George Gifford and the Reformation of the Common Sort: Puritan Priorities in Elizabethan Religious Life 9781935503415

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George Gifford and the Reformation of the Common Sort

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Habent sua fata libelli

SIXTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYS & STUDIES SERIES GENERAL EDITOR Raymond A. Mentzer University of Iowa EDITORIAL BOARD OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYS & STUDIES ELAINE BEILIN Framingham State College MIRIAM U. CHRISMAN University of Massachusetts, Emerita BARBARA B. DIEFENDORF Boston University PAULA FINDLEN Stanford University SCOTT H. HENDRIX Princeton Theological Seminary JANE CAMPBELL HUTCHISON University of Wisconsin–Madison RALPH KEEN University of Iowa ROBERT M. KINGDON University of Wisconsin, Emeritus MARY B. MCKINLEY University of Virginia

HELEN NADER University of Arizona CHARLES G. NAUERT University of Missouri, Emeritus THEODORE K. RABB Princeton University MAX REINHART University of Georgia SHERYL E. REISS Cornell University JOHN D. ROTH Goshen College ROBERT V. SCHNUCKER Truman State University, Emeritus NICHOLAS TERPSTRA University of Toronto MARGO TODD University of Pennsylvania

MERRY WIESNER-HANKS University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

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Copyright © 2004 Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri 63501 All rights reserved tsup.truman.edu Cover art: “Sloth,” Stephen Bateman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation (London, 1569), F4r. Cover designer: Shaun Hoffeditz Type: Bembo Printed by: Sheridan Books, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan USA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGinnis, Timothy Scott. George Gifford and the reformation of the common sort : Puritan priorities in Elizabethan religious life / by Timothy Scott McGinnis. p. cm. — (Sixteenth century essays and studies ; v. 70) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-931112-40-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-931112-41-X (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-10935503-41-5 (e-book) 1. Gifford, George, d. 1620. 2. Puritans—England. I. Title. II. Series: Sixteenth century essays & studies ; v. 70. BX9339.G54M34 2004 285'.9'092—dc22 2004017982

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means without written permission from the publisher.

∞ The paper in this publication meets or exceeds the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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To Beth, who knows

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CONTENTS

Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

GEORGE GIFFORD One

Introduction: Puritans and the Common Sort . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Two

The Politics of Godliness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Three

The Errors of Rome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Four

Fraterne Dissentire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Five

“Subtiltie” Exposed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Six

Creating Godliness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Seven

Conclusion: Commending and Confuting the Common Sort. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

APPENDICES One

Gifford’s Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Two

Dedicatees of Gifford’s Works. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

Three

The Will of George Gifford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

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FIGURES

1

John Norden’s Map of Essex, 1594.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2

“Sloth,” Stephen Bateman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

3

Maldon in the sixteenth century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

4

River Blackwater. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

5

All Saints Church, Maldon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

6

All Saints Church, south aisle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

7

All Saints vicarage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

8

St. Peter’s Church, Maldon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

9

The Moot Hall, Maldon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

10

All Saints Church, interior of the bell tower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

11

“Hope,” Stephen Bateman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Starting a book and bringing it to completion leaves a person indebted on numerous fronts. Thanks go first to my graduate advisor, Peter Iver Kaufman, who directed the dissertation on which this work is based. I recall a meeting during my initial semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in which he suggested that my interests in the sixteenth century and early Christianity might be well served by looking at a curiously understudied English preacher who had a fondness for Augustine. Thus the beginning. In the ensuing years I was privileged to work with someone who was as comfortable talking and writing about the fifth century as the sixteenth, whose reputation among undergraduates as an engrossing lecturer inspired those of us who lacked some of his theatrical flair, and whose generosity was a constant draw to students, friends, and colleagues. If what follows makes any contribution to the study of early modern religious culture, it is due to his careful reading, consistent prodding, sage advice, and enthusiastic support. Others offered regular support and guidance as well. Lance Lazar reminded me that studying early modern England required paying regular attention to the Continent. My preparation as a scholar and teacher owes much to his example, and my timely progress through graduate school was made easier by the many grants to which he directed me. Richtie Kendall enthusiastically welcomed an interloper to his course on early modern drama, and he kindly tolerated pointed questioning about puritanical concerns. Sarah Beckwith did the same in a wonderful interdisciplinary course on heresy and reform. Hans Hillerbrand graciously took on a dissertating student with a shared interest in religious dissent and popular culture. Karen Bruhn, George Demacopoulos, Julie Mell, Mike Pasquerello, and Edwin Tait listened to my early seminar papers on Gifford and were encouraging as only fellow students can be. During the academic year 2000–2001 I participated in the Folger Shakespeare Library Colloquium “Puzzling Evidence: Literatures and Histories,” directed by David Scott Kastan and Peter Lake. David Kastan convened the group ably, and managed somehow to keep our musings on track and lead us past our disciplinary divisions. Peter Lake kindly agreed to read and comment on early drafts of some dissertation chapters, which are the better for his comments. I presented to the colloquium much of

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what makes up the chapter on Gifford’s attitudes towards witchcraft. For the constructive feedback that followed, and for the many enjoyable conversations at the Hawk and the Dove, thanks go to Jennifer L. Anderson, Angela Balla, Leeds Barroll, David R. Como, John D. Cox, Lori Anne Ferrell, Katie King, Zoltán Márkus, Peter G. Platt, Claude Rawson, Jeanne Shami, Stuart Sherman, and Lauren Shohet. I suppose none of them realizes how very welcome and needed their incidental encouragements and kindnesses were at that particular stage in my career. A dissertation fellowship from the graduate school of the University of North Carolina in the fall of 2001 made it possible for me to visit a number of libraries and archives in England. There, I benefited regularly from the advice and patience of professionals who were willing to take the time to show a newcomer the ropes. Thanks go to the staffs at the British Library, Dr. Williams’s Library, The Institute of Historical Research, the London Metropolitan Archives, the Guildhall Library, the Lambeth Palace Library, Westminster Abbey Library, and the especially pleasant group at the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford. The biographical sketch of George Gifford in the first chapter, especially as it relates to Maldon, has been guided at nearly every turn by the work of William J. Petchey, local historian and librarian of the Thomas Plume Library in Maldon until his death in spring 2001. Close to five decades of archival research meant that Dr. Petchey knew the Maldon borough records better than anyone. His dissertation and subsequent book on the history of Maldon provided the road map for my archival research in Essex. I regret that I did not have opportunity to share with him my appreciation for the gracious encouragement he offered in response to my initial request for advice, and for his eagerness to discuss my work on Gifford. The transition from dissertation to book is rumored to be a rocky one, but again my way was made easier with the help of old friends and new colleagues. Samford University has been a marvelous place to begin a career in teaching, and my fellow members of the religion department— David Bains, Paul Holloway, Penny Marler, Ken Roxburgh, and Joe Scrivner—have been welcoming and encouraging. My students have made teaching enjoyable and even energizing for my research. I benefited from many conversations with friends around the university, and special thanks go to Gerald Bray, Timothy George, Killian Manning, and Joe Scrivner for reading and commenting on portions of this work. Cathy Thompson and Beth Gilbert both provided excellent secretarial support. Thanks also go to my student assistants, Matt Grimes and David Conrad, who were undaunted by vaguely worded research requests and many trips back and

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forth to the library. The staff of the Samford library, especially the interlibrary loan office, have provided indispensable services. New colleagues outside Samford have also helped this work along toward publication. A serendipitous bus ride from a conference hotel to an airport gave me a chance to meet John Craig, who kindly tolerated my questions relating to his work on the Dedham classis records. He also put me in touch with Brett Usher, who generously responded to my brief inquiry with a detailed summation of his own archival work on Gifford. Barry Samuels enthusiastically volunteered to photograph sites in Maldon based on nothing other than an email inquiry. The staff of Truman State University Press have been very patient with a first-time author. Raymond Mentzer, general editor of the series, was encouraging from the start, and recruited two marvelous readers whose questions and comments helped me at numerous points. I presented portions of chapters at various conferences and received many helpful responses. An early version of chapter 5 first appeared as “‘Subtiltie’ Exposed: Pastoral Perspectives on Witch Belief in the Thought of George Gifford” in the Sixteenth Century Journal, and I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint the material here. Early in George Gifford’s dialogue Countrie Divinitie, the easygoing Atheos predicted what life would be like if the puritans had their way: “You would have [men] sitte mooping alwayes at their bookes,” he moaned; “I like not that.” I doubt anyone comes to the end of a writing project without sharing Atheos’s sentiments at some points along the way. I certainly could not have found the will to “sitte mooping alwayes” at my books without the steadfast support of my family. My son William showed up just in time for the last few weeks of graduate school and has been a very present companion during the revision process, quick to remind me when his books were to be preferred to mine. My parents were unswerving in their optimism and offered the kind of unbridled confidence that only parents can seem to manage. My in-laws were likewise supportive, and special thanks go to my father-in-law, Edd Rowell, for copyediting services on early drafts. But surely I would have given up “mooping” at books long ago had it not been for my wife, Beth. Her support came in a variety of roles—everything from therapist to editor to indexer—even as she juggled her own studies in musicology and the challenges of pregnancy and new motherhood. Yet to say more risks reducing who she is to what she does, a disservice indeed, and so I leave it to her to recognize that my love and gratitude extend much further than written words on a page. I leave it to Beth, who knows.

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction Puritans and the Common Sort

T

The road running northeast out of London towards the town of Chelmsford carries the traveler into the heart of Essex, the county that topographer John Norden described in 1594 as “most fatt, frutefull, and full of profitable thinges.” Norden no doubt had in mind the agricultural bounty of Essex—an “Englishe Goshen,” he observed—when he spoke of its fertility. But Essex also had a long history of producing sizeable crops of a different sort: religious radicals and reformers who seemed to maintain a toehold despite repeated attempts by authorities at enforcing conformity and order. Discontent seemed to simmer constantly under the surface and frequently bubbled over in many Essex towns. From the Lollards of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, to Lutherans in the 1520s, to the defiant Protestants during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary in the 1550s, religious malcontents persisted in Essex, always out of step with the status quo. By the time Norden made his observations toward the end of the sixteenth century, however, decades of political and religious upheaval had ended with the Church of England rooted firmly in the Protestant camp. Or so its defenders claimed. Critics, on the other hand, continued to argue that the English church was “but halfly reformed,” a work in progress in dire need of attention. Remnants of Catholicism persisted in the Elizabethan church—“popishe abuses,” detractors claimed—ranging from clerical vestments to unscriptural liturgies in the Book of Common Prayer. Moreover, not only was the church polluted; critics charged it lacked the welltrained, preaching clergy and the discipline needed to address the problems. The more vocal and insistent of these critics knew each other as “the godly,” “professors,” or “gospellers.” Their enemies derided them as “puritans,” “precisionists,” and “busie controllers.” Regardless of the label, Essex seemed to observers then and now to have had more than its fair share of these discontented and restless Protestants.1 1 John Norden, Speculi Britanniae Pars: An Historical and Chorographical Description of the County of Essex, XXXX

2

Figure 1. John Norden’s Map of Essex, 1594. Reproduced by permission of the Essex Record Office.

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The road from London to Chelmsford was as good a setting as any, then, for one such impatient reformer to set a fictional debate over what he knew to be the woeful condition of the Church of England. George Gifford was just beginning his career as minister in Maldon, a coastal town a few miles east of Chelmsford, when he published a lively, sometimes amusing dialogue entitled A briefe discourse of certaine 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.2 Like many of Gifford’s writings, Countrie Divinitie has a didactic tone and a polemical purpose, initially seen in Gifford’s choice of names for his characters: Zelotes, a zealous, godly puritan well schooled in scripture and theology; and Atheos, an unlearned country person—one of the “common sort”—though hardly an atheist by the modern definition.3 Gifford’s two travelers encountered one another on the road to Chelmsford, and before long the conversation turned to religion. Atheos was quite proud of his minister in his small town: “I am perswaded wee have the beste Prieste in this countreye, wee would bee lothe to forgoe him for the learnedest of them all.” When pressed for details, Atheos was quick to name the virtues of his popular priest: “Hee is as gentle a person as ever I see: a verye good fellow, hee will not sticke when good fellowes and honest men meet together to spende his groate at the Alehouse.” Furthermore, he frequently joined fellow townspeople at bowling or card games, and was known to arbitrate disagreements between his parishioners over a drink or two—“a Godlye waye to make Charitie,” Atheos concluded.4 2

ed. Henry Ellis (London: Camden Society, 1840), 7. On the history of dissent in Essex, see William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 87–112. On puritan critics of an Elizabethan church “but halfly reformed,” see the chapter of that name in the essential Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 29–44, and the complaints detailed in “A View of Popishe Abuses,” in William Hugh Frere and Charles Edward Douglas, eds., Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of Puritan Revolt (New York: Burt Franklin, 1972), 20–39. 2 London, 1581 (hereafter referred to as Countrie Divinitie). Quotations that follow are from the 1582 edition. For a complete listing of all printed editions of Gifford’s works and short titles used herein, see appendix 1. 3 In the sixteenth century, absolute disavowal of a deity was quite rare, if not unheard of; Gifford’s concern was with those who, in his estimation, paid insufficient attention to matters of religion. Zelotes’s definition of atheism is telling: “I know there be many which care not for the Pope, but yet beleeve much of his doctrine: they bee those which wee call Athiests, of no religion, but looke whatsoever any prince doeth set forth, that they will professe.” Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, C6r. On such questions of definition see the excellent discussion in John Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics: The Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2001), 12–24. 4 Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, A1v–A2r.

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To Zelotes, however, this jolly priest sounded “more meete for to keepe swine then too bee a Sheaphearde over the flocke of Christe.” Should not the minister be busy teaching and preaching? Atheos protested that his priest read the prayer book services “as well as anye of them,” but Zelotes grumbled that a ten-year-old boy could do as much. What Atheos and his merry companions needed, Zelotes proclaimed, was someone who would “reproove naughtinesse among the people” and spend time in his study preparing sermons rather than in the alehouse making merry. By this point in the conversation, Atheos appeared to regret his choice of traveling companions, for he recognized Zelotes as “one of those curious and precise fellowes which will allowe no recreation,” one who meddled in everyone’s affairs and wore his piety on his sleeve. In short, a “busie controuler.”5 Even at this early stage in his career, Gifford was no stranger to conflict and had likely been on the receiving end of Atheos’s accusation, just like his godly protagonist Zelotes. In fact, although Countrie Divinitie presents itself as fictional, the circumstances of Gifford’s life in the latter 1570s suggest Gifford may have had a model in mind when he described Atheos’s lessthan-godly minister, known elsewhere in the dialogue as “Sir Robert.” Early in the dialogue, Atheos claimed to live “not farre from Chelmsforde” in a place he called “G.B.” At least two possibilities exist for “G.B.” One is Great Baddow, which lies a few miles east of Chelmsford. At the time Gifford wrote Countrie Divinitie, the minister in Great Baddow was Christopher Ampleforth. A survey of Essex clergy conducted by puritans in the 1580s identified Ampleforth as one of several “preachers of a scandalous life in Essex,” claiming that he “hadde a childe by his owne sister…and is also suspected of poperie…and he is one that doth falsifie the Scriptures.” A second possibility is Great Burstead, which is farther away from Chelmsford but quite close to Mountnessing, the town where Gifford lived at the time of his ordination in 1578. The minister in Great Burstead during the period was Timothy Okeley, identified in the same puritan survey as “a gamster.” 6 Gifford may well have hidden behind initials and a changed name to take a concealed jab at Ampleforth or Okeley. The reference would have been recognizable to those in the know—probably a small group—while retaining a 5

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, A2r–A3v. Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, A1r, A5v, C8r. For lists of clergy in Great Baddow and Great Burstead, see Richard Newcourt, Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense (London: B. Motte, 1710), 2:25, 116. For “preachers of a scandalous life in Essex,” see Albert Peel, ed., The Seconde Parte of a Register: Being a Calendar of Manuscripts under That Title Intended for Publication by the Puritans about 1593, and now in Dr Williams’s Library, London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 2:162–63. Gifford’s ordinations as deacon and priest are recorded in the Diocese of London Ordination Register, 1578–1628, Guildhall Library MS 9535/2, 4r-v. 6

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veneer of respectable deniability. More important, Atheos’s minister was emblematic of the problems facing the English church. For Gifford and the godly, the vague reference to “G.B.” pointed to a larger truth: far too many parishes in England languished under a “Sir Robert.” With their battle lines drawn, Zelotes and Atheos proceeded to cover a laundry list of troublesome topics in Elizabethan ecclesiastical life: the education of ministers, the frequency and content of preaching, moral regulation in communities, scripture reading by the laity, popular entertainments, faith and works, predestination and election, church polity, loyalty to the magistrate, and more. In the course of the dialogue, the reader hears from Atheos that those who filled the parishes of England, the common sort of Christians, were by and large satisfied with the status quo in their communities, especially when it came to matters of religion. They were suspicious of change, since they saw no need for improving what did not look to be in disrepair. They valued their traditions, especially the festivals and entertainments that gave them a sense of connection with the world of their ancestors. Notably, they considered themselves good Protestants—Atheos at one point vehemently consigned the pope and his teaching to “the dunghill”— but at the same time they doubted the necessity of the more extreme pietistic practices and resented the meddlesome ministers who demanded them. Listening to Atheos, one comes away with the impression the common sort were content with their religion and communities until a cantankerous and troublesome minority of pushy Protestants came along to upset the natural order of things. Zelotes, on the other hand, told an entirely different tale. He and Atheos may have traveled the same road, but based on their respective descriptions of the church, they inhabited different worlds. What Atheos saw as respect for tradition, Zelotes thought was a blind devotion to the sins of the fathers. He and the godly believed that the common sort failed to take their faith seriously, instead confining it to a manageable corner of life and avoiding the demands of the gospel. For example, Zelotes observed that most people allowed much more time for bawdy entertainments than for listening to preaching. Atheos could occupy the ale bench for hours but “if the Preacher doe passe his houre but a little, your buttoke beginne for to ake, and ye wishe in your hearte that the Pulpit would fall”—hardly the wholehearted desire for learning that godly pastors hoped to see.7 Yet despite the common sort’s lack of zeal and their stubborn attachment to tradition, Zelotes—and by extension Gifford—did not lay all the 7

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, D2r.

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blame at their feet. In Countrie Divinitie, Gifford’s picture of the common sort is of a people more ignorant than inveterate. Atheos was “blinde and should have a guide to leade ye the way to heaven, and to instruct yee in true godliness,” according to Zelotes, but the church had failed to provide one. Stephen Bateman, a chaplain to Archbishop Matthew Parker, chose a sleeping teacher and his errant charges to depict the vice of sloth in his 1569 woodcut, but from Gifford’s perspective the image could just as easily have represented the failure of the church’s ministers to instruct their parishioners in the teachings of the faith (fig. 2). Gifford stated the matter more plainly in the dedicatory letter of Countrie Divinitie, addressed to the

Figure 2. “Sloth,” Stephen Bateman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation (London, 1569), F4r. “He which sitteth sleeping signifieth slothfulness amongest teachers, whose desire being satisfied, careth not for the charge: the children idleness, whose mindes without a carefull tutor, are bent to nothying but ease and vanities.” Reproduced by permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University.

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prominent puritan patron Ambrose Dudley. “The church therefore and common wealth, being the Lords husbandrie, is overgrowne with weedes and almost laide waste,” he lamented. The chief source of corruptions was “the want of a sincere ministerie of the woorde…through absence of which, there is a flood of ignorance and darknes overflowing the most part of the land.” Zealous Protestants were suspicious of the vestiges of popery remaining in the people, but believed the attachment to Catholic beliefs and practices was by and large not a conscious one. Certainly, Gifford knew there were a few papists who “cannot be converted,” but the great mass of the people—namely, the common sort of Christian to whom he directed his attentions—fell into a different category. “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.”8 Gifford thought the failure to fashion a suitable “coate” for these “men indifferent” was the great failure of the Elizabethan church, and he was not alone. During the 1570s and 1580s many of the “hotter sort of Protestants” mounted a campaign to overhaul the ministry of the church and force the hand of conservative bishops and a cautious queen. Of the details of Gifford’s involvement in this effort there will be more to say later, but for now let it suffice to say that all his writings—and especially Countrie Divinitie— must be read in the context of an impatient demand for reform of the church and its ministry. Despite the popularity of Gifford’s depictions of the attitudes of the common sort among scholars seeking to reconstruct what “the people” thought, Gifford was no innocent bystander, neither a “Tudor anthropologist” nor the disinterested author of “one of the most perceptive and useful studies of post-Reformation English popular religion.”9 Nevertheless, for the modern student of Elizabethan religious life, listening in on Gifford’s Atheos and Zelotes is irresistible, if only because their lively conversation lures the reader with a certain sense of immediacy. However, eavesdropping quickly raises several questions: Who were these “precise fellowes who allowed no recreation,” these puritans, and how did 8

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, A6v, Epistle Dedicatory. For the “hotter sort,” see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 26–27. Alan Macfarlane found a kindred spirit in Gifford in “A Tudor Anthropologist: George Gifford’s Discourse and Dialogue,” in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 140–55. For Gifford as a student of popular religion, see Christopher Haigh, “The Taming of the Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” History 85 (2000): 572–88, quote at 572. 9

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they understand their relationship to the Church of England and to the “common sort of Christians” who filled its parishes? Conversely, whom did Gifford have in mind when he spoke of the “common sort,” and how much light can Gifford’s Atheos shed on those elusive attitudes of the people who are of such interest to historians of early modern England? And what if anything can Atheos and Zelotes reveal about the progress of reformation—or as some would have it, reformations—in England more than two decades into Elizabeth’s reign?

ZELOTES AND THE PURITANS Atheos needed little time to recognize Zelotes as a puritan, and he apparently had a firm definition in mind when he made the identification. Later taxonomists, however, have not been as successful. Debate over who should be labeled—or perhaps branded—puritan and what religious practices or ideological positions constitute puritanism began in the sixteenth century and has continued until the present, so much so that in the course of explaining puritanism to a general audience, Patrick Collinson was forced to admit that a “secondary academic industry has arisen, devoted to the search for an acceptable definition” of puritanism.10 It is ironic that puritans, often derided as “precisionists” by their detractors, would be the subject of such ambiguity.11 One problem with pressing for any sort of definition stems from the fact that the term was born and nurtured in a polemical context. Puritan was most often hurled as an insult, and only rarely (if at all in the sixteenth century) worn as a badge of honor. Etymological consensus locates its emergence in the 1560s in the context of ecclesiastical conflicts over vestments 10

English Puritanism (London: The Historical Association, 1983), 6. The literature surrounding this question is extensive. Of particular use in preparing the following overview have been Patrick Collinson, “A Comment: Concerning the Name Puritan,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (October 1980): 483–88; idem, The Puritan Character: Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1989); idem, “Puritans,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans Hillerbrand et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Peter Lake, “Puritan Identities,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984): 112–23; idem, “Defining Puritanism—Again?” in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. Francis Bremer (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 3–29; Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, “Introduction: The Puritan Ethos, 1560–1700,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. idem (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 1–31; Basil Hall, “Puritanism: The Problem of Definition,” in Studies in Church History, ed. G. J. Cuming (London: Nelson, 1965), 2:283–96; and Richard L. Greaves, “The Puritan-Nonconformist Tradition in England, 1560–1700: Historiographical Reflections,” Albion 17/4 (Winter 1985): 449–86. I also am grateful to Peter Iver Kaufman for allowing me access to his manuscript of Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2004). 11

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and ceremonies, as the Elizabethan Settlement tried in vain to live up to its name. Puritan was the accusation leveled at those who refused, often noisily, to wear vestments or follow liturgies they deemed to be holdovers from the church’s Catholic past. To raise the stakes, opponents frequently uttered puritan in the same breath as Cathar, the medieval heretics whose name derives from the Greek word for “pure.” By the 1570s and 1580s, puritan increasingly found general use as “a gibe hurled, as it were, in the vernacular at all too evidently religious persons, Protestants, by their less obviously religious or crypto-Catholic neighbors.” It was in this popular context, “rather than learned ecclesiastical company, that the term mostly resided for the next sixty years”12 and in which puritan rapidly took on much of the political and social baggage that, in addition to theological questions, has provided such grist for the academic mill dedicated to definitions. Very early in its life puritan took on meaning in a social context. Atheos’s initial complaint to Zelotes did not concern the godly’s theological positions (although these disagreements surface later in the dialogue) but their intrusion into the social life of communities and the private lives of individuals. Puritan ministers were “busie controulers,” he thought, in that they concerned themselves with questions beyond their purview. Yet for Zelotes, all matters were fundamentally religious, including relations with neighbors and the moral state of the entire community. Thus, as William Hunt concluded, “a puritan who minds his own business is a contradiction in terms.”13 For some, this potential for social disruption means that puritanism is best interpreted in nonreligious terms. Christopher Hill prefaced his Society and Puritanism by suggesting “there might be non-theological reasons for supporting the Puritans, or for being a Puritan,” and proceeded to interpret puritanism primarily in the context of political and economic concerns that culminated in the English Civil War.14 But seeking to understand puritans with only passing reference to religion seems unnecessarily reductionistic, and it requires the interpreter to set aside much of what those labeled as puritans said about themselves, or more specifically how they said it. This by no means implies that historical subjects should have the last word, but it does mean knowing something of the past requires listening carefully to the languages that were spoken. 15 12

Collinson, Puritan Character, 20. Hunt, Puritan Moment, 146. 14 Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964), 9. 15 Writing of the religious beliefs of “ordinary villagers,” Margaret Spufford concluded “No determinism, economic, social, educational or geographical, will fully account for the existence of religious conviction; which is as it should be.… The local historian is not dealing with communities whose XXX 13

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Nevertheless, in a state-church environment, puritan carried connotations of political disobedience, and opponents sought to gain advantage by tarring puritans with the brush of disloyalty to the Crown. “It were good that you Puritanes should consider your selves,” Atheos warned his godly companion, “and become better subjects to the Prince.”16 The common identification of puritanism with clerical nonconformity—and hence disobedience to the ecclesiastical and civil authorities—is based in part upon the early associations with the vestments controversy, but in later historiography the notion was reinforced by histories that were organized around tracing a lineage of dissent, such as Benjamin Brook’s The Lives of the Puritans: Containing a Biographical Account of Those Divines Who Distinguished Themselves in the Cause of Religious Liberty, from the Reformation under Queen Elizabeth, to the Act of Uniformity in 1662, or Daniel Neal’s The History of the Puritans; or, Protestant Nonconformists; from the Reformation in 1517, to the Revolution in 1688.17 However, the range of sixteenth-century uses of puritan belies the simple equation of puritan with nonconformist. More important, the methodology that begins with a definition and then seeks out examples that match inevitably leads the seeker back to the beginning, a rather pointless exercise. As Collinson has wryly observed, “the coherence of our concept of Puritanism depends critically upon our knowing as little about such individual Puritans as possible.”18 In his own writings on the subject, Collinson has avoided static definitions as unproductive. Instead, he favors understanding puritan in the polemical context in which it regularly was deployed. This requires viewing those labeled puritan in their natural habitat, as it were, in relation to their contemporaries. Thus in his early work, he recognized the differences between puritans and those whom he reluctantly labeled Anglicans as “differences of degree, of theological temperature so to speak, rather than of fundamental principle.” According to Collinson, contemporaries saw puritans as marked by a singular commitment to “voluntary religious exercises” and certain “peculiarities of moral and social behaviour,” and it was in the attempt to enforce these peculiarities universally that puritans frequently 16

interests, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were confined to the bare economic necessities of life, even though the materials he has at his disposal on the economic life of any community are often so much richer than any others.” Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, rev. ed. (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2000), 352. 16 Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, L3r. 17 Brook, Lives of the Puritans (London: J. Black, 1813); and Neal, History of the Puritans (London: R. Hett, 1732). See also Hall, “Puritanism: The Problem of Definition,” 286. 18 Collinson, “Puritans.”

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came into conflict with their neighbors.19 Elsewhere, he has observed that puritanism “was neither alien to Protestantism nor even distinct from it but was its logical extension, equivalent to its full internalisation.” However, that ambiguous relationship with Protestantism was also a contentious one, and so puritanism must be seen as “not a thing definable in itself but only one half of a stressful relationship.”20 Puritan, then, much like liberal in modern American politics, is a term best viewed in action rather than in abstraction. Such an approach may be bad news for lexicographers but not for historians interested in investigating the friction created when Elizabethans of varying “theological temperatures” came in contact with one another in the Parliament, universities, and parishes. In such places and encounters, “what matters is not what people were in themselves but what they were doing to each other and saying about each other and against each other.”21 Countrie Divinitie offers one such record, although Gifford’s polemical purpose must remain as the guiding interpretive lens. In 1581 when Gifford wrote Countrie Divinitie, the term puritan was young, barely into its adolescence. This makes his usage all the more compelling, in that it shows early evidence of the contested history of the term as well as an example of an attempt to recast it in a positive light. Toward the end of the dialogue, Zelotes sought to defend preachers who denounce sin by likening them to the well-intentioned prophets of the Old Testament who warned the people of the impending judgment of God. Atheos was not convinced: ATHEOS: Naye, you that are precise Puritans doe finde faulte where there is none: you condemne men for every trifle. Whereas ye are but men, and have your infirmities as well as other[s]: yet yee would make your selves as holy as Angels. ZELOTES: I abhorre the errour of the Catheristes or Puritans, I confesse that I am loden with corruptions: if that be your meaning, to charge mee with that opinion which is wicked and divelishe. But if yee take the name Puritane for one which hath more care to obey God then the common sort, and therefore laboureth to keepe himself pure and unspotted of the worlde (as Saint James speaketh) then looke to it, that yee be not found among those which revile not men but God. If ye meane by precise men, those which are so scrupulous, as to make sinne 19

Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 26–27. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 95, 143. 21 Collinson, Puritan Character, 16–17. 20

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l CHAPTER ONE where there is none, as your wordes doe playnely shewe, then doe I utterly renounce that name for to be called precise, and I disalowe such fond persons, whosoever they bee. But I knowe you mean those which walke precisely as Saint Paule willeth, and doe take heede to their waies: not condemning men, but admonishing them, not in trifles, but in waightie matters: although you count them trifles. The commaundementes of God (at the least some of them) are but trifles with you.You see not, nor consider how greate the Lorde God is, and therefore ye dare affirme divers sinnes done against him to be but trifling and small, ye measure not sinne with a true measure, when ye doe measure it after the rule of a man. Ye doe not knowe wherefore there is eternall death threatened against every small sinne: yee marvell at that because yee are blinde and cannot judge how great he is, whose will is disobeyed.22

At first glance, one might safely conclude from this exchange that Zelotes and Atheos had very different definitions of what a “precise puritan” was. Yet upon closer scrutiny, the disagreement appears to be less substantive than interpretive. Atheos disliked the puritans’ meddlesome natures, reflected in preachers who condemned sinners by name and so split communities, and laymen who were all too ready to charge their neighbors with moral infractions. From the perspective of someone who did not share Zelotes’s godly attitudes, such interference was overly invasive (“you condemne men for every trifle”) and hypocritical (“ye…have your infirmities as well as other[s]”). Thus, for Atheos puritan was pejorative, a term of abuse reserved for the spiritually self-absorbed and self-righteous. From the point of view of the godly, however, such behavior was not “condemning” but “admonishing,” a duty forced upon them by scriptural mandate. For Zelotes, puritans were those who “hath more care to obey God then the common sort,” an attitude to be commended, not condemned. Commendation, however, came only from the like-minded. Zelotes recognized that what he counted as “waightie matters” Atheos thought to be “but trifles.” The distinction is crucial, for this difference in judgment was, according to Gifford, one of the key rifts between the godly and the ungodly. Zelotes believed Atheos “measure[d] not sinne with a true measure,” and so it was inevitable that he would resist admonitions to a godly life. Zelotes—that is to say Gifford—expected the Atheoses of the world to be stubbornly resistant to change, and this expectation was an important element of godly identity. Zelotes reminded Gifford’s godly 22

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, K4r–K5r.

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readers who they should be; more important, Atheos reminded them who they were not. So, was Zelotes a puritan in the pejorative sense or the commendable sense? Historians hoping to find the answer to this question in Countrie Divinitie, that is, to define the essence of puritanism, risk picking up the debate where Atheos, Zelotes, and countless sixteenth-century religious radicals and conservatives left off. This study assumes that the answer to that question reveals much more about the respondent—either sixteenthcentury or modern—than Zelotes. Faced with a similar choice of divergent readings, Peter Lake suggested that the “inherent polyvalence” of such situations can be a useful “point of entry into that process of identity formation and labeling whereby the godly and their enemies looked at each other, and not liking what they saw, decided what to say and do about it.”23 This study examines what Gifford had to say about the enemies he observed as he surveyed the landscape of the Elizabethan church, and what he thought must be done. Along the way, Gifford will frequently be found writing and speaking of the common sort of Christian, the Atheoses of the world. Just as Zelotes represented for Gifford an idealized zeal, so Atheos stood for an idealized ignorance, simultaneously full of both promise and peril. But just who were these commoners? What does Atheos have to say?

ATHEOS AND THE COMMON SORT Reading the mind of “the people” can be a notoriously difficult task, one that has nevertheless become increasingly popular among historians of early modern religion. This attraction certainly comes in part as a reaction to earlier historiographical traditions that paid much less attention to popular culture. Crudely put, the assumption seemed to be that if the people had an opinion, it didn’t particularly matter because they sat on the receiving end of decisions by kings, popes, archbishops, bishops—the elites, the makers of history. In this model the people were the raw material of history, most often spoken of in the passive voice or the objective case. Eventually, the people found a voice, however, as historians turned from traditional sources such as legislation, royal decrees, political correspondence, and literary treatises towards sources previously less utilized, such as wills, local court and town records, churchwarden accounts, tax returns, broadsides, and the like.24 Perhaps not surprisingly, historians of the popular voice discovered 23

Peter Lake, “‘A Charitable Christian Hatred’: The Godly and Their Enemies in the 1630s,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, 150. 24 Peter Burke provided a useful introduction to the history of the study of popular culture, along XXX

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that it frequently contradicted the official voices of the age. For example, in England, it is alleged, the people were less than enthusiastic supporters of Protestantism and so were not quick to follow the directions of Crown and church. Local records often revealed that parliamentary and royal decrees were met with only grudging compliance, or sometimes noncompliance around the country. Everything from preambles of wills to investments in church furnishings showed that many people still maintained a strong attachment to the old ways.25 The evidence pieced together from the fragmentary sources of popular history can prove difficult to put into context, however, and characters like Atheos serve to give a face and narrative voice to the collective discontent that seemed to bubble under the surface during the century of English reformations. In this context, Gifford’s Atheos appears to be a star witness for those who would prosecute the reformers and puritans for attempting to force an unpopular and stringent brand of Protestantism on an unwilling populace, those who had the comforts of their traditional religion ripped from them on account of Henry VIII’s marital and financial woes. Here, five decades after Henry’s break and two decades after his daughter Elizabeth ostensibly settled the matter, is evidence that the Reformation was never wanted by more than a handful of zealous reformers who were enamored of continental reformed religion and who sought to nationalize Calvin’s Genevan model. Here is a character whose plainspoken eloquence knits together a convincing picture of the common sort’s rejection of religion 25

with a survey of sources and methodologies, in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, rev. reprint (Brookfield,VT: Scolar Press, 1994). For particular attention to England, see the excellent introduction in Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding Their Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 1–26; and the many works of Margaret Spufford, esp. Contrasting Communities; idem, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–102; and idem, Figures in the Landscape: Rural Society in England, 1500–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), esp. 1–26. 25 For the traditional account of the English Reformation as a movement generally welcomed by the majority of the population, see Arthur Geoffrey Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken, 1964). In a second edition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), Dickens responded to critics but essentially maintained his arguments. For accounts of the strength of English Catholicism and the unpopularity of Protestantism, see J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); Christopher Haigh, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); idem, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1993). In between these poles lie accounts of the widespread passivity or malleability of the people with respect to religion, e.g., Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and idem, Local Responses to the English Reformation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

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forced on them from above. Or does he? Can Atheos bear up under the strain of cross-examination? As with the discussion of puritans, it is critical to recognize Gifford’s polemical and pastoral motivations. Both Zelotes and Atheos were Gifford’s creations. He knew how their conversation would end before it began, and the words he put in the mouth of Atheos were designed to create opportunities for Zelotes to press his theological agenda. While frequently sympathetic with the spiritual plight of the common sort, Gifford also went to great lengths to demonstrate, or perhaps create, a distinct antagonism between the godly and their surrounding culture. This filter is useful when mining Gifford’s writings for information about how “the people” responded to religious reformers. Gifford’s Atheos may reveal something of what the people thought, but he has much more to say concerning what the godly thought of the people and, just as important, of themselves. In this light, Atheos’s compelling testimony is best heard as hearsay evidence, and from a sometimes hostile source at that. Who were the common sort? In general usage, “common sort” denotes a distinction of social class. Common people, the Oxford English Dictionary informs, refers to those “undistinguished by rank or position; belonging to the commonality; of low degree,” and then notes parenthetically that the usage is “sometimes contemptuous.” Of course, contempt often accompanied the designation of someone as “of low degree,” since social status, moral stature, and worth were believed to go hand in hand. So it was that Shakespeare’s Gloucester passed judgment on a cowardly act by concluding “To say the truth, this fact was infamous / And ill beseeming any common man / Much more a knight, a captain, and a Leader,” and Montjoy asked Henry V “for charitable licence / That we may wander o’er this bloody field / To book our dead, and then to bury them; / To sort our nobles from our common men.”26 Such usage turns on the idea that what virtue might be found among the common sort should necessarily be present many times over among the nobility, and this virtue deserved better treatment in life and death. Based on such contemporary connotations of “common sort,” it is not difficult to understand the modern argument that the commoners Gifford and other puritans spoke harshly of were in fact the poor, the lower classes, and that the godly were most likely to be found among the “middling sorts,” those who owned some property or business, were more likely to be 26 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “common”; William Shakespeare, I Henry VI, 4.1.30–32 and Henry V, 4.7.71–74, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

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literate, and thus had a chance to study scriptures and other godly writings. Moreover, it is alleged, these socially mobile middlers had an economic motivation to expand their social control over the lower classes, and in this effort they found ready allies in puritan ministers concerned to curb the excesses of the profane masses. In “William Perkins and the Poor,” Christopher Hill judged Perkins to be a “systematizer and popularizer” of a theology that justified harsh treatment and little mercy for the poor, as seen in the poor laws passed late in Elizabeth’s reign. Crudely put, this theology said that material prosperity was a sign of God’s favor and a mark of the elect, and thus poverty an indicator of sin, failure, and damnation. As such the responsibility of the godly was not undiscriminating charity, which ran the risk of encouraging sloth and furthering poverty, but compulsion of the idle poor towards more profitable endeavors. “Ideas lubricate economic processes,” Hill argued, and puritan theology made it “very much nicer for a business man, finding himself under strong economic pressure to indulge in actions traditionally held to be sinful, to be told that those actions are in fact in accordance with the will of God.”27 But precisely who was it that puritan clergy and middlers reportedly sought to control? Hill’s poor were paupers, the truly indigent, yet he allowed that, in terms of reprogramming societal attitudes toward charity and poverty, “the real problem was set by those above the poverty line and below the status of large-scale employer of labour—the artisan and peasant majority of the population.”28 Others have followed Hill’s lead in finding collusion between godly middlers and ministers, while at the same time expanding the group the godly opposed. In one of the most influential of these narratives of opposition, Keith Wrightson and David Levine studied the village of Terling, located not far from Maldon. Wrightson and Levine attempted to explain the forces behind the creation of a “highly stratified” village society in Terling, wherein the “upper and middling ranks of village society” distanced themselves from a rapidly expanding lower class. These “better sort,” they concluded, “owed their prosperity to their commercial farming, their novel attitudes and perceptions to their involvement in the currents of administrative, educational, and religious change, their power to their role as the local officers of church and state, their social identity to their withdrawal from and hostility to a popular culture that was slowly being transformed into a culture of poverty.” In this process of social distancing, religion played an instrumental role by providing the ideological 27 Christopher Hill, “William Perkins and the Poor,” in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in the Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), 224–25. 28 Hill, “William Perkins and the Poor,” in Puritanism and Revolution, 232.

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grist for the mill: puritan preachers raised the stakes on relatively minor moral infractions that had been passed over as harmless by previous generations. Thus, in addition to poverty, a whole host of activities and entertainments traditionally enjoyed by the laboring masses was targeted by puritans as both spiritually detrimental and potentially subversive to the social order. “Poverty, idleness, ungodliness, disorder: These were the key themes underlying the sense of dissociation that fueled the actions of the innovating ‘better sort’ of Terling.”29 Among the many reactions to the “Terling thesis,” one of the strongest came from Margaret Spufford, who not only challenged Wrightson and Levine’s interpretations of the data, but also questioned the “assumptions about religious belief ” that undergirded their study. Spufford suggested that social historians err when they assume that “religious belief is primarily about moral behaviour and social attitudes, rather than the relationship of the individual with the being he thought to be exterior, whom he described as ‘God.’” In this case, the “unwary student” might conclude from Wrightson and Levine’s analysis that religious belief was a “by-product of social and economic position,” and correspondingly, “the emphasis on ‘puritanism’ as an instrument of social control leads in no time at all into a simplified equation of puritanism with social control,” an unwarranted reduction. Other critics have delved into puritan literary remains and discovered that, rather than seek to increase social distance, many godly ministers sought to close the gap. Eamon Duffy highlighted the neglected “theme of love for and compassion towards the common people among English Protestant writers,” as evidenced by the mass of inexpensive chapbooks written by puritan ministers for popular consumption during the seventeenth century. Peter Kaufman surveyed Elizabethan religious radicals and found that the “tough talk” that characterized much puritan rhetoric was only “part of the preliminaries…a first stride toward integration and laicization,” exactly the opposite of the social distancing observed by Wrightson and Levine.30 What then can Zelotes and Atheos add to the stormy debate over the puritans and the common sort? The evidence in Countrie Divinitie suggests that Gifford did not believe material poverty was an indicator of the kind 29 Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 174, 182, 180. 30 Margaret Spufford, “Puritanism and Social Control,” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. A. J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 41, 43; Eamon Duffy, “The Godly and the Multitude in Stuart England,” The Seventeenth Century 1/1 (January 1986): 33; and Peter Iver Kaufman, “How Socially Conservative Were the Elizabethan Radicals?” Albion 30/1 (Spring 1998): 47.

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of spiritual poverty he thought burdened the common sort. Instead, for Gifford “common sort,” though not devoid of class associations, carried a fundamentally religious connotation. A key undercurrent running throughout Countrie Divinitie is a muddling of class boundaries vis-à-vis godliness: just as the godly could be found among both the poor and the gentry, so also were the “common sort of Christians”—the spiritually dull “men indifferent”—spread across social classes. Early in their discussion, Atheos strenuously declared his objections to ministers who were “busie controulers.” He claimed “as poor a man as I am, I would not for fortye shillinges that wee had one of them,” and then added for good measure, “there be more of my minde.” When Zelotes supposed the “more” were “some poore men perhaps,” Atheos corrected him: “Naye, the best in the Parish, who would not so well like of our Curat, if hee should meddle that way.”31 Resistance, Gifford wanted his godly readers to believe, could be as easily found among the yeomen as the laborers who worked their fields. Correspondingly, Gifford’s Zelotes worked hard to convince Atheos that despite his lowly station—evidenced in this case by Atheos’s lack of education—he should increase his spiritual aspirations. In fact, formal education sometimes hindered proper interpretation of scriptures, and the learned were more likely to be arrogant and less open to the leading of God’s spirit. Here Gifford played with the meaning of “learned” and “unlearned”: It is not learning alone whiche must judge of sound preaching, for there be manie learned men which cannot judge well, as also there be manie unlearned, which are verie well able to discerne, all lieth in this point: the doctrine is of God, and not of men, and therefore those doe feele it, and judge rightly whether they be learned or unlearned, whom God doth inwardly teach with his spirite.32

The unlearned can have spiritual wisdom that eludes the learned. But Zelotes’s faith in the spiritual discernment of the unlearned did not comfort Atheos. He still thought “the Scriptures are darke and hard, and therefore men nowe due not understand them as the Doctors did.” He was content to have others explain to him what the scripture meant. Zelotes responded that “the Lord hath spoken so clearely, that verye simple men maye bee taught for to see the plaine evidence of the word.” Atheos was not convinced, telling Zelotes that he “shall never make mee beleeve that every man is for to judge, whether the Preacher speake true or false.” He 31 32

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, A2v. Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, B3v.

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neither felt qualified to judge his preacher’s sermons, nor was he inclined to spend the time necessary to become so. Moreover, he thought it incredible that Zelotes would have him “beleeve that God doeth require that men should leave their businesse when they be poore and have charge of children, and give themselves to reading and hearing of preachinges.” But Zelotes insisted on both: every man had a responsibility to provide spiritual as well as physical sustenance for his family.33 In the imaginary world Gifford created in Countrie Divinitie, social station and education did not predetermine spiritual condition. But what of Gifford’s actual ministry? Did it encourage division in Maldon along class lines? Only scattered evidence remains to indicate the social composition of Gifford’s support and opposition, but what there is suggests that Gifford’s practice and rhetoric cohabited comfortably. Town leaders in Maldon were divided with regards to support of Gifford. A majority supported his ministry and sought to have him reinstated following a suspension on account of his nonconformity. One petition toward that end sent to the bishop of London was signed by fifty-two “persons of the best and substantialist” in the town. At the same time, town records also indicate a steady undercurrent of opposition to Gifford among some town leaders who preferred the later conformist vicar, Robert Palmer, but this group never managed to gain complete control of the corporation and so could only offer limited resistance.34 More widespread support for Gifford’s ministry is also difficult to measure precisely, but suggested by two incidents. The first occurred during an episcopal visit in 1586, when “certaine younge heades” in Maldon hatched a scheme to humiliate the bishop of London John Aylmer by having someone dressed as a jester snatch off his cap and toss it among the crowd. Town leaders were chagrined at the disorder and likely thought it did more harm than good for their cause, but this disrespect for clerical vestments, indeed for the episcopacy itself, indicates Gifford’s nonconformity had found a willing audience among some townspeople. Who these “younge heades” were or how great their number was is not known, but two things seem clear: they supported Gifford, and yet they were not particularly close to town leaders who also favored the godly preacher. A second glimpse of Gifford’s support comes from the following decade, when an observer told of the strife between Gifford—by then a lecturer—and Palmer, and described how Palmer’s sermons attracted only half the crowd that Gifford’s did. The 33 34

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, G4r–v, G7r, K1v. The petition may be found in British Library Lansdowne MS 68.48.

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reason for the disparity was that “the phantasticall sort” were running down the road to listen to another godly preacher on the Sundays when Palmer was scheduled to preach. In the conflict between Gifford and his rival, Maldon’s townspeople were apparently voting with their feet, in numbers significant enough to disrupt the order of the town.35 These snapshots into Maldon’s ecclesiastical life do not provide enough evidence to make a detailed breakdown of Gifford’s support and opposition—counting heads in the sixteenth century remains problematic—but enough remains to cast doubt on a narrative that pits a narrow godly middling sort against a mass of unreformed commoners.36 Based on Countrie Divinitie and Gifford’s experiences in Maldon, it is difficult to conclude with William Hunt that what was “at issue in Maldon…was the attempt of a local elite, centered around a Puritan minister, to impose the culture of discipline upon a refractory majority.”37 Maldon was a town divided over questions of religion, but not neatly along class lines.

GIFFORD AND THE COMMON SORT Recent studies of late Tudor religious culture have moved beyond the wellworn debates over the essence of puritanism and bipolar models of reformation “from above” or “from below.” There is growing interest in turning from religious debates centered in the universities and Parliament to the religious experience at the parish level, the front lines of the struggle to bring reformed Protestantism to England. A number of studies have explored the reception of the Reformation in specific locales, and studies of parish clergy are giving increasing attention to pastoral ministry—what Elizabethans called “practical divinity”—a neglected topic in previous accounts of the establishment of Protestantism in England.38 In this context, the Elizabethan 35

For Aylmer’s letter outlining his troubles in Maldon, see British Library Lansdowne MS 50.40; the 1596 letter describing the split in Maldon, Westminster Abbey Muniments 8125. For a detailed discussion of these events and sources, see chapter 2. 36 On the difficulties, both practical and theoretical, see Margaret Spufford, “Can We Count the ‘Godly’ and the ‘Conformable’ in the Seventeenth Century?” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 428–38. 37 Hunt, Puritan Moment, 153. 38 See the useful overview of shifting scholarly interests by Eric Josef Carlson, “Cassandra Banished? New Research on Religion in Tudor and Early Stuart England,” in Religion and the English People, 1500– 1640, ed. Carlson (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1998), 3–22. A sampling of recent studies that utilize a local and parochial lens to interpret the Reformation (or in the latter examples, a broader period) include: Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics; Patrick Collinson and John Craig, eds. The Reformation in English Towns (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Caroline Litzenberger, The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire 1540–1580 (Cambridge: Cambridge University XXX

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pastor Richard Greenham has enjoyed particular popularity. Two recent works focus on this godly minister, a contemporary of Gifford, who spent the majority of his career in the small parish of Dry Drayton near Cambridge. Greenham was well respected by other ministers both during and after his lifetime: his collected works went through five editions within twenty years of his death. Kenneth Parker and Eric Carlson have attributed Greenham’s enduring popularity to his “exceptional work as a parish minister, teacher and comforter of afflicted consciences,” as well as the way he influenced young ministers by converting his home in Dry Drayton into an unofficial school of practical ministry for nearby Cambridge students. John Primus outlined Greenham’s theology and claimed that his dedication to practical ministry made him “in his written works…almost oblivious to the ecclesiastical and civil skirmishes of his time.” Based on this avoidance of political entanglements, Primus thus labels Greenham a “cooperative puritan.” In sum, both works present Greenham as a telling example of puritan practical divinity.39 Given these recent directions in puritan studies, Gifford is an ideal candidate to explore Elizabethan puritan culture, since his career captures both its pastoral and political dimensions. Gifford, like Greenham, spent the majority of his career in a parish, but he could hardly be said to have avoided the “ecclesiastical and civil skirmishes” of the day. In fact, Gifford sought them out, believing his role as a pastor necessarily propelled him into the politics of the church. In his opinion, such skirmishes had a direct effect upon practical ministry and thus upon the spiritual condition of the common sort. Following his deprivation due to his nonconformity, he lobbied sympathetic members of Parliament for relief. He was quick to lay blame for the church’s ills on the intransigence of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, led as it was by bishops far removed from the problems of the parish, and he seemed to prefer the local control that presbyterian polity offered. On the other hand, Gifford argued for the establishment when he confronted two English separatists, Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, in a two-year, written debate in which he claimed his opponents threatened to undermine lay support for the ministry by confusing the people and 39

Press, 1997); Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger, eds., Belief and Practice in Reformation England (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1998); Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat A. Kümin, The Parish in English Life 1400–1600 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1997); and S. J. Wright, Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750 (London: Hutchinson, 1988). 39 Kenneth L. Parker and Eric J. Carlson, Practical Divinity: The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1998), 5; and John H. Primus, Richard Greenham: The Portrait of an Elizabethan Pastor (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), 2, 6.

