A straying collective: Familism and the establishment of orthodox belief in sixteenth-century England

Table of contents :
3461393.pdf
PREFATORY MATERIAL 1
ABSTRACT
PREFATORY MATERIAL 2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
DISSERTATION
conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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A STRAYING COLLECTIVE: FAMILISM AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ORTHODOX BELIEF IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

by Douglas FitzHenry Jones

An Abstract Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Religious Studies in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa May 2011 Thesis Supervisor: Professor Raymond A. Mentzer

1 ABSTRACT The Family of Love was a religious collective that emerged in the Low Countries during the Reformation and settled in England in the latter half of the sixteenth century. It was a casualty of entrenched doctrinal disagreement and the sensationalism of popular print culture. Yet, there is reason to believe that Familists were very much a part of the very society that so vehemently condemned them. While earlier scholars have noted the surprising level to which the group immersed themselves in their local communities, few have specifically addressed the immersion of Familists in their religious and intellectual milieu. This dissertation seeks to uncover the worldview that the Elizabethan Family shared with even its fiercest detractors. Through a close reading of the surviving material, the following chapters reveal a religious climate in England that was far more porous, and far less set-in-stone, than many in the period were willing to admit. In particular, the dissertation focuses on two, related categories: the religious justifications for outward obedience to authority and the methods of interpreting the “literal” meaning of sacred writings. Familists were notorious for transgressing the accepted boundaries of both categories. As those hostile to the group were eager to point out, they were furtively disobedient and ruthlessly allegorical. My research suggests, to the contrary, that Familist thought often fell within the accepted boundaries of these two categories; only the categories themselves were inchoate. In making this point, this dissertation contributes to a broader interest in the reification of religious traditions at the expense of those less-defined worldviews that contributed to their original development. Abstract Approved: ____________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________ Title and Department ____________________________________ Date

A STRAYING COLLECTIVE: FAMILISM AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ORTHODOX BELIEF IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

by Douglas FitzHenry Jones

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Religious Studies in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa May 2011 Thesis Supervisor: Professor Raymond A. Mentzer

UMI Number: 3461393

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

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Copyright by DOUGLAS FITZHENRY JONES 2011 All Rights Reserved

Graduate College The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL _______________________ PH.D. THESIS _______________ This is to certify that the Ph. D. thesis of Douglas FitzHenry Jones has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Religious Studies at the May 2011 graduation. Thesis Committee: ___________________________________ Raymond A. Mentzer, Thesis Supervisor ___________________________________ Michelene Pesantubbee ___________________________________ Claire Sponsler ___________________________________ Alvin Snider ___________________________________ Kathleen Kamerick

To my mother, father, and sister

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To see what has become self-evident as something that was not originally self-evident is the task of all historical reflection. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Graduate College at the University of Iowa as well as the Department of Religious Studies for the generous support I have received over the past five years. The research necessary for what follows would not have been possible without funding provided by the Seashore-Ballard Dissertation Fellowship and numerous travel grants from the Department. I have also benefited from the continued opportunity to serve as a graduate teaching assistant in areas relevant to my academic interests. While preparing the dissertation, I have enjoyed the unwavering support of a number of the faculty in the Department of Religious Studies. In particular, I would like to thank my advisor, Ray Mentzer, for his instrumental role in reading and offering valuable comments on my work. His mentorship has been a great benefit throughout my doctoral career. Michelene Pesantubbee and Maureen Walterhouse have also provided me with much-needed assistance in varying areas related to the dissertation for which I am very grateful. I am also grateful to a number of the faculty in the Department of English at the University of Iowa who have offered their advice and guidance at various stages of this dissertation. Claire Sponsler and Alvin Snider both reviewed portions of my work at different stages in the process and have since given me helpful counsel on the overall organization of my chapters. Huston Diehl, who sadly passed away in 2010, also offered particularly helpful comments in the early stages of my research. Finally, I would like to thank the many family and friends who have supported me in recent years. I owe special thanks to the other graduate students in the Department, as well as to Amanda Licht who read portions of this work. Most of all, I would like to thank my father, Mac Jones, for spending numerous hours reading the dissertation. His own interest in the material has been an inspiration to me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ……………………………………………………………………...vi INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………..........1 CHAPTER I.

THE CULT OF HN ........................................................................................10 The problem with “HN” .................................................................................13 Hendrik Niclaes, the libertines, and the dreaded puritan ................................22 The cult of HN ................................................................................................32

II.

A MYSTERY OR A MUDDLE? ...................................................................44 The divided field .............................................................................................46 The secret mysteries of the Family .................................................................55 Muddled relations to the mainstream .............................................................77

III.

THE FAMILY AND ADIAPHORA ..............................................................82 The two schemes of Niclaes’ allegory ............................................................88 Erasmus, Thomas Starkey, and adiaphora ......................................................96 Like a god in earth ........................................................................................116

IV.

HERESY AND THE USE OF ALLEGORY ...............................................126 The monstrous brood ....................................................................................136 Familist hermeneutics and the “pattern of love” ..........................................146 The spirit of William Whitaker.....................................................................157

V.

A STRAYING COLLECTIVE.....................................................................169 Frank Familist in the seventeenth century ....................................................173 Familist neutrality and Modernity ................................................................192 A straying collective .....................................................................................199

CONCLUSION .………………………………………………………………..............207 BIBLIOGRAPHY .………………………………………………………………..........211

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.

The two schemes of Niclaes’ Terra Pacis ................................................................94

2.

Section 9 from Rogers’1578 edition of The Displaying (I1r-I1v) ..........................160

3.

Chapter 13 from Niclaes’ Prophetie (D4v-D5v) with Rogers’ selections..............161

4.

Pordage’s hieroglyph (1661) ..................................................................................172

5.

1647 heresy broadside ............................................................................................188

6.

1648 heresy broadside ............................................................................................189

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1 INTRODUCTION The Family of Love was a religious movement that emerged in Europe during the period of the Reformation. Formed by the merchant-prophet Hendrik Niclaes (HN) in the Low Countries, the movement eventually spread to areas in France and England before declining in the decades after the death of its beloved founder around the year 1580. Of their many beliefs, the most enduring and, as it turned out, controversial centered on the doctrine of justification. Familists believed that sinners were justified by being rendered essentially righteous or, as they often put it, “godded with God.” This unique stance held implications for both the inner and outer person. Internally, it meant that the human being could merge natures with the “spirit of Christ” to achieve a prelapsarian state, thereby becoming homo novus, the “new man” symbolized by the initials HN. In their interactions with the outside world, Familists preached conformity to religious and political authorities, believing that a “godded” person was, in outward conduct, a peaceful person. This dissertation focuses on the rise and fall of Niclaes’ followers in England. The fate of the Family in this locale is a striking example of the deadlock that so often results from competing claims to absolute truth. Even while being pulled kicking and screaming into heretical obscurity, English Familists still cried out that they were consummate conformists, model Protestants, and loving citizens. The opponents of the group – often more severe Christians – claimed, quite simply, that Familists were lying. None of these things, they said, were true. In fact, given the chance, the Familist heretic would not hesitate to overthrow the Queen’s religion by force. Each side called the other a “puritan,” each side cited influential Protestants like William Tyndale in support of their cause, and each side claimed to embody the moderate principles of true religion. To date, academic work on the Family of Love in England has been conducted exclusively by scholars in the fields of English Literature and History. For literary critics, the Family is important largely because of the immense body of polemic its otherwise

2 negligible presence in England generated over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 1 Some of these critics have focused, in particular, on the way in which this polemic artfully combines a cluster of alleged Familist misdeeds – political subversion, sexual promiscuity, and religious hypocrisy – under the more general rubric of Familist perfectionism. Others have concentrated their efforts in the area of literacy studies, examining the role played by Niclaes and his followers in a growing class of lay religious readers without formal scholastic training. Historians of the English Family have paid special attention to the social status of the movement within the larger context of the English Reformation. Earlier accounts, starting with that of Rufus Jones in 1909 and culminating in the work of Christopher Hill in 1972, invariably emphasized the progressive, even revolutionary, potential of Familist philosophy. In Jones’ estimation, for example, Familism, though a “dead sect,” held on to an intellectual position that “is a very live doctrine in the world today.” 2 Hill and others have discussed Familism within the larger context of the lay anticlericalism that was believed to have served as an engine for the continued progress of the Reformation as popular event.

1 See Janet E. Halley, “Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the Politics of Religious Discourse: The Case of

the English Family of Love,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Thomas W. Hayes, “The Peaceful Apocalypse: Familism and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 17, no. 2 (1986): 131-143; William C. Johnson, “The Family of Love in Stuart Literature: A Chronology of Name-Crossed Lovers,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7, no. 1 (1977): 95-112; and Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2 Rufus Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion (London: Macmillan, 1919), 448. See also William

Nigel Kerr, “Henry Nicholas and the Familists: A Study of the Influence of Continental Mysticism on England to 1600” (doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1955); A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989),; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Penguin Books, 1971); and Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith Ltd, 1972).

3 However, with the decline of “Whig” accounts of the English Reformation and the ascendancy of revisionist and post-revisionist historical approaches to the subject, the portrait of the Family of Love has changed. No longer are English Familists depicted as a revolutionary body of mystical or anticlerical sectarians; they are, rather, part of a larger, less confessionally-divided group of ordinary, conforming English people. The new portrait fits comfortably with the post-revisionist contention, voiced by Ethan Shagan in 2003, that the English Reformation is best seen as a “process of cultural accommodation that is not easily mappable onto a simple, confessional axis.” 3 The most influential work in this new wave of English Familist studies has been Christopher Marsh’s 1994 microhistory The Family of Love in English Society, 15501630. 4 Marsh’s post-revisionist hypothesis, that accommodation taking place on the local level belies the violent antagonism expressed by the religious polemics of the period, leads him to the discovery that Familism did in fact enjoy a tolerated, even dignified status in Elizabethan Cambridgeshire. Through a close study of surviving Familist bequests, marriage patterns, and burials sites, Marsh reconstructs Familist society from the ground up, never failing to address the English Family on its own terms rather than in terms substituted by its clamorous detractors.

3 Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2003), 7.

4 Christopher Marsh has published a number of shorter essays on the Family of Love in addition

to his 1994 book length study: “‘A Gracelesse and Audacious Companie:’ The Family of Love in the parish of Balsham, 1550-1630,” in Voluntary Religion: Papers read at the 1985 summer meeting and the 1986 winter meeting of the ecclesiastical history society, eds. W.J. Shields & Diana Wood (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986); “The Gravestone of Thomas Lawrence Revisited (or the Family of Love in the local community of Balsham, 1560-1630),” in The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725, ed. Margaret Spufford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);“Piety and Persuasion in Elizabethan England: The Church of England Meets the Family of Love,” in England’s Long Reformation, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and “‘Godlie matrons’ and ‘loose-bodied dames:’ heresy and gender in the Family of Love,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, eds. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

4 Marsh’s picture is convincing, and it is hard to imagine areas that remain to be further explored in light of his contribution. However, his work does invite further speculation into the ideological assumptions undergirding the “considerable resources of religious tolerance” that English Familists enjoyed. 5 The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a more substantive account of the intellectual and religious themes that influenced the Family of Love in England. One encounters a dearth of scholarship in this area. When the writings of Niclaes and his English followers have been carefully explicated, it has for the most part been by literary scholars hoping to arrive at a better understanding of either the use of polemic during the period or others studying the destabilizing implications of radical religious ideas. 6 Given what we now know about the decidedly non-radical immersion of Familists in their surrounding milieu, what might we also find out about the intellectual and religious affinities of the group with the English mainstream? The following chapters provide evidence that in some ways confirms, in other ways develops, Marsh’s thesis. Though often assumed to be bitterly unorthodox and, at best, novel, the English Family of Love did not favor religious currents that ran counter to conceptions that many of their contemporaries held to be part of the religious mainstream. In making this argument, I am adding a new voice to the voices of literary critics and historians who have tackled the subject of Familism in recent decades. As a scholar in the history of Christianity, my interest is in the development of a distinct notion of the Protestant tradition to the exclusion of those elements that Jaroslav Pelikan has termed, somewhat ironically, “cancerous aberration[s].”7 As a student in the field of 5 See Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994), 250-251.

6 A notable exception is Nigel Smith’s chapter on the Family in Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 144-184. 7 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition: A

History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), 9.

5 religious studies, I am also aware of the retrospective distortions that arise once a dominant culture – in this case the culture of Protestant Christianity – has divested itself of its association with the religious beliefs of the “other.” The method I employ is a combination of techniques drawn from the sociology of religion and historical phenomenology. From a sociological perspective, I assume that new religious movements like the Family of Love seek to legitimate themselves within the wider social field; and, to a significant extent, their success rests on their ability to tap into this field in a meaningful fashion. For this reason, a portion of the below dissertation (Chapters 1-2) examines the manner in which Familists spoke to their generation. Additionally, it is important to state that my interest in the movement stems from the fact that, by the time the dust had settled around the middle of the seventeenth century, it was apparent that Familists had been spectacularly unsuccessful over the longue durée. They were, as Rufus Jones has said, a “dead sect.” Chapters 3 and 4 are organized in accordance with this interest. Both begin with pervasive and ultimately fatal critiques of the Family of Love by their society and both follow the development of ideal types (adiaphora, allegory) that correspond to these critiques in an effort to reconstruct the field prior to the group’s deafening condemnation. From the perspective of historical phenomenology, I attempt to practice what Ninian Smart has referred to as “informed empathy” in my approach to the worldview of the English Family. 8 This need not entail, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has assessed, bewitching ourselves “with the witchcraft or mythologies of others.” 9 Rather, my aim is not only to reconstruct the field of religious and intellectual assumptions from which Familists articulated their point of view but also to discover, qualitatively, what this point 8 Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (Berkeley: The

University of California Press, 1996), 2.

9 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1990), 68.

6 of view meant to them. How, that is, did Familists experience their world? While the “true” nature of this experience is no doubt unobtainable and the search for some Hegelian “essence” behind the period is undesirable, this does not mean that the attempt should not be made from an informed perspective. Beyond the field of religious studies, a number of historians and literary critics, including Brad Gregory, Bruce Ray Smith, Kristen Poole, and Jeffrey Knapp have made this attempt in recent years and have developed the method, whether explicitly or implicitly, with persuasive results. 10 Chapter 1 below introduces the life and writings of Henry Niclaes while, at the same time interrogating the polemic against the group in the latter part of the 1570s. Of central concern is the relationship of English Familists to their intenerate founder, or the “doting Dutchman” as he was often called. Did these Familists follow the Dutchman to the letter of his doctrine, forming a “cult of HN” and thereby confirming hostile suspicions that members were duped simpletons of the “lower sort,” incapable of thinking for themselves? Or was English Familism its own creed, drawing from the writings of Niclaes but taking his ideas in unique directions? By their own account, a number of English members followed Niclaes less as an active charismatic leader than as a pioneer in the sort of spiritual regeneration which they hoped also to attain. These

10 See Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Brad Gregory, Alister Chapman, John Coffey, eds., Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); Bruce Ray Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Bruce Ray Smith, “Premodern Sexualities,” PMLA 115, no. 3 (2000): 318-325; Kristen Poole, “The Devil’s in the Archive: Doctor Faustus and Ovidian Physics,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 191-219; and Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). In a special segment entitled “Looking Forward: the Field the Future” in the Sixteenth Century Journal, Dan Breen writes that, at present, the field lacks “more consistent exploration of the experience of belief” as well as “the resources upon which sixteenth-century readers drew in order to better understand – or to complicate – their beliefs.” Too often, Breen continues, current research “dismisses religious belief as a mistaken devotion to a chimera of the political elite. The suggestion that such a vast arena of human intellectual experience that inspires such intense emotional commitment is dispensable to our understanding of the sixteenth century seems to me untenable.” “Literary Criticism and the Experience of Religious Belief in Sixteenth-Century England,” 40, no. 1 (2009): 236238.

7 sentiments are confirmed by the decidedly different rhetorical strategy chosen by these Familists to defend their cause before an English audience. Chapter 2 turns more directly to the manner in which the Family of Love in England spoke to their audience. Borrowing from E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, I first ask whether the movement is best described as a “mystery” or a “muddle.” For their contemporary critics, most notably the godly polemicist John Rogers, Familists were most certainly a mystery. Simply, this meant that the outward profession of Familist belief was at variance with the hidden truth of Familist practice. Members, that is, had one face they gave to the world and another they reserved for their private conventicles. While Rogers’ characterization of the Family fits comfortably within later discourse on the “trans-institutional” nature of mysticism, it also reflects a broader concern in the late sixteenth-century with what I call the divided field – a space between public and private persona that could be abused for nefarious purposes. Familists, we find, were well-aware of the divided field (alongside their alleged place within it) and used it to their advantage. What’s more, in speaking to their generation’s anxieties regarding this field, they created a place for themselves within an admittedly muddled mainstream. Chapter 2 ends by suggesting that Familists perhaps inherited assumptions that linked them together with their ordinary, conforming brethren in England. Chapters 3 and 4 trace these assumptions through an ideal-typical analysis of the subjects of religious conformity and hermeneutics, respectively. In the minds of their detractors, Familists were, first and foremost, a straying collective. Though seemingly obedient to the English Queen, they were, in actuality, ambivalent to their home nation and would happily stray elsewhere if the opportunity presented itself. Though ostensibly skilled in interpreting sacred writings, they strayed from the pure and saving sense of the word to any number of mystical and convoluted senses. In the accomplished hands of the Family’s mortal enemy, John Knewstub, these two accusations were to prevail well into the seventeenth century.

8 The development of the concept of adiaphora is the central focus of Chapter 3. Familists, and Niclaes in particular, did indeed have a tendency to discuss the external elements of religious practice as things indifferent, as “elemistish ceremonies” that had little or no efficacy in the arena of human salvation. For Knewstub this was, of course, prima facie evidence that the Family of Love did not care about the religious establishment in England. In fact, he even went so far as to suggest that Familists were secretly planning a revolution. Not surprisingly, members of the group denied the charges. Faced with the resulting stalemate, Chapter 3 follows the development of adiaphoristic thought in England from the writings of Erasmus through those of the lesser-known Thomas Starkey and up to the Family itself. Many of these texts exhibit an undeniable emphasis on obedience to otherwise indifferent policies as a necessary, even salvific, undertaking. Far from being detached from their larger society, Familists valued engagement with the “indifferent” world as both a prerequisite and a fulfillment of their more spiritual aspirations. Chapter 4 continues this line of argument by exploring the much-maligned practice of Familist hermeneutics in the greater context of sixteenth-century debates over the literal sense of Scripture. Protestants had struggled for some time to reconcile what they called the “pure sense” of Scripture with the undeniable fact that certain segments of the text were not intended to be read literally. Here, the Cambridge theologians William Tyndale and William Whitaker serve as bookends to the debate, each reaffirming the Augustinian emphasis on the total sense of Scripture variably accommodated in particular passages. I argue that Familists, though often accused of perverting the pure sense through the use of allegory, were in fact closer to this distinctly Protestant tradition than has been suggested in the past. In defending their own texts as more timely explications of the nevertheless superior gospel, they exhibited a concern for accurate and spirituallyinformed interpretation that was shared by many thinkers of a less “radical” persuasion.

9 Above all, proper interpretation depended on living the text in the context of everyday life. The final chapter of this dissertation is concerned with the memory of the Family of Love in the seventeenth century. Here, my purpose is to suggest some of the ways in which later depictions of the movement have altered our surviving portrait. Long after Familists ceased to be publicly active, the stereotypical “Familist” lived on in plays, broadsides, heresy catalogues, and religious tracts. The writers of these works often drew from the polemics of the 1570s and 80s to depict Familists in a variety of ways, from the comic image of the over-sexed Elder, “ministering” to his wonton followers, to the more serious anti-cult rhetoric of concerned parents and their curious offspring. I also address later historiographical depictions of the Family in the context of the epochal transition to what, in hindsight, is described as the modern era. Though Familism, by most accounts, had ceased to exist, their memory could be resurrected in the middle of the seventeenth century to serve as a reservoir for godly anxieties about freethinking naturalists and pantheists who, it was feared, were skeptical of the hegemonic status of the Christian faith. Sources from the period warned of the near-Faustian pretensions of the Familist antichrist, attempting to control nature through the use of reason and astrology. Later historians have also latched-on to these sources to portray the movement as a revolutionary force for modern ideas. In a way, this dissertation tells the story of a group whose reputation extended well beyond the modest boundaries it set for itself. As a result, the majority of the sources available to the scholar are mined from the world of popular print. This world is not entirely foreign to our own society, in which the retrospective account of new religious movements – especially those that met with either public disgrace or catastrophic ends – is largely pieced-together by sensationalist media. What follows is an attempt at recovery, not for the purposes of vindicating the Family, but so that we might arrive at a richer understanding of the religious climate that held a home for its members.

10 CHAPTER I THE CULT OF HN Who were the English Familists? Though simple, the question serves in both contemporary and early modern discourse as an obligatory acknowledgement of the apparent difficulty of revealing anything concrete about the group. As one historian notes, “members in England had little wish to be studied” and their self-conscious Nicodemism ensured that any subsequent efforts to locate identity would be necessarily reductionist. 11 To early modern critics, the English Family of Love was as backwards and brainwashed as the worst of anabaptists, papists, and libertines. The surviving portrait is not unlike that of movements which we today pejoratively label “cults.” Blindly following their Dutch leader, Homo Novus, members of the group were believed to have foolishly severed themselves from the body of English believers. Isolated from the life-blood of the orthodox mainstream, their own beliefs had simply stifled and, at length, decayed. In the words of one critic, “they so farre passe and exceede the measure of common speach: that the ruder sorte not able to understand them being astonied, might be as it were hanged in an admiration of them.” 12 The cult of HN in England was thus a cult of duped simpletons, collectively misrecognizing the deranged source of their leader’s seemingly enlightened ideas. Much of the literature against Familism billed itself as a charitable endeavor to deprogram this ruder sort – to bring them back into the fold while banishing their prophet to the dustbin of old heretics.

11 Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 6. See also Halley, “Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the

Politics of Religious Discourse.” Looking at the Family, Halley proposes that “we should be less interested in establishing fixed definitions of religious identity than in constructing a model of literary discourse dynamic enough to accommodate a problematic of identity” (304). 12 John Knewstub, A confutation of monstrous and horrible heresies taught by H.N. and

embraced by a number, who call themselves the Familie of Love… (London, 1579), sig. 5v.

11 It is not the purpose of this chapter to interrogate whether or not such claims were true; a significant body of evidence suggests that they were not. 13 Rather, in this chapter and the next I want to explore the extent to which Familists in England inherited and modified the teachings of their spiritual founder Niclaes. A significant portion of this chapter will be devoted more broadly to the relationship of English followers to Niclaes as this relationship was expressed in both antagonistic and apologetic sources. I assume that members were not simpletons; nor did they wish to be separate from the mainstream fold. Instead, they followed Niclaes because they believed that elements of his message held implications for their lives and for the lives of others in England. “Were all [of Niclaes’ books], rightly considered of with indifferency,” wrote an English follower in 1580, “so should they be found assistances in all, to this aforesaid Religion, and not hinderances.” 14 While antifamilist polemic has largely robbed us of the luxury of indifferent consideration, we may begin to ask how Familists in England considered themselves in light of their adherence to Niclaes’ books. Were their own sentiments – expressed in a dozen or so printed theological tracts, apologies, correspondences, and confessions from the 1570s and 80s – mere recapitulations of their leader’s dictates or were they modifications, tethered to Niclaes but ramifying in other directions? Though clearly indebted to their founder, the English sources reveal a number of curious shifts in emphasis. As Christopher Marsh has noted, English sources stress the 13 See for example Poole’s discussion of Familism in Radical Religion from Shakespeare to

Milton in which the author highlights the hyperbolic nature of antifamilist polemic. In point of fact, she says, “the Family was a quiet, apolitical, conformist sect; unlike many other types of sectarians, the Family did not advocate ecclesiastical separation and did not have a history of political dissension” (75-76). Taking a step further, Marsh compellingly argues in Chapters 6 and 7 of The Family of Love in English Society that English Familists held remarkably powerful positions both within their own local communities and within the court of Elizabeth I. 14 Anon., An Apology for the Service of Love and the People that own it, commonly called, The

Family of Love… (London, 1656), 47. Though printed in the seventeenth century, Marsh suggests that The Apology was in fact written in 1580 by the courtier Familist Robert Seale. The Family of Love in English Society, 40, 133. The speaker does refer to himself as a “true hearted subject to the Queens Majesty,” dating the text at least sometime during the reign of Elizabeth (5).

12 inclusive nature of the Family of Love to a degree not present in the writings of Niclaes. 15 Moreover, this shift hints at a deeper difference between the overall projects of the two bodies of literature. Niclaes, it will be suggested, engages in a process of distinction in which identity is forged through the negation of an imagined collective – variably referred to as the “unwilling ones” or “scripture-learned” – which comes more and more to resemble the photo-negative of Familism. English members, by contrast, cultivate identity through a process of absorption or incorporation. Rather than distinguishing themselves from an imagined collective, they define themselves by embracing this collective. In fact, the definition of what Niclaes of called “obedience in the love” at times stretches so far as to elicit questions from outsiders (both real and imagined) about the need for definition in the first place. 16 If English Familism was at times out of tune with Niclaes’ Familism, then perhaps this fact was due to something more than the group’s notorious tendency to dither, dissemble, and generally “wander in every uncerteine way” after the “drowsie dreams of a doting Dutchman.” 17 It is of course true that English followers spoke to a markedly different audience than had Niclaes, and – assuming that they were not sequestered Dutch 15 See Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 97, 180-181. See also Marsh’s “Piety and Persuasion,” 143, 151. “It was,” he writes, “the responsibility of the English Family of Love to interpret and apply this rather bewildering set of instructions, to make their choices from HN’s varied menu of commands. The history of the fellowship between 1560 and 1630 provides evidence of attitudes both aggressive and gentle, but it was overwhelmingly at the quieter end of the spectrum that the activities of members were concentrated” (143). 16 The Bishop of Rochester, for example, is quoted in William Wilkinson’s A confutation of

certain articles delivered unto the Familye of Love, with the exposition of Theophilus, a supposed Elder in the sayd Familye upon the same Articles (London, 1579) saying that the essence of Familism “is none other, but such as any meanly learned may gather by diligent readyng of Scriptures” (A2). Likewise, the character of the skeptical Countrey-man in The Apology responds to the Exile’s description of his Familist faith by asking why the group should call itself anything at all. “That life,” he says, “is indeed the best, but why doth he call his ministration the Service of Love, and those that take warning thereat, why are they termed the Family of Love?” (51) 17 John Rogers, The displaying of an horrible secte of grosse and wicked heretiques, naming

themselves the family of love with the lives of their authours and what doctrine they teach in corners (London, 1579), B7v, E1r.

13 immigrants – spoke from a very different perspective. Assuming, I think rightly, that a majority of English Familists were not sequestered but “tapped in” to the world around them, they may be able to tell us something about the lingering anxieties and unspoken expectations of that world. The problem with “HN” Though there is some evidence of Familism in England as early as 1553, 18 much of what we know of the group in this location derives from a flurry of antifamilist sentiment in the 1570s culminating with Elizabeth’s “proclamation against the sectaries of the Family of Love,” first issued in 1580. The purpose of the proclamation was to pinpoint and eliminate a “monstrous new kind of speech” rooted in the numerous books of HN, “printed beyond the seas, and secretly brought over into the realm.” 19 Pulling the reins of earlier polemics from the 1570s, the Queen’s words emphasized the blind adherence of followers to the cult of HN, twice making note of their naïve involvement in damnable heresies well beyond their meager comprehension.

18 There are a number of sources that suggest the presence of some form of Familism around this

early date. See for example Rogers, The Displaying in which the author reproduces “a confession made by two of the Familie of Love, before a worthie & worshipfull Justice of peace, the 28. of May, 1561” (H3r). Christopher Vittels, the alleged elder of the Family in England, was later to deny that the two members, Thomas Chaundler and Robert Strete, had any knowledge of Niclaes’s teachings, though they do make what would seem to be a clear reference to “Henryke a Dutchman, the head of all the Congregation.” This reference, along with a list of other known Familist “sectarians,” is reprinted in St. George Kieran Hyland, A Century of Persecution under Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns from Contemporary Records (London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co, LTD, 1920), 112. Putting aside their controversial status, Chaundler and Strete also make reference in The Displaying to the earlier presence of Familists “in the beginning of Queene Maries time” – 1553 (H4v). Finally, a minister of the Dutch church in London during the reign of Edward VI (1547-1553) went on record against “those evill Chickens…glorifying that they have founde the house and region of love,” a seemingly unmistakable reference to Family who were sometimes known as the domus charitatis. John Knewstub later reproduced these words in his Confutation, titling them “A Confutation of the doctrine of David George, and H.N. the father of the Familie of Love, By M, Martin Micronius” (87v). 19 Elizabeth I, “A Proclamation against the sectaries of the Family of Love (1580),” in Edward

Cardwell, Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England: Being a Collection of Injunctions, Declarations, Orders, Articles of Inquiry &c. from the Year 1546 to the Year 1716 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1839), 1:397-398.

14 Whatever these heresies were, the heart of the problem was a perceived total obedience to Niclaes among English devotees. Referring to the Family’s 1575 printed confession of faith, an anonymous Cambridge faculty member casually suggested in 1606 that if only HN and his books were forsaken, followers could happily keep their confession “without farther molestation, imprisonment, or persecution.” 20 To eliminate the monstrous new religion was accordingly to defame its foreign prophet and his ideas. Reworked by the able hands of England’s antifamilist writers, HN became a “sower of heresies almost worn out of use,” borrowing freely from Pelagianism, Arianism, and Priscillianism. Not unlike the latter heretic, HN was also alleged to have “committed moste shameful wickedness with the women of his secte,” going so far as to physically abuse them. 21 Again and again, Niclaes was portrayed as a charlatan: a dangerous libertine posing before the eyes of the world as an austere Christian. In 1579, the Suffolk clergyman John Knewstub provided perhaps the ultimate example of his duplicitous behavior when, upon reading the prophet’s Evangelium Regni, he declared that members of the Family were instructed to “worship here as God, one H.N.” This deified imposter, Knewstub continued, “turneth things common unto his own private use,” selfishly hoarding heavenly resurrection for himself. 22

20 Anon., A Supplication of the Family of Love (said to be presented into the Kings royall hands,

knowen to be dispersed among his Loyall Subjects) for grace and favour. Examined, and found to be derogatory in an hie degree, unto the glorie of God, the honour of our King, and the Religion of this Realme both soundly professed & firmly established (Cambridge, 1606), 64-65. According to the seventeenth-century historian Samuel Rutherford, the Supplication was “printed at Cambridge anno. 1607. And answered by one of the Universitie.” A survey of the spirituall Antichrist opening the secrets of Familisme and Antinomianisme (London, 1648), 168. 21 John Rogers, An answere vnto a wicked & infamous libel made by Christopher Vitel, one of the

chiefe English elders of the pretended Family of Loue maintaining their doctrine, & carpingly answeringe to certaine pointes of a boke called the displaing of the Fam. (London 1579), B6r, E6r; Knewstub, A Confutation, sig. 5r. 22 Knewstub, A Confutation, A4v, A3v.

15 The truth was of course far more complicated. The particular reference to resurrection in the Evangelium Regni that most enraged Knewstub was intentionally unclear. It detailed the joyful message of one “HN; through the grace and mercie of God and through the holie Spirit of the Love of Jesus Christ; raysed-upp by the highest God, from the Death.” Though it could be read either way, Knewstub chose the more inflammatory interpretation, positing HN, not Christ, as the subject of God’s divine agency. 23 In fact, references to the resurrection appeared in nearly all of the forty-two chapters. While a number of these references remained ambiguous, the majority regarded the death and resurrection of Jesus. There were also a lesser number of allusions to the resurrection of Jesus’ followers, his saints, and others who have long since “fallenasleape in the Lorde.” 24 Niclaes’ purpose was to evoke a sense of continuity between those elected in the past and those elected in the present. A popular image, which was to be repeated with great allegorical flourish in his Terra Pacis, was of the meeting of the dead and the living together in the land of peace when God’s trumpet had been blown to signal the end of days. 25 Affirming Knewstub’s greatest fears, HN went on in the Evangelium Regni to declare that these days had already arrived. Indeed, God had “shortened these Dayes” and “raised-upp mee HN, the least among the holyons of God…from the Death and made mee alive through Christ.” 26 The language raises more questions than it answers. To what does “death” refer? Does “through” here imply an 23 Hendrik Niclaes, Evangelium Regni: A Joyful Message of the Kingdom, published by the holie

Spirit of the Love of Jesus Christ, and sent-fourth unto all Nations of People, which love the Trueth of Jesus Christ. Set-fourth by HN, and by him perused a-new and more-distinctlie declard (Cologne, 1575), A3r. Emphasis mine. “The first thing, that H.N. would persuade us,” Knewstub responded, “is, that God hath raised him from the dead: or (to use his owne wordes) that he is raised up by the most highest God from the death.” A Confutation, A1r. 24Niclaes, Evangelium Regni, L4r. 25 In the Evangelium Regni, Niclaes makes primary use of I Thessalonians 4:13-18 to express this

image. See also I Corinthians 15:6,18 for further references to those who have “fallen asleape in the Lorde.” 26 Niclaes, Evangelium Regni, L1r-v.

16 authentic, or even physical, exchange? Are these last days to come or have they already passed? One particularly maddening passage from the preface to Terra Pacis answers that “truly, the gracious time cometh, and is now already come.” 27 Though it is difficult to empathize with Knewstub’s call for the execution of Elizabethan Familists, it is not impossible to understand his frustration with the manner in which Niclaes expressed his ideas. As one bemused scholar related in the 1960s, Niclaes’ original documents “have a naïve charm, characterized by an incomprehensible flow of nouns and adjectives, only rarely linked by verbs.” 28 What’s more, translation out of “base almayne,” or German, and into English did little to improve clarity. Writings like Evangelium Regni and Terra Pacis were to remain “a riddle, or darke speeche” to many outside the group in England. 29 Some of the confusion was no doubt owing to Niclaes’ fervent desire to conflate, or rather transgress, spatial and temporal distinctions for the purposes of communicating an inward state of spiritual awareness. He expected all of his followers to “resurrect,” just as he had, from a state of spiritual death to an enlightened disposition in which the boundaries between Christ and the believer were no longer relevant. “Godded with God,” as he put it, the true Christian was to become a humble abode for the spirit, yielding his or her own identity to the indwelling of the divine will. According to the Familist chronicler Tobias such ideas were rooted in Niclaes’ first vision at the age of nine in which he “was surrounded by a great Mountain, and was thoroughly illuminated in all his being with the glory thereof.” The mountain, Tobias continued, “wholly united it selfe

27 Hendrik Niclaes, Terra Pacis, a true testification of the spiritual land of peace, which is the

spiritual land of promise, and the holy city of peace, or the heavenly city of Jerusalem, and of the walking in the spirit, which leadeth thereunto (London, 1649), 9. 28 Julia G. Ebel, “The Family of Love: Sources of its History in England,” Huntington Library

Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Aug. 1967): 333.

29 Rogers, The Displaying, B2v.

17 with him in his whole spirit and mind, so that…he became also of an equal greatness and like being, with the same, in altitude, latitude, and profundity.” 30 This was the prototype for a religious program, and it was not long before Niclaes would feel compelled to communicate such profundity to his readers. Those who received his message in England were, more often than not, ridiculed as simpletons, mesmerized by a mystery that was in truth a tangle of jazzed-up heresies. At worst, they were seen as feverous libertines clustering around any ideology that might legitimate their wantonness. As the literary critic Janet Halley recently suggested, all one need do to render Niclaes scandalous in the extreme is to “simplify the referential difficulty of his language, omitting several of its elements and thus relieving its contradictory tensions.” 31 Knewstub, for one, saw these tensions – between future glory and glory in this life, heaven and earth, saint and sinner – as confirmation of a giddy, inconstant temper and accordingly sought to deconstruct them. Part of Niclaes’ charm is his naïve faith that his writings would escape simplification – that they would be effectually understood. There is after all some evidence that the prophet’s ideas were either ignorantly adopted or plainly abused by a number of his followers in England. Though we may doubt their authenticity, more than one apostate Familist from the 1570s and 80s confessed adherence to a form of belief that seemed calculated to ignite outside hostility. The Essex parson Robert Sharpe, for example, who had in 1574 defended the absolute orthodoxy of his Familist beliefs found himself, not a year later, admitting 30 Tobias, Mirabilia opera dei: certaine wonderfull works of God which hapned to H.N. even

from his youth … (London, 1650), 16-17. In the second vision, Tobias claims, “the Lord chose him to be a Minister of his holy and gracious word.” From that point, we are told, Niclaes was moved “to publish and express writingly in letters, before all eyes of understanding” (22). 31 Halley, “Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the Politics of Religious Discourse,” 310. “Oddly enough,”

Halley continues, “errant Familists and orthodox attackers, whether Presbyterian clerics or popular satirists, are united in making this mistake: they amputate elements from Niclaes’s oscillating paradoxes of time and matter, making them unproblematic and hence scandalous” (310) For a more recent and thorough treatment of alleged Familist perversion, see Poole, “Lewd conversations: the perversions of the Family of Love,” 7779.

18 before an audience at Paul’s Cross in London that he had been duped by a false prophet who he knew very little about. He concluded by ensuring his listeners that, “understanding nowe my grosse errours, I doe…utterly detest, and from my heart abhorre, as well the saude Aucthour [HN], wyth all hys arregant, and blasphemous titles, as the instrument of Sathan.” 32 As if such an admission were not enough, in 1580 the glover’s apprentice Leonard Romsye provided Wisbech authorities with a provocative account of his indoctrination into the Family which effectively shattered the fragile balance of the Dutch prophet’s contradictory tensions. Where HN had described the ascension of God’s elect “in spirit and mind” to terra pacis, Romsye claimed to reveal a clandestine scheme on the part of Familist elites to overthrow temporal authority, believing that “their kyngdom which they call Davides Kyndome is to be erected here uppon earth.” 33 Whether Romsye simply misunderstood Niclaes’ writings or had more sinister aspirations is a matter for debate. In any event, it is not difficult to envision similar “misunderstandings” contributing to the Queen’s 1580 campaign to squash Familist insurrection. Other sources from the period present a more sophisticated, if not also more elaborate, understanding of Niclaes and his ideas. These more “educated” Familists

32 Robert Sharpe, The Confession and declaration of Robert Sharpe Clerke, and other of that

secte, tearmed the Familie of Love, at Pawles Crosse in London the xij. of June: an. 1575 (London, 1575), 1. For Sharpe’s initial confession in which he (inasmuch as he could) defended Familism, see “A Declaration and Confession made the 13 of December 1574, of certain Articles of Religion hereafter following, before Andrew Pern, D.D. and Pason of the Parish Church of Balsham in the County of Cambridge, by Rob. Sharp Parson of Strethal in Essex, and Tho. Laurence, John Tayler, Tho. Diss, Edmund Rule, and Barthol. Tassel of Balsham aforesaid, in the said County of Cambridge,” in John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1821), 472-473. 33 Leonard Romsye, “The confession of Leonard Romsye delivered unto me Thomas Barwicke

minister with his owne hand,” in Jean Dietz Moss, “Variations on a Theme: The Family of Love in Renaissance England,” Renaissance Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 190. For information about Romsye’s rather dubious association with the Family of Love see Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 35, 108, 142.

19 responded to vitriolic attacks on their prophet in fascinatingly unexpected ways. 34 In 1578 John Rogers, learning that a friend had recently fallen in with the English Family, decided to publish the first of what would become a two-part assault on the group. His Displaying of an horrible secte of grosse and wicked heretiques gave an account of the early days of one “Henrie Nicholas, borne in Amsterdam … tall in stature, somewhat grosse of bodie” and told of his rise from prosperous textile merchant to religious prophet in the 1540s. “This Henrie was very brave in his apparel,” Rogers claimed, parading around on holidays “in his crimsen satten doublet.” He was also said to have lived with three women in his household, all dressed in identical clothing. When one of these women, his cousin, sought outside help for a sort of spiritual malaise it was discovered (on “good report,” Rogers insists) that she had been physically abused by the head of the household. 35 “Henrie Nicholas,” not surprisingly, fled. Choosing not to quibble over biographical details, the Familists who responded to Rogers’ sensationalized story of cult intrigue focused instead on the mystical meaning of the letters “HN.” This shift in focus was more than a sly evasion calculated to obscure the prophet’s alleged misdeeds; it was an effort to relocate the entire conversation onto what the Familist responders considered to be more essential territory. A letter signed “your unkowen friend” clarified that the characters “HN” were “not the signification of any mans name.” Rather, “HN” was to be understood as the new man of Christ, or Homo Novus. In words that must have seemed particularly enigmatic to Rogers, the anonymous

34 According to Alistair Hamilton, “one of the more confusing features of English Familism is the

marked dichotomy between the confession made by individuals before justices of the peace and ecclesiastical authorities, and the printed apologies and replies to Puritan attacks. These replies are the work of educated men who knew how to argue and they indicate the existence of a Familist elite whose members are unlikely to have shared the unsophisticated interpretations of Niclaes’ [HN’s] writings provided by many of the men and women interrogated in the late 1570s.” The Family of Love (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 1981), 122. 35 Rogers, The Displaying, A5r. “Henrie Nicholas,” Roger’s clarifies, “had abused her bodie, and

made her beleeve that she should never die” (A5r).

20 Familist writer inferred bluntly that, if Christ could refer to himself by the letters “AO” (for Alpha and Omega), there was no reason why the savior could not “be all the letters betweene them two, in as much as he is the first and the last.” 36 In other words, homo novus – whatever or whomever it signified – was thought to dwell within Christ just as the letters HN existed somewhere on the alphabetical continuum created by the letters “A” and “O.” The synecdoche was clearly authorized by Niclaes’ books, and indeed shows a high level of acquaintance with the prophet’s ideas. Just as the spirit of the elect could be absorbed into the great mountain, so the letters “HN” could be used to signify the incalculable nature of Christ. As another anonymous member was to tell Rogers, the letters pertain to “all such as overcome in that battaile, and not … any one particulerly.” 37 Perhaps empathizing with what he anticipated would be the polemicist’s bewilderment, the second writer confessed that it would be a misunderstanding to say that “HN” does not refer to a human being. Niclaes, after all, was not a fiction. There are numerous references to the man HN in the writings of English Familists. Prominent members possessed significant segments of his work tucked away in chimneys and behind furniture and correspondences survive which were allegedly written between Niclaes and his followers in Warwick. 38 It is hard, then, to deny his status in English circles. Nevertheless, the second writer added, “there is some meaning, more than you or 36 Anon., “A Letter of the Familie to J.R.,” reproduced in the 1579 edition of Rogers’ The

Displaying. In Rogers’ words: “Since the imprinting of this booke of the displaying of the Familie of Love, I have been answered by diverse letters, but from whome they were sent, it is not expedient that I declare, for as much as I do but guess at the matter.” With regard to the authenticity of the letters, Rogers continued: “Since the family have coppies hereof [of these letters], I minde not to add any thing least they exclame against me as you see they do” (I2v). 37 Rogers, The Displaying, N3v. 38 See Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 18. The Warwick letters are reproduced,

albeit by a hostile editor, in Henry Ainsworth., An Epistle sent unto two daughters of Warwick from H.N. the oldest Father of the Familie of Love. With a refutation of the errors that are therein (Amsterdam, 1608).

21 wee can well tell, in these two carecters H.N.” 39 Christopher Vitells, one of the individuals responsible for the English translations of Niclaes’ works in the 1570s, clarified that the characters properly refer to the prophet’s inward virtues. God, he related, grants titles to his children “according to the worke that he will accomplish by them.” 40 As a minister who had long ago “overcome and attained to have a new name,” Nicholas was to be an instrument of the Lord, enabling others to achieve a new humanity and a similar state of oneness with the Godhead. 41 Niclaes did not, therefore, enjoy the blind adherence of his followers in England. While some appear to have simply misunderstood or abused his ideas, a significant number latched on to the message rather than the man – choosing to see their Dutch founder, not as a deity, but as the living embodiment and grateful beneficiary of a spiritual process. This is not to say the contrary, that English Familism stood for little more than a willy nilly adulteration of HN’s doctrine, twisted and shaped to fit an emerging set of interests. 42 In fact, there is a significant interpretational danger in gravitating too close to either proposition. Though seemingly opposed, the assertion that HN was blindly followed fits comfortably alongside the assertion that his ideas were twisted and even forsaken by his followers. Both are revolving elements of a polemical 39 Rogers, The Displaying, M6r. 40 Vitells words are recorded in Rogers, An Answere, F3r. 41 Anon., “Notes upon the booke entitled Evangelium Regni, gathered by the Reverend father in

Christ J.Y. Bishop of Rochester, with the aunswere of the Familie unto the sayd Notes,” in Wilkinson, A Confutation, B2r. The allusion to the “new name” appears in three of the English Familist sources here mentioned and is a direct reference to the Apocalypse of S. John (Book of Revelation). “To him that overcometh wil I geve to eate Manna, that is hid, and will geve him a white stone, and in the stone a newe name written, which no man knoweth, saving he that receaveth it.” The Bible in English (Cambridge, 1569). 42 Hamilton, for example, writes: “Although English Familism is one of the nearest creeds we get

to pure Niclaesism, it was adulterated from the start.” He goes on to cite Wilkinson who had affirmed in 1579 that “there is not almost any one particular erroneous and Schismaticall phantasie, whereof the Familie of Love hath not borrowed one braunche or other thereof, to peece unto themselves this their broken Religion.” The Family of Love, 115. This, we will see, becomes a common refrain.

22 strategy already in use in the sixteenth century. Before approaching the development of Familist ideas in England, I want then to look at this strategy and, more precisely, to the accusations of “libertinism” and “perfectionism” in Dutch and English polemics. Doing so not only allows us to avoid uncritically reproducing this designation in our evaluation of the group but also brings to the fore a number of interesting parallels between HN’s context and that of his followers in England. Hendrik Niclaes, the libertines, and the dreaded puritan In line with John Rogers’ arguably embellished account, it is probable that the real HN, Hendrik Niclaes (c. 1502-1580), spent a reasonable portion of his life fleeing from what he perceived to be outside hostility. He was not born in Amsterdam as Rogers indicates, but most probably in Westphalia where he was raised Catholic by his merchant father. 43 Tobias recounts that at this time Niclaes’ father was “much perplexed” by his young son’s tendency to fling himself into vexing theological matters. After being chastised by a local priest, however, the boy resolved to keep his opinions private “and was stil more and more an earnest lover of [the] Service and Ceremonies of the Roman Catholique Church.” 44 Whatever his true thoughts on the matter were, in 1529, following the second Diet of Speyer, Niclaes threw in his lot with local Lutherans and was arrested. It is difficult at this point to fully account for his intentions. Alistair Hamilton maintains that Niclaes was unimpressed by Lutheran theology, choosing instead to side with the Lutheran movement in its broader plea for toleration. 45 Three years earlier, the first Diet of Speyer had tentatively affirmed a prototypical version of cuius regio, eius religio, opening the field 43 For a discussion of Niclaes’ early days see Hamilton, The Family of Love, 24-32 and Jean Dietz

Moss, “‘Godded with God’: Hendrik Niclaes and His Family of Love,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 71, no. 8 (1981): 8-17. 44 Tobias, Mirabilia opera dei, 7, 16. 45 Hamilton, The Family of Love, 26.

