Nicodemites between Italy and Tudor England (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History) 9004331662, 9789004331662

Table of contents :
Contents
Publishers’ Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Words and Styles
Prologue
Part 1
The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’
A Nursery of Nicodemism: The Circle of Reginald Pole in Italy
Pole’s Nicodemite Piety? Viterbo to England
The VolteFaces of Pietro Vanni
Nicodemite’s Progress: Edward Courtenay
Part 2
The Confusions of
The Case against Nicodemites
Exploiting Francesco Spiera in Italy and in England
Counsel for Nicodemite Sinners: Vermigli, Curione and Cheke
Radical Texts for the Queen of Nicodemites
Mixed Messages in Elizabethan England
Echoes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Nicodemites

St Andrews Studies in Reformation History Lead Editor Bridget Heal (University of St Andrews) Editorial Board Amy Burnett (University of Nebraska-​Lincoln) Euan Cameron (Columbia University) Bruce Gordon (Yale University) Kaspar von Greyerz (Universität Basel) Felicity Heal (Jesus College, Oxford) Karin Maag (Calvin College, Grand Rapids) Roger Mason (University of St Andrews) Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews) Alec Ryrie (Durham University) Jonathan Willis (University of Birmingham)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​sasrh

Nicodemites Faith and Concealment between Italy and Tudor England

By

M. Anne Overell

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Crijn Hendricksz. Volmarijn, Christ talking with Nicodemus. © Sotheby’s /​akg-​images. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at http://​catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2018960027​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. ISSN 2468-​4 317 ISBN 978-90-04-33166-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-33169-3 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To Stephen and James and in memory of Alan

∵

Contents Publishers’ Acknowledgements ix Acknowledgements x List of Abbreviations xi Words and Styles xiii Prologue 1

Lives

Part 1

1

The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’ 15

2

A Nursery of Nicodemism: The Circle of Reginald Pole in Italy 33

3

Pole’s Nicodemite Piety? Viterbo to England 52

4

The Volte-​Faces of Pietro Vanni 76

5

Nicodemite’s Progress: Edward Courtenay 96

Texts

Part 2

6

The Confusions of Il Beneficio di Cristo 115

7

The Case against Nicodemites 131

8

Exploiting Francesco Spiera in Italy and in England 150

9

Counsel for Nicodemite Sinners: Vermigli, Curione and Cheke 165

10

Radical Texts for the Queen of Nicodemites 186

viii Contents 11

Mixed Messages in Elizabethan England 205

12 Echoes 226 Bibliography 239 Index 273

Publishers’ Acknowledgements I should like to thank all the editors and publishers who have given permission for re-​use of extracts from an earlier monograph and from several published chapters and articles. These are listed below. Specific acknowledgments appear again at the beginning of the Chapter in which the work is used. To Taylor and Francis Group:  Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–​c.1585 (Aldershot:  Ashgate, now Taylor and Francis Group, 2008); ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy:  Edward Courtenay, 1548–​1556’, in David Loades, ed., John Foxe at Home and Abroad (Ashgate, now Taylor and Francis Group, 2004,), pp. 117–​135. Three of my articles appeared in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History: ‘Vergerio’s Anti-​Nicodemite Propaganda and England:  1547–​1558’, 51 (2000), 296–​ 318; ‘An English Friendship and Italian Reform: Richard Morison and Michael Throckmorton, 1532–​1538’, 57 (2006), 478–​493; ‘Pole’s Piety? The Devotional Reading of Reginald Pole and his Friends’, 63 (2012), 458-​74. For permission to re-​use of parts of all three articles, my thanks are due to the Editors of the jeh and the publishers, Cambridge University Press. Also, permission was given for re-​use of parts of the following: ‘Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo, 1547–​1553’, in Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 151–​174 (Jonathan Woolfson and Palgrave Macmillan); ‘Cardinal Pole’s Special Agent: Michael Throckmorton, 1533-​1558’, History, 94 (2009), 265-​278 (the Editors, the Historical Association and John Wiley and Sons); ‘Arthur Golding’s translation of the Beneficio di Cristo’, Notes and Queries, New Series, 25 (1978), 424–​26 (the Editors and Oxford University Press); ‘The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 26 (1995), 619–​37 (the Editors and the scj Press). I thank all those concerned for their permission, advice and encouragement.

Acknowledgements Amidst nicodemite mists and obscurities, I have needed guides and companions. This text would never have appeared without Alec Ryrie’s profound and witty insights and his steady confidence in the whole project. Susan Brigden’s sensitivity to sixteenth-​century texts and images means much, and her friendship still more. The generous scholarship of Diarmaid MacCulloch remains an inspiration, while James Carley, John McDiarmid and James Willoughby are the best counsellors and collaborators anyone could wish for. I remember Tom Mayer, who died whilst this book was being written and on whose unique research I have relied so often. I thank Andrew Pettegree, the founding Editor of the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History Series, Bridget Heal, the current Editor and Francis Knikker, Assistant Editor at Brill, for being always so helpful and affirmative. I have depended on a company of historian friends who kindly read parts of this text and were sage critics: Dermot Fenlon, Peter Marshall, Diego Pirillo, Susan Royal, David and Pamela Selwyn, Frederick Smith, Tracey Sowerby and Alexandra Walsham. And I  have presumed on the inexhaustible goodwill of other friends, not historians, who agreed to act as ‘general readers’ and promptly turned themselves into eagle-​eyed specialists:  Margaret Atherton, Jacob Blakesley, Gerald Hargreaves, Tim Jarrold and Ailsa Swarbrick. Mistakes that remain are mine but there would have been many more without their help. Linguistic advice came from my patient polyglot allies, Chiara La Sala, Katarina Pellijeff, Alessio Baldini, Richard Hibbitt and Leonardo Costantini. Also, I want to thank the staff of Durham University Library, and especially Judith Walton in Document Delivery, who went way beyond all expectation to help me go on working even when I was not able to travel. My family kept me almost sane: I thank Helen, Jan and Olive for their constant loving-​kindness, and also five younger people who are not (yet) keen on nicodemites but are very good to me: Joseph, Dominic, Seb, Sam and Lucia. Then there are my sons, Stephen and James; in their intriguingly different ways, they cared unceasingly, read willingly and made sure this work was completed. This book is dedicated to them and to the memory of their father and my husband, Alan. Anne Overell Easter 2018

Abbreviations (First references are given in full and the abbreviated form is used thereafter) arg AS BL cpec

Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte Archivio di Stato British Library Thomas F. Mayer, Cardinal Pole in European Context; a via media in the Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2000) Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. J. E. Cox, PS (Cambridge, 1846) Cranmer, Writings and Disputations Thomas Cranmer, Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer relative to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, ed. J.E. Cox, PS (Cambridge, 1844) crp Thomas F. Mayer, Correspondence of Reginald Pole (4 vols, Aldershot: Ashgate 2002–​08) csp Foreign  Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, ed. W.B Turnbull, J. Stevenson et al 23 vols (London: Longman, 1863-​1950). csp Spanish Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, ed. P. de Gayangos, G. Mattingly, M.A.S. Hume and R. Tyler, 15 vols in 20 (London: hmso, 1862–​1954) csp Venetian Calendar of State Papers relating to English Affairs in the Archives and Collections of Venice, ed. Rawdon Brown (London: Longman, 1864–​ 1947) cspde Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Reign of Edward vi, 1547–​1553, revised, ed. C.S. Knighton (London: hmso, 1992) cspdm Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Reign of Mary I, 1553–​1558, revised, ed. C.S. Knighton (London: pro, 1998) cwe Collected Works of Erasmus dbi Dizionario biografico degli italiani, ed. A.M. Ghisalberti (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960 –​) ehr English Historical Review HJ Historical Journal jbs Journal of British Studies jeh Journal of Ecclesiastical History lls Peter Martyr Vermigli, Life, Letters and Sermons, translated and edited by John Patrick Donnelly SJ, The Peter Martyr Library volume 5 (Kirksville MO: Thomas Jefferson UP, 1999)

xii Abbreviations LP

Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the reign of Henry viii, 1509–​ 47, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, 21 vols (London: Longman, 1862–​1932) NS New Series OC Corpus Reformatorum, Ioannis Calvini Opera, ed. William Baum, Edward Cunitz, and Edward Reus (Brunswick: C.A. Schwetschke, 1863–1900) odnb Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) OL Original Letters relative to the English Reformation, 2 vols, ed. H. Robinson for Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846–​7) pro Public Record Office Processi Carnesecchi I processi inquisitioriali di Pietro Carnesecchi, 1557–​1567, ed. Massimo Firo and Dario Marcatto (2 vols in 4, Citta del Vaticano: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 1998–​2000) Processo Morone Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone, ed. Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, 6 vols (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1981–​96) scj Sixteenth Century Journal tamo The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or tamo (hri Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011) 

Words and Styles I have avoided modernising contemporary spelling, in order to create a respectful distance. Problems occur, however, with one ubiquitous title which, in the sixteenth century, usually appeared as il beneficio di Christo; the modern form is often Il Beneficio di Cristo. I have tried to show when and why the older usage is appropriate. Throughout the book ‘protestant’ and ‘catholic’ appear in lower case. This is intended to reflect the fact that these terms were not fixed or stable until well after the mid-​sixteenth century. The word ‘catholic’ in particular could mean many things. Correspondingly ‘nicodemite’ and ‘nicodemism’ are in lower case, partly to indicate that these words do not suggest a religious sect or ‘a movement’. I have used ‘evangelical’ for English reformers before 1550 but avoided doing so in the Italian context, where the term is controversial. For correspondence, sender’s and recipient’s names, place of writing and date are given, except in the case of less important letters. The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, edited by Thomas F. Mayer, is numbered across all volumes and these continuous numbers are used here in accordance with the Editor’s suggestion. Calendar entries appear with document numbers, except the Calendar of State Papers Spanish where page numbers are more clearly marked in the Calendar, so these are given and clearly indicated. Universal Short Title Catalogue references are given for books published in mainland Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century. For printed books published in England between 1475 and 1640, Short Title Catalogue references appear. In rare instances where an Italian book does not appear fully in these two Catalogues, the reference is to ‘Edit 16’ of the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico delle biblioteche italiane. Translations appear in the text and the foreign language version is given in the footnotes. The translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

Prologue The doings of men be as it were a tongue:1

Pietro Martire Vermigli, A treatise of the cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull

∵ During the great spiritual upheaval of the Reformation era, nicodemites chose to keep their religion secret. They went to church as their rulers directed, but they were just obeying orders without conviction. Most of them told the authorities whatever they wanted to hear. Thus, they usually avoided trouble and survived the persecutions which were widespread in Europe. From a modern perspective, their reactions may seem sensible, designed to keep the peace and avoid a fuss. Yet, in the eyes of devout contemporaries such behaviour was despicable, un-​Christian and subversive of all proper religious and political order. Nicodemites were depicted as having let down the side; in the mid-​sixteenth century it was usually the protestant side, since most ‘anti-​nicodemite’ writers were protestants.2 Later on, the same theme would be taken up by catholic writers, especially in Elizabethan England.3 We do not know when ‘nicodemite’ first came into use as a hate-​word. There is evidence from the Netherlands of its use in a pejorative sense by 1522.4 Yet those who were keeping quiet about their beliefs did not attract very much 1 A treatise of the cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull Whereunto is added a sermon made of the confessing of Christe and his gospel, and of the denyinge of the same [Strassburg: W. Rihel, 1555], ustc 505214, also stc 24673.5, p. 23. 2 Carlos M. N. Eire, ‘Prelude to Sedition: Calvin’s Attack on Nicodemism and Religious Compromise’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte [hereafter arg], 76 (1985), 120–​45; Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: the Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 234–​75. 3 Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (London: Royal Historical Society 1993; repr., with a new preface, Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999); Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), especially Part I, pp. 53–​125. 4 Andrew Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, in his Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 86–​117, at pp. 89–​90.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004331693_​0 02

2 Prologue attention until John Calvin’s brilliant and withering ‘anti-​nicodemite’ polemic began in the 1540s.5 His most famous title, Excuse à messieurs les nicodemites (1544), mentions no individuals, but drips contempt for groups of unnamed people. Among these shameful ‘messieurs’ were flirting courtiers, ‘sensitive protonotaries [who] .... are well content to have the Gospel and to talk happily about it with the ladies, provided this does not prevent them from living at their own pleasure.’ He also condemned intellectuals, who made a philosophy out of the Gospel, and clerics determined to keep their jobs at all costs.6 In 1550, Calvin accused Italians, in particular, of ‘playing games with God’.7 He kept up his campaign and his policy remained zero-​tolerance.8 From the start, however, he was deeply uneasy about the name. Why use Nicodemus to denote such evil?9 He had appeared in St John’s Gospel as a good man: ‘There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night’: a late visitor, no explanation, perhaps cautious. But he is drawn in by the ‘signs’ Jesus performed; then Nicodemus wanted to know about being born again through the spirit. Later he argued with the Pharisees, contending that no-​one (especially Jesus?) should be condemned without being given a fair hearing. And Nicodemus turned out very well: after Christ’s death, he brought expensive spices and helped with the burial.10 In the Middle Ages readers would have been baffled by the idea of using his name to suggest 5

David F. Wright, ‘Why was Calvin so severe a Critic of Nicodemism?’ in David F. Wright, Anthony N. S. Lane, and Jon Balserak, eds, Calvinus evangelii propugnator: Calvin, Champion of the Gospel: Papers from the International Congress on Calvin Research, Seoul, 1998 (Grand Rapids, Mich: crc Production Services, 2006), pp. 66–​90. 6 ‘les prothonotaires delicatz, qui sont bien contens d’avoir I’Evangile, e d’en deviser ioyeusement & par esbat avec les Dames, moyennant que cela ne les empesche point de de vivre a leur plaisir’, Excuse de Jehan Calvin à messieurs les Nicodemites sur la complaicte qu’ils font de sa trop grand rigeur ([Geneva: Jean Girard, 1544), ustc 4768, sig. B; Corpus Reformatorum, Ioannis Calvini Opera, ed. William Baum, Edward Cunitz, and Edward Reus (Brunswick: C.A. Schwetschke, 1863–​1900) [hereafter cited as OC], 6, 598–​9, trans and quoted in Bernard Cottret, Calvin; A  Biography, trans. M.  Wallace McDonald (Grand Rapids, Mich: W. B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), p. 270. 7 ‘Hinc discant Itali quibus nimium familiare est cum Deo ludere’, John Calvin, preface to Henry Scrimger [Scrymgeour], Exemplum memorabile desperationis in Francisco Spiera (Geneva: Jean Gerard, 1550), ustc 450029, sigs A4v and A6r, cited by Adriano Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande: storia di Giorgio Siculo e della sua setta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000), p. 127, note 15. 8 Jon Balserak, John Calvin as Sixteenth–​Century Prophet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), at pp. 84 and p. 136. 9 Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 189–​97. 10 For references to Nicodemus in the New Testament, see John 3: 1–​10; 7:50; 19:39. Quotations are taken from the King James Bible of 1611 , accessed 11 August 2017.

Prologue

3

wickedness. The ‘Gospel of Nicodemus’ had set him in the exalted company of gospel writers, even if it was apocryphal. In late medieval devotional literature Nicodemus was depicted as a humble seeker after truth.11 Calvin would have known that older tradition, hence perhaps his discomfort about a ‘bad’ Nicodemus. He showed unease about the name even while he was writing against ‘messieurs les nicodemites’: and when that famous text was translated into Latin, Calvin used ‘pseudo-​nicodemos’ instead.12 By the time he wrote his lectures on Hosea (c. 1555-​6), he seemed to suggest that deceivers were justifying themselves by snatching a good man’s name; he wrote of ‘those wicked scoundrels who boast themselves nicodemites’.13 His biographer Bernard Cottret commented: ‘In reality Calvin did not speak so much of Nicodemites as of alleged nicodemites.’14 Good Nicodemus, bad nicodemites, alleged nicodemites:  this name is miasmic, anachronistic and imprecise  –​so best abandoned. But it is too late to do that. There are important historical studies of people and groups in different localities displaying so-​called ‘nicodemite’ characteristics, like keeping quiet about their beliefs, obeying outwardly, or masking their views.15 General readers and students, too, seem to know enough of human secrets to relate to this behaviour very quickly. So the words ‘nicodemite’ and

11

12 13 14 15

Federico Zuliani, ‘The Other Nicodemus: Nicodemus in Italian Religious Writings previous and contemporary to Calvin’s Excuse à messieurs les Nicodemites (1544)’, in Sabrina Corbellini, Margriet Hoogvliet and Bart Ramakers, eds, Discovering the Riches of the Word: Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 311–​333; Zbigniew Izydorczyk, ed., The Medieval Gospel of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts and Contexts in Western Europe (Tempe, Ariz: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997). De vitandis superstitionibus, quae cum sincera fidei confessione pugnant, libellus Joannis Calvini. Eiusdem excusatio, ad pseudonicodemos (Geneva: Jean Girard, 1550), ustc 450027. ‘Et non tantum hic cum papistis certamen nobis est, sed cum nebulonibus istis, qui iactant se Nicodemitas’, OC, 42: 290. Cottret, Calvin, p. 186; see also Paul Cavill, ‘Heresy and Forfeiture in Marian England’, Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 879–​907, at p. 906. See especially, Walsham, Church Papists; Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, in his Marian Protestantism, pp.  186–​117; Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry viii:  Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003); Susan Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation during the English Reformation: the “Subtle Shadows” of Dr. Edward Crome’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History[hereafter jeh], 44 (1993), 224–​242; Massimo Firpo, Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation, trans. Richard Bates (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) [hereafter Firpo, Valdés], esp. parts i and iii; Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 115 and 157–​61; Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

4 Prologue ‘nicodemism’ appear in this book –​with caution. My hope is to separate the nicodemite as constructed in angry polemic (always bad) from frightened people acting in various ways thought to characterise deceivers. Crucially, this was not a group with ‘modern’ values –​of ‘moderation’, flexibility, honest doubt, and a disposition to understanding and tolerance; nicodemites were neither liberals nor heroes.16 Only in the second half of the sixteenth century did links with tolerance and toleration become apparent. Studies of local groups have shown how they misled the authorities, did as they were told but held on to their secrets, and ‒ hardest to handle –​recanted their beliefs when they were investigated, then returned to what they had thought before. These tactics have been studied by specialists interested in French evangelicals, Italian reformers, English evangelicals and, later, English catholics in Queen Elizabeth’s reign.17 Very rarely, however, have historians looked across borders to consider links between nicodemites in different parts of Europe. The exception is Carlo Ginzburg’s classic Il Nicodemismo, a work which has been criticised for depicting a cohesive European nicodemite movement created by one specific group of individuals.18 Those criticisms were just and convincing but I shall argue that their long-​term effect has been to obscure an important kernel of truth in Ginzburg’s arguments. There was no cohesion and no European movement, yet there were similar patterns of thought and action in different places: these were shared, usually through texts. The problem was specific and widespread –​what to do in face of demands for religious conformity enforced by persecution. This book connects two ‘hotspots’, areas where contemporaries thought that nicodemism was prevalent. Respectful of wise cautions about ‘that dubious word “influence” and the only slightly less dodgy word “reception” ’, it will suggest an interaction and exchange between people forced to keep secrets.19 Its title limits the enquiry; this is not about nicodemism in Italy, or 16

17 18 19

Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011); Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner, eds, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially Diarmaid MacCulloch’s essay, ‘Archbishop Cranmer: Concord and Tolerance in a Changing Church’, pp. 199–​215. For studies of these groups, see note 15 above. Carlo Ginzburg, Il Nicodemismo; simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’ Europa del ‘500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1970); Carlos M.N. Eire, ‘Calvin and Nicodemism: A Reappraisal’, Sixteenth Century Journal [hereafter scj], 10 (1979), 46–​69, especially pp. 67–​69. Patrick Collinson, ‘The Fog in the Channel clears; the Rediscovery of the Continental Dimension of the British Reformations’, in Polly Ha and Patrick Collinson, eds, The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain, Proceedings of the British Academy, 164 (2010), pp. xxvii–​xxxviii, at p. xxxv.

Prologue

5

nicodemism in England, but about a long-​lasting connection of nicodemites ‘between Italy and Tudor England’. Every person in Part 1, every text in Part 2, was part of that exchange. It lasted through the reformation era and echoed for centuries thereafter. Unhampered by the usual confessional divisions, this study links a (mostly) catholic area with a (usually) protestant one. It connects a fragmented collection of city states (Italy before unification) with an island monarchy, unified as far as the Scottish border (Tudor England). That coupling may seem perverse, but the exchange between Italy and England shows how often contemporaries ignored, leapt over and sailed through confessional and political boundaries. In both these areas, the enforcement of uniformity was spasmodic and patchy, but efficient enough to create sizeable dissimulating groups, often but not solely among the educated. Persecutions and migrations in Spain, France, the Netherlands, and large parts of the Empire introduced into Europe new groups of ‘strangers’, exiles, displaced scholars and preachers, new faiths and rituals, and representatives of other ways of living and praying. ‘Areas of exchange’ are observable near borders and frontiers where different kinds of religion were known and practised.20 But vast mountain ranges and rough seas separated Italy and England. We might have expected that travel between the two was a choice open only to those with brave hearts, good health, and full purses –​or a degree of desperation. Yet this was a busy route and a surprising number made the journey:  Englishmen went to study in Italy’s famous universities, especially to Padua which offered Europe’s best and most expensive education; the disaffected and those who had displeased prickly Tudor governments often sought refuge in Italy, usually in Venice, a great commercial and maritime centre, a melting pot of different cultures and a place where you could hide.21 Italians came to England as merchants, book distributors, or as religious advisers for England’s dizzying succession of reformations –​of both ‘protestant’ and ‘catholic’ varieties.22 This persistent exchange was supported by long-​standing connections through learning, trade and diplomacy and often conducted under cover of those activities.

20 21 22

Kaplan, Divided by Faith, pp. 149–​158; Eszter Andor and István György Toth, eds, Frontiers of Faith: Religious Exchange and the Constitution of Religious Identities, 1400–​1750 (Budapest: Central European University, 2001). Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors:  English Students in Italy, 1485–​1603 (Cambridge: James Clark, 1998). M. Anne Overell, Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–​c.1585 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) [hereafter Italian Reform], pp. 41–​61, 103–​125.

6 Prologue So why write about this Anglo-​Italian network of nicodemites? It all began with Italian spirituali, whom I met for the first time in Dermot Fenlon’s study of Reginald Pole and his friends in Italy. Men and women in this group were profoundly attracted to Luther’s reforms and doctrines, they longed to further reconciliation but they also wanted to remain catholics. They hoped for co-​ operation from church authorities and hardly ever got it: hence ‘The cause of the spirituali was marked by evasion and dissimulation’.23 They doubted and dithered, decided then faltered, and sometimes ran away. They were not dissimulators for a lifetime but moved in and out of that role. Their religious identities were unstable, their responses driven, not by inherent deceitfulness, but by the events of Italy’s half-​born reformation ‒ and by their own hopes and fears. And what of Europe’s other ‘reformations’? Since Fenlon wrote, several historians, especially Andrew Pettegree, Alec Ryrie, Susan Wabuda and Alexandra Walsham, have uncovered the ‘evasion and dissimulation’ going on in England, among both catholics and protestants.24 That, too, was driven from above, by Tudor religious change and made worse by fear. This book will trace the connections between troubled Christians driven to nicodemism in these two countries. Anti-​nicodemite polemic makes these dissimulators appear homogenous and boring, just spineless deceivers on their way to damnation. As martyrologists focused attention on a minority response –​courageous death in the name of faith, so anti-​nicodemites insisted on another minority reaction, brave ‘witness’ to true belief. They forced the rest into the shadows, regarding them as lumpen-​deceivers, not individuals trying to address serious dilemmas. In terms of the weight of documentary evidence, talented anti-​nicodemite propagandists win hands down. Thousands of their pamphlets were printed and hundreds of preachers and story tellers followed their lead. It is impossible to ignore the rich historical evidence of their strident voices, but we should always attach health-​warnings. Nonetheless, their insistence proves that they were on to something big: nicodemites were legion. But they were also secretive; that is the historian’s problem. Writing about people who kept secrets is an enterprise which poses daunting questions of

23 24

Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) (repr. in paperback, 2008), quotation at p. 282. Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, in his Marian Protestantism, pp. 86–​117; Walsham, Church Papists and Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain; Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry viii; Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation during the English Reformation’. For details see above, note 15.

Prologue

7

evidence. Dissimulators’ own testimony is always subtle; they did not wish to be clear: ‘I trust I make myself obscure?’ says Sir Thomas More, in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons.25 In face of persecution, many wanted to do just that. Yet historians cannot work from obscurity ‒ unless they work in a different way. For instance, insights can be gleaned from letters at first intended to be private but subsequently published, or ‘secret’ spiritual counsel given to friends and later recorded, sometimes set between the covers of small, easily concealed books with safe, orthodox-​looking titles. Even though it was dangerous to advise people to dissimulate, a few counsellors did so.26 Close reading of subtleties, hesitant wording, sudden deletions, pseudonyms and changed titles always pays dividends: these writers were ‘telling it slant’. On that tactic, which we shall encounter a lot, the most sympathetic guide is the nineteenth-​century American poet, Emily Dickinson: Tell all the truth but tell it slant –​ Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind –​27 Not all the writers who appear in this book had such noble and ‘kind’ motives: some texts were ‘ways of lying’, others told the truth very slant indeed –​ but that was as close as they dared come to telling it at all.28 There are rewards but great difficulties with the evidence of texts, so it is helpful to start by focusing on lives, on nicodemites’ behaviour. In 1555 the exiled Italian reformer Pietro Martire Vermigli warned a Strassburg university 25 26

27

28

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: a Play in Two Acts (London: Samuel French, 1960; Vintage International: New York, 1990), p. 91. See below, Chapter  9; John F.  McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie’’:  The Troubles of Sir John Cheke under Queen Mary’, in Elizabeth Evenden and Vivienne Westbrook, eds. Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 185–​227. Emily Dickinson, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’, Poem 1263, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, first pub. 1998; paperback edn. 2005), p. 494. I owe this reference to my late husband, Alan Overell. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, passim.

8 Prologue audience that ‘the doings of men be as it were a tongue’.29 Watching the ‘doings of men’ ‒ and some women –​and listening to their ‘tongue’ is our objective in Part 1 of this book. We shall be looking at actions, often quite ordinary actions, of clerics, humanists, reformers, monarchs, nobles, and diplomats, all acquainted with that inner pendulum swinging between accord and reserve, conformity and dissent.30 Their ‘doings’ took place against a very bleak backdrop. During the lifetime of those born early in the sixteenth century, Western Christendom had quaked and split; then there were after-​shocks, enforcement, brutal persecution and –​ coup de grâce  –​pulpit warnings that concealing your faith would lead you straight to hell. At a distance of nearly five hundred years, we cannot hope to understand the anguished dilemmas of the educated, still less those of the illiterate or half-​literate. There is no reason, apart from devout confessional tradition, to assume that most people were sure where they belonged or what they should do. Long words are used to describe the behaviour of suspected nicodemites: they were ambiguous, ambivalent, equivocal, evasive, deceitful and dissimulating; they went in for abjuration, recantation, volte-​face and deliberate absenteeism.31 These may seem self-​evidently wicked actions but such behaviours can be difficult to understand and to grasp. The Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels have no word for lying and they find the concept completely incomprehensible; they call it ‘the thing which is not’.32 Trying to write about this ‘thing’, happening in the distant past, also causes confusion. Perhaps we should start by avoiding all the long accusatory words and instead give careful attention to the simple quotidian ‘doings of men’, revealing in their very ordinary-​ness. People suspected of nicodemism did much the same as everyone else, only more fervently and fearfully.

∵ 29 30

31 32

A treatise of the cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull, pp. 23r and 24v. For examples, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, especially pp. 69–​88; Massimo Firpo, Inquisizione Romana e Controriforma: Studi sul Cardinal Giovanni Morone e il suo processo d’eresia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992). Abjuration is a renunciation on oath, usually a renunciation of previous beliefs, see Jonathan Michael Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 5, 15, 173–​4. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Claude Rawson, with notes by Ian Higgins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, paperback edn. 1986; new edn, 2005), p. 219. Alec Ryrie reminded me of this and I thank him.

Prologue

9

They waited. Waiting in hope of better times is the lot of humankind, but of the undecided in particular. While they delayed, they conformed to the religion prescribed in the place where they lived. Religious reformers in Italy went to catholic churches while they were waiting for a Council of the Church to change doctrine in the direction they desired ‒ and then they waited for a new and more sympathetic pope ‒ and then for a different Council.33 Evangelicals in Henrician England waited until well into the 1540s for their irascible king to see the glorious light of the Gospel they were offering him.34 In Elizabethan England, conforming catholics, often known as ‘church papists’, were ‘waiting for the day’ when their queen or their pope would alter entrenched positions which seemed set to lead to worsening persecution and then to European war.35 Rosy-​futures played a large part. They sought comfort and consolation. Most of our suspect-​nicodemites went to church somewhere, accepting whatever religious rites happened to be on offer at the time, putting up with churches for comfort’s sake, without necessarily believing the whole package. Custom was, as Erasmus recognised, a refuge and reassurance, a good reason for conforming, even when one did not fully agree.36 Spiritual comfort was another powerful motive: Il Beneficio di Cristo, the most famous text of the Italian spirituali, was written by ‘catholics’ who favoured ‘protestant’ teachings as a means of reassurance for scrupulous souls, including their own.37 Cardinal Reginald Pole delighted in religious discussions led by one of that book’s authors, the impulsive Marcantonio Flaminio: ‘I do not know when I have felt greater consolation’, wrote Pole.38 For him, as for many, spiritual consolation and comfort were more important than careful examination of doctrine.

33 34 35 36 37 38

Delio Cantimori, ‘Submission and Conformity:  Nicodemism and the Expectations of a Conciliar Solution’, in Eric Cochrane, ed., The Late Italian Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 226–​44. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry viii, especially pp. 113–​56. Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 5–​2, 73–​99; Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 527–​ 533. Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, trans. F. Hopman (New York: Harper and Row, 1957; republ. New York: Dover, 2001), p. 165. Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio di Cristo. Con le versioni del secolo xvi, ed. Salvatore Caponetto (Florence: Sanzoni, 1972); Overell, Italian Reform, p. 70; see below, Chapter 6. Pole to Contarini, 9 December 1541, The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, ed. Thomas F. Mayer, 4 vols (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002–​08) [hereafter crp; letter numbers are continuous throughout all 4 volumes], 341; Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole, Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) [hereafter, Mayer, Pole], pp. 105, 115–​17.

10 Prologue They carried on and kept quiet, conforming to the religion of their country. ‘Remain at your post’ for the sake of your flock or your friends was a precept offered especially to clergymen. That, at least, was the high-​minded version: the pull of a secure living surrounded by friends was also a powerful motive for priests and ministers to stay put and continue their lives. Before Calvin’s pronouncements against dissimulation were widely known, reformers in much of Europe were just ‘carrying on’; Bernardino Ochino, Pietro Martire Vermigli and Pier Paolo Vergerio all stayed in Italy, in prominent posts in the catholic church, long after their ministry had become thoroughly uncomfortable. Ochino wrote that he had never preached ‘with greater reserve’ than in his last year in Italy; after that, he fled across the Alps in 1542, followed by Vermigli. In 1540-​41, the Strassburg reformers, Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito, advised staying put, carrying on, even ministering in catholic churches, in order to help those whose faith was weaker.39 For similar reasons, the Spanish layman, Juan de Valdés emphasised the importance of gradualism. How were they all to recognise the exactly right moment for that terrifying leap into non-​conformity and doing something different? Most stayed where they were, meditating on St Paul’s ‘I am made all things to all men, that I might by all meanes save some’, that favourite biblical quotation of troubled clerics and teachers.40 They sought peace and reconciliation –​and mercy. Many who were suspected of dissimulation claimed to be finding grounds for concord, usually through their writings. The first author of the classic, Il Beneficio di Cristo, came from a Benedictine community identified as peacemakers. Henrician evangelicals were ready ‘to dress their reformism in conservative clothes’ in order to be loyal and keep peace with their monarch.41 In the early decades of Elizabeth I’s reign, many, probably most, catholics went quietly to the services of the new, established church, even though it was protestant. This was what the law required and so these church papists could claim that they were obedient subjects. Both they and their co-​operative neighbours tried not to ask questions, or ‘make a fuss’. They were ‘holding their peace’.42 In the second half of the sixteenth century, some erstwhile nicodemites began to seek peace for others 39

40 41 42

‘mai predicai piu riservato e con modestia che quest’anno’, Ochino to Vittoria Colonna, Florence, 22 August 1542, quoted in Caesare Cantù, Gli eretici d’Italia: discorsi storici, 3 vols (first published Turin: Unione Tipografico–​Editrice, 1865): online ed. 2014 , 2, p. 46; Peter Matheson, ‘Martyrdom or Mission; a Protestant Debate’, ARG, 80 (1989), 154–​172. 1 Corinthians 9: 22. Ryrie, Gospel and Henry viii, pp. 3–​5. Walsham, Church Papists, pp.  11–​12; Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth–​ Century England; Holding their Peace (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

Prologue

11

as well as themselves, arguing against all persecution. A daring Italian reformer who came to London, Giacomo Aconcio, was an important representative of this development.43 They found friends. Anti-​nicodemite polemicists depicted nicodemites sinking into lonely despair but it appears that most found some likeminded people and friendship networks. Threatened minorities needed to be clubbable. This was no organised fifth-​column, yet humanist antennae were raised and news exchanged about who was threatened, where ... when ... how ... and what might be said or done about it. In Calvin’s Excuse ... à messieurs les nicodemites, the offending nicodemites were always plural, composed of groups of people, courtiers, intellectuals and ordinary folk.44 The gentler Proscaerus by Wolfgang Musculus was translated into English as The Temporysour in 1555. Here the central character is a nicodemite who has plenty of helpful friends who have taught him to parrot passages from scripture to justify his deceitful attendance at mass: eventually he is persuaded to leave them and join the godly group.45 Partly fictional tales of the abjuring Italian lawyer Francesco Spiera present his Paduan deathbed as open daily to large groups of visitors.46 In the real world, busy ambassadorial households served as safe houses for groups of non-​conformists: in particular, English diplomatic representatives in Venice shielded Italian reformers.47 Tightly-​knit elite networks and households are important in this book: the group settled around Valdés in Naples; Reginald Pole’s houses in Padua, Venice and Viterbo. English translators and defenders of Italian nicodemite texts lived in country houses, like Little Gidding and Great Tew.48 We are left with the impression that the nicodemite was rarely an island –​but that may be an artefact of the evidence. Last, they floated between different religious identities, ‘passing in and out of close engagement’ with the religion imposed upon them.49 In the intervals 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

See below, Chapters 10 and 11. Calvin, Excuse à messieurs les Nicodemites, OC, 6, 593. Wolfgang Musculus, The Temporysour that is to saye: the obseruer of the tyme, or he that changeth with the tyme (Wesel?: [H.Singleton?], 1555), ustc 505172. See below, Chapter 8. See below, Chapter 4. See below, Chapter 11. I owe this image to Fiona Somerset, Feeling like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Ithaca; London: Cornel University Press, 2014) p. 17; Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–​1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially pp. 9, 74–​75; Willem Frijhoff, ‘Shifting Identities in Hostile Settings’, in Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop and Judith Pollmann, eds, Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–​1720 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 1–​17, especially p. 16.

12 Prologue they veiled their opinions. Sometimes they changed their minds completely. Such choices are called ‘converting’ or ‘recanting’, though these words have a decisive ring and many troubled souls did not decide finally. A leader of the Jewish community in Venice tried to describe this pattern in the life of an acquaintance, born a Jew, living mostly as a catholic. This man was, he said, ‘a ship with two rudders’.50 During the reformation era, many Christians developed ‘two rudders’, whether they were nominally protestant or nominally catholic. This was observable in the lives of those born into the spotlight: Edward Courtenay, with his claim to the English throne, steered from traditional catholicism to translating Il Beneficio di Cristo during the reign of the protestant King Edward vi; when Queen Mary I came to the throne, he embraced catholicism enthusiastically, but later, when in exile, he sought the company of dissident English protestants.51 The diplomat, Pietro Vanni, served the Tudors for forty years but, in order to survive their demands, his own religious changes became unusually theatrical.52 Then there was Reginald Pole: in Italy he drew comfort from ideas of salvation by faith very like those of Luther. Slowly he questioned such views and finally, when he returned to England in the reign of Queen Mary Tudor, he appeared to comply with harsh persecution of those who held them.53 Among English reformers, Thomas Cranmer embraced evangelical doctrines and was made Archbishop of Canterbury by Henry viii. Yet, facing probable death in Queen Mary Tudor’s reign, Cranmer recanted his beliefs six times; then he recanted his recantations and, at the end, died in agony for his protestant faith.54 Overwhelming change had left layers of religious experience. Faced by fear of losing loved ones, church, home, or life itself, people might become what they pretended to be. So-​called nicodemites were not necessarily dissimulating.

50 51 52 53 54

Brian Pullan ‘ “A Ship with Two Rudders”: ‘Righetto Marrano’ and the Inquisition in Venice’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 25–​58: as Pullan notes, any comparison between Jewish converts and nicodemites cannot be exact, pp. 37–​40. See below, Chapter 5. See below, Chapter 4. See below, Chapter 3. MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 75–​6 and 604–​605.

Pa rt 1 Lives

∵

Chapter 1

The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’ We need a sort of holy cunning;1

Desiderius Erasmus to Justus Jonas, 10 May 1521.

∵ Deceivers in matters of religion existed long before anyone thought of calling them nicodemites. Their lives were marked by the same ordinary ‘doings’ and habits as those we observed in the Prologue –​lying low, biding their time, keeping company with a small group of trusted friends. Despite their characteristic carefulness, such behaviour often aroused suspicion. Zealous clergy or observant neighbours became aware of any small difference in practice or belief, seeing it as a sign of deviance and, at worst, of ‘heresy’. That was dangerous, a grievous sin, seen as liable to corrupt the whole of society, but, ‘always a matter of definition by authority’.2 Heretics were brought before church courts, where they were persuaded to agree to renounce (abjure) their previous views. Those who would not do so were handed over to the secular power for punishment, and possibly execution. It is the others, the compliant abjurers, who are important in the history of dissimulation. In the short term, they were usually given a penance and then released. In the long term many went back to their old beliefs and practices, and old friends. They had complied through fear, often in abject terror, but their conformity was false. That same sequence of suspicion, threat of persecution, fear, and deceit would, in the sixteenth century, become a central strand of the nicodemite experience. This chapter will examine some groups often regarded as deceivers by contemporaries and by historians. It will then move on to the background of sixteenth-​century debates about dissimulation in Italy and in England.

1 Erasmus to Justus Jonas, 10 May 1521, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1122–​1251, 1520–​ 1521 trans. R.A.B. Mynors, annotated by Pieter G. Bietenholz in Collected Works of Erasmus [hereafter cwe], vol. 8 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), Letter 1202, p. 210. 2 Stuart Schwartz, All can be Saved:  Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 11.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_​0 03

16 Chapter 1 1

Waldenses and Lollards

Among medieval groups who had survived by not always telling the truth were Waldenses, the followers of Peter of Waldo, recorded from the late-​twelfth century onwards, living at different times in parts of Southern France, Piedmont, Southern Italy and Germany.3 Followers were often called ‘pauperes’, ‘the poor of Lyons’ and their simple life was contrasted with the clerical luxury which they criticised. English Lollards are found from the late fourteenth century onwards, largely in south-​east England, the Thames valley and the Midlands though their influence extended as far as Bohemia. Lollardy is generally associated with teachings of the Oxford scholar, John Wyclif (ca. 1328–​1384), who was first declared a heretic in 1377.4 He emphasised the importance of preaching and, later in his life, he attacked the Church’s teaching about the Eucharist. An English translation of the Bible also became important for many Lollards. Usually Waldenses and Lollards went to church with the rest of the community; many found consolation in the church’s services and often they queued up for communion with everyone else.5 Most of our evidence for their teachings and beliefs comes from records of heresy trials which, of their nature, stress the distance of such groups from ‘orthodoxy’ (a loaded word). In her study of Lollard texts, Fiona Somerset preferred the term ‘mainstream’ and redressed the bias of the records by revealing the mutual influence between Lollard texts and mainstream writings and practices.6 Peter Marshall, too, suggested that Lollardy was ‘an added spiritual dimension, an elitist tendency within the world of parochial catholicism’.7 A sense

3 In Italian-​speaking areas, they were known as ‘valdesi’; Euan Cameron, Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 4 Somerset, Feeling Like Saints, pp 36–​46; Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); J. Patrick Hornbeck ii, Mishtooni Bose and Fiona Somerset, A Companion to Lollardy (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Robert Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-​Reformation England: Reconstructing Piety (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006). 5 Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldenses (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 93–​4, Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 85–​87; Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodoxy, pp. 158–​60; Jeremy Catto, ‘Religious Change under Henry V’, in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. Gerald Leslie Harriss, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 97–​116, at p. 101. 6 Somerset, Feeling Like Saints, pp. 1–​17, especially pp. 4 and 13; Hornbeck et al, Companion to Lollardy, pp. 196–​8. 7 Peter Marshall, ‘The Reformation, Lollardy and Catholicism’, in Kent Cartwright, ed., A Companion to Tudor Literature (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010) pp. 15–​30, at p. 19: the italics are mine. For a similar perspective, see Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion, pp. 194–​5.

The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’

17

of ‘nearness-​to-​the-​rest’ may explain, at least in part, why many Lollards and Waldenses were ready to renounce their beliefs –​to abjure –​when brought before a church court. And, without doubt, they did so very often: Anne Hudson wrote of the Lollards that ‘for one suspect persistent and unlucky enough to deserve burning, there were fifty or more who renounced their opinions and practices’.8 Fear of that ‘burning’ was almost certainly the main reason why so many were ready to abjure. Gradually Waldenses and Lollards were assimilated into groups of evangelical reformers in the Swiss Alps and in England. There was no sudden ‘take-​ over bid’, Waldenses came into contact with Swiss reformers and eventually they joined them. Usually, however, the newcomers kept up their traditions of deception.9 In England, early in the sixteenth century, individual Lollards became part of evangelical groups –​but remained ready to dissimulate. They influenced the ‘mainstream’ communities they had joined. Alec Ryrie argued that Lollard dissimulation ‘informed early English Protestantism’s similar tradition’.10 2 Jews, Conversos and Moors The dissimulations of European Jews were the product of centuries of suffering all over Europe but some of the worst of it was in the Iberian Peninsula. In the pogroms of late-​fourteenth-​century Spain, Jews were either killed or forced to be baptised, becoming conversos. Often they were suspected just as much after their ‘conversion’ as before it and they were treated as a separate caste. Expulsions of Jews took place in most parts of Europe: crucial events were expulsions from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal, peaking in 1497.11 Those Jews who remained almost always did so by living as conversos. Some became committed to their new faith, but most were seen as unsafe converts, as ‘judaising’, which meant practising their old rituals and customs in secret.12 Learned conversos 8 9 10 11 12

Hudson, Premature Reformation,, pp. 158–​162, quotation at p. 158; see also pp. 373–​374, 514. Cameron, Waldenses, pp. 264–​84; id. Reformation of the Heretics, p. 224. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 78–​81, at p. 81. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, pp. 312–​19; Sharon Achinstein, ‘John Foxe and the Jews’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001), pp. 86–​120. Kevin Ingram, The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain, 2 volumes (Leiden: Brill, 2009), I, pp. 2–​7; David Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: the Religion of the Crypto-​Jews (Albuquerque:  University of New Mexico Press, 2002), especially pp.  563–​586, quotation at p. 569; David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

18 Chapter 1 were a very influential group, famous in Spanish universities; they had a strong presence among Erasmian humanists and among Christian mystics called ‘alumbrados’ –​ the enlightened ones. It was into this mystical but conflicted culture, a little before 1500, that Juan de Valdés was born. We shall hear much of him because, like some of his converso forbears, Valdés believed in keeping secrets. Later he would teach his many Italian disciples to do the same.13 Waldenses, Lollards and conversos had contributed to Europe’s culture of secrets, as did the Moors of the Iberian Peninsula, who had an ancient principle of taqiyyah which allowed concealment of religion when under threat.14 These groups were seen as deceivers ‒ sometimes justly, sometimes not, but there were abundant instances of pretence and dissimulation in history, in literature, in the community –​and most people needed only to look within themselves. 3 Precedents Those with a humanist education debated the rights and wrongs, going ‘back to the sources’ and searching scripture and the classics for wisdom and insight. The Old Testament example noted most often was that of Namaan the Syrian, who had converted to the worship of the god of Israel, except for rare occasions when he went back to his old religious practices: ‘In this thing the Lord pardon thy servant’. Apparently he was even given the prophet Elisha’s blessing.15 Many sixteenth-​century humanists remembered the prophet Amos’s words: ‘Therefore the prudent shall keepe silence in that time, for it is an evill time’.16 They recognised such evil in their own times. From the New Testament, Christ’s own counsel might be quoted to defend discretion, reserve, even secrets: ‘give not that which is holy unto the dogs neither cast ye your pearls before swine’; and, at a poignant moment, after the Transfiguration, ‘Tell the vision to no man, until the sonne of man bee risen again from the dead’.17 Also, as we have seen, priests and teachers quoted St 13

14 15 16 17

Massimo Firpo, Tra alumbrados e spirituali: Studi su Juan de Valdés e il valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del’500 (Florence: Olschki, 1990); Stefania Pastore, Un’eresia spagnola: spiritualità conversa, alumbradismo e Inquisizione (1449–​1559)(Florence: Olschki, 2004), especially pp. 184–​185 and 198; Firpo, Valdés, pp. 1–​58. s.v., Oxford Dictionary of Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2 Kings 5: 18–​19. Amos 5: 12–​13. Matthew 7: 6; on the Transfiguration, Matthew 17: 9; see also Mark 9: 9; Ginzburg, Il Nicodemismo, pp. 5 and 130.

The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’

19

Paul on his own situation as Jew who became a Christian teacher working among Jews: ‘to the Jewes I became as a Jew that I might gain Jews’ –​sometimes he was prepared to be flexible but nonetheless he challenged St Peter’s pretences and deceits in wooing the Jewish community.18 It was far from clear how much flexibility was allowed. The most terrifying quotation appropriated by critics of dissimulation was: ‘But whosoever shall deny me before men him will I also deny before my father which is in heaven’.19 That would be used throughout the sixteenth century to threaten deceivers with damnation. Last, there was the haunting text used in discussions of martyrdom through all the Christian centuries: ‘He that loveth his life shall lose it; and hee that hateth his life in this world, shall keepe it unto life eternall’.20 From the middle of the century onwards, this was quoted regularly, not just by martyrs trying to find the courage to die for their faith, but by anti-​nicodemite polemicists too.21 Those who witnessed would be guaranteed ‘life eternal’. Many studied the precepts of the Fathers, especially they turned to St Augustine. On the surface, he offered no consolation to would-​be deceivers:  a lie, defined as ‘a false statement made with the intent to deceive’, was always wrong, he said. He considered fully arguments offered by the fourth-​century Priscillianists that ‘what is true must be kept in the heart’ but it was allowable ‘to utter what is false with the tongue’. Augustine was having none of it: where did that leave the martyrs, he asked, had they died for nothing? There was, however, one chink in Augustine’s armour:  he allowed that concealing the truth, usually by silence, was not the same thing as lying. St Thomas Aquinas, too, rejected lying, but wrote ‘it is licet to conceal the truth prudently under some dissimulation’. This qualification about concealment would become important later, especially for catholics in Elizabethan England.22 18 19 20 21

22

1 Corinthians 9: 19–​23. Matthew 10.33; see also, Luke 9: 26; against deceit, see also Galations 2: 11–​15. John 12: 25. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake; Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Albano Biondi, ‘La giustificazione della simulazione nel Cinquecento’, in Eresia e Riforma nell’ Italia del Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni and Chicago:  Newberry Library, 1974), pp.  3–​68; Jacob Vance, Secrets:  Humanism, Mysticism, and Evangelism in Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, and Marguerite de Navarre (Brill: Leiden, 2014), especially pp. 36–​40. Augustine, De mendacio, New Advent, Fathers of the Church , downloaded 25 April 2017; Zagorin, Ways of Lying, pp. 20–​31; Perez Zagorin, ‘The Historical Significance of Lying and Dissimulation’, Social Research, (1996), pp.  863–​912, especially, pp.  869–​871; Peter Marshall, ‘Papist As Heretic: The Burning of John Forest, 1538’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 351–​374, at p. 364. On Elizabethan Catholics, see below, Chapter 11.

20 Chapter 1 Many humanists looked further back, including the classics in their search for precedents. Desiderius Erasmus meditated on the difference between seeming and being in his Sileni of Alciabiades. In that work he reflected on hidden-​ness of the Good and on how Christ himself was concealed within the unpolished stories of the Gospels.23 One of Erasmus’s most important subtleties was his revisiting of the ancient and medieval separation of the fundamentals of belief, fundamenta, from things inessential and indifferent, called adiaphora. For the fundamentals, it was worth fighting, perhaps even dying, but it was possible to compromise on the rest.24 Erasmus did try to compromise: he sympathised with Martin Luther’s intention to reform the Church but did not approve of his schism. Erasmus tried to stay neutral but, when that did not seem to be working, he wrote: ‘We need a sort of holy cunning. We must be time servers but without betraying the gospel truth.’ In 1521, he admitted: ‘Not all have strength enough for martyrdom. I fear that I shall, in case it results in a tumult, follow St. Peter’s example’.25 Another comment he made in 1526, in the first part of Hyperaspistes (The Protector) captured a common reaction: One bears more easily the evils to which one is accustomed. Therefore, I will put up with this Church, until I see a better one, and it will have to put up with me, until I become better. And surely a person does not sail infelicitously if he holds a middle course between two evils.26 Many were like him, ‘putting up with’ a church, conforming but not convinced. Those who steered his hazardous middle course were described variously as ‘moyenneurs’, ‘temporiseurs’, as ‘sitting between two saddles’, agreeing with ‘ni Rome ni Genève’, neither Rome nor Geneva; ‘being regarded in Rome as a 23

24

25 26

Desiderius Erasmus, Sileni alcibiadis. Cum scholiis Joannis frobenii ad calcem adiectis (Basel:  Johann Froben, 1517), ustc 503433; Thomas More, Utopia, with Erasmus’s ‘Sileni of Alcibiades’, trans. and ed. David Wootton (Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett, 1999), pp. 169–​191, at p. 175. Peter G. Bietenholz, Encounters with a Radical Erasmus: Erasmus’ Work as a Source of Radical Thought in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2009), pp. 3–​5, 108–​9. This distinction became very important in English religious controversies, Gregory D. Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus: the Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 69, 182–​192. Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1122–​1251, cwe, 8, pp. xiii-​xiv, and Letter 1202, p. 210. Controversies, De libero arbitrio, latipbh sive collatic, hyperaspistes I, cwe 76, ed. Charles Trinkaus, translated by Peter Macardle and Clarence H. Miller (Toronto; London: University of Toronto Press, c. 1999), p. 117; Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation: with a selection from the Letters of Erasmus, translated from the Dutch by F. Hopman (New York: Harper and Row 1957), p. 165.

The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’

21

Lutheran and in Germany as a Papist’. To be somewhere in the middle is not necessarily to be nicodemite; to favour reconciliation does not always involve deceit, as some would prove. Yet, in the tortuous conflicts of the sixteenth century, these states could be very close.27 In the summer of 1535, the year before Erasmus’s death, Europe was rocked by news from England of the executions of three English Carthusian monks, Bishop John Fisher and then Sir Thomas More. They had refused to swear to oaths required by the King of England. Here the terrible alternative to deceit was proclaimed. In prison More had considered the arguments: ‘But now is all the peril if the man answer himself that he would in such case rather forsake the faith of Christ with his mouth and keep it still in his heart than for the confessing of it to endure a painful death.’28 The heart and the mouth, il cuore e la bocca –​those metaphors, used since ancient times, will echo through this book in both the English and Italian languages. Keeping faith ‘in the heart’ had been the way of Waldenses, Lollards, of some conversos of Jewish ancestry –​and many more minority groups. Could sixteenth-​century Christians do the same? The answer given by More, Fisher and the Carthusians devastated European observers, not least those in Italy.29 In the decades that followed, international news of brutal persecutions and martyrdoms had to be relayed again and again all over Europe. Knowledge of these deaths made some people more determined to follow the martyrs in witness to their faith; others looked for ways to survive. 4

Dilemmas in Italy

Uncertainty about the doctrine of salvation by faith alone (sola fide) caused dilemmas for many Italians, making them wait, keep quiet and sometimes

27

28 29

Thierry Wanegffelen, Ni Rome ni Genève: des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVI le siecle (Paris: Champion, 1997), p. 29; ‘per potere sedere (come si dice) sopra due selle’, Francesco Negri, Della tragedia intitolata libero arbitrio, editione seconda, con accrescimento [Poschiavo, Dolfino Landolfi], 1550 [1551]; [Basel, Oporinus, 1550 [1551]], sigs [B6]v-​[B7]r; ‘in opinione a Roma di lutherano et in Alemagna di papista’, I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi, 1557–​1567, ed. Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, 2 vols in 4 (Citta del Vaticano: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 1998–​2000)[hereafter Processi Carnesecchi], 2/​2, 492. Thomas More, Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, ed. Monica Stevens (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973), p. 162. Edmund Harvel to Thomas Starkey, 15 June 1535, in Original Letters, illustrative of English History, 2nd ser, ed. H. Ellis, 4 vols (London: Harding and Lepard, 1827) [hereafter Original Letters, ed. Ellis], 2, pp. 73–​4.

22 Chapter 1 deceive. This belief had its origins in scripture, especially in St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans; it was known and cherished long before Luther lived, yet sola fide became widely regarded as ‘his’ doctrine.30 All the same, it was not formally condemned by the catholic church until 1547. It will crop up often, so a quick review is in order: if you believed in ‘sola fide’, you thought salvation came from God alone and was achieved solely through Christ’s passion. No-​one could earn salvation by good actions. All that you, a miserable sinner, could do was to have faith and only by that faith could you hope to be saved. Once you had it, good works followed on from faith, they were vital, but they never achieved salvation. This teaching brought into question all the spiritual effort and good works that had been a crucial part of Christian life for centuries:  prayer, going to church, mass and confession, fasting, visiting shrines, praying for the sick, the dying and the dead, giving to the poor (known as almsgiving). The list was interconnected and most of it was associated with the church whose head, the Pope, was usually resident in Rome, as were many of its most senior staff; its organisation stemmed from there. All over Europe ‘salvation by faith alone’ was potentially revolutionary, but in Italy it was apocalyptic. Especially so when it was allied to campaigns to reform the corruptions and shortcomings of the church itself. That combination brought the whole ‘economy of salvation’ into question, as many educated Italians recognised.31 The impetuous noblewoman, Giulia Gonzaga, listened to a visitor fretting about the long-​term implications of salvation by faith:  then, ‘Almost laughing, she told me not to speak of such destructions if I did not want to suffer’. That recollection may be true or false, but it certainly captures a mood that lay deep within nicodemism as it developed in Italy: conspiratorial, enjoying the secrets, half-​laughing, half-​ scared.32 In the early 1540s many Italians still saw Luther’s doctrines through a glass darkly. Reformers’ texts were brought across the Alps and some were translated and printed in Italian cities, in defiance of a papal ban of 1521.33 What is less 30 31 32

33

Alister E.  McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross:  Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); see Romans 3: 28; Romans 5: 1 and Romans 10: 9. The phrase suggests God’s ‘management’ of his household, the world, including his gift of salvation. Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone, 6 vols, eds Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto (Rome:  Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1981–​96) (hereafter Processo Morone), 1, 827–​8, cited by Firpo, Valdés, p. 144; on a similar ‘laughing’ reaction much later in Christian history, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: a Christian History (London: Allen Lane, 2013), p. 189. Rozzo and Seidel Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, pp. 321 and 346–​7.

The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’

23

clear is how they were understood in the very different circumstances of Italy. The word ‘doubt’ appears constantly in testimonies and recollections from this era. Many did not make a clear distinction between the teaching of Erasmus and Luther, humanists and Erasmians were often referred to as ‘luterani’.34 During his own time of imprisonment as a heretic from 1557 until 1559, Cardinal Giovanni Morone looked back on earlier decades as a time when people were without Inquisitors, ‘doing and saying what each one thought best’.35 This was part of Morone’s skilfully crafted self-​defence against Inquisition investigation, but it was also true; there had indeed been uncertainty. If you could not be sure, it was best to keep quiet, to wait and see –​and that was the policy of a group of reformers who, from the late 1530s, began to be known as gli spirituali, the unwordly ones. In this circle, the Spanish humanist, Juan de Valdés was, and still is, a controversial figure. Massimo Firpo, an influential modern historian of the spirituali, argues that Valdés made Italy’s reform into an ‘Italian reformation’, indigenous, authentic, much more than a sub-​office of the great German and Swiss conglomerate further north. Euan Cameron, however, cautions against over-​estimating Valdés’s influence.36 Arguably there was never a proper ‘reformation’ at all in Italy, only a disorganised reform movement in which Valdés was a charismatic leader of one élite group. His disciples said there was something magnetic about him: ‘Signor Valdes was one of the rare men of Europe’.37 Valdés came from a Jewish converso family, who were also respected humanists as we noted earlier. After his writings were banned by the Inquisition in Spain, he moved to Rome in 1531 and thence to Naples in 1534. There he taught a doctrine of salvation by faith, but he also stressed sanctification of the individual believer by the Holy Spirit –​consoling and empowering. Valdés was a 34

35 36 37

Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia:  1520–​1580 (Turin:  Bollati Boringhieri, 1987), especially pp. 16–​18 and 197–​205; Euan Cameron, ‘The Reformation in France and Italy to c. 1560: a Review of Recent Contributions and Debates’, in Philip Benedict, Silvana Seidel Menchi and Alain Taillon, eds, La Réforme en France et en Italie: Contacts, comparaisons et contrastes (Rome:  Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2007) accessed 13 August, 2017, para 13, nn. 27 and 28; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 76. ‘Molti anni fa … molti luoghi erano senzo inquisitori et molti inquisitori erano di poca portata, talmente che era quasi licito o tollerato a ogn’ uno fare e dire quanto li pareva’, Processo Morone, 2, 465. Massimo Firpo, see Tra alumbrados e spirituali and Firpo, Valdés and the Italian Reformation; Cameron, ‘The Reformation in France and Italy’, especially para 16. The humanist Iacopo Bonifadio to Pietro Carnesecchi, summer 1541, in Bonifadio, Le lettere e una scrittura burlesca, ed. Aulo Greco (Rome: Bonaci, 1978), pp. 91–​2, quoted in ­Firpo, Valdés and the Italian Reformation, p. 39.