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fomenting schism. In spite of his diverse career, or perhaps because of it, Gifford remains underrepresented in puritan historiography.40 In addition to his varied political involvements, Gifford’s writings represent a largely untapped resource for puritan studies. While many godly ministers tended to limit their writings to pastoral concerns, Gifford’s works reflect his political interests, running the gamut from the homiletic to the polemic. Countrie Divinitie was his first and most popular work, but in the two decades that followed, Gifford had nineteen other published works, many of which went through multiple printings extending into the 1630s, more than three decades after Gifford’s death. These include works directed against Catholics and against separatists, a dialogue and treatise on witchcraft, a catechism, and many sermon collections. The styles vary from dense, theological treatises to colloquial dialogues specifically “applied to the capacity of the unlearned,” but in general Gifford tended toward practical application.41 The most comprehensive study of Gifford to date appeared in an article by Dewey Wallace, who surveyed Gifford’s writings and identified several themes that run throughout his work. Wallace was especially concerned with Gifford’s descriptions of the average Elizabethan parishioner and argued that Gifford’s common sort were superstitious, nostalgic for the old days, anticlerical (when it came to puritan clergy), and had a works-based understanding of salvation, a position Wallace designated “common man’s pelagianism.” These ministerial challenges, Wallace concluded, shaped Gifford’s approach to pastoral ministry: “Gifford’s ministry and writing seem to have been motivated by and to have gained unity from his task of educating the ‘common sort’ in true religion.”42 In part, this study builds upon Wallace’s thesis by fleshing out more precisely what Gifford had in mind when he spoke of the “common sort of 40 Gifford has received occasional attention from historians. He appears as a minor player in many histories of puritanism, and has been the subject of a few articles and essays but no monographs. To date, scholarly interest in Gifford has focused on his descriptions of popular religion, his involvement in the sixteenth-century witchcraft controversies, or his participation in the campaign for presbyterian polity. Articles include Haigh, “The Taming of the Reformation”; Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., “George Gifford, Puritan Propaganda and Popular Religion in Elizabethan England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978): 27–49; Macfarlane, “Tudor Anthropologist”; James Hitchcock, “George Gifford and Puritan Witch Beliefs,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 58 (1967): 90–99; and Christabel F. Fiske, “The Saneness of George Giffard,” Poet Lore 31 (1920): 210–31. Gifford’s witchcraft writings are frequently discussed in monographs on the subject, e.g., Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971); and Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). On Gifford and witchcraft, see chapter 5. 41 From the full title of his Papist and Protestant (London, 1582). 42 Wallace, “George Gifford,” 47.

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Christian.” Specifically, this study suggests that Gifford used the image of the common sort in two distinct and sometimes contradictory ways, based on the particular polemical context. In Gifford’s world, Atheos was simultaneously one of the “common sort of Christians” and, by Zelotes’s definition, an atheist due to his passive acceptance of tradition and authority. Atheos’s ambiguous status is revealing. On the one hand, Gifford’s common sort were as Wallace described them—ignorant and stubborn villagers like Atheos, comfortable in their traditions and resistant to change. In this context, Gifford used the idea of the ignorant layperson as evidence of the overwhelming need for more educated preaching clergy to fill the parishes of England. More important, designating the majority of England’s parishioners as “the common sort of Christians” was also a way of admonishing the godly and defining a distinctly minority identity for them. So, when his godly listeners heard Gifford preach that they should marke how far the holye Ghost doth differ in setting forth a righteous man from the common manner of worldings…[those who] count it no matter though a man be an Idolater, or superstitious, or a swearer…these are brute beasts without understanding, very Atheists, which wil say plainly they can see no difference between the papists and the professors of the gospel,43

then they were reminded what they should not be. On the other hand, Gifford could speak of the common sort with a more sympathetic tone that, in a latter era, might well be dubbed populist. In the dedicatory letter of Countrie Divinitie, Gifford spoke of the “men indifferent” abandoned by the church, left somewhere between popery and Protestantism. The situation intrigued him, in part because he believed the common sort had untapped spiritual reserves, and in many cases, one finds Gifford less interested in lamenting their faults than in celebrating the possibilities they represented. So it was that the unlearned regularly showed up in Gifford’s writings as spiritually discerning, an ideal type Gifford used to reinforce his message of the simplicity and accessibility of the gospel. Toward this end, Zelotes tried to persuade Atheos to discard his understanding of “learned” and “unlearned” that hindered his pursuit of a godly life. Gifford also wielded the figure of the simple man as a foil against the papists: armed with the scriptures and led by the Holy Spirit, even an unlettered man could hold his own with the learned Catholic debater.44

43 44

Gifford, James (London, 1582), D4r. All quotations are from the 1582 edition. See Gifford, Papist and Protestant, and discussion in chapter 3.

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In what follows, this study examines how these competing attitudes toward the common sort played out in Gifford’s writings. Before turning to his literary corpus, however, the stage is set by assembling what features of Gifford’s life and ministry can be pieced together. The evidence is fragmentary, perhaps raising as many questions as it answers, yet enough survives to demonstrate the broad strokes of Gifford’s involvement in the ecclesiastical politics of his day. Moving between Parliament and the parish, this study shows that Gifford serves as an especially good example of the contention that in “localis[ing] the Reformation, we do not depoliticise it.”45 Local politics were often a microcosm of what played out at the national level, and national debates could be joined by those like Gifford, who had a strong investment in local parish ministry. To discern the nature of that investment requires following Atheos and Zelotes on the road to Chelmsford, and beyond.

45

Collinson and Craig, Reformation in English Towns, 16.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Politics of Godliness We must therfore be so hot and zealous in the profession of true religion, that it cause us to forget our own state and commoditie: wee must have so burning a loove for Gods trueth, that nothing may be able to quenche the same. We must not stagger and vary, because we shall endure trouble.1

A

Around the time Gifford published Countrie Divinitie, he went to London to preach “a godly, profitable, and zealous sermon on the second chapter of Saint James.” He had just begun his ministry in Maldon, where he would remain for the next two decades. He was at this point in relatively good standing with the church, yet in his sermon on James, one has no trouble detecting the contentious attitudes that would shape Gifford’s life and work during the 1580s. Professors of “true religion” must be selfless, he reminded his audience, and perhaps himself. The pursuit of godliness required travel on a perilous, sometimes lonely, path. Those who followed it risked losing their possessions, their livelihoods, perhaps even their lives. As he stood in the pulpit and considered the state of the English church and his place in it, Gifford anticipated a ministry marked by controversy. “We shall endure trouble,” he told his hearers, and in this case the preacher proved to be a prophet.

BEGINNINGS—CAMBRIDGE TO MALDON Only a few details of Gifford’s early life are known. The record of his ordination in December 1578 lists him as thirty years of age, suggesting he was born sometime around 1548. He was the son of Bonniface Gifford of Dry Drayton, a small village near Cambridge. Historian William Petchey supposed Gifford’s father to be a yeoman, a reasonable suggestion given that Dry Drayton had no substantial occupations other than farming and that 1

Gifford, James, D3v.

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Gifford later had sufficient means to attend Cambridge. Otherwise, little is known of his youth.2 Gifford’s family apparently had a close relationship with John Hutton of Dry Drayton, who was an MP for Cambridgeshire between 1563 and 1572. One of the few biographical clues in Gifford’s published writings appears in the dedication of his Sermon on the Parable of the Sower (1581), wherein Gifford thanked Hutton for his support of the gospel and acknowledged his many special ties which are so wel knowne unto you, that it wer needlesse for me to recite them: onely thus much, seeing I was born and brought up under you, my parents receiving benefits daily from you, I think I ought, when as I am not able to make any recompence, at least shew some token of a grateful mind. But especially I am moved heereunto, with consideration of the greatest blessing which all my kindred have enjoyed by you now so long, in providing and procuring their spiritual instruction.3

The earliest certifiable record of Gifford appears in the register of Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a B.A. in 1570 and proceeded to earn an M.A. in 1573. It is possible he was the same George Gifford who spent some time at Hart Hall, Oxford. Such is the assumption of Oxford historian Anthony Wood, who claimed Gifford was a student “several years before 1568” but gives no evidence to link the Gifford thus enrolled with the Gifford who later gained recognition as a minister and author. On the other hand, evidence of Gifford’s ties to Cambridge appears throughout his biographical record. Wood relied on enrollment records in listing Gifford, but found no record that indicated this George Gifford received any degree. The mere proximity of Dry Drayton to Cambridge would seem to suggest Cambridge as a more convenient choice for university training, and no record other than the Hart Hall registry links 2 My reconstruction of Gifford’s ministry in Maldon has been guided at nearly every turn by William John Petchey, The Borough of Maldon, Essex, 1500–1688 (Ph.D. diss., University of Leicester, Department of English Local History, 1972); and idem, A Prospect of Maldon: 1500–1689 (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1991). In addition, I have been saved from many errors by the recent appearance of Patrick Collinson, John Craig, and Brett Usher, eds., Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church: Dedham and Bury St Edmunds, 1582–1590, Church of England Record Society, vol. 10 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003). The thoroughly documented entry on Gifford in the biographical register was indispensable in my discussion of Gifford’s career. Gifford’s ordinations as deacon and priest appear in the Diocese of London Ordination Register, 1578–1628, Guildhall Library MS 9535/2, 4r– v. The register lists Gifford as born in “draton” in the county of Cambridge. Dry Drayton parish records from the time of Gifford’s birth are lost. For Petchey’s speculations on Gifford’s family, see Prospect of Maldon, 201. A family tree produced by George Gifford’s son John lists “Bonniface Gifford of Dry Drayton” as George’s father but names no mother. See Joseph Jackson Howard and Joseph Lemuel Chester, eds., The Visitation of London, Anno Domini 1633, 1634, and 1635 (London, 1880), 1:314. 3 Gifford, Sower, (London, 1582), Aiiv.

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Gifford to Oxford. It is possible that Gifford began at Oxford and then moved to Cambridge. If so, he may have been attracted to the reforming cause while a student and have been drawn to the progressive religious atmosphere that permeated Cambridge during the 1560s. But this is impossible to know, as Gifford made no reference to any such experience in his many writings.4 In any case, Gifford’s training and experiences at Cambridge certainly set the course of his later life. Studying at Christ’s College exposed Gifford to the evangelical ideals that marked his entire ministry, and college connections later helped him land in the pulpit at Maldon. Christ’s College was relatively young, having been founded in 1505 by Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII. As the influences of continental reform initially filtered into England, Christ’s College had its share of progressives set on bringing similar reform to the English church. Later, when during the reign of Mary the most stubborn Protestants fled England for the Continent, Christ’s ranked third among Cambridge colleges in the number of students and fellows who left, among them later puritan leader Anthony Gilby.5 In the 1560s and 1570s Christ’s also ranked among the top three Cambridge colleges (along with St. John’s and Trinity) in terms of matriculations. During these eventful decades Christ’s developed into “a puritan seminary in all but name” under the influence of Edward Dering (1540?– 1576) and his successor Laurence Chaderton (1536?–1640), a noted teacher and preacher who became, in the estimate of Collinson, “the pope of Cambridge puritanism.” Gifford certainly absorbed the reforming ideals of Dering and Chaderton, and likely studied with both. According to Lake, “the foundations of the moderate puritan tradition were laid” with Dering at Christ’s College during the 1560s. Indeed, Dering’s assorted complaints and suggested reforms became standard puritan fare and regularly punctuate Gifford’s writings. Dering emphasized “the present state of the church, devoid of godly preachers, afflicted by dumb dogs, non-residence, pluralism 4 For records of Gifford’s university training, see John Peile, Biographical Register of Christ’s College 1505–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 1:98; John Venn and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates, and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pt. 1, 2:213; and Anthony A. Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford (London, 1815), 2:291. 5 A general history of Christ’s College may be found in John Peile, Christ’s College (London: F. E. Robinson, 1900). For special attention to reformers and puritans at Cambridge, see Harry Culverwell Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: University Press, 1958), which lists all Cambridge Marian exiles by college (91–98).

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and a faulty form of ecclesiastical discipline.” Furthermore, he did not hesitate to broadcast his complaints to those in a position to effect change, as seen in a fiery sermon at court in February 1569. Chaderton followed in Dering’s footsteps as a fellow and tutor at Christ’s and also as a consistent advocate for reform and a supporter of presbyterian polity.6 Of course, reformers at Cambridge were not limited to Christ’s College alone. The religious debates that pervaded the country’s political discourse drew much of their intellectual strength from Cambridge, where controversies over the course of reformation multiplied during the 1560s and early 1570s. Perhaps the best known of the religious upheavals of the 1560s began at St. John’s College, where William Fulke persuaded several hundred students to abandon the use of the surplice in chapel. For this act of defiance, he suffered a temporary expulsion. Despite this, he was able to rebuild his reputation with church leaders in part by his later polemics against Rome, and eventually was successful in gaining a position as Master of Pembroke Hall.7 Gifford must have known Fulke, since Gifford's first published work was a translation of Fulke's commentary on the book of Revelation, published in 1573.8 Another well-known and controversial Cambridge divine was Thomas Cartwright, of St. John’s and later Trinity College. Cartwright was appointed as the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1569, only to lose the professorship after a year when, in a controversial series of lectures on the first two chapters of Acts, he strongly advocated a presbyterian polity for the church. Given Gifford’s later support for the presbyterian cause, it is not difficult to imagine him as an eager listener in Cartwright’s audience. Cartwright’s popularity and politics caught up with him, though, and he was forced to leave England for the Continent. As Cartwright retreated to the safe haven of Geneva, Cambridge continued to be a hotbed of religious debate and even apocalyptic fervor. In this environment of reform and controversy Gifford began his career.9 Scattered records indicate the course of Gifford’s life during the remainder of the 1570s following his completion of studies at Cambridge in 1573. The record of his ordination by London Bishop John Aylmer in 1578 lists Gifford as residing in “Monnessinge,” that is, Mountnessing, a 6 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 125–27, quote at 127. On both Dering and Chaderton, see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), quotes at 16, 17. 7 Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 119–35; and Lake, Moderate Puritans, 57–58. 8 Gifford, Revelation (Fulke) (London, 1573). 9 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 112–13; and Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 174–78.

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small village in southern Essex not far from the larger town of Brentwood. Beginning in 1574 Gifford worked as a schoolmaster in Brentwood, located on the London-Chelmsford road that he used as a setting for Countrie Divinitie. At Brentwood, Gifford was exposed to prophesyings, the sometimes disorderly preaching exercises that became such a point of contention between the queen and Archbishop Edmund Grindal. Prophesyings consisted of multiple sermons preached on the same text before a large audience, followed by a private discussion among ministers. Brentwood was one of the several market towns in Essex that hosted the meetings, often on market days when a sizeable crowd would be guaranteed. Grindal and others who decried the lack of suitable preaching in the English church supported these exercises as one more tool for improving the undereducated ministry in England. However, since many of the preachers who frequented the prophesyings also supported further reform of the church, opponents saw the gatherings as unregulated and potentially dangerous venues for zealous reformers to inculcate in their hearers resentment against ecclesiastical authority.10 Even at this stage in his career, it is not difficult to discern which side of the debate Gifford would have favored. One concern of opponents centered on the extent of lay participation: were laypeople simply there to listen, or did they become involved in matters of doctrine and interpretation? In the case of Brentwood, surviving records indicate that Gifford, then still a layman, not only observed but also participated in the prophesyings. In the course of defending the meetings, John Walker, the archdeacon of Essex, allowed that the schoolmaster Gifford had been “suffered to speak sometimes when such ministers as were appointed to speak did fail, partlie for necessity…partlie for that he is an universitie man and well exercised in the Latin tongue and in the scriptures, and therefore doth well teach.” 11 The nature of the appointed ministers’ failures is unclear—presumably a failure to appear—but it is not hard to imagine Gifford, fresh from university training, eager to step into the gap and offer his opinions in debates over the interpretation of scripture. A final glimpse into Gifford’s life in Brentwood also testifies to his identification with the cause of reform: he and his wife Agnes were summoned before the archdeacon’s court in 1575 for failing to receive communion, a common protest among those who disapproved of the order and forms of the prayer book. Records indicate 10 On the prophesyings, see Collinson, Craig, and Usher, Conferences and Combination Lectures, xxvi–xxxii, 209; and the fuller discussion below in chapter 3. 11 Lambeth Palace Library MS 2003, 12r, quoted in Collinson, Craig, and Usher, Conferences and Combination Lectures, 212 n. 6.

30

Figure 3. Maldon in the sixteenth century. Source: W. J. Petchey, A Prospect of Maldon: 1500-1689 (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1991), 4-5. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge University, and the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford University.

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Figure 4. River Blackwater. The Blackwater, along with the River Chelmer, empties into the sea at Maldon. This location made Maldon an important trading point. Photograph © Barry J. Samuels. Reproduced by permission.

that the case proceeded to the point of excommunication, but this must have been resolved by the time of Gifford’s ordination in 1578. 12 Following his stay in Brentwood, Gifford found his way to Maldon, another Essex market town also known for its support of the prophesyings (fig.3). As a port town located where the Chelmer and Blackwater rivers empty into the sea, Maldon had from Roman times been an important trading point (fig. 4). The name Maldon, derived from the earlier “Maeldune,” means “cross on a hilltop.” In medieval times the Saxons valued its strategic location, given the way the land rises quickly up from the sea, and so established a town and defensive fort there to guard against aggressive Norsemen. The threat from across the sea was realized when the Vikings invaded in August 991, and a bloody battle was fought on the surrounding plains. The Saxons saved the town but lost the battle in a bloody and valiant effort that inspired the earliest recorded Anglo-Saxon epic poem, The 12

Collinson, Craig, and Usher, Conferences and Combination Lectures, 209, 212 n. 8.

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Battle of Maldon.13 Maldon’s trade guaranteed its continued prosperity, and in the early sixteenth century Maldon ranked third among Essex towns in terms of tax revenues, and was the only town other than Colchester to return members to parliaments.14 In the sixteenth century the town of Maldon stretched across three parishes: All Saints, St. Peter’s, and St. Mary’s. The parish of All Saints had in medieval times been carved out of the midst of St. Peter’s, with the result being that the largely urban All Saints lies like a tiny island (57 acres) in the midst of the much larger and more rural St. Peter’s (1,610 acres). Despite this territorial disparity, however, All Saints benefited from its central location. The church of All Saints still occupies a prominent position adjacent to the old town market at the top of High Street, the town’s main thoroughfare (figs. 5–7). By the middle of the fourteenth century, All Saints had become the largest and most richly adorned church in the town. By the sixteenth century the livings of All Saints and St. Peter’s had been combined, and services were held regularly at All Saints while the church of St. Peter’s fell into disrepair (fig. 8). Thus, though the livings were combined, All Saints had pride of place, and the position of vicar was typically styled in church records as “All Saints with St. Peter.” Both parishes fell under the administrative jurisdiction of the bishop of London.The third parish church in the town was St. Mary’s, located down High Street towards the wharf. Due to the ownership history of the estate that eventually became St. Mary’s, the parish fell under the jurisdiction of the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey. During Gifford’s stint in Maldon, godly reformers attempted to exploit this administrative anomaly in order to circumnavigate the restrictions placed on the town by the bishop of London.15 Gifford must have arrived in Maldon no later than 1581, when a note in the town chamberlain’s accounts recorded an expense related to an inquiry “directed from the busshop of London touchinge Mr Gifford and Mr Withers.” The precise circumstances of the inquiry are obscure, but apparently were resolved in Gifford’s favor so that his later promotion to vicar was not hindered. Fabian Withers, whose brother George was the archbishop of Colchester, served as the vicar of All Saints with St. Peter’s from 1575 till his resignation in 1582. Gifford served as curate under 13 For the Old English text and modern translation, see Samuel Salerno, trans., The Battle of Maldon (Monterey, CA: Lighthouse Press, 1996); and Donald Scragg, ed., The Battle of Maldon, AD 991 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 14 Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 10–11. 15 Leonard Hughes, A Guide to the Church of All Saints, Maldon (Maldon and London, 1909); and Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 7–9.

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Figure 5. All Saints Church, Maldon. The thirteenth-century tower, marked by its unique triangular design, is the oldest remaining portion of the church. Photograph © Barry J. Samuels. Reproduced by permission.

Withers in a sort of apprenticeship, until such time as Withers retired and the position officially passed into Gifford’s hands on August 30, 1582. In order to become vicar, Gifford had to be recommended by the patron, Richard Franks, and approved by the bishop of London. Bishop Aylmer, who had ordained Gifford three and a half years earlier, apparently had no cause by the time of Gifford’s presentation to reject the recommendation of the patron, and the transition proceeded without incident. Franks probably relied on the retiring vicar for advice in choosing a replacement. Fabian Withers’s knowledge of Gifford likely came by way of the tight network of godly ministers in Essex, many of them with Cambridge connections. Withers had attended Christ’s College during the 1540s, and his son Samuel was there in 1572, the year before Gifford proceeded to the M.A. Gifford may also have come to the attention of Withers and Franks by way of Countrie Divinitie, published in 1581. Even a casual reader of the work could discern Gifford’s godly inclinations, an attitude that no doubt

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Figure 6. All Saints Church, south aisle. This portion of the church dates from the fourteenth century. Photograph © Barry J. Samuels. Reproduced by permission.

Figure 7. All Saints vicarage. Photograph by the author, 2001.

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Figure 8. St. Peter’s Church, Maldon. The church served as a grammar school during the sixteenth century. The building was in poor repair and eventually collapsed in 1665, leaving only the tower intact. In the late seventeenth century, the church was rebuilt by Thomas Plume, and now houses the Plume Library. Photograph by the author, 2001.

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attracted Withers and his reform-minded patron but would prove less appealing to conservative constituents in the town.16 Perhaps a copy of Countrie Divinitie also found its way into the hands of Roger Nowell, vicar of the parish of Heybridge just across the river from Maldon. If so, this might help explain the circumstances of a minor clash recorded in the court rolls of the Quarter Sessions meeting in Chelmsford. Regardless of its origin, the case exemplifies the type of controversies in which Gifford would involve himself over the next two decades of his ministry. The examination involved Nowell’s refusal to allow Gifford, then Withers’s assistant at Maldon, to preach at Heybridge. Witnesses reported Gifford had “given warning to the said Roger Nowell that he the said Preacher was determined to come to preach at the said parish church of Heybridge at the afternoon of the 26th day of Januar [1582].” What followed was a conflict between Nowell and one of his churchwardens, whom Nowell informed that “yf he [the churchwarden] did suffer the said preacher to preache he was forsworne, and that he [Gifford] should not preache though he came their to preache.” This pronouncement earned Nowell the condemnation of one of his parishioners, John Lock, who claimed that Nowell was showing himself to be an “enemy to the word preached.” An incensed Nowell claimed if this was true, then so was the queen, and it was this last indelicate remark that earned Nowell his appearance before the court.17 This case probably tells as much about Nowell’s poor relations with his parishioners as it does about his relations with his fellow ministers in the neighboring parish, but it suggests something of Gifford’s local reputation that his possible visit could arouse such a strong reaction in the vicar of Heybridge. (It may also be the case that the often contentious Gifford was less than diplomatic in seeking permission to preach in a fellow minister’s church.) Furthermore, it is not hard to imagine Lock to be one of those who wished preaching to be both more frequent and more edifying, and easier still to conclude that he found the services of his present minister to be lacking. He may even have been one who “gadded about” to sermons, crossing the river on occasion to hear the new young godly minister preach and hoping to bring the same sort of fire to his town. Finally, Nowell’s claim to stand with the queen against preachers such as Gifford not 16 For the expenditures and the inquiry, see Petchey, Borough of Maldon, 223; and Collinson, Craig, and Usher, Conferences and Combination Lectures, 209. Gifford’s assignment as vicar of All Saints with St. Peter in Maldon is listed in the register of the bishop of London, Guildhall Library MS 9531/ 13, 206r. 17 Essex Record Office Q/SR 79/93.

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only hints at Gifford’s reputation, but in hindsight one may conclude Nowell had a better understanding of the political winds of the English church. For within little more than a year of the spat between Nowell and Gifford, Archbishop Grindal would be dead, and the queen’s choice for his replacement would immediately begin to make his presence felt. For puritans still mourning the loss of their preaching exercises, the world was about to change dramatically.

THE 1583–84 SUBSCRIPTION CAMPAIGN AND GIFFORD’S DEPRIVATION Following the death of Edmund Grindal in July 1583, the queen was free to choose an archbishop who shared her view of an orderly, structured church and who would not tarry in bringing it about. She found the new leader in John Whitgift, who was at the time serving as bishop of Worchester, though he had spent much of his earlier career at Cambridge, rising to the position of vice-chancellor. Whitgift had gained national prominence in the early 1570s through a pamphlet war he waged against Thomas Cartwright over presbyterian polity. Whitgift’s strong support for episcopacy in the course of the debate no doubt assured the queen that she had found her champion who could bring a new sense of discipline and order to the unruly ministry of the Church of England.18 The new archbishop wasted no time in his task. Within a month of his election in September 1583, he drafted and promulgated a set of “Articles Touching Preachers and Other Orders for the Church” that outlined reform of the church and ministry. Some actually addressed concerns repeatedly voiced by puritans (a fact frequently overlooked by Whitgift’s critics), such as the one requiring bishops to enforce certain educational prerequisites for ordination to ministry. Others, however, sought to curb practices associated with puritans: all preaching, reading, and catechizing in private places was prohibited if more than a single family was present; none could preach or catechize unless he also said divine service at least four times a year (an attempt to bring freelance lecturers under control); and preachers must wear proper ministerial apparel at all times. By far the most notable of the articles, however, was the one requiring agreement or subscription to a set of three statements by all

18 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 243–44; and Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (London: Longman Group, 1988), 35.

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who wished to “preach, reade, catechize, minister the Sacraments or to exercise any other ecclesiasticall function” within the church. 19 The three subscription articles addressed the relation between the queen and the church, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Articles of Religion. The first required subscribers to affirm that her majesty “hath and ought to have the soveraignetie and rule over all manner of persons…either ecclesiasticiall or temporat sover they be and that no forrayne power prelatt state or potentate hath or ought to have anie Jurisdiction,” essentially a restatement of the Act of Supremacy. Puritans certainly had no problem with denying “forrayne” powers any influence in the English church, but in the context in which it was issued and enforced, the first of the three articles of subscription was directed less at closet Catholics with a hidden loyalty to the pope than at zealous Protestants who questioned the extent of the queen’s authority over issues of discipline, order, and liturgy in the church. Thus, the first article must be read in conjunction with the second, which declared “that the Booke of commen prayer, and of orderinge Bishopps Preistes and Deacons conteyneth nothinge in it, nothinge contrarie to the word of God, and that the same maye lawfullie be used and that he himselfe will use the forme of the said booke prescribed in publique prayer and administration of the Sacramentes and none other.” Puritans wanted to be able to express reservations about the prayer book while also pledging their allegiance to the queen. Their challenge was to voice their religious complaints without appearing to be politically disloyal, a position made more difficult to maintain by the combined force of the articles of subscription. 20 The Book of Common Prayer had been a source of contention since its creation during the reign of Edward VI. The first edition (1549) was marked by a “studied ambiguity” in terms of doctrine, and resulted from a series of compromises carefully negotiated by Thomas Cranmer, then archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer had been the driving force behind reforming the Latin liturgies of the medieval church into a book of services written in the vernacular and reflective of Protestant teaching, but he had been forced to wend his way between adherents of the old and new thinking. As with all compromises, however, parties at either extreme were disappointed: conservatives decried the intrusion of reformed thinking, and reformers sought to erase further the vestiges of Catholicism. A second edition of the Edwardian prayer book (1552) moved the liturgy more strongly in the Protestant direction, and so exacerbated conservative and 19

Lambeth Palace Library, Register of Archbishop Whitgift, 1:97r. Lambeth Palace Library, Register of Archbishop Whitgift, 1:97v. On the articles, see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 244–45. 20

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Catholic concerns. The pendulum swung rapidly in the opposite direction under the Catholic Queen Mary, who reinstituted the old Catholic liturgy. The Act of Uniformity passed at the start of Elizabeth’s reign returned the English church once again to the 1552 prayer book, albeit with a few conservative alterations. For example, the words of institution from the 1549 prayer book were added to the 1552 liturgy, so that the communicant now heard: “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life: and take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.” Zealous Protestants were disappointed with the inclusion of language that could be interpreted as endorsing the real presence. Some openly voiced their opposition to the Elizabethan prayer book throughout the 1560s and early 1570s, while others simply found ways to ignore or work around the problematic portions.21 Whitgift implemented the subscription campaign of 1583 and 1584 in order to force the hand of these tacit nonconformists and to strengthen diocesan discipline and control, but different bishops proceeded with the campaign with varying degrees of alacrity. It happened that the diocese of Chichester was vacant at the time. This meant the new archbishop temporarily had direct administrative authority over the diocese, and so he began his efforts there.Twenty-four Chichester ministers responded that they could subscribe only with reservations and so were promptly suspended. Elsewhere as the campaign was implemented around the province of Canterbury, more ministers faced suspension for their nonsubscription: at least forty-three in Essex (Gifford among them), eleven in Ely, forty-five in Peterborough, and so on, for an estimated total of three to four hundred who failed the first litmus test of unqualified subscription.22 Some of these later relented under pressure during the early months of 1584, while others appealed their cases to the Privy Council and demanded to be heard in London. Council and archbishop exchanged numerous letters addressing individual cases. Gifford’s inclusion among those targeted in the subscription campaign is not surprising, for the first year of his vicarage had been an eventful one. It was likely during this period that he began meeting with fellow ministers 21 On the making of the Edwardian prayer books, see Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd ed., 242–47, 276–78 (p. 243 for “studied ambiguity”). On the Elizabethan prayer book, see Norman Jones, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 25–27; Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 31–35; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547– 1603, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 26–27; and John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 327–82 (communion liturgy at 264). 22 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 249–53.

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in the conference organized at Braintree. The best known of the conferences—based on the surviving records—is the group centered in Dedham, but the Braintree meeting included some of the key leaders among the Essex godly. In addition to Gifford, several of his friends from his Cambridge days were members of the Braintree group, including Richard Rogers, the vicar of Wethersfield and author of the popular work Seven Treatises, and Robert Wright, the chaplain to Lord Rich, Essex landholder and puritan patron. The conferences served a number of functions, including a network of support for nonconformist ministers when they came into conflict with their ecclesiastical superiors.23 By the fall of 1583, Gifford faced a number of charges, including not observing the order of the prayer book, wearing the surplice, or offering the proper number of services. He appeared before Aylmer in March of 1584 and faced the ultimatum: subscribe or be suspended. Gifford held his ground and was duly suspended by way of excommunication on May 6.24 Thus the initial skirmishes in Whitgift’s subscription campaign were well underway by the time William Cecil, Lord Burghley, wrote to the archbishop on Gifford’s behalf in the late spring of 1584. Burghley had challenged Whitgift on a number of occasions with respect to the subscription campaign as well as other issues, so his intervention for Gifford does not necessarily indicate any special patronage.25 In fact, Gifford’s case typifies the sort that concerned Burghley and the more moderate members of Elizabeth’s council: a well-educated, preaching minister suspended from his duties for what they perceived to be the archbishop’s obsessive campaign for uniformity of practice among the clergy. In his reply to Burghley, dated May 29, 1584, Whitgift offered a defense for the attention focused on Gifford. Appearing to be unfamiliar with the case, he had sent to Bishop Aylmer “in whose diocesse he is, and by whome he was suspended” to learn the details. The reply from Aylmer apparently suggested to Whitgift that Gifford was “a Ringeleader of the rest, against whome also I have received certen complaynte.” Furthermore, the complaints were of sufficient seriousness that Whitgift intended to make Gifford an example to others by calling him 23 Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 202. On Rogers and Wright, see the entries in the biographical register in Collinson, Craig, and Usher, eds., Conferences and Combination Lectures, and on the conferences, the introduction to the same. The records of the Braintree conference have not survived, though the editors suggest that if they had, “we would be in possession of considerably more vital information about the conference movement than is afforded by the Dedham records” (xiv). 24 Collinson, Craig, and Usher, eds., Conferences and Combination Lectures, 210, 213 n. 16. 25 Not only was Burghley one of the most powerful of the queen’s inner circle; he also had shown some amount of sympathy with reformers’ causes and so attracted the allegiance of a number of writers. Gifford dedicated two of his antiseparatist writings to Burghley. See chapter 4 and appendix 2.

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before the High Commission. The Court of the High Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes predated Whitgift and consisted of a series of occasional tribunals composed of prelates and laity chosen and charged by the queen. However, Whitgift certainly viewed it as being at his disposal. Something of his attitude perhaps may be seen in a slip of the pen in the manuscript of his letter to Burghley. In a phrase originally reading “I meane to call hym by vertue of the High Comission,” the “I” is crossed out and a “Wee” is inserted. The latter was perhaps more orthodox, more politically astute, but the former may well have more accurately represented the court as Whitgift hoped to use it: a tool for the enactment of his vision of a unified and peaceful church.26 That this vision was more difficult to realize than Whitgift initially imagined may at first appear odd, since the new archbishop had the support of his queen in his quest for conformity. Yet that support alone did not guarantee him success since many in Elizabeth’s political inner circle were more indulgent than she when it came to matters of religious nonconformity. Collinson’s description of Whitgift’s strategy in his subscription campaign helps place Gifford’s case among the large number heard during the tumultuous year of 1584. Collinson argued Whitgift’s initial instinct upon assuming office was to push for complete subscription on behalf of all ministers, with suspension being the punishment for failure to comply. But the outcry that arose as a result of this massive campaign involving the suspension of hundreds of ministers threatened to overwhelm the newly installed archbishop.The Privy Council regularly forwarded the complaints and petitions they received along with firm requests for response; lawyers debated the legality of the commission and its procedures; suspended ministers demanded opportunities to debate the substance of the charges against them. Even John Foxe, “the most benign” of Whitgift’s critics, saw little benefit to be gained from a relentless push for subscription while “the Roman hawk is hovering around.” In the midst of this barrage, Whitgift retooled his strategy. Rather than continue a general campaign against nonconformity, Collinson concluded, Whitgift chose to “adopt a more flexible procedure which offered a real chance of breaking the power of puritanism as an organized force where that power lay, in the small minority of ultras.”27 The new procedure entailed both compromise and escalation. 26 For Whitgift’s letter, see British Library Lansdowne MS 42.43. The copy of the queen’s charge to the 1584 High Commission and a listing of its members may be found in British Library Lansdowne MS 1101, 31r–37v. See also Roland G. Usher, The Rise and Fall of the High Commission, reprint ed. with an introduction by Philip Tyler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 27 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 257, 266.

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Compromise came in the form of a chance for a quiet and conditional subscription, not unlike what the Chichester ministers attempted in the early days of the campaign, which greatly reduced the number of ministers under suspension and thus the pressure on Whitgift to resolve the situation. Alongside this leniency, however, Whitgift escalated the campaign against the most obdurate of the nonconformists, the “ringeleaders” like Gifford. That Gifford remained to face this more rigorous round of interrogations speaks to his dedication to the reforming cause and his prominence among the nonconformists, especially within the county of Essex. For those who rejected the archbishop’s compromise and insisted on the hard road, Whitgift developed a set of twenty-four interrogatories to be used by the High Commission in its examinations. These he wrote in May 1584, the same month he was corresponding with Burghley concerning Gifford’s fate. Whereas a bit of equivocation previously allowed some precisionist ministers to reconcile their consciences with the original articles, this new, more extensive set of questions was designed to eliminate any remaining uncertainties. For example, a minister might (with a wink) subscribe to the statement “that he himselfe will use the forme of the said booke [that is, the prayer book] prescribed in publlique prayer and administration of the Sacramentes and none other,”28 and then proceed to choose only those passages that he found acceptable, or else avoid the sacrament altogether and instead attend only to preaching. But when puritans faced the High Commission and were pressed to agree that they “deeme and judge the said whole booke to be a godly and a vertuouse booke, agreable, or at the least not repugnant to the word of God,” and to demonstrate adherence to specific ceremonies and rites, there was less room for ambiguity. 29 No record exists of Gifford’s trial before the High Commission— nearly all the court’s records were destroyed in the 1630s by members of Parliament anxious to deprive Archbishop Laud of any records potentially useful in his defense—but from what miscellaneous records do remain one may reconstruct a general picture of the proceedings and the outcome. First, the course of the proceedings required ministers to answer all questions with an ex officio oath, a controversial procedure that in practice forced self-incrimination.30 The first two questions required the minister 28

Lambeth Palace Library, Register of Archbishop Whitgift, 1:97v. The twenty-four articles appear in British Library Add. MS 48064, a collection of papers of Robert Beale, clerk of the Privy Council, puritan sympathizer, and harsh critic of Whitgift. They are also transcribed in John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), 3: 81–87. Quote from British Library Add. MS 48064, 44v. See also Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 266–68. 30 Gerald Bray, ed., The Anglican Canons 1529–1947. Church of England Record Society, vol. 6 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), cix. 29

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to admit the source, manner, and propriety of his ordination, done “accordinge to the booke in that behalf by lawe of this land provided.” This tactic very cleverly put the accused in the uncomfortable position of admitting that his status as a minister depended on the authority of the very book he rejected. Further questions emphasized the lawfulness of the process by which the prayer book had been approved, and specified in greater detail than had Whitgift’s original article exactly what support of the prayer book and its services entailed. Moving from issues of doctrine to procedural issues, the interrogatories pressed the accused to address a number of specific issues frequently raised by puritans: use of prescribed ministerial apparel, use of the sign of the cross in baptism and the ring in marriages, thanksgiving services for women following childbirth, saying of all scheduled litanies, prayers, services, and so forth. In the final questions, the accused was asked to identify any time he “advisedly and of sett purpose preached, taught, declared, sett downe, or published by writinge, publique or private speache, matter against the said Booke of Common Praier, or of some thing therein contained, as being repugnant to the word of God,” and furthermore, whether he intended to continue to do so. It is interesting to speculate how many ministers in the Elizabethan church might have survived such questions—especially the portions concerning private speech—certainly, no one of puritan inclination. But the question need never be answered, since the successful application of the strategy required only that the High Commission make examples of a few ministers in order to sway the reluctant subscriber.31 Gifford’s trial and deprivation probably occurred in June of 1584. Alongside a January 18, 1585, entry in the bishop of London’s register that officially records the installment of Gifford’s replacement, there is a marginal note that briefly states that the previous vicar was deprived before the royal commission for ecclesiastical causes.32 In addition to loss of his position, Gifford’s punishment may have included some time in prison as well, though the evidence for this is ambiguous.33 His deprivation might have 31

British Library Add. MS 48064, 44r–46v. Guildhall Library MS 9531/13, pt. 1, 216r: “…Gyfforde deprivatus fuit coram comiss regius ad causas eccliasticas.” 33 The minutes for the Dedham Classis meeting of November 2, 1584, record an item in which “Mr Tay put the brethren in mynd that some of Malden were cast into prison and did crave helpe of the brethren.” Roland Usher, the first editor of the Dedham minutes, believed this to be a reference to Gifford; more recently, Collinson, Craig, and (Brett) Usher suggest that this scenario is unlikely because of a lack of corresponding evidence of an imprisonment of Gifford and the prospect of a reference to Gifford—well known to the Dedham group—with an uncharacteristically vague “some.” See Roland G. Usher, ed., The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth as Illustrated by the XXXX 32

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ended his ministry in Maldon, but his supporters and patrons apparently thought otherwise. Although the mechanism is not clear, Gifford managed to regain his license to preach from Bishop Aylmer and so stayed on in Maldon as a lecturer. Nothing survives to document how this came about—later records simply refer back to an arrangement approved by the bishop and archbishop—but it must have involved the intervention of powerful patrons, perhaps the earl of Leicester, for whom Gifford served a brief stint as a chaplain during a campaign in the Low Countries. 34 Lectureships existed in many towns led by progressive corporations, being fostered by “an impatience with a church that would not or could not produce sermons and learned, preaching clergy fast enough either to satisfy the needs of the godly or to meet the threat of the Counter-Reformation as the Puritans perceived it.”35 Gifford’s new position actually gave him greater freedom, since he could preach and catechize regularly without the burden of conducting services of which he disapproved. The situation, engineered as it was by Gifford’s supporters in Maldon, would work out fine for all involved, assuming the cooperation of the newly installed vicar. And for a short while, this indeed was the case.

“SOUR FRUITS OF THESE NEW REFORMERS”— CONTINUING CONFLICTS IN MALDON Gifford’s replacement as vicar of All Saints with St. Peters was Mark Wiersdale, a young and largely inexperienced minister who had been ordained as a deacon for only a couple of years at the time of his appointment as vicar in January 1585. Unlike his predecessor, he had attended but taken no degree from Cambridge. Maldon historian Petchey suggested that the Company, the town corporation that was dominated by reform-minded leaders, may have been trying effectively to circumvent Gifford’s deprivation by convincing the patron to offer up a weak and pliable candidate who would allow Gifford free reign in his new position as lecturer. The scheme seemed to work initially, until Wiersdale showed himself to be of a quarrelsome nature that attracted more attention to the parish than the 34

Minute Book of the Dedham Classis, 1582–1589 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1905), 40; and Collinson, Craig, and Usher, Conferences and Combination Lectures, 16 n. 53. 34 In December 1585, Leicester granted Gifford and fellow ministers Dudley Fenner and John Knewstub £30. Collinson, Craig, and Usher, Conferences and Combination Lectures, 211. 35 Paul S. Seaver, The Puritan Lecturerships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 82.

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town leaders desired. Wiersdale began to flaunt his own nonconformity, which had been on display even prior to his arrival in Maldon, and soon found himself in trouble with the archdeacon of Essex. He foolishly flirted with charges of treason for attempting a public debate over the propriety of Elizabeth’s title as queen of France and Ireland. In the end, after a short and tumultuous stay in Maldon, Wiersdale decided to return to Cambridge and so resigned in the latter half of 1586, supposedly with a request that Gifford resume his position.36 If there was a conspiracy afoot, patron Richard Franks was certainly on board, for he soon submitted Gifford’s name to Bishop Aylmer once again to serve as vicar. Aylmer, however, would hear nothing of the sort. Given his eventful visitation to Maldon in July of 1586, it is not difficult to imagine the reason. Surveying Aylmer’s career highlights the fluidity of definition of terms like “conformity” and “reform” in the English church in the sixteenth century. Before assuming the role of an enforcer of Whitgift’s campaign, Aylmer had been a vocal advocate of reform, albeit in a very different ecclesiastical context. Early in Mary’s reign while serving as archdeacon of Stow, he had spoken out boldly against transubstantiation in convocation. For this he was deprived of his position and forced to flee England for his safety. He lived with other Marian exiles first at Strassburg and then Zurich until the accession of Elizabeth. In 1559 he wrote An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects Against the Late Blowne Blaste, Concerning the Government Of Women in response to John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). Aylmer challenged Knox’s wholesale denunciation of female monarchs, and he encouraged his countrymen to stand strong against the enemies of English Protestantism, be they French Catholics or Scottish radicals like Knox. They should not fear to proceed, he reminded them, since “God is English.” His defense of England and attack on Knox stood him in good stead with the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth, and upon his return to England he was reinstated to his former position and was one of eight Protestants chosen to debate with Catholic representatives at Westminster. Aylmer was made bishop of London on March 24, 1577. Initially he found himself hobbled in his attempts to enforce discipline throughout his diocese, but he soon found his footing. Later under Archbishop Whitgift, Aylmer’s strict diocesan administration earned him many enemies, some of whom brought charges against him for misappropriation of funds. He survived the inquiry, but the charges dogged him and provided fodder for the radical Protestant 36

Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 208–9; and Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, 260.

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satirist Martin Marprelate, who later targeted Aylmer due to his aggressive prosecution of puritans.37 During his 1586 tour throughout the diocese of London, Bishop Aylmer searched for signs of nonconformity among the clergy, and he did not have to look far. Even before he returned to London, he had taken time out to write Lord Burghley in order “to advertise your Lordship in what state I finde in this visitation both the ministry, and the people.” Both the timing and the subject of the letter represented strategic moves on Aylmer’s part. He no doubt hoped to counter previous reports the Privy Council had received, such as the one that had circulated during the 1584 campaign recording “certaine disorders and corruptions committed and…done by the Bishopp of London, the chancellor, the Archdeacons, and officialls within the Countie of Essex.” Aylmer hoped to show the need for more, rather than less, discipline, and as it happened Gifford’s supporters gave him the ammunition he would need.38 The “disorder of them both [that is, ministry and people] are not so great as was feared (thoughe more then is to be wished),” Aylmer reported, “till we came to Maldon.” Only God’s good grace had kept Aylmer and his company from “tasting the sour fruits of these newe reformers.” A scheme had been hatched, he related, whereby one was by certaine younge heades in the towne (men of occupation there) to be hired to come in the church [dressed] like a foole and to take my cappe of my head, and to twirle it about his finger, and then to have cast it, and tosse it to and fro amonge them in the middest of the people, whereupon it is not to be doubted but a dangerous tumulte would have risen, and I feare, not without bloude: we have examined the matter, and have committed the chiefe devisers thereof.

The “chiefe devisers” may have been unruly youths, but Aylmer left little doubt as to whom he held responsible for inspiring this planned affront to episcopal dignity. At the same time, he proffered the incident as an opportunity for discipline: The Bailiffs [of Maldon], and the rest are much dismaied at the matter, so that if her majestie, or some of your Lordships of the councsaile wilbe pleased to shewe some countenance of mislikinge of so dangerous a 37 Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Aylmer, John”; and Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 201–2. “God is English” quoted in Collinson, Birthpangs of Protestant England, 4. On the Marprelate tracts, see chapter 4. 38 For Aylmer’s letter to Burghley, dated July 25, 1586, see British Library Lansdowne MS 50.40. For “Certaine disorders…” see British Library Add. MS 48064, 76r–78r, 85r –87v.