23 for the development of Lutheranism at the behest of German princes. During the second Diet, the pope promptly annulled the dictates of the first and chose rather to reaffirm the decisions of the 1521 Council of Worms which had earlier condemned Lutheranism and which now effectively condemned Anabaptism and Zwinglianism. It seems that Niclaes – who would have agreed full-heartedly with Luther’s professed dislike of dissension over trivial matters 46 – was among those who protested the persecution of otherwise lawabiding Christians in Germany. The difficulty with Niclaes’ proposed Lutheranism emerges when we look rather to a 1529 letter written by the chancellor of Brandenburg, George Vogler, and signed by a number of prominent Germans (foremost among them, the Elector of Saxony) that politely declined the pope’s innovations. Though ostensibly arguing for European unity and for religious tolerance on the basis that, beyond what is evident and plain in Scripture, “all human additions and trifles shall fail,” Vogler’s document closed by repeating the pope’s condemnation of Anabaptism – assuring the pope that, in this matter, they were in perfect agreement. 47 As the historian Henry Clay Vedder has remarked, the incongruous final note of the 1529 Speyer protest reflected a larger discrepancy within Luther’s thought and among the Lutheran princes. Religious tolerance worked in theory but not so much in practice. Once liberated from Roman authority, Vedder concludes

46 See for example Luther’s critique of Andreas Karlstadt in “Against the Heavenly Prophets in

the Matter of Images and Sacraments (1525),” in Luther’s Works, ed. Conrad Bergendoff (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1958). A cryptic passage in Niclaes’ Proverbia HN. The Proverbs of HN which hee; in the dayes of his old-age; hath set-fourth as similitudes and mysticall sayinges (Cologne, 1575) makes reference to those “uncircumcised hearts” who “do also not spare to open their Mouth very-wide, for to talk much therof, also to invay-against and maligne very reprochfullie all Idolatrie which they with their outward Eyes looke-on or judg to be Idolatrie; and to curse or defie the Antichrist which yet they knowe not; very vehementlie: and yet ther-under; they themselves do serve the Devell, the Father of all Idols” (D2v). Niclaes was also fond of drawing a distinction between “elementish ceremonial righteousness” and Christ’s righteousness (see for example An Epistle sent unto two daughters of Warwick, 14, 52). 47 George Vogler, “The Protest at Speyer (1529),” in Henry Clay Vedder, The Reformation in

Germany (New York: MacMillan, 1914), 437.

24 that, ironically, Germany “now had three hundred popelets.” 48 It is here that we can imagine Niclaes parting ways with the Lutherans, and the discrepancy that Vedder notes was to form a cautionary refrain in later Familist writings. Two years after his brief imprisonment, Niclaes left home for Amsterdam, hoping to find others in the tolerant port city who might share his ideas. According to Hamilton, the “Lutherans” of Amsterdam were most likely members of an “infinitely more complex assembly of movements … which were later to adhere to very different confessions.” 49 A year after his relocation, Niclaes was arrested a second time for his association with this diffuse assembly and was soon thereafter released by the Court of Holland. Later in the 1560s, as the authority of Dutch Catholicism was waning, the clamoring of reformed Protestants against sectarians was gaining intensity. In 1569, a reformed minister in Emden – a city where Niclaes was to flee for a second time in 1540 – dubbed Niclaes a “libertine” along with the itinerate prophet David Jorge of Delft. 50 To many Protestants the term referred simply to those who, at heart, believed in nothing (or were, at the very least, one step away from dissolving into atheism) and who were searching for just about any lingering religious ideology to justify their freethinking designs. The definition of libertine used in the Netherlands owed much to Calvin who, lamenting his own battle to garner control over the church in Geneva, declared that the

48 Vedder, The Reformation in Germany, 297. 49 Hamilton, The Family of Love, 27. Hamilton proposes the Melchiorite Anabaptists and the

Sacramentists as two of these “very different confessions.”

50 Mirjam G.K. Van Veen, “Spiritualism in the Netherlands: From David Joris to Dirck

Volckertsz Coornhert,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 33, no. 1 (2002): 133, 140-143. In his discussion of Joris’ life, Rogers numbers “Henrie Nicholas” among those “in Holland that stifly did maintain David Georges heresies, and perverted many,” even after his death in 1556 (The Displaying, A3r). For a less hostile account of the alleged relationship between Joris and Niclaes, see William Nigel Kerr, “Henry Nicholas and the Familists.” According to Kerr, “both Joris and Nicholas were children of that strange complex of ideas which were “in the air,” each giving to it his own peculiar structure.” “Those ideas of the Antichrist, the third age of the Spirit, the inner light, continued revelation, and the worthlessness of external ceremonies, which both had in common, were by no means novel in that area” (103).

25 sole intent of the libertines was “to mix the heavens and the earth, nullifying all religion.” 51 We can again see something of this anxiety in a letter of François Junius to King Philip in 1566 regarding the state of the reformed faith in the Netherlands. Junius was convinced that, while adherence to a particular religion is ultimately an inward matter of conscience, people must nevertheless “be kept under the outward discipline of some religion, whatever it may be” lest they “would then become vile atheists and libertines.” In words which seemed almost to prefigure later attacks on HN by the likes of Rogers and Knewstub, Junius went on to describe the presence of “separate sects” in the Netherlands which denied all religion, all external practices, and whose leaders “even boast of being Christ.” 52 François Junius shares much the same assumption as had Vogler in 1529: while there is to be tolerance in matters of conscience and therefore tolerance of religious differences, libertinism (and its associated incarnations) is not religious and therefore not to be tolerated. 53 As Benjamin Kaplan notes, this early-modern assumption is not altogether foreign to contemporary scholarship, and modern historians have often fallen into the trap of seeing Libertinism as irreligious. In contrast to their professed beliefs, prophets like Niclaes and David Jorge are transformed into precursors of European secularization, their ideas becoming the embryo of a new enlightened modernity. In his own work on the 51 Calvin’s “Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertines qui se nomment spirituels” is

here cited in Bernard Cottret Calvin, A Biography (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000), 179.

52 François Junius, “A brief discourse sent to King Philip, our prince and sovereign lord, for the

interest and prophet of His Majesty and in particular of his Netherlands, in which are expounded the means that should be applied to obviate the troubles and commotion about religion and to extirpate the sects and heresies that abound in the Low Countries, 1566,” in Ernst Heinrich Kossmann and Albert Fredrik Mellink, eds., Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 57. 53 As far as Junius was concerned, “libertinism” was little more than a fated byproduct of the

triumphant break with Rome. “For today we see a large number of people who have rejected the yoke of obedience to the Roman Church and deride the mass and priests. But for fear of losing their possessions or offices they do not want to attach themselves to the discipline and worship of some other religion and have become absolute atheists without faith and without law” (“A brief discourse,” 57).

26 Netherlands, Kaplan argues that there were in fact two dominant religious strains that constituted the libertine movement: Protestant dissent and spiritualist mysticism. 54 Both served as “the most powerful ideological ammunition then available against ecclesiastical discipline.” 55 If Calvin had transformed Luther’s revolution into an ineffectual Moralism, then a new revolution was called for. This time, however, mystical interiority was to take precedence over outward shows of obedience. Kaplan’s libertines, in effect, used Protestantism to critique Protestants and medieval Catholic spirituality to critique Catholic fetishism. The question, however, remains as to whether these ideological impulses were something more than ammunition – whether they were largely polemical expediencies or natural outgrowths of a deeper, more intractable, set of religious assumptions. For Niclaes, who reportedly spent the last decade of his life in Cologne after fleeing from yet another bout of persecution in Emden, 56 the hovering phantom of the “scripture-learned” was never far away, and the boundary between deeply-held religious belief and “ammunition” probably never existed. If the protest against tyranny resulted only in more tyranny, then where was true Protestantism to be found? The right to defend one’s conscience was an issue that was calculated to strike at the heart of Protestantism itself. As Kaplan notes, the so-called 54 Benjamin J. Kaplan, ““Remnants of the Papal Yoke:” Apathy and Opposition in the Dutch

Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25, no. 3 (1994): 656-658. “One way that historians have often read the Libertine’s typical behavior is to consider it irreligious. Numerous historians suggest that Dutch Libertines simply lacked religious conviction. Jean Charles Naber, for example, attributes to them a ‘decided unbelief.’ In drawing this conclusion, Naber ratifies the judgment of contemporary Calvinists, a judgment implicit in the very word Libertine.” See also Kaplan, Calvin and the Libertines. Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578-1620 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). The subjects of Protestant dissent and spiritualism are also developed at length in Stephen E. Ozment’s Mysticism and Dissent: Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). 55 Kaplan, “Remnants of the Papal Yoke,” 668. 56 “Niclaes,” according to Moss, “probably lived in Cologne during the 1570’s and had his works

there at that time” (“Godded with God,” 16). Referring perhaps to Niclaes’ persecution in Emden, Tobias recounts that “into this Abysse and Depth, the Lord let fall his chosen servant H.N., and suffered him to tast and feel the condemnation of all ungodly ones in the hellish fire, the most horrible perdition, and the most ugly abomination of desolation” (Mirabilia opera dei, 26).

27 libertines were fond of drawing similarities between the contrasting poles of Catholicism and Calvinism (popes and popelets) based on what appeared to them to be a pharisaical need to control. 57 The opponents of Familist libertinism in England could play this game as well. John Knewstub proposed in 1579 that members in England were the true puritans (not the Calvinists) – “bragge they of all perfection, even unto a verie deifying of themselves.” 58 Of course Knewstub’s own pastimes had included abolishing clerical vestments, refusing to sign the cross at baptism, and attempting to further reform the Book of Common Prayer. He himself was by no means free of the accusation of Puritanism and clearly wished to shuffle it along to someone else. Kristen Poole has persuasively shown that the term “puritan” functioned in early modern discourse as something of a catchall for “taxonomic crisis.” 59 Oppositional taxonomies like Catholic/Calvinist and Libertine/Perfectionist were fragile; and the resort to “Puritanism” often stemmed from anxiety over the breakdown of these taxonomies. 60 As puritans, Familists embodied not merely a hypocritical perfectionism which bordered on libertinism but also the blurring of the very boundaries which allowed for group identity and, accordingly, disciplinary action. In the polemical portrait that emerged in the England of the 1570s, Familists were both obedient automatons and unbridled libertines – followers of the cult of HN and

57 Kaplan, “Remnants of the Papal Yoke,” 662. For instance, Christopher Vitells, the alleged

Familist elder in England, compared the hostile Protestant magistrates of his day with the Pharisees of Jesus’ time who had accused him of breaking the laws of Moses (Rogers, An Answere, B6r-v). 58 Knewstub, A Confutation, sig. 13r. 59 Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton, 4.

60 “In a culture loudly proclaiming the need for religious uniformity,” Poole continues, “‘puritans’

were the mutable, the indeterminable, the unlocatable; they seemingly incorporated pluralities, oppositions, and binaries. They were at once Protestant, Papist, and Jew; repressive killjoys and wanton libertines; of foreign origin and dangerously, subterraneously domestic; the sacred and the obscene” (Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton, 4). See also Poole’s Chapter 3, “Lewd conversations: the perversions of the Family of Love.”

28 followers of no one. This was in part because, to the hostile imagination, “perfectionism” and “libertinism” signified the two extremes that resulted in equal measure when one had unmoored oneself from orthodox belief. It was also because a central tenet of orthodox belief asserted the impossibility of perfect obedience in the first place. As Calvin related in the 1559 edition of The Institutes, the purpose of the divine Law was not the act of its fulfillment but rather its ability to function as a mirror, showing us our own depravity. Erroneously believing that the Law can be obeyed, the individual was condemned to the chaos of his or her own imagination. “So long as he is permitted to appeal to his own judgment,” Calvin explained, “he substitutes a hypocritical for a real righteousness, and, contented with this, sets up certain factitious observances in opposition to the grace of God.” 61 Thus, the closer that one moved to the extreme of perfectionism, the farther one fell from actual perfection. As the logic went, only a true hypocrite would claim alongside HN to be “godded with god.” In the words of one Familist critic, it was far more likely that such individuals were “devilified like their father the Devill.” 62 The tendency of antifamilists to oscillate between charges of perfectionism and libertinism was also owing to conflicting polemical purposes. Were local Familists, once ferreted out, to be charitably admonished and brought back to the fold or were they, as Knewstub advised, to be severed from the English people altogether? 63 Were members

61 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids:

WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1989), II.VII.VI.

62 It is worth noting that Familists made use of the same polemical strategy in their writings

against the so-called “scripture-learned.” Such individuals, they believed, were prone to following their own imaginations rather than simply submitting themselves to the true love of God. “These are very Libertines,” wrote the anonymous author of The Apology, “inclined always to hatred and iniquity, stirring up strife, setting variance amongst Princes, breaking lawes, despising authority and ordinances of men, resisting Gods love and mercifullness, Blaspheming the truth, and persecuting the Innocent or simple” (20). “Devilified like their father the Devill” is from Ephriam Pagitt, The Mysticall Wolfe: Set forth in a Sermon Preached in the Church of Edmund the King (London, 1644), 6. 63 For Knewstub’s advice, see the closing of his dedication to the “very good Lord and Maister,

Ambrose, Earle of Warwick” at the beginning of A Confutation, sig. 7v-8r.

29 of the group naïve country folk who had simply fallen in over their heads or were they the newest incarnation of an age-old insurrectionism? One can find hints of either perspective throughout the antifamilist oeuvre. In practically the same breath, Rogers could claim that English Familists were simpletons “captived” to the pernicious doctrine of HN and were the same old English heretics “under a new devised name.” 64 Logically speaking, the need to incriminate those involved runs afoul of the need to express the insidious nature of the leader and his belief system. If Familism demands the unflagging obedience of its members, and if HN achieves such obedience by mystifying the simple with “trifling and halfepeny doctrines” emboldened by “loftie and high phrases of speech,” then the blame falls on the leader and not on the followers. 65 A comparable dynamic prevails in our current context in the debate over brainwashing in religious movements that are described as “cults.” According to Eileen Barker, the anticult contingent stems in part from the efforts of parents in the 70s who “were concerned about their (adult) children’s suddenly converting and giving up promising careers and futures to follow a charismatic leader.” Faced with their loved one’s intransigence in the matter, and unable to convince them to defect, the concerned parents had recourse to then-popular brainwashing theories which, Barker relates, had “the further advantage of absolving both parents and converts from any responsibility.” 66 To the degree that HN’s charisma was imbued with the Devil’s subtlety, his English converts were lamentably mistaken and free of responsibility. As is the case with 64 Rogers, The Displaying, D7v-D9v. 65 Knewstub, A Confutation, sig. 14r. 66 Eileen Barker, “Charting the Information Field: Cult-Watching Groups and the Construction of

Images of New Religious Movements,” in Teaching New Religious Movements, ed. David G. Bromley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 313. “According to brainwashing logic,” Barker continues, “the converts were not really happy, nor had they made a free choice to join the NRM [New Religious Movement]. Rather, something had been done to them – they had been subjected to irresistible and irreversible techniques that had rendered them incapable of resistance or escape or of recognizing their own best interests” (313).

30 twentieth century brainwashing theories, such a verdict simultaneously infantilizes the subject; the “cult” member is simply too immature, too stupid, to be much of a threat alone. At the other end of the spectrum, however, Knewstub and Rogers clearly felt threatened by the English Familists. The cult of HN, and not simply Niclaes alone, were believed to have formed a network stretching throughout England. In 1580, a repentant ex-member told the Wisbech minister Thomas Barwick that there were an “infinite number” of Familist sympathizers – so many, that if any one of them should be imprisoned for their beliefs, “they have so many friends and such collections amonge the famelye that … it is impossible they should be reclaimed.” 67 Outside the prison walls, a certain number of Familists were also alleged to hold prominent positions in the Queen’s court. As Christopher Marsh has suggested, this fact would have been especially infuriating to those antifamilists whose austere Protestantism put them somewhat at odds with the moderate Elizabeth. 68 Rogers, for example, received a letter from an anonymous Familist in 1578 boldly threatening to banish the puritanical polemicist to obscurity. “You give a glaunce also at the greatest house in this realme, which you wish were cleare of such errours [Familism], but (put by your bolt I advise you) whether that house hath auctoritie to overlooke you and your adherents, that may you knowe hereafter.” 69 These were not the sentiments of brainwashed followers. Whether the

67 Romsye, “The confession of Leonard Romsye,” 190-191. 68 See Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 138. 69 Anon., “A Letter of the Familie to J.R.” A later antifamilist writer was to refer to a number of

the Familists as “courtiers” and “householde servants” of the Queen (Anon., A Supplication of the Familie of Love, 18). Elizabeth “had always about her some Familistes, or favourers of that Sect, who always related, or bare tidings what was donne, or intended against them” (46). “They say they are also poore, or the most of them,” the anonymous critic continued, “but if the booke of their names, called of them The booke of Life, could be seene, it would then appeare, I doubt not, that both the number of them is great, and most of them very rich” (57). Yet another Familist wrote to Rogers in 1578 signing the initials “E.R.” at the close of document. Marsh has proposed that “E.R.” (which was commonly emblazoned on the chest of the Queen’s Yeoman) may in fact be a reference to Elizabetha Regina (Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 120-121).

31 threat was real or entirely ungrounded, it was representative of a larger collective capable of thinking for itself and of playing the same political game as its opponents. If English Familists were not blind supporters of HN but rather, as Rogers feared, the same old English heretics operating under new a name, then their doctrine could be seen as little more than a cloak for more sinister operations. After all, because HN’s doctrine was unintelligible to begin with (a judgment Knewstub made with particular relish), English followers could do little more than adulterate it. Niclaes had judged his fellow Familists harshly in The Prophetie of the Spirit of Love, denouncing those among them who “under the Pretence or Colour of the Howse or Service of Love; have taken-on to your-selves, the Volupteousnes of the Flesh according to the maner of the World.” In fact, The Prophetie devoted an entire chapter to such ruthless apostates, lumping them together with the worst of the “Wyse and Scripture-learned.” 70 While Niclaes’ criticism of his own ranks can be dismissed as a sort of Jeremiad, more affective than descriptive; it provided the antifamilist contingent in England with exactly the sort of evidence it needed to show the world that HN’s followers had run amuck. In 1606, on the heels of a Familist plea for clemency from James I, an anonymous English critic declared that even HN, “the oldest Father of that Familie, and privie to all their actions and delinges take them, I meane many, even Almost all of them, to bee but an whorish company, making the voluptuousnesse of the flesh their freedome, or summum bonum.” 71 Not unlike Luther, HN had opened the door to all manner of libertines bent on subverting the discipline necessary for a proper commonwealth. In so far as they were not simply debased as pawns, the Familists in England were thus subjected to much the same charge as had been Niclaes and the other alleged

70 Hendrik Niclaes, The Prophetie of the Spirit of Love. Set-fourth by HN: And by him perused a-

new and more distinctly declared (Cologne, 1574), A5r-A7v. 71 Anon., A Supplication, 13.

32 “libertines” in Germany and the Netherlands. They were, at best irreligious and, at worst, subversive. On the other hand, when English Familists were debased as pawns, their socalled “religion” was understood to be little more than a snare. At times, this seems to be Knewstub’s greatest fear: that the religiosity of Familism – capable of drawing “a man so far from the place wher he was, that hardly can he get home again” 72 – would someday plunge all of England into chaos. Either side of the polemical strategy was rooted in the same assumption. The doctrine of the Family of Love was a representation without actual substance – a catchall much like the term “puritan” for any number of underlying maladies. Of course, this was not so for the members themselves who, as their writings attest, saw Familism as a living breathing faith. The remainder of this chapter will attempt to describe this faith by asking how the Familists in England altered the expression of Niclaes’ teachings to fit their particular context. The cult of HN

Niclaes sought to communicate an inward state of spiritual awareness by transgressing seemingly fixed boundaries. The gracious time in which those obedient in the love would be called to terra pacis was believed to “commeth” and to have “already come.” As Leonard Romsye awkwardly confessed before an Ely magistrate, the Family believed that “everlastynge lyffe was in this lyffe and that is nothinge but the peace of conscience whiche they enjoye who are perfetly obediente unto the doctrine and religion of H.N.” 73 It was this message of peace of conscience that members in England sought, in turn, to communicate to those outside the group. However, given the harsh polemical climate of the 1570s and 80s, such a message was not foremost in the public imagination. Every word, no matter how temperate, functioned like a stake in the ground, tethering the speaker to a preexisting network of opinions. In the 1580 Familist dialogue An Apology 72 Knewstub, A Confutation, M1v. 73 Romsye, “The confession of Leonard Romsye,” 191.

33 for the Service of Love the exiled English speaker had first to deal with charges of Anabaptism, Pelagianism, Libertinism, and Catholicism, before even attempting to make his point. Moreover, men like Rogers and Knewstub were extremely successful in stringing these charges together in such a way that Familists, being guilty of one of them, were somehow guilty of all of them. 74 To describe a spiritual state that transcended both the charges and the aberrant doctrinal opinions that supposedly lurked behind them was thus no easy task. Despite having similar goals, members in England often moved beyond Niclaes, expressing the central tenets of the Family of Love in ways unique to their context outside of the Netherlands. While we can explain these differences in method by having recourse to the different polemical contexts against which Familists were reacting (one in Holland and one in England), such a tack can be problematic for two reasons. For one, as suggested in the previous section, the polemical strategies against the libertines largely carried over from one context to another. François Junius, for example, issued much the same attack on “separate sects” in general as did Knewstub and others on Familists in particular. In fact, the tendency to acknowledge continuity between the two contexts was itself part of the polemical strategy. The reformed faith was united in its denunciation of the amorphous “other” that, in turn, was united only in parading pigheaded disunity as a theological virtue. 75 A second, related reason why this tack can be problematic is that it 74 For an example of the connectedness of these charges see Poole’s discussion of Familism in

Chapter 3 of Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton. “However scurrilous, scandalous, or sexy these accounts of Familist behavior may be,” she writes, “such representations are not an end unto themselves. Reports of unconstrained Familist sexuality demonstrate not only the threat of antinomian chaos but also the consequences of linguistic anarchy: the Familists’ salacious reputation is consistently, directly correlated to their aberrant discursive practices” (77). 75 While it is worthwhile to note that Junius and Knewstub spoke from different, albeit Calvinist,

backgrounds, the elements of their writings that concern us were rooted in polemical forms used by Calvin in, among other things, his Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertines qui se nomment spirituels (1545). Knewstub, for example, noted that the Familists were the same Libertines which “that wothie instrument in Christ his Church Master Calvine did so mislike of.” Calvin, he continued, “willeth al ment to cut them of here at the first” (A Confutation, M3r).

34 assumes, along with the Family’s hostile contemporaries, that the group existed only in so far as it stood opposed to the dominant order – or, perhaps more accurately, to whatever order was claiming to represent “dominant” interests. While many of the extant sources are indeed products of this opposition, it would be a mistake to assume that Familism, as understood by its practitioners, was exclusively reactive or opportunistic. Assuming, rather, that English Familists believed what they said they believed – that their religion was an assistance to the Queen’s religion and not a hindrance – their derivations from Niclaes’ works may be owing instead to an effort to articulate a sense of continuity with existing strands of religion in England. Niclaes’ numerous books were first translated and manufactured in Cologne by Niclas Bohmbargen before appearing in England in 1575. Their rapid dissemination amongst English Familists was no doubt due to the efforts of two of Bohmbargen’s probable associates, Thomas Basson and Christopher Vitells. 76 Both men had roots in Cambridgeshire and in the Netherlands. The religious affiliation of Basson, an English printer living in Leiden, is unknown. However, he did publish Temporis Filia Veritas in 1589, a text that is almost certainly Familist in origin. The fact that he moved to Leiden in the 1570s, the same period in which English Familists were most harshly persecuted, has also been offered as evidence that he was himself a Familist, or at least had Familist sympathies. 77 Vitells, who is identified by a number of sources as an elder in the Family, was central to the development of Familism in the Isle of Ely and Essex. J.W. Martin has claimed that Vitells was likely of English origin, citing, among other evidence, his

76 Hamilton, The Family of Love, 62, 119. 77 For information on Basson and for the origins of Temporis Filia Veritas, see Marsh, The

Family of Love in English Society, 181-182 and Hamilton, The Family of Love, 131. J.A. van Dorsten has also published a helpful book-length study of Basson entitled Thomas Basson 1555-1613, English Printer at Leiden (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1961) which argues in part that Basson’s relocation from England to Leiden in the 1570s was perhaps a consequence of the rising tide of antifamilist sentiment in England at that time.

35 “indigenous English surname.” 78 In 1578, Rogers referred to Vitells as HN’s “disciple here in England” – “a man that all the dayes of Queene Marie was a teacher of those famous heretiques the Arrians.” 79 He was later to clarify, however, that Vitells was “of the Dutch race…salling from one error to another, as those countrymen are apt unto.” 80 In any event, it is clear that Vitells’ bilingual and multi-national status made him an apt candidate for the translation of Niclaes’ ideas into a new English context. Familists in England were thus left to draw from what Marsh has called “HN’s varied menu of commands.” 81 All and all, this menu was comprised of just under twenty books, from The Letters of the ABC in Rhyme (for “thee youngones”) to more sophisticated theological tomes like the Dicta HN and the Evangelium Regni. 82 Vitells also translated a number of Niclaes’ ballads, blessings, and hymns alongside the extended mystical allegory Terra Pacis. Throughout these many writings, Niclaes often exhibited an uncompromising asceticism. He urged the spiritual neophyte to utterly forsake the “wicked world” – a task that he called the “first School-rule” of upright Christian doctrine. 83 Familist elders were to weed their gardens obsessively, to separate themselves from the “durt” of this world, and, like Noah, to prepare an “uncorruptible Arke” for their salvation. 84 To those non-Familists who might approach the faithful “as though they were hungrie and thirstie,” Niclaes advised his followers –

78 J.W. Martin, Religious Radicals in Tudor England (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 206. 79 Rogers, The Displaying, sig. 8v, D3r. 80 Rogers, An Answere, E8r. 81 Marsh, “Piety and Persuasion,” 143. 82 Hendrik Niclaes, All the Letters of the A.B.C. in Rhyme (Cologne, 1575), 1. 83 Niclaes, The Prophetie of the Spirit of Love, A5r. 84 For references to the world as “durt,” see Hendrik Niclaes, Dicta HN: Documentall sentences

eaven-as those-same were spoken-forth by HN, and written-up out of the woordes of his mouth (Cologne, 1574), 13v and Niclaes, Epistolae HN: The Principall Epistles of HN, which he hath set-foorth through the

36 … feed them not for-al-that, in their Hunger, nether quench you their thirst: Eate not also with them, of one Bread nether yet likewise drinke you with them, out of one Cup: but let them passaway and have not any Pitie or Compassion at-all over them. 85 Niclaes’ insularism was supported by a dualistic soteriology in which salvation was achieved through the mystical ability to discern the difference between good and evil – a task that was symbolized to great effect in Terra Pacis, or “the spiritual land of peace.” First published in English in 1550, Terra Pacis told of a “secret land … severed from all other lands and people.” On the exact time and location, Niclaes’ was characteristically evasive. He claimed in his preface that terra pacis had “descended from heaven” and “the knowledge thereof” had already been given to the Family. However, at other points, he seemed to envision the new heavenly Jerusalem as existing sometime in the future. 86 It seems that Niclaes intended the allegory as a means of illustrating to the spiritual neophyte the differences between the land of ignorance and the land of truth. “Consider well,” he said, “the strange states of the Wildernessed Land, and People, to the end that ye may forsake or pass by them, and have also a good regard unto the lovely state of the good Land, and of the holy People.” 87 The second-to-last chapter of the text justified the preceding narration of strange people and “horrible places” by suggesting simply that they need to be “knowne.” 88 Elsewhere, Niclaes clarified that the relationship between the earthly wilderness and terra pacis was perceived “as thorowe a Glasse.” To those who were experienced members of the Family – or, in Niclaes’ terminology, “obedient in the Love” or “grown

holy Spirit of Love and written and sent them most-cheefly; unto the Lovers of the Trueth and his Acquaintance (Cologne 1575), 81. “Uncorruptible Arke” is from Niclaes, Proverbia , C1r. 85 Niclaes, Proverbia, E4v-E5r. 86 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 12. 87 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 20. 88 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 191.

37 up in the Love” – the land of peace showed forth “in perfect cleerness.” To those outside the collective who, as the prophet believed, followed the chimeras of their own wisdom, the glass had been thoroughly darkened with “smoke and vapour.” 89 In his Introduction to the Glasse of Righteousness, Niclaes imagined the glass as a “middle-wall” separating the human creature from divinity. Sounding more than a little like the biblical Koheleth, he detailed his own days of wandering amongst the confused people of the earth. “Oh how much experience have I of this their Ignorance and Conceitedness! I have examined it very much. I have had regarde unto the Judgement of many Men, and made myselfe common with every-one. Howbeit, I have founde many Things vayne.” 90 Like the pilgrim in the allegory of Terra Pacis, Niclaes’ had traveled through numerous lands of ignorance before arriving home. For the middle wall to be torn down, one had first to consider the things of this earth before coming to the conclusion that indeed all is vanity. One was to remain an objective outsider, learning “to have a consideration betwixt a godded and an ungodded Man” while, at the same time, walking “unseene and unknowen before all those that are with out the Family of Love.” 91 While the dualism expressed in works like Terra Pacis and the Introduction to the Glasse of Righteousness was to be “considered,” it was also to be overcome by a mystical form of sanctification. Niclaes believed that the foggy glass or wall that appeared between the creature and its creator was a consequence of Adam’s Fall. In a prelapsarian state, “God was all that Man was, and the Man all that God was.” 92 Ontologically, the 89 Niclaes, Proverbia, D2v-D3r. 90 Hendrik Niclaes, Introductio. An Introduction to the holy Understanding of the Glasse of

Righteousness. Wherin are uttered many notable Admonitions and Exhortations to the Good-life, also sundry discreet Warnings to beware of Destruction, and of wrong-conceiving: and misunderstanding or censuring of any Sentences (Cologne, 1574), F7v, E4r. Niclaes likewise describes the so-called “middle wall” in the second chapter of his Epistolae as being synonymous with the consequences of the Fall. 91 Niclaes, Epistolae, 171, 246. 92 Niclaes, Epistolae, 340.

38 prophet held an arguably Manichean view of human nature, asserting that “no man ascendeth unto Heaven but hee which cometh or descendeth from Heaven.” 93 Future generations, though estranged from God, still retained part of the divine essence that had been implanted in them from birth. To be “godded with God” was thus to actualize that which remained dormant in the heart of the elect in such a way that “God the Father doth then live substantially in us.” 94 This, Niclaes believed, was the “inward Life of Christ (which is called the New Man).” The real terra pacis was to be sought, not in a literal heaven, but in the soul of the spiritually-aware individual. 95 The Lydford minister and alleged Familist, Anthony Randall, was to confirm these sentiments before local English authorities in 1581. In his words, “there was no place of Paradise: but it was to be understood spiritually, or allegorically.” 96 This spiritual understanding, or “inseeing” as Niclaes called it, 97 was moreover to be cultivated only within the bounds set by the Family of Love. This is not to deny that Niclaes could be remarkably tolerant at points. He censured anyone who “judgest another” in order to “justify thy selfe;” he condemned neither the Pope nor “any institutions of Religion;” and generally believed that, at the end of days, all “Christians, Jewes, Mahometists, and heathen” would be absorbed into the Family of Love. 98 So far

93 Niclaes, Dicta, B5r. 94 Niclaes, Epistolae, 61. 95 Niclaes, Introductio, Q1r-v. According to Niclaes, “it is all to no-purpose, to set ones mynde

upon any thing, that is above in the Heaven, or that is beneath under the Earth: eyther what People, this or thatt is: or wherhence Christ shall come or not; or with what outward Appeerance, the kingdome of God commeth” (Q2r). 96 Anthony Randall, “Assertions of Anthony Randal of the Family of Love, Minister of Lydford.

For which he was deprived by the Bishop of Exon, in the year 1581,” in John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1822), 3:159. 97 Niclaes, Dicta, B8v. 98 Niclaes, Introductio, B3v, B4r, B3r.

39 as this was his focus, Niclaes resembled one of the many religious thinkers who comprised what Louis Dupré has called the “surprising religious ecumenism” of the Netherlands. Hoping to have it both ways, these thinkers retained an emphasis on a “pious disposition” while siding with Protestants in their revolt against outmoded doctrinal accretions. 99 To a degree, this helps explain Niclaes’ willingness, on the one hand, to throw in his lot with those Lutherans who opposed the second Diet of Speyer while, on the other hand, resisting the heavy-handed finality of the Dutch Reformed establishment in the 1560s. Yet, more often than not, “obedience in the Love” was a profoundly selective category in Niclaes’ writings. While the prophet certainly emphasized a pious disposition, he also believed that, though a man might have “such faith that he could move Mountains,” “could open and declare all mysteries,” give “all his Goods to the Poore,” “shewe a certain obedience,” flee “from Land to Land,” and ultimately martyr himself before God, these actions were meaningless “if he have not the Love.” 100 Niclaes’ writings are filled with grand visions of Europe’s religious sects putting aside their differences and coming together to terra pacis. These same writings, however, stressed a dualism so entrenched as to allow little room for agency on the part of those outside the Family. The world was simply too fallen, too mutable, to produce anything other than weeds. For those who did not exhibit what he called a “goodwillinge” disposition toward absorption in the Love, Niclaes’ reserved the title of “scripture-learned” or simply “unwilling.” These, he believed, were individuals who wallowed in the flesh and set up as idols their own vain speculations. They were the hypocrites of the New Testament and

99 Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 231. 100 Niclaes, Introductio, B2r.

40 the sophists of those “famous Schooles” that dotted the contemporary landscape. 101 If the Family floated toward salvation on an incorruptible Ark, the unwilling ones would surely either drown or, in one of Niclaes’ more potent images, “be swallowed-up through the terrible Fyre of the hellish Dragons.” 102 What defined the Ark was therefore its ability to separate from this heathen collective – to achieve a unified state of spiritual awareness that trumped the ravings of those who were tossed about in the sea. For whatever reason, members in England adopted a markedly different rhetorical strategy. In the Familist dialogue An Apology for the Service of Love, three characters, a cocksure Citizen, a skeptical Countryman, and an Exile, debate the place of the Family in the context of advancing Elizabethan Protestantism. While the Citizen is rather easily won-over by the pro-Familist arguments of the Exile, the Countryman fixates on the charge that HN (and by extension the Family in England) proffers his own religious opinions to the exclusion of more orthodox religious ideals. “Will thou then,” he asks the Exile, “take part with, and justifie the Author (HN) and his Books, and so condemn our learned Preachers?” By now weary of so many questions, the Exile responds: “I am against no learned Preacher, which advertizeth the people to repentence, godliness, peace, obedience, and love; and so long as they love God, and his righteousness, they have, I suppose, all heard of the ministration of Love.” 103 The Countryman is no doubt intended to represent those in England who were predisposed to the austere message of a Rogers or a Knewstub. His demand that the exile either condemn HN or condemn learned English preachers is just one of many such oppositions in the dialogue that make up the spurious claim that one cannot be both a member of the Family and an upright English citizen. 101 Niclaes, Epistolae, 22. 102 Niclaes, Proverbia, C2r. 103 Niclaes, An Apology, 44, 43.

41 The Exile’s response is a far cry from the dualistic reasoning implicit in many of Niclaes’ works. Rather than being a selective mystical category, “obedience in the love” is here synonymous with a simplistic, yet refined, faith expressing nothing more than the highest ideals of English communitas. In this sense, the exile embodies what Jeffrey Knapp has called “rogue nationalism.” In contrast to the precise doctrinal oppositions of the countryman, the rogue is “the crude image of a ‘free’ society committed to moderation and organized on the most basic principles of Christian faith.” While Knapp relates that “the rogue underworld may have appeared a crisis in itself … it was also capable of seeming to reflect deeper English crises.” 104 Though the Exile is removed from mainstream society, he thus upholds and exemplifies the basic principles of that society. In the Countryman’s words, though he “hath no certain dwelling place,” he also “is indeed our very near kinsman.” 105 Moreover, the Exile’s isolation grants him a unique perspective. He, more than anyone else, is able to recognize the true crises that currently encircle the English nation: the very pharisaicalism that had once doomed him to exile. As an anonymous Familist proudly reminded John Rogers in 1578, such unsettling truth is “always manifested amongst the outsevered ones from this world.” 106 A similar dynamic to the one found in the Apology appears in a polemical work published in 1579 by William Wilkinson, then a fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge and an avid critic of the Family of Love. It has been suggested that, as was the case with Rogers, Wilkinson had a personal acquaintance with a number of Familists and, in 1578, compiled his Confutation of Certaine Articles with every intention of sending it along to

104 Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 77, 70. 105 Anon., An Apology, 7. 106 Rogers, The Displaying, I6v.

42 these Familists for their consideration. 107 As a result, the final document faithfully replicates the responses of an anonymous member of the group writing under the biblical name “Theophilus.” Like the Exile, Theophilus expresses “obedience in the Love” in the broadest terms possible, declaring that “it is all one to say the house of Love and the house of God: the familye of Love, and the family of God.” 108 In reference to Niclaes’ call in the Epistolae for the faithful to separate themselves from the “wicked Worlde” and flee to the “Hill of the Love, wheron the Lordes Howse is buylded,” Theophilus insists that the reference to the Hill “is spoken of the love itself and not of the Family.” In other words, the prophet’s call is properly understood as a call to charity broadly-construed, not as a call to membership in a distinct religious collective. After all, he continues, “how is a house to be builded on a house?”109 Theophilus urges Wilkinson to consider the Family of Love – the “sect” or “cult” of HN – as but an expression of a far more inclusive divine Love. Like the English members who responded to Rogers vitriol by stating flatly that “HN is not the signification of any man’s name,” Theophilus here denies that the Family itself is anything other than a group of rogue nationalists who, though exiled, cling to the same divine charity which lies at the very heart of the Queen’s religion. Wilkinson, of course, was loathe to accept such conciliatory speeches; and his response to Theophilus is a reminder of just how difficult it was for the Family of Love to transcend the polemical climate of the 1570s and 80s. He accuses his anonymous respondent of taking “that to be graunted which is in controversie” – namely, that the Family of Love is simply a particular way of referring to Christians in general. In fact, he says, what you really affirm is “that you onely which are of that familye, and no man els 107 See Christopher Marsh, “Wilkinson, William (c.1551–1613), religious writer and

ecclesiastical lawyer,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004 –), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29431. 108 Wilkinson, A Confutation, C2r. 109 Wilkinson, A Confutation, C3r. For the quote from Niclaes, see Epistolae, 5.

43 which is not of that societye, is of the Church.” 110 In this affirmation, Wilkinson concludes, the Family is just another libertine sect hoping to shatter the religious unity of England.

110 Wilkinson, A Confutation, C2r.

44 CHAPTER II A MYSTERY OR A MUDDLE? English Familists believed that the essence of their religion, expressed and witnessed by their founder Hendrik Niclaes, spoke to the people of England at large. However, as many scholars of the movement have noted, theirs was not a rigorously evangelizing faith. To a degree, this was due simply to necessity. Whether or not Familists wanted to usher in the sort of spiritual utopia imagined by their founder, it was not in their more immediate interest to advertise. While the Queen’s 1580 Proclamation was perhaps the loudest blast against the Family, there had been rumblings against the group almost from its inception. Knewstub, ever-conscious of his own somewhat marginalized status, 111 had pushed for the interrogation and, when necessary, execution of alleged members. Too long, he insisted, had Familism not been “esteemed perilous unto the estate,” and, as a result, the group now threatened “the overthrowe of the comon wealth.” 112 Moreover, as Keith Thomas has proposed, in early modern England “the idea that every person was endowed with unique capacities which could be cultivated and developed was only embryonic.” 113 For the most part, the English public held fast to rigid social hierarchies in which one’s hopes and dreams were narrowly circumscribed by

111 One registers more than a hint of anxiety in Knewstub’s following address to his reader: “A number in this lande, upon false alarme, have been in a vaine jealousie and feare of Puritanisme. Nowe the justice of God hath payed us. For that which was spoken before in slaunder, nowe may bee spoken in trueth: and that which was believed, when it was not, is scarce suspected when it is. For if you seeke after the Puritans, these [i.e. the Family] they bee” (A Confutation, sig. 13r). There is also strong evidence that Knewstub was a member of the “Cambridge boys” fellowship that his friend and fellow Suffolk Cleric Thomas Rogers (no relation to John Rogers) denounced in 1589 as being needlessly sectarian and in many ways no better than the members of the Family of Love. For a discussion of Thomas Roger’s accusation, see John S. Craig, “‘The Cambridge Boies’: Thomas Rogers and the ‘Brethren’ in Bury St. Edmunds,” in Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from his Students, eds. Susan Wabuda and Carolina Litzenberger (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 157-159. 112 Knewstub, A Confutation, sig. 12v. 113 Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England (Oxford :

Oxford University Press, 2009), 13.

45 one’s lot. To the poorer sort, then, mystical exploration was simply not within the realm of possibilities. If, as some have suggested, English Familists were not poor, but often of the middling sort (and, in certain exceptional cases, enjoyed prominent royal posts from Keepers of the Armoury to Yeoman of the Queen’s Guard), then who exactly did they hope to speak to? 114 As this chapter will argue, members of the Family of Love in England advertised themselves to the outside world by appropriating and altering the meaning of the divorce between tongue and heart – public and private – identities. In so doing, they spoke to a portion of the population that was concerned with the primacy of the former in the construction and maintenance of collective identity. This tack was no doubt a gamble. In the minds of many of their contemporaries, Familists could (and did) become dissemblers, exploiting the gap between public and private life when the opportunity demanded. By pronouncing the Family of Love a mystery, hostile critics and apostate Familists were largely successful in hinting at what they thought was a deeper truth: that the inner life of the group, once revealed, would resemble the monstrous face of heresy. But the gamble was also to succeed in bringing to the fore important questions about the nature of spirituality in England. As J.W. Martin has noted in his Religious Radicals in Tudor England, even the most ardent reformers like the Dry Drayton minister Richard Greenham acknowledged that the Family of Love, however aberrant, was symptomatic of larger problems. As Greenham lamented in 1580, the English people “attribute so much to ministerial knowledge, and have so little profit by the teaching of the Spirit.” As a consequence, he wrote, “the Lord…doth now teach us by deluding spirits and fantastical devisers and the lying Familie of Love.” 115 For the Familists, and

114 See Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 150-173. 115 Richard Greenham is quoted in Martin, Religious Radicals in Tudor England, 221-222.

According to Martin, Greenham implies that “the popular success of the Familists…should show the

46 for those who entertained their message, the larger issue was one of collective identity. Was this identity clarified or obscured through such public conceits as the minutiae of doctrine and ministerial knowledge? A number of scholars have suggested that English Familism, by questioning the relevance of such knowledge, earned for themselves a place decidedly outside of the mainstream. Christopher Marsh, however, has provided ample evidence to the contrary by pointing to the relatively comfortable socio-economic position of the group’s members. The purpose of this chapter is to supplement this evidence through a discussion of the ideological reasons for the Family’s appeal to, and ready engagement with, elements of the mainstream. The divided field Though they may agree on little else, both English Reformation historians and literary critics have pointed to the emergence of a radical disjunction between private and public identities in the Elizabethan period. According to the historian Peter Lake, the Queen’s reluctance to constrict her claims to legitimacy to the manifestly contested territory of Protestantism produced a situation in which adherence to “Protestant orthodoxy” could, in theory and in practice, be divorced from one’s personal beliefs. Elizabeth’s policy, Lake says, “opened up a gap between the inward and the outward…a space which, it seemed to many contemporaries, could be exploited for all sorts of dissimulation and pretense by the faithless and the unscrupulous.” 116 While Lake here steers us away from the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt’s similar, though in his estimation more “nebulous,” concept of “Renaissance self-fashioning,” there is good reason to believe that the divide between inner and outer did indeed have roots in an

Puritan clergy that in emphasizing the objective doctrinal side of religion, they have been neglecting its subjective side, the inner spiritual experience which should accompany theologically sound belief.” 116 Peter Lake, “Religious Identities in Shakespeare’s England,” in A Companion to Shakespeare,

ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 64.

47 admittedly more nebulous English worldview. 117 For Greenblatt, the late sixteenth century was a period of “unmooring” in which rigid social and intellectual hierarchies had begun to break down. What emerged was an unprecedented emphasis on “the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process.” 118 The following analysis will flesh out the divorce between private and public identities in terms of the twin-track development of Elizabethan policy (as noted by Lake) and popular worldview (as noted by Greenblatt). Doing so offers a glimpse into the divided field on which English Familists constructed and evaluated their religious beliefs. After all, if Familism was to flourish on the island nation, it had to speak to existing social, political, and religious concerns. More to the point, if Familists were to avoid being locked up by the likes of Wilkinson, Rogers, and Knewstub, they had to negotiate the divided field in such a way as to prove that they were not the exploiters, the dissimulators, and the unscrupulous. The term “field” is intended to suggest that the division between public and private identities was simultaneously a subjective and an objective phenomenon. In other words, the sixteenth-century person not only believed that his or her identity could be fashioned apart from private belief but also lived in a world where such a division was inscribed into relations of power and everyday social affairs. Like the interlocking concepts of habitus and field described by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, these subjective and objective components are mutually-reinforcing. “The player, mindful of the game’s meaning and having been created by it, plays the game and by playing it assures its existence.” 119 English Familists, by playing the game, reinforced the divided 117 Lake, “Religious Identities,” 64. 118 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 88, 2. 119 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 257.

48 field to which they were equally subject. However, in seeking to prove their innocence in accord with the rules of the game, they also altered a small portion of the field to their advantage. If Knewstub, for example, could claim that the public persona of “obedience in the Love” was, in truth, a cloak to cover private heresies, then members of the Family could respond that such an accusation reflected an inordinate fixation on externals (rather than on interiority) as the grounds for evaluation. Both Lake and Greenblatt locate the source of the divided field in the vicissitudes of the English Reformation. In Lake’s words, “the tergiversations of the previous decades had left a cultural terrain strewn with the wreckage of partially disrupted belief systems.” Those in power, most notably Queen Elizabeth, took part in what Lake calls “creative bricolage” – sorting, combining, and recombining the remnants of a religious world in order to achieve a plausible myth of coherence. 120 Greenblatt likewise points to the dismantling of the old religious system as the basis for the division between public and private identities. His focus, however, is on the theater as representative of larger social alterations. “The transmigration of a single ecclesiastical cloak from the vestry to the wardrobe,” he says, “may stand as an emblem of the more complex and elusive institutional exchanges.” The moment the Elizabethan player dons the surplice and cope of some long-forgotten priest and struts across the stage, he emblemizes the manner in which “a sacred sign, designed to be displayed before a crowd of men and women, is emptied, made negotiable, traded from one institution to another.” 121 The pliability of 120 Lake, “Religious Identities,” 78-79. 121 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 112. According to Bourdieu, this process is simultaneously a means of critiquing the status quo. In his words, “breaks with the most orthodox works of the past, i.e. with the belief they impose on the newcomers, often take the form of parody (intentional, this time), which presupposes and confirms emancipation. In this case, the newcomers ‘get beyond’ [‘dépassent’] the dominant mode of thought and expression not by explicitly denouncing it but by repeating and reproducing it in a sociologically non-congruent context, which has the effect of rendering it incongruous or even absurd, simply by making it perceptible as the arbitrary convention it is” (The Field of Cultural Production, 31).

49 these once-sacred signs extends to the pliability of one’s persona. Like the player, the face the individual presents to the world is something that is cultivated or, in Greenblatt’s terminology, “fashioned” to meet the demands of the present. The individual’s true identity, like the wreckage of partially disrupted belief systems, is emptied and rendered negotiable in the process. Lake differs from Greenblatt in his emphasis on the decidedly polemical function of contemporary allusions to the rift between public and private identities. That is to say, he is interested less in the development of a particular renaissance habitus or worldview than he is in the self-conscious machinations of those seeking to either consecrate or criticize the Elizabethan status quo. How, he asks, did authorities navigate a religious scene in which the dizzying variety of religious belief and sensibility disrupted the necessity for uniformity in life and practice? The Queen, for one, stressed the significance of outward conformity. John Whitgift, who was to enjoy Elizabeth’s favor throughout the 1570s and 80s, was adamant in his opposition to those who sought to derail the 1559 religious settlement by refusing to conform. “There is no reformed church that I can hear tell of,” he told his opponents in 1574, “but it hath a certain prescript and determinate order, as well touching ceremonies and discipline as doctrine, to the which all of those are constrained to give their consent.” 122 While this determinate order admittedly contained both scripturally-mandated and indifferent elements, the principle point was simply that it had been determined by the civil authorities. To refuse outward consent and itch for further reform was therefore, at best, disrespectful to her Majesty’s efforts to date and, at worst, dangerous. To Whitgift’s mind, the island nation was beset by papists on one side and Anabaptists on the other, waiting patiently for a moment of weakness to march into London.