24 Chapter 1 gradualist: he said that these teachings should be kept secret until outsiders were ready to receive them:  ‘I desire you to keep the doctrine in your soul, not on the tip of the tongue’. His disciples should preserve the light of faith as ‘una cognitione secreta’ –​‘a secret knowledge’; they were always to walk ‘in un camino secreto’ ‒ ‘on a secret path’.38 Valdés teachings justified ‘any kind of Nicodemite caution and ambiguity’.39 Celio Secondo Curione, translator of Valdés Divine Considerations into Italian, emphasised that:  ‘he gained many Disciples unto Christ; and especially among the gentlemen, and Cavaliers, and some Ladies’.40 The group included Pietro Martire Vermigli, head of the Augustinians and Bernardino Ochino, Superior of the Capuchins and Italy’s most charismatic preacher; also Pier Paolo Vergerio, later an anti-​nicodemite polemicist, was there briefly.41 Donna Giulia Gonzaga was Valdés’s devoted disciple; the poet, Marcantonio Flaminio thought the Spanish teacher was a ‘holy soul’ and Pietro Carnesecchi, Flaminio’s friend, formed the same opinion.42 Shortly, Flaminio and Carnesecchi left Naples and moved into the household of an English nobleman resident in Italy; Cardinal Reginald Pole was, as we saw in the Prologue, incautiously enthusiastic about Flaminio’s homilies which were inspired by Valdesian teachings. Il Beneficio di Cristo was a short, confusing but powerful book which was revised surreptitiously in the Cardinal’s house at Viterbo and published in Venice 38 39

40

41

42

Quoted in Firpo, Tra alumbrados e spirituali, pp. 24, 27, 56–​7 and 62. On reactions in Stuart England, see Chapter 12 below. Firpo, Valdés and the Italian Reformation, pp. 51 and 53. Nicodemism permeates Valdés’ works, especially his Alphabeto christiano, che insegna la vera via d’acquistare il lume dello Spirito santo (Venice: Marcantonio Magno, 1545), ustc 861681, which was written for Giulia Gonzaga. Celio Secondo Curione’s preface to Le cento e dieci divine considerationi del signor Giovanni Valdesso (Basel: Pietro Perna and Michael Isengrin, 1550), ustc 861682, translated into English as The hundred and ten considerations of Signior Iohn Valdesso, trans. Nicholas Ferrar (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1638), p. 2; Firpo, Valdés and the Italian Reformation, pp. 5–​58; see below, Chapter 11. Josiah Simler, Oration on the Life and Death of the Good Man and Outstanding Theologian Doctor Peter Martyr Vermigli, printed in Peter Martyr Vermigli, Life, Letters and Sermons, trans. and ed. John Patrick Donnelly SJ (Kirksville MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999)[hereafter Vermigli, lls], pp. 9–​64; Anne Jacobson Schutte, Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Schutte, Pier Paolo Vergerio e la riforma a Venezia, 1498–​1549, Italian edition with revised bibliography (Rome: Il Veltro, 1988); see Chapter 7. Camilla Russell, Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-​Century Italy (Brepols: Turnhout, 2006); Marcantonio Flaminio to Giulia Gonzaga, Viterbo, 14 Jauary 1542, printed in Marcantonio Flaminio, Apologia del ‘Beneficio di Cristo’ e altri scritti inediti, ed. Dario Marcatto (Florence: Olschki, 1996), pp. 200–​206, at p. 201.

The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’

25

in 1543. It has a strong claim to be regarded as one of Europe’s most important ‘nicodemite’ texts.43 Thanks to Venetian printers, who were good at finding innocent-​looking titles to evade censorship, Il Beneficio became a ‘trattato utilissimo’ ‒ an extremely useful treatise.44 In fact, it promulgated the doctrine of sola fide and was packed with unattributed quotations from the works of Valdés, Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin.45 Before Il Beneficio was published, the spirituali had lost an important friend. Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, who had tried to negotiate some form of agreement with German and Swiss protestants, became ill and died in 1542.46 There was also a change of mood in Rome, where the Inquisition was being re-​ organised. Fra Bernardino Ochino, follower of Valdés was summoned to Rome to answer questions; he began to comply, but then took fright and travelled north, dressed as a soldier. He fled from Italy and, a little later, Pietro Martire Vermigli followed. Ochino said that, if he had stayed longer in Italy, he would have had to preach Cristo mascherato, ‘Christ masked’. After his flight, Ochino reflected on his ministry in Italy: he said he had ‘introduced the Lutheran doctrine with ‘oblique artifice’ but he ‘certainly did not lie at all’, he said; he had proceeded ‘little by little, almost stealthily.’ Ochino came closer to admitting concealment than any other reformer, Italian or English and, much later in his long life, he became openly sympathetic to nicodemites.47 The departure of these exiles in 1542 astounded observers. Cardinals and bishops, who had employed them as preachers were confounded –​and implicated. A cover-​up began.48 Several friends and disciples also went into exile in 43 44 45 46 47

48

Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio di Cristo. Con le versioni del secolo XVI …, ed. Salvatore Caponetto (Florence: Sanzoni, 1972) [hereafter Beneficio ed. Caponetto]; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience pp. 69–​88; Firpo, Valdés and the Italian Reformation, pp. 123–​76. Rozzo and Seidel Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, in J-​F. Gilmont, ed., The Reformation and the Book, pp. 319–​367, especially p. 332. Trattato utilissimo del beneficio di Giesu Christo crocfisso, verso i christiani (Venice: Bernardio de Bindonis, 1543), edit 16, number 78389; see below Chapter 6. Peter Matheson, Cardinal Contarini at Regensburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Elisabeth Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome and Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). ‘Da poi, che farei piu in Italia? Predicar sospetto e predicar Christo mascherato in gergo, Ochino to Vittoria Colonna, Florence, 22 August 1542 in Cantù, Gli eretici d’Italia, 2, p. 46; quoted by Roland H. Bainton, Bernardino Ochino: esule e riformatore senese del Cinquecento, 1487-​1563 (Florence: Sansoni, 1940), p. 50, quoted and translated in Giorgio Caravale, Beyond the Inquisition:  Ambrogio Catarino and the Origins of the Counter-​Reformation, trans. Donald Weinstein (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), p. 111. Gigliola Fragnito, ‘Gli “spirituali” e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino’, Rivista storica italiana (hereafter rsi) 84 (1972), 777–​811.

26 Chapter 1 the same year, including a humanist who had worked in Lucca with Vermigli; Celio Secondo Curione –​in this history Curione is a man worth watching. In the cities of the north of Italy, matters were moving out of control, especially in the great merchant republics of Venice and Lucca. Lucca was said to be ‘infected’ by heresy. The same was true of Sienna and Bologna and the court at Ferrara (where Calvin had spent a few weeks in the spring of 1536).49 In Modena, irrepressible intellectuals (accademici) aired ideas much like those of Luther and other northern reformers. This ferment caused anxiety among those responsible for ‘ruling peacefully’.50 Had they promoted a reform which they could not stop? The less powerful were also involved: in Venice artisans gathered in back streets and shops, especially printers’ shops, explaining to each other books and pamphlets that they should not have been reading.51 The Venetian Inquisition, set up in 1547, focused at first on the powerless, including a notary from Cittadella just north of Venice, called Francesco Spiera. He abjured, like Waldenses, Lollards, conversos, and many more. The outcome for Spiera, however, was different. He sank into deep despair, convinced that he had ‘denied Christ’ and was destined for hell: ‘whosoever shall deny me before men …’. Spiera’s story, as written up by anti-​nicodemite polemicists, became known throughout Europe, but perhaps in England most of all.52 The dramatic events of the 1540s made some Italians cut ties with the spirituali.53 But most chose to wait and see ‒ that favourite ploy of nicodemites everywhere. Many hoped for a Council of the church which might deal with dissensions and achieve reconciliation with German and Swiss reformers.54

49 50

51 52 53 54

Simonetta Adorni-​Braccesi, ‘Una città infetta’: la repubblica di Lucca nella crisi religiosa del Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1994); Eleonora Belligni, Renata di Francia (1510–​1575): Un eresia di corte (Turin: utet, 2011). Paul V.  Murphy, Ruling Peacefully:  Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-​Century Italy (Washington, DC:  Catholic University of America Press, 2007); Adam Patrick Robinson, The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone:  between Council and Inquisition (1509–​1580), (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Paul F.  Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–​1605 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); John Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). M. Anne Overell, ‘The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera’, SCJ, 26 (1995), 619–​37; see Chapter 8 below. Adriano Prosperi, Tra Evangelismo e Controriforma: G. M. Giberti (1495–​1543) (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1969), p. 314. Delio Cantimori, ‘Submission and Conformity: “Nicodemism” and the Expectations of a Conciliar Solution to the Religious Question,’ in Eric Cochrane, ed., The Late Italian Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 226–​44.

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When the Council of Trent assembled in 1545, Pole was appointed one of three papal legates who were to preside.55 He hoped that the Lutherans would be represented, but the Council started to discuss the contentious doctrine of salvation without their views being heard. Suddenly, in the early hours of the morning of 28 June 1546, Pole left Trent: the Council’s secretary noted that he was ill –​‘an illness of body and mind’. Was this ‘heresy’, or ‘obedience’, or nicodemism?56 In January 1547 the Council’s Decree of Justification was passed. Sola fide was condemned; the Tridentine doctrine was that faith and works both contributed to salvation. This was made possible because the grace of God came first, making people just, changing them utterly, so that their faith and their good works could play some part in their salvation. It was utterly different from Luther’s doctrine, the one embraced by the spirituali. Nonetheless, the majority of them remained uncomfortably in Italy, within the catholic church, believing that unity and obedience were paramount.57 Their position would be mocked and condemned by protestants and by traditionalist catholics alike, but we should remember the historical wisdom that ‘it might have been otherwise’. The spirituali were caught on shifting sands, a series of tumultuous events had happened in one fraught decade: flights of their famous preachers into exile, reformed Inquisitions, the introduction of new lists (Indices) of Prohibited Books, greater censorship, and finally the Council of Trent’s decree of salvation. Even after that, there were still uncertainties: doctrinal mists were slow to clear.58 Anti-​nicodemite writers allowed only two options: staying in Italy to face probable martyrdom or exile across the Alps. Of those Italian reformers who went into exile, some settled well, embracing the various doctrines taught in their chosen places of refuge, principally Geneva, Locarno, Strassburg, Basel and Zurich.59 Others found themselves at odds with mainstream northern reformers, but these cuckoos in evangelical nests could not go back to certain persecution and probably death in Italy. So they stayed, covering up their 55 56 57 58 59

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 100–​115. CT, 1, 557, cited by Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 135; M. Anne Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti-​ Nicodemite Propaganda and England: 1547–​1558’, JEH, 51 (2000), 296–​318. Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp.  282–​3; Silvana Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’, in Bob Scribner, Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds, The Reformation in a National Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 181–​196. Anthony D. Wright, ‘The Significance of the Council of Trent’, JEH, 26 (1975), 353–​62. Mark Taplin, The Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church c. 1540–​1620 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Simonetta Adorni-​Braccesi, ‘Religious Refugees from Lucca in the Sixteenth Century; Political Strategies and Religious Proselytism’, ARG, 88 (1997), 338–​379.

28 Chapter 1 disaffection and masking their views. For the large Italian community in exile in Basel, in particular, ‘the modus vivendi was dissimulation’.60 Their leader was the humanist Celio Secondo Curione, a complex character. Like Cardinal Pole, he was accused of being a nicodemite. In fact, by the early 1550s, Curione would go much further, even implying that ‘acting like Nicodemus’ was a good thing, one way out of their impossible dilemma.61 5

Dilemmas in England

Meanwhile, English people were also experiencing religious change and uncertainty, partly because they were bombarded with royal orders for ‘reformation’. And not just orders, but also oaths, imposed on them as a means of affirming loyalty to their King and to his interpretation of true religion. When Henry viii could not obtain his divorce from the Pope, all his subjects were required to swear the Oath of Succession in 1534. They were ordered ‘thus to do without any scrupulosity of conscience’.62 This royal command required not only obedience but, if necessary, nicodemism as well. The executions of those who would not swear followed fast.63 Many of the King’s subjects were appalled at the deaths suffered by the Carthusian Fathers, More and Fisher, yet the majority of English people acquiesced and waited for better days.64 Disobedience to the ruler, even in the secret depths of the heart, did not come easily in sixteenth-​century England, so compliance, ‘holding their peace’ was the usual response of the English population through successive waves of Tudor religious change.65 Some clergy encouraged dissembling conformity, for instance, the Franciscan Observant, John Forest, confessed that he had told one of his penitents that when he [Forest] had sworn the Oath accepting the Kings supremacy over the English church, ‘he had denied the bishop of Rome [the pope] by an oath given by his outward man but not in 60 61 62 63 64 65

Hans R. Guggisberg, ‘Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth Century Basel’, in Grell and Scribner, eds, Tolerance and Intolerance, pp. 149–​63; Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), quotation at p. 218. Lucio Biasiori, L’eresia di un umanista Celio Secondo Curione nell’ Europa del Cinquecento (Rome: Carocci, 2015); pp. 65–​96; see below, Chapter 9, p. 174. Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge; New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 1i7–​27. It is possible that the oath required of Fisher and More involved more than swearing loyalty to the succession, see, Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation, p. 120. See Brigden, London and the Reformation, pp. 222–​231. Marsh, Popular Religion, pp. 197–​219.

The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’

29

the inward man’. Forest was burned alive on 22 May 1538.66 As King Henry viii aged ungracefully many were driven to suppress what Friar Forest had called ‘their inward man’.67 The reactions of English evangelicals resembled those of the spirituali in Italy. They were not satisfied with their King’s reformation any more than many Italian reformers were content with papal reforms. But only small number of English people, probably less than forty, went into exile.68 Others protested enough to be arrested, but many of these subsequently abjured –​abjurations that appeared to be deceitful. Susan Wabuda has described Dr Edward Crome as ‘the supreme practitioner of the equivocal recantation’. During Crome’s four abjurations, he spun ‘subtle shadows’, always using the public occasion of his recantations to advance evangelical teachings: ‘Dr Crome’s canting, recanting, decanting, or rather double canting’, quipped one witness.69 Moderate Henrician evangelicals continued to work as preachers, teachers and printers, accepting Henry viii’s ever-​changing religious diktats as their least-​worst option. After 1540, Alec Ryrie detects ‘a trend of surreptitious reformism’, ‘adjusting the content of their message, playing down controversial doctrines and presenting reformist ideas in traditional terms’. Their behaviour was subtle, but not exceptional.70 In Italy, too, reformers were ‘adjusting’ their message, proceeding ‘surreptitiously’ and masking their ideas in traditional terms. The avalanche of Henrician doctrinal diktats lasted over six years and often one contradicted another: the Ten Articles (1536), the Bishops’ Book (1537), the Act of Six Articles (1539), the Act for the Advancement of True Religion (1543), ‘the King’s Book’ (also 1543).71 Probably even the most conscientious subjects did not pore over every detail, sorting out ‘fundamentals’ from adiaphora, but English religion seemed suddenly to have acquired many definitions; with that came confusion, perhaps relativism as well. The King’s own amateurish theology made matters worse. Valiantly, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of 66

67 68 69 70 71

Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, 1509–​47, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie 21 vols (London: Longman, 1862–​1932) [hereafter lp], 13/​1, 1043(1), cited by Peter Marshall, ‘Papist as Heretic: the Burning of John Forest, 1538’, Historical Journal, 4 (1998), 351–​374, at p. 362. Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, pp. 87, 100–​103. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 94–​5. Original Letters, ed. Ellis, 2, pp.  176–​8, cited by Susan Wabuda, ‘Edward Crome’, odnb; Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation’, pp. 224–​242. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry viii, p. 126–128, 156. Alec Ryrie, The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms (Harlow: Pearson Longman 2009), pp. 130–​133; Marshall, Heretics and Reformers, pp. 255–​59, 274–​5, 288–​9.

30 Chapter 1 Canterbury, tried to rub the doctrine of justification by faith alone, into the Supreme Head  –​but he knew he had failed.72 Henrician credal gymnastics ended only with the old King’s death in January 1547. Before he died, he made one clear doctrinal statement: he left his nine-​year-​old son and heir, Edward vi, in the care of evangelicals. In December 1547, at the beginning of the ‘Boy King’s’ reign, the Italian exiles, Pietro Martire Vermigli and Bernardino Ochino arrived in London at Archbishop Cranmer’s invitation. We last met them in 1542, when they left their spirituali friends and fled from Italy. Ochino and Vermigli had spent five years of exile in Swiss and German cities. Then, in 1547, increasing persecution in the Holy Roman Empire had made further flight advisable –​this time to England where they were to become advisers for King Edward’s radical reformation. Other Italians followed them:  Immanuele Tremellio, a Jewish convert who became a catholic and then an evangelical; Pietro Bizzarri, a scholar in Cambridge; Michelangelo Florio, a minister in London; Guido Giannetti da Fano, distributor of reformation books and a spy.73 All had wrestled with the dilemma of ‘heart’ and ‘mouth’ before they decided to leave Italy for exile. Vermigli soon realised that problems lay ahead:  he was aghast when he heard Oxford’s street-​corner theologians in full flow about the doctrine of Eucharist.74 He helped to draft a new Prayer Book, published in 1549 but encountered tensions: ‘I see that there is nothing more difficult in the world than to found a church’. Rebellions broke out in 1549, some of them specifically against ‘the radical discontinuity’ of the religious changes.75 Vermigli and Ochino were required to earn their keep, by writing in defence of the King and of conformity to his law: Ochino clearly found it difficult.76 England’s radical reformation lurched forward with another Prayer Book (1552), and a new Catechism, with Articles of Religion appended.77 Each new move added to religious uncertainties but, suddenly, this radical reformation ended. The young King became

72 73 74 75

76 77

MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 185–​97, 209–​11, 343–​345; Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 131–​2, 157–​8. For their English exile, see Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 41–​60, 104–​124. Martyr to Bucer, 26 December 1548, Original Letters relative to the English Reformation, ed. Hastings Robinson, 2 vols (Cambridge, Parker Society: Cambridge University Press, 1846–​7) [hereafter OL], 2, p. 468. Martyr to Bucer, 15 January 1549, Gleanings of a Few Scattered Ears during the Period of the Reformation in England (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857), p. 74; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–​1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), quotation at pp. 464–​5. Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 51–​3. Marshall, Heretics and Believers, pp. 347–​55.

The Landscape of ‘Holy Cunning’

31

critically ill. He died in 1553 at the age of sixteen and Henry viii’s elder daughter, the catholic Princess Mary, became Queen. Her accession pleased those who had hated all the Edwardian changes, but left many others ‘in limbo’, uncertain what was truth and who was right.78 By then, the normal pattern in the experience of the English adult population was that religious circumstances changed frequently, making the idea of playing nicodemite for what might be a short time much more plausible.79 The new Queen and her government wanted rid of Ochino, Vermigli and other Italian exiles, and gave them safe conduct out of the country. The Italians headed for yet another exile in Swiss cities and from there they preached and wrote about the dilemmas which English people were facing. Vermigli was firmly on the anti-​nicodemite side. Ochino’s contributions were, as we shall see, much more ambivalent.80 England’s evangelicals now faced their greatest trial. Several leading reformers were imprisoned and in great danger, among them Cranmer, John Bradford and Hugh Latimer. In the course of Queen Mary’s reign around a thousand people went into exile and about three hundred died as martyrs for their beliefs. The rest imitated Italy’s spirituali and conformists all over Europe –​waiting, staying put, trying to be true to the heart, il cuore, whilst keeping the mouth, la bocca, tightly shut. From his prison cell, the reformer and future martyr John Philpot observed how those who had once believed in reform now obeyed government orders and went to mass: ‘Some fondly think that the presence of the body is not material so that the heart do not consent to their wicked doings’.81 Philpot’s metaphors were the same as those used by Augustine, by Thomas More, by Valdés and many Italians: the mouth, the tongue and the whole fragile body, interpreting the heart, il cuore, and its consent. In the middle of the sixteenth century the debate about nicodemism was still couched in these ancient and unrelentingly physical terms. In 1553, Pope Julius iii needed a respected figure to travel to England to reconcile the whole English population and to absolve the nation from its long schism. By a profound irony, he chose the English nobleman and Italian spirituale Reginald Pole. From one point of view it was an obvious choice: Pole was

78 79 80 81

Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–​1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 269. I thank John McDiarmid for email conversations which included this insight. See below, Chapter 9. John Philpot, Examinations and Writings of John Philpot, PS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1842), p. 221, quoted by Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, p. 95.

32 Chapter 1 the only English Cardinal. Yet his belief in ‘sola fide’ had been similar to that of the English reformers whom he now proposed ‘to reconcile’. Enemies on both sides, catholic and protestant, said Pole had kept quiet when he should have spoken out. They thought that he and his friends were deep-​dyed dissimulators ‒ nicodemites. In the next two chapters we shall examine the context and validity of those claims.

Chapter 2

A Nursery of Nicodemism: The Circle of Reginald Pole in Italy I will not follow in the steps of Luther whose judgement I esteem very little, and yet he and his disciples be not so wicked and foolish that in all things they err. Heretics be not in all things heretics. Wherefore I will not so abhor their heresy that for hate thereof I will fly from the truth.1 Words spoken by the character named Pole, in Thomas Starkey’s A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset.

∵ Thomas Starkey’s ‘Pole’ was pure fiction, just a speaker in one of many renaissance dialogues. Yet the words Starkey put into Pole’s mouth seem to capture the haughty but troubled nobleman of real life. Pole had arrived in Italy to study in 1521; he was then twenty-​one and he was financed by his cousin, King Henry viii, who would claim a return on his investment at some time in the future. Starkey was also in Padua by 1525 and he became Pole’s secretary in 1529. The Dialogue between Pole and Lupset was written between then and 1532. Those three years were formative. In October 1529 Starkey and another friend, Thomas Lupset, accompanied Pole on a mission to secure opinions from the University of Paris about King

I thank the editors of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Cambridge University Press who have given me permission to re-​use extracts from the following article; ‘An English Friendship and Italian Reform: Richard Morison and Michael Throckmorton, 1532–​1538’, JEH, 57 (2006), 478–​493. Also, I wish to thank the editors of the journal History and John Wiley and Sons for granting permission for the re-​use of extracts from my article ‘Cardinal Pole’s Special Agent: Michael Throckmorton, 1533–​1558’, History, 94 (2009), 265–​278. 1 Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. Thomas F. Mayer, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 37 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1989), p. 90; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 37; T. F. Mayer, ‘Reginald Pole’, odnb.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_​0 04

34 Chapter 2 Henry viii’s wish to end his marriage. There are several versions of exactly what happened but –​for the time being ‒ the outcome seems to have satisfied the King.2 Pole and Lupset returned to England in 1530: Lupset died shortly afterwards.3 Starkey was still finishing his Dialogue when Pole retired to Sheen, close to the Carthusian priory there and well away from court gossip. He seems to have done some hard thinking. In the spring and early summer of 1531, there was a ‘turn’, one of several in Pole’s career. He warned Henry viii of the political difficulties in the way of the royal divorce and, according to Thomas Cranmer, even wrote to the King saying ‘he had never pleasure to intromit himself in this cause’.4 Then Pole left England early in 1532.5 The Act in Restraint of Appeals, effectively cutting England off from papal obedience,​was passed in March of that year. Pole and Starkey went to Avignon.6 By autumn 1532, Pole was back in Venice, not settling because Pole did not settle. Starkey re-​joined him there shortly afterwards, once again working as his secretary.7 Soon Reginald Pole was established in Italy for his second stay, which lasted just over twenty years. He was at the centre of a group of young men who had travelled to Padua in search of Europe’s best education. Yet this great university was no safe academic retreat. Raccomandazione from the great and the good was essential and Padua’s students all had one eye on their future careers –​including Pole.8 They were all finding their way amidst intellectual excitement and uncertainty about religious truth and they needed to grow up fast. This chapter will show that being in Italy while the dramatic events of the Henrician reformation proceeded in England necessitated great caution, many secrets and, finally, nicodemism.

2 For conflicts of evidence, see T. F. Mayer, ‘A Fate Worse than Death, Reginald Pole and the Paris Theologians’, EHR, 103 (1988), 870–​891, reprinted in T. F. Mayer, Cardinal Pole in European Context; a via media in the Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2000) [hereafter cpec], xi. 3 Thomas F. Mayer, ‘Thomas Lupset’, ODNB. 4 BL Lansdowne MS, 115, f. 2r, quoted in Mayer, ‘Fate Worse than Death’, p. 889. 5 For the different reasons given for this decision see Thomas F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 170–​1. 6 crp, 62 and 64. 7 Mayer, Starkey, p. 169. 8 Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors.

Nursery of Nicodemism

1

35

Pole and the Paduan ‘Flock’

George Lily would describe the close-​knit gang of English students at Padua in the mid-​1530s as ‘our flock’.9 It would be going too far to describe Pole as their shepherd, but his patronage was important, albeit ‘spiritual’ rather than material.10 These students also had to stick together, to help each other through complex times. Lily, son of the grammarian William Lily, had come into Pole’s service about 1529 and later he began linguistic study at Padua.11 The keen and able scholar Richard Morison arrived in Padua in July 1532: he had been drawn to reformers in England and probably remained committed to their evangelical cause. Michael Throckmorton’s presence is recorded a year later, though in fact he had been travelling in Italy with his father as early as 1519. Both he and Morison were students of law, Throckmorton seems to have had family money, but Morison was very hard up. Together with Lily, they read the classics, as keen humanists did, but they also absorbed religious topics under discussion: salvation by faith as taught by St Paul and by the German and Swiss reformers, abuses in the Church, the importance of Bible study and private prayer. John Friar [sometimes Fryer] studied medicine and became MD at Padua in 1535. The Italians Marcantonio Flaminio, Pietro Martire Vermigli and Pier Paolo Vergerio were also there from time to time. Others, who were not technically students, were loosely attached. The Englishman, Edmund Harvel, had been living in nearby Venice since 1524, acting as agent for the famous philosopher Niccolò Leonico Tomeo: Harvel was a shrewd observer.12 As the drama unfolded, they would all play different parts, creating a miscellany of the ‘doings of men’ –​and few of them straightforward. Choosing Padua, famous for its humanist curriculum, did not imply that these Englishmen thought more of classical learning than Christian teaching. Studi sacri were an integral part of Italian humanism, perhaps especially in

9 10 11 12

Lily to Starkey, 29 December 1535, LP 9, 1034. Thomas. F. Mayer, ‘When Mycaenas was broke: Cardinal Pole’s Spiritual Patronage’, SCJ, 27 (1996), 419–​435. Mayer, Starkey, p. 197; W.G. Zeeveld, The Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), pp. 117 and 238. Tracey A. Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: the Careers of Sir Richard Morison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) [hereafter, Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform], pp.  19–​20; M.  Anne Overell, ‘An English Friendship and Italian Reform:  Richard Morison and Michael Throckmorton, 1532–​1538’, JEH, 57 (2006), 478–​493; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp.  31–​2; Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors, pp.  213, 276; T.  F. Mayer, ‘Michael Throckmorton’, ODNB.

36 Chapter 2 the Aristotelian and conciliarist form associated with Padua.13 Such studies are mentioned regularly as an important part of student life.14 Historians of Tudor England have shown how experience at Padua became a determining factor for English humanism, politics, government and the development of the professions.15 Padua lies some twenty-​five miles west of the city of Venice. That great maritime republic was the melting pot of Italy’s religious reform. Padua’s students were exposed to a dizzying variety of religious influences: some were intensely personal, like the significant number of departures to hermitages, or local, based on courts, confraternities and individual preachers.16 Suspicions about ideas imported across the nearby Alps from Northern Europe began in the early 1520s.17 The international student community of the University of Padua had a large contingent of German and French students, and some were religious exiles.18 Jan van Campen, a Dutch theologian and Hebraist from Louvain, arrived in Padua in May 1534. He was the man to know, welcomed into Pole’s house and introduced to Italy’s reforming clerics. Van Campen highlighted the humanist concept of ‘benefit’, but turned it to Christ’s action, ‘beneficium Christi’, which covered sins and justified sinners. The idea went straight to the hearts of Pole and Starkey, and inspired the title of the classic text of Italy’s reform, Il Beneficio di Cristo. They were absorbing a theology of beneficium close to Luther’s 13

14

15 16

17

18

Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Introduction’, in Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 8–​9; T. F. Mayer, ‘Marco Mantova and the Paduan Religious Crisis of the Early Sixteenth Century’, Cristianesimo nella storia, 7 (1986), 41–​62, especially pp. 56–​62. Starkey to Cromwell, 1534, LP 8, 214; Pole to Sadoleto, 28/​9 October 1532/​1 November 1532, crp 64:Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors, p. 109; Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Reginald Pole and his Greek Manuscripts in Oxford’, Bodleian Library Record, 17 (2000), 79–​95, especially pp. 85–​90. See Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors, esp. the indispensible Biographical Register; Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy, passim. Stephen Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy (Leiden; Boston:  Brill, 2002):  Constance Furey, ‘The Communication of Friendship: Gasparo Contarini’s Letters to the Hermits at Camaldoli’, Church History, 72 (2003), 71–​101. Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 1–​23; Euan Cameron, ‘Italy’, in Andrew Pettegree, ed., The Early Reformation in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 188–​ 214; Silvana Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’, in Bob Scribner, Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds, The Reformation in a National Context (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 181–​200. J. Van Kessel, ‘The Denominational Pluriformity of the German Nation at Padua and the Problem of Intolerance in the Sixteenth Century’, ARG, 75 (1984), 156–​176.

Nursery of Nicodemism

37

doctrine of justification by faith alone, filtered through a catholic scholar from the Netherlands.19 Paduans could hardly miss the impact of reform. Yet this was Italy:  King Henry viii’s religious changes were a distant menace and he did not call the shots. Religious reform could still be considered separately from his divorce, his transient beliefs and his capricious requirements. Clear distinctions between what was catholic and what was not, between Italy’s religion and England’s, emerged very slowly. While they waited for clarities, all this English ‘flock’ dissimulated to varying degrees. This chapter will suggest that this ‘nursery of nicodemism’ in Padua and the Veneto, provided an important apprenticeship in how to wait and evade uncomfortable truths and, above all, how to deceive those with the power to harm. 2 Betrayals Then the betrayals began –​that was how Pole saw them. Before December 1534 Starkey jumped ship. Early in 1535 he entered the service of Thomas Cromwell, Henry viii’s chief minister. There he was assigned to ‘the Pole desk’, ordered to persuade, perhaps harass, the silent, inscrutable Pole to commit himself by sending an opinion about the King’s divorce.20 Most of Pole’s ‘flock’ left in Italy began to look to the future. Poor and in search of a job, Richard Morison started to put out feelers for work in the household of Thomas Cromwell.21 Meanwhile, he studied hard, and helped George Lily do so.22 Lily was to become Pole’s devoted servant, but in the year 1535 he was painting wildly different futures for himself: first planning to enter the King’s service, then to stay in Italy and join the Theatines, a new and very strict Italian congregation founded by Giovanni Pietro Carafa, who later became Pole’s enemy. Two years earlier, Pole’s friend, Marcantonio Flaminio, thought he had the same demanding 19

20 21 22

crp 85, 88; M. Anne Overell and James Willoughby, ‘Books from the Circle of Cardinal Pole: the Italian Library of Michael Throckmorton’, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 75 (2012), 111–​40 [hereafter, Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’; page numbers refer to the Introduction, numbers refer to items on the booklist,] 23, p. 122; Mayer, Starkey, pp. 191–​194. Starkey to Pole, 15 February 1535, crp 73; same to same crp 74, 76, 78; Mayer, Starkey, 198–​231, quotation at p. 207. Morison to Cromwell, 26 October 1534, LP, 6, 1131; Bedyll to Cromwell, 28 July 1535, LP, 8. 1125. For Lily’s reading list, Lily to Starkey, 22 April 1535, LP, 8, 581; Lily took Pole’s side once De Unitate had been published, LP, 10, 503.

38 Chapter 2 Theatine vocation but he was turned down.23 Thomas Goldwell, later to become a Theatine, was in Padua by 1532 and probably met Pole, but then left for Oxford (1534) and Louvain (1536). Henry Cole arrived in Padua from Oxford to study law and possibly Greek. By March 1536 he was watching Pole and the university’s scholars with great interest, helping Morison, but also fretting about finding patronage in England.24 They were waiting … like true nicodemites. In summer 1535, Morison moved to Venice, where he stayed in Pole’s and Harvel’s households. He had been registered at Padua as a student of law, but he promised to return to England skilled in Greek, philosophy and theology.25 He was so hard up that he was pawning his books and on one occasion Pole helped him redeem them:  Morison, like other Paduans, read many medical texts, while for their friend, John Friar, these were part of the formal medical curriculum.26 Michael Throckmorton, in particular, seems to have become Morison’s friend, giving him a loan, and passing on second-​hand clothes.27 Later Pole remembered bitterly that, in these years, Morison had lived in his house and been treated well.28 By the spring of 1536, Morison’s coveted job in England was definitely in the bag.29 Jubilant, he returned to England in 1536 to wield ‘the best propagandist pen in Henrician England’. In the closing years of the 1530s, his polemical pieces against the papacy and against Pole came thick and fast. In that role he drew on his experience of the stirrings of reform in Italy, the pope’s own country –​and Morison hated popes.30 3

De Unitate and Crisis

Edmund Harvel stayed on in the Veneto, together with Pole, Throckmorton and Lily, but their Italian safety was now much more threatened by Henry viii’s 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Mayer, Starkey, p. 212; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 30. Cole to Starkey, 3 March 1536, LP, 10, 411. Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, pp. 26–​9, 240–​53. Morison to Starkey, 16 August 1535, LP, 9, 101–​103; Morison to Starkey,? February 1536, LP, 10, 320; for Throckmorton’s medical texts, see Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’, p. 114; F. V. White, ‘John Fryer’, odnb. Morison to Thomas Starkey? 1535, LP, 9, 102, quoted in Overell, ‘English Friendship and Italian Reform’, p. 2. Pole to Morison (draft), March? April 1539, CRP 243. Morison to Friar, Venice, March 1536, LP, 10, 418; Morison to Starkey, 27 March 1536, LP, 10, 564. The best guide to Morison’s polemic is Sowerby, Renaissance and Reformation, pp. 41–​117; Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972),pp. 191–​207, quotation at p. 199.

Nursery of Nicodemism

39

faraway schism. Harvel was troubled, but something more profound was happening to Pole. John Friar had noticed it before he left Padua for a diplomatic mission in Saxony at the end of 1535. Friar’s gnomic letter, written in Greek, to Starkey (who was by then in London) was full of puns: Friar said that Pole was undergoing a great change; he ‘was studying divinity and meteorologizei, despising things merely human and terrestrial’ and ‘substituting God for man’.31 During the summer of that fateful year, 1535, Pole had begun writing his excoriating response to Henry viii, later known as De unitate; by September he had reached the most important part, the defence of the Catholic Church. In all Pole’s later mis-​rememberings, one fact is certain: the Carthusians, Fisher and More suffered execution in June and Pole began to write his response to the royal supremacy a few weeks afterwards. Pole noted that these martyrs had committed no crime but had refused to betray their belief in Christ and the Church. Pole was one of the first to present the deaths of Fisher, More and the Carthusians as martyrdom.32 There was a vital connection between their anguished decision and his. Meanwhile Italians were condemning Henry viii’s ‘extreme cruelty’: they were, wrote Harvel, ‘infaming … our nation with the vehementist words they could use’.33 In face of this hostility Harvel became inscrutable. In the summer of 1535, he stayed with Pole and then, in the autumn, he undertook a mysterious journey to Sicily, raising the smoke screen of a business trip which involved grain and wool, and much else besides. In fact, the Emperor was in Sicily and Harvel carried to him a letter from Pole and, more important, a verbal message. The letter urged the Emperor to ‘try peace’ before war in sorting out English problems. Probably, the verbal message was less pacific. When the Emperor replied, once again it was Harvel who delivered the letter.34 This high diplomacy was full of subterfuge. In May 1536, near the time Pole sent off his blistering text to England, Harvel expressed his own preference for ‘a private and quiet life’, as deceivers often did when trouble was brewing.35 In January 31

32

33 34 35

Friar to Starkey, 1 December 1535, LP, 9, 917, p. 310. In Greek, to meteorologise means ‘to think or talk about the heavenly bodies’, see Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 36. Friar seemed to accept Henry viii’s break with Rome but in later life he conformed to catholicism, see White, ‘Fryer ’, odnb. Reginaldi Poli cardinalis Britanni, Ad Henricum Octauum Britanniae regem, pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, libri quatuor (Rome: Antonio Blado [1536]), ustc 850087[hereafter Pole, De Unitate]; crp 79 and 80; Anne Dillon, Michelangelo and the English Martyrs (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 19–​38, especially p. 27. Harvel to Starkey, June 1535, Original Letters, ed. Ellis, 2, quotations at pp. 73–​4. Mayer, Pole, pp. 35–​37; crp 77, 81, 94. Harvel to Starkey, May 1536, in Original Letters, ed. Ellis, 2, pp. 77–​8; Mayer, Starkey, p. 204.

40 Chapter 2 1537, he signed a marriage contract with Apollonia Uttinger, the daughter of a merchant from Augsburg.36 This is sometimes seen as a ‘protestant’ affair of the heart; certainly, even after Harvel’s death, the Venetian Inquisition kept a watch on Apollonia and her two subsequent husbands.37 That did not make Harvel, or Apollonia, or her family into evangelicals in the mid-​1530s. Apollonia’s sister, Caterina Utinger, was buried in 1537 with full catholic rites and a catholic-​sounding will.38 However, Harvel’s contacts with the Fondaco Tedeschi provided him with the opportunity to meet German merchants, many of whom were ‘luterani’. It has been suggested that, effectively, he was running a radical hostel in Venice to rival Pole’s more orthodox household. But it is anachronistic to organise English expatriates into ‘catholic’ and ‘protestant’ teams.39 Those who stayed on in the Veneto tried hard to remain uncommitted: they waited, as nicodemites do. Harvel acted as an agent for Pole until 1537, although Thomas Cromwell was headhunting him from 1535 and Harvel did not brush him off. His behaviour was ‘murky in the extreme’.40 Clarities began to emerge during 1536, and not just in the Veneto: in that year John Calvin wrote his earliest anti-​nicodemite letter.41 In May or June 1536, Pole’s long awaited ‘opinion’ reached Henry viii in England, probably delivered by Michael Throckmorton.42 Like most of Pole’s literary efforts the text had been reworked a great deal. Untitled at the time, it became known as ‘de unitate’, a plea for the unity of the church, under the pope and the bishops. Should the pope fail in his care, Pole argued, remedies lay within the church itself; it was not up to kings to put things right. The deaths of Fisher and More were highlighted; the angry reaction of Londoners to More’s death was being proclaimed throughout the world (echoes of those ‘vehementist words’ which Harvel reported?).43 Pole called on the Emperor to deal with ‘the danger to the republic’ posed by Henry viii –​helped by ‘whole legions lurking in England’. This sounded like an incitement to treason: the rising known as the Pilgrimage 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Venice, Archivio di Stato, Proprio Vadimoni R. 33, f. 51v, printed in H. F. Brown, ‘The marriage contract, inventory and funeral expenses of Edmund Harvel’, EHR 20 (1905), 70–​7; LP, 13/​1, 507. Brown’s dating of Harvel’s arrival in Italy (as 1535) was a mistake. Venice, Archivio di Stato, S. Uffizio, busta 39, f. 34 r. Venice, Archivio di Sato, Notarili Testamenti, busta 128. iii, c. 14 (c. 27 June 1537). Robert Barrington ‘ “Two Households both alike in dignity”: Reginald Pole and Edmund Harvel’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 895–​913 at pp. 897–​99. crp 77 (especially note 197), 79, 93; Harvel to Cromwell, 11 March 1535, LP, 8, 373; Mayer, Pole, p. 36. John Calvin, Epistolae duae. Prior, de fugiendis impiorum illicitis sacris … (Basel: Thomas Platter & Balthasar Lasius, 1537), ustc 667726. For a full summary of Pole’s de Unitate, see Mayer, Pole, pp. 13–​46. Ibid., pp. 17–​25.

Nursery of Nicodemism

41

of Grace began in the autumn of the same year.44 There was also a clear religious demand –​that Henry, even at this late hour, should accept the ‘beneficium’ which Pole was offering him –​a beneficium of salvation and justification, then conversion and penance, which was the only way to avoid ‘iniquity’ and ‘ruin’.45 On this subject, Reginald Pole was outspoken, far from being a nicodemite. And yet, for a long time after he had returned to Italy in 1532, Pole had waited. His protégés in the Veneto, Starkey, Morison, Throckmorton, Lily, and Harvel had done the same. All this group had kept quiet, gone to church, listened to catholic sermons, been taught by catholic scholars and met Italy’s reforming bishops, some of whom were Pole’s friends.46 Then, finally, Starkey and Morison made bold decisions to return to England. But in the years before those decisions, when the English schism began to endanger their middle ground, most of the English flock in Padua concealed their innermost religious views, played for both sides, hoped for the best, flattered to get patronage and evaded issues. These are often seen as nicodemite characteristics, but they were usually also an inevitable part of mid-​sixteenth century life. Morison’s choice in 1536 was final, but Starkey, distrusted by the King and by Cromwell, changed tack one more time, leaking valuable information to benefit Pole’s family in 1538. Starkey died that same year. Like countless other humanists, these English Paduans had been forced to make hard choices as the untidy old world in which they had been educated gave way to alien clarities.47 They had all learned the concealing arts of delay, secrecy, and deceit but, after 1536, Michael Throckmorton proved to be an outstanding practitioner. 4

Michael Throckmorton, Nicodemite Agent

Gradually Throckmorton became a traitor’s agent. The breach between Pole and King Henry viii was finalised in stages: begun by the delivery of De unitate to England in May/​June 1536; widened by the announcement in Rome that Pole was to be made a Cardinal (22 December 1536); made irrevocable by his appointment as papal legate (7 February 1537). Ostensibly Pole was to liaise with Christian princes in preparation for a General Council and secretly he was 44 45 46 47

Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 30; the word ‘beneficium’ appears frequently, see pp. 20 and 31–​2. See Overell, ‘English Friendship’, pp. 8–​10. On the humanists’ dilemma, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–​1700 (London; New York: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 680–​681.

42 Chapter 2 expected to aid the rebels against Henry viii in the northern rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Cromwell appears to have thought that Throckmorton was working not for Pole, but for him. There was a tug of war for ‘our Michael’s’ services. While this went on, Throckmorton played a double game; it is possible that he was also still double-​minded. It is an error to pass him over as just ‘Cardinal Pole’s agent’, a servant, a shadow. During Henry viii’s murderous pursuit of Pole in the later 1530s, Throckmorton became a James Bond figure, anticipating assassination attempts, minding the Cardinal’s business on emergency dashes across Europe, deceiving whenever he thought fit. There were times when he came close to bluffing Pole as well as Cromwell. He proved a clever deceiver as those in diplomatic service have to be.48 The chief mark of nicodemites, however, is their dissimulation in specifically religious matters. Throckmorton proved himself adept at that, too, especially in the 1540s when he was accepted into Pole’s élite religious circle at Viterbo. Later still Throckmorton would store in his own house the banned ‘heretical’ books owned by members of this group, whilst still speaking devoutly catholic words.49 Serving Cardinal Pole was a tough call. He was always a resister.50 In the years 1537–​1538, he tried to organise foreign war abroad and popular rebellion in England. He possessed the will to harm Henrician England –​and came close to doing it.51 Being Pole’s agent required fast reactions and exceptional duplicity. Experienced diplomats knew the dangers of contact with Throckmorton.52 What prepared this younger son of English gentry for such a role? First: ambivalent relations within his own large family, the Throckmorton tribe of Coughton in Warwickshire. Religious changes created painful divisions among them. The main line usually remained catholic, though at the dangerous time of the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536–​7), Sir George Throckmorton tried to fend off trouble by describing Michael, his exiled younger brother, as ‘unthrifty and unnatural’.53 Nonetheless, ‘blood was thicker than religious bile’ in this large clan,

48 49 50 51 52 53

On diplomacy and nicodemism, see below, Chapter 4. M. Anne Overell, ‘Cardinal Pole’s Special Agent: Michael Throckmorton, 1533–​1558’, History, 94 (2009), 265–​278; Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’, pp. 116–​119. T. F. Mayer, ‘Nursery of Resistance: Reginald Pole and his Friends’, in Paul. A. Fideler and T. F. Mayer, eds, Political Thought and Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse and Disguise (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 50–​74. T. F. Mayer, ‘A Diet for Henry viii: The Failure of Cardinal Pole’s 1537 Legation’, Journal of British Studies, 26 (1987) [hereafter Mayer, ‘Diet for Henry viii’], 305–​31, at p. 306. Susan Brigden, ‘ “The Shadow that You Know”: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Francis Bryan at Court and in Embassy’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 1–​31, at p. 9. LP, 11, 580; despite his traditionalist views, Sir George finally submitted to the King, Peter Marshall, ‘Crisis of Allegiance: George Throckmorton and Henry Tudor’, in Peter Marshall

Nursery of Nicodemism

43

and Michael stayed in touch with his benighted evangelical relatives, and did business with them.54 His long experience of Italy proved another useful preparation: he was already in Florence in 1518, while probably still a teenager. A codicil to the second will of his father, Sir Robert, shows that Michael was accompanying his pious parent on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Sir Robert died en route, and left ‘Mighell’ ‘£10 for his four years exhibition’.55 He was with Pole in Venice and Padua in January 1525-6 and in 1533 he was studying at Padua, one of the ‘flock’ of Englishmen.56 Italy remained his base throughout a life marked by fast rides across Europe and he possessed that core skill of diplomats, linguistic fluency. Irritated colleagues reported that ‘he always spoke Italian’.57 Like Pole, he was an example of immersion in the host community, ‘the European mainstream’.58 Having listed the attempts to assassinate Pole during the 1530s, G. B. Parks concluded: ‘the intent to capture or kill him [Pole] was unmistakeable and the successful kidnapping in the Low Counties of William Tyndale in 1536 and of Sir John Cheke in 1556 shows that it could be done’.59 Henry viii ordered that Pole should be ‘trussed up and conveyed to Calais’, where the English king could have his way with traitors.60 On 21 April 1537, it was reported that the English envoy, Sir Francis Brian, had bragged that ‘he would kill him [Pole] with his own hand’, yet Bryan also warned Pole of plots against him. The diplomacy of these later years of Henry viii’s long reign was marked by unending doubleness and Throckmorton had to deal with it.61 He worked his contacts. One of the most valuable was Rodolfo Pio, papal nuncio in Paris, who had also been a student at Padua.62 Throckmorton moved

54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

and Geoffrey Scott, eds, Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 31–​68, at p. 49. Job Throckmorton was, almost certainly, the radical Elizabethan pamphleteer known as Martin Marprelate, Leland H. Carlson, Martin Marprelate, gentleman: Master Job Throckmorton laid open his colours (San Marino, CA, 1981), pp.  94–​97; Patrick Collinson, ‘Job Throckmorton’, odnb. For Michael Throckmorton’s business transactions, see Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’, 141 and p. 117. Warwickshire Record Office: CR 1998/​Box 73/​2; my thanks to Peter Marshall for this reference. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Venturi Ginori Lisci, 472, f. 567: I thank Susan Brigden for this reference; Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors, p. 213. LP 12/​1, 34. Peter Marshall, Religious Identities, at pp. 256 and 258. G. B. Parks, ‘The Parma Letters and the Dangers to Cardinal Pole’, Catholic Historical Review, 46 (1960), 299–​317, at p. 310; Marshall, Religious Identities, p. 252. London, British Library Additional Manuscript, 25114, f. 263 (LP 12/​1, 1032), cited by Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: the heart’s forest (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 332. LP, 12/​1, 996; Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, p. 330; Marshall, Religious Identities, p. 255. LP, 12/​1, 34; Mayer, ‘Diet for Henry viii’, p. 308; Marshall, Religious Identities, p. 251–​3.

44 Chapter 2 between meetings with Pio in Paris and Pole in Rome, all the while pretending to be serving Thomas Cromwell in London, fobbing him off with pointless travelogues, torrents of words intended to mislead. ‘Our Michael’ was a much more engaging writer than his master: not difficult. Throckmorton’s letter, written in 1537 to his student friend, Richard Morison, is his most enigmatic. His use of Italian on the address, suggests deliberate nostalgia about their university days ‘Alll mio car[issi]mo quanto Fratello Ricardo Morisono’. He admitted that his own nature was ‘suspicious’; ‘I would my master had some of my jealous and suspicious nature in him’, but he said Pole was ‘without dissimulation’. Throckmorton thanked Morison, ‘For so loving a stomach declared in so strange and dangerous time.’ He said he was glad that he had once been kind to Morison –​presumably a reference to the Paduan loans and second-​hand clothes. Those comments were emotional blackmail, because Throckmorton needed to use Morison to find out what Thomas Cromwell thought about Pole. But then there came a tribute, more generous than was necessary:  whereas other men get money, he said, Morison ‘gets men’s hearts’. Had he ‘got’ Throckmorton’s heart? If so, there was now the ‘ineluctable uncertainty’ of friends who might turn into enemies.63 Separations like this one often led to nicodemism. At the same time, Throckmorton wrote to Thomas Cromwell, who was by then mystified by the delays. Pole, said Throckmorton, was aware of the King’s anger about De unitate and ‘the sharp and uncomely fashion that he [Pole] has used in reconciling his Grace[Henry viii]’. In such phrases we begin to see how Cromwell was taken in ‒ a busy minister’s cursory glance might suppose that ‘sharp’ and ‘uncomely’ reflected Throckmorton’s own confidential but candid assessment.64 Blandly, Throckmorton closed with the comment that his information was not worth the expense of sending it by expensive post; too true.65 His excuses were feeble enough to exasperate any spymaster. At this time, both Cromwell and Pole seem to have been uncertain about where Throckmorton’s real loyalty lay. There was a tug of war for his services. In an angry letter, Pole spat out protests against Cromwell’s attempts to suborn his agent who ‘ departing as my messenger, returns, as it seems to me, more than yours, mitigating, as much as he can, all your whole discourse in your letter’.66 63

64 65 66

Throckmorton to Morison, 1537, SP 1/​116 ff.38–​39; LP 12/​1, 430. Throckmorton had a gracious turn of phrase, evident in his later correspondence with Edward Courtenay, see Chapter 4 below; Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), quotation at p. 204. 15 February 1537, LP 12/​1, 429. Michael Throgmerton to [Cromwell], 15 February 1537, SP 1/​116, f. 34; LP 12/​1, 429. Pole to Cromwell, 16 February 1537, crp 154.

Nursery of Nicodemism

45

At the end of September 1537, Cromwell’s patience ran out. He exploded in a drafted letter, which was probably sent: ‘You have bleared myne eye once: your credit shall never more serve you so farre to deceyue me the second time’, he thundered. There was a headmasterly passage: ‘Michael if you were either natural towards your country or your family you would not thus shame all your kin … if you will turn to your country you will yet find the king ready to forgive you’. In the context of the attempts on Pole’s own life at this time, reassurances about Throckmorton’s safety were risible. Threats of assassination on Italian soil were much more convincing ‘There maybe found ways enough in Italy to be rid of a trayterous subject’.67 Cromwell knew Italy and he meant it. Thereafter Throckmorton had to be Pole’s man. A description written in the summer of 1538 depicts him as neurotically aware of the dangers to the Cardinal. The writer was Thomas Theobald, a chatterer, trying to ingratiate himself with Cromwell and with Archbishop Cranmer. Theobald reported that, in Padua on 18 August 1538, he had met Throckmorton, who was in a state of high anxiety, ‘clothed in a coat of woolskins and a cap of mail, as pale as ashes blowing and puffing like unto a raging lion’ (this was mid-​August in Padua). Apparently, Throckmorton had not slept for fear that Harry Philips, known as the betrayer of William Tyndale (evangelical and Bible translator) had come to Italy to assassinate Pole. Throckmorton was frightened and told Theobald: ‘when his master rode out as usual with 5 or 6 horses unarmed, he [Harry Philips] might destroy him with the help of three or four hardy fellows and escape to the mountains in 3 or 4 hrs …. this is the Italians’ practice, or poison’. Throckmorton owned several books on poisons and antidotes; he had reason to keep abreast of the assassin’s arts.68 Pole’s relatives in England came under attack after the so-​called ‘Exeter conspiracy’ (August 1538) and Pole and Throckmorton topped the list in acts of indictment on a charge that they did ‘betake themselves to the … Roman pontiff in parts beyond sea, and maliciously, falsely, unnaturally, and traitorously renounce their natural prince’.69 Pole’s second legation, from late December 1538 until early February 1539, intended to rally the Christian Princes of Europe against Henry viii, only served to increase the dangers. All hope ended with 67 68 69

Thomas Cromwell to Michael Throckmorton, September 1537, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, ed. R. B. Merriman, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 2, 86–​90; see also LP 12/​2, 795; crp 154, note 64. LP, 13/​2, 507, 508 and 509. On poisons and antidotes, see Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’, 125 and 251–​2. Pole’s two brothers and his aged mother, the Countess of Salisbury, were arrested. Others indicted in the act of December that year included Pole’s friends, Thomas Goldwell and William Peto, LP, 13/​2, 979; Marshall, Religious Identities, pp. 237–​8.

46 Chapter 2 the fierce act of attainder of 19 May 1539. First on the long list was Pole, but Michael Throckmorton’s name came second; he had been promoted from traitor’s agent to traitor in his own right.70 Their property in England was forfeit. It looked like a life sentence to stay out of the way in Italy and a looming death sentence if they were caught. English pursuit of the ‘pestiferous’ Pole and his friends is an important context for the evidence that they were duplicitous dissemblers: people in mortal danger often are. 5

Throckmorton among the Spirituali

Italy remained home for Pole and Throckmorton for the next decade. The agent stayed near his master and, in the early 1540s, his exciting life seemed becalmed. Yet there was need for new caution and for a new kind of nicodemism. As the diplomatic crisis of the late 1530s receded, religious tensions in Italy were coming to the boil. Plans for reform of the church and, possibly, its doctrine, were taking hold. Pole became a figurehead of that reform and leader of the spirituali and, once again, Throckmorton’s support was necessary. The regular spiritual homilies in Pole’s household included discussions of the doctrines of the ‘luterani’ and focused on the doctrine of justification by faith alone: as Starkey had suggested in his ‘Dialogue between Pole and Lupset’, Pole and his friends knew that ‘he [Luther] and his disciples be not so wicked and foolish that in all things they err.’71 Between 1541 and 1543, Throckmorton was with them, and so was Marcantonio Flaminio (a regular reader of Calvin and Bucer); also the poet Vittoria Colonna, reader and disciple of Juan de Valdés and patron of Bernardino Ochino; also, Flaminio’s friend, Pietro Carnesecchi. Both Carnesecchi and Colonna reported that between 1541 and 1543 ‘Michele inglese’ and ‘nostro messer Michele’ was part of Pole’s ‘famiglia’; in 1543 ‘messer Michele’ was at Viterbo even when the cardinal himself was not there.72 It is clear that Throckmorton was accepted into this devout but necessarily secretive society. They had formed an élite network of powerful friends. They knew that there were risks attached to their religious views.

70 71 72

This was largest attainder in the sixteenth century, including 53 persons, 31 Henry viii c. 15; 32 Henry viii c. 60; 33 Henry viii c. 40, cited by Marshall, Religious Identities, p. 238. Pole to Contarini, 9 December 1541, crp 341; Mayer, Pole, pp. 105, 115–​7; see above, note 1. Vittoria Colonna to Pole, 19 August 1543, in Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole, ed. S. Pagano and C. Ranieri (Città del Vaticano: Archivio vaticano, 1989), pp. 96–​7; Processi Carnesecchi, vol. 2/​2, p. 407.

Nursery of Nicodemism

47

Throckmorton’s change, from daredevil diplomatic agent to cloistered spirituale, is more apparent than real. Viterbo was some forty miles from the English Hospice in Rome, which was Throckmorton’s other Italian base in these years. Later it would become the English College ‒ an emblem of loyalty to the papacy. In the middle of the century however, its future direction was unknown. In 1538, it had come under Pole’s direct control: this ancient institution was undergoing reform, and many spirituali passed through its doors. Throckmorton was often there, acting in official roles, for instance he was one of the auditors from 1539 (when he was identified as Pole’s secretary) until May 1551; in 1540 he served as one of the Hospice’s two ‘camerarii’.73 In 1547–​8, he was used by Pole to make contacts with the new evangelical regime governing England on behalf of the young King Edward vi. Pole had not given up hope of influencing England and Throckmorton may have travelled there in 1549.74 It came to nothing. They were still blacklisted in their home country. And in Italy they were still watched by English exiles and travellers. William Thomas, self-​appointed, unofficial mentor to King Edward, had been in Italy, to escape from the English law. In an account written in the late 1540s and published in Italian in the early 1550s, Thomas gave an assured account of Pole’s complicated stance: Pole, said Thomas, ‘secretly professes to be a Protestant and openly maintains the papacy’.75 With such rumours in circulation, Pole’s agent needed to defend him against critics from both sides of the religious divide. 73

74 75

‘Reformation or Correction of the Statutes’ [for the English Hospice], late 1546, crp 509; Thomas F. Mayer, ‘Michael Throckmorton’, ODNB; Michael Williams, The Venerable English College, Rome, second ed. (Leominster:  Gracewing, 2008); The English Hospice in Rome, vol. 21 of The Venerabile, 1962 (sexcentenary issue) (I have used the facs. repr. edition, with supplementary annexe, The English Hospice in Rome [ed. M. Harold](Ranelagh & Rome:  Fergus Mulligan, 2012)  [hereafter English Hospice], see especially chapters by A. Kenny, ‘From Hospice to College 1559–​1579’, pp. 218–​73, and G. B. Parks, ‘The Reformation and the Hospice (1514–​59)’, pp. 193–​217; see annexe, James Willoughby ‘The English Hospice’s first Library’, pp. 303–​316. John Yong to Michael Throckmorton, 26 October 1548, Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Reign of Edward vi, 1547–​1553, revised, ed. C. S. Knighton (London: hmso, 1992) [hereafter cspde] 160; Overell, ‘Pole’s Special Agent’, p. 274. British Library, Cotton mss, Vespasian D.xviii, ‘Six Discourses’ and ‘Peregrine’; William Thomas, The Pilgrim:  a dialogue on the life and actions of King Henry the Eighth, 1547, ed. J.A. Froude (London:  Parker, Son and Bourn, 1861), pp.  61–​66.; William Thomas, Il pellegrino inglese ne’l quale si difende l’innocente, et la sincera vita de’l pio, et religioso re d’Inghilterra Henrico ottavo [Zürich:  Andreas ii Gessner & Rudolf Wyssenbach,  1552], ustc 85900; E.  R. Adair, ‘William Thomas; a Forgotten Clerk to the Privy Council’, in R.  W. Seton–​Watson, ed., Tudor Studies, presented to A.  F. Pollard (London:  Longmans, Green, 1924), p. 138; Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–​1580 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 108–​141; Brett Foster, ‘Harry’s

48 Chapter 2 The next four years saw a series of dramas, and yet more reasons for being a nicodemite. First, Throckmorton just missed being principal agent to a new pope when Pole lost at the conclave on 1 December 1549, by two votes.76 The cause of spirituali at Rome was not finished, but it was coming under serious attack. At the end of December 1552, Throckmorton left the Hospice and may never have returned.77 He was going to be married for the second time: a papal licence, dated 15 January 1553, confirmed that he was then living in the Roman Curia. We do not know where his wedding to Agnes Hyde took place, but the couple set up home in Mantua –​conveniently far from Rome, where the traditionalists were taking over, grabbing power.78 Pole was alarmed; he wanted to be well away from the Curia, at least for the time being. In the spring, he left Rome, retreating north to a Benedictine monastery on the shores of Lake Garda. Within weeks, Edward vi died and Mary Tudor became queen of England. Pole was made papal legate again; this time he was responsible for ending the English schism. 6

Agent in the Reign of Queen Mary

In the years 1553–​4, Michael travelled to England, carrying the papal bull announcing Pole’s appointment as legate and later delivered Pole’s congratulatory address to Philip ii on his marriage to Mary –​a task requiring a skilled deceiver, given Pole’s real opinion of that controversial union.79 The Queen seems to have trusted Throckmorton to deliver her reply.80 Throckmorton’s English property was restored and, after the duke of Northumberland’s execution, he acquired the valuable Haseley estate and passed it on to his evangelical relative Clement.81 In other ways, however, he maintained an impeccably catholic

76 77 78 79

80 81

peregrinations: an Italianate Defence of Henry viii’, in Henry viii and History, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Thomas Freeman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 21–​50; T. F. Mayer, ‘The War of the Two Saints: the Conclave of Julius iii and Cardinal Pole’, reprinted in cpec, number iv. Parks, ‘The Reformation and the Hospice’, pp. 202–​209. Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Arm. xli 67, fol. 48r, I owe this reference to the generosity of the late Thomas Mayer; Massimo Firpo, La presa di potere dell’Inquisizione romana, 1550–​ 1553 (Rome: Laterza, 2014). Pole to Dandino 12 August, 1553, from Maguzzano, crp 643; Pole to Morone, 10 June 1554, from Dilighem, saying the Queen did not want him to use a churchman, so he ‘thought to use Michael who is in England’, crp 883. For Michael Throckmorton’s mission to England, crp 887, especially p. 318, note 375; also crp 888, 889, 890. Queen Mary to Pole, 28 September 1554, crp 946; see Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’, 136 and 213. Ibid., number 141.