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devise, as the fruite of theire preachinge whiche have disobied the booke, and other orders, I doubte not but beinge daunted now as they are already beginninge somewhat to yelde, we shoulde finde them, and all other in that corner very tractable.39

Disobedience begat disobedience, Aylmer reasoned: nonconformist ministers preached defiance in both word and deed and so gave license to unruly laity to attack authority. No evidence surfaced to show that Gifford had any previous knowledge of the plot to humiliate Aylmer. At the same time, it is difficult to argue with Aylmer’s conclusion that the mischievous hooligans had not chosen their target in vain. Like an icon of order, the bishop’s cap represented authority and conformity to the prayer book and its prescriptions concerning proper liturgical dress. Gifford’s defiance of that order by way of his refusal to wear the surplice was on display every time he entered the pulpit. Aylmer attempted to realize his hopes for more “tractable” ministry in Maldon and elsewhere in Essex with another suspension of Gifford for failing to wear the surplice. The impetuous Wiersdale took the opportunity to resign in protest and return to Cambridge. Gifford’s suspension may have curbed his activities in Maldon but not elsewhere. Not long after the tumultuous visitation of 1586—perhaps in part because of it—Gifford left Maldon to serve as a chaplain to a prominent and powerful figure, again in the context of Leicester’s campaign in the Low Countries. The timing and circumstance of his arrival are unclear, but Gifford appears to have been in attendance during the final days of Leicester’s nephew, the poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney. After Sidney had been mortally wounded in battle on September 22, he sent for Gifford, possibly summoning him from England. Gifford reports that he arrived at Sidney’s side on September 30 and there ministered to him until Sidney’s death on October 17. Gifford later recounted the experience in a short work entitled “The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death,” an edifying and pious account of Sidney’s final spiritual struggles and ultimate triumph over doubt and despair. Though some have questioned whether the work is accurate in its details and its presentation of Gifford’s prominence in Sidney’s final days, Gifford’s previous connections with Leicester as well as a late codicil in Sidney’s will giving £20 to “Mr Gifford the minister” make Gifford’s involvement both plausible and likely.40 That said, “The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death,” like nearly 39

British Library Lansdowne MS 50.40. For the text and history of “The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death,” see Katherine DuncanJones and Jan van Dorsten, eds., Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), XXX 40

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everything else Gifford wrote, had a pastoral intent. Indeed, it reads like a primer in how to die a godly death, or perhaps live the godly life. Sidney struggles with guilt over sin, fear of God’s wrath, and a mind “dull in prayer.” However, by the end, he takes comfort in Gifford’s reassurances that his faith given by God could not and would not fail, so that “the nearer he saw death approach, the more his comfort seemed to increase.”41 Following his visit to the Low Countries, Gifford returned to England to find Aylmer’s disfavor still firmly in place. On August 16, 1587, Gifford’s name shows up on a list of preachers who were banned from any pulpit in the diocese of London. He nevertheless continued to be an active participant in conferences and synods, and the following spring Gifford was among a group of suspended ministers who petitioned parliament for restoration on March 8, 1588. The precise details of Gifford’s restoration are unknown, but the timing is suggestive. At some point in 1589 or 1590, Gifford turned his attentions and his pen toward a new foe: the separatists. It may well be that the price of his restoration was his willingness to serve as a polemicist for the establishment, yet, as will be seen below, Gifford’s antiseparatist writings are in keeping with the pastoral emphasis found in his other works.42 His suspension must have been lifted by April 1589, when 41

161–72. The work survives in two manuscripts—both copies—with texts that vary considerable from one another. Neither gives certain attestation to Gifford’s authorship. The copy in the British Library (Cotton Vitellius C.17, fols. 382–87) is damaged so that only “fford” is legible in the ascription. From this and the bequest in Sidney’s will to “Mr. Gifford the minister” (Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, eds. Miscellaneous Prose, 152), Sidney’s biographer Thomas Zouch concluded the likely author to be George Gifford, and it is so listed in the Catalogue of Cotton Manuscripts (1802) in the British Library Manuscript room. See Thomas Zouch, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Philip Sidney (York, 1808), 266. The other manuscript is held privately, but was printed in a limited run by B. E. Juel-Jensen. In the preface Juel-Jensen notes that while the manuscript identifies the author as the “Right Honble. Fulke, Lord Brooke,” he accepts the identification of Gifford as the author. See B. E. Juel-Jensen, ed., The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death (Oxford: New Bodleian Library, 1959), A2. Duncan-Jones and van Dorsten, interested as they were in uncovering the details of Sidney’s life, allow for Gifford’s presence but not his prominence in the final hours of Sidney’s life as seen in the “Manner.” They discount many of the details of the work and dismiss it as “a piece of pious myth-making” (Miscellaneous Prose, 162). But Collinson, Craig, and Usher rightly point out that “myths are not created by leaving material in manuscript” (Conferences and Combination Lectures, 214 n. 37), and suggest that Gifford wrote for a private audience—the Lady Rich, mentioned by name by Sidney in the “Manner”—a detailed and spiritually informed account of Sidney’s final days. 41 Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, Miscellaneous Prose, 166–67, 170. 42 Gifford likely attended a puritan synod held privately at either Cambridge or Warwick on September 8, 1587. His name appears following a list of orders made at that gathering. See John Strype, Annals of the Church under Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), vol. 3, bk. 2, 477–79. A “Commission against Certain Preachers” and the “Supplication of the ministers suspended in Essex, offered to the parliament the 8th of March, 1587 [1587/8]” is printed in Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, 231–32, 258–59. See also Richard Bancroft, Daungerous Positions and Proceedings, Published and Practiced XXX

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he once again is listed as preacher in Maldon, but the culmination of this restoration occurred when Gifford preached at St. Paul’s Cross in March 1591, his only known appearance in that important venue. In the sermon he made no direct reference to either his suspension or to his presbyterian activities, but his choice of a scripture passage was telling: “Behold how good and how comely a thing it is for brethren also to dwell in unitie.” 43 It may be that some of Maldon’s citizenry again had a hand in protecting their preacher. A copy of a letter from Maldon town leaders to Aylmer requesting Gifford’s restoration appears among Burghley’s papers in British Library Lansdowne Manuscript 68, although the precise date is difficult to determine. The letter is undated in the body of the text, though written across the back is “1591.” But the date is in pencil and by a different hand, and thus likely represents an archivist’s guess. A postscript written by the original copyist yields the better clue for dating the letter. At the bottom of the page, he noted that an “originall coppie of this petition, exhibited to the Bishopp of London was published with the handes and names of the two and fifty persons of the best and substantialist of the said towne. Whereof 2 were bayliffe, 2 Justice of peace, 4 alderman, 15 hed burgesses, the vicar of the towne and the most honest men.” Assuming that Gifford did not sign his own petition prior to his deprivation, the unnamed vicar must have been Wiersdale, since the next vicar, Robert Palmer, was a staunch conformist and would never have supported Gifford. Thus the petition must have been written before May 1587 when Palmer was appointed, possibly sometime in 1586 toward the end of Wiersdale’s short tenure.44 In any case, these fifty-two “most honest men” of Maldon certainly formed the core of Gifford’s godly support, and their petition has much to tell about the situation in Maldon and the clash between the reformers and the rest of the town. “With lamentable harte and grieved conscience,” they bemoaned the loss of Gifford’s preaching, by which we, and many others of our Christian bretheren, have not only bene norished and strengthened in many good graces: But also thereby 43

within this Iland of Brytaine, Under Pretence of Reformation, and for the Presbiteriall Discipline (London, 1595), 75. On Gifford’s antiseparatist writings, see chapter 4. 43 The scripture quoted is Psalm 133:1; for the sermon text see “A Sermon Preached at Pauls Crosse the Thirtie Day of March, 1591,” in Gifford, Certaine Sermons, Q8v–S8v. 44 British Library Lansdowne MS 68.48. Brett Usher associates this petition with Gifford’s 1584 deprivation and offers the plausible suggestion that the vicar in question may have been that of St. Mary’s. Private correspondence with author, February 27, 2004.

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l CHAPTER TWO the outrage of many notorious sinnes commonly used before his coming, is abated and suppressed to the greatt glorys of almightie god and comfort of our weake conscience: And for that the prophane and wicked have not reasted in their greatt rage and malyce both of his person and true religion to accost him in their moost slanderous and unjuste report that he hath taught disobedience to magistrates, used conventicles, and secreate teaching and diverse other things woorthy of sharpe reprehension, with moost unjust accusations that malyce of his ennimyes, and of the truth, being so greatt can not be but presented to your Lordship with an entent thereby to exashperate your displeasure towarde him.45

The description of the clash between the reformers and the less enthusiastic townspeople—“the prophane and wicked”—could easily have come up in an exchange between Zelotes or Atheos. In this sense Countrie Divinitie, written only a few years earlier in 1581, appears to be either a blueprint for or a prophecy of the course of Gifford’s ministry in Maldon, or perhaps a bit of both. “This is a common thing among all the packe of ye,” Zelotes had chided Atheos, “if there be any man which hath a care to know God, and seeketh after his worde, and will not commit those beastly sins which overflow in all places, then you which cannot abide to have Gods word set foorth, devise a number of lies and slaunders against them, calling them Puritanes, rascals, and many such like.” Even at the outset of his ministry in Maldon, Gifford assumed that the “true religion” he planned to bring to the town would create friction. In Gifford’s dichotomous model, godly reform involved all the members of a community, either as supporters or members of the opposition. Controversy was not only to be expected, but welcomed, since it proved that the devil was being challenged. “Can yee put fire and water together but they will rumble?” Zelotes wondered. “Will yee have light and darknesse for to agree as companions together?” 46 To confute the testimony of his enemies, Gifford’s supporters went on to claim that all those of his usuall auditory do testify, by the testimony of a good conscience that we never receyved from him, any other but true and sounde doctryne to our judgemente. That he allways in preaching and catechizinge teacheth outward obedience to prynce and magistrate: he preacheth and catechisth in no other place than in the churche, he useth no conventicles, and that in his life he is modest discreate and unreprovable: By which good and

45 46

British Library Lansdowne MS 68.48. Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, C1v, F6v.

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gracious means there is wrought a godly conformitie of the people to the greate benefit of our towne and of the churche of God.47

It was especially important that Gifford be shown to be supportive of the magistracy and thus no separatist; hence the emphasis on the entirely public nature of his ministry. This petition, along with Gifford’s appeal to Parliament, seemed designed to reinforce Gifford’s general acceptability and to narrow the issue once more to the drive for subscription and conformity among the ministry. Throughout the latter 1580s, precisionist ministers and their supporters continued to argue that this demand was unreasonable and quite simply erroneous, a violation of both law and conscience. Gifford’s Maldon supporters may have facilitated his restoration to preaching, but they were not successful in returning him to his previous position. Following the 1586 visitation, the hopes of the Maldon town leaders that Gifford might be restored by Aylmer to the post of vicar were dashed. If indeed there was a conspiracy surrounding Wiersdale’s resignation, the plot failed. Aylmer’s prompt rejection of the patron’s nomination of Gifford meant that the position of vicar of All Saints was technically classified as lapsed, in which case the bishop had the option of installing his own choice to fill the vacancy. Aylmer took advantage of this prerogative, and he presumably envisioned his pick of a new vicar for Maldon as an attempt to bring order to the unruly Essex town. In fact, his choice guaranteed that for the next thirteen years Maldon would continue to be a microcosm of the conflict between conformity and reform that so permeated the English church throughout the Elizabethan period.

TWO MINISTERS, ONE PULPIT Based on the testimony of Maldon’s godly, Robert Palmer, the new vicar of All Saints appointed by Bishop Aylmer May 23, 1587, could easily have appeared on a puritan broadside intended to advertise the impoverished state of the ministry in the English church. He was a career churchman, though his involvement tended to the administrative as opposed to the ministerial. He served as Bishop Aylmer’s chaplain and so had the bishop’s ear and favor. Even worse for the godly of his new parish, Palmer was a pluralist, serving simultaneously as vicar of All Saints and Great Wakering, a parish south and east of Maldon. His training was primarily legal; he spent some time at Cambridge but received his final education in law at the Middle Temple. His training in common law may have led him to take an 47

British Library Lansdowne MS 68.48.

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interest in the church courts, and from 1591 to 1593 he served as an official of the archdeaconry court in Essex. In this role, he would have supported the archdeacon’s enforcement of ecclesiastical law and policy, and filled in as judge when the archdeacon was absent. If his establishment connections were not enough to make Palmer a reprehensible choice to the Maldon reformers, there were also the numerous accusations concerning his lifestyle: he frequented the card tables (with a fellow minister, no less), set up a bowling alley in the vicarage orchard wherein he gambled with townspeople, was given to a less-than-godly manner of speech peppered with oaths, and in general led a worldly life. All these charges come from depositions taken in association with a case brought against him by the town leaders of Maldon. The Company had been infuriated by having their plans for a godly reformation in Maldon thwarted by the bishop, and so opposed Palmer at every turn during the course of his tenure. 48 Despite the many reasons Gifford had given church authorities to be wary, the agreement allowing him to preach at All Saints on alternating weeks with the incumbent vicar remained in place during the majority of Palmer’s tenure. While this unique arrangement had the endorsement of the bishop and the archbishop (a fact frequently repeated by Gifford’s supporters), Palmer never fully supported the plan and understandably regarded it as an intrusion upon his prerogatives as vicar. So it happened that during the 1590s in Maldon a struggle raged for control of the pulpit at All Saints, and by extension the religious direction of the town. Three contemporary records help to outline the struggles between conformers and reformers in Maldon and allow several conclusions. First, Palmer was reluctant to cede any ground to the puritan “anti-vicar,” and always assumed a confrontational posture. At the same time, the center of the power struggle lay as much between Palmer and members of the Company as between the two ministers themselves. Town leaders’ support of Gifford certainly had a genuine religious motive, but it was also an attempt to establish their control over all affairs of the borough, including its religious life. Finally, late Elizabethan Maldon was a town divided—much like the country itself—with citizens found on either side of the religious debate. 48 Petchey, Borough of Maldon, 226–29; and idem, Prospect of Maldon, 209–10. The town leaders’ case against Palmer, brought around 1594, is found in Essex Record Office D/B 3/3/178, “Evidence in a suit against Rev. R. Palmer.” No records remain to give Palmer’s response. Palmer was granted the living of Great Wakering on June 28, 1587, a little more than a month after he received his position at All Saints (May 23). He held the former until 1594, and the position in Maldon until his death in 1600. See the Bishop of London’s Register, Guildhall Library MS 9531/13, pt. 1, 232r; and also Newcourt, Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense, 2:399, 620.

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Notably, support of either Gifford or Palmer does not seem to be directly traceable to economic or social position: each seemed to enjoy some measure of popular support, and each also could rely on various town leaders to take up his cause. Gifford had support among the “best and substantialist” of Maldon. According to Petchey, Palmer’s supporters also included many who had previously held positions of responsibility in Maldon, although they had become “disenchanted with their Corporation.” Some held grudges that apparently had little to do with religion, such as the former bailiff thrown out of the Company for failure to show proper deference to the elder members. Yet others had concerns similar to those of Atheos. John Morris broke with the Company after they rebuked a group of actors for performing on Sunday evening without a license. Morris apparently believed “Master Gifford’s favourers” intruded too far into the social life of the community with their godly reformation. In his noisy exit from a meeting at Moot Hall, he was heard to call his opponents “a sort of precisians and Brownists,” a charge reminiscent of Atheos’s complaint that Zelotes was a precise fellow who allowed no recreation.49 The first record of direct conflict between Palmer and the Company comes from January 1592, but it certainly represents the culmination of frustrations built up over the nearly five years Palmer had spent in Maldon. A deposition describes how one Saturday, a Mr. Frith, minister in Hawkwell, showed up at All Saints and announced his intention to preach there that day, which happened to be a market day. Frith was one of Palmer’s card-playing minister friends whose parish of Hawkwell lay a few miles west of Palmer’s other parish of Great Wakering, so he was certainly not unaware of the divisions in Maldon. Mr. Bantofte, one of the town aldermen and a Gifford supporter, promptly informed Frith “that he myght not doo so, for that the place was appointed unto Mr Gyffard by order from the Lord Archbishop.” Frith persisted and Bantofte warned him in no uncertain terms not to press the matter further. Gifford also heard of the fracas and sent to Frith telling him quite directly that his services were not needed that day. Frith, however, was determined to bring the matter to a confrontation, and so waited until the service had begun, when the psalm was in singinge before the sermon, and the same more than halfe being sung and Mr Gyffard was gonne out of his seat to the pulpitt, the said Mr Frithe came into the churche and entered into the

49

Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 215–16; and Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, A3r.

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l CHAPTER TWO pewe wheare devyne service is used to be said, an[d] presentlie, so soone as the psalme was ended (Mr Gyffard standinge in the pulpitt readye to begynn his sermon) the said Mr Frythe begoone to make a speech with a lowde voice where he stood, whereat the Baylieffes and other the people there assembled (being ignorant of his pretense) weare greatly astonished, supposing him to have benne out of his wyttes rather then otherwyse, then after a whyle one of the Baylieffe called unto him, demandinge what he ment to distorbe thus preaching from this sermon, requiringe hym to stoppe and be quyett, but he would not stayed him selfe, then the preacher from the pulpitt desired the Bayleffe that the said disturbance myght be removed, then they removed him in her majeties name to surceasse his disturbance, and so prompt the preacher so proceede in his sermon and then he stayde, And turning him selfe towarde the Baylieffe, said they hadd disturbed hym, for he ment to have preached, for (said he) Mr Palmer who is viccarre, and hath more authoritie heare then Mr Gyffard hadd appoynted me to preache.…

The service proceeded without further incident, and the troublesome Mr. Frith was taken to the Moot Hall to be interviewed before the town leaders (fig. 9). This discussion proved to be no more productive than the impromptu dialogue held in the church earlier in the day, and the matter was referred to the next meeting of the assizes, the outcome of which is not known.50 The prior association between Frith and Palmer, as well as Frith’s feigned ignorance and very real stubbornness, allow the conclusion that the whole incident was orchestrated by Palmer as one more salvo in his ongoing struggle with the town leaders for control of the religious life of the town. Palmer resented the influence town leaders attempted to exert over the church and its functions and tried to maintain a more traditional distinction between the ecclesiastical and civil. Despite the Company’s support for Gifford, he wanted everyone to know that he “hath more authoritie heare then Mr Gyffard.” On the other hand, the Company continued to treat All Saints Church and its resources as an extension of the town and its resources. In a town the size of Maldon, it was inevitable that parish officials and civic leaders were drawn from the same pool, and so it is not surprising that in practice, the lay leaders of Maldon did not care to distinguish between their different roles.51 50 The deposition describing the incident survives in borough records, Essex Record Office D/B 3/3/155/5. See also Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 212. 51 Petchey notes, “The Company’s attitude towards the church buildings and funds was extraordinarily proprietorial” (Borough of Maldon, 216).

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Figure 9. The Moot Hall, Maldon. This fifteenth-century building, originally known as Darcy’s Tower, lies in the center of town on High Street. It remains today a hub of town business, as it was in the sixteenth century. Photograph by the author, 2001.

55

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Figure 10. All Saints Church, interior of the bell tower. This was the scene of a heated confrontation between Richard Palmer and supporters of Gifford. Photograph © Barry J. Samuels. Reproduced by permission.

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The second recorded clash enacted in a very literal way the proverbial tug-of-war between Palmer and the town leaders for control over the agenda of All Saints church. One day in November of 1592 it fell to Gifford to preach, but Palmer apparently had decided to take it into his hands to modify the standing arrangement. First he had a workman place a lock on the pulpit door. Then, when he confronted two Gifford supporters on their way into the church, the situation came to a tragically comic end: presentlie after their came into the church one Richard Williams and John Pratt, whoe range the Bell their to a sermond, and the said Mr Palmer did forbidd them, chardging them in gods name, the Queene’s Majestie’s and his own to leave ringinge and [he] taking hold of the Belrope they seased. Then the said Richard Williams said though he forbade them to ringe, yett they might toule and Mr Palmer holding the bell roope in his hande [Williams] toke the same and touled certayn tymes, and said that Mr Giffard hadd shewed forthe an order from the Lord Bisshope of Lodon that he might preache then, and the said Mr Palmer made answer that Mr Gifford should not preache their nor non suche as he was, except he did weare the surplise, minister the sacraments, make the cross in baptisme and subscribe as [Palmer] hadd done.52

At this point, Williams and Pratt apparently had enough of Palmer’s stonewalling and decided to take up ringing again, whereupon they report “the said Mr Palmer forbidding the said Mr Williams and John Pratt to ringe pluckt the bellrope out of the said Mr Williams hand and with that thrust him on the breast.” Not surprisingly, Mr. Palmer’s perspective on the conclusion of the rope-tugging exercise differed; another source records that when Palmer tried to hold the rope, the two ringers reached over his head and “with his [Pratt’s] over reaching of him he [Pratt] pressed and beat down a little his hat; and thereupon the said Master Palmer went forth the church and said that he was pressed down and beaten out of breath”53 (fig. 10). Petchey supposed that after this confrontation, Palmer may have used his position as an official of the archdeaconry courts to press his case against Pratt, since the alleged offense occurred within the church. Apparently, Pratt was excommunicated for a time but town officials were less than cooperative in enforcing the sentence. However, the tug-of-war in the All Saints bell tower only marked the beginning of Palmer’s attempts to 52

Essex Record Office D/B 3/1/8, 97v. Williams and Pratt’s account is in Essex Record Office D/B 3/1/8, 97v. Palmer’s is in Essex Record Office D/B 3/3/178, Art. 7. The partisan scribe of the latter document editorialized that despite Palmer’s claim to have been abused, “in truth it was no such matter.” 53

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consolidate his hold on his position. In the month following (December 1592), Palmer preached a sermon based on Acts 6, in which he allegedly argued that ministers should be chosen by the popular consent of the people. Certainly, this appears to be so far out of keeping with Palmer’s known proclivities for order and control, as well as his general support for episcopal authority, as to border on the absurd. It appears that the struggle with the Company had driven Palmer to the point of making claims he would not have uttered in the presence of his bishop. Perhaps, as Petchey suggested, he was appealing to those townspeople who felt excluded by the puritan program of reform, and so was trying to isolate Gifford’s supporters from the rest of the population. In any case, his words soon came back to haunt him.54 Complaints to the bishop of London regarding Palmer’s behavior—if indeed the Company even took the time to lodge them—quite likely met with little enthusiasm on Aylmer’s part; he had no reason to encourage these troublesome town leaders. But Aylmer died on June 2, 1594. Exactly how this affected the case against Palmer is impossible to tell, but certainly the All Saints vicar felt the loss of his patron. Palmer and members of the Company continued to face off until the leaders of the town finally met with success by bypassing the ecclesiastical chain of command and pressing their case with the Privy Council. The Council referred the case to the archbishop with the request that the High Commission look into the matter. As with the case of Gifford, nothing remains to document Palmer’s appearance before the commission. The only extant record relating to the trial is a group of depositions, supplied by town leaders, that outline the charges made against Palmer, ranging from his lifestyle to his dangerously populist sermons. These depositions of course represent the perspective of the prosecution. While Palmer’s response is not known, something of the outcome of the trial can be inferred from the situation that existed in Maldon in the years following.55 First, Palmer did not lose his position as vicar of All Saints, where he remained until his death, although it appears to be the case that he was either ordered or else strongly encouraged to resign his position at Great Wakering. He gave up the latter post in August of 1594, the timing of 54

Petchey, Borough of Maldon, 233; and idem, Prospect of Maldon, 215. Petchey outlined the struggle between Palmer and the Company for control of All Saints and how the debate divided the town. Based on analysis of wills and town records, he identified citizens on both sides of the question and traced their economic and political fortunes. See Petchey, Borough of Maldon, 230–80; and idem, Prospect of Maldon, 210–31. The summary of the Company’s case against Palmer is in Essex Record Office D/B 3/3/178. 55

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which in relation to his trial was certainly more than coincidental. Second, although he remained as vicar of All Saints, he apparently was forced to share some of the proceeds of the position with Gifford, a fact that must have galled him to the extreme. Evidence for this arrangement appears in Gifford’s will, in which he grants to one John Brooke his “lease and intereste which I have of the demise and graunte of Robert Palmer, clarke, vicar of All Saints and St. Peters in Maldon aforesaid, by indenture of and in the vicaradge howse, tithes, proffitts and other things thereby letten and demised.” Finally, it appears the High Commission and/or the new bishop of London Richard Fletcher once again attempted to mollify all parties with regard to the preaching schedule at All Saints. That Fletcher had little more success than his predecessor can be seen in a report two years later offered by a bystander to the continuing struggle for the pulpit of All Saints.56 In 1596 William Arthur was serving as the stipendiary curate of St. Mary’s Church, located down High Street toward the waterfront. He had no direct involvement in the conflict that raged up the hill at All Saints, and from his comments did not appear to desire any. His observations on the situation appear in a letter he wrote to the dean of Westminster, who had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the parish of St. Mary’s. Although the letter described the rift in the town, Arthur appeared to be more interested in getting the dean to pay for a new roof for his church than in getting involved in any disputes. But duty required him to report the current situation to the dean, whereby my Lorde of London in his late vistacion compounded rather than cured (and that with very much adoe) the envyouse brawls and controversies betweene Mr Palmer and Mr Gifford, with these conditions and orders prescribed and to be kept on both partes, viz that they should by turnes preach on sondayes, the other should catechize the afternoone, etc. Mr Gifford his wonted Wednesdayes sermons utterly to cease by which order his Lordship no doubt hoped to remedy the schisme and take away the dangerouse factions here amonge us, but howe happily may it please your worship now to heare if Mr Gifford preach the church is full but if the other, not half so. The reason is the phantasticall sort runn by flockes ii or iii myles of to one Ralph Hawdon an other Giffard…yett they are not content, but have earnestly labored Mr Palmer to agree contrary to my Lord of Londons order that Mr Giffard may preach agayne on Wednesdayes alleadginge that many of them are greatly decayed and become poore for wante of the concourse of people on those dayes by whom they

56

For Gifford’s will, see appendix 3.

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Palmer refused the bribe and offered, no doubt with his tongue in his cheek, to deliver an extra weekly sermon himself. The “phantasticall sort,” however, were not interested. Instead, they sought out Arthur and offered him ten pounds a year to let Gifford preach on Wednesdays at St. Mary’s. He was not inclined to contribute to the schism in the town, Arthur wrote, but his church desperately needed a new roof and his parish was a poor one. And so he forwarded the matter to his dean.57 Arthur’s description of Maldon in 1596 shows that after a decade of dissension, the split between the reformers and the conformers in the town remained very much in place. The godly still felt “greatly decayed” and “poore for wante of the concourse of people,” but not just any people. They cared not for Palmer or his supporters, and so voted with their feet when it came to his preaching. Rather than listen to the despised vicar, they flocked to hear Ralph Hawdon, vicar of nearby Langford, fellow Christ’s College graduate, and an “other Gifford”—a curious phrase that says something of Gifford’s reputation as a preacher, as well as the close relation between Hawdon and Gifford.58 But they still could not bear to have full sway in their parish and town, and thus tried to bribe first Palmer and then Arthur, in both cases to no avail. William Petchey has shown how, in the course of Elizabeth’s reign, the town corporation of Maldon was increasingly filled with leaders who had an interest in promoting religious reformation in the town. Recent studies of the Reformation in an urban context suggest that Maldon’s town leaders were not alone in their attitudes. Robert Tittler argued that sixteenthcentury English towns came under tremendous pressure from accelerating economic and social change at the same time that the Crown pursued a strategy of delegating more authority to local governments. Both power and responsibility became more concentrated, and the “‘better sort’ of people in the middling and more complex provincial towns had no choice but to govern in a more vigorous and authoritative manner.” The resulting conflicts blurred the line between the secular and the religious as town 57 Arthur’s letter is found in Westminster Abbey Muniments 8125. Apparently nothing came of the proposal. There is no record that Gifford preached at St. Mary’s and the church was not rebuilt until the 1620s. 58 In his will, Gifford referred to Hawdon (alternately Hawden) as his “good friend,” and appointed him as one of the overseers of his will (see appendix 3). On Hawdon, see the Biographical Register in Collinson, Craig, and Usher, Conferences and Combination Lectures, 215–16.

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leaders sought to impose order on their societies. Tittler maintained that this drive for order, however, was not exclusively religious in its orientation, and that “puritanism may not always have prompted the demand for greater civic discipline as much as it was called into being to fill that need.”59 In one sense the evidence of the situation in Maldon fits Tittler’s description. Disputes in the town were driven by personal animosities, social and familial connections, and economic concerns. Religious practices were, at least for the divided town corporation, one of the playing fields on which they worked out their grievances. Yet it would be misleading to imagine that the participants thought Maldon’s tumultuous debate over a godly reformation was only the expression of an underlying drive for civic order, for “if the Reformation secularised, it also sacralised.”60 Certainly from Gifford’s perspective it might be said that civic order was but one expression of a godly reformation that touched every area of life, from personal piety to public manners. So it was that he encouraged the leaders of Maldon—some, but not all, of the “best and substantialist” of the town—to do their godly duty by establishing and maintaining a community life that reflected his godly ideals. In this effort, Gifford had the support of both town leaders and a substantial portion of the population. At the same time, he faced opposition from those he knew as the “common sort of Christian,” and here especially the term must be understood with respect to its essentially religious connotations: the common sort were those who enjoyed profane recreations and resisted the extension of godly rule over all areas of life. These included disaffected members of Maldon’s town corporation and no doubt many of the rest of the town’s inhabitants as well, and they gathered around a conformist minister who shared their interest in less preaching and more recreation. Gifford anticipated such opposition; he knew that the “profession of true religion” would bring trouble, and that trouble defined his life and ministry until the end. lm On May 8, 1600, George Gifford, “preacher of God’s Worde in Mauldon in the countie of Essex, being weake in mind and sicke in bodie, yett of good and perfecte memorie,” dictated his last will and testament, making allowances for his wife and several children, the youngest of whom had been

59 Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540– 1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 336–38. 60 Collinson and Craig, Reformation in English Towns, 8.

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born just one year prior. He died shortly thereafter, probably on the ninth, and was buried in the yard of All Saints Church on the tenth of May. 61 Robert Palmer died sometime later that summer, having outlasted his nemesis by only a few weeks. Yet Gifford and his godly contingent would have the last word. Upon Palmer’s death, the patron Richard Franks presented Ralph Hawdon to the bishop of London to fill the vacant pulpit at All Saints. The bishop had no objection and so this “other Gifford” was duly appointed September 5, 1600, and served in Maldon until his death nineteen years later.62 The story of Gifford’s life, or at least what can be known of it, is punctuated throughout by conflicts: from the early days in the crucible of reform at Cambridge, to the first skirmish with the conformist minister Roger Nowell of Heybridge across the river from Maldon, to the pivotal defiance of Whitgift and the High Commission, to his association with the campaign for presbyterian polity, and finally to the series of battles with Palmer that raged for more than a decade for influence over the ecclesiastical life of Maldon. From this evidence it would be easy to judge Gifford a contentious minister bent on challenging the authority of the church at every turn. And perhaps there is some truth to that charge. Yet to leave the case there does not answer the entire question, for the evidence reviewed here—court records and correspondence addressing problems and complaints—brings with it an inherently negative bias. Courts are convened to address problems, not issue compliments, and administrators are more likely to write letters of complaint than commendation. Thus, in order to understand the reason behind the various stands that Gifford insisted on maintaining, often in the face of overwhelming pressure to relent, it is necessary to turn to his written legacy. In this large and varied collection, one finds something of the unifying force that undergirded Gifford’s ministry and helped stiffen his resolve in the face of resistance: an abiding interest in translating reformed religion into a language that could be appropriated by the “common sort” of Christian who filled the parishes of the nation. 61 See appendix 3. Gifford’s burial on May 10, 1600, is recorded in the All Saints Register Book, Essex Record Office D/P 201/1/1. 62 Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 231; and Hughes, Guide to the Church of All Saints, xliv. It is something of a mystery that Hawdon had no apparent difficulty in assuming his position at All Saints. He was suspended at least once (“Supplication of the ministers suspended in Essex, offered to the parliament the 8th of March, 1587 [1587/8],” printed in Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, 258–59), and his name often appeared alongside Gifford’s when church officials made lists of troublesome Essex ministers. Strangely, the bishop of London who approved Hawdon was none other than Richard Bancroft, Whitgift’s right-hand man in the battle against the puritans.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Errors of Rome

I

In April 1580 Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion, two English Jesuits, received the blessing of Pope Gregory XIII and departed Rome for England. They were not the first Catholics to go to England to aid the Catholic faithful (and, according to their detractors, to pave the way for the return of the English Crown and nation to Catholicism). The Douay Seminary, founded by the English Catholic exile William Allen in 1568, had been sending its students to England since the early 1570s. However, Parsons and Campion were the first Jesuit missionaries to go to England, and the Jesuit order’s close ties to the papacy made it difficult for any English Catholics who associated with them to avoid accusations of treason. In addition, the eventual capture of Campion and the subsequent series of high-profile debates between Campion and prominent English Protestants at the Tower of London caused contemporaries to mark the Jesuit mission of 1580–81 as a turning point in the history of English Catholicism.1 Sometime in 1582, Gifford wrote A Dialogue betweene a Papist and a Protestant, applied to the capacitie of the unlearned. Based on the timing as well as his interests in the Dialogue, it seems clear that Gifford wrote the work in response to news of the day: talk of the Jesuit mission and the Catholic 1 On the Jesuit mission, see Ernest Edwin Reynolds, Campion and Parsons: The Jesuit Mission of 1580–1 (London: Sheed and Ward, 1980); and Malcolm H. South, The Jesuits and the Joint Mission to England during 1580–1581 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999). Reports of the Tower debates were many and varied. The official Protestant account was prepared by John Field, the notary at three of the four debates, and appeared as A True Report of the Disputation or rather private Conference had in the Tower of London, with Ed. Campion, Jesuite the last of August, 1581. Set downe by the Reverend learned men them selves that deale therein. Whereunto is joyned also a true report of the other three dayes conferences had there with the same Jesuite.Which nowe are thought meete to be published in print by authoritie (London, 1583). A second title page appearing at G4r reads The three last dayes conferences had in the Tower with Edmund Campion Jesuite, the 18: 23: and 27. of September, 1581, collected and faithfully set downed by M. John Feilde student in Divinitie. Nowe perused by the learned men themselves, and thought meete to be published (1583). Many unpublished Catholic accounts also circulated, and not surprisingly, these offer a contrasting judgment on Campion’s success in defending the Catholic position. Several of these manuscripts have been collated and published by James V. Holleran in A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion’s Debates at the Tower of London in 1581 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999).

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threat was standard fare in the streets of London as well as the halls of Parliament.Yet while these events formed the backdrop for Gifford’s composition of A Dialogue betweene a Papist and a Protestant, he did not feel bound by the parameters of the Tower debates in formulating his own attack on Roman Catholicism. Instead, in the Dialogue Gifford shifted the focus by introducing questions and answers he considered more relevant for his parishioners. The Tower debaters considered the canon of scripture; Gifford’s interlocutors argued over who was fit to interpret the Bible. Campion and his adversaries debated the visibility of the church and the fallibility of the pope; Gifford’s Papist and Protestant considered the state of the ministry in England and who had responsibility for the spiritual health of the people. In the Dialogue and also in a later work, A Briefe Treatise against the Priesthood and Sacrifice of the Church of Rome, Gifford did not simply seek to translate esoteric theology into a language comprehensible to the “capacitie of the unlearned”; he shifted the locus of the debate and placed these “simpler sort” at the heart of the conversation. In this way he turned the debate over the failures of England’s Catholic past into a critique of the Protestant present and a plan for a puritan future. The result was a theology both for and of the common sort of Christian.

CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND In 1559, even youths had lived under no fewer than four English monarchs, each with distinct religious policies. Throughout his reign Henry VIII had seemed more interested in progeny and property than Protestantism. Shortly after Henry’s death in 1547, the protectors of the boy-king Edward VI wasted little time in starting to reshape the Church of England along the lines of Calvin’s Geneva. They were well on their way when Edward’s untimely death brought the six-year project to a screeching halt. The religious pendulum then swung back toward Rome as Queen Mary oversaw the restoration of Catholicism with a firm hand. Once again, however, the project floundered upon the unexpected death of the monarch. Due to this series of rapid reformations and restorations, the church inherited in 1558 by the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth came packaged with no small amount of disarray. Based on the religious upheaval of the previous decade, if many people took a wait-and-see attitude with respect to religion, who could blame them? Yet many optimistic Protestants saw opportunity in turmoil, and they interpreted the accession of Elizabeth—this new “Deborah” sent by God

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to save her nation—as a prelude to reformation.2 The first act of the Elizabethan Parliament restored the supremacy of the English monarch over the Church of England, thus breaking the brief reunification with Rome established under Mary. The second act made that breach felt among clergy and laity alike by imposing a new prayer book; threatening recalcitrant clergy with deprivation, fines, and imprisonment; and mandating a oneshilling fine for any layperson who was absent from the newly reestablished Protestant services. But uniformity could not be accomplished by legislative fiat. In addition to national and ecclesiastical commissions, the queen and Parliament relied in part upon the vast array of judges, priests, churchwardens, and other officials spread across the parishes of England to implement the practices of the new religion and enforce the laws of the Crown. Throughout the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, only limited progress was made, especially outside the larger towns.3 Visitation records frequently report the frustrations of bishops. In some cases, lay Catholics boldly and publicly maintained their faith in spite of increasingly strict censures and fines, but these defiant recusants4 were almost certainly a minority of those inclined to support the old religion. As Alexandra Walsham has recently argued, even more crucial for understanding Catholicism in post-Reformation England is the larger number of Catholics who regularly conformed to the new religious requirements. As a corrective to the traditional focus of English Catholic history on high-profile recusants, Walsham suggests “conformity needs to be seen as a positive option rather than a form of spineless apathy or ethical surrender; as a position of moral principle rather than an inferior, interim stage on the road to full-blown recusancy.” 5 Gifford also believed these closet Catholics to be worthy of attention. According to Walsham, he was the first to use “church papist” in print to 2

For Elizabeth as a new Deborah, see Haigh, Elizabeth I, 7. Whiting, Local Responses to the English Reformation, 125–31, 202. 4 From the Latin recusare, to demur or object. The term recusant first appeared during the reign of Edward VI in reference to those who refused to attend services in the Church of England. Though frequently employed by both contemporaries and later historians to refer to Catholics, recusant as defined by the Edwardian statutes included all who refused to attend services and so resisted the Crown’s efforts at conformity, be they Catholic or radical Protestant. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “recusant”; and the very useful article by Caroline Litzenberger, “Defining the Church of England: Religious Change in the 1570s,” in Wabuda and Litzenberger, Belief and Practice in Reformation England, 137–53, esp. 143–44. 5 Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1993), passim; and idem, “‘Yielding to the Extremity of the Time’: Conformity, Orthodoxy and the Post-Reformation Catholic Community,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 211–36, quote at 213. For an account that emphasizes post-Reformation English Catholicism as a “branch of the English nonconforming tradition,” see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), quote at 7, but also 121–25. 3

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describe them, though he likely borrowed the term from the vernacular. 6 Ironically, church papists presented the same problem to both Catholic and Protestant clergy: each group pondered how to win and keep the complete devotion of these seemingly indifferent laities. From the 1560s onward, many Catholic priests alternately urged, goaded, and threatened lay Catholics who attended Protestant services in order to avoid fines and social pressures. Jesuit priests like Parsons and Campion were especially unyielding as upholders of the Tridentine orthodoxy that called for complete refusal, although Walsham argues that this position was often challenged. Nevertheless, among the Catholic faithful a slew of tracts circulated that counseled recusancy as the only safe option for conscientious laity. Those who chose outward conformity placed themselves at risk of hellfire, they were told, and were guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy. From a pastoral perspective, Catholic priests worried this creeping conformity meant an inevitable weakening of the bonds between Catholic laity and the Church of Rome, and they also feared the discouraging effect it would have on Catholic recusants suffering under persecution.7 Zealous Protestants like Gifford also fretted about church papists, but their goal was to overcome resistance to Protestant teaching and practices rather than encourage it. Thus, whether one saw the glass as half-empty or half-full, church papists represented a serious pastoral challenge. The persistence of English Catholics in maintaining their faith was abetted during the 1560s by several circumstances: the possibility of a Catholic marriage by the queen, questions of succession, the lack of an efficient administrative machinery to enforce religious conformity, and the fear that draconian persecution might encourage open revolt by Catholic nobility. By the 1570s, though, the times had changed. The rebellion by northern earls in 1569 realized the fear of Catholic political disloyalty, Pius V’s 1570 bull Regnans in excelsis declared Elizabeth a heretic and ordered resistance by English Catholics, Catholic missionaries began arriving in England, and conflict with Spain loomed on the horizon. Each of these developments raised the price of adherence to Catholicism, and increasingly strict censures passed by Parliament swelled the number of those troublesome “papists which can keepe their conscience to themselves, and yet goe to church.”8 In church these reluctant attendees likely heard sermons and liturgies that mingled spiritual and nationalistic themes of the sort contained in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Antipapalism may have had both political and 6

Walsham, Church Papists, 9 n. 15. Walsham, “Yielding to the Extremity of the Time,” 215–16. 8 Gifford, Papist and Protestant, A1v. 7

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salvific elements, but in practice the two themes were inextricably intertwined. In addition to pulpit rhetoric, the 1570s and 1580s saw an explosion in printed antipapal polemics. Peter Lake has shown how this particular genre of writing provided a meeting ground for a range of English Protestants, from radical presbyterians like Thomas Cartwright to more moderate puritans like William Whitaker.9 English churchmen of many different stripes found common cause in opposition to Rome, and taking up the pen might even be promoted as a path to rehabilitation within the established church. Hence, Sir Francis Walsingham wrote to an exiled Thomas Cartwright to enlist him to refute the recently published Rheims New Testament, this the same Cartwright who had been forced to leave the country for his promotion of presbyterian polity. As an inducement, Walsingham offered financial support and the possibility of reconciliation with Archbishop Whitgift and the queen. For their part, puritans saw antipapal polemic as a chance to emphasize familiar Protestant doctrines—grace, justification, scripture, and the like—against Rome’s error while simultaneously pointing out the papist remnants in the English church. This combination of loyalty to and criticism of the established church was a hallmark of Lake’s “moderate puritans,”10 many of whom were called upon by the church to form the first line of defense against the perceived Catholic assault on true religion in England.

EDMUND CAMPION AND THE CATHOLIC CHALLENGE For all the attention it garnered, the Parsons-Campion mission was rather short-lived. The pair arrived in England in June 1580, and soon began visiting at houses of the Catholic faithful in order to hear confessions, say Mass, and preach. Parsons succeeded in setting up a Catholic press just outside London. Their efforts did not escape the attention of the English government for long, however, as spies had tracked them from the outset of their journey in Rome. In March 1581, Parliament passed a bill condemning the two by name. Parsons managed to flee England for the Continent, but Campion was captured later that year.11 Campion’s subsequent 9

Lake, Moderate Puritans, 55–76. “To attack Rome was at once an avowal of loyalty to the church of England and the Royal Supremacy, and a defense of the cause of true religion.… In short, the role of antipapal polemicist managed to combine respectability with ideological rectitude to an extent unrivalled by any other single activity open to the godly scholar.” Lake, Moderate Puritans, 57. 11 On Parsons’s continued involvement in English affairs, including his attempt to influence the succession of the English Crown, see Michael L. Carrafiello, Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580–1610 (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1998), esp. 12–15. 10

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examination, trial, and execution for treason at the Tower of London on December 1, 1581, captivated the nation’s attention and heightened the level of rhetoric surrounding the Catholic threat. It would have been difficult to be in or around London at the end of 1581 and not hear of the capture of Campion and the subsequent debates, so it comes as no surprise that the first words off the tongue of Gifford’s Papist concern the trial: PAPIST:

I pray yee what newes? Were yee at London lately? What is become of the Catholiks? I heare there hath bin great disputation in the Tower. PROTESTANT: There hath beene disputation in deede, by reason of a proude challenge which was made. PAPIST: Yee might terme it a proude challendge if hee had not beene able to make his part good. But I heare he behaved himself very learnedly, and with great victorie against all which were so upon him. PROTESTANT: Yee have heard moe lyes then that, but I perceive yee are a Papist, or at the least a favourer of Papisttes, for they bragge that hee did excellently, although in very deede, hee was there shewed to be but an obstinate caviller.12

Although Gifford did not identify the “obstinate caviller,” the reference would not have escaped his readers. The “proude challenge” mentioned by Gifford’s Protestant no doubt referred to a short letter written by Campion prior to his capture and addressed to the Privy Council. At the encouragement of a lay Catholic supporter, Campion had composed a brief statement that disavowed any politically subversive motives associated with his mission to England. The layman, Thomas Pounde, had himself spent much time in prison as a result of his Catholic sympathies. If Campion and Parsons were to be captured, Pounde warned, the Privy Council would undoubtedly attempt to paint them as undercover political operatives bent on the overthrow of the English Crown. To counter this negative publicity, Pounde recommended writing a statement that described the Jesuits’ intentions in their mission to England. He promised to hold the document and release it only in the event of Campion’s capture. Yet Pounde’s enthusiasm for Campion’s short and direct declaration caused him to share it with a few friends, and shortly the statement found its way into wide circulation.

12

Gifford, Papist and Protestant, A1r–A1v.

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Nicknamed Campion’s “Challenge” or “Brag,” the statement was written in the form of a confession of nine key points. Campion admitted that he was a Jesuit sent to England by his superiors with a charge to “preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners and to confute errors.” Most important, he claimed to be strictly forbidden “to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy.” His “challenge” came in the form of a request for three audiences before whom to make his case: the Privy Council, learned men from the universities, and lawyers. Campion expressed confidence that given these audiences and a fair disputation, he could prevail “because I know perfectly that no one Protestant, nor all the Protestants living, nor any sect of our adversaries (howsoever they face men down in pulpits and overrule us in their kingdom of grammarians and unlearned ears), can maintain their doctrine in disputation.” Surely, he concluded, the queen and her council would see the merits of his arguments and “disfavor some proceedings hurtful to the Realm, and procure towards us oppressed [Catholics] more equitie.”13 Campion’s dissembling disclaimer in his statement to the Privy Council—“I would be loth to speak of anything that might sound of any insolent brag or challenge”—belied his readiness to do battle for his faith, and his estimation of the weakness of the Protestant position can scarcely be seen as anything other than a challenge to English Protestants. 14 Anticipating that many might snatch up the gauntlet, Campion composed in early 1581 a more detailed statement giving the outline of his theological arguments against the Protestants and in favor of the Roman Catholic Church. His Rationes Decem was printed and distributed among students at Oxford but soon found its way into more general circulation. In the short treatise, Campion addressed specific questions concerning scripture and its interpretation, the nature of the church, the authority of church councils and the church fathers, theological and methodological errors of the Protestants, and the evidence of history. Although it was written in Latin, the influence of Campion’s work quickly extended beyond the scholarly audience. The secret printing and distribution of the Rationes Decem raised the profile of the Catholic voice in England’s religious debates and created a controversy that the Crown could not allow to go unchallenged. Protestants dashed off responses that were hurried to the presses.15 Thus, even as he gave Catholics in England a cause célèbre, Campion raised the stakes on 13

The text of Campion’s “Challenge” is reprinted in Holleran, Jesuit Challenge, 179–81. Holleran, Jesuit Challenge, 180. 15 For a brief description of the pamphlet war, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of the Printed Sources (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 57–58. 14

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his own presence in England. Eventually, the Crown’s spies caught up with their man. On July 17, 1581, local authorities near Oxford entered the house of the Yates family, Catholics who had been providing the Jesuits with clandestine refuge and a place to conduct worship services. After much searching, they finally discovered Campion and two fellow priests hiding in a priesthole in a wall over the stairs. Within the week Campion was transferred to the Tower of London, where he would spend the last few months of his life. Early meetings with government officials and even the queen herself failed to produce the desired recantation. During the course of his stay, Campion faced torture on the rack on more than one occasion in an attempt by authorities to discover who had given him and his fellow priests refuge during their mission in England. In addition, the Crown arranged for Campion to engage in a series of debates with leading Protestant divines in the hopes of discrediting him. The first took place August 31 in the Tower Chapel. Alexander Nowell and William Day, two well-established Protestants loyal to the queen, argued with Campion over the canon of scripture and justification by faith. The second and third debates, on September 18 and 23, involved William Fulke and Roger Goade, both Cambridge divines, and covered the visibility of the church, whether the church may err, and the nature of the Eucharist. The fourth and final debate on September 27 with John Walker and William Charke, two reforming activists, largely recapitulated the topics of the first, with additional discussion of whether scripture contained sufficient doctrine for salvation. The controversy initiated by the publication of Campion’s Rationes Decem and the subsequent debates between him and his Protestant opponents produced no definitive outcome, at least in terms of settling the issues raised. The combatants rehearsed arguments that had been well developed throughout the sixteenth century, and so represented no theological innovation. Neither side relinquished its positions, and each claimed victory in respective accounts produced by Protestant and Catholic partisans. Campion’s execution elevated him to martyr status for the Catholic faithful, while among English Protestants both Campion and Parsons stood as symbols of the subversive threat of Roman Catholicism. Yet the debates did serve to thrust issues fundamental to the legitimacy of the English church and Protestantism in general back into the limelight: What is the authority of scripture, how can one understand scripture, and how does scripture interact with church tradition? What is necessary for salvation? What are the marks of the true church? Far from being settled by legislative fiat, these questions had survived the political transformations of

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the English church, and if one accepts Gifford’s depiction of the church papist, remained serious and unresolved problems for puritan ministers attempting to convert their indifferent parishioners into a godly flock. 16

TOM CARTER AND THE BIBLE Questions about the Bible—what to read, how to read, and who should read—were not new to the sixteenth century but as old as Christianity itself. As a source of authority, scripture often lay at the center of theological disputes, claimed by partisans on both sides of debates. Those deemed heretics by the church regularly appealed to the Bible to support their positions. In the medieval church some, such as John Wycliffe, anticipated the arguments of sixteenth-century Protestants by maintaining that the Bible was the sole criterion for doctrine. Under siege from Protestant reformers on this point, sixteenth-century Catholics pointed out that the church had been the guardian of the sacred texts from the beginning, discerning the true from the false gospel in the early councils and preserving the true interpretation of scripture in the teaching of the church fathers. As such, scripture and the traditions of the church existed in an equal and interdependent relationship, as attested to by the fathers of the Council of Trent who “receive[d] and venerate[d], with equal pious affection and reverence, all the books both of the New and the Old Testaments…together with the said Traditions…as having been given from the lips of Christ or by the dictation of the Holy Spirit and preserved by unbroken succession in the Catholic Church.”17 According to both Protestant and Catholic accounts, when the disputants in the Tower debates turned to the question of scripture, they focused on what books should be included in the canon and who had the right to decide. Protestants, Campion had charged in his Rationes Decem, handled the scriptures in a cavalier manner, and their disrespect gave the lie to their elevation of God’s word as the sole authority. Beset by superior arguments, “they cannot hold their own otherwise than by laying violent hands on the divine volumes themselves…to retrieve their desperate and ruined fortunes.”18 Campion charged that Protestants took it upon themselves to pick and choose among scripture as it suited their doctrine, and gave Luther’s 16

See Gifford, Papist and Protestant, A1v–A2v; and Walsham, Church Papists, 1–3, 100–6. From session 4 of the Council, promulgated on 8 April 1546. See Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 368. 18 Edmund Campion, Campion’s Ten Reasons, trans. Joseph Rickaby (London: Manresa Press, 1914), 92. 17

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rejection of the Epistle of James as an example. In doing so, he concluded, they usurped the authority of the church and its conciliar tradition. In reply, Nowell and Day argued that the process of choosing some books and rejecting others was part of the very tradition to which Campion appealed. They cited such venerable authorities as Augustine and Jerome to show disagreement over the canon continued in the early church, and they differentiated between canonical books suitable for doctrine and apocryphal books suitable only for establishing manners.19 Behind the question of what books to read lay the more complicated question of how to read them. Even when they agreed upon a book’s canonicity, Catholics and Protestants regularly disagreed upon the interpretation. “We urge the word of God,” Campion complained in the Rationes Decem, “they darken the meaning of it. We appeal to the witness of the Saints as interpreters, they withstand them.”20 Despite Campion’s broadside against the Protestants’ “darkened meanings,” Campion’s interlocutors during the Tower debates largely avoided the question of interpretation.Yet as Gifford set out to recast the debates with his fictional Papist and Protestant, the question took center stage. When Gifford’s Protestant proudly proclaimed “we acknowledge nothing but the holy doctrine of the Bible,” the Papist quickly retorted that “your reason is not good, because the Scriptures are hard to bee understood.”21 Only the church could serve as the repository of the collective wisdom of the church fathers. Only the church could provide guidance in sorting out the difficult issues of interpretation and avoiding heresy. How else could one know the mind of the apostles other than by listening to their successors? How else could one avoid the inevitable diversity of opinion and schism that followed unbridled and private interpretations? “For the Scriptures can prove nothing without the interpretation of the Churche, you cannot interpret, neither can yee judge, but the great shepheard, whose voyce you should hear, must give the sense.” Gifford’s Protestant, however, was not so easily swayed. “[The Scriptures] are not as hard as you make them, that is to say that in no wise may they be understood, or have any certaintie in them, but by the Pope and his cleargie.”22 Not the church, but the Spirit of God worked to lead the godly to the truth.The presence of the Spirit meant interpretation by individuals was not by definition private (and

19

Holleran, Jesuit Challenge, 82–93; and Field, True Report, C1r–D3v. Campion, Campion’s Ten Reasons, 99. 21 Gifford, Papist and Protestant, A5r. 22 Gifford, Papist and Protestant, A7r. 20

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thus of the sort discouraged in the Second Epistle of Peter 23) but suitable for the building up of the faithful. Why should the laity not read the Bible for themselves? Gifford’s contentious Protestant suspected that his Catholic counterpart was not inclined to improve on the status quo of lay education since “ignorance is the strongest pillar of your religion, and as you tearme it, the mother of devotion.” People were wont to adhere to the Catholic past only as long as they did not know any better. They clung to Catholic rituals for comfort because they did not know the Bible. For this reason, the Protestant argued, papists feared a people who could read and interpret scripture. “For so soone as men have a little knowledge of God, their zeale towardes you is quenched.”24 Or so the zealous Protestant (and Gifford) hoped. Thus far Gifford’s Protestant preached a gospel around which all English Protestants could rally. Two decades before Gifford wrote his dialogue, John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury and defender-in-chief of the newly established Elizabethan church, contended with the Catholic Thomas Harding over the right for people to have access to the Bible in the vernacular. History, Jewel thought, was on his side. “[T]hat the people was in old times willed to read the Scriptures, and that in such tongues as they were able to understand, it is evident, and appeareth many ways”—ways that Jewel was happy to supply. He even went so far as to claim that in matters of interpretation, “oftentimes the unlearned seeth that thing that the learned cannot see.” Certainly the sum of Jewel’s career does not reveal one overly inclined toward ecclesiastical populism, so it may well be that Jewel overstated his support for lay empowerment in the heat of battle with Harding. In any case, Jewel stood ready to challenge Harding’s sweeping assertion that lay reading was neither necessary, convenient, nor profitable, being more often dangerous and hurtful.25 Gifford’s Protestant hoped that all parishioners might become avid readers of scripture. But while English Protestants might have agreed in theory on the necessity of bringing the Bible to the people, how to do so was another matter. In what environment should the people hear and study scripture, and who should be the controlling interpretative authority? In the decade following Jewel’s exchanges with Harding, another controversy 23 The Papist and Protestant debate the meaning of II Peter 1:20–21: “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (AV). 24 Gifford, Papist and Protestant, H1r. 25 John Jewel, “The Reply to Harding’s Answer, Art. 15: Of Reading the Scriptures,” in The Works of John Jewel, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: University Press, 1847), 2:670, 683, 672.