122 John Whitgift, Works, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1853), 3:321.

50 As a result of the staunch conformity championed by authorities like Whitgift, budding “puritans” were subjected to what must have been a particularly aggravating form of dissonance. Such individuals, in Lake’s words, “were forced to watch as what they regarded as some of the leading preaching ministers of the day, the most forward Protestants and enthusiastic campaigners against popish darkness, were suspended and even removed from the ministry because of their refusal to use vestments and ceremonies which even the authorities conceded were in themselves indifferent.” 123 Declining to acknowledge this ill treatment, Whitgift insisted that, despite their cavils, the puritan faction had been given nothing but respect. It was their own inner turmoil that had brought outward punishment to bear. 124 Nevertheless, the puritan gripe was not without cause. Thomas Cartwright, who Whitgift deprived of his chair at Cambridge in 1570, was to claim, contra Whitgift, that the gap that Elizabeth had opened between inward conscience and outward conformity was rooted in an erroneous conception of Christian polity. Where Whitgift had maintained a separation between civil and ecclesiastical government – the body and the conscience – Cartwright countered that “we have as a manifeste example of the joining of them together in one and the same action in the scripture.” 125 For the Queen to demand only outward conformity, and, worse, for her to punish her subjects for refusing to go against their own consciences, was to steer England away from the proper course of reform. It was, moreover, to encourage those less-

123 Lake, “Religious Identities,” 65. 124 Whitgift, Works, 3:320. 125 Thomas Cartwright, Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition, against the replie of T.C.

Admonition to the Parliament (Heidelberg, 1575), 2-3. According to Whitgift, “there are two kinds of government in the church, the one invisible, the other visible; the one spiritual, the other external.” The latter, he continued, “is that which is executed by man, and consisteth of external discipline and visible ceremonies practised in that church, and over that church, that containeth in it both good and evil, which is usually called the visible church of Christ” (Works, 1:183).

51 scrupulous subjects whose religious observance was out-of-step with their religious affection. The Cartwright camp did not, in the final analysis, prevail over Whitgift who soon became bishop of Worcester and, later, archbishop of Canterbury. As Christopher Marsh has argued, in the late 1570s individuals of Cartwright’s ilk were forced to sublimate their cause. Faced with what they perceived to be a “systematic de-purification” of the episcopate and ever-aware that a semblance of devotion to the Queen was the linchpin without which they had no voice at all, austere Protestants turned their attention to the Family of Love. 126 In their emphasis on public compliance to whatever religious or political regime happened to be in power, Familists were thought to be no better than players. Knowing that the world was a stage, they simply fashioned their public persona to please their audience. In Roger’s words, “the secret part of their doctrine is hid for the most part…and this suttlety doth Sathan worke to deceave the simple, to keep certain secret mysteries, and doctrine, to worke admiration in the hartes of deceaved people.” 127 What Familists really believed was thus thought to be intentionally obscured. Like the lamentable player of Stephen Gosson’s antitheatricalist writings, they were “nawghte of them selves” because proficient in the “divorce between the tongue & the heart.” 128 Before expanding on these accusations in the section to follow, it is worthwhile to address Greenblatt’s association of this lamentable divorce with the development of a more “nebulous” worldview. While Lake’s “hot Protestants” seethed over Whitgift’s

126 Marsh, The Family of Love, 114. In Marsh’s words, “it can also be suggested, tentatively at

first, that criticism of the Family was to a certain extent something rather like displaced, even subconscious, criticism of Elizabeth herself” (118). 127 Rogers, An Answere, sig. A3r. 128 Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in five actions proving that they are not to be suffred in a

Christian common weale, by the waye both the cavils of Thomas Lodge, and the play of playes, written in their defence, and other objections of players frendes, are truely set downe and directlye aunsweared (London, 1582), B8v, D8r.

52 religious policy and redirected their angst in polemics against the relatively unarmed Familists, is there also some sense in which both run-of-the-mill conformists and Familists (who were arguably also run-of-the-mill conformists) swam together in a soup of popular assumptions about the nature of religious reality? A number of scholars focusing on the history of ideas have stressed the intellectual or theological origins of these assumptions. William Bouwsma, for example, has located a problematic divorce worthy of Hamlet in John Calvin’s soteriology. To attain a level of authentic spirituality it was first incumbent on Calvin’s viator to engage in paroxysms of self-doubt. Unable to perceive the right path due to the noetic effect of original sin, yet, at the same time, goaded into the “role of repentant sinner,” the viator could only struggle in fits and starts toward salvation. “In short,” Bouwsma writes, “the distinction between role and reality in this crucial aspect of human existence is made problematic.” The spiritual neophyte is urged toward public displays of self-doubt in the hopes of initiating a very real, and by definition very private, malaise of self-doubt. Calvin, Bouwsma concludes, “was driven back to theatricality even by his effort to escape it.” 129 In prescribing such implicitly theatrical religious practices, Calvin is thought to have been representative of an age marked by anxiety over the distinction between appearances and reality. Greenblatt, for his part, has put forward the famous Lord Chancellor Thomas More as the embodiment, this time ardently Catholic, of this Hamletlike angst. For More, he says, “appearances have a … problematical relationship to reality.” Inextricably bound to outward conventions which he knew full-well to be politically-charged illusions, More was forced to live his life “as a character thrust into a play,” torn between “his engagement in the world as a character he had fashioned for

129 William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1988), 180.

53 himself and his perception of such role-playing as unreal and insane.” 130 Facing his own execution in 1535, More continued to play his part in the drama of salvation by exhibiting a particularly self-deprecating form of repentance. In his last days, he allegedly told his daughter: “What a great difference there is between such as have in effect spent all their days in a straight, hard, penitential, and painful life religiously, and such as have in the world, like worldly wretches … consumed all their time in pleasure.” Counting himself foremost among the latter, he continued: “Thy silly father, …God thinking him not worthy so soon to come to that eternal felicity, leaveth him here yet still in the world, further to be plunged and turmoiled with misery.” 131 Moving across the confessional axis, Susan Schreiner has compared Luther’s “believer” with Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” on the basis of their mutual “concern with the disjunction between appearances and reality and the consequent search for the real.” 132 Both, she argues, are confronted with a troublingly disjointed situation, recognizing the absurdity of the human condition – its backbiting, its power-plays, its spiritual poverty and its vanity – they must nonetheless engage the world in as sincere a fashion as they can muster. The problem that I can imagine Lake having with these analyses is simply that they are too broad. Why not extend this epistemological crisis well into the Enlightenment or even into any number of twenty-first century concerns with spiritual authenticity? In considering this issue, however, another emerges. If the divided field,

130 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 14, 31, 36. 131 Quoted in Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1984), 491.

132 Susan Schreiner, “Appearances and Reality in Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare,” The

Journal of Religion 83, no. 3 (2003): 345. See also Chapter 3, “Hamlet’s Kind of Fighting” in Peter Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).

54 when considered as a worldview, appears too “nebulous,” is this not also because it is believed to be the unintended consequence of the unmooring of sacred symbols from the very contexts which had previously rendered them precise and meaningful? Certainly the Elizabethan theater was, in Lake’s words, “a sort of playpen in which participants could adopt and lay aside, ventriloquise and caricature, try on for size, test and discard;” but does it make sense to apply a similar freedom to the world outside the playhouse where claims were rather “deployed in earnest and often for the highest stakes on the scaffold and in the press and pulpit”? 133 Does it make sense, that is, to think of sacred symbols as being emptied or, rather, evacuated of their once immutable contents? Jeffrey Knapp compelling argues that, at least in the case of Shakespeare, it does not. While other scholars have either called Shakespeare a secularist (who was, at best, subconsciously religious) or avoided his affiliation altogether, Knapp proposes that Shakespeare and his “tribe” of like-minded theatricalists were self-consciously furthering a religious program that was roughly Erasmian in nature. The point is well-taken. Given that history is never value-free, it is not surprising that Shakespeare, that central figure of Western literature, is so often given a place in the great tradition of secular(izing) modernity and analyzed accordingly. However, to see the Reformation as somehow evacuating the old religion of its contents and thereby freeing people to recombine the fragments at will undermines the embedded nature of religious belief. Conflict does not create ideas ex nihilo but rather creates a context in which existing assumptions can be

133 Peter Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation

England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), xxxi. Perhaps the most compelling discussion of the appropriation of sacred symbols for use in the stage is provided by Huston Diehl in her Staging Reform: Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). After a discussion of Foxe’s chronicle of the life of the Protestant martyr Rochus – a convert who had before been a manufacturer of graven Catholic images – Diehl notes that Rochus’ “conversion to Protestantism does not shut down his creative energies, despite Protestant hostilities toward sacred images, but rather authorizes him to enter into an attempt to manipulate a new symbol system, one that is characterized by self-reflexivity, arbitrariness, and the free-floating play of signifiers” (39).

55 articulated with fresh conviction. This is not to say, with Eamon Duffy, that people in England remained attached to traditional “Catholic” religion, only, that among what Knapp calls the many “kinds of Catholicism and kinds of Protestantism” that coursed through sixteenth-century English society, people were bound by conscience, not only to the beliefs they professed, but also to the ingrained assumptions that attended those beliefs. 134 It cannot be denied that the distinction between outer persona and inner belief was inscribed on the cultural landscape. It appeared not only in the theater but in polemics against the theater. It was also invoked in Familist writings and in polemics against the cult of HN. Many people in the sixteenth-century were anxious over the gap between appearance and reality. Yet seeing people (even English Familists) as unconsciously subject to the divided field, and therefore prone to staging religious modes of being which they did not truly inhabit runs the risk of uncritically duplicating the polemic. Where Rogers, Cartwright, and Gosson could criticize Familists, conformists, and players for their tendency to divorce their public identities from their private identities, calling them ditherers, dissimulators, and dissemblers in the process, Greenblatt essentially assumes that they were – albeit without the name-calling. While Knapp praises Greenblatt for depicting Elizabethan society as the recipient of older symbolic systems, he criticizes the inclination to see this reception as simultaneously an “evacuation” or “fictionalization” of traditional content. The secret mysteries of the Family

Any effort to understand the Family as it understood itself must first come to terms with the ways in which the antifamilist campaign competed with and oftentimes overwhelmed the voices of those who stood trial. There were two prongs to this

134 Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 10.

56 campaign: the confessions of alleged Familists and the systematic assault on the group by austere Protestants. In both cases, those involved relied upon a strategy which was culled from the perceived divide between public and private personae and which envisioned Familist civic identity as something of a mystery to be decoded. The group identity “exposed” in Familist confessions is questionable at best, often telling us more about the polemical context of its recitation than about belief. Elicited under duress, most of these confessions masqueraded as the honest disclosure of a missing narrative to a researcher eager to solve a puzzle while, in truth, representing the exercise of inquisitorial power on the construction of this narrative. 135 Turning to men like Knewstub and Rogers, it is clear that such narratives were not really confessions at all, but the products of a larger campaign of “displaying,” in Roger’s language, “an horrible secte of grosse and wicked Heretiques.” 136 As the sociologists Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony have written with regard to more recent polemic, “apostate confessions and recriminations are a staple of countersubversion agitation.” 137 The Familist confessions of Robert Sterte and Thomas Chaundler, along with that of the glover’s apprentice Leonard Romsye, all to some degree signal the adoption of a stance that is best described in terms of apostasy. Claiming intimate understanding of Familist practice, these men focused on the more controversial elements of group identity, thereby feeding into the narrative expectations of those in power. Romsye went so far as to warn his confessor that an “infinite number” of Familists looked forward to “rebellion when they shall have gotten a complet number

135 See Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected

Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 194-228. 136 Rogers, The Displaying, sig. 1r. 137 Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, “Cults, Brainwashing, and Counter Subversion,” Annals

of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 446 (1979): 87.

57 of disciples or at the least shalbe persuaded by their fantasticall spirit that they are of sufficient number to vndertake the matter.” With little hesitation, he went on to describe the “lyinge and dissemblinge” nature of his one-time brethren alongside their steadfast denial of sacramental efficacy. 138 The dissenting ex-member or apostate is, according to the sociologist Stuart Wright, a “moral entrepreneur who becomes engaged in a mission to expose the evils of the suspect group.” 139 Central to understanding this role and its mission is an implicit oppositional structure. In the place of the charismatic “cult leader” the apostate confesses before a therapist. “In exchange terms,” Wright explains, the new, therapist-centered group “demands reparation equal to the offence. Consequently, the disgruntled exmember pursues the apostate role with the same vigor and intensity that characterized his or her former commitment.” 140 Apostasy therefore holds a unique position within the larger enterprise of counter-subversion. If this enterprise aims to rectify what it perceives to be a specific social ill, the apostate embodies the eradication of this ill. He or she is both an agent in the project and an illustration of its lasting success. The concept of apostasy is helpful in that it allows us to approach Familist confessions with a critical eye, recognizing that such confessions often played a role within a preexisting set of narrative expectations. The following “apostate” narratives of Sterte, Chaundler, and Romsye are told in such a way as to capitalize upon the listener’s expectations. They begin with a stirring account of seduction at the hands of charismatic elders wielding dazzling secrets. From there, they claim to lay bare these secrets, often in the form of an itemized list of heresies. The type of religion practiced by Familists was

138 Romsye’s confession is printed in Moss, “Variations on a Theme,” 190. 139 Stuart A. Wright, “Exploring Factors that Shape the Apostate Role,” in The Politics of

Religious Apostasy, ed. David G. Bromley (Westport: Praeger Publications, 1998), 97. 140 Wright, “Exploring Factors,” 103.

58 the antithesis of God’s truth – its adherents “bound to deale truely with no man in word or deede,” going so far, in Roger’s estimation, as to “dissemble with God.” 141 By comparison, the “true” religion for which the apostates had exchanged their former affiliation was sober, transparent, and a source of certainty for even the most humble intellects. While useful, we do well to remember that Wright’s notion of apostate exchange assumes a secular/religious dichotomy that simply did not exist in the sixteenth century. Religiosity during Elizabeth’s reign was not in danger of “diminishing other roles (familial, occupational),” but was inextricably interwoven with these roles. 142 Everywhere, in C.S. Lewis’ words, “we find the assumption, unemphasized because it is unquestioned, that every event, every natural fact, and every institution, is rooted in the supernatural.” 143 What was on trial in these confessions was therefore not the degree but the type of religion practiced. And it was this pre-established typology of “true” and “false” belief which rendered the confessions poor indicators of Familism as it actually was. Christopher Vittels, whom Rogers identifies as “one of the chiefe English elders” of the Family, vehemently denied the worth of Sterte and Chaundler’s 1561 confession. “Of HN,” he says, “his doctrine at that time they knew not.” Rogers responded by claiming that Vittels’ refusal to accept responsibility for the two men was a ploy,

141 “A Confession made by two of the Familie of Loue, before a worthie & worshipfull Iustice of

peace, the 28. May, 1561” in Rogers, The Displaying, H5v. “Dissemble with God” is from Rogers, F7r. 142 Wright, “Exploring Factors,” 110.

143 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1954), 38. See also Kristen Poole, “The Devil’s in the Archive.”

59 calculated to save face. “You are ashamed of them,” he demanded; and “since they have bewrayed your doings, in secret you regard them not.” 144 Vittels’ denial of responsibility was understandable. While it begins as a relatively straightforward description of practice, the 1561 confession soon devolves into a veritable litany of heresies. The Familists were said to collect themselves at nighttime in “such houses as be far from neighbors.” There, they spent their time eating meat and imbibing until at length they had either consumed everything or overcharged their proprietor. Such voraciousness also carried over to the group’s teaching. The elder, whose spiritual perfection went unquestioned, “doeth continually feede [the congregation] with expectations of newe matters.” Everyone was to deny the creation of the world ex nihilo, God’s providential role in human events, the existence of an otherworldly kingdom, the sacrality of the Sabbath day, infant baptism, and the Trinity. Divorce, moreover, was expected upon spousal disagreement which presumably happened often considering the extent to which men tended to “bragge verie much of their owne sincere liues.” New members, finally, were carefully instructed in the art of dissembling and were not obliged to speak truthfully about the above matters. As Sterte and Chaundler made clear, a man not of the sect was considered a soulless beast. “He is no neighbor,” they write, “and … they may abuse him at their pleasure.” 145

144 Rogers, An Answer, R1v-R2r. Hamilton admits that our argument for the Familist origin of

Sterte and Chaundler’s confession remains speculative. “We cannot dismiss the possibility that Niclaes paid a brief visit to England and made the acquaintance of some of the men denounced by Chaundler and Sterte. But even if they did meet the prophet, Vittels was probably right in claiming that the sectarians of 1561 knew little to nothing of his doctrine. What they did know must have been based more on rumour than on any first hand acquaintance with his work, since it was only ten years later that English versions of Niclaes’ writing began to arrive in England (The Family of Love, 119).” J.W. Martin, however, denies Niclaes’ visit to England writing that “the years 1540-1560 found him safely established in Emden (Religious Radicals in Tudor England, 200).” Nevertheless, Martin goes on to suggest that “by Mary’s reign [Niclaes] had followers in England who would be guided by his advice (Ibid., 201).” 145 Rogers, The Displaying, H3r-H6r. “Whosoever is not of their sect they accompt him as a

beast, that he hath no soule” (H6v).

60 As if such a depiction were not enough, Sterte and Chaundler concluded their confession by providing a list of known sectarians in London, Cambridgeshire, and diverse places along the southern coast. John Gryffyn of Essex, for example, was accused of engaging in a particularly pernicious form of communalism, keeping “strange women in his house.” Others, we are told, were forced to recant before local authorities, some fleeing rather than facing excommunication. Foremost among the names mentioned was “Henryke a Dutchman, the head of all the Congregation,” whom, Sterte admitted, had no fixed abode but “still wandereth to visit his flock.” 146 There is, of course, good reason to believe that Sterte and Chaundler were referring to none other than HN. As Hamilton notes, Vittels’ claim that the two men were ignorant of HN’s doctrine is not tantamount to denying their knowledge of Niclaes himself. 147 It is possible that, for Sterte and Chaundler, “Familism” was defined less by a set of creeds, and more by social affiliation. 148 If so, such an orientation goes a long way toward explaining how, in line with Wright’s definition of apostasy, they were able to simply reverse their affiliation. The 1561 confession affords a glimpse at a genre of rhetoric which was curiously perched between self-incrimination and vindication through the incrimination of others. On the one hand, it was necessary for Sterte and Chaundler to embody the sectarian

146 Though they are not represented in Rogers’ Displaying, the list of known sectarians that

concludes Sterte and Chaundler’s confession is reprinted in Hyland, A Century of Persecution under Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns, 112. 147 Hamilton, The Family of Love, 119. 148 In fact, J.W. Martin suggests that the occasion for Chaundler’s discontent with the group was

“a marriage that the sect had arranged for him (Religious Radicals in Tudor England, 194n60).” Marsh provides a compelling argument that the 1561 confession exhibits a schism within early Familism between “a form of radical Anabaptistical sectarianism” and a “more subtle, mystical faith.” What is represented in the confession is the older, Marian form of Familism which was at the time in the process of morphing into a more confident confession. Those names betrayed by Sterte and Chaundler were thus of the stubbornly radical old guard (Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 67). In a sense, then, Vittel was right in claiming that the two men “new nothing” of HN’s doctrine because they stood at the beginning of a transition to that which would appear to be a very different animal ten years later.

61 identity, for doing so allowed them to authenticate themselves as “sources of information” before the authorities. On the other hand, Sterte and Chaundler were under pressure to denounce this identity and extricate themselves from their former affiliation. In his 1579 introduction to the reprinted confession Rogers’ words paralleled the tensions to which Sterte and Chaundler were most certainly subject. While he acquiesced in admitting that the two men had indeed “reformed some of these grosse matters since,” he still thought it necessary “to manifest their wavering heads & unconstant minds, that Gods children may beware of their impious dealinges.” 149 The concession here did little to outweigh the critique. As the epitome of their former selves, the apostates had to shout loudly in order to illustrate, in an equally convincing manner, their consummate recovery. Like the alleged Familists of 1561, Leonard Romsye appears to have been on the group’s periphery. Apprentice to John Bourne, a glover and Familist elder in Surrey, Romsye notes that he had been drawn into the secret alliance after his master noticed that he “fauored religion,” “frequented sermons,” and “was zealous but not accordinge to knowledge.” From the start of the 1580 confession Romsye thus pictures himself as rebel in need of a cause: a man with broadly religious sentiment desiring proper direction. As if to confirm this persona, the first half of the confession narrates the indoctrination of a passive victim. Bourne, he says, “shewed me a booke of H.N. caled the firste exhortation requiringe me to reade it and to shewe him my judgement of it.” From there, Romseye was told that his name would be handed over to Niclaes and thereafter kept on file in “the booke of lyffe.” This, he conjectures, “is the usuall manner of entertayning their disciples.” Romsye engaged in Familist practice with one foot out the door, preferring throughout the confession to refer to “their kingdome,” “there manor,” and “their religion.” 150 At some point, of course, his relationship with the group soured. Affirming 149 Rogers, The Displaying, H3r. 150 Moss, “Variations on a Theme,” 190. Emphasis mine.

62 his apostate status, Marsh suggests that Romsye may have been something of a “professional informer” or, to continue the sociological comparison, “cult expert.” After all, Romsye’s confession was given voluntarily. 151 An equally scandalous manuscript exists in the British Library bearing the name “Leonard Rumsey” and purporting to uncover the doctrinal errors of individuals as far away as Bury. 152 After establishing his previous membership and expertise in the area of Familism, Romsye moved on to the “principall and most material pointes” of their doctrine. Here he shouted even more emphatically than had Sterte and Chaundler. Not only was the Trinity denied, but “euery man who is growen vppe in the obedience of the loue is Christ.” “That doctrine which concerne the Christ in scripture,” Romsye clarified, “is to be understoode allegorically.” Baptism was not merely denied to children and young adults, but was rejected wholesale. Along with the Eucharist, it was said to be “of no effecte unto them that be growen unto the perfection of the familye of love.” Like Sterte and Chaundler, Romsye told of the Family’s desire to disavow any notion of an ethereal kingdom; only he took a gaping step forward in claiming that HN, signaling an imminent Familist rebellion here on earth, had already blown the “last trumpe.” As he told the minister Thomas Barwicke, “they have a prophecy…wherein was declared that there should comme a time shortly when their should be no magistrate prince nor pallace uppon the earthe but all should be governed by the spirite of love.” 153 However unlearned Romsye may have been, it is hard to believe that he was unaware of the incendiary potential of his description. His account provided Barwicke and others with precisely the information needed to justify suppression of the alleged sectarians.

151 Felicity Heal, “The Family of Love and the diocese of Ely,” in Schism, Heresy and Religious

Protest, ed. D. Baker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 220. 152 Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 35n90.

153 Moss, “Variations on a Theme,” 190-191. Emphasis mine.

63 In its overall structure, the 1580 confession moved from the particular to the general, starting with Romsye’s initiation and ending with rebellion. The reader (or auditor) was thus invited to re-experience the path of discovery; to be at first enticed by a “lyffe which many kings and princes had desired to se and could not” and then horrified at having naively implicated themselves in outright sedition. 154 Interestingly, a similar format reappears in 1641 with the tale of Mistress Susannah Snow and her flirtation with Familism and subsequent descent into madness. The structure, of course, had the added benefit of absolving Romsye. If the reader could empathize, he or she could forgive. What’s more, Romsye supplied Barwicke with the theological glue to make his accusations stick. If Familist elders literally155 understood themselves to be Christs, surely they would not wait quietly for the divine overthrow of the government but would take the task upon themselves. In return for his confession, Romseye – whose Familist zeal was undoubtedly nominal to begin with – found a powerful audience eager to have their fears realized. It is believed that Romsye divested himself of the Familist heresy on or after October 10, 1580. 156 That same month, Elizabeth was to issue an injunction against the group which was a virtual pastiche of Sterte, Chaundler, and Romsye’s confessions. It

154 Moss, “Variations on a Theme,” 190. 155 Other scholars have touched on the tendencies of Romsye and others toward literal

interpretation. Throughout his confession, Marsh notes, “complex points of mystical theology may have been reduced to trite denials of literal truth” (The Family of Love in English Society, 35). Hamilton likewise warns of the “extremes to which a literal interpretation of Niclaes’ writings could lead,” using Romsye as “the best example” (The Family of Love, 122). Janet Halley refers to the more general ease with which Familist doctrine may be perverted, arguing that Familist confessions, including that of Romsye, should be understood as an extension of Familist Nicodemism. “Confessing Familists say all they are required to say and join in all the required rituals while privately believing them to be meaningless images” (“Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the Politics of Religious Discourse,” 317-318). While I agree with Halley that individuals like Romsey were feeding into the narrative expectations of their inquisitors, the evidence urges me to see Romsye more as an apostate than as a secret believer. 156 Heal, The Family of Love in the Diocese of Ely, 220. Heal suggests that the original dating of

the confession, 1579, is incorrect.

64 railed against mysterious elders and unlearned initiates who, removing themselves from the flock, met in secret conventicles. “After the [elders] have craftily and hypocritically allured [the initiates] to esteem them to be more holy and perfect men than others are, they do then teach them damnable heresies.” Erroneously thinking themselves in possession of mystical truth, the elders proceeded to “move ignorant and simple people at the first rather to marvel at them, than to understand them.” 157 Just as Romsye narrated his courtship with the alluring cult of HN, the Queen here warned of the detriment of Familism to England’s naïve. Romsye, again like the Queen, had followed this courtship with a parallel narrative marking his instruction in damnable heresies and culminating in the revelation of a seditious plot. While it is impossible to draw a direct association between this confession and the Queen’s injunction, the similar rhetoric that appears in both does point to an available network of popular assumptions. Antifamilists like Rogers and Knewstub had after all been honing these assumptions for some time prior, and Rogers was quick to incorporate the “confessional” genre into his Displaying of an horrible secte of grosse and wicked heretiques. 158 It is not hard then to imagine that confessions like Romsye’s could have very real consequences on the world’s stage. That October saw the Privy Council’s publication of an abjuration requiring suspected Familists all over England to disavow HN as a “detestable hereticke” before a magistrate and to do so, this time, from “the true meaning of [their] heart.” 159

157 Elizabeth I, “A Proclamation against the sectaries of the Family of Love (anno. 1580),”

reprinted in Cardwell, Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, 1:396-397.

158 The confession of Leonard Romsye represents in its more “sensational elements” a form of

radical Familism which Marsh claims “owed as much to Knewstub as to HN” (The Family of Love in English Society, 273). 159 Printed in Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist (London, 1648), 354.

65 Admittedly, the “heartfelt” testament of Leonard Romsye was not the only voice to be heard. A fraction of Familist confessions from the 1570s and 80s took on a decidedly apologetic tone, and it is interesting, by way of comparison, to note the concomitant shift in form and content. The confession of Anthony Randall, for example, omitted the narrative of seduction, choosing instead to speak candidly about a set of beliefs which, though heretical, seemed at least to be honestly maintained. The minister from Exeter had simply “never thought the Lord’s Supper and Baptism to be sacraments” because he had never encountered the term “sacrament” in Scripture. He likewise promised that he had never slandered the religion of the realm, “that whosoever doth murmur and grudge against it in his conscience, being her Majesties subject, doth neither know God, nor yet his holy word.” When presumably asked by the magistrate regarding his opinion on certain accepted doctrinal matters, Randall chose not to respond, and invoked his right against self-incrimination. 160 What did emerge in Randall’s account, however, was a desire to adhere to a “third church” which might transcend doctrinal differences. At the close of his confession, he made a bizarre move in stressing loyalty to the Queen and to the Roman Church. Though these sentiments appear contradictory, the point for Randall was clearly to advance a form of “spiritual understanding” (mentioned at least five times in the course of his short confession) which, if practiced, might vindicate himself as well as the realm. Furthermore, the fact that Randall was consequently deprived of his vocation by the Bishop of Exeter indicates that, unlike Romsye, he had little to gain by his confession. An earlier statement by suspected members in Balsham including the Essex priest Robert Sharpe also omits the initiation narrative and provides an equally sophisticated

160 Randall claimed that he could not address his belief “without speaking, or at least seeming to

speak, against the laws of the realm.” Randall’s confession is reproduced in John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), 3:158-160.

66 defense of the Family. They refer to their confessor, Dr. Andrew Perne, as a “learned Man” who “hath Charge over us, in such Matters, where we find ourselves [to] doubt of any Place for the true understanding of Scripture.” 161 Perne, it would seem, had taken a decidedly moderate approach to the presence of Familism amongst his parishioners and, at times, received harsh criticism for his magnanimity. 162 Ideologically, the parson was known for his tendency to designate doctrinal divisions as things indifferent, writing to the Lord Chancellor in the 1580s that all should be tolerated in Balsham whether “this or that profession, protestant, papist or puritan.” 163 The confession of the Balsham Familists under his charge struck a similar note. Throughout, it emphasized the manner in which the freedom of the Christian had nullified the ritual distinctions which had before divided Jew and Gentile. They did not hesitate to indulge in swine, “beef or mutton, butter or cheese,” though they preferred their private meeting rooms to the alehouse. They were, as one individual promised, neither puritans nor libertines. They thought no one “so perfect” as to exempt themselves from the community. And, according to the confession, they followed closely the Book of Common Prayer, the Apostles,’ Nicene, and Athanasian creeds, and the “Laws and the Authority of Christian Magistrates” – more than could be said for their more “puritanical” contemporaries. 164 The emphases on toleration and a transcendent “spiritual understanding” are a promising departure from Romsye’s factional clamor. Randall and Sharpe were both

161 A Declaration and Confession made the 13. of December 1574, of certain Articles of Religion

hereafter following, before Andrew Perne, D.D. and Parson of the Parish Church of Balsham in the County of Cambridgeshire, by Rob. Sharp Parson of Strethal in Essex, and Tho. Laurence, John Tayler, Tho. Diss, Edmund Rule, and Barthol. Tassel of Balsham aforesaid, in the said County of Cambridge. Printed in John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1711), 472-473. 162 See Marsh, “Piety and Persuasion,” 159. 163 Quoted in Patrick Collinson, “Perne, Andrew (1519?–1589),” in Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004 –), doi:10.1093/ref.odnb/21975.

164 A Declaration and Confession made the 13. of December 1574, 472-473.

67 educated clerics, and it is perhaps not a stretch to view them as examples of a more “belief-centered,” more authentic, Family. As such, they certainly would have been less likely to exchange their persecuted affiliation for one which offered them a higher degree of social mobility. There is also hope in the fact that Balsham, under the leadership of Perne, was a decidedly more comfortable environment – one in which ideas could be honestly displayed and received without the harsh, inquisitorial judgment of Rogers or Knewstub. Yet a declaration provided by Robert Sharpe not six months after his statements in Balsham serves as a disappointing reminder of the fickleness of all printed confessions. As he mounted the stage of the famous outdoor arena at Paul’s Cross in London, Sharpe proceeded to decry the gross heresies that had, until recently, so thoroughly dazzled him. He admitted that he had been much taken in “by the novelty of the doctrine, and great promises made,” but had come to realize that HN’s doctrine was both an affront to learned men like himself and a means to “seduce and beguile the simple people.” 165 Though the authenticity of Sharpe’s Familism may with good reason be considered doubtful due to his subsequent fall into apostasy, the content of the earlier Balsham confession may nevertheless be important for our understanding of the Family. Just as the confessions of Sterte, Chaundler, and Romsye were calculated to communicate a distinct message to the world, so too was the Balsham confession. Only the message from Balsham perhaps spoke to a qualitatively different crowd, one which cared less about the security of orthodoxy and more about religious freedom. If the admittedly inauthentic confessions tell us anything at all, it is that the search for authenticity – for the uncontaminated origins of the group – is a problematic historiographical endeavor. To

165 Robert Sharpe, The Confession and Declaration of Robert Sharpe clerke, and other of that

secte, tearmed the Familie of Loue, at Pawles Crosse in London … (London, 1575), Broadside sheet.

68 “understand” the Family as they understood themselves is most importantly to understand how they wanted to communicate themselves to the people of England. The search for the uncontaminated origins of the group, purportedly embodied and disclosed by its apostate members, was more-explicitly taken up by England’s austere Protestant contingent. Throughout the 1570s these Protestants had been stifled in their broader allegations that the English polity encouraged a divorce between tongue and heart through an inordinate emphasis on outward shows of obedience. For their lessaustere but more powerful opponents like Whitgift, Protestantism was synonymous with the Queen’s religion and, consequently, those who submitted themselves to her prescript and determinate order were by all accounts “Protestant.” 166 Given this prevailing outlook, the Family of Love, with, in Lake’s words, their “obscure yet entirely heterodox inner convictions,” could conceivably find a home within the Protestant mainstream. 167 This, however, was clearly too much for individuals like Knewstub and Rogers to bear. For them, the Family was perhaps the most poignant example of the profanity which England would simply have to accept if, in the end, Winthrop and others continued to hold sway. Their strategy, then, was to define the group as nothing less than the embodiment of the divided field – as a mystical group whose mysterious public persona willfully obscured their true identity. The designation of members of the Family as either mystical or mysterious is a common one, appearing in both early modern and contemporary sources. Knewstub, whose rancor toward the group in the late 1570s led him to demand the speedy

166 Peter Lake writes that “for Protestants like Whitgift (and even more like Whitgift’s successor

in the anti-Presbyterian struggle, Richard Hooker), everyone who was not an overt recusant – everyone, that is, who went, on something like a regular basis, to church – had to be accepted as a member of the national Church, and since that Church has been, since 1559, formally Protestant, as some sort of Protestant” (“Religious Identities,” 63). 167 Lake, “Religious Identities,” 64.

69 interrogation and execution of its members, relied on the perceived link between mystical interpretation and subversion to prick the consciences of his listeners. Where Augustine had extolled the simplicity of Scripture, HN, he says – … is farre from this lowe stile, that creepeth in the most difficult matters upon the grounde: for when hee is the lowest & most neere unto us, he is at the least soaring in the middle region of the ayre, and verie often a man shall not meete with him, no not if hee were rapte into the thirde heaven: so mysticall is his meaning. 168 The implication is that the flight from simplicity is tantamount to a uniquely subversive form of mysticism – one already present in those libertines who “Master Calvine did so mislike.” 169 For Knewstub, Familist mysticism signaled both intellectual mystification and social transgression. Because Scripture represents the moral foundation of daily life, the experience of it as a means (rather than as an end) leads to a corruption of interpersonal relationships. Knewstub concludes that we are left with “naked Allegorie” – a ladder that reaches beyond Scripture to nowhere. 170 Social morality becomes an afterthought, and the moralistic ramblings of Familist elders becomes little more than a product of their absurd belief in their own charismatic perfection. Knewstub’s fears were shared by many others. The 1570 edition of the hugely popular Shepherd’s Calendar lamented the presence of those “blynde folke derkned in the clowd of ignoraunt fumes, thicke and misticall.” 171 The designation had long been a catchall for needless and extravagant confusion, often going hand in hand with the

168 Knewstub, A Confutation, 86v. 169 Knewstub, A Confutation, 87r. 170 Knewstub, A Confutation, 83r. See also Knewstub, A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse the

Fryday before Easter, commonly called good Fryday, in the yeere of our Lorde 1576. The Family of Love, according to Knewstub, considers the Scriptures to be “but an ABC to Christianitie.” “The spelling and reading thereof,” he continues, “must be drawne from their Spirite, as if the Gospel should give place to the revelations, and so carie with it the staine of imprerfection” (R4r). 171 Robert Copland, The Shepardes Kalender (London, 1570), 94.

70 accusation that such folk would use the Bible as a springboard to allegorical oblivion. As a requirement for the fulfillment of his doctorate of theology, the future bishop of Worcester Gervase Babington preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross in October of 1590 on the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in which he claimed that sacred doctrine in general is never “so high, mysticall, obscure, & hidden, if it be soberly intreated of and within the limits of the word.” 172 The implication was that the appearance of mysterious doctrine alongside the equally mystical or obscure interpretations of those doctrines was owing to the inconstancy and haziness of one’s intellect – a sign, in turn, that one was as yet counted among the reprobate. In John Rogers’ polemic, however, the image of mystical fumes and airy phantoms is replaced by a more subterranean image of unspoken depths. The implication is that Familist practice is a puzzle – something to be decoded, unearthed, and its components displayed. What is more, Rogers’ archeological endeavor involves the recognition of Familist belief as in some way supplementary to orthodox belief. Once the Familists had displayed their belief, he entreated, “surely I and others woulde conceiue that upon some grounde of good conscience you were severed in judgment from us.” Again, he assures that a clear exposition of the boundary between the Family and the rest of England would serve as a “shewe of good meaning” to be entertained in good faith. 173 Of course, this entreaty is a patronizing one, and Rogers’ purpose was no doubt to coax members (which he believed in 1579 to number in the thousands 174) to the surface. He was, after all, no less a critic than Knewstub. Crediting the Family of Love with a

172 Gervase Babington, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the second Sunday in Mychaelmas

tearme last. 1590 (London, 1591), 30. See also John S. Macauley, “Babington, Gervase (1549/50–1610),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004 –), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/973. 173 Rogers, The Displaying, L1r, K6r. 174 Marsh, The Family of Love, p. 7.

71 secret purpose “not sufficiently knowen” by its Elizabethan adherents, Rogers intended to win over followers in England by revealing their elders’ “secret misterie” as “blasphemie.” 175 Nevertheless, Rogers assumed that the primary differences between Christian orthodoxy and Familist heterodoxy must in the final analysis be hidden from view, locked away in some subterranean vault. Pointing to the Family’s eminently orthodox 1575 confession of faith, he momentarily congratulated the group for being “very plausible” and for providing “nothing differing from us.” “It is therefore convenient,” he coyly suggests, “that you shew us wherin you & we differ, in what points, & in what doctrine.” 176 Predictably, Rogers’ opponents understood this demand for the disclosure of their mysterious underpinnings as, at the same time, a demand for self-incrimination. In a response dated the 15th of December, 1578, a member of the Family identifying simply as “ER” made it clear that Rogers was chasing a chimera. “Is it,” ER asks, “an odious matter in your eyes to be simple?” Citing Ecclesiastes, the anonymous Familist declared that fear of God and obedience to his commands were the “conclusion of all things,” reprimanding his snooping correspondent for desiring a confession of some deeper heretical conviction. 177

175 John Rogers, The Displaying, D4v-D5v. Perhaps Rogers’ frequent excursions to the Low

Countries in the 1570’s led to his fascination with the link between HN on the continent and his followers in England. The term “secret misteries” appears in several places but is quoted here from Rogers, An Answere, L5v. 176 Rogers, the Displaying, D4r, K6r. 177 Rogers, The Displaying, L6r-L6v. The simplicity of English Familism received its fullest and

most eloquent expression through the “playne Plowman (whose Religion was unknowen: although he had bin so long tyme by all these aforesaid suspected & bruted for an Heretiq)” in the anonymous text Temporis Filia Veritas: A mery devise called the Troublesome travel of Tyme, and the dangerous delivery of her Daughter Trueth (Leiden, 1589). “For that cause,” spoke the Plowman, “all People that are zelous for Religion & for the Trueths sake, (be they what they be, or dwell they where they shall: so they love God, and desyer to live under obedience to the King and his good laws or, at the least wise, liveth quietly and harmelesly among the People, bearing a true and faithfull hearte to the Prince of the Land) are to be borne withall in their ignorant zeale for Conscience sake” (B2r).

72 As was the case with the confessions, the big picture was already there; the pieces needed only to be put together by the skilled hands of the apostate. Rogers’ feigned fascination, however, points to a more enduring fascination with mysticism as the spiritual core and revolutionary branch of early modern religion. In his 1955 dissertation, Henry Nicholas and the Familists: A Study of the Influence of Continental Mysticism on England to 1600, William Nigel Kerr produced a portrait of the group which went hand in hand with then-popular whiggish accounts of the Reformation. 178 For Kerr, “spiritual reformers” like the founding members of the Family of Love were imbued with the “vital force of reforming power” which would erupt into full-scale reformation when the time was right. 179 The fulcrum of this power, moreover, was to be found in the Family’s ideological structure – the mystical stance that had enraged Knewstub and enthralled Rogers. Familist belief, in Kerr’s words, was a “valid witness to the worth of ‘inner light’ mysticism” buried under the “chimerical claims of prophetical mission” and “faulty organization.” 180 Kerr identifies such mysticism by way of three components: the recognition that our reality is an unreal symbol of a much deeper reality, an attempt to merge with this deeper reality, and finally the numinous experience of the consubstantiality of temporal and eternal. The combination of the three alerts us to the

178 For the archetypal “whig” history, see A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (University

Park: Penn State Press, 1991). In the second edition of his tome, Dickens defends the notion that the Reformation in England was initiated by powerful “progressive forces” at work in lay circles (20). Christopher Haigh, amongst other so-called “revisionist” historians, had since sharply criticized Dickens, arguing that the “growth of articulate laity” alongside other Dickensian categories were but “the convenience-foods of historical study, which give us our past pre-packaged and frozen, in ready-mixed meals needed only to be warmed in the moderate oven of a mediocre essay or lecture.” The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 56. Perhaps the most eloquent attack on Dickens was provided by Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Duffy demands that the Reformation in England did not progress in accordance with its initial revolutionary principles but rather was a piecemeal process, only recognized for what it was once the dust had settled in Elizabeth’s reign. 179 Kerr, “Henry Nicholas and the Familists,” 40-41. 180 Kerr, “Henry Nicholas and the Familists,” vii.

73 idealization inherent in any effort to define Familism. Though “invalid” in the sense that they are beholden to a chimera (HN’s “mission”) that in turn renders them unorganized (or incapable of a rational exposition of their doctrine), the Family of Love is “valid” because it represents the idealized core of Christianity. The Familist mystic is thought to recognize the heavenly kingdom of pure forms, endeavoring to realize this kingdom through the saving work of Christ who is human and divine, temporal and eternal. Beneath Kerr’s identification of a “vital force” behind the public persona of Familism lies the assumption that a constituent element of “mysticism” is its revolutionary potential. In the 1570’s, Knewstub had appealed to the earl of Warwick, then presiding on the Queen’s privy council, by alluding to such potential. For too long, he insists, the problem of Familism has been ignored due to the group’s public show of obedience. Yet, beneath this appearance lies a treacherous and ultimately subversive reality. In October of 1580 the Queen, perhaps at the behest of Ambrose, issued a proclamation condemning “certain persons who do secretly in corners make privy assemblies.” 181 Clearly the threat of political subversion was essential to justifying the interrogation and arrest of Familists; and the justifications provided by Knewstub, Rogers and others were often interwoven with similar accusations of traits that they (and we) would have defined as “mystical.” The subversive potential of mysticism furthermore rests on its perceived separation from historical exigencies. Stephen Ozment locates mysticism within a series of “transhistorical transactions between God and the depths of the soul” – a privileged space apart from historical existence. 182 Four-hundred years earlier, Knewstub had decried the Familists who, he believed, “have wholy drunke up, and altogetheather

181 Quoted in Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 106. 182 Stephen E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 8.

74 drowned the histories” through pernicious allegorizing. 183 For him, the Family represented the greatest threat to the cause of advancing Protestanism precisely because it dared to interrogate what many saw as the hard-won certainties of the Reformation. Neglecting history and hence tradition, mysticism was thus branded as dangerously progressive. Whether as a vital force behind the Reformation or as force that threatened to overturn it, the Familist novelty became part of a larger functional argument regarding the power of spiritual experience to bring about paradigmatic change. In Ozment’s words, mysticism “bears a potential anti-intellectual and anti-institutional stance, which can be adopted for the critical purposes of dissent, reform, and even revolution.” 184 The characterization of mysticism as an idealized core removed from historical exigencies and therefore potentially revolutionary is problematic in historical accounts of the Family in so far as it reproduces the assumptions of antifamilist polemicists. For twentieth century historians like Kerr, this articulation served to validate both the Family itself and the group’s role within a larger drama of religious change. For individuals like Knewstub and Rogers, however, the articulation of mysticism was bound up with a campaign against the specter of libertinism lurking behind a mask of perfect conformity. According to the medievalist Sarah Beckwith, “because of its supposedly transhistorical character, its constitutive transcendence of the merely material, [mysticism] can function…like the inwardness of religion itself, the soul of a soulless world. It can be both the ultimate validation of the sacred, and because of that very extra-institutional dimension, the essence of the dissenting soul.” 185 Beckwith points us to the manner in which the liminal status implied by “mysticism” causes the term to function in two

183 Knewstub, A Confutation, 83v. 184 Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 8. 185 Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings

(London: Routledge, 1996), 7.

75 seemingly antithetical ways: as the valid soul of “religion itself” and as the explosive freedom which threatens to overthrow religion. Familists, as the Dry Drayton minister Richard Greenham believed in 1580, are among those of the latter camp, whose experience of inward truth renders them disordered or irrational and, accordingly, renders their doctrine invalid (and therefore possibly seditious). Kerr’s mistake is to duplicate this oppositional system in attempting to uncover the Familist mystery. In other words, he, like Greenham, credits the Family with a transhistorical core; though, the two differ on the relative merit of this core. In neither case, however, do we move beyond the assumptions that antifamilists labored to create and maintain. The group is either the revolutionary force behind the triumph of the modern world or the lascivious recapitulation of old heresies. Beckwith’s critical stance sees mysticism as a predominantly post-Reformation phenomenon – “the repository of a profound nostalgia” in the wake of Enlightenment processes of rationalization. 186 Faced with a world that had been evacuated of its sacred content, students of mysticism were wont to project their nostalgia for the sacred onto history. What emerges, in Beckwith’s understanding, is an idealist conception of a mystical spirit at work in the turbulent progression of modernity. “Protected from contamination,” mysticism “can supposedly escape from the ravages of the temporal, of merely historical contingency.” 187 Much as a soul separates from the dying body, mysticism thus separates from the world; and, through its detachment, it is given a privileged objective position from which to assess society, to subvert and to reform it.

186 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 8. After all, Beckwith continues, “so-called mystics never …

‘practiced nor propagated mysticism,’ because, as Szarmach had recently argued, ‘mysticism is itself a construct.’ And it is a construct crucially tied up with a protestant (post-reformation) view of the spirit. Although mystical theology has had a history that goes back to Origen and Pseudo-Dionysus, ‘mysticism’ as a word was only first used in 1736” (11). 187 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 10.

76 Beckwith’s critique here owes much to Pierre Bourdieu’s earlier critique of scholasticism in Pascalian Mediations. For Bourdieu, scholasticism (a movement which he never identifies with a specific thinker or time period) implies “the adoption of the posture of a motionless spectator” 188 – the individual whose removal from the game allows her to more accurately diagnose its rules. Both Bourdieu and Beckwith point to the anachronism of such an enterprise. Mysticism is not behind but within history, and, as such, is subject to endless contestation with regard to its meaning. The fallacy then derives from the scholar’s attempt to naturalize the term – to see mysticism as a stable essence waiting to be excavated from a series of distinct historical manifestations. “Historians,” writes Peter Marshall, “delude themselves if they suppose that language can be stripped away like old wallpaper to expose a freestanding reality underneath.” 189 Instead, “mysticism” exists insofar as it is used. Though the term “mysticism” may not have appeared in print until the middle of the eighteenth century, the cluster of concepts it invokes were very much in play in the 16th century. In fact, the use of these concepts serves as a marker, pointing us to the layout of the cultural field as perceived by those who inhabited it. When Rogers, for instance, alludes to the Family’s “secret misteries,” he invites his reader to locate the group within an existing field of reference; much as Kerr would later invite his reader to discover the “vital force” behind the more general mechanisms of religious change. Far from hermetic, the Familiy’s brand of mysticism was thus forged in dialogue with preexisting networks of social and religious classification – networks that could serve as points of contact between individuals with otherwise intractable differences.

188 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2000), 22.

189 Peter Marshall, “Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the semantic of schism,” in Catholics

and the “Protestant Nation,” ed. Ethan Shagan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 42.