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identity –​Mary’s man, Pole’s man and in this guise he became the victim of a scam initiated by English protestant exiles. They used false details, as propagandists do, dragging in Throckmorton’s name: A copye of a verye fyne and wytty letter sent by Lewes Lippomanus … translated out of the Italyan language by Michael Throckmerton. The false details of publisher and place ‘Curtigiane of Rome’ (in fact it was printed in Emden) suggested that Throckmorton was a trimmer to the papacy.82 Probably the real author was Richard Morison, using their burnt-​out Paduan friendship and his own knowledge of catholic Italy. Before the tract was actually issued, Morison died in Strassburg on 20 March 1556, so someone else was responsible for the later stages of publication.83 Among English protestant exiles, Throckmorton was remembered as ‘Curtigiane’, trimmer, the smear of dissimulation was attached to his name. At the Mantuan court, however, he was highly regarded and his name regularly mis-​spelt; ‘il nostro messer Michel Fragmarton’. Aloisio Schivenoglia, a Mantuan observer in London praised abilities as a translator.84 It was said that Throckmorton lived ‘for many years’ in Mantua, under the protection of its ruler, Cardinale Ercole Gonzaga, who was Pole’s friend and was allied to the spirituali until that became too risky. The city’s peculiar humanist culture was open-​minded for the educated and traditionalist for the rest.85 Throckmorton’s value as an agent and translator came from partly from his immersion in Italian language and culture: that was true at the end of his life, as at the beginning. Ageing by now, he travelled less, but still handled dangerous commissions. He took up his old body-​guard role, trying to prevent other assassination attempts, this time not on Pole but on the cardinal’s young cousin, Edward Courtenay, who was also a nicodemite.86 As the Marian persecution of protestants proceeded in England, Throckmorton’s comments, made in his correspondence with Courtenay, suggested that he approved of the English government’s burning its dissenting subjects: ‘the fraternity meets in huddles embracing them and comforting them to continue in their blind obstinacy’.87 82

83 84 85 86 87

A copye of a verye fyne and wytty letter sent by Lewes Lippomanus (‘Curtigiane of Rome’, [i.e.  Emden:  E.  van der Erve], 1556), ustc 505342 and 505323, sig. Aii; Jennifer Loach, ‘Pamphlets and Politics’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 48 (1975), 31–​44, at p. 44. Luigi Lippomani was a traditionalist. Overell, ‘English Friendship’, pp. 492–​3; Sowerby, Renaissance and Reformation, p. 238. Mantua, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Gonzaga, Inviati Inghilterra/​Scozia, busta 578, f. 169 (17 August 1557). Murphy, Ruling Peacefully, pp. 28–​9, 137 129–​41, 253–​66. See below, Chapter 5. Michael Throckmorton to Devon (at Venice), 17 March 1556, cspdm, 330; the word ‘obstinacy’ was often used to describe disobedience in religion, see crp 1411 and crp 1421; and see Chapter 4, below, pp. 108.

50 Chapter 2 Thus, Throckmorton on English affairs in 1556, yet his activities in Italy had allied ‘messer Michele’ with the spirituali, who held evangelical beliefs similar to those for which English protestants were dying. 7

A Nicodemite’s Booklist

At Throckmorton’s death in Mantua in 1558, an inventory was taken and his valuable library was included. There were humanist titles, works of the ‘medical renaissance’, books about natural history, and about poisons and antidotes. There were many religious works, mass books, breviaries and guides to the spiritual life –​but also at least four titles which contained the writings of the northern reformers, especially Luther’s: such works were banned in Italy. Throckmorton was storing what others might have burned –​or handed in to the Inquisition.88 The collection was less than perfectly catholic, it suggested ‘obstinacy’; one volume had once belonged to Marcantonio Flaminio, but probably most of them were Pole’s. The Cardinal’s library had been split up on his departure for England in 1553. Some books went to the English College, some were sent on to him in England, others were given to Italian friends, but there were few of his allies still resident in Italy. Both Flaminio and Colonna had died. Only his agent, the layman Throckmorton, had a safe family home ‒ in Mantua.89 He stored those books: whether willingly or dutifully, we cannot tell. ‘Messer Michele’ died on 1 November 1558 in Mantua, followed in London in the same month by Queen Mary and Pole –​all in their beds.90 Throckmorton’s career reflects the confused religious experience of his generation: the part he played in the Paduan ‘nursery’; his affection for its evangelically-​inclined members, especially Morison; his long deception of Thomas Cromwell; his friendships with the spirituali; his humanist book collection, containing banned religious titles. Like Pole, Flaminio, Colonna and their friends, Throckmorton had listened to doctrines of salvation by faith alone at Viterbo. Ten years later, with the catholic Queen Mary on the English throne, he had decided that it was possible to go only so far in the direction of reform. His sympathetic acquaintance

88

89 90

Mantua, Archivio di Stato, Registrazioni notarili [hereafter asm, Registrazioni notarili] 1558, vol. I; for the booklist see ff. 94v–​97r, transcribed in Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’; see especially suspect volumes, numbers, 84, 130, 176; for discussion of the religious titles, see below, Chapter 3, pp. 59–62. Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’, pp. 112–​113. asm, Registrazioni notarili, 1558, vol. 1, fol 94v.

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with reform theology in Italy turned into contempt for English evangelicals’ ‘blind obstinacy’. Throckmorton seemed to fall into line, the catholic line, except that this experienced deceiver quietly kept hold of some heretical books. As we shall see in the next chapter, those texts provide valuable evidence of the strange, nicodemite piety of Pole and his friends.

CHAPTER 3

Pole’s Nicodemite Piety? Viterbo to England besides also it is thought of hym [Reginald Pole] that toward his latter ende, a litle before hys comming from Rome to England, Card. Poole halfe suspected for a Lutheran at Rome.he began somewhat to sauour the doctrine of Luther, and was no lesse suspected at Rome.1 John Foxe, ‘The Acts and Monuments’, 1570.

∵ Contemporaries thought that Cardinal Pole and members of his household were very pious. Witnesses testified that they prayed fervently, went often to communion and to confession, and gave alms.2 The Cardinal himself was said to be a man of ‘parole catholicissime’. In 1537 his close friend, Alvise Priuli, described the devout daily routines of Pole’s household: private prayer, matins, mass, spiritual reading.3 Nonetheless the beliefs which lay behind their devotion were unfathomable. At his own trial for heresy in 1567, Pietro Carnesecchi said that ‘In the eyes of the world’, Cardinal Pole had died unhappily, ‘being regarded in Rome as a Lutheran and in Germany as a Papist’.4 Much the same could have been said of several other members of Pole’s circle, especially the poet Marcantonio Flaminio. We saw in the last chapter that Pole, Flaminio and their friends owned heterodox religious books. Until the Inquisitions were reorganised (from 1542), and the doctrine of salvation was defined (in 1547), they could get away with it. Christian piety had shown itself plastic over many I wish to thank the editors of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Cambridge University Press for generously giving their permission for re-​use of extracts from my article entitled ‘Pole’s Piety? The Devotional Reading of Reginald Pole and his Friends’, 63 (2012), 458–​74. My warm thanks are also due to Susan Brigden for reading this chapter and for sharing her profound understanding of the spirituali and much more besides. 1 tamo, 1570, book 12, p. 2198. 2 Processi Carnesecchi, 1, p. 390. On Carnesecchi’s opinion of Pole, see Dermot Fenlon, ‘Pietro Carnesecchi and Cardinal Pole: New Perspectives ’, JEH, 56 (2005), 529–​33, at p. 531. 3 Alvise Priuli to Ludovico Beccadelli, 20 July 1537, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Italiano, c. 25, f. 24v, cited Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 43–​44. 4 ‘in opinione a Roma di lutherano et in Alemagna di papista’, Processi Carnesecchi, 2/​2, p. 492.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_​0 05

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centuries, and adaptable to countless different environments and emphases. It had themes and expressions, fads and foibles, and rarely more so than in the first half of the sixteenth century, just before reformers on both sides systematised the cheerful variety of Christian spiritual life. The practice of piety is intended to join men to God, but it is said also to mould characters. This chapter will argue that, in the case of Pole and his friends, there were complex connections between their style of devotion and their nicodemite behaviour –​silence, evasions, hiding your books, absenting yourself. Such ‘doings’ were part of the piety nourished at Viterbo and still evident at the Council of Trent’s meeting in 1545–​6. Later, in 1553, those same devout but ambivalent attitudes would be transferred to Marian England when Pole returned there as Cardinal Legate. He was charged with responsibility for bringing to an end England’s twenty-​year-​old schism. He had, as it turned out, only four years to complete his task. 1

The Move to Viterbo

In August 1541, Pole took up residence at Viterbo as legate of the Patrimony of St Peter, part of the Papal States. The English Hospice in Rome, where he was also in charge, was close enough for a symbiotic relationship to develop. These two centres sheltered the same people, Pole’s friends, a close-​knit group of Italians and Englishmen, including, as we saw in the last chapter, his friend and agent Michael Throckmorton. The poet and writer Marcantonio Flaminio, arrived in Pole’s household at Viterbo in November 1541, together with his friend Pietro Carnesecchi. Both had been with Juan de Valdés in Naples, absorbing his teachings on individual illumination, on Bible reading inspired by the Holy Spirit and his ‘secret way’ of personal holiness, which must be concealed until others were ready to receive it.5 Their arrival at Viterbo may have been a deliberate missionary strategy, intended to spread Valdés’s doctrines, but it was also part of Flaminio’s long sequence of spiritual enthusiasms.6 After being a student at Padua in the early 1520s, Flaminio had spent a long period in Verona in Bishop Giberti’s strenuously pious household. Then in 1532–​33 he proposed to join the Theatines –​so long as their rule could be made gentler for him; he was turned down. In 1535 he resumed his contacts with Pole. His writing flourished: his paraphrase of

5 See above, Chapter 1, pp. 18, 23–5. 6 Firpo, Tra alumbrados e spirituali, pp. 127–​38; Firpo, Valdés, pp. 131–​176.

54 Chapter 3 thirty-​two Psalms appeared in 1538.7 He was also in some sort of trouble for reading ‘libri luterani’, ‘Lutheran’ books8 Possibly still in the shadow of this incident, Flaminio had left Giberti’s household in 1538 and moved to Naples to join the Valdesian circle. But even Valdés warned him to control his ‘prattle’.9 So Pole welcomed his unsettled and unsettling guest to enjoy ‘una dolcissima quiete’, the lovely peace of Viterbo.10 Their roles were reversed as Flaminio, a restless humanist poet in minor orders, became the Cardinal’s ‘cor et anima’.11 By December, the reserved Pole was euphoric: he said they formed a ‘holy and useful’ company, ‘I say useful because in the evening Messer Marcantonio gives me and the better part of my household that ‘food that does not die’, so that I do not know when I have felt greater consolation and greater edification’.12 The pursuit of spiritual consolation characterised many nicodemites. But Pole had a particular need: Henry viii had turned on several members of his family in 1539, after the so-​called Exeter conspiracy; in May 1541 Pole had heard that his aged mother, the Countess of Salisbury, had been beheaded. It was a botched execution and she died in agony. Of course he was searching for consolation.13 His praise for Flaminio’s spiritual talks casts doubt on the idea, propounded later, that he had invited the poet in order to ‘rescue’ him from ‘heresy’, aware that danger to the church might have arisen from ‘his incomparable style’.14 Another gifted poet had arrived that same autumn: Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara. Widowed at an early age, by 1538 she had begun to follow Fra Bernardino Ochino on his preaching tours, listening to his emotive sermons in Bologna, then Pisa, then in the great centre of reform, the republic of Lucca. Her spiritual search brought her to Viterbo in October 1541 and there she attached 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

crp 125; Marcantonio Flaminio, Paraphrasis in duos et triginta psalmos (Venice: Giovanni Padovano, 1538), ustc 830007. Alessandro Pastore, Marcantonio Flaminio, fortune e sfortune di un chierico nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Milano: F. Angeli, 1981)[hereafter Pastore, Flaminio], p. 94. Marcantonio Flaminio, Apologia del ‘Beneficio di Cristo’ e altri scritti inediti, ed. Dario Marcatto (Florence: Olschki, 1996) [hereafter Flaminio, Apologia], pp. 201–​3; Processo Morone, 1, p. 827. Flaminio, Apologia, p. 52, note 16. Processo Morone, 6, p. 290. Pole to Contarini, 9 December 1541, crp 341; Mayer, Pole, pp. 105, 115–​17. Hazel Pierce, Margaret Pole: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003); Susan Higginbotham, Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower (Stroud: Amberley, 2016). ‘Vita del Cardinale Reginaldo Polo’, in Lodovico Morandi, Monumenti di varia letteratura tratti dai manoscritti di mons. Ludovico Beccadelli, 2 vols in 3 parts (Bologna: Istituto delle scienze, 1797–​1804), 1/​2, pp. 277–​353, at p. 326; see also, p. 350.

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herself to the nearby convent of Santa Caterina.15 Her friend, the artist Michelangelo Buonarotti, was another impressionable visitor to Viterbo who, as Anne Dillon emphasises, ‘conflated his own image with that of the archetypal model of dissimulation’ Nicodemus. He presented, however, the ‘good’ Nicodemus.16 Pole’s shifting famiglia moved between Viterbo and Rome. The English contingent included George Lily, Thomas Goldwell and Michael Throckmorton. They had made their painful decision:  in choosing the catholic church and Pole rather than Henry viii, they had risked their own lives and those of vulnerable families left in England; if we detect some ambivalence and secrecy, it is no wonder. George Lily’s decision to remain in Italy was firm from 1536 onwards. He loved the household at Viterbo and was trusted to smooth out its quarrels; although not ordained until 1556, he was regarded as especially devout.17 The ebb and flow between Viterbo and the Hospice is most evident in Goldwell’s career. During the 1540s he held all the major offices at the English Hospice,18 yet Pietro Carnesecchi listed him among ‘all his [Pole’s] familiars’ at Viterbo and another witness claimed that ‘Don Thomaso’ [Goldwell] was close enough to Pole to have joined the household to listen to Flaminio’s spiritual conferences, in which he was reading from St Matthew’s Gospel and ‘speaking of justification through the blood of Christ, and not through our works’.19 William Peto, an Observant Franciscan, was older than most of the others. Stephen Vaughan, Thomas Cromwell’s representative in the Low Countries, once described Peto as ‘a hypocrite, a tiger clad in a sheepskin, a perilous knave’.20 This tiger, however, was thought to be holy and had been confessor to Queen Catherine of Aragon and the Princess Mary. Peto’s final decision to

15

16 17 18 19

20

Stephen Bowd, ‘Prudential Friendship and Religious Reform, Vittoria Colonna and Gasparo Contarini’, in Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Serena Sapegno, eds, A Companion to Vittoria Colonna (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 349–​70; Emidio Campi, ‘Vittoria Colonna and Bernardino Ochino’, ibid., pp. 371–​398; Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) [hereafter Brundin, Colonna], pp. 42–​46. Dillon, Michelangelo and the English Martyrs, pp. 97–​100, 115–​117, and especially pp. 133–​5, and ­figures 7.3, 7.4 and 7.5; Sarah Rolfe Prodan Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 83–​108. Pole to Colonna, 4 October 1546, crp 500; Thomas F. Mayer, ‘George Lily’, odnb. Kenny, ‘From Hospice to College 1559–​1579’, p. 269. ‘a Viterbo, dove il Flaminio leggeva san Matheo presente il Carnescca, Soranzo, Priuli, messer Bartolomeo Stella, don Thomaso Inglese [Thomas Goldwell] et altri servitori de casa, parlando dell giustificatione per lo sangue di Gesu Christo, non delle nostre opere’, Processo Morone, 6, pp. 271–​3; Processi Carnesecchi, 2/​1, p. 255; Mayer, ‘Thomas Goldwell’, ODNB; crp 221; Flaminio, Apologia, pp. 52 and 202. LP, 6, 1324.

56 Chapter 3 move south, from his exile in the Netherlands to Italy, was firm by 1538, when he arrived at the Observants’ house in Venice ‘by Mr Pole’s means’. Then, in December that year, Pole negotiated hard with Peto’s superiors to gain their permission for him to travel onwards to Rome.21 Pole’s most glittering acquisition was Richard Pate, recently Henry viii’s ambassador to the Emperor. In September 1541, Pate defected, leaving the imperial court at Namur ‘by night’. Diplomatic sparks flew as Pate headed south.22 Declared Bishop of Worcester by the pope, he then went on to join a triumphant Pole.23 Pate had been hiding doubts about his religious allegiance for years. Theology, however, is not the same as allegiance and Pate’s views on justification by faith seem to have been even more ‘Lutheran’ than Pole’s.24 2

Dangerous Departures

So, by late 1541, leading members of the group had gathered, but storms were brewing. Ochino, devoted disciple of Valdés, close to Colonna, proved a dangerous friend to the friends of Pole. Suspected of preaching heresy and summoned to Rome in 1542, he chose to flee from Italy instead. He wrote to Colonna saying that he had to leave Italy because ‘I cannot either deny Christ or be crucified’. Cardinals Contarini, Gonzaga and Pole, Bishop Giberti and Vittoria Colonna knew more about his decision than they were prepared to say.25 For her safety, Pole advised Colonna to hand over to the authorities a book sent to her by Ochino. Decades later Carnesecchi said Pole often advised Colonna against ‘curiosità’.26 Ochino’s flight into exile was followed by that of Pietro Martire Vermigli, whose carefully planned itinerary did less damage to the spirituali. Nonetheless, they had both preached reformation-​style doctrine and then abandoned the church. That did not stop Flaminio describing them in public as ‘apostles of Italy’, while Pole listened in silence.27 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

crp 233; LP 13/​2, 1034. Tracey Sowerby, ‘Richard Pate, the Royal Supremacy, and Reformation Diplomacy’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 265–​285, esp. pp. 265–​8. crp 75; on Pole’s sense of triumph, see Pole to Contarini, 1 September 1541, crp 337. Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 156–​60, 170–​3. ‘perché non potrei se non negar Christo o esser crucifisso’, Ochino to Vittoria Colonna, Florence, 22 August 1542, in Cantù, Gli eretici d’Italia, 2, p. 46; Fragnito, ‘Gli “spirituali” e la fuga di Ochino’. ‘massime havendo il cardinale più volte ammonito la detta signora che non dovesse essere troppo curiosa’, 20 February 1567, Processi Carnesecchi, 2/​3, p. 1041. Sergio Pagano, Il processo di Endimio Calandra(Vatican City: Biblioteco Apostolica Vaticana, 1991), p. 298.

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Such ambiguities were noticed. The Mantuan ambassador to Rome reported in September that there were ‘some little things [‘qualche cosetta’] about Flaminio and others at Viterbo ‘about which the good laugh’ but he added they were nonetheless well regarded.28 They lost a powerful friend when Cardinal Gasparo Contarini died in 1542. Pole had failed to give him effective support during his negotiations with protestants at the Colloquy of Regensburg and there were claims that the once-​sympathetic Contarini had thought that Flaminio was going ‘too far’.29 Nonetheless, Pole and his friends still had influential supporters:  Giovanni Morone, Bishop of Modena, had moved into close agreement with their views on salvation by faith alone and Gregorio Cortese, Abbot of the great Cassinese Benedictine monastery in Venice, was an old friend of both Pole and Flaminio.30 3

A Bookish Devotion

Devotional texts appearing on their booklists are one way to understand the nicodemism buried deep within their spiritual lives. We have lists of books owned by three of them, the Cardinal himself; his close friend Marcantonio Flaminio; also Michael Throckmorton’s probate inventory which included books owned by Flaminio and probably by Pole, as we saw in the last chapter. We know that they exchanged texts and inherited books from each other.31 The first to die was Colonna in 1547. Then the always delicate Flaminio died in 1550, in Pole’s house, leaving most of his goods (and presumably most of his books) in Pole’s charge, with a series of verbal bequests. Alessandro Pastore points out that that Flaminio’s booklist may have been ‘filtered’, cleaned up in case the Inquisitors became interested.32 Part of Pole’s collection was taken to England in 1555, and carefully listed by George Lily. That list, too, looks innocent, although 28 29 30 31

32

Edmondo Solmi, ‘La fuga di Bernardino Ochino secondo il documenti dell’Archivio Gonzaga di Mantova’, Bolletino senese di storia patria, 15 (1908), pp. 23–​98, at p. 51. Processi Carnesecchi, 1, pp. 4–​5, cited by Firpo, Valdés, pp. 150–​51. Robinson, Giovanni Morone, pp. 60, 67–​9, 77–​80. Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s Circle’, pp. 112–​113; Alessandro Pastore, ‘Due biblioteche umanistiche del Cinquecento: Libri del Cardinal Pole e di Marcantonio Flaminio’, Rinascimento, 2nd Series, 19 (1979) 269–​90 [hereafter Pastore, ‘Due biblioteche’]. The books that Pole bequeathed to New College at his death in 1558 came from the collection he inherited from Longolius, see crp 14 and Emden ‘Longolius Collection of Books’, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Rotterdami, 12 vols, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906–​58), 9, pp. 380–​83. Pastore ‘Due biblioteche’, pp. 270, 275–​6; Processo Carnesecchi, 2/​1, pp. 92, 171; Pastore, Flaminio, p. 276.

58 Chapter 3 there was a lot of Erasmus. As we have seen, some items were sent to Throckmorton’s house, probably at the time of Pole’s departure for England. That may have provided a chance to filter what was too suspect for a cardinal to hold.33 These collections reveal that the spirituality of Pole’s circle was biblical and bookish and that the books they loved most were old, pre-​dating the controversies of their own time. The Bible was ‘the taproot of all meditation’ for Viterbo, as for the wider Christian world.34 Pole’s thought had been ‘permeated by the Bible’ at least since his studies at Padua in the 1520s.35 In 1537, Alvise Priuli, perhaps the Cardinal’s closest friend, said that Pole always taught that Scripture must be absorbed ‘nel suo interiore senso’; people who did not attempt this missed out on its spiritual fruits and could not know ‘la dolceza’ hidden within the text. Myriad biblical metaphors in the Cardinal’s letters prove his lifelong search for that same ‘dolceza’, akin to consolation. For him, as for many, this was much more important than the finer points of doctrine.36 Flaminio took the same line:  he once said that the first part of Christian prayer was reading: ‘leggendo, meditando et orando’.37 Juan de Valdés, who had influenced him so much, had also advocated direct consideration of the Bible, through the illumination of the Holy Spirit.38 Pole had Valla’s Annotations on the New Testament and Erasmus’s commentaries on Luke, on the Pauline Epistles, on the Psalter, as well as his Enchiridion, his ‘Handbook of a Christian Knight’. The Enchiridion envisaged a spiritual revolution achieved through laymen reading their Bibles, just as these devotees at Viterbo were reading theirs.39 In the same years when repression of scripture reading in Italy was increasing, they were praying the Bible.40 But that led them to texts and commentaries

33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s Circle’, pp. 111–​114. Carlos Eire, ‘Early Modern Catholic Piety in Translation’, in Peter Burke and R. Po–​Chia Hsia, eds, Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 83–​100, quotation at p. 87. Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 31. ‘et ci concluse infine S. Sria che chi non facea cusi dei libri sacri non poteva ricever molto frutto da essi ne sentir la dolceza che è in quelli nascoste’, Priuli to Beccadelli, 10 August 1537, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Italiano, c.25, f. 24v, quoted by Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 43–​44; on consolation, see above, Prologue, p. 9. Flaminio, Apologia, pp. 122–​3. Firpo, Tra alumbrados e spirituali, p. 45. Desiderius Erasmus, Enchiridion militis christiani (Louvain: Thierry Martens, 1515) ustc 403366; Pastore ‘Due biblioteche’, p. 280; Douglas H. Parker ‘The English Enchiridion militis christiani and Reformation Politics’, Erasmus in English, 5 (1972), 16–​21. On censorship, Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Gigliola Fragnito La Bibbia al rogo: la censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–​1605) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997); Church,

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on scripture which contained writings of the northern reformers –​like Il Sommario dela sancta Scriptura, ‘the summary of Holy Scripture’, which was on Throckmorton’s booklist. This text was drawn mostly from the scriptural writings of Erasmus and of Luther, published in Italy about 1534. Ten years later it had been condemned in print as heretical by the traditionalist Ambrogio Catarino.41 This group’s fervent bible reading also nurtured sixteenth-​century Italy’s most controversial spiritual text, Il Beneficio di Cristo. Written by the Benedictine monk Don Benedetto da Mantova, it was ‘polished’ by Flaminio at Viterbo. Its publication caused confusion and uproar. Unsurprisingly it is not on these booklists. The importance of the psalms for Viterbo’s piety was immense. Flaminio’s life-​long work of translating and paraphrasing the psalms was encouraged by Pole and it influenced other translators, such as George Buchanan and, almost certainly, the English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Throckmorton owned Flaminio’s Paraphrasis in triginta psalmos versibus scripta (1546), also Savonarola’s psalm meditations and a commentary on the psalms by Pole’s teacher, Jan van Campen.42 The psalms were fundamental to Christian spirituality but these friends at Viterbo sometimes understood them through Valdés commentaries. At his trial in 1566–​7, Carnesecchi testified: ‘I am sure that Flaminio had with him [at Viterbo] some of Valdés’s writings and I believe they were the book of Considerations and his commentary on the psalms’.43 Those works certainly do not appear on any of the three booklists. Yet Flaminio, together with Giulia Gonzaga, was working to preserve and publish Valdés works. The Alfabeto cristiano

41

42

43

Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy, ed. Gigliola Fragnito, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Sommario dela sancta Scriptura et l’ordinario deli cristiani [Venice c.?1534]; Ambrosio Catarino Politi, Resolutione sommaria contra le conclusioni Luterane, estratte d’un libretto senza nome del’ autore, intitolato il Sommario dela sacra scrittura; Libretto scismatico, heretico et pestilente (Rome: M. Girolama de Cartolari, 1544); Susanna Peyronel Rambaldi, Dai Paesi Bassi all’Italia: Il Sommario della sacra scrittura; un libro proibito nella societa italiana del Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1997). For bibliographical details, see Rozzo and Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, pp. 347–​48; Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’, 176. He had begun work in 1533, then resumed at Pole’s urging, and published his paraphrase of thirty–​two Psalms, Paraphrasis in duo et triginta psalmos (Venice: Giovanni Padovano, 1538), ustc 830007. This was followed by In librum psalmorum breuis explanatio (Venice: Aldo I Manuzio, 1545), ustc 830008 and Paraphrasis in triginta psalmos versibus scripta (Venice:  Valgrisi, 1546), ustc 830009; Mayer, Pole, p.  113; Pastore, Flaminio, p.  143–​8; Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 472, 487; Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s Circle’, 4, 23, 197. ‘So bene che il Flaminio haveva seco una parte delli scritti di Valdes et credo che fussero il libro delle Considerationi, et il commento sopra li Psalmi’, Processi Carnesecchi, 2/​3, p. 1031.

60 Chapter 3 appeared in Venice in 1545, also his catechism for children and an anthology containing writings by Flaminio and Valdés. Massimo Firpo writes: ‘There is no doubt that Flaminio, abetted by his patron [Pole], was behind the printing of these books’.44 Valdés, as we saw, advocated secrecy about religious belief. His ideas were part of Viterbo’s piety: Hebraic and humanist, mystical and nicodemite. 4

Evasion and the Imitation of Christ

There were, however, plenty of orthodox enthusiasms; they owned and read patristic works and quoted liberally from them. Later there were the claims that Pole’s ‘rescue’ of Flaminio from heresy was achieved by persuading his friend to read the Fathers. Like the Scriptures, patristic texts were malleable and were cited by both catholic and evangelical theologians; they were used regularly to support this group’s view that salvation was achieved by faith, not works.45 And, until 1547, that was not definitely heretical. Yet evasions and deceits remained obvious. Pole was not involved in discussions with the protestants at the Diet of Regensburg, offering his friend Cardinal Contarini little personal support. When Contarini asked Flaminio to go to assist him at Regensburg in September 1540, he backed out with the barefaced lie that he did not know enough about theological controversy.46 In truth, he had participated in contemporary theological debates; also he owned a copy of the Unio Dissidentium. The Unio was a collection of biblical and patristic extracts of evangelical colouring, which had been condemned directly it was published in Italy in 1532. A copy passed into Throckmorton’s collection in Mantua with Flaminio’s name on it.47 In 1541 Flaminio was absenting himself deliberately in true nicodemite style. He had been in trouble for reading

44 45 46 47

Alfabeto christiano che insegna la vera via d’acquistare il lume dello Spirito santo (Venice: Marcantonio Magno, 1545), ustc 861681; Firpo, Valdés, pp. 46–​49, and quotation at p. 147. Overell, Pole’s Piety, p. 7–​8; Filippo Gheri to Beccadelli, Rome, 29 April 1553, Monumenti Beccadelli, 1/​2, p. 350. Flaminio to Contarini, 25 September 1540, Marcantonio Flaminio, Lettere, ed. Alessandro Pastore (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo & Bizzarri 1978)[hereafter Flaminio, Lettere], 32, p. 98: Pastore, Flaminio, pp. 106–​07. Pastore, Flaminio, p. 94, 96–​7; Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’, 84, see also p. 112; Robert Peters, ‘Who compiled the Sixteenth-​Century Patristic Handbook Unio Dissidentium?’, in G. J. Cumings ed., Studies in Church History 2 (1965), 237–​50; Grendler, Roman Inquisition, p. 75; Pastore, Flaminio, pp. 94–​7.

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banned books but three years before. He was no stranger to the doctrinal battle ground, but he preferred to claim that he knew only ‘simple things, devotional works, and works of spiritual edification, more fit to arouse feelings than improve the intellect’.48 Nonetheless, he did honour ‘simple things’, especially the Imitation of Christ, now attributed to Thomas à Kempis.49 Its importance at Viterbo was immense. Flaminio’s biographer sees imitation, the ‘following’ of Christ, as a unifying theme in all the poet’s meditations.50 In Pole’s households the Imitation was often read aloud and his friend, Alvise Priuli, tried insistently to introduce the text to others in their circle.51 Throckmorton owned at least two different editions of the work.52 The Imitation inspired all these complex individuals. It is likely that they ‘caught’ this enthusiasm from their friends, the Cassinese Benedictines.53 Flaminio came up with the most exuberant recommendations:  ‘I cannot recommend any book ‒ setting aside the scriptures ‒ that could be more useful to you’.54 In his letter to Galazzeo Caracciolo there is an extended meditation on the theme of imitation.55 In the poet’s other meditations sent to friends, the motif comes again and again, ‘dedicate yourself earnestly to the Imitation of Christ’.56 Yet, according to Flaminio, even the much-​loved Imitation was too keen on ‘the way of fear’; most of the spirituali chose instead the 48

49

50 51

52 53 54 55 56

‘di cose piane, devote et di edificatione sperituale, et piu atte a mover l’affetto che illustrare l’intelletto’, 25 September 1540, Flaminio, Lettere, 32, p. 98. On tensions between emotion and intellect in Italian reform circles, see Una Roman D’Elia, ‘Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michael Angelo, Vittoria Colonna and the Aesthetics of Reform’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 90–​129, at pp. 100–​03. Thomas à Kempis (1380–​1471). Six editions of the Imitation had appeared in Italian, Anne Schutte, Printed Italian Vernacular Religious Books, 1465 –​1550 (Geneva: Droz, 1983); Maximilian von Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant Translations of the ‘Imitatio Christi’, 1425–​ 1650: from Late Medieval Classic to Early Modern Bestseller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Pastore, Flaminio, p. 122. Alvise Priuli to Beccadelli, 10 August 1537, printed in full in Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Monumenti Beccadelli’, in A. Casamassa, ed., Miscellanea Pio Paschini: studi di storia ecclesiastica, 2 vols (Rome: Facultas Theologica Pontificii Athenaei Lateranensis, 1948–​9), 2, pp. 251–​268 at p. 265; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 43–​4. Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s Circle’, 78 and 200. Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation; the Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 184. Flaminio to Carlo Gualteruzzi, Naples, 28 February 1542, Flaminio, Lettere, 42, p. 121; for imitationist reflections, see Flaminio to his cousin, Cesare Flaminio, 15 February 1544, Flaminio, Lettere, 49, p. 145. Flaminio to Galeazzo Caracciolo, Viterbo, 14 February 1543, Flaminio, Lettere, 48, pp. 139–​143. ‘attendono con ogni studio ad imitare Cristo’; ‘attende con ogni studio a la imitatione di Cristo’, Flaminio, Apologia, p. 128; Flaminio to Priuli, 1540–​41, in Modo che si dee tenere il

62 Chapter 3 way of misericordia, mercy:  that choice and that word became very important for Italian reformers in the later sixteenth century.57 Another renaissance best-​seller, Meditationes uitae Christi, was also part of their spiritual reading; this encouraged identification with the suffering Christ.58 Imitation and identification were intensely private practices: though never intended to separate individuals from their church, they could have that effect. 5

Spiritual Direction

Lay sermons and devotional addresses were part of their spiritual life. Scholars think that the anonymous Good Friday meditation was delivered by Flaminio at Viterbo in Holy Week 1542, shortly after the group had gathered.59 Far from being a lost soul needing rescue, as was claimed later, Flaminio appears to have been chosen to lead the group’s meditations on one of the most sacred days of the year. At his first trial in 1557, Carnesecchi remembered ‘I heard [Flamino preach] but only a few times and those were at Viterbo in the house of Cardinal Pole, where he was speaking on St Matthew [‘s Gospel] in the presence of Cardinal Pole’.60 Perhaps to redress the balance, Pole had brought in a Jesuit preacher and confessor Nicolás Bobadilla before Christmas in 1541, and assured Ignatius Loyola that his man had done a fine job. Yet the very next day the Cardinal admitted to Contarini that Bobadilla’s opinion was completely

57 58

59 60

principio della religione christiana, printed in Flaminio, Apologia, p. 166. The same phrase occurs in Il Beneficio di Cristo, see Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, p. 78. ‘cioe che non appruovo la via del timore della quale egli [l’autore] spesso si serve’, Flaminio to Carlo Gualteruzzi, Naples, 28 February 1542, Flaminio, Lettere, 42, p. 121. On misericordia, see below, Chapter 9, pp. 178–9, 185. pseudo–​Bonaventuran, Incomincia le devote meditationi sopra la passione del nostro signor Jesu Christo cavate originalmente da Sancta Bonaventura cardinale del ordine minore & da Nicolao da Lira (Bologna: Girolamo Benedetti, 1520), ustc 800370; Brundin, Colonna, pp. 56–​7 and 138. Subsequently, this work was bound together with Vittoria Colonna’s Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la passione di Christo (Bologna: Antonio Manuzio, 1557), ustc 823547; Brundin, Colonna, pp. 56–​63. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ital. c.  25, f.  191v, undated, but for dates, see Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1979), p. 219 n. 46; Flaminio, Apologia, pp. 50–​2; ‘Si che ne ho audite, ma poche et quelle in Viterbo in casa del cardinale Polo, dove egli legava san Mattheo in presentia del cardinale Polo’, 16 May 1560, Processi Carnesecchi, 1, pp. 63–​4. For Flaminio’s prominence at Viterbo, see Pastore, Flaminio, p. 133.

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different from his own and therefore he, Pole, had resolved ‘to try harder’. Pole was ambivalent, not sure, probably fearful, but still taking risks.61 The task of spiritual direction was shared within the household rather than handed over to visiting clergy:  like many other nicodemites, they were networking and nourishing friendships. Pole thought that Flaminio’s spiritual talks imparted ‘food that never dies’ and Goldwell and Lily were present at the poet’s addresses. Colonna regarded Flaminio as ‘our best spirit’ and had religious discussions with him.62 Pole acted as informal spiritual director to Colonna though he was not then ordained priest; he had, she said, ‘consoled me above anyone else’, and had taught her to ‘humble myself’ and live entirely in Him ‘who is all consolation’.63 Correspondingly, Pole spoke of Colonna as ‘our dearest mother in Christ’.64 The terms ‘ecclesia viterbiensi’ and ‘chiesa viterbiense’, used even by sympathetic contemporaries, suggest a perception of a church within the Church.65 We know from Pole’s hurt rejoinder in 1542 that Cardinal Contarini had criticised Flaminio and, by implication Pole himself, for not sharing ‘more widely the goods we enjoy here’; it is clear from the context that ‘goods’ means spiritual goods.66 Years later, in October 1566, the Inquisitors would comment on Carnesecchi’s frequent use of collectives and the first person plural: ‘amici di Deo’, ‘noi’, ‘nostri’, ‘nostro reverendissimo Polo’; ‘friends of God’ ‘we’ ‘our’, ‘our most revered Pole’.67 Tellingly, Flaminio compared the Church of God to the court of a great lord.68 Some contemporaries thought that the views of the Italian spirituali rendered the church and its sacramental life secondary. Flaminio’s own views changed. Several of his letters of direction seem to make sacramental life redundant; for instance, his meditation on the Lord’s Prayer, and his letter of spiritual direction to Teodorina Sauli, written about nine months before he arrived in Viterbo, which contains not a word on the sacraments. After he arrived, however, Flaminio’s comments became more sacramental, probably 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Pole to Ignatius Loyola, 22 December 1541, crp 344; Pole to Contatrini, 23 December 1541, crp 345; on Bobadilla, see Thomas Mayer, ‘A Test of Wills: Cardinal Pole, Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits in England’, in Thomas M. McCoog, ed. The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996), pp. 21–​37. Pastore, Flaminio, p. 119. Vittoria Colonna to Pole, 21 June 1541, crp 325; same to same 25 December 1545, crp 460. Pole to Contarini, 4 February 1541, crp 314. Giuliola Fragnito, ‘Gli spirituali e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino’, Rivista storica italiana, 84 (1972), 777–​811, at p. 787 n. 35. Pole to Contarini, 29 January 1542, crp 350. Processi Carnesecchi, 2/​1, pp. xlviii and 224. ‘La chiesa di Dio è simile alla corte d’un gran signore’, Flaminio to a Lady, 31 December 1547, Lettere, 55, p. 162; Pastore, Flaminio, p. 162.

64 Chapter 3 influenced by Pole. Probably in 1545 or 1546, Flaminio wrote an impassioned defence of the catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, adding that ‘we must not allow ourselves for any reason, however true it may seem, to break with the union of the Catholic Church’.69 Such comments imply uncertainty, fear of going too far, and a conviction about the importance of ‘union’; all these were part of many nicodemites’ life-​experience. 6

The Consolation of Unorthodox Texts

Pole and his friends were scrupulous souls who shared in abundance the spiritual anxiety typical of their generation. It was revealed in their search for mercy, salvation and ‘consolation’ –​that last word crops up again and again and, like the English poet Thomas Wyatt and many others, they found it in the Psalms.70 Consolation is a leitmotiv of their book, Il Beneficio di Cristo, clearly intended to rescue troubled souls and laced with quotations from Scripture and the Fathers. The Beneficio, however, also paraphrases and sometimes translates, without attribution, Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin, often at length.71 These texts, too, should be counted among Viterbo’s devotional books: since the Bible was central to Christian meditation, so were commentaries on the Bible, from varied sources. Reading them was a theological activity with profound spiritual implications, but such reading had to remain under wraps. At his two Inquisition trials, Pietro Carnesecchi made several depositions about ‘heretical’ books in circulation at Viterbo. At the second trial, in August 1566, he admitted that, whilst he was there, he had read forbidden books without licence: ‘And the first time I began to read them was in the year 1541, in the house of Cardinal Pole and it was the commentary of Bucer on the Epistle to

69

70 71

Lettere, 68, pp.  191–​3; Flaminio to Teodorina Sauli, Naples, 12 February 1542, ibid., 41, pp. 117–​119; Flaminio to Carnesecchi, 1 January 1543, ibid., pp. 136–​7, quoted and translated by Firpo, Valdes, pp. 134–​5. Firpo dates this letter as 1545 or 1546, ‘Marcantonio Flaminio, Pietro Carnesecchi e la questione eucharistica’ in Firpo, ‘Disputar di cose pertinente alla fide’ (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2003),pp. 209–​225 at p. 216. For Pole’s probable alarm at Flaminio’s views on the sacrament of penance [confession], see Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 89. Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 465–​473. The theme of consolation also pervades contemporary Jesuit writing, John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) pp. 19–​20, 41–​3, 82–​4. Unattributed quotations from the writings of other reformers are recorded in notes to the text, Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 13–​85.

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the Romans, which belonged to Flaminio’.72 He also mentioned that Flaminio had Valdés’s Considerations and his commentary on the Psalms; also that he had once shown Carnesecchi a small part of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.73 The evidence of Carnesecchi’s trial is often used uncritically. Carnesecchi was remembering his experiences twenty-​five years earlier, offering to his Inquisitors episodic and sometimes self-​contradictory memories, about friends who were suspected but had died before the most rigorous investigations began (like Flaminio in 1550, Pole and Throckmorton in 1558). Yet the general conclusion that works of protestant reformers were known in Cardinal Pole’s household is substantiated by other sources, such as testimonies given in other Inquisition trials and confirmed by the extracts from Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin that appear in the Beneficio itself.74 Flaminio’s false modesty about his own ‘simple’ reading matter was a cover for acquaintance with these forbidden fruits and Pole himself knew the texts that had inspired the piety of his household. 7

From Trent to London, 1545–​1553

When the Council of Trent was re-​summoned to meet on 13 December 1545, Pole was chosen as one of the legates. Once arrived, he advised the fathers not to sneer at the writings of opponents and not to argue on the lines: ‘Luther said that, therefore it is false’. That phrase is very like Starkey’s in his Dialogue written fifteen years earlier: ‘Heretics be not in all things heretics’.75 But debates were moving against the doctrine of justification by faith alone and Pole did not contribute much: when he did, he was ‘intent on avoiding any definition of his sentiments’. Cardinal Girolamo Seripando watched his performance and 72 73 74 75

‘Et la prima volta ch’io cominciassi a legerli fu nell’anno [1541] a Viterbo in casa del Cardinal Polo et fu il commento di Bucchiero sopra l’epistola ai Romani ch’era del Flaminio’, Processi Carnesecchi, 2/​1, pp. 170–​1. Ibid., 2/​2, pp. 92, 150; ibid., 2/​3, p. 1031. See above note 72; Processo Morone, 1, p. 222. Nelson H. Minnich, ‘ “Wie in dem Basilischen Concilio den Behemen Gescheen”: Status of Protestants at the Council of Trent’, in Councils of the Catholic Reformation: Pisa I (1409) to Trent (1545–​63) (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum Collected Studies, 2008), pp. 201–​219 at p. 211, n.30; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, 134; Thomas F. Mayer, ‘ “Heretics be not in all things heretics”: Cardinal Pole, his Circle and the Potential for Toleration’, in J. C. Laursen and C. J. Nederman, eds, Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 107–​124 and reprinted in cpec, I; see above, Chapter 2, p. 33.

66 Chapter 3 commented that he was ‘a man to whom nothing was more suitable than silence’.76 Then, in June 1546, he departed suddenly from the Council, at night, with an unexplained illness. Vittoria Colonna’s reaction to his departure was perhaps the most ‘nicodemite’; she noted that God had ordered matters so the cardinal was not involved in the decree.77 Pole’s hands were clean: at a price. He and most of his friends were in near-​agreement with the core protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone. It is most unlikely that their view would have prevailed finally at Trent, with or without Cardinal Pole. Yet, in Italy, dilemmas about the doctrine of justification had made more people into nicodemites than any other single issue. And Pole, long regarded as sharing that dilemma, had avoided the ‘last-​chance’ debate. After he left, attempts to find a compromise came to nothing and the winds of ‘counter-​reformation’ change began to howl through Rome.78 The Council of Trent’s decree on justification, passed in January 1547, said that man was made just through God’s grace, and that therefore human beings’ faith and works contributed to their salvation.79 Thereafter, Pole and his friends had to keep their counsel but, tellingly, Pole delayed signing the Council’s decree for over two years and did not fix his seal to the printed version.80 He was viewed with increasing suspicion in Rome, but on the wider European stage he still had considerable political support, especially from the Habsburgs. He was nearly elected pope in 1550, but he refused to promote his own candidature and the zelante Cardinal Caraffa’s bitter criticisms won the day. Under Julius iii, the next pope, Pole survived ‒ but curial politics began to appal and to threaten him. Massimo Firpo called his study of the years 1550 to 1553, ‘La presa di potere’, ‘taking power’: it was the time when the Inquisition, led by Carafa, grasped power inexorably from a weak papacy and set out to ruin the spirituali, especially Morone and Pole.81 Pole resigned from the Curia in 1553 and his household left Rome and moved northwards to the Cassinese Benedictine monastery of Magunazzo on the shore of Lake Garda. It had the advantage of being a very long way from Rome. He intended a long retreat in sympathetic surroundings –​perhaps to remember and rediscover the ‘dolceza’ and consolation of Viterbo.

76 77 78 79 80 81

CT, 2, p. 415, quoted by Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 116, see also p. 134. Firpo, Valdés, p. 155; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 174–​95. Pastore, Flaminio, pp.  168–​171; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp.  124–​36, 195, 209–​213; Mayer, Pole, pp. 151–​4. See above, Chapter 1, p. 27. Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 195–​7, 200–​208. Firpo, La presa di potere, pp. 132–​166 and 238–​41; Robinson, Morone, p. 83.

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That summer of 1553 changed everything. Mary Tudor’s accession caused dilemmas for many who appear in this book: for Englishmen who had been attracted to Edwardian-​style religion in their home country and for diplomats posted to Italy, like Pietro Vanni. All were expected to revise beliefs and behaviour at speed and such rapid revisions of doctrine always made nicodemites. Pole was made legate responsible for ending England’s schism and, at first, he rejoiced in accepting his new post. English friends who had been with him at Viterbo, such as George Lily, Thomas Goldwell and William Peto, decided to join or follow him on his journey back to his homeland. But what did they know of England? Pole had last been there in 1532, when his dissent from Henry viii’s policies was suspected; in Italy, he had written de Unitate, plotted against the English government, and was attainted traitor in 1539. His tentative rapprochement with those governing on behalf of Edward vi was short-​lived and proved futile. Pole could not then return to England, or even visit, without certain death. In the intervening twenty years, his country had been through several styles of reformation, some conservative, some radical, none ‘catholic’ in the way he understood that term. Pole, distracted by the uncertainties of catholic teaching and curial politics, had had little chance to examine Tudor doctrinal somersaults. Memories of his homeland were of a bullying King, an alien religious settlement and a tortured mother. His English friends were in a similar position: they came ‘home’ as mystified strangers, and it showed. For all of them, this offered a dramatic life-​change, but some things could not be obliterated. Dermot Fenlon commented: ‘It was against a background of dissimulation sustained and accentuated over a period of twenty years that Pole returned to assume direction of the Church’.82 The short time that he and his friends spent in England from 1554 until 1558 is the subject of several profound studies.83 This chapter will not attempt to recount the detail of those four dramatic years. Our questions are concerned only with the effects of their ambivalent Viterbo-​style piety in England  –​a country that none of 82 83

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 282. Rex H. Pogson, ‘The Legacy of the Schism: Confusion, Continuity and Change in the Marian Clergy’, in Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler, eds, The Mid–​Tudor Polity, c. 1540–​1560 (London:  Macmillan, 1980), pp.  117–​136; Thomas M.  McCoog, SJ, ‘Ignatius Loyola and Reginald Pole: A Reconsideration’, JEH, 47 (1996), 257–​273; Eamon Duffy, ‘Cardinal Pole Preaching’, in Eamon Duffy and David Loades, eds, The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 176–​200 (p. 189); Dermot Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, in John Edwards and Ronald Truman, eds, Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor (Aldershot; Ashgate, 2005), pp. 81–​97; Mayer, Pole, pp. 215–​220; Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2009); John Edwards, Archbishop Pole (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

68 Chapter 3 them understood. Tantalisingly, Pole’s journey was much delayed by Habsburg and papal politics. In June 1554, still on the way to England, Pole wrote an important letter to Otto Truchess, Cardinal of Augsburg, which he did not send at the time of writing. Pole attempted an explanation of his views on salvation. His motive was self-​defence against attacks from both traditionalists and reformers, especially from Pier Paolo Vergerio, once a catholic bishop and, by 1554, well-​known as an anti-​nicodemite polemicist whose prime target was the spirituali. Vergerio’s propaganda was a threat and Pole was frightened of its possible effects on his new appointment. In his letter to Truchess, Pole acknowledged a change of mind about how people could be saved:  he had once believed in salvation by faith alone, he said, a view he found in St Paul, ‘interprete ecclesia’ –​interpreted by the church. Then he learned from St James, also interpreted by the church, that we are saved by works. He had come to understand the two texts equally. He also said that, when he had been in Italy, he had taught others to show by the example of their lives the importance of St James’s view that we are justified by works. That claim did not reflect the piety cherished at Viterbo, but he was doing what he had always done –​trying to reconcile his beliefs with those of the church he loved.84 If we set parts of this letter against the teaching of Il Beneficio, revised in his house, and his flight from discussions at Trent, then contemporary accusations of nicodemism have some substance.85 He appears to have hesitated, waited, found friends with whom he could read and pray ‒ all those ordinary behaviours suggested in the Prologue to this book. Pole’s delays, however, had gone on for a very long time. Even in 1554, he did not send his letter. Reginald Pole was as fearful and uncertain as many others. 8

In Marian England

Finally, on 30 November 1554, Pole arrived in England as Cardinal Legate; from 22 March 1556 he became Archbishop of Canterbury.86 Later the Venetian ambassador would comment that Pole ‘employs none but Italians’, but it is truer to say that he surrounded himself with friends, both English and Italian, who had been with him in Italy: his close friend Alvise Priuli, Thomas Goldwell and 84 85 86

Pole to Otto Truchess, 20 June 1554, crp 885 (p. 317); for analysis, see Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 200–​204; on Pole’s belief in justification by faith, Mayer, Pole, p. 181. M. Anne Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti-​Nicodemite Propaganda and England: 1547–​1558’, JEH, 51 (2000), 296–​318. Edwards, Archbishop Pole, esp. pp. 169–​213.

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George Lily; Henry Cole, who was with Pole at Padua, had been back in England since 1538 and had once conformed to evangelical reforms, but he was now promoted.87 Pole relied heavily on Goldwell and argued with his Theatine superiors so that he could remain in England; by May 1555 Goldwell had been elected bishop of St Asaph. George Lily became Pole’s domestic chaplain. William Peto, old and experienced, stayed in Italy: in 1553 he moved to a Franciscan house in Mantua, the city where his cousin Throckmorton had influence. Two years later, Peto followed the Cardinal to England.88 Thus, several members of Viterbo’s tightly-​knit pious group were transferred to England, but with significant additions, such as Nicholas Harpsfield, talented administrator and writer, and several Spanish friars, most of whom were already known to Pole.89 Sorting out the chaos left behind by schism now took priority –​the leisured piety of Viterbo was a distant memory. The struggle about restitution of church property dominated the Cardinal’s four years in England:  he lost that fight but never gave up hope. Yet the English church had lost more than its buildings: there were few books of devotion, mass books, office books, and ordinals; vestments were in short supply: even the bishops and the clergy had to be absolved and dispensed before they could begin to ‘reconcile’ others.90 There was a marked change from Pole’s earlier acceptance of lay sermons and informal spiritual direction. In this, a national reform, Flaminian-​style originality and consoling homilies were not prized. There was a corresponding stress on the formation of a fully-​ordained clergy, professionally trained in seminaries with a routine too strict to have suited Viterbo’s one-​time residents. The curricula of the universities were revised, with all protestant theology banished: probing visitations took place at Oxford and Cambridge.91 Pole’s friends tried to keep up their own pious practices and to disseminate them in England, by publishing spiritual books, educating the clergy, and preaching.92 Their love for the Bible and medieval spirituality was still in 87 88 89 90 91 92

Michieli, ‘Report of England’, 13 May 1557, Calendar of State Papers relating to English Affairs in the Archives and Collections of Venice, ed. Rawdon Brown (London: Longman, 1864–​1947) [hereafter csp Venetian] (1556–​57), 884; T.F. Mayer, ‘Henry Cole’, odnb. Mayer ‘William Peto’, odnb. Thomas S.  Freeman, ‘Nicholas Harpsfield’, odnb; on the Spanish connection, see Edwards, Archbishop Pole, esp. pp. 160–​61, 181–​2. Pogson, ‘Legacy of the Schism’, passim. Claire Cross, ‘The English Universities, 1553–​58’, in Duffy and Loades, eds, The Church of Mary Tudor, pp. 57–​76; Andrew Hegarty, ‘Carranza and the English Universities’, in Edwards and Truman, eds, Reforming Catholicism, pp. 153–​172, at p. 158. See Duffy, ‘Cardinal Pole Preaching’, in Duffy and Loades, Church of Mary Tudor, pp. 176–​ 200, at p. 189; Mayer, Pole, pp. 215–​220; Dermot Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, in Edwards and Truman, eds, Reforming Catholicism, pp. 81–​97, at p. 93.

70 Chapter 3 evidence and they used the press to good effect, instigating publications intended to further catholic devotion.93 In 1556 William Peto was responsible for a new edition of an English translation of the Imitation of Christ, Viterbo’s favourite spiritual book, now entitled The folowinge of Chryste.94 In a handwritten note in one copy, Peto wrote that regular daily reading was essential at ‘best leisure’ –​the kind of meditative reading practised in Pole’s households. Bad books had caused England’s fall, according to Peto’s preface: ‘yf men woulde haue ben so diligent to loke upon [good books], as they were curious to loke on the other, they shuld not haue fallen so sone from the true knowledge of Chrystes doctryne and the ryght sence of holy scrypture’.95 Peto’s stress on the ‘the ryght sence of holy scrypture’ closely resembled Pole’s advice at Liège: scripture must be read nel suo interiore senso (‘in its inward sense’). Juan de Valdés, too, emphasised the importance of private Bible reading inspired by the Holy Spirit.96 Peto was deeply influenced by the Franciscan spirituality of his Order but also, for many years, he had been listening to Italian spirituali and aware of Viterbo’s passion for the ‘dolceza’ of scripture. In Marian England, ‘Bible reading or the possession of bibles was never condemned by the regime’. In 1555, Pole’s legatine synod decided to begin a new translation of the Bible into English, though Pole now noted that obediently taking part in ceremonies was even more important than Bible reading.97 Nonetheless, he stressed the importance of good books: ‘just as people have been corrupted here even more by books than by the spoken word, so they must be recalled to life through the written word’.98 He and his friends were still using their favourite good books, the Bible and Imitation of Christ. There were new emphases:  Jesuit spirituality, so strikingly absent from their own

93 94

95 96 97 98

Alexandra Walsham, ‘Dumb preachers: Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, in Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 235–​283, at p. 242–​44. The folowinge of Chryste … newly corrected and amended (London 1556), stc 23966. Peto’s editorship is proved in James P. Carley and Ann M. Hutchison, ‘William Peto, O.F.M.Obs., and the 1556 Edition of The folowinge of Chryste: Background and Context’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 17 (2014), pp. 94–​118; M. Anne Overell, ‘Books of Italian spirituali in Tudor England’, in James Willoughby and Jeremy Catto, Books and Bookmen in Early Modern Britain: Essays presented to James P. Carley (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018). London, British Library, C.122.c.29, sig A ii r, quoted by Carley and Hutchison, ‘William Peto’, p. 100; The folowinge of Chryste, 1556, sig. Aiii. Firpo, Valdés, 45–​9. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 530–​31. crp 2252; William Wizeman, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006), pp. 1, 34–​7 and 45–​47; stc 19784 and 19785.

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booklists, now came to the fore in William Peryn’s Spiritual Exercyses, which appeared in 1557.99 9

Pole and Persecution

Cardinal Pole’s officials issued hundreds of individual dispensations, urging clergy to absolve, ‘reconcile’ and return heretics to the fold.100 His orders to local commissioners proceeding against heresy were lenient; loopholes were to be offered wherever possible.101 Serial recanters, like Edward Crome, thought well of the cardinal and Pole himself had written about his desire to rescue ‘rebel sons’.102 Sometimes he did rescue them, for instance when he countermanded the verdicts of ‘Bloody’ Bonner, Bishop of London.103 Foxe said Pole ordered the digging up and burning of the remains of dead protestants, because he was ‘loathe to be so cruel’ toward the living.104 In these continuities with the Viterban piety of consolation, there is a caesura: close to 300 people were burned alive whilst Pole was legate and Archbishop of Canterbury. This happened ‘on his watch’, but in most cases (not all) he was not directly responsible.105 Controversially, Eamon Duffy argues for Pole’s ‘commitment to silencing heresy at all costs’.106 That had not been his priority in Italy, least of all at Viterbo. Given his ignorance of England’s reformations, it is possible that, once arrived, he ‘expected a quiet return to harmony, not a fight to the death’. If that failed, like his agent Throckmorton, Pole drew the line at ‘obstinacy’. Like the mature Flaminio, he thought it wrong ‘to break with the union of the catholic church’.107 Probably, like most of his contemporaries,

99 William Peryn [and Nicolás van Essche], Spirituall exercyses and ghostly meditations (London: John Walley, 1557), stc 19784; Lucy E. C. Wooding, ‘William Peryn’, odnb. 100 For the avalanche of dispensations, see crp 3, passim. On Pole’s understanding of individual reconciliation, see Lucy Underwood, ‘Persuading the Queen’s majesty’s subjects from their allegiance’, Historical Research, 89 (2016), 246–​267, at p. 249. 101 Mayer odnb; Mayer, Reluctant Author, catalogue 7e, cited by Mayer, Pole, p. 277. 102 Pole to Otto Truchess, 20 June 1554, CRP 885, especially p. 317; Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, pp. 89–​90. 103 CRP 1593 and 1675; Gina Alexander, ‘Bonner and the Marian Persecutions’ in Christopher Haigh, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 157–​175, at p. 175. 104 TAMO 1563, book 5, p. 1211. 105 ‘Pole took only a very small part in the campaign against heresy’, Mayer, ‘Reginald Pole’, in ODNB. 106 Fires of Faith, pp. 148–​50, at p. 154. 107 Pogson, ‘Legacy of the Schism’, p. 134; see above, note 69.