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erupted within the English church. In 1570, Cambridge divine Thomas Cartwright argued strongly for presbyterian polity in a series of lectures on the organization of the New Testament church as seen in the Acts of the Apostles. As a result, Cartwright lost his professorship and left Cambridge for the more hospitable atmosphere of Geneva. In 1571 the “hotter Protestants” were again frustrated in their attempt to push further ecclesiastical reform through Parliament, and their frustration spilled into the public forum with the publication of the anonymous pamphlet An Admonition to Parliament in 1572. The Admonition accused the bishops in the Church of England of popish tyranny and demanded that Parliament act to correct abuses. For their efforts the pamphleteers, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, earned a stay in prison, but the arguments had a life of their own. The cause of the reformers quickly found a new spokesman in Cartwright, who had only recently returned from Geneva. Speaking for the establishment was John Whitgift, master of Trinity College (Cartwright’s own college), vicechancellor of the University of Cambridge, and no friend of Cartwright’s. Their clash over the issues raised in the Admonition appeared in a series of treatises published over the next five years.26 One of the many complaints Cartwright and his fellow reformers lodged against the church concerned read prayers and homilies. Many puritans found this practice particularly offensive since they suspected it simply masked an ill-trained ministry. In its place, they preferred preaching ministers in every parish who could tailor the message of God and prick the hearts of individual hearers. Whitgift defended the practice of read prayers and sermons in part by questioning Cartwright’s assertion that sermons should only be preached by those who had received a calling to the ministry, regardless of their level of education. Cartwright contended the gift of preaching accompanied the call, but Whitgift wondered. [I]f this were true that you here so boldly without proof affirm, then it should not much skill what kind of men were chosen to be either pastors or magistrates; for howsoever they were before furnished with gifts, yet when they be once called, God will miraculously pour upon them gifts necessary, though they be the rudest and ignorantest men in a whole country.27

26 A complete listing of the tracts may be found in Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age, 29–33. For an overview of the Admonition controversy and topically organized excerpts from the major treatises, see Donald Joseph McGinn, The Admonition Controversy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949). 27 McGinn, Admonition Controversy, 111.

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Cartwright attempted to demonstrate that both the Old and New Testaments showed that God frequently used the unlearned, even to the point of favoring them over the leaders of the day. The spiritual lesson was manifest; when people saw the “baseness and rudeness of the instrument, they might the more wonder at the wisdom and power of the Artificer, which with so weak and foolish instruments bringeth to pass so wise and mighty things.” Whitgift chided this extrapolation from specific incidences to general doctrine as “not the part of a skillful divine.” Cartwright’s errant logic inevitably led one to conclude the opinions of the ignorant were always to be favored over the learned. Down such a path lay anarchy, the master of Trinity concluded, the roots of which found nourishment in unlearned, “spirit-filled” reading and teaching of scripture.28 Another example of establishment unease with unregulated scriptural interpretation may be seen in the controversies over preaching exercises or prophesyings, as they were known to contemporaries.29 For many, prophesyings offered an ideal way for new clergy to hone their preaching and hermeneutical skills by listening to their more learned and practiced colleagues and then debating with them thereafter. But organizers of the earliest English exercises conducted in the “stranger churches” of London regularly encouraged both clerical and lay participation based on the belief that free debate led not to discord but concord, since the concerns of more radical members were aired and not allowed to fester.30 Worse still for their detractors, prophesyings frequently spilled outside the confines of the congregation into an even more casual forum, such as those staged in market towns. Crowds gathered to hear popular preachers, whose performance was often more akin to theatrical presentation than the dry printed records of their sermons would indicate.31 These audiences at market-day sermons and elsewhere apparently felt free to offer up opinions on the performance and the exposition of the preachers, and this unscheduled and largely uncontrollable commentary on scripture made many in the English church who favored more orderly edification of the commoners nervous. In many 28

McGinn, Admonition Controversy, 112–13. On the prophesyings, see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 168–76; and idem, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 233–42. Collinson judges the prophesyings to be generally tame and unremarkable events that were not as threatening to the authorities as their opponents made them out to be. For an overview of lay involvement in prophesyings and the case for their potential subversiveness, see Peter Iver Kaufman, “Prophesying Again,” Church History 68:2 (June 1999): 337–58. 30 Kaufman, “Prophesying Again,” 339–40. 31 Patrick Collinson, “Puritanism as Popular Religious Culture,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 47. 29

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cases, commentary apparently turned into criticism of the clergy (often at the behest of an overheated precisionist preacher), giving the critics of the prophesyings sufficient evidence to paint the exercises as subversive of ecclesiastical and especially episcopal authority.32 Gifford condemned uneducated clergy who could do no more than read the homilies as prescribed by the established church, and he also challenged those who restricted the right to interpret scripture. Thus, while A Dialogue betweene a Papist and a Protestant was ostensibly written to counter the errors of Rome, Gifford’s target was not foreign but domestic. His real concern was how popish opinions persisted among authorities in the English church. So it was that many conservative English Protestants may have found themselves more like Gifford’s Papist than his Protestant. For example, those who fretted about the intrusion of the uneducated into the clerical prerogatives of interpretation may have seen themselves in the Papist, who thought his Protestant friend surely overestimated both the interest and the ability of the average layperson to read and interpret scripture. In good sooth me thinketh ye overshoote your selfe greatly, very reason doth lead a man to see it is not a seemelye nor fitte thing for Tom Carter, when he hath layde downe his whippe to take up the Byble. Let him meddle with that which he can skill of, and leave the Scriptures to such as have learning to judge of them.

The Tom Carters of the world were better off behind the plough. But Gifford and his Protestant would hear nothing of it: And howsoever it pleaseth you to esteeme of the common people (whom ye do in disdaine set forth by Tom Carter) and thinke it no reason to lay down the whippe, and to take up the Byble: yet you must know they are the people of God, redeemed by the bloud of his sonne, unto whom the Gospell doth belonge, and they have as great interest and full right in it as any other: God hath promised to teach it them, and also doth teach it them.33

Here the Protestant voiced as succinct a statement of Gifford’s theory of practical divinity as may be found anywhere in his writings. Diligent attention to scripture formed the bedrock of puritan piety, so the notion that the meaning of scripture might be beyond the grasp of the laity contradicted Gifford’s conception of the godly flock. More important, the notso-subtle condescension heard in the Papist’s—and by implication, the 32 33

Kaufman, “Prophesying Again,” 343, 348–49. Gifford, Papist and Protestant, H3r.

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conservative Protestant establishment’s—estimation of those who peopled the parishes of England chafed Gifford. In the Papist’s scorn at those who “layde downe his whippe to take up the Byble,” Gifford saw everything that was wrong with the ministry of the Church of England: lazy ministers who expected little of themselves and less of their parishioners. A year earlier in Countrie Divinitie, Gifford grimly observed “our church therefore and common wealth, being the Lords husbandrie, is overgrowne with weedes and almost laid waste” as a result of a “want of a sincere ministerie of the woorde.”34 So it comes as no surprise Gifford reserved his harshest words in A Dialogue betweene a Papist and a Protestant not for Catholics across the Channel but for indifferent Protestants at home.

CHURCHES AND PREACHERS Gifford’s pronouncement of a church “almost laid waste” sounds pessimistic if not apocalyptic. However, his deliberate insertion of an “almost” softened the blow and shows his statement to be less judgment than diagnosis. Gifford was certainly not alone in this attitude. Many godly ministers fretted that abuses in the Church of England and its ministry threatened its legitimacy, but most sought reform rather than separation. Even if the Church of England was lacking in discipline, puritans were generally quick to defend her legitimacy against Rome. Some, like William Fulke, successfully rehabilitated their careers in the English church following clashes with authorities by publicly engaging the church’s Catholic enemies. 35 In the second round of Tower debates, the Crown tapped Fulke and Roger Goade, a Cambridge colleague, to lead the charge against Campion. The reason for the replacement of Alexander Nowell and William Day is not clear, but some evidence suggests the Crown was not entirely satisfied with the outcome of the first day’s debate.36 Since the topic of the second day was to be the doctrine of the church, the stakes were high; the very legitimacy of the Church of England had to be defended and defended well. In his Rationes Decem, Campion had attacked the Protestant doctrine of a hidden or invisible church known only to God: 34

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, Epistle Dedicatory. Fulke was involved with the Vestments Controversy at Cambridge in the 1560s, but later earned the favor of the Crown through his anti-Catholic polemic, including attacks on the Rheims New Testament. 36 Holleran notes, inter alia, the delay between the first and second debates, the change in venue from the Tower chapel to the private quarters of the Lieutenant of the Tower, and the repeat of the first day’s topics on the fourth and final day of debates. See Holleran, Jesuit Challenge, 58. 35

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Campion’s charges hit the Protestants in a tender spot. Catholics frequently spoke of Protestant doctrines as “innovative” or “new,” while Protestants sought to show the ancient, scriptural, and apostolic origins of their teachings. Practically speaking, however, Campion wondered what use such a doctrine of the church was, if “so many men for so many centuries should not know where the church is or who belong to it!”38 As the more prominent of the two Protestant representatives in the debate, Fulke took the lead in challenging Campion concerning the visibility of the church. In order for the authority of the Church of England to be maintained, it was necessary for the Protestants to argue that the true church—“the whole Catholic Church” as Fulke put it—had not been continuously visible throughout history. Indeed, only a part of it was visible upon earth, and then only occasionally. If this was not the case, then the Roman church could claim authenticity based on its continuity throughout history. Fulke contended since the true church is based on faith and since faith is invisible, the true church, composed of the faithful, was not visible. Thus, Christians who faced persecution in previous generations, even if they had no public presence or place of resort, nevertheless constituted the true church. Identification with these martyrs and “heretics” from the past gave the Church of England access to a lineage that did not depend exclusively upon Rome, and in fact often sat in opposition to it, as was demonstrated by the preeminent English martyrologist John Foxe. In his Acts and Monuments, Foxe had knit together the earliest Christian martyrs with those English Protestants who lately had endured persecution under Queen Mary into an unbroken line of the faithful.This vision lay behind Fulke’s understanding of the true church “not always seene, because it is oftentimes hidden from the worlde, and sometimes also from the true members thereof.” 39 Since the true church was sometimes hidden, Fulke and Goade maintained, the question of “whether the visible church may erre” could be answered easily: it can and it has. Throughout the afternoon of the second 37 Campion, Campion’s Ten Reasons, 102. Campion’s gibe referred to Martin Luther (“unhappy monk”), Ulrich Zwingli (“Swiss gladiator”), and John Calvin (“branded runaway”). 38 Campion, Campion’s Ten Reasons, 103. 39 Field, True Report, H1r.

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day’s debate, Fulke and Goade recited to Campion a litany of past errors of the visible church. Church fathers, councils, popes—even the great leader of the apostles, Peter himself—were all susceptible to error. For his part, Campion defended the authority of the church when speaking in matters of faith, and he was happy to enlighten the Protestants concerning conciliar or papal statements that appeared contradictory or in conflict with scripture. When his Papist and Protestant turned their attention to ecclesiology, questions of the fallibility of the church as a whole seemed to concern Gifford less than the fallibility of its individual ministers. In this case, the godly professor found himself on the defensive for a change. It was simple enough for the Protestant to ponder “who are the Church, or of the Church but such as doe imbrace [the] whole worde of God?”40 But embracing the word meant embracing the discipline that the godly found therein, and on this count the Protestant was forced to admit that his church fell woefully short, especially in the discipline of its ministers. Notably, here was one of the few places Gifford allowed the Papist to gain the upper hand in the debate. “What good things can a man see in your cleargy,” the Papist scorned, which shoulde give good ensample to others, and what pure conversation should be a patterne for other to followe? How many of them are there whiche are men voyde of all learning and grace? Who having spent their time lewdely and consumed their substance, when they cannot tell how to live, steppe into the ministery, or at least coveting to live as ease, and shunning to work, being scarce fit for the plow, much lesse for the pulpit, yet are admitted by your heavenlie gospel to be masters in Israel?…Your common people, seeing they have no better examples, are given over to all kinds of naughtinesse.41

Faced with this condemnation, Gifford’s godly professor can only meekly concede, “we doe also with great griefe acknowledge it.” With a tidy rhetorical sleight of hand, Gifford had placed on the lips of the church’s hated enemy the worst of the godly’s complaints about the Church of England: ministers who hold multiple livings, lack the ability to preach, indulge in less-than-godly behaviors and entertainments, or exhibit even more serious moral failings. Of course, by allowing the point Gifford hoped to make the case for reform. His Protestant recovers sufficiently to argue the fault lay not with Protestant doctrine but with the implementation thereof, a point that advocates for further reformation never tired in making. In any case, 40 41

Gifford, Papist and Protestant, F2v. Gifford, Papist and Protestant, E2r–E2v.

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intransient, greedy, and immoral ministers were to be expected, he told the Papist, based on the years of Catholic control of the English church: “all this corruption in the ministrie came from you.”42 Gifford’s belief that the failures of the English ministry had Catholic roots coincided with his claim that clerical incompetence manifested itself in the continued prevalence of Catholic beliefs and practices among the people. With respect to the problem of Catholic recusancy, Gifford was less concerned with those who clung to the practices of their youth out of religious nostalgia. Such cases, while not desirable, were at least understandable. But Catholic belief among those who never lived under a Catholic monarch or church was another matter entirely. Why should there “be so many which being borne since the Gospel was restored in this land, are so zealously addicted unto popery, which they never did know and so utter enimies unto the Gospel which they hear?” Not surprisingly, Gifford blamed those charged with tending the flock of England. Against these malingering ministers, his charge was not merely negligence, but malfeasance. They said one thing and did another and so “for every one which they convert to the Gospel, they cause a hundred to revolt, to be hardened in their errors, or fal[l] into flat Atheism.” Ministers who spoke the words of reformation yet failed to enact true reform in their parishes, put the church in a worse state than it would be to have no ministers at all. While they pretended to crush the eggs of Catholicism, they sat upon them and so hatched the “browdes of this evill kind.”43

THE MINISTRY OF BREAD AND TEARS One of the “evil browdes” of Catholicism that William Fulke and Roger Goade addressed in the third Tower debate was the Mass, or more specifically the doctrine of transubstantiation. The two Protestant divines challenged Campion to explain a number of seemingly contradictory papal and conciliar pronouncements, and they barraged the Jesuit with several logical syllogisms concerning the nature of the postresurrection body of Christ. Campion argued from the familiar scriptural words of institution (“This is my body”44) that the substance of the elements becomes the body and blood of Christ. The Protestants replied that even though something mysterious and profitable does occur during the Eucharist, the bread and wine remain as such while also serving as figures of Christ’s body and 42

Gifford, Papist and Protestant, E3r, E4v. Gifford, Papist and Protestant, dedicatory epistle (3v, 4r). 44 Matt. 26:26; and I Cor. 11:24 (AV). 43

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blood. In large part the debate proceeded along philosophical lines, with terms like material, substance, accident, sign, species, being, etc. repeatedly coming to the fore.45 Gifford devoted no great portion of the Dialogue to transubstantiation, but the topic was one of two central questions in A Briefe Treatise against the Priesthood and Sacrifice of the Church of Rome, published two years later.46 In keeping with his previously stated goal to make the case accessible to those unfamiliar with the church councils and fathers, Gifford argued only from scripture.47 Yet in this case, he turned away from the more accessible dialogue format and wrote a denser theological treatise. In addition to educating the commoners on the failings of the Roman church, Gifford likely had a more pressing agenda. Given the circumstances surrounding his deprivation in 1584, he may have felt compelled to write against Rome in an effort to demonstrate his loyalty to Crown and bishop. Anti-Catholic polemic could serve as a tool both to support and critique the English church, but in the Briefe Treatise, Gifford’s interests tend more toward the former.48 In many respects the Briefe Treatise might have been written by any number of English or Continental Protestants, since its themes were standard Protestant fare. Gifford presented two main arguments: first, the priesthood of Rome was to be judged false because Christ was the only priest of the new covenant, and second, the sacrifice of the Mass of the Roman church was false because Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient for all time. In Gifford’s view, the issues at stake—priesthood and the Mass—were not trivial matters, for if the Roman church could be shown to be at fault in these two “principall” items, then men should no longer doubt that “all their whole worship [was] idolatrous and Antichristian.”49 Gifford judged separation a necessity 45

Holleran, Jesuit Challenge, 65–72, 122–43; and Field, True Report, O1r–Z2v. London, 1584. Quotations are from the 1634 edition. 47 While Gifford here avoided discussing the church fathers, other apologists for the English church had been quicker to take up the challenge. In 1560, John Jewel preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross in London in which he cited the church fathers to argue that the Mass was an innovation of medieval Catholicism. His impassioned concluding plea showed his confidence in the testimony of the fathers: “O Gregory! O Augustine! O Hierom! O Chrysostom! O Leo! O Dionyse! O Anacletus! O Sixtus! O Paul! O Christ! if we be deceived herein, ye are they that have deceived us: you have taught us these schisms and division; ye have taught us these heresies!” See John Jewel, “A Sermon Preached at Paul's Cross,” in The Works of John Jewel, ed. Richard William Jelf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1848), 1:29. 48 Fifty years after its initial publication and more than three decades after Gifford’s death, his Briefe Treatise would be deployed in an entirely different set of circumstances. The work was reprinted twice during the 1630s (the latest printings of any of Gifford’s works), a time when Archbishop William Laud (1573–1645) sought to restore elements of pre-Reformation liturgy in the English church. Among the changes was a return of the communion table to the center of the church in place of the pulpit, a move strenuously resisted by puritans. In this context, the reprinting of the Briefe Treatise represented a challenge to the increasingly conservative established church and its leader. 49 Gifford, Priesthood and Sacrifice, B1v. 46

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since the Roman church, with a defective priesthood and misguided Mass, no longer represented the true church. At the time Gifford wrote, the English break with Rome lay decades in the past, but in his attack on the Mass Gifford took note of lingering pastoral problems surrounding its abolition. His theological arguments followed a typical Protestant line: Roman priests have “made [the people] worship that for God which was but a cake of flower” and “those reasons which are there brought [in the Book of Hebrews] to prove that the sacrifices of the law could doe nothing, and therefore were to be abolished, will also serve to throw downe the abominable idol of the papists.” Gifford thought the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice lay in its status as a heavenly and spiritual sacrifice, one unlike any mortal priest might make. Thus, Gifford judged priests not only unnecessary, but also incapable of serving as intercessors between the people and God. Beyond this theological rejection of the Mass, however, the pastor in Gifford could not avoid wondering why people felt the need for continued sacrifice. Once the perfect sacrifice was made, there was no need for any other. Just as a doctor does not continue to administer medicine to a patient after effecting a cure, continual sacrifices are unnecessary since Christ's sacrifice has provided once and for all the redemption of humanity. According to Gifford, Catholics claimed need for continued sacrifice was not because of any deficiency on Christ's part, but rather that “we see and feele in our selves that we are still guilty.” For Gifford, guilty consciences might be a sign of either assurance or conviction. In this case Gifford suspected the latter: the “remnants of iniquity remaine in us because of the weakenes and imperfection of our faith.”50 The remedy for guilty consciences was not continued sacrifice, since the problem was not with Christ and a less-than-perfect sacrifice, but with the incomplete faith of his followers. What then could one do with this “conscience of sinne”? Herein lay the practical problem for pastors seeking to teach the doctrines of predestination, sanctification, and assurance to their congregations. On the one hand, Christians were told they could rest secure in the virtues of Christ’s sacrifice. However, the rub came in the fact that “although we are by his one oblation fully and perfectly discharged for ever before God from the guiltinesse of our sinnes, yet we are not in the full possession of this benefit.” Such confidence only came after Christ permanently dispatches with “the Divell, sinne and death” at the end of time. Until then, Gifford advised, “we must in the meane time wrestle with them.” And wrestling 50

Gifford, Priesthood and Sacrifice, D1v, E1r, E1v.

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meant conflict, doubt, tears, despair. Gifford agreed with the Catholics that Christians had the assistance of Christ in the struggle, but he thought “we are bid to approach to lay hold of him by faith, for we can not either with the hand or with the mouth.”51 For pastors like Gifford, the struggle came in teaching such an intangible faith to commoners used to living in a hand-to-mouth world. Gifford’s rhetorical positioning in the dedication of A Dialogue betweene a Papist and a Protestant reveals his concern to make the matter perspicuous for his simple hearers, and with this emphasis he sought to distinguish his anti-Catholic writings from those of his contemporaries. Gifford humbly cast himself as a minor player in the great debates of the English church. Like David of the Old Testament, unable to bear the weighty armor of Saul,52 he resorted to the simplest of weapons, the word of God. His duty was to address the concerns of the simpler sort, and to leave the weightier matters to the “principal adversaries” of the conflict. Beneath these selfeffacing remarks, however, lies a subtle critique of both the method and content of previous defenses of the Church of England against her Catholic enemies. Regarding method, Gifford observed “wheras sundry men of fame have shewed deep skil in setting forth their books to confute the Papists, full of learning out of auncient Doctors, Counsels, Hystoriographers and other: it doth not so wel serve the turne of the simple unlearned man, neyther can hee defende himself therewith, because it is beyonde his reache.”53 Gifford believed a minister’s fundamental charge to be the welfare of his flock. Learned disputes common to the university or even the Tower of London failed to address the spiritual crisis faced by the average parishioner. William Tyndale had dreamed of a church where the scriptures were on the tongue of every ploughman. Gifford hoped for that and more: a parish of the godly who could employ scripture in debates with their religiously indifferent, or worse still, church-papist neighbors. In addition to offering the proper weapons against the papists, Gifford thought a true pastor must also know the mind of the common sort. As he turned to the questions of faith brought to the fore by the Campion debates, Gifford humbly claimed “to deale in those poyntes whiche doe most commonly trouble them [that is, the unlearned] omitting the great poyntes of the controversy.”54 In fact, Gifford believed he was indeed dealing with “great poyntes,” since he sought to complete the work of reformation 51

Gifford, Priesthood and Sacrifice, D4r, E1v, E2r. I Sam. 17:38–39. 53 Gifford, Papist and Protestant, dedicatory epistle (2v). 54 Gifford, Papist and Protestant, dedicatory epistle (2v). 52

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among the people. To do so, he gave a godly voice to the basic Protestant arguments regarding scripture, the ministry, and the sacraments. Yet even as he spoke to the common sort, he also spoke about them to his fellow ministers and his superiors in the Church of England. Thus, as he defended the authority of scripture against Catholic tradition, Gifford went one step further by encouraging free and frequent access to scripture by the laity, the “Tom Carters” of the world. He supported the Church of England as the true church, a necessary defense for English Protestants of all stripes, but quickly called into question the lack of discipline among the church’s ministers. He refuted the intermediary role of the priest in administering the sacraments but then paused to question the pastoral implications of the abolishment of the Mass and the unmet spiritual needs of the people in a church “almost laid waste” and in dire need of reform.

A DANGEROUS POSITION Where Gifford saw a lack of progress, however, some modern observers detect the inexorable flow of Protestantism. According to Eamon Duffy, despite the strength of “traditional religion” among the laity in England, by the middle of Elizabeth’s reign the clock had run out on valiant lay efforts to maintain the most vital traditions of English Catholic life in the face of a legislated Protestantism. And so Duffy’s celebration of medieval English Catholicism ends on a wistful note: The imaginative world of the Golden Legend and the Festial was gradually obliterated from wall and window and bracket, from primer and blockprint and sermon, and was replaced by that of the Old Testament. Cranmer’s somberly magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemn and vulnerable moments. And more astringent and strident words entered their minds and hearts too, the polemic of the Homilies, of Jewel’s Apology, of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and of a thousand “no-popery” sermons, a relentless torrent carrying away the landmark of a thousand years. By the end of the 1570s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.55

55

Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 593.

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Duffy’s view of the Elizabethan world in which Catholicism was defeated and Protestantism firmly established in England was hardly one Gifford could have imagined, much less endorsed. As he began his ministry in the early 1580s, Gifford saw a church in near ruin, with the previous two decades under a Protestant monarch largely squandered. Indeed, if reformation had come to England, Gifford believed, it was hardly detectable in the lives of the common sort, who had been ill served by misguided ministers prone to misjudge or ignore the religious needs of the people. But not everyone agreed with the pessimistic and persistent criticism of Gifford and other godly ministers, and some saw such discontent as a more serious threat than the church’s external enemies. A common rhetorical tack employed by defenders of the established church involved delineating two forces that opposed the Church of England: on the one side were the puritans (many of a presbyterian bent), whose zeal for reform knew no bounds; and on the other the papists, whose failure to support and participate in the church exposed their loyalty to a foreign power. Both groups, it was alleged, manifested disloyalty to the Crown through their disobedience. And both groups, according to detractors such as Richard Bancroft, represented equally “dangerous positions.”56 In reply, puritans frequently tried to fudge the lines that separated conforming from nonconforming and well-intentioned dissent from truly subversive radicalism. As the next chapter shows, Gifford modified this dichotomy and made it his own in his antiseparatist writings. From Gifford’s vantage, it was the separatists who, along with the papists, formed the two radical extremes in the English church. By replacing Bancroft’s puritans with separatists, Gifford located himself and his ilk comfortably in the middle as critical defenders of the true church in England. Ignoring for a moment Gifford’s moving of the goal posts, were Bancroft’s fears justified? To put it another way, for those in the establishment, who was more dangerous, the enemy without or within? Could not puritans be relied upon to defend the church against her foreign enemies, and thus were they not unjustly classified with the traitorous papists? Certainly some prominent godly ministers demonstrated their loyalty by attacking the Catholics—William Fulke in the Tower debates being a prime example— 56 “The experience which wee have hereof at this day in the Church of England is more then pregnant: partly through the divelish and traitorous practices of the Seminary Priests and Jesuites and partly by reason of the lewd and obstinate course, held by our pretended reformers, the Consitorian Puritanes: both of them labouring with all their might, by raylinng, libeling, and lying, to steale away the peoples harts from their governours.… The which proceedings of both the sorts of disturbers, are so much the more dangerous, in that they deale so secretely.…” Bancroft, Dangerous Positions and Proceedings, B1v–B2r.

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but that sword, once unsheathed, cut in many directions. In the case of Gifford, the evidence shows the targets of his anti-Catholic writings to be domestic as often as they were foreign, and episcopal as frequently as they were Catholic recusant. Herein lay the brilliant subversiveness of puritan anti-Catholic polemic: one could appear loyal, even useful, to the Crown while simultaneously and subtly pointing out those unreformed elements puritans found so distressing in the English church. Thus, Gifford’s godly Protestant sighed in recognition of the truth of the Papist’s charges about the lax morals and inadequate training of the English clergy. The gesture may have been slight, but it spoke volumes about the godly’s true concerns, which had less to do with a formally reestablished Catholicism than with the vestiges of the old religion nestled comfortably in the hearts of so many of the common sort. At fault were the ministers who lacked both the interest and ability necessary to remedy this deficiency. And the failure of the clergy was the failure of its leaders. After wilting under the Papist’s onslaught, Gifford’s godly Protestant recovered sufficiently to state his piece: [T]hough we have not the discipline of the gospel in our Church here in this lande, so whole and sound as it shoulde be, yet because we allow it, we pray for it, wee thirst after it, wee confesse the want thereof: we ought not to bee charged as those which defile Gods house, we wayte when it shall please God to put into the heartes of our godly governors to purge the Church by it.57

A dangerous position, indeed.

57

Gifford, Papist and Protestant, F2r.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Fraterne Dissentire When shall we then here come to an end? There wil bee contention in the Church: and humaine frailtie hath shewed it selfe this way, even among the holie teachers of old…but godlie men when they have somewhat gone awrie, seek to amend their fault by subduing their passions.1

T

“This Giffard,” John Strype mused more than a century after the fact, “however he were a puritan, wrote very well against [the London separatist leader Henry] Barrow.…”2 George Gifford shows up only a few brief times in Strype’s richly detailed chronicles of sixteenth-century ecclesiastical history, invariably as a minor player in some larger drama. For example, in Strype’s chronicle of the life of Bishop John Aylmer, Gifford is but one example of a number of overly zealous, nonconforming preachers that the dedicated London bishop attempted to return to the discipline of the church. Aylmer, along with Archbishop Whitgift, had little patience with noisy troublemakers like Gifford and employed a variety of coercive and restrictive measures to bring them into line. In such cases the line between nonconformity and separation could be a fuzzy one, so it may well have been the case that Aylmer shared the puzzlement of his biographer concerning Gifford’s attacks on Barrow, “however he were a puritan.” Why would a puritan write against a separatist? Certainly from Strype’s vantage point in the early eighteenth century, puritans and separatists appeared to be but two species of the same genus of troublemaker, each expressing in its own way dissatisfaction with the state of reform in the Elizabethan church. The two groups may have differed in tactics— open appeals to Parliament, the deployment of influential patrons, or anonymous and sometimes scurrilous tracts printed across the channel and 1

Gifford, Plaine Declaration (London, 1590), A1v. John Strype, Historical Collections of the Life and Acts of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Aylmere (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1821), 73. 2

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smuggled back into England—or the amount of time they were willing to “tarry for anie” authority to reform, but from Strype’s perspective as well as Aylmer’s, puritans and separatists both represented a fundamental challenge to ecclesiastical, and more important, episcopal authority. 3 Gifford could not have disagreed more. He and other godly ministers regularly resisted the bishops’ attempts to smear them with the reputation of those who had separated completely from the English church. Separatists had come to believe the English church in fact represented no church at all, since it retained an unconscionable number of papist practices and placed few demands on its members. Gifford had offered similar complaints about the church’s laxities but had stopped short of the separatists’ wholesale condemnation—the church was “almost laid waste,” Gifford lamented, but not quite.4 However, this fence-sitting position elicited only complaints from his adversaries. Leaders of the established church preferred less criticism; the separatists accused Gifford of stopping short of the logic of his convictions. Gifford tried in vain to convince the separatists that their differences did not center on “whether there be imperfections, corruptions and faults, in our Worship, Ministerie and Church government, nor how many great or smal: but whether there be such heinous enormities as destroy the verie life, and being of a true church, and make an utter divorce from Christ.”5 Separatists said yes; Gifford claimed no. In Gifford’s mind the distinction was crucial. Yet for Bishop Aylmer and episcopal apologists such as Richard Bancroft, such niceties of definition simply obscured the more practical problems of managing ministerial malcontents. Like the continental Anabaptists, the English separatists made easy targets for conservatives, either Catholic or Protestant, who wished to retard or even reverse the reform in the church. Earlier in the sixteenth century, Catholic polemicists had been quick to hold up the brief but bloody reign of the revolutionary Anabaptists of Münster as the logical end of the Protestant revolt, and magisterial Protestants such as Luther and Calvin had been just as quick to deny the association by mounting their own withering attacks on the Anabaptists. The dynamic was similar in England, as apologists for the established church painted both the separatists and the troublesome presbyterian puritans with the same broad brush of sedition, so there was good reason for ministers like Gifford to make their case in the public square. On the other hand, there were just as many reasons to avoid the 3 The case against “tarrying” was strongly put by the infamous separatist Robert Browne in A Treatise of Reformation Without Tarrying For Anie (Middelburg, 1582). On Browne’s infamy, see below. 4 Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, dedicatory epistle. 5 Gifford, Plaine Declaration, 3v.

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task. Attacking the separatists inevitably meant defending the Church of England, including some features that many puritans found distasteful, such as the prayer book and authoritarian bishops. So while they disapproved of schism, many puritan divines avoided attacking separatists in print since it meant both publicly repudiating ministers with whom they shared some beliefs and defending the very church that they were trying to reform. 6 A few of the difficulties involved may be seen in the career of Robert Some, a Cambridge-trained minister who fits well Peter Lake’s profile of a “moderate puritan.” Some learned firsthand of the dangers of writing against the separatists. Earlier in his career, Some had been a follower of Thomas Cartwright and a supporter of the presbyterian movement. Later, he became less concerned with the issue of the visible church, was reconciled to the church leadership, and took up his pen to defend the church against her enemies. When he decided to write against the separatists, and specifically against John Penry, Some’s past affiliation with presbyterian causes came back to haunt him. Following his writing against Penry, Some became the target of the satirical pen of Martin Marprelate in Mr Some Laid Open in His Colours. As was his style, Martin was less concerned with countering Some’s arguments than with attacking his personal reputation as a minister. The portrait painted was of one who had sold his godly birthright for the sake of his career, and like all good satire, its sting lay in the fact that the circumstances of Some’s career, taken in a negative light, could support just such an accusation.7 Gifford also hesitated to publish against the separatists, if one accepts his record of the circumstances surrounding his written debates with London separatists Henry Barrow and John Greenwood. Unlike Some and some other antiseparatist writers, Gifford was not inclined to name names; that is, he had no interest in reporting any of his opponents to the authorities, and claimed not even to know who they were: “I meddle not with the controversies of our church, but deale by way of admission. I never received the names of any subscribed to the writings I received, and for that cause I do name none.” Here one senses Gifford’s reluctance to expose others to the ecclesiastical discipline to which he himself had been recently subject.8 6

Lake, Moderate Puritans, 77–79. On Some’s conflicts with the separatists and Penry, see Peter Lake, “Robert Some and the Ambiguities of Moderation,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 71 (1980): 254–79. Lake defends Some against the charge of careerism, stressing instead his position as a moderate puritan who, while supporting the “essential righteousness of the English Church and the social hierarchy it represented,” did not believe that righteousness rested “on the personal qualities of any of its members” (278). 8 Gifford, Short Treatise (London, 1590), A2v. This anonymity was possible in the early stages of Gifford’s exchanges with the separatists; by the end of the controversy it became a moot point. Barrow XXX 7

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Yet the threat posed by the separatists was too great for Gifford to ignore. In the dedication to William Cecil in A Short Treatise Against the Donatists of England, Gifford explained his reasons for publishing. As was the case with his other writings, he took care to position his effort both as a response to a grave need and for the benefit of the common people who were perplexed or misinformed about matters of religion. He recalled how several articles circulated by the separatists were brought to his attention by “a Scholemaister in Essex…of a godly mind” who implored him to write a rebuttal to their doctrines. After initially demurring he finally conceded when the schoolmaster pressed him and said “diverse of the people about them were troubled, and did hang in suspense and for their sakes he did require it.” What followed was a semiprivate correspondence between Gifford and some of the separatist leaders, but when part of this became public and Gifford observed more and more people attracted to the separatist teachings, he had decided to put his response into print.9 In the course of his debates with the separatists, Gifford found himself in the unusual position of arguing the conservative, rather than the radical, position. Once again, his underlying concern for the common sort gave unity to his arguments, and the issues he pressed—the importance of charity in the godly life, the need for patience in teaching the common sort, and the importance of respect for the ministry—reflected the insights of a decade spent in Maldon.

SEPARATISM IN ENGLAND On April 6, 1593, several months after Gifford had traded books and barbs with Barrow and Greenwood, the two separatists were convicted of sedition and executed.10 Twice during the preceding two weeks, they had been led out to the gallows, only to receive last-minute reprieves from Queen Elizabeth. Finally, on the third trip their luck and presumably the queen’s mercy ran out, and they were hanged. But before coming to the end of the 9

and Greenwood were already imprisoned, and Gifford knew his opponents and addressed them by name in his later writings. 9 Gifford, Short Treatise, A2r. 10 Barrow and Greenwood were convicted of a felony for violating the statute of 23 Elizabeth, chapter 2, which made it a felony to circulate any writings “with a malicious intent” or “to the stirring up of insurrection or rebellion,” charges which both vehemently denied. See Leland Carlson, ed., The Writings of John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, 1591–1593. Elizabethan Nonconformist Text Series, vol. 6 (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1970), 6:501–2; and Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Barrow, Henry” and “Greenwood, John.”

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story, it is helpful here to turn to its beginning—in this case, the decades of dissent from which the London separatists emerged. In the murky origins of these religious radicals, one finds much evidence of that purifying ideal that so vexed the earliest proponents of Elizabeth’s settlement and gave impetus to puritan and separatist alike. Modern historians have had no more luck sorting puritan from separatist than did Bishop Aylmer, though they may have more interest in doing so. Investigating the origins of religious separatism in England quickly leads to a definitional controversy similar to that involving puritanism. How should separatism be measured—by action, written creed, intent? Simply stated, separatism may be said to be the rejection of the established church as the true church, and yet in the same breath one must note that the reasons for that rejection and the characteristics of the communities that emerged after separation varied widely. Some separated with the intent of returning once the Church of England was properly reformed, while others left with nary a backward glance. Furthermore, opinions that eventually may have inclined a pious Elizabethan divine to separate, such as an opposition to clerical vestments or other worship practices, were frequently held by many more of the clergy and laity than chose to withdraw. Gifford demonstrated as much when he allowed the legitimacy of several separatist complaints. These similarities led Stephen Brachlow to suggest that separatists and the “radical puritans” were more alike than different in their understandings of the church. Patrick Collinson stopped short of such a claim, but nevertheless emphasized the need to consider separatist history within the broader history of the English church.11 The roots of many separatist complaints may be traced to the earliest part of Elizabeth’s reign, when conflicts over the pace of reform arose following the Elizabethan Settlement.Yet even prior to the unrest of the 1560s, patterns of dissent that would influence both puritans and separatists were already in place. For instance, one precedent for the clandestine meetings of later sixteenth-century radicals was the conventicle, a “periodic gathering for religious purposes of self-selected persons.”12 Joseph Walford Martin 11 Histories of English separatism include Barrington Raymond White, The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); and Joseph Walford Martin, Religious Radicals in Tudor England (London: Hambledon Press, 1989). See also Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of the Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Patrick Collinson, “Toward a Broader Understanding of the Early Dissenting Tradition,” in The Dissenting Tradition, ed. C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), 3–38. 12 Martin, Religious Radicals, 13. Martin’s examples begin with fifteenth-century Lollards and continue through the early Tudor period, but continuity is difficult to establish due to a lack of records. In XXX

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began his account of Tudor radicalism with the story of these groups, often lay-led, that convened for scripture reading, prayers, and sometimes even the sacrament. Conventicles were viewed with suspicion by both Catholic and Protestant governments, in part because they represented a form of popular religion not easily managed via traditional ecclesiastical channels. In one well-known case from the brief reign of the Protestant Edward VI, a group of parishioners in Kent were arrested for an unlawful assembly, and some of these claimed they had avoided communion for over two years since “they wolde not communycate with synners.”13 Their position reflected an enduring separatist complaint, one that would occupy a substantial portion of Gifford’s debates with Barrow and Greenwood: the purity of the church was compromised by the lack of congregational discipline and consequently, the presence of unrepentant sinners. From questions of congregational purity, Edwardian radicals naturally moved to questions concerning the identity of the true church. Among the leaders of the Kent conventicle was Henry Hart, a minister so committed to his separatist ideals that he later refused to worship with fellow Edwardian Protestants when imprisoned during the reign of the Catholic queen Mary. Hart’s case illuminates some of the problems associated with the rapid shift of the ecclesiastical landscape following the death of Edward and the accession of Mary. Almost overnight, the definition of dissent changed. Ironically, Protestants only recently in power were imprisoned alongside radicals like Hart whom they previously had sought to suppress. Yet for Hart, even a common Catholic enemy failed to provide sufficient cause for unification, and this lack of unity continued to mark Protestant radicals throughout Elizabeth’s reign.14 The persecution of Protestants during Mary’s reign also provided the foundation for a legacy of dissent, one popularized by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments. Foxe included the Protestants who had been martyred at the behest of the Catholic queen in a line of martyrs extending from the early church. But that legacy could also become contested ground. Later separatists looked to the Marian martyrs as “worthie servants of God,” kindred 13

most cases, arguments for a lineage of dissent are based on geography. See Arthur Geoffrey Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509–1558 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959); and Spufford, The World of Rural Dissenters. 13 Nicholas Yonge, as quoted in a deposition in British Library Harleian MS 421, 133–35. Reprinted in R. J. Acheson, Radical Puritans in England 1550–1660, Seminar Studies in History Series (London: Longman Group, 1990), 80–81. On this group, often known as the “Freewillers,” see Martin, Religious Radicals, 41–63. 14 Acheson, Radical Puritans, 4.

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spirits who had been abandoned and persecuted by an authoritarian church.15 Yet for Gifford, the Marian martyrs were a testimony to the legitimacy of the Elizabethan church, in that they died “both for the truth of Christ and for our Church.” The church of the martyrs was one with the Church of England that existed at the time Gifford and the separatists debated, Gifford argued, and if the separatists honored the martyrs as blessed, then they implicitly recognized the church the martyrs died to preserve. Of course, honoring the martyrs did not mean that “every thing which they allowed must needes be good, for they had their errors and imperfections,” but Gifford claimed their ignorance in some matters did not diminish the fact that “they dyed for the substance of that faith and worship which our Church mayntayneth.”16 Even in a church that denied the intercessory power of saints, identification with the persecuted of the past tended to lend an air of legitimacy to the present. But for the separatists, history could be a fickle friend. One reformer and sometime separatist whose legacy Barrow and Greenwood hoped to avoid was Robert Browne. Browne graduated from Cambridge in 1572, one year before George Gifford and a time when the presbyterian movement was gaining full momentum under leaders such as Thomas Cartwright. The anti-episcopalism implicit in presbyterian polity was not lost on Browne, and it formed the substance of his message when he began preaching without a license in and around Cambridge. In 1580, after a period of illness and a rebuke by Richard Bancroft for his unorthodox preaching, Browne moved to Norwich to join a friend from his undergraduate days, Richard Harrison. In Norwich, Browne persisted in his earlier beliefs. He rejected all episcopal authority and suggested that individual congregations should call their own ministers. Congregations should include only those committed to a covenant that bound them to obey divine law. Only by strict adherence to the covenant could the church expect the blessings and protection of God. This conditional aspect of God’s covenant with the church meant that for Browne, separation was not so much an act of defiance as one of survival.17 Later, self-preservation would also be cited by Barrow and Greenwood as a reason for separation.

15 As quoted by Gifford in Short Treatise, N1v. Barrington Raymond White argued that Foxe’s work “played a significant part in the foundation and later the nourishment of the English Separatist tradition” by providing them with examples of separation from a false church. English Separatist Tradition, 16–19, 160–61, quote at 160. 16 Gifford, Short Treatise, O1v–O2r. 17 White, English Separatist Tradition, 54–55.

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In 1581, Browne and Harrison formed a small congregation organized around a written covenant and complete with officers and instructions for worship and discussion. Following a short imprisonment, Browne led his congregation into exile in Middelburg in the Netherlands, where he wrote some of the earliest published works in favor of separation.18 Despite the covenantally enforced discipline of the Middelburg congregation, however, heaven on earth was not to be had; conflict between Browne and Harrison eventually led to Browne’s departure along with a few of his followers in 1584. He traveled through Scotland and England for the rest of the decade, ministering to various separatist groups. Then, for reasons that remain obscure, toward the end of the 1580s Browne reversed his position, made peace with the church, and proceeded to live out his long life as rector of Thorpe Achurch, Northants. Browne’s return to the Church of England was a triumph for the Elizabethan church, but was viewed as a defection by separatists like Barrow and Greenwood. To add insult to injury, Browne’s role in promoting the separatist cause in the early 1580s had resulted in separatists’ gaining the label of “Brownists,” a name that stuck even after Browne’s desertion. Although some of Browne’s followers later appeared among the London separatists, direct linkage between Browne and Greenwood or Barrow cannot be established. Not surprisingly, both denied any reliance on Browne’s writings, though it is impossible to believe they did not know them. According to Barrow and Greenwood, the only thing they owed to “troublechurch Browne” was an unwelcome appellation.19 A cursory comparison of the early careers of Gifford and his opponent John Greenwood shows how puritans and separatists might be rooted in the same soil. Like Gifford, John Greenwood was a Cambridge-educated minister who refused subscription to Archbishop Whitgift’s articles. And just as with Gifford in Maldon, Greenwood lost his Norfolk pulpit. From there, however, Greenwood migrated to London and became associated with a separatist congregation. His activities eventually landed him in the Clink in 1586, and kept him in and out of prison until his death seven years later. Greenwood’s compatriot Henry Barrow had been well on his way to a successful law career when he experienced a radical conversion upon hearing a godly sermon. In November 1587, Barrow went to visit Greenwood in prison and found himself detained upon Whitgift’s orders. Despite their imprisonment, Barrow and Greenwood managed, by way of 18 E.g, Browne, A Treatise of Reformation; and A Book Which Sheweth the Life and Manner of All True Christians (Middelburg, 1582). 19 White, English Separatist Tradition, 70–72.

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writings smuggled out of prison a page or two at a time, to become the foremost spokesmen for the separatist cause. They pled their case at every turn, confronting Gifford and others in print, insulting their interrogators, and remaining obstinately rooted in their separatist convictions until their deaths in 1593.20 Both puritans and separatists shared common concerns over the worship, discipline, and polity of the Church of England, but Gifford fretted that similarities could be deceiving. Separatists, he believed, were more than “godlie Christians…but a little overhot in some matters.” 21 In a preface to readers in his first antiseparatist work, Gifford warned that the devil’s attacks on the church often came disguised. Few of the devil’s henchmen come dressed in his “liverie,” and the enemies of the church can appear to be concerned friends. On the one side, Gifford cautioned, the papists “shrowde themselves under the name and title of the Catholike Church. These cry out, the fathers, the fathers, the auncient fathers” and accuse the Church of England of breaking ranks with tradition. On the other, a “blinde sect opposite to these” claimed that the Church of England remained hopelessly mired in its Catholic past. The most dangerous aspect of the latter, Gifford cautioned, was that in their unrelenting zeal to drive out all superstition, false worship, and idolatry from the church, one begins to hear the biblical “voice of Elias, of Haggeus, and of that third Angel” of Revelation, all of whom called the people of God to purity. However, the devil by his “counterfet voice seduceth many” as he masked division under the cause of reform. The mask was one Gifford sought to remove, and to do so he turned to an unlikely ally: tradition.22

LOVE, RIGOR, AND THE TRUE CHURCH History taught that the problem of division in the church was not new. Thus, Gifford reasoned, the arguments needed to refute schism need not be new either. In his opinion, the Brownists amounted to little more than modern-day Donatists, the schismatic African Christians whom Augustine 20 Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Barrow, Henry,” and “Greenwood, John.” On Greenwood and Barrow’s last days, see the collection of examinations and letters in Carlson, The Writings of John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, 1591–1593, 85–92, 221–54, esp. Barrow’s “Letter to an Honorable Lady and Countesse of His Kin[d]red Yet Living,” in which only a day or two before his death, Barrow wrote to Anne Dudley, countess of Warwick (the likely recipient as suggested by Carlson), to declare his loyalty to the queen and ask for intervention on his behalf. 21 Gifford, Plaine Declaration, A2r. 22 Gifford, Short Treatise, A1r.