77 Muddled relations to the mainstream If English members of the Family of Love were subjected to finger pointing for their alleged divorce of tongues and hearts, they were also heartened by the idea that the tongues of others seemed of late to be embroiled in needless doctrinal matters. To their minds, such ready engagement with unsolvable theological ideas compromised English national identity and obscured the more quotidian elements of religious piety on which such identity should be based. In effect, English Familists appropriated the divided field by placing doctrine on the side of public righteousness and arguing that brotherly concord and spiritual fellowship were the end result of private religious experience. In the Family’s 1580 dialogue An Apology for the Service of Love the lone Exile is identified, paradoxically, as both a defender of English national identity and a homeless and dejected “wildman.” In the words of the Countryman, “he was born of my mother, and was her second son begotten of my father, but he is not my brother.” 190 The paradox functions to clarify what will become one of the central concerns of the Apology: the basis for membership in the Elizabethan commonwealth. The Exile is quite intentionally portrayed as a mystery to be decoded. From one angle, he and the Familists he represents are thought of as appearing like us but, in reality, being something quite different. This was certainly the reading favored by the antifamilists, and, as a matter of course, it is given voice in the Apology. The Exile’s first interlocutor, the Citizen, concerns himself with what the Countryman considers to be “trifling matters,” choosing to speak “boldly, plainly, and fully” with the Familist about his various dwelling places, his attire, and his reasons for remaining in England despite persecution. 191 These are all questions that are designed to elicit uncontroversial

190 Anon., An Apology, 6-7. 191 Anon, An Apology, 7,10.

78 responses. As the Citizen makes plain, it is not at all a trifling matter that such an uncontroversial person, “living obediently under the Laws and Ordinances,” is so cruelly banished from the company of his brethren. 192 The Countryman’s reply is illuminating: Doutblesse Citizen, he is in great Heresies and misbelief, or else I may tell to thee in counsel, in any of the learned in these days are far out of the way that leadeth to life, and also ignorant of the ground of heavenly truth; wherefore I think it not amiss, that thou examine him concerning his belief…lest haply we might be seduced through some subtle heretick, infidel, or disobedient person, which perchance might be against the Queens Religion. 193 This closely on the heels of the Exile’s avowal that he has, until now, endured harassment for the sole reason that he is a passionate supporter of the Queen’s religion. The Countryman’s negligence is not a mistake. Rather, it is calculated to illustrate the popular trend of viewing Familists as quiescent heretics, veiling their sacrilege under the banner of Protestant conformity. From another angle, the Exile’s paradoxical status could be read as lamentable oversight. Though he appears a monstrous heretic, rightfully sequestered from the English mainstream for his doctrinal inadequacies, he is in point of fact just like us. The Countryman’s hesitation here serves an opposite purpose. “Some say, you deny Christ, the Trinity, and the Lords prayer; others say that you are Libertines, and lie one with anothers wife…some say, you would have no Magistrates…as also that you say you live without sin: yea and some say you are against the State.” 194 One imagines the Exile slyly responding with the old adage, “If John Knewstub told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?” His actual response however brings together seemingly conflicting strains of argument. The first is a simple reversal of the polemic to which they were accustomed.

192 Anon., An Apology, 10. 193 Anon., An Apology, 36-37. 194 Anon., An Apology, 54-55.

79 England, though in essence good, has been stifled under the dominion of “heathenish magistrates.” These men, while by all accounts “Judges over the true observers of all good Laws,” are in fact “offenders against all Laws” concealed under royal support and emboldened by royal preferment. 195 They are, that is to say, the scripture-learned of Niclaes’ earlier polemic. Yet the exile does not go on to follow the predictable pattern of denouncing obedience to the laws as a form of rote legalism, a confusion of the spirit and the letter, and so on. The second strain rather argues for obedience to the laws of the realm as the ultimate expression of brotherly concord and hence true membership in the Elizabethan commonwealth. Appropriately, the Countryman, once he has divested himself of his skepticism, is convinced that the exiled Familist is just like us in a more meaningful, more enduring sense. What the scripture-learned “say,” the Countryman concludes, “you desire to do … and I think thou hast spoken all this out of the ground of thine heart without either dissimulation or guile.” 196 The problem with polemic, as Greenblatt has noted, is that it is “dangerously reversible.” 197 This instability was, as Chapter 1 proposed, inscribed in the term “puritan.” Both Knewstub and his opponents hurled the accusation at one another at various points in their respective polemics; and one wonders if the “taxonomic crisis” that Kristen Poole has identified with the term was in fact a product of this back and forth rather than a prerequisite for its use. Throughout their writings, English Familists were mindful of this instability. “Are we not all scripture learned, that do read & talke of the

195 Anon., An Apology, 55, 60. 196 Anon., An Apology, 63. Two other Familist texts (Anon., A Brief Rehersal of the Belief of the

Good-Willing in England, which are named the Family of Love (Cologne, 1575; reprinted, London, 1656), 1 and Anon., Temporis Filia Veritas, A1r) begin “Condemn no man before thou knowest the matter, know it first, and then rebuke. Give no judgement before thou hast heard the cause, and let men first tell out their tales.” 197 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 82.

80 scripture? Doth not every man approve his sect or opinion (as much as in him lyeth) by the scripture?” 198 They mourned the prevailing association of truth with power, believing that the success of a given polemic rested not on the discovery and articulation of an indifferent reality but on the exercise of power in defining “truth.” “All is untrue now,” reasoned Roger’s anonymous respondent in 1578, “except it be to prove your false words & slanderous brutes trewe.” “How,” he asked, “do you approve your matter? It can (belike) be no truth, except you allowe it.” 199 In such a situation, the Family had little choice but to dissimulate and rely on their guile to pull them through. The heathen magistrates were depicted, in turn, as the true dissimulators, relying on “outward shewes of holiness” to legitimize their domination. 200 If only the Family were permitted to manifest their true understanding, one member told his opponent, “you shoulde then bee shewed in your right colours.” 201 Focusing inordinately on doctrine, the opponents of Familism were experts at playing the game. They could speak heroically of Scripture and preach before rapt crowds at Paul’s Cross and in the presence of the Queen; but, if one penetrated beyond their exterior, they were devoid of both conscience and religious sensibility. In opposition to these “learned” preachers, Familists celebrated the simple person – the “plain plowman” of Temporis Filia Veritas and the good-willing but unschooled “youngone” of Niclaes’ writings. “So doe I wish from the bottom of my

198 Rogers, The Displaying, L5v. 199 Rogers, The Displaying, I7r. 200 Anon., Temporis Filia Veritas, B5r. While the text neither makes explicit mention of the

Family of Love nor ever identifies itself as a Familist work, Marsh insists that “there are good reasons to believe that this book, which deserves a place in the history of religious toleration, was written by a member of the English Family of Love.” As mentioned before, the title page shares the quotation from Ecclesiasticus with the Family’s Brief Rehersal of their belief. The book also shares many expressions with other books that are distinctively Familist – most notably with An Apology which Marsh suggests may have been written by the same Familist author as Temporis, Robert Seale (The Family of Love in English Society, 181). 201 Rogers, The Displaying, I7r-v.

81 heart,” wrote another member, “that all the Lordes people were simple … then strife, contention, envying, backbiting, lying, persecuting for conscience cause, theft, murder, whoredom, dronkennesse, Idolatrie, and such like, should not beare so great dominion as it doth.” 202 For the Family, then, England was under siege, though not by the Anabaptists and Papists. Rather it had been deprived of its true identity through the sinister efforts of its own publicly-righteous local authorities. Like the Exile from the Apology, Familists sought to forge points of contact with the English mainstream through a focus on faithful action – on “doing” rather than on “saying.” It was incumbent on every religious person to take up their cross “to a reformation of their own lives” before presuming to “expound Gods secret mysteries.” 203 England, they thought, could resemble the island nation of Terra Pacis if, and only if, its citizens cultivated the simplicity of the saints. This is not say, however, that the Family of Love had forsaken its emphasis on mystical reformation, choosing a relatively undemanding, rugged faith at the expense of becoming “godded with God.” As the next chapter will argue, the Family of Love inherited a religious system in which “simplicity” and “brotherly concord” were assumed to be the natural outcome of precisely the sort of mystical exploration that was suggested by Niclaes’ life and works.

202 Rogers, The Displaying, L6r. 203 Anon., An Apology, 18-19.

82 CHAPTER III THE FAMILY AND ADIAPHORA The previous chapter dealt with the way in which members of the Family of Love spoke to their generation. It also suggested some of the problems inherent in approaches to the group that posit an unbridgeable chasm between public persona and the “essence” of authentic Familism. Here we can locate not only the hostile reactions of contemporaries like Rogers and Knewstub, but the more scholarly and “objective” account of subversive, reforming power in the work of Nigel Kerr and – to use an even more current example – the contention made by Peter Lake that, beneath it all, the pandering Family was entirely heterodox and cared little about the English commonwealth. 204 These approaches are problematic for a number of reasons. As mentioned in the last chapter, members were well-aware of the perceived divide between public and private identity and sought to use it to their advantage. As far as the Familist Exile in the Apology was concerned, what you see is what you get; the cult of HN should be judged not by its subterranean mysteries but by its fruits. 205 Against the so-called scripture-learned, Familists portrayed themselves as nothing less than the heart of English civic and religious identity.

204 In Lake’s words: “Meaning nothing in spiritual or religious terms, the outward structures and

forms of the church could safely be accepted, while the real business of true religion, of achieving salvation in the next life and moral and spiritual perfection in this, went on within the group. Over the long haul, of course, Familists expected to take over the world; in their eschatological scheme, the writings of H.N. represented the final stage in the working out of God’s purposes for the world, and the opening of the final age of ‘the love,’ when the tenets of ‘the love,’ and the ‘little ones’ who embodied them, would triumph over all other religious forms. In the short run, since only members of the Family were saved, the outside of the group could be left to their fate, with the Family’s evangelical efforts left to picking off carefully chosen individuals deemed likely to be open to the Familists’ message and unwilling to denounce them to the authorities.” “Puritanism, Familism, and Heresy in Early Stuart England: the case of John Etherington Revisited,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, eds. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 92. 205 As the Citizen asks: “How shall men know then the false prophets and false teachers?” “By

their fruits,” responds the Exile (Anon., An Apology, 17-18).

83 Crucially, the tendency to divide Familism in hindsight parrots an unreliable body of antifamilist polemic. The knife’s edge on which Elizabethan Familists found themselves in the 1570s can be gauged in a letter written to John Rogers in the winter of 1578 by a member of the Family going by the pseudonym “ER.” Citing the influential Protestant William Tyndale, ER criticized those disciples of Antichrist “that do breake up into the consciences of men,” urging them to profess things which are at variance with their fundamental beliefs. The quotation from Tyndale was to be repeated at length in a second letter to Rogers signed “Your lovers and friends, FL.” 206 Ever suspicious of Familist claims to orthodoxy, Rogers responded to ER that the inner life of the Family, its “conscience,” was deeply heretical. “A bare confession of Christ with our mouthes is not sufficient.” 207 The heart, he implied, must not shelter its subversive tendencies from the silver tongue. Of course, Rogers’ interpretation of the letters was the reverse of what his anonymous interlocutors had in mind. For ER and FL, the point was most certainly not to violate their consciences by their outward profession. They, like Rogers, insisted that tongue and heart be as one and, like Rogers, they longed for a time when “poore men mought enjoy libertie of good conscience without such stretching and strayning as is now used.” 208 In a sense, then, the polemical context of the 1570s is a hall of mirrors. If we took HN, his followers, and their opponents completely at their word, we would be left with the unsatisfying conclusion that everyone in early modern Europe was lying. Both sides were puritans and, by adverse association, libertines. It is tempting, given this virtual stalemate, to reduce extant statements of religious belief to underlying political, social, or economic incentives. Like politicians obliged to conform their rhetoric to hot-button 206 Rogers, The Displaying, L4r, N1r. 207 Rogers, The Displaying, M2r. 208 Rogers, The Displaying, N1r-v.

84 issues, Familists, in this scenario, expressed themselves publicly in a fashion calculated to achieve the maximum of cultural capital. We might ask of the Exile the same question asked of presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama after their forum with pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in 2008: what is to be gained politically by professing religious belief? There is after all significant evidence to support Christopher Marsh’s contention that Wilkinson, Rogers, and Knewstub attacked the Family of Love not solely out of honest piety, but because they themselves had been thoroughly marginalized by political forces that had absolutely nothing to do with Familism.209 Might something similar be said of the Family itself? Running too far in this direction has its own problems. As Brad Gregory has compelling argued, the tendency to reduce early modern religious belief to allegedly more enduring – more real – secular factors entails a confessional, albeit irreligious, agenda. Defaulting to Enlightenment naturalism, historians “employ a hermeneutics of suspicion as their chief interpretive assumption, seeing self-professed religious motivations as an ideology for the exercise of power and the assertion of selfinterest.” 210 The possibility that groups like the Family of Love drew their inspiration from something real is occluded. Members either naively mistook social and religious representations for reality, as Gregory puts it, or manipulated these representations for sinister gains. 211 Again, one confronts the same paradigm from earlier chapters: the cult

209 See Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 33-34, 111-122, 124-127. 210 Brad Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,”

History and Theory 45 (December 2006): 144.

211 Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 9. In “The Other Confessional History,” Gregory points to the

work of Emile Durheim and Clifford Geertz as particularly influential examples of the reduction of religion to more enduring “secular” factors. For Durkheim, of course, the practice of religion was primarily a means for people to express their relationship to society and to ritually remember the collective wisdom of that society. “Because,” Gregory writes of Durkheim, “…there can be nothing beyond the natural world, all religious claims that refer to anything transcendent, spiritual, or supernatural must be false considered as such, and their referents must be reducible to natural phenomena” (140). Under the influence of Durkheim, Geertz likewise “reduced” religious claims to underlying symbol-systems. “The implication of Geertz’s

85 of HN was composed of either duped simpletons or dangerous revolutionaries. As two other historians have proposed in a recent volume edited by Gregory, the upshot of this “confessional” agenda is that “people in the past are portrayed in ways that they would have found seriously deficient or even unrecognizable.” 212 The point is not that scholars of religion should scurry back to confessional church history, trading naturalism and suspicion for an emphasis on the continuity of tradition by the hand of divine providence. Such a trade would probably result in dismissing the Family as a noxious aberration. In seeking rather a middle way in line with the tenets of phenomenology, Gregory proposes that we bracket our judgment and attempt to approach the beliefs of historical agents on their own terms. 213 Though there is little doubt that the Family of Love could be political, this does not imply that they were any less sincere. If they were at all successful in speaking to the outside world, it view seems to be that to analyze religion properly entails stripping away its impressive, powerful aura, which enables one to see both what it really is and how it does what it does” (143). 212 John Coffey and Alister Chapman, “Introduction,” in Seeing Things Their Way, 242.

Emphasis mine

213 Gregory is aware of the criticisms which have arisen against phenomenological epoché: “At a

time when some would construe all scholarship as displaced autobiography, many regard the idea of bracketing one’s own convictions a naïve chimera. While such bracketing might well be impossible to realize perfectly, those who have had the experience of self-consciously restraining their own convictions know that it is not something of which scholars are constitutionally incapable. Imperfect self-restraint is better than none” (“The Other Confessional History,” 147). Bourdieu provides a further distinction that proves helpful. Against the method of phenomenology, he asserts that “one cannot really live the believe associated with profoundly different conditions of existence, that is, with other games and other stakes, still less [referring to the phenomenological project of evocative description] give others the means of reliving it by the sheer power of discourse” (The Logic of Practice, 68). Elsewhere, however, Bourdieu clarifies: “The effort to put oneself in the place of the author is only valid if one has acquired the means of constructing that place as such, as a position, a point (the basis of a point of view) in a social space that is nothing other than the … field within which the author is situated” (Pascalian Meditations, 88). In other words, the distinction (with which I think Gregory would agree) is between [A] reliving the experience of others by means of some shared epistemological or ontological status – a “humanness” that transcends historical exigency – and [B] understanding the experience of others by means of reconstructing the historical field of assumptions and social relations which both shaped and were shaped by this experience. Both Gregory and Bourdieu recognize that, while it impossible to completely bracket out our assumptions, there is no reason why we cannot strive in that direction. “Just because a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible does not mean that one should conduct surgery in a sewer” (Gregory, “The Other Confessional History,” 147).

86 was because they spoke from a perspective that lent their words an aura of plausibility. What, then, were the terms from which they articulated their point of view? In answering this question we take a step closer to understanding Familism, not in light of its eventual defamation, but in the context where its ideas originally operated in a meaningful and deliberate fashion. The following section begins with a stumbling block. Niclaes’ Terra Pacis (c. 1550) implies two schemes that appear logically irreconcilable: the first dismissing earthly existence as a snare, the second concerning the necessity of engagement with the world. Indeed, opponents in England were quick to note the irreconcilability of these two schemes as symptomatic of Familism’s heretical status. Simply put: if the appearance of civic engagement is incompatible with HN’s detached, mystical program, then his followers must be dissemblers. Assuming that Familists were not dissemblers, I propose to flesh out the context of debate over adiaphora (or things indifferent) in an attempt to make sense of Terra Pacis and its reception in England. As scholars have noted, discourse on the topic of adiaphora had a profound influence on the English cultural milieu of the 1530s and 40s. 214 The topic, especially as communicated by Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas Starkey, implied a tension between liberty and charity, detachment and social engagement, which clearly reemerged in the writings of later English Familists. Thus, while previous chapters have been concerned with the Family of Love speaking to a particular audience, this chapter and the next focus on the perspective from which English Familists were speaking. As an aside: significant research has already been undertaken on the subject of Familism in the context of Continental humanism. Alastair Hamilton and J.A. Van Dorsten have both, for example, addressed the influential figure in Antwerp, Christophe

214See, for example, Bernard J. Verkamp’s The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English

Reformation to 1554 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977).

87 Plantin, who, like Basson in Leiden, was responsible for printing Niclaes’ works in the second half of the sixteenth century. Plantin was most definitely a Familist who moved in broadly humanist circles. “Far more than a religion in any theological sense,” writes Hamilton, “Plantin desired an ethical code, based on Christian precepts, which came into effect outside the Church, in his day-to-day relationships with other people, with friends, business partners and members of his family.” 215 This philosophy was culled from the writings of Niclaes and emphasized the Erasmian desire to transcend political difference through the cultivation of a spirituality that was, at the same time, free from theological conceits and bound to a chartable social ethic. Continental Familists like Plantin were, in Van Dorsten’s words, “found in the most unexpected and often most influential quarters.” 216 Though Niclaes himself fled from city to city, his ideas were no doubt at home among the luminaries of the devotio moderna. My focus, in what follows, on the reception of the adiaphoristic tradition and the related tension between liberty and charity in England is not intended to overshadow this research. As both Hamilton and Van Dorsten have argued, Familism in England was a decidedly different phenomenon. My interest, then, is not in the manner in which “humanist Familism,” as Hamilton calls it, infiltrated London through the Dutch communities that settled there in the 1560s but in the way in which English members constructed their collective worldview out of existing strands of English religious culture. Erasmus is central to this task because his thought, unlike that of Plantin (whose influence was primarily felt in France), pervaded this culture. Thomas Starkey, though lacking in Erasmus’ international influence, is also important for distilling humanist ideas about adiaphora in a uniquely English religious climate. My aim, finally, is to propose

215 Hamilton, The Family of Love, 65. 216 J.A. Van Dorsten, The Radical Arts: First Decade of an Elizabethan Renaissance (Leiden:

Leiden University Press, 1970), 28.

88 that when English followers read Terra Pacis they read it from the perspective that this climate afforded them. The two schemes of Niclaes’ allegory Though he praised God’s ability to creatively accommodate his word to our humble imaginations, John Calvin nevertheless despised the view that Scripture contained “sublime mysteries that cannot be exposed except by hammering out allegories.” 217 Utilizing rather an “unpolished simplicity, almost bordering on rudeness,” he insisted that Moses and the others poured forth their message without “the rhetorician’s art.” 218 Though the Holy Spirit was central to the reception of this message, Calvin also warned of those “giddy men” who, in placing too much emphasis on the Spirit, “reject all reading of the Scripture themselves, and deride the simplicity of those who only delight in what they call the dead and deadly letter.” 219 For Knewstub, writing in the 1570s, members of the Family of Love were just such giddy men. In his 1576 sermon at Paul’s Cross in London, he lampooned the strange alchemy of the prophet HN and his Familists – their tendency, along with the Papists, to “transubstantiate” the natural sense of Scripture (a deadly letter) into a mystical body and to cling to “their profession of the trueth, as unto a sufficient fortresse.” 220 On one level, such allegorizing was a frustrating form of idolatry. As Calvin had written, “like water gushing forth from a large and copious spring, immense crowds of gods have issued from the human mind, every man giving himself full license, and devising some peculiar form of divinity, to meet his own views.” 221For Knewstub, however, the Familist affinity for

217 Cited in Bouwsma, John Calvin, 122. 218 Calvin, Institutes, I.VIII.I. 219 Calvin, Institutes, I.IX.I. 220 John Knewstub, A Confutation, P5v, R4v. 221 Calvin, Institutes, I.V.XII.

89 an allegorical “fortress” was more than idolatry. After all, like Calvin, he understood that idolatry was ubiquitous and hence forgivable. Prideful sectarianism was a different story. Familists were bad neighbors. “Their love,” wrote Knewstub in 1579, “is so lame, that it cannot steppe a foote out of their own doores.” 222 As “inclosers,” Familists left “neither hope nor comfort for us in any other man beside our selves.” 223 Allegory, then, was primarily a symptom of social detachment. While Knewstub never explicitly referenced the lengthy Familist allegory Terra Pacis, he did allude to many of the subjects addressed in the text. Notable among these was the allegorical approach to heaven in which the future kingdom became little more than a state of transcendent understanding. “Though [HN’s] religion be very high and mystical,” Knewstub explained, “yet his heaven is very lowe, even heere uppon Earth among us.” 224 Not only did such a doctrine bar the anticipation of future joys, it also promoted a damaging state of detachment from things as they are. The last thing the commonwealth needed was a bevy of heretics tottering about with their heads in the clouds. As usual, however, Knewstub admitted only one dimension of what was, in truth, a more complex picture. 225 As discussed in Chapter 1, Terra Pacis certainly reflected an uncompromising asceticism which emphasized the need to distinguish between the fallen

222 Knewstub, A Confutation, sig. 14r. “But peradventure,” Knewstub goes on, “as the verie name

of the householde of love, is their great glory, so it may breede in us an opinion of their harmlesnesse. For who can feare any eville from love, which doth good to all, and hurteth none. Howbeit adde only (which the trueth it selfe doth prove) that it is the housholde of Selflove.” 223 Knewstub, A Confutation, H7v. 224 Knewstub, A Confutation, H7v. 225 As mentioned earlier, Niclaes’ Terra Pacis did court this interpretation of heaven. Indeed,

“the gracious time cometh, and is no already come.” “Without this one City of Peace,” the narrator continues, “there is no convenient place of Rest on the whole earth.” Yet, seemingly to the contrary, the City of Peace was later proclaimed to be “more excellent” than “all what may be found…upon the universal earth” (Terra Pacis, 9-16). Niclaes did make some attempt to justify his spatial and temporal transgressions by alluding to the spiritual (not physical) nature of heavenly participation. However, the allegorical tension was never fully released, even in the allegedly “objective” preface and conclusion.

90 world and the land of peace. Though an “allegorical fortress,” Terra Pacis was also a gushing fountain, pouring out into the emptiness of the world. In fact, the text is unparalleled in its ability to weave together apparently contradictory schemes into a complete, if not jumbled, narrative. 226 In a way, this also made Knewstub’s point: allegory could never be the basis for straightforward and edifying doctrine. Yet, as the following sections of this chapter will argue, the jumbled narrative was not without its more orthodox precedents and, interestingly, it was precisely these precedents that English Familists latched on to and promoted. The first scheme embedded in Terra Pacis was symbolized by the unapproachable fortress, a structure with high stone walls setting the city of peace apart from the profane world. “No man,” HN declared, “can come into this good City, nor become one body with these peaceable people, except he do forsake all the other forementioned confused lands, and the detestable people, for God hath not chosen any one of all of them to his kingdom.” 227 The impenetrability of the city was moreover aided both by the searching glare of an omniscient watchman perched atop its walls and by a swirling tempest billowing from its keep. Safe inside, the citizens of Terra Pacis enjoyed their status as saints, basking in the glory of God and freely enjoying a prelapsarian garden “ful of all maner of riches and pure beauties…not possible to be written.” 228

226 Marsh has also discussed the contradictory character of Familism with reference to Terra

Pacis, and in some ways I take his discussion as a starting point. Marsh, however, is less interested in the “return” to civil society that marks what I am calling the “second scheme” of Terra Pacis [see Figure 1] than he is in the paradoxical combination of exclusion and inclusive love that marks the first portion of the text. Though Terra Pacis, in his words, “may have inspired feelings of arrogance and impregnability among H.N.’s devoted followers,” the author also “placed continual emphasis upon the humility, meekness and simplicity of the true believer as he journeyed to ‘Terra Pacis’” (The Family of Love in English Society, 197). 227 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 98. 228 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 117.

91 Though liberated, the world inside the walls nevertheless reflected an ideal civil society. “No man desireth to possess, nor to have any thing more under his hand or power, then is needfull for him, or expedient to a good Government.” Labor was to be undertaken joyfully and the fruits of that labor were to circulate equitably through society as a chain of gifts stretching from one person to another. Nowhere was murder, theft, or adultery to be found. Most importantly, due to the “upright disposition” of its citizens, laws were obeyed out of love rather than out of fear. 229 By way of contrast, HN asked his reader to “consider well of the strange States of the wildernessed Lands, and People” – the anomie just outside the fortified walls of Terra Pacis. Here individuals were crushed under the weight of their own unprofitable labor. Becoming “bewitched” by the products of their hands, they soon slid comfortably into idolatry. 230 In such a situation – …there be made also, playing Tables, Draft-boards, Chess-boards, Cards and Mummeries or Masks, for to delight the idle people with such foolish vanity. Here are made likewise many Rings, Chains, and Gold and Silver Tablets, and Brooches; also Garnishing of Plumes or Tufts of Feathers, and many maner of stitched or imbroidered works, with Gold, Silver, Pearl, and Silk…and likewise, many kindes of Pictures, Tables of Imagery, Painted Walls, and divers kinde of Carved, and Graven, or wrought Images. 231 The litany of images, textures, and sounds is reminiscent of the sociétés joyeuses in Lyon or the Bankside activities of Shakespeare’s London and continues in much the same fashion for almost the entire chapter. Idolatry, the text suggests, is something that is performed with the eyes, the hands, and the ears. It is a physical way of engaging with the world so as to pass the time in vanity. Religion outside the walls of Terra Pacis was a mummery – a means, in HN’s words, “whereby to wave or hold forth something in 229 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 128-130. 230 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 20, 29, 33. 231 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 31.

92 shew…sundry sorts of garnishing of services, and of gods, which they may handle or feel in their ignorance.” 232 The first scheme thus juxtaposed the world inside with the world outside, creating a soteriology rooted in the opposition between the two. The castle keep, the locus of the beatific vision, was set off from profanity by an impenetrable bulwark. Inside, citizens had traded the material for the spiritual, their world for heaven – a process that the text explicitly described as having already occurred in those who had “grown up in the Love.” Straining the allegory a little too far for comfort, HN suggested that each one of these individuals is “like one that is risen from the Death into the everlasting Life.” 233 For those that had not yet “risen,” the wilderness outside was crowded with a thick materiality that confronted and conquered the weakened traveler. “As long as one is in the journey,” HN cautioned, “he must account of himself a Pilgrim, or walker in strange lands, who suffereth nothing to delight him in the same.” 234 The second scheme in Terra Pacis is perhaps less intentional, though nonetheless available in the text (see Figure 1). Where the fortress and its narrow gate called to mind the exclusivity of Terra Pacis, its separateness from the vicissitudes of material existence, the “mighty river” or “water-fountain” implied an embrace of the world beyond the walls. 235 The mighty river could, of course, also imply the destruction of the flood, and HN did not shy from envisioning Familism as an incorruptible ark carried on

232 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 32-33. 233 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 120. Emphasis mine. 234 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 64. 235 There is an interesting parallel to be drawn here with the figure of Christ as discussed by

Sarah Beckwith. “For Christ’s body,” she says, “is both exclusive…closed, hermetic, monumental, static, elevated, awesome, homogeneous, and simultaneously inclusive, warm, material, welcoming, heterogeneous, the very existential stuff of birth and death, the very stuff too of mortality and bodily change, open to the world through its welcoming wounds” (Christ’s Body, 44).

93 the crest of a great deluge submerging the reprobate. 236 Yet the source of the deluge was not God’s righteous anger but instead what was called the fountain of “the Mystery of God and of his infinite Being.” From this fountain, the citizens of Terra Pacis were said to draw all of their wisdom and “godly knowledge.” 237 HN’s text detailed the manner in which the more enlightened sort, having immersed in the water, now engaged freely with the outside world. He now therefore, that is in this manner come thereunto essentially, may as then (in the love, and in the unity of peace) go out and in, without harme, and may walk thorough all Lands, Places, and Cities. 238 As with the earlier suggestion that the enlightened individual was like one who had achieved resurrection, the weight in the above passage fell on the term “essentially.” What type of change enabled the traveler to go out and in while avoiding the pitfalls of mummeries, masks, graven and wrought images? Later in the text, HN was to clarify that the spiritual understanding drawn from the fountain of God’s infinite being altered the perspective of the faithful with regard to “manly and natural things.” 239 In other words, Terra Pacis worked retroactively. The new individual (homo novus), was no longer prone to external forms of idolatry, but, in HN’s words, changed essentially, “in every part, as in sences, thoughts and minde.” 240 Idolatry, for homo novus, was not predominantly physical but noetic.

236 The deluge itself was associated with “The Righteous Judgment of God.” “Out of this City,”

wrote Niclaes, “there floweth an unsearchable or infinite deep River…in such sort that this River, with the same winde, gusheth vehemently forth, as with an exceeding violent thorow-rushing stream; and breaketh out with such violent force, like burning heat and flames of fire, to the devouring of all the Enemies of the same good City” (Terra Pacis, 107-108). 237 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 109-110. 238 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 142. Emphasis mine. 239 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 167. 240 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 118.

94

Scheme A Idolatry external Soteriology dependent on opposition

World as snare Salvation internal, otherworldly

Terra Pacis as a fortified city guarded by an omniscient watchman

Citizens and their surroundings are both bejeweled and transparent

Scheme B Idolatry internal Soteriology dependent on emanation

World as neutral Salvation communal, worldly

Terra Pacis as a mighty river flowing from the font of divine wisdom

Figure 1. The two schemes of Niclaes’ Terra Pacis

Given the retroactive scope implied by this second scheme, it is also possible to tease out a different soteriological pattern. The first scheme had linked salvation with the viator’s ability to “tune in and drop out,” so to speak, entailing a stark opposition between the material and the spiritual, external and internal, society and Terra Pacis. In the second scheme, salvation emanated from the land of peace much as a stream flowed from its source. This opened the door for a new conception of collective or communal salvation here on earth. Elders in the Family had participated in God’s infinite mysteries “to the end that the love in her service might be spread abroad, and have her going forward, to a serviceableness unto the life.” If, moreover, the saints in Terra Pacis enjoyed an ideal civil society so, too, might the people of the wilderness lands. “Yea, all

95 Majesties, Rulers, Governors and Magistrates, that are of God, shall every one submit them with us thereunder, for the peaces Cause … and have a desire to the peace upon earth.” 241 This was a striking turn, especially given the preceding description of the wilderness with its mummeries, games, and other forms of unprofitable labor. Taken as a whole, HN’s jumbled narrative seemed to advocate a sort of detached engagement: a mystical spirituality bordering on giddiness nestled together with a profound sense of civic responsibility. These were strange bedfellows indeed; and it is no surprise that Knewstub and the others threw up their hands before HN’s “bastardly broode of Allegories.” 242 How does one move from an emphasis on spiritual escapism and worldly asceticism to an emphasis on collective salvation, brotherhood, and English communitas? A final set of images from Terra Pacis drove the paradox home. Though protected by impenetrable walls, the city of peace was said, at the same time, to be devoid of “partitions, coverings, and middle walls.” Though decked in “precious riches,” “unspeakable garnishing,” and beauty “of form,” the city was nevertheless formless, transparent, invisible. Its citizens, likewise, were “gorgiously apparelled, and the Garments so very cleer, that one may behold the inward Members of their body naked and bare.” 243 Everything was both bejeweled and transparent – a sumptuous feast for the eyes that was light as air. Here, the radical indeterminacy of Niclaes’ language echoed the larger tendency of the text to oscillate between images of the elect as set apart and as indistinguishable from their surroundings.

241 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 167, 164-165. 242 Knewstub, A Confutation, L5r. 243 Niclaes, Terra Pacis, 124, 117, 113, 136.

96 Erasmus, Thomas Starkey, and adiaphora “When I was in Britain,” explains Erasmus’ character Eusebius in the Convivium Religiosum, “I saw St. Thomas’ tomb, laden with innumerable precious jewels in addition to other incredible riches.” In words that seem tantalizingly prescient to the modern reader, Eusebius continues to tell his dinner guests that he would “rather have this superfluous wealth spent on the poor than kept for the use of officials who will plunder it sooner or later.” 244 The Convivium, written in 1522 when Erasmus was already well versed in Luther’s evangelical designs, concerns itself with the often difficult balance of Christian freedom and charity. As David Weil Baker puts it, the work walks a veritable tightrope between worldly withdrawal and engagement with the larger and more variegated Christian community. 245 At times, Eusebius and his guests can be found celebrating the enlightened soul who need not (and indeed should not) be bound by any human laws or customs. At others points, however, they seem to extol that charitable spirit “which everywhere regards what contributes to the salvation of our neighbour and on that account frequently abstains from what is permitted, preferring to yield to the welfare of a neighbor rather than exercise its liberty.” 246 The tightrope act performed by Eusebius and the others is no doubt intentional. The two schemes in Terra Pacis were two poles of an oppositional framework that was of no small importance to Renaissance humanists. In the Convivium, Erasmus allegorized

244 Erasmus, “Convivium Religiosum,” in The Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, ed. Craig

Ringwalt Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 199.

245 See David Weil Baker, Divulging Utopia: Radical Humanism in Sixteenth-Century England

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 44-47.

246 Erasmus, “Convivium Religiosum,” 190. Early in the text the character of Timothy had praised

“the perfect man, who his bodily passions under control, is governed solely by the power of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, to compel such a man to conform to human laws is perhaps inappropriate. Instead he should be left to his master, by whose spirit he is led; he is not to be judged by those circumstances through which the weakness of feeble men is drawn in one way or another, to true godliness…What need is there to prescribe to him who voluntarily does more than human laws require?” (185)

97 the tension between liberty and charity – spiritual indifference and social responsibility – in a manner not altogether foreign to Niclaes’ work. Eusebius’ house was described as a private sanctum to which only a select few dinner guests were invited. It was surrounded by concentric circles of dense and beautiful gardens – the outer grounds, we are reminded, were “public property” and were of use to the “needy.” 247 As one moved inward, they found themselves enjoying a private and more “cultivated garden,” replete with a charming fountain, a square, and plots of fragrant herbs (including marjoram to repel the swine). 248 Inside the house was what Baker calls “the intimate world of an idealized community of humanist readers” – friends sitting around the table, eating with abandon and discussing Peter, Paul and, of course, the saints Socrates and Cicero. 249 Eusebius’ wife, who busily prepared the meal in the spirit of the biblical Martha, was not invited to the discourse. The liberty of the humanist readers, however much ensured by casement windows and thick shutters, was soon to be interrupted by the exigencies of the outside world. In the final scene, Eusebius bids his guests to remain in the house, feasting their bellies, their eyes, and their minds, while he attends to “business elsewhere.” 250 Other people, we are told are hotly debating one another out there in the real world, and Eusebius, now quite rested and full, feels himself called to return and take up the office of mediator. The

247 Erasmus, “Convivium Religiosum,” 177, 200. 248 Erasmus, “Convivium Religiosum,” 178. 249 Baker, Divulging Utopia, 47. Erasmus was famous for arguing that pagan writers could be of

use to the Christian intellect, and Eusebius, sure enough, follows suit: “Sacred Scripture is of course the basic authority in everything; yet I sometimes run across ancient sayings or pagan writings – even the poets’ – so purely and reverently and admirably expressed that I can’t help believing their authors’ hearts were moved by some divine power. And perhaps the spirit of Christ is more widespread than we understand, and the company of saints includes many not in our calendar” (Convivium Religiosum, 192). “I cannot help exclaiming,” shouted another interlocutor, “‘St. Socrates, pray for us!’” (194) 250 Erasmus, “Convivium Religiosum,” 206.

98 guests say farewell, praying that God bless his “going and coming;” and, with that, they bring an end to the godly feast. 251 What was for the hostile reader of Terra Pacis a paradox was, for Erasmus, two alternating aspects of the Christian life. The tension between liberty and charity animated much of Eramus’ work. In 1523, the author took a short break from writing a series of satirical works against ceremonial deviations in the Church to dedicate his Paraphrasis in Evangelium Lucae to Henry VIII. As one historian has proposed, the Paraphrase on Luke was intended as a healing balm of peace for Henry who was currently united with the Spanish king Charles V in planning to invade France. 252 Though ultimately unsuccessful in his endeavor to arrest the violence, Erasmus was nevertheless convinced that an ingredient of true religion, such as that which Luke had modeled in his gospel, was its transcendence of ignoble squabbling. He was again to meet with disappointment at the hands of the English king shortly before his own death as the axe fell on his good friend Thomas More. In his interpretation of Luke 10, Erasmus elaborated the different natures of Mary and Martha, the two virtuous sisters who had received Christ and his disciples into their home. Mary, who promptly positioned herself at Christ’s feet, “was so plundered that, oblivious to everything, she was not able to be torn away.” 253 Martha, on the other hand, ran furiously about the house, making provisions for the dinner and lamenting her sister’s apparent profligacy. Turning to Jesus, she pleaded: “order her therefore to assist me, 251 Erasmus, “Convivium Religiosum,” 207. Baker muses that the quarrels that demand Eusebius’

attention represent Erasmus’ own dealings with Luther and the Pope. “These two men (Luther and the pope? Luther and the emperor?) are said to be friends, but clearly the spirit of friendship that animates Eusebius and his guests does not animate them” (Divulging Utopia, 45-46). 252 See Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Erasmus’ Prescription for Henry VIII: Logotherapy,”

Renaissance Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 161-172.

253“Nam Maria feriata à negotiis domesticis assidebat ad pedes domini Jesu, audiens sermones

illius, quibus adeo rapiebatur, ut oblita caeterorum non posset avelli” (Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraprhasis (Basel, 1523), 123v).

99 otherwise I know she will not be torn away from you, except with your support…so magnificent and beautiful is your conversation.” 254 Despite the faults of both sisters, Erasmus insisted at numerous points that they were loved equally by their guest who, given his charitable inclination, was especially suited to acknowledge the complementary differences in their natures. Reading between the lines of the relatively short passage, Erasmus implied that the complementary traits of Mary and Martha could be further grafted onto the Pauline matrix of soul and body, individual spirituality and social reality. By this account, Mary, “relinquishing the duty to the body,” appeared to exhibit the superior piety. Indeed, in Christ’s words, she “hath chosen that good part” while her sister remains “rattled and pulled this way and that over numerous things.” 255 Like the wilderness traveler in Niclaes’ Terra Pacis, Martha was at risk of losing herself in a labyrinth of inessentials while Mary reclined in the land of peace. Erasmus, however, was never one for inordinate asceticism. The life of the cloistered monk was, after all, only a lifestyle choice, and no more meritorious than that of the Christian yeoman. 256 Martha’s virtue had its place as well, and it was equally incumbent upon Mary to imitate Christ by spreading his message to those without the privilege of sitting at his feet. “And yet,” Erasmus assured, “such persons will not lack their reward, who according to the example of your deeds … relieve the bodily necessity of those who have the cause of the gospel in hand, who feed the hungry, who clothe the naked, who visit the sick, who visit the imprisoned, and who harbor vagrants and the

254“Iube igitur ut me adiuvet, alioqui scio non avelletur abs te, nisi tu iufferis. Tanta est dulcedo

sermonum tuorum” (Erasmus, Paraphrasis, 124r).

255 Luke 10:42. “…quae oblita eorum quae sunt corporis, tota est in his quae sunt animi”

(Erasmus, Paraphrasis, 124r). “Martha Martha, inquiens, tu quidem solicitudine torqueris apparandi convivii, ac tumultaris distraheris’q; circa multa” (124r). 256 Roland Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 68.

100 homeless.” 257 In brief, Christ reserved equal admiration for those whose innate sense of responsibility – feeding the famished and harboring the vagrant – enabled the spiritual ecstasy of others. In his political life, Erasmus trod a line between a Roman establishment that appeared, in his opinion, more and more like a mere social utility and a burgeoning evangelical movement that moved too far in the other direction. 258 Mirroring the attitude of Martha, the ecclesiastical hierarchy staked its claims to legitimacy on the ceremonial and ritual aspects of the mass at the expense of a religion of the heart. Moreover, if this hierarchy had ceased to play the Good Samaritan, becoming rather miserly in its old age, then it no longer performed its ecclesiastical function. 259 On the other hand, as Erasmus confided to Philip Melanchthon less than a year after the publication of his work on Luke, “practices grown corrupt by long usage might be gradually corrected without throwing everything into confusion.” “What good is done by 257 “Nec interim tamen carituri sunt sua mercede, qui, quod tu facis, pio studio pro tempore

subveniunt corporali necessitati tractantium rem Evangelicam, qui pascunt famelicos, qui vestiunt nudos, qui visunt aegrotos, qui adeunt vinctos, qui tecto iuvant vagos & hospitii egentes” (Erasmus, Paraphrasis, 124v). 258 According to Bainton, “in his eyes no rite of the Church, no external framework of the Church

was necessary for salvation, which depends rather on a heartfelt piety which can be cultivated apart from outward aids” (Erasmus of Christendom, 165). Later, Bainton adds that Erasmus “so spiritualized everything within the Church and so denuded the hierarchy of all sanction save utility that the lines run also from Erasmus to the Sacramentarians; Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and Pellikan, and even to the spiritualists and rationalists such as Caspar Schwenkfeld, Sebastian Franck, and Sebastian Castellio” (193). Erasmus did, after all, assume an oddly apologetic tone when discussing the anabaptists – even while deriding both Roman and Evangelical excesses (261). 259 Earlier in his career, Erasmus is alleged to have written an ironic and in no way flattering

portrait of the current pope, Julius II. Julius had of late usurped his spiritual authority as pope to join Henry VIII in a plot to invade France. The portrait, titled Dialoge betweene Julius the seconde, Genius, and Saint Peter in the English edition of 1534 (originally Julius Exclusus), warned the reader to “refraine from laughinge” as Julius was pictured attempting to use the power of the keys to unlock the doors to heaven and, when unable to do so, threatening Saint Peter with force. “This freateh me not a litell. I will breke downe the gates” (1). Seeing Julius’ armies arrayed against the gates of heaven, Peter responded: “I se not one among them all that loketh like a good Christen man. I se a filthy sorte of men savouring nothing but of bawdry, dronkenes, and of gonpowd. They seme to be hired to rob, or rather a sorte of spirites come out of helle, to make a batail against heven. Now the more I beholde thyself, so moche lesse I se any steppe of an apostolike man” (5-6).

101 telling foolish lads that the Pope is Antichrist,” he asked, playing to Melanchthon’s moderate reputation. 260 With these words, Erasmus echoed his earlier attack on Luther’s doctrine of total depravity in De libero arbitrio (1524). What good is done in parading theological nuances before the masses? If the masses are as paralyzed with sin as you, Luther, would have us believe, then perhaps the budding evangel should think twice before telling them that their meritorious works are to no ultimate avail. As much as he bemoaned the lack of spirituality in the Roman church, Erasmus was no less angered by the impracticalities of a nascent Protestantism. Luther famously replied to Erasmus’ warnings in De libero Aribtrio by stating flatly that religious truth trumped the demands of civil society and, if it came to it, “God could make another world.” 261 Erasmus could not accept as “truth” that which the events of recent years had proved to be so divisive. Even if Luther’s rendering of certain doctrinal matters was accurate, the respect for authority which Erasmus found wanting in the Lutherans was based on an adherence to custom. In his mind, custom, though in itself adiaphora or indifferent, was the glue which held society together. A similar emphasis on custom was later restated by John Whitgift in support of Elizabeth I. Believing it manifestly absurd to ignore circumstance and proscribe all things not explicitly mandated by Scripture, the future archbishop argued that adiaphora were, in effect, not adiaphora because necessary to the maintenance of decorum and civility. Though not the efficient cause of collective edification, custom was indeed the accidental cause of a moderate and peaceful reformation. 262 260 Erasmus, “To Philip Melanchthon,” in Life and Letters of Erasmus, ed. J. A. Froude (New

York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 327.

261 Erasmus, “De libero arbitrio,” in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, eds. E.

Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 41. Luther, “De servo arbitrio,” cited in Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom, 192. 262 John Whitgift, “A Brief Examination of the Reasons used in the Book called an Admonition

to the Parliament,” in Works, 1:71.

102 Augustine had also said much on this subject at the beginning of the fifth century. In his letter to the layman Januarius, Augustine cited the beloved and recently deceased bishop Ambrose who had declared that, to avoid “scandal,” it was imperative “to whatever church you go, observe its custom.” Augustine lamented that those in his day had forgotten the venerable Stoic principle of adiaphora. Crashing through foreign lands, destroying tradition, and sowing insurrection, these rash Christians judged “nothing correct but what they themselves do.” 263 They also neglected a more enduring principle: things in themselves inessential – the different figures and ceremonies encountered in various foreign lands – could nonetheless be utilized as steps to a higher understanding. “All these things,” wrote Augustine, “that are presented to us in figures pertain somehow to nourishing and fanning the fire of love by which we are carried upward or inward to rest as if by a weight.” The soul, he went on, “is strengthened by the passage, and is set aflame like the fire in a coal when stirred up.” 264 Not only was it important to avoid 263 Augustine, “Lettter 54,” in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century,

ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Roland J. Teske (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2001), 1:211.

264 Augustine, “Letter 55,” in Works, 1:226. Such statements were due, in part, to a lingering

Platonism that was later to influence Erasmus as well. With regard to its influence on Erasmus, via his friends Thomas More and John Colet, Bainton writes that “Neoplatonism explained the origin [of being] rather in terms of emanations proceeding in a downward progress from unity to multiplicity, from spirit to matter. The Aristotelian static classification of God, celestial beings, men, animals, plants, and minerals thus became a ladder of descent, but might also be a ladder of ascent, for man at the center, combining the below and the above, might sink to the one or rise to the other until, purified and illumined, he might be united in rapture with the Ineffable One” (Erasmus of Christendom, 60). William Bouwsma has argued that such sentiments are best attributed, not to Platonism, but to the influence of Stoicism on Renaissance humanists – an influence which he goes on to argue is at odds with the Augustinian conception of biblical creation and the fall. According to Stoicism, the human intellect is aligned with the divine intellect and hence capable of ascending toward God as if by steps. This, of course, lays the groundwork for a natural theology in the Renaissance. By contrast, Augustine posits the separation between nature and God and thus obliterates the abilities of the human intellect. It is, however, important to remember that Bouwsma’s “Stoicism” and “Augustinianism” were ideal types and thus together reflect as oppositional that which was in fact mingled in the Renaissance mind. Calvin, for example, could claim that the human intellect was capable of admiring the order of nature while adding that such a capability existed only to render a sinful humanity culpable for not conforming to that order. Augustine himself, as Bouwsma suggests, gradually moved from an interest in Pagan philosophy (such as that of the Stoics) to a more biblical Christianity. A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 24.