72 Chapter 3 he thought the ultimate punishment was right if heretics absolutely refused to repent. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury in King Edward vi’s reign, did repent: while in prison, he recanted six times. In this instance, there was a disjunction between Pole’s precepts and what he did –​or rather did not do. Cranmer’s trial proceedings began in September 1555, with the Legate marginalised: the trial was conducted on papal authority and the powers of the Inquisition deputed to James Brooks, Bishop of Gloucester. By the time it took place, there was a new pope, Paul iv, once the traditionalist Cardinal Carafa, polite at first, but likely to turn hostile.108 Cranmer asked for a face-​to-​face meeting, but instead Pole wrote two wordy letters, now badly damaged and incomplete. John Foxe called them ‘solicitous writings’ and Pole’s closing warning certainly sounded urgent: ‘I say if you be not plucked out by the ear, you be utterly undone both body and soul.’109 The Cardinal understood the importance of reconciliation in this case: he told Philip ii that, if Cranmer recanted, the church would profit.110 But there is no evidence that he took action on that insight. Cranmer’s anguished recantations were elicited by others in the winter of 1556. Thereafter, canon law and Pole’s own precepts dictated that Cranmer should be ‘reconciled’ and pardoned. Nonetheless, on 17 March 1556, he was told he would be executed. At the last, he recanted his recantations and died courageously, as a protestant.111 From this burning there was no profit. It is likely that any intervention on Pole’s part would have been futile, but he was Cardinal Legate, Archbishop of Canterbury, a person whom the Queen revered: and he was missing. Being absent was a favourite tactic of nicodemites. It appears that Pole was ‘ducking out’, as absent in this crisis, as he had been from several others: the Colloquy of Regensburg (1541–​2); the Council of Trent (1546–​7); Rome (1553): now Oxford (1556).112 Pole and the government may have learned a bitter lesson. In the year of Cranmer’s death, Pole helped another leading protestant:  John Cheke, once Regius Professor and tutor to King Edward vi. Cheke thanked Pole for his help

108 MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 574–​605; Edwards, Archbishop Pole, pp. 163–​68. 1 09 Pole to Philip, 24 October 1555, CRP 1414; Mayer, Pole, pp. 233–​5; Pole to Crammer, 6 November 1555, CRP 1421, see also CRP 1414 and 1415. For a summary, MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 579–​83, quotation at p. 583; TAMO, 1570 edition, Book 12, p. 2198; 1576, Book 12, p. 1891; 1583, Book 12, p. 1997. 110 Duffy, Fires of Faith, p. 149. 111 MacCulloch, Cranmer, esp. pp. 594–​605. 112 Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 56–​61, 134–​6; Mayer, Pole, pp. 106–​112, 153–​161, 201–​2; for Pole’s ‘ducking’ see Edwards, Archbishop Pole, p. 266.

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and, after two humiliating abjurations, went free.113 Pole’s biographer, Thomas Mayer, thought the Cardinal ‘potentially tolerant’.114 He had certainly shown that quality at Viterbo and two contemporaries testified to his tolerant disposition in England. They were both biased, but on different sides in the conflict:  John Foxe, English Protestant martyrologist, and Bartolomé Carranza, Spanish cardinal. It was said that the Spaniard criticised him for being ‘más blando’, ‘more easygoing’ in the pursuit of heresy.115 Foxe said that Pole was ‘none of the bloody cruel sort of papists.116 Bernardo Navagero, a seasoned Venetian diplomat, speculated that he was anxious to defend himself against suspicions which arose from his own past in Italy.117 Disaster struck in 1557. Pope Paul iv was a true Neapolitan; he hated the Habsburg power that ruled Naples. He provoked war with Queen Mary’s husband Philip ii of Spain, which inevitably involved England. In April 1557, the pope revoked Pole’s legatine powers as part of an attack on all the spirituali. Behind this purge was the pope’s dread that one of them might be the next pope: by 31 May, Cardinal Morone was in prison. The pope tried to make William Peto legate in Pole’s place, but reckoned without the loyalty which infused Pole’s circle. Peto sent the pope a firm letter of refusal, circulated among Pole’s friends.118 Then Pole’s closest friend, Alvise Priuli, was deprived of his right to the Bishopric of Brescia and, in October, Bernardo Navagero, the Venetian ambassador, tried to appeal to the pope on Priuli’s behalf. In a furious outburst against Pole’s friends, the Pope said that Priuli was one of ‘that accursed school, and that apostate household, of the cardinal of England’; he added that Flaminio was one of them and, had he lived, he would have been burned.119

1 13 Cheke to Pole, 15 July 1556, CRP 1616; on Cheke ’s probable nicodemism, see Chapter 9 below. 114 Mayer, Pole, p. 278; Mayer, ‘ “Heretics be not in all things heretics” ’; Rex Pogson ‘Reginald Pole and the Priorities of Government in Mary Tudor’s Reign’, Historical Journal, 18 (1975), 3–​20 (p. 10). 115 Carranza’s criticism that Pole was ‘más blando’ was reported by Luis Venegas, quoted in José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, Fray Bartolomé Carranza y el Cardinal Pole. Un Navarro en la restauración catolica, 1554–​58 (Pamplona, 1977), pp. 49–​52, at pp. 51–​2, quoted and translated in Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, p. 88; Edwards, ‘Spanish Religious Influence in Marian England’ in Duffy and Loades, Church of Mary Tudor, pp. 201–​223, at pp. 207–​09. 116 TAMO 1570, Book 12, p. 2198. This comment does not appear in the 1563 edition. 117 Bernardo Navagero to the Chiefs of the Council of Ten, 12 June 1557, CSP Venetian (1556–​ 57), 933. 118 See Overell and Willoughby, ‘Books from Pole’s circle’, 248 and pp. 118–​9. 119 Bernardo Navagero to the Doge and Senate, Rome, October 1557, CSP Venetian (1556–​ 1557), 1062, pp. 1343–​1359, at pp. 1358–​9: Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 278; Processo Morone, 2, p. 35.

74 Chapter 3 10

Ambivalent Endings

Queen Mary did not want ‘her’ cardinal recalled to Rome and initially refused to allow the papal orders to be received into England. Pole’s behaviour in this crisis reveals his complicated piety and that of his circle. In the summer of 1557, he wrote a passionate apologia to the pope, defending himself and the imprisoned Morone. Most daring was his comment that, whenever the Pope’s actions were ‘not of God but of men’, the cardinals had a duty to admonish him, using ‘clear words’. The tale that Pole immediately threw this protest into the fire was hagiography. A copy was taken to Rome but apparently never read by the Pope, extracts were inserted into other documents sent subsequently, and a copy survives.120 Then, in 1558, an outbreak of influenza (‘the protestant flu’) began: by the autumn the Queen was ill and full of despair about England’s future faith, and so was Pole. When his will was drawn up on 4 October 1558, he professed unqualified loyalty to all popes and to Paul iv in particular. His one-​time friends among the spirituali left in Italy, Pietro Carnesecchi and Giulia Gonzaga, were disappointed about this, his final obedience.121 In the last eighteen months of his life, Cardinal Pole had left two important documents: his apologia recorded in ‘clear words’ his resistance to the pope and his will testified to his unqualified obedience. Probably both were true: ambivalence was part of the piety of Viterbo. Nicodemites are said to deceive by hiding their ‘real’ beliefs. It is the evasion, the secrecy –​operating ‘at night’ like Nicodemus –​that might substantiate the charge. The whole tenor of Viterbo’s piety had been separated and secretive for many years, from Flaminio’s evasions, to forbidden books in circulation, to Pole’s unexplained departure from Trent. They had cut themselves off: the ‘ecclesia viterbensis’ listened to Flaminio’s emotive talks, did not bother to buy books that were gaining approval; in their booklists there is no sign of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, in print ten years before Pole and Throckmorton died.122 Looking backwards to the Bible, the Fathers and the Imitation, some 120 Inner Temple, Petyt MS 538/​46, ed. and transcribed by José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, Fray Bartolomé Carranza y el Cardenal Pole: Un navarro en la restauraciόn catόlica de Inglaterra (1554–​1558) (Pamplona: Disputacion Foral de Navarra and others, 1977), pp. 199–​241, at pp. 235–​6; extracts are translated by Edwards in his Archbishop Pole, pp. 277–​8; CRP 2076; for a commentary, see Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 273–​7. 121 Both Queen and Cardinal died on 17 November 1558; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 280–​81; Russell, Giulia Gonzaga, p. 149. 122 Ignatius Loyola, trans. André Des Freux, Exercitia spiritualia (Rome:  Antonio Blado, 1548) USTC 836132, (but see EDIT 16 24618).

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of them had also looked sideways to the forbidden texts of German and Swiss reformers. Their ‘old-​fashioned’ biblical and imitationist piety offered them mercy and personal consolation, but also became a secret way –​like the ‘camina segreta’ of Valdés. It was a poor preparation for leading the whole English nation back to catholic allegiance. In England their nicodemism was less obvious. Pole has been portrayed as leading a strong-​minded return to catholicism, reconciling, organising, accepting executions for heresy as necessary, and preaching effectively.123 Yet Pole remained elusive about justification, avoided intervention in Cranmer’s execution; he wrote an angry and bitter reproof to one pope and then vowed absolute obedience to him and to all popes. Contemporaries who disagreed about everything else were close to concord: Pole was a papist but ‘none of the bloody cruel sort of papists …’ (Foxe); he was trapped by suspicions about his Italian past (Navagero); inclined to ‘savour’ Luther’s doctrine (Foxe); soft on heresy (reported words of Carranza).124 He was one of those ‘lukewarm’ people ‘who would not go to heaven even if they are called moderates’ (Feria); finally and famously, he was good but ‘a dead man’ (Feria).125 They were all musing on the same problem, trying to understand a pious nicodemite. 1 23 See, especially, Duffy, Fires of Faith, passim. 124 See above, notes 1, 115, 116, and 117, 125 CSP Spanish (1554–​1558), pp. 370–​1.

Chapter 4

The Volte-​Faces of Pietro Vanni Deceit is normally held in low esteem; pointing as it does to an evil disposition; there are, nonetheless, countless instances when it has reaped obvious benefits and deflected all manner of harm and ill report and mortal perils. For our conversation is not always with friends in this earthly life.1 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, Canto 4.

…

For forty years I have wholly dedicated my selfe, my wyll, my diligence to the uttermost of my power to the service of that most noble Crowne of Englande.2 Peter Vannes to the Council, August 1555.

∵ In 1550, when Reginald Pole and his friends were beginning to adjust to the traditionalists’ growing power in Rome, Pietro Vanni took up a coveted job as King Edward vi’s ambassador to Venice. He was already an experienced royal servant, but he could not know how much he too would need to adapt to change ‒ in Rome, Venice and London. Diplomats as well as churchmen had to survive religious revolutions far beyond the control of hapless individuals. The service of the ‘Crowne of Englande’, to which Vanni dedicated himself ‘wholly’, involved some dizzying adjustments. This Italian humanist served Henry viii as Latin secretary, both before the schism from the Church of Rome and after it. Then in 1550, Vanni began to represent the radical evangelical government of Edward vi in Venice. When the catholic Mary I became Queen in 1553, he represented her as well, managing that vertiginous transition with great skill.

1 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, translated by Guido Waldman (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), Canto 4, p. 30. 2 London, British Library, MS Harley, 5009, ff. 131v–​133r (Peter Vannes’ Letter Book).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_​0 06

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By then, Vanni had become used to deceiving in the interests of the state. On the other hand, he was ordained and he knew that dissimulation was seen as sinful, especially in matters concerning religious belief. From the early 1540s onwards, this precept was underlined by anti-​nicodemite polemicists, whose favourite phrases Vanni echoed, perhaps unconsciously, as we shall see. But could anyone, especially a diplomat, live through these five decades of Tudor rule and never deceive? This chapter will trace Vanni’s responses to that dilemma:  his fearful and sometimes tearful uncertainty, followed by voluble and breathtaking volte-​faces. It will show one Italian’s nicodemism in the service of English monarchs. It will suggest that, while Vanni’s behaviour was extreme –​one historian called him ‘a man of no moral sense’ –​it was not singular.3 He experienced the isolation and inner conflict endured by many servants and subjects of the Tudors, and not only foreigners; we have already seen that Pole’s English friends had faced similar dilemmas during the 1530s.4 Sir Thomas Wyatt, born English, born with good connections, dreaded ‘the Slipper[y]‌ toppe of courtes estates’.5 It was just as slippery and morally dangerous for an immigrant secretary and then ambassador, searching for a foothold on the treacherous lower slopes. Dissimulation was expected at the courts of kings and rulers, or during embassies to other courts, said to promote ‘understanding’. Italian humanists were especially forthright on this subject:  Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine diplomat and historian, thought deceit was ‘odious’ but ‘very useful’.6 Baldassare Castiglione’s depiction of the good courtier underlined the importance of ‘sprezzatura’ ‒ a kind of nonchalance, so carefully controlled that it depended on constant pretence.7 Niccolò Machiavelli was the most outspoken of them all: his Prince had to be ‘a great liar and deceiver’.8 Courtiers, lawyers and diplomats (and that last group included many clerics) were all schooled in

3 Geoffrey de C. Parmiter, The King’s Great Matter: a Study of Anglo–​Papal Relations 1527–​1534 (London: Longmans, 1967), p. 80, n.2. 4 See Chapter 2. 5 Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 491–​526, at p. 526. 6 Guicciardini wrote collections of Ricordi between 1512 and 1530, Maxims and Reflections (‘Ricordi’), trans. Mario Domandi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), Series C, no. 104, p. 67. 7 Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano (Venice: Manuzio 1528), ustc 819485; Il libro del Cortegiano ed. Ettore Bonora (Milan: Mursia, 1972), Book 1, 26, p. 62. 8 ‘un gran simulatore e dissimulatore’, Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe (Florence: Giunta, 1532), ustc 839314, Chapter 18, p. 17; The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961; repr. 1999), Chapter 18, p. 56.

78 Chapter 4 techniques of deceit. They had to do business with those of a different religious affiliation and feign amity across the confessional chasm. Many who appear in this book –​Pietro Vanni, Edmund Courtenay, Michael Throckmorton, Giacomo Aconcio ‒ moved through hostile courts, sometimes prepared to attend religious rituals which they, and/​or their governments, loathed. Government servants existed in that borderland where professional expectations collided with religious precepts: Christians should not deceive, but Christians had to serve their ruler. Early in the seventeenth century this dilemma was expressed by Sir Henry Wotton, English ambassador to Venice, ‘An Ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’.9 Such was Pietro Vanni’s world throughout his adult life. 1

Vanni in the Reign of Henry viii

Born in Lucca before 1490, Vanni came to England in 1513, well before the unpredictable English reformations had begun; he died there in 1563.10 He became Latin secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, then to Henry viii, then to Edward vi. The English usually called him Peter Vannes. His promising start was due to a tradition of appointing clerics from Lucca’s merchant families to the service of the English Crown. The small Anglo-​Lucchese network was a feeble imitation of the great consorteria of Italian renaissance diplomacy.11 At the top of the pyramid was the Gigli family, who became absentee Bishops of Worcester.12 At a lower level was Vanni’s cousin, the humanist Cosma Della Rena, usually known as Andrea Ammonio, a Gigli protégé and a close friend of Erasmus. A small cloud passed over Vanni’s humanist career when Ammonio died suddenly on 17 August 1517. Vanni acted as executor, and offended the ever-​touchy Erasmus by his slowness in returning private correspondence: Vanni was worse than a monster, he said.13 The day after Ammonio’s death, Vanni applied to Cardinal 9 10 11 12

13

Originally written in Latin, ‘Legatus est vir bonus peregrè missus ad mentiendum Rei publicæ causâ’, Logan Pearsall Smith, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 1, p. 49. There is no biography of Vanni in English, but see L. E. Hunt, ‘Peter Vannes’, odnb. Catherine Fletcher and Jennifer M.  DeSilva, ‘Italian Ambassadorial Networks in Early Modern Europe  –​An Introduction’, Journal of Early Modern History 14 (2010), 505–​512 (509–​10). Cecil Clough, ‘Three Gigli of Lucca in England during the Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Centuries:  Diversification in a Family of Mercery Merchants’, The Ricardian, 13 (2003), pp. 121–​147; Mandell Creighton, ‘The Italian Bishops of Worcester’ in idem, Historical Essays, ed. Louise Creighton (Longmans: London, 1903), pp. 202–​234. Erasmus to Peter Vannes, 23 April 1518, LP, 2/​2, 4103.

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Wolsey for his cousin’s benefices.14 Gradually he assembled a clutch of valuable prebends and livings mostly in the South and West of England. He tried to gain the bishopric of Lucca in 1526 and failed. But Vanni was not anxious to return to his native city where reformation was gradually attracting interest.15 In England, the ‘Great Matter’ of King Henry viii’s divorce offered diplomatic experience, the chance to travel and superb training in the arts of deception. We shall move quickly through Vanni’s part in this intricate ‘Divorce diplomacy’ because his own volte-​faces were more blatant later on, in the reigns of Edward vi and Mary I. Nonetheless King Henry’s determination to get what he wanted, at all costs, provided an apprenticeship for Vanni, as for many other royal servants. In January 1529, when the difficulties were mounting, Vanni was ordered to join Sir Francis Bryan’s mission to Rome, leaving England in November 1528. They stayed in the house of Henry’s ‘man in Rome’, Gregorio Casale, and that was where Vanni first met Guido Giannetti da Fano, who was then working as Casale’s secretary. Later Giannetti became a reformer, a distributor of reformation books in both Venice and England, and a spy for Henry viii; Italians viewed him as Vanni’s protégé.16 Vanni also met men who would later become famous spirituali, like the Venetian Cardinal, Gasparo Contarini, who described Vanni as ‘really a most amiable person, and partial to the Signory [Venice], being a Lucchese’.17 Vanni also met Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga of Mantua, who would become a friend and supporter. Vanni remained in Rome until October 1529, armed with royal directions about how and when to deceive; he was to speak ‘being an Italian’, and ‘as of himself’ –​a classic ploy, adopted so that the waters could be tested, while plausible deniability remained intact.18 He learned quickly and soon he was counselling King Henry viii about other useful deceptions.19 Appearance, dissimulation, tampering with the post and bribery of officials were hallmarks of 14 15 16 17 18 19

LP 2/​2, 3602. Simonetta Adorni-​Braccesi, ‘Una città infetta’: la repubblica di Lucca nella crisi religiosa del Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 53–​88. Catherine Fletcher, Our Man in Rome (London:  Bodley Head, 2012), pp.  56–​80; Guido Dall’Olio, ‘Guido Giannetti (Zanneti) (Guido da Fano)’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, ed. A.M. Ghisalberti (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960 –​) [hereafter dbi]. Gasparo Contarini to the Signory, 18 January 1529, csp Venetian (1527–​1533), 398, p. 189. On these ploys, I am very grateful to Tracey Sowerby for her guidance. For Vanni’s instructions in 1528, see LP, 4/​2, 4977; ‘Poterit etiam dicere, licet non verum est, quod nos nihil timemus de advocatione …’ Vanni to King Henry viii, 9 July 1529, State Papers … King Henry viii (London: Her Majesty’s Commission for State Papers, 1830–​52) [hereafter SP], vol. 7, 249, p. 191; for calendared version, see LP 4/​3, 5763. On dissimulations practised by Gregorio Casale and Vanni, see Fletcher, Our Man in Rome, p. 86.

80 Chapter 4 this mission.20 All those involved knew that failure would be dangerous. They claimed to have pleaded with the sick pope ‘not to do anything to irritate the King’.21 Then Vanni resorted to cipher to warn Wolsey not to irritate the pope.22 Anxiety about upsetting the mighty was to dominate his whole career. By the time he travelled home in October 1529, Wolsey, his patron, had been charged with high treason and died the following year. Just before the legislation that made the break with Rome, Vanni was made collector of papal taxes in England (the coveted ‘colletaria’ had long been an perk given to Italians), but less than a year later the English schism from Rome became law and so the ‘colletaria’ was suspended. When the catholic Mary was Queen, and Pole was Legate, Vanni would try very hard to get it back, but by then his luck was running out.23 After the papal sentence of excommunication of Henry viii was pronounced in 1533, Vanni was sent, with Edmund Bonner, to attend the pope in Marseilles, where they intimated that the King would appeal to a General Council. It was yet another delicate mission, yet Vanni wrote home confidently, by then rejoicing in the protection of a new and powerful patron ‒ Thomas Cromwell.24 The Italian secretary did more than survive the political and religious storms of these years –​he did well out of them. He was called ‘the King’s chaplain and Latin secretary’ and was given a licence to enjoy ‘at one time, presentation or patronage’ to monastic and cathedral appointments and four parishes.25 He never made it to a bishopric, but in 1536 he signed himself Dean of Salisbury in a letter written to help an Italian merchant, Niccolò Diodati, whom Vanni described as his ‘nigh friend and fellow countryman’.26 Five years later, Diodati was to lead a significant group of reformers from Lucca into religious exile.27 By the late 1530s, Vanni’s own religious affiliations were clear and there was no need for nicodemism: he supported the King’s religion whatever that was 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Catherine Fletcher, ‘ “Those who give are not all generous”: tips and bribes at the sixteenth century papal court’, European University Institute Working Papers, Florence, Max Weber Programme (mwp 2011/​15), pp. 5–​6. , accessed 27 August 2017. Casale and Vannes to Henry viii, 6 June 1529, LP, 4/​3, 5650. Vannes to Wolsey, 30 June 1529, LP, 4/​3, 5740. 6 July 1533, LP, 6, 929, item 43. Vannes to Cromwell, 24 October 1533, LP, 6, 1335. For a summary of this mission, ibid., Preface, pp. i–​x li. LP, 8, 632, item 14. Peter Vannes, Dean of Sarum, to Lord Lisle 26 Sept 1536, The Lisle Letters, vol. 3, ed. Muriel St Clare Byrne (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 773, p. 496 . Ole P.  Grell, Brethren in Christ:  A Calvinist Network in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 28.

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and despite its irrational changes. His friend Guido Giannetti seems to have identified Vanni as sympathetic to anti-​papal views. He sent Vanni a present, ‘something from Italy’, which had been translated ‘here’ (Giannetti was then in Nuremberg). He thought it would make Vanni laugh. We do not know the book’s title but it is almost certain that this was the sex scandal-​of-​the-​moment, a story then circulating in Nuremberg of a violent homosexual rape committed by the Pope’s natural son, Pier Luigi Farnese.28 Vanni was seen as a man who could be relied on to enjoy a lewd story about a papal bastard.29 By 1538 Vanni was getting himself noticed and was even invited to supper with Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, who was to become powerful in Edward vi’s reign, as Lord Protector.30 But with the ageing Henry viii on the throne, no-​one was safe. In June 1540, Vanni’s patron, Thomas Cromwell, was indicted and later beheaded. Then, in December 1540, Richard Pate fled from his embassy to the Emperor’s court in Namur and joined Pole’s circle in Italy –​ we noted Pole’s delighted welcome in the last chapter. This was an outrage to royal authority, sabotaging the faith put in ambassadors and it led to arrests of several diplomats.31 A month later, the French ambassador, Michel de Marillac, reported a rumour that Pietro Vanni had fled from England. Marillac ‘could hardly believe this’, because ‘he [Vanni] was rich in benefices here and has nothing beyond the sea; and, besides, as one of the principal instruments to suppress the authority of the Holy See here, he would not be welcome in any country but the Lutherans’, where he would be always poor.’ The rumour turned out to be untrue and Vanni did well out of the crisis.32 All the same, Marillac’s analysis was correct: Vanni was tied to the Henrician reformation; he had to go on conforming; if he fled abroad, his only option would be ‘the Lutherans’, and then he would be poor. These hard facts are the key to his behaviour. 28

29

30

31 32

LP, 13/​2, 598; G. B. Parks ‘The Pier Luigi Farnese Scandal: an English Report’, Renaissance News, 15 (1962), 193–​200, especially p. 193; Anne Overell and Scott C. Lucas, ‘Whose Wonderful News? Italian Satire and William Baldwin’s Wonderfull Newes of the Death of Paul the iii’, Renaissance Studies, 26 (2012), 180–​196, especially pp. 188–​9. By the next year, an English version of the story was in print, Richard Morison, An exhortation to styrre all Englyshe men to the defence of theyr countreye ([London: Thomas Berthelet] [1539]), stc 18110.5, sigs C vi–​Di; Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, pp. 100–​104; Overell, ‘English Friendship and Italian Reform’, pp. 484–​6. Longleat, Seymour Papers, xviii, f. 90r, ‘Kitchen accounts of Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp from 1 October 1538, for a whole year’, ‘Maister Peter Vanne’, was present at supper at ‘Beauchamplace’ on Thursday 6 March 1539. I am very grateful to Susan Brigden for this reference. Sowerby, ‘Richard Pate’, pp.  265–​285, especially pp.  283–​4; Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 517–​26. LP 16, 450.

82 Chapter 4 Meanwhile Giannetti moved back to Italy, where he distributed ‘heretical’ books and was used by Henry viii as a spy and agent for the formation of an anti-​papal league, backed by desperado Venetian rebels. Then Giannetti fled again, returning to England, and arriving –​with terrible timing –​just after his employer, the old king, died. Desperately short of money, Giannetti was given shelter in London by the merchant Bartolomeo Compagni, but there is no evidence of help from his old friend Vanni.33 Like many other nicodemites at times of uncertainty, Vanni was waiting to see what would happen. 2

Success in the Reign of Edward vi

That paid off: after Edward vi’s accession, he retained his office as Latin secretary and was reappointed for life in 1549. He may have been replaced as Dean of Salisbury for a short period, but that was a mere detail compared to his glittering new appointment; in the summer of 1550 Vanni became England’s ambassador to Venice.34 Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, Regent of Mantua, friend of spirituali, wrote to congratulate him and recalled their friendship; he even bothered to add an autograph.35 From then on, Vanni knew that he could rely on Mantua. Once he had arrived in Venice, his delight in his new post is revealed in a torrent of new-​broom reports, for which the Council in London commended him.36 He gained royal approval for a trip to Lucca to attend to ‘private affairs’.37 Then he returned to Venice, where he had to represent the

33 34

35 36 37

Aldo Stella, ‘Utopie e velleità insurrezionali dei filoprotestanti italiani (1545–​47)’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 27 (1965), 133–​182; Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 78–​80. ‘The Cathedral of Salisbury: from the Reformation to the Restoration’, in R. B. Pugh and Elizabeth Crittall, eds, A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 3 (Victoria County History) (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 183–​197; the Doge and College to Daniel Barbaro, 9 August 1550, csp Venetian (1534–​1554), 679. Mantua, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Gonzaga, 6498, n. 100, c. 36r–​v; n.105, c.38r, ‘A messer Pietro Vannes, Mantova, 1550 settembre 7’, Ercole Gonzaga to Peter Vannes, Mantua 7 September 1550. The Council to Peter Vannes, 10 June 1551, Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Edward vi 1547–​1553 ed. William Turnbull (London, Longman, 1861) [hereafter csp Foreign 1547–​1553], 378. Edward vi to the Senators and Magistrates of Lucca, 16 October, 1551, ibid., 460; a related but undated document mentions Vanni’s return to Lucca, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury, preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, 24 vols (London: Eyre and Spottiswode for hmso, 1883–​), 13 (Edward vi), 135, p.  32; Gary M.  Bell, A Handlist of British Diplomatic Representatives, 1509–​1688 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1990), p. 289.

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interests of an evangelical government in a catholic, if often anti-​papal, state; it was no sinecure. Moreover Vanni, a good linguist, could hardly miss the anti-​nicodemite propaganda by then becoming known in the Veneto and the north of Italy. ‘A faithful man associating with papists cannot participate in their superstitions without offending God’, wrote Calvin.38 Vanni chose similar words: Venetian rituals were, he said, ‘not without suspicion and superstition’, but he sought permission to attend official services, stressing that this was not ‘for the worshipping of idols and images’.39 He reported, willingly, even enthusiastically, on Englishmen travelling ‘under the protest of studying and seeing countries’ and especially on those who had any contact with Cardinal Pole, still bête-​noir of the English government. He complained to the Venetian authorities about Robert Stafford, Pole’s nephew, who had forced his way violently into Vanni’s household –​ambassador’s houses were supposed to be sacrosanct.40 Vanni also sent a spy to Rome to gain information from Pole’s friends, William Peto and Richard Pate, who still held titles to English bishoprics.41 His own criticisms of the pope were well pitched to please his English masters: ‘The Bishop of Rome is reckoned here to be a man of very heavy mind, sudden and unadvised in his determinations.’ He turned his heavy humour against the creation of new cardinals: ‘The Bishop of Rome to the intent that part of his friends … should keep themselves from the rain this winter, hath sold them 13 red hats’.42 At this stage it was fun –​and unthinkable that the Bishop of Rome would ever again have to be called Pope in English diplomatic correspondence. Yet sneers in London revealed Vanni’s vulnerability. It was not because he was a clergyman in an increasingly secularised profession; modern historians argue for a ‘type-​ancien’ diplomacy grounded in the ability to work within existing social codes and cultural values. Appointing laymen as ambassadors was far from being established European practice.43 Vanni had overcome competition 38

39 40

41 42 43

Calvin, Excuse a Messieurs les Nicodemites, OC, 6, col. 593, translated by Bernard Cottret, Calvin, p. 269; Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti–​Nicodemite Propaganda and England’, pp. 296–​98; Enrico Garavelli, Ludovico Domenichi e ‘il Nicodemiana’ di Calvino (Manziana, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2004), pp. 175–​180. Peter Vannes to the Council, 26 April 1551, csp Foreign (1547–​1553), 326; same to same, ibid., 361. The Chiefs of the Ten to [Daniel Barbaro] the Venetian Ambassador in England, 5 November 1550, csp Venetian, (1534–​1554), 687; Catherine Fletcher, ‘Furnished with Gentlemen’: the Ambassador’s House in Sixteenth–​Century Italy, Renaissance Studies, 24/​4 (2009), 518–​535, especially pp. 519–​20. Peter Vannes to the Council, 5 April 1551, csp Foreign (1547–​1553), 313. Peter Vannes to the Duke of Northumberland, 24 November 1551, ibid., 495. I have relied on Tracey Sowerby’s invaluable summary of current scholarship, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’, History Compass, 14/​9 (2016), pp.  441–​456, especially

84 Chapter 4 from the highly-​qualified layman, Richard Morison, a good Italianist, identified with reform and, by this time, ‘a well-​trained diplomat’. Morison wrote: ‘Happy and thrice happy is Peter Vannes that serves where he is made of and is where great service may be done’. He wished that Vanni were as weary of being in Venice as he (Morison) was tired of his own posting to the Imperial court.44 Later that year, he argued that if his own friend Roger Ascham were to take over some of Vanni’s old work of translation, the King would see ‘a difference between the past and those to come’; he seems to have thought that Vanni was not up to scratch.45 William Thomas, too, had the ‘right’ religion and experience of Italy and was lusting after the Venetian embassy.46 The Italian-​born ambassador was both envied and mocked: his job was not safe and that made him extra cautious. 3

The Ambassador and Italian Reformers

Italian evidence, however, paints a different picture –​one in which Pietro Vanni was worth knowing, one of Lucca’s famous sons and a true friend to its many religious reformers. In the whimsical dedication of Ortensio Lando’s Miscellanae Questiones, Lando depicted himself sitting in a Venetian bookshop, musing on the famous men born in the city of Lucca. Two of Lando’s friends arrive and suggest that he should dedicate his book to the Lucchese, Pietro Vanni ‒ which he promptly did. Another character in Lando’s fictional bookshop was the Venetian physician and heretic, Girolamo Donzellini, whose contacts with Vanni are important.47

44 45 46

47

p.  443–​44,, accessed 27 August 2017; Loretta T. Burns, ‘Cleric Diplomats and the Sixteenth Century French State, The Historian, 57 (1995), pp. 721–​732. Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, p. 190; Morison to Sir William Cecil, 20 February 1552, csp Foreign (1547–​1553), 536. Morison to Cecil, 28 November 1552, ibid., 586. William Thomas to William Cecil, 14 August 1552, Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Reign of Edward vi, 1547–​1553, revised, ed. C. S. Knighton (London: hmso, 1992) [hereafter cspde], 695; Overell, Italian Reform, p. 89. On William Thomas, see Brett Foster, ‘Harry’s Peregrinations: an Italianate Defence of Henry viii’, in Thomas Betteridge and Thomas Freeman, eds., Henry viii and History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 21–​50; Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform, pp. 192–​3. Ortensio Lando, Miscellaneae quaestiones (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1550); Walter Bullock, ‘The “lost” Miscellaneae Quaestiones of Ortensio Lando’, Italian Studies 2 (1938–​9), 49–​64; Meredith K.  Ray, ‘Textual Collaboration and Spiritual Partnership in Sixteenth-​Century ­Italy: the case of Ortensio Lando and Lucrezia Gonzaga’, Renaissance Quarterly, 62 (2009), 694–​747.

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Lando’s fiction was based on fact. One witness at the Inquisition trials of Pietro Carnesecchi claimed that ‘l’ambasciatore’ of England was among the group which went with the accused to hear heretical sermons.48 It is certain that Vanni befriended heretics, Donzellini in particular. The previous English representative in Venice, the popular Edmund Harvel had, after his time of wavering between Reginald Pole and Henry viii, finally made clear his sympathies for reformers: he had made Donzellini his physician. Vanni took on Harvel’s mantel –​and his doctor. Finally Donzellini was brought before the Venetian Inquisition: in the processo of 1560 he said that the English ambassador’s house had been the occasion of his ‘first temptation’: there, during Edmund Harvel’s tenure, he had been encouraged to read heretical books. Then Harvel had died and Vanni took over. Donzellini remembered that in the summer of 1553, he had found the Ambassador Vanni reading a text by the moderate reformer Joannes Rivius –​ De admirabili Dei consilio. Vanni recommended it as ‘bellisimo’ and then loaned the book to him. The transfer of texts was something ambassadors often undertook, an aspect of their role. Through discussion of Rivius’s book, Vanni was recognising Donzellini’s adherence to reformation views and confirming his own.49 When Donzellini was told that the Venetian Inquisition was definitely after him, he took refuge in the English ambassador’s household, sure that he had a friend in Vanni.50 4

Vanni in the Reign of Mary I

Thus, in the summer of 1553, as the catholic Mary Tudor came to the throne in London, Vanni was in Venice acting as friend, protector and book supplier 48 49

50

Deposizione di Agostino Moreschini, 27 August 1556, in Processi Carnesecchi, 2/​1, p. 33. Venice, Archivio di Stato [hereafter ASVen], Sant’Uffizio, busta 39, f. 47v, Processo di Girolamo Donzellini, 26 November, 1560, ‘Apresso di questo medicando io la famiglia del signor pietro Vanni luchese qui Ambasciator della Corona d’Inghilterra una fra l’altre lo trovai che leggeva un libro, il qual mi disse che era bellissimo. Dimandando il lo nome dell’ autore e la materia mi ripose Joannes Rivius De admirabili consilio Dei e mi disse quando io lo havevo letto, selo voulete legger ne lo davo’; Johannes Rivius, De admirabili Dei consilio (Basel: Oporinus, 1545), ustc 628906. Rivius attracted considerable attention both in Italy and England, see Johann Rivius, A Treatise against the Foolishnesse of Men in Differing the Reformation of their Living, trans. J. Bankes (London: William Powell, 1550), stc 21065; Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: a Tudor Mystery (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), p. 72. On diplomats’ ‘textual strategies’, see Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomacy’, p. 447. ASVen, Sant’Uffizio, busta 39, fol. 51v, Processo di Donzellini, ‘No dimeno per assicurarmi andai alla casa del signor Pietro Vanni Lucchese’; Anne Jacobsen Schutte ‘Girolamo Donzellini’, dbi.

86 Chapter 4 to Venetian reformers. Heterodox writers like Ortensio Lando regarded him as definitely on their side –​the side of reform. The English ambassador’s perceived religion did not tally with that of the new Queen. To hold on to his job would require diplomacy and dissimulation on the grand scale, and also those quotidian activities that we observed in the Prologue: waiting, networking and finding friends, changing tack at the perfect moment.51 This was Vanni’s greatest crisis. In his first letter to Queen Mary, on 13 August 1553, Vanni made no direct reference to religion, except to congratulate her, saying that ‘the stone which the builders rejected is become the chief corner stone’. That was incontrovertible. He added that he hoped it was lawful to use a sacred comparison.52 A sequence of begging letters followed, and an agonising five months’ wait. Wisely Donzellini left Venice, while Vanni was left to stew. Perhaps not knowing the precise state of play at the English court, he continued to refer to the Pope as ‘the Bishop of Rome’. The Imperial ambassador reported that the Queen had said that Vanni had warned her ‘not to be too fervent a papist’.53 He had managed the nicodemite act of ‘changing tack’, a sudden turning. He had done so without apologia or self-​justification: there was no hint of Pole’s attempt to half-​explain himself in a letter.54 Then luck and well-​primed contacts dealt Vanni a trump card. In August 1553 a relatively inexperienced cleric, named Francesco Commendone, was sent secretly from Flanders to England by Cardinal Dandino, legate to the Emperor.55 Despite fumbling attempts to keep Commendone away from the Queen, they met and they talked –​in private, or so she imagined. According to Commendone’s biographer, the Queen said she wished for private papal absolution after the schism and enlarged on the difficulties of restoring catholicism.56 Commendone then travelled back 51 52 53 54 55

56

See above, Prologue, pp. 9–12. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series of the Reign of Mary, 1553–​1558, ed. William Barclay Turnbull (London: Longman, 1861)[hereafter csp Foreign (1553–​1558)], 7. Peter Vannes to the Council, 9 September 1553, ibid., 32; The Ambassadors in England to the Emperor, csp Spanish, (1553), pp. 211–​229. See above, Chapter 3, p. 68. Giacomo Soranzo to the Council of Ten, 11 September 1553, csp Venetian (1534–​1554), 789; same to same, 19 September 1553, 790; The Accession, Coronation and Marriage of Mary Tudor as related by Four Manuscripts of the Escorial, translated and published by Caesare V. Malfatti (Barcelona: n.p., 1956), especially pp. xiii–​xix. Antonio Maria Graziani, De Vita Joannis Francisci Commendoni, cardinalis, libri quattuor (Paris:  Sebastian Mabre-​Cramoisy, 1669), pp.  40–​45. The formal request for absolution was made through Pole’s servant, Henry Pyning. Mary told Pyning that Commendone had well nigh promised a personal papal absolution to her. For Pyning’s report, csp Venetian (1534–​1554), 813; Edwards, Archbishop Pole, p. 127.

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to Rome and made a full report. Vanni got wind of this. Politely, he wrote to the Queen saying she would, of course, have already heard of events in Rome. She had not. Vanni noted that, as a result of Commendone’s detailed report, the pope had decided not to send Cardinal Pole, or any Legate, to England at present.57 He knew a scoop when he saw one. Writing to Pole, the Queen recorded her fury that Commendone should have made her private conversation public, ‘in publico Consistorio, & extra’. So public, she said, that her ‘orator’ in Venice had picked up the story.58 In fact, Vanni was not then her ‘orator’, he was in limbo, between jobs. Just fourteen days later his embassy in Venice was renewed in London.59 His letters of appointment finally reached Venice on 3 November 1553. The agonising delay with no financial support had paid off, but it ensured that he would be co-​ operative.60 For the last twenty years he had seemed sympathetic to English and Italian reformers; he had counted reformers like Diodati, Giannetti and Donzellini among his few friends. Now he would serve a catholic Queen. In 1553–​4, others made similar decisions to conform, for instance Roger Ascham, William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, but they were not Italians isolated and marooned in Venice. No-​one changed as theatrically as Vanni. Vanni would now be spying not on Pole’s catholic household, but on all English exiles disloyal to Queen Mary. This was part of an ambassador’s role, but Vanni took it up just as enthusiastically as he had done in Edward vi’s reign. Now it was different; some of his targets were old acquaintances, colleagues and friends. His first quarry was a member of his own staff, the loudmouth protestant Londoner, William Page. Vanni heard privately from a junior member of the household, that Page had uttered ‘atrocious words’. Diplomats at the Imperial court reported that Page had said he was ready to kill the Queen of England. Frightened for his own reputation, Vanni applied to the Venetian authorities for permission to have Page arrested. When the Venetians refused, Vanni applied to his allies, the Gonzaga in Mantua, who allowed an 57 58

59 60

Vanni to Queen Mary, 23 September, 1553, csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 43. [Commendone] ‘statim ut Romam advenit, in publico Consistorio, & extra, publicavit, atque tam fideliter secretum continuit, ut orator noster, qui agit Venetiis, nobis plenissime negotium, multorum relatu, descripserit & expresserit.’, Queen Mary to Pole, 28 October 1553, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, ed. Angelo Maria Quirini, 5 vols (Farnborough: Gregg, 1964) 4, p. 44 (abbreviated in crp 746); John Strype, Memorials of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1840)  [hereafter Strype Memorials], 1, pp.  464–​65, 922, 929. Pole thought the Queen was overreacting, see ‘Goldwell’s Instructions’, no date, crp 777. London, British Library, Cotton MS Titus B ii, ff. 151–​2, cited by Elizabeth Russell, ‘Mary Tudor and Mr Jorkins’, Historical Research, 63 (1990), 271. csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 60; ibid., 62.

88 Chapter 4 examination to take place. Page was sent to prison for three months.61 Thereafter, Vanni wanted rid of him, so he adopted the time-​honoured ‒ if deceitful ‒ strategy of writing a reasonable reference, informing the exiled reformer, Sir Philip Hoby, that Page ‘writes correctly in the Italian and Englishe tonge and hath a good and redie witte’. To recommend a would-​be assassin to an English protestant gentleman in exile was questionable behaviour, but ‘I for divers respectes am not minded to medle to him any further’. Soon Page entered the service of Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford, who was himself suspected of treasonable activities against Queen Mary.62 It was said that Vanni ‒ always verbose ‒ had written a ‘processo’ about the Page affair. Yet other diplomats presented it as a ridiculous storm in a teacup and were mocking him. Marc’Antonio Damula, Venetian ambassador to the Imperial Court, thought that Vanni was too fearful of being reprimanded and condemned. According to Damula, Vanni did not know what to do about Page; moreover, he had seen him still more anxious about other ‘ridiculous matters’. Damula said that Sir John Mason, English ambassador in Brussells, an experienced diplomat, had told him that Vanni had a ‘timorous’ nature, that he had seen him cry from fear, and that the Queen herself would laugh off the whole William Page incident.63 Vanni needed to put his own household in the clear; that was seen as normal. His anxiety was, perhaps, excessive and it was that anxiety which produced his most theatrical changes. English exiles began to arrive in the summer of 1554, just as gossip about the Page affair was breaking. In the course of Queen Mary’s reign about fifty English gentlemen came to the Veneto, for instance John Cheke, Anthony Cooke, Thomas Wroth, and Philip and Thomas Hoby. Vanni was required to check up on them. They were mostly protestants, hoping that by choosing exile in the Veneto they would avoid the worst of the Queen’s displeasure. After all, Venice was not a suspect, protestant place ‘where sects do bear rule’, as Mason pointed

61

62

63

Vannes to Queen Mary, 16 June 1554, ibid., 224; Council of Ten to Giovanni Michieli, 22 June 1554, csp Venetian (1534–​1554), 903; Vannes to the Council, 20 October 1554, csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 278; for a report of Page’s words, ‘che gli saria bastato l’animo di amazzarla’, see Marc’Antonio Damula, Venetian Ambassador in Brussells to the Doge and Senate, 19 August 1554, csp Venetian (1534–​1554), 936. BL, MS Harley 5009, fol. 74v, Vanni to Philip Hoby, 7 December 1554; Kenneth R. Bartlett, ‘The Household of Francis Russell in Venice, 1555, Medieval Prosopography, 2 (1981), 63–​ 83, at p. 78; Page remained in Bedford’s service and his radicalism continued, see Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 191–​2. Damula to the Doge and Senate (reporting his own conversation with Mason), 19 August 1554, csp Venetian (1534–​1554), 936; on the importance of the good conduct of ambassadors’ servants, see Fletcher, ‘ “Furnished with gentlemen” ’, pp. 530–​2.

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out.64 But no-​one quite reckoned with the English ambassador’s volte-​face. He, apparently once a reformer, was now spying on reformers, as he was expected to do, but Vanni seemed to relish that covert task. Sir Peter Carew arrived by August 1554.65 He had taken part in the failed West Country conspiracy and then, after a brief time in France, moved on to Venice.66 He was regarded as a protestant but it was hoped that he would decide to co-​operate with Queen Mary’s government.67 Vanni, however, was nervous: he knew Carew was anxious to meet him but said that he did not know how to behave.68 Mason gave smooth assurances that Vanni could speak to Carew as a private person. It was reported that Mason thought Carew ‘could not be in a better place than Venice’ and that he ought to be entertained because he was not evil by nature. Such urbane mediation fell on Vanni’s deaf ears.69 His antagonism was evident –​to the point that he was suspected of trying to have Carew assassinated. Our main –​if unreliable –​source is John Hooker’s sympathetic biography of Carew, written during Elizabeth I’s reign.70 Hooker claimed that Vanni tried to involve the Venetian government (just as he had done in the case of Page). When that failed, the ambassador hired ‘certain ruffians’ to ‘dispatch and murder’ Carew.71 These claims are almost certainly inflated, but they reveal how deeply the English exiles suspected Vanni. Vanni’s accounts of the suppression of Wyatt’s rebellion were intended to persuade the Venetians that the English government was in control.72 However, the anti-​Habsburg policies of a new Pope, the mercurial Paul iv, made him jumpy: ‘daily doth happen some novelties’.73 He would have been still more

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

London, pro, 69/​4, fol. 165v, Sir John Mason to Sir William Petre, 4 August 1554, abbreviated version in csp Foreign (1553–​58), 247, pp. 111–​112. Sir John Mason to the Council, 26 August, 1554, csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 256; J. P. Cooper, ‘Sir Peter Carew’, odnb. David Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp.  35–​44; John Wagner, The Devon Gentleman:  Sir Peter Carew (Hull:  Hull University Press, 1998), pp. 209–​11. Dr Wotton to Queen Mary, 14 July 1554, csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 222; Carew to Queen Mary, 11 July, 1554, ibid., 243; Damula to the Doge and Senate, 2 September 1554, csp Venetian (1534–​1554), 944. ‘non sa come governarsi’, same to same, 28 August 1554, ibid., 941. Same to same, 2 September 1554, ibid., 944. John Hooker (otherwise John Vowell), The Life and Times of Sir Peter Carew, ed. J. Maclean (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857). Wagner, Devon Gentleman, p. 21. Vannes to the Council, 17 March 1554–​5, csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 339. Vannes to the Council, 14 September 1555, ibid., 414; Vannes to the Council, 30 November 1555, ibid., 439.

90 Chapter 4 anxious had he known that, during 1555, the Council had discussed his own recall. This was because, after Queen Mary’s marriage, the English government could save money by using the services of Imperial and Spanish diplomats.74 Most of the English exiles did not stay long in Venice. In the autumn of 1555, the first group, including Carew, Cheke and the Hoby brothers, left the Veneto; some were heading for Strassburg’s clear protestant air. They were replaced by a second wave of Englishmen, more aristocratic and more dangerous, led by Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford, followed by Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire; both were suspected of plotting against Queen Mary. Courtenay was of the blood royal on the Yorkist side and some saw him as an Alternative King, while others wanted him dead. Courtenay was said to be ‘molto dubioso’, very fearful, and assassins were already in the pay of Ruy Gómez, King Philip’s advisor.75 Foolishly, Courtenay risked a meeting with Russell in anti-​Habsburg Ferrara, duly reported by Vanni, who invited him to stay in his own ‘clean and simple house’.76 Courtenay did not take that bait, but nonetheless moved to Venice in April 1556. He arrived in time to enjoy the celebrations attending the visit of Bona Sforza, the dowager Queen of Poland.77 The anxious ambassador now faced State visits, vip’s with a grave security problem, and a series of anti-​government plots in England. Ambassador Vanni had to put his own loyalty and his own religion beyond doubt. It is in this context that we should view what is perhaps his best-​known comment, made at his official meeting in Padua with the Queen of Poland. He tried to kiss her hand but she would not let him: a bad start. Then they discussed the recent burning of Thomas Cranmer, ex-​Archbishop of Canterbury, which had taken place in Oxford a month before. In his report, Vanni said: In that point I did ripely answer that his [Cranmer’s] iniquity and obstinacy was so great against God and your Grace that your clemency and mercy could have no place with him but you were constrained to minister justice.78 74

75 76 77 78

Exact date unknown, but 1555, Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Reign of Mary I, 1553–​ 1558, revised, ed. C. S. Knighton (London: Public Record Office, 1998) [hereafter cspdm], 233; Giovanni Michiel to the Doge and Senate, 3 December 1555, csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 297; same to same, 22 September 1556, ibid., 627; Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (rev. edn., New York: Dover, 1988), p. 168, n.1. Federico Badoer, Venetian Ambassador to the Emperor to the Doge and Senate, 6 June 1555, csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 123, p. 99; Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 131–​135. Vannes to the Earl of Devon, 15 January 1556, cspdm, 304. Devon to Sir John Mason, 2 May 1556, ibid., 418. BL Harley MS 5009, fols 94r –​95r, Vannes to Queen Mary, 25 April 1556; MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 597.

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It is breathtaking –​given that he would have known Cranmer at Henry viii’s and Edward vi’s courts, and three years earlier he had been befriending reformers in Venice. Yet we should not miss the detail. Queen Buona Sforza had asked about Cranmer’s ‘opinions’; Vanni sidestepped the question, focusing on ‘his iniquity and obstinacy’. Obstinacy: Throckmorton used the same word; Sir John Mason wrote ‘Cranmer is burned standing obstinately in his opinions’.79 Harassed officials fixed on ‘obstinacy’ and avoided discussion of religious belief: it was another instance of deliberate evasion. The Queen of Poland left Venice, but Vanni’s worst problem remained: Edward Courtenay. His servants in London were arrested because they were suspected of plotting and he had further, perhaps treasonable, negotiations in Ferrara. Two months later he moved to nearby Padua. Two weeks after that, he was dead. We shall look more deeply into this murky affair in the next chapter. The Council in London enacted Vanni’s formal recall two days before Courtenay’s death; Vanni himself seems to have asked to be recalled shortly after it.80 Some argued that Courtenay had been murdered and that Vanni was probably implicated. Vanni’s gothic report of Courtenay’s death certainly reveals his determination to pose as perfectly catholic. On 18 September 1556, he wrote to Queen Mary: ‘The Earl of Devon died little more than an hour ago’. He recorded in detail Courtenay’s jolting journey from Venice to Padua, his illness and isolation, except for two doctors –​and, of course, Vanni, who rushed to the scene and made sure he stayed there.81 Vanni orchestrated a devout deathbed scene; once again he proved theatrically that he was a catholic servant of a catholic queen. In doing so, he opened himself to charges of nicodemism. When he returned to England in the autumn of 1556, he was not the trusted ambassador of yesteryear.82 A whiff of criticism came from Pole: the Cardinal Legate of England focussed on Vanni’s attempt to recover the office of the collectaria, the right to collect papal taxes in England which he had been given

79 80 81

82

Mason to Devon, 29 March 1556, cspdm, 342. The Council to the King, 16 September 1556, ibid., 492; Vanni’s request is lost but for Mason’s reply, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian, 49, fol. 200 (12 October 1556). Pietro Bizzarri, Senatus Populique Genuensis … annales (Antwerp:  Plantin, 1579), pp.  561–​62, cited by Massimo Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri esule italiano del cinquecento (Turin: Giappichelli, 1971), p. 35, note 60; Kenneth Bartlett, ‘ “The Misfortune that is wished for him”: The Exile and Death of Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon’, Canadian Journal of History, 16 (1979)[hereafter Bartlett, Misfortune], 1–​28 (esp. pp. 23–​4); Bartlett’s account is dramatic but not fully corroborated. Vannes to Queen Mary, 18 September 1556, csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 537. Giovanni Michieli to the Doge and Senate, 22 September 1556, csp Venetian (1555–​ 1556), 627.

92 Chapter 4 in July 1533, and then lost almost immediately because of Henry viii’s schism from the papacy. On 25 November 1554, with full reconciliation to the Catholic Church achieved a mere week earlier, Vanni argued that he should be allowed to collect these taxes once again.83 But he found out that Pole was critical of that request. In response Pole pointed out that he had done nothing to oppose Vanni officially, even though privately he did not agree with the reappointment: he said Vanni’s fall and weakness (caduta et mancamento) were especially serious because he was the pope’s minister when the schism began; he had used a religious office. Pole thought he should profit from the reconciliation in a different way; almost certainly the Cardinal envisaged spiritual profit.84 5 Conclusion The start of Elizabeth’s reign was the single time in the history of the English reformations when a significant number of churchmen took a principled stand by refusing to bend to the will of the government ‒ but not Vanni. He changed tack –​as nicodemites so often did, conforming to the new, protestant settlement and thereby retaining some of his valuable ecclesiastical livings. His exceptional age may have protected him from scrutiny. Despite his regular anxieties that serving the English government would ruin him, he died a rich and very old man. On the same day in July 1562, he made two wills, similar but not the same. There were personal bequests to his sisters, a bed to Alice, probably his mistress, and all his property in Lucca to ‘Benedict Hudson’ (her son and, in all likelihood, Vanni’s illegitimate son). Mason, who had mocked him behind his back, was made executor and was also a beneficiary. Vanni also made bequests to William Petre, including ‘a new black satin robe adorned with black velvet newly acquired from Venice’.85 These relationships had come as close to friendship as Vanni, always the stranger, had been able to manage. Mason had once been in Padua, a friend of Thomas Starkey and in those far off days he had been sympathetic to Thomas More; since then, on religious matters, ‘his silence became legendary’. Petre had shown conservative, probably catholic, sympathies, but we should not interpret Vanni’s religious position through theirs. By the time their generation grew old, there were different degrees of 83 84 85

Vannes to [Sir William Petre], 25 November 1554, csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 296. London, British Library, MS Harley 5009, fols. 131v–​133r; Pole to Vannes, 4 October 1555, crp 1391 (also csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 233). Sir John Mason to Peter Vannes, 29 June 1556, csp Foreign (1553–​58), 514; pro, prob 11/​46, fols. 161v–​162r; fol. 173r–​v, cited by L. E. Hunt, ‘Peter Vannes’, odnb.

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compromise with state religion. Nicodemism had become a way of life and most public servants found individual variations on this constant theme.86 Vanni’s ‘real’ religion, like Mason’s and Petre’s, remained safe behind a smoke screen of professional language and duties. Italians tried to see through that screen. During his last trial for heresy in Rome in March 1567, Pole’s friend, Pietro Carnesecchi said ‘But I maintain that he [Vanni] was a catholic even though it seemed that he tried sometimes to make it appear otherwise, for the sake of the dignity of his role as ambassador of a heretical prince like Edward’.87 There is another neglected but important Italian assessment. Endimio Calandra, once Cardinal Gonzaga’s secretary, testified before the Inquisition in Mantua in March 1568, and he listed several reformers he had known in Venice. He mentioned his ‘amicitia’ with ‘Pietro Vanes’: ‘I had never heard him talking of matters of religion, and I had the impression that he had his mind on completely different things.’ Calandra was co-​ operating with his inquisitors but he acknowledged only that Vanni had been suspected through ‘being ambassador of the country he was working for’.88 Both Carnesecchi and Calandra pinpointed his role and his duty to ruler and country. Ambassadors were indeed a special case; expected to be faithful. Richard Pate’s defection had caused such a stir because it flew in the face of that fundamental loyalty.89 Diplomats had to appear to believe whatever their monarch believed and their role compelled them to nicodemism. Vanni is especially relevant here because he had been an Italian serving four different English regimes, but his dilemma was similar to that of all Tudor agents and ambassadors. Catherine Fletcher notes how many Henrician diplomats ended up in Queen Mary’s service: ‘How many were loyal in spite of their convictions rather than because of them? … the trouble is that, with only occasional exceptions, they all told Henry [viii] what he wanted to hear’.90 Vanni had done that ‒ through four reigns. While he was relatively new to English politics, death had removed his patrons one by one: cousin Ammonio, then Wolsey and then 86 87 88

89 90

Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 234–​235, and quotation at pp. 464–​5; P. R. N. Carter, ‘Sir John Mason’, odnb; C. S. Knighton, ‘Sir William Petre’, odnb. ‘Ma questo tengo che fusse catholico, sibene per servare il decoro de l’ambasciatore d’un principe heretico come Odoardo pareva che sforzasse qualche volta di parere altrimenti’, Processi Carnesecchi, vol. 2/​3, pp. 1096–​7. ‘al quale non udi mai ragionar di cosa di religione, et mi pareva che pensasse in ogni altra cosa: nondimeno per essere ambasciatore di chi era, era tenuto sospetto.’, Il processo di Endimio Calandra e l’Inquisizione a Mantova, 1567–​68, ed. Sergio Pagano (Città del Vaticano: Bibiloteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1991), p. 249 and p. 266, note 23. Sowerby, ‘Richard Pate’, p. 282. Fletcher, Our Man in Rome, p. 219.

94 Chapter 4 Cromwell. Experience of Henry viii’s embassies was formative. As ambassador after 1550, his post had a representative character; he had to represent the monarch’s position if he was to do his job properly. In 1553, when there was religious revolution in London, Vanni did not press for a recall; on the contrary, he did everything he knew to keep his post. Venice, however, was a catholic place where the slightest mis-​step might be communicated to the catholic Marian government in London: therefore Vanni’s most pronounced phase of theatrical nicodemism was at that time. His long life ended before Renaissance priorities –​putting the service of the sovereign first ‒ were seriously questioned. Twenty-​five years after Vanni’s death, another Italian, Alberico Gentili, a protestant exile in England, thought that capital punishment was appropriate for ambassadors who were not loyal to their sovereign, yet he also argued that, in the conflict between conscience and loyalty: ‘no ambassador should be so mad as to prefer to sin’. Pietro Vanni faced this dilemma for much of his life, and Gentili’s purist vision of the ambassador ‘as he ought to be’ came too late to trouble him.91 According to some social psychologists, the experience of conflicting values provokes a state of tension, which we struggle to reduce: that process is known as cognitive dissonance reduction.92 The pattern –​inner conflict, uncertainty, tension, adjustment –​is clear in the copious correspondence of Pietro Vanni. He knew conflict, as he pleaded with a dithering pope to stop irritating his dangerous King in 1529; and again in the summer of 1553, as he welcomed a catholic Queen, but still called the pope ‘bishop of Rome’.93 Sir John Mason, a fellow ambassador, said that the Italian had a ‘timorous’ nature, that he had seen him weep from fear. Contemplating the arrival in Venice of the bluff protestant Peter Carew, Vanni did not know what to do or how to behave.94 He was a conflicted, fearful man. Possibly he reduced his ‘dissonance’ by believing in his own dissimulations. His history reveals something more complex than just an opportunist who lacked ‘moral sense’.95 From the start, he was compromised by being an Italian working for English governments. Then, for him, as for Pole and many others, the diplomacy associated with Henry viii’s divorce provided an apprenticeship 91

92 93 94 95

Alberico Gentili, De legationibus, libri tres (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1585), stc 11737, p. 125; Diego Pirillo, ‘Tasso at the French Embassy. Epic, Diplomacy and the Law of Nations’, in Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter, eds, Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 135–​153, at pp. 146–​7. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, ill: Row, Peterson, 1957). csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 32. csp Venetian (1534–​1554), 28 August 1554, 941; ibid., 19 August 1554, 936. Parmiter, The King’s Great Matter, p. 80, n.2.

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in deceit. In Edward vi’s reign he appears to have been drawn to Italian reformers –​to Niccolò Diodati and Guido Giannetti. And then he was made English ‘protestant’ ambassador to devoutly catholic, but not very papal, Venice, a place of compromise if ever there was one. Ambassadors ‘just doing their job’ were not found reading and recommending reformation books, as Donzellini had found Vanni: nor did they impress heterodox writers like Ortensio Lando, nor take in fugitive reformers, as Vanni had sheltered Donzellini in 1553. If Vanni was a just a diplomat doing his job by playing reformer, he staged some very convincing scenes. Likewise, after Mary Tudor’s succession, he changed sides as he was expected to do; he appeared to believe what was required and then constructed more drama, hotly defending the burning of Cranmer and spending time and ink describing his stage-​management of Courtenay’s ultra-​ Catholic deathbed. He was a special kind of nicodemite, so timorous that his volte-​faces had to be theatrical.