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had rebuked in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.23 The Donatist movement arose early in the fourth century, shortly after a period of intense persecution of the church. The main concern of the Donatists was the purity of the church, and they especially objected to the return of church leaders who had lapsed under persecution. Opponents accused them of perfectionism, while the Donatists claimed that they were simply upholding the church’s ideals and paying proper respect to the memory of those who had suffered and died for their faith. The resulting schism in the North African church lasted for decades, lingering even after the decisive condemnation of the Donatists at the Council of Carthage in 411. 24 Just as with Augustine and the Donatists, the question of what marked the true church dominated the debate between Gifford and the separatists. However, the fact that the English church itself had broken with Rome added a layer of complexity. In their attempt to discredit the Church of England, the separatists relied upon some of the same scriptures as Gifford and other reformers. Gifford called heavily on scripture in his anti-Catholic writings and argued strongly for the right of the average layperson to read and interpret the Bible. However, opposing the separatists forced Gifford to change his tactics, since in this case his opponents did not claim to rely on tradition. So it was that Gifford found himself turning to the writings of Augustine, one of early Christianity’s chief advocates for the unity of the church. Invoking Augustine as an authority gave Gifford access to the ideas of one who had wrestled at length with the consequences of division in the church. Of course, Gifford knew his earlier writings against the Catholics might come back to haunt him. Previously, he had denounced tradition as an authority, and he suspected his arguments for abandoning the Roman church could be used by the separatists with little change to argue their own cause. Gifford sought to forestall criticism by expressing the “desire 23 Gifford was not the first to accuse the separatists of Donatism. Earlier critics had been quick to apply the label, and as recently as 1588 Stephen Bredwell, a puritan layman, had denounced Robert Browne as a Donatist. In addition, Bredwell was an early witness to the tradition that Browne was mentally unstable. He maintained that while “Browne [was] sound, his brain [was] sick.” Stephen Bredwell, The Rasing of the Foundations of Brownisme (London, 1588), 43, 53, quoted in Edward H. Bloomfield, The Opposition to the English Separatists 1570–1625: A Survey of the Polemical Literature Written by Opponents to Separatist Writings (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981), 101–2. 24 The standard account of the Donatist controversy is William Hugh Clifford Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). More recently, Maureen Tilley has edited and translated a series of Donatist texts in Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996) and written on the controversy in The Bible in Christian North Africa:The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997).

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that the sayings of the ancient writers which I alleage may be wel waied.” This conception of the authority of the church fathers harkened back to the attitude of the early English reformers, who emphasized that their writings were useful as long as they complemented the testimony of scripture.25 In deference to those who asked “what shall we ground upon men?” Gifford tried to minimize his dependence upon Augustine’s arguments. “I alleage them [i.e. the writings of men] but to show what the controversie was and how it was disputed on both sides, and for this they are sufficient witnesses.”26 However, Gifford’s Augustine was more than a witness, a simple reporter of facts. Indeed, Gifford mined his key charges against schismatics from the bishop of Hippo: the separatists’ lack of respect for ecclesiastical and civil authority, their misunderstanding of the nature of the church’s purity, and their lack of charity in addressing the needs of uneducated Christians. lm Based on his past, separatists may have wondered if Gifford’s tongue was lodged in his cheek when he faulted them for a failure to adhere to the authority and discipline of the church. Despite his history of dissent, Gifford argued that total separation was not productive because true reform of the church could be accomplished only by working within the ecclesiastical structure: “What rule of discipline have [the separatists] observed in this: have these things been brought forth, scanned, discussed, and judged in the Synods of the learned Pastors and teachers of the Churches? Nay, but even as Augustine saith of the other furor, dolus, et tumultus, furie, deceipt and tumult, do beare the sway.”27 Gifford stressed the separatists’ failure to submit to proper authority, ecclesiastical or civil. This caused a breakdown in the structure of the church and even worse, confused the laity. The resulting anarchy—furor, dolus, et tumultus—impeded the function of the true church. Obedience was crucial because schism was a much more serious offense than some realized. Division of the church, he suggested, was Satan’s greatest tool. Schismatics were deceived by the devil into believing they were acting for the good of the church—at least the church as they understand it—when in actuality they were destroying it.

25 Stanley Lawrence Greenslade, The English Reformers and the Fathers of the Church: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 10 May 1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 6–7. 26 Gifford, Plaine Declaration, A4r–v. 27 Gifford, Plaine Declaration, C1r.

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Gifford claimed the separatists failed to follow the doctrine of the apostles—fraterne dissentire—to disagree in a brotherly manner.28 But how could one distinguish between disagreement and disobedience? And how should a godly minister respond to problems in the church? For Gifford, “where anything is amisse in Gods Church, it is the part and duetie of the faithfull Ministers of Christ, all dutifull reverence and submission being observed towards the Magistrates and publique authoritie, peaciblie to seeke redresse of the same, with godlie and charitable reprehension.” 29 Now, some might have claimed that Gifford himself had not always exercised “godlie and charitable reprehension,” but in his mind disagreement did not equal disobedience. Sometimes, conscience demanded that godly ministers challenge authority, and the error came not in disagreeing with those in power but in ignoring their authority, and in offering private solutions—namely, separation—to public problems. Thus, despite his own history of conflict with ecclesiastical officials, Gifford could claim that the foremost obligations of the minister, loyalty to Christ and his church, were expressed by his obedience to the church authorities and civil magistrates. Obedience did not mean passive silence, but it did require taking up one’s grievance in a public forum. Since the separatists sought to escape the jurisdiction of authorities, they erred and passed into “damnable schisme,” whereby they destroyed the very church they would reform. Gifford’s observation on the duties of ministers was notable not only for its explicit call for submission to the magistrates but also for the corresponding implicit association of schismatic reform with sedition. The accusation of disloyalty to the state was one that separatists were quick to deny, but in an environment where the monarch was supreme governor of things temporal and ecclesiastical, the rejection of church order was viewed as a simultaneous challenge to the order of the state. Unlike in the days of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, when supporting a break from Rome was a sign of loyalty to the monarch, schism in the Elizabethan church endeared no one to the Crown. In his reply to Gifford, Greenwood observed that blind obedience to a false church was not appropriate. Gifford himself had argued as much against the Roman church. On what basis could one judge whether or not a church was true? The danger of schism was so great that Gifford argued for the strictest standards. Even if the separatists succeeded in their efforts to demonstrate via scripture the corruptions in “our praiers, in our fasts, in our keeping the Saints dayes, in the Crosse, and in manie other things,” 28 29

Gifford, Plaine Declaration, A2r. Gifford, Plaine Declaration, A1r.

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they must further prove that such problems “destroy the worship of God, overturne the foundation of the faith, and take away the verie life and being of true Christianitie.”30 They must prove that the English church was no longer the true church. But how could one discern the true church? lm Greenwood maintained that the Church of England was a false church, and the reasons he cited—errors in the prayer book, church organization, membership standards, etc.—would have been familiar to any reader of Gifford’s Countrie Divinitie. Throughout his controversy with the separatists, Gifford struggled to reconcile his support of the establishment with his own identity as a dissenting member within the church. In the course of his offensive against the separatists, Gifford paused to remind his readers that no one should equate his attack with a defense of the status quo in the church: In the matter some have found fault as though I should stand to cleere and justifie al things, not onlie in the Booke of Common praier, but also in the calling and ordination of our Ministers, and in our Church governement, others affirme that I have diminished the faults which are estemed to be in these, and made them lighter, at the least by not reprooving them.31

He was happy to demonstrate that this was not the case. He agreed on the need for reform, but argued that it should be accomplished from within. Despite its problems, the Church of England retained its status as the true church. Whereas Gifford had challenged the legitimacy of the separatists’ reforming efforts on the basis that they ended in schism, Greenwood picked up the same argument and applied it to the Church of England’s break with Rome. Did not this reforming effort also end in schism? Was it not always the duty of the godly to separate themselves from those who are persistently unclean? Gifford agreed wholeheartedly with Greenwood’s accusation of sin in church, but cited Augustine and others as witnesses that the church has always had open sinners in its midst; its job was to redeem, not abandon. However, the presence of sinners did not detract from its status as the true church, and those who truly cared about the church should seek to reform, not destroy it through schism. Sinners in the 30 31

Gifford, Plaine Declaration, 4r. Gifford, Plaine Declaration, 3r–v.

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midst of the godly were to be redeemed through patient instruction. Did not Jesus himself teach that both the wheat and the tares would remain until the last times? Reform was an incremental process. Greenwood had little use for what he saw as Gifford’s lukewarm reform efforts and probably had Gifford’s own checkered past in mind when he called him “a man inexpert in discerning the times and seasons, having long skirmished with vaine titles.”32 He was similarly impatient with the substance and style of Gifford’s Plaine Declaration. Rather than utilize scripture to prove his point, Gifford called on the arguments of “dead men.” Greenwood rooted his Breife Refutation in a two-pronged argument. On the one hand, the so-called church in England that Gifford strove to defend was not the true church, and thus the separatists were obliged to withdraw; secondly, if one were to accept Gifford’s argument for the legitimacy of the English church, then by default one must also accept the legitimacy of the Roman church, for Greenwood suggested the same proofs could be applied to both. So, if the separatists were indeed guilty of Donatism, so were all English Protestants. If Gifford attempted to refute the charge of Donatism by claiming that England separated from a false church, Greenwood reasoned, “all are not Donatists that make a separation.” On the other hand, if Gifford accepted Rome as a true church with the seals of the covenant and many doctrines of faith, then the separatists were justified in their belief that the church in England was filled with “daughters of that damnable harlot” and so were justified in their separation from it.33 Greenwood also sought to distance himself from the charge of Donatism by suggesting that the legitimacy of separation depended upon the reason for withdrawal. He argued that the Donatists held “still the same worship, government, offices, officers, entrance, and the same administration of sacraments, etc., that the other did from whome they did separate,” while the separatists rejected the English church’s stance in these areas. Furthermore, the Donatists “received whole citties and contries to be the church as before,” making their separation “more like the sectes and schismes amongst your selves; you from the papists.”34 Greenwood and his 32 John Greenwood, A Breife Refutation of Mr. George Gifford His Supposed Consimilitude betwene the Donatists and Us, Wherein is Shewed How His Arguments Have Bene and May be by the Papists More Justly Retorted against Himself and Present Estate of Their Church, in Carlson, The Writings of John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, 1591–1593, 3. 33 Greenwood, Breife Refutation, in Carlson, The Writings of John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, 1591–1593, 10. 34 Greenwood, Breife Refutation, in Carlson, The Writings of John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, 1591– 1593, 6. A similar argument is found on p. 9: “So that there is no consimilitude in the Donatistes’ XXXX

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fellow separatists rejected such territorial claims as incompatible with true faith and repentance. Although Gifford downplayed the English church’s break with Rome in his writings against the separatists, the status of that separation could not have been far from his mind. According to Gifford, the history of schism was marked by schismatics’ taking on the name of their leader: “as of Montanus, the Montanists; of Novatius, the Novatians; of Arius, the Arians; of Pelagius, the Pelagians; of Donatus, the Donatists; of the Pope, the Papists.”35 In this bit of rhetorical sleight of hand, Gifford hinted at his strategy for refuting the separatists’ charge that the church in England was itself schismatic. By including papists on his list of heretics, Gifford indicated in a not-so-subtle way the distinction he made between the pope and his corrupt followers, from which the English church had separated, and the true church, of which the English church was still a part. The Donatists separated from the true church in their day, just as the English separatists had withdrawn from the true church in Gifford’s own day, the church in England. lm In addition to charging the separatists with a lack of respect for authority and a misunderstanding of the true nature of the church, Gifford followed Augustine in accusing his opponents of a failure in charity. Gifford knew that “there be faults in extremities on both sides: as on the one side…a perswasion of love…so on the other side…a perswasion of zeale against all falsehood and wickedness,” but he believed that too often human nature tended to crowd out love with rigor.36 He saw in the separatist attempt to form pure congregations an abundance of rigor, but little love. Separatists complained the Church of England encouraged the presence of unrepentant sinners, since all those who lived within the parish boundaries were automatically members of the congregation. Instead, separatists argued that a self-selecting body based on faith and obedience had more ability to discipline its members and keep itself pure. But when forced to weigh the relative merits of purging the church of all open sinners versus tolerating 35

separation and ours in this poinct; their matter being about sinnes committed in the Church, where there was lawful office, worship, government, as they did not denie; and our cause being about the not having of a Church gathered unto Christ from the apostasie, from all them that remaine under that apostatical ministerie, government, and worship, and in that confusion we have warrant to separate.” 35 Gifford, Plaine Declaration, B1r. 36 Gifford, Plaine Declaration, A2r–v.

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the less flagrant (and certainly the repentant), Gifford argued that the unity of the church was to be valued over its purity: “Oftentimes open sinners cannot bee all cast forth without daunger of schisme, and therefore are to be tollerated for the peace of the Church.”37 Discipline could still be attempted. Sinners could be rebuked; the notorious, excommunicated, provided they did not have a multitude of followers. But the separatists should remember “regeneration which consisteth in putting off the old man, and putting on the new, is by degrees wrought in Gods elect.” 38 Such degrees demanded a discipline that balanced severity with patience, patience with those who struggled to purge sins and practice godliness.

THE PRACTICE OF PRAYER In the summer of 1590, Greenwood replied to Gifford’s first antiseparatist writing with An Answere to George Gifford’s Pretended Defence of Read Praiers and Devised Litourgies. Never one to shun taking up the gauntlet, Gifford devoted nearly half of his second antiseparatist writing to “an answere to Master Greenwood, touching read prayer, wherein his grosse ignorance is detected, which labouring to purge himselfe from former absurdities, doth plunge himselfe deeper in the mire.”39 The prayer book remained a touchy subject with precisionists of all varieties. For many, the most loathsome of Archbishop Whitgift’s articles of conformity was the one requiring agreement that the prayer book contained nothing contrary to the word of God or true religion.40 Yet while both Gifford and Greenwood were among the nonsubscribers, their agreement did not extend to their attitudes regarding read versus impromptu prayers. Gifford did not object to the idea of scripted prayers and liturgies, although he did allow that certain prayers in the prayer book were less than adequate. Not surprisingly, he believed the more scripted prayers relied upon scripture for their language and cadence, the more acceptable they were. Reading, in and of itself, however, did not nullify the prayer or dull the hearts of its hearers—in fact, the effect could be quite the opposite. Greenwood’s opposition to “read praiers and devised litourgies” went beyond the normal godly suspicion that any such script might contain Catholic holdovers. He thought the practice of reading prayers encouraged a parasitic piety, since individual listeners were not required to conjure up 37

Gifford, Plaine Declaration, F1v. Gifford, Short Treatise, 63. 39 From the full title of Plaine Declaration. 40 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 243–48. 38

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their own sorrow over their own sins. In short, as one modern observer summarized, “borrowed sorrow was not godly sorrow.” To engage fully in the painful process of wrestling with one’s sinful self, the penitent must take a personal inventory, an internal accounting that could not be accomplished by mumbling another’s words. Greenwood’s rejection of read prayer was in keeping with the general separatist emphasis on individual faith and accountability. Individuals must thoroughly vet their own sinful selves in order to be ready to participate in the community of the godly. Active participation in the process of repentance could not be accomplished by rote repetition. True prayers, Greenwood suggested, must be offered in faith, and good pastors should practice in communal worship the type of impromptu praying that was the obligation of all the faithful. 41 Faith was certainly the essential ingredient, Gifford allowed, in that there could be “no sighes nor grones, nor any praiers that can be regarded of God” except when accompanied by faith. But the process was far from simple. Prayers might be offered with varying degrees of faith, degrees that corresponded to the efficacy of the prayer. From a practical standpoint, the pastor in Gifford knew that not everyone in the congregation started with a full measure of faith: for doubtlesse if there were in men a perfection of knowledge, of faith, and of quicknesse, there should need no outward helpe: but the best come farre short of that. Such as approche nearest thereunto, need so much the lesse any outward helpe. But the most are ignorant, weake, short of memory, dull and slow, and need all helpes to stirre them up, and to direct them, even as children, that are to be stayed up and led by the hand.42

Perhaps in a perfect world, faithful Christians might be thoroughly equipped to offer their prayers, but the common sort that Gifford believed filled the parishes of England needed more assistance to be “stirred up.” Frequently, the need for assistance arose during the process of regeneration, in which a crippling doubt might overtake the heart of the penitent. Greenwood perhaps suspected laziness among these praying apprentices, but Gifford accused him of ignoring those who “are so perplexed in their 41 For parasitic piety and borrowed sorrow, see Peter Iver Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection. Studies in Anglican History Series, vol. 2 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 27–29. Kaufman locates the “prayer wars” of Gifford and Greenwood in the larger context of late Elizabethan Calvinist piety. These pietists employed fervent prayer as the central tool in internal drama wherein the penitent was both “pressed down” and “pulled up” in his spirit, torn between faith and doubt, between joy and despair, in a continuing quest to discern “godly sorrow” from “feigned repentance” (7). 42 Gifford, Short Treatise, D3v.

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troubles of heart that they cannot pray, which through helpe of outward meanes doe poure foorth tears and supplications.” There was a difference, he cautioned, between the “troubled minde” that experienced sorrow over sin and the “minde which in despaire or doubt is perplexed.” The latter must not be left to languish. Perplexity that fed a consuming despair over the inability to escape the consequences of one’s sins must be addressed by a pastor: “Therefore, the ignoranter sorte in perplexity need outward helpe.”43 Though it was less of a concern than leaving the weak or troubled Christian behind, Gifford also fretted over the disorder that impromptu prayer threatened to introduce into local congregations. Even though Gifford favored presbyterian polity, his support of more localized control did not mean that he envisioned a church marked by autonomous congregations or, worse still, autonomous individuals. He feared that impromptu prayers and the corresponding elimination of read prayers might be the first step down a slippery slope of ministerial improvisation, resulting in a church wherein “every frantike spirit…will not onely be unlike themselves, but vary from others.” That kind of inconsistency would harm the public confidence in the ministry and provide an opening for theological innovations. “Difference of phrases” could easily mask “differences of doctrine” and mislead the faithful. “Your experience in these matters,” he chided Greenwood, “is not so great as your boldnesse.”44

RESPECT FOR THE MINISTRY The separatists’ boldness forced Gifford into the role of a conservative, though he assumed the part begrudgingly. He regularly felt compelled to remind his readers that he was not endorsing the status quo, even though he rejected radical change. The prayer book had its flaws, but scripted prayers had their place in the spiritual edification of the common sort. Purity in the community was a laudable goal, but it should not be pursued at the expense of the unity and discipline of the church. And when it came to the ministry, Gifford felt the separatists overstepped the bounds of propriety: “I would the Ministerie of England were better then it is. If by tearming it a franticke Ministerie, you meant but to speake against unlearned and ungodlie men, you should have leave for me: but you comprehend all the learnedest and godly which you could not bee bold to doo, unless yee were taken with a frenzie.”45 43

Gifford, Plaine Declaration, L1v–L2r. See also his Short Treatise, D4r. Gifford, Short Treatise, F4v. 45 Gifford, Short Treatise, G1r. 44

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Gifford may have been bruised by the separatists’ wholesale condemnation of the ministry of the Church of England, but his concern extended beyond matters of ego. He worried that the endless division and ministerial wrangling diluted the efficacy of the ministry among the common sort: These speeches do so abash and trouble some, that they are driven back and retyre into Poperie, as into a safe haven, which yet in truth is the gulfe of all Schismes and abhominable heresies. Others are so much displeased, that they become Atheists, and care not much for any Religion, though of both they doo rather favour the Poperie. A third sort there be which did runne, and now stand still and wonder: they knowe not whether they were best to goe backe or forward. Their love and zeale is decayed, and readie utterly to be quenched.46

More than any other, Gifford fretted over this last group, Christians whose forays into godliness had been sabotaged and misdirected. Divisions had caused a loss of faith in the ministry, and the harsh, often ad hominem attacks that circulated between ministers had poisoned the air. Something of the poisoned atmosphere of which Gifford complained may be seen in the scandal surrounding the Marprelate tracts, a series of violently satirical writings published in 1588 and 1589. The pseudonymous Martin Marprelate wrote “for the behoofe and overthrow of the Parsons, Vicars, and Currats that have lernt their Catechismes and are past grace.”47 Although he never mentioned the tracts directly in his writings, it is impossible to imagine that Gifford was not influenced by their publication and the crackdown on religious reformers that followed. The Marprelate tracts represented the culmination of a decade or more of disappointments among radicals in the English church. Since October 1583, the first month of his archiepiscopate, Archbishop Whitgift sought to enforce conformity among English clergy. Though the threat of deprivation of benefices and appearance before the High Commission often effected begrudging compliance, many ministers maintained a policy of subtle resistance and bided their time. But reformers in Parliament met with no success. What finally brought Martin’s pen to paper was A Defence of the Government Established in the Church of Englande (1587), written by John Bridges, dean of Salisbury. Bridges himself was writing in reply to a well-known presbyterian work, A 46

Gifford, Short Treatise, A3v. From the title page of Martin's first work, commonly called the “Epistle.” The Marprelate tracts are available in a facsimile edition: The Marprelate Tracts, 1588–1589 (Menston, England: The Scolar Press Limited, 1967), and an edited edition: William Pierce, ed. The Marprelate Tracts, 1588, 1589 (London: James Clarke & Co., 1911). References herein are to the edited edition, as many of the original tracts appeared without pagination. 47

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Briefe and Plaine Declaration.48 Originally enlisted to preach against the work from the pulpit at St. Paul’s Cross, Bridges expanded his sermon into a massive fourteen-hundred-page attack, a fact that did not escape his sharptongued critic: Bridge’s volume was “a portable booke if your horse be not too weake.”49 Most puritans, even those defended by Martin, were scandalized by the Marprelate tracts. Many complained of the way he treated serious matters with levity, and others objected that he carried his complaints too far.50 The scandal must have been in Gifford’s mind when in early 1591 he wrote “the warre is made as deadlie, as if the grounds of christianitie were in question: while some passing the bounds of modestie, others doo replie against them after the same manner.”51 Martin Marprelate had little concern for modesty in his first tract, which encouraged readers to “read over D. John Bridges, for it is a worthy worke” but then proceeded to mock Bridges’s overly erudite style. The Epistle attacked the institution of the episcopacy, calling all bishops in England “pettie popes and pettie Antichristes” who should not be “tolerated in any christian commonwelth.” Martin also initiated personal attacks on a number of prominent bishops by listing incidences of abuse of power, unsavory dealings, and immorality. He enumerated the sufferings of prominent puritans like John Penry and John Udall, and concluded by offering several conditions of peace that, if kept by the bishops, would ensure that Martin’s work was finished. Otherwise, Martin threatened “a yong Martin in everie diocesse which may take notice of your practizes” and report them in future writings.52 Although Gifford had been subject to episcopal discipline, he had little desire for “yong Martins” spread through the parishes of England, poisoning the common sort with satirical disrespect for all clergy. He had spent a decade in ministry alternately goading and encouraging the common sort to live godly lives, and along the way he had engaged in his share of controversy, both locally and nationally. Yet in 1590, as he surveyed the ecclesiastical landscape in England, his attention focused on the effects of unrelenting dissension, and he concluded that continued, vociferous calls for reform were causing more harm than good among the laypeople. “Men have not now the consideration what it is to condemne the 48 An anonymous work, though usually attributed to William Fulke, Cambridge puritan and master of Pembroke Hall. See Leland Carlson, Martin Marprelate, Gentleman: Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in His Colours (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1981), 6. 49 Marprelate, “Epitome,” in Marprelate Tracts, ed. Pierce, 122. 50 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 393. 51 Gifford, Plaine Declaration, A1r. 52 Marprelate, “Epistle,” in Marprelate Tracts, ed. Pierce, 4, 40.

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whole worship and Ministrie as Antichristian, and so utterlie to take away the credite and power of the Ministrie and preaching Gods word.” 53 Separatists regularly condemned ministers who remained within the Church of England as false ministers in a false church. In so doing, they threatened the effectiveness of the main weapon in the puritan arsenal of reform and education: preaching. Gifford feared that those who were just beginning to accept the godly message would be deceived by the separatists’ call to private purity and drawn away from the Church of England. The risk was one he could not take.

BUILDING A PUBLIC CHURCH Gifford began his third and final antiseparatist treatise, A Short Reply, with an open letter to Barrow and Greenwood that gives it a more personal tone than his earlier writings. Gifford appeared stung by the criticism that he had been overly harsh with his separatist opponents. Since previously he had accused the separatists of failing in their duties of charity toward other Christians, of favoring rigor over love, Gifford felt especially burdened to justify his harsh attacks. He agreed that personal sins should be dealt with in private, “But when they be publike and notorious seducers, defacing Christs Ministers, and many poore sheepe of Christ are in hazard to be spoyled” he reasoned that such open threats required open responses. For Gifford, the fundamentally public nature of the church meant not only that persons should not act “in private”—that is, without the sanction of the civil government—in reforming, but also that any attempt to do so thrusts them into a public arena for judgment.54 The distinction between what was public and what was private went right to the heart of the disagreement between Gifford and the separatists. Gifford’s vision of a public church—one that in its present form included both the godly and the ungodly—was fundamentally incompatible with the separatists’ desire for purity. For Gifford, following his muse Augustine, unity trumped purity. Thus, the practice of prayer should encourage the feeble in faith. The exercise of discipline in the church should redeem, not condemn. And ministers should act so as to instill respect—both for themselves and for the ministry as a whole—among the common sort. Separatist ministers acted as if their actions only affected themselves, but Gifford 53 Gifford, Plaine Declaration, A3r. Similar sentiments may be found in the Short Treatise: “You knowe it is the direct way which the devill taketh by his ministers to bring in flat Atheisme, to disgrace and throwe downe the credit of the ministrie” (M1r). See also A3r, C4v. 54 Gifford, Short Reply (London, 1591), A3r.

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believed the ministry to be a public trust. “They intrude themselves without calling,” he complained, “being mere private men, to the creating and establishing of a publike government.” The fact that a number of them gathered together did not give them the public authority required to choose a minister, any more than “all the Apprentises in London taking upon them to choose a Lorde Maior of the Citie.” The public authority invested by God in the magistrate extended over the administration of the church, even to the point of compelling attendance at preaching. 55 If Gifford understood the church as essentially public, in what way were the godly distinguishable from the multitude? Stephen Brachlow argued that the ecclesiologies of separatists and those he termed “radical puritans” who stayed within the church were quite comparable, leading one to wonder if actual acts of separation amounted to little more than historical accidents, confluences of opinion and circumstance.56 The contrast between Gifford and his opponents suggests a more substantive distinction. Separatists like Barrow and Greenwood found the very heart of their religious identity in the fact that they stood removed from the profaneness of the world, which, in their understanding, included much of the Church of England. They stood as a godly minority outside of the godless majority, and everything associated with the majority represented a possible source of contamination: sacraments offered by faulty ministers, scripted prayers that too closely resembled the hated Roman liturgies, and mixed assemblies made up of both the godly and the indifferent. While Gifford and likeminded puritans may have shared some separatist likes and dislikes with respect to the practice of the faith, they stopped short of total withdrawal, and their hesitation was inspired by more than self-preservation or weak wills. Their identity was rooted firmly in their position as a godly minority among a less-than-godly majority, even to the point of worshipping in a (partially) polluted church. Thus, Gifford consistently and emphatically argued that the mixture of the godly and ungodly in the church did not pollute the godly: the true Christian can live as a pilgrim in a foreign and sometimes oppressive land. Certainly Christian charity demanded patience with the failings of the weaker of Christ’s sheep, reason enough to tolerate the presence of tares among the wheat.Yet just as importantly for the spiritual identity of the godly, the errors of the ungodly also served as a constant reminder to the godly of what path they were to avoid.

55 56

Gifford, Short Treatise, A2v, O4r, P2r–v. Italics added. Brachlow, Communion of Saints, 6–8, 11.

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The job of the godly shepherd required patience, tolerance even, but the task did not end there. A decade before his conflicts with the separatists, Gifford had excoriated the nonpreaching prelates for abdicating their responsibility to the common sort. In this case, Gifford imagined that by exposing the separatists, he was protecting, even educating, the commoner who might otherwise be misled. He suggested that it would be “high treachery and unfaithfull dealing to Christ and his Church when the woolfe dooth come in sheepes clothing not to pluck it off and to let the sheepe see that is a wolfe.” And when it came to responsibilities, Gifford believed separatists had committed ministerial malfeasance by betraying the fundamental trust between congregation and pastor in leading the simple astray and poisoning them toward the church. “Ye have rent out the hearts of many all reverence and love towards the preachers of the Gospell, and led them into such a presumptuous opinion of their owne understanding, that if they become not heretikes, yet experience doth teach, that many of them growe into irreligious prophanenes.”57 Unlike the failure of lazy, nonresident ministers to take up the gauntlet in the first place, the failure of the separatists came through misguided zeal that turned the common sort away from the church and so ruined the hopes of Gifford’s godly reformation. He understood the private and perfectionist nature of separatism to be fundamentally at odds with his program of practical divinity, which relied upon a gradual, but relentless, purifying assault on all aspects of life. Although many of the godly despaired that such a goal might ever be achieved, Gifford’s vision encompassed a reordering of the whole of society, not simply a holy remnant. The separatists, he might well have complained, thought too small.

57

Gifford, Short Reply, A3v.

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“Subtiltie” Exposed SAMUEL: Doe you thinke there is nothing but subtiltie in these things? DANIEL: Doe I thinke there is nothing but subtiltie? Tell me what you thinke. What other end can there be but subtiltie?1

S

Samuel’s situation certainly demanded action. A previously healthy hog from his farm died under mysterious circumstances one night; his wife also lost five or six hens in short order. He suspected an old woman who lived in his village of bewitching him. His neighbors were quick to agree and even suggest solutions: some thought he should offer a sacrifice, while others suggested consulting with the cunning man who lived in the next village in the hopes of getting to the root of the evil. At his wife’s urging, Samuel went to meet with the old man known to be wise in the ways of magic and the supernatural. By chance Samuel encountered his godly friend Daniel on the road. After hearing Samuel’s circumstances, Daniel immediately concluded that Samuel and his wife had not been bewitched by the old woman but misled by a more diabolical adversary: the devil himself. At once suspicious and curious, Samuel invited Daniel home with him to discuss the matter further with the local schoolmaster, a recognized authority, Samuel noted, due to his familiarity with the “Latine tongue.” This intriguing scene opens A dialogue concerning witches and witchcraftes, the second of two works on witchcraft written by Gifford.2 In the first, A discourse of the subtill practises of devilles by witches and sorcerers, Gifford methodically outlined the different types of witches, their capabilities as well as 1

Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, K1r. The work appeared in 1593 and was reprinted in 1603. A facsimile of the 1593 edition was published in 1931: George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, ed. with intro. Beatrice White (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). The 1603 edition appeared in the Percy Society Series: Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages, vol. 8, ed. Thomas Wright (London: T. Richards, 1843). References that follow are from the 1593 edition. 2

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their limitations, and their relationship to the devil.3 For his second work on witchcraft, Gifford returned to the dialogue format that he used so effectively in his most popular work, Countrie Divinitie. Once again, he concerned himself with the popular mind and its affections, and he introduced in the person of Daniel a wise but gentle voice of religious authority to guide the unsophisticated mind of Samuel and the pseudosophisticated mind of the schoolmaster toward the truth of the puritan gospel.That truth, however, sometimes lay hidden, and the devil sought to keep it so. By peeling back the layers of deception put forth by the Prince of Lies, Gifford attempted to reassure the common sort of God’s sovereignty and providential care while at the same time impressing upon them the need for contrite and pious hearts before such a powerful God. Unlike other writers on witchcraft who occupied themselves with intellectual or theological debates, Gifford made the common person the central figure in the discussion, since he was most interested in winning the hearts and minds of these recalcitrant laypeople. There is an old historiographical tradition that associates the rise in witch-hunting in Elizabethan England with the influence of Calvinism and the rise of puritanism.4 Certainly, the prima facie evidence appears convincing. The 1563 witchcraft statute was passed in a parliament that felt the influence of the returning Marian exiles. These “hotter” Protestants, the argument runs, returned from the Continent more rigid in their Calvinism and inflamed with European suspicions about witchcraft. Furthermore, regions like Essex, where puritans were stronger in number, also saw higher incidence of witch trials. Finally, the Calvinist-leaning James VI of Scotland, author of a treatise condemning witches, came to the English throne in 1603 as James I and strengthened the punishments for sorcery. 5 Though plausible on its surface, this tradition has long been under suspicion.6 John Teall partially exonerated Calvin from the charge of inspiring 3 Gifford’s Discourse of the Subtill Practises was published in 1587, making it the second treatise on witchcraft published by an English author. 4 For a classic statement of the argument, see George Lincoln Burr’s article “New England’s Place in the History of Witchcraft,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (October 1911): 3–35. See also Robert Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Belief (London: Methuen, 1947; repr., New York: B. Blom, 1972), 13–32. 5 James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1770 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996), 239–40. 6 For example, see George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), 329–73. Kittredge engaged in a running debate with G. L. Burr. He defended puritans with evidence drawn from the seventeenth century and from New England, and concluded that witch belief was the “common heritage of humanity” and “is not chargeable to any particular time, or race, or form of religion” (372).

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the witch hunts by demonstrating that in England Calvinism did not inevitably coincide with a propensity to hunt witches.7 The case of Gifford supports a further claim: not only did his Calvinism not lead him to hunt witches, but Gifford’s puritan practical divinity led him to active discouragement of witch hunts as spiritually detrimental for his flock.

WITCH BELIEF IN GIFFORD’S WORLD Before turning to Gifford’s thought on witches and witchcraft, however, it will be beneficial to consider more generally some aspects of witch belief in early modern England. The world Gifford inhabited was alive with demons and devils.8 The late sixteenth century saw a surge in witch hunts and prosecutions across Europe, and England was no exception. This increased interest in witchcraft is noticeable both in contemporary literature and the judicial proceedings of the day. Gifford’s county of Essex had a somewhat greater number of witch trials than elsewhere in England, and the 1570s and 1580s saw the most activity. Thus, Gifford had good reason to be interested in witch beliefs and the effect they had among the people for whom he felt responsible as pastor. The brief, initial encounter between Samuel and Daniel encapsulates many notions common to Gifford’s day concerning witches and their activities. First, the occasion that raised Samuel to action was the loss of his livestock. Charges of witchcraft often came about on the basis of some physical harm the alleged witch was thought to have perpetrated. These acts, known as maleficia, could be any of a number of misfortunes that might threaten

7 Teall compared Gifford, Reginald Scot, and William Perkins and concluded there was no “inevitable connection” between the Calvinist theology and witch hunts. Though the identification of Scot as a Calvinist is not entirely convincing (see discussion below), the contrast between Gifford and Perkins supports the case. Even so, Teall, writing before the current definitional dilemma over who/what constitutes puritans/puritanism, avoided distinguishing between Calvinist and puritan, and took Perkins as representative of “Protestants of a Calvinist inclination in England.” See John L. Teall, “Witchcraft and Calvinism in Elizabethan England: Divine Power and Human Agency,” Journal of the History of Ideas 23/1 (January–March 1962): 21–23, 33, and esp. 34–36. 8 The history of witchcraft has received much attention from scholars in recent years. The following recent studies give good introductions, the first three with significant attention to England and the sixteenth century: Clark, Thinking with Demons; James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001); Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness; and Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London: HarperCollins, 1996). Useful older histories and sources include Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic; Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England; Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Belief; Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England; C. L. Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1929); and idem,Witchcraft and Demonianism (London: Heath Cranton Limited, 1933).

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life, limb, or property. Many involved aspects of life in a rural and agrarian economy. Thus, maleficia ranged from the inconvenient (a cursed churn that refused to make butter) to the problematic (the death of livestock) to the catastrophic (a bewitched child who promptly falls sick and dies). Second, the process whereby Samuel identified the source of his troubles reveals some of the logic of witch accusations. His suspicions immediately turned to an old woman already known and feared for her dealings with the devil. The fact that his neighbors quickly confirmed his suspicions highlights the importance of reputation in witch identifications. Later in the dialogue, Daniel complained about the willingness of simple folk to identify and even convict a witch based solely on “common fame.” Indictment records indicate that it was not uncommon for the same person to be charged multiple times, and if actual indictments represent only those cases strong enough to be taken to the authorities, it is easy to imagine the extent to which local gossips embellished the reputations of suspected witches. Third, the suspect in this case conforms precisely to the typical person accused of witchcraft: an old, usually poor, woman, often unmarried or widowed. In such a case, the woman was without protection from either husband or family, lacking in social power in the local community, and therefore prey to local judicial proceedings that the better connected might evade.9 Finally, the scene illustrates the dichotomy that existed in the popular imagination between practitioners of good magic (the cunning man) and practitioners of evil magic (the witch). Gifford’s spokesman Daniel rejected this distinction and instead argued that both represented a sinful attempt to manipulate supernatural powers and seek solace in something other than divine comfort. With this claim, Gifford resisted popular opinion concerning the potential benefits of cunning folk, who were renowned for their ability to assist with everything from finding lost items to gaining protection against evil magic.

9 The relationship between women and witchcraft cannot be explained solely by questions of social status, however. For an overview of the question of gender and witchcraft, see the characteristically thorough discussion in Clark, Thinking with Demons, 106–33, esp. 106–18. Clark suggests that rather than ask why women were most often associated with witchcraft, a more relevant question is why contemporaries associated witchcraft with women. This approach “assumes that it was what early modern communities themselves expected of witches that was crucial in their identification and accusation” (110). Posing the question this way allows him to explore the number of broader cultural presuppositions about both women and witchcraft held by demonologists as well as most of their contemporaries. These presuppositions included such notions as women’s inferior intellectual and psychological qualities, greater carnal appetites, inordinate curiosity, loquaciousness, vindictiveness, etc. In these beliefs, the demonologists were not exceptional, a fact that accounts for the otherwise curious omission of extensive comments specifically about women (as opposed to witches) in much of witchcraft literature.

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Accusations of witchcraft often, though not always, landed the accused in either the secular or ecclesiastical courts.10 In Maldon, the administration of justice involved a balance between local and external powers. The charters of incorporation granted to the borough of Maldon in 1554 and 1555 by Queen Mary confirmed the traditional prerogatives of the local magistracy in several judicial venues. For instance, local officials tended to handle lesser offences such as drunkenness, prostitution, vagrancy, disorderliness, and the like by meting out public punishments intended to set an example for potential delinquents. The offending party might be pilloried, flogged, or branded in the marketplace, confined in one of the town’s prisons, or subjected to an unpleasant stint on the ducking stool that was affixed directly over the town sewage drain at the docks. On the other hand, town magistrates demonstrated less eagerness to handle cases that could lead to capital punishment. Indeed, the only two executions in Maldon recorded for the entire sixteenth century both involved religious dissidents—a dissenter (likely an Anabaptist) burned at the stake during Edward VI’s reign and a Protestant burned under Mary. In neither case was the offending party a Maldon citizen. Likely, the executions took place at Maldon since its status as a market town guaranteed a sizeable audience for the intended message of religious conformity. As for capital cases that involved Maldon citizens, local officials as a rule referred such cases to other venues, such as the archdeaconry of Essex, the Essex assizes in Chelmsford, or the Privy Council.11 Two major witchcraft trials took place in Maldon during the 1570s, the decade before Gifford arrived, and each reflects the disinclination of the Maldon magistrates to handle potential capital cases. The first involved Alice Chaundler, a “spinster” accused of bewitching “Mary Cowper, aged eight years, daughter of Francis C[owper] of M[aldon], fletcher, who then and there died.” Other alleged victims included “Robert Brisco of M[aldon], weaver, aged thirty years, George Brisco, aged two years, and Prudence Brisco, aged five years, daughter of said Robert B., who died at Maldon.” 12 All were found to be true bills, indicating that enough evidence existed for the cases to be tried. Yet while the charges were brought in the Maldon borough court, Alice’s case was not decided there. Two years later, she was tried on these charges (as well as two others) at the assizes in Chelmsford, found guilty, and hanged.13 10 Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 213: “One of the defining features of the European witch craze was that it was essentially a judicial operation.” 11 Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 171–72. 12 Cases 67–69 in Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials, 128. 13 Macfarlane, “Tudor Anthropologist,” 142.

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As seen in the case of Samuel, “common fame” or reputation often formed the basis of a witchcraft accusation, and such reputations could be inherited. A charge of witchcraft, whether it led to a conviction or not, tarnished both an individual and her family for generations to come. In 1579, Ellen Smythe, daughter of Alice Chaundler, was accused of bewitching four-year-old Susan Webbe, who subsequently became ill and died. The details of this case are preserved in a short pamphlet that describes the trial and execution of Smythe and two other witches at Chelmsford.14 The anonymous author of the Detection of damnable driftes writes with a first-person intimacy that suggests participation in the trials, though this is impossible to determine. What is more certain is that the writer fears witches and their powers, and he admonishes the careless to do the same. While the claim that “no trifles are therein conteined…nor pernicious fantazies deservying to be condemned”15 may be questioned, the pamphlet provides a good example of how witch prosecutions often came as the culmination of a series of incidents. According to the account, John Chaundler, husband of Alice, approached his stepdaughter Ellen Smythe following Alice’s execution in order to demand the return of money Alice had given to Ellen. Ellen rebuffed and threatened John, after which time his health began to decline. Unable to digest his food, he eventually “wasted awaie to his death.” Later, Ellen Smythe’s son came to the house of one John Eastwood to beg alms; Eastwood promptly sent him away empty-handed. That very night, John began to experience “great pains in his bodie.” The next evening as he sat warming himself by the fire, he saw a rat run up his chimney and a toad fall down immediately thereafter. He thrust the toad into the fire with his poker and held it in the flames, whereupon it burned a bright blue. The pamphlet suggests that this mysterious flaming toad was linked to Smythe, since at the same moment she experienced great pains. This part of Ellen’s case exhibits all the elements of the model accusation described by Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, who argued that witch accusations frequently came as a result of social friction in a community between the poor and the middling or wealthy classes. A refusal of charity, an insult, and bruised reputations could set in motion a chain of events that eventually resulted in charges of witchcraft.16 14

Anonymous, A Detection of damnable driftes, practized by three Witches arraigned at Chelmisforde in Essex, at the late Assizes there holden, which were executed in Aprill 1579, Set forthe to discover the Ambushementes of Sathan, whereby he would surprise us lulled in securitie, and hardened with contempte of Gods vengeance threatened for our offences (London, 1579). 15 Anon., Detection of damnable driftes, Aiir. 16 An insightful discussion of the so-called “denial narrative” may be found in Marion Gibson, XXXX

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Other evidence against Smythe resulted from her encounter with the Widow Webbe. Following a fight between their two daughters, Smythe confronted Webbe and struck her in the face. Thereafter, four-year-old Susan Webbe languished and died and Widow Webbe “fell distraught of her wittes.” On top of all this, Smythe’s own son testified that his mother kept three spirits: “one called by her great Dicke, was enclosed in a wicker bottle; the seconde named little Dicke, was putte into a leather bottle; and the third termed Willet, she kepte in a wolle packe.” A search of the premises turned up the bottles, but unfortunately the spirits had “vanished awaie.” Nevertheless, the lack of supernatural evidence did not deter the court from convicting and sentencing Smythe to death.17 The story of Ellen Smythe’s trial and execution told in the pamphlet shows the intricate web of family conflicts, disputes with neighbors, bad reputations, unfortunate circumstances, popular beliefs, and common wisdom that went into the identification and prosecution of a witch. The trials of Alice Chaundler and Ellen Smythe show that the conventional wisdom of Maldon townspeople concerning witches was like that elsewhere in England. Witches represented a danger to the community, and therefore the community was justified in searching out, prosecuting, and executing suspected witches. Gifford challenged this conventional wisdom about witches on both theological and practical grounds. Based on the town’s behavior toward witches following his arrival in 1581, it appears at least some may have heeded their new preacher’s opinion.

17

Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London: Routledge, 1999), 78–94. The identification of a narrative common to many witchcraft accusations is not original to modern historians, but rather dates to sixteenth-century skeptics such as Reginald Scot, who cast a dubious eye on the oft-repeated narrative of denied charity and witches’ revenge: “These miserable wretches are so odious unto all their neighbors, and so feared, as few dare offend them, or denie them anie thing they aske.… These go from house to house, and from doore to doore for a pot full of milke, yest, drinke, pottage, or some such releefe.… It falleth out many times, that neither their necessities, nor their expectation is answered or served, in those places where they beg or borrowe; but rather their lewdnesse is by their neighbors reprooved. And further in tract of time the witch waxeth odious and tedious to hir neighbors.… Doubtless (at length) some of hir neighbors die, or fall sicke; or some of their children are visited with diseases…which by ignorant parents are supposed to be the vengeance of the witches.” Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584); critical edition with notes and introduction by Brinsley Nicholson (London: Elliot Stock, 1886; repr., East Ardsley: EP Publishing Limited, 1973). Quote from bk. 1.3. Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane applied the methods and categories of anthropology in describing a stereotypical witch and model accusation. See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 552–60; Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 196–98; and idem, “Tudor Anthropologist,” 151–52. 17 Anon., Detection of damnable driftes, A5v–A6v.

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GIFFORD, WITCHES, AND THE WISDOM OF THE COMMON SORT Given his position as a pastor, Gifford was not unusual in the attention he gave to witchcraft. Parish and university clergy were responsible for many of the witchcraft writings in the early modern period. Since belief in witches occupied such a central place in the common person’s understanding of the supernatural world, many pastors felt the need to attend to the great number of practical, spiritual questions that arose concerning witches and their powers.18 Gifford’s interest in witchcraft tended, as elsewhere, toward the practical. Two main topics occupy the interlocutors in his Dialogue and will give structure to the inquiry here. The first set of questions concerns the nature of witchcraft and its operation in the world: Wherein lies the true danger of witches? How do they operate? Who is in control, the witch or the devil? Popular belief, represented in the dialogue by the character of Samuel, held the chief power of witches to be over property and person. However, Gifford sought to redirect the popular mind from the physical to the spiritual world, and this realignment had ramifications for society’s attitudes toward witches and witch trials. The second set of questions concerns the proper response to witchcraft. How should individuals and society as a whole react to the threat? How should individuals protect themselves from maleficia? Should society pursue, try, and punish persons suspected of witchcraft? What role should cunning folk play? Practitioners of “good magic” at first glance would seem to provide a useful function by alleviating some of the anxiety associated with the spiritual world. For Gifford, however, they had no place in a godly community. lm The chance meeting between Samuel and Daniel on the road whetted the appetite of the two for the debate, which began in earnest as they arrived at Samuel’s home. There, Daniel met Samuel’s wife, who had little patience with her husband’s delays. Rather than consult a cunning man, Samuel had returned home with a godly one, one who she quickly concluded would be of little help. Also present was the schoolmaster, who wasted no time engaging Daniel in debate. Did not the scripture itself

18

Clark, Thinking with Demons, 437–39.

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command that witches should be put to death?19 Were not those who seek out, try, and punish witches simply doing their Christian duty? And so the gauntlet was thrown. As one of the godly, Daniel adhered to scripture as the supreme authority, and so he conceded that the Bible lists witchcraft as a capital crime. However, he suggested that there was a prior problem: the devil was at work in the very process whereby people identified and destroyed witches to “lead them from God, even to follow himself, to offer sacrifice unto him, to worship him, to obey his wil, to commit manie grievous sinnes, and be drowned in manifold errours.”20 People who sought out witches and attempted to counter their magic often were motivated not by godly zeal but by blind fury, rage, and fear. This is Daniel’s chief argument, from which several conclusions will flow: the whole process whereby witches were sought out and punished was one in which the devil was very much active, but not in the way people believe. The devil’s subtlety was so great that when people believed they were acting for God and against the devil they were actually doing the reverse. Wherein lay the true danger? The fundamental way the devil led people into error was to distract them with fears of maleficia. Daniel argued that these fears caused people to overlook the real power the devil exercised over them: temptation to sins of the heart and spirit. As he explained to Samuel and the schoolmaster: The power of divels is in the hearts of men, as to harden the heart, to blind the eies of the mind, and form the lustes and concupiscenses which are in them, to inflame them unto wrath, malice, envie, and cruell murthers: to puffe them up in pride, arrogancy, and vaine glory: to intice them unto wantonnesse and whoredomes, and all uncleannesse. And about these things they worke continually, and with such efficacy, that without the power of the glorious passion and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, which we have by faith, they cannot be withstood, and they will seeme to be but meane fellowes, busied about making drinke that it shall not work in the fat, in keeping cheese from running, and butter from coming, in killing hennes or hogges, or making men lame.21

The devil’s chief tool, then, was misdirection. He enticed; he beguiled; he obfuscated. Then, while people spent their energy fleeing physical calamities, the devil entered their hearts and thrived on the fear and distrust of neighbors, and the pride of the self-righteousness. Gifford did not deny 19

The schoolmaster refers to Exod. 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, B2v–B3r. 21 Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, C2r–C2v. 20

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the potential ill the devil might effect through witches in the physical world, but he suggested the more fundamental problem was how the devil was at work in one’s own soul. Daniel also objected to the popular belief about the source of the witches’ power. Daniel asked the schoolmaster if he believed the witch obeyed the devil or the devil obeyed the witch. The schoolmaster replied that witches could call the devil forth in order to plague their enemies. Yet did not the witch desire evil against her neighbors because the devil had planted hatred and anger in her heart, Daniel queried? Indeed, he suggested, while the devil appeared to respond to the witch’s beckoning, he was simply doing what he intended all along. But here again, Daniel patiently explained, there was a prior question. Whether the witch or the devil willed the matters was secondary since all power ultimately came from God. The devil only had power because God gave it to him; he was the “Lord’s executioner.” Therefore, people should realize that any evil that came their way came with God’s permission, and he may well have been punishing them because of their offenses. The first response to misfortune should not be to blame the devil or seek out the witch but to beg forgiveness from God. A second possibility, Daniel allowed, was that physical ills or misfortune might result from “natural causes”—people got sick, livestock died, accidents happened. The devil, in addition to his role as the Lord’s executioner, was also a keen observer of the natural world and its causes and effects, and he was quick to exploit these to create fear and enmity between persons. So, witches were impotent, the devil hobbled, and people duped. Based on this understanding of witches and their power, how should individuals and society as a whole respond to the threat posed by witches? Puritans like Gifford sought to modify behavior as well as attitudes, and it is not surprising that much of the Dialogue was taken up with these questions. As in the case of Samuel and his wife, a common response to calamity was to turn to those people known as “cunning folk,” individuals renowned for their ability to diagnose and suggest solutions to everyday problems. A cunning man might help a person identify a thief, suggest where to look for lost goods, explain why crops fail, identify the cause of illness—in short, give advice about any one of a thousand ills that might befall someone in a rural agrarian economy. Common wisdom held that cunning folk practiced a good magic that was useful in rejecting the evil magic of witches.22 Alan Macfarlane suggested that the attractiveness of 22

The best discussion of the status and function of cunning folk is still to be found in Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 212–52. However, it should be noted that the conclusion of Thomas XXX

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cunning folk also lay in their ability to provide not only solutions but also explanations for suffering.23 Even if their prescriptions sometimes failed, the fact that cunning folk helped rationalize misfortune gave them authority in the community. Seen from this perspective, cunning folk offered a competing source of spiritual succor for the people. The puritan idea of a godly community was rooted in the person of the pastor, a preaching minister who lived in his parish and helped the people live godly lives on a daily basis. Thus, in Gifford’s opinion, when people who are frightened of a witch turn to cunning folk for direction, they subvert the spiritual authority of the pastor.24 It is no accident that Samuel’s wife referred to puritans as those who are “cunning in Scripture.” With this reference, Gifford identified the tendency among the common sort to equate the two sources of spiritual aid: one might seek help from one who is cunning in magic or else from one cunning in scripture. The message of reformed Protestantism to people who were experiencing hardship often consisted of searching out one’s own sins; the scourge of the Almighty was often painful but always redemptive. Such austere advice often failed to satisfy, however, and so the cunning folk found a ready market for their spiritual wares. According to the Goodwife R, friend of Samuel’s wife, the cunning woman with whom her husband consulted “doeth more good in one yeere then all these Scripture men will doe so long as they live.” 25 Given the puritan desire to promote the position of pastor, Gifford’s judgment on cunning folk comes as no surprise. Since cunning folk do not depend on God, Daniel reasoned, they must get their power from the devil. Witches were those who “dealeth by the power and devices of the devill”;26 thus, cunning folk were no different than witches. Even if people did not intend to serve the devil by turning to cunning folk, they erred when they did not turn to God. Gifford recognized the strong, even desperate, desire for healing and reassurance that led people to place their trust in cunning folk—“Shall not men take helpe where they can find it?” he asked in the Discourse—but he also doubted any assistance the devil offered: “Is Satan become a weldoer?”27 23

(and Macfarlane) regarding cunning folk as an aspect of witch belief that distinguished England from the Continent is now rejected by historians. See Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England, 12. 23 Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 122. 24 On the competition between cunning folk and pastors, see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 263–67. 25 Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, M3v. 26 Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, G1r. 27 Gifford, Subtill Practises, H1v.