103 throwing society into confusion over adiaphora, it was also implied that such matters could be of some use to the Christian traveler. Augustine’s letter enjoyed something of a revival in the sixteenth century. The Huguenot preacher Jean de L’Espine urged his readers to “follow the council of S. Augustine writing to Januarius” if we are to avoid slaughter and “keep peace.” Citing Augustine to Januarius, Peter Martyr more modestly admitted that ceremonial accuracy was not “essential,” and that a little diversity could never hurt. In England in the 1570s and 80s the Cambridge polemicist William Fulke and the bishop of Winchester Thomas Bilson likewise followed Augustine’s counsel in their efforts to refute Catholic austerity, asserting, as the church father “largely debateth in his epistle to Januarius,” that diversity in ceremonial matters in no way imperiled the essential character of international Christendom. Finally, combating the Protestant austerity of Thomas Cartwright, Whitgift advised would-be puritans to heed Augustine’s warning and “do after that manner the which he seeth used of the Church the which he shall peradventure come.” 265 All of this was to reiterate Erasmus’ belief that Christian charity depended on the acceptance of variance in custom on the basis that customs in general were adiaphora or inessential. The dedication to Henry VIII with which Erasmus began his 1523 paraphrase on Luke expressed a desire to merge the spiritual intensity of Mary with the more practical nature of Martha. 266 England, he told the king, was to rise above its customs, 265 Jean de L’Espine, An excellent treatise of Christian righteousness, written first in the French tongue by M.J. de L’Espine, and translated into English by J. Feilde (London, 1577), 123. Peter Martyr Vermigli, A treatise of the cohabitacion of the faithfull with the unfaithfull whereunto is added a sermon made of the confessing of Christe and his gospel, and of the denyinge of the same (Oxford, 1555), 45. William Fulke, A Confutation of a popishe, and sclaunderous libelle in forme of an apologie: geven out into the courte, and spread abrode in diverse other places of the realme (Cambridge, 1571), 10. Thomas Bilson, The true difference betweene Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion wherein the princes lawfull power to commaund the trueth, and indeprivable right to bear the sword are defended against the Popes censures and the Jesuits sophismes uttered in apologie and defence of English Catholikes (Oxford: 1585), 224. John Whitgift, The defense of the answere given to the Admonition against the replie of T.C. (London, 1574), 127. 266 For more on Erasmus desire to merge the two natures of Mary and Martha (“otium” and

“negotium”) see Elfie S. Raymond’s discussion of “Erasmus 1464-1536: Man in the Middle,” part of her

104 allowing itself to be conquered by the essentials of Christian doctrine. 267 Mary’s monomania – her fixation on Christ’s “sweet conversation” at the expense of preparing his meal – could be instructive if understood as a goad to unity rooted in the fundamentals of the faith, rather than as a call to an extreme and ultimately divisive form of asceticism. In keeping with Martha’s nature, it was no less important to respect custom, but to do so always with an eye to making preparations for the future feast. As his biographer Roland Bainton has suggested, Erasmus advocated a form of detached engagement that earned him the status of forerunner to the moderate religious policy of Elizabeth I. 268 But what of Augustine’s emphasis on the deeper significance of worldly things? Could customs, themselves indifferent, perform an anagogical function akin to that of sacraments? Luther, for one, was famously critical of the superstition implicit in this suggestion. Though he admitted the virtue of “mental images” of Christ’s passion, he could not abide the tendency of cloistered men and women to “tormente themselves after the forme of mennis statutes and tradicions,” passing such observances off as genuine

three-part lecture on Democratic Intimations of the Continental Reformation, available at http://pages.slc.edu/~eraymond/reformation/one.html. Raymond here suggests that Erasmus’ retranslation of the word “good” in Luke 10:42 (Mary “hath chosen that good part”) from the original “better” reflects an underlying desire to read Mary and Martha as equals. I would like to thank Professor Raymond for reading a draft of this chapter, and for offering a series of helpful suggestions. 267 “…ex diversis linguis, diversis institutis, in humilem quandam philosophiam consentirent”

(Erasmus, Paraphrasis, Dedication). According to Boyle, “the letter’s message is this: there is a divine truth more universal and more powerful than the exercise of human power within national boundaries. To this international truth the ancestral Britons assented and it allied them concordantly with nations of diverse laws, institutions, and mores. This same medicine which remedied the ills of the body politic in former times is the still efficacious drug which Henry must now, as head of state, swallow into the whole anatomy of the commonwealth” (“Erasmus Prescription for Henry VIII,” 171). 268 Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom, 67, 96, 279. Bainton writes of Erasmus: “If the warfare

was not primarily with the devil, all the more is it a conflict with the world and with the flesh, from which in this life man cannot escape, not even in a monastery. He must live with them both, yet is to be subject to neither. They are to be used in the spirit of Paul’s phrase, ‘having as not having.’ This attitude affects not only food, drink, and all material possessions, but also the externals of worship: images, pilgrimages, relics, spoken prayers, and the very structure of the Church” (67).

105 interior piety. 269 It would be better, he admitted, if such people were to take a spouse, raise a family, and live “like as Martha [who] was cumbred & intangled with many charges & moche bussinesse.” 270 For Luther, those truly wishing to imitate the interior piety of Mary were to take leisure in “diligente attendance daily unto the worde of God.” 271 England provides a somewhat different picture. John Colet, the scholar who, alongside Thomas More, introduced a young Erasmus to English Neoplatonism, followed Augustine in describing the multiplicity of material existence as an arena for the emanation of the divine light. “In all cases,” Colet wrote in his treatise On the Celestial Hierarchy, “there is a diversity of objects, and the light remains one and undivided in different objects.” Moreover, God, in his mercy, was said to have accommodated spiritual reality to the capacity of human beings, rendering truth in the process “almost corporeal through the indication of corporeal signs and figures.” Salvation, for Colet, was a matter of swimming upstream. Just as history itself had been a gradual movement from the shadow of the Mosaic Law to the image of Jesus and, finally, to the beatific vision, so the individual’s path to God was paved with signs, figures, and ceremonies. Sounding more than a little like HN, Colet went on to assert that those who had ascended further along

269 “Of this I am certain, that God desires to have his works heard and read, especially the passion

of our Lord. But it is impossible for me to hear and bear it in mind without forming mental images of it in my heart” (Martin Luther, “Against the Heavenly Prophets on the Matter of Images and Sacraments,” in Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut H. Lehman (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1958), 40:177). Luther, William Roye’s an exhortation to the diligent studie of scriptures and an exposition in to the seventh chaptre of the pistle to the Corinthians, ed. Douglas H. Parker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 155. The editor explains that the first portion of this text by Roye was written by Erasmus, while the second portion on the seventh chapter of Corinthians was written by Martin Luther. 270 Luther, An Exhortation, 155. 271 Luther, An Exhortation, 155.

106 the hierarchy “truly are in the day, and walk, as it were, more brightly coloured, and in fair order among themselves.” 272 This natural movement upstream was a far cry from the iconoclastic tendencies of Luther’s followers, who saw in traditional society a damnable reversal of the heavenly kingdom. As Erasmus noted in 1524, “the extravagant Lutherans have most hurt Luther.” 273 The reformer himself was horrified by the excesses of his more radical successors – those “honor-seeking prophets” who insisted on thrashing through vapors in search of popish idols to destroy. 274 For the extravagant Lutherans, “diverse objects” were not to be considered rungs on Jacob’s ladder, but steps spiraling to the top of Babel. Erasmus’ fear that Protestant extravagance would bring chaos was also palpable in England. In 1533, he wrote to his publisher in Freiburg, Johannes Faber, of Thomas More’s dismissal as Lord Chancellor, warning that, “behind the shield of religion, crowds of rascals are ready to break into crimes unless restrained by the magistrate.” 275 Upon hearing another rumor that his confidant in England had been beheaded, Eramus mourned that such a stunning humanist as More had so thoroughly entrenched himself in matters of polity and doctrine – a “dangerous business” in the best of times. 276 To those who shared Erasmus’ concerns, England needed to temper the nature of Mary with that of Martha. It needed, in other words, to check its theological zealotry with a respect not only for custom but for circumstance. 272 John Colet, Two Treatises on the Hierarchies of Dionysius, ed. J.H. Lupton (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869), 2-4, 8. Emphasis mine 273 Erasmus, “To Philip Melanchthon,” in The Life and Letters of Erasmus, 327. 274 As Luther lamented, “no one concerns himself with faith and good conscience before God,

but only with what glitters and shines before reason and the world…So it is with these honor-seeking prophets who do nothing but break images, destroy churches, manhandle the sacrament, and seek a new kind of mortification, that is, a self-chosen putting to death of the flesh” (“Against the Heavenly Prophets on the Matter of Images and Sacraments,” 158-159). 275 Erasmus, “To John Faber,” in The Life and Letters of Erasmus, 403. 276 Erasmus, “To Latomus,” in The Life and Letters of Erasmus, 417.

107 Whether Henry and company actually did this is another story. The pace and cataclysmic potential of the English Reformation has been a central subject of debate for historians over the past fifty years. As some would have it, Protestantism triumphed at such a gradual pace as to be indistinguishable as such until well after the Elizabethan settlement of 1559. 277 For others, it was a religion eagerly anticipated by ordinary people hoping to rid themselves all at once of the old, burdensome economics of salvation. 278 There is also some question as to what is meant by “reform.” Did reform entail, as Erasmus had hoped, a charitable engagement with the myriad customs of traditional religion as so many adiaphoristic accretions; or did it entail rather the cataclysmic obliteration of “an imaginative world” – in Eamon Duffy’s affecting prose, “a relentless torrent carrying away the landmarks of a thousand years”? 279 Did the Protestant faith, like Augustine’s traveler, accommodate itself to existing circumstances in England or rudely trample through foreign lands? Regardless of the reality we posit in retrospect, there were a number, native to England, who sought in the 1530s and 40s a moderated reform somewhere between Mary and Martha and who spoke of such reform along generally Erasmian lines. One such figure was the royal propagandist Thomas Starkey. Starkey is perhaps most famous for defending Parliament’s Act of Supremacy (1534) on the basis that Henry VIII would no 277 See, for example, the revisionist approach of Christopher Haigh and others in The English

Reformation Revised. For Haigh, “the Reformation was not an inexorable process, carried forward by an irresistible ideological force; it was a succession of contingent events which, in total, tended toward Protestant victory” (6). Haigh’s critique could easily be applied to Kerr’s understanding of the Family of Love as a “vital force of reforming power.” 278 A.G. Dickens has famously argued in The English Reformation (1964) that the Reformation in

England happened rapidly among, not only the elite, but the common people as well. “Though too often simplifying the problems of interpretation, Luther declared war between bible-Christianity and churchly, scholastic Christianity. Within this intellectual context, by 1530 widely apparent, we should also locate the core of the English Reformation. From 1526 onward the translations by Tyndale, Coverdale and others gave the English a vernacular bible with Lutheran commentaries making a resonant impact at all levels of English society, not solely upon the learned” (21). 279 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 593.

108 doubt bring about a “wholesome, quiet, and just Reformation” by avoiding, on the one side, Protestant extravagance and, on the other, Popish superstition. 280 Echoing Erasmus’ own self-description, A.G. Dickens has described Starkey as a “reforming humanist but not a Lutheran.” 281 If, as some historians argue, solafideism was the central element that distinguished the new Protestantism from its Lollard antecedents, then Starkey was by no means a Protestant. 282 He insisted in 1536 that there was no more “pestilent opinion and more pernicious to Christian doctrine” than that “faith alone, without charitable works, is sufficient to man’s salvation.” 283 Nevertheless, Starkey chose not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In lambasting England’s Protestants on the one side and its Papists on the other, he argued that it was incumbent upon the nation to pick up where Germany had stumbled – to set up Christ’s religion in its true simplicity without superstition and without needless prattling. As a “reforming humanist,” Starkey was also familiar with the work of Erasmus and Colet – both of whom were popular reading at Magdalen College, which he had attended in the 1520s. 284 Like Erasmus and, arguably, Philip Melanchthon, 285 Starkey

280 Thomas Starkey, An Exhortation to the people, instructing theim to Unitie and Obedience

(London, 1536), A4r.

281 Dickens, The English Reformation, 35. 282 Collinson, “Night Schools, Conventicles, and Churches,” The Beginnings of English

Protestantism, eds. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 228. 283 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 81r. 284 Starkey’s biographer, Thomas F. Mayer, notes that Starkey’s contemporary at Oxford,

Thomas Lupset, was part of the so-called “Coletion movement,” had lived with Colet for a number of years, and had for some time maintained correspondence with Erasmus (Lupset was later to become one of the two imagined interlocutors in Starkey’s most popular work, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (15291534) – a work that also mentions Erasmus at a number of points). It was from Lupset, Mayer continues, that Starkey received training in the humanist ideas of these authors during his formative years. Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 30. 285 The argument for Melanchthon’s influence on Starkey was first made by W. Gordon Zeeveld,

“Thomas Starkey and the Cromwellian Polity,” The Journal of Modern History 15, no. 3 (1943): 177-191. According to Zeeveld, “Melanchthon’s Christian adiaphorism, presented in that work as the philosophical

109 combined a belief in the fundamentally adiaphoristic status of human customs with a felt need to enforce, or at least respect, these customs. Like Colet, he portrayed the world and its customs in broadly Neoplatonic terms. “The wonderful varietie and nature of things,” he explained, “is nothing els but a certain shadowe of goddis goodnes and divinitie.” Starkey, moreover, admired the “infinite nombre & multitude of sterres ever keping their certain course…the son, the mone, with all the other planettes wavering abdrode…the fyre, the ayre, the water, and the erthe,” but he was surpassingly impressed by “mans actis and fashion of living here in policie.” 286 This unity, recognized within the folds of diverse human acts and fashions, was for Starkey the clearest manifestation of the divine light shining on its creation. It brought Starkey no small dismay to see crowds of rascals waiting in the wings to overthrow good English policy. Throughout the mid 1530s, King Henry had seemed to waver between positions. On the one hand, the royal abrogation of holy days and the dissolution of the monasteries could, taken together, be considered as tacit support for the intentions of the more zealous reformers. But, in the wake of the 1536 Pilgrimage of

basis for Protestant church unity, became, through Starkey, the direct ideological forbear of the Anglican polity” (178). This argument is difficult to accept for a number of reasons. First, we know that Starkey’s particular formulation of the via media (what he calls an “indifferent mean”) had scant discernable influence on later Elizabethan polity, however much it might have condensed a number of more enduring assumptions about the nature of adiaphora, Christian freedom, and English national identity. Second, it is problematic to posit a distinct Anglican settlement as early as 1559 with Elizabeth’s so-called “middle way” or, for that matter, any settlement in the sixteenth century based on these principles. As numerous scholars have suggested since the time in which Zeeveld was writing, “the Reformation did not produce a Protestant England: it produced a divided England” (Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, 209). Lastly and most importantly, Thomas F. Mayer has directly challenged Zeeveld’s particular claim that Melanchthon influenced Starkey through his conception of Christian adiaphora. Melanchthon did not believe, as Starkey did, that adiaphora should be mandated as a matter of keeping civil decorum. “There are,” Mayer says, “several elements in Melanchthon’s theory with strong similarities to Starkey’s, but the fundamental difference remains that adiaphora are to be allowed, not enforced, and the people are to be taught their meaning.” “Starkey and Melanchthon on Adiaphora: A Critique of W. Gordon Zeeveld,” Sixteenth Century Journal 11, no. 1 (1980): 49. It is perhaps more probable that Melanchthon – along with other adiaphorisitic theorists like Erasmus, Augustine, Aristotle, William Tyndale, and John Frith – was but one component in a general stock of assumptions from which Starkey drew freely. 286 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 1v-2r.

110 Grace, the king appeared to swing the other way, condemning contentious preachers for “speaking against honest, laudable and tolerable ceremonies, usages and customs of the Church.” 287 It would be a mistake to see this apparent waffling as evidence of Henry’s conversion from one cause to another. Nor was he simply a pawn. As G.W. Bernard has proposed, Henry, far from bumbling along the confessional line between Catholic and Protestant, was ardently opposed to extremes – his chief ideological conviction being a distaste for ideological conviction. 288 All the same, the king’s every move could serve as a rallying point for those with more polarizing aspirations. Seeing this potential, Starkey in 1536 published An Exhortation to the People Instructing Them to Unity and Obedience, a tract which effectively argued that adiaphora, once instituted by civil authority, were no longer adiaphora. In Starkey’s words, “such thinges as by their own nature be indifferent, are made therby to our salvation necessary.” 289 This was not a radical call to reform, nor was it particularly moderate. It was a profoundly conservative plea for obedience to the King’s version of moderation. In forming his argument, however, Starkey made full use of the humanist voices echoing through England at the time. Soon after he had begun the Exhortation, the king’s principle secretary Thomas Cromwell took particular interest in the work, commissioning Starkey’s talents for his broader scheme of humanistic reform. Starkey’s Exhortation is significant not only because it condensed humanist principles already prevalent in Erasmus, Colet, and others but also because it provides a striking comparison with the two schemes of HN’s Terra Pacis. Both texts held “brotherly concord” as their highest Christian ideal – a state of affairs that, in turn, could

287 A portion of Henry VIII’s circular is reprinted in Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 399. 288 G.W. Bernard, “The Making of Religious Policy, 1533-1546: Henry VIII and the Search for the Middle Way,” The Historical Journal 41, no. 2 (1998): 321, 325. 289 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 8v.

111 only be brought about through a cultivated detachment from and obedience to indifferent laws and ceremonies. In both texts, moreover, the disposition necessary for proper civil engagement was achieved through spiritual experience. In fact, with little ado, the Exhortation passed over the very conflict that for English Familists, forty years later, was to become the center of a turbulent field on which the group battled for legitimacy as an orthodox religious movement. As mentioned before, the brand of Familism exhibited in Terra Pacis drew criticism for its apparent escapism – its bastardly brood of allegories that enticed the follower away from the edifying, plain sense of the Word and into spiritual oblivion. In no uncertain terms, Knewstub saw HN’s spiritual project as a failed attempt at anagogical reasoning. Allegorical relationships that aspired to spiritual transcendence remained trapped in a sort of effete circularity. Plummeting back to earth, Familists were said to conduct themselves as hypocrites, engaging with society as honest citizens, while secretly awaiting its dissolution. In almost the same breath, however, Starkey’s 1536 Exhortation could praise the “wise Romans with all their civil constitutions” and the detached spiritual pilgrim – an exile, in the author’s words, “with no dwelling place.” 290 This would not have seemed strange to Erasmus who, in his own life, attempted to navigate between these very poles. After all, civil society was rooted in customs that the spiritual pilgrim, having achieved like Mary a certain level of wisdom, knew to be adiaphora. What makes Starkey so interesting is that he, like HN, implied that this level of wisdom – this indifferent or detached disposition – was nothing short of the foundation upon which an active and fiercely obedient society was built. Toward the end of the Exhortation, he described as ideal that commonwealth which depended on the submission of its citizens to their ruler, not out of fear, but out of love. However much one is inclined to applaud the appearance 290 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 65r.

112 of order, Starkey insisted, it is nonetheless vital to understand the source of the order. All citizens must be brought to a “higher consideration” – … which is this, all obedience presupposed and taken to all civile and politike rule, a certaine consente of spirite and mynde, and as it were with one hart a hevenlie conspiracie, to the attaininge of hevenly thinges, whiche by god are to manne, puttinge his onely truste by faith in him promised & appointed, by the hope wherof he treadinge under fote all worldly vanities, ever liveth in desire of hevenly thinges and celestiall, the sure trust wherof giveth to mans harte inestimable quietnes, and maketh him to be obedient to al worldly policie. 291 For Starkey, indulging in “worldly vanities” was an altogether different practice from participating in otherwise “holsome customes and traditions.” Like Augustine, he thought it “plaine foly” to demand uniformity across “so many sundry nations” with diverse ordinances, traditions, and religious practices. 292 Instead, vanity was derived from the effort to force conscience, either by a popish drive for international uniformity or by an iconoclastic impulse to unsettle the ground of traditional religion. On the Catholic side, Starkey perceived “overmoche extolling of mans tradition,” on the Protestant, “that scrupulous and exact knowledge of thinges conteined in goddis scriptures.” 293 The manifest purpose of the Exhortation was not, then, to force obedience, but to persuade the people of two, related points: first, that the success of any society, whether “Jewes, sarasines, Turkes, or Mores,” depended on the consent of the people to certain

291 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 65r. 292 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 25r, 67r. “For such,” he wrote, “is their pestilent persuasion, that all thinge they wolde as it semeth bringe to confusion, nothinge admittinge at all, but that whiche is in scripture expressely conteyned, which they will understonde after their own fantasie, to the contrarienge wherof if you bring the sentence of any auncient doctour, as of Jerome, Austine, Gregorie, or Ambrose, their authoritie by and by they trede under fote, sayinge they were men, to whose judgement they be nothinge bounden at al” (25r). 293 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 7r. Interestingly, Starkey, like Erasmus, argued that

religion is best when “reduced unto certaine articles” (7v). He further proposed that the dictates of the Council of Nicaea might be a good place to start.

113 propositions drawn up by those who happened to be in power and, second, that civil consent, understood as a form of collective caritas, was “the chief point of Christ’s doctrine” – “the key, whiche shal make open to us heven gatis.” 294 In making the first point, Starkey was no different from John Whitgift. Conformity to royal mandate over indifferent things was a matter of decorum. If nothing else, Starkey continued, we simply must have ceremonies as “a convenient menes to induce rude & simple mindes, to memory, & to the conceiving of the mysteries of oure religion.” 295 This was a bland point indeed and, on its own, lacked much of the nuance that figures like Erasmus had earlier attached to the subject of adiaphora. The second point, however, emphasized the connection between “a higher consideration” and the achievement of civil communitas – individual and collective salvation. The ability to achieve a higher consideration was authorized by Starkey’s Neoplatonism. If a true reformation could be brought about through gentle persuasion, this was because, as he asserted in good Neoplatonic fashion, “reson ever hath dominion, leadynge man to his naturalle dignitie.” 296 The world bends naturally toward the good and, if only certain individuals would stop calling one another heretic, “littel by littel” God would “reduce us at the laste to the meane.” 297 It was for this reason that Starkey (and Henry VIII for that matter) 298 could never accept the Lutheran doctrine of total depravity. Though he may have been quick to add the proviso that we are naturally dignified only inasmuch as we can be “in this mortall life full of frailtie,” Starkey clearly

294 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 40r, 49v, 14v. 295 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 73r. 296 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 5r. 297 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 3v. 298 According to Bernard, Henry “always rejected the Lutheran theology of justification by faith

alone. That links back to his warm endorsement of Erasmus’s treatise on free will in the 1520s” (“The Making of Religious Policy,” 326).

114 also considered the heights of human reason and charity to be indissolubly knit together with Plato’s pure forms. 299 The spiritual understanding requisite for proper civic engagement was to be experienced, “as it were, in a clowde.” 300 Referring to this world as a shadow, he urged his reader to “conceive the wonderful nature of this unity” between the spiritual and the political – to experience the perfect order of the heavens. 301 God, resting in the clouds, was likened to a fountain whose grace poured down upon a peaceful planet, drowning all contention, and refining the social order to a central point at which “mannes minde with all kinde of vertue garnisshed, is broughte to his naturall perfection and light.” 302 Though Starkey could, at times, discuss the achievement of natural perfection as an escape from the world, his primary emphasis was on the recognition of the near prelapsarian utopia dormant within the existing order of things. Sin, accordingly, was a form of forgetting, after years of strife, the world as it could be. Much like Terra Pacis, the Exhortation imagined the fall as a noetic phenomenon. The perspective of humanity had gradually shifted and, with this shift, the intellectual faculties of humanity had been obscured. As Starkey put it, we had fallen asleep and needed to be awakened from a dream. 303 His preamble “to the reders” compared the appearance of earthly multiplicity

299 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 5r. In the Exhortation, for example, Starkey refers to

“policy, both spiritually and worldly…wheruppon is founde the hole ingin of this sensible worlde, as in the whiche all the partes therof both in the heavenlye bodyes and in the erthely creatures, are as in a chaine coupled and knitte” ( 64v). 300 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 40r. 301 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 64v. 302 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 83r. 303 According to Starkey, human beings are prone to “utterly forgette this our high perfection and

dignitie” (An Exhortation to the People, 40r). We must therefore “wake them out of their dreame” and “put them in remembraunce of the benefites of god and of their dignitie, and that so by his [Christ’s] doctrine they at the last inspired and stirred uppe, might attaine to their felicite” (49v).

115 with a “glasse” through which, if we arise and “diligently loke,” could be seen the overriding unity that had been there all along. 304 Communal salvation consisted in what Starkey called the “streight use” of worldly customs, laws, and ceremonies “with perfite charitie.” 305 The older virtue of eremitic seclusion was thus the shibboleth before which true religion faltered. Starkey absolutely hated monks and exalted the rugged belief and charitable acts of the plain plowman. Though lacking Saint Benedict’s dazzling vestments and Francis’ humble rope, “ye & though he be at ploughe and the carte, and labouringe the grounde, yet,” Starkey insisted, “may he be as perfite in religion as the moste perfite monke living in his cloister.” 306 At numerous points throughout the Exhortation, he praised those who, looking up to heavenly things, lived nevertheless close to the earth and toiled within earthly society. These sentiments went well beyond the simple demand that adiaphora, in so far as it found favor with the king, was to be enforced. As suggested with respect to Erasmus, existing strands within Renaissance humanism profoundly influenced the ideology behind this demand. Above all, Starkey wanted to promote a spiritual state of indifference that was conducive, not merely to outward obedience, but to collective salvation through charitable use. Like the citizens of Terra Pacis, the plain plowman toiled in freedom, “using without using,” and living, in Starkey’s words, “like a Christe, like a god in erthe, and like reasone it selfe.” 307 304 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 1v. 305 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 29r. 306 Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 20r. “For the gospell,” wrote Starkey, “is a doctine of

simplicitie, and nothinge but faithfull charitie, a doctrine so manifeste and plaine, that if it were as easye to fulfill and put in effect, as it is to conceive and to understande, I thinke there is no manne so rude, nor no manne by nature so ignoraunt, but he mighte attaine to the highest mysteries, and to the highest knowledge necessarie to the salvation of manne conteined therin” (34v). 307 See 1 Corinthians 7:31. Starkey, An Exhortation to the People, 39v.

116 Like a god in earth Niclaes also exhorted his fellowship to “go out and in,” and at various points in his corpus he sounds like a consummate humanist. 308 This is perhaps not accidental. As Hamilton observes, a text like Terra Pacis with its utopian vision of Christian unity would have been popular with the very same Dutch humanists who read the likes of Erasmus and More. 309 As for the social responsibility implied by the second scheme in Terra Pacis and shared by texts like Starkey’s Exhortation and Erasmus’ Convivium, Niclaes’ other work remained largely silent. As Peter Lake and Van Dorsten have argued, Niclaes and his followers were, more often than not, ambivalent with regard to the societies they inhabited. Predecessors of the Quakers, Familists simply observed “outwardly the rites of any Church that happened to be in power” while refusing to acknowledge any inherent worth behind the façade. 310 As a rule, Niclaes dictated that customs were not to be despised, flouted, or attacked, though true members of the domus charitatis would ultimately look to a non“ceremonial Christ” for guidance. 311 Like Erasmus, he had little tolerance for iconoclasts. “Men,” he said, “ought not to contemne anyone for the outward Services or Ordinances cause.” In both the Introductio and the Epistolae, Niclaes noted that services and ordinances could indeed be useful for “young ones” growing up in the Love, and that those who thought themselves entirely liberated from the same – “not snared [that is] by any Man, nor with outward Services” – had forsaken the right path. 312 Yet elsewhere,

308 As quoted above, Niclaes asserted that those who had arrived “essentially” to Terra Pacis

“may as then (in the love, and in the unity of peace) go out and in, without harme, and may walk thorough all Lands, Places, and Cities.” 309 Hamilton, The Family of Love, 73. 310 J.A. Van Dorsten, The Radical Arts, 27. 311 Ainsworth, An Epistle sent unto two daughters of Warwick, 23. 312 Niclaes, Epistolae, 128-129. See also Niclaes, Introductio, 5v.

117 Niclaes also cautioned that salvation was not to be found in this world. In “mystical sayings” to his followers, or Proverbia, he imagined the postlapsarian earth as a “wilde Sea” where at every turn the appearance of land – that much-anticipated salvific civilization – turned out to be a disappointing mirage. 313 It is thus difficult to find passages in Niclaes’ work outside of Terra Pacis that seem to promote civil engagement as much more than a practical necessity. However, English Familists were not as likely to miss the connections between Terra Pacis and the intellectual milieu to which they, as English citizens, were equal inheritors. Starkey’s Exhortation in and of itself had little enduring impact. As his biographer observes, “the Elizabethans never mentioned it, nor did their late Stuart and Georgian successors, who gave a great deal of attention to the via media.” 314 However his work was indeed a product of the Erasmian influence which was to endure in England for some time. The historian Bernard Verkamp has shown that Erasmus’ writings were enormously important for the England of Henry VIII. 315 During the reign of Henry’s son Edward in the early 1550s, a translated copy of Erasmus’ Paraphrases was provided for each parish in the realm 316 – a translation to which the future Catholic Queen, Mary Tudor, had anonymously contributed in 1544. 317 To what extent, however, did Erasmus’ ideas permeate the intellectual context of later, Elizabethan England? Gregory Dodds suggests that, “rather than seeking direct influence, we should see Erasmian ideas as a latent part of English religious culture.” Dodds’ work traces the presence, and indeed

313 Niclaes, Proverbia, C7r. 314 T. F. Mayer, “Starkey, Thomas (c.1498–1538),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

(Oxford University Press, 2004 –), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26318. 315 Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 24. 316 Baker, Divulging Utopia, 106.

317 See Beatrice White, Mary Tudor (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2006), 115-117.

118 exploitation, of Erasmus well into the reign of Elizabeth where the figure’s general outlook influenced the semi-Pelagianism of mainstream religious thinkers and, more generally, “contributed to the rise of anti-Calvinism in the 1590s.” 318 Jeffery Knapp, finally, has demonstrated that the Elizabethan worldview was penetrated by Erasmian ideas on many levels, in areas as diverse as English puritanism and popular playwriting. 319 There were also others whose influence would have been felt by Elizabethan Familists. Many, for instance, were likely to remember Starkey’s contemporary John Frith, whose Articles wherefore John Frith Died (1533) chronicled his imprisonment and anticipated execution over the right to declare doctrinal differences adiaphora. In the hugely popular Acts and Monuments, 320 John Foxe described Frith as doctrinally sophisticated while also charitable to a fault. Maintaining an air of “friendly and prudent moderation,” the martyr refused to push doctrine to the brink of contention and, indeed, died for this refusal. Literate Familists may also have empathized with the manner in which Frith was hotly pursued by the “great hatred” of the Lord Chancellor and forced into a near permanent state of exile. 321

318 Gregory D. Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus: The Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early

Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 117. 319 Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 28-29.

320 Editions of Foxe’s work were published in England in 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583.

Interestingly, the literary historian John R. Knott has noted that “the major irony of the reception of the Acts and Monuments is that a work embraced by the governing body of the church (Convocation ordered in 1571 that copies be placed in cathedral churches and the houses of various orders of the clergy) should have fuelled resistance to the church’s authority.” Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 15631694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3. As a side note, Knott points to the popularity of Foxe amongst Brownists and other “separatists.” As this chapter has in part argued, Familists did not consider themselves separatists, though they may nevertheless have moved in similar circles. 321 John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Josiah Pratt (London, 1870), 5:9, 6.

According to Foxe, Frith hoped to see, “by little and little, all controversies turned to truce and quietness, until that time should breed more love and charity among men, or that love and charity should find a remedy for these controversies” (5:11).

119 Another potentially influential source, Frith’s confidant William Tyndale, is cited at length in the Family’s 1579 response to John Rogers. Particularly, Tyndale’s “booke of Obedience” is mentioned twice, both times with reference to the foreswearing of conscience. 322 However, the spirit of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1527) animates no small portion of the anonymous Familists’ discourse. Rogers, at numerous points, comes out looking like the Catholic hypocrite of an early time. Claiming perfect obedience, the Romish foxes, wrote Tyndale, “say unto the Kings and Lords, ‘These heretics would have us down first, and then you, to make of all common.’” But, he continued, it is really they who hope to make kings and lords into “children” and their subjects into slaves to their infantile system of merits. “We would have them up again, and restored unto the room and authority which God hath given them, and whereof ye have robbed them.” This back and forth would certainly have appealed to the anonymous Familists who saw in Rogers’ writings a foolhardy effort to win the Queen’s favor by gainsaying her humble Familist servants. Both the response to Rogers and Tyndale’s Obedience bemoan the fact that, to some degree, these hypocrites have succeeded. “Whatsoever they make of their own heads, is more feared and dread than God and his commandments.” 323 The irony of conceiving “puritans” like Rogers as “papists” was not lost on the English Family. As the letters made plain, Rogers was not acting his part. One could not, at the same time, claim to be a Protestant and oppress Protestants. In fact, one begins to get the idea that, for Familists, this designation – or any designation, for that matter – was not really the point. What mattered, in England as in Terra Pacis, was that a cultivated spirituality – an indifference, not to worldly affairs in general, but to unprofitable matters 322 Rogers, The Displaying, L4v, N1r. 323 William Tyndale, “The Obedience of a Christian Man,” in Doctrinal Treatises and

Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848), 246-247. Emphasis mine.

120 in particular – formed the basis for charity and indeed collective salvation through civil engagement. Like the citizen of Terra Pacis, English Familists wanted very much to return to, and inform, their society. Godded with God, they hoped nonetheless to be like gods in the earth. In the writings of English Familists this status generally took two forms: that of the “outsevered one” and that of the “plain citizen.” Both tropes can be found scattered throughout the writings of earlier English sources, from Foxe’s “exiled Firth” to Starkey’s alternative to monkish austerity, the “perfect plowman.” In many ways, the opposition between the two identities symbolized the opposition between the real and the ideal. As suggested in previous chapters, the Family’s lamentable status as “outsevered” functioned to drive home the irony that, however much they appeared to be wild men, they were still just like us – that is, obedient English citizens. Given an ideal world, these wild men would be (and, as Marsh has argued, oftentimes were) plain citizens going about their business – albeit doing so equipped with the spiritual acuity necessary to render this business profitable. As “outsevered ones,” English Familists could also reserve for themselves the ability to profoundly critique a world where, as Tyndale also lamented, power had shifted in the direction of the scripture-learned. It is here that we find some of the most biting Familist invective and, indeed, some of the hardest to reconcile with an overall picture of Familist quietness and civil conformity. In 1579, an anonymous “chosen minister” of the Family in England wrote a prefatory epistle to the translated work of one of HN’s chief elders in the Netherlands, Abia Nazarenus, mentioning both Rogers and Knewstub by name. Seething with indignation over the unfounded accusations in The Displaying and Confutation, the English minister condemned the work of the two polemicists as the “Cainish bloud-thirstie Tiranie” of “Pharisees and Saducees.” Rogers and Kewstub had,

121 he reasoned, been given fair warning and could expect in the not-so-distant future to meet their end in the destruction of Sodom. 324 If this seems uncharacteristically incendiary for the English Family, it is important to remember that the chosen minister’s charge was to introduce a Dutch text that was far more incendiary. According to Abia Nazarenus, the world was filled, not just with Cainish Pharisees, but with “sathanish Houndes,” “renting Wolves,” “Dragons,” “Vipers,” “Hedghogs,” “Swines-dung,” and, last but not least, the “adulterous Children of the uncleane and defilded Bed.” 325 Needless to say, this was not gentle persuasion in the Love but scatology worthy of Luther. What is more, English Familists went to great lengths to separate their biting criticism of the scripture-learned from their undying respect for the Queen and her ministers. Rogers and Knewstub were not representatives but interlopers. The “plain citizen” fulfilled a somewhat different function in Familist sources. Here, just as with Starkey, the point was to exhibit the natural coalescence of religious profundity and civil responsibility. Because he was spiritually enlightened, the citizen could engage profitably in daily toils. The designation of plain citizen could also counteract the growing assumption that Familists, in Roger’s words, were “strange Christians.” The anonymous author of the 1575 Familist confession thought it a great injustice that his law-abiding and orthodox brethren had been refashioned as “detestable and monstrous before the eyes of the common people.” 326 ER likewise went into some

324 Anon, “An Epistle writen and sent vnto the Communialtie of Loue, by the chosen Minister in the same,” in Abia Nazarenus, A reproofe, spoken and geeuen-fourth by Abia Nazarenus, against all false Christians, seducing ypocrites, and enemies of the trueth and loue. Wher-withall their false deuices, punishment, and condemnation together with the conuersion from their abominations and their preseruation in the godlynes, is figured-fourth before their eyes (London, 1579), A3r-A3v. 325 Nazarenus, A Reproofe, A5v, B1v, B2r. 326 Rogers, An Answere, I2v. Anon., A Brief Rehersal, 1.

122 detail about the virtues of Familist simplicity over and against Roger’s lack of charitable indifference. The most developed treatment of the plain citizen is to be found in 1589 with the anonymous Familist work, Temporis Filia Veritas. The Temporis, which Marsh celebrates as deserving “a place in the history of religious toleration,” takes the form of a dialogue within a dialogue. 327 It begins with Bennison the button maker and Balthasar the barber. Balthasar, having roamed for a time about the countryside, asks his companion if he has seen or heard anything good while in the city. Bennison responds that he has indeed overheard some very promising developments. Parliament, he says, has recently convened in London over the question of religion. In particular, the monarch is curious which religion, of all the sundry practices in his realm, is superior and should therefore be set up as law for the sake of uniformity. Executing “true judgment without parceality,” he has heard diverse arguments from a Papist, a Protestant, a Puritan, and “a playne plowman whose religion was unknown, [commonly called an Heretiq.].” 328 The dialogue within a dialogue begins as each religious representative provides a systematic and, from Balthasar’s perspective highly convincing, account of his beliefs. The Papist, with “his old rusty religion,” stakes his claims on both the antiquity of his faith and the value of ceremonies as a means for ensuring unity. 329 Catholicism, quite simply, has a proven record of keeping people in line. The Protestant than retorts that his religion has its “ground and foundation from Christ and his Apostles,” and therefore enjoys an even greater antiquity. Furthermore, he continues, the very ceremonies praised

327 Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 181. 328 Anon., Temporis Filia Veritas, A3v. 329 Anon., Temporis Filia Veritas, A3v.

123 by the Papist have long since been abused “for monyes cause.” 330 Best to stick with Martin Luther. The Puritan, now given the floor, admits that he has in the past railed against the “superstitious” ordinances of the realm with an eye to defending his private conscience. Shifting the blame, he implies that that today’s Protestant is nevertheless a parody of the Papist. The churches of England, he says, are still “full of Bells…together with Coaps, vestments and cornered caps: Tippets, Rotchets, Sirplusses, processions, singings, organs &c.” These “Raggs of the Romish Church” are blithely refashioned out of the “Romish sincke” – that “stincking Popish puddle” which Martin Luther had so ardently hoped to escape. 331 If nothing else, the Temporis reveals its author to be well-versed in the theological debates of the past century, capable of outlining with an ironic tinge the very ideas which had led earlier zealots to accept the stake. By the end of the dialogue, Balthasar is at a loss. “O Lord! What shall I saye?” Turning now to the plowman, he feels the game has already ended in a draw. “Notwithstanding of fellowship let me heare what the foolish fellow could say.” 332 It is, of course, Folly who emerges as the voice of wisdom in the end. The Plain Plowman at first dismisses both Protestant and Puritan for “rejecting the good life.” The Protestant, following a doctrine of solafideism, has neglected to live as Christ, and the Puritan, thinking himself one better, has thrown off the yoke of obedience altogether. “So many as have rejected obedience,” the Plowman adds, “have rejected the true Religion.” He further claims that, having experienced the truth himself, he knows that obedience to

330 Anon., Temporis Filia Veritas, A4v. 331 Anon., Temporis Filia Veritas, B1r. 332 Anon., Temporis Filia Veritas, B1v.

124 civil laws and ceremonies “proseedeth” naturally out of this experience. 333 For this reason, the Plowman maintains that no Papist, Protestant, or Puritan can be criticized so long as they too, put aside their contention, and seek to live as gods on earth. Taken aback, Balthasar finds himself, along with the monarch, converted to a religion of simplicity. J.A. Van Dorsten has observed that the Family of Love in England “involved mainly a provincial group of simple followers whose intellectual curiosity in no way resembled that of their contemporaries in Antwerp.” 334 Only later, Dorsten argues, did the Family in England achieve a certain level of sophistication by incorporating foreign members from the Low Countries. This chapter has labored to suggest the opposite. In speaking to English society, English Familists spoke from a set of assumptions that had been popular amongst English humanist scholars for decades. Like Erasmus, they denied the value of solafideism, emphasized both inward spirituality and good fellowship, and insisted on the practical ramifications of even their most mystical flights of fancy. Like Starkey, they promised that an indifferent disposition did not mean disengagement but rather a form of social responsibility worthy of the wise Romans. My goal, however, has not been to prove that English Familists read Starkey, or even Erasmus (though a number of them most certainly read Tyndale and probably Foxe as well), but that they were part of an existing intellectual milieu that pervaded their culture and, in numerous ways, helps us to make sense of their ideas. What is more, members of the Family in England filtered these assumptions through their reception of Niclaes’ works. Clearly, Terra Pacis admitted a number of 333 As the Plowman addresses the monarch: “Now have I shewed you [Right High and

Honorable:] the inconfutable ground of my Religion [which God of his gracious goodness hath made knowen unto me, and for the which I have bin long suspected] together with the unfallible Trueth, wherout all right obedience unto God and Governours proceedeth” (Temporis Filia Veritas, B3r). 115.

334 Dorsten, The Radical Arts, 32. Hamilton makes a similar point in The Family of Love, 112-

125 interpretations, some scandalous and others completely orthodox. It would be wrong to see Familists as simply prooftexting Niclaes, selecting one interpretational scheme over another for entirely political reasons. As the letters to Rogers attest, many Familists despised this behavior as a constituent characteristic of the scripture-learned. 335 It is more probable and, indeed, more profitable, to assume instead that English Familists “read” Niclaes in line with their own preexisting set of intellectual assumptions regarding the nature of religious liberty and charity, truth and obedience.

335 “I would,” wrote Roger’s anonymous respondant, “you had played an honest mans part, and had used but equall weight and measure, & not have (contrarie to your promise, where you said you wil alledge the Authors words, and neither add ne diminish) taken here three or foure lines, and then passe over tenne or twelve, and then againe take two lines, and again passe over sixe lines, & and take halfe a line, &c. and so make a sentence thereof. Thus is your doings found out of so many as have compared your allegations with the bookes of the Author” (The Displaying, I6r).

126 CHAPTER IV HERESY AND THE USE OF ALLEGORY In the early 1590s, Richard Hooker compared English Familists to the early Pythagoreans who, “through their misfashioned preconceipt,” convinced themselves of a certain order within the folds of God’s creation – an order that appeared everywhere to the Pythagoreans though was manifestly absurd to the uninitiated. Where the followers of Pythagoras were wont to see numbers, Familists saw an allegorical Christ. “When they of the Family of Love have it once in their heads, that Christ doth not signify any one person but a quality whereof many are partakers … how plainly do they imagine that the Scripture everywhere speaketh in the favour of that sect?”336 There was, however, more at stake in this accusation than the fate of a dwindling group of English sectarians. Hooker was concerned, not with Familists per say, but with the puritan demand that English ecclesiastical polity model itself after Calvin’s consistory in Geneva. Such a demand, he thought, implied that the consistory was a reflection of the primitive church, biblically-instituted, and therefore transposable to a new, English context. Puritans, just like Pythagoreans and Familists, had “misfashioned” their collective disposition so that forms of government that were, in truth, contingent seemed biblically sanctioned and necessary. The passing reference to the Family of Love is not surprising, and Hooker’s concern certainly reflects a broader fear during the late sixteenth century of the spiritualist current in hermeneutics. The English Family, due in large part to the efforts of Knewstub, had since become the poster-child of this current – a monstrous brood, claiming that “special illumination” was required to untangle the more knotty segments of God’s Word. 337 More surprising is that Hooker counted Reformed Protestants like 336 Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Books 1-4, ed. Henry Morley (London,

1888), 23.

337 Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 24.

127 Knewstub among this brood as well. Did the “pure sense” of Scripture, he asked, appear self-evident due to the inner workings of the Holy Spirit, or was there a darker, more manipulative spirit at work in the puritan assumption that biblical simplicity was manifest in the push for further reform? Hooker was not the only one to ask this question in the 1580s and 90s. Though an enduring fixation for polemicists like Knewstub, Wilkinson, and Rogers, the Family of Love was, for other Protestants, a fleeting symptom of a more significant confusion within Protestant orthodoxy itself. This confusion was marked by a crisis of self-evidence in which the claim of plain scriptural meaning, rooted in one’s faith in the perspicuity of revelation, was no longer sufficient due to the excesses of crass literalists and irresponsible spiritualists. In either of these two scenarios (represented, for some, by puritans and Familists respectively) the error proceeded from a desire to read the text in such a way as to confirm one’s own opinions: to cut and to paste, to allegorize, and to fragment the Word in the very process of declaring it to be manifestly indifferent. Thomas Rogers (not to be confused with the antifamilist John Rogers) also found himself grouping austere Calvinists together with the cult of HN on the basis of exegetical excess. The Suffolk clergyman had originally been something of a mediator between conformists and nonconformists in his area. Though Rogers, for example, agreed in theory with John Whitgift’s sweeping demand for conformity in 1585, he nonetheless sympathized with the Presbyterian faction, claiming that, if only “that which was doubtful” could be “made evident and plaine” to these men, the Queen’s archbishop would get what he wanted. 338 Each week, Rogers would travel the short distance to Bury St. Edmunds to engage in what were by all accounts fruitful biblical discussions amongst 338 Thomas Rogers, The English Creede, consenting with the true auncient catholique and

apostolique Church in al the points and articles of Religion which everie Christian is to know and beleeve that would be saved (London 1585), sig. 3r. See also Craig, “The ‘Cambridge Boies,’” 158. For more on Rogers, see Craig, “Thomas Rogers (c. 1553-1616)” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004 –), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/23998.

128 the Cambridge godly and moderated by none other than Knewstub. In 1589, however, a series of discussions on Romans 12:6-8 mysteriously pushed the moderate Rogers over the edge. Wringing his fist at his puritan colleagues, he accused one recent expositor of the Pauline epistle of rabble-rousing, comparing him in the process to “H.N. the familist.” 339 Horrified, Knewstub and the others abruptly excluded Rogers from the Bury dialogue. What made Rogers suddenly abandon the relative equanimity at Bury? The simple answer is that he finally tired of moderating conflict while those around him seemed intent on creating it. Perhaps the Family of Love was the first sect that came to mind. After all, the target of Roger’s accusation, the Presbyterian Laurence Chaderton, had himself mentioned the “heretical sectaries of the Family of Love” twice in his exposition of Romans 12. 340 Chaderton’s interest had been in Paul’s allusion to “differing gifts” which he thought to refer to the perpetual offices of church government. Lacking the offices of pastor, doctor, elder, deacon, and widow in every congregation, Chaderton argued that England was now overrun with “noisome, hurtfull, & monstrous beastes:” Familists, Anabaptists, and Papists with a “masse of old and detestable workes, of conjuring, witchcraft, sorcery, charming,” and so on.341 To Rogers, however, this sweeping diagnosis was nothing short of an indictment of the Queen herself and a shameful effort to sow dissension among her people. Thomas Rogers published his refutation of Chaderton in 1590 “at the request of certaine frendes.” Much like Hooker, he denied the notion of a primitive church with

339 Quoted in Craig, “The ‘Cambridge Boies,’” 162. 340 Laurence Chaderton, A fruitfull sermon, upon the 3.4.5.6.7. & 8 verses of the 12 chapiter of

the Epistle of S. Paule to the Romanes very necessarie for these times to be read of all men, for their further instruction and edification, in things concerning their faith and obedience to salvation (London, 1584), 7274. 341 Chaderton, A fruitfull sermon, 72-73.