CHAPTER 5

Nicodemite’s Progress: Edward Courtenay this breve and godly treatise following written bj a famous clerk in the Italionne, the understanding whereof as I  have bi my noune studie acheved.1 Edward Courtenay’s dedication of his translation of Il Beneficio di Cristo (1548)

∵ Edward Courtenay represented a new generation of nicodemites. He was born in 1526, at a time when Pole was intending to serve Henry viii and Pietro Vanni was already establishing himself in England and at court. Courtenay had just as much reason to be fearful of Tudor monarchs as they did: more, in fact, because of his strong claim to the English throne. Yet he was not a typical nicodemite, as constructed by the polemicists. Calvin had implied that ‘Messieurs les Nicodemites’ were below the aristocracy; flirtatious humanist courtiers; possibly hair-​splitting lawyers or intellectuals or clergymen, but definitely not noble. The danger of wrecking relations with the nobility was all too obvious. Nobles and aristocrats, however, had special reasons to deceive. Like diplomats, they were expected to follow the religion of their monarch and were exposed to royal displeasure; they were tempted and vulnerable. If there was ‘diplomatic nicodemism’ of the sort practised by Vanni, there was also another kind enforced on nobles and courtiers. This chapter will examine the situation of Edward Courtenay, sometimes seen as the Yorkist alternative to the Tudors,

I am grateful to Taylor and Francis Group for permission to use parts of previous work published as ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy: Edward Courtenay, 1548–​1556’, in David Loades, ed., John Foxe at Home and Abroad (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 117–​135; also to Jonathan Woolfson and Palgrave Macmillan for their permission for re-​use of parts of my ‘Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo, 1547–​1553’, in Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 151–​174. 1 Cambridge, University Library [hereafter cul] MS Nn. 4. 43, ‘A treatice most profitable of the benefitt that christianes receyve by the dethe of Jesus Christ’, 1548.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_​0 07

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cousin of the King –​and, ironically, of Reginald Pole too. Courtenay’s father, the Marquis of Exeter, was executed in 1538, because he was seen as a focus for rebellion, especially in the catholic West Country. Henry viii kept the child Edward Courtenay in prison for the same reason. When Edward vi became king, Courtenay was one of four prisoners regarded as too dangerous for inclusion in the general pardon of 1547. 1

The Prisoner Courtenay in Edward vi’s Reign

His temptation to dissimulate was all the greater because he was desperate to get out of prison. He was ‘poorly and strictly kept’ as a teenager, but his mother Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, was allowed to employ tutors for him in 1541.2 In 1548 he tried to attract the attention of the court by sending a translation of the classic Italian text Il Beneficio di Cristo. Courtenay’s dedication of the work to Anne, Duchess of Somerset played on the sympathies of the young King Edward vi’s court. He wanted her have him released from his ‘miserable captivite’ where he had been since 1538 when he was twelve or thirteen. He had been shut up, he says, ‘from such of whom and bi whose godlie conversation I should or mought have conceived or lernid annj either godliness or civilite’. ‘Civilitie’ is a word that crops up often in this period. Associated with cultivation and sophistication –​personal, social and political ‒ it was a notion much promoted by humanists, whilst ‘godliness’ accounts for the other, more distinctly religious, part of the Edwardian court’s programme. Courtenay says that, as a prisoner, he has been ‘destitute of all good lerning and experience’ and is ‘abashed to speak or write to annj man’. But he is persuaded that the duchess will accept ‘whatsoever is unfeignedlie and from a careful mind written or spoken’. He wants a place in the duke’s household where ‘godliness and civilitie is continually exercised’. These were humanist words, likely to strike all the right notes at this court, where he thought he rightfully belonged.3 The young King Edward vi inserted two brief autographs on the manuscript of Courtenay’s translation. The first is a quotation from the Epistle of St James:  ‘Faith is dede if it be without workes, your loving neveu, Edward’.

2 LP, 16, 1011. In 1546 he was ‘sick in the Tower of London’, LP, 21/​2, 775. Nicholas Udall became his tutor in 1549, Matthew Steggle, ‘Nicholas Udall ’, odnb. 3 cul Nn. 4.43, ‘A treatice most profitable of the benefitt that true christianes receyve’, Courtenay’s Dedication to the Duchess of Somerset, f. 1v–​ 4v at f. 2r.

98 Chapter 5 The second is:  ‘Live to die and die to live again. Youer neveu, Edward’.4 The child-​king’s aphorisms seem to highlight good works in the process of salvation, rather than faith alone, which was the Beneficio’s dominant theme. He had not quite grasped the book’s message. Edward Courtenay, evaded the controversy about salvation altogether. He wrote, possibly with someone guiding his pen: ‘this litle boke most playnely declarethe and settithe out’ … ‘Christ’s glory’: that was bland, incontrovertible, nicodemite.5 When he was released twelve years later, his humanist cousin Reginald Pole noted with pleasure that Courtenay had continued his studies during his imprisonment.6 When Courtenay died in 1556, Thomas Wilson’s funeral oration (in Padua) pointed to his skills in mathematics, painting and music and his knowledge of the Spanish, French and Italian languages.7 They were over-​ stating his learning, but the humanist study Wilson tried to emphasise certainly played some part in Courtenay’s life and, connected to that, was his interest in Italy and, later, his wish to travel there. In the late 1540s, the court of Edward vi, the ‘young Josiah’, was one of the few places in Europe where the gospel seemed safe and dissimulation unnecessary for evangelical reformers.8 But it was not shut off from the religious strife and migrations of the European reformation. In December 1547, the year before Courtenay presented his Beneficio translation, Bernardino Ochino and Pietro Martire Vermigli arrived at the invitation of Thomas Cranmer and, after them, a flurry of arrivals of exiles and their texts. Other Italians were at court: Pietro Vanni, the King’s Latin secretary, wearing his ‘reformer’ hat, would in all likelihood have known about il Beneficio, through his contacts in his native Lucca, that city republic so deeply ‘infected’ by reformation. His friend, Guido Giannetti da Fano, was at the English court too, trying to impress the young king; Giannetti was already a known smuggler of banned books. Between 1543 and 1545, he had been reported for lending out the Beneficio and later an Inquisition witness described his activities on the Beneficio’s black-​market.9 Another 4 5 6 7 8 9

For Edward vi’s godly education, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward vi and the Protestant Reformation (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999), pp. 23–​38; cul MS Nn 4.43, ff. 4v and 92r. Ibid., f. 3r. crp 720; Mayer, Pole, pp. 206–​7. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 3/​1, p.  550; 3/​2, pp.  420–​427 (at pp.  422 and 425), and ‘Catalogue of Originals’, 57; csp Spanish (1553), p. 114. Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Dario Marcatto, “Questo passo dell’heresia”; Pietrantonio di Capua tra valdesiani, spirituali e Inquisizione (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2003); Aldo Stella, Dall’anabattismo al socinianesimo

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reformer, Gian Battista Castiglione, was teaching Italian to the Princess Elizabeth and may have been teaching Courtenay in prison as well. At court, these Italians were lauded as religious exiles, patterns of Christian witness, no one seems to have considered that they might have concealed their evangelical faith for a time before leaving Italy. In London, they tried to make sure they satisfied the religious requirements of England’s radical reformation.10 Any one of them could have brought the Beneficio di Cristo to England. Reginald Pole may seem to be the most obvious supplier of the book to his young cousin Courtenay; after all, the text had been revised by Pole’s friends, in Pole’s household.11 But by 1548 catholic criticism of the book’s theology was fierce and widespread and, in the following year, the work appeared on Giovanni della Casa’s Venetian Index of Forbidden books.12 It is unlikely that Pole sent the text to Courtenay. By 1547–​8 the risk was too great. Courtenay’s own religious allegiance is hard to fathom, though he often used religious language. Was he catholic, like his West Country family; or a spirituale catholic, like cousin Pole? Or was he a humanist protestant –​which might account for his translation of il Beneficio di Cristo.13 Was he an ‘English’ Catholic, like his mentor in prison the traditionalist Henrician Bishop Stephen Gardiner? Or was Courtenay a nicodemite ‒ frightened and bending to the winds of change? Courtenay grew up tempted to pretend, because of the pace of Tudor religious reform, his own isolation and his consequent confusion. That temptation was increased by his patchy superficial humanist education, with its fondness for irony and occasionally for ‘holy cunning’. Sir Thomas Wilson who preached his funeral oration in Padua in 1556 said ‘he placed his chief good in virtue’, made much of his languages and his humanism and avoided comment about Courtenay’s faith. Strype followed Wilson: ‘He was a man of great piety’ but he did not say what sort.14

10 11 12 13

14

nel Cinquecento veneto (Padua: Liviana, 1967), p. 31, note 80; Stella, ‘Guido da Fano; eretico del secolo XVI al servizio dei re d’Inghilterra’, Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, 13 (1959), 196–​238, at 209; Processo Morone, 6, p. 304. Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 46–​48, 110–​112. See above, Chapter 3, pp. 59 and 65. Rozzo and Seidel Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, p. 323; Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 26, p. 242. For Courtenay’s translation, see Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 156–​206; see below, Chapter 6. On humanist protestants, see M. Anne Overell, ‘Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo, 1547–​1553’, in Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 151–​173. On humanist catholics, see Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials relating chiefly to Religion, 6 vols in 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), 3/​1, p. 550; ibid., 3/​2, pp. 420–​427 (at p. 426)

100 Chapter 5 Modern commentators, however, do not evade the issue of nicodemism. Elton thought him ‘far from reliable in religion’. Kenneth Bartlett, in his study of Courtenay’s exile and suspicious death, points to his ‘facile religion’, ‘dependent on his immediate circumstances’ and ‘coloured with the stigma of Nicodemism.’15 William Harwood thought that Courtenay remained at heart a catholic but went in for ‘conspicuous conformity’ ‒ which makes him sound very much like Pietro Vanni.16 Between them, they suggest that his religious position was complicated and shrouded in nicodemism. His own brief and inelegant letters raise the usual Renaissance problem: he is representing himself, ‘self-fashioning’. He corrects and deletes and his meaning is often very obscure. Courtenay was not rewarded for his translation of Il Beneficio by being given his freedom and, a year later, he tried unsuccessfully to break prison. Most sources suggest that Courtenay’s friendship with Stephen Gardiner was one of the few relationships in his miserable life in which there was mutual affection.17 ‘Courtenay is Gardiner’s creature’, wrote the Spanish ambassador.18 Courtenay referred to Gardiner as his ‘father’. The friendship suggests that even in prison in Edward’s reign, Courtenay was catholic enough to satisfy his traditionalist mentor –​or nicodemite enough to make even the shrewd Gardiner uncertain.19 As the young Edward vi became very ill, they suffered together the rapid twists of fortune in the summer of 1553. Amidst preparations to make Lady Jane Grey the new and protestant Queen, it was feared they might become leaders of a catholic take-​over. In July they faced an order from the Duke of Northumberland to prepare for death.

15

16 17 18 19

Geoffrey R. Elton, Reform and Reformation England, 1509–​1558 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 279–​280; idem, England under the Tudors (London: Methuen, 1955), p. 215, cited in Kenneth Bartlett, ‘ “The Misfortune that is wished for him”: the Exile and Death of Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon’, Canadian Journal of History 16 (1979), 1–​28, at p. 4, see also pp. 3 and 12; Kenneth Bartlett, The English in Italy (Geneva: Slatkine, 1991), p. 68. William Harwood, ‘The Courtenay family in the politics of the region and the nation in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ (University of Cambridge, PhD), 1978, pp. 245 and 248. Horatia Durant, Sorrowful Captives:  The Tudor Earls of Devon (Pontypool:  Hughes, 1960), p. 72. Devon to Sir John Mason, 20 November 1555, cspdm, 277, p. 135. Glyn Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic:  A Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 298.

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101

Released by Queen Mary

In the same month, however, the catholic Queen Mary triumphed and ordered that Courtenay and Gardiner should be released from the Tower, greeting them with the words, ‘theis are my prisoners’.20 At last, at twenty-​seven, Courtenay had his big chance –​but he wrecked it. Mary, like most, regarded him as one of the western connection and therefore a catholic. She restored him to his Earldom of Devon; his mother was one of her chief ladies-​in-​waiting; Gardiner became the queen’s chief adviser and Lord Chancellor. Courtenay’s perks were a house in London and induction to the manners of the court. He needed patronage and it was being offered. Nevertheless the Emperor wrote to his ambassador: ‘no well founded reliance can be placed on him [Courtenay]in matters of religion and his firm adherence to it, as rumour has it that he was half seduced [to protestantism] in prison’.21 The French ambassador claimed that Courtenay had offended the Queen by consorting with prostitutes:  ‘femmes publicques e de mauvaise vie’.22 Nonetheless, in the streets of Marian London, Courtenay acted the catholic zealot and interrogated would-​be servants to check that they were good catholics.23 This harmonises with his comments about loyalty two years later: in 1556, when he was under pressure about the disproportionate number of his servants suspected of plotting, his line of defence was that they were known to be catholics, and therefore could not possibly be plotters.24 Then he became involved in the plots of the winter of 1553–​1554. The details are not relevant here but some events throw light on Courtenay’s tangled deceptions and confusion.25 There were conspiracies in the West, led by Sir Peter Carew, a distant cousin of Courtenay; in the Midlands, led by the Duke of Suffolk; in Kent, led by Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger. Courtenay certainly knew of the preparations in the West, but, in January 1554, Gardiner made his protégé divulge enough information to stop the rising in the West Country from materialising.26 In February, Courtenay was arrested and sent to the 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

A Chronicle of Queen Jane and Two Years of Queen Mary, ed. John Gough Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1850), p. 14. Emperor to Renard, 20 September 1553, csp Spanish (1553), p. 245. René Aubert de Vertot, Ambassades de Messieurs de Noailles en Angleterre, 5 vols (Leiden: Dessaint & Saillant, 1763), 2, 216 and 219; csp Spanish (1553), p. 202. csp Spanish (1553), p. 242. Devon to Mason, 18 April 1556, cspdm, 383. David Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). E. Harris Harbison, Rival Ambassadors at the Court of Queen Mary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), p. 126.

102 Chapter 5 Tower. In March Carew’s cipher was found carved in Courtenay’s guitar: a truly humanist hiding place.27 These plots were not about religion according to several modern historians, who stress instead the disaffection caused by Queen Mary’s Spanish marriage to Philip ii of Spain and fears of a catholic succession.28 Courtenay himself, however, defined the issues in religious terms and did so persistently. The rebels’ main platform seems to have been that Elizabeth should be married to Courtenay and that together they should succeed. Yet the Spanish ambassador, reported insistently Courtenay’s own rejection of the idea that he should marry Elizabeth –​because she was ‘a heretic, too proud and of too doubtful lineage on her mother’s side’. To call Elizabeth a heretic and engage with plotters who wanted to put her, and possibly him, on the throne, was double-​dealing.29 That winter he was in conversation with Sir Peter Carew, Sir Francis Russell, Sir Philip Hoby, Sir Richard Morison –​all of them were known as protestants, even though some were temporarily collaborating with Mary’s government.30 In January 1554, when Courtenay was told of a project to send him to accompany Pole on his journey to England, he was said to have replied: ‘Yes and defend him against all heretics’; a model answer.31 The Imperial ambassador, Renard, thought his confusions had gone too far: ‘I shall discreetly urge that he be executed’.32 Death was the Habsburg solution to the problem of Edward Courtenay and his nicodemite capacity to play for both sides. But for the time being, his sentence for his involvement in conspiracies was a further imprisonment which lasted for

27 28

29 30

31 32

csp Spanish (January –​July, 1554), p. 139. For instance, ‘Their religious affiliations were shadowy’, Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies, p. 16. For a different view, see Penry Williams, ‘Although the restoration of Protestantism was not the principal motive, several leaders had reforming views, and the only planned rising to gather momentum was in a county where Protestantism was strong’, The Later Tudors: England 1547–​1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 96. csp Spanish (1553), p. 292; Durant, Sorrowful Captives, p 83; Gardiner was said to have advised Courtenay to marry the vilest woman in England rather than the Queen’s heretical sister, csp Spanish (1553), p. 472. For Morison and Hoby’s visit to Courtenay in the autumn of 1553, see Harbison, Rival Ambassadors, pp. 96–​8; Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies, pp. 72–​73. Durant makes Courtenay’s contribution sound nobler than the sources warrant, Sorrowful Captives, p. 91; at first Wyatt incriminated Courtenay but said on the scaffold that he was not involved, Chronicle of Queen Jane and Two Years of Queen Mary, p. 68; Bartlett, ‘ “Misfortune” ’, pp. 5–​6. Renard to the Emperor, 23 January 1554, csp Spanish (January–​July 1554), p. 42; Durant, Sorrowful Captives, p. 89. csp Spanish (January –​July 1554), p. 230; ibid., p. 187.

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fourteen months: that made sixteen years in all, well over half his life.33 He was released, once again, in the spring of 1555. If diplomats and clergy were tempted to conceal, so were long-​term prisoners. That experience should be borne in mind when we consider the later twists and turns of his life: unlike many Marian nicodemites he had already experienced the bitter results of royal displeasure. 3

Prisoner at the Imperial Court?

After a slender fortnight’s real freedom in London, in May 1555 he was sent to what was effectively another prison –​the imperial court at Brussels –​to polish him, it was said. Probably it was to make sure that the Alternative King was safely out of the country because it was thought that the Queen was to produce an heir. On his arrival at Calais, Courtenay sent several short but ingratiating letters telling Queen Mary how kind she had been to him.34 News that Mary’s pregnancy was false changed everything. Without a Habsburg heir, Elizabeth and Courtenay became the embodiment of all that the imperial party dreaded. Courtenay wanted to move on to Italy: he was immensely keen on this project but, for the time being, it suited the Habsburgs to keep him in the stifling atmosphere of the Emperor’s court in Brussels.35 There he was surrounded by catholic influences: the Bishop of Arras took him to Mass, the Lucchese banker Antonio Bonvisi, ‘that fautor of all good Catholic men’, friend of Pole and Throckmorton, was recommended to him.36 An excitable correspondent told Courtenay that Pole would again be a candidate for the papacy: ‘It will be good for you to have your kinsman at Rome’.37 James Bassett, a gentleman of Mary’s court, was also acting as Courtenay’s chief advisor and agent. Courtenay was being ensnared in a catholic net in case he became the emblem of further conspiracy and rebellion. He had moved from being viewd as a figurehead of catholic disaffection in Edward’s reign to being the focus of possible protestant plots. His mother expressed her fears for him and he became tired of playing courtier. Sarcasm was an outlet for his frustration: ‘I am become so in love with

33 34 35 36 37

This imprisonment lasted from 12 February 1554 until 8 April 1555. He was removed from the Tower to Fotheringay on 25 May 1554, Durant, Sorrowful Captives, pp. 93–​94. For instance, Devon to the Queen, cspdm, 172. Ibid., 67. John Story to Courtenay, 17 June 1555, ibid., 137. Thomas Martyn to Devon, 31 May 1555, ibid., 182.

104 Chapter 5 waiting [at court] that I am not satisfied if I am not there once or twice a day’.38 On 6 July 1555, Federico Badoer, Venetian ambassador to the Imperial court, made an astute observation: ‘I perceive he is in great fear (‘molto dubioso’) for his life and thinks of nothing but preserving it, but without evincing the Emperor’s suspicions’.39 ‘Molto dubioso’, fearful, timorous … Edward Courtenay and Pietro Vanni had similar problems. Attacks on his household from unruly bands of Spanish soldiers became steadily more serious until the Spanish ‘varlets’ gained entry to his own chamber which ‘pained him beyond measure’. Badoer said Courtenay had told a confidante that this was all a set-​up to ensure that ‘he himself may at length encounter the misfortune that is wished for him’.40 And he was right. There is reliable evidence in the Venetian archive that, as early as August 1555 –​just over a year before Courtenay’s death –​Ruy Gomez, Philip’s closest adviser, was paying assassins to carry out their task.41 Given the seriousness of his situation, there is bathos in Courtenay’s ineradicable longing for life’s small pleasures; a decent horse, ‘a cittern’, ‘good black velvet for a long, straight nightgown’, ‘spoons of the best fashion and forks with some pretty thing on top’.42 He was of the stuff from which nicodemites, not martyrs, are made. 4

Freedom and Nicodemite Letters

For months he had been angling to be let out of his courtly prison in Brussels and go to Italy. This ambition was openly acknowledged ‘to this suit [to be allowed to travel to Italy] time persuades me and extreme necessity enforces me’.43 By this time several other Englishmen were heading in the same direction, towards the Veneto, notably John Cheke; most of them were protestants, heading for an ambiguous exile in a catholic country.44 In October 1555, Courtenay was released from his stifling confinement in Brussels and given his longed-​for permission to travel, but first he went to Louvain. There he had arranged to meet two known conspirators against Queen 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Devon to Bassett, 11 October 1555, cspdm, 236. His mother was fearful for him, cspdm, 215 and 237. Badoer to the Doge, 6 June 1555, csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 123. In all, there were four attacks; Badoer to the Doge, 4 August 1555, ibid., 173. Deposition of Marco da Risano, ibid., 328. Devon to Sir Thomas Gresham, 1 July 1555 and 25 July 1555, cspdm, 198 and 209. csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 67, 77, 84; Devon to James Bassett, 29 May 1555, cspdm, 181. On this ‘nicodemite exile’, see Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 125–​144.

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Mary’s regime:  Philip Hoby, who meant to come but never made it, and Sir Peter Carew. Hoby was a protestant and Courtenay thought Carew was of the same persuasion. They were all plotting something. The letters they exchanged are full of veiled allusions –​but they are also the best evidence we have about Courtenay’s religious allegiance and, as such, are worth study. But problems of reliability of evidence come into play. We do not know how much was sincere and how much was written in expectation that letters would be intercepted by postmasters or spies (Vanni among them). Hoby’s letter about Gardiner’s death begins the exchange. He sent Courtenay ‘good wishes for the safety of your person and, as for your Lordship’s religion, I will not meddle therewith.’ So Hoby thought that Courtenay’s ‘person’ might not be safe and he may have been testing to see if Gardiner’s death would finally cut the last of Courtenay’s links with catholicism. If so, he was unlucky. Courtenay’s cryptic reply says he will pray for Gardiner’s soul, not a protestant phrase. He continues: And touching my religion, I pray God yours be, or at least wise maybe, such as mine, for your good conformity wherein you have, of him [Gardiner], lost a good schoolmaster. But since I doubt not you shall find such whose hot and burning charity will help instruct you, I repose myself in that behalf well satisfied.45 Hot and burning charity? He wrote in November 1555, when Marian executions by burning were under way: perhaps Courtenay was capable of irony.46 Then he actually met Carew. In a letter sent to William Petre, he claimed he was playing the religious prefect and having a good influence on Carew, the erstwhile plotter, whom Courtenay found ‘ready to serve the king and queen’. ‘Touching his [Carew’s] conscience led by his religion’, Courtenay claimed there was more influencing still to be done, despite the good effect he, as a virtuous catholic, had achieved.47 Reginald Pole, appeared to be watching his cousin’s travels anxiously and he was not taken in by this pious mouthing. He wrote of concerns about the bad company Courtenay was keeping.48 So three things emerge; first Courtenay was willing to meet Carew, second he thought him a protestant and, third, Courtenay was also playing to the catholic gallery. 45 46 47 48

Hoby to Courtenay, 20 November 1555, csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 284; Courtenay to Hoby, 21 November 1555, ibid., 285. tamo, Essays, Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Foxe’s Marian Martyrs –​a chronological table’. Courtenay to Petre, 23 November 1555, cspdm, 281. Pole to Archbishop Conza, 27 November 1555, csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 292.

106 Chapter 5 In December there were yet more exchanges between Courtenay and Philip Hoby about Peter Carew’s religion. By this time, Carew had secured his own pardon, possibly by agreeing to assist in the kidnapping of Sir John Cheke.49 A thick fog gathered round the whole affair as on 30 December 1555, Courtenay, a dissembler, wrote to urge Hoby, described as ‘one of the craftiest heretics in England’, to convert Peter Carew, a double dealer.50 The manuscript is much corrected and the passages deleted are the most significant. Courtenay instructs Hoby to work on the Carews, Sir Peter and his loyal wife: to make them at least as Catholic as you are; but what should I write to you whose soul is spotted I fear with late spots? [then a second, separate deletion follows] If you will, work with my lady in remembrance to work with him day and night. I would you were such as might persuade him to be perfectly Catholic but both of you being stained with the like spot, I will pray for you both. The undeleted passage is less incriminating, it reads:  ‘Salute … Sir Peter Carew and his lady … whom I pray may become a good catholic, as I do also for you’. The manuscript appears to be a genuine original as sent and is signed by Courtenay himself; it is staccato, difficult to fathom. Why choose Hoby, a known protestant, as Carew’s catechist? More important, why keep up with such dangerous acquaintances at all?51 It is probably a smoke screen written in anticipation that the mail would be subject to scrutiny. But the very existence of this correspondence shows that Courtenay wanted to keep in touch with protestants whilst trying to make sure that the English government thought him catholic. 5

In Unsafe Italian Cities

In January, the final act of this nicodemite’s progress began. It all took place in the cities of the spirituali, on the Mantua –​Ferrara –​Padua –​Venice circuit, regularly travelled by Italians contemplating exile and by Englishmen in search

49 50 51

By then, Courtenay was in Augsburg and Hoby and Carew were in Louvain; J.P.D. Cooper, ‘Sir Peter Carew’, odnb. Harbison, Rival Ambassadors, p. 174. Devon to Sir Philip Hoby, 30 December 1555, cspdm, 298. I am indebted to Dr C. S. Knighton for his advice on these letters.

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of Italian culture and language; this was not a place of safety in 1556.52 It was the seedbed of the Italian reform, and often of resistance to the Habsburgs. Pro-​French Ferrara appears to have been one of the bases for the interrelated plots against Mary Tudor known for short as ‘Dudley’s conspiracy’. Venice and Padua formed the Italian sub-​station for exiles from Marian England: it used to be regarded as the ‘political exile’.53 Sir Francis Russell, Philip and Thomas Hoby, John Cheke and Thomas Wilson, who were all protestants, had been there before Courtenay arrived, as had that ubiquitous duo Peter Carew and the plotter-​cum-​pirate, Henry Killigrew.54 Mary’s government, aware that Edward Courtenay was going to a colony of disaffected Englishmen, asked for an undertaking that he would not make contact with Russell whilst he was there. The Venetian government allowed him to carry arms and have more servants. Danger and fear seemed to be in the air.55 Exceptionally for a nobleman he enrolled as a law student at Padua.56 He does not appear to have been a very serious student but the University provided a cover and a base and, as we have seen, Courtenay had humanist interests. During his stay in the north if Italy, he visited at least four places: Verona, Venice, Padua, and Ferrara. Ferrara was extremely dangerous, usually pro-​French, it became the main place for secret meetings with plotters against Mary’s government. In Venice, Courtenay had a chance to relax and view the celebrations in preparation for the ceremonial visit of the Queen of Poland. In Venice he was under the obsessive surveillance of Vanni, as we saw in the last chapter.

52

53

54

55 56

Kenneth Bartlett, ‘The English exile community in Italy and the political opposition to Queen Mary 1’, Albion, 13 (1981), 223–​241, but Bartlett exaggerates the political involvement of some exiles, especially John Cheke, see McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, pp. 186, 193–​5, 199. P. W. Hasler, ‘The Role of the Marian Exiles’ in P. W. Hasler, ed., The House of Commons, 1558–​1603, 3 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1981), 1, Appendix xi, pp. 102–​ 110; Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 125–​144; Kenneth Bartlett, The English in Italy, 1525–​1558: A Study in Culture and Politics (Geneva: Slatkine, 1991), pp. 131–​163; Jennifer Loach, ‘Pamphlets and Politics: 1553–​8’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 48 (1975), 31–​44, at p. 32. See Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors, ‘Biographical Register’, passim: Thomas Hoby, The travels and life of Thomas Hoby written by himself, ed. Edgar Powell, Camden Miscellany, volume 10 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1902); John F. McDiarmid, ‘John Cheke’s Preface to De Superstitione’, JEH 48 (1997), 100–​120; J. P. D. Cooper, ‘Sir Peter Carew’, odnb; Amos C. Miller, Sir Henry Killigrew, Elizabethan Soldier and Diplomat (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1963). csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 73; csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 385, 386. Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors, pp. 17 and 121; Bartlett, ‘Misfortune’, p. 18, n.103.

108 Chapter 5 Also, all the posts (so apt to go astray) were directed through Vanni. In January 1555, he also tried to get Courtenay to stay with him in Venice.57 Courtenay had another invitation; it came from someone better at nicodemite games than he was. Michael Throckmorton, Pole’s agent and friend, was also very loyal to Courtenay’s catholic mother. He invited Courtenay to his house in Mantua: ‘no man would be gladder to see you than I’, he wrote.58 None of these cities was safe for the Alternative King of England, but Courtenay would have been safer in Mantua, where the authorities thought so well of Throckmorton.59 He and Courtenay had already met at Verona in March, and there were suggestions that posts had been mislaid; intercepts and spies were probably suspected. Courtenay wrote more than once to say that he would come to stay soon and recorded devoutly his cousin Pole’s coming ordination and first mass (in preparation for consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury).60 It is impossible to tell whether this was one of the flashes of fervent piety to which nicodemites were often subject, or another smoke screen. But he never went to stay with Throckmorton. He chose to live dangerously in Ferrara instead, and was there by 21 March. His letter to Sir John Mason, who was in Brussells and acting as master of posts, resembles a holiday-​maker’s postcard. Courtenay said he had delivered royal letters to the duke, driven in coaches by the waterside and, all in all, had a fascinating three-​day visit.61 But the Venetian ambassador thought there was conspiracy afoot. Other Englishmen there at the time were certainly plotters: Nicholas Tremayne, Sir John Chichester and Francis Russell, but when Courtenay left Ferrara, he still had not made a definite commitment to the rebels.62 The inter-​related plots in England, France and Ferrara are sometimes known by the shorthand ‘Dudley’s conspiracy’ and whilst Courtenay was in 57

58 59 60 61 62

Peter Vannes to Devon at Padua, 15 January 1555, cspdm, 308; Bartlett, English in Italy, p. 195; Christina Garrett, The Marian Exiles, The Marian Exiles; a Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1938, repr. 1966), pp. 105–​108. Michael Throckmorton to Devon, 14 June 1555, cspdm, 193; Courtenay acknowledged another letter of invitation, now lost, dated 31 January 1556, Devon to Throckmorton, 13 March 1556, ibid., 320. Mantua, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Gonzaga, busta 578, fol. 169r, Aloisio Schivenoglia to the Duke of Mantua, 17 August 1557; see above Chapter 2. Devon to Michael Throckmorton, 13 March 1556, cspdm, 320, written partly to discuss an unpaid debt; Throckmorton had loaned him £100. For Courtenay’s lavish lifestyle, see Bartlett, English in Italy, p. 141. Devon to Sir John Mason, 29 March 1556, cspdm, 343. For Courtenay’s ultra-​careful wording of this letter, see Bartlett, ‘ “Misfortune” ’, p. 20, note 115. csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 434, 440; csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 219.

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Ferrara, the English government became aware of the activities of the plotters in England. Therefore, on his return to Venice, Courtenay learned that several of his servants in England had been arrested, suspected of complicity.63 When he heard that his man, John Walker, was in prison for involvement, his retort was couched in religious terms as usual: ‘he is well known to be catholic’.64 All his geese were catholic swans. His servant in England, Edmund Tremayne, also fled suddenly.65 Courtenay prevaricated, ‘For Tremayne’s foolish departing, I am very sorry but also content, as he shall perceive’; it was obscure, unfathomable. 6

The Final Act

The Queen of Poland’s visit to Venice had made Ambassador Vanni very nervous, but for Courtenay this grand occasion provided a brief escape from complications. He recorded the festivities: the bucintoro, the ‘fairest gentlewomen’, and the dancing which was ‘a pleasure to behold’.66 Then he took his most incriminating step. He went back to Ferrara in late May. He did not need to. He had already delivered his official letters; he had done what was required of him. Later, the English government examined one Martin Dore who claimed that, in Ferrara, Henry Killigrew, one of the rebels acting as representative of the French king, offered Courtenay a large bribe to go to France join those plotting against Queen Mary. Courtenay is said to have replied that ‘it was not for him to enter any King’s realm upon any subject’s promise’.67 Dore’s evidence is not safe, but that phraseology sounds like Courtenay; conscious of his royal blood and ducking commitment.

63 64

65 66 67

For ‘Dudley’s Conspiracy’, see Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies, pp.  176–​217, especially p. 207. Devon to Mason, 18 April 1556, cspdm, 383; Walker subsequently confessed to having sold some of Courtenay’s land to raise money for the plotters. A former servant of Courtenay’s, William Staunton, was arrested as a principal conspirator, csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 448. By May 1556, the Italian exile in London, Gian Battista Castiglione, tutor to the Princess Elizabeth, who may have been Courtenay’s Italian tutor, was also arrested, cspdm, 456; Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 85, 96, 141. Mason to Devon, 19 April 1555, cspdm, 384. Devon to Mason, 2 May 1556, ibid., 418. Bartlett argues that he was keeping up ‘a delicate policy of dissimulation towards both the English exiles and the Habsburgs’, ‘ “Misfortune” ’, p. 19. ‘The examination of Martin Dore’, SP 11/​7, fol. 59, printed in Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies, pp. 258–​264.

110 Chapter 5 By July 1556, several of his servants were in custody. He complained that his mail was being opened, noted John Cheke’s kidnapping (an awful warning) and bewailed the fact that an outbreak of plague had stopped the Venetian junketings. ‘All feasts of gentlemen and women are banished where I had my greatest pleasure and commodity’. It would be easy (and unfair) to mock his ‘pleasure and commodity’, the silver spoons, the gentlewomen and ‘lusty gentlemen’, and the dancing.68 He had had a deeply unsatisfactory life and these brief festive scenes were played out on a desperately dangerous stage. He was flying hawks on the Lido in late August. Then he moved on to Padua. By 18 September 1556, he was dead. As we saw in the previous chapter, Vanni wrote a detailed account of Courtenay’s last illness and death. Near the moment of death, Vanni said he had exhorted Courtenay to accept the sacraments but Courtenay had been too ill to swallow.69 In a work published in 1579, Pietro Bizzarri who had been a religious exile in England in Edward vi’s reign, claimed that Courtenay did not die from completely natural causes. He wrote that the Earl of Devon caught a fever, but also suffered ‘by the hand of a parricide’. It is possible that Bizzarri was at Courtenay’s deathbed and he certainly knew the ways of English noble households because Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford had been his protector. Bizzarri’s phraseology was portentous, but he may have been right.70 It is possible to turn the story of Courtenay’s death into a veritable ‘whodunnit’: the Habsburgs wanted him dead and the Venetian government behaved in an incriminating way. But 1556 was a year of viral epidemic all over Europe; Courtenay may have died from a fever as Vanni said he did. To his own surprise, the English humanist Thomas Wilson was hired by Vanni to give the funeral oration in Padua.71 He produced a humanist set piece, which mentioned tertian fever and was very guarded.72 They were all hiding something, but not necessarily murder. 68 69 70

71 72

Devon to Elizabeth, Lady Mason, Venice, 11 July 1556, cspdm, 477. Vannes to Queen Mary, 18 September 1556, csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 537. ‘Quod gravius est, inimicorum suorum fraudibus circumventus, non antea dolum et parricidiales manus sensit, quam nulla remedia malo sibi inflicto relinquerentur, atque ita in manibus suorum domesticorum, imperterrito animo ac mente ad Deum conversa, languidum spiritum exhalavit’, Pietro Bizzarri, Senatus populique Genuensis … annales (Antwerp: Plantin, 1579), ustc 401810, pp. 561–​62, quoted by Massimo Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri: esule italiano del Cinquecento (Turin:  Giappichelli, 1971), p.  35, note 60; Nicholas Barker, ‘The Perils of Publishing in the Sixteenth Century: Pietro Bizarri and William Parry’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack, eds, England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), pp. 125–​41, especially p. 127, note 8; Francis Cairns, ‘Pietro Bizzarri, Italian Humanist and Protestant Exile, (1525c–​1586)’, Studi umanisti piceni, 12 (1992), 57–​72. Bartlett, “Misfortune”, pp. 24–​5. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 3/​2, pp. 420–​427; see above, note 7.

Nicodemite’s Progress: Edward Courtenay

111

The cast-​list at the end of his life reflects the nicodemite world in which Courtenay had lived and died: Bizzarri was an Italian protestant, who worked on a ‘hire-​a-​humanist’ basis, though he preferred to work for English protestants.73 Vanni, once protestant Dean of Salisbury and a friend of Italian reformers from Lucca and Venice, had become the obsequious employee of the English catholic government. Wilson was a stout protestant, employed by Vanni to sing the praises of Courtenay, whom the Habsburgs had wanted dead. Later Wilson himself conspired with papal agents against Cardinal Pole; he was then denounced to the pope as a heretic by Queen Mary and spent a year in prison in Rome.74 People worked for both sides, as they often do in times of international tension. Like many nicodemites, Courtenay had compromised in this confused and confusing world. In Edward vi’s reign, a (probably) protestant supplier gave him Il Beneficio di Cristo, a tract written by the spirituali. Someone, possibly Courtenay himself, translated it and wrote a preface telling Edward vi’s humanist protestant government exactly what it wanted to hear.75 Then, in Mary’s reign, he kept on acting the ostentatious catholic but he also associated with plotters against the Queen’s catholic regime. It is often argued that the plots were not about religion but in Courtenay’s correspondence they definitely were. The language of his letters and reported remarks shows that he saw the issues in religious terms: he did not want to marry Elizabeth because she was a ‘heretic’. Heretics were ‘enemies’ and Pole needed defending against them; Gardiner was a shining example of ‘conformity’; Hoby and Carew were Protestants, with ‘souls stained with like spots’, who needed to be converted; his servant Walker was ‘well known to be catholic’ and therefore he must have been wrongly arrested.76 At times, Courtenay may have been writing in the expectation that his mail was being intercepted, but he kept it up consistently. Apparently, Edward Courtenay thought in religious categories; he certainly wrote in them. His letters are the most veiled and impenetrable of all the nicodemite correspondence which appears in this book –​more unfathomable, even, than those of his cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole. In many ways, Courtenay’s strategy was similar to Vanni’s: change sides to please the government

73 74 75 76

In Elizabeth I’s reign, Bizzarri was employed by Sir Francis Walsingham to provide information, Barker, ‘Perils of Publishing’, pp. 130–​34. Albert J. Schmidt, ‘Thomas Wilson, Tudor Scholar–​Statesman’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 20 (1957), 205–​218; Susan Doran and Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Thomas Wilson’, odnb. See below, Chapter 6. csp Spanish (1553), 292; csp Spanish (January –​July 1554), 42; Durant, Sorrowful Captives, p. 89; csp Venetian (1555–​1556), 285; cspdm, 298.

112 Chapter 5 and then proclaim the ‘right’ views. He, too, took up dramatic religious postures when he thought it was in his interest to do so. He also kept secrets: in Edward vi’s reign he introduced il Beneficio di Cristo in the blandest terms possible, sounding vaguely evangelical without revealing his position; it is possible that the experience of working on that confusing and ambiguous text had some effect on his own attitudes to religion.77 When Queen Mary came to the throne and he was let out of prison, the newly ‘catholic’ Courtenay had many contacts he did not need to have, with other English exiles, most of them protestant plotters, whom he said he regarded as heretics with ‘spots’ on their souls.78 For all those reasons, he may be judged a dissembler. He was born a nobleman in a generation that experienced an interlude of terrifying religious uncertainty and he feared for his life many times. The link between fear and nicodemism was manifest in his letters. The European landscape had changed radically since the early 1540s when Calvin choreographed black-​and-​ white choices between witness and dissimulation. During Queen Mary’s reign in England, decisions were especially complex and many responded like true nicodemites: they waited, wondered and floundered, half-​conformed, changed sides and pretended –​and sometimes enjoyed the dancing. Among them was Edward Courtenay, who had struggled to find his place in a world of pathological uncertainty about who was on what side. 77 78

See below, Chapter 6, pp. 126–30. cspdm, 298.

Pa rt 2 Texts

∵

Chapter 6

The Confusions of Il Beneficio di Cristo One book [about Il Beneficio] says one thing; the other the opposite. What kind of confusion is this? What are people to believe?1 Pier Paolo Vergerio, Orazione … al Doge Francesco Dona, Riva del Garda, November 1545.

∵ Il Beneficio di Cristo was the most famous book ever produced by Italy’s spirituali. Written by people hoping to reconcile different theologies, and then circulating in manuscript, it was finally published anonymously in Venice in 1543. By 1549, it was banned in the Veneto.2 Modern textual research has shown that this ‘catholic’ book about salvation included well over sixty unattributed quotations from Valdés, Calvin, Luther and Melanchthon.3 It is important to remember that most contemporary readers had no way of knowing this: presumably the text’s authors knew and a few sharp-​eyed readers suspected as I am grateful to Taylor and Francis Group for permission to re-​use paragraphs from my Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–​c.1585 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 61–​76; also to Jonathan Woolfson and Palgrave Macmillan for permission to re-​use paragraphs from my chapter entitled ‘Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo, 1547–​1553’, in Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 151–​173. 1 ‘l’un di libri insegna una cosa, l’altro l’altra. Che confusione e questa, quale de’ creder il popolo?’, Orazione di Pier Paolo Vergerio al doge Francesco Dona, November 1545, Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 19, pp. 438–​39. Vergerio was commenting on different reactions to Il Beneficio di Christo. 2 Benedetto da Mantova, Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Giesu Christo crocifisso, verso i christiani (Venice:  Bernardino de Bidonis, 1543). For the full text, see Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 13–​83. 3 Unattributed quotations from the work of other reformers are indicated in footnotes to the original Italian version in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 13–​83; also in ‘The Beneficio di Cristo’, ed. Ruth Prelowski, in John Tedeschi, ed., Italian Reformation Studies in Honour of Laelius Socinus (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1965), pp. 21–​102. See also Tommaso Bozza, Il Beneficio di Cristo e ‘la Istituzione della Religione Cristiana’ di Calvino (Rome, 1963); Philip McNair, ‘Benedetto da Mantova, Marcantonio Flaminio and the Beneficio di Cristo: a Developing Twentieth–​ Century Debate’, Modern Language Review, 82 (1987), 614–​24.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_​0 08

116 Chapter 6 much. But these ‘silent’ quotations contributed much to the book’s main message of salvation by faith alone. Before the end of the 1540s, protestants regarded this text, written by catholics, as in some way ‘theirs’. By 1573 it had had been translated into four languages and had been published in Venice, Lyons, Paris, London, Tubingen.4 Meanwhile in Italy the book was suppressed, copies were destroyed and it was thought to be lost for ever. Then, in 1855, the original was re-​discovered by Churchill Babington in the library of St John’s College Cambridge.5 In previous chapters we have introduced people closely connected to the Beneficio, such as Pole, Flaminio, Courtenay, but here we focus on the text, in its original form and then in the Courtenay’s first English translation of 1548. Ambiguity and confusion were part of the text’s history from the outset, but there was one constant: a wish that this text might forward reconciliation between protestants and catholics and that intention, explains much of the secretiveness that is part of the book’s history. An apparently ‘good’ end was used to justify some dubious means. The first part of this chapter examines the early years of secret preparation and revision in Italy and does so as chronologically as possible. The second section examines the text itself, asking in what sense it was ‘nicodemite’? Finally we turn to the English reception of the text at the court of King Edward vi. 1

Secret Preparations

Some four years before the published book came into being, there were rumours about a manuscript concerning salvation.6 That time of guarded allusions is usually missed out in English-​language accounts, where the text’s history is hardly ever written chronologically. Anglophone readers are often plunged in around 1566–​7, the time of Pietro Carnesecchi’s exciting revelations before the Inquisition. That was over a quarter of a century after the start of the story. We shall start in the late 1530s when a handful of people were involved and their comments in letters to each other were teasing and tantalising, as if they were playing a forbidden game. This was especially true when the author’s

4 Titles of all European translations are listed in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 506–​519. 5 Churchill Babington, The Benefit of Christ’s Death (London: Bell and Daldy, 1855). 6 The early circulation in manuscript form is emphasised by C. Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, ‘Le due redazioni del Beneficio di Cristo’, in Eresia e riforma nell’ Italia del Cinquecento, Biblioteca del Corpus Reformatorom Italicorum, Miscellanea 1 (Florence and Chicago: Sansoni and Newberry Library, 1974), pp. 135–​205; Flaminio, Apologia, pp. 10–​12; Mayer, Pole, pp. 119–​23.

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name was mooted. They might hint but they could not possibly say … They were living in a world not yet fully warned of the wickedness of veiling religious beliefs. By 1537, Calvin had penned two letters against alleged nicodemites, but they were not widely known in Italy. His anti-​nicodemite polemic began in earnest in 1544, just after Il Beneficio was published.7 The manuscripts of the Beneficio moved within two overlapping networks: the houses of the Cassinese Benedictines and Pole’s circle of friends, mostly at Viterbo and at the English Hospice at Rome. Cassinese houses were scholarly, aristocratic, used to exerting theological influence, but taught to treat silence as a way to God. The preparation of a manuscript by one of their Congregation was not an unusual occurrence.8 Pole’s friends at Viterbo knew that a book was being prepared in the household. In a letter dated 1 May 1542, Alvise Priuli recorded the group’s happy discovery of a passage from the writings of St Bernard which would support their views on salvation. He said that Cardinal Contarini had passed the quotation to Pole, and then it was given to Flaminio, who was pleased with it and was thinking of putting it in his ‘libretto’. Almost certainly Priuli was referring to Il Beneficio –​and, if so, we have an author’s name, Flaminio –​but only in a private letter to Priuli’s good friend Ludovico Beccadelli, and not attached to a definite title. Priuli thought that the passage from St Bernard should serve as a riposte to the criticisms of ‘Padre Polito’.9 Ambrogio Catarino Politi was a Dominican, independent-​minded rather than traditionalist, and no mean opponent in any religious controversy.10 When it was published in 1543, the work was entitled Trattato vtilissimo del Beneficio di Giesu Christo crocifisso verso i christiani. Superlatives like ‘utilissimo’ were often used to cover content that might be suspect.11 The book was small, easily passed around and concealed. The printer, Bernardino Bindoni explained that it appeared anonymously, so that readers would be more impressed by the subject than by the authority of the author.12 There seemed to 7 8 9

10 11 12

Federico Zuliani, ‘The Other Nicodemus’, pp. 314–​16; Enrico Garavelli, Lodovico Domenichi e i Nicodemiana di Calvino (Manziana, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2004). Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation; the Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 119–​156. ‘Il loco di S.  Bernardo del quale S.S.R.ma[Contarini] ha advertito Monsignore e` grandemente piacuto a Messere M. Antonio sugli gli altri, talché ha pensato di scriverlo nel suo libretto. Questo sol loco doveria bastar per risposta a questo padre Polito’, Priuli to Beccadelli, Viterbo, 1 May 1542, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 9, p. 431. Giorgio Caravale, Beyond the Inquisition:  Ambrogio Catarino and the Origins of the Counter–​Reformation, trans. Donald Weinstein (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), pp. 92–​3 and 116–​140. For the full text, see Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 13–​49. ‘accioche piu la cosa vi muova che l’autorità dell’autore’, ibid., Document 10, p. 431.

118 Chapter 6 be a strange, anxious need to half-​explain. In October 1543, a second edition appeared, ‘not without uproar and suspicion’.13 The book was seen in Rome by Marcello Cervini, then Bishop of Reggio, who wrote to his vicar, Ludovico Beccadelli, saying that the book must not be distributed in his diocese.14 Beccadelli’s reply was careful and embarrassed. He admitted that he had seen the work three years before (presumably in manuscript). He had ‘liked it’ and was impressed by the ‘authority of the person who abbreviated it’. Nonetheless Beccadelli said that he would now, of course, submit to his bishop’s judgement.15 Neither he, nor Cervini, had revealed names; the title, too, was suppressed, just ‘il libretto’. In fact, Beccadelli almost certainly knew the title because there are reports of Inquisition proceedings ‘del libro de Beneficio’, in the same codex as this correspondence, covering the years 1543–​4. He must also have known the name of the person who revised the text, because he said his good opinion was based on that person’s ‘authority’. He was being cagey. Cervini decided against an official prohibition in his diocese but he continued to object to things in the book that were ‘doubtful and too subtle and convoluted’.16 In contrast, Giovanni Morone, then Bishop of Modena, thought it molto spirituale and allowed it to be distributed.17 In the year 1544, Catarino’s criticisms appeared in his Compendio d’errori e inganni luterani; the word ‘inganni’ suggests tricks and deceit. The section about the Beneficio came first in this compendium of Catarino’s attacks on three books. The other two were the Sommario de la santa scrittura (which was found on Throckmorton’s booklist) and Bernardino Ochino’s Epistola to the magistrates of Siena, explaining his flight from Italy.18 By 1545, Flaminio had 13 14 15

16 17

18

‘non senza qualche rumore e suspicione’, Scipione Bianchini to Ludovico Beccadelli, 26 October 1543, cited by Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 74. Marcello Cervini to Beccadelli, Rome, 10 January 1544, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 12, p. 432; William V. Hudon, Marcello Cervini and Ecclesiastical Government in Tridentine Italy (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992). ‘E per questo a me piacque il libretto detto di sopra, lo qual vidi gia tre anni sono parendomi che andasse a questa via farci conoscere il Beneficio di cristo … movendomi anco l’autorita della persona che lo abbreviò, la quale ho per dotta e per bene’, Beccadelli to Cervini, 29 January 1544, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 13, pp. 432–​436. ‘le cose dubie e troppo sottili et involute’, Cervini to Beccadelli, 5 February 1544, ibid., Document 14, p. 436; for discussion, see Caravale, Beyond the Inquisition, pp. 118–​119. Massimo Firpo, Inquisizione Romana e Controriforma: Studi sul Cardinal Giovanni Morone e il suo processo d’eresia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), pp. 114 –​118. For Morone’s involvement we rely mostly on the retrospective evidence of his own Apologia of 1557, Processo Morone, 2, 447–​505, especially p. 465; on the testimony of self–​preserving witnesses at his trial, see Robinson, Morone, pp. 60, 67–​69. Ambrogio Catarino Politii, Compendio d’errori et inganni luterani contenuti in un libretto senza nome di autore, intitolato “Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Christo crucifisso” ’,

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drafted a reply to Catarino, his Apologia del Beneficio di Christo, but he decided not to publish it. In the manuscript, Flaminio defended both Beneficio and, tongue in cheek, its still-​anonymous author ‘whom you will have heard praised by many’.19 By then, however, secrecy was more than a joke. Not for the first time, Flaminio had to extricate himself from theological controversy.20 A few months after Il Beneficio was published, Marcello Cervini had written: ‘it talks very confusingly about faith’ –​‘confusissimo’.21 Others were enjoying the muddle: Pier Paolo Vergerio, still a catholic bishop, if a disenchanted one, said that, to many committed people, the Beneficio seemed a good thing, while another book (that was Catarino’s) said exactly the opposite. Vergerio asked artfully:  ‘What kind of confusion is this?’22 The Beneficio was moving out of the charmed circle into the public forum. On 21 July 1546, the Bishop of Aquilo, Galeazzo Florimonte, addressed the Council of Trent. He was an independent, not a hard liner, but he criticised the Beneficio on grounds that its doctrine implied that no earthly penance (payment) was required for human sin. He thought that the text’s emphasis on justification by faith alone had gone too far. The Council’s decree on salvation endangered the Beneficio because it defined a different theology of salvation as the one which catholics must believe.23 A French translation of the book appeared in 1545, but it was listed among texts prohibited by the Sorbonne in 1547.24 In May 1549, the original Italian version appeared in Giovanni della Casa’s Venetian Index of Prohibited Books.25 After Vergerio had left his diocese for exile in 1549 he issued a pirated ‘index’ in which he defended the Beneficio as a ‘dolce libriccin0’, ‘a sweet little book’, which he said had two authors, known by the great and the good in Rome.26

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

(Rome: Giroloma Cartolari for Michele Tramezino, 1544), ustc 850157, reprinted in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 347–​422; Caravale, Beyond the Inquisition, pp. 121–​126; see above Chapter 2. ‘Il quale havete sentito lodare da molti’, ‘Apologia del Beneficio di Christo’, printed in Flaminio, Apologia, ed. Marcatto, pp. 83–​142, quotation at p. 83. See above, Chapter 3, passim. ‘Parlar confusissimo della fede’, Cervini to Beccadelli, Rome, 10 January 1544, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 12, p. 432; Flaminio, Apologia, ed. Marcatto, p. 21. ‘Orazione di Pier Paolo Vergerio’, Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 19, pp. 438–​39. See above, note 1. Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 21, pp. 439–​44; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 148. Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 23, p. 440. Ibid., Document 26, pp. 442. P. P. Vergerio, Commento alla condanno del ‘Beneficio’, from his Il catalogo de’ libri, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 28, pp. 443–​445.

120 Chapter 6 Meanwhile, in Rome, the Inquisition was extending its power.27 There were three popes in 1555 and, during the pontificate of the third, the intransigent Paul iv, Il Beneficio came under urgent investigation. In addition Cardinal Morone, friend of the spirituali, was imprisoned and a formal Inquisition processo against him began. In his own evidence about the Beneficio, Morone was ‘evasive and probably deliberately vague’. He said that he had known the book in Modena; the text had been brought to him by a bookseller called ‘mastro Antonio’ –​another veil, there were a lot of Antonios. Morone quoted his friend (Pole’s and Flaminio’s friend, too), the Cassinese Benedictine abbot, Gregorio Cortese, who had said that, every morning when he woke up, he ‘clothed himself in the Benefit of Christ’. By then Cortese was dead: it was safer to quote the dead than the living. Morone said that he had heard that the author of Il Beneficio was ‘a black monk’ from the Order of St Benedict but he did not know the name; also that Flaminio had revised the book in his own way and sent it to press.28 While Morone was still in prison, Il Beneficio appeared on the ‘Pauline Index’ of 1559.29 Thereafter, the ‘libretto’ was blacklisted for good, but there was still no certainty about the name of Morone’s ‘black monk’, the original author. Then, in 1566/​7, Pietro Carnesecchi, Flaminio’s friend, came before the Inquisition for the second time in his life (Pole had interceded for his release on the first occasion.) The questioning about Il Beneficio was intense and exhausting: Carnesecchi said: The first author of this book was a black monk of the order of S. Benedict called Don Benedetto, who said he had written it while he was in a monastery of his order in Sicily, near Mount Etna. This Don Benedetto, being a friend of Marcantonio Flaminio, passed the said book on to him, asking him to polish it and illustrate it with his beautiful style, so that it would be more readable and pleasing. And so Flaminio, keeping the subject unaltered, corrected it as seemed right to him.30 27 28

29 30

Firpo, La presa di potere, passim. ‘Intesi dire, non so da chi, che l’autore era stato un monaco benedettino nero, amico del Valdesio; il qua monaco non conosco né per nome, néper altro; che di poi il Flaminio l’aveva riveduto e rassettato a suo modo e dato alla stampa’, Confessione di Giovanni Morone, Rome, 18 June 1557, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 35, pp. 453–​5; Robinson, Morone, pp. 60 and 67–​8. Morone remained in prison until 1559, but was released on the death of Pope Paul iv and presided at the last session of Council of Trent from 1563 until 1564. Indice di Paolo iv, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 36, p. 455. ‘Il primo auttore di questo libro fu un Monaco negro di san Benedetto chiamato don Benedetto di Mantua il quale disse haverlo composto mentre stette a un monasterio della sua religione in Sicilia presso il monte Etna. Il quale don Benedetto essendo amico di messer Marco

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Modern readers often come in on the story at this point, when Carnesecchi told the Inquisition about the two authors, the Cassinese Benedictine monk, Don Benedetto da Mantova, and Flaminio.31 But the Beneficio had, by then, been in existence for some twenty-​five years ‒ a long cycle of secrets and dissimulations. The ‘double authorship’ finally revealed by Morone and Carnesecchi lent itself to inconsistency; the manuscript had circulated and it was altered in the process, so no one was solely responsible. Pole’s biographer, Tom Mayer, regarded Il Beneficio di Cristo as a ‘collective effort’.32 But the book’s direct style was that of the wordsmith and poet, Flaminio: Pole’s suffocating prose is not in evidence. Carnesecchi’s testimony emphasised humanist aspects of the text, like ‘beautiful style’ and being ‘readable and pleasing’. These tended to blur the crucial doctrinal issues. It is to these we now turn, as we examine the six chapters of the mysterious ‘libretto.’ 2

Il Beneficio di Cristo: Doctrinal Confusion

In the small ottavo piccolo edition of 1543, the first chapter was a mere three pages long –​48 lines, so short that it made the book look like an easy read: it was not. The last chapter went on for 25 pages, much longer. As the work progressed, the text became more heavyweight and more combative in tone. Chapter length seems to have been dictated by mood, perhaps by a different writer taking over. This haphazard libretto was not intended to be an ‘academic’ book. It appeared in the vernacular and most of it was in vigorous and stylish Italian. Historians often call it a ‘best seller’, relying on Vergerio’s estimate that 40,000 copies were in circulation by 1549.33 This is an over-​quoted remark, from a biased writer, who was keen to attract new readers. Unlike most ‘best sellers’, this was quite difficult to read, because of the fast-​moving and allusive style. Especially in the last three chapters chains of patristic and scriptural ‘authorities’ flash by, express-​style, sometimes slightly misquoted. Thanks to patient textual scholarship, we now know the extent of its borrowing from

31 32 33

Antonio Flaminio, li comunicò il detto libro pregandolo che lo volesse polire et illustrare col suo bello stile, acciò fusse tanto più legibile et dilettevole. Et cossì il Flaminio, servando integro il subietto, lo riformò secondo che parse a lui’, Processi Carnesecchi, 2/​1, pp. 170–​1. Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation; the Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford, 1985), esp 167, 183–​4, 204; Salvatore Caponetto, ‘Benedetto da Mantova’, dbi. Mayer, Pole, p. 120. ‘Commento di Pier Paolo Vergerio alla condanna del Beneficio’, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 28, pp. 443–​445.

122 Chapter 6 Northern reformers. Plagiarism was common, but in Italy it was not common to quote so often and at such length from texts which ordinary people were not supposed to read at all –​Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin and so on. Quoting them in a little vernacular book, apparently intended for general readers, seems deliberately misleading. Chapter 1 started with a universally fascinating subject: human beings and their sinful nature.34 Left to their own devices, they were born to be bad, ‘inferior to the most brute beasts’, like the devil. Il Beneficio’s gloomy assessment of human nature resembles Valdés, and quotations from his One Hundred and Ten Divine Considerations appear at the beginning of the book. But another important influence is the doctrine of man propounded by Benedetto’s teachers within the Cassinese Benedictine Order. These sections were probably written by him, with Flaminio over-​writing and adding some Valdesian colour.35 The theme of Chapter  2 is the need for recognition of humanity’s sinful state, helped by a passage on the offices of law taken from Valdés’ Alfabeto Cristiano; parts of this section also resemble Benedictine theology, but the idea that God’s law serves as a mirror to human sinfulness came straight from Calvin.36 The pick-​and-​mix gathering of theologies was well under way. Chapter 3 is the most problematic, drawing upon a miscellany of ideas, most of them from the Imitation of Christ and from Benedictine spirituality. From the latter, came the image of Christ as ‘the most kind physician’, ‘healing all our sicknesses, reforming our free will and restoring us to our first innocency and bringing us again to the likeness of God’.37 It is possible that the first three chapters were written mostly by the monk Benedetto in the late 1530s or very early 1540s, when the long process of defining ‘orthodoxies’ about salvation was still under way. Most reformers thought, with Luther, that man was ‘simul iustus et peccator’ –​always a sinner, but made just. ‘Restoration’ to God’s likeness was a completely different matter. According to Augustinian theologians

34

35 36 37

I have relied much Barry Collett’s profound chapter on Il Beneficio, in Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation; the Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 157–​85, but our emphases are not always the same. Quotations in Italian are taken from the edition of 1543, printed in Il Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 11–​85; quotations in English are taken from Edward Courtenay’s translation of 1548, printed in ibid., pp. 156–​206. See Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 13 and 159. Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 159–​62. The metaphor of the law as mirror is found in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1, p. 355. Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, p. 163, especially lines 31–​2. For Christ the Physician, a patristic topos used by the Benedictines, see Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars, pp. 26–​27.