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Gifford’s condemnation of the cunning folk also reflects the more general Protestant concern with many forms of popular lay religiosity. Lying behind the Reformation’s rejection of the spiritual value of saints, relics, pilgrimages, and other popular practices was nothing less than an attempt at a wholesale reorientation of attitudes toward the supernatural. Protestants faced the predicament of trying to displace what they saw as foolish superstitions held by the common sort while simultaneously attempting to instill a healthy respect for the power of the Divine. While they downplayed human capacity to manipulate supernatural powers, Protestants nevertheless promoted a healthy respect for the world beyond their own. The resulting message, Robert Scribner has observed, was that “the supernatural could still intervene in the natural world, but the traffic was irredeemably one way.”28 The claims of the cunning folk contradicted this pattern. For Gifford, the potential hazard they posed to the faith of the common sort was akin to idolatry. Based on Daniel’s response to cunning folk, one might expect equally harsh pronouncements concerning the punishment of those suspected of “evil” witchcraft. To the contrary, Daniel methodically questioned the entire juridical apparatus that allowed for the prosecution of witches. In fact, by the conclusion of the Dialogue, the reader finds it difficult to imagine a case wherein a person might be justly put to death for the crime of witchcraft.29 The chief problem was with the standards of evidence. Normally at least two witnesses must testify to secure a conviction, but Daniel complained that this requirement was routinely ignored in witch trials. The schoolmaster replied that the difficulty came about since witches often acted in secret, and they had a tendency not to want to confess since the devil would not let them. Nevertheless, he was “of this opinion, that if there were any likelihood, and suspition, and common fame, that it was even proofe enough, and the best deede that could be done was for to hang them up, and so ridde the countrey of them.”30 For Daniel, such reasoning represented the worst kind of judicial misconduct and paved the way for all manner of abuse. If anything, the 28 Robert Scribner, “Elements of Popular Belief,” in Handbook of European History 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 1:253. 29 Kittredge concluded that Gifford supported the death penalty for witches based on Daniel’s admission that scripture calls for witches to be put to death, and so saw in Gifford the attitudes that led to the more stringent witchcraft statute of 1604 (Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 297). But James Hitchcock is surely right when he argues “the major force of Gifford’s writings is to persuade his readers not to support the persecutions.” Hitchcock, “George Gifford and Puritan Witch Beliefs,” 98 n. 53. 30 Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, H2v.

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difficulty with evidence in witch trials should make one more skeptical, not less. Indeed, every type of testimony offered was potentially flawed. Testimony by devils through signs or the evidence of cunning folk was misleading and unreliable since both were deceivers by nature. Confession by the witch may be produced or manipulated by the devil in order to mislead and create injustice (the true goal of Satan in most witch trials, Daniel wryly concluded). “Common fame,” or the reputation of suspected witches, could be manufactured out of the panic, guilt, and blame that often accompanied misfortune. In every case where the possibility existed for the shedding of innocent blood, Daniel concluded one should err on the side of caution.Yet given the hysteria that surrounded the process, he lamented, “Many goe so farre, that if they can intice children to accuse their parents, they thinke it a good worke.” 31 Gifford’s teaching on witches and their powers ran counter to the presumed conventional wisdom of the common sort in almost every instance. The danger posed by witches was internal rather than external, spiritual rather than physical. To act as if either the witch or the devil had control over one’s circumstances was to insult the providence and sovereignty of God. Turning to cunning folk for help with physical ills ignored the fact that the chief danger of the devil was the threat to one’s soul and spirit. Prosecution of witches provided yet one more area for the devil to make mischief and breed enmity among members of the community. Such was Gifford’s message to his flock. In order to judge its uniqueness, one must turn to the writings of two of his contemporaries, one a layman and country gentlemen, the other a prominent puritan theologian and university preacher. Their works, together with Gifford’s, represent some of the earliest published writings in English on witchcraft, and so provide insight into the range of belief present among the literate classes during the height of sixteenth-century England’s most intense witch scare. Gifford’s overriding practical concerns, which led him to condemn cunning folk yet reject the overzealous prosecution of witches, distinguished him from both naturalistic skeptics on the one hand and many of his fellow ministers on the other.

“YOONG IGNORANCE AND OLD CUSTOME”— REGINALD SCOT’S DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT Prior to Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584, the only printed English works related to witchcraft were trial records, tabloidlike descriptions 31

Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, L1r.

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of “monstrous events,” and translations of a few European treatises. Scot moved beyond the sensational in order to concentrate on the theory behind witch belief. To do so, he drew on authorities from antiquity to the most recent European demonologists in order to create a massive compendium of learned opinion concerning witches and witchcraft.32 In his introduction, he lists more than two hundred “forren authors” and sources used in the book, and nearly two dozen English writers and works. Gifford and Scot shared a sense of frustration, even outrage, with the injustices of witch trials and witch hunts. They both complained about the gullibility of the common people and promoted a more rational and less sensational set of explanations for the alleged maleficia.Yet the targeted audiences, the arguments, and the conclusions of their respective works are separate. In his lengthy treatise, Scot entered into learned debate with the important witchcraft treatises of the past and present. It is as if he imagined that exposing the fallacies of scholars would cause witch belief among the greater part of the society to cease to exist. On the other hand, Gifford addressed a more general audience. The lively debate of his dialogue format was designed to entertain as well as instruct the reader and thus carry a broader appeal. Though he was quick to chastise the common sort, he also was sympathetic to their spiritual plight. The exhaustive bibliography of the Discoverie indicates that Scot had dedicated much time to the investigation of witches, yet the cause of his intense interest in the subject remains a mystery. His background yields few clues. Scot spent some time at Hart Hall, Oxford, in the 1550s but did not take a degree, instead preferring to retire to the life of a gentleman in his native Kent. Rather than examine witches, his first publication focused on spirits of a different sort. His A Perfite platforme of a hoppe garden and necessarie instructions for making and mayntenaunce thereof promoted the development of a domestic hop industry, which hitherto had been a monopoly of the Flemish.33 While the work did not foreshadow his later interest in the supernatural, it does reveal his interest in the functioning of the natural world, a topic that would reappear in his discussion of witchcraft. If Scot’s background does not suggest a specific reason for his intense study of demonology, the four prefatory epistles to his Discoverie provide some evidence of his intent in publication. In the first dedicatory epistle to Roger Manwood, knight and lord chief baron of the Court of the Exchequer, Scot complained that “witchmongers [set out] to pursue the poore, 32

The first edition of Scot’s Discoverie ran a total of 488 pages in sixteen books. Reginald Scot, A Perfite platforme of a hoppe garden and necessarie instructions for making and mayntenaunce thereof (London, 1576). 33

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to accuse the simple, and to kill the innocent,”34 and he appealed to the good judgment of Manwood to help remedy the abuses. In addition to the judicial abuses, Scot saw a more fundamental theological error: And therefore, that which greeveth me to the bottome of my hart, is, that these witchmongers cannot be content, to wrest out of Gods hand his almightie power, and keepe it themselves, or leave it with a witch: but that, when by the drift of argument they are made to laie downe the bucklers, they yeeld them up to the divell, or at the least praie aid of him, as though the raines of all mens lives and actions were committed into his hand; and that he sat at the sterne, to guide and direct the course of the whole world, imputing unto him power and abilities inough to doo as great things, and as strange miracles as ever Christ did.35

Witchmongers, Scot believed, had a dangerously dualistic understanding of witchcraft that equated the power of the devil with the power of God and undermined divine sovereignty and freedom.36 Convinced of the dangerous (though not the diabolical) nature of witchcraft, Scot attempted to correct the errors of both witches and witch-hunters. He did not hesitate to challenge popular opinion, which he believed to be superstitious and simply wrong. He complained his “greatest enemies are yoong ignorance and old custome.”37 In his attempt to dismantle the common understanding of witches, Scot deployed theological, juridical, rational, philological, and biblical arguments. For instance, the theological error of witch belief lies in the fact that “the fables of witchcraft have taken so fast hold and deepe root in the heart of man, that fewe or none can (nowadays) with patience indure the hand or correction of God.”38 Common wisdom attributed power to witches that must be reserved for God alone. Since people too frequently fail to recognize their sins or believe they might be punished for them, they search for causes of their distress outside themselves and so create witches. Furthermore, Scot argued, this willingness to believe pervades the judicial apparatus. Courts regularly convict witches based on frivolous or unreliable evidence that is often manufactured by torturing the suspects. Although both Gifford and Scot saw the commoners as overly credulous, the two authors diverged when it came to questions of responsibility. 34

Scot, Discoverie, Dedication to Manwood, vii. Scot, Discoverie, Dedication to Manwood, viii. 36 On witch belief and the doctrine of Providence, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25–28. 37 Scot, Discoverie, Dedication to [Sir Thomas] Scot, xiv. 38 Scot, Discoverie, 1.1. 35

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For Scot, if anyone should be blamed for the witch hunts, it was the papists for the centuries of superstition they encouraged among the people, or the witches themselves for duping a gullible populace. In Scot’s portrayal, the commoners appeared most often as victims rather than actors, but Gifford placed more of the responsibility on the backs of the common sort. 39 They were the ones who failed to listen to their pastors or seek pastoral counsel in time of misfortune. And they are the ones who served on juries. When Daniel and Samuel discussed the potential injustice of witch trials, Daniel stressed the responsibility of those who make up the juries. Clearly, the blood of the innocent rested on their heads. Concerning a woman Samuel helped convict, Daniel concluded “if she were a witch, your warrant was small: but she being no witch, you have taken away both her life, and covered here with infamie.”40 Gifford and Scot also differed in their methods for challenging witch belief. According to Scot, common wisdom concerning witchcraft may be disproved easily through the application of scripture and reason, which in every case can suggest a more plausible and natural explanation for alleged supernatural phenomena. Here Scot applied Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is to be favored. For instance, he suggested, witches often claim to be able to manipulate the weather. Perhaps a witch “hurleth a little sea sand up into the element, or wetteth a broome sprig in water, and sprinkleth the same in the aire; or diggeth a pit in the earth, and putting water therein, stirreth it about with hir finger.” All of these methods have been confessed by witches and dutifully recorded as true by demonologists. Yet “these credulous or rather idolatrous people” ignore the sovereignty of God shown in his natural ordering of the world and attested to in scripture. Thus, speculations about a witch’s power to create storms contradict the natural order whereby “exhalations are drawne and lifted up from out of the earth, by the power of the sunne, into the middle region of the aire, the coldness thereof constreineth and thickeneth those vapours; which being become clouds, are dissolved againe by the heate of the sunne, wherby 39 According to James Hitchcock, Gifford “had apparently come to think that witch beliefs were more deeply rooted than any specific theological tenets and that the people, in attributing such great power to the devil and the witches, espoused a kind of practical manicheeism which was thoroughly un-Christian.” Hitchcock, “George Gifford and Puritan Witch Beliefs,” 94. Of course, for the puritan Gifford, Catholicism itself was “thoroughly un-Christian.” It is true that in his Witches and Witchcraft, Gifford did not blame Catholics for witch belief, yet elsewhere he readily equated “popery” with superstition and labeled it an enemy to the gospel (Papist and Protestant, “Epistle Dedicatorie”). In the case of witchcraft, his goal was to force the common sort to assume responsibility for both their actions in the witch trials and their spiritual health. 40 Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, L4v.

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raine or haile is ingendred; raine, if by the waie the drops be not frozen and made haile.”41 Such naturalistic explanations appear time and again throughout the Discoverie. For Scot, the problem of witch belief was primarily an intellectual one. Any rational person should be able to conclude that it made more sense to believe rain occurred as a result of evaporation and condensation rather than a witch’s supernatural power. Although Scot did not ignore scriptural teachings, the natural evidence spoke for itself. In contrast, Gifford displayed a more pastoral intent in his Dialogue. He addressed the common sort’s belief in witches as a spiritual rather than an intellectual problem. The spiritual trust of the people was misplaced.Yet this was not Scot’s concern. He made no special point of condemning the cunning folk, other than seeing them as one more type of greedy tricksters. On the other hand, Gifford saw in the cunning folk a far worse spiritual evil, one that bordered on idolatry. Scot’s underlying concern with the irrationality of witch belief framed the Discoverie of Witchcraft. He struggled to avoid denying the existence of witches altogether, but the trajectory of his arguments leaves the reader with few options. At least one modern interpreter accepts Scot’s claim that his question is not “whether there be witches or naie.”42 Teall judged that “Scot never explicitly denies the existence of witches; he quarrels with demonologists not over whether they are but over what they may do.”43 Yet, a close consideration of Scot’s definition of witches exposes his equivocation: “There will be found among our witches onelie two sorts; the one sort being such by imputation, as so thought of by others (and these are abused, and not abusers), the other by acceptation, as being willing so to be accompted (and these be mere cousenors).”44 So, the first type of witch was one suspected but not guilty of the charges against her; they are “abused” since they were generally ignorant and poor and the target of the powerful. The second sort was guilty mostly of shameless self-promotion or deceit, for while they might represent themselves as having supernatural powers, they were in fact charlatans, “mere cousenors”45 who exploited 41

Scot, Discoverie, 3.13. Scot, Discoverie, Dedication to Coldwell and Readman, xvii. 43 Teall, “Witchcraft and Calvinism,” 31 (Teall’s italics). 44 Scot, Discoverie, Dedication to Manwood, x. See also 16.2: “Witchcraft is in truth a cousening art, wherein the name of God is abused, prophaned and blasphemed, and his power attributed to a vile creature. In estimation of the vulgar people, it is a supernatural worke, contrived betweene a corporal old woman, and a spiritualle divell. The maner thereof is so secret, mysticall, and strange, that to this daie there hath never beene any credible witnes therof. It is incomprehensible to the wise learned or faithfull; a probable matter to children, fooles, melancholike persons and papists.” 45 In the sixteenth century, to cousen (alternately, cousin, cosin, cosen, cossen, kosen, kosin, kussin, XXX 42

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the gullible for gain. Therefore, Teall’s distinction between being and doing, while technically valid, is ultimately inconsequential. By reducing witches’ powers to mere deception, Scot left no room for such a thing as a “real” witch, that is, one through whom the devil actually worked evil upon the defenseless. Scot’s critics certainly saw where his logic led. The publication of the Discoverie drew harsh criticism from many quarters. In 1590, Henry Holland complained “in this question of witchcraft, some have preferred the wicked folly of man before the holy wisdom of God.” To clarify his accusation, Holland inserted a marginal note that referred to Scot’s Discoverie so that everyone would know exactly who favored folly. 46 Another critic, King James I, who was rumored to have ordered the burning of all copies of the Discoverie, no doubt preferring either his own learned treatise on the matter, or that of the godly Master Perkins.47

WILLIAM PERKINS AND THE “DAMNED ART” William Perkins (1558–1602) was the most prominent puritan theologian of his day. He was born in the same year Elizabeth came to the throne, and by the time he arrived at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1577, the early struggles over vestments lay more than a decade in the past. As a preacher 46

coosen, coozen, cozen, etc.) meant to beguile, deceive, mislead, impose upon, gull, or hoax. As a noun, cousin had a broader meaning than the strict, modern “a son or daughter of one’s aunt or uncle,” and could refer to a variety of familial relationships or even intimate relationships that lacked consanguinity. The phrase to make a cousin of relies upon this more general meaning and links the nominal and the verbal forms of the word. To make a cousin meant to gain someone’s confidence, presumably for deleterious ends. Eventually, the phrase was shortened to the simple verbal form, to cousin, though often cozen in this context. (The precise etymological relation between cousin and cozen is disputed, with some suggesting that the latter term derives from the Italian cozzone, meaning horse trader and carrying a similar connotation of fraud. The OED favors the derivation of cozen from cousin.) Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “cousin.” The connotation of falsehood or deceit surrounding cousen gives a fuller context to Scot’s understanding of witches and witchcraft. His favorite term for witches, “mere cousenors,” supports the argument made here that Scot cannot be said to believe in witchcraft in a way comparable to his sixteenth-century interlocutors, this despite his own protestations to the contrary. 46 Henry Holland, A Treatise Against Witchcraft (Cambridge, 1590), A3r. 47 There is some question whether James actually ordered the burning of Scot’s work. There is no contemporary record that indicates as much, with the report only appearing in much later sources, e.g., Gisbert Voet, Selectarum Disputationum Theologicarum (Utrecht, 1659). For relevant excerpts, see the bibliographical note in The Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot: With an introduction by the Rev. Montague Summers ([London]: John Rodker, 1930). In any case, based on his Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), it is safe to assume that James had little use for Scot’s skepticism. Cf. Stuart Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship,” in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 156–81.

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and lecturer, Perkins excelled, and his writings helped him to become the first English Calvinist with a major international reputation.48 Perkins’s theological attentions often revolved around the question of grace, the nature of which had become the chief preoccupation among reformed theologians across Europe.49 The idea of the covenant of grace between God and the elect grounded Perkins’s theology and his teaching on witches. For Perkins, the covenant explained how God carried out the decree of election. God’s promise binds him to the elect and vice versa: God will save, and the elect must maintain their obedience in order to fulfill the contract. Of course, wrongly interpreted, the covenant could be seen as a departure from the fundamental Protestant idea of gratuitous salvation, but for Perkins, God provides for the elect both the means (works of obedience) and the end (salvation). In practice, however, it was difficult to discuss the covenant between God and humanity at length without some reference to mutuality. Perkins’s attention to witchcraft may also have been inspired by a youthful fascination with astrology, an art he later condemned upon his turn to the study of divinity. “I have long studied this art, and was never quiet until I had seen all the secrets of the same: but at length, it pleased God to lay before me, the profaneness of it, nay, I dare boldly say, idolatry, although it be covered with fair golden shows.”50 Perkins did not take up the subject of witchcraft in depth until sometime in the 1590s, when the national fascination with witches and witchcraft made it inevitable that the subject would arise in his sermons. From these sermons, his work A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft was compiled and published after his death.51 Gifford fretted over the devil’s subtlety and the common sort’s credulity: too much attention to the person of the witch threatened to obscure 48 The judgment of Patrick Collinson, who reckons Perkins “virtually the first puritan theologian in the systematic sense, if we exclude the young prodigy Dudley Fenner, who died in his twenties in 1587.” See Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 434. 49 On Perkins and grace, see Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1986), 129–73. 50 Quoted in The Work of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 7. 51 William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft so far forth as it is revealed in the scriptures and manifest by true experience, framed and delivered by Mr. William Perkins in his ordinary course of preaching and published by Thomas Pickering, Bachelor of Divinity, and minister of Finching Field in Essex (Cambridge, 1608, 1610). The following references are from the 1608 edition. As is always the case with posthumous publications, we must make allowance for the possibility of editorial interference or extrapolations. However, while I have no reason to believe Pickering was not faithful to Perkins’s attitudes, I am less interested in this question than in understanding A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft as one of the possible approaches to the problem of witchcraft.

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the greater spiritual threat. For Perkins, a witch’s compact with the devil represented a chief concern. The notion of a pact with the devil had appeared regularly in European discourses with which Perkins was no doubt familiar, but previous works by English authors had emphasized witches’ maleficia rather than scrutinize the precise nature of their agreement with the devil.Yet given Perkins’s interest in covenantal theology, it is not surprising that his condemnation of witchcraft was couched in such language. Practitioners of witchcraft, he argued, perverted the natural order established by God. Instead of entering into the covenant of grace with their creator, “a witch is a magician who, either by open or secret league, wittingly and willingly consenteth to use the aid and assistance of the devil in the working of wonders.” Self-love, pride, and curiosity were the main motivations. The volitional element formed the key part of Perkins’s definition, and it figured large in ascertaining the witch’s culpability and liability for punishment. “The very thing that maketh a witch to be a witch [is] the yielding of consent upon covenant.” Consent must be fully informed. As such, mad or ignorant persons whom the devil may employ are necessarily excluded from being classed as witches.52 Although Perkins began his discussion of witchcraft with allusions to the sovereign power of God, his detailed description of the devil’s power and workings in the world make it difficult for the reader to detect signs of God’s oversight. Instead, it is easier to imagine a dualistic cosmos wherein God and the devil regularly engage one another. Perkins’s framework for the devil and his minions mirrors the divine order. God is “sovereign lord and king over all his creatures…[and] he exerciseth also a special kingdom” made up of the elect on earth and the saints and angels in heaven. “In like manner, the devil hath a kingdom called in scripture the kingdom of darkness” wherein the Evil One works “effectually” in the hearts of men. God orders his kingdom by laws; so too, the devil. Practitioners of the “damned art” of witchcraft must observe the guidelines laid down by Satan for his apprentices. Perkins occasionally pauses along the way to remind the reader that “God restrained [the devil’s] power in the execution of his malicious purposes,” but the reminder seems secondary to his fuller description of the intricacies of diabolical power let loose in the world. 53 With such evil in the world, what are the godly to do? Gifford’s answer was to direct the common sort to the primary task of tending their souls. Daniel reluctantly admitted the need for prosecution of witches, but 52 53

Perkins, Damned Art, L4r–L5v. Perkins, Damned Art, A3r, C4r–C4v (emphasis added).

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the whole of his argument worked to lessen the incidence and severity. For Perkins, the elect must participate in the cosmic battle by actively seeking out, prosecuting, and punishing the servants of the devil. Despite Perkins’s belief that maleficia inflicted by witches might well represent the punishment or the trials of God upon the elect, he nevertheless supported capital punishment for those convicted of witchcraft. The law of Moses reserves capital punishment for those crimes that “tended directly to the dishonour of God.” Witches deserve death not for their maleficia but for their covenant with the devil, by which they cut themselves off from their “covenant made with [God] in baptism, from the communion of the saints, from the true worship and service of God.”54 Like Gifford, Perkins recognized that the charged environment surrounding witch accusations presented opportunities for abuse, and he carefully outlined the process whereby witches are properly accused, examined, and convicted. Unlike Gifford, however, whose restrictions on witch trials made prosecution difficult if not unlikely, Perkins’s guidelines gave credence to precisely the kinds of evidence Gifford’s Daniel had sought to avoid. Perkins required that the magistrate only proceed to formal examination of a suspect when he had special presumption, namely, the “common report of the greater sort of people” in the community, the testimony of a fellow witch, a suspicious correlation of a suspect’s curse or enmity and the death of the opposing party or “some other mischief,” evil associations (that is, a child, servant, or parent who has been convicted of witchcraft), the presence of the devil’s mark, or inconsistent testimony from the accused.55 Any of these reasons was sufficient to proceed to further examination. Valid forms of examination included simple questioning or questioning by torture if the subject proved particularly obstinate. 56 For Perkins, the devil’s ways were not so subtle as to be invisible. If many of the differences between Scot and Gifford may be attributed to their respective positions—one a country gentleman and the other a parish minister—then one might expect Gifford and Perkins—both preachers—to have more in common. But this is not the case. The contrast between Gifford and Perkins bears out the conclusion that here, as in other 54

Perkins, Damned Art, M3r, M4r–M4v. The “devil’s mark” could be any of a variety of bodily marks that were interpreted as evidence of a compact with the devil. From a theological perspective, marks were imagined to be an inversion of circumcision, the sign of the cross, or the holy stigmata. See Clark, Thinking with Demons, 84. 56 Perkins, Damned Art, N5r–N6v. In accepting the validity of confessions obtained by torture, Perkins followed European rather than English tradition, in which torture of suspects was not allowed. However, this prohibition was sometimes loosely enforced. See Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 213–18; and Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 123–24. 55

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areas, it is dangerous to generalize about “puritan” attitudes.57 Perhaps the prominence of Perkins as a puritan who enjoyed national and international acclaim encourages historians to view his support of witch trials as representative of puritans at large. But the testimony of Gifford offers an alternative set of puritan priorities, priorities that may well have stemmed from the distance between the university and the parish. Gifford had seen the practical effects that overzealous prosecution of witches had on his community. Certainly, the theodicean tensions that Perkins allowed to resolve into a kind of weak dualism are present in Gifford’s Dialogue as well. Samuel and the schoolmaster both searched for a reason evil seems to have its way in the world.Yet, whereas Perkins created for his readers clear enemies in the form of the devil and his evil minions (both spiritual and physical), Gifford resisted dualistic language. In its stead, he directed readers to contemplation of their own sin and the judgment of God. The message was not the one Samuel wanted to hear; perhaps that assured Gifford of its truth.

PASTORING SAMUEL(S) In the Dialogue, one finds Gifford hard at work at his lifelong goal of educating the common sort of Christian. How could people who seemed willing to accept whatever religion was thrust upon them be transformed into the godly flock every puritan pastor desired? Gifford thought belief in the power and danger of witches represented a misdirected form of zeal, so he sought to capture that spiritual energy and channel it in ways he thought more appropriate. Understanding Gifford’s attitudes toward witchcraft requires reading them in the context in which he formed them: as a parish preacher who occasionally inserted himself into regional or national debates when he believed they had direct relevance for his task as a minister. Many of his treatises on other subjects begin with his stated desire to make the matter plain and accessible for the common sort. For instance, in his anti-Catholic treatises, he argued that the average layperson should be able to defend the legitimacy of the Church of England against the papists.58 In his antiseparatist treatises, he fretted about how schism might affect the dedication of the average person to the church.59 In Countrie Divinitie, Gifford described and critiqued the religious attitudes he perceived among the common sort 57 Despite his review of the evidence of Gifford, Teall identifies Perkins’s judgment that witches must be put to death as “characteristically Puritan.” Teall, “Witchcraft and Calvinism,” 30. 58 Gifford, Papist and Protestant, “Epistle Dedicatorie.” 59 Gifford, Plaine Declaration, A3r.

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while simultaneously seeking to make the reformed religion intelligible and rational to the same. Likewise, in the dedication to his witchcraft dialogue, Gifford claimed to write “least the ignoranter sort should be carried awry and seduced more and more” by the sleights and subtle practices of the devil.60 In Gifford’s view, exposing the devil’s subtlety empowered the common sort by allowing them to see past the devil’s tricks and concentrate on the true spiritual threat at hand. More broadly, Gifford’s Dialogue helps illustrate the internalizing tendencies of Protestant piety. Since many of the popular religious practices and rituals that previously had helped ease the anxieties associated with day-to-day living no longer had a place in the new religion, what did puritans and other reformers offer in their stead? Gifford’s godly protagonist Daniel constantly redirected his listeners’ attention from the physical tricks and torments of the devil to his spiritual wiles. The devil’s true playground was not the barnyard but the soul, and there the truly penitent must turn to work out their salvation. In recommending such introspection, Daniel takes his place among of the litany of late Elizabethan puritan voices urging the godly to focus upon the inward struggles, finding grim comfort not so much in the resolution as in the struggle itself.61 In the present effort to locate Gifford among his contemporaries, little is heard from him concerning women and witchcraft. For some modern interpreters, gender is the key category historians should use in examining the phenomenon of early modern witch hunts. 62 From this perspective, one might argue that Gifford’s teaching on witchcraft and his rejection of the logic of witch trials represented a moderating influence on a subject that was ripe with potential for misogyny. One only need turn to the most famous of the late medieval witchcraft inquisitorial manuals, the Malleus Maleficarum, for example, or a bit closer to home for Gifford and England, Perkins’s comments about women’s susceptibility to the devil.63 Gifford’s moderation, then, seems to stand out for commendation 60

Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, A2r. On this “wretched” state, see Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama, 41–92. 62 For example, see Anne Llewellyn Barstow, “Violence and Memory: The Politics of Denial,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68/3 (September 2000): 591–602. Barstow castigates witchcraft historian Robin Briggs for “looking the other way” by failing to report in detailed fashion on the varieties of torture that took place during witch examinations and trials. Since this torture was nearly always perpetrated by male examiners on female victims and often had a “sexual angle,” Barstow concludes that “it is when we include these acts that we realize that witch-hunting was woman hunting” (596). 63 Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum (Cologne, 1486); and Perkins, Damned Art, L4v–L5r. 61

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among such attitudes. Yet leaving aside whether it is the job of historians to commend, ascribing social progressivism to Gifford is misplaced. 64 His concern was not the social position of women in his world but the spiritual condition of the people, both male and female, who feared the power and evil they believed witches represented. The fact that Gifford’s own treatises on witchcraft contain little explicit comment on the position of women may well mean he accepted the commonly held notions about women’s greater vulnerability to the devil’s enticements. Alternately, his silence may reflect his subtle revision of what he perceived as the excesses of his day. In either case, the question was not his central concern. Finally, Gifford established standards of evidence for witch prosecutions so stringent as to make a conviction well-nigh to impossible. Should he then take his place on the road to modernity as one of the voices expressing skepticism about the rationality of witch belief altogether? One nineteenthcentury editor of Gifford’s Dialogue certainly thought so. He lauded Gifford “for the good sense with which the writer treats a subject on which so many people ran mad” and compared Gifford’s work to that of James I, whose Daemonologie was “as much distinguished by bigoted ignorance as the present is by enlightened views.”65 One should not ignore the editor’s choice of words when he found in Gifford an “enlightened” attitude toward witchcraft. Yet despite the kinship felt for Gifford by this nineteenth-century editor, Gifford was no precursor of Enlightenment rationality. In the centuries following Gifford, there was a growing tendency to reject the intersection of the supernatural and the natural worlds, or in some cases deny the supernatural altogether. Nothing could be further from Gifford’s position. It is an intriguing coincidence of intellectual history that the effects of his providential understanding of the world, in which God was very much active and in control of all aspects of life, would, on the subject of witches, lead to a conclusion similar to those that denied any divine intervention in the world. In both cases, tolerance was the result, but the intellectual gulf dividing the two could hardly be wider. No witch trials took place in Maldon during the 1580s, this despite a surge in indictments for witchcraft that occurred elsewhere in Essex during precisely this period.66 Perhaps the teachings of the godly Master 64 For an example of a measured commendation of Gifford’s attitude toward witches (though without reference to the issue of gender), see Fiske, “The Saneness of George Giffard,” 210–31. Fiske sees in Gifford’s Dialogue “the action of a strong and humane intellect which, clogged by many a superstition, nevertheless worked itself logically out into an attitude which, had it prevailed universally, would have meant for the so-called witches, cessation of all active persecution” (210). 65 Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, ed. T. Wright, vii, viii. 66 Macfarlane, “Tudor Anthropologist,” 144.

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Gifford had some effect. Yet the old beliefs died slowly. In 1591 and again in 1592, one Margaret Wiseman of Maldon found herself accused of using “the wicked art of witchcraft, sorcery and charming, to the great offence and terror of many.” In the course of the proceedings, town magistrates sought out six women of good standing in the borough to serve as her compurgators in the archdeaconry court.67 Based on his analysis of borough records surrounding other conflicts in Maldon, Petchey identified these women as supporters of Gifford. Unfortunately, no records exist to give the outcome of this case, either at the local or county level. Perhaps Gifford’s supporters succeeded in their defense, the case did not progress, and Margaret took the advice of the magistrates “to live Christianly, honestly and orderly, and to behave herself.”68 Gifford, no doubt, would have been pleased.

67 A compurgator was a person who vouched for the innocence or truthfulness of another in a legal proceeding. 68 Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 173.

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Creating Godliness One of the principall ends and uses of preaching is to give men warning that they doe not deceive themselves with every kind of faith or joy in the word: but to looke for good and sound triall in themselves: which is not the way to bring men to dispaire, but to bring them to true godlinesse: to cause them to shake of[f] securitie and loosenesse in the service of God: to beware least their heartes be hard still within: it causeth men to try themselves least they shuld be deceived by a vaine shadow of a dead and fruitlesse faith.1

T

Thus far, this study of Gifford’s ministry has concentrated on the ways he processed and repackaged problems of national concern—church polity, Catholicism, separatism, witchcraft—in the context of the local parish. Gifford consistently approached such issues from a pastoral perspective, with the idea that addressing the spiritual needs of the “common sort” of Christian should be the primary focus of any true minister in the English church. Excursus into the finer points of theology or into political squabbles, he suggested, should not preempt the basic pastoral responsibility to educate the parishioners entrusted to one’s care. In turning from a focus on Gifford’s involvement in the issues of his day to the core duties of his pastoral ministry—teaching and preaching— one might expect to encounter an even fuller and more forceful statement of his concern for the common sort. In fact, the theme rarely surfaces in a straightforward way in his sermons. However, the lack of an explicit common-sort motif in Gifford’s preaching does not necessarily point to an inconsistency with his approach in the rest of his pastoral work and writings. Godly education and preaching served as the foundation of Gifford’s ministry as he sought to carry the ideas and ideals of reformed Protestantism to an indifferent laity. In Gifford’s opinion, there was no need to demonstrate the relevance of preaching for the common sort. Preaching was 1

Gifford, Sower, B3v.

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the most practical part of Gifford’s practical divinity, the cornerstone of godly learning. And godly learning was the chief antidote to the church’s ills, a claim puritans never tired of repeating. Thus, at the outset of his ministry Gifford had lamented to Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, that the “want of a sincere ministerie of the woorde” had resulted in a “flood of ignorance and darknes overflowing the most part of the land.” 2 In his view of this chief failing of the Church of England, Gifford stood shoulder to shoulder with fellow godly ministers. Other puritan complaints pale in comparison to the incessant demand for a renewed preaching ministry in the Elizabethan church. During the 1580s, puritans mounted a massive effort to survey the state of the ministry in the Church of England toward the end of demonstrating the lack of qualified ministers, which to their minds meant university-educated, resident, preaching clergymen.3 The failure in the church’s preaching ministry, puritans proclaimed to any who would listen, had resulted in generations of spiritually ignorant laity, and the spiritually ignorant were the devil’s playground. In this context, frequent attendance at sermons became something of a godly pastime, and attempts to increase the frequency of sermons in any and all available venues—be it pulpits, lecture desks, or marketplaces—a consistent puritan platform. So it was that Collinson concluded that “any attempt to decipher and characterise puritanism as a culture must begin, and probably end, with the sermon and its various concomitants.” This study of Gifford’s ministry began with an examination of Gifford’s demand for more preachers to carry the puritan gospel throughout the “Lords orchard” that was England. It concludes with a consideration of the contents of that gospel, and how Gifford attempted to communicate it to a people “who care[d] not what religion came” to them.4 From Gifford’s perspective, the common sort may have shown little interest in choosing from among the varieties of religious options available to them, but his writings and sermons show that these “men indifferent” became decidedly less so when presented with some of the more distinctive doctrines of reformed Protestantism. As seen in the discussion of witchcraft, strong declarations of God’s providential control over the affairs of the world provoked questions about the presence of evil. Similar doubts were expressed when, in his catechism and sermons, Gifford addressed issues of God’s control over matters of salvation: If God alone chose the elect and the 2

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, 3r. Portions of the survey are printed in Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, 2:88–174. See also the discussion in Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 271–72. 4 Collinson, “Puritanism as Popular Religious Culture,” 47; and Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, 2v, 3v. 3

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reprobate, wherein lay human responsibility? Why strive after good works if they did not affect faith? With no control over his own fate, how could a person avoid despair and anguish over his final destiny? The attention Gifford dedicated to teaching and preaching on these questions shows that the tenets of reformed Protestantism did not come easily to the common sort. But this difficulty itself held a truth for the godly: while many heard the call of God, few responded.

TEACHING JUDGMENT TO THE “MANYE” Although not as rhetorically glamorous as preaching, catechizing grew in popularity and influence during the sixteenth century. Ian Green has demonstrated recently the crucial role catechizing played in the Church of England as a tool ministers employed to instill Protestant doctrines in the minds of their parishioners. Thorough catechetical training prepared the mind of the hearer to receive the sermon. Like dutiful farmers, godly pastors were especially concerned with preparing the soil so that the seed of the gospel might take root. Green argued the sheer number of catechisms circulating in early modern England attests to their importance. Not only did the most popular catechisms pass through dozens of editions, but the final decades of Elizabeth’s reign saw something of an explosion in the number of different catechisms that were published. Green’s estimates (based on a rather conservative methodology) show a gradual rise in the number of new catechisms or catechetical works published in English during the sixteenth century: eight in the 1530s, twelve in the 1540s and again in the 1550s, twenty in the 1560s, thirty-seven in the 1570s, sixtyeight in the 1580s, and finally dropping to forty in the 1590s. To these figures must be added reprints of many catechisms—some of the most popular went through dozens of editions and printings—as well as works that do not appear in official registers of works printed, due either to their nonconformity or simply to the vagaries of early modern record keeping. In the end, Green hazards the guess that a million or more catechisms may have circulated at any given time during the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a staggering figure when considered in relation to an estimated English population of around five million.5 The proliferation of catechisms in the Elizabethan period was certainly no secret to Gifford and his contemporaries. Gifford felt obliged to preface 5 Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 45–68.

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his catechism, published in 1583, with an apologetic note to the reader: “I know right well, that manye men of good judgement in the trueth are of this minde, that they would have but one, or as few catechismes as might be: and in as briefe and fewe wordes, as with any light the necessary poyntes of doctrine may be comprised. Wherefore I cannot escape some blame, not only for setting forth this of mine after so many: but also for [it] being so large.” The reasons Gifford offered for writing his own catechism are in keeping with his interests in addressing the mechanics of parish ministry, as well as his continuing criticism of the English church. First, he suggested the church consisted of “divers sortes of men,” and experience had shown him that not all learn in the same way or are at the same level of understanding. Rote memorization of simple precepts may have been satisfactory for infants in the faith, but godly living demanded more. Puritans frequently criticized the short catechism included in the prayer book for use prior to confirmation. The bar was too low. Gifford likely had this catechism and its rote application in mind when he claimed that “if to rest in the wordes or sentences, when a man can repeate them, were so sure a way, as to search into the matter it selfe, which is better, and with more judgement attained unto by manye, then by one: I should also thinke it best.” 6 The judgment of the many versus the judgment of the one—Gifford thought a successful catechetical ministry should not simply ensure that parishioners were able to parrot the correct answers as supplied by their more learned ministers. Instead, he hoped to build in his listeners the ability to “search into the matter it selfe” and to make judgments, a necessary part of the godly living in an ungodly world and a polluted church. Only then would they be able to set forth the tenets of the reformed faith to their neighbors, to articulate the errors of both the papists and the separatists, and to correct the superstitious habits of thought that undergirded much of what passed for common wisdom. The desire to promote a practical, godly mind-set in his parishioners is manifest both in Gifford’s preaching, which tended to the pragmatic and logical, rather than the rhetorically grandiose or emotive, as well as his catechism, which has a disputatious tone more akin to his dialogues than to the traditional didactic catechism of the prayer book. Something of the difference may be seen in the way each handles the doctrine of the Trinity. In the prayer book catechism, the respondent states in straightforward terms: “First, I learn to believe in God the Father, who hath made me and all the world. Secondly, in God the Son, who hath redeemed me and all mankind. Thirdly, in God 6

Gifford, Catechisme, 2r–v.

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the Holy Ghost, who sanctifieth men and all the elect people of God.” 7 On the other hand, Gifford introduced the concept by allowing Q to offer up typical, commonsensical objections in a rapid-fire manner: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q:

Yee do acknowledge God the father, God the sonne, and God the holie Ghost. Are there more then one God? Holy Scripture doth teach that there is but one God. Wherefore do yee then acknowledge three? I doe acknowledge three persons in the Godhead and every person to be God, and yet but one God. Doth the word teach that Christ is God? It doth in sundrie place most plainlye affirme that Jesus Christ is God. How can ye prove that the holy Ghost is God: seeing the Scriptures doe not so manifestly name him God. Although the Scriptures doe not so manifestly speake as to say the holy ghost is God.… There is but one God, and every one of these is that one God. Doe ye affirme then that the Father is the sonne, or the sonne the holy Ghost?8

The prayer book catechism offered a simple and perfectly orthodox statement of the doctrine, but in his catechism Gifford was more interested in promoting godly overachievement. But did Gifford believe he could create a godly army of Zeloteses and Daniels to march through the Essex countryside wielding the indisputable logic of the Protestant gospel? From his optimistic remark that judgment might be “attained unto by manye,” one might reasonably conclude his targeted audience for the Catechisme to be a broad if not all-inclusive one, yet the facts suggest a more selective group. Given its length of 171 pages, as well as the bevy of complex doctrinal questions it addresses, Gifford’s Catechisme was more suitable for adults than for children, and for private or semiprivate than for public use. Gifford may have written his catechism by expounding upon the general catechetical lessons he offered at All Saints in Maldon. This would have offered the literate godly one more avenue for distinguishing themselves through further study. Yet even as Gifford offered his catechism to the reading public, he acknowledged that not everyone 7 8

Booty, The Book of Common Prayer 1559, 284. Gifford, Catechisme, A2r–v.

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would be inclined to study so diligently. “I crave no more but this of him whom it cannot further,” he implored, “that hee will give it gentle passage to such as it is sent.” Perhaps here is another example of the disparity between the puritan reach and grasp, between the ideal and the real. Godly ministers spoke of a church in which every member sought to live a devout life and study the scriptures, but they worked in parishes comprised of the zealous and the indifferent. The distinction was a key element of puritan identity, and a source of both comfort and frustration for godly ministers. Of his Catechisme—and perhaps by extension, his ministry—Gifford seemed resigned “if not to profit all, yet to be a furtherance unto some.”9 Be it for some or for many, the Catechisme carries the same give-andtake style that marks Gifford’s other dialogues. As Dewey Wallace observed, Q[uestion] and A[nswer] come across at numerous points as real characters, rather than labels of didactic convenience.10 The Catechisme begins with a common theme of Gifford’s writings, seen for instance throughout his dialogue on witchcraft: in the temporal world appearances were often deceiving, but the wise person acted in light of spiritual truths. Conversely, when people busied about with worldly affairs, they ignored the eternal at their own peril. Or as Q so conveniently put it to A: “Ought not the care and diligence then for thinges eternall, to be doubled and multiplied so farre above the care for thinges temporall?” To this A easily snorted in reply “I holde him a very sotte which will denie the point.” As in the case of Gifford’s earlier works, the appeal was to good judgment and common sense, common sense, that is, in possession of all the relevant information. If people could be made to see that God, not the witch, was in control, then they would fear God more and the witch less. Similarly, if a person realized that damnation was worse than poverty, and heaven better than riches, then he would order his priorities accordingly. The basis of A’s argument was to place spiritual self-interest ahead of economic self-interest, a rational call to active management of one’s own fate.11 Not all of Q’s inquiries were as easily addressed as his opening question. Throughout the Catechisme, Q did not hesitate to bring up the thornier issues of the faith, more often than not with the half-incredulous tone that so animated the character of Atheos in Countrie Divinitie, written only two years earlier. For example, the problem of evil was especially vexing for reformed Protestants due to the great emphasis on the thoroughgoing sovereignty of God. Thus Q: “If ye take it that this providence of God 9

Gifford, Catechisme, 2v. Wallace, “George Gifford,” 32. 11 Gifford, Catechisme, A1r. 10

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should extend itself so far as unto all motions and actions whatsoever, then what saie yee to al the evil and wicked deeds which are wrought by the devils and by wicked men: is there any further providence of God then a sufferance?” A stated that nothing is done against the will of God, to which Q responded that this seemed to make God the author of evil. This was a common charge levied by opponents of the strong Calvinist emphasis on God’s sovereignty. Notably, it drew its ostensible strength from logic, something Gifford elsewhere used to his favor. In this case, however, he avoided logic and spent much time showing biblical precedents wherein God uses humans’ evil acts to accomplish his will. Q did not find the evidence convincing, however, maintaining that “al the doubt is not yet taken away” since A’s answer left the impression that God had a double will, one secret and one revealed. A concluded by reflecting on the mystery of God and the weakness of human understanding, and Q moved the conversation to another topic.12 By playing the devil’s advocate, Q forced detailed discussion on other theological points of significance to zealous Protestants. Concerning the true church, Q voiced the question that likely crossed the mind of every Protestant who had ever debated with a Catholic: “By what reason can ye shewe wee bee of the true Catholyque Church, for they call us Heretiques?” Elsewhere, A asserted that one could be sure of the forgiveness of sins, and Q quickly concluded, “Yee speake of a matter which seemeth to bee farre beyonde a mannes reache, for to hope that his sinnes are forgiven he maye: but to knowe it for certainetie, that seemeth unpossible.” Q even went so far as to point out the practical problems with the notion of resurrected bodies (those who died many years ago would be dust, while others have been “eaten and devoured by foules, and some by fishes, and their fleshe caryed who can tell whether”).13 The doctrine of election occupied a central place in Gifford’s preaching. In his sermons, he generally spent more time on practical questions surrounding election—for example, how can one determine the status of his salvation?—than theoretical concerns, such as the fairness of God’s judgments. Sermons were an opportunity to educate his godly listeners on the process by which they could discern the virtues of faith in their lives and so gain some measure of assurance. However, while assurance of salvation was of paramount concern for those who accepted the doctrine of election, Gifford’s portrait of the common sort indicates that the Atheoses of the 12 13

Gifford, Catechisme, A5v–A7v. Gifford, Catechisme, C6v, D2v–D3r, D4r.

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world had a more fundamental concern, and the demand on the godly to evangelize meant that these pastoral concerns must also be considered. So it was that in the Catechisme, a discussion of God’s condemnation of the reprobate provoked the lengthiest outburst from Q in the entire work: Yee confesse that those whome God leaveth unto themselves, have no power at all, to performe any part of the law. The law being spirituall, and they carnall, altogether fold under sin. How can they then be justly condemned unto eternal fier? Shal they be cast away for breaking those lawes, which they were not able to keepe? If the prince should commaund a subject under paine of death to doe a thing unpossible, as to remove a mountaine: and then put him to execution for not doing the same: who would not say this were extreeme tyrannie? It is as possible for a man to remove a mountain, as to keepe the law. And yet God doth damne him both bodie and soule for breaking it.14

A glibly replied that the “answere unto this is easie” and proceeded to outline how the sin of humanity’s first parents tainted all. But this did little to quell Q’s uneasiness: “Our first parents in whom we were created and with whose flesh we are cloathed did loose all, we cannot doe with it. We be uncleane before we are borne and are cast into a necessitie of sinning: and so it may seeme still great rigour to condemne where there is a necessitie of transgression?”15 Again the matter fell short of definitive resolution. A offered a short answer, and another topic was taken up. The discussion of the fairness of God’s election is representative of many places in Gifford’s Catechisme where there is a less-than-definitive conclusion to the conversation. That is not to say that Gifford—as heard in the responses of A—equivocated on any point of doctrine. To the contrary, A remained a resolute spokesman for reformed Protestantism. What is less certain, however, is whether Q was convinced. Mirroring the homespun wisdom of Atheos in Countrie Divinitie or Samuel in A Dialogue on Witches and Witchcraftes, Q raised hard questions and accepted no easy answers. The tension that marks Gifford’s Catechisme distinguishes it from earlier works such as Calvin’s Genevan Catechism, in which a Master and Student engaged in an exchange that read more like an examination and less like a debate, or the short prayer book catechism, with its more perfunctory tone.16 14

Gifford, Catechisme, E3r. Gifford, Catechisme, E3r. 16 Calvin’s early catechisms followed a treatise form. See Calvin’s First Catechism, ed. John Hesselink (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), which includes commentary and the entire text of the 1538 edition. The later edition used regularly by the Genevan church is found in John Calvin, The Catechism of the Church of Geneva, trans. Elijah Waterman (Hartford, CT: Sheldon & Goodwin, 1815). 15

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Perhaps Q’s stubbornness reflected Gifford’s early experience with catechizing rural parishioners. Just a few years out of Cambridge, his eagerness to bring the puritan gospel to the parishes of England may have been squelched by the indifference he encountered in his flock. But taken in light of Gifford’s target audience for the Catechisme, it is more likely that Gifford intended the stubbornness of Q to highlight for the godly learner—“to such as it is sent”—the spiritual ignorance of the common sort, and so serve as an example of what not to be. The godly must remain resolute in a polluted church, wherein the remnants of Catholicism posed stumbling blocks at every turn.