129 perpetual offices, calling Chaderton’s reading of Romans 12 “a manifest wresting and perverting of Gods word.” 342 Also like Hooker, Rogers exhibited a more general distaste for the manipulation of the supposedly “pure sense” of Scripture without any consideration of the current context. Even if distinct offices could be alleged from the text, these offices were not simply transposable from one place to another. “Take-awaie application from doctrine,” he wrote, “and you take-awaie life from the word…Naie, who can teach, and teach profitablie, which applieth not the thinges he saith unto the proper circumstance of time, of places, of persons, and such like?”343 In wresting the true meaning of Paul for their subversive English reformation, Chaderton and those sympathetic to his cause were no better than Familists.344 The cult of HN was thus caught in the middle of a larger battle over the role of the interpreter in hammering out the true meaning of Scripture. The accusation, made by Hooker and Rogers, that the puritan’s “pure sense” was really what Renaissance historian Debora Shuger has variously called a “subjective projection” or “ideological

342 Thomas Rogers, A Sermon upon the 6.7. and 8. Verses of the 12. Chapter of S. Pauls Epistle

unto the Romanes; Made to the Confutation of so much of another Sermon, entitled, A Frutful Sermon (London, 1590), 38. Hooker’s account of puritan wrangling in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is virtually identical to that of Rogers: “And assuredly the very cause which maketh the simple and ignorant to think even see how the word of God runneth currently on your side is that their minds are forestalled and their conceits perverted beforehand by being taught that an Elder doth signify a layman admitted only to the office of rule or government in the Church; a Doctor, one which may only teach, and neither preach nor administer the sacraments; a Deacon, one which hath charge of the alms box and of nothing else; that the sceptre, the rod, the throne and kingdom of Christ, are a form of regiment, only by pastors, elders, doctors, and deacons” (23). 343 Rogers, A Sermon, 33. 344 Rogers never mentioned the Family in the published version of his refutation of Chaderton.

His earlier comparison of Chaderton with HN is, however, implicit in many of his statements. Chaderton’s, for example, “are faire and glosing wordes to entoxicate the simple, but to the godlie wise, that will trie the spirits, they are in respect of art, but subtile sophismes to beguile, and of divinitie either apparent blasphemies, or untruths too grosse and palpable” (A Sermon, 60).

130 hermeneutics” now imperiled the seemingly airtight Protestant claim that all things necessary to salvation were stated plainly in Scripture for all to see. 345 Hooker had himself made this claim in the preface to his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 346 though the most involved discussion of scriptural perspicuity came earlier, in 1588, from a Cambridge theologian, William Whitaker. Over the course of his 530-page refutation of Jesuit theology, the Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura, Whitaker mentioned the English Familists only once as “not Christians truly but equivocally,” because members had allegedly denied the doctrine expressed clearly in Scripture. 347 His larger purpose, however, was to merge the cool, objective approach to scriptural truths (favored by Hooker and Rogers) with the more inward and spiritualizing approach. The first approach tended to make God’s word a “plain, perspicuous, and simple doctrine;” the second, “so sublime, so heavenly” that the truth could only be “sought and found with so much labour.” 348 Again, the first emphasized the rational and intuitive abilities of the human interpreter; the second, the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit. To merge these two contentions, Whitaker nuanced the traditional conception of biblical “senses.” Rather than four divergent senses, as described by Origen in the third century, there was to be but one, true sense of Scripture. The aetiological, analogical, and 345 Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the

Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 28, 30.

346 “Some things,” wrote Hooker, “are so familiar and plain, that truth from falsehood, and good

from evil, is most easily discerned in them, even by men of no deep capacity. And of that nature, for the most part, are things absolutely unto all men’s salvation necessary, either to be held or denied, either to be done or avoided. … Other things also there are (though in a lower degree of importance) unto the offices of Christian men, which, because they are more obscure, more intricate, and hard to be judged of, therefore God hath appointed some to spend their whole time principally in the study of things divine, to the end that in these more doubtful cases, their understanding might be a light to direct others” (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 20). 347 I am using William Fitzgerald’s translation of Whitaker’s 1588 Latin text, A Disputation on

Holy Scripture, Against the Papists, especially Bellarmine and Stapleton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 298. 348 Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 376, 365.

131 the allegorical were all understood by Whitaker as “various applications and accommodations” of the literal sense described, in turn, as “that which arises from the words themselves, whether they be taken strictly or figuratively.” 349 As Charles Cannon has pointed out, Whitaker’s nuance had little precedent in Renaissance intellectual culture. To suggest that the literal sense was not simply the immediate or grammatical meaning of words on a page, but a more complex mingling of sundry “applications” was an innovative reintegration of older Catholic exegesis into a more responsible, more unified Protestant hermeneutic. 350 Whitaker’s hermeneutic had the added benefit of refuting the old contention that reformers made Holy Writ idiotic and one-dimensional while also putting a check on the multi-dimensional excesses of spiritualist interpretation. That Whitaker felt the need to discern between crass literalism and spiritualist interpretation while charting a course between the two is a testament to the instabilities that survived within Protestant exegetical theory up to the turn of the century. The Family of Love was an easy target. Yet, as the remainder of this chapter will suggest, the issue ran deeper than the Family. What is more, Familists were engaged with this issue as well and sought to develop their approach to Scripture accordingly. Hooker’s question as to what spirit – good or evil – predisposed Pythagoreans, Familists, and puritans to claim that “obviously” Scripture meant one thing and not another haunted those on all sides, cutting across the otherwise unbridgeable abyss separating the cult of HN from the scripture-learned.

349 Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 406, 405. 350 According to Cannon, “it might be argued…that had Whitaker’s perception of the nature of

scriptural language been understood by those whose primary interest was literature rather than theology, the awkward chasm between words and meaning, fiction and truth, that frustrates literary theory of the late sixteenth century, might had disappeared like a mirage.” “William Whitaker’s ‘Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura’: A Sixteenth-Century Theory of Allegory,” Huntington Library Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1962): 137138.

132 Whitaker believed that Scripture should be taken as a totality. The saving sense of the whole was manifest in the parts, and therefore required neither the aid of an expert interpreter nor, still less, the fragmenting logic of the scholastic theologian. As Augustine had long ago argued in de Doctrina Christiana, Scripture was its own interpreter. Following this logic, the perspicuity of the text was such that anyone could derive knowledge appropriate to their capacity by wandering its pages. The good book, in the famous formulation of Gregory the Great, was like a river where “the elephant may swim” and “the lamb may walk.” 351 Yet everyone agreed that effective knowledge depended on the ability of the Holy Spirit to persuade the reader of its truth, predisposing him or her to see things in a certain light. “For the true interpretation of scripture,” wrote Whitaker, “is granted only to the elect and faithful.” 352 He elsewhere admonished his principle opponent, the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine, that, although ecclesiastical traditions were “intelligible to even the most stupid of mankind,” there were “some greater things than these, which, although they had often heard them, and although they were extant in the Scriptures, could not be understood without the assistance of the Holy Spirit.” 353 These “greater things” implied a depth to Scripture that counterbalanced the simple claim that all things necessary were plain to even the most untutored reader. Indeed, in his efforts to avoid the fragmentation of God’s word into divergent “senses,” Whitaker divided the Scripture into external and internal components. “As to external persuasion, we [that is, Protestants] say that Scripture itself is its own interpreter.” 354 As he was later to clarify in the Disputation, in matters of dispute “we 351 Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 400. 352 Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 614. 353 Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 544. 354 Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 415. On page 287, Whitaker also drew a

distinction between external and internal components in the course of his larger argument against the Jesuit

133 ought to consider the scope, end, matter, circumstance … the antecedents and consequents of each passage.” 355 In this, Whitaker was reiterating the time-honored Protestant belief that what is rendered obscurely in one instance is no doubt stated plainly elsewhere. He was also anticipating Hooker’s important caution in the Laws that it is not “the fervent earnestness of their persuasion, but the soundness of those reasons whereupon the same is built, which must declare their opinions in these things to have been wrought by the Holy Ghost.” 356 Hooker’s was an important caveat, for it provided a much-needed ground to the subjective experience of certainty, thereby curtailing the antinomian, enthusiastic, or, as the godly colonist John Winthrop would later say, “Familistical” tendencies inherent reform. 357 For Whitaker, the external component was not properly a different “sense” of Scripture but rather a different “application” of the same sense from a private to a public arena. The internal component – what Whitaker described as “that full assurance which resides in the minds of the faithful” 358 – nevertheless retained its instability. It was, at the same time, an almost inescapable emphasis in English biblical hermeneutics. Even Hooker, who might otherwise be considered an early advocate of the modern exegetical method of source criticism, could not fully avoid the irrational and therefore unverifiable testimony of the Spirit. Shuger, for example, highlights the paradox at the center of the

demand that the “church knows best” and should therefore be considered necessary for Scripture to be effectively understood. “The external judgment of scripture,” wrote Whitaker, “…may properly belong to the bishops: but here [the Jesuit] understands the internal judgment, which is not only proper to the pastors, but common among all Christians: for all Christ’s sheep know his voice, and are internally persuaded of the truth of scripture.” 355 Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 471. 356 Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 25. 357 Winthrop’s use of “Familistical” as a synonym for antinomianism is cited in Dwight

Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion & Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 318. 358 Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 415.

134 figure’s unflagging orthodoxy. On the one hand, she says, “Hooker’s spiritual psychology consistently makes desire rather than reason the epistemic ground.” On the other, “his understanding of self-deception and ideological hermeneutics problematizes this optimism of self-warranting desire: one can feel very strongly and still be very wrong.” 359 What we see in Hooker, Rogers, and Whitaker is thus an appreciation of the affective nature of Scripture – the ability of the text to evoke heavenly desire in the heart of its listener – coupled with the need to provide external methods of authentication. If Familists and puritans had been deadlocked for the past decade, perhaps this was because both sides exhibited a dangerous combination of liberal exegetical methods and misconceived biblical literalism. In this case, even the most bizarre interpretations were obviously correct, because God, in his charitable accommodation, would not suffer his creatures to go astray. These three representatives of Protestant orthodoxy provide something of a view from above: a retrospective account, not unlike that provided by the plain plowman in Temporis Filia Veritas, of the issues at stake in the previous decades. Descending into the fray, it is apparent that many of the issues voiced later in the 1580s and 90s centered on the use of allegory, not only in the process of interpreting the Bible, but also as a general outlook or approach to religious life and experience. The remainder of this chapter will examine the subject of allegory from the mutually-opposed perspectives of Knewstub and the Family of Love. Knewstub’s argument against the allegorical method of his opponents shares much in common with the critique made by Whitaker against the Jesuits. Familists ignored the totality of Scripture and lost themselves in obscure particularities that they were therefore doomed to misinterpret. Like Hooker, Knewstub also claimed that the followers of HN allegorized Christ and altogether refuted the 359 Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance, 44.

135 historical component of Scripture. And, like Rogers, Knewstub concluded that such practices were tied to underlying ideological agendas that were largely subversive in nature. Many of these criticisms bear out when tested against the available sources written by Familist authors. Niclaes and his followers were not only fond of using allegory but, indeed, came close to exhibiting a Christology rooted in the contention that vital gospel narratives were not historically true. At the very least, they seemed to suggest that a fiery insistence on the historicity of Christ’s death and resurrection had fallen short of the mark. However, it would be anachronistic to shelve the Family of Love alongside later, seventeenth-century movements that were genuinely sectarian, denied wholesale any literal or historical meaning to Scripture, and therefore, as Alastair Hamilton writes, “bear a superficial resemblance to Familism.” 360 Familists were not sectarians. Moreover, their preference for a modified form of allegory over biblical literalism shares interesting points of contact with the writings of Hooker, Rogers, and Whitaker and therefore deserves a more thorough examination than a mere cataloguing of “radical religion” would allow.

360 Hamilton, The Family of Love, 139. Hamilton is referring to groups like Gerard Winstanley’s

Diggers, the Levelers, and most notably the Quakers. It is true, as T. Wilson Hayes explains, that Familist writings were reprinted in the mid seventeenth century by Giles Calvert, and, as Hamilton adds, enjoyed a moderate level of interest on the part of those who affiliated with the Quaker movement. Hayes, “The Peaceful Apocalypse,” 142-143 and Hamilton, The Family of Love, 139-140. However, to read back onto sixteenth-century Familism those characteristics later exhibited by the group’s alleged predecessors is deeply problematic. Above all else, such a tack tends to oversimplify the issues being compared. George L. Scheper, for example, groups the seventeenth-century latitudinarian Henry More together with Winstanley on the basis of their mutual denial of “the literal-historical reality of the biblical narratives.” “Reformation Attitudes toward Allegory and the Song of Songs,” PMLA 89, no. 3 (1974): 555. More also had links to the Quaker movement and to individuals who were fond of Niclaes’ reprinted books. But before drawing another link between More and the Family, it important to note that, though he celebrated and revived the allegorical method of Origen, More nonetheless hated the “Sadducism” of Niclaes and the divisive “micheif” of the Family. The Theological Works of the most Pious and Learned Henry More (London, 1708), 171-188.

136 The monstrous brood Before condemning the puritans in his midst, Thomas Rogers had used the Family of Love as his favorite punching bag in the pantheon of latter day, English heretics. In his 1585 exposition of the English Creed, Rogers cited HN and the Familists numerous times alongside Anabaptists, libertines, enthusiasts, and Origenists as those who “prefer the allegorical sense of Scriptures; and thereby devise what them list, most monstrously, from the word of God.” 361 The Familists, he went on, allegorize and destroy the human nature of Christ, his Passion, and the entirety of the gospel. By Christ’s blood, for example, they intended not a literal sacrifice, but only the agency of the Holy Spirit who is shed onto the hearts of HN’s followers. Rogers’ Familists were said to make no distinction between a “letter-doctor Christian,” who has spent decades pouring over God’s Word, and the “uncircumcised heathen.” 362 Rogers was acquainted with John Knewstub, his neighbor just ten miles away in the parish of Cockfield, and probably drew much of his material, not merely from extent Familist works, but also from the influential work of Knewstub himself. The latter figure had published his Confutation of a detestable practice of H.N. in supplanting the true and grammatical sense of the woorde, by bringing in place thereof, a bastardly broode of Allegories in 1579 to which he appended a further confutation of the Family’s “darke and obscure forme of writing” – both of which were part of much larger collection of antifamilist miscellanea. Among the antifamilists tracts of the 1570’s, Knewstub’s was also the most influential. When, for instance, the London writer Ephraim Pagitt sat down to compose his section on the Family of Love in his popular Hersiography of 1645, he

361 Thomas Rodgers, The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England, An Exposition of the

Thirty Nine Articles (originally published in 1585 as The English Creed), ed. J.J.S. Perowne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1854), 196. 362 Rodgers, The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England, 158. For more on Rogers’ critique

of Familist allegory, see 52, 59, 64, 110, 163, 197, 231.

137 borrowed almost exclusively from Knewstub, even referring his reader to the author’s Confutation in the event that further detail was desired regarding the group’s “lewd conversations.” 363 Knewstub’s main point in the Confutation was plain. The Family in general, and HN in particular, neglected the historicity of Scripture and thus obscured, in the process, the “native sense” of the text. The upshot of such neglect was, above all, a loss of certainty. If the Bible was to be rendered uncertain through allegorizing, then “our faith which is grounded thereupon, can not be sure.” 364 Beyond these rather straightforward allegations, Kristen Poole has demonstrated a cluster of related allegations centering on “the perceived social and discursive implications of perfectionist doctrine.” 365 Because Knewstub’s Familist Elders believed themselves to have achieved an inspired status, becoming “godded with God” so to speak, they could unapologetically violate Scripture. Furthermore, if they could violate Scripture, they could also violate a marriage contract, a previous testimony before a magistrate, or even the Queen’s ordinances. In other words, Familists were thought to practice what might best be described as an ethic of straying. Their immoderate allegorizing was merely a symptom of a larger tendency to stray from the native sense to obscure and mystical meanings, from one lover to another, and from half-truth to halftruth. Members, wrote Knewstub, “are always borrowing constructions and meaninges:

363 Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography: or, a description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these

latter times (London, 1645), 82.

364 Knewstub, A Confutation, L5r. 365 Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton, 76. “Perfectionism,” Poole clarifies,

“implied, to hostile observers, a radical interpretive individualism: while Scripture is not dispensed with as a book of law, it becomes subject to modes of reading that are personal and idiosyncratic, rather than communal and authoritative.” As she continues, “reports of unconstrained Familist sexuality demonstrate not only the threat of antinomian chaos, but also the consequences of linguistic anarchy: the Familists’ salacious reputation is consistently, directly correlated to their aberrant discursive practices … Sexual trespass is both a sign and a function of discursive iniquity” (77).

138 their dealinges are like to the traffique of suche as goe all uppon trust: for be their shoppes never so well furnished of wares, yet all is but borrowed.” 366 Familists, it was implied, could construct vast palaces out of a labyrinth of hallways and rooms filled with such borrowed delights as to make their visitors altogether forget the door from which they had entered. As traffickers in borrowed goods, HN and his brood were portrayed, not just as perfectionists, but as the sort of folk or fringe element in English society – the bricoleurs, the players, and, in sum, the masters of the divided field. 367 Knewstub alluded to this element at points in his discourse against allegory, referring to members as “inchaunters” whose diseased imagination had transformed Holy Writ into little more than another folktale in the vein of Aesop’s Fables or Robin Hood. 368 HN’s followers, that is, were still tinkering with the unpolished myths that properly reformed English society had long since left behind: a sundry collection of ancient heresies, medieval stories, and carnivalesque inversions. As Pagitt was later to paraphrase the Confutation, Familists

366 Knewstub, A Confutation, L5v. 367 “Folk” is, of course, a somewhat anachronistic (and now largely discredited) term. Carlo

Ginzburg, for example, has referred to the “now antiquated conception of folklore as the mere collecting of curious facts,” associating the term with “the attitude that saw in the ideas, beliefs, and world views of the lower classes nothing but an incoherent fragmentary mass of theories that had been originally worked out by the dominant classes perhaps many centuries before.” The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John & Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), xiv. However, there is plenty of evidence in sixteenth-century sources of a general anxiety over the carnivalesque, the theatrical, and the poetic. Antifamilists, in particular, were fond of depicting their opponents as traffickers in old heresies, alchemists, and magicians, and were often caught between a need to portray the movement as a genuine threat and a desire to relegate Familism to the popular margins. 368 Knewstub, A Confutation, L6r. “Esop his fables wilbe made to afforde as good divinitie, as

the scripture shal be able to yeeld any. And what blasphemie then is this, against the majestie of the woorde, to bee in effect, no other thing, then a tale of Robin Hoode.”

139 turn religion “up-side-down” and, in the process, make “but a jest of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” 369 Knewstub’s classification of the Family might also belong to a more paradoxical dynamic between the inherent magnetism of fringe culture and the concomitant desire for its annihilation. Stephen Mullaney has described an anxious fascination in the sixteenthcentury with the Wunderkammer: “wonder-chests” or, more broadly, “collections of curiosities” that were the nexus for all things foreign, strange, and inassimilable to the demands of Protestant austerity. The interest in these curiosities was, he says, not fully innocent, as the ultimate purpose was to ritually destroy these bizarre cultural accretions in the very act of displaying them for public consumption. Mullaney recounts, for example, tales of an “Eskimo couple,” brought to London in 1577 to hunt swan on the Thames, who died on display not long after their arrival; a “jungle” in the city of Rouen staged for Henri II in which a barbaric battle “illustrating the manner of fighting in Brazil” led to its ritualistic (and actual) destruction; alongside numerous other foreign wonders. 370 He points also to print collections – to the Anatomie of Abuses of Philip Stubbes (1583) and Popular Errors of Laurent Joubert (1578) – as efforts to absorb, control, and purge the everyday excesses, not merely of the “ethnickes,” but of the common people as well. 371 369 Pagitt, Hersiography, 80. The original passage is in Knewstub’s dedicatory epistle to the Earle

of Warwick in A Confutation (Pagett’s second remark regarding Familists as “making a jest of the Gospel” is not in Knewstub). 370 Stephen Mullaney, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of

Cultures in the Late Renaissance,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 69-71.

371 The term “ethnickes,” interestingly, is from Knewstub’s A Confutation, M1v. The author’s

intent is to show that even they have a less-confused grasp on the truth than do the Familists. “In the sixteenth century,” Mullaney notes, “a commonly drawn analogy articulated a certain equivalence between inquiries into newly discovered cultures of the Western hemisphere and the increasingly important subcultures of the Old World” (75). Ian Frederick Moulton has also noted the analogy between “ethnickes” and the “lewd verse” of the popular London book market in Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 117.

140 The Anatomy focused its ire on the common players, those “painted sepulchres,” and “doble dealing ambodexters” who “intermingle…his blessed word with such profane vanities.” 372 Though an ardent defender of his own stock-and-trade, the poet Philip Sidney followed the anatomist in the digressio to his Defense of Poesy, critiquing the stage for its mingling of time and place, comedic and tragic elements, to the effect of destroying all sense of propriety and circumstance. While such collections of sundry elements – what Mullaney calls “things on holiday” – could be the subject of some fascination, they were also always to be feared and, in the end, colonized. 373 English Familists were thus thought to strike at the very heart of unequivocal truth, turning the Bible’s native sense into a playground for their giddy imaginations. In HN’s hands, the text became a Wunderkammer: a shop of seductive but nonetheless borrowed wares. As Knewstub implied in the Confutation, the adoption of an allegorical hermeneutic was not only the mechanism by which such wares were accumulated but also a symptom of a more profound malaise in which delusions of grandeur could license almost any form of popular error. “Allegories,” he reminded his reader, “maintained the sinne of the Sodomites.” “The heretiques in all times have by allegories upholded their errors. And allegories in al ages have been their strongest instruments to worke with all.” 374 In the hands of HN, the instrument was thought to wield an almost magical power to bend an otherwise transparent discourse on moral conduct in any direction.

372 Phillip Stubbes, The anatomie of abuses containing a discoverie, or briefe summarie of such

notable vices and imperfections, as now raigne in many Christian contreies of the worlde (London, 1583), L6r. 373 A similar process to that described by Mullaney can certainly be illustrated by John Roger’s

less-than-ingenuous strategy in The Displaying of inviting members of the Family of Love to emerge from their dark corners and “display” themselves to the world in order to receive a fair hearing (as discussed in Chapter 2). 374 Knewstub, A Confutation, M1r.

141 In condemning Familist allegory, Knewstub also pointed the way toward what he considered to be a more moderate hermeneutic. After all, if Familists had shipwrecked the simpler sort in England, then only a proper exegetical method could return them to the terra firma of biblical truth. In articulating this method, Knewstub had recourse to earlier Protestant formulations of the pure or literal sense. He also anticipated the more elaborate and sophisticated work of Whitaker on the subject. However much they may have wanted to, sixteenth-century Protestants like Knewstub could not altogether dismiss an allegorical reading of certain passages in Scripture. Their primary concern, as discussed before, was not to banish the allegorical sense but rather to root such readings in a more secure notion of the literal sense. George L. Scheper has, for example, illustrated the inability of Luther, Calvin, and Tyndale to completely abandon in practice what they so often reviled in theory. Solomon’s dark speech in the Song of Songs, he says, was a common stumbling block. So, too, was the necessity of reading Christ into every corner of the Old Testament. 375 The varied scriptures simply could not be made exclusively literal without, at the same time, losing some of their collective force. The problem, then, was not allegory itself but the manner and frequency with which it was used as an interpretive device. A veracious interpreter would, of course, use allegory responsibly as a means to accommodate different passages to current circumstances. The perfidious interpreter, on the other hand, would almost always read a passage allegorically in order to fulfill a selfish or sinister motive. Allegory became a symptom if overused. As Scheper clarifies, the target of early Protestant anti-allegorical sentiment was rarely the entire exegetical tradition but, in most cases, “one school of allegorical exegesis that flourished especially in the later Middle Ages and came to predominate in the Renaissance Catholic commentaries contemporary with the 375 George L. Scheper, “Reformation Attitudes,” 551.

142 Reformers.” 376 This “dialectical” school applied a strict allegorical apparatus unilaterally to every passage of Scripture with little regard for the context implied by Scripture itself. Its greatest crime was thus in using allegory to build a tottering edifice of spiritual “senses” with little or no foundation in God’s word. If the interpretations of the dialectical school ran woefully perpendicular to Scripture, then English reformers sought to run their own interpretations parallel to the text. For Knewstub, as for Whitaker, Scripture was to be its own interpreter in accord with the rule of faith. 377 This meant that any figurative portion of the text must find clarity in other portions that one could safely assume were beyond doubt. Dark passages, Knewstub clarified, “must have their meaning made manifest, and beaten out, by the circumstance of places, from whence they are taken.” 378 By circumstance, he intended the larger “signification and sense, which the woordes being set togeather, yeeld of them selves.” 379 In this conception, the literal sense was not synonymous with the “letter” of

376 Scheper, “Reformation Attitudes,” 552. 377 Both Knewstub (A Confutation, M1r) and Whitaker (A Disputation, 493) reference the rule

faith as described by Augustine in On Christian Teaching. For Augustine, the concept was intended as a failsafe for those passages in Scripture that were not easily translated or interpreted. Though not synonymous with what I am calling a “parallel” rather than “perpendicular” reading of Scripture, the rule of faith (or analogy of faith) was the true sense that was to be culled from the larger context of Scripture and, as Augustine added, “the authority of the Church.” For example, if we know from Galatians 5:14 that charity is the “fulfillment” of the law in its entirety, and the perspicuity of this particular statement has led to it rightly becoming an article of faith, then, if we happen to stumble over another passage which appears to violate this article, we should reevaluate our interpretation of the second passage. To use another example, Augustine writes: “The well-known heretical punctuation ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and there was God’ [John 1:1-2], giving a different sense in what follows (‘This Word was in the beginning with God’) refuses to acknowledge that the Word was God. This is to be refuted by the rule of faith, which lays down for us the equality of the members of the Trinity.” On Christian Teaching, ed. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 68-69. Of course, for Protestants, who denied that the authority of the Church was of equal importance to the testimony of Scripture, Augustine’s rule of charity did, for all intents and purposes, become synonymous with a “parallel” interpretation. Faith, that is, was to be drawn solely from the words of Scripture confirmed in the heart of the believer by the agency of the Holy Spirit. 378 Knewstub, A Confutation, M1r. 379 Knewstub, A Confutation, L6r.

143 the law or, stated differently, interpretation according to the flesh; 380 nor was it opposed, in all places, to a figurative reading. Rather, the literal sense in Protestant theory referred to the intuitive meaning gathered from words and letters “set together” in the larger biblical context of parallel sentiments and expressions. Knewstub most likely drew his particular conception of the literal sense from Tyndale. In fact, given a number of remarkable similarities, it can be plausibly argued that Tyndale’s section on “The Four Senses of Scripture” in his Obedience of a Christian Man was Knewstub’s chief source in his critique of Familist allegory. 381 The general purpose of both men was to defend the literal sense as the foundation upon which allegory, like a roof, was to be constructed. Both juxtaposed the world-as-Wunderkammer in which colloquialisms, vulgar stories, and other curiosities circulated indefinitely with the more somber, intransient world of the gospel. To inhabit this world was to exist “within the compass of the faith,” applying one’s interpretations for the purposes of edification, not, as Tyndale had said, for “wild adventures.” 382 Like Knewstub, Tyndale referred to allegory as a “borrowed speech” which, though unavoidable in some circumstances, could of itself prove nothing. “Thus borrow we, and feign new speech in

380 In Tyndale’s words, “the letter signifieth not the literal sense.” “God,” he continues, “is a

Spirit, and all his words are spiritual. His literal sense is spiritual.” The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 162. 381 A number of the similarities between the two texts are listed in the paragraph. For example,

both Tyndale (The Obedience, 159) and Knewstub (L6v-L8r) refer to the notion of allegory as a “borrowed speech” or as a roof built on the foundation of Scripture (which they both, in turn, derive presumably from Jerome). Both refer to “Aesop’s Fables” (Tyndale, 157 and Knewstub, L6r) and both reference Robin Hood (in Tyndale: “If I could not prove with an open text that which the allegory doth express, then were the allegory no greater a thing to be jested at and of no greater value than a tale of Robin Hood,” 159; in Knewstub: “And what blasphemie then is this, against the majestie of the woorde, to bee in effect, no other thing, then a tale of Robin Hoode,” L6r). Finally, both also use similar language to refer to borrowed speech (in Tyndale: “naked similitude,” 165; in Knewstub: “naked allegory,” L7r). 382 Tyndale, The Obedience, 158.

144 every tongue. All fables, prophecies, and riddles are allegories.” That which the allegory “signifieth,” however, “is ever the literal sense which we must seek out diligently.” 383 Seeking with diligence entailed seeing the text as a totality – a multitude of “accommodations” hovering around the unity of a coherent and edifying revelation. Proper interpretation was accordingly a comparative endeavor to discover what Tyndale called “the order and process of the text.” 384After all, if the sole purpose of Holy Scripture was to accommodate heavenly truths to our own mean capacity, then it made sense to say that a certain coherence must continue to flow through even the most obscure passages. Knewstub accused Niclaes of disrupting this natural flow through incessant allegorizing. The prophet, he believed, had robbed “many wordes and sentences set together” of their ability to “maintaine a proper and naturall sense and signification.” 385 Decades earlier, Tyndale had leveled the same critique against the dialectical school; and Whitaker would repeat it in general outline while opposing the Italian Jesuits of the 1580s. The point was to avoid either interpreting or, in most cases, imposing a dizzying array of particularities on an otherwise plain and univocal discourse. Knewstub believed that, by imposing particularities on the text, the Familists had committed the most dangerous of all exegetical sins: denying the truth of the atonement. HN’s allegories, “in the weightiest matters, as in the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, have wholly drunke up, and altogeather drowned the histories.” 386 Like Hooker, 383 Tyndale, The Obedience, 156-157. 384 Tyndale, The Obedience, 160. According to Scheper, this comparative endeavor in accord

with the Augustinian rule of faith is one reason why Protestants could not, in good faith, entirely reject allegory. In his words, “the theoretical insistence on a plain literal sense tended to be belied in practice by the rigors of interpreting Scripture according to the analogy of faith (i.e. interpreting Scripture by Scripture)” (“Reformation Attitudes,” 151). 385 Knewstub, A Confutation, L8r. 386 Knewstub, A Confutation, L7v.

145 Knewstub accused the group of misfashioning an allegorical Christ out of the fragments of the biblical text. This adulterated savior soon became, like the letters “HN,” less a man than a state of mind or “estate of perfection” in which all objective revelation ceded priority to the subjective desires of the allegedly begodded individual. 387 As both Knewstub and Hooker claimed, these exegetical transgressions were bound together with the fuzzy disposition of the interpreter. Familists saw allegories everywhere precisely because they had been predisposed to do so by their adoption of a crooked doctrine of perfectionism. While Knewstub reserved most of the blame for HN’s allegorical excess, John Rogers extended his own 1579 attack on the Family to include certain English ministers and common people. Chief among these, Rogers named the tradesman Christopher Vitells, the undisputed First Elder in the English Family. Though little is known about Vitells’ personal religious development or even his nationality, Marsh has provided sufficient evidence to at least suggest that Vitells traveled through the Isle of Ely and Essex as early as 1555, spreading Familist ideas as he went. 388 Rogers, for his part, thought it “very wel known” that Vitells had for some time “trudged from country to country,” disseminating an allegorical approach to scriptural truths while at the same time condemning other exegetes as pharisaical literalists. 389 Not only were Vitells and his Familists believed to have thoroughly allegorized Christ, they had also made a farce of the creation story. Adam did not exist, but signified only the earthly man who contained within himself symbolic elements of Eve, the garden, and the serpent.

387 Knewstub, A Confutation, M2r. 388 Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 54-60. 389 Rogers, The Displaying, D3v-D4r. “How he miserably doeth expound the holie scripture unto

the simple people in corners, my heart doth lament: how he driveth the true sense of the holie Ghost into allegories, it pitieth me to heare: and other wise to interpret the holie scripture, is to stick to the letter, as he untruly affirmeth.”

146 It remains to be seen whether these ruthless acts of allegory match with the surviving Familist sources. Knewstub and John Rogers had, of course, studied these sources; though, as might be expected, they did so selectively. Knewstub, in particular, was convinced that the English Family of Love’s exegetical transgressions were the tip of the iceberg, and warned of a time when the group would feel sufficiently empowered to transgress the boundaries of worldly authority as well. Allegory, he thought, functioned now just as it had for “the hereticques in all times:” to convince the monstrous brood of subversive ideologies. 390 Familist hermeneutics and the “pattern of love” Though he never explicitly denied the weightiest moments of biblical history, Niclaes did cite Scripture in ways that made skeptics understandably uncomfortable. This was predominantly because his purpose was not to provide evidence for his religious claims – a practice that he, and other Familists, found distasteful in the extreme – but to weave together strands of existing revelation into a new tapestry “to publish now in the last time.” 391 This inspired objective was nowhere more apparent than in the beginning of the prophet’s Proverbia, delivered “in the dayes of his olde age” to his followers. 392 The first chapter of the work surveyed the unfolding of biblical history from the creation in Genesis to the apostolic witness of Christ’s death and resurrection before turning to God’s election of HN as his minister, chosen in the last time to resurrect the true service of Love and, by so doing, restore “his true Sanctuarie.” 393 By inserting his own work into the sweep of the providential narrative, Niclaes reserved for Familism a unique place

390 Knewstub, A Confutation, L8v. 391 Niclaes, Evangelium Regni, A3r. 392 Hamilton tells us that the Proverbia was first published in 1570 (The Family of Love in English Society, 59) – a date which puts Niclaes in his late sixties. 393 Niclaes, Proverbia, A6v.

147 as the final act of an unfolding revelation and as a definitive expression of God’s love for his people. Though bold, Niclaes’ enlightened grasp on revelation did not overshadow the demand for a measured exegetical strategy. Among the thicket of biblical references, mystical sayings, and prophetic allusions that make up the works of HN and his followers, it is possible to discern a complex Familist hermeneutic that is, at once, a polemical reaction to and a product of prevailing sixteenth-century assumptions. Familists, much like their detractors, had an axe to grind when it came to wrenching objective scriptural truth in accord with unspoken ideological convictions. They, too, believed that God’s word had an overriding “sense,” and that this sense could be thoroughly obscured by the monomania of interpretation according to the Letter. While many of their Protestant contemporaries were hard at work reconciling the demand for scriptural perspicuity with the less transparent and potentially more problematic demand for the inner testimony of the Spirit, Familists followed Niclaes in a related reconciliatory endeavor. The internal mysteries of Scripture, they insisted, were only attained when the plain mandate of the text was lived out in the context of the everyday. This final concept was perhaps the central tenet of Niclaes’ unique version of Christian belief. In much the same way as the Proverbia had envisioned the fulfillment of the biblical narrative in the present, Niclaes’ earliest Dutch elders, Elidad and Fidelitas, spoke of the “New and the Olde (namelie the True and the Figurative)” being manifested out of the heart of the devout individual. 394 In other places, Niclaes could refer to Scripture as dictating a form of “Being” which “takes shape” in the individual and, in turn, furnishes the individual with a proper understanding of its message. He likewise criticized those who “indeed, hold very much of the Scripture and, according to their 394 See Elidad, A good and fruitful exhortation unto the Familie of Love … (Cologne, 1574),

A4v; Fidelitas, A distinct declaration of the requiring of the Lord… (Cologne, 1574), A3r; and Niclaes, Epistolae, 214.

148 owne Sense, do gladly heare and speake therof; but what the Scripture requireth, thatt do they not.” 395 It was in the performance that the text found its fulfillment and, without due consideration of this fact, any attempt to express the true meaning of revelation, however erudite, was irrelevant sophistry. It was in this active sense that Niclaes considered his own writings a renewed application of the gospel. In 1579, an English Familist, writing under the name Theophilus, responded to the charge, made by the bishop of Rochester, that members of the Family preferred HN’s Evangelium Regni to the Holy Scriptures. Against the bishop, he pointed out that the former work conveyed the “very same” message as the Scriptures, delivered only with special application to “what the Lord will now accomplish in these last dayes.” Theophilus clarified for the bishop that HN had not been given his chosen status as minister in order to simply banish the New Testament but to set up a community in which its dictates could be acted out and fulfilled. Though Scripture was a “necessary and sufficient doctrine of salvation,” it had yet to be actively put into practice by those who had spent so many wasted hours poring over its verses. 396 As a result, the true church had declined. Niclaes lamented that many since the time of Christ had grown lazy and, by setting down their guard, had let open the door to all manner of false Christians. His primary targets were the scripture-learned, men who “wrest and construe the Scripture” in accord with “their owne Will and Good-

395 Niclaes, Introductio, E6r. In his Epistolae, Niclaes criticizes those who “give not their

Understanding captive under the Obedience of the Love of Jesu Christ, and com not evenso to the Beeing wherof the Scripture speaketh” (44). In the Introductio, he clarified that “if Christ therefore hath Shape in you and you believe in Him as the Scripture saith then may you confesse Him rightly” (O4r). And elsewhere: “Mark wel what I write, No man can confesse Christ among al those that wil confesse him, unlesse that he in his like being, have his fashion or shape in him; not according to the elementish ceremonies wherewith the one maketh another wise with the historical scriptures” (An Epistle sent unto two Daughters of Warwick, 52). 396 Theophilus’ responses to the bishop of Rochester are printed in William Wilkinson, A

Confutation, B1r.

149 thinking.” 397 The scripture-learned had, furthermore, risen to their place in society, not by their deeds, but by out-witting their adversaries. In so doing, they blithely ignored the plain mandate of God’s word, and chose contention over peace. Love, to them, had become an abstract principle and the entirety of Scripture a mere historical document without living force – something to be acted upon rather than affected by. 398 For Familists in England, the scripture-learned took on concrete form in figures like Knewstub and John Rogers. Rogers’ anonymous interlocutor, ER, imagined himself as a reluctant David forced into battle with the Philistine giant. Having once left the wilderness of contention, and by now well aware of its unprofitable dealings, he again found himself plummeting from Terra Pacis to take arms against a formidable foe. 399 For ER, the difference between David and Goliath was to be found in the process by which one achieved mastery of the scriptures. Switching to a different analogy, ER added that a merchant can either “useth his trade in balance … according to the rule of scripture” or, rather, take advantage of his customer. In both cases, however, he is still called a merchant. 400 Familists like ER found particular fault with two related elements of their opponents’ approach to the learning of Scripture. First, like Goliath, Rogers was wont to rely on his own power to move mountains. If a given passage did not confirm his

397 Niclaes, Epistolae, 331. 398 Niclaes’ sense of the term “history” is somewhat misrepresented by Knewstub who, for his

part, accuses the prophet of “drowning” biblical history in a torrent of allegories. It is clear from Niclaes’ printed works that the author intends to critique those who conceive of the bible merely as a litany of historical truths without also considering the relevance of these truths for human society in the present context. Niclaes did not, therefore, explicitly deny the historical truths of Scripture, though he certainly favored their application over their interpretation. 399 Rogers, The Displaying, L3v. 400 Rogers, The Displaying, L5v. Christopher Vittel responded in a similar fashion to Rogers,

saying that, after all, “the scripture is serviceable unto every one, even as he is minded, (be it whatsoever,) to be high minded in pleasant lustes” (Rogers, An Answere, L7r).

150 opinions, he would simply bend it to his will and crush the truth in the process. Second, like the crooked merchant, Rogers ignored the “rule” of the text – its flow and its circumstance – choosing instead to skillfully arrange snippets in order to cobble together a marketable product. These were, in fact, two ways of saying the same thing. By either strength or intellectual cunning, the scripture-learned were determined to alter what had, by dint of divine inspiration, been made unalterably clear. One particularly daring Familist poked fun at Rogers’ line of argumentation in The Displaying, pointing out that, for Rogers, nothing could be true “except you allowe it to be true” – a “sound consequent” indeed! 401 The quip echoed the inquisitorial strategies of local magistrates, including Knewstub, who had bullied the “truth” out of alleged members. In these dire conditions, formerly goodwilling Familists (though perhaps lacking in David’s fortitude) had succumbed to the exercise of administrative power. Around 1579, the pseudonymous FL expressed his grief at the fact that Rogers, in attempting to display the gross and wicked heresies of the group, had unwittingly displayed his own will. The same, he added, “wee shall finde perfourmed ere it be long by master Knewstub: who (as we suppose) shall displaye him self therein.” 402 The battle had been set in motion, and the enemy was resolute in propagating its opinions. Most of all, FL bemoaned Rogers’ dismissal of the confession, A Brief Rehersal (1575), as yet another instance of Familist Nicodemism. Here, FL thought, was a clear articulation of Niclaes’ doctrine, perfectly harmonized with the laws of the land. Even Rogers had surmised that, by all accounts, the Rehersal was free of serious error and, indeed, beneficial. In particular, the document expressed the centrality of the Bible in terms that, in a perfect world, would have endeared them to any Protestant. God’s Word was the measure of all things; the complete source of salvific power; and, quite simply, 401 Rogers, The Displaying, I7r. 402 Rogers, The Displaying, M7v.

151 “an upright, godly and healthsome doctrin.” 403 Within the boundaries of its orthodox framework, the author of the Rehersal even managed to slip in a few quiet statements that were uniquely Familist. Not only was the Bible to be confessed, it was to be inhabited, acted-out, and fulfilled. To live in peaceful obedience to the Queen and to her magistrates was also to fulfill, not merely the outward demands of the law, but “our conscience” and, with it, the internal demands “contained in the Old and New Testament.” 404 Numerous later references attest to the fact that the Rehersal was a document about which English Familists were singularly proud. To Rogers, nevertheless, the Rehersal was a lie. FL protested that the confession encapsulated “the true principles of our faith and religion,” and that his opponent, finding nothing in it to justify his otherwise fruitless inquisition, had unfairly deemed it a “mockerie.” 405 The exchange exhibits in microcosm the hall of mirrors that marked the divided field in the 1570s. For Rogers, the more convincing the performance, the less likely it was to be true. Familists, after all, were experts at this sort of thing. For FL, the Philistine giant had triumphed only by trampling over the truth. The Rehersal was a fake simply because he had the power to make it so. FL’s protest held additional implications for the more refined project of exegesis. English Familists deplored irresponsible interpretations of either Niclaes’ work or Scripture that neglected what they called the “rule” of the text. Still somewhat acrid in tone, FL jestingly compared Rogers’ interpretation of Niclaes with a synopsis of the Decalogue that omitted the word “not” in each commandment. 406 The meaning of a 403 Anon., A Brief Rehersal, 7. 404 Anon, A Brief Rehersal, 6, 9. 405 Rogers, The Displaying, M6v. 406 Rogers, The Displaying, M7v. “You have not,” FL accuses Rogers, “set down any whol

sentence, but patched & peeced the same without all order, contrarie to your promise. For you say, you will not adde nor diminish, but set downe the authors wordes worde for worde: which ye have done, even as onee may take the tenne commaundments and leave out some wordes, & thereby say that God

152 given passage, he implied, was something greater than that which could be deduced from single words, lone phrases, or even entire sentences. This was not some convoluted mystical “sense” – though Familists would elsewhere acknowledge such a sense – but the affirmation of an overriding, objective coherence to both Scripture and Niclaes’ work. Other Familists similarly accused their detractors of selective interpretation. For example, Theophilus and the other members who responded to Wilkinson criticized the tendency of the scripture-learned to ignore what he called the “right sense and minde” of the Bible, challenging antifamilists in the process to test the merits of the group according to the “rule of Scripture.” 407 ER further invited Rogers to evaluate Niclaes’ writings with the holy scriptures in hand, without having recourse to the foolish practice of selecting “here some, and there some, and of divers sentences, and part of divers sentences, to make one sentence.” 408 Such imaginative patchwork, ER suggested, might sell more copies of the Displaying to those individuals eager to read about curious customs, aberrant theologies, and subversive plots, but it would in no way serve the demands of an indifferent truth. What emerges in these accusations is a more general concern for the cultivation of a Familist hermeneutic at once straightforward and inspired. In his lengthy Epistolae, Niclaes had declared that the mind of scriptures clearly pointed to the implanting of the spirit of Christ in the hearts of believers. It also pointed to a true, spiritual baptism in which the dictates of the moral life would be actualized in the mature devotee. This was, without doubt, a denial of Luther’s sola fide doctrine; and, like Thomas Starkey, Familists rarely offered their opponents any concessions on the topic of the human

commaunded such things: as for example. Thou shalt have none other Gods but mee. Thou shalt not steale. Thou shalt not commit adultrie, & c. Leave out none & not, and then what is the commaundment?” 407 Wilkinson, A Confutation, B1v, T3v. 408 Rogers, The Displaying, L2v.

153 will. 409 It was of clear and singular importance to Niclaes and his followers that proper interpretation rest, concomitantly, on proper living. To rightly understand the scriptures was to live in accord with their message. In its insistence on proper living, Niclaes’ Epistolae emphasized an overriding meaning to Scripture not altogether foreign to Whitaker’s “literal sense.” The Epistolae railed against the habit of interpreting scriptural passages in isolation. The exegete must rather, with each passage, consider “from whence it proceedeth” and “to what ende it stretcheth.” 410 Happening upon an especially-contentious Ecclesiastes 12:7 (“and the dust returns to earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it”), Niclaes took the opportunity to illustrate the way in which irresponsible interpretation could mistakenly sanction spiritual and moral apathy. Here, he began, many are predisposed to “judge eventhus: Let him live how they wil live, when they dye their Spirit shall com againe to God, and their Body to the Earth.” 411 According to Niclaes, this misinterpretation was due to the erroneous habit of condensing the mind of God into a single, isolated sentence without reference to the larger pattern of the text. 409 ER, for instance, countered Roger’s solafideism by citing Jerome: “accursed be he which saith

God commaunded unpossinle thinges” (Rogers, The Displaying, L6r). Vittel’s also responded to Rogers in even more unequivocal terms: “You say moreover, that we affirm that the lawe of God may be kept, it is true, we doe so affirme, that they which love God, will keep his commaundmentes: or saith Christ, he that loveth me, will keepe my commaundementes: but he that loveth me not, will not keepe them” (An Answere, G7r). There are, however, a few places where Niclaes seems to speak against the essential righteousness of the faithful. In the Epistolae, for example, he affirms that those who thirst for righteousness will receive it, “but not for any Righteousness that anyman mought have don” ( 319). Likewise, in the Dicta, Niclaes clarified that “with our owne Power wee are able to doo nothing against the Iniquitie as throughlie to vanquish the same or utterlie to destroy it” (11v). Finally, chapter XII of the Dicta goes under the heading “a cleere Demonstration that the Man hath not any-Good of himself: but receaveth it all of the Lorde in his Grace” (23r). In short, determining whether the Family of Love accepted or rejected solafideism is intensely difficult and depends largely on the context. In a more antagonistic atmosphere, Familists were prone, like Erasmus, to reject the notion as impractical and, after all, not explicit in Scripture. However, at the same time, they acknowledged that becoming “godded with God,” as they put it, was due solely to the grace and not to any merits on behalf of the individual. 410 Niclaes, Epistolae, 109. 411 Niclaes, Epistolae, 107.

154 In Niclaes’ hands, however, what Whitaker called the “scope, end, matter, and circumstance” of a given passage took on varying shades of meaning. In its straightforward application, Niclaes’ interpretation of Ecclesiastes was not entirely antithetical to that of Luther. The German reformer had understood Ecclesiastes as a stinging indictment of worldly asceticism in the service of merit, and as a “thunderbolt” against the traditional monastic mode of living. This did not imply living however one desired, but living moderately in accord with the needs of the day and without obsessive concern for earning one’s eternal salvation. 412 Interpreting the final lines of Ecclesiastes 12, “fear God and keep his commandments,” Niclaes likewise concluded that the goal was to “submitt” oneself “obediently under the Love and her Service.” 413 As ER was later to add, Qoheleth’s was a rather straightforward command. Repeating Ecclesiastes 12, he wished, “from the bottom of my heart, that all the Lordes people were simple” so that all obsessive squabbling would cease. The heart-felt wishes of Niclaes and ER were again expressed by the plain plowman of Temporis Filia Veritas as he longed for the establishment of the “good life which all the holy scriptures do require and witness.” 414 The plowman’s “good life” took on another shade of meaning when considered in light of what Niclaes believed to be the scriptural promise of mystical implantation. First and foremost, biblical interpretation was a transformative event. In his exegesis of Ecclesiastes 12:7, Niclaes maintained that the true sense of Ecclesiastes was located in II

412 Martin Luther, “Notes on Ecclesiastes,” in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis:

Concordia Publishing, 1972), 15:322-323. Many scholars have consequently viewed Luther’s exegesis of the text as the final blow in his debate with Erasmus over the efficacy of human works in the realm of salvation. See, for example, Robert Rosin, Reformers, the Preacher, and Skepticism: Luther, Brenz, Melanchthon, and Ecclesiastes (Mainz: Verlag Philip von Zabern, 1997), 101. See also William John Wright, Martin Luther’s Understanding of God’s Two Kingdoms: A Response to the Challenge of Skepticism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Press, 2010), 149-152 for a discussion of Luther’s “optimistic” interpretation of Ecclesiastes in light of his understanding of the bondage of the will. 413 Niclaes, Epistolae, 112. 414 Rogers, The Displaying, fols. L6r-v. Anon., Temporis Filia Veritas, B2r.