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everywhere, catholic and protestant, including the English Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, innocence was never restored.38 Later in Chapter 3, the Beneficio veers close to a doctrine of universal salvation –​‘a general pardon to all mankind’ is the fruit of Christ’s saving work, an idea found in Benedictine Cassinese writings and also prominent in the work of Valdés.39 To benefit from this ‘general pardon’, all people had to do was to believe the Gospel. We shall hear a lot more of pardon for all and universal salvation later in this book: it is part of the characteristic Italian emphasis on God’s mercy, ‘sola misericordia’, that came to be associated with acceptance of nicodemism.40 Readers of Il Beneficio in the early 1540s, however, were swept suddenly from the intense gloom of Chapter 1 to the exuberant optimism of the ‘general pardon’ in Chapter 3. What of that impenetrable divine decree, by which only some were elected to salvation? At least potentially, this ‘general pardon’ came into conflict with the beliefs of predestinarians everywhere. It also conflicted with the final chapter of the Beneficio, which recommended predestination and accepted reprobation. Inconsistency on this scale suggested that the book was indeed a ‘collective effort’.41 Then, towards the end of this third kaleidoscopic chapter, standard reformation theology takes over again: salvation is no longer restoration, nor is it universal and available to all; instead, it is cancellation of guilt, achieved by Christ’s death. ‘Confusissimo’ was the word chosen by Marcello Cervini.42 The mystical Chapter 4 was given the title, ‘of the effects of living faith and of the union of the soul with Christ’. Starting from the Pauline analogy of the marriage of Christ and the Church, this author shifts subtly (as Luther did) to the marriage of Christ with the Christian soul. Then the Beneficio suddenly turns that relationship into identification:: ‘Truely it may be saide that the christen man was fastenyd to the crosse, buried, raised agayne, ascended to heaven and was made partaker of the nature of God.43 Later in the same chapter: ‘We 38 39

40 41 42 43

MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 345. ‘un perdon generale a tutta l’umana generazione’, Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 22 and 165; Benjamin B. Wiffen, Life and Writings of Juan de Valdés … with a Translation from the Italian of his ‘One Hundred and Ten Considerations’, trans. John T. Betts (London, 1865), Consideration 103; Firpo, Tra alumbrados, pp. 132–​8. Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, pp. 143–​145, at p. 144; later Giacomo Aconcio, Bernardino Ochino and Francesco Pucci took this view, see below, Chapter 10. Mayer, Pole, p. 120. See above, p. 119, note 21. Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 27 and 169–​70; compare Ephesians 5: 21–​32 and Colossians 2: 11–​15.

124 Chapter 6 become one thing with Christ, who being onely one thing with God, we also by Christ be one onely thing with God.’ That extraordinary statement was not the English translator’s fault. It is there in the original text: ‘una cosa sola con Dio’, a neoplatonist idea, at odds with the teaching of reformers, protestant or catholic.44 For them sinful man could not partake of God’s nature. Human beings might love Christ and imitate him, but they could not ‘be’ Christ, or God. Here the Beneficio came to a mystical precipice –​and then stepped back once more into teachings of salvation associated with German and Swiss reformers Many have seen this as the point where the reviser, Flaminio, took over and Benedictine teachings faded. Readers already used to reformation polemic would have found themselves more at home from near the end of Chapter 4 until the end of the text. There was the usual scattergun citation of the ‘authorities’ to support the teaching of salvation by faith alone:  Origen, Augustine, Basil, Hilary, Ambrose, all crowded into a short space.45 These citations suggest that the author knew his patristic theology, but he was not above using standard ‘teach yourself’ materials; identical mistaken citations appear in the Beneficio and that favourite theological ‘crib’, the Unio Dissidentium, written in Strassburg by protestant reformers. We know that Flaminio owned a copy which passed to Throckmorton’s shelves in Mantua.46 Chapter 5 develops St Paul’s image of ‘being clothed with Christ’: the ‘clothing’ distinguishes those who are saved from ‘the man of the worlde’ and ‘false Christians’.47 Towards the end of the chapter, this book of reconciliation becomes ‘partisan’, hostile, distinctly ‘them’ and ‘us’.48 ‘We’ are the saved, but others, those ‘with Hebrew minds’ do not accept salvation by faith. This text of the spirituali had been meant to reconcile but Catarino’s criticisms were in manuscript by 1543. Chapter 5’s challenging tone revealed hostile defensiveness rather than a longing for reconciliation. The Beneficio’s long sixth and final chapter begins with four ‘remedies’:  prayer, recall of our baptism, communion and ‘a very good remedy … the rememberauce of our predestinacyon and election to eternall lief’. These remedies, intended to comfort those plagued by doubts, come mostly from Luther.49 The section on communion relied on Calvin but Il Beneficio’s authors 44 45 46 47 48 49

Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, p. 28, note 1, and p. 182. Beneficio, Caponetto, pp. 34–​38. Peters, ‘Who compiled the … Unio Dissidentium?’, pp. 237–​40; see above, Chapter 3, p. 60. Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 187–​188; for this image, used by both Luther and Calvin, see Ephesians 4:  22–​24. Caponetto, Beneficio, p.  52, n.  1 and Prelowski, ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 73–​77. Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars, p. 179. Beneficio, ed. Caponetto pp. 69 and 196; Prelowski, ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 78 and 84.

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simply by-​passed core Eucharistic questions like ‘what is being received?’ When the text was written Eucharistic debates were still not common in Italy. At the end of the chapter, the authors reached the acid test:  predestination to eternal life.50 Who were the elect? According to the Beneficio, those who believed were also the predestined. Predestination provided comfort, that psychological necessity for many nicodemites; it ‘keapeth the true Christian in a contynuall myrth and ioyfulness of spirite’.51 In the life of the faithful, thoughts about reprobation are no more than temptations. But what of the un-​faithful, the others? There was something dangerously un-​pastoral about the concluding comment on reprobation: I saie that … certaintie of predestination cannot hurte true christians … and I cannot see that it can hurte the reprobate and false christians; for howe moche so ever those men which be reprobate do forse them selves to beleve that they be in the nomber of them that are predestinate, yet they can never persuade their conscience thereunto.52 Such directness about damnation was generally avoided by those who had souls in their care. Ironically, on this one subject, pastors of all religious affiliations would almost certainly have preferred caution –​perhaps a little more nicodemism.53 Il Beneficio ended by hammering home the necessity of works as a consequence of faith, a message beloved of reformers all over Europe; God predestined the elect, their faith alone justified, but ‘good works cannot be separate from faith’.54 Here, at the very end, there was no deviation from standard reformation teaching, taken from Luther and known in much of Europe. Yet the text as a whole was confusing. Since the 1960s, historians have been engaged in peeling away layers of different doctrines, finding this section was from the Cassinese Benedictines, this from the Imitation of Christ, another from Valdés, or Luther, or Melanchthon or Calvin. Why was there no attempt to delete Benedictine and Imitationist theology when it conflicted with the ‘reformation’ voice? Probably what we see as a contradiction was less obvious when the doctrines of Christendom were still being moulded. Also, a

50 51 52 53 54

Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 196–​205. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., Beneficio, p. 205. For Cranmer’s caution, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 211 and 375; for Ignatius Loyola’s caution on this point, see his Spiritual Exercises, Fourteenth Rule, Foordham University, Sourcebooks Online, Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, p. 206.

126 Chapter 6 Benedictine tract with a non-​committal title was a useful cover for teachings known to come from Germany and Switzerland. More than that, the combination was one way of reconciling two approaches to the problem of salvation, which was what the spirituali had set out to do. Inquisition investigations of the Beneficio and its authors became intense during Paul iv’s pontificate from 1555 until 1559:  even owning a copy was a marker of heresy. On the other hand, Italian reformers in exile were very much ‘on’ the book. They claimed that it was a spiritual classic; all the more fun, then, that it had been written by friends of cardinals, and subsequently condemned.55 Perhaps only an exceptionally subtle text could pass so seamlessly from being composed by catholics to being taken over by evangelical reformers. The version in French, which appeared in Lyons in 1545, was entitled Traité du benefice de Jesus Christ crucifié envers les chrestiens. Its translator was Claude le Maistre and the printer was the humanist, Jean de Tournes, who converted to evangelical allegiance about the time his Traité du benefice appeared. The French version was reissued in Paris in 1548, with the same title, and presented as suitable for ‘all Christians who are under heaven’, especially ordinary people, ‘les simples gens’.56 In the same year Courtenay’s English translation was made not from the French, but from the original Italian. 3

The English Translation of Il Beneficio di Cristo (1548)

We have already looked at the translator’s troubled career.57 Here we focus on the manuscript which bore his name, asking how the Beneficio came into Courtenay’s hands and who helped him translate and promote his work? Even as a young prisoner, Edward Courtenay was allowed tutors, so he had some links to the outside world. He might well have been permitted to receive this pious-​sounding title to read in prison. He seems to have known something of the Italian language and he had time on his hands: it is possible that he had translated Il Beneficio himself, as he claimed. The beautiful calligraphy of the 55 56

57

See Vergerio’s reaction, ‘Commento’, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 443–​445. Traité du benefice de Jesus Christ crucifié envers les chrestiens (Lyon:  Jean de Tournes, 1545), ustc 40402; Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 506–​507; Du benefice de Jesuchrist crucifié envers les chrestiens (Paris: Antoine Jurien, 1548), ustc 9586; reprinted in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 89–​153; ‘Le traducteur a tous les Chrestians qui sont dessoubz le ciel’, ibid., at p. 93; Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby, Alexander S. Wilkinson, French Vernacular Books: Books published in the French Language before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 3382, 3383. See above, Chapter 5.

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manuscript, however, was almost certainly not his own: it looks like the work of a professional scribe at the top of his trade. In 1548 Courtenay was swallowing the bitter disappointment of continued imprisonment and was desperate to gain his freedom. Above all else, this translation must not make his predicament worse. In his preface addressed to Duchess of Somerset, veils were drawn over anything that might be controversial: ‘this breve and godly treatise following written bj a famous clerk in the Italionne, the understanding whereof as I have bi my noune studie acheved’. The needy ‘I’ of the imprisoned translator is central and any interest in the author or his views is shrugged off –​just ‘a famous clerk in the Italionne’. Given all the secrets and obfuscation in Italy, it may be true that Courtenay knew little or nothing of the text’s history. He made no attempt to address the finer points of theology; by-​passing the controversies of his generation, he noted only that the little book ‘declarethe and settithe out’ … ‘Christ’s glory’.58 He was in need of all the help he could get and it looks as if he had plenty:  advisers, suppliers, theologians and calligraphers, working in a chain of command between prison and court. Flaminio’s limpid emotive Italian appeared in a lumbering but adequate translation, presented in this most exquisite of mid-​Tudor manuscripts. Despite his humanist interests and his longing to see Italy, Coutenay did not rate his own literary abilities very highly. In 1555 he would write ‘I am neither good secretary nor good orator’, and the halting prose of his letters and his dedication of Il Beneficio bears this out.59 Who gave the text to him? Since Courtenay’s dedication came into the court it is likely that the original came to him through someone at court. Catherine Parr, Henry viii’s last Queen, a devout protestant humanist and guide of royal children, is a possible supplier; she had embraced evangelical teaching and wrote of ‘this great benefite of Christ crucified’.60 We should, however, exclude Stephen Gardiner, Courtenay’s adopted ‘father’ in prison –​a shrewd traditionalist, likely to recognise the drift of Il Beneficio’s theology. We can also cut out Nicholas Udall, later his tutor, because the dates of Udall’s appointment do not fit.61 Also –​reluctantly ‒ we should exclude his cousin, Reginald Pole, even 58 59 60 61

cul MS Nn. 4. 43, f. 1v–​4v, ‘A treatice most profitable of the benefitt that christianes receyve by the dethe of Jesus Christ’, Edward Courtenay’s dedication to the Duchess of Somerset; Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 157–​8. Devon to Paget, 25 August 1555, cspdm, 216, p. 106; ‘You know how ill a secretary I am’, Devon to James Bassett, 26 August 1555, cspdm, 218, p. 106. Courtenay’s letters were often very short. Catharine Parr, The lamentacyon of a synner (London:  Edward Whitchurch, 1547), stc 4827, sig D iiii v. See Overell, Italian Reform, p. 73.

128 Chapter 6 though he was then making enigmatic overtures to Edwardian regime.62 By 1548, the book was too hot for him to hold. Already traditionalists suspected that he was a heretic. It is unlikely that he was distributing this dangerous ‘libretto’ –​least of all sending it into England’s radical court. Thinking observers might well have connected Courtenay’s manuscript to Italian exiles who had been familiar with the text in Italy and later fled to the court of King Edward vi. Guido Giannetti da Fano, friend of Flaminio, a spy, a book pedlar and a known promoter and supplier of Il Beneficio di Cristo, had been hovering around the English court since 1546, helped by his countryman Pietro Vanni. The timing of Guido Giannetti’s visits would have coincided neatly with Courtenay’s work on the Beneficio.63 By 1548, Ochino and Vermigli were in England and were visitors to the court. It is likely that both had known the text in manuscript before leaving Italy for exile in 1542: almost certainly they would have seen the published book in the German and Swiss reformation cities where they had found refuge. When they arrived in England in November 1547, they brought boxes of books, no doubt the ‘right’ books of reformation colouring, and Il Beneficio di Cristo may have been among them.64 Yet there was a narrow time span between their arrival in November 1547 and the appearance of the beautiful manuscript during the next year. If they passed it on, Courtenay’s supporters made fast work of the translation and the calligraphy. The young King’s autograph phrases, written in childish hand on the manuscript, may have been out of tune with the ‘sola fide’ message of the text, but they proved it had reached its target: if the young Edward vi read it, or pretended to, so did others at court.65 To make it to such exalted circles, the text had powerful English promoters at this humanist court. In short, there was an important English end to the chain. Courtenay had contacts who knew more than he did about recent developments in doctrine. Changes made to the title suggest a wise hand on the tiller, someone with theological competence and political acumen. In the early Italian versions, the work is called: Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Giesu Christo Crocifisso verso i christiani. To educated ears, that title alone might suggest evangelical doctrine. ‘Beneficium’ was a favourite humanist word, but reformers used it in a particular sense, to refer to God’s gifts, and specifically to Christ’s saving work for mankind. Beneficium Christi was a

62 63 64 65

Ibid., pp. 66–​67; see above, Chapter 2, p. 47. For Guido Giannetti, see Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 78–​80; Processo Morone, 1, pp. 282–​3; 6, pp. 223, 236, 304 and 425–​7. N. Nichols, ‘The Bill of Expenses attending the Journey of Peter Martyr and Bernardino Ochinus,’ Archeologia, 21 (1827), pp. 469–​73. cul MS Nn 4.43, fols. 4v and 92r; see above, Chapter 5, p. 97–8.

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phrase favoured by Philipp Melanchthon, by Pole’s and Starkey’s teacher, the catholic Hebraist van Campen –​and by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.66 According to the original Italian title, Trattato vtilissimo del Beneficio di Giesu Christo crocifisso, verso i christiani, the beneficiaries are clearly ‘i cristiani’, Christians ‒ presumably all of them. The French translator was similarly universal:  ‘du benefice … envers les chrestiens’. But the title page of Courtenay’s translation narrows it down: ‘A Treatice most profittable of the benefitt that true christianes receyve by the dethe of Jesus Christe’. The benefit has become available to ‘true Christians’, no longer to all Christians.67 The echo of medieval devotion to ‘Christo crocifisso’, the Crucified, has been taken away as well. It is as if someone recognised that the original title teetered on the brink between catholic and evangelical doctrine and pushed it in an evangelical direction. Out goes the stress on the Crucified, and in come ‘true Christians’ –​presumably the predestined ones. This was Il Beneficio skilfully marketed for Edward vi’s godly evangelical court. King Edward vi had been on the throne only a year but the direction of his reformation was already clear  –​it was to be bold and radical. Who was the theological adviser in the background, placing the accents where they were needed in order to satisfy this new Tudor theology? In the mid-​nineteenth century, Churchill Babington suggested that Archbishop Cranmer was an early English reader of Il Beneficio di Cristo and that he made use of it when he was preparing his ‘Homily of Salvation’, which appeared in July 1547, just a few months before Courtenay’s translation.68 Babington gave no specific evidence but textual and circumstantial evidence makes his ‘hunch’ perfectly possible.69 Cranmer was not fluent in Italian but he could translate a little and three Italian books are found in his library.70 The Italianate John Ponet was his chaplain. Richard Morison was at court and he had known reformers among 66

67 68 69 70

See above, Chapter 2, p. 36; J. E. Cox, Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer … relative to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1844), p.  114, cited by Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 122. Traité du benefice de Jesus Christ crucifié envers les chrestiens; for titles of all sixteenth–​ century edition, see Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, pp. 504–​511. The Benefit of Christ’s Death, ed. Churchill Babington (London:  Bell and Daldy; Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1855), Introduction, p. lv. Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 61–​80, at pp. 74–​5. Maria Dowling, ‘Cranmer as Humanist Reformer’ in Paul Ayris and David Selwyn, eds, Thomas Cranmer:  Churchman and Scholar (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1993), pp.  89–​114, at pp.  101–​102; David Selwyn, ‘Cranmer’s Library:  its potential for Reformation Studies’ in ibid., pp. 39–​72; David Selwyn, The Library of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1996), numbers 359, 382 and 599.

130 Chapter 6 Pole’s friends in Italy, as we saw in Chapter 2. Diarmaid MacCulloch reveals the Archbishop as a true European humanist, interested in exiles and texts, and ‘alarmingly eclectic in his use of sources to reach his goal’.71 Both Cranmer, the King’s godfather, and his tutor, John Cheke, had authority and opportunity to have passed this manuscript to the young Edward vi. Both had encouraged the young King’s interest in foreign exiles and texts, both had befriended Vermigli and Ochino, and both had written of ‘the benefit of Christ’.72 In addition, it is probable that Cheke was already beginning to develop contacts with Italian humanists in Basel, who certainly knew Il Beneficio di Cristo.73 Thus, there were important people at court who had encountered the theology of ‘beneficium’ and had the chance to know ‒ or know of ‒ the Italian text. The young translator did not act alone; someone close to the court helped him to turn a catholic-​sounding title into an acceptably evangelical one, to find professional scribes and to filter the resulting beautiful manuscript into the hands of the King himself. But did those at the English end of this chain also know about the text’s origins in the catholic household of Cardinal Reginald Pole? That, too, is likely: Pole was watched obsessively by English spies, as we have seen.74 By 1548, Il Beneficio di Cristo was known in much of Europe. Any English humanist who saw the original, as delivered to Courtenay, might well have registered one other small but important fact; Italian printed editions gave Venice as the place of publication. That was unusual for a thoroughly ‘protestant’ book, though some slipped through, unrecognised by censors. Nonetheless that bibliographical detail suggested that Edward vi’s court may have been in receipt of a work originally written by catholics. It was enough to create unease, especially when combined with fears about Courtenay’s claim to the English throne. At any rate, the young nobleman remained in prison, despite his pleas for freedom and his best humanist efforts, and his translation was never published.75 The original English reception of this text involved a lonely prisoner of uncertain religious beliefs, who had powerful minders at an evangelical Tudor court. The English story, like the Italian one, was not straightforward: it was marked by subtleties and things left unsaid. 71 72

73 74 75

MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 374. Cranmer wrote of ‘the merit and benefit of Christ’, Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer, p. 114. For Cheke’s use of the phrase, see his ‘Discourse of Superstition’, in John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1821), p. 196; John F. McDiarmid, ‘John Cheke’s Preface to De Superstitione’, JEH, 48 (1997), 100–​120. For contacts between Cheke, Basel’s publishers and Italian exiles, see below, Chapter 9, p. 178. See above, Chapter 2 and Chapter 4. For the successful English translation of the Beneficio in Elizabeth I’s reign, see below, Chapter 10, pp. 201–204.

Chapter 7

The Case against Nicodemites Pole wanted to lead people to believe that we can carry forward true doctrine by keeping quiet, deceiving and running away.1 Pier Paolo Vergerio, Giudicio sopra le lettere di tredici uomini illustri.

∵ For the polemicist, Pier Paolo Vergerio, the appearance of Il Beneficio on the Venetian Index of 1549 was pure gain: he could delight in the free advertising of this dolce libriccino and the confusion it was causing; he could castigate the catholic church for seeing evil in a book written by eminent catholics; he could sneer at the text’s authors for staying in Italy and not living out their beliefs. They were, in his view, errant nicodemites who would be damned eternally.2 He relished these paper wars and thrived on the cut-​and-​ thrust of sixteenth century polemic.3 He made his point by using real life examples: corrupt popes, ridiculous rosaries, unscriptural devotions, banned books  –​all were grist to his mill.4 Most of all, however, Vergerio attacked I thank the editors of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Cambridge University Press for their permission to re-​use in this chapter parts of my article, ‘Vergerio’s Anti-​Nicodemite Propaganda and England: 1547–​1558’, JEH, 51 (2000), 296–​318. 1 ‘il Polo havrebbe voluto dar ad intendere, che havremmo potuto farci avanti con la pura dottrina, tacendo, dissimulando et fuggendo, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Giudicio sopra le lettere di tredici uomini illustri (Tubingen:  Ulrich Morhart, 1555), ustc 862619, B5r ‒[B6r–​v], quoted by Paolo Simoncelli, Il caso Reginal Pole: eresià e santita nelle polemiche religiose del Cinquecento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1997), pp. 142–​143. 2 Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 26, p. 442; Pier Paolo Vergerio, ‘Orazione’, in Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, Document 19, pp. 438–​39; Pier Paolo Vergerio, Il catalogo de libri, li quali nuovamente nel mese di maggio nell’anno presente mdxlviiii sono stati condannati, et scomunicati per heretici ([Poschiavo, Dolfino Landolfi], 1549), ustc 862570. 3 For Vergerio before his exile, see Schutte, Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer; Robert A. Pierce, Pier Paolo Vergerio the Propagandist (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003); Ugo Rozzo, ed., Pier Paolo Vergerio il giovane, un polemista attraverso L’Europa del Cinquecento (Udine: Forum, 2000). 4 Anne Overell and Scott C. Lucas, ‘Whose Wonderful News? Italian Satire and William Baldwin’s Wonderfull Newes of the Death of Paul the iii’, Renaissance Studies, 26 (2012), 180‒196, especially pp. 187‒191; Giorgio Caravale, Forbidden Prayer; Church Censorship and Devotional Literature in Renaissance Italy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 55‒69. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_​0 09

132 Chapter 7 dissimulators:  they had failed their faith and their God. His main victims were those who had stayed in Italy, trying to compromise. The worst was Cardinal Reginald Pole, who had ‘seen the light’ and ‘tasted the sweetness of the Gospel’ but still took no action. In Vergerio’s eyes, Pole was the greatest nicodemite in Europe.5 In this chapter we examine the skilful propaganda strategies of Vergerio and his collaborators and ask how the Italian ‘case against nicodemites’ was received in England. From the moment he chose to go into exile in 1549, Vergerio made sure that he knew about English affairs and that England knew about him. His vociferous pamphlets were read there, as were the works of his collaborators, Francesco Negri, Celio Secondo Curione and the lawyer, Matteo Gribaldi.6 These Italian writers in exile were part of a swelling pan-​European chorus against nicodemism. Calvin was its most famous voice, but he had support from many reformers: Heinrich Bullinger, Pietro Martire Vermigli, and even Martin Bucer after an earlier phase when he had advised compromise.7 Yet their anti-​nicodemism was no more fixed or homogenous than the nicodemism that it condemned. Both were subtly changing phenomena, affected by differences of time and place, the temperament of the polemicists and the specific European crises they addressed. The style of European propaganda veered from sober theological reflection to violent personal attack. This chapter will examine the fiery Italian brand and its impact in England’s often-​nicodemite society. Italian writers focussed  –​perhaps obsessively ‒ on individuals and their ‘witness’ to their faith. Calvin was different:  he wrote about groups and communities. In the first of his Epistolae duae of 1536, Calvin avoided shining his spotlight on one person alone. He wrote ‘These pages are not written for you alone’; he was addressing not one errant deceiver but the community.8 That letter was re-​worked into his Petit traicte written in 1540,

5 Vergerio, Il catalogo de libri, sig. g iiii v, cited by Firpo, La presa di potere, p. 50. 6 Lucio Biasiori, ‘Francesco Negri’, DBI; Albano Biondi, ‘Celio Secondo Curione’, DBI:  Diego Qualioni ‘Matteo Gribaldi Moffa’, DBI. 7 Eire, War against the Idols, pp. 120 and 235–​9; Matheson ‘Martyrdom or Mission’, pp. 154–​172. 8 Epistolae duae, de rebus hoc saeculo cognitu apprime necessariis. Prior, de fugiendis impiorum illicitis sacris, & puritate Christianae religionis observanda. Altera, de Christiani hominis officio in sacerdotiis papalis ecclesiae vel administrandis, vel abiiciendis (Basel: Thomas I Platter & Balthasar Lasius, 1537), ustc 667726. David Wright argues that ‘virtually the whole essence of his refutation’ of nicodemism was contained in the first of these letters, ‘Why was Calvin so severe a critic of nicodemism?’, p.  73; Jean-​Francois Gilmont, Insupportable mais fascinant: Jean Calvin, ses amis, ses ennemis e les autres (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 159–​60; Eleonora Belligni, Renata di Francia (1510–​1575): un eresia di corte (Turin: utet, 2011).

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published in 1543, 1544 and 1555 and reissued and translated many times thereafter. The Petit traicte in its turn was prequel to the still more famous Excuse à messieurs les nicodemites, his ‘Answer to the Nicodemites’.9 These texts form the building blocks of Calvin’s great anti-​nicodemite decade in the 1540s, but there is very little naming and shaming of individuals, partly because noble leadership remained crucial in France. In his Excuse there are no named people, except for Jesus Christ, Calvin himself, the fictional ‘messieurs’ and ‘Maitre Fifi’, the cesspool cleaner who, like nicodemites conforming in catholic churches, became desensitised to the ghastly goings-​on around him.10 Anti-​nicodemite polemic by Calvin and by Bullinger was translated into English and published in 1544 and an English translation of Calvin’s Petit traicte was printed four times in England in the course of the year 1548.11 Thus, by the time the Italian texts against nicodemism became known in England, readers were half-​prepared –​but they could not have anticipated the marked difference in style. Italian polemicists focused on the personal. They did not hesitate to highlight the terrifying isolation, suicidal states and eternal damnation that awaited dissembling individuals. Often they adopted ad hominem tactics, especially against Pole and his friends. Why fix on individuals? Partly because organised groups were not part of their experience; Italian reform had hardly any organised churches: ‘The “confessional” era never came’.12 Their style was influenced strongly by humanist satire, especially evident in the popular tradition of pasquinades. The talking, teasing statue called Pasquino was originally 9 Petit traicte monstrant que c’est que doit faire un homme fidele congnoissant la verité de l’evangile quand il est entre les papistes([Genève: Jean Girard] 1543), ustc 4761, and see also ustc 4769 and 4777; Excuse a messieurs les nicodemites, ustc 4768, see above, Prologue, p. 2. 10 Eire, War against the Idols, p. 239; Gilmont, Insupportable mais fascinant, pp. 127, 159–​60; Nikki Shepardson, Burning Zeal: The Rhetoric of Martyrdom and the Protestant Community in Reformation France, 1520–​1570 (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2007). 11 Two epystles one of Henry Bullynger, wyth the consent of all the lernyd men of the Churche of Tigury: another of Ihon Caluyn, cheffe preacher of the church of Geneue: whether it be lawfull for a Chrysten man to communycate or be pertaker of the masse of the Papysts … ([Antwerp: Matthias Crom], 1544), ustc 410458; The mynde of the godly and excellent lerned man M. Ihon Caluyne, what a faithfull man, whiche is instructe in the Worde of God, ought to do, dwellinge amongest the papistes [Ipswich: [John Oswen], 1548], stc 4435.3; 4435.5; 4435; 4435.7. 12 Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, pp. 42–​3; Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, pp. 20–​ 23; Euan Cameron, The Reformation in France and Italy to c. 1560: a review of recent contributions and debates, in Philip Benedict, Silvana Seidel Menchi and Alain Tallon, eds., La Réforme en France et en Italie: Contacts, comparaisons et contrastes (Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2007)  at paragraph 13, notes 27 and 28, accessed 2 June 2016.

134 Chapter 7 a Roman who attacked Italians, especially popes.13 Pasquino’s merciless mockery was soon turned on nicodemites, especially in the work of Curione and Negri, but the most unrestrained exponent was Vergerio himself. 1

Pier Paolo Vergerio before His Exile

Vergerio’s family was poor, he grew up in Istria which was then part of the Venetian republic, and he had one famous ancestor of the same name: Pier Paolo Vergerio the elder, the early fifteenth-​century humanist and poet. At the University of Padua in the 1520s, Pier Paolo Vergerio, the younger, received a humanist education, at about the same time as Peter Martyr Vermigli, Reginald Pole and other spirituali. Despite Padua’s tradition of studi sacri, he had little or no theological training; like Matteo Gribaldi, he read law and was appointed to a lectureship in jurisprudence at Padua. Then he took up diplomatic posts in the employment of Pope Clement vii and Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga. In 1536 he was made bishop of Capodistria, where he had been born. He also visited Naples where he was acquainted with Valdés’s circle but only briefly; later, he knew Pole’s household at Viterbo, but there, too, he was no more than an occasional acquaintance. Nonetheless, his knowledge of the ideas read and discussed in these circles became ammunition in his later polemic.14 It also contributed to his very gradual ‘conversion’, first to sympathy with the spirituali, and then to the doctrines of the reformers. Vergerio moved uncertainly, undergoing some kind of conversion in 1545 but he did not decide to leave Italy until 1549. Thereafter, like many anti-​nicodemite writers, he had to deal with memories of his own years of nicodemite ‘waiting’.15 Politics played a part in his change of allegiance. After defeat of the protestant princes at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547, it looked as if twenty years of struggle in the Empire might end in catholic and imperial victory. The Council of Trent’s decree on the subject of justification was complete by January 1547. Venice, that devout if anti-​papal state, began to check up more carefully on the irregular beliefs of her subjects ‒ especially if, like Vergerio, they were 13

14 15

Chrysa Damianaki, Paolo Procaccioli and Angelo Romano, eds, Ex Marmore:  Pasquini, Pasquinisti, Pasquinate nell’Europa moderna (Manziana, Rome:  Vecchiarelli, 2006); Chrysa Damianaki and Angelo Romano, eds, Pasquin, Lord of Satire, and his Disciples in Sixteenth-​Century Struggles for Religious and Political Reform (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2014). Schutte, Vergerio, pp. 46 and 122; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 70–​72. Robert A. Pierce, ‘A New Look at the Conversion of Pier Paolo Vergerio’, in Rozzo, Pier Paolo Vergerio il giovane, pp. 83–​97 (pp. 87–​8); Pierce, Vergerio the propagandist, pp. 27–​28.

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also bishops. The Venetian Inquisition, set up in 1547, began to seek evidence against him. Vergerio faced the storm on his own because eminent patrons, like Cardinal Gonzaga, had become tired of him.16 At this highly charged time in his own life, he witnessed the illness of Francesco Spiera in Padua, late in 1548. Spiera had abjured his protestant faith and then fallen into guilt and terrible despair. From his exile in Basel in 1550, two years after this drama, Vergerio wrote ‘I would not be here had I not seen Spiera.’ This was not completely true; there were strong political reasons why Vergerio fled when he did. In the years that followed, he was the driving force in bringing to press several accounts of Spiera’s death, enthusiastically read all over Europe.17 2

Vergerio’s Collaborators: Negri and Curione

After leaving Italy in 1549, Vergerio fled first to Vicosoprano, conveniently placed in the tolerant Rhaetian Republic, near the Italian border, but this proved too small a world. He travelled to Chiavenna and to the great humanist centre of Basel. He met printers and exiles who became his collaborators, especially Celio Secondo Curione, a respected humanist, best known at that time for his pasquinades, and the ex-​Benedictine, Francesco Negri. Negri was the model anti-​nicodemite, he had crossed the mountains from his native Bassano del Grappa as early as 1525, which made him ‘clean’, uncompromised by any protracted dissimulation in Italy. Some of the most effective polemic against the spirituali and against Pole would appear in Negri’s name but it was written with Vergerio’s assistance. They turned out to be a perfect duo; the radical Negri, perceived as uncorrupt because of his early exile; Vergerio, deeply compromised by over a decade as a catholic bishop, but a brilliant polemicist, who was willing to organise and help other propagandists.18 Curione had been in exile since 1542 and he had lived mostly in Losanne. He was the first to use pasquinade against ‘nicodemite’ targets, especially against 16

17 18

Antonio Santuosso, ‘Religious Orthodoxy, Dissent and Suppression in Venice in the 1540s’, Church History, 42 (1973), 476–​485; Santuosso, ‘The Moderate Inquisitor Giovanni della Casa’s Venetian Nunciature, 1544–​1549’, Studi Veneziani, new series, 2 (1978), 119–​210; John Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 66–​70, 125–​133; Murphy, Ruling Peacefully, pp. 132–​8. See below, Chapter 8. Edoardo Barbieri, ‘Pier Paolo Vergerio e Francesco Negri: tra storia, storiografia e intertestualita’, in Rozzo, Pier Paolo Vergerio il giovane, pp. 239–​277; Silvano Cavazza, ‘ “Quei che vogliono Cristo senza croce”: Vergerio e i prelati riformatori italiani (1549–​1555)’, in Rozzo, Pier Paolo Vergerio il giovane, pp. 107–​142.

136 Chapter 7 Erasmus.19 His Pasquino in estasi … nuovo of 1550 was intended for those dissemblers who knew the gospel but had remained in Italy. There Curione preached a hard doctrine. He echoed St Paul’s ‘terrifying sentence’, of damnation for nicodemites who had committed the unforgiveable sin against the Holy Spirit.20 Yet his versions of Pasquin were continually developing and his views were not settled.21 Moreover, Curione was soon to make some puzzling moves, to become more sympathetic to nicodemites and much less sure about damnation. Finally, he would condemn persecution and believe nearly everyone was saved –​but Curione’s ‘turn’ is a later story, saved for Chapter 9. In 1546 Curione moved from Losanne to Basel and there, in 1549, he was Vergerio’s host after the ex-​Bishop’s decision to leave Italy. For a short time they collaborated, but they soon fell out dramatically.22 3

Italian Anti-​Nicodemite Propaganda and England

In the four years after he fled, Vergerio published about forty books and pamphlets. It was a phase of frenetic activity and most of it had anti-​nicodemite objectives, to force the spirituali who had remained in Italy, and secret protestants everywhere, to declare themselves, to ‘witness’.23 His polemic proved highly exportable, seen as relevant in many places. Paradoxically, it had considerable appeal for those who were not, at that time, facing the likelihood of persecution ‒ like the majority of the population of Edwardian England. Vergerio wrote for and about England for two reasons: in Edward vi’s reign, largely because he had hopes of finding work there; then, in the catholic Mary Tudor’s reign, he was still hunting nicodemites and his main quarry, 19

20

21

22 23

The first edition, Pasquino in estasi, appeared anonymously in Italy in 1542 (Rome: ‘ad instantia di maestro Pasquino’, n. d.). For Curione’s pasquinades, see Lucio Biasiori, L’eresia di un umanista: Celio Secondo Curione nell’ Europa del Cinquecento (Rome: Carocci, 2015), pp. 43–​54 and see Biasiori’s Bibliography, at pp. 115–​116; Albano Biondi, ‘Celio Secondo Curione’, DBI. Pasquino in estasi nuovo, e molto più pieno, ch’el primo, in sieme c’ol viaggio de l’inferno (Rome [=Basel], “nella bottega di Pasquino all’istanza di papa Paolo Farnese”, [1550]), ustc 825110, sigs L viiir and M Ir, cited by Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande, pp. 105–​6; see also ustc 825107. Davide Dalmas, ‘Satira in progress. Una lettera del Pasquino in Estasi di Celio Secondo Curione’, in Damianaki, Procaccioli and Romano, Ex marmore, pp. 379–​94, especially pp. 381–​ 82; Dalmas, ‘Forme della ristruttura nel “Pasquino in estasi”‘, in Damianaki and Romano, eds, Pasquin, Lord of Satire, pp. 61–​83. Overell and Lucas, ‘Whose Wonderful News, pp. 185–​7. Schutte, Vergerio, pp. 247 and 264–​265.

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the spirituale Englishman Reginald Pole, had just returned home as Cardinal Legate. Vergerio and his compatriots in exile insisted that Pole’s compromised past must be revealed yet, as we have already seen, English traditions tended to keep much concealed.24 Nonetheless his propaganda served to focus attention: English humanists who knew about Henry viii’s pursuit of Pole or had vaguely heard of Il Beneficio and the spirituali were, through Vergerio, brought to clearer knowledge of all the doubts, fears, waiting and secrets that had been part of Italian history during the 1540s. Vergerio started angling for an invitation to England soon after he left Italy. He knew that Pietro Martire Vermigli and Bernardino Ochino were there as Archbishop Cranmer’s honoured guests. Probably he also knew that il Beneficio di Cristo, which he had praised so often, had been translated into English. Vergerio began to dedicate his own works to the young King Edward: notably Copia di una Lettera (1550) and the Al Serenissimo Re Eduardo Sesto (1550). Edward’s accession seemed to him to herald a reversal of defeats for ‘the Gospel’ in other parts of Europe. In Al serenissimo re, he attacked those who, despite these renewed hopes, still would not commit themselves but were waiting, ‘doing what Nicodemus did’, ‘fanno dei Nicodemo’.25 At this early stage, Vergerio did not understand that patient waiting lay deep within English religious experience, at Edward vi’s court and throughout the country. He used Copia di una lettera to mark the death of Pope Paul iii (whom he hated) and hope for ‘lesser evil’ from the next pontiff, Julius iii. He also threw in references to the silent spirituali in Italy, claiming that the new pontificate had caused them ‘to think again and to acknowledge that on some points we [the Italian exiles, the protestants] were right’. He wanted to believe that ‘some Cardinals and bishops and generals [religious superiors] would now want to make up for it and admit their mistake’. To initiates this would have appeared as a jab at Cardinals Pole and Morone, the attack was veiled, but only for the time being.26 Vergerio was still warming up. 24 25

26

Paolo Simoncelli, Il caso Reginal Pole: eresia e santita nelle polemiche religiose del cinquecento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1997); Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 220–​ 69; see above, Chapter 2. Al serenissimo Re d’Inghilterra Eduardo Sesto, della creatione del nuovo Papa Jiulio terzo et ciò che di lui sperare si possa(n.p., n.pub., 1550), ustc 862568; see also Al serenissimo re d’Inghilterra Edoardo sesto. De portamenti di papa Giulio iii. Et quale habbia ad essere il concilio, che egli intende di fare ([Poschiavo, Dolfino Landolfi], 1550), ustc 862569, fols 16r and 24v. There are Latin, French and German translations of this text, see Simonelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, pp. 78–​79. The phrase ‘fanno dei nicodemo’ is used of Pietro Bertano, Bishop of Fano, see Cavazza, ‘ “Quei che vogliono Cristo senza croce” ’, pp. 107–​142, at p. 126. ‘Quei di Roma cominciano a risentirsi et a concedere che in alcuni articoli noi habbiamo ragione … Et voglio credere che alcuni Cardinali et Vescovi et generali et altri … hora voranno

138 Chapter 7 Meanwhile Curione was watching Vergerio’s activities, and observed with contempt that he had sought English financial help.27 Vergerio himself urged Bullinger to persuade Vermigli to pull strings for him to travel to London. On 26 October 1551, Vermigli wrote to Bullinger explaining why he could not help: The affair of the bishop Vergerio cannot now be undertaken or promoted by me because I am a long way from court and from persons in power: for I am residing, as you know, at Oxford where I have no intercourse with any but students. In the next place some great commotions have been raised in the state … but when an occasion shall be afforded I will not be unmindful of this duty. Vermigli had a point: amidst the ‘commotion’ which led to the Duke of Somerset’s arrest three weeks later, Vergerio’s travel plans cannot have been a priority. However, when a degree of calm had been restored, still Vermigli did not offer an introduction.28 Both he and Vergerio were fervent anti-​nicodemites but their approach was utterly different, one a scholar, the other a journalist. It was left to the English diplomat, Richard Morison, and the Polish nobleman, Jan Łaski, to provide Vergerio with a ‘raccomandazione’ to England and Edward vi’s court. Richard Morison, who had become English ambassador to the Emperor from 1550 until 1553, had a good deal in common with Vergerio; both were polemicists and Morison was a good Italianist, an enthusiastic ‘European’ –​we met him when, as a struggling student at the University of Padua, he was member of the ‘flock’ loosely attached to Pole’s household. But he had abandoned Pole and chosen the King of England and, like Vergerio, he often attacked ‘His Hollowness’, the pope.29 A polemicist himself, he was intrigued by Vergerio’s propaganda activities. In 1551, he wrote from Augsburg to the King’s Council in London to praise the Italian’s ‘printing daily of new books which go in great numbers into Italy. Many of these are dedicated to the king’s majesty’.30 In the preface of one of those books, dedicated to Morison, Vergerio described King Edward vi and Morison as leaders in the struggle against the papal Anti-​Christ and the Council of Trent. Morison was expecting to leave his

27 28 29 30

risarcire et emendare il fallo’, in Vergerio, Copia di una lettera, quoted by Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, pp. 79–​80. Friedrich Hubert, Vergerios publizistiche Thätigkeit nebst einer bibliographischen Übersicht (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1893), pp. 108–​09. Vermigli to Bullinger, 26 October 1551, OL, 2, pp. 499–​500. Sowerby, Morison, p. 216. Morison to the Council, Augsburg, 14 April 1551, csp Foreign (1547–​1553), 318.

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post and return to England in 1552; he suggested that Vergerio should accompany him and possibly take up work as minister to Italian exiles in London, but the scheme never materialised.31 Vergerio’s other valuable contact in England was Jan Łaski (Johannes a Lasco), Polish reformer and exile, who had become superintendent of the Stranger Church in London in 1550.32 Between 1551 and 1552 Łaski suggested that Vergerio might take up a post in England.33 Vergerio translated into Italian a part of the text of Łaski’s Forma ac ratio. ‘It was sent to me from England recently’, said Vergerio in his preface ‒ faux-​casual, but clearly proud of his English contacts.34 Nevertheless, the appointments he wanted never materialised. Sometimes Vergerio’s collaborator Francesco Negri is overlooked as a little-​ known radical, an also-​ran. Not so. Even before Vergerio had chosen exile, Negri was known to some English readers for his text la Tragedia del libero arbitrio, first published in Basel in 1546. During his own travels through Germany, Thomas Hoby began to translate that text.35 The Italianist William Thomas, who, as we saw, took refuge in Italy and spread rumours about Pole, also read and praised Negri’s Tragedia.36 By 1551, Negri was working with Vergerio on a revised edition of the Tragedia, with a new preface and other accretions which had the effect of turning it into a more blatantly anti-​nicodemite work. It is likely that some of the new purple passages were written by Vergerio.37 Their effective critiques are often 31

32 33

34 35 36 37

Pietro Paolo Vergerio, Risposta del vescovo Vergerio ad un libro del Nausea vescovo di Vienna scritto in laude del Concilio Tridentino (Poschiavo: [Dolfino Landolfi], 1552), sigs. A2r–​A3v, see Sowerby, Morison, p.  216; Hubert, Vergerios publizistische Thätigkeit, pp.  113–​15 and number 68. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The Importance of John Łaski in the English Reformation’, in Christoph Strohm, ed., Johannes à Lasco; Polischer Baron, Humanist und Europäischer Reformator (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), pp. 315–​45. Hubert, Vergerios publizistische Thätigkeit, pp.  112–​15, esp. p.  112, note 295. On Vergerio’s interest in English affairs, Emidio Campi, ‘Pier Paolo Vergerio ed il suo epistolario con Heinrich Bullinger’, in Rozzo, Pier Paolo Vergerio il giovane, pp.  277–​94, especially, pp. 285–​7. La forma delle publiche orationi et della co[n]‌fessione, & assolutione, la qual si usa nella chiesa de forestieri, [Zurich: Andreas ii Gessner & Rudolf Wyssenbach, 1551], ustc 862601 16576, sig. A2r. Francesco Negri, Tragedia intitolata libero arbitrio (Basel: Johann Oporinus, 1546), ustc 844416; see also ustc 699249 and ustc 844418; Hoby, Travail, p. 63. William Thomas, The Pilgrim: a dialogue on the life and actions of King Henry the Eighth, 1547, ed. J.A. Froude (London:  Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), pp.  61–​66; Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 89–​90; for Thomas, see above Chapter 2 p. 47. Francesco Negri, Della tragedia intitolata libero arbitrio, editione seconda, con accrescimento ([Poschiavo, Dolfino Landolfi], 1550 [1551]), ustc 844420. The preface and the second scene of the fourth act are probably Vergerio’s additions, see Cavazza, ‘ “Quei che vogliono

140 Chapter 7 quoted: according to Negri/​Vergerio, the spirituali had created ‘a new school of Christianity’: they believe in justification by faith ‘but do not want to admit the consequences’, so they keep the papacy and the mass; they are sitting ‘astride two saddles’. The naming of names follows, in true Italian style: first, Reginald Pole, then ‘il suo Priuli et Flaminio’ –​that sarcastic ‘il suo’ insinuated control and possibly homosexuality as well. Others associated with the spirituali are also named:  for instance, Cardinal Giovanni Morone and Ascanio Colonna, Vittoria’s brother and Ochino’s patron.38 In this text Vergerio was singled out for special praise: that often happened in works which he had written or partly written. The same self-​praise occurs in a salacious anti-​papal satire translated into English in Edward vi’s reign: the anonymous and venomous L’Epistola de morte Pauli Tertii, probably by Vergerio, or possibly ‘a work for four hands’ with Curione. This was translated into English by William Baldwin as Wonderful News of the Death of Paul iii (1552).39 By the next year, however, anti-​catholic pasquinades were no longer allowed in England. In July 1553, the catholic Mary

38

39

Cristo senza croce”‘, in Rozzo, Pier Paolo Vergerio il giovane p. 133; but see Barbieri, ‘Pier Paolo Vergerio e Francesco Negri’, ibid., pp. 239–​277. ‘Per il che non posso fare invero ch’io non mi maravigli grandemente del card. Polo d’Inghilterra col suo Priuli et Flaminio, del card. Morone, del sig.r Ascanio Colonna, del s. Camillo Orsino, et de molti altri omini di grandissima autorità sì in lettere, sì in altre dignità mondane, i quali paiono aver fatto una nuova scola d’un cristianesimo ordinato al loro modo, ove essi non niegano la giustificazione dell’uomo essere per Giesù Cristo sì, ma non vogliono admettere le conseguenze, che indi necessariamente ne seguono, perciò che vogliono tuttavia con questo sostenere il papato, vogliono avere le messe, vogliono osservare mille altre papistice superstizioni ed empietà, alla veramente cristiana pietà del tutto contrarie imaginandosi non so in qua modo, che queste cose possino aver convenienza insieme …. Hormai dovrebbono pur vedere quelli, che in tutto non sono ciechi, cotesto miscuglio di cose christiane et papistice esser solamente fatto per potere sedere (come si dice) sopra due selle’ … Negri, Della tragedia (1550), sigs[B6]v–​[B7]r 1551, see also [P 8] r –​ Q [1]‌ r, quoted by Cavazza, ‘ “Quei che vogliono Cristo senza croce”‘, at p. 134; G. Zonta, ‘Francesco Negri l’eretico e la sua tragedia “Il libero arbitrio”‘, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 67 (1916–​17), see vol. 67, pp. 265–​324, and vol. 68 (also 1916–​17) 108–​160 (especially pp. 139–​40); Edoardo Barbieri, ‘Opere di Francesco Negri in Gran Bretagna’, Aevum, 71 (1997), 691–​709 (at 695–​7); Firpo, La presa di potere, pp. 135–​6. Overell and Lucas, ‘Whose Wonderful News?’, p. 190; L’Epistola de morte Paulii pont.max. deque iis quae ei post mortem eius acciderunt a firma di Aesquillus, [Pasquillus, Pasquino] (Piacenza: n.pub., 1549)[Basel; Johannes Oporinus], translated into English as Wonderful news of the death of Paul iii. written in Latin by P. Esquillus and englyshed by W B[aldwin], (London: Thomas Gaultier, [1552]), stc 10532. For attribution of the original version, see Overell and Lucas, ‘Whose Wonderful News?’, pp.  186–​91, and Lucio Biasiori, ‘ “L’uomo scaltro” e il “vescovo mascherato”: Celio Secondo Curione, Pietro Paolo Vergerio e ‘L’epistola de morte Pauli iii’, Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 72 (2010), 385–​396.

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Tudor became queen. Late in November 1554 Cardinal Pole arrived in London. Vergerio’s main target had come home. 4

Vergerio and Cardinal Reginald Pole

The nicodemism of Reginald Pole was Vergerio’s obsession. To explain why, we need to look at their parallel lives, both haunted by dilemmas about conformity and obedience. As we saw in earlier chapters, in 1546 Pole had urged the Council of Trent not to condemn the protestant theology of salvation because it was protestant, and had then withdrawn from its proceedings, possibly experiencing a breakdown. But he emerged as a candidate for the papacy on Pope Paul iii’s death in 1549 and narrowly missed election. After 1550, his position in the Curia became intensely difficult; he survived by silence and the occasional piece of skilled self-​defence. In 1553 he withdrew from curial politics to monastic peace on the shores of Lake Garda. A few weeks later, Mary was queen and Pole was made legate for ending the schism. His journey to England was much delayed because first he was required to make peace between the French King and the Emperor –​a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. Like it or not, Cardinal Pole was thrust into the diplomatic limelight.40 It was probably that limelight which galled Vergerio most. He had witnessed to his faith, whereas Pole had dissimulated, yet Pole had kept his diplomatic prominence whilst Vergerio, also once a diplomat, entered the ranks of rootless Italian exiles. Ironically, in the same month as Pole began work on his legation and his diplomacy for peace, October 1553, Vergerio was forced to accept the post of Rat (Adviser) to the Lutheran Duke of Württemberg, prominent on the protestant side. The most furious phase of Vergerio’s attacks began then. Anti-​nicodemite literature had never been so personal. Paolo Simoncelli argued that this was the point when Vergerio’s ‘case against Pole’ changed emphasis; Pole’s supposed secrecy receded and his anti-​ reform stance as persecutor of protestants came to the fore. His diplomacy was presented as an attempt to unite Europe’s catholic powers in order to crush protestants everywhere. Yet after 1553 Vergerio continued to allude to Pole’s dissimulation and the way he had encouraged secrecy in others. ‘Pole the Nicodemite’ gave way only in part to ‘Pole the Persecutor’. By 1553, the battle lines were drawn. Pole was supposed to be peace-​making on a long journey through Europe towards England. Vergerio hated Pole: as nicodemite, as diplomat, as

40

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, 234–​250; Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, pp. 77 and 95–​96.

142 Chapter 7 peace negotiator and, in the mid -​1550s, as representative of a potential Catholic recovery throughout Europe. Vergerio’s Giudicio sopra le lettere di tredici huomini illustri and Epistolae duae duorum amicorum, both published in 1555, are packed with references to Pole, Flaminio, the spirituali and the affairs of England. The two texts continued the double-​pronged attack on Pole as nicodemite and as persecutor. The text in Italian, Giudicio, was a comment on an already popular collection of Lettere of famous men by Dionigi Atanagi. The letters of Flaminio were among those Atanagi had published and these provided Vergerio with an immensely useful case study in nicodemism. The ‘buon Flaminio’ had been stopped from witnessing to his faith by Pole. The cardinal had taught Flaminio and all his followers to be content with secret knowledge, ‘secreta cognitione’ ‒ that was the same phrase as Valdés had used. Vergerio knew the spirituali’s sources, their language and their mind-​set. He accused Pole of teaching Flaminio and others to proceed by ‘keeping quiet, dissimulating, and running away’. His faithful followers said he ‘was awaiting the time’. Vergerio recounted how Pole had returned to England, where pure doctrine had been restored and ‘a flourishing Church’ had existed under Edward vi; then Pole had made the nobility kneel to him, he had absolved those who had once believed in ‘justification by faith in Christ alone’.41 This was right on target; salvation by faith was the cherished doctrine of English evangelicals and the spirituali alike. Now it had been made into sin and absolved by –​of all people –​Reginald Pole. The second letter of the two in Epistolae duae referred explicitly to Pole. Vergerio insisted that formerly, when Pole had been in Italy, he had believed in salvation by faith; now, however, either he had lapsed or he had never been serious. Having arrived in England, Pole had imprisoned Cranmer, and sent others like John Hooper, John Rogers and Rowland Taylor to their deaths. John Ponet, ‘the real bishop of Winchester and real servant of Jesus Christ’ had been forced into exile and Stephen Gardiner had replaced him. Vergerio could recite all these English names perfectly, he had a handle on tumultuous English events. Presumably there was a reliable informer among Englishmen in exile 41

Dionigi Atanagi, De le lettere di tredici huomini illustri, libri tredici (second edition) (Venice: n. pub., 1554), ustc 803648; ‘Egli attendeva a persuadere onde l’uomo si havesse a contentare di quella secreta cognitione’, …. il Polo havrebbe voluto dar ad intendere, che havremmo potuto farci avanti con la pura dottrina, tacendo, dissimulando et fuggendo. I suoi devoti rispondevano che egli aspettava tempo … horribilissima cosa e a pensare quanto sia stato danno’, Giudicio sopra le lettere di tredici uomini illustri pubblicate da M. Dionigi Atanagi et stampate in Venetia nell’ anno 1554 (Tubingen: Ulrich Morhart, 1555), ustc 862619, B5r –​ [B6r–​v], cited by Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, pp. 142–​3: Cavazza, ‘ “Quei che vogliono Cristo senza croce”‘, pp. 107–​113.

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in Mary’s reign; possibly Morison, possibly John Ponet, who were both Italianists. Vergerio’s message delivered in Latin in his Epistolae duae was available to educated English readers and intended for all Europeans:  he proclaimed that Pole was a nicodemite, not a fellow traveller. He was willing to persecute those whose doctrine he had once shared. Vergerio’s final sentence was anti-​ nicodemite stock-​in-​trade: ‘I say to you, one of you has betrayed me.’42 Damnation had never been closer to the surface. That was what would happen –​to Pole, Morone, Francesco Spiera, and all the others: dissimulate and be damned eternally. By 1555, however, there were dangers in pushing this message too far. Manifestly, there were a lot of protestants dissimulating in Marian England, as well as spirituali left in Italy and half-​committed reformers in France. Meanwhile, the Spanish radical Miguel Servetus had been burned as a heretic in 1553, not in catholic territories, but in Geneva, Calvin’s city. There was a furious outcry against that ‘protestant persecution’ in several places, but especially in Basel, humanist university city, where the Piedmontese Sebastien Castellio and his friend Celio Secondo Curione were leaders of a large group of Italian exiles. Their protest was closely connected to the debate about nicodemism. In Basel and elsewhere, opposition to persecution and to brittle certainties about damnation was creating a syndrome of dissent, which soon included sympathy for nicodemites. Curione, once Vergerio’s host, once an anti-​nicodemite, was changing. Vergerio was on unsafe ground for another reason too: 1555 was ‘the year of three popes’. Pope Julius iii died, his successor was Marcellus ii (who had been Cardinal Marcello Cervini, perceptive critic of Il Beneficio). His pontificate lasted a mere three weeks and, on 23 May 1555, the intransigent Cardinal Carafa, Pole’s arch-​enemy, became Pope Paul iv. Shortly afterwards, the new pope made it clear that he suspected Pole of years of dissimulation; on 9 April 1557, he withdrew Pole’s legatine authority and summoned him to Rome. Quite suddenly, in the propaganda battle against Pole, Vergerio found himself on the same side as this most reactionary of popes. So, his attack on Pole as nicodemite stopped; he would only be doing the pope’s work for him. Vergerio had focused mostly on the past; he had lambasted Pole for having

42

Epistolae duae duorum amicorum, ex quibus vana flagitiosaque Pontificum Pauli tertij et Iulij tertij et Cardinalis Poli et Stephani Gardineri pseudoepiscopi Vuintoniensis angli, eorum adulatorum sectatorumque ratio, magna ex parte potest intelligi, (n.p., n.d. [Strasbourg: Christian I Muller, 1555]), ustc 651203, sigs B1v, B3r–​3v, B4v. This text is printed in full by Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole as Appendix 1, pp. 243–​252, quotation at pp. 251–​ 52; listed by Pettegree in ‘Checklist of Latin Polemic published by Marian Exiles abroad’, Marian Protestantism, Appendix 4, number 12, p. 186.

144 Chapter 7 been a dissembler. His objective was not the correction of Pole’s secretive behaviour but the destruction of his career. Now the pope could take over. Vergerio would watch and wait. 5

English Reactions

For centuries, historians of religion in Mary Tudor’s reign followed John Foxe’s lead in focusing on the brave, the martyrs and the exiles. Yet, as Andrew Pettegree pointed out, when Mary Tudor’s government did all in its power to enforce conformity, about a thousand people went into exile ‘and the number who witnessed boldly in England … was even smaller’.43 The suffering of martyrs in Mary’s reign and the endurance of exiles have obscured the likely nicodemism of the rest. Some, like Sir William Cecil, gave up office but stayed close to the court and there is no record that he was harshly criticised for this.44 Roger Ascham went further: he continued to serve the Tudor state. His correspondence reveals his humanist contempt for Vergerio’s propagandist tactics. In 1554 Vergerio re-​published excerpts from Pole’s De unitate, with the title Oratio R. Poli.45 Vergerio used a pseudonym and chose a moment when he could do maximum damage, while Pole was still travelling in Europe on his ‘peace-​making’ mission, before he arrived in England. De Unitate had been written to condemn Henry viii’s divorce and supremacy almost twenty years previously.46 In that polemical text Pole had called protestants ‘the seed of the Turks’ and had urged the Emperor to take up arms against them. Re-​printed in 1554, such phrases did not reflect well on Pole the Peacemaker. The cardinal was made to appear the enemy of all religious peace. The next year, Vergerio issued a full version of De unitate. It was called Reginald Poli … pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione. In this full version, Vergerio’s name appeared as author

43 44 45

46

Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, Marian Protestantism, p. 87. Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 65–​82; Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, p. 104. Oratio R. Poli, qua Caesaris animum accendere conatur et inflammare … cum scholiis Athanasii (n. pl., n. pub., 1554), ustc 681010. Another copy, ustc 850101, is listed as printed in Venice in the same year. ‘Athanasius’, who wrote the notes, was Vergerio. He was probably ‘the German’ from whom Pole received an anonymous letter in the spring of 1554; Pole to Truchess, Brussels, 20 June 1554, Epistolae Reginaldi Poli, 4, 150–​58, excerpts are printed by Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, pp. 121–​122. Cardinal Morone, too, refers to a letter from ‘a German’, one of those ‘unable to control their tongues and pens’, Morone to Pole, Rome, May 1554, Epistolae Reginaldi Poli, 4, 149. See c­ hapter 2, pp. 38–41.