FAITH, WORKS, AND THE GODLY LIFE A Dialogue between a Papist and Protestant shows how Gifford turned the debate regarding the threat of Catholicism away from politics and complex theological issues toward questions of more relevance for parish ministry. Rather than tarry over the intricacies of scripture versus tradition, Gifford’s Protestant argued for the right—indeed the responsibility—of the common sort to read the Bible for themselves. When it came to the question of what, or more properly who, constituted the true church, the Protestant supported the Church of England against Rome but in the same breath allowed the Papist’s point that many English clergy failed to model godly lives for their parishioners. Gifford’s interest throughout the dialogue was to provide the common sort with a straightforward defense against their recusant neighbors while simultaneously pointing out places where the English church was still burdened by the baggage of its Catholic past. 17 Gifford’s attempt to address the practical questions raised by lingering Catholic beliefs was not confined to his dialogue treatises. In the same year that A Dialogue between a Papist and Protestant appeared, Gifford published a sermon on the second chapter of James, “the principall pillar which the papists do leane unto, and the chiefe place of Scripture which they doe perverte and abuse, to proove and establish justification by workes and the merits of men and to overthrow the free justification we have in our Lord Jesus Christ through faith.”18 Disagreements over the respective roles of faith and works in the economy of salvation had been fodder for debate throughout the sixteenth century, both between Catholics and Protestants, and within Catholic and Protestant confessions as well.19 In 1520, Martin 17

See chapter 3. Gifford, James, B1r. 19 See, for example, Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the 18

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Luther proclaimed his firm belief that “a Christian man is free from all things and over all things so that he needs no works to make him righteous and to save him, since faith alone confers all these things abundantly.” Nearly three decades later, the fathers of the Council of Trent passed judgment on the upstart monk and other Protestants when they concluded “if any one says that by faith alone the impious is justified in such wise as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification, and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will, let him be anathema.”20 Between these two poles lay ample room for theological nuance and emphasis by university theologians and parish preachers who continued to refine and extend the debate over the precise relation of faith and works. In England, puritans especially struggled to formulate a practical doctrine of works that was theologically compatible with their strong emphasis on predestination.21 In his sermon on the second chapter of James, Gifford began by offering a basic Protestant explanation of how James’s teaching—“faith without works is dead”—did not contradict the doctrine of justification by faith as set forth in the writings of Paul. Paul and James were not at odds on faith and works, Gifford argued; they simply approached the question from different sides and wrote with different audiences in mind. Paul addressed those who sought to be justified, in part, by their own deeds, whereas James offered a warning to those who were quick to claim God’s justification but ignored sanctification. James sought “to shewe that all ungodly and carnall professours of Christ have but a dead faith which in no respecte is able for to helpe or save them.” Such a dead faith, Gifford concluded, was not really faith at all. Conversely, good works inevitably resulted from true faith and so also accompanied it.22 20

Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), wherein Fenlon showed Pole’s affinity for Luther’s doctrine of justification; and Stephen Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), who argued that Calvin “re-Catholicized Protestant theology at its most sensitive point, the doctrine of justification by faith,” by emphasizing the correlation of good works and election (374). 20 Martin Luther, A Treatise on Christian Liberty, trans. W. A. Lambert, in Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1947), 265; and The Council of Trent, Session Six, Canon Nine, in Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom (1919; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996 ), 2:112. 21 Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 29–111; and Peter Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635,” Past and Present 114 (February 1987 ): 32–76. 22 Gifford, James, B2r–B3v; quote at B2v. Gifford referred to Paul’s discussion of Abraham in Romans 4:1–3: “What shall we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh, hath XXXX

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After addressing the fundamental theological question raised by the passage, Gifford shifted his attention to the pastoral implications of the relation between faith and works. The teaching of justification by faith alone was easy enough to explain to parishioners—easier, say, than predestination—but how was a pastor to encourage the kind of morality that so preoccupied puritans? What responsibility did the godly have regarding good works? What did one owe God? one’s neighbor? For Gifford, the Catholic understanding of works presented a pastoral problem, for if a person believed that what he did contributed to his salvation, the sin of pride no doubt lurked at the door. On the other hand, to discount totally the value of works also presented a problem for pastors, since then the laity were not motivated to improve their moral lives. Or as the Papist put it to the Protestant: “Yee teache all loosenesse and licentious libertie to the fleshe…yee denie the merites of good workes, yee teache that men are justified by faith…and so by this meanes the people are brought to have no care of good workes but to live as they lust.”23 Gifford’s answer to this dilemma consisted of two main points regarding the function of good works, and each corresponds with his attention to the needs of the common sort as well as his puritan dissatisfaction with the status quo of the English church. First, Gifford suggested, the teaching of James concerning faith and works helped level the playing field between the simple and learned (or, more properly, the pseudolearned). Second, works in the life of the Christian—as a consequence, not a cause of faith— became in the hands of the godly an evangelical and world-changing tool that often worked to disrupt a community rather than to order it. To begin with, Gifford observed, James “sheweth heere how every simple man which is a true Christian may be able to deale against the greatest and moste skilfull Doctour that is, to proove that he hath no faith if he hath not good workes.” Here Gifford had in mind those who claimed that faith was a private matter. When challenged publicly with their sins, they defended themselves by asking “Will you take uppon you to see what is in my heart?” In Countrie Divinitie, Atheos was likewise suspicious of the invasive pastoring that Zelotes seemed to favor. Instead, he preferred ministers like his hometown curate, who resolved rather than provoked confrontations, encouraged friendliness, and generally avoided bothersome meddling: “I thynke it a Godlye waye,” he observed, “to make Charitie: hee is 23

found? For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God. For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.” 23 Gifford, Papist and Protestant, D8r–v.

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none of these busie Controulers: for if hee were, hee could not be so well liked of some.”24 And a well-liked minister was a successful minister. Gifford, however, was suspicious of popularity and did not mind the role of “busie controuler.” To the contrary, he viewed controversy as a mark that the godly were doing their job. By this standard, he must have judged his turbulent ministry in Maldon a success, since contemporary records testify repeatedly to the split in the town: Gifford’s supporters at one point argued to London Bishop John Aylmer that false charges against Gifford had been leveled by “prophane and wicked” sorts in the town who hoped to discredit his ministry, and even a less partisan bystander spoke readily of the “schisme” and “dangerouse factions here amonge us.”25 But dissension was often a necessary evil, a fact of godly life in a church in need of repair. “There is no more excellent note of faith and of the true feare and love of God,” Gifford preached, “then when a man is greeved, and mourneth to see men out of the way to life, running headlong in their sinnes unto destruction, and when as he dooth in love and pitie admonish them, and seeke by instruction to drawe them out of the snares of the Divell.”26 In another sermon on the virtues that accompany faith, Gifford reflected on the duty of the godly to their neighbors, distinguishing between the virtues of brotherly kindness and love as outlined in the Second Epistle of Peter. “We may take this difference either that the first of these doth expresse what wee owe towards the Godly, who be chiefly called the brethren, and the latter what we owe unto all, both good and bad: or els the former, doth signifie the inwarde affection of love, and the latter, the outward practise of the same.” Gifford found in other New Testament writings some evidence to support the first interpretation, that is, that the godly owe a special duty to their own. Yet here he rejected this interpretation in favor of the latter. Many thought they had fulfilled the command to love when they could say “I hurt no man, nor I meane no hurt to any,” a sentiment similar to Atheos’s claim in Countrie Divinitie that he was as good as any in the country. However, Gifford claimed the demands of the virtues of faith pushed one further, beyond an ethic of noninterference—“do no harm”—to actively seeking the spiritual good of all persons, good or bad, godly or ungodly.27

24

Gifford, James, B5r–v; and idem, Countrie Divinitie, A2r–v. See chapter 2 for discussion of Gifford’s controversy-filled ministry in Maldon. Quotes from British Library Lansdowne MS 68.48; and Westminster Abbey Muniments 8125. 26 Gifford, James, D6r. 27 Gifford, Vertues of Faith (London 1582), D5v–D6r; and idem, Countrie Divinitie, B4r. 25

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Gifford preached these sermons nearly a decade before his public clashes with the separatists, but the foundations for his idea of the inherently public duty of the godly, the duty to press their reforms upon society rather than withdraw from it, were already firmly in place. “If then we wil love the brethren, heere is the touchstone, by which we may prove our love, that wee spare not for any labour or cost, nor yet waxe weery: because love is not like one that is lazie and luskish, loytring at home within a mans brest, but steppeth abrod and is verie diligent.” For Gifford, that diligent love could only be expressed when the definition of “brethren” was expanded to include those who didn’t necessarily want to join.28 In preaching on the relation between faith and works, Gifford shifted the locus of discussion from the standard Catholic/Protestant theological debate towards the practical responsibility of the godly to their communities. Gifford’s frequent admonitions to promote public piety might seem to support the argument made by many that puritan ministers were simply pawns in the hands of upwardly mobile local elites bent on establishing strong social control in their communities.29 However, in the sermon on James, whereas Gifford argued that it was incumbent upon all the godly to be confrontational in rooting out sin, he repeatedly noted that the linkage between faith and works—“[faith] can be no more without good deeds then fire can be without heate”—provided the ammunition so that even the lowly and uneducated in the community might be able to judge and challenge those who rested in the security of high social or vocational status. In this case, Gifford’s attitude toward common wisdom was supportive, a stance similar to his anti-Catholic writings and unlike his witchcraft treatises. Common wisdom misled the simple when they sought to unravel the mysteries of the Providence of God, but it proved a remarkably useful tool to expose the arrogance of man. At times, it appeared, simplicity could be a virtue.30

GODLY VIRTUE, BRAIN BEATING, AND THE ASSURANCE OF SALVATION For many Protestants, discussion of Christian virtues held dangers akin to the issue of faith and works. Too much stress on human inability to cultivate virtuous lives led either to despair or indifference. On the other hand, 28

Gifford, Vertues of Faith, D6v. See chapter 1. 30 Gifford, James, B6r. 29

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too much confidence threatened to produce a prideful self-reliance. Yet godliness and virtue must go hand in hand, Gifford suggested, and “we are to take great heede that wee doe not sever or sunder those thinges which the Lorde himself hath so neerely coupled and linked together.” Most important, diligent attention to this divine coupling of faith and virtue offered a practical answer to a peculiarly Protestant problem: assurance of salvation.31 Assurance of salvation—“the great pearl of Reformed piety”—preoccupied many Elizabethan divines who, like Gifford, were intent on carrying reformed doctrines to the parishes of England. For earlier generations of Protestants, faith and assurance of salvation were inseparable, but later Protestants, especially those in the Calvinist tradition, began to separate the two. Behind this theological realignment lay at least two practical problems. First, Calvin had looked to the doctrines of election and perseverance as a comfort: Christians could rest secure in the knowledge that God has committed the salvation of the elect to Christ, and Christ has “freed us from anxiety” regarding the future. Of course, objective certainty concerning the salvation of all the elect was one thing; subjective certainty that one was numbered among the elect could be, for some apparently more than others, entirely another. In many cases, the doctrine of predestination inspired unrelenting fear rather than comfort in the faithful. How then should a pastor reassure those who led godly lives but lacked the comforting belief in their own salvation? If faith and assurance went hand in hand, what did the lack of assurance say about one’s faith?32 At the opposite end of the spectrum lay another pastoral problem, one less prevalent among the godly, but of similar concern to Gifford: those who presumed upon the grace of God and claimed what amounted to a superabundance of assurance. When Gifford preached Foure sermons upon the seven chiefe vertues or principall effectes of faith, and the doctrine of election: wherein everie man may learne, whether he be Gods childe or no, he recalled seeing too “many carnall professors and beastly abusers of christianity which doe seem very willingly and gladly to imbrace the promises of the Gospell…and yet they looke nothing at al to this godliness and vertue.”33 If zealous pastors confronted the spiritually lazy with their sin, Gifford observed, their indolent 31

Gifford, Vertues of Faith, A6v. On “the great pearl” of assurance, see the very useful discussion in Michael P. Winship, “Weak Christians, Backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers: Assurance of Salvation and the Pastoral Origins of Puritan Practical Divinity in the 1580s,” Church History 70/3 (September 2001): 462–81, quote at 462. Calvin’s comment from Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 2:972 (bk. 3, chap. 24, para. 6). 33 Gifford, Vertues of Faith, A6v. 32

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parishioners lamented that “all men are not alike godlye, everie man cannot doe as you doe.” At the same time, however, “their own heart and conscience doeth tell every [one] of them the contrary, saying, thou are carelesse and negligent, though hast as much as thou desirest: for God doth increase all gifts and graces in those which use all diligence in seeking after him.” Whereas salvation and faith remained entirely the product of grace, Gifford implied that assurance came as the result of discernment on the part of the elect. “Let us learne therefore, brethren, to put in practise all those things which are heere taught, to give greater diligence, and so beate our braine more earnestly about heavenly thinges.”34 As a spiritual exercise, brain beating certainly connoted active participation by the godly, but not necessarily in the form of extended introspection favored by many Elizabethan “curers of afflicted consciences.” Richard Greenham maintained that fear itself could be a source of assurance in that it alerted the godly to their distress over their condition. Tools Greenham regularly recommended to soothe afflicted consciences included scripture reading, prayer, meditation, frequent association with the godly, and care of the physical body. Gifford, on the other hand, demonstrated less patience with the disconsolate, and his advice regarding assurance was designed to refocus the anxiety from the inner to the outer self. In sum, Gifford sought to convince the godly of two things: assurance comes from God alone and not the human heart, and the perception of assurance should be based more on external and objective signs than on internal and subjective feeling.35 Gifford knew the power of doubt to ravage the lives of the godly. Assurance “that wee are called and chosen of God,” Gifford maintained, is a “thing so necessary for us to knowe, that without it, there is no right faith, no frank and willing obedience, no sounde joy.” Without assurance, belief becomes a “wavering fantansie” wherein one’s good works were done in a “desperate madness which in very deed is greatly to be wondered at.” But assurance was something that one knew, not something that could be created. Such “desperate and brutish security” as persons manufactured in their own hearts could be compared to the case of a murderer awaiting execution whose friends came to him and told him to be of good cheer.

34

Gifford, Vertues of Faith, C1r. For consideration of the therapeutic function of introspection in religious as well as (ostensibly) nonreligious contexts, see Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama. On the pastor as “curer of afflicted consciences,” see the discussion of Richard Greenham’s ministry in Parker and Carlson, Practical Divinity, passim, but esp. 87–96. 35

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Unless mad, the criminal would not be comforted, since he had no sure basis for hope and the chance of a pardon was very slight.36 On the other hand, assurance that came from God was more reliable since it was more tangible. If one had the signs that Peter outlined, then “by these wee shall undoubtedly know, because if we have them, if they abound in us, if we walk in them, we shal, as he saith, never fal[l].” Just as election rested on the unchangeable purpose of God, so the certainty of election came from God and not from the individual. How could this idea of demonstrable assurance be squared with the fact that salvation was God’s alone to give, and nothing a person did influenced his fate? Papists claimed God chose the elect based on his foreknowledge of their good deeds. But Peter’s intent, Gifford argued, was not to show that virtues were the foundation of election, but rather to tell people what signs they could search out in order to know their status. The fruits of the spirit were in the believer, but they were not of the believer, a small distinction which Gifford gave great weight since by this one could avoid self-deception. 37 The process of coming to know assurance by way of the virtuous life should result in the gradual increase in feelings of certainty, not lapses into self-doubt. “By these vertues we know that we are sealed with Gods spirite, whose woorke wee feele in us.… From hence it commeth, that looke howe much more a man feeleth in him selfe the increase of knowledge, the increase of vertues and heavenly desires, so much more sure hee is, that hee is the childe of God, and as the one increaseth, so increaseth also the other.” Despite occasional wavering, the trajectory was forward. “Thus in time (for it is wrought in men by degrees and they never come to the ful) God will let them see that he is their God.” Salvation was eternal, but assurance was accomplished in time and over time.38 Alongside constant reminders that God was the source of both salvation and assurance, Gifford empowered Christians regarding the means by which they came to know that assurance. The godly were not to wait in passive resignation for knowledge of their salvation to come to them, but to search diligently for the virtues of faith in their lives, and as outlined by Gifford, this searching essentially was equated with the cultivation of those virtues. Thus, corresponding to this godly responsibility, blame fell on those who struggled too long with doubt. People who sang “this dolefull song, I knowe not whether I shal bee saved or not” in a sense suffered from selfinflicted wounds. Those who possessed assurance based on the presence of 36

Gifford, Vertues of Faith, E6r. Gifford, Vertues of Faith, E7r–E8r, quote at E8r. 38 Gifford, Vertues of Faith, E8v, F4v. 37

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virtues in their lives were “merciful to their own soules, which with al their power day and night give up themselves to seek after the knowledge and obedience of the Lords wil.” In other words, knowledge of assurance was due in large part to one’s active perceiving of it, whereas those who lived in perpetual doubt were “unkinde and cruel…to themselves, which through idlenes and slouth in seeking after God, with their daily and continual sinnes, doe even as it were cut the throte of their faith, seeing they cannot have truste in him.”39 Other godly ministers also encouraged spiritual inventories during times of doubt and struggle with guilty consciences. Richard Greenham recommended that one such vexed parishioner “first search the cause, whether it be for some evil thing done, or for some good thing not done.” Searching out sins required diligence and patience, since some were hidden, and others, repented of, “but not soundly.” Next, one should “use the remedie”—that is, the affliction—and “please not yourself in it, but rouse uppe your selfe as from a slumber.” Thus, anxiety over sin should not be permanent, and yet it cannot be willed away: the third step required one to “offer they self to God, waiting, humbly, and patiently for the time of deliverance, neither esteeming too much or too little of thy afflictions.” Here and elsewhere, Greenham recognized the patient endurance of afflictions and spiritual anxiety not only as a necessary part of the godly life, but as one of its “greatest moments.”40 Gifford also believed anxiety over spiritual state had its place in helping root out sin, but as a pastor Gifford did not allow the doctrines of election and assurance to push the believer into despair. Those who had the certainty of assurance actively sought it; those who did not failed not inwardly, but in their external actions. The distinction was crucial, if for no other reason than that Gifford believed one had some control over one’s actions. “What is it then,” Gifford asked which maketh men to doubt that they shall not be saved? Is it not the conscience of sinne which is in them? Is it not that their heart is full of uncleane vices, and that the holy vertues are wanting? Now where the vices have their full power, and doe raigne; there is a whole doubting, and worthlie: for men may assure themselves that in such an estate, they cannot be saved. Then where the worke of the spirite is begunne, so that

39

Gifford, Vertues of Faith, F1r. Richard Greenham, Propositions Containing Answers to Certaine Demaunds in Divers Spirituall Matters, Specially Concerning the Conscience Oppressed with the Grief of Sinne (London, 1597), B5v. For “greatest moments,” see Parker and Carlson, Practical Divinity, 96. 40

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the vices are somewhat suppressed, and the vertues beginne to budde and growe up, there ariseth some comforte and assurance, there the spirit, the water, and the bloud beginne to beare recorde.41

Thus, the way to cure the afflicted conscience was not through prolonged internal deliberations but a focus on externals. Godly living drove out doubt or, at the very least, made the passage from despair to assurance more rapid. In the case where doubts arose, the faithful must take the opportunity for a thorough inventory of their lives and deeds towards the end of rooting out sin and encouraging repentance. If good works were found but were not a source of assurance, one must consider that the works may have been motivated by “vaine glory, or some other sinister respect,” since “God doth not woorke so darkely by his spirite in men, but that they may learne to know whether it be of him, if they would make a due triall.” Whatever the result of the spiritual inventory, one must not tarry in passive despair. “If hee bee wise hee will not stay heere, as the maner of fooles is, saying I am not sure indeede, neither do I thinke any man can bee, I commite it to God, let him doe with mee what he will: these speeches may seeme to have some wit and godlinesse in them but they are in deede divelish and mad.” “Divelish,” thought Gifford, because Satan succeeded when overly introspective godly people focused on feelings of despair to the detriment of godly living and deeds, and mad because even extended introspection failed to supply that “great pearl” of assurance.42 Peter Kaufman has written of Elizabethan “pietists,” Calvinist divines who replaced the lost assurances inherent in the Catholic penitential system with certainties gained through an internalized rehearsal of one’s sins and spiritual shortcomings. The result was a pious “dis-ease” with one’s own spiritual state and a constant remembering that the sinner’s only hope lay in the mercy of God. The anxiety and despair produced by revisiting past failings served, paradoxically, to reassure, for surely only those truly among the elect would despair so greatly over the burdens of sin. Too much despair, and one became lost in a sea of doubt and failed to appreciate the mercy of God. At the same time, lurking at the opposite end of the spectrum was an equally dangerous sense of pride in one’s own election, a failure to recognize the seriousness of sin, and the great distance between the sinner and the righteousness of God. The result was something of a dialectic of religious emotion, two poles between which

41 42

Gifford, Foure Sermons (London, 1598), F2v. The sermon text is 1 John 5:7–13. Gifford, Vertues of Faith, F2r, F4r.

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the faithful vacillated in a quest for assurance wherein the journey was, in a very real sense, the destination.43 Kaufman’s case is grounded in key figures of the period like Greenham and William Perkins, and he strengthens his argument by sampling Elizabethan theater and poetry that mirrors his divines’ preoccupations with self-examination and anxiety. Almost begrudgingly, Gifford too recognized that anxiety was a fact of life for the godly, but he preached more often about passing through despair than tarrying in it. In evaluating Gifford’s debates with the separatists over impromptu prayers, Kaufman designates Gifford an “apostle of restraint.”44 Perhaps with regard to issues of piety and internalized anxiety, Gifford also might be said to preach a gospel of restraint: But I wil returne to applie this doctrine to the godly, for whom it is written: howe they may as wee use to say, make this thing dead sure: for there is many a godly man, which after long travel, and muche care to please God, is yet so matched with stubborn nature so deepely infected and poysoned with sinne, that he is compelled, although he have gained muche and doeth feele the power of Gods spirit in him, sometimes to bee in doubt, and to thinke his labor but lost, because he cannot get so great a victorie as he would faine: let not this man be dismaied, but let him goe forward, remembring what is here promised: the more he wanteth, the more let him strive, and hee shal plainly perceive, that God regardeth his care and travel, considereth his sighes and grones, and wil perfourme all his desires.45

For the godly, the path to becoming “dead sure” involved wanting, striving, perceiving. The attainable result was—incredibly—a God that “wil perfourme all [their] desires.” Assurance of election obviously ranked high among Gifford’s concerns, but that assurance was found less in vacillating deliberations of conscience than in external, concrete signs: elimination of visible (that is, external) sins, cultivation of virtues, and the production of a steady stream of the fruits of regeneration. With justification came sanctification; with sanctification, assurance. The process certainly involved some degree of introspection, but for Gifford the lens seemed to be turned outward as often as inward.

43

Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama, 6–11. Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama, 29–30. 45 Gifford, Vertues of Faith, F8v–G1r. 44

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“A TOUCHSTONE FOR EVERIE ONE” OR “A VERY HARD WORKE?” George Gifford taught and preached at a time in England when reformed Protestantism was being shaped and reshaped as godly ministers set out to carry Protestant principles from the university into the parish. Their efforts bred controversy on at least two fronts. Their belief that England was like a long-neglected vineyard in need of drastic and invasive husbandry brought them into conflict with bishops and other ecclesiastical officials concerned to protect the prerogatives of the established church in matters of parish discipline, order, education, and ministry. Apologists for the established church heard in the demand for more preaching and better ministers a simultaneous indictment of their leadership and competence—a perception that (depending on the critic) did not miss the mark by far, if at all. But more important for the questions under consideration here, preachers like Gifford, in addition to irritating bishops, met with resistance from at least some of their parishioners, the very people who were the supposed beneficiaries of a more localized and encompassing ministry, yet who often flinched in the face of the hard words and stringent demands that flowed from puritan pulpits. Thus, many reformed doctrines were refined in the crucible of the local parish as Calvinist ministers struggled with the pastoral implications of the sovereignty of God in all areas of life, the relation between faith and works, and the doctrines of election, sanctification, and assurance. Not surprisingly, Gifford’s treatment of these questions in the course of his teaching and preaching reflected both his concern for the common sort and his belief in the distinctive godly identity, yet these two messages coexisted uncomfortably throughout his preaching, and often within the same sermon. Evangelizing the common sort required casting a wide net, but the path of godliness was a narrow way that few could trod. On the one hand, Gifford repeatedly stressed the simplicity of the Christian faith, or more precisely, the need for faith to be presented in a simple manner so it is accessible to anyone. Saint Peter wrote “to poore and riche men, women and children, to al sortes, and to be short, to as manie as would have faith and vertue, and so come to life and glorye, and therefore as well the poore ploughman as the greate Clarke is commanded to increase his knowledge out of Gods booke.” At least in part, simplicity meant eliminating ambiguity, and the result was an emphasis on the external and the visible. Thus, works could be used to test faith. The parable of the sower offered “a touchstone for everie one to trie himself withall,

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whether he have rightly embraced the Gospell, and to his salvation: for what a sottishnesse were this, when we have so just and plaine a rule, not to measure our selves with it.”46 Corresponding with the priority of simplicity was a suspicion of ministers who obfuscated and those who appreciated their complexity. They “needeth no more when a man preacheth unto them, but a glorious shew of learning, a sweet ringing voice, and matters so strange and straungely handeled, that they may be brought into a wonderment of that they know not. And Satan hath many chaplaines fit for this turne, to serve the vaine humor of such people, and set forth them selves after a pompous sort.” 47 At the same time that Gifford proclaimed the perspicuity of the gospel, however, he also recognized its elusiveness. The gospel might be simple and available to all—even the simplest of the common sort—but the godly life was far from easy. Following Christ involved one in a cosmic battle wherein even attendance at sermons met with diabolical resistance. “Seeing this great daunger,” Gifford warned, “we ought when we come to heare Gods word taught, to make account that we goe about a very hard worke, that we goe to encounter with Satan hand to hand, who seeketh then most busily to steal away our hart: that he may make the word fruitles in us, and cause us to sinne grevously against God.” Due to the interference of Satan or simply the competing demands of world affairs, Gifford implied that the gospel would take root in only a few hearts, and herein lay a crucial component of godly identity. In the parable of the sower, Christ showed that “of this great heap and rablement of people…ther wer three parts which did not profit by his doctrine but continued still damned and forlorne creatures, onely one parts of foure are true schollers.”48 Signs of the godly’s sense of separation, both from the world and from their church, regularly punctuated Gifford’s sermons. The godly lived in a “dissolute age, wherein iniquitie hathe almost gotten the upper hande.” They worshipped in a land where “al true faithfull hearts doe sob and grone with sorrow…when they behold the desolations and ruines of the Church.” They observed their weak-willed neighbors and lamented, “It is a horrible thinge for any one [profane person like Esau] to be found in the Church: and yet alas, now they swarme everywhere: how many townes and villages may a man come to in this land, where he shall scarce finde two or three which zealously imbrace the Gospell?”49 46

Gifford, Vertues of Faith, C4r; and idem, Sower, A5v. Gifford, Sower, B2r. 48 Gifford, Sower, A4r–v, A8r. 49 Gifford, James, B8r, C6v; and idem, Foure Sermons, F8v. 47

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Claims to such a distinctive identity might suggest Gifford’s sermons would have appealed to the separatists, who also knew themselves to be pilgrims in a strange land. But whereas the separatists abandoned the Church of England as hopelessly corrupt, Gifford argued that the true godly must remain and temper their rigor with patience.50 Similarly, in his sermons Gifford pressed on the godly a further duty: not simply to tolerate the less-than-godly, but to reclaim them by way of virtuous lives and ceaseless effort. They must constantly serve as living examples, lest their failures snuff out the only witness left in England. “O wretches,” Gifford implored, shall not these things move us to let the world see our faith and love towards God, by our good works? Likewise is ther any greter love which can be shewed towards men, then when they shall be mooved by our good deedes, to glorify God in the day of their visitation, when our godly dealing shall cause them to confesse that it is an holie religion which we profess, and so give eare and joyne themselves unto the same?51

The Church of England was indeed a strange land for the godly, but not totally foreign.

50 51

See chapter 4. Gifford, James, E1r.

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Conclusion Commending and Confuting the Common Sort

T

Toward the end of Countrie Divinitie, Zelotes informed Atheos “I doe seeke to bring ye unto faith in Christ.” An unimpressed Atheos replied “Yee may keepe such seeking to your selfe, and let me alone. I beleeve as well as you, take care for yourselfe, you shall not answere for me.”1 In many ways, this short exchange summarized their disagreement, at least as seen from the godly perspective. For Gifford, the gospel demanded the godly seek out and attempt to reform common sorts like Atheos. Gifford lived in a tumultuous time when the English church was being reshaped by Protestant evangelicals who felt compelled to carry their understanding of “true religion” to all corners of England. Their Protestant faith was the faith of the “convinced, the instructed, and the zealous.” They believed, contrary to Atheos’s claim, that they were indeed responsible for creating a godly public church and that they would answer for the Atheoses of England.Yet alongside this vision of a public church, the “character of popular Protestantism inevitably tended towards congregational independency” by way of behaviors and attitudes that served to distinguish the godly from their fellow parishioners.2 Tended, perhaps, but had not yet arrived, and this interim position helped sustain the chief tension that this study has examined—the struggle, as it was seen from the perspective of the godly, to live in a church filled with those they perceived to be the “common sort of Christians.” This study began by asking exactly who were these common sort, why Gifford was interested in them, and how his attitudes affected the course of his ministry and informed his writings. Two main themes have emerged from this consideration of Gifford’s reformation of the common sort. First, Gifford frequently spoke of the common sort in a manner that stressed both his sympathy with their plight and his faith in their ability. 1 2

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, K7v. Patrick Collinson, “The Godly: Aspects of Popular Protestantism,” in Godly People, 1, 3.

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The reformation of the common sort was, in this sense, the common sort’s reformation. Some of this attitude may be seen in Countrie Divinitie, wherein Gifford used the figure of the common sort to critique the English church and press for further reformation of its ministry. The church failed, he believed, when it assumed the gospel was complex and beyond the grasp of the simple sort. Gifford believed, ironically, that both the separatists and the established church failed the common sort in the same way: they demanded too little and underestimated the religious capacities of the people. He put much faith in the power of the simple person to comprehend the essentials of the gospel, and he looked with suspicion on those who styled themselves as religiously elite. The message of the gospel was simple, and the Bible was understandable to all. Thus Catholics could be refuted by the simple man armed only with scripture, and a spiritual common sense should prevail on issues like witchcraft. Gifford believed that given the proper teaching, the people could exercise their good sense and focus on their spiritual rather than material well-being. By promoting such a simple faith, Gifford simultaneously questioned what it truly meant to be learned. Much of what preoccupied supposedly learned clergy Gifford believed to be either irrelevant or, worse still, harmful to the spiritual edification of the common sort. From this populist position, Gifford placed himself outside the religious establishment as a supporter of the common sort and defender of what he envisioned as the true church in England. Those same godly attitudes that motivated Gifford to embrace the evangelization of the common sort, however, also caused him to question whether his efforts were in vain. Thus, Gifford sometimes spoke of the reformation of the common sort in a manner that distinguished the godly from the ungodly, in the objective case, as it were: it was the common sort who were sorely in need of reformation. They were men indifferent— whom the church had abandoned, certainly, but who also stubbornly persisted in adhering to their comfortable tradition in the face of godly admonition. They resented and resisted such interventions and believed time was on their side. With Atheos, they clung to their traditions and told the godly “these things were used before you were borne, and will bee when you are gone.”3 Despite their resistance, Gifford continued to urge reform on the common sort, but he did so in a way that left open the question of whether they might respond. Thus, Atheos took his leave of Zelotes more resolute than ever in his ungodly ways. Daniel may have won the debate with Samuel and the Schoolmaster on the merits, but the ensuing conversation 3

Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, A3v.

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after he departed leaves the reader wondering if indeed the whole effort has been in vain. One should be careful about attributing such pessimism to the frustration of a weary minister too long in the trenches with no signs of success, for if the profaneness and stubbornness of the common sort was the object of much godly hand-wringing, such traits also served as a constant reminder of how few travel the godly way. This outlook helped establish and maintain the identity of the godly as a minority group who stood outside the mainstream of the church. The spiritual regeneration they sought was indeed “a very hard worke,” but they knew their course to be all the more correct

Figure 11. “Hope,” Stephen Bateman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation (London, 1569), N3r. “The troubled seas signifie the tempations of mankinde, the shippe beyng rent, signifieth the dispersed churche of God, who beyng tossed to and fro by the force of tempations, and throwne out, yet they not fearying the boysterous windes of adversitie, but [through] assured hope in Christ they flie to the rocke of endles felicitie, which is Christ.” Reproduced by permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University.

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because so few adhered to it. They would have no doubt identified with Stephen Bateman’s depiction of the virtue of hope, which imagines the church as a battered ship attempting to navigate difficult seas in order to reach safe haven. The passage is perilous. Some quail with fear and others flounder in the sea, while a handful struggle to safety on the rocky shore (fig. 11). The waves of resistance the godly encountered they understood to be the work of the devil, and for many, it was evidence that they were living in the last days. The pope was the Antichrist, the Jesuits his minions, and the “manie olde rustie Protestantes” who failed to answer the stringent demands of the faith, his unknowing accomplices. The gospel in the mouth of such Protestants was “too hard a crust for their old teeth.”4 But such was to be expected in a dissolute age, wherein the godly were in the world but not of it, in the church, but ever striving to avoid being polluted. A fundamental contention of this study has been that these two aspects of Gifford’s attitude toward the common sort—embracing and distancing—must be viewed simultaneously in the course of locating the godly within the context of Elizabethan religious life. Yet this dichotomous orientation toward the common sort requires the utmost care in interpreting Gifford’s depictions of the religion of those who filled the parishes of England. In a recent article, Christopher Haigh has argued that resistance on the part of parishioners “tamed” the Reformation by forcing godly preachers to modify both the method and the content of their preaching and their pastoral styles. The result was that the “Calvinist Reformation was contained and domesticated by consumer resistance as much as by conformist bishops and Arminianizing theologians.”5 In making his case, Haigh relies heavily on the narratives of resistance, both literary and anecdotal, of godly preachers like Gifford. Haigh acknowledges the potentially polemical ends of his source material at the outset, but then proceeds to take his sources at their word.6 To take one of many examples: Haigh looks to Gifford’s Atheos in order to show how preaching could be disruptive, yet the context of the passage he cites from Countrie Divinitie shows that Gifford is trying (as he does throughout) to make the case for more preaching. Following Atheos’s observations about preachers’ sowing dissension, Zelotes replies that dissension is the natural result of the meeting 4

Gifford, Sower, B6r. Haigh, “The Taming of the Reformation,” passim, quote at 572. Haigh’s argument here continues an emphasis found in his early works. See also the thorough response to Haigh on this point in Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics, 12–24. 6 The conflict between Zelotes and Atheos and their respective conceptions of religious life and practice “is a clash which, even allowing for literary convention and propaganda purposes, rings true.” Haigh, “The Taming of the Reformation,” 572. 5

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of God and the devil, as surely as steam results from fire and water. 7 That Atheos does not recognize this shows his blindness. Atheos’s resistance and complaints then serve to highlight Zelotes’s (that is, Gifford’s) point that those who do not see the need for reform and more preaching are most in need of it. These men indifferent are waiting for the “cloak of the gospel” but do not know it. Such an observation is not necessarily mutually exclusive with Haigh’s point. That is to say, Gifford may be giving a faithful rendering of a truly common complaint on the way to making his own case for reform. On the other hand, he may also be exaggerating in order to buttress his argument for more preaching, taking a seed of commoner resistance and giving it larger voice in the everyman eloquence of Atheos. Puritans, like so many other reformers throughout history, frequently interpreted resistance to their programs as diabolical and then went on to portray that resistance in apocalyptic terms. In this narrative, resistance plays a crucial role. Thus, Countrie Divinitie (and other works like it) must be read with a respectful skepticism: seeing the authors portraying the world they knew, but recognizing the location of the work in the larger discourse of reform. Addressing a similar question for a different historical context, John Van Engen observed the impulse to compile exemplary stories and inquisitorial records originated with learned clerics, making these sources at best only a very indirect indicator of the strength and quality of popular folklore and a much better indicator of clerical zeal to deepen Christian faith and practice.8

Applying Van Engen’s observation about medieval religious culture in an Elizabethan setting requires some adjustments, notably the availability of printing, which allowed a much wider distribution of Gifford’s descriptions of the religion of the common sort than those compiled by Van Engen’s clerics. Yet the conclusion about the utility of such descriptions holds for Gifford as well. Although he would deny it, Atheos argued a puritan case. In light of the preceding emphasis on source criticism, one should also note the danger in emphasizing the rhetorical and polemical contexts of Gifford’s work, namely reducing Countrie Divinitie and works like it to no more than figments of their authors’ imaginations, totally disconnected from reality. Since the sources of this study have been primarily literary, it is worth asking in what way the world reflected in Gifford’s literary output 7

Haigh, “The Taming of the Reformation,” 573; and Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, F6v. John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 531. 8

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corresponded to his historical context, or as Peter Lake has put it, “the extent to which these divisions between the godly and the profane, or Puritans and their defamers, left the realm of ideology, of polemically constructed and literarily conditioned images, and invaded the world of social reality.”9 As was suggested earlier, in the case of Maldon the evidence of a division between the godly and those who opposed them is fairly clear, even before Gifford’s arrival. Certainly during his tenure, the episcopal visitations, the controversies surrounding his deprivation, and the continuing conflict between Gifford and the town corporation on the one hand, and the conformist vicar Robert Palmer and certain prominent citizens on the other, all point to the serious breach. Impossible to know with precision, however, is the relative size of the factions: if the godly were in the minority, how much so? Though compelling, the question so constructed threatens to overshadow the fact that Gifford’s literary world was itself a part of his historical reality.10 Printing implies an audience, and Gifford’s readers were found among the would-be Zeloteses rather than the Atheoses of his world. Such an audience found a stark yet tangible comfort in the delineations reflected in the accusation Zelotes hurled at Atheos: This is a common thing among all the packe of ye, if there be any man which hath a care to know God, and seeketh after his worde, and will not commit those beastly sins which overflow in all places, then you which cannot abide to have Gods word set foorth, devise a number of lies and slaunders against them, calling them Puritanes, rascals, and many such like. On the contrary part, let a man be a common drunkard, a Dicer, an ignorant beast which hath no knowledge of God, a wretched worldling, or any kinde of suche person: he is an honest man: for they be those whom you would have a man lose his eares over: he is now counted the honest man which giveth as the most doe.11

9

Lake, “Defining Puritanism—Again?” 16. Lake, “Defining Puritanism—Again?” 17–18. 11 Gifford, Countrie Divinitie, C1v. 10

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APPENDIX ONE GIFFORD’S WORKS

FULL TITLES AND PRINTED EDITIONS WITH SHORT TITLE CATALOGUE NUMBERS Catechisme

A catechisme conteining the summe of Christian religion, giving a most excellent light to all those that seek to enter the path-way to salvation: Newlie set foorth by G.G. Preacher of Gods word at Malden in Essex. 1. Imprinted at London: At the three Cranes in the Vintree by Thomas Dawson, 1583 [STC 11848] 2. Imprinted at London: At the three Cranes in the Vintree by Thomas Dawson, 1583 [STC11848.2] 3. At London: Imprinted by John Windet for Tobye Cooke, 1586 [STC 11848.3]

Certaine Sermons

Certaine sermons, upon divers textes of Holie Scripture.Whereof some have been severally before published, and other some for the greater benefit of the godly reader are here now added. By M. George Giffard, preacher of the worde of God at Mauldon Essex. London: Printed by the Widowe Orwin for Thomas Man, 1597 [STC 11848.5]

Countrie Divinitie

A briefe discourse of certaine 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 compiled by George Gifforde. 1. 2. 3. 4.

London: T. Dawson for T. Cook, 1581 [STC 11845] London: T. Dawson for T. Cook, 1581 [STC 11845.5] London: For T. Cook, 1581 [STC 11845.7] Imprinted at London: For Toby Cook, dwelling at the Tigres head in Paules churchyard, and are there to bee solde, 1582 [STC 11846] 5. Imprinted at London: For Toby Cook, dwellinge at the Tigers head in Paules churchyard & are there to be solde, 1583 [STC 11846.5] 6. Imprinted at London: By Richard Field and Felix Kingston, 1598 [STC 11847] 7. Imprinted at London: By Richard Field and Felix Kingston, 1612 [STC 11847.5]

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Ecclesiastes

Eight sermons, upon the first foure chapters, and part of the fift[h] of Ecclesiastes. Preached at Mauldon, by G. Giffard. At London: Printed by John Windet for Toby Cooke at the Tygers head in Paules Church-yard, 1589 [STC 11853]

Foure Sermons

Foure sermons upon severall partes of scripture, preached by George Gyffard, preacher of the worde, at Maudlin in Essex. At London: Printed by Thomas Judson for Tobie Cooke and Robert Walker, 1598 [STC 11859]

James

A godlie, zealous, and profitable sermon upon the second chapter of Saint James. Preached at London, by Master George Gifford, and published at the request of sundry godly and well disposed persons. 1. Imprinted at London: By Thomas East for Tobie Cooke, dwelling at the Tigers head in Paules Churchyard, 1582 [STC 11860] 2. Imprinted at London: By Roger Warde for Tobie Cooke, dwelling at the Tigers head in Paules Churchyard, 1583 [STC 11861] 3. At London: Imprinted by John Windet for Toby Cooke at the Tiger head in Paules Churchyard, 1586 [STC 11861.5]

Papist and Protestant

A dialogue betweene a Papist and a Protestant, applied to the capacitie of the unlearned. Made by G. Gifford, preacher in the towne of Maldon. Seene and allowed according to the order appoynted. 1. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Dawson for Tobie Cooke, 1582 [STC 11849] 2. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Dawson for Tobie Cooke, 1583 [STC 11849.3] 3. Imprinted at London: By Richard Field and Felix Kingsone, 1599 [STC 11849.5]

Pauls Crosse

A sermon preached at Pauls Crosse the thirtie day of May. 1591. By M. George Giffard, preacher of the worde of God at Maldon in Essex. At London: Printed by J. Windet for Tobie Cooke, at the Tigers head in Paules Churchyard, 1591 [STC 11862.3]

Peter

Two sermons upon 1. Peter 5. vers .8. and 9.Wherein is shewed that the divell is to be resisted only by a stedfast faith, how soever he commeth either against soule or body: and that whosoever hath once attained the true and livelie faith, it can never be utterly lost, but he is sure to get the victorie. By M. George Giffard, Preacher of the worde of God at Mauldon in Essex. London: Printed by Felix Kingston for Thomas Man, 1597 [STC 11871]

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Plaine Declaration

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A plaine declaration that our Brownists be full Donatists, by comparing them together from point to point out of the writings of Augustine. Also a replie to Master Greenwood touching read prayer, wherein his grosse ignorance is detected, which labouring to purge himselfe from former absurdities, doth plunge himselfe deeper into the mire. By George Gyffard minister of Gods word in Maldon. At London: Printed by T. Orwin for Toby Cooke, dwelling at the Tygers head in Paules Churchyard, 1590 [STC 11862]

Priesthood and Sacrifice

A briefe treatise against the priesthood and sacrifice of the Church of Rome.Wherein the simple may perceiue their intollerable impietie, usurping that office and action, which ever appertaine to Christ onely, by G.G. 1. London, 1584 [STC 11493.5] 2. London: Printed by William Jones, 1634 [STC 11494] 3. London: Printed by W. Jones for Andrew Kembe dwelling by the Sessions House in Long South-Warke, 1635 [STC 11495]

Revelation

Sermons upon the whole booke of the Revelation. Set forth by George Gyffard, preacher of the word at Mauldin in Essex. 1. London: Printed by T. Orwin for Thomas Man, and Toby Cooke, 1596 [STC 11866] 2. London: Printed for Thomas Man, 1599 [STC 11866.5] 3. London: Printed by Richard Field and Felix Kingston, 1599 [STC 11867]

Revelation (Fulke)

Prælections vpon the sacred and holy Revelation of S. John, written in latine by William Fulke Doctor of Divinitie, and translated into English by George Gyffard. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Purfoote, at the signe of the Lucrece, 1573 [STC 11443]

Salomon

Fifteene sermons, upon the Song of Salomon.Written by George Gyffard, preacher of the Word at Mauldin in Essex. 1. At London: Printed by Felix Kingston for Thomas Man, 1598 [STC 11854] 2. At London: Printed by John Windet for Thomas Man, 1600 [STC 11855] 3. At London: Printed by W. Stansby for George Norton, 1612 [STC 11856] 4. At London: Printed by J.E. for Barnard Alsop, by the assignes of J. Man and G. Norton and are to be sold at his house, by Saint Annes Church, neere Aldersgate, 1620 [STC 11857]

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5. At London: Printed by Barnard Alsop, by the assignes of J. Man and are to be solde by Arthur Johnson at the white Horse by the great North Doore of S. Paules, 1620 [STC 11857.3] Short Reply

A short reply unto the last printed books of Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, the chiefe ringleaders of our Donatists in England. Wherein is layd open their grosse ignorance, and foule errors: upon which their whole building is founded. By George Gyfford, minister of Gods holy worde, in Maldon. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Orwin, for Tobie Cooke: and are to be solde at the Tygers head, in Pauls Churchyard, 1591 [STC 11868]

Short Treatise

A short treatise against the Donatists of England, whome we call Brownists.Wherein, by the answeres unto certayne writings of theyrs, divers of their heresies are noted, with sundry fantasticall opinions. By George Giffard, Minister of Gods holy Word in Maldon. At London: Printed by J. Windet for Toby Cooke, dwelling at the Tygers head in Paules Churchyard, 1590 [STC 11869]

Sower

A sermon on the parable of the sower, taken out of the 13. of Mathew. Preached at London by M. G. Gifford, & published at the request of sundrie godly and well disposed persons. 1. Imprinted at London: By T. Dawson for Tobie Cooke, dwelling at the Tigres head in Paules Church-yarde, 1581 [STC 11862.5] 2. Imprinted at London: By T. East for Tobie Cooke, dwelling at the Tigres head in Paules Churchyard, 1582 [STC 11863] 3. Imprinted at London: By Roger Ward for Tobie Cooke, 1583 [STC 11863.5] 4. London: Printed by Robert Walde-grave, for Tobie Cooke, at the Tigers head in Pauls Churchyard, 1583 [STC 11863.7; formerly 11865] 5. London: Printed by John Wolfe for Toby Cooke, 1584 [STC 11864]

Subtill Practises

A discourse of the subtill practises of devilles by witches and sorcerers. By which men are and have bin greatly deluded: the antiquitie of them: their divers sorts and names.With an aunswer unto divers frivolous reasons which some doe make to proove that the devils did not make those aperations in any bodily shape. By G. Gyfford. Imprinted at London: By T. Orwin for Toby Cooke, 1587 [STC 11852]

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True Fortitude

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A treatise of true fortitude. By M. George Gyffard, Preacher of the worde of God, at Maldon in Essex. At London: Printed by J. Roberts for John Hardie, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Churchyard at the signe of the Tygars head, 1594 [STC 11870]

Vertues of Faith

Foure sermons upon the seuen chiefe vertues or principall effectes of faith, and the doctrine of election: wherein everie man may learne, whother he be Gods childe or no. Preached at Malden in Essex by Master George Gifford, penned from his mouth, and corrected and given to the Countesse of Sussex, for a Newyeeres gift. 1. London: T. Dawson for T. Cooke, 1581 [STC 11857.5] 2. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Dawson for Tobie Cooke at the Tigers head in Paules Churchyard, 1582 [STC 11858] 3. Imprinted at London: By John Windet and Thomas Judson by Tobie Cooke at the Tygers head in Paules Churchyard, 1582 [STC 11858.5]

Witches and Witchcraftes

A dialogue concerning witches and witchcraftes. In which is laide open how craftely the Diuell deceiueth not onely the witches but many other and so leadeth them awrie into many great errours. By George Giffard minister of Gods word in Maldon. 1. London: Printed by John Windet for Tobie Cooke and Mihil Hart and are to be sold by Tobie Cooke in Pauls Churchyard at the Tygers head, 1593 [STC 11850] 2. London: Printed by Richard Field and Felix Kingston and are to be sold by Arthur Johnson at the signe of the Flowerde-luce and Crowne in Paules Church-yard, 1603 [STC 11851]

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APPENDIX TWO DEDICATEES OF GIFFORD’S WORKS

JOSEPH AND JONE BAINHAM (BY THOMAS MAN) Thomas Man was the printer of several of Gifford’s works, including his sermons on First Peter, which Man dedicated to the Bainhams. Nothing is known of them, and Man spends most of the dedication praising their ancestor James Bainham, whose death under Henry VIII as a Protestant martyr is recorded in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.

WILLIAM CECIL, LORD BURGHLEY (1520–1598) William Cecil was the central political figure in Elizabeth’s administration. He served successively as secretary of state, master of the Court of Wards, and finally lord treasurer. He was also chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Throughout four decades of Elizabeth’s reign, Cecil guided the queen and England through a maze of political perils at home and abroad. Although Cecil was not a vocal supporter of puritan causes, he often intervened with ecclesiastical authorities on behalf of individual ministers, such as during Archbishop Whitgift’s 1584 subscription campaign.1 Gifford dedicated to Cecil the two antiseparatist works he published in 1590. In the first, he recognized Cecil as one “which many yeares [has] borne, and still doo beare, a great part of the waight of this our common-wealth, under her right excellent Majestie: and for that cause I judge it meete your Honor should see such things as any way touch the generall estate.”2 But Cecil did not need to be alerted to the danger posed by religious radicals. It is more likely that Gifford, with his dedications to Cecil, hoped to demonstrate his loyalty in the wake of the Marprelate scandals and rehabilitate himself following conflicts with church authorities during the late 1580s.

ROBERT CLARKE (?–1607) Gifford dedicated his dialogue on witchcraft, published in 1593, to Robert Clarke, a judge who served in various posts in Her Majesty’s Court of the Exchequer. One of the prominent cases he handled, one with which Gifford was no doubt familiar, was the trial of John Udall, a puritan minister accused of writing one of the Marprelate tracts and tried for treason in 1590. Udall was found guilty, but his punishment was deferred to give him time to make a full submission to the Queen by admitting to his crime. This Udall refused to do and so was sentenced to death. However, he died in prison before the sentence was carried out. Clarke also adjudicated witchcraft trials, possibly including some in Essex. In his dedication Gifford offered the work to Clarke “not as unto one as needeth to be taught in these 1

Unless otherwise noted, biographical information is drawn from the Dictionary of National Biography. 1 See chapter 2 for Cecil’s intervention on Gifford’s behalf. 2 Gifford, Short Treatise, a2v.