155 Corinthians with the metaphor of the self as a “temple.” God, he promised, will shatter all the idols in the temple, and they will inevitably fall like dust to the earth. That which belongs to God, namely the indwelling spirit of Christ, will ultimately go back to God, “according to the Promises.” 415 The dust returns to earth and the spirit returns to God who gave it. We must, Niclaes believed, be “turned into another Minde” through the grace of God and brought into a state of conformity with the overriding spirit of the scriptures. 416 Later Familists would see this transformation as a prerequisite for spreading the gospel and for avoiding the pitfalls of erroneous interpretation. In the Apology, a dialogue otherwise known for its embattled attempt to accommodate Familism to outsiders, the lone Exile could, at times, sound uncharacteristically exclusivist. When asked by the carefree Citizen if spiritually unenlightened, though outwardly conforming Christians could nevertheless preach the gospel, the Exile responded with a resounding no. They have not received the Spirit and are not accordingly “under the same Being or life, whereunto the Scripture witnesseth.” 417 Not entirely persuaded, the Citizen repeated his question, this time with recourse to Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial in the gospel. Both of these apostles had sinned grievously, he admitted; but is not God’s word so lucent as to transcend the shortcomings of its human mouthpiece? Again, the Exile

415 Niclaes, Epistolae, 110, 112. 416 Niclaes, Epistolae, 21. 417 Anon., An Apology, 21-22. Niclaes was to write in the Introductio that the “written Word of

the Letter, is not the Worde itself, that clenseth and sanctifieth the Man from the Sinne or which procreateth the Life: but the same is a Shadowe or figuring-out of the holy and true Worde and a serviceable Instrument wherby we are made wel-affected, inwardly in our Soules, to the true Worde of Divification, and do becom beleeving of the same to thend that; through the beleefe and Love; we might so, in the Spirit of our Minde, be made of like-beeing with the Nature and Beeing of the good Life: even as the Worde or Scripture witnesseth therof” (E6v).

156 responded that the spirit of Christ is the clear light of Scripture and that those “which are void of Christ” cannot therefore bring a light which they do not have to others. 418 Niclaes’ imperative that his Familists live out or, rather, “fulfill” the scriptures – an act that was simultaneously the rule and “right sense” of Scripture – could be communicated in terms that were both quotidian and mystical. On the one hand, Familists held that the Bible conveyed a message that was as simple as it was lamentably ignored by the scripture-learned – a message that could be applied to everyday toil “under the sun.” Indeed, their Brief Rehersal had assured the skeptics that, as far as the Family was concerned, the Bible was an upright, godly, and healthsome doctrine, necessary above all for the good life, and a text to which they were bound by conscience to obey. On the other hand, the mystical transformation of believers was both the consequence of God’s word and the condition for its right understanding. Followers were to become godded by God and imbued, essentially, with the righteousness of the spirit of Christ. 419

418Anon., An Apology, 23-24. 419 It is worth noting that the Familist notion of the implanting of Christ’s essence differed

markedly from the Protestant conception of justification. In the fifth chapter of his fourth epistle in the Epistolae, Niclaes insisted that justification was a matter of merging essences. “To whomsoever now thesame Christ doth com thus in the Spirit essentially to thos is He also seene and knowen rightly in the Spirit: and He is likewise of one-substance with them in all Love and upright Righteousness” (55-56). Though the “godded” individual may, he continued, still sin at times, “all thatt godly Beeing evenas we have witnessed before of God the Father; doth then live substancially in us: and so we have our Fellowshipp with God the Father, and with his Sonne the Lord Jesu Christ in the everlasting Life, wherin our Joye is perfect” (61). The notion of essential righteousness was particularly aggravating for Calvin. In the process of his discussion of justification by faith in The Institutes, he censured the Königsberg professor, Andreas Osiander, for introducing “a kind of monstrosity termed essential righteousness, by which, although he designed not to abolish free righteousness, he involves it in darkness” (III.XI.5). The problem for Calvin was that Osiander’s notion revived the Manichean heresy that, for its part, endeavored to “transfuse the divine essence into men” (III.XI.5). This notion furthermore detracted from the efficacy of Christ’s atoning sacrifice by insisting that justification was only truly accomplished when the individual, inspired by the spirit dwelling essentially within him, exorcized his righteousness in the course of everyday affairs. “There is no room for works in justification,” Calvin concluded (III.XI.6).

157 The spirit of William Whitaker Much like Hooker, Familists believed that their opponents were simply incapable of discerning a “patterne of Love” in anything. 420 Whether it was the work of HN or God’s revealed word, the scripture-learned were wont to see their own sour disposition reflected back at them. Scripture nevertheless did have a pattern for Familists. The words themselves, considered as a totality, pointed to their fulfillment in the good life of the godded individual. It was this latter emphasis on the mystical transformation of the believer that, time and again, put Familists at odds with their Protestant contemporaries. To many, this emphasis amounted to a denial of scriptural perspicuity. If only HN and his elders could truly engage the text, then God must speak with a dark and incomprehensible tongue. Hence Knewstub’s focus on allegory: the Family, he thought, implied that Scripture required a teetering superstructure of mystical senses to be comprehended. If Familists were willing to take liberties in such a vital matter as this, who knew what other liberties they may take in the future. A curious altercation between Rogers and Vitells serves to illustrate the misunderstandings that could arise from Niclaes’ call for mystical transformation. In the six months following his initial 1578 publication of the Displaying, Rogers received a lengthy diatribe from Vitells condemning his inaccurate rendering of Familist heresies. This, along with his own response to Vitells’ “wicked & infamous libel,” Rogers published again in 1579, dedicating the work to the Queen’s principle secretary Francis Walsingham. Among Vitells’ accusations was the claim that the author of the Displaying had seriously misquoted Niclaes (and, for that matter, “Christ and his Apostles

420 Rogers, The Displaying, N2v. “For it is now adays a common thing that every man can say,

shewe mee a good man, when as in deed in their beholding none is better then themselves, & therefore cannot beleeve that god hath such worke with any man, as to bring any goodness more (than they have) to any other. And further we know, that with what mind a man beholdeth another, in such forme he appeareth whome he beholdeth: for a mind of envie cannot discerne any patterne of Love, no more then a blacke Moore looking in a glasse, can see his face altered into white colour” (N2r-v).

158 doctrine” 421) and engaged in a particularly poisonous form of ideological hermeneutics. In particular, Vittell took issue with Rogers’ claim that, for HN, only Familist elders could suitably arrive at scriptural truth. “You write very untruly of HN,” he complained, “where you say that no man, be he never so learned or godly, can understand or interpret the scripture; for, I am sure, there are no such wordes written by him.” 422 What is curious about Vitells’ accusation is that Rogers had, for the most part, paraphrased Niclaes correctly in the 1578 Displaying. These were indeed HN’s words. Under the ninth section heading “No man, be he never so learned or godly… ,” Rogers included two “absurd speaches, taken out of the bookes of HN.” 423 The first was from chapter 13 of The Prophetie of the Spirit of Love; the second from chapter 16 (wrongly cited by Rogers in the margins as “chapter 11”) of the Exhortatio I. The cumulative effect of these two passages was to show that the Family was uncompromisingly exclusivist and, hence, sectarian. The cult of HN, as displayed by Rogers, enjoyed a consummate understanding of Scripture. To everyone else, the text was parabolic, cloudy, and unprofitable. And the damning consequent: everything that is uttered about the Scripture by those who had yet to be initiated into the Family was accordingly “false and lies.” 424 Rogers had skillfully paved the way for this conclusion in the preceding sections of his work which dealt, respectively, with the subjects of Familist perfectionism and the group’s condemnation of other Christians. 421 Rogers, An Answere, J4r. 422 Rogers, An Answere, J4r. 423 Rogers, The Displaying, H6v. The statement, cited by Vittel and written in Rogers, beginning

with “No man, be he never so learned or godly…” was probably not intended by Rogers to be a direct citation from HN, only a section heading. However, Niclaes had delivered a remarkably similar statement in the English translation of the Evangelium Regni: “Understand or well perceive, that no man (how wise or understanding soever he be in the knowledge of the Scripture) can by any meanes comprehend or understand the Wisdom of God” (B2v). Though a tantalizingly similar passage, there is no way of gauging from Rogers text whether or not he was paraphrasing Niclaes in this instance. 424 Rogers, The Displaying, H6v.

159 Had Vitells simply not read the Prophetie and the Exhortio? Was he merely assuming that his beloved Niclaes would never put such words to paper? It is highly unlikely given Vitells’ central role in the translation and dissemination of many of Niclaes’ works in the mid 1570s. Furthermore, the Prophetie and Exhortio were both among the writings confiscated in the Cambridge port town of Wisbech in 1580, and Theophilus, earlier in 1579, had attached a copy of the Exhortio in his embittered letters to William Wilkinson.425 The two texts circulated with some frequency through the English Family’s subterranean channels. It is therefore probable that Vitells, given his alleged status in the group, was not just aware but had an intimate knowledge of the works in question. On closer inspection, Rogers’ ninth section in the Displaying did take some liberties with its citation of Niclaes that may have made Vitells uncomfortable, especially given the Familist distaste for selective interpretation. These were HN’s words, but not without certain notable omissions. Rogers had, for example, left out a significant portion of Niclaes’ discourse in chapter 13 of the Prophetie (see Figures 2 and 3). Though he would later respond to Vittel’s attack with a more complete citation, 426 his initial paraphrase ignored much of Niclaes’ discussion of the Spirit in the process of cutting and pasting the author’s admittedly cyclical and soporific statements.

425 Christopher Marsh discusses the confiscation of the Wisbech documents in The Family of

Love in English Society, 18-19. Wilkinson notes that Theophilus appended “an Exhortation” to his response (A Confutation, C1r) and Theophilus himself refers Wilkinson to the Exhortatio later in the text (R1r-v). 426 Rogers responded to Vittel’s accusation in An Answere by citing, without omissions, most of

the Prophetie, Chapter 13, Verse 1 (fol. J5r). His earlier citation in The Displaying had, however, condensed the chapter, freely selecting from all the material ranging between verses 1 and 6.

160

Figure 2. Section 9 from Rogers’ 1578 edition of The Displaying (I1r-I1v) Source: Rogers, John. The displaying of an horrible secte of grosse and wicked heretiques, naming themselves the family of love with the lives of their authours and what doctrine they teach in corners. London, 1579.

161

Figure 3. Chapter 13 from Niclaes’ Prophetie (D4v-D5v) with Rogers’ selections. Source: Niclaes, Hendrik. Prophetie of the Spirit of Love. Set-fourth by HN: And by him

perused a-new and more distinctly declared. Cologne, 1574.

162 To be sure, Niclaes’ chapter 13 could be read as a ringing indictment of the scripture-learned, and, at points, it blurred the line between that designation and anyone not in the Communality of the Love. However, chapter 13 also contained a more complex, and arguably more orthodox, discussion of the relative noetic capacities of the spirit and the flesh. This less controversial discussion took place almost entirely between the lines of Rogers’ paraphrase. The heart of Niclaes’ broader passage was that God’s truth, “which is heavenlie and spirituall,” cannot be attained by the innate capacities of the flesh. Only the “children of the kingdom,” who had received his spirit and cultivated it within themselves, could accordingly understand and experience divine reality. 427 The problem was owing to the tendency of chapter 13 to oscillate between the divisive notion that the elect were of the spirit and everyone else was of the flesh and the more Pauline notion of the spirit and the flesh warring within the heart of each and every individual. This was not the only place where Niclaes was to muddle the two notions. In the grand creation story of the Proverbia, he declared that, “in the Beginning,” God made one man “of the earth” and another “of the holie Spirit of his godlie nature.” He then specified that, in every human birth, two men, one fleshy and one spiritual, descend from the “womanlie vessell” into the body of one man. Finally, and paradoxically, HN returned to his initial formulation without any explanation, comparing the spiritual man’s exiled status on earth alongside the earthly successes of the fleshy man. 428 Given these ambiguities, Rogers could reasonably conclude that, for HN, the spiritually-minded Familists held a monopoly on revelation. Vitells could also conclude, without doing too much violence to the original text, that “there are no such words” as his opponent had wrangled out of Niclaes. According to Vitells, Rogers had myopically interpreted what was a much larger and more variegated passage. Without the Spirit, 427 Niclaes, Prophetie, D5r. 428 Niclaes, Proverbia, A7r-v.

163 Vitells believed, it was of course impossible for ordinary, unaided human beings to understand a thoroughly spiritual truth. Furthermore, Niclaes’ original words in the Prophetie had said nothing with explicit regard to Scripture, focusing rather on one’s effective understanding of the heavenly truths contained in Scripture. But, granting their accuracy, were Vittel’s apparently logical consequents orthodox? Tyndale had affirmed in 1528 that the literal sense of Scripture was indeed spiritual. “God is a spirit and all his words are spiritual.” In The Obedience of a Christian Man – a text encountered and appreciated by more than one English Familists in the 1570s – Tyndale clarified that, if one truly considered the “process” and “order” of Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians, it would become apparent that the letter which “killeth” refers, not to the literal sense (as opposed, say, to the allegorical), but to the Mosaic Law. 429 Paul was himself using the concept of the letter allegorically to exhibit the manner in which the Law must first be confirmed in the heart of the believer by the secret agency of the Holy Spirit. “For the law,” Tyndale said, “doth but kill and damn the consciences, as long as there is no lust in the heart to do that which the law commandeth.” When one truly believed God’s promises, he continued, the Spirit “entereth the heart,” establishing therein a lively desire to act righteously. Understood properly, the letter “quickeneth your hearts … and maketh you to do of love and of your own accord without compulsion, that which the law compelled you to do and damned you because ye could not do with love and lust and naturally.” 430 According to Tyndale, Paul’s was the spiritual message and saving doctrine expressed, whether strictly or figuratively, in the overriding literal sense of the text. Not a calculating obedience to the letter, but a lively and inspired desire to act in accord with its dictates enabled the enlightened believer to appear justified before the searching eyes of 429 Tyndale, The Obedience , 160. 430 Tyndale, The Obedience, 160-162.

164 God. These sentiments were not incompatible with elements of the religious perspective later held by the Family. “A spiritual man,” Niclaes wrote, using comparable language, is one who is “clothed with the Spirit of God and the Trueth” – one who exhibits “a Lust of his Woorkes,” not by his own power, but by means of the indwelling spirit. 431 The spiritual man has become godded with God, and capable, therefore, of envisioning the true sense of Scripture in accord with its spiritual message. This is not to say that Familists like Vitells were entirely orthodox, but rather that orthodoxy itself could be porous and, oftentimes, more inclusive in its application than its adherents could anticipate. After all, Tyndale’s discussion of Second Corinthians followed closely on the heels of a fierce confutation of the dialectical school of allegorical interpretation – a text from The Obedience that John Knewstub most likely borrowed for his Confutation of the monstrous brood. Before the dust had settled, and before Familism became “Familistical,” it was not altogether improbable that English members could consider their own hermeneutic to be harmonious with Tyndale’s or, for that matter, with the hermeneutic later professed, but not practiced, by Knewstub. William Whitaker’s discussion of the literal sense of Scripture is a compelling example of these instabilities in orthodox exegesis. The author of the Disputation on Sacred Scripture did not share Knewstub’s intense dislike of sectarians, and preferred to dismiss Familists out of hand before moving on to what he saw as a more relevant critique of contemporary, Jesuitical methods of interpretation. Against thinkers like the Italian, Robert Bellarmine – “an invisible champion” for Jesuits 432 – Whitaker 431 HN, Prophetie, D4v. 432 Whitaker, A Disputation, 6. Later, Whitaker clarifies the nub of Bellarmine’s argument: “he imposes upon us [Protestants] the office of maintaining that the scriptures are in themselves most plain and easy, and stand in need of no interpretation: - as if we either though that every part of scripture was plain, easy, and clear, or even rejected the exposition and interpretation of the scriptures! Could Bellarmine really hope to impose on us in so gross a manner, as to make us confess that to be our opinion which had never so much as entered into our thoughts?” (9) According to Charles Gannon, Protestants like Whitaker, “having to defend their position, … could not dismiss the discrepancy between what was said and what was meant – between the immediate

165 demanded that Scripture, rightly understood, was both plain in all doctrines necessary to salvation and reliant on the persuasive powers of the Holy Spirit for its effectual internalization. “For it is not enough,” he said, “to know the words, the letter or the history, but a full persuasion is required.” 433 As discussed earlier in this chapter, this emphatically did not mean penetrating into new and thoroughly spiritual “senses” of Scripture. It did, however, imply, with Ambrose, that the process of right interpretation was not concerned solely with “what lies ready to hand and at the surface” but also with “what is profoundly buried like a treasure.” 434 The surface, Whitaker admitted, contained everything essential to the laity, but the Holy Spirit called the exegete deeper still, into further applications of the same simple refrain. Why, then, go deeper? Why embark on a journey for treasures that are reflected so clearly on the surface, especially given the risk of misinterpretation? Whitaker’s simple explanation was that the scriptures urge the exegete onwards in order to stimulate and renew his or her interest. However, the situation as described in the Disputation was decidedly more complex. “God,” he related, “willed to have that truth, so sublime, so heavenly, sought and found with much labour, the more esteemed by us on that account.” 435 Moreover, this sublime truth, in seeming opposition to the plain sense on literal sense and the more distant implications of the language of the Scriptures –with some well-worm cliché like that of the sugar coating on the pill. At the same time, they were too sophisticated to ignore the fact that the Bible often implied more than it literally stated. Caught in this dilemma, they became much more deeply involved in the problem of allegory than were either the Catholic students of the Scriptures or the literary theorists; and this involvement led them to a zealous examination of the nature of language itself” (“Whitaker’s ‘Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura,’” 131). 433 Whitaker, A Disputation, 367. And, elsewhere, “We say that the Holy Spirit is the supreme

interpreter of scripture, because, we must be illuminated by the Holy Spirit to certainly persuaded of the true sense of scripture” (415). 434 Whitaker, A Disputation, 372. “We readily confess with Ambrose, that there are many

obscure meanings in scripture, and the scripture is like a sea: but same Ambrose says also presently in the same place, that ‘there are also in the scriptures rivers sweet and clear, and pure fountains springing up unto eternal life.’” 435 Whitaker, A Disputation, 365.

166 the surface, was available only to those who had been illuminated by the Holy Spirit. “For the true interpretation of scripture is granted only to the elect.” 436 This came dangerously close to a denial of the perspicuity of Scripture. If nothing else, the overemphasis on sublime treasures stood in tension with the Protestant insistence that the more obscure passages of Scripture were not qualitatively different from passages describing the same saving doctrines in simpler terms. 437 Like the Familists, Whitaker admitted a seemingly unavoidable but nonetheless problematic distinction into his discussion of scriptural interpretation. Scripture contained both external verities – those things, as the plain plowman might say, “necessary for the good life” – and internal revelations that were actualized by the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer. What was essential for Whitaker, and for many other Protestants, was that the one side not eclipse the other. Scripture was not simplistic, nor was it inaccessible and altogether mysterious to the common person. Familist hermeneutics, though often blamed for the second error, was never so one-sided. This was precisely what was at stake for Vitells in his debate with Rogers. Did HN make Scripture the exclusive province of the Family of Love, or was Niclaes, like Tyndale, concerned more broadly with the quickening power of the Spirit? Were allegories, as Knewstub was later to suggest, instruments for building a fence of mystification around the Family’s idiosyncratic interpretations or were they, rather, a valid and indeed scriptural form of accommodation to human interests? The answers to these questions, as Familists were all too fond of pointing out, depended on the political agenda (or misfashioned disposition) of the person doing the asking. 436 Whitaker, A Disputation, 614. 437 In fact, at many points in A Disputation, Whitaker wants to suggest that the simpler passages

of scripture are superior to the more obscure passages. “But scripture does indeed explain itself with the utmost plainness and perspicuity, if we will only attend to scripture thus explaining itself; and although it may not in all places leave absolutely no room for doubt, yet it does so in most, and the most necessary places, and in the principal articles of faith” (488).

167 In 1588, Whitaker went to great lengths to remind his reader that Scripture and the Holy Spirit were not “mutually repugnant.” 438 After all, the end to which Scripture stretched was not mere understanding but understanding so that “we may be made like to God.” 439 To attain the internal assurance of the Holy Spirit one must read Scripture; and to properly read Scripture one must have first attained the internal assurance of the Holy Spirit. This hermeneutical circle inevitably placed stress in Whitaker’s analysis on the process itself. In his words, “the usage of scripture is to send us, for the true meaning of one part of scripture, to another; so that, in this way, we do not rest or acquiesce in any single portion, but embrace the whole body of the sacred volumes in our reading and meditation.” 440 Wandering from part to part while evolving in understanding led to a saving conception of the whole that, in turn, lent clarity and inspiration to the parts. The greatest mistake, Whitaker concluded, was to take leave of this process and to fixate on a single portion. The Spirit, in other words, was in the transitions. In their effort to give life to the Word through the feelings and actions of the spiritual traveler, members of the Family of Love created a similar hermeneutical circle. Straying from passage to passage served to enlist the reader in the process of determining the total message of Scripture. Enlivened by the text, and “godded with God,” this total message seeped back into its parts. If one were to make the tragic mistake of arresting this crucial cycle of interpretation by pulling back from the process itself, everything would suddenly appear absurd. To outsiders – to those who chose rather to freeze the text for later use in a heady lecture or disputation – the inspired interpreter seemed to be 438 Whitaker, A Disputation, 415. 439 Whitaker, A Disputation, 491. 440 Whitaker, A Disputation, 490. Christ, Whitaker adds, refuted “opponents who torture scripture

into various senses” by “testimonies of scripture compared together, skillfully applied and correctly understood.” Later in the text, he clarifies that the “drift” of Scripture “is to enable us to interpret scripture by scripture, not to direct us to have recourse to external means whenever we would expound a difficult place in scripture” (495).

168 aimlessly traipsing through allegorical mud while mumbling about the Spirit. To Familists, the surest method of achieving external verification for their interpretations, especially in light of the mistaken excesses of previous efforts, was to live the text. This indeed gave a special meaning to the passage from the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus with which anonymous Familists began both the Brief Rehersall and Temporis Filia Veritas: “Geve no sentence before thou hast heard the cause, but first let men tell out their Tales.”

169 CHAPTER V A STRAYING COLLECTIVE Following Hans Blumenberg’s dictum that “the task of all historical reflection” is rooted in the effort to imagine “what has become self-evident as something that was not originally self-evident,” Bourdieu suggests that the truly revolutionary figures of the past often succumb to the very revolutions they brought about. 441 In the case of the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, “the categories of perception that we apply to his actions and his works, and which are the product of the world resulting from that revolution, make them appear normal, natural, self-evident.” Bourdieu’s interest is in recapturing the original context in relation to which the products of artists like Baudelaire were oriented in a meaningful and deliberate fashion. This endeavor, he says, is in direct opposition to the celebrants of the Great Tradition whose “ordinary historiography” tends to view artists as isolated geniuses, anticipating their place in the later academic pantheon. “The sociology (or social history) that is always accused of being ‘reductive’ and of destroying the creative originality of the writer or artist is in fact capable of doing justice to the singularity of the great upheavals that ordinary historiography obliterates.” 442 Bourdieu’s critique of ordinary historiography may seem remote to the study of groups like the Family of Love whose artistic output has been given little attention over the years and whose religious proclivities are remembered, if at all, as practices not to be emulated. Yet, from another perspective, this is precisely why Bourdieu’s critique is important. Though the revolution in question may not have been one of their choosing, it nonetheless altered the retrospective portrait of HN and his followers. In 1592, Francis Bacon declared that Familism was “old news:” a “very great heresy” to be sure, but now, 441 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1999), 594.

442 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 85-86.

170 twelve years after the 1580 abjuration, appearing as harmless as “blisters in some small ignoble part of the body, which have soon after fallen and gone away.” 443 Familism may have come and gone like a blister, but Bacon was in the minority when he considered the group all-but-forgotten. This was more likely wishful thinking. Bacon was in the process of commending a recent libeler for avoiding mention of the Family in his catalogue of the “great troubles” facing the commonwealth. 444 This suggests, not that Familism had been forgotten, but that its memory (in Bacon’s mind at least) had ceased to be edificatory. In a later document, the author cited the Family of Love again, this time in the course of criticizing the unchristian practice of “amplifying wrongs” in the displaying of heretical nonconformity. “It is enough to note and number them; which I do also, to move Compassion, and remorse, on the offending side; and not, to animate Challengers, and Complaints, on the other.” 445 While Bacon was here referring to the unsavory practices of royal magistrates, his more general caution was to avoid an inordinate fixation on heretical minorities like the Family that pose no real threat. 446 Against Bacon’s wishes, the movement was to attain a level of celebrity in the next century. The following two sections address a number of the predominating characteristics of this celebrity. The most well known, due mainly to Thomas

443 Francis Bacon, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon including all his occasional works,

ed. James Spedding (London, 1861), 1:166. See also Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 169 for an elaboration of Bacon’s possible involvement with the Family of Love. 444 Bacon, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, 1:146. 445 Bacon, Resuscitatio, or, Bringing into publick light severall pieces of the works, civil,

historical, philosophical, & theological, hitherto sleeping, of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount Saint Alban according to the best corrected coppies : together with His Lordships life, ed. William Rawley (London, 1657), 174-175. 446 Bacon’s prudence is here reminiscent of his contemporary Andrew Perne in the parish of

Balsham (see above, p. 59). See also Marsh, “Piety and Persuasion,” and Patrick Collinson, “Perne the Turncoat: An Elizabethan Reputation,” in Elizabethans (London: Hambledon & London, 2000).

171 Middleton’s play, was the Family as lascivious laughingstock. Members of this “Pharasithypocritical crew,” as Middleton called them, were utterly selfless, but only in so far as “husband and wife are all one” and Familists loved their neighbors “better than their husbands.” 447 Less well known is the association of “Familistical” opinions with one among many promising philosophies in the seventeenth century – something, like alchemy or astrology, to be dabbled with or casually taken up for a time. A number of Niclaes’ books were, for example, reprinted in the period with little in the way of fanfare or scandal, suggesting that, in some small degree, Familism had become a marketable curiosity. 448 As late as 1661, the Behmenist Samuel Pordage blended images that were unmistakably Familist (see Figure 4) into the ornate hieroglyph at the end of his epic Mundorum Explicatio. 449 The final characteristic was of Familists as neutral freethinkers. The group was to be resurrected in the seventeenth century as a reservoir for godly anxieties regarding the alleged pantheistic and materialistic beliefs of a freethinking fringe who sought to undermine the established church. Perhaps for this reason, some later historians have remembered the Family as a force on the verge of the modern epoch.

447 Thomas Middleton, “The Family of Love,” in The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A.H.

Bullen, (London, 1885), 3:Act 3, Scene 3, Lines 110-111 and Act 2, Scene 4, Lines 73-78.

448 See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English

Revolution (London: Temple Smith Ltd, 1972), 141 where the author discusses the republication of Niclaes’ works in the 1640s alongside the writings of Jacob Boehme. Marsha Keith Schuchard has also noted that Archbishop Laud commissioned “a fine manuscript copy, with gilt centerpiece, of Hendrik Niklaes’s Second Exhortation to His Children and to the Family of Love” in 1633. Restoring the Temple Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (London: Brill Publishers, 2002), 400. 449 Two other scholars have noted the similarity between Pordage’s hieroglyph and Familist

iconography. See Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, n148 and B.J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism and its Development in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12. For the image reprinted in Figure 4, see Pordage, Mundorum explicatio, or, The explanation of an hieroglyphical figure wherein are couched the mysteries of the external, internal, and eternal worlds, shewing the true progress of a soul from the court of Babylon to the city of Jerusalem, from the Adamical fallen state to the regenerate and angelical : being a sacred poems (London, 1661), 336-337.

172

Figure 4. Pordage’s hieroglyph (1661). Source: Pordage, Samuel. Mundorum explicatio, or, The explanation of an hieroglyphical

figure wherein are couched the mysteries of the external, internal, and eternal worlds, shewing the true progress of a soul from the court of Babylon to the city of Jerusalem, from the Adamical fallen state to the regenerate and angelical : being a sacred poems. London, 1661.

173 While these later incarnations are fascinating in their own right, my aim is to exhibit the gradual upheaval stemming from the polemic of the 1570s and 80s that has clouded our ability to see sixteenth-century Familism in its original context. As will become clear over the course of the chapter, later Familism was, in the words of the bewildered Countryman from the Apology, “very straying.” 450 Members could, that is, take on any number of identities in the public eye. Where the Exile had hoped to play the charitable and conforming brethren to the Countryman, his predecessors were to play the fool, the libertine, and the revolutionary. Frank Familist in the seventeenth century Familism lingered in the popular imagination long after its members had slinked away from the world’s stage. By the winter of 1582, the flood of polemic against the group had largely receded, and Elizabeth I, surrounded by patently disloyal Jesuits and inconsistently loyal puritans, had more pressing matters on her mind. Knewstub, who had headed up the Queen’s investigation into Familist activity in the earlier part of the decade, was now embroiled in the campaign to oppose Archbishop Whitgift’s demand for subscription to the Prayer Book – an undertaking which not only alienated him from the Queen but later cost him his post on the grounds, ironically, of nonconformity. 451 A 450 Anon., An Apology , 51. 451 According to Patrick Collinson, Whitgift, who ascended to the position of Archbishop of

Canterbury in 1583, “began to emerge as the hand-picked general in a merciless war against the forward but often froward preaching ministry. The timing of this onslaught, to which the Queen was personally committed, could not have been more unfortunate, in the perception of the Protestant political nation. For it coincided with ever-growing threats to the safety of the queen and the realm, threats connected not with the little local difficulty of Puritanism but with the global menace of international popery” (Elizabethans, 77). Kenneth Fincham adds that, one of Whitgift’s first orders of business was to “circulate twelve articles to reform the discipline and government of the Church. Article six proposed a strict uniformity, offensive to all shades of nonconformist clergy, which provoked a major crisis.” “Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660, eds. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbrige: Boydell Press, 2000), 130-131. For Knewstub’s particular role in the period leading up to the subscription crisis see Francis Bremer, “Knewstub, John (1544-1624),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004 –), doi.10.1093/ref”odnb/15713. See also Bremer, Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2006), 2:151, 371.

174 letter of the same period survives in the Folger library from three “loving frendes” in the Privy Council, asking authorities in Cambridge to release a number of prisoners from the castle who had “growen diseased” since the Queen’s 1580 proclamation against the alleged sectaries. The one-time zealots, now tired and lame, had abjured their affiliation with “anye heresie of the said familie, or H.N. the principall author therof,” and were, upon royal command, to be set free until further notice. 452 As Christopher Marsh has noted, any argument for Familist activity after the passing of the first generation must rely almost exclusively on the hearsay of hostile commentators. 453 Two documents do, however, exist from the early Stuart period that include the voices of probable Familists, The Supplication of the Family of Love (1604) and John Etherington’s A Description of the Church of Christ (1610). The Supplication was largely an attempt to ingratiate the Family with the new Scottish King in the wake of Elizabeth’s death in 1603. Earlier, in 1599, the future James I had advised his young son to fiercely suppress those “verie pestes in the Church and common-weill of Scotland,” the so-called “puritans.” Because, James continued, Scotland had been reformed by “popular tumult,” these more “fyerie ministers” had capitalized on the confusion by insinuating dreams of democratic government into the minds of the common people. 454 James’ official denunciation of the Presbyterian movement would have been music to the ears of English Familists. However, as luck would have it, James soon changed his tune. In 1603, in sight of the English throne, he noted that “some of the honest sort” in England had misunderstood his “sharpe and bitter words” against the

452 Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, Loseley MS X.d.30, fol. 1v. I would like to thank

Marjon Ames for sharing a copy of this manuscript with me. Marsh briefly mentions the Privy Council letter in The Family of Love in English Society, 110. 453 Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 236.

454 James VI, Basilikon Doron Devided into three bookes (Edinburgh, 1599), 49, 46. See also,

51-52 for further references to the “puritane.”

175 Presbyterians in 1599. Changing tack, he clarified that, by “puritan,” he had hoped only to advise his son against “that vile sect amongst the Anabaptists, called the Familie of Love.” 455 The presence of Familists in Scotland during its reformation in the 1560s is farfetched indeed, and the Familist writer of the Supplication can hardly be blamed for harboring a barely-stifled indignation at being compared to “our mortall enemies, the disobedient Purtianes.” 456 In the 1570s, members had made the case to John Rogers that the Family, though Dutch in origin, was not an Anabaptist organization. 457 Members were likewise clear that the term “puritan” reflected a stubborn tendency to ignore decorum, cultivate hatred of one’s neighbor, and contend with the established regime all in the name of a myopic and therefore tragically literalistic interpretation of Scripture. Surely, they thought, James could provide little evidence for either charge. Perhaps, the author of the Supplication humbly suggested, his Majesty had never had the benefit of reading HN’s works. If so, the English Family would be happy to arrange for a few writings to be dispatched from Cologne along with “some of the learned men of that Countrie … that were well acquainted with the author and his works in his life time.” 458 455 James I, Basilikon Doron or His Maiesties instructions to his dearest sonne, Henrie the prince

(London, 1603), A3r, A4v.

456 Anon., A Supplication, B2r. 457 Rogers, The Displaying, I8r-v. As an aside, it seems that the letters written in the 1570s in

response to Rogers’ original publication of The Displaying did not do the 17th century Familists any favors. ER, for example, had alluded to the fact that English Familists enjoyed the Queen’s favor in the process of threatening Rogers (The Displaying, I7v). As Marsh proposes, the letters “ER” might have been a loosely veiled allusion to those Familists serving in the Queen’s guard who had the letters emblazoned on their coats (standing for “Elizabetha Regni”). Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 120-121). When the Familist author of the Supplication claimed, in 1604, that “we are a people but fewe in number, and yet most of us very poore in worldly wealth” (H1v), the hostile editor of the text could confidently counter that Familists, according to the Displaying were great in number and, indeed, increasing. Moreover, “they say they are also poore, or the most of them: but if the booke of their names, called of them The booke of Life, could be seene, it would then appeare, I doubt not, that both the number of them is great, and most of them very rich” (H2r). He also acknowledged, as ER had hinted in 1579, that the Queen kept Familists as “her housholde servants” (C2v). 458 Anon., A Supplication, D2v, G2v.

176 However, as was to become increasingly apparent over the course of the seventeenth century, the term “Familist” had political utility and, as such, enjoyed the same useful indeterminacy as the terms “Anabaptist” and “puritan.” The authentic voice of a humble Familist supplicant was to become little more than a voice crying out in the dark. A second story of the London box-maker and alleged sect-master, John Etherington, is a particularly fascinating one, and has recently been the subject of a detailed study by Peter Lake. 459 While James’ Familist supplicant had spoken proudly of his affiliation with the followers of HN, Etherington chose rather to absorb elements of Familism into his own, autonomous worldview. In so doing, he speaks to a practice of dabbling in Familist ideas that would come to dominate the treatment of the group in seventeenth-century print. Etherington’s first work, The Description of the Church of Christ, flirted with Familism, mentioning HN and his followers in words that were ambiguous if not favorable while copying, in a rather obvious manner, the form and content of Temporis Filia Veritas. 460 A decade and a half later, the Description earned Etherington the unwanted attention of Stephen Denison – a “John Knewstub” of sorts for the Jacobean and Caroline ages – who accused the former box-maker of corrupting his parishioners through the subtle conceits of HN. Etherington denied the charges, was briefly imprisoned, and, in 1641, published a Defense of himself against Denison that declared his disgust with all sectarian error. In words reminiscent of ER and FL, Etherington lamented that he had been accused of “tenents and opinions” that were allegedly a “sure mark whereby they should know a Familist” – only nobody, lest their witch-hunt be

459 Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: “Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy,” and the Politics of the

Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 460 See Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 243-244.

177 discredited, could remember what these tenets and opinions were. 461 In 1623, Etherington had updated his condemnation of Anabaptism in the 1610 Description, adding new sections against Familist perfectionism, and, in 1645, he was to compensate for his public embarrassment at the hands of Denison by publishing A Brief Discovery of the Blasphemous Doctrine of Familism. 462 Had Etherington, like James I, simply changed his tune for political reasons? Had he, rather, chosen to denounce an emergent and lascivious form of Familism while retaining tenets of the authentic Familism of the 1570s and 80s – a proposition entertained by Christopher Marsh? 463 In his striking explication of the 1610 Description, Lake comes to the conclusion that, although Etherington clearly marketed the text as a “piece of anti-separatist, indeed, of anti-puritan, propaganda” in line with the conformist ideology of John Whitgift, he nevertheless exhibited an “H.N.-centered familist view of the world.” 464 As the last two chapters have suggested, these two perspectives were not necessarily antagonistic; members of the Family of Love were as eager to denounce both 461 John Etherington, The Defence of John Etherington against Stephen Denison, and his

Witnesses, their Accusations, and Depositions (London, 1641), 21. “For all the fanfares and trumpets of The white wolf [the text in which Denison refutes Etherington] with its distinctions between the Castalian familists, the Gringltonian familists and the familists of the mountains and the valleys,” says Lake, “Denison, in fact, knew a good deal less about familism than he claimed. … It is surely not without significance that, having spent pages denouncing Etherington as a familist and an anabaptist, Denison chose not to engage with or confute any of Etherington’s supposedly familist opinions” (The Boxmaker’s Revenge, 148-149). 462 Etherington [published under the name Edmund Jessop], A Discovery of the errors of the

English Anabaptists as also an admonition to all such as are led by the spirit of error (London, 1523); A Brief discovery of the Blasphemous Doctrine of Familism, first conceived and brought forth into the world by one Henry Nicolas about an hundred years ago (London, 1645). 463 Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 241. In the early twentieth century, the

historian Rufus Jones made a similar point: “It is quite probable that loose livers took advantage of the movement in its beginning, and, under the guise of a spiritual Family of Love, formed a Family of Love with low motives and so gave the Society a bad reputation. No such charges can be established against the founder himself or against the genuine members of the House of Love” (Studies in Mystical Religion, 435n3). 464 Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, 113,115. After all, Etherington was known to have owned a

copy of Niclaes’ Evangelium Regni (110).

178 separatists and puritans as were those who accused them of being separatists and puritans. More to the point, as illustrated in Chapter 3, engagement with the world and refusal to separate was a central tenet of the Familist religion. If individuals existed in the seventeenth century who masked their libertinism, hypocritical Pelagianism, and backbiting with the term “Familist,” then ER and FL would, presumably, join Etherington in condemning them. So, was Etherington a Familist in 1610 when he published the Description? Not in the limited sense often attributed to the cult of HN by its hostile critics in the 1570s. There were, indeed, obvious Familist expressions littered throughout the work. The recurring emphasis on “overcoming,” the favoring of spiritual baptism over an “elementish Baptism,” numerous references to the “book of life” and to the perfected “little-ones” whose names were written in its pages and who would someday reside in a “land of peace,” were all redolent of the movement. 465 If this was not enough, the Description closed by rehearsing the hostile opinions of a Papist, a Protestant, a Puritan, an Anabaptist, and a Familist in much the same way as had the Temporis. “There is,” wrote Etherington, “a Controversie this day in the world where Christ should be…Wolves in sheepes cloathing on every side.” 466 However, the argument for Etherington’s Familism on the basis of this evidence is not convincing, and for an important reason: Etherington was self-consciously and studiously tinkering with Familist ideas. In doing so, he both rejected and absorbed elements of Niclaes’ written philosophy. In the very same text, Etherington warned would-be separatists, “running from Sect to Sect, and from error to error,” that many

465 See Etherington, The Description, 4-6, 9, 12, 31, 49, 76, 103, 113. These were but a few of the

arguably “familisitical” statements in the work. See also 2, 10, 63-64, 66, 89, 118 for further expressions that occur also in numerous Familist writings. 466 Etherington, The Description, 114, 117.

179 have now become “carnall and blasphemous Familists” as a result of such behavior. 467 He was to repeat the expression, almost verbatim, in 1623. Furthermore, the Temporis-like conclusion of the Description is far from the endorsement of Familism that both Marsh and Lake want it to be. Marsh relates that there is a “notable lack of satire and scorn” in Etherington’s treatment of the Familist speaker, whose defense “occupies over twice as much page-space as the combined contributions of the four others.” 468 This is true. But, after the Familist, it is the Anabaptist who receives the most thorough treatment; and it is therefore not unreasonable to assume that Etherington, who devoted most of the Description to refuting Anabaptism, simply thought that the two movements deserved special attention because they were the most dangerous. There may also be, as Marsh suggests, a notable lack of scorn in Etherington’s depiction of God’s “obedient man, H.N.” A lack of satire, however, is more difficult to maintain. HN is said to speak “with darke, and parabolous saying,” among other things, “condemning the whole word [world?],” “saying Christ is not, nor was not a man,” maintaining that “it is possible to keep all the ten commandments” and that to accomplish this feat is to be “risen from the dead.” 469 This reads like a litany, not of Familist belief, but of “Familistical” heresy. Etherington’s Familism, if it existed, would presumably have been a great deal subtler than that of the conveniently literal-minded apostate Leonard Romsye from Chapter 2 who had “confessed” his Familist heresies before a Wisbech magistrate thirty years prior. The Temporis-like conclusion did not, then, turn Etherington’s work, as Lake says, “into a full-blown familist manifesto.” 470 Lake’s rehearsal of the final lines of the 467 Etherington, The Description, 92. 468 Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 239. 469 Etherington, The Description, 116. 470 Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, 110.

180 Description is misleading, for it transgresses the admittedly fuzzy boundary between Etherington’s paraphrasing of the Familist and his own sentiments. In particular, Lake attributes statements to Etherington-as-Etherington that precede the close of the dialogue and therefore rightly belong to the imaginary Familist speaker. 471 The boundary, however, does exist. Etherington, speaking as himself, begins the dialogue by noting that there are woeful divisions “this day in the world” and asking the question “where is Christ to be found?” The representative of each division then makes his case before thus concluding: “therefore he is here.” 472 This ends, three pages later, with the Familist who maintains, just like the others, that Christ is with the followers of HN. In the very next sentence, Etherington resumes his own discourse, echoing the words with which he began the dialogue by observing, “these are strange and woefull times.” 473 As Lake argues elsewhere in his work on the box-maker, the 1610 manifesto was first and foremost a “creative bricolage,” in which Familist elements swam alongside other, more orthodox ideas. “Here,” for instance, “was the pure conformist gospel as preached by John Whitgift and myriad other defenders of the Elizabethan status quo.” 474 But was Etherington’s Whitgiftianism also Familism or had he simply chosen to avoid all 471 Lake observes, rather ambiguously, of the dialogue: “These, he concludes, were ‘the

contentions of our days, who shall end the controversy?’ He answered his own question telling the reader ‘to put away therefore all your good thinkings and all your scripture learnedness … for … whosoever comes to learn at this school must be as simple and hold himself as ignorant as a little child.’” “In that state,” Lake, continues, “the reader was fit to ‘take this book but keep it close, for H.N. hath many enemies, especially among the wrangling crew’” (The Boxmaker’s Revenge, 110). The first citation in Lake’s prose is in fact the last in Etherington’s text (118) and is spoken after the author closed the dialogue and resumed his own voice. The second two citations, including the characteristically Familist sayings (“good thinkings” and “scripture learnedness”), alongside the reference to Niclaes, are from the previous page (117) and are spoken by the imaginary Familist, arguably before Etherington had closed the dialogue. If Etherington, speaking in his own voice, had so defended HN against the good thinking and scripture-learned, then it would certainly be fair to claim, as Lake does, that the close of the Description transformed the whole work into “familist manifesto.” 472 Etherington, The Description, 115. 473 Etherington, The Description, 117. 474 Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, 400, 106.

181 sides –being “all things to all men”? If not for those elements like the closing dialogue that, ironically, later commentators have pointed to as sign of the author’s Familistical opinions, it would indeed be possible to paint a picture of Etherington as unabashedly Familist and conformist. There were, after all, places in the Description where the author had absorbed ideas that were shared by both camps. Though various ceremonies and ordinances were adiaphora they were nonetheless to be obeyed lest “wee are guilty of the breach of the morall law, which saieth, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy selfe.” 475 Love, moreover, was the fruit of regeneration for Etherington – the true, spiritual baptism that rendered foolish the ceremonies of the Dutch Anabaptists who had turned their backs on mother England. 476 Asleep in the love, the little ones of the Lord rested in their liberty, while the pharisaical wranglers “pretended reformation in the generall” while forgetting to “reform [themselves] in particular.” 477 Given his repeated, if not originally somewhat ambiguous, denunciations of Familism, it is probable that Etherington wished simply to avoid “all sides.” He was a dabbler and, as such, he points in the direction Familism was to take in the popular imagination of the seventeenth century. While condemning the movement for a third and final time in 1645, Etherington casually recounted that he had talked with Familists some forty years ago, learned of their doctrine, and knew, in particular, of “one great person” who had discussed HN with him on numerous occasions. 478 Like many of his contemporaries, Etherington perhaps saw in the cult of HN something of a promising philosophy saddled with the burden of its potentially blasphemous popular incarnations.

475 Etherington, The Description, 82. 476 See Etherington, The Description, 10, 31, 108. 477 Etherington, The Description, 90. 478 Etherington, A Breif Discovery, 10.

182 The most discussed of such incarnations has certainly been Thomas Middleton’s play The Family of Love (1608), 479 but there were others. “Frank Familist” – alongside “Sim Separatist,” “Rodulphus Reformer,” and “Agnes Anabaptist” – was to appear in numerous plays over the course of the seventeenth century. 480 Often, the figure of the Familist was a source of comic relief, and a simple allusion to the group was enough to communicate to the audience the potential for sexual transgression lurking behind the motives of a given character. In the second act of George Chapman’s comedy Sir Gyles Goosecappe (1606), for instance, the noble lady Eugenia and her two ladies-in-waiting, Penelope and Hyppolita, are greeted by two dashing lords who sit down to join the women for dinner. Asked by the more innocent suitor if she “lacks guests,” Eugenia responds rather coquettishly: “I my Lord such guests as you.” Hyppolita: 2nd Lord:

There’s as common an answere, as yours was a question my Lord. Why? All things should be common betwixt Lords and Ladies you know.

479 Hamilton describes Middleton’s work as having a scornful and “mocking attitude” toward the

Family (The Family of Love, 135). Kristen Poole and Marsh, however, see a more complex dynamic working through the lewd activities of the unforgivably lascivious Familists in the play. In fact, says Poole, the play seems even to celebrate these activities. “The Family of Love, which stages a victory for the subversive freedoms of Familism over the rigors of the law, may well have catered to an audience curious about and sympathetic to this form of radical religion” (Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton, 102). Marsh, in a brilliant microhistorical approach to Middleton’s work, suggests that many of the people in the audience would have been familiar with James I’s recent panning of Familists as puritans and that Middleton perhaps intentionally “fused” the two stereotypes for comic effect. “James I,” Marsh writes, “in apparent seriousness, had confused the identities of two distinct religious groups; Middleton, in jest, did precisely the same thing” (The Family of Love in English Society, 210). Indeed, Marsh goes so far as to suggest that the play was less antifamilist in intention than it was “a carefully crafted satire on the way in which an essentially harmless and respectable religious ‘fraternity’ could be misrepresented by jealous and hostile minds.” It was only as the seventeenth century wore on that “the satirical Familist stereotype [Middleton] did so much to create became a popular figure of fun on the London stage, though Middleton’s subtle and positive undertones were almost certainly lost” (213-213). 480 Richard Carter, The Schismatick Stigmatized. Wherein all Make-bates are branded; whether

they are Eves-dropping-newes-carriers, Murmurers, Complainers, Railers, Reproachers, Revilers, Repining Reformers, Fault-finders, Quarrell-pickers, and Corner-creepers; with all the rabble of Brainsicks, who are enemies to Old Englands Peace (London, 1641), 15.