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of the bitter preface: no more hiding.47 Nonetheless Pole still refused to accept that it was Vergerio who had undermined the credibility of his mission. Roger Ascham saw matters more clearly. Ascham met Alvise Priuli, Pole’s close friend, after he had arrived in England with Pole at the end of 1554. Priuli asked Ascham whether he thought that the name ‘Vergerio’ on the hostile republication of De Unitate could be a pseudonym. Perhaps, suggested Priuli, the writer was really the humanist Johannes Sturm. Ascham took defensive action, writing to Sturm in September 1555, telling him that his name was being linked to this text and that he, Ascham, had quashed the rumour: ‘I confirmed that not only was his [Vergerio’s] very wordy style different from yours but that to have done such a thing was very far from your attitudes and intentions. I do not want you left in ignorance of this.’ Ascham, a nicodemite himself, disapproved of Vergerio’s publications against Pole.48 There appears to have been a movement to protect Pole in the last year of his troubled life: we saw something of that in Chapter 3. The Queen and her consort were against Pope Paul iv’s attacks on him and Mary blocked the attempt to recall the Cardinal to Rome. The English nobility, when forced to choose between a paranoid (possibly mad) pope and an inscrutable (possibly deceitful) English cardinal, definitely chose the latter. The Count of Feria had homed in on his failure to commit: ‘I do not believe the lukewarm go to Paradise even if they are called moderates’.49 That was completely different, however, from Vergerio’s certainty that Pole was heading straight for hell. John Foxe, the English martyrologist, also perceived Pole’s nicodemism, but there was no hint that Foxe took Vergerio’s side.50 The several English reformations proved that the links among the noble and governing classes of England were stronger than religious divisions ‒ an old 47 48

49 50

Reginald Pole, Pro Ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, libri quatuor (Strasbourg, Wendelin I Rihel, 1555), ustc 690309, dedicated to John Frederick, Duke of Saxony. ‘Hic perquisivit a me, an non putarem Praefationem Vergerii praefixam libro Poli a te fuisse scriptam. Aperte affirmabam non solum illum stylum longissime discrepare a tua scriptione, sed tale etiam factum, valde abhorrere a tuo animo e cogitatione’, Roger Ascham to Johann Sturm, 14 September 1555, Roger Ascham, Epistolarum libri quatuor (Oxford:  Lichfield, 1703), p. 53, cited by Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, p. 131. For Ascham’s involvement with the Cambridge group which had supported Italian reformers in England, see Winthrop Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980), pp. 58 and 134; M. Anne Overell, ‘The Cambridge Connection and the “strangeness” of Italian Reformers, 1547–​1556’, in The Cambridge Connection in Tudor England: Humanism, Reform, Rhetoric and Politics, ed. John F. McDiarmid, forthcoming in 2019, in St Andrews Studies in Reformation History, Brill. csp Spanish (1554–​1558), 415, pp. 370–​71. tamo 1570, book 12, 2198.

146 Chapter 7 allegiance which tended to produce nicodemites. Sir William Cecil accepted the invitation to join the group sent to Brussels to meet Cardinal Pole and to accompany him back to England, they became friends and dined together, and Cecil was a beneficiary in the Cardinal’s will.51 Englishmen knew that Pole was the victim of hostility: he was not particularly popular, but a sense of ‘unfair play’ helped him. English nicodemites at court may well have drawn strength for their own complicated position from their knowledge of Pole’s history of double-​mindedness and the bitter attacks on him. English protestants in exile, on the other hand, might be expected to condemn Pole and support Vergerio. They had renounced the path of nicodemism, rejecting the religion of England’s Queen and her cardinal. Yet, while not for Pole, English Marian exiles were definitely against Vergerio. They favoured Swiss theology and Vergerio was by then in the employ of the Lutheran Duke of Württemberg. Paradoxically, John Utenhove complained of the dissimulation of Vergerio himself ‒ he who had spent ten furious years exposing deceit in others: ‘While he [Vergerio] was here, however, he conformed himself to us and asserted and pretended that he entirely agreed with us’. In the same year, 1558, John Burcher told Bullinger that Vergerio had betrayed ‘his certain and manifest calling … in search of worldly employment’ and had ‘not conducted himself with becoming moderation’.52 The Universal Short Title Catalogue lists over 200 works by Vergerio. The majority were vociferous pamphlets, produced in several European cities, usually cheaply and at speed. Most appeared in the 1550s when there was a sense of urgency among Europe’s protestants, born of fear of catholic triumph –​in France, the Netherlands, England and Scotland: in Italy that triumph was almost complete. Protestants needed his polemic and his publishing skills. English exiles’ presses in Europe might have produced translations of his polemic had they not scorned his Lutheran allegiance. As it was, Vergerio’s works did not appear at all among their publications –​featuring the works of Calvin, Vermigli and Wolfgang Musculus.53 There was an important difference between Vergerio and these more ‘mainstream’ anti-​nicodemite writers. He had reduced the argument to individuals, to ‘real life’ stories and, in the case against Pole, to personal attack. They, on the other hand, dealt in general precept usually

51 52

53

Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, pp. 103–​4, 107, 110–​111; Alford, Burghley, pp. 70–​71. John Utenhovius to Henry Bullinger and Peter Martyr, Wladislaw, 23 June, 1557, OL, 2, 603; John Burcher to Henry Bullinger, Cracaw, 1 and 16 March, 1558, OL, 2, 693–​695. The charge of worldly ambition recurred throughout Vergerio’s life, but see Anne Schutte’s modification, Vergerio, p. 47. For discussion of these publications, see below Chapter 9.

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supported by careful scriptural references. They sought to prevent ‘cohabitation’ of groups of the faithful with unfaithful regimes, while Vergerio concentrated on destroying the reputations of individual nicodemites. Calvin expressed contempt for Italian exiles in general and, in particular, he warned of Vergerio’s ‘unstable showing off’.54 When the founder of anti-​nicodemism dismissed him, most European protestant opinion was likely to turn against him. 6

Overtaken? Outmoded?

It is an error to see the controversies about nicodemism as a backwater, cut off from other great debates of the mid-​sixteenth century, for instance about persecution, the right of resistance to rulers and ‘just’ war. There was significant over-​lap. In the long term, however, these fundamental and enduring controversies undermined Vergerio’s arguments and indeed all anti-​nicodemite arguments. The debate about persecution and the violent punishment and execution of heretics, did not begin with the burning of Miguel Servetus in Geneva in 1553, but it was that act which most obviously weakened the anti-​nicodemite argument. Since the late 1530s the whole discourse had been predicated on the notion that those tempted to be nicodemites were, by definition, protestants living under catholic persecution and forced to worship catholic ‘idols’. Persecution to the death in Geneva, one of Europe’s leading protestant cities, introduced unforeseen complexities. Should one witness to faith even when protestants were the persecutors? Servetus’s execution split the Italian exile community. Vergerio took a moderate position: he was shocked by Servetus’s heretical teaching, but he did not approve of burning him.55 Castellio, Curione, Ochino and others condemned the act and (unjustly) they held Calvin personally responsible. They also raised the volume on their Erasmian discourse about mercy, about salvation for all on the grounds that God alone could see into the hearts of sinners ‒ and that large category included nicodemites.56 Second:  these arguments were related to theories of resistance. Anti-​ nicodemites had considered carefully the proper reaction of individuals forced by unrighteous (catholic) governments to conform:  for instance the spirituali in Italy and English protestants in Queen Mary’s reign. Their answer 54 55 56

‘Non dubito quin jam expertus sis quam parum tibi profuerit ventosa hominis ostentatio’, John Calvin to John à Lasco, 1556, cited in OL, 2, p. 603. Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 60. For completion of Curione’s ‘turn’, see Chapter 9.

148 Chapter 7 was: ‘witness to faith’, ‘be brave’ and the manifest failure of Pole and the spirituali to do this had been one of Vergerio’s major themes. Yet it was becoming clear that the brave witness of individuals would change neither the legitimacy nor the religious affiliation of governments. Perhaps the ultimate way of standing up for your faith might be to resist those who put it down. In the mid-​1550s, with Mary Tudor was still on the English throne, resistance theorists, especially John Ponet, Christopher Goodman and John Knox, considered solutions more radical than individual witness: under certain circumstances they justified resistance to rulers and, later on, others would call for the removal of rulers on religious grounds.57 The personal witness demanded by writers like Vergerio and Negri was replaced, in their lifetimes, by proposals for communal action of large groups, witnessing to their faith by resisting ungodly rulers. The third discourse interlocking with anti-​nicodemite polemic was about war –​perhaps even ‘holy war’. Carlos Eire argued that religious warfare was a long-​term result of Calvin’s anti-​nicodemite propaganda; his ‘politics of purity’ distanced the godly group from the rest of society. Although Calvin said he would go no further than passive disobedience, Eire argued that the uncompromising tone of his polemic provided ‘a blueprint for social, political and ecclesiastical strife’. Calvin’s ‘war against idols’ … ‘contributed to iconoclasm throughout Western Europe, but also to theories that supported armed resistance against established rulers’.58 More recently, Jon Balserak proposed that Calvin’s understanding of prophetic mission included an acceptance of the use of force and therefore of ‘French (holy) wars’.59 If these two scholars are right, unrelenting propaganda about witness and the defence of truth helped fuel the fury which made Europe’s religious wars. In the longer term, moreover, this was true of propaganda on both sides, protestant and catholic.60

57

58 59 60

John Ponet, A short treatise of politike power and of the true obedience which subjects owe to kynges (Strasbourg: Paul Kőpfel and Philipp Kopfel, 1556), ustc 693853; Christopher Goodman, How superior powers ought to be obeyed (Geneva:  Jean Crespin, 1558), ustc 450270; John Knox, An appellation from the sentence pronounced against him. (An admonition to England and Scotland) (Geneva: Pierre-​Jacques Poullain and Antoine Reboul, 1558), ustc 450271; Eire, War against the idols, p. 274; Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory’, in James Henderson Burns and Mark Goldie, eds, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–​1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), pp. 208–​212. Eire, War against the idols, pp. 309–​310; id., ‘Prelude to Sedition: Calvin’s attack on Nicodemism and Religious Compromise’, ARG, 76 (1985), 120–​45, especially pp. 140–​41; id., ‘Calvin and Nicodemism: A Reappraisal’, SCJ, 10 (1979), 46–​69. Balserak, Calvin as Sixteenth-​Century Prophet, Chapter 4, esp. p. 103. Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print:  Catholic Polemic and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002).

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Italian propaganda went out of date more rapidly than Calvin’s: the sins of Pole and the spirituali became yesterday’s news. Largely because of its topical and individualistic approach, Vergerio’s polemic was sidelined. Religious war required whole communities taking to the battlefield, not erstwhile nicodemites repenting in their lonely cells. As later chapters of this book will show, the whole anti-​nicodemite ideology was a largely sixteenth-​century phenomenon and its arguments were diluted and distorted even in that era. By the next century, its core texts were slipping off publishers’ lists.61 It seems that they were less marketable, probably because religious war had replaced individual witness. Thus, revolutionary discourses about persecution, godly resistance and righteous war made the ad hominem attacks of Vergerio, Negri and other Italians seem parochial, peripheral and somewhat passé. With one exception: the European success of an Italian tale about a miserable nicodemite in despair and on his way to hell; it compensated for the gradual outmoding of all the rest of Vergerio’s propaganda. The story of Francesco Spiera was substantially ‘his’ drama and it would grip English protestant consciences for three hundred years. 61

See Chapters 11 and 12.

Chapter 8

Exploiting Francesco Spiera in Italy and in England Oh let us not so run down headlong into perdition, stumbling on those sins from which there is no recovery …. as it chanced to Lot’s wife, Judas Iscariot, Francis Spira, and to many others.1 John Bradford, ‘Exhortation to the Brethren’.

∵ Stories about Francesco Spiera were Italian polemicists’ greatest scoop: on-​the-​ spot accounts of the real life and real death of a nicodemite –​or so said their creators. They traced a thread of cause and effect through his dissimulation exhibited in his recantation, to his despair, thoughts of suicide, miserable death and then to his eternal damnation. That was what happened to nicodemites. Spiera’s chroniclers were exiles who intended to prod stay-​at-​home Italians into making a proper commitment to their faith by going into exile. It is ironic that these stories had their greatest success not in Italy, but in protestant lands, pre-​eminently in England. In King Edward vi’s reign, less than a year after the original had appeared in Italy, an English translation was published in Worcester, by one of the King’s Printers, no less. This was red-​carpet treatment for the Italian tale.2 In this chapter we examine the composition of these accounts of Spiera by Italian writers and their importance in England in the reigns of King Edward vi and Queen Mary i.

I am grateful to the editors of the Sixteenth Century Journal for their permission to re-​use in this chapter some paragraphs of my article ‘The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 26 (1995), 619–​37. 1 The Writings of John Bradford:  Containing Sermons, Meditations, Examinations, ed. Aubrey Townsend, PS, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1848–​53), 1, p. 433. 2 Matteo Gribaldi, Historia de quodam quem hostes evangelii in Italia coegerunt abiicere agnitam veritatem (Wittenberg: Josef Klug, 1549) ustc 663365; Gribaldi’s account was published six times in 1549, four times in Latin, twice in German, see ustc; A notable and marvailous epistle concerning the terrible judgement of god, upon him that for feare of men denyeth Christ and the knowen veritie, with a preface of Doctor Calvine, tr. E. A. [Edward Aglionby] (Worcester: John Oswen, 1550), stc 12365; reissued during Elizabeth’s reign with the same title (London: Henry Denham [and John Kingston?] for William Norton [1570?]), stc 12366.

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The stories of Spiera bent minds more effectively than all the direct preaching and polemic, because they did so subliminally. Popular contemporary literary conventions permeated them, especially that of the ars moriendi –​ meditation on last things. But these accounts were also products of international conflict and religious persecution. Spiera’s death became a pawn in the hands of those who chose to write up his story to further the anti-​nicodemite message –​to spread fear of the consequences of dissimulation across Europe. For that reason every detail needs to be treated with caution. We are not dealing with conscientious reporters. First we should separate what is known of Spiera’s life from the mushroom growth of fiction and admonition around it, beginning in the 1550s and continuing until well into the nineteenth century. 1

Evidence of Spiera’s Life, Trial and Death

Spiera was a notary, a leading figure in a group of reformers in Cittadella, just north of Venice, that bustling centre of heterodox opinions. In 1548, during one of the earliest investigations undertaken by the Venetian Inquisition, Spiera recanted his earlier beliefs in salvation by faith.3 After his recantation Spiera was very distressed, so he was taken to Padua for medical help, in ready supply in that great university and city. There, eminent doctors and theologians came to visit him, sometimes over twenty at a time. Among the visitors were some who were themselves experiencing acute personal dilemmas similar to Spiera’s, a product of religious confusion and ‘doubt’ in Italy in the late 1540s. Time and place made Spiera’s confusion worse than most. He appears to have been wrestling with the problem of salvation for a considerable time and reading about doctrine. But he went on fraction too late, when others had backed off and thoughts like his had become risky.4 The Council of Trent’s decree of Justification of January 1547, issued just before Spiera’s trial, was supposed to settle matters but clarities do not come that fast.5 Spiera’s home in Cittadella, was forty miles north of Venice, the melting pot of Italian reform, an area dangerously close to the mountain borders between Italy and lands which had adopted the reformation. Books came across those frontiers in large quantities; works by Erasmus, Valdés, Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer and Calvin circulated and were being read by literate artisans and 3 Giuseppe de Leva, Degli Eretici di Cittadella (Venice: Grimaldo, 1873), p. 30. 4 Anne Jacobsen Schutte, ‘The Periodization of Sixteenth Century Religious History: the Post Cantimori Paradigm Shift’, Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989), 270–​84. 5 Anthony Wright, ‘The Significance of the Council of Trent’, JEH, 26 (1975), 353–​62, esp. p. 355.

152 Chapter 8 notaries, like Spiera. The state of Venice, traditionally resistant to the papacy, was moving from laxity to vigilance for political rather than theological reasons. Giovanni della Casa’s Venetian nunciature (1544‒49) and the establishment of the Inquisition in Venice (1547) led to more regular investigations for heresy. Protestant defeat by imperial forces at the battle of Mühlberg (1547) and the Interim of Augsburg outlawing the Lutherans produced repercussions in Venice. Papal hostility to the republic of Venice made matters still worse. Squeezed as they were between papal and imperial engines of reaction, the Venetian authorities became very cautious. All this coincided with Spiera’s investigation; he was caught in shifting political sands. When neighbours denounced him to the Inquisition in November 1547, he maintained that hatred and envy were their motives. When his trial began in Venice in May 1548, Spiera was in a fight-​or-​flight situation and at first it seemed as if he would fight, showing his knowledge of doctrinal controversies. On purgatory and the suffering of the dead, he admitted doubts which were based on his faith that Christ atoned for and purged all sins.6 This was an old chestnut, but dangerous because purgatory was a defined doctrine of the church. Other admissions were not so doctrinal. He had a Bible, had translated the Lord’s Prayer into Italian (hints of a small-​town lawyer proud of his learning?) and had read various ‘modern books’. He admitted to ‘having seen’ Il Beneficio di Cristo.7 That was a bad move. By 1548 manuscript and printed versions of the book had given several years of trouble. The text had become a litmus of guilt by association. By June 1548, he began to try to make peace with his inquisitors by seeking their compassion. He emphasised his good standing in the local community, his poor family (he had two married children, eight still at home and his wife was pregnant again). He and his nephew, Facio, who faced even more serious accusations, emphasised that their family had powerful enemies in the local community. There are hints in the Inquisition records that the marital or sexual problems of one of his daughters lay at the root of the conflict. Spotlight usually fell on the religious opinions of individuals for reasons that were not religious. The verdict was not particularly harsh, though clearly intended to humiliate. Spiera was told to abjure his heresies, return to Cittadella and there confirm his abjuration in public at the end of the Sunday mass and buy a tabernacle for the local church. The last was both a financial and a spiritual blow. Tabernacles,

6 Costituto of 24 May 1548, cited by de Leva, Degli Eretici di Cittadella, p. 30. 7 Ibid., pp. 31–​32.

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where the consecrated host was kept, were symbols, a daily irritant for Italian reformers, indeed for anyone involved in ‘war against the idols’. Francesco Spiera was being asked to climb down and nullify what he had said he believed. He went back to Cittadella and obeyed; he was an early victim of the Venetian clean-​up, but one of many.8 What was different was the effect on him and the conclusions drawn from his experiences. Extreme desperation was said to have set in immediately after he had abjured. After his family had taken him to Padua for medical help, Spiera stayed in the house of his cousin, Nardini, who testified to the Inquisition about two weeks after Spiera’s death. Family members in this situation had their own axes to grind. Nardini said he thought Spiera was mad, an obvious line of defence against further investigations of the rest of the family. He thought that the real cause of Spiera’s melancholy was despair of God’s pardon for his cupidity as a lawyer. In view of Spiera’s large family, pregnant wife and troubled daughter, Nardini may have picked out one strand of the complex truth.9 He was also being questioned as a witness to the behaviour of the learned visitors gathered at Spiera’s bedside: a bishop (Pier Paolo Vergerio), a professor of Civil Law (Matteo Gribaldi) who brought with him groups of students, and Henry Scrymgeour, a Scottish humanist. Vergerio was facing enquiries about his religious position. Venetian realpolitik affected him more than the others because he was a bishop and the Venetian authorities had just given up a four year old struggle to protect him from papal enquiries. The desperate Spiera was an obvious candidate for Vergerio’s pastoral attention and he visited him two or three times a day, or for several consecutive days.10 Understandably the local suffragan bishop objected to such trespass on his spiritual patch. Nonetheless, Nardini suggested that Vergerio had behaved kindly and done all the proper spiritual things.11 It had been almost a catholic deathbed, but not quite, because most of the important people gathered around were disaffected catholics and some were already protestants. Soon Spiera’s condition deteriorated 8 9 10

11

De Leva, Eretici, pp. 32–​9; Schutte, Vergerio, p. 239; Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 300–​ 01; Eire, War against the Idols pp. 279–​82. De Leva, Eretici, p. 39; Schutte, Vergerio, pp. 239–​40. Antonio Santosuosso, ‘Religion ‘more veneto’ and the trial of Pier Paolo Vergerio’, in Joseph McLelland, ed., Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1980), pp. 108–​19; Silvano Cavazza, ‘Una vicenda europea: Vergerio e il caso Spiera’, in Guido Dall’Olio, Adelisa Malena and Pierroberto Scaramella, eds, Per Adriano Prosperi: La fide degli italiani (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011), pp. 41–​51. De Leva, Eretici, p. 45.

154 Chapter 8 further, his family took him back to Cittadella and he died there in December 1548 in great distress of mind and body. The public drama at his bedside was, to some extent, choreographed by the same visitors who later told Spiera’s story. For that reason the rest of the records have to be treated with even greater care than Nardini’s testimony. He was trying to save his family; those who created the Spiera legend intended to save Christendom from the perils of nicodemism. 2

The Spiera Legends

As well as questions about alteration and selection of evidence, there exists, in this case, a problem about the form itself. Deathbed drama was imprinted on the culture of sixteenth-​century Europe, a way of seeing death and life. These writers were borrowers, perhaps unconsciously, from the ‘ars moriendi’ which was still current, indeed at a high point in its popularity. Perception itself was bound to be affected by so universal a cultural form. Just as protestant artists went on depicting female subjects in exactly the same stances as medieval catholic madonnas, so protestant death narratives borrowed from the medieval arts of dying. The polemicist’s pen was no more ‘innocent’ than the artist’s eye. Thus Spiera becomes Moriens of the tough medieval tradition, receiving visitors graciously, making theological judgements, citing scripture and joining in religious debates. Passages from the New Testament were put into his mouth, quoted with amazing accuracy, clearly intended to prove his certainty of the impossibility of his own salvation. The medieval form was most obvious in the account translated into English, that of Matteo Gribaldi. Spiera has visions, demons are present, left there at deathbeds, of course, by medieval literature and iconography –​but it is significant that they are carried so completely into this death of a nicodemite. Spiera sees a fly and thinks it is Beelzebub; later, ‘weeping …. [he] began to declare unto to us horrible visions. He perceived devils to come to his chamber, yea to his bed, making a noise and business …. sticking pins in the pillow …. and … he conceived not these things by a false or corrupt imagination.’ This was certainly not original: the ars moriendi’s woodcut for the moment of despair also has a devil perilously close to the pillow.12 The drama

12

Gribaldi, sig. Bii; “The temptation to despair”, reproduced in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars:  Traditional Religion in England (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1992), see pp. 348–​54 and i­llustration 117. See also Peter Marshall, ‘Geographies of the Afterlife in Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds, The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.  110–​30; Marshall, ‘Fear, Purgatory and

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was medieval, familiar to the illiterate and literate, Italian and English, through the printed cycle of woodcuts. Moreover, these first accounts of Spiera were written very close to that turning point, emphasised by Ariès, when the ars moriendi became concerned not with the moment of death, nor indeed with the dying, but with the living and the implications for leading a good life.13 That was certainly the slant of the Spiera accounts. The anti-​nicodemite authors aimed to use Spiera’s despair and death to provide an example to living nicodemites of what might happen to them if they were not ‘good’. Spiera’s dramatic death was made into the best weapon in the anti-​nicodemite armoury. It also fitted well with the Italian polemicists’ characteristic emphasis on individuals, rather than groups and communities.14 The English version of Gribaldi’s account, was issued by the King’s printer in Worcester just a few months after the original had appeared in Wittenberg and Basel, and less than a year after Spiera’s own death. The English translator was Edward Aglionby, not especially well known at this stage, though he was to make his mark later in the Elizabethan House of Commons.15 Gribaldi’s story of Spiera, in Aglionby’s translation was quoted, exploited and distorted in England for centuries.16 Gribaldi himself was a ‘radical’, very independent and something of an eccentric. He had been a citizen of Berne since about 1542, but continued to teach Civil Law at Padua, moving to and fro across borders. In the University of Padua he had a large following of Swiss and German students who were a force to be reckoned with, even sending embassies to the Doge. These were probably prototypes for the young men who, in Gribaldi’s account, set up a theological seminar at Spiera’s bedside. When reaction really set in during Paul iv’s pontificate (1555–​9), Gribaldi left Padua, still in safety. Despite his dramatic tale about Spiera’s distress, he was not in personal danger in 1548–​ 1549 and he had no immediate need to identify with the dying man. His account is so closely modelled on the ars moriendi that it is easy to overlook the reformers-​to-​be present at the deathbed and their conversation which centres on sola fide, salvation by faith alone. Formal conventions are

13 14 15 16

Polemic’, in William Naphy and Penny Roberts, eds., Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 150–​66. Ariès, The Hour of our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981; Peregrine 1987), pp. 303–​4. See above, Chapter 7. Gribaldi, Historia de quodam, ustc 663365; Gribaldi, A notable and marvailous epistle, trans. Aglionby, stc 12365; for details see above, note 2; Diego Quaglioni, ‘Matteo Gribaldi Moffa’, DBI; Stephen Wright, ‘Edward Aglionby’, odnb. Overell, ‘Exploitation of Spiera’, SCJ, 26 (1995), 619–​37; Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 145–​8 and p. 211.

156 Chapter 8 paramount. Immediately after his abjuration Spiera is convinced ‘that he had sinned against the holy ghost’ and that his sin was unpardonable.17 Three times they try to comfort Spiera with the Lord’s Prayer, changing language from Italian to Latin as the drama moves on, until the crisis is reached when: ‘he said it no more with such affection of heart as he was wont to do.’ At first, there is a mere hint about Spiera’s intention to kill himself; he does not eat, is troubled with insatiable thirst. Later he is tied down and forced to take broth: ‘And thus with much ado he is refreshed twice a day.’ The hints increase. Disingenuously the visitors put ideas into Spiera’s head, asking if he wants to kill himself and, if so, if he will choose to do so with a sword or a cord. Spiera’s reply is alarming: ‘Give me a sword and ye shall see what I will do.’ Finally, as his sons move him for the final journey back home to Cittadella, Spiera tries to snatch a woodknife ‘to stick himself’. In the eyes of most contemporaries, suicide was a certain cause and absolute proof of damnation.18 Like all the accounts, Gribaldi’s was not as hot-​off-​the press as it purported to be, but false dating was common in epistolary literature. In Gribaldi’s version, the story was theologically unstable:  about a nicodemite; about his death; full of hints about his suicide. Spiera believes in God’s mercy to everyone except him and he has a strong sense of having committed the sin against the Holy Spirit and a perception of ‘the wrath and indignation of the righteous god against hym’.19 Gribaldi’s became the ‘English’ version, and it introduced English readers to ‘the reverend Lorde Vergerius’.20 Vergerio contributed to or wrote several accounts of Spiera’s death, highlighting his own contribution and sprinkling self-​praise, as was his wont, for instance Horrendus casus of 1549 and Francisci Spierae …. historia of 1550.21 17 18 19 20 21

Quotations are taken from, Matteo Gribaldi, A notable and marvaillous epistle … with a preface of Doctor Caluine, trans. Edward Aglionby (London: Henry Denham [and J. Kingston?] for William Norton [1570?]), stc 12366, sig A viii r. Ibid., sigs Cii r–​Ciii v. Ibid., sigs Avviii r; Biiii v. Ibid. sig. Bi v. Horrendus casus, qui ob negatam in judicio, cognitam evangelii veritatem, in miseram incidit desperationem (Basel: Johann Oporinus, 1549), ustc 658127; Francisci Spierae qui quod susceptam semel evangelicae veritatis professionem abnegasset, damnassetque, in horrendam incidit desperationem, historia (Basel:  Oporinus, 1550), ustc 658129; this contains prefaces by Caelio Secondo Curione, Calvin, and also Vergerio’s ‘Apologia’; as well as accounts by Gribaldi, Henricus Scotus [Scrimgeour], Sigismund Gelous, Francesco Negri and Martin Borrhaus; see also ustc 658128; and 663143; P. P. Vergerio, La historia di M. F. Spiera, il quale per havere in varii modi negata la conosciuta verita dell’ Evangelio casco in una misera desperatione ([Poschiavo, Dolfino Landolfi], 1551), ustc 862573; Pierce, Pier Paolo Vergerio, the Propagandist, p. 233.

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Curione, collecting accounts of the Spiera story in Basel, was the editor of both these texts. After Spiera had died, Vergerio attributed his own conversion to witnessing Spiera’s misery. He wrote to the radical Martin Borrhaus saying ‘I would not be here [an exile, in Basel] had I not seen Spiera’. In fact he tried to stay in Italy for several months after seeing the sick man. His final decision to flee had as much to do with the withdrawal of political support and the threat of imprisonment by the Inquisition for his reformed views as with the dictates of conscience. Nonetheless, Vergerio claimed that his own and others’ choice of exile could be born of Spiera’s desperation.22 In 1550, Curione wrote that Vergerio had gone into exile ‘having seen with his own eyes, in the person of Spiera, the terrible punishment of those who dissimulate their religion’.23 In his account, Vergerio presented Spiera as sane, initially very conscientious and well-​versed in the Scriptures. Gribaldi’s pin-​sticking devils do not appear. Spiera’s sober contemplation of damnation and firm rejection of all spiritual comfort are emphasised. As in most other accounts there are hints of Spiera’s failure to live a moral life, despite his faith. After Vergerio had gone into exile, he highlighted God’s eternal decree of damnation for Spiera and for all nicodemites. Vergerio was using the dead man to jolt consciences into action and his propaganda message is clear: ‘He [God] puts this spectacle before our eyes and He will have it carried from land to land, so that it will be seen, considered and known for certain that he chastizes those who deny Him’.24 The universalism, ‘land-​to-​land’, reveals the purpose. This was an international anti-​nicodemite crusade. Calvin, never one to miss a crusade, intervened almost from the start. He wrote a preface which appeared in the account of the Scotsman Henry Scrimgeour, whose work was printed in Geneva.25 Calvin’s preface also appeared in Gribaldi’s text, and in the Spiera accounts edited by Curione. Calvin’s impatience with Italians was clear. He wrote that Italy was a stupid place where people despised God; the Italians ‘played games with God’, though he added 22 23 24 25

Martin Borrhaus recorded Vergerio’s comment: ‘Ego Borrhae, inquit, hoc tempore Basileae non essem, si Spiera non vidissem’, Francisci Spierae … Historia, p. 150; Schutte, Vergerio, pp. 244, 273–​5. ‘Avendo con gli occhi suoi veduta nella persona di Francesco Spiera ….la pena orribilissima de quegli che dissimulano la religione’, Curione’s preface to Le Otto difesioni del Vergerio (Basel: [Pietro Perna], 1550), ustc 862596, sig I viii. Vergerio, La Historia di M. Francesco Spiera, p. 9v–​11v, quoted by Schutte, Vergerio, p. 242; Cavazza, Una vicenda europea, pp. 46–​7. Henry Scrimgeour, Un exemple notable et digne de memoire d’un homme desesperé, pour avoir renoncé la verité de l’evangile (Genève; Jean Girard et [René de Bienassis], 1550), ustc 29998.

158 Chapter 8 warnings to the French, the Germans, the English and others: as usual, he was thinking about communities, groups and nations, not individuals. According to Calvin, Spiera had been guilty of dissimulation, then he had strangled himself ‘because in one way or another the reprobate never cease sinning’ and he was ‘a sign of divine judgement’.26 Genevan reprobation theology was manifest. Curione did not let editorial etiquette hold him back. In an eloquent preface, he rebuffed Calvin’s anti-​Italian barbs and retaliated against Calvin’s attempt to use Spiera to teach reprobation. The devil was at work not just in Italy but all over the world, said Curione, and ‘the papacy was not only found in Italy’. That phrase was ominously prophetic of later Italian attacks on the ‘papacy’, or ‘new papacy’ of protestant leaders. By 1550, Curione, leader of the Italian community in Basel, was already experiencing a personal revolution against Calvin’s teaching.27 When Curione’s collection was issued in 1550, ostensibly he and Calvin were discussing Spiera, but other profoundly significant theological and moral controversies became attached to Spiera and to the whole issue of nicodemism. Tongue-​in-​cheek, Curione sent a personal copy of his own preface to Calvin.28 Battle was joined. Curione had edited the Spiera accounts, but he was not willing to have Calvin tell the world exactly what they meant. 3

Critics of the Spiera Stories: Siculo and Cockburn

Spiera’s dramatists were not allowed free reign: critics spoke their minds and did so very soon after the first accounts appeared. The first to criticise was Giorgio Siculo, friend of the first author of Il Beneficio di Cristo, Benedetto da Mantova. Like Benedetto, Siculo was a Cassinese Benedictine monk, trained in his Order’s distinctive theology of salvation, which stressed restoration and reconciliation. Siculo’s Epistola of 1550 was addressed to his small adopted congregation in Riva di Trento (Riva del Garda). There he attacked all the accounts of Spiera, which he thought manipulative because they spread fear, making people believe that they were damned. He condemned the predestination

26 27 28

‘Hinc discant Itali, quibus nimium familiare est cum Deo ludere’; ‘sicuti aliud ex alio peccare non cessant reprobi. …. Cum ergo specimen sit divini iudicii’, Calvin’s ‘Preface to the Christian reader’, Francisci Spierae … historia (1550), pp. 57–​61, at pp. 59 and 60–​61.. See below, Chapters 9 and 10. Curione’s preface ‘to all lovers of truth’, in Francisci spierae … historia, A 2r–​v, is quoted in Biasiori, L’eresia di un umanista, pp. 69–​70, and note 7; Davide Dalmas, ‘Calvino e Curione’ in Franco Giacone, ed., Calvin Insolite (Paris: Classiques Garniers, 2013), pp. 359–​371.

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theology fast becoming attached to the story. Siculo was one of a small group of Italian writers who argued that dissimulation was allowable for those facing persecution.29 Siculo asserted that ‘a great number’ held the same opinions as Spiera did before his abjuration; they were ‘protestanti nascosti ‘–​‘hidden protestants’.30 Siculo counselled them against dwelling on predestination and damnation. He asked: how could Spiera believe in the gospel message of salvation and think himself damned? By contrast, Siculo told his flock to accept catholic services temporarily  –​in short, they should be nicodemites. He wanted to preserve them from the teaching of Spiera’s ‘mendacious teachers’. Of course, Vergerio was furious and retaliated that Siculo had ‘smeared the most true and terrifying history of Francesco Spiera’ and had argued ‘that Christians should wait patiently, accept errors and idolatries and keep their mouths shut’.31 In the autumn of 1550, Siculo moved south to Ferrara and fell into the hands of the Inquisition. In March 1551 he was condemned as a heretic and strangled in his cell. All his works incurred bitter criticism from both catholics and protestants, especially his Espositione (on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans) and ‘Il Libro Grande’, apparently written by him and once in wide circulation, but now lost. Long after his death this text was cherished in secret groups in Italy. Starting from beliefs about salvation which veered close to those of the heretic Pelagius, he continued his fervent attack on predestination.32 Siculo was one

29

30

31

32

Here I have relied on Adriano Prosperi’s profound, L’eresia del Libro Grande, pp. 145–​170; Siculo, Epistola di Giorgio Siculo servo fidele di Jesu Cristo alli cittadini di Riva di Trento contra il mendatio di Francesco Spiera e falsa dottrina de’ Protestanti (Bologna: Anselmo Giaccarello, 1550), ustc 832899; see below, Chapter 11. ‘O quanto gran numero de preti e frati, huomini e donne i quali sonno dell’ openione de’ protestanti nascosti in diverse reggioni e paesi della dottrina romana, che per timore de non essere presi e maltrattati dall’inquisitori, consentino …’, Epistola, f. 45v, quoted by Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande, p. 148. ‘La dottrina di Spiera confirmata dalli suoi mendaci maestri, Siculo, Epistola, f. 45v, quoted Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande, p. 148; Vergerio wrote of Siculo, ‘il quale in un suo libro, ch’egli ha impiastrato contra la verissima et spaventosissima historia di francesco Spiera dice chiaro in un par de luochi che i christiani debbono star patienti, et consentire agli errori et alle idolatrie e non aprire bocca’, Vergerio, A quegli venerabili padri dominicani, che difendono il rosario per cosa buona ([Poschiavo, Dolfino Landolfi], 1550), ustc 862586, printed as an appendix to Cavazza’s, ‘ “Quei che vogliono Cristo senza croce” ’, pp. 136–​141, at p. 138. Espositione di Giorgio Siculo … del nono decimo & undecimo capo della epistola di san Paolo alli romani (Bologna: Anselmo Giaccarelli 1550), ustc 832900; Siculo’s Della verità christiana et dottrina appostolica, known among his followers as ‘Il Libro Grande’ is now lost; see Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande, pp. 226–​233; Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo, pp. 170–​9; for Siculo’s ‘pelagian’ theology, see Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars, pp. 213–​245.

160 Chapter 8 of that rare breed who counselled people to dissimulate; what is still rarer, he dared to do so in print. Another early critique came from the Scottish humanist and scholar of biblical languages, Patrick Cockburn, who travelled between St Andrews and Paris and later visited London in the early 1560s.33 In his De vulgari sacrae scripturae phrasi, which appeared in 1552, he discussed especially the sin against the Holy Spirit, which Spiera was said to have committed. Cockburn quoted from Curione’s collection of Spiera stories and criticised the writers’ stress on this supposedly ‘unforgiveable’ sin. He saw their emphasis as evidence of their culpable failure to understand that hyperbole in scripture should not be taken literally. Spiera’s story-​tellers, he said, had failed in their scholarly duty of impartiality. They knew there were two possible outcomes for Spiera, damnation or divine mercy, but concentrated only on the former, thus failing to nourish hope and faith in their readers.34 Siculo’s and Cockburn’s criticisms showed that controversy about predestination and reprobation had become enmeshed with Spiera’s story. Doctrinal questions clustered around the tale: should readers admire the scriptural grasp with which propagandists had endowed Spiera or condemn as perverse his rejection of scriptural messages of God’s mercy? This saga of despair seems to hover between God and Spiera himself as authors of damnation; was Spiera damned because of his own corruption as a lawyer, or his thoughts of suicide, or his sin of despair? Alternatively was he condemned eternally because of God’s reprobation, which Calvinists believed to be revealed in his failings? If contemporary interpreters were divided and confused, there was little hope for later readers, who encountered the tale in translations and re-​workings. Spiera’s chroniclers had produced a good story but also labyrinthine uncertainties about what it meant. For centuries people argued about his fate throughout Europe, but especially in England. Preachers placed the despairing Italian in notorious company –​Cain, Esau, Judas Iscariot, Nero, Spiera –​all these individuals had denied, despaired and were damned. No-​one wanted to be like them. Gradually these accounts were moulded to become a tale about damnation, 33 34

Anthony Esposito, ‘Patrick Cockburn,’ ODNB; Oratio Patricii Cockburni Scoti De excellentia verbi Dei ad Reverendiss. Sancti Andreae Archiepiscopi (Paris: Michaele Fezandat and Robert Granjon, 1551), ustc 150942. Patrick Cockburn, De vulgari sacrae scripturae phrasi (Paris: Robert Masselin 1552), ustc 153166, sig. iv r, quoted by Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande, pp. 299–​300, notes 10–​24, especially p. 301 and note 17. This work was re–​issued in 1558 with several new chapters, indices and an appendix, see ustc 152449. By 1560 Cockburn had converted to protestantism. John Day published his In secundae partis catechismi (London: John Day, 1561), stc 5459; see Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande, p. 303, note 24.

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a grim message with profound psychological effects; it would push many towards despair of salvation, especially among seventeenth-​century English puritans.35 Yet Spiera’s first story-​tellers had intended mostly to stop nicodemism. Theology was not their main point, nor were they very good at it. 4

Spiera’s English Readers

Edward vi’s reign seems a strange time for English interest in the tale of Spiera. There was no obvious need for nicodemism or for warnings against it. Despite local rebellions, most English people were not then suffering for their faith; as usual, most were waiting to see what religious change would come next. Nonetheless, Aglionby’s translation of Gribaldi’s account was issued by the royal printer and found readers in high places.36 English evangelicals knew about persecution in Europe; they were girding their loins, aware that it might happen to them. Bernardino Ochino and Pietro Martire Vermigli had fled from Italy in 1542. After exile in European protestant cities, both were invited to England by Archbishop Cranmer in 1547. Vermigli gave an important lecture series at Oxford during 1549, most of which was printed in Basle in 1558 and translated into English in 1568, as his Commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans. There he told the Spiera story, using it as illustration of the hoary problem about whether God wills sin and damnation. Even this justly famous biblical scholar seems to have become trapped in the theological confusions of the tale. ‘In our time indeed it happened that a certain man in Italy named Francis Spiera inwardly felt that God had inflicted upon him this evil. But this I suppose was done to the terror of others …’. His account of Spiera’s recantation and death is followed by an attempt at analysis: all this had happened because ‘God would in this man by a certain singular dispensation feare others away from like wickedness and impiety. Howbeit this neither customably happeneth’. Vermigli’s only alternative explanation was the Devil: ‘peradventure God did not put this into the head of Spiera but the Devil, whose bond slave he was, having now renounced piety, to the end to drive him to utter desperation.’ It was a conundrum. Vermigli tried to solve it by distinguishing between ‘them that are utterly without all feeling of piety’ and ‘the godly’, but the drift is far from clear.37 35 36 37

John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). See above, note 2. Vermigli’s analysis of the Spiera story is part of his ‘Treatise of Predestination’, placed at the end of commentary on Romans c­ hapter 9, in his In Epistolam S. Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos … Commentarii (Basel:  P. Perna, 1558), ustc 665629; then in English as Most

162 Chapter 8 Intriguingly, Hugh Latimer, Edwardian England’s most famous preacher, stressed God’s mercy –​even for Spiera. Latimer was preaching to Edward vi’s court in 1552, when Spiera had been dead for three years. It was a time when Vermigli, Ochino and other Italian reformers were in vogue and Il Beneficio di Cristo had been translated for the King and court four years before.38 Ever topical, Latimer made a reference to Spiera, clearly anticipating that his humanist court congregation would be familiar with the name. Latimer re-​told the story carefully and made it interesting for his listeners: then, with an emphatic ‘but’, he put them all on their guard against its implied theology. I know now that Judas had sinned against the Holy Ghost, also Nero, Pharoah and one Franciscus Spira; which man had foresaken popery and done very boldly in God’s quarrel; at the length he was complained of …. he, contrary to that admonition of the Holy Ghost, denied the word of God and so finally died in desperation; him I  may pronounce to have sinned against the Holy Ghost. But I  will show you a remedy for sin against the Holy Ghost. Ask remission of sin in the name of Christ and then I ascertain you that you sin not against the Holy Ghost.39 Latimer, like Cockburn and Siculo, cut through all the persuasion by guilt and fear. The confidence and sheer mercy of his viewpoint distinguishes it from that of most mid-​century commentators, Italian or English. He was preaching in the last year of Edward vi’s reign, just before such leisured critique gave way to anguished identification with Spiera’s dilemma. 5

Readers during the Marian Persecution

In 1553, after the failure of the attempt to put the protestant Lady Jane Grey on the throne and the accession of the catholic Mary Tudor, the story gained a terrible relevance: now many were, like Spiera, required to renounce their evangelical faith. It is no surprise, then, that John Bradford and other English protestant writers used the Italian story to strengthen the resolve of frightened

38 39

learned and fruitful commentaries … upon the Epistle to the Romanes, translated out of Latin by H. B. [Henry Billingsley] (London: John Daye, 1568), stc 24672, pp. 288–​312, especially p. 301–​2; Overell, Italian reform, pp. 116–​117. See Chapter 6. Hugh Latimer, Sermons, ed. G. E. Corrie, PS (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1844), p. 425.

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fellow-​believers.40 Myles Coverdale, whose long experience as an exile gave him acquaintance with European texts, referred to Spiera in his ‘Sermon on the Carrying of Christes Cross’. He said people should not betray their faith ‘a causing of thee to deny us before thy Father.41 His words about Spiera are almost the same as those of the martyr John Bradford in his ‘Exhortation to the Brethren’, written in 1554 and intended to steel himself as well as others: ‘Oh let us not so run down headlong into perdition, stumbling on those sins from which there is no recovery …. as it chanced to Lot’s wife, Judas Iscariot, Francis Spira and to many others’. Bradford also used Spiera’s name to try to bolster the courage of the protestant Lord Francis Russell, when he was in sheriff’s custody: ‘Remember Lot’s wife which looked back; remember Francis Spira’.42 This was tough-​talk in desperate times: recantation led to hell and had ‘no recovery’. Lady Jane Grey was viewed as a martyr-​queen. Accounts of what she said and did just before her execution had a profound significance for protestant communal memory. She had moved within humanist circles at Edward vi’s court, where she may have encountered the story of Spiera in Latin versions or in Aglionby’s English translation. On the other hand, it is possible that words about Spiera were put into her mouth by those who published her Epistle after her execution. In that letter she upbraided her father’s chaplain, Thomas Harding, to stop him recanting ‘like a white hewred [haired] milk soppe’.43 ‘Remember the horrible history of Julian of old, and the lamentable case of Spira of late, whose case (me thinke) should be yet so greane in youre remembrance, that being a thing of our time, you should fear the like inconvenience seeing you are fallen into the like offence’.44 At her own most desperate hour Lady Jane remembered Spiera ‒ in order to taunt her elderly nicodemite chaplain. 40

41 42 43

44

Thomas Freeman, ‘Dissenters from a Dissenting Church’, in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, eds., The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2000), 129–​157 (p. 130 note 3, 135, 152); Freeman, ‘ “The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuouse Women”: the Elizabethan Martyrologists and the Female Supporters of the Marian Martyrs’, JBS, 31, 2000, 8–​33 (12–​16); Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti–​Nicodemite Propaganda’, pp. 298–​99, 317–​18. Myles Coverdale, Remains, ed. George Pearson, PS, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), 2, 276. The Writings of John Bradford: Containing Sermons, Meditations, Examinations, ed. Aubrey Townsend, PS, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1848–​53), 1, p. 433; 2, p. 80. Lady Jane Dudley, An Epistle of the Lady Jane to a learned man of late falne from the truth of Gods word [no place, no date; London? John Day? 1554?], stc 7279, sig. Bii and sig. Aiiii; another version, Here in this booke ye have a godly epistle made by a faithful Christian [London:  Successor of A.  Scoloker?, 1554?], stc 7279.5. See also stc 25251–​2. For Lady Jane Grey’s Epistle and the printer John Day, see L. P. Fairfield, ‘The Mysterious Press of “Michael Wood”‘, Library, 5th series., 27 (1972), 220–​232, at 226–​7. An Epistle of the Lady Jane, sig. Bii.

164 Chapter 8 During the Marian persecution, the Spiera story also appeared in Johannes Sleidan’s account of the state of religion published in 1556. This was translated into English in 1560 as his Chronicle and the English martyrologist John Foxe knew Sleidan’s work.45 Although Foxe ‘never seriously discussed the problem of nicodemitism in the Rerum, or, come to that in the ‘Acts and Monuments’, he transferred Lady Jane’s speech about Spiera to the first edition. Bradford’s reference to Spiera in his letter to Russell appeared in the edition of 1570.46 Foxe was relaying the anti-​nicodemite message but, as we shall see later, he also modified that message.47 The story of Francesco Spiera had been constructed by Italian writers and then by English readers. The black-​and-​white simplicity with which Italian exiles endowed him was not possible in the confused European situation in the 1550s –​criticisms by Siculo and Cockburn proved that. Certainty was still more difficult in the relentless ‘all change’ of English religion under the Tudor monarchs. Why did Spiera attract so much notice in England? Links between the English and Italian reformations, formed by Cranmer, Vermigli and Ochino in the late 1540s, helped to establish the legend. The name of Vergerio, interpreter of the deathbed scene, was also known to many. Most English protestants identified closely with Spiera’s despair, but there would always be a few, like Latimer, who would not buy into the myth because of the doctrine of damnation it implied.48 Criticism continued to come from the theologically educated, along with compassionate counsel emphasising the mercy of God, even for nicodemites. 45

46

47 48

Johannes Sleidan, De statu religionis et reipublicae, Carolo Quinto Caesare (Geneva: Simon Du Bosc, 1556), ustc 450436; Johannes Sleidan, A Famouse Cronicle of oure time, called Sleidanes Commentaries concerning the State of Religion and Commonwealth during the raigne of the Emperour Charles the fift (London: John Day, 1560), stc 19848, volume 21, ff. cccxxii–​cccxxviii. Mark Greengrass and Thomas S.  Freeman ‘The Acts and Monuments and the Protestant Continental Martyrologies’, TAMO Essays accessed 1 April 2017; for Lady Jane Grey’s words, tamo, 1563, Book 5, pp. 988–​990; for Bradford’s letter ‘To the honourable Lord Russell’, tamo, 1570, Book 11, p. 1855 [1854]; Bradford’s ‘Exhortation’ appears in Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortable letters of such true saintes and holy martyrs of God (London:  John Day, 1564), stc 5886; Susan Wabuda, ‘Henry Bull, Miles Coverdale, and the Making of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in Diana Wood ed., Martyrs and Martyrologies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 245–​258; Ruth Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 187–​8. See below, Chapter 11, pp. 212–214. M. Anne Overell, ‘Recantation and Retribution: “Remembering Francis Spira”, 1548–​1638’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, eds, Retribution, Repentance and Reconciliation, Studies in Church History, 40 (2004), 159–​168.

Chapter 9

Counsel for Nicodemite Sinners: Vermigli, Curione and Cheke But for asmuch as dyuers are so infyrme & weake and indewed with so lyttle knowledge and fayth, that they dare not publykelye contemne and forsake the supersticious seruices … I woulde counsayle suche not to attempte or enterpryse any thing rashely.1 Celio Secondo Curione, An Excellent Admonition and Resolution, in The Temporysour, 1555.

∵ This chapter will examine three texts published in the year 1555, during the reign of Queen Mary Tudor. All addressed the question how to respond to catholic persecution and examined the grim options for protestants: exile, death or dissimulation. Two of these texts were written by Italian reformers and published by Englishmen in exile in protestant cities. These were intended as urgent counsel for the many faint-​hearts who had stayed in catholic England, warning them not to be nicodemites. Pietro Martire Vermigli’s Cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull fulfilled the exiles’ intentions admirably. Its message was abundantly clear, ‘don’t cohabit with papists’, ‘don’t go to their services’ ‒ and have as little as possible to do with them. Vermigli was eloquent and Cohabitacyon was well translated; advice from this reformer, once revered in Edwardian England, might well sway doubters.2 The other, shorter, work was written by Celio Secondo Curione, leader of the Italian exile community in Basel. Entitled An Excellent Admonition and Resolution, it appeared as a 1 Caelio Secondo Curione’s, An excellent admonition [against] papisticall services, in The Temporysour that is to saye: the obseruer of the tyme, or he that changeth with the tyme, Compyled in Latin by the excellent Clarke Wolfgangus Musculus, [and] translated into French by Mayster Valleran Pulleyn. And out of the French into Inglishe by R.P. 1555 (Wesel?: [H.Singleton?], 1555), ustc 505172; see stc 18312 and 18313. 2 A treatise of the cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull; a sermon made of the confessing of Christe and his Gospell [Strassburg: W. Riehl, 1555], ustc 505214, also stc 24673.5 [hereafter Cohabitacyon].

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004331693_​0 11

166 Chapter 9 companion text to a translation of dialogues by Wolfgang Musculus, called in English The Temporysour. Curione was every bit as eloquent as Vermigli, but suddenly, in the last three pages, he began to consider the plight of those who ‘are so infirme and weake’ that they ‘dare not … forsake superstitious services’. There he was so tentative and sympathetic that he seemed very ambivalent.3 Most modern Italian scholars regard this last section as ‘nicodemite’.4 English exiles had rushed to publish but they were playing with Italian fire. In the same year, 1555, the great Cambridge scholar and one-​time royal tutor, John Cheke was in exile in Swiss cities and in Italy. Cheke had already established contacts with Italian reformers. He had befriended Vermigli when the latter was in Oxford, and had also received letters and books from Curione, whom he finally met in Basel in 1554. Like both these Italians, Cheke had thought deeply about the issue of conformity. Like Curione, he was toying with nicodemite solutions, especially in his De ecclesia which he began to write in exile in Venice between 1554 and 1555.5 It was intended for publication, one day, when circumstances permitted. 1

The Marian Context

The year 1555 frightened English evangelicals to the limits of their endurance. During that summer alone, 51 protestants were burned alive in England for heresy.6 The executions continued until November 1558, the month of Queen Mary’s death –​and Pole’s. Over 300 English people were named by Foxe as having died for their faith through execution or in prison during those four years. A relatively small number chose exile (probably about 1000). Nonetheless it was the first time in English history that so many had refused to save themselves by abjuration or dissembling.7 3 4 5 6 7

See note 1 above, Curione’s, An excellent admonition, in Temporysour, sigs H v–​H vii. Mario Turchetti, ‘Nota sulla religiosità di Caelio Secondo Curione (1503–​1569) in relazione al nicodemismo’, in Rolando Bussi, ed., Libri, idee e sentimenti religiosi nel Cinqucento italiano (Modena: Edizioni Panini, 1987), pp. 109–​115; Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo, pp. 186–​9. McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie’’:  The Troubles of Sir John Cheke under Queen Mary’, pp. 185–​227. Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers. A History of the English Reformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 395–​396; Overell, Italian reform, pp. 145–​66. For a controversial interpretation of Pole’s involvement, see Duffy, Fires of Faith, pp. 148–​54. Thomas S.  Freeman, ‘Foxe’s Marian Martyrs’  –​a chronological table’, in tamo, Essays; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘ “Imitatio Christi with a Vengeance”: the Politicisation of Martyrdom in Early Modern England’, in Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer, eds, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c.  1400–​1700 (Woodbridge:  Boydell, 2007), pp.  35–​69; Pettegree,

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The Princess Elizabeth, once sympathetic to humanist protestant doctrine conformed and went to mass when that became unavoidable.8 Matthew Parker, later to be her Archbishop of Canterbury, remained in England.9 In earlier chapters, we have seen how Roger Ascham conformed and talked confidentially with Pole’s friend, Alvise Priuli. Cecil went to meet Cardinal Pole in Brussels and accompanied him on his journey back to England: they became friends –​ both were good at discretion. Pietro Vanni, Michael Throckmorton and Edward Courtenay all comformed to catholicism in these years.10 Many clergy adapted, prepared to change vestments and ritual as and when required.11 Gentlemen’s families kept to their country houses, unwilling to lose their livelihoods by choosing exile. A powerful factor in the thinking of this generation was their direct experience of religious ups and downs. Many had lived through the era of Cromwellian reform, then late Henrician reaction, then Edwardian reformation, then Mary’s catholic restoration. In their experience the normal pattern was that religious circumstances changed frequently, thus they might need to play nicodemite only for a short time.12 Andrew Pettegree’s words about the compromisers are worth remembering:  ‘there was a variety of reasons holding people in England whose commitment to Protestantism was at bottom wholly genuine’, ‘Theological rationalizations of a sort were also available to the troubled, flexible conscience’ ‒ but few were available in print.13 In 1541 the Strassburg reformer, Martin Bucer had written a defence of nicodemism, arguing that clergy should not desert their congregations. His ‘Consilium Theologicum Privatim Conscriptum’ was intended as private counsel. Nonetheless it was

8

9 10 11

12 13

Marian Protestantism, p. 87; Jonathan Wright, ‘The Marian Exiles and the Legitimacy of Flight’, JEH, 52 (2001), 220–​43. Thomas S.  Freeman, ‘Providence and Prescription:  the Account of Elizabeth in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” ’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds, The Myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp.  27–​55, especially pp. 37–​39. Louise Campbell, ‘A diagnosis of religious moderation: Matthew Parker and the 1559 settlement’, in Luc Racaut and Alec Ryrie, eds, Moderate Voices in the European Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005), pp. 32–​50. See above, Chapter 2, 4 and 5. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 194–​202, at p. 253; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 520–​523 and 591–​593; Eamon Duffy, Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 2001), especially pp. 149–​90. I owe this reflection on the effects of change as the ‘normal pattern’ to John McDiarmid; see also his ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, p. 202. Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, pp. 87, 100–​105, quotations at pp. 105–​6.

168 Chapter 9 smuggled into northern Italy and a manuscript copy was carried to England by Bucer himself when he arrived there as an exile in Edward vi’s reign. Later, under pressure from his fellow reformers, Bucer was forced to retract.14 But, one private manuscript was as nothing compared to the volume and passion of printed advice on the other side. Two anti-​nicodemite works of Europe’s most famous counsellor, John Calvin, had been translated into English before Queen Mary came to the throne and the first was printed together with Heinrich Bullinger’s stalwart advice.15 Then came the English translation of the Spiera story, another message against conformity.16 In 1552 Calvin’s Quatre Sermons appeared and the next year, Robert Horne, newly arrived in exile, translated two of them and added his own preface.17 From 1553 English exiles began an intense phase of printing such advice because they were appalled by the conformity of the stay-​at-​home ­majority. 2

Counsel in Crisis

The tradition of counsel was ancient, and therefore imprinted. In the mid-​ sixteenth century many adults would have remembered going to confession at least once a year, an occasion when advice was expected.18 The English Books of Common Prayer retained the possibility for a sinner to seek out a minister –​ to confess his sins, according to the 1549 Book, and to ‘open his grief’ in the

14 15 16 17

18

Matheson, ‘Martyrdom or Mission’, p. 162, n. 41 and p. 171. Parts of a manuscript of the Consilium were found in the Bologna Inquisition’s processo against Camillo Renato (aka Lisia Fileno, Paolo Ricci), see appendix to Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo, p. 210. Two epystles, ustc 410458; stc 4079.5; The mynde of the godly … man, stc 4435.3; 4435.5; 4435; 4435.7, for details see above, Chapter 7, note 11. Gribaldi, A notable and marvailous epistle, trans. Aglionby, stc 12365, see above, Chapter 8, note 2. John Calvin, Certain homilies concerning profitable admonition for this time (Rome [ie Wesel?]:  Before the castle of.s. Angel, at the signe of s.  Peter [i.e. J.  Lambrecht? for Hugh Singleton?], [1553]), stc 4392. John Hooper, Whether Christian faith maye be kepte secret in the heart, without confession thereof openly to the worlde … Also what hurt commeth by them that hath received the Gospell, to be present at Masse (Rouen s.n. 1553), [i.e. London, John Daye, 1553], stc 5160.3, ustc 504898, also attributed to Robert Horne, Jan Laski and John Calvin; another edition of this work was published in 1564, bound up with Certain most godly and comfortable letters, stc 5886. Alexander Murray, ‘Counselling in Medieval Confession’, in Peter Biller and Alastair J.  Minnis, eds, Handling Sin:  Confession in the Middle Ages (York:  York Medieval Press, 1998), pp. 65–​77, at p. 66.

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more careful words of the Prayer Book of 1552.19 A similar pattern of tweaking, but not giving up, confessional conversations is evident throughout Europe during its many reformations.20 The forms and skills of advice-​giving were preserved especially in confidential conversations, but in Marian England that was not always possible. Protestant ministers, in prison and expecting death, had to help friends in other ways. Their letters, written in gaol and carefully preserved, are a moving illustration of counsel given to anxious souls who might become martyrs or exiles –​or, if all failed ‒ nicodemites.21 The three advisers in this chapter also intended to guide souls, but they were not in prison, not martyrs-​to-​be. They were in a more compromised position, reasonably safe in exile, when others were in danger of death. Calvin, also in safe exile, had become exasperated by all the talk. In 1552 he wrote: ‘every day there are people who seek my counsel on this again, as if I had never spoken of it’.22 His ‘put up or shut up’ is testimony to the widespread search for advice. Yet, despite his contempt for empty talk, Calvin decided to seek support in the form of ‘consilia’ –​advice pieces ‒ from Vermigli, Bullinger, Bucer and Melachthon: these were appended to a selection of his own works, entitled De vitandis superstitionibus. Calvin’s anti-​nicodemite message, once written in French was now turned outwards, published in Latin for all educated Europeans. Matters were so urgent that even Calvin had employed a chorus of counsellors.23 This mood of spiritual emergency is the context of our three texts by Vermigli, Curione and Cheke.

19 20

21 22

23

The Two Liturgies … in the Reign of Edward vi, ed. Joseph Ketley, PS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), p. 4; ibid., pp. 82, 138, 274, 314; Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 238–​41. Peter Marshall, The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.  33; Thomas N.  Tentler, ‘Postscript’, in Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer, eds, Penitence in the Age of Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 240–​59, especially p. 245; M. Anne Overell, ‘Soul Talk and the Reformation’, in Thomas F. Mayer, ed., Reforming Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 119–​140. (Miles Coverdale), Certain most godly fruitful and comfortable letters, stc 5886; Wabuda, ‘Henry Bull, Miles Coverdale, and the Making of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, pp. 249–​50; Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 139–​45 and passim. ‘Toutesfois il y a tous les jours gens que m’en demandent conseil de nouveau, comme si jamais ie n’en avoye parlé’, Quatre sermons de M. Jehan Calvin, traictans des matieres fort utiles pour nostre temps … (Geneva: Robert Estienne, 1552), ustc 4806, sig. a ii; ‘Four sermons’, trans. Skolnitsky, Come out from among them, p. 129. De vitandis superstitionibus, quae cum sincera fidei confessione pugnant, libellus Joannis Calvini. Eiusdem excusatio, ad pseudonicodemos. Philippi Melancthonis, Martini Buceri, Petri Martyris responsa de eadem re. Calvini ultimum responsum, cum appendicibus (Geneva:  Jean Girard, 1549), ustc 450016; see also Calvin, De vitandis superstitionibus

170 Chapter 9 3 Vermigli’s Cohabitacyon of the Faithfull with the Unfaithfull By the time his Cohabitacyon was printed in Strassburg in 1555, Vermigli was an exceptionally experienced exile. The problem of staying faithful in an ‘unfaithful’ place had dominated his life. He had fled from Lucca in 1542, and then settled in Strassburg; but when reformers were in danger there, he was invited to England in 1547 by Archbishop Cranmer and stayed for the rest of Edward vi’s reign. At the accession of the catholic Queen Mary in 1553, he left England for yet another exile. He went back to Strassburg, started teaching, and two years later, his Cohabitacyon was printed. Originally it had been part of a course of Latin lectures on the Old Testament Book of Judges given at the College of St Thomas in Strassburg, between November 1553 and summer 1556.24 Cohabitacyon was published anonymously and it was not certain that Vermigli was the author until 1564, but the atmosphere of that distant lecture theatre certainly pervades the text.25 Wavering nicodemites in England might well have found his academic style hard-​going. Nonetheless, he had a way with words, which comes through in this translation, possibly done by the English reformer, Thomas Becon, who spent much of his exile in Strassburg.26 Vermigli fixed on actions:  ‘the doinges of men be as it were a tongue’.27 He was adamant: where you went and what you did served to declare your beliefs: you polluted your body, your whole self by the sin of ‘Masse hauntinge’. It was no use arguing that this was an unimportant sin committed with the body but not ‘with mynde, will and affection’. Vermigli saw through all the usual nicodemite self-​justifications.28

24

25

26 27 28

(Geneva: Jean Girard, 1550), ustc 450027; Wright, ‘Why was Calvin so severe a critic of Nicodemism?’, pp. 66–​90. His complete commentary on Judges was published as In librum Iudicum Commentarij doctissimi (Zurich: Christoph I Froschauer, 1561), ustc 666001; Torrance Kirby, The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Leiden and Boston; Brill 2007); Torrance Kirby, ‘Political Theology: the Godly Prince’, in Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi and Frank A. James iii, eds, A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), pp. 401–​421, especially p. 404. This treatise was attributed to Vermigli in Thomas Becon’s An answer to a certain godly manne’s letters (Strassburg: Wendelin I Rihel, 1557), ustc 505424; see ‘an Christianis liceat cum infidelibus habitare’ published in Vermigli’s Loci communes, translated into English as The common places of … Doctor Peter Martyr translated and partlie gathered by Antonie Marten (London: Henry Denham and Henry Middleton, 1583), stc 24669, pp. 309–​323. See stc 24673.5. On Becon’s Christen prayers and godly meditacions, translated from Italian, see stc 2985.3 and stc 2985.5; Jonathan Mark Reimer, ‘The Life and Writings of Thomas Becon, 1512–​1567’, University of Cambridge PhD, 2016, pp. 184–​5. Cohabitacyon, p. 23r: Walsham, Charitable Hatred, p. 196, note 180. Cohabitacyon, p. 40v.

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The secondary title of Cohabitation indicates the treatise’s core purpose:  ‘Whether the dwellinge together and familiar conuersacion of … the professor of Christes gospell withe the papiste be lawfull or no.’ Cohabiting with papists was the point to which Vermigli’s scriptural and historical parallels would lead. He distinguished between situations where the faithful were free to live out their religion and where they were not. In the latter case, the only possible justification for remaining among the unfaithful was to convert them: ‘So long as there is good hope of winning and converting them’. If unbelievers showed themselves obstinate, then ‘no company or conversation is to be had with them, further than the necessitie of life enforcith either partie’. Even unnecessary trade and social life were not allowed: here was radical separatist counsel, which would become important for future generations of English protestants.29 Those who compromised faced a slippery slope: ‘First their conscience miserably afflicteth them’. And in the end, ‘their perpetual portion’ will be ‘payed them full truly in the laste daye’.30 This was the crux of the difference between Vermigli and his more nicodemite countrymen: he thought that nicodemite dissimulation put people outside the limits of God’s mercy; Curione and others would decide that God’s mercy had no limits. Vermigli criticised the justification that the dissimulator’s heart was in the right place: ‘I saye with paule that the belefe of the harte doth iustifie but the mouthe and owtwarde doinges do make the confession vnto saluation’. He faced squarely the arguments that to being too strict placed ‘stumbling blocks’ in the way of the weak. To give in, ‘condiscend’ and ‘yeald somewhat’, would do no good, he said: ‘if we stand and continue in dissembling then is the light of truth put out’.31 He acknowledged that there was a danger of being ‘rigorus and strayte in this matier’, but his counsel was in fact rigorous.32 A more personal tone was shown in his letters to friends, especially those he left behind in Lucca but, on the subject of dissembling, Vermigli’s stance was always militant

29

30 31 32

Cohabitacyon, p. 5 v-​r; on separatism, see Patrick Collinson ‘The cohabitation of the faithful with the unfaithful’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I.  Israel and Nicholas Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to Toleration:  the Glorious Revolution in England (Oxford:  Clarendon, 1991), pp. 51–​76; Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–​1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 107, 110, 121; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Supping with Satan’s Disciples’, in Adam Morton and Nadine Lewycky, eds, Getting Along?: Religious Identities and Confessional Relations: Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 29–​56, at pp. 45–​46. Cohabitacyon, p. 21 v. Cohabitacyon, p. 37v Cohabitacyon, pp. 37r –​38r, 40v.

172 Chapter 9 and uncompromising.33 In addition, he had to support his colleagues; his lectures on Judges had been written with one eye on the requirements of the anti-​ nicodemite lobby in Reformed Switzerland, represented chiefly by Calvin and Bullinger. The publication of his Cohabitacyon was instigated by English exiles in Vermigli’s audience in Strassburg. They were desperate to call their fainthearted countrymen to witness, ‘obsessed’ with the task.34 4 Curione’s Excellent Admonition Perhaps without realising it, English exiles also printed more ambiguous counsel from Curione. Here we move into a different moral world from Vermigli’s –​ elegantly polite, enigmatic, occasionally self-​contradictory, but respectful towards potential nicodemites. In earlier chapters of this book we met him as a writer of pasquinades satirising Erasmus for his compromises. He played host and co-​adjutor when Pier Paolo Vergerio fled from Italy to Basel in 1549. Surely at that time an anti-​nicodemite? How did Curione move from there to unorthodox ambivalence on this crucial subject? Earlier we noticed that Curione’s ‘turn’ was beginning in the late 1540s.35 By that time he was in Basel, respected among Italian exiles there. The publication of Pro vera et antiqua Ecclesiae Christi auctoritate in 1547 has been seen as the point when Curione’s relations with Calvin worsened. That same book has also been described as ‘an explicit apology for nicodemism’. In the text Curione was tolerant towards ‘simulatores’ –​saying that the visible church on earth should not exclude them. Yet it is not certain that ‘simulatores’ should be translated as ‘nicodemites’ rather than as ‘hypocrites’ in general –​those who professed their faith without living fully in accordance with it. In the same work, Curione also defended Anabaptists, which was more shocking: he claimed that they should be punished for their sedition but not for their religion.36 At the very least, 33 34 35 36

Vermigli, lls, Part ii, Letters: numbers 5, 6 and 152, pp. 67–​94, 96–​101, 155–​169; see especially pp. 73 and 164. Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, quotation at p. 88. See Chapter 7, p. 136. Dalmas, ‘Calvino e Curione’, in Giacone ed., Calvin Insolite, pp.  361–​65; Albano Biondi, ‘Celio Secondo Curione’, dbi; ‘Ecclesia est hominum quidam coetus, ex bonis plerunq~ malisq~ permixtus, in Christi universa doctrina palàm consentiens, eiusq~rite celebrans sacramenta. In hac definitione nihil abert aut redundat, nihil positum est ambigue; nec excludit simulatores aut impuros qui soli Deo noti sunt, modò sanae doctrinae non contradicant quieteque vitam degant’, in Caelio Secondo Curione, Pro vera et antiqua ecclesiae Christi autoritate, in Antonium flore bellum mutinensem (Basel: Johann Oporinus, 1547), ustc

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Curione’s comments were exceptionally tolerant. Yet John Philpot, future martyr, translated Pro vera et antiqua into English in 1549, dedicating his work to the Duke of Somerset and there is no sign that Philpot regarded the sentence about ‘simulatores’ as controversial.37 By 1550, it seemed that Curione had started playing for both sides. We saw that he edited the 1550 collection of Spiera stories, but recorded his irritation with the predestinarian doctrine and anti-​Italian gloss of Calvin’s preface to the story. Wickedness was everywhere not just in Italy, he said ‒ in Geneva? in Calvin? in himself?–​especially, perhaps, the too-​certain self of his early pasquinades?38 In the same year, Curione translated into Italian ‘One hundred and ten divine considerations’ of Juan de Valdés, sage of the spirituali: in this case Curione’s preface was full of admiration. The Spanish author’s phrases advocating ‘secrets’ in religion spoke for themselves:  Valdés believed in dissimulation and it is likely that the enigmatic Curione was beginning to agree with him.39 Curione’s change is also suggested in an undated letter of religious counsel, a medium beloved of Italian spirituali.40 It was addressed ‘to his brothers scattered in the land of Babylon’ ‒ where the Jews had sat down and wept: henceforward we shall call it ‘the Babylon letter’. It was intended to comfort and guide those Italian reformers left in Italy. When four of Curione’s letters were published in 1552 as Quatro lettere christiane, this letter appeared as the second in the collection. The publication is now rare –​no surprise there, it was shocking for its time and was almost certainly suppressed in both protestant and catholic areas.41 Ginzburg regarded such ruses as ‘a subtle apology for a nicodemite approach and a defence of the very position which people wanted to combat’.42 Ginzburg has been criticised for finding nicodemites in improbable

37 38 39 40 41 42

622862, pp. 16–​17; on Anabaptists, see p. 186. I have relied on John McDiarmid’s help with this Latin text. ‘An oration of Coelius the second Curio for the trew and auncyent avthoritie of Christ his churche agaynst Antony Florebell of Mvtiny’, in The Examinations and Writings of John Philpot, ed. Robert Eden, PS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1842), pp. 319–​432. Curione’s preface in Francisci spierae … historia, A 2r–​v, quoted by Biasiori, L’eresia di un umanista, pp. 69–​70. Curione’s preface to his translation of Valdés, Le cento e dieci considerationi dell Signor Giovanni Valdesso (Basel:  Pietro Perna & Michael Isengrin, 1550), ustc 861682:  for the seventeenth-​century English translation of this work, see Chapter 12, pp. 230–31. Anne Jacobson Schutte, ‘The lettere volgari and the crisis of Evangelism in Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 28 (1975), 639–​68. Quatro lettere christiane, con uno paradosso (Bologna, “per Pietro Perugino & Paolo Perugino”, 1552) (=Basel, s.n., s.d.), ustc 825111, pp. 33–​34. ‘una sottile apologia dell’ atteggiamento nicodemitico o una testimonianza della stessa posizione che si voleva combattere’, Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo, at pp. 190–​91, see also pp. 186–​9.

174 Chapter 9 places, but even those who see Curione as generally against concealment regard this particular text as nicodemite in intention.43 In the Babylon letter Curione recalled his own sufferings and anguish under persecution in Italy which, he said, made him feel sickened by the plight of victims everywhere.44 Yet he was, as ever, subtle. He put into the mouths of ‘others’ the suggestion that the Nicodemus of the Gospels might be a positive model. These useful others said that although ‘Nicodemus came to Christ by night, this did not prove that he denied him in the daytime’. Also there was the provocative, if undeniable, comment that ‘when the Apostles abandoned Christ, both [Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus] openly and clearly confessed him, and went to Pilate to ask boldly for his body for burial’.45 Here we seem to be transported back to the ‘other’ Nicodemus ‒ the good man of medieval religious literature.46 We are encountering again the profound instability that haunts this subject. Curione appears to be changing positions, saying one thing, seeming to mean another. Someone –​we do not know who ‒ cut out the radical propositions about Nicodemus’s goodness. Then, in this expurgated version, the letter was published again in an anti-​nicodemite work later known to French readers as Le Temporiseur and to English readers as The Temporysour. At this point, our tale becomes complicated. We should study the texts in chronological order. In 1549, four anti-​ nicodemite dialogues entitled Proscaerus, were printed in Latin, with a pseudonym on the title page.47 The author was Wolfgang Musculus, a reformer from Lorraine who settled in Strassburg; then, from 1549, in Berne –​ close to Basel, where Proscaerus was printed that same year. The dialogues, about the gradual conversion of an errant nicodemite, were expertly printed as a single work. ‘Eusebius’, a kindly minister argues with ‘Proscaerus’, 43 44 45

46 47

Turchetti, ‘Nota sulla religiosita di Caelio Secondo Curione, in Bussi, ed., Libri, idee e sentimenti religiosi, pp. 109–​115; see also Biasiori’s emphasis on Curione’s habits of ambiguity and pretence, L’eresia di un umanista, pp. 14–​15, 66–​67. ‘Quando mi ricordo di esser stato anco io nella medesima servitù et angoscia mi vien tanto e tal fastidio per cagion di quelli che vi sono ancora involti, né trovano modo di uscirne che mi viene a noia la vita’, Quatro Lettere, p. 22. ‘Se Nicodemo venne di notte al Signore non si trova per questo che lo rinegasse di giorno … Quando gli Apostoli tutti haveno abbandonato Christo ambi due essi apertamante ed in fatto lo confessorono ed arditamente domandorno a Pilato il corpo di Giesu’, Quatro lettere, pp. 33–​34. See Zuliani, ‘The Other Nicodemus’, pp. 322–​ 29. [Wolfgang Musculus], Proscaerus. Liceát ne homini Christiano, evangelicae doctrinae gnaro, papisticis superstitionibus ac falsis cultibus externa societate communicare, dialogi quatuor (Basel: Jakob Kündig, 1549), ustc 687911. The pseudonym was Eutichius Myonius

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the temporiser, who has been living among nicodemite friends, even going to mass with them. Other characters join in, but the important exchanges are between these two. Like many contemporary counsellors on this subject, Eusebius uses language reminiscent of the confessional: ‘praye ye the Lord to pardon your dissimulation but ye cannot do that oneless first of all ye confesse the faulte, and then sorrow earnestly in repentance.’48 Anxious to justify himself, the temporiser ‘Proscaerus’ rehearses the teaching he has been given by his dissimulating friends. Eusebius is firm: gradually he demolishes the standard scriptural references used to support of nicodemism and wins back this wandering soul. Moreover, Proscaerus ends up liking his counsellor. Despite short references to fear-​inducing stories of those who had temporised –​among them ‘Franciscus’ Spiera –​the main emphasis is on divine pardon for repentant nicodemites,​a pardon often denied by anti-​ nicodemite writers.49 The next year, 1550, Valérand Poullain, minister to French strangers in London, translated Musculus’s Proscaerus into French.50 It was printed in London and entitled Le Temporiseur, but this was no longer a relatively short and accessible set of dialogues. The addition of nineteen other writers’ ‘conseilz’ made it an indigestible feast of counsel.51 Moreover, close reading of some of these co-​ opted advisers reveals some proto-​nicodemites skulking within Temporiseur’s supposedly anti-​nicodemite covers. Ochino and Curione both turned out to be wild cards in the anti-​nicodemite pack  –​to a lesser extent, so did Curione’s colleague, the professor of Old 48 49 50

51

Quotations are taken from the contemporary English translation, Temporysour, stc 18313, sig G iii. Ibid. Giiii and H iiii. [Wolfgang Musculus], Le temporiseur. Par Eutichius Myonius. Avec plusieurs bons conseilz & aduis sus la mesme matiere … Dont les noms des autheurs [London:  Estienne Mierdman, 1550], stc 18311; ustc 679. Andrew Spicer, ‘Poullain, Valérand (c.1509–​1557)’, odnb. There was a later edition, Le temporiseur en forme de dialogue par Eutychius Musculus (Lyon: Saugrin, 1565), ustc 479, see Andrew Pettegree, The French Book and the European Book World (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), pp. 82–​3; Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, pp. 70–​76. Many of these conseils are taken from De vitandis superstitionibus of 1549, see above, p. 169. Appended to Temporiseur from sig. H v onwards are comments from: Oeclampadius, Melanchthon, Bucer, Vermigli, Calvin, Simon Sultzer, Jan Lasco (very long), Bernardino Ochino (alarmingly short), then the ministers of Zurich, headed by Bullinger; Coelius Secondus Curio, Pierre Viret, then Martin Borrhaus, who was Curione’s colleague at Basel. The opinions of Myconius and Zwingli followed, although they were both dead. Last, there was more from Calvin and another letter written by Calvin to Poullain; see Eugénie Droz, ‘Musculus, Poullain e les temporiseurs’, in Chemins de l’hérésie, 4 vols (Geneva: Slatkine reprints, 1970), 1, pp. 173–​271, esp. pp. 248–​255.

176 Chapter 9 Testament at Basel, Martin Borrhaus: his short piece focused on the plight of the weak and began with comments about the prophet Amos who taught that when times were bad, the good should keep quiet.52 Perhaps the strangest of the ‘bons conseilz’ was that of Bernardino Ochino, whose opinion appeared thus: ‘Christians should not be where they cannot be without dishonouring God.’ And there it ends. Presumably he had in mind being at the papist mass, but why be so enigmatic? The effect is evasive, mocking, nicodemite and ‘insolent’ –​as if he did not wish to be part of the chorus.53 Curione’s contribution, entitled ‘Advis’, was an expurgated version of his ‘nicodemite’ Babylon letter. Poullain’s volume is sometimes said to have been ‘translated’ into English in 1555. In fact, what appeared in English was a much shorter book, called Temporysour, which contained Musculus’s dialogues, as in Proscaerus. They were bound together with just one of the ‘conseilz’. This was from Curione, whose piece, now called Excellent admonition and resolution, was in fact the altered and expurgated version of the Babylon letter.54 All Poullain’s many other counsellors were dropped ‒ unceremoniously. We do not know why Robert Pownall, the translator from French into English, prioritised Curione’s ambivalent piece.55 As in the French translation, the reference to imitating the good example of Nicodemus has been deleted  –​presumably much too unorthodox. But Curione’s exceptional compassion remained.56 From the start, he made clear his concern for the plight of the ‘oppressed’. They wanted to know, he said, if it is ‘consonnant wyth the worde of God, in a pure conscience, to be corporally present, to assiste, & communicate at the Babilonicall papisticall seruices, the harte beyng absent and alienated from all supersticion and vayne religion’. Here are those pervasive metaphors of ‘heart’ and ‘body’ once again. Curione is sensitive about the delicate task ahead; he knows that ‘the mynde is led hyther & thyther, into dyuerse ambigious and doubtful 52 53 54 55 56

Temporiseur, sig P vii; the quotation from Amos did not necessarily support mild silence, rather it can be seen as a rejection of that silence forced on good men by tyrants, Balserak, Calvin as sixteenth-​century Prophet, pp. 160–​162. ‘Les chretiens ne se doibvent pas trouver ou ilz ne peuvent pas estre sans contemelie de Dieu.’, Temporiseur, sig. P vi; Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo, p. 188. The Temporysour, see note 1 above; Caelio Secondo Curione’s An excellent admonicion [against] papisticall services is appended at sigs Hii –​ Hviii. Pownall became an elder in English exile community in Wesel, Andrew Pettegree, ‘Robert Pownall’, ODNB. (1520–​1571)’, ODNB . Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo, pp. 189 –​90, esp. note 1.

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cogitacions’. He even asks ‘forgiveness yf in geuinge counsayle I shal speake any thing that shal seme over harde unto them, not having accommodated myself sufficientelye to theyr infirmitie’. It is hard to imagine Calvin and Vermigli seeking forgiveness or accommodating themselves to nicodemite ‘infirmitie’. Nonetheless, for most of the text, Curione seems orthodox enough: ‘dissimulacion is a certayne kynde of denyall’ and ‘Let those that thinke it lawful to semble or dissemble in religion tell me, where appeareth in them the glorie of Christ?’ He rehearses the standard scriptural texts against dissimulation. Then, in the last three pages, there is a change of tone. It begins at the point where Curione acknowledges that that ‘dyuers are so infyrme & weake … that they they dare not publykelye con|temne the superstitious services’.57 For these weaker brethren, ‘I would counsayle such not to attempte or enterpryse any thing rashely ’. He seems to be suggesting that they should wait, as nicodemites had always waited. There is none of English exiles’ acute sense of urgency. Curione tells those unable to be bold witnesses to ‘read the scriptures in their houses’, seek counsel, and ‘pray to God that he will increase their faith’.58 To modern readers this counsel may look like no more than pious advice. Yet, in the mid-​1550s, Curione’s closing comments were very unusual indeed. Most protestant leaders did not allow that the matter was so unclear that prayer was the only recourse. For them action was necessary –​ Vermigli’s ‘doings of men’. As we saw, Calvin rebuffed those who kept on seeking counsel, delaying and ducking obligations already made perfectly clear ‒ by him.59 Not so Curione, who understood perfectly that confused people might go to papist services ‘through frailty or feare of men’. They should repent, he said, and ‘being void of counsel, what to do’ they should ‘ask pardon of the Lorde and committing themselves to the mercy of God’, who might show them the way to a ‘peaceable place’ of exile. At the end, he returned, as the mature Curione usually did, to misericordia, ‘the Lord have mercy upon …’ the next word is illegible.60 Poullain and then Pownall had included in their collections a dazzling stylist who seemed, at first, to toe the anti-​nicodemite line, but then subtly sympathised with tempted nicodemites and finally retreated into certainty of God’s mercy.

57 58 59 60

Temporysour, sig H v. Ibid., sig. H vi. See Prologue, p. 2; and above, p. 169 note 22. Temporysour, sig. H vi–​vii.

178 Chapter 9 5

John Cheke’s De ecclesia

Several Englishmen met Curione during their exile in Switzerland and Germany, among them, John Cheke, professor of Greek at Cambridge and tutor to King Edward vi. He arrived in Basel as an exile in the spring of 1554, and with him was Richard Morison, who had been a member of Pole’s ‘nursery’ in the Veneto and had then returned to England to serve Henry viii and Edward vi.61 John Cheke had been imprisoned for some six weeks in the late summer of 1553, then he stayed quietly in the country for six months, whence he wrote letters begging help from friends at court. He gave up and left England for exile in April 1554.62 The shock of leaving his wife and extended family was followed by demanding journeys to Strassburg, Zurich, Geneva, and then to liberal, some said double-​minded, Basel.63 There Cheke and Morison finally met Curione, although they already knew of him through letters he had sent to Edward vi’s court. In these earlier contacts, Curione had described Cheke, tutor to the young King Edward at that time, as ‘a man of remarkable judgement and wisdom’.64 His friend Castellio had also introduced himself to the godly English by dedicating his biblical translation to the young King.65 Curione’s contacts included another present which is rarely examined. It was his teenage son Orazio’s translation into Latin of De amplitudine misericordiae Dei (Basel, 1550). Orazio translated from an Italian original, said to be by the Carmelite Marsilio Andreasi.66 Modern Italian scholarship has shown that this was in fact Erasmus’s work 61 62 63 64

65 66

See above, Chapter 2, pp. McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, p. 191. For their itinerary see McDiarmid ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, pp. 192–​194. Also, I thank John McDiarmid for several enlightening email ‘conversations’ about their itinerary. ‘vir iudicio et sapientia singulari Joannes Kekus ’ in ‘Caelius Secundus Curio Eduardo vi Brittaniae: Regi Serenissimo’, in M. Tullii Ciceronis Philippicae Orationes XIV in M. Antonium (Basel: H. Froeben, 1551), ff. 2r –​3r, cited in Hans R. Guggisberg, Sebastien Castellio: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age, ed. and trans. Bruce Gordon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 59; Cheke had also sent his translations of eight sermons of St John Chrysostom to the Basel publisher, Sigismund Gelenus,, ibid. p. 60. In 1552–​3, Curione made it known that the attentions he had paid to England had received no reward, Bartolomeo Balbani to Francis Yaxley 5 January 1552–​3, CSP Foreign, 1547–​1553, 601. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward vi and the Protestant Reformation (London: Allen Lane, 1999), p. 174. De amplitudine misericordiae Dei absolutissima oratio, a Marsilio Andreasio Mantuano Italico sermone primum conscripta, nunc in latinum conuersa, Caelio Horatio Curione … interprete. Item, sermones tres D. Bernardini Occhini (Basel: Oporinus, 1550), ustc 628939; Strype, Cheke, p. 23.

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on divine mercy, translated into Italian, but considerably altered. Under Andreasi’s name the work circulated in spirituale circles. Subsequently Curione’s teenage son re-​translated it into Latin –​probably with his father’s help. It was part of the characteristically Italian stress on mercy, misericordia, and ‘a wide-​ open heaven’. Divine mercy was becoming crucial for Curione –​and for many Italians in exile.67 In 1554, the year of Cheke’s visit to Basel, Curione’s own work with a similar title, De Amplitudine beati regni dei, was published. Inspired by Erasmus, it revealed a belief that the wideness of God’s mercy excluded violent persecution and included the predestination to heaven of a large number of people –​ sinners all.68 Thus Cheke’s visit to Basel happened against a background of intermittent contact in the past between Curione and Castellio and the Edwardian court. When Cheke arrived the Englishman was feted; he stayed in lodgings provided by Basel University’s rector and he met Curione.69 It might have turned into an academic jolly –​except that this was the spring and early summer of 1554 and Cheke was witnessing a European crisis. During the previous year, the radical Spanish theologian, Miguel Servetus, had fled the Inquisition in catholic territories, but was captured, condemned as a heretic and then burned alive in Geneva on 27 October 1553. Basel’s Italian community, led by Curione and his friend Sebastian Castellio, became the centre of unyielding opposition to that act. Unjustly Calvin’s enemies in Basel held him solely responsible, putting about false news that he had smiled during the execution. The text De haereticis an sint persequendi, published in March 1554, voiced the horror felt by many Italians, including Curione. There is little doubt that the editor of this work was Castellio, seconded by Curione himself. These two bore the brunt of Calvin’s fury –​and that of other Swiss protestant leaders.70 67

68

69 70

Desiderius Erasmus, De immensa dei misericordia (Basel:  Froeben, 1524), ustc 630027. This work was printed nine times in the year 1524. On the Andreasi text, see Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, pp. 153–​56, 163–​7; Prosperi, Il Libro Grande, pp. 301–​303; Luca D’Ascia, ‘Celio Secondo Curione: erasmista o antierasmista’, in Achille Olivieri, ed., Erasmo,Venezia e la cultura padana nel ‘500 (Rovigo: Minelliana, 1995), pp. 207–​224, esp. p. 219. Coelii secundi curionis de amplitudine beati regni dei, dialogi sive libri duo (Basel: [Johannes Oporinus], 1554), ustc 622859, p. 174. This text has been seen as early evidence of the questioning of eternal torment, Daniel Pickering Walker, The Decline of Hell; Seventeenth–​ Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 36 and 74. ‘Rationes rectoratus’ for 1554/​5, cited by H. R. Guggisberg, Basel in the Sixteenth Century (St. Louis, MO: Center for Reformation Research, 1982), p. 50; Tracey Sowerby, Morison, pp. 227–​29. De haereticis, an sint persequendi, et omnino quomodo sit cum eis agendum, doctorum virorum tum veterum, tum recentiorum sententiae. Liber hoc tam turbulento tempore

180 Chapter 9 The protest in Basel was not about nicodemism but the burning of Servetus had taken place in Geneva, city of anti-​nicodemites and Calvin, arch-​anti-​ nicodemite, was being blamed. Had Servetus been more prudent, more ‘nicodemite’, none of this would have happened. The event became critical for the history of concealment –​and, in the long term, for that of toleration in Europe.71 Thus the normally cautious John Cheke had walked into a perfect storm. He had seen a level of hostility between protestants that was way outside his own experience. He had also encountered Curione’s unorthodox views. All the same, he trusted the Italian enough to leave two manuscripts with him for printing in Basel; Cheke’s De Pronuntiatione graecae linguae was duly published in Basel during the next year. Curione’s preface to the work refers to Cheke as a Greek scholar of European stature.72 Curione would maintain his contacts with England until his own death in 1564.73 By the beginning of the summer of 1554, Cheke had revised his plans. On 18 June, he wrote to Calvin, noting that Queen Mary had been angered by his visit to Geneva (of course). Therefore he had decided to travel to Venice and Padua and he arrived in Padua on 10 July.74 He was no longer accompanied by Richard Morison, but by Sir Thomas Wrothe, another firm evangelical. Cheke soon met the Hoby brothers, Thomas and Philip.75 Cheke’s exile there, and that of his English companions, was not political, nor even religious, but distinctly nicodemite.76 Unlike all the other cities where English exiles took refuge during Queen Mary’s reign, Venice was catholic. Cheke was scared. He wrote to

71

72

73 74 75 76

perneceßarius (Basel, n. pub., 1554), ustc 629928; another issue, same title and details, ustc 629929; Guggisberg, Sebastien Castellio, pp. 114‒27. Guggisberg, Basel in the Sixteenth Century, p. 42; on Ochino’s reaction, ‘quae res eum reddidit invisum’, see [Sebastien] Castalio, Contra libellum Calvini ([Amsterdam] 1612), sig. A6r, cited by Mark Taplin, ‘Bernardino Ochino’, ODNB; Freya Sierhuis, The Literature of the Arminian Controversy; Religion, Politics and the Stage in the Dutch Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 20–​21. John Cheke, De pronuntiatione graecae potissimum linguae disputationes cum Stephano Vuintoniensi episcopo (Basel: Nikolaus ii Episcopius, 1555), ustc 667475, Curione’s Preface to Sir Anthony Cooke, f. 2.2. The other text Cheke left in Curione’s care was Leonis imperatoris de bellico apparatu (Basel: Michael Isengrin, 1554), ustc 672366, a translation from Greek into Latin of the Tactica of the Byzantine Emperor Leo vi. See Chapter 10, p. •. Cheke to Calvin, Strassburg, 18 June 1554, OC, 15, cols 169–​70; John Mason to Sir William Petre, Brussels, 10 July 1554, csp Foreign, (1553–​1558), 236; Cheke to Mason, Padua, 12 July 1554, enclosed within a letter sent by Mason to Petre, Brussels, 4 August 1554, 247. Hoby, Travailes, p. 117. On this ‘nicodemite exile’, see Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 125–​144.

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his wife, ‘Direct your next letters to Venice unto me whither me thincke I goe as Paul warned went to Jerusalem’. We should unpick that reference ‒ to Acts 21: Paul is warned that he will be bound and handed over to the pagans.77 Had someone had warned Cheke of similar dangers? By 1554 a theatrical nicodemite called Pietro Vanni, aka Peter Vannes, was Queen Mary’s English ambassador to Venice. Now an ultra-​catholic ambassador, as we have seen, Vanni was trying to entrap English protestant exiles who had once been his co-​religionists –​like Cheke.78 Cheke had very mixed feelings about his Venetian exile, but on arrival he struck a positive, humanist note:  he planned ‘to learn … the Italian tongue, which he despair[ed] not of’. Also, he aimed ‘philosophically to course over the civil law’.79 At Padua he gave informal readings on Demosthenes’ Orations, a politically significant choice.80 However, the assertion that Cheke was masterminding political resistance to Queen Mary has been rejected convincingly by John McDiarmid.81 Whilst they could, these Englishmen were keeping their heads well down, not witnessing to their political or religious beliefs –​in short, being nicodemites. In the Veneto at that time were other Italians whom Cheke had known in England in Edward vi’s reign: Pietro Bizzarri and Guido Giannetti da Fano (Vanni’s friend). Both were reconsidering their positions as a result of the religious disruption in England. By 1555 Giannetti was considering changing sides and becoming catholic again. Then, suddenly, there was upheaval in Italy. Breathlessly, Thomas Hoby recounted the events of the extraordinary spring of 1555, ‘the year of three popes’. On 23 March Julius III died. Then came a glimmer of hope for reformers. The new pope Marcellus II seemed to be ‘[going] abowt spedilie to bringe to pass sundrie reformations of abuses in the Churche’. He died within three weeks. Then on 23 May, Cardinal Carafa, traditionalist opponent of all the spirituali, enemy of all compromise, became Pope Paul IV. It

77 78 79 80

81

Cheke to Lady Cheke, n.p., n.d., but written in 1554 as he was setting out for Venice, BL MS Add. 46367, ff. 14v–​15r; see Acts: 21: 10–​15. For Pietro Vanni, see above, Chapter 4. Cheke to Mason, Padua, 12 July, 1554, csp Foreign (1553–​58), 247: 1. Thomas Wilson’s dedicatory letter to William Cecil, The Three Orations of Demosthenes … with those his fower Orations titled expressly and by name against King Philip of Macedonie, trans. Thomas Wilson (London: Henry Denham, 1570), stc 6578; Alastair Blanchard and Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Thomas Wilson’s Demosthenes and the Politics of Tudor Translation’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 12 (2005), 46–​80. Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 125–​44; McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, pp. 186, 193–​5, 199; Kenneth Bartlett, ‘The Role of the Marian Exiles’ in P. Hasler, ed., House of Commons, 1558–​1603 (London: History of Parliament Trust, hmso, 1981) 1, 102 –​ 110.

182 Chapter 9 was he who would have burned Flaminio, would imprison Morone and who wanted to bring Pole before the Inquisition. He saw them all as heretics and nicodemites. Giannetti da Fano changed his mind about ‘popeing’, and hid in the back streets of Venice, shielded from Inquisition enquiries by sympathisers with reform.82 The English exiles, too, were deeply affected. Everywhere, catholicism seemed to be prevailing. They began to think about packing up and moving back to protestant cities. During the preceding winter Cheke had been clarifying his thoughts by writing a text intended, ultimately, for publication. It was also, it seems, a form of advice to himself. He was troubled by recent experiences: the persecutions of Queen Mary’s catholic regime; his own exile; his distress at leaving his wife; the conflicts in Basel after the death of Servetus; fear everywhere; finally the election of Paul IV. Cheke’s treatise was never published, but it survives in manuscript in the British Library, entitled ‘An ecclesia posit errare’, whether the Church can err. That same question had been addressed by several reformers, including Curione in his Pro vera et antiqua ecclesia.83 Cheke concluded that the authorities governing the visible church were liable to error. But there was also an invisible church, made up of those who have the Holy Spirit dwelling within them. They cannot fall into error for good. There are times when God casts the visible church into darkness but later God ‘reopens the treasury of his mercy and truth’. The conclusion is tentatively optimistic –​ finally, mercy is possible.84 When Cheke considers the choices open to those endowed with the Spirit, he sounds like many nicodemites we have met in this book:  wait for better times, keep hoping, keep quiet. Cheke writes that there are those whom God knows to be his, but who: on account of the age or on account of the state of the times cannot reveal themselves, for want not of zeal but of a fit occasion … For even the good servant gives his measure at the fitting time, and that which is planted by

82

83 84

Hoby, Travail, p.  120; Dall’Olio, ‘Guido Giannetti’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani; M. Anne Overell, ‘The Cambridge Connection and the “strangeness” of Italian reformers’, 1547–​1556’, in John F. McDiarmid, ed., The Cambridge Connection in Tudor England: Humanism, Reform, Rhetoric, Politics (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming, 2019). For Curione’s Pro vera et antiqua ecclesia, see above, p. 172. BL MS Harl. 417, ff. 179–​205. See especially ff. 183v–​189v, 202r–​205r, cited in McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, pp. 197–​9. This and the following paragraph depend on John McDiarmid’s important research and I thank him for his generous help.

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the waters bears fruit in due season, and there are times when even the good should keep silent, because the times are bad, as Amos said.85 And what were his sources for so daring a thought? As we have seen, other humanists had quarried the prophet Amos, for solutions to the dilemma about conformity.86 Also, Cheke had once had a friend, deeply mourned, who considered nicodemism very positively for a short time: Martin Bucer’s tentative advice in Consilium Theologicum Privatim Conscriptum had almost certainly passed through Cheke’s hands when he checked Bucer’s library after his death.87 In thinking of Amos, Cheke might have been describing his own dilemma, that of a good servant in bad times. A few pages later in De Ecclesia, he says that even a magistrate who errs in religion must be obeyed, but erroneous laws should be obeyed with a certain caution. That was a dark, confusing saying  –​‘telling it slant’, perhaps not meant to be clear.88 Nonetheless Cheke’s comments in De Ecclesia suggest a wistful nicodemism, rooted in meditation on the English crisis, deepened by his experiences in Basel, in the Veneto and with the compromised Italians he met during his travels: Vanni, Bizzarri, Giannetti were all in Venice at the time he was there. And in Basel he had met Curione, who had once written of the positive example of Nicodemus and, more recently, in his De Amplitudine, of the unstoppable mercy of God.89 By February 1556 Cheke was safely out of Venice and in Strassburg. He wrote to his brother-​in-​law William Cecil, who had been more fortunate and more nicodemite than he had. Cecil had stayed in Marian London, close to the court, undertaking official roles except for times when he returned to estates in Lincolnshire, where a protestant press was in operation. Cecil ‘had adapted’.90 In his letter, Cheke suggested that Cecil should aim ‘to content God quietlie’.91 85

86 87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., f. 180r: ‘vel propter aetatem vel propter tempora se patefacere non possunt, non studio defecti in quo prompti sunt, sed occasione. Nam & servus bonus demensum dat in tempore [Matthew 24:45], & qui ad aquas plantatus est fructum feret suo tempore [Psalm 1:3], & incidunt tempora quando etiam bonis silendum est, quia tempora mala sunt sicut Amosus ait [Amos 5:13], quoted and translated by McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, p. 198. For instance, Martin Borrhaus, See above, p. 176. Martini Buceri Opera (4 vols): Consilium Theologicum Privatim Conscriptum (vol. 4), ed. Pierre Fraenkel (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. xi–​xii; McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, p. 198. BL MS Harl. 417, f. 189v; see above, Prologue, pp. 6–7. Overell, ‘The Cambridge Connection and the “strangeness” of Italian reformers’, in McDiarmid, ed., Cambridge Connection in Tudor England, forthcoming. Alford, Burghley, p. 76–​7; Elizabeth Evenden, ‘The Michael Wood Mystery, William Cecil and the Lincolnshire Printing of John Day’, SCJ, 35 (2004), 383–​94. Cheke to Cecil, Strasbourg, 18 February 1556, BL MS Lansdowne 3, ff. 130–​131, at 131r, quoted by McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, pp. 204–​205.

184 Chapter 9 That sounds like advice to act like a nicodemite. ‘Contenting god’ without being persecuted seems to have been Cheke’s own intention. Yet he left Strassburg and ventured to more dangerous places, ruled by Queen Mary’s consort. We do not know exactly why he went. Possibly he aimed to visit Sir John Mason, his stepfather-​in-​law.92 On 13 May 1556 he was kidnapped between Brussels and Antwerp and brought to prison in London. Queen Mary’s government put intense pressure on him to recant. As we saw in Chapter 3, Cardinal Pole was closely, if indirectly, involved in securing Cheke’s recantation of his evangelical views, some of which Pole had once shared. Cheke was to be the prize ex-​ evangelical, the one who made up for the Marian government’s ‒ and Pole’s ‒ tragic errors in dealing with Cranmer’s recantation. In October 1556, Cheke signed a second, complete abjuration of his protestant faith. Had he changed his religious beliefs? Was he dissimulating? At moments of terror, these two states might become one. ‘Homines sumus’ said Matthew Parker with charity and perhaps with fellow-​ feeling, for he had stayed on in catholic England.93 Vermigli’s reaction to the recantation of his one-​time English friend was more merciful than readers of his Cohabitacyon might have anticipated; he had heard, he said, that Cheke’s faith was ‘bent rather than broken or extinguished’.94 Cheke died less than a year later, on 13 September 1557. According to John Foxe’s brief comment, he repented his recantation and ‘hys ende [was] comfortable’.95 In De ecclesia and in his letter to Cecil of 1556, Cheke had considered what good men should do in bad times. The issue was the same as that being addressed throughout the crisis of the mid-​1550s, by Bullinger, Calvin, Vermigli, Ochino, Borrhaus, Curione and many more. The counsellors were a mixed group:  some, like Calvin and Vermigli, were rigorous anti-​nicodemites, others ambivalent and ready to change sides. Some responses were mocking, like Ochino’s evasive one-​liner; others double-​tongued but compassionate, like Curione’s Excellent Admonition; Cheke’s words were cautious but they suggested that by 1555 he, too, was a nicodemite.96 His visits to Italians in Basel and then in Venice and Padua, almost certainly helped him towards this out-​of-​character conclusion. In Basel, Cheke had witnessed controversy about

92 93 94 95 96

See Philip Hoby to Mason, 6 June 1555, csp Foreign (1553–​1558), 383. John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1821), pp. 180–​81. ‘potius inclinatam quam fractam vel extinctam’, Vermigli to an unidentified friend, Zurich, 15 March 1557, printed in his Loci communes (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1583), p. 1118. Foxe, tamo, 1576, 11, p. 1876; see below Chapter 11, p. 214. McDiarmid, ‘To content god quietlie’, pp. 222–​224.

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Servetus’s execution and the revival of an Erasmian and Italian approach to the problem: ‘misericordia’, mercy. It was not new; evident in the ‘consolation’ stressed at Viterbo, in Flaminio’s dislike for ‘the way of fear’, proclaimed in il Beneficio di Cristo, at least until the final predestinarian chapter. The theme of mercy was also present in Curione’s ‘Babylon’ letter, expurgated then inserted into his Excellent Admonition, made available to English readers in the popular Temporysour; finally it was dominant in his De Amplitudine. Developed by younger Italians like Giacomo Aconcio and Francesco Pucci, it would be heard in England throughout Queen Elizabeth I’s reign and beyond. Clearly it threatened the anti-​nicodemites’ message: if there was mercy and few were damned, then even nicodemites might live, in Italy, Basel and England, on earth as in heaven.

Chapter 10

Radical Texts for the Queen of Nicodemites Wherefore, if an heretick cannot, though he would, cast away his error, unless reason compel him: why trouble you the poor wretch, to make him lye, and so to offend God, yet more and more?1 Giacomo Aconcio, Satan’s Stratagems, 1648.

∵ In 1558–​9, there was a new religious settlement in England, with three nicodemites in charge: Queen Elizabeth I, Sir William Cecil, Principal Secretary and the scholarly Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. All had conformed in Mary’s reign, not knowing when it would end. The Elizabethan present was better than they had dared to hope.2 Historians agree about the nature of their reformation in 1558: ‘To a very large extent the Elizabethan settlement was a Nicodemite Reformation.’3 ‘At heart, Elizabeth was a Nicodemite queen and willing to reign as a queen of Nicodemites.’4 The Act of Uniformity of 1559 required outward conformity but not inner consent, the ‘mouth’ not the ‘heart’. It was an unusual development, watched carefully in Europe, disappointing many reformers, but appealing to those Italian exiles who had already begun to loathe enforcement of doctrine and the persecution which followed from it.5 All the Queen’s subjects those who had no lawful excuse were required by law to go to their parish church: 1 Jacobus Acontius, Stratagematum Satanae Libri octo (Basle:  P. Perna, 1565), ustc 694746. A quarto edition was published at Basle the same year, Satanae Stratagemata (Basel: P. Perna, 1565), ustc 692119. Quotations are from the first translation into English, Satans stratagems, or The Devils cabinet-​councel discovered (London: John Hancock, 1648), stc Wing A443, p. 110. 2 Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, pp. 103–​105 and p. 116; Diamaid MacCulloch, ‘The Latitude of the Church of England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, eds. Religious Politics in post–​Reformation England: Essays in honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 41–​59, especially p. 49–​50. 3 Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, in Marian Protestantism, pp. 86–​117, at p. 106. 4 Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 449. 5 See above, Chapter 9.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_​0 12

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upon every Sunday and other days ordained and used to be kept as holy days, and then and there to abide orderly and soberly during the time of the common prayer, preachings, or other service of God. Those who did not do so had to pay twelve pence a time.6 It amounted to an order to vote with your feet. Churchgoing had become the ‘tongue’ of obedience. There was to be no subscription to doctrinal statements, and no counting of communicants (not yet). Just ‘abide’ in church: most subjects did just that, reading, praying, sleeping and keeping quiet. A  minority found recalcitrant ways of ‘abiding’, like reading the catholic Lady Psalter, or their Latin primers –​ sometimes quite loudly.7 It was a peculiar arrangement and foreign observers did not grasp its subtleties and its limits. Even English people were perplexed and divided about the proper response. Many catholics believed in obedience and attended the Queen’s church.8 Their behaviour found partial understanding even from the Spanish Ambassador to England, Bishop Alvaro de la Quadra, who thought that attending services of the established church was not intrinsically evil, except for ‘the sin of dissimulation’ –​a significant exception.9 Meanwhile a group of catholic clergy, many of them in the North of England, argued steadily that catholics should not conform; they should be ready to refuse, ‘recusare’ in Latin. ‘Recusancy’ did not begin in the 1580s with the arrival of catholic missionaries trained abroad, though Robert Persons depicted it that way.10 All except one of Queen Mary’s bishops took a stand against the changes and were imprisoned. Anxious lay catholics, faced with divergent counsel, waited –​as Italian spirituali and Henrician evangelicals and many Marian protestants had waited. Many exiles returning from European protestant cities had found their time out of England uplifting; some thought they had, at last, seen their gospel put into practice. Once home they found insufficient enthusiasm for reformation

6 Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England: Manuscript and Printed Sources in translation, ed. Ginevra Crosignani, Thomas M. McCoog, and Michael Questier, with the assistance of Peter Holmes (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 2010), Document 1, p. 1. 7 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Dumb Preachers: Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, in her Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 235–​283, at p. 274. 8 Later on, around 1580, this group would become known as ‘church papists’, see Walsham, Church Papists. 9 Alvaro de la Quadra, Spanish ambassador to England, to Francisco Vargas, London, 7 Auguust, 1562, printed in Recusancy and Conformity, ed. Crosignani, McCoog and Questier, Document 3, pp. 5–​8, at p. 7. 10 Frederick Smith, ‘The Origins of Recusancy in Elizabethan England Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 60 (2016), 301–​332.

188 Chapter 10 and too many delays; ‘the slow paced horses retard the chariot’ was John Jewel’s comment in a letter to his erstwhile mentor, Pietro Martire Vermigli.11 Yet even the most dissatisfied protestants admitted that the Queen’s less-​than-​ perfect regime was better than a catholic one. The Family of Love, first established in the Netherlands, had groups in England, especially in the village of Balsham in Cambridgeshire. ‘The Family was notable for elevating the practice of cryptic deception (which Calvin had called Nicodemism) to a high and conscientious art’. They attended the Church of England’s services although there was not complete consensus among them on this matter. They flourished in the early decades of this reign, taking their place at court and some were found even in the Queen’s household.12 They joined the ranks of the many, all keeping quiet. The English had seen much religious change. The ‘doings’ of nicodemism  –​waiting, finding consolation from whatever religion the state allowed, staying at your post, converting out of convenience –​all these behaviours were very common. They had become the English norm, a nuanced norm, hard for Italian observers to understand. Even those who had personal knowledge of England, like Vermigli and Ochino (both in Zurich by 1558) were uncertain about the right response in the first decade of the reign.13 Other Italians in exile had spent years thinking through the complex of issues we call ‘nicodemism’ but now, as ever, they took different sides. The strange fate of anti-​nicodemism in Elizabeth’s reign will be the subject of the next chapter. Here we shall focus on Italian writers who, from the late 1550s, often came to accept some kind of nicodemism, especially Celio Secondo Curione, Giacomo Aconcio, Bernardino Ochino and Francesco Pucci. They are described in different ways, usually as radicals, less correctly as ‘early tolerationists’. They shared a rejection of Calvinist predestination, a hatred of persecution, and a belief in seeking some basis for reconciliation. They thought that orderly dissenters should be allowed to keep silence, unmolested by persecutors. Some Italian historians describe their doctrinal mix as favouring Erasmian misericordia: the benefit of Christ, mercy from God, mercy to men, and ‘il cielo aperto’, a heaven of great amplitude, wide open to sinners. But Erasmianism

11 12 13

Jewel to Martyr (Vermigli), 16 November 1559, ZL, 1, p. 55. Patrick Collinson, ‘Perne the Turncoat’, in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), pp. 179–​217, quotation at pp. 201–​202; Christopher W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society: 1550–​1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), pp. 93–​5. For instance, Vermigli to Queen Elizabeth, 22 December 1558, lls, 200, pp.  170–​7, at pp. 175–​6.

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was an unstable compound.14 The Princess Elizabeth, too, had a humanist and Erasmian education, which still marked the mature Queen: ‘she seems to have been frozen into the religion of her youth, which was necessarily dependent on Erasmian, evangelical and Lutheran (of the Melanchthon ilk) influences’.15 Yet her Erasmianism was of a mainstream protestant kind, different from that of Italian radicals who were now anxious to dedicate their texts to the Queen of Nicodemites. 1

Curione’s and Castellio’s Humanist Dedications

The two leaders of the Italian community in Basel decided that their first contact with the new, learned Queen of England should be of a humanist kind. On 7 January 1559, soon after Elizabeth’s accession, Sebastien Castellio wrote a personal letter to her and his Dialogi Sacri, very popular humanist schoolbooks based on the Bible, were issued in London, probably in 1560, certainly by the early 1570s.16 Castellio, translator of the Bible was still a bible man; for him that was the only essential and anyone who insisted on doctrinal extras was distorting the faith of Christians. Curione, too, made his pitch. In 1562 he dedicated to Elizabeth I the second edition of a work which had first appeared in 1558, a humanist collection by his pupil, Olympia Morata.17 In his preface, he presented Morata, not as exile and martyr, but as a woman who combined humanist learning with lively faith, like Elizabeth, ‘Ecclesie christiane vere patrone’. He was promoting women’s learning before a learned Queen.18 This seemed light years away from his 14

15 16

17 18

Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, pp.  153–​156, 163–​167; Giorgio Caravale, The Italian Reformation outside Italy: Francesco Pucci’s Heresy in sixteenth-​century Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2015) [hereafter Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy], pp. 225–​29. Gregory D. Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus: The Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). Susan Doran, ‘Elizabeth I’s Religion: the Evidence of her Letters’, JEH, 51 (2000), 699–​720, at p. 720. Castellio wrote a personal letter to Queen Elizabeth I on 7 January 1559. His Dialogi Sacri, first published in Geneva in 1543, ustc 40222, seem to have appeared in London in 1560, Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio pp. 32–​33, 173–​4; the first publication listed in stc is Dialogorvm sacrorvm libri iiii. Authore Sebastiano Castalione, qui nunc postremò opus recognouit (London: John Kingston, 1571), stc 4770.4. Olympiae fulviae moratae mulieris … [opera] (Basel: P Perna, 1558), ustc 679528. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions, of 1562, 1570 and 1580 respectively, were dedicated to Elizabeth 1, Ruth Chavasse, ‘Humanism in exile: Caelio Secondo Curione’s learned women friends and exempla for Elizabeth 1’, in S.  M. Jack and B.  A. Masters, eds, Protestants,

190 Chapter 10 early and vehement anti-​Erasmian pasquinades, and also far removed from his bitter rejection of Calvinist persecution after Servetus’s execution. His musings on the wide gates of heaven and salvation for everyone, which had appeared in De Amplitudine in 1554, were not given prominence in his approach to the Queen. Curione was studiously avoiding controversies and so he applied himself to humanist translations. He was ready to help other Italian exiles, but he stopped writing religious works. He helped the impulsive Giacomo Aconcio at the start of his exile. Then, as we shall see, Curione’s name was drawn into Ochino’s controversial attacks on predestination and persecution –​and so was Castellio’s. Basel’s two humanist leaders were enablers and supporters of other radicals who proposed acceptance of nicodemism and an end to persecution. England’s new Queen was unlikely to agree. 2

Giacomo Aconcio’s Stratagems

The exile Giacomo Aconcio had a rude awakening soon after his arrival in London in 1559. Two years earlier he had chosen to give up his work as secretary to the governor of Milan and go into exile in protestant lands. He was sympathetic to the teachings of the spirituali, especially to their text Il Beneficio di Cristo. One of the events that provoked him to choose exile seems to have been the arrest in 1557 of Pole’s friend, Cardinal Giovanni Morone, a leader of the spirituali.19 That group, their texts and their nicodemism cast a long shadow. Later Aconcio would admit that he had concealed his faith long before he chose exile. ‘Moreover my mind was long since vexed with plans to flee whither I might freely profess the Gospel’. Even in his pre-​exile works, he had suggested that if a few lived by true doctrines, but kept quiet about them, the truth would gradually spread. That was reminiscent of Valdés.20

19

20

Property, Puritans: Godly People Revisited, Parergon, NS, 14 (1996), 165–​86 (at pp. 177–​8); Biasiori, L’eresia di un umanista, pp. 108 and 181. For a scholarly guide to Acontio’s early texts, see Giorgio Caravale, Storia di una doppia censura. Gli Stratagemmi di Satana nell’ Europa del Seicento (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2013)  [hereafter Caravale, Una doppia censura], esp. pp.  22–​40; C.  D. O’Malley, Jacopo Acontio, trans. Delio Cantimori (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1955). For Aconcio’s early works, see Giacomo Aconcio, Dialogo di Giacopo Riccamati (Basel: Pietro Perna, 1558), ustc 807732; also Somma brevissima della dottrina cristiana di Giacopo Riccamati ossanese, printed in Aconcio, De methodo e opusculi religiosi e filosofici, ed. Giorgio Radetti (Florence: Vallecchi [1944]), pp. 211–​283. London, British Library, Cotton, Titus F xiii, ff. 232r–​234v, quoted by Lynn White, Jnr, ‘Jacopo Aconcio as Engineer’, American Historical Review, 72 (1967), 425–​44, at 440; Delio Cantimori, ‘Iacopo Aconcio’, DBI.

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Once Aconcio had crossed the mountains into Swiss protestant cities, he found friends who were familiar with English affairs. In Basel, he met Curione, who gave him a recommendation to help him move on to Zurich and there Aconcio spent nearly a year with Bernardino Ochino as his pastor and close friend.21 Also in Zurich was Ochino’s friend Lelio Sozzini whose questioning of doctrine and apparent dissimulation made many suspect him (Lelio’s more famous nephew the ‘anti-​trinitarian’ Fausto had not at this time left Italy).22 Not only was Ochino surrounded by radical Italian friends, he had also made useful English ones. Through him, Aconcio also met the Englishmen, Sir Thomas Wroth and Sir Anthony Cooke, exiles in Italy in Queen Mary’s reign. Aconcio gained recommendations from them, prior to moving on to Paris and then to London, where he had been offered work as a military engineer.23 By the end of 1559, Giacomo Aconcio was established in England and receiving a royal pension.24 He tried to sort out Ochino’s English business affairs, left in chaos. He met Francis Russell, the devoutly protestant Earl of Bedford and a lifelong Italianist; also John Jewel; William Cecil helped him; Gian Battista Castiglione, the Queen’s one-​time Italian tutor, became a close friend.25 Suddenly, in the summer of 1560, all this support was thrown away when Aconcio became involved in a controversy raging in London’s Dutch Stranger Church, about the exclusion of a small group of Anabaptists. Adrian Haemstede deputy minister to the church defended the rights of this minority and Aconcio took his side, arguing forcefully against persecution. That stance would dominate the rest of his life. Castiglione joined in the dispute on his friend Aconcio’s side. All the protesters were disciplined by Edward Grindal, Bishop of London.26 Haemstede was banished. Aconcio and Castiglione were banned 21 22 23 24 25 26

Caravale, Una doppia censura, p. 40. The Italian community in Zurich gave Aconcio money, Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 98. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, p. 96; Mario Biagioni, The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe: a Lasting Heritage (Leiden: Boston, Brill, 2017), pp. 38–​46. [Nicholas] Throckmorton to Cecil, 25 August 1559, csp Foreign (1558–​59), 1246; White, ‘Jacopo Aconcio as Engineer’, pp. 432, 440. Acontius to Queen Elizabeth, December?, 1559, Calendar of State Papers Domestic, of the Reigns of Edward Mary, Elizabeth 1547–​1580, ed., Robert Lemon, 7 vols (London: Longman, Brown et al, 1856–​71), vol. 6 (1601–​1603, with Addenda 1547–​1565), no number, p. 495. Jewel to Martyr, 22 May 1560, ZL, vol. 1, p. 78; Bernardinus Ochinus to Cecil, 25 August 1561, csp Foreign (1561–​62), 454. Patrick Collinson, ‘Calvinism with an Anglican Face; the Stranger Churches in EarlyElizabethan London and their Superintendent’, in ibid., Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 213–​44; Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica italiana a Londra’, in Delio Cantimori et al, eds, Ginevra e l’Italia (Florence: Sansoni, 1959), pp.  309–​411, at pp.  326–​34; Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–​1583, the Struggle for a Reformed Church (London:  Cape 1980), pp.  134–​40; Ole Peter Grell, ‘Exile and

192 Chapter 10 from communion in the Dutch church. According to Vermigli, observing from Zurich, Aconcio had ‘upset the church’. For the time being, the new exile took cover, concentrating on military engineering.27 His behaviour in Elizabethan London had not been nicodemite; he had been outspoken and shown courage. He often appears in history books as an early advocate of ‘toleration’. The term is anachronistic if applied to the 1560s.28 Aconcio’s main objective was to stop persecution; that does not necessarily involve accepting nicodemism, but in the writings of Aconcio, and the mature Ochino, and Francesco Pucci, the two were closely connected. Aconcio wrote Stratagematum Satanae –​Satan’s Stratagems, ‘a title natural to a military engineer’.29 The work was printed in 1564/​5, in humanist Basel by Curione’s printer-​friend Pietro Perna, who issued so many of the books of this group. The controversial Stratagematum, dedicated to ‘Divae Elisabethae’, remained in Latin. The first time it appeared in English was 1648 and, even then, only part of the work was translated: that is some indication of its perceived radicalism.30 Aconcio argued that persecution of others for their beliefs does not work and its divisiveness becomes one of ‘Satan’s stratagems’ to deceive and ruin human beings.31 There should be no question ‘that a man might be put to death for matter of Religion’, wrote Aconcio. He wanted a world where nicodemism was made unnecessary: ‘Wherefore, if an heretick cannot, though he would, cast away his error, unless reason compel him: why trouble you the poor wretch, to make him lye, and so to offend God, yet more and more?’32 Aconcio had seen the effects of trying to make people ‘lie’ in Italy, in Hapsburg dominions –​and

27 28 29 30

31 32

Tolerance’, in Grell and Scribner, eds, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, pp. 164–​81, at pp. 180–​81; Overell, Italian Reform, p. 176–​8. Vermigli to the Stranger Church at London, 15 February 1561, lls, 266, pp. 184–​187; E.R. Briggs, ‘An Apostle of the Incomplete Reformation: Jacopo Aconcio (1500–​1567)’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 22 (1976), 481–​495. On ‘concord’ and ‘tolerance’, see Mario Turchetti, ‘Religious Concord and Political Tolerance in Sixteenth-​and Seventeenth -