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thinges, being zealously affected to the Gospel, and so grounded in the faith of the high providence, that I have been delighted to heare and see the wise and godly course used uppon the seat of Justice by your Worship, when such have beene arraigned. I offer it therefore as a testimony of a thankeful mind for favours and kindnesse shewed towardes me.”3

ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX (1567–1601) Several factors combined to make Robert Devereux a powerful member of the English court in the 1580s and 1590s: he was a cousin to the queen on her mother’s side, was the stepson of Robert Dudley, and had lived in the house of William Cecil from age nine, following the death of Robert’s father, Walter Devereux. He was a favorite of Elizabeth but was also ambitious and frequently quarrelsome. His military successes and political base propelled him to a seat on the Privy Council in 1593 at the age of twenty-six, but his ambition finally caused him to overreach: he corresponded with James VI prior to the death of Elizabeth, and some accused him of planning to take the throne. He was tried and convicted for treason and executed February 25, 1601. Following the death of Essex’s stepfather, the puritan patron Robert Dudley, many radical puritans looked to his stepson as his natural successor. Indeed, the Earl of Essex did show some favor toward the puritan cause: he was rumored to have supported Marprelate and tried to help John Udall when the latter was thrown into prison. But he also respected the queen’s support of Whitgift, and so gave due attention to the archbishop. Gifford dedicated three works to Devereux, more than any other, all during the 1590s when the Earl of Essex was at the height of his power. In his Treatise of True Fortitude (1594), Gifford claimed “it is the common hope and expectation of our whole Land…that God hath prepared our Honour as a right worth instrument, furnished with an heroicall spirite for the defence of our most noble Queene and Kingdom.” Two years later in the dedication to his sermons on Revelation, Gifford placed England’s political situation in apocalyptic context and implied that Essex was posed to play a significant role: “If such wars and troubles do come, there is on the other part…a rare expectation of great things to be performed by your Honor.” And in a few years, Essex would indeed play an important role, but not the one Gifford had anticipated.4

AMBROSE DUDLEY, EARL OF WARWICK (1528?–1590) Gifford dedicated two works to Ambrose Dudley and one to Dudley’s wife Anne. Ambrose Dudley and his family had supported Elizabeth prior to her accession to the throne, and under her rule enjoyed significant political advancement. Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester and favorite of the Queen, was Ambrose’s brother. Ambrose Dudley led military campaigns in France in 1563 and against the Northern Rebellion in 1569. He was admitted to the Privy Council in 1573, and joined with other influential Elizabethan political leaders (his brother Robert, Francis Walsingham, Walter Mildmay, and Francis Knollys) in taking zealously Protestant positions on key issues facing the realm: foreign aid, the Queen’s marriage, Catholic recusancy, and ecclesiastical reform. He was throughout his life a consistent supporter of puritan clergy.5 3

Gifford, Witches and Witchcraftes, A3r–v. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 444–47; Gifford, True Fortitude, A2v; and idem, Revelation, A4r. 5 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 166–67. 4

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In the dedication of his translation of Fulke’s commentary on Revelation, published in 1573, Gifford praised the Earl of Warwick for “the great benevolence and good will which ye have towardes the Authour hereof, and to all other that are godly learned.” Whether Gifford referred to himself or Fulke as “the Authour” isn’t clear, but he apparently maintained a relationship with Dudley over the next two decades. In 1581, writing as to a kindred spirit, Gifford dedicated his manifesto on church reform, Countrie Divinitie, to Dudley. Finally, in 1589 he dedicated his sermons on Ecclesiastes to Dudley’s wife Anne “as the token of a dutifull and thankefull minde, for so honorable favours as I have receyved from the right Honourable my Lord the Earle of Warwike, and from your Honour.”6

JOHN HUTTON John Hutton of Dry Drayton was an MP for Cambridgeshire between 1563 and 1572.7 The exact relationship between Hutton and the Gifford family is not known, but Gifford’s dedication in his Sermon on the Parable of the Sower (1581) suggests a close affinity. Gifford thanked Hutton for his support of the gospel and acknowledged his many special ties to Hutton, “which are so wel knowne unto you, that it wer needlesse for me to recite them: onely thus much, seeing I was born and brought up under you, my parents receiving benefits daily from you, I think I ought, when as I am not able to make any recompence, at least shew some token of a grateful mind. But especially I am moved heereunto, with consideration of the greatest blessing which all my kindred have enjoyed by you now so long, in providing and procuring their spiritual instruction.”8

EDWARD LEWKENOR (?–1605) AND SUSAN HEIGHAM LEWKENOR (BY ROBERT WALKER) Edward Lewkenor was from Denham in Suffolk but represented the borough of Maldon in Parliament. He was a prominent patron of puritan ministers. In the 1580s, Lewkenor was one of several MPs who campaigned strongly for a presbyterian polity, and even spent some time in the Tower of London for holding extraparliamentary conferences, a practice not protected by parliamentary privilege. Robert Walker, a printer of Gifford’s Foure Sermons, praised the Lewkenors as “comfortable lightes shining in the midst of this crooked generation, as lively examples to your brethren, and worthie ornaments to the profession of the Gospel.”9

RICHARD MARTIN (1534–1617) In 1587, Gifford dedicated his first work on witchcraft to Richard Martin, then alderman of London. Martin was by trade a goldsmith, and served as the warden of Her Majesty’s Mint throughout most of Elizabeth’s reign. He was elected an alderman of London in May 1578, and was sheriff in 1581. He served two brief stints as lord mayor of London, once in 1589 and once in 1594, filling out terms upon the death of the incumbents.

6

Gifford, Revelation (Fulke), iiiir; and idem, Ecclesiastes, A3v–A4r. Collinson, Craig, and Usher, Conferences and Combination Lectures, 209. 8 Gifford, Sower, Aii v. 9 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 306–7, 310–11; Petchey, Prospect of Maldon, 206–7, 234, 249; and Gifford, Foure Sermons, A5v–A6r. 7

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Gifford probably knew Martin by way of his frequent visits to London to preach and consort with the godly community there. The praises Gifford heaped on Martin in his dedication indicate that the London alderman was a supporter of the godly preachers. “I present [this work] unto your worship, not for the greatnes of the worke, but to testifie my hearty good-will: which is in respect of that loving favour, and friendship which your worship hath for certaine years shewed towards me, is great: but farre greater, because that your zeale hath bin shewed towards the gospell, and love towards al those that publish and professe it.”10

THOMAS RADCLIFFE, EARL OF SUSSEX (1526?–1583) Thomas Radcliffe, also known as Lord Fitzwalter, was a prominent military and political leader under several Tudor sovereigns. He fought the French during the reign of Henry VIII, attempted to broker a marriage for Edward VI, and served as lord deputy of Ireland under Mary and lieutenant general of Ireland under Elizabeth. He assisted in suppressing the Northern Rebellion in 1569, but he was suspected by some to be in sympathy with the rebels. He continued thereafter as an active member of the Elizabethan court, though often at odds with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. The Earl of Sussex was not generally sympathetic with puritan concerns, but Gifford offered his anti-Catholic dialogue to him “to signify and shew forth a thankful mind, for that great ayd and honorable assistance which I have received from your Lordship in the furtherance and maintenance of the Gospel,” although he did not elaborate on the nature of that support. Sussex’s wife, Francis, was a patron of Cambridge and perhaps some of its graduates as well. Richard Josua, a Maldon Bailiff, dedicated to her a collection of Gifford’s sermons that he helped publish “as a taste of those fruites wherewith the Lorde doth feede us in the Countrie.”11

10

Gifford, Subtill Practises, A2v. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 167; Gifford, Papist and Protestant, 3r; and idem, Vertues of Faith, 2v. 11

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APPENDIX THREE THE WILL OF GEORGE GIFFORD

Gifford’s will is in the London Metropolitan Archives (formerly the Greater London Record Office), DL/C/359, 210v–211r. The following transcription was made by Leland H. Carlson, and appears in Carlson, ed., The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1590–1591, Elizabethan Nonconformist Text Series, vol. 5 (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1966; repr., London: Routledge, 2003), 382–85. Reproduced by the permission of The Sir Halley Stewart Trust. In the name of God, Amen. The eighte daie of Maie in the yeare of our Lord one thowsande and sixe hundred, and in the twoe and fortiethe yeare of the reigne of our Soveraigne Ladie Elizabeth by the grace of God nowe Queene of Englande, etc., I George Giffard, clarke, preacher of God’s Worde in Mauldon in the countie of Essex, beinge weake and sicke in bodie, yett of good and perfecte memorie, thancks be unto God, knowinge that all men (by nature) are borne to die, doe therefore make, publishe and declare this my laste will and testamente in writinge in manner and forme followinge: First, I comend my sowle into the handes of Almightie God (that blessed Trinitie), The Father, The Sonne, and the Holie Ghoste, assuredlie beleevinge by the mightie worke and wittnes of the Holie Spirritt in me that all my synnes of God’s great mercie by and throughe the pretious merrittes, sufferinges and passion of Jhesus Christe my alone Saviour and Redeemer (in whome I have beleeved, whome I have professed and whome I have preached and tawghte accordinge to the guifte and grace of God bestowed on me), are fullie pardoned and donne awaie. And my bodie I comytt to christian buriall. And as towchinge the worldly possessions, benefitts, and blessings bestowed on me of the bounteous kindnes and goodnes of God for this mortall lief, my mynde and will is thereof as followeth: firste, I will and devise by this my will that Agnes my welbeloved wief, for and duringe the terme of her naturall lief, shall have and enjoye all that parcell of lande and pasture contayninge by estimacion three acres [(] nowe in the occupation of Edwarde Faunce or his assignes) lyinge and beinge in Maldon aforesaid. And I will and devise aswell the revertion or remaynder of the said parcell of lande and pasture with the appurtenaunces, as alsoe my coppiehould, tennement, and orchard with the appurtenaunces nowe in the occupation of John Courtnoll in St. Peter’s parishe in Maldon aforesaid, after the deathe of the said Agnes my wief, in which tennement and orchard with the appurtenaunces she hath alreadie an estate for lief, unto theise my righte trustie and welbeloved freinds, Raphe Breeder, one of her Majestie’s bayliffs of the said burrowghe towne of Maldon, William Dernon [Vernon?], Elizabeth Garington, John

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Brooke, Christopher Henworthe, and William Burles of Maldon, gentlemen, and John Gaywood the elder of Mutche Tottenham [Great Totham], yeoman, their heires and assignes. To this verely end, intente, and purpose that they the said Raphe, William Darnon [Vernon?], Eliza, John Brooke, Christopher, William Burles, and John Gaywood or the survivors or survivor of them or the heires or executors of the survivor of them, after the deathe of my said wief or before yf necessitie shall soe require, whiche therefore I leave to their discreations and wisdomes, shall make sale of the saide parcell of lande and of the said tennement and orchard with the appurtenaunces for the beste price and to the moste advantage they maie or can make therof. And the sommes of monney to be made and rise of sutche sale thereof, I will to be paide and distributed by my said trustie freinds or the survivors or survivor of them or the executors of sutche survivors, unto and betwixte all my children then lyvinge, exceptinge onelie my sonnes John and Daniell Giffard and my dawghter Marie, to every one suthce parte and portion as his or her estate, imbecillitie, or necessitie shall [211 recto] (less or more) require at the good discreation of my said freinds or the survivor of them aforenamed. And yt is my earnest desire that yf the said Agnes my wief fortune to decease owte of this lief duringe the terme and lease which my right worshipfull freind John Butler, esquire, hath of and in the said tennemente and orchard with the appurtenaunces, that then the said Mr. Butler doe use and imploye the lease and intereste of and in the said tennement with the appurtenaunces then to come and not expired for and to the benefitt of my said children, exceptinge the said John, Daniell, and Marie as aforesaid, in sutche mannor and sorte as my good meaninge appeareth in this my will. Item, I give unto my saide two sonnes John and Daniell Giffard all my library and bookes equally betweene them to be devided att the discreation of my good freinds Mr. Raphe Hawden of Langford and Maister John Leake of Woodham Ferrers. Item, I will and give unto the said Marie Gifford my dawghter twnetie pounds of lawfull monney of Englande, to be paide to her by the executrix of this my testamente att her daie of marriage or within one yeare after my deathe, which firste happen. Item, I will unto the forenamed John Brooke my lease and intereste which I have of the demise and graunte of Robert Palmer, clarke, vicar of All Saincts and St. Peters in Maldon aforesaid, by indenture of and in the vicaradge howse, tithes, proffitts and other things thereby letten and demised. And yt is my will and mynde that the said Agnes my welbeloved wief shall have the use and occupation of the messuage wherein I dwell, with the orchards and gardeyne and other the appurtenaunces thereunto belonginge, for and duringe soe mainie yeres and soe longe time of my lease and terme as the said Agnes shall live. And after her decease I will the lease, interest, and terme of yeres of and in my said dwellinge, howse, orchards, and other the appurtenaunces thereunto, shalbe sould by my said freinds, afore speciallie named and appoynted in this my will for the sale of my lands, or the survivors

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or survivor of them or the executor of sutche survivor. And the monney to come and growe thereof to be paide over and distributed unto and betwixte theis my children, Samuell, Jeromie, George, William, and Martha Giffard and of the childe wherewith my wief now goeth yf ytt please God she be with childe, or to the survivors or survivor of them then livinge, everie one of the said sonnes to have his parte and portion at his full age of one and twentie yeres and the dawghter at her age of twentie yeres or daie of marriage, whiche firste happen. And I doe make, constitute and ordaine the said Agnes my wief sole and onelie executrix of this my laste will and testamente, to whome I give all my howshould stuffe and my readie monney and debtes to me owinge and whatsoever ells I have that is testamentary (not before in this my testamente otherwise bequeathed) for and towarde her better maintenaunce, bringinge upp and education of the same my younger children. And I desire and intreate my said good freinds Mr. Raphe Hawden and Mr. John Leake and the said Raphe Breeder, William Dernon [Pernon?], Eliza Garington, John Brooke, Christopher Hanworthe and William Burles to be overseers of this my testamente and laste will and to see the same performed soe farr as in them liethe. In wittnes hereof I have hereunto putt my seale and subscribed my name the daie and yeare firste abovesaid in the presence of us George Giffard, Thomas Albert, John Burton, and Thomas Cheese. *** Probatum fuit huiusmodi testamentum coram venerabili viro magistro Edwardo Stanhope legum doctore, reverendi patris domini Richardi London[ensis] Episcopi vicario in spiritualibus generali et officiali principali, etc., ultimo die mensis Maii anno domini 1600. Juramento magistri Galfridi Clarke, notorii publici, procuratoris Agnetis Gifford relicte dicti defuncti et executricis in huiusmodi testamento nominat[e] cui in persona dicti procur[ator]is comissa fuit ado [administrando, administratio] etc., de bene etc. [de bene et fideliter administrando eadem ac de pleno et fideli inventario]. Jurat etc. Saluo iure cuiuscumque, etc.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES British Library Additional MS 48064, Papers of Robert Beale Relating to Religious Affairs. British Library Lansdowne MS 42.43, Letter from Archbishop John Whitgift to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, 29 May 1584. British Library Lansdowne MS 50.40, Letter from Bishop of London John Aylmer to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, 25 July 1586. British Library Lansdowne MS 68.48, “Petition of the Town of Malden for the Restoring of Mr. Gyfford Their Preacher.” British Library Lansdowne MS 1101.31–37, Charge to the High Commission of 1584. Essex Record Office D/B 3/1/8, Maldon Corporation Records, 1583–1595. Essex Record Office D/B 3/3/155/5, “Memorandom of Disturbance Made by Mr. Frith.” Essex Record Office D/B 3/3/178, “Evidence in a Suit Against Rev. R. Palmer.” Essex Record Office D/P 201/1/1, All Saints Register Book. Essex Record Office Q/SR 79/93, Quarter Session Court Records. Guildhall Library MS 9531/13, Bishop of London’s Register. Guildhall Library MS 9535/2, Diocese of London Ordination Register, 1578–1628. Lambeth Palace Library, Register of Archbishop Whitgift. London Metropolitan Archives (formerly the Greater London Record Office), DL/C/359, 210v–211r, Will of George Gifford. Westminster Abbey Muniments 8125, Letter from William Arthur, Stipendiary Curate of St. Mary’s, Maldon, to the Dean of Westminster, 25 March 1596.

PRINTED SOURCES Acheson, R. J. Radical Puritans in England 1550–1660. Seminar Studies in History Series. London: Longman Group, 1990. Anonymous. A Detection of damnable driftes, practized by three Witches arraigned at Chelmisforde in Essex, at the late Assizes there holden, which were executed in Aprill 1579, Set forthe to discover the Ambushementes of Sathan, whereby he would surprise us lulled in securitie, and hardened with contempte of Gods vengeance threatened for our offences. London, 1579. Bancroft, Richard. Daungerous Positions and Proceedings, Published and Practiced within this Iland of Brytaine, Under Pretence of Reformation, and for the Presbiteriall Discipline. London, 1595. Barstow, Anne Llewellyn. “Violence and Memory: The Politics of Denial.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68:3 (September 2000): 591–602. Bettenson, Henry, ed. Documents of the Christian Church. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Bloomfield, Edward H. The Opposition to the English Separatists 1570–1625: A Survey of the Polemical Literature Written by Opponents to Separatist Writings. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981.

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Booty, John E., ed. The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976. Bossy, John. The English Catholic Community 1570–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Brachlow, Stephen. The Communion of the Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Bray, Gerald, ed. The Anglican Canons 1529–1947. Church of England Record Society, vol. 6. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998. Briggs, Robin. Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. London: HarperCollins, 1996. Brook, Benjamin. The Lives of the Puritans: Containing a Biographical Account of Those Divines Who Distinguished Themselves in the Cause of Religious Liberty, from the Reformation under Queen Elizabeth, to the Act of Uniformity in 1662. London: J. Black, 1813. Browne, Robert. A Book Which Sheweth the Life and Manner of All True Christians. Middelburg, 1582. ———. A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying For Anie. Middelburg, 1582. Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Rev. repr., Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1994. Burr, George Lincoln. “New England’s Place in the History of Witchcraft.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (October 1911): 3–35. Reprinted in George Lincoln Burr: A Life by Roland H. Bainton with Selections from His Writings, ed. Lois Gibbons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1943), 360–71. Calvin, John. Calvin’s First Catechism. Edited by John Hesselink. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997. ———. The Catechism of the Church of Geneva. Translated by Elijah Waterman. Hartford, CT: Sheldon & Goodwin, 1815. ———. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960. Campion, Edmund. Campion’s Ten Reasons. Translated by Joseph Rickaby. London: Manresa Press, 1914. Carlson, Eric Josef. “Cassandra Banished? New Research on Religion in Tudor and Early Stuart England.” In Religion and the English People, 1500–1640. Edited by Carlson. Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1998. Carlson, Leland Henry. Martin Marprelate, Gentleman: Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in His Colours. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1981. ———, ed. The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1590–1591. Elizabethan Nonconformist Text Series, vol. 5. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1966. ———, ed. The Writings of John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, 1591–1593. Elizabethan Nonconformist Text Series, vol. 6. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1970. Carrafiello, Michael L. Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580–1610. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1998. Clark, Stuart. “King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship.” In The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, edited by Sydney Anglo, 156–81. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. ———. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

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Hitchcock, James. “George Gifford and Puritan Witch Beliefs.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 58 (1967): 90–99. Holland, Henry. A Treatise Against Witchcraft. Cambridge, 1590. Holleran, James V. A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion’s Debates at the Tower of London in 1581. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999. Howard, Joseph Jackson, and Joseph Lemuel Chester, eds. The Visitation of London, Anno Domini 1633, 1634, and 1635. London, 1880. Hughes, Leonard. A Guide to the Church of All Saints, Maldon. Maldon and London, 1909. Hunt, William. The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. James VI and I. Daemonologie. Edinburgh,1597. Jewel, John. The Works of John Jewel. Edited by John Ayre. Cambridge: University Press, 1847. ———. The Works of John Jewel. Edited by Richard William Jelf. Oxford: University Press, 1848. Jones, Norman. The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Juel-Jensen, B. E., ed. The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death. Oxford: privately printed, 1959. Kaufman, Peter Iver. “How Socially Conservative Were the Elizabethan Radicals?” Albion 30, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 29–48. ———. Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection. Studies in Anglican History Series, vol. 2. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. ———. “Prophesying Again.” Church History 68, no. 2 (June 1999): 337–58. ———. Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Kittredge, George Lyman. Witchcraft in Old and New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929. Kramer, Heinrich, and Jacob Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum. Cologne, 1486. Lake, Peter. “Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635.” Past and Present 114 (February 1987): 32–76. ———. “‘A Charitable Christian Hatred’: The Godly and Their Enemies in the 1630s.” In The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, edited by Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, 145–83. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. ———. “Defining Puritanism—Again?” In Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, edited by Francis Bremer, 3–29. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993. ———. Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ———. “Puritan Identities.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984): 112–23. ———. “Robert Some and the Ambiguities of Moderation.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 71 (1980): 254–79. Lake, Peter, and Michael Questier, eds. Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. Litzenberger, Caroline. The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire 1540–1580. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Luther, Martin. A Treatise on Christian Liberty. Translated by W. A. Lambert. In Three Treatises. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1947. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Macfarlane, Alan. “A Tudor Anthropologist: George Gifford’s Discourse and Dialogue.” In The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, edited by Sydney Anglo, 140–55. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. ———.Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Marprelate, Martin (pseud.). The Marprelate Tracts, 1588–1589. Menston, England: The Scolar Press Ltd., 1967. ———. The Marprelate Tracts, 1588, 1589. Edited by William Pierce. London: James Clarke & Co., 1911. Marsh, Christopher. Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding Their Peace. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Martin, Joseph Walford. Religious Radicals in Tudor England. London: Hambledon Press, 1989. McGinn, Donald Joseph. The Admonition Controversy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949. Milward, Peter. Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of the Printed Sources. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. Muller, Richard. Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins. Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986. Neal, Daniel. The History of the Puritans, or Protestant Nonconformists, from the Reformation in 1517 to the Revolution in 1688, Comprising an Account of Their Principles,Their Attempts for a Further Reformation in the Church, Their Sufferings, and the Lives and Characters of Their Most Considerable Divines. London: R. Hett, 1732. Newcourt, Richard. Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense. London: B. Motte, 1710. Norden, John. Speculi Britanniae Pars: An Historical and Chorographical Description of the County of Essex. Edited by Henry Ellis. London: Camden Society, 1840. Ozment, Stephen. The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1980. Parker, Kenneth L., and Eric J. Carlson. Practical Divinity: The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1998. Peel, Albert, ed. The Seconde Parte of a Register: Being a Calendar of Manuscripts under That Title Intended for Publication by the Puritans about 1593, and now in Dr Williams’s Library, London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. Peile, John. Biographical Register of Christ’s College 1505–1905. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910. ———. Christ’s College. London: F. E. Robinson, 1900. Perkins, William. A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft so far forth as it is revealed in the scriptures and manifest by true experience, framed and delivered by Mr. William Perkins in his ordinary course of preaching and published by Thomas Pickering, Bachelor of Divinity, and minister of Finching Field in Essex. Cambridge, 1608, 1610. ———. The Work of William Perkins. Edited by Ian Breward. Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970.

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Petchey, William John. The Borough of Maldon, Essex, 1500–1688. Ph.D. diss., University of Leicester, Department of English Local History, 1972. ———. A Prospect of Maldon: 1500–1689. Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1991. Porter, Harry Culverwell. Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge. Cambridge: University Press, 1958. Primus, John H. Richard Greenham: The Portrait of an Elizabethan Pastor. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998. Reynolds, Ernest Edwin. Campion and Parsons: The Jesuit Mission of 1580–1. London: Sheed and Ward, 1980. Salerno, Samuel, trans.The Battle of Maldon. Monterey, CA: Lighthouse Press, 1996. Scarisbrick, J. J.The Reformation and the English People. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Schaff, Philip, ed. The Creeds of Christendom. 1919. Reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996. Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Edited by Brinsley Nicholson. London: Elliot Stock, 1886. Reprint, East Ardsley: EP Publishing Limited, 1973. ———. The Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot with an introduction by the Rev. Montague Summers. [London]: John Rodker, 1930. ———. A perfite platforme of a hoppe garden, and necessarie instructions for the making and mayntenaunce thereof. London, 1576. Scragg, Donald, ed.The Battle of Maldon, AD 991. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Scribner, Robert. “Elements of Popular Belief.” In Handbook of European History 1400– 1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, edited Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. Seaver, Paul S. The Puritan Lecturerships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970. Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1770. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996. ———.Witchcraft in Early Modern England. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001. South, Malcolm H. The Jesuits and the Joint Mission to England during 1580–1581. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. Spufford, Margaret. “Can We Count the ‘Godly’ and the ‘Conformable’ in the Seventeenth Century?” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 428–38. ———. Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Rev. ed. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2000. ———. Figures in the Landscape: Rural Society in England, 1500–1700. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000. ———. “Puritanism and Social Control.” In Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, edited by A. J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson, 41–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ———, ed. The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Strype, John. Annals of the Church under Queen Elizabeth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822. ———. Historical Collections of the Life and Acts of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Aylmere. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1821. ———.The Life and Acts of John Whitgift. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822. Teall, John L. “Witchcraft and Calvinism in Elizabethan England: Divine Power and Human Agency.” Journal of the History of Ideas 23, no. 1 (January–March 1962): 21–36.

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INDEX

Abraham (biblical patriarch), 144n22 Acheson, R. J., 92n13 Act of Supremacy, 38 Act of Uniformity, 39 Acts and Monuments, 66, 78, 84, 92, 168 Acts of the Apostles, 74 Admonition to Parliament, An, 74 Allen, William, 63 All Saints parish, Maldon, Essex, 32, 33, 34, 44, 51, 56, 139 Gifford and Palmer at, 51–60, 62 Ampleforth, Christopher, 4 Anabaptists, 88, 114 Anglo, Sydney, 7n9 Articles of Religion, 38 Arthur, William, 59, 60 assurance of salvation, 148–53 astrology, 128 atheism, 3n3, 23, 80, 105, 107n53 Atheos (character in Countrie Divinitie), 3–24 passim, 50, 140, 145, 157, 160–62. See also common sort as common sort, 13–20, 141, 142, 158 and virtue, 146 Augustine, Saint, 72, 95–97, 99, 100, 107 Aylmer, John, Bishop of London, 19, 20n35, 28, 33, 40, 51, 146 career of, 45–47, 87 death, 58 on separatists, 88

Bantofte, Mr., 53 Barrow, Henry, 21, 87, 89–95 passim, 107–8 Barstow, Anne Llewellyn, 132n62 Bateman, Stephen, 6, 159 Battle of Maldon,The (epic poem), 31–32 Beale, Robert, 42n29 Beaufort, Lady Margaret, 27 Bible. See scripture Blackwater, River, 31 Bloomfield, Edward H., 96n23 Book of Common Prayer, 1, 38–39, 42–43, 65, 99, 102 catechism of, 138–39, 142 Bossy, John, 65n5 Brachlow, Stephen, 91, 108 Braintree conference, 40 Bray, Gerald, 42n30 Bredwell, Stephen, 96n23 Bremer, Francis, 8n11 Brentwood, Essex, 29, 31 Bridges, John, 106 Brief and Plaine Declaration, A, 106 Briggs, Robin, 112n8, 132n62 Brisco, George, 114 Brisco, Prudence, 114 Brisco, Robert, 114 Brook, Benjamin, 10 Brooke, John, 59 Browne, Robert, 88n3, 93–94, 96n23 Brownists, 94, 95. See also separatists Burke, Peter, 13n24 Burghley, Lord. See Cecil, William, Lord Burghley Burr, George Lincoln, 111n4

B

C

Page numbers in italics refer to figures.

A

Bainham, James, 168 Bainham, Jone, 168 Bainham, Joseph, 168 Bancroft, Richard, 62n62, 85, 88, 93

Calvin, John, 14, 64, 78 on Anabaptists, 88 on assurance of salvation, 148 catechism of, 142

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Calvin, John, continued on faith and works, 144n19 and witch hunts, 111–12 Calvinism, 141, 160 and assurance of salvation, 148 and pietism, 152 and witch hunts, 111–12 Cambridge, 21, 25, 26–28, 33, 37, 40 See also Christ’s College; Pembroke Hall; St. John’s College; Trinity College and Browne, 93 and Cartwright, 74 and Cecil, 168 and Fulke, 106n48 and Gifford, 62, 143 and Goade, 77 and Greenwood, 94 and Palmer, 51 and Perkins, 127 and Radcliffe, 171 and Some, 89 and Tower debates, 70 and Wiersdale, 44, 45, 47 Cambridgeshire, 170 Campion, Edmund, 63, 66, 67–71 Challenge of, 69 Rationes Decem, 69, 70, 71, 72 and Tower debates, 70–72, 77–80 trial of, 68 canonization, 71–72 Canterbury, 39 Carlson, Eric Josef, 20n38, 21, 149n35, 151n40 Carlson, Leland, 90n10, 95n20, 100n, 101n34, 106n48 Carrafiello, Michael L., 67n11 Carter, Tom (as common sort), 76, 84 Cartwright, Thomas, 28, 37, 67, 89 and presbyterian movement, 93 and Whitgift, 74–75 Catechisme, 136–43 catechisms, 137–38 Cathars, 9, 11 Catholic exiles, 63 Catholicism in Church of England, 1, 7, 9, 14n25, 143, 158 Catholics in England Jesuits, 63, 66, 67–71, 160 missionaries, 66

recusants, 65–66, 80, 143, 169 Yates family, 70 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, 40, 41, 42, 46, 90, 168, 169 Certaine Sermons, 49n43 Chaderton, Laurence, 27–28 chapbooks, 17 Charke, William, 70 Chaundler, Alice, 114, 115, 116 Chaundler, John, 115 Chelmer, River, 31 Chelmsford, Essex, 4, 36, 114, 115 Chester, Joseph Lemuel, 26n2 Chichester, 39, 42 Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation, 6, 159 Christ’s College, Cambridge, 26–28, 33, 60, 127 church, doctrine of the, 77–80, 107–9, 141, 143 church fathers, 81n47, 95 Church of England, 3 and Calvinism, 64 catechizing in, 137–38 Catholic remnants in, 1, 7, 9, 14n25, 143 Gifford’s criticism of, 7, 79, 136, 138 legitimacy of, 77–80, 93, 99, 100, 131 problems in, 5 and separatists, 88, 95, 156 supremacy of monarch over, 65 Clark, Stuart, 22n40, 112n8, 113n9, 117n18, 127n47, 130n55 Clarke, Robert, 168 Colchester, Essex, 32 Collinson, Patrick The Birthpangs of Protestant England, 11n20, 46n37 on Cambridge, 27 “A Comment: Concerning the Name Puritan,” 8n11 Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 26n2, 29n10, 31n12, 36n16, 40n23, 43n33, 48n40 The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 3n1, 7n9, 10n19, 28n6, 37–39 passim, 128n48, 169n4 English Puritanism, 8

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INDEX

Collinson, Patrick, continued “The Godly,” 157n2 on Marprelate tracts, 102n40, 106n50 on preaching, 136 on prophesyings, 75n29 Puritan Character, 8n11, 9n12, 11n21 “Puritans, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation” 8n11, 10 The Reformation in English Towns, 20n38, 61n60 on separatists, 91 on subscription campaign, 41 common sort. See also Atheos; Samuel Atheos as, 3, 5, 13–20 Gifford on, 6, 13–24, 83–84, 108–9, 131–35, 153–62 in opposition to reform, 61 Zelotes’ view of, 5, 12 Company, the. See Maldon, Essex: Company, the compurgators, 134 conventicles, 91–92 Council of Carthage, 96 Council of Trent, 71, 144 Countrie Divinitie, 3–36 passim, 99, 111, 131–32, 140, 142, 157–58 autobiographical themes in, 50 dedicatory epistle of, 77, 88n4, 170 on pastoring, 145, 160–61 and virtue, 146 Court of the High Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes, 41, 42, 58, 59, 62, 105 cousenors, 126–27 Cowper, Francis, 114 Cowper, Mary, 114 Craig, John, 3n3 Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 26n2, 29n10, 31n12, 36n16, 40n23, 43n33, 48n40 The Reformation in English Towns, 20n38, 61n60 Reformation, Politics and Polemics, 160n5 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 38, 84 Cuming, G. J., 8n11 cunning folk, 119–22

m

185

D

Daemonologie, 133 Daniel (character in Witches and Witchcraftes), 110–11, 112, 113, 117–22, 125, 129–32. See also godly, the as godly, 139, 158 Davies, Robert Trevor, 111n4 Day, William, 70, 72, 77 debates at Tower of London. See Tower of London debates Dedham, Essex, 40, 43n33 Denham, Suffolk, 170 denial narrative, 115n16 Dering, Edward, 27–28 Detection of damnable driftes, 115 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 169 Devereux, Walter, 169 devil’s mark, 130 Dickens, Arthur Geoffrey, 14n25, 92n12 Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, A, 128–31 Discoverie of Witchcraft, 122–27 Donatism, 95–97, 100–101 Douay Seminary, 63 Douglas, Charles Edward, 3n1 Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 21, 25– 26, 170 Dudley, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, 7, 136, 169, 170 Dudley, Anne, 169, 170 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 44, 47, 169, 171 Duffy, Eamon, 14n25, 17, 84–85 Durston, Christopher, 8n11, 13n23

E

Eales, Jacqueline, 8n11, 13n23 Eastwood, John, 115 Ecclesiastes, 170 Edward VI, King of England, 38, 64, 92, 114, 171 election, doctrine of, 136–37, 141–42, 148–53 Elizabeth, Queen of England, 7, 14, 29, 36–37, 41, 169, 171 accession of, 64–65 and Bishop Aylmer, 45 and Burghley, 168

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INDEX

Elizabeth, Queen of England, continued and Campion, 70 as “Deborah,” 64, 65n2 and marriage, 66, 169 and separatists, 90 title of, 45 Elizabethan Settlement, 8, 14, 91 Ely, 39 England, Protestantism in, 14, 20 English Civil War, 9 Esau (biblical character), 155 Essex, 29 archdeaconry of, 45, 114, 134 clergy in, 4, 33, 39–40 corruption in, 46 nonconformists in, 1, 42 witch trials in, 111, 112, 133–34, 168 Essex, Earl of. See Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex evil, problem of, 140–41

F

faith and works, 143–47 Fenlon, Dermot, 143n19 Fenner, Dudley, 44n34, 128n48 Field, John, 63n, 72n19, 74, 78n39, 81n45 1569 rebellion, 66 Fiske, Christabel F., 22n40, 133n64 Fitzwalter, Lord. See Radcliffe, Thomas, Lord Fitzwalter, Earl of Sussex Fletcher, A. J., 17n30 Fletcher, Richard, Bishop of London, 59 Foure Sermons, 155n49, 170 Foxe, John, 41, 66, 78, 84, 92, 168 Franks, Richard, 33, 45, 62 fraterne dissentire, 98 Freewillers, 92n13 French, Katherine L., 21n38 Frend, William Hugh Clifford, 96n24 Frere, William Hugh, 3n1 Frith, Mr., 53–54 Fulke, William, 28, 70, 77–80, 85, 106n48

G

Geneva, 14, 28, 64, 74 Genevan Catechism, 142 Gibbs, Gary G., 21n38

Gibson, Marion, 115n16 Gifford, Agnes, 29 Gifford, Bonniface, 25, 26n2 Gifford, George, 13 on assurance of salvation, 148–53 biography of, 3, 4, 19, 21, 25–44, 61– 62 charges against, 40 on Catholic recusants, 65–66, 80 on common sort, 6, 13–24, 83–84, 108–9, 131–35, 154–62 criticism of Elizabethan church, 7, 79, 136, 138 deprivation of, 37–44 on election, 136–37, 141–42 on faith and works, 144–47 on godly virtue, 146–53, 157 and Palmer, 51–60 on practical divinity, 76 on read prayers, 102–4, 153 on reform, 7, 85–86, 161 restoration of, 48–49 and separatists, 48, 88–90, 95–102, 107–9, 147, 153, 156 sermons of, 136, 138 St. Paul’s Cross sermon of, 49 on doctrine of the Trinity, 138–39 will of, 59, 61, 172–74 on witchcraft, 116–22, 131–34, 140, 158 Gifford, George, works of. See also specific titles Catechisme, 136–43 Certaine Sermons, 49n43 Countrie Divinitie, 3–36 passim, 50, 77, 99, 111, 131–32, 157–58 Ecclesiastes, 170 Foure Sermons, 155n49, 170 James, 23n43, 25, 143–47, 155n49, 156n51 “Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death,” 47 Papist and Protestant, 23n44, 63–64, 66n8, 68, 71n16, 72–86 passim, 125n39 Plaine Declaration, 87, 88n5, 95–107 passim, 131n59 Priesthood and Sacrifice, 64, 81–83 Revelation, 169

McGinnis/Gifford2.book Page 187 Friday, September 3, 2004 11:10 AM

INDEX

Gifford, George, works of, continued Revelation (Fulke), 28, 170 Short Reply, 107–9 Short Treatise, 89n8, 90, 93n15, 95n22, 102–7 passim, 168n2 Sower, 26, 135n, 154–55, 160n4, 170 Subtill Practises, 110, 111n3, 171n10 themes of, 22 True Fortitude, 169 Witches and Witchcraftes, 110–11, 117– 22, 125n40, 131–34, 142, 168 Vertues of Faith, 146–53 passim, 155n46, 171n11 Gifford, John, 26n2 Gilby, Anthony, 27 Goade, Roger, 70, 77–80 godly, the, 1, 12, 13. See also Daniel; Zelotes Gifford on, 15, 146–56, 157, 158 and parishioners, 154 godly learning, 135–37, 143 Goodwife R. (character in Witches and Witchcraftes), 120 grace, 128–29 Great Baddow, Essex, 4 Great Burstead, Essex, 4 Great Wakering, Essex, 51, 52n48, 53, 58 Greaves, Richard L., 8n11 Green, Ian, 137 Greenham, Richard, 21, 149, 151, 153 Greenslade, Stanley Lawrence, 97n25 Greenwood, John, 21, 89–95 passim, 98– 104, 107–8 Gregory XIII, Pope, 63 Grindal, Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, 29, 37

H

Haigh, Christopher, 7n9, 14n25, 22n40, 37n18, 65n2, 160–61 Hall, Basil, 8n11, 10n17 Harding, Thomas, 73 Harrison, Richard, 93–94 Hart Hall, Oxford, 26, 123 Hart, Henry, 92 Hawdon, Ralph, 59, 60, 62 Hawkwell, 53 Hebrews, Epistle to the, 82

m

187

Henry VII, King of England, 27 Henry VIII, King of England, 14, 64, 98, 168, 171 Hesselink, John, 142n16 Heybridge parish, 36, 62 High Commission. See Court of the High Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes Hill, Christopher, 9, 16 Hillerbrand, Hans, 8n11 Hitchcock, James, 22n40, 121n29, 125n39 Holland, Henry, 127 Holleran, James V., 63n, 69n13, 72n19, 77n36, 81n45 homilies, read, 74, 76 “Hope” (woodcut in Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation), 159 Howard, Joseph Jackson, 26n2 Hunt, William, 2n1, 9, 20 Hutton, John, 26, 170

J

James, Epistle of, 72 James (sermon by Gifford), 23n43, 25, 143–47, 155n49, 156n51 James I, King of England (James VI of Scotland), 111, 127, 133, 169 Jerome, Saint, 72 Jesuits, 63, 66, 67–71, 85n56, 160 Jewel, John, Bishop of Salisbury, 73, 81n47, 84 Josua, Richard, 171 justification, 153

K

Kaufman, Peter Iver, 8n11, 17, 75n29, 76n32, 103n41, 132n61 on introspection, 149n35 on pietists, 152–53 Kent, 92, 123 Kittredge, George Lyman, 111n6, 121n29 Knewstub, John, 44n34 Knollys, Francis, 169 Knox, John, 45 Kramer, Heinrich, 132n63 Kümin, Beat A., 21n38

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188 l

INDEX

L

Lake, Peter, 8n11, 27–28, 65n5, 89, 162 on antipapal polemic, 67 on defining “puritan,” 13 on faith and works, 144n21 Langford, 60 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 42, 81n48 Leicester, Earl of. See Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester Levine, David, 16, 17 Lewkenor, Edward, 170 Lewkenor, Susan Heigham, 170 liturgies, controversy over, 1, 8, 9 Litzenberger, Caroline, 20n38, 21n38, 65n4 Lock, John, 36 Lollards, 1, 91n12 London, 94, 170–71 London-Chelmsford road, 1, 3, 29 Luther, Martin, 71, 78 on Anabaptists, 88 on faith and works, 143–44 Lutherans, 1

M

Macfarlane, Alan, 7n9, 22n40, 114n13, 115, 116n16, 119–20, 134n66 Maldon, Essex, 3, 16, 19–20, 25, 30, 31– 36, 162. See also All Saints parish, Maldon Company, the, 44, 52, 53 conflicts in, 44–51 executions in, 114 Gifford’s ministry in, 146 and Parliament, 170 reform in, 60–62 witch trials in, 114–16, 133–34 maleficia, 112–13, 117, 118, 123, 129, 130 Malleus Maleficarum, 132 Man, Thomas, 168 “Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death, The,” 47 Manwood, Roger, 123–24 Marian exiles, 27, 28, 45, 111 Marprelate, Martin, 46, 89, 105–6, 169 Marprelate tracts, 105–6, 168 Marsh, Christopher, 14n24

Martin, Joseph Walford, 91–92 Martin, Richard, 170–71 martyrs, 92–93, 168 Mary, Queen of England, 1, 27, 39, 45, 64, 171 persecution under, 78, 92–93, 114 Mass, 80–82 McGinn, Donald Joseph, 74n26, 75n28 Middelburg (Netherlands), 94 Mildmay, Walter, 169 Milward, Peter, 69n15, 74n26 Morris, John, 53 Mountnessing, Essex, 4, 28 Muller, Richard, 128n49

N

Neal, Daniel, 10 Newcourt, Richard, 4n6 Norfolk, 94 Norwich, 93 Nowell, Alexander, 70, 72, 77 Nowell, Roger, 36–37, 62

O

Okeley, Timothy, 4 original sin, doctrine of, 142 Oxford, 26–27, 123 Ozment, Stephen, 144n19

P

Palmer, Robert, 19, 20, 49, 162 at All Saints, 51–60 biography of, 62 career of, 51 Company and, 53 corruptions of, 51–52 Papist and Protestant, 23n44, 63–64, 66n8, 68, 71n16, 72–86 passim, 125n39 dedication, 171 on faith and works, 145 and pastoral concerns, 143 papists, 7, 85, 125, 131, 150 Parker, Kenneth, 21, 149n35, 151n40 Parliament, 65, 66, 74, 105, 170 Parsons, Robert, 63, 66, 67 Paul, Saint, 144 Paul’s Cross. See St. Paul’s Cross Peile, John, 27n4 Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 28, 106n48

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INDEX

Penry, John, 89, 106 Perkins, William, 16, 112n7, 127–31, 132, 153 perseverance, 148 Petchey, William John, 25, 26n2, 32n14, 36n16, 40n23, 44, 60 on All Saints, 62n62 on the Company, 53n49 on Palmer, 52n48, 53, 57–58 on witch trials, 114n11, 134n68 Peterborough, 39 Peter, Saint, 79 Peter, Second Epistle of, 73, 146, 150, 154 Pickering, Thomas, 128n51 pietism, 103n41, 152 Pius V, Pope, 66 Plaine Declaration, 87, 88n5, 95–107 passim, 131n59 Pope, 3n3, 160 popery, 4, 7, 105 Porter, Harry Culverwell, 27n5, 28n7 Pounde, Thomas, 68 poverty, 16 “practical divinity,” 20, 109, 135 Pratt, John, 57 prayer book. See Book of Common Prayer prayers, read, 74, 102–4, 108, 153 preaching, 107, 135 puritans on, 136 predestination, 148 presbyterian polity, 93, 104, 106, 170 Priesthood and Sacrifice, 64, 81–83 Primus, John, 21 printing, 161 Privy Council, 41, 46, 58, 68, 69, 114, 169 prophesyings, 29, 75 Protestantism, English, 14, 20, 154, 157 enemies of, 45 Protestants and assurance of salvation, 148 common sort as, 5 as devil’s accomplices, 160 in Essex, 1 Marian exiles, 27, 28, 45, 111 on popery, 7 and popular religion, 121 and puritans, 9–11 and true church, 141, 143

m

189

puritans, 1, 7, 8–13, 161. See also godly, the and antipapal polemic, 67, 85–86 as derisive term, 50 on ministers’ qualifications, 136 as nonconformists, 10 and parishioners, 140, 154 patrons of, 169, 170, 171 on preaching, 136 and Protestants, 9–11 and separatists, 87–89, 108 social context of, 9, 162 and witch-hunting, 111–12, 131

Q

Questier, Michael, 65n5

R

Radcliffe, Francis, 171 Radcliffe, Thomas, Lord Fitzwalter, Earl of Sussex, 171 Rationes Decem, 69, 70, 71, 72, 77–78 recusants, 65–66, 80, 143, 169. See also Catholics in England reform, 14, 20, 100, 161, 169 in Maldon, 60–62 and politics, 24 Regnans in excelsis, 66 Revelation, 95, 169 Revelation (Fulke), 28, 77n35, 170 Reynolds, Ernest Edwin, 63n Rheims New Testament, 67, 77n35 Rich, Lady, 48n40 Rich, Lord, 40 Robert, Sir (character in Countrie Divinitie), 4–5 Rogers, Richard, 40

S

Salisbury, 73, 106 Samuel (character in Witches and Witchcraftes), 110–11, 112, 113, 115, 117–22, 125, 131. See also common sort as common sort, 142, 158 Scarisbrick, J. J., 14n25 schism, 97, 98, 100, 105, 131 Scot, Reginald, 112n7, 116n16, 122–27 Scribner, Robert, 121

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190 l

INDEX

scripture authority and interpretation of, 70, 71–77, 118 canonization of, 71–72 separatists, 85, 90–95. See also Barrow, Henry; Brownists; Greenwood, John Gifford and, 48, 88–90, 95–102, 107– 9, 147, 153, 156 and puritans, 87–89, 108 sermons attending, 155 read, 74, 76 Seven Treatises, 40 Shakespeare, William, 15 Sharpe, James, 111n5, 112n8, 114n10, 120n22, 130n56 Short Reply, 107–9 Short Treatise, 89n8, 90, 93n15, 95n22, 102–7 passim, 168n2 Sidney, Sir Philip, 47–48 “Sloth” (woodcut in Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation), 6 Smythe, Ellen, 115–16 Some, Robert, 89 South, Malcolm H., 63n1 Sower, 26, 135n1, 154–55, 160n4, 170 Spain, 66 Sprenger, Jacob, 132n63 Spufford, Margaret, 9n15, 14n24, 17, 20n36, 92n12 Stevenson, J., 17n30 St. John’s College, Cambridge, 27, 28 St. Mary’s parish, Maldon, Essex, 32, 59– 60 St. Paul’s Cross, 49, 81n47, 106 St. Peter’s parish, Maldon, Essex, 32, 34, 44 Stow, 45 Strype, John, 87 subscription campaign, 37–44, 94 Subtill Practises, 110, 111n3, 120n27, 171n10 surplice, 28, 47, 57. See also vestments controversy Sussex, Earl of. See Radcliffe, Thomas, Lord Fitzwalter, Earl of Sussex

T

Teall, John, 111, 112n7, 126–27, 131n57 Terling, Essex, 16, 17 “Terling thesis,” 17 Thomas, Keith, 22n40, 115, 116n16, 119n22, 120n24 Thorpe Achurch, Northants, 94 Tilley, Maureen, 96n24 Tittler, Robert, 60–61 Tower of London, 170 Tower of London debates, 63–64, 68, 70, 77–80, 83, 85 transubstantiation, 39, 45, 80–82 Tridentine orthodoxy, 66 Trinity, doctrine of, 138–39 Trinity College, Cambridge, 27, 28, 74 True Fortitude, 169 Tyndale, William, 83

U

Udall, John, 106, 168, 169 Usher, Brett, 26n2, 29n10, 31n12, 36n16, 40n23, 48n40, 170n7

V

Van Engen, John, 161 Venn, J. A., 27n4 Venn, John, 27n4 Vertues of Faith, 146–53 passim, 155n46, 171n11 vestments controversy, 1, 8, 9, 10, 77n35, 91, 127. See also surplice virtue, 146–53

W

Wabuda, Susan, 21n38, 65n4 Walker, John, 29, 70 Walker, Robert, 170 Wallace, Dewey D., Jr., 22, 23, 140, 144n21 Walsham, Alexandra, 65, 66, 71n16, 124n36 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 67, 169 Warwick, Earl of. See Dudley, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick Webbe, Susan, 115, 116 Webbe, Widow, 116 Westminster, debates at, 45

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INDEX

Wethersfield, 40 Whitaker, William, 67 White, Barrington Raymond, 91n11, 93n15, 94n19 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 45, 62, 87 and Burghley, 168 and Cartwright, 67, 74–75 and conformity, 105 and Devereux, 169 and Greenwood, 94 and prayer book, 102 and subscription campaign, 37, 39–43 Whiting, Robert, 14n25, 65n3 Wiersdale, Mark, 44–45, 47, 49, 51 Wilcox, Thomas, 74 Williams, Richard, 57 Winship, Michael P., 148n32 Wiseman, Margaret, 134 Witches and Witchcraftes, 110–11, 117–22, 125n40, 131–34, 142, 168 witches, 110–11 belief in, 112–16, 136 Calvinism and, 111–12 Gifford on, 116–22, 131–34, 140, 158

m

191

hunting of, 111–12 Perkins on, 127–31 Scot on, 122–27 women and, 113n9, 132–33 Withers, Fabian, 32–33, 36 Withers, George, 32 Withers, Samuel, 33 Wood, Anthony, 26, 27n4 Worchester, 37 works. See faith and works Wright, Robert, 40 Wright, S. J., 21n38 Wrightson, Keith, 16, 17 Wycliffe, John, 71

Y

Yates family, 70 Yonge, Nicholas, 92n13

Z

Zelotes (character in Countrie Divinitie), 3–24 passim, 50, 145, 157, 160–62. See also godly, the as godly, 8–13, 139, 158 Zwingli, Ulrich, 78

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