183 Penelope: Eugenia:

Indeed Sir Kuttberd Bingcob, I have heard, you are either of the familie of Love, or of no religion at all. Hee may well be said to be of the family of Love, he does so flowe in the loves of poore overthrowne Ladies. 481

The exploitation of the word “common,” the view of Familism as one step away from atheism, and the association of “the Love” with lust were all popular tropes in the seventeenth century. Both Middleton and the unsuccessful London dramatist, Richard Flecknoe, also exploited the word “minister” to refer to the manner in which hypocritical Familists catered to the needs of their wonton followers. 482 As Swapan Chakravorty notes of drama in the seventeenth century, the subject of Familism, seen as a “secret agenda of communism and sexual license,” “became virtually synonymous with sexual libertinism.” 483 Thus, whomever the Family had really been in the sixteenth century had ceased, by the seventeenth, to matter. Supplications, like the Apology of 1580 or the address to James I in 1604, were to have little effect on the popular development of “Frank” the lascivious and laughably hypocritical Familist. If, as Peter Lake has argued, the middle ground of moderate, conforming Christianity (Starkey’s via media) was the prize territory in an unending struggle between individuals of otherwise irreconcilable religious positions, then the Family of Love had lost the fight and had been shoved to the periphery. 484 481 George Chapman, Sir Gyles Goosecappe, A Knight (London, 1606), Act 2, Scene 1. 482 See Thomas Middleton, The familie of love, Acted by the children of his Majesties revels (London, 1608), Act II, Scene 1 and Richard Flecknoe, Love’s Dominion, A Dramatique Peace, Full of Excellent Moralitie; Written as a Pattern for the Reformed Stage (London, 1654), 22-23. 483 Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1996), 27. See also Johnson, “The Family of Love in Stuart Literature,” 95-112.

484 See Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). According to Lake, “the whole debate between conformists and precisians can be seen as a struggle for the middle ground, their respective polemical positions can in turn be seen as attempts to shift and modify the definition of ‘true moderation’ by the manipulation of the twin threats of popery and separation” (77). A similar point is made in Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, 398.

184 This fate was nowhere more apparent than in the later work of the restless London preacher Henoch Clapham who, in 1608, published two companion dialogues lampooning Errour on the Right hand and Errour on the left. Clapham had himself been privy to the former error, exhibiting what he called a “preposterous zeale” in his youth. 485 In the 1590s, he had aligned himself with the Presbyterian faction, had flatly denied the legitimacy of the Queen’s religion, and found himself in prison for allegedly embracing the willful sectarianism of the Brownists. Exiled from England upon release, Clapham soon reformed his ways. In 1598, shortly before returning to his home country, he made a public denunciation of his former affiliation. The Brownists, he now believed, had made the terrible mistake of condemning the English Church for its failure to live up to the model of the primitive church with its “ministery of Pastors, Doctors, Elders, Deacons, Widowes,” and so on. These, Clapham countered, were, in truth, merely elements of “outward church government…not essential or of the Ghospells substance.” 486 By the plague of 1603, the recovering Brownist had evidently taken his zeal for national loyalty too far, claiming that one must not run away or seek “physic” but

485 Henoch Clapham, Errour on the Right Hand, through a preposterous Zeale (London, 1608),

sig. 1r. Apart from Clapham’s own writings, some of the following biographical information is drawn from Alexandra Walsham, “Henoch Clapham (fl. 1585-1614),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004 –), doi: 10:1093/ref:odnb/5431. 486 Clapham, The syn, against the holy ghoste made manifest from those grounds of faith, which

have bene taught & received by the faithful in England, & that for those 40 y. together under the prosperous raigne of my Soveraigne Lady and Quene Elizabet (Amsterdam, 1598), B3r. In Errour on the Right hand, Clapham seems to reference the debate (discussed in Chapter 4) between the Cambridge divine Laurence Chaderton and Thomas Rogers in the latter part of the 1580s over Romans 12:6-8. Chaderton had maintained the necessity of the offices of Pastor, Doctor, Elder, Deacon, and Widow in his Fruitfull Sermon of 1584. Rogers later in 1590 published a Confutation of Chaderton’s anonymous work, claiming that his reading of Romans was a “manifest wresting and perverting of Gods word.” In Clapham’s 1608 text, the two travelers, Malcontent and Flyer, debate much the same subject. In response to Flyer’s accusation that he has forsaken the English Church because “the true government of Christ Jesus (consisting in Pastors, Doctors, Elders, Deacons and Wydowes) is lacking,” Malcontent admits that, yes, “I thinke I so writ once in a Sermon upon Rom. 12.6, 7, 8.” To this, Flyer adds: “if you remember, I was one of your Classis, when in Cambridge you (in secret) chattred out that Sermon upon Rom. 12. which afterwardes was published without name” (Errour on the Right hand, 3).

185 rather face God’s pestilential scourge head-on. After all, he said, “leaning on the Lords promise, what neede is there of locall flight or cover?” 487 Surprisingly, Clapham did survive the plague to write against Familism in 1608 – though not before once again being imprisoned for contempt of the laws set down for public safety in the Book of Orders. 488 In Errour on the Right hand, Clapham drew from his early days as an itinerant sectarian to tell the story of Flyer, a member of the Church of England, who flees a malcontented puritan only to meet with an Anabaptist, a Legatine-Arian, and a Familist along the road. The Familist – who has apparently traveled a parallel path from simple weaver to Brownist, Anabaptist, and, finally, follower of HN – is portrayed as something of a whiz in the marketplace of heretical spiritualism. Indeed, says the Arian to Flyer, “now in one quarter of an hower whilst he is in his Loome, he can comprehend farre greater Revelations of the Spirit, then (whilst he was out of the Family) he could in his whole life.” 489 Flyer is immediately impressed with the Familist. However, the Legatine-Arian soon grows intimidated by the rival heresy and, after a comic display, parts with the two others. Legat. ar.: Famalist: Legat. ar.:

You are a paltry Heretique, for calling the Bibles faith, by the name of Scripturelearnedness. Dear Brother, raile not: but submit yourself to the Lovely-beeing. You are a lovely-Asse: and there is a lovely boxe on the ear for you.

487 Clapham, An Epistle discoursing upon the present pestilence Teaching what it is, and how the

people of God should carrie themselves towards God and their neighbour therein (London, 1603), B2v. Interestingly, the historian Keith Thomas has noted the way in which some critics of the Family of Love (Laurence Chaderton and Richard Greenham, in particular) accused the sect of holding “naturalistic views.” The Family, Thomas writes, “apparently attributed all troubles to outward causes, and had expelled a member for regarding a chill he had caught as a divine visitation” (Religion and the Decline of Magic, 100). If, by chance, Clapham had met a Familist holding these views in 1603, the two would most certainly have disagreed. 488 See Clapham, His demaundes and answeres touching the pestilence methodically handled, as

his time and meanes could permit (London, 1604), A2r, D2v. 489 Clapham, Errour on the Right hand, 46-47.

186 Famalist: Legat. ar.: Famalist:

Will you provoke mee? Will you provoke mee? Whya sir foole; your opinion of Love is against fighting. Doe not provoke mee brother: for though I am of that opinion, I am yet clothed with the old flesh. 490

Rid of the heretical Arian, it seems as if Flyer has found a solution to England’s religious division in the well-travelled and spiritually enlightened Familist. Division, the Familist explains to his companion, results when a literalistic approach to the scriptures combines with a particularly fierce and iconoclastic spirit. Adamant that God’s word tends in one direction and not another, those outside the Love revolt against the status quo and seek to set up their idiosyncratic customs as law. This had certainly been the case among the Brownists, but also, he adds, among Protestants and Papists. No one (excepting the Family, of course) really understands the Love and thus no one is able to live peaceably under its mantel. 491 Later in Clapham’s text, Flyer and the Familist happen upon an alehouse and decide to sit down for a drink. Seeing Tannikin, a “cherry-cheeked damsel,” across the room, the latter character grabs hold of the opportunity to prove his Familist metal to Flyer. “Could you behold her naked, and not lust?” Taken aback by the challenge, Flyer admits that no, he could not. “O, you’r deceived: There is no one Goddified amongst us, but can behold many of them naked, without any carnal lusting.” Still somewhat baffled, Flyer watches with horror as the Familist begins to assault Tannikin in an effort, ironically, to show that he has transcended all desires of the flesh. 492 This grotesque exhibition in the spirit of Paul’s command to “have as if not having” is the final straw, sending Flyer back into the outstretched arms of the English Church. Here, in the final pages of Errour on the Right hand, he meets the champion of 490 Clapham, Errour on the Right hand, 50. 491 Clapham, Errour on the Right hand, 52-53. 492 Clapham, Errour on the Right hand, 53-55.

187 the via media, Medioctritie, and finds comfort in his moderate and “tender information.” 493 In the process, the Familist is tossed on the same pile as the Anabaptist and the Legatine Arian. Mimicking the format of Clapham’s work, popular broadsides were later to depict the errant follower of HN as just one in a catalogue of popular heretics available for literary appropriation [see Figures 4 and 5]. Pictured beside an Adamite in the nude, an Ante Scripturian shaking an overturned Bible, and a Libertine with hammer lifted against the Decalogue, the Familist raised a demonstrative finger toward the sky. As the caption read: “A perfect state like Adams, is pretended, | Whilst outwardly each day God is offended.” 494 Another broadside portrayed the Familist as one drowning face in a sea of popular errors safely navigated by an ark holding the enthroned personification of the Church. There is some evidence, however, that Familism could be interpreted as a promising philosophy. 495 Though his works were otherwise littered with blistering criticism of the group, Richard Greenham could nevertheless admit that, in a fallen world, HN might have some appeal. “We have the mysteries of iniquitie to teach the mysteries of righteousness,” Greenham wrote of the Family, “and we must learn love of them, which are the abusers of love.” 496 A similar backhanded compliment can be found in 493 Clapham, Errour on the Right hand, 57. Reflecting on his journey, Flyer tells Mediocritie:

“Next day I met with a Familist. Hee by his talke of Love, Love, and beeing in Love, and nothing but Love, so prevailed, together with his running glo[ss]ing on Scripture, as I left all to follow him, till I see his beeing in love and lust” (58). 494 R.A., A Catalogue of the severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nation , With a

briefe Rehearsall of their false and dangerous Tenents (London, 1646), Broadside.

495 See for example Hill’s discussion of Familism in The World Turned Upside Down for more on the group’s popular appeal. “In the 1640s,” writes Hill, “attitudes toward the lower-class heresy of Familism were almost the test of radicalism. John Milton defended Familists. The Leveller William Walwyn asked the enemies of the Family of Love ‘What family are you of, I pray?’ John Hales of Eton condescendingly observed that ‘some time or other those fine notions will take in the world’” (29). 496 Richard Greenham, The Works of the Reverend and Faithfull Servant of Jesus Christ M.

Richard Greenham, Minister and Preacher of the Word of God, collected into one volume: Revised,

188 Etherington’s work. Having familiarized himself with the Evangelium Regni, he channeled elements of Niclaes’ philosophy in his early work while denouncing his followers as blasphemous sectarians. Later, he probably discovered that these philosophical fragments could be framed in other, less controversial, terms. Pursued by the angry hounds of Stephen Denison, Etherington threw HN to the wayside.

Figure 5. 1647 heresy broadside. Source: Anon. A Catalogue of the severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nation , With a briefe Rehearsall of their false and dangerous Tenents. London, 1647.

Corrected, and Published, for the further building of all such as love the truth, and desire to know the power of godliness (London, 1612), 453.

189

Figure 6. 1648 heresy broadside. Anon., The invincible vveapon or truths triumph over errors, by vvhich all the true bred sonnes of the Church, may obtain strength to vvithstand the desperate tenents that have been broached… London, 1648. < http://eebo.chadwick.com>

Other sources from the period suggest a less-conflicted acquaintance with Familist philosophy. A 1658 copy of Thomas May’s comedy, The Old Couple, included a particularly eclectic list of “Books worth buying” from Samuel Steed’s bookshop in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Here alongside the works of the puritan minister Nicholas Lockyer and the late Lancelot Andrewes were “The first Exhortation of H.N. to his children” and “H.N. on the Beatitudes, and the seaven deadly sins.” 497 According to Margaret Spufford, the paratextual convention of trade-lists like Speed’s emerged in the 1650s as a means “to tempt the pious to further purchase,” and often drew a clear distinction 497 Thomas May, The Old Couple, A Comedy (London, 1658), 49.

190 between godly chapbooks and more “secular” conceits. 498 Speed’s trade-list, however, fails to make the distinction. The profane Exhortatio mingles with the sacred writings of the godly. In the period between 1657 and 1660, Speed’s name also appeared on a number of printed works dealing with astrology, natural magic, and the “art of physic” 499 – subjects that, if we are to believe Keith Thomas, were associated with the Family of Love in the popular imagination. 500 The trade-list points to a growing market in the mid-seventeenth century for works on the margins of orthodoxy – curiosities that, like objects in a Wunderkammer, could be safely handled because long since parodied and purged of their dark powers. Given the image of Familism as a reserve for dark, alchemical, and cabalistic practices, 501 it is not surprising that the Elizabethan sect could be resurrected as the province of youthful rebellion. Bored by the austerity of their parents’ Christianity, young adults, like Clapham’s Flyer, would seek new adventures before inevitably returning to Mediocrity and to the Church of England. The group, in this scenario, played a role in a 498 Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership

in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 197. See also Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 318. 499 Of the texts printed for Samuel Speed, I have found six which deal more-or-less explicitly

with these subjects: John Sadler’s Enchiridion medicum: an enchiridion of the art of physic (1657), Giambattista della Porta’s Natural magick (1658), Robert Turner’s Astrological institutions (1658), Richard Edlyn’s Observationes astrologicae, or, An astrologicall discourse (1659), George Atwell’s An apology or, defence of the divine art of natural astrologie (1660), and, finally, the anonymous A brief answer to six syllogistical arguments brought by Mr. Clark, minister of Bennet-Finck, London: against astrologers, and astrologie (1660). Thomas also notes that “more books on alchemy were published in England between 1650 and 1680 than before or afterwards” (Religion and the Decling of Magic, 270). 500 See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 100, 322, 446-448. 501 See, for example, Thomas Scot, Philomythie or Philomythologie wherein Outlandish Birds,

Beasts, and Fishes, are taught to speake true English plainely (London, 1622) where the author compares English Familists with Dutch Brownists. Thomas urges such sectarians to “findeout Sr. Thomas Mores Utopia, or rather Platoes Communitie, & be an Elder there…Foolish Alchemisters they are both, seeking a Philosophers Stone” (E5v – E6r). Much of Thomas Scot’s description is repeated verbatim in Pagitt’s Hersiography, 74-75. Richard Baxter grouped Familists together with Cabbalists in his Scripture Gospel defended (London, 1690) and Oliver Foulis discussed Familism in his Cabala: or, the Mystery of Conventicles Unvailed (London, 1664), 24-25, 38-39.

191 narrative of prodigality that always affirmed, in the end, the values of the dominant culture while ridding the occult of its mysterious attraction. According to one chapbook of the period, the “real” Family of Love still existed in the woods around London. The true tale of one Mistress Susan Snow (1641) promised to delight the reader with a story of paganism, sex, and madness under the “signe of the Bucke” near the Surrey village of Bagshot. 502 Having first heard of the group from a family friend, Snow, we are told, became obsessed. The young woman embarked on a journey of discovery, “vowing not to returne till she had seen some of their behaviours.” Before long, she happened upon a dense forest of birch trees where she met a number of the company who took her a bit further into a clearing in order to hear a sermon in honor of the God Cupid. The leader, after uttering a few bawdy passages in Latin from Virgil’s Epigrams, sat down with the rest of the Family to eat. Seeing Snow, however, he became distracted by her beauty and “mightily enflamed with her, that either he must enjoy her or perish.” 503 She consented, and after a week amidst the heathens, she returned to her concerned father. Safe at home, she was plagued by her past experiences with the Family of Love, descending into melancholy until she “fell starke mad.” A divine was called in from Oxford to attend to her and, upon seeing him, “she shrieked out, and cried, The divell, the divell, I am damn’d, I am damn’d, I am damn’t, with many such like horrid horrible exclamations.” 504 After a half-hour in paroxysms, the story ended with Snow’s miraculous redemption.

502 Anon., A Description of the Sect called the Familie of Love: With their common place of

residence (London, 1641), A2r.

503 Anon.. A Description, A2v - A3r. 504 Anon., A Description, A3v - A4r. “I cannot express her fathers grief,” writes the storyteller,

“when he saw his onely beloved daughter in this plight. But I will leave you to judge of it who have children of your owne, how it would grieve you to see your children in such a plight.”

192 True tales like Snow’s profoundly changed the memory of the Family. As one historian noted during the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, there had been, at one point in time, “a real difference” between Familists, Enthusiasts, Antinomians, and Anabaptists; though, at present, there was practically no discerning between “their severall absurdities.” 505 That Familism as it actually was had ceased to carry any real importance had already become apparent by James’ accession in 1603. Etherginton could later harangue the monolithic “Familist” monster in 1610 as the culmination of all sectarian movements while nonetheless utilizing philosophical elements that had once held currency in Familist circles. Clapham, writing around the same period, dramatized the pilgrimage from sect to sect, piquing his reader’s curiosity with the admirable and loving Familist before pulling back the veil to reveal him as a base libertine. Later popular writings would detail a similar descent into Familist madness, using the group as an antipode by which to highlight the true middle way of the English church. The followers of HN, who had struggled for decades to avoid error on the right and on the left, had lost their ground. Familist neutrality and Modernity If Familism could be made to play the magician and the fool in a period that saw the decline of magic and the triumph of the middle way, it could also, paradoxically, appear to contemporaries and later commentators as a rationalistic, or even scientific movement. In hindsight, sixteenth and seventeenth century sources do provide some evidence for this claim, albeit in the form of antifamilist polemic. Benjamin Bourne’s convoluted text, The Description and Confutation of Mystical Antichrist, the Familists (1646) implied that the “neutrall” Family of Love worshipped a deus absconditus, a God

505 Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain; from the Birth of Jesus Christ to the Year

M.DC.XLVIII (London, 1655), 113. See also Rutherford, A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist, 171-193 for a thorough confusion of Familism and Antinomianism in the context of New England and Rhode Island in particular.

193 who had withdrawn his providential care from human civilization. In his absence, “the Devil in a black shape saith, that the visible world, and the externall things thereof, is thy onely comfort.” For Bourne, then, Familism was ultimately about controlling the visible world. Like Goliath, he said, members of the group hoped, “by the knowledge of Astrologie and strength of Reason,” to conquer the humble faith of David. 506 That astrology had become associated with the “strength” of human reason was apparent in the fervency with which the London bookseller John Allen condemned the rational pretenses of astrologers for the “publick good” in the fall of 1659. The motives behind this condemnation were both godly and intellectual. The first section of his Judicial Astrologers Totally Routed dealt with the subject of astrology as an affront to divine providence and as a gateway to moral relativism. The affairs of individuals, Allen demanded, do not succeed or fail by “natural means” but by their “carriage towards God” who, in the end, decides all things. Astrology, as such, sapped the very marrow of godly living in England. “Indeed,” he said, “learned men have observed that such delusions have prevailed amongst popish and anabaptistical spirits. But that England should countenance such! and in a time of Reformation, Oh let us blush for shame!” 507 The following section of Allen’s work concerned itself rather with the intellectual absurdity of astrology. Since reason rested solely on experience, and only God could experience the vast celestial tapestry, the judgments of astrologers, he concluded, were based fundamentally on an irrational, even demonic, impulse. Allen’s emphasis on the antagonistic relationship between the godly doctrine of divine providence and the dubious rationality of “natural means” was nothing new. 506 Benjamin Bourne, The Description and Confutation of Mystical Antichrist, the Familist, or,

An Information drawn up and published for Confirmation and comfort to the Faithful, against the many Antichristian Familisticall Doctrines which are frequently Preached and Printed in England (London, 1646), B3v, B2r, T1r. 507 John Allen, Judicial Astrologers totally routed, and their pretence to Scripture, reason &

experience, briefly, yet clearly and fully answered (London, 1659), 4, 15.

194 Clapham had said as much during the plague in 1603. Richard Greenham had also condemned the Family of Love for similar reasons earlier in the sixteenth century. In fine Calvinist style, Greenham urged Christians to always look for the sovereign hand of God in their afflictions. They were to suffer, like Job, with humility, acknowledging all the while that misfortune “came by Gods providence.” Such godly perseverance, Greenham added, was altogether “contrary to the familie of love who denying the providence of God attribute [suffering] to outward causes.” 508 It was a short step from the conclusion that Familists denied divine chastisement to the insinuation that members of the movement relied upon reason and scientific chicanery to get the job done. Bourne also went further in 1646 by accusing the Familist antichrist, not merely of assuming a deus absconditus, but of positing a pantheistic universe. According to this error, Bourne said, “there is but one Spirit in the world, that is, there is but one spirit or life internall fire, heat or motion in all things whatsoever, without exception, in God, in good Angels, as we call them, in devils, as we term them, in all creatures, and in all the sons and daughters of men.” 509 Bourne’s statement could be interpreted as the seventeenth-century reformulation of HN’s theological discourse on essential righteousness or becoming “godded with God.” If a person could merge his or her essence with the spirit, then it was perhaps conceivable that this spirit animated the rest of material reality as well. It is no less possible, however, that Bourne did not intend to refer to Familism as such, but only to a broad range of “Familistical” opinions that floated in and out of the

508 Richard Greenham, The workes of the reuerend and faithfull seruant of Iesus Christ M.

Richard Greenham, minister and preacher of the Word of God collected into one volume: reuised, corrected, and published, for the further building of all such as loue the trueth, and desire to know the power of godlinesse, ed. H.H. (London, 1601), 362, 419-420. According to Greenham, the group had allegedly chastised an individual for claiming that his sickness was “but a meanes to serve [divine] providence.” 509 Bourne, The Description, B3v.

195 minds of individuals like John Etherington and Stephen Clapham. Margaret C. Jacob has described a general swath of “pantheistic materialism” prevalent among freethinkers in the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was further ignited by the radicalism of the 1688 Revolution. “The best description of the freethinker’s stance,” she says, “would be to say that they embraced the pagan naturalism of the late Renaissance.” “The unifying notion that Nature is alive, coupled of course with the belief that motion is inherent in matter, in short, that matter and spirit effectively are one, derives not primarily from seventeenth century mechanists but from the vitalistic interpretation of nature found most commonly among late Renaissance thinkers such as Giordano Bruno.” 510 For Jacob, this freethinking subculture was a more likely predecessor to the Enlightenment philosophy than was Newton and his coterie of Christian philosophers who used the new science to defend divine providence. 511 Giordano Bruno, often touted as the central figure marking the epochal transition from the medieval to modern world, also provides an interesting comparison with “Familism” as described by hostile commentators like Bourne. The Italian Hermetic philosopher and Copernican publicist, who had spent no small amount of time working the intellectual circuit in England, was burned at the stake in Rome in the winter of 1600

510 Margaret C. Jacob, “Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment: A Reassessment,”

Eighteenth-Century Studies 11, no. 1 (1977): 18, 5. See also Jacob, “John Toland and the Newtonian Ideology,” Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 313-321 for a more in-depth discussion of Bruno’s influence on the seventeenth and eighteenth-century freethinkers. 511 Jacob’s praphrases the religious implications of Newtonianism as follows: “The natural rulers

should be allowed their positions annd stations; they of course must practice a moral virtue which inevitably conduces to harmony because God’s providence sees to it that it does. There can be no doubting the absolute necessity for social stability and no doubting that the moral laws ordained by God for its attainment are universal and guaranteed to work. The physical order explicated by Newton proclaims order and stability, but this order comes not from matter or nature but directly from God whose will operates in the universe either directly or through active principles. The word natural stands as a model for the ‘world politick’ and Newton’s explanation of the first provides a foundation upon which the government of the second should rest” (“Newtonianism and the Origins of the Englightenment,” 9-10). For a book-length discussion of the Newtonian and freethinking influences on the Enlightenment see Jacob’s The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981).

196 for allegedly denying the truth of the incarnation. The real story of Bruno’s execution was, however, far more complex. Scholars have suggested that Bruno’s dual emphasis on a pantheistic world and an acentric cosmic abyss – a radicalization of Nicholas of Cusa’s “absolute maximum” – forfeited the reality of the historical Christ. In the words of Hans Blumenberg: “the post-Copernican cosmology, with its superabundant consequence of the infiniti mondi [infinite worlds], represents the background against which the denial of the Incarnation, of the saving event that is centered on man and that draws the universe into cosuffering and coredemption with him, attains intuitive evidence.” 512 In other words, the sort of spatial and temporal neutrality advocated by Bruno had the added (and ultimately fatal) consequence of rendering Christ’s propitious act, in our time, on our planet, irrelevant. To say that later Familists were part of Jacob’s freethinking company or disciples of the late Giordano Bruno would be a stretch worthy of James I and his ScotsPresbyterian “Familists” of 1603. However, the term did seem applicable to polemicists of the period who genuinely feared the presence of upstart pantheists intending, by means magical or otherwise, to subvert godly religion. After all, the relativizing of history that attended Bruno’s post-Copernican denial of geocentrism echoes John Knewstub’s fear, in 1579, that “in the weightiest matters, as in the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ” the cult of HN “have wholy drunke up, and altogeather drowned the histories.” 513 Familists, too, had been accused of abolishing the terra firma of Christianity in their vertiginous climb toward perfection and absolute control over their world.

512 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 551. See also Karsten Harries, Infinity

and Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 242-263 for an account of Bruno’s crime that builds on Blumenberg’s earlier account. See, finally, Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 513 Knewstub, A Confutation, L7v. As has been earlier established, Knewstub’s work enjoyed

some renown as the go-to text for those wishing to write against the Family in later decades, and it is thus possible that Bourne had encountered it.

197 As a final note, the supposedly freethinking character of the group has not been lost on twentieth-century commentators who have seen in Familism one possible spring for the “progressive forces” described by A.G. Dickens in The English Reformation. 514 In his first book (1959), Dickens noted a cluster of dissenting movements during the early stages of the English Reformation. Indeed, he says, “skeptical, materially-minded laymen” were often scarcely distinguishable from both the Lollards and a nascent English Protestantism. All sides exhibited something like a “religious toleration and Rationalism” – a philosophy “nearer to the age of Voltaire” – that seems to have vanished as the Reformation wore on. 515 In 1964, Dickens returned to these ideas in an effort to describe the triumph of the English people, “reading and thinking for themselves,” over the “intellectual slackness” of traditional, medieval religion. 516 Under the heading of “lower-class heresy,” Christopher Hill makes the connection between the sort of movement described by Dickens and the Family of Love explicit. 517 Familists, alongside the early reformers, are here associated with a freethinking,

514 Dickens, The English Reformation, 20. Before Dickens, Kerr had referred to Familists as a

“vital force of reforming power” (“Henry Nicholas and the Familists,” 40-41). See above, Chapter 2, for a discussion Kerr’s work. 515 A.G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509-1558 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1959), 13.

516 Dickens, The English Reformation, 31. For an interesting account of Familism in the context

of Protestant literacy, see Hayes, “The Peaceful Apocalypse.” “Familists,” writes Hayes, “emerges as more than a vaguely defined spiritualist sect that dwindled into insignificance after its founder’s death. Like the Lollards before them, Familists did not advocate separation from the dominant church and, as Champlin Burrage and David Loades have pointed out, should not be referred to as a sect at all. By encouraging the apocalyptic transformation of consciousness that literacy provokes, Familists showed ordinary people how they might transform both themselves and the world around them” (143). For an earlier treatment of much the same subject with reference to the alleged seventeenth-century Familist, John Everard, see Hayes, “John Everard and the Familist Tradition,” in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, eds. Margaret Jacob & James Jacob (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1984), 62. 517 “Familism, developing the lower-class skepticism of the Lollards,” Hill clarifies, “was an

anti-clerical, layman’s creed. In this it fitted the temper of Elizabethan society, when members of many congregations, increasing in wealth and self-confidence, were more and more critical of traditional clerical claims” (The World Turned Upside Down, 23).

198 progressive tendency among the poor. After 1640, Hill says, “Plebian materialist skepticism and anti-clericalism could express themselves freely.” Confirming Bourne’s suspicions in 1646, Hill suggests that members of the Family of Love used astrology to gain control over their world and to offer their adherents explanations for events based on observable phenomena – “rather like sociology in mid-twentieth century English universities.” 518 The Family, in other words, kept alive the “tolerant and rationalistic” spirit that had left its mark on early Protestantism, gone underground during the reigns of Edward and Mary, and reemerged in the 1640’s to flourish even later, presumably, with Voltaire. The version of history offered by Dickens and Hill has since been criticized by those, like Eamon Duffy, wishing to extol the vitality of traditional religion on the eve of the Reformation and others, like Ethan Shagan, who criticize all teleological conceptions of history relying on the dialectic between clearly-defined creedal positions. 519 That the Family of Love could be a force of both reformation and revolution, symbolizing the epochal transition from a world of magic to a world of naturalism and disenchantment, is likewise rendered suspect by these more sweeping criticisms. As Dickens himself admitted in 1988, “the English population was far from dividing itself neatly into 518 Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 233-234. Hill is here conflating the evidence for

Familist astrological practice suggested by Bourne with Keith Thomas’ discussion of astrology in Religion and the Decline of Magic. It was, Thomas suggests, the comprehensiveness of astrology “which made the art so compelling. In the absence of any rival system of scientific explanation, and in particular of the social sciences … there was no other existing body of thought, religion apart, which even began to offer so allembracing an explanation for the baffling variousness of human affairs. … This was the intellectual vacuum which astrology moved in to fill, bringing with it the earliest attempts at a universal natural law” (384). Later, Thomas adds: “In [the astrologers’] confident assumption that the principles underlying the development of human society were capable of human explanation, we can detect the germ of modern sociology” (387). 519 For criticisms of Dickens see Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 479-480, 506-523;

Christopher Haigh, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1-23. For general criticisms of the theory of disenchantment as used by Weber and others, see Alexandra Walsham’s excellent survey, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 497-528.

199 convinced Protestants and convinced Catholics.” A frustrating body of “neuters,” he says, remains regardless of our attempts to outline confessions, pinpoint political ideologies, and, once the dust has settled, pronounce a winner. 520 The “neutral Familists,” as Bourne called them in 1646, resisted classification and were thus destined to be feared as unaccommodated individuals and admired as precursors to an age without religious division. The resistance of the Familist persona to classification owed itself to the polemic of the sixteenth-century. Familists, as many believed, were irreligious libertines who had a hand in relativizing doctrinal history. If they obeyed the laws of the realm, they did so, not for the sake of conscience, but for pragmatic reasons, and thought nothing of lying before a magistrate like John Knewstub. Finally, they were rumored to hold it as an article of faith that heaven could be attained here on earth through a mastery of material existence. These accusations were repeated throughout Elizabeth’s reign and were instrumental in forming a distinct characterization of the group to be refashioned again and again as the context demanded. A straying collective In 1578, an “unknown friend” of the Family chided John Rogers for neglecting the “many Protestants … under the Bishop of Romes inquisition, which holde it good policie to defend themselves & their consciences in keeping them from such Tyranny.” “Will you not allowe to others,” he asked his opponent, “as you gladly challenge to your self?” The point was that Rogers, as puritan inquisitor, had settled comfortably into the very tyrannical stance that had been challenged by earlier generations of Protestants. According to the “unknown friend,” the Family of Love had loyally carried on this

520 Dickens, “The Early Expansion of Protestantism in England 1520-1558,” in Reformation to

Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England, ed. Margo Todd (London: Routledge, 1995), 163.

200 tradition, facing persecution for principles that were consummately Protestant, though too often ignored. Is it fair to call Familists Protestants? Though it may be problematic to posit a modernizing trajectory from, say, John Frith in 1533 to Voltaire, Christopher Hill’s identification of Familists with early Protestant dissenters is not off-base. A number of English Familists certainly saw themselves as one with the Protestant mainstream. Admittedly, some, like Anthony Randall, the Lydford minister who confessed his opinions in 1581, anticipated a “third church” that might outlive Protestantism. 521 Taken to a scandalous extreme, Randall’s sentiments reflected a uniquely Familist supersessionism in which the new religion of the spirit was to replace the hardened shell of pharisaical Christianity. This was, of course, the interpretation of the group favored by Elizabethan antifamilists and apostates and later inherited by polemicists, like Bourne, who expressed concern with the freethinking Familist antichrist. As noted in Chapter 2, the Family also fit naturally into discourse on the subject of mysticism – “a potent weapon,” in Stephen Ozment’s words, “…to be taken up when the essence of Christian truth, which is love and union with God, became lost in the penultimate pursuits of speculative theologians and the boring routine of insensate clerics.” 522 However, to affiliate the group with the progressive forces that threatened to tear apart and supersede the Protestant consensus is to neglect the repeated emphasis on religious conformity in the Familist recriminations of the 1570s and 80s. With this in mind, Chapter 3 took on one of the most effective and abiding assumptions about the Family. “For except a few faire speaches,” Knewstub wrote in 1579, “wherewith they would (forsooth) approve them selves to bee led with the spirit of Love, and which are 521 Randall’s confession is found in John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, D.D.: The

Third and Last Archbishop of Canterbury in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), 3:158-160. 522 Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 8.

201 rather a cloke to cover their hatred against us, then any wholesome fruit of unfained love: their love is so lame, that it cannot steppe a foote out of their owne doores.” 523 Familist conformity, as the logic runs, is a violation of Familist conscience. As Nicodemites, members pretended civic responsibility while nonetheless awaiting (and even plotting) the dissolution of their Protestant enemies. The followers of Niclaes in England were exceedingly self-conscious about this persona, and labored to overturn it through an appeal to principles that were as characteristically Familist as they were Erasmian and Protestant. Conformity, as Thomas Starkey argued in 1536, was not simply a matter of decorum but a matter of spiritual import. Nothing short of collective and individual salvation depended on a cultivated indifference to indifferent things. By reiterating these opinions, English Familists hoped to implicate themselves in the Protestant mainstream. Perhaps the most significant stumbling block to the historian’s association of Familists with some notion of the mainstream is the unavoidable emphasis in Familist sources on good works or, rather, the “fruits” of regeneration. English followers, as should now be quite clear, were not rigorous Calvinists. It is for this reason that the historian Robert Barclay concluded in 1876 that “Familists cannot be termed a Protestant sect.” 524 Rufus Jones, writing thirty years later, confirmed the opinion that Familism “was in the main an isolated outburst, a sporadic upheaval, having its own course apart from the central stream which was breaking up the hardened crust of tradition and custom.” 525 While both scholars provide largely sympathetic accounts of the movement, neither can imagine Familism having any positive affiliation with the cultural currents

523 John Knewstub, A Confutation, sig. 14r. 524 Robert Barclay, The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth (London,

1876), 29.

525 Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, 428. Jones does admit that Niclaes “undoubtedly read the writings of Luther” (428).

202 that were, over the course of the century, to coalesce in a distinct conception of Protestant Christianity. Positions hardened over the course of the sixteenth century. One was either a foolish plowman, overly reliant on works and, in the off-hours, merriment or a precise villain, prepared to abandon good fellowship for the sake of true religiosity. The antagonism between these positions was captured in numerous works in the sixteenth century, but most extensively in George Gifford’s Country Divinity (1581). According to Christopher Haigh, Gifford’s work, though sensationalized, reflects a genuine attitude among the people. The disagreement, Haigh says, “is an almost Troeltschian one, between church-type and sect-type religion: between the desire for parish unity … and the will to risk community division by attacking sin.” 526 Gifford’s two interlocutors, Atheos and Zelotes, debate the relative importance of living the good life and living a life by precise accord with the scriptures. For Atheos, the role of the minister is to engage in card games, tables, and competitive drinking at the alehouse in the company of his parishioners. “I think it a Godlie way,” he tells Zelotes, “to make Charitie.” 527 Zelotes, for his part, defends the ministerial right to reprove others by the measure of God’s Word. In response to Atheos’ homegrown version of St. Paul, he exclaims: “ye cry for love, love, and bee the greatest enemies thereunto your selves…You call none love, but that carnall love.” 528 The echoes of John Knewstub in Zelotes’ words are unavoidable. In Gifford’s text, the emphasis on good works and good fellowship could not be expressed without a dark side. This was more than the sort of stubborn folk theology that 526 Christopher Haigh, “The Taming of the Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in

Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” The Journal of the Historical Association 85, no. 280 (2000): 572573. 527 George Gifford, A Briefe discourse of certain points of the religion, which is among the

common sort of Christians, which may bee termed the Countrie Divinitie. With a manifest confutation of the same, after the order of a Dialogue (London, 1582), 2r. Hereafter Country Divinity. 528 Gifford, Country Divinity, 5r-5v.

203 Patrick Collinson has identified as “rustic pelagianism;” it was a nagging suspicion that, under the cloak of conformity and good works, one could stray from any one position to another without detection. 529 One could, in effect, be “neutral.” As Gifford warned the Earl of Warwick in his dedicatory epistle – There are the most in number, who having Poperie taken from them and not taught throughly and sufficiently in the Gospel, doe stand as men indifferent, so that they may quietly injoye the world, they care not what religion come: they are like naked men fitte and readie for any coate almost that may bee put upon them. 530 The ready association of the covenant of works with religious indifference and, worse, libertinism was built into the framework of the divided field. If good deeds were synonymous with outward conformity, then, as the cocksure Citizen of the Apology affirmed, proper Christianity had been achieved. Why worry? Putting aside their seventeenth-century popular incarnation, actual Familists would never have agreed with such an association. Nevertheless, Gifford’s description of the “plough men” of his native Essex, “fit and ready for any coat,” could as easily have been spoken by any number of antifamilists and ex-Familist apostates in the 1570s. 531 Adding to this persona, Thomas Scot and Stephen Denision both referred to Familists as chameleons in the 1620s – a moniker that flowed naturally from the earlier works of John Rogers and John Knewstub. Familists, Denison explained, were a

529 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1967), 37. For an interesting discussion of the lingering covenant of works in many areas of English culture, see also Linda Pollock’s With Faith and Physic: the life of a Tudor gentlewoman: Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552-1620 (London: Collins and Brown Ltd, 1993). Pollock sees in Lady Grace Mildmay (the subject of her book and a sixteenth-century member of the landed elite) an “applied rather than theoretical Calvinism.” “It appears that in practice the idea that certain people did not have to earn salvation, although they should live worthy of their status, and that certain reprobates were damned to hell, was added to the idea that people could repent their sins, amend their wicked ways and find God. Predestination in the lay understanding was humanized; the concept was understood as if free will were involved and as if everyone, or almost all, had a choice” (60-61). 530 Gifford, Country Divinity, sig. 3v. 531 Gifford, Country Divinity, sig. 2r.

204 “slipperie adversary… like a Chameleon ready to take any color which may stand best with his own designes.” 532 Here, again, was Knewstub’s ethic of straying. The followers of HN trafficked in borrowed goods, being all things to all men, and were therefore nothing before God. If Familists were Protestants, they were also Priscillianists, papists, puritans, and atheists. As Familists told their opponents, however, the truth is always manifested among the outsevered ones. If given the chance to “tell out their tales,” Familist vagrants would be revealed to the world as rogue nationalists. Clearly, English Familists knew their audience. Faced with their unfortunate place in the divided field, they were challenged to make a virtue of necessity. Like the character of Folly in Erasmus’ Moriae Encomium, Familists inevitably affirmed the blissful experience of true wisdom while admitting that, to the worldly wise, such wisdom appeared blasphemous in the extreme. Even more appropriate perhaps is Shakespeare’s carnivalesque Flagstaff who, in Roy Battenhouse’s formulation, covers his charitable wisdom with a veneer of lechery, dissembling, and thievery in order to mimic Christ’s own reticence to reveal his true self in the gospel. 533 As on the Shakespearean stage, the attributes of the chameleon could be easily reversed to shed the straying Familist collective in a more positive and Christ-like light. As hinted in Chapter 4, the notion of a straying collective could also have a deeper significance. What appears in modern scholarship as a foregone conclusion, namely, that Familists practiced an idiosyncratic approach to Scripture that relied heavily 532 Stephen Denison, The White Wolfe, or a Sermon preached at Paules Crosse, Feb. 11 being

the last Sonday in Hillarie tearme (London 1627), A5v. See also Scot, Philomythie or Philomythologie, E5v.

533 Roy Battenhouse, “Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool,” PMLA 90, no. 1(1975):32-52.

“No doubt,” the author admits, “few of today’s playgoers think of imputing charity to a Falstaff whose prankish chicanery and braggadocio seem to make him the very image of traditional vice, garnished at one time or other with all the Seven Deadlies. Yet may not the fulsome display of reprobation be more mask than inner man? One of Auden’s most tantalizing points is to remind us that the Sermon on the Mount enjoins Christians to show charity through a secret almsgiving not trumpeted, and to fast while not appearing unto men to fast” (32).

205 on the use of allegory belies the fact that, in doing so, Familists were nearer to Tyndale and William Whitaker than they were to the much-maligned dialectical school. Add to this the irony that both Knewstub and certain anonymous Familists used the same text from Tyndale to critique their opponents, and it is apparent that there was room in the Elizabethan mainstream for wildly divergent positions. The deeper significance which Familists attached to textual interpretation centered on the idea that the text needed to be lived in order to be understood. Straying from passage to passage, they believed, produced a saving conception of the whole. To consider words in isolation, to rest content in one’s learnedness, was to trade life in Christ for the dead letter. English Familists empathized especially with Niclaes’ description of the so-called scripture-learned because they believed England’s ministers had ruthlessly attacked them “before thou hast heard the cause” – that is, before experience had awarded their detractors a better view of the big picture. There was, then, an explicit parallel between erroneous explanations of Scripture and erroneous explanation of the cult of HN. The supplicant of 1604, for example, pleaded with James I to test the writings of Niclaes, “conferring them with the holy Scriptures, wherein it seemeth … that you have had great travaile, and are therefore the better able to judge.” A bit later in the Supplication, he invited James to “discerne betwixt the right & wrong of our cause according to that most certaine, and Christian rule set downe by our Saviour Christ unto his disciples (Matt 17.12) Yee shall know the tree by his fruites.” 534 Though ostensibly a reference to good works, the emphasis on “fruits” was also an appeal to charitable living that had deep roots in English culture. If, like Eusebius in the Convivium Religiosum or the citizen of Terra Pacis, Familists believed themselves to have achieved a more complete, more cultivated picture than that of their predecessors, they also believed that such spiritually-informed indifference obliged them to return to 534 Anon., A Supplication, G2r, H2r.

206 the soil, and to engage in civic life in a productive manner. As Dr. Marsh has shown, Familists in England often did just this; and, as a result, they sometimes attained a respected, if not exulted, status, in their local communities.

207 CONCLUSION The concept of religious orthodoxy, especially when talking about early modern Christianity, is often associated more or less explicitly with the subject of coherence. Calvin, for instance, came close to exhibiting a natural theology in the Institutes when he suggested that the world and the human body were knit together in a “distinct and wellordered array of the heavenly host.” 535 The beauty of this well-ordered array was obvious, he said, and its clarity – like the clarity of the Moral Law – was sufficient to render the blind guilty. Calvin’s natural theology, if it can be called that, was balanced by an equally damning narrative of the noetic fall into incoherence. Postlapsarian reality was a “ruin.” Those avid philosophers who scoured nature and the human heart found themselves in a labyrinth of confusion, seeking “fit arrangement in disorder” as Calvin said, and straying from the certainty of revelation. The Catholic Church, moreover, was the end product of this long process of fragmentation. “Although they exhibit a temple, a priesthood, and other similar masks, the empty glare by which they dazzle the eyes of the simple should not move us to admit that there is a Church where the word of God appears not.” 536 Guided instead by their fallen imaginations, the Pope and his prelates had buried the loss of coherence under an idolatrous superstructure that only appeared orderly to the simpleminded. The association of orthodoxy with coherence was at the heart of the Reformation project. Protestants, of course, did not see themselves as revolting against centuries of tradition but as unearthing the coherent faith that had been there all along – albeit not in Rome. That which endures, endures because it is consistent, intuitive, and unifying. That

535 Calvin, Institutes, I.V.II. 536 Calvin, Institutes, I.XV.VIII, IV.II.IV.

208 which does not is, by comparison, “straying,” unnatural, and divisive. If Protestantism appeared a little less consistent than was desirable, its adherents could always argue that this was because it had made a clean break with the sort of superficial sleekness that had buoyed the Church of Rome through the centuries. The narrative of coherence was also a swansong for the Family of Love who hoped, along with many of their contemporaries, to achieve a harmony in England between spirituality and civic piety. While they aimed to follow the New Man, Hendrik Niclaes, and be “godded with God,” they believed that the attainment of such righteousness hinged on their acceptance of the essentials of the Queen’s faith. The continued emphasis on civic engagement in Familist writings also bled into the movement’s approach to the Bible. Righteous interpretation was a matter of embracing the whole before returning to the parts with renewed vigor. Members wished to breathe life into the fragments and to orient each one toward its end in the Love. That the Family of Love has not endured, that it met with imprisonment in one century and embarrassment in the next, provides a particular challenge to those wishing to study the religion. It is not surprising, given our received impression of Familists as sectarian, radical, and even revolutionary, that our interests tend toward explaining the unfortunate fate of the movement by recourse to what are believed to be its less-coherent intellectual positions. When and how did Familists diverge from the mainstream? What about them invited the guardians of coherence, the Knewstubs and the Denisons, to bristle? The assumption underlying this line of questioning is that we, today, have a firmer grip on the rules of the game. We have seen its outcome and have lived to inherit a bigger picture. This assumption, however, leads us to favor those elements that flout the rules at the expense of the more quotidian elements, now seen as ancillary because they did not play a part in the march toward oblivion. Predictably, the resulting portrait of the Family of Love is one of profound religious isolation. The outcome is explained, but the larger field on which the group operated is obscured.

209 This dissertation has worked to reconstruct this field by focusing on two, typological categories: religious obedience (in particular, discourse on the subject of adiaphora) and hermeneutics (or, debates over the notion of allegory and the literal sense). Though they are in-themselves largely the products of my own interest, such ideal types can help us form the basis for a comparison. In this case, the comparison is between Christian heterodoxy and Christian orthodoxy, fragmentation and coherence, “straying” and constancy. I began with the hunch, informed by Marsh’s microhistory, that the radical opposition between the two sides being compared was a not entirely accurate. Were Familists always so obviously heretical? If they were as patently despicable as the polemic of the 1570s and 80s made them out to be, why did they so often thrive in their local communities? The notion of a divided field (discussed in Chapter 2) is essential to understanding the polemical environment that Familists and their detractors had to navigate. It is also essential to peer beyond this divide to envision a religious and intellectual culture before the dust had settled. When we do, the static body of doctrine which we term “Protestant orthodoxy” begins to look more like what Ninian Smart has called a “loose organism.” “An organism functions as a whole,” he says, “so that an injury to one part affects the whole to a greater or lesser degree.” 537 This whole need not be coherent, but is made up of affinities between dependent doctrines and ideas. The emphasis on detached engagement, on the spiritually-informed love of civil society, has, for example a demonstrable affinity with the concept of adiaphora, which, in turn, falls under the broader rubric of Christian freedom. Niclaes, though at the time a “lover of the Roman Church,” could also join voices with the Lutherans in 1529 over the sowing of dissension over trivial matters; and his followers in England felt assured that their Familist interpretations of Scripture were, at the same time, Protestant interpretations of Scripture. 537 Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred, 7.

210 All of this is to say that coherence – the establishment of orthodox belief – does not take place independently of those who would later be thrown, like Frank Familist, on the pile of latter-day heretics. This process, as one scholar puts it, of “imposing direction and overcoming division, correcting waywardness and suppressing dissent,” of formulating mainstream belief, was a process in which Familists participated and, by their accounts, championed. 538 Moreover, this was not simply a civilizing process targeted against some monolithic conception of popular culture. It was not a Reformation of manners against the ill-mannered and the carnivalesque; though, certainly, a common polemical strategy was to paint the Family with this brush. It was, rather, a means by which underlying religious assumptions, deeply held and irrevocable, could diverge and find conscience expression as Christian belief.

538 Lee Patterson, “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,”

in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, eds. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 72.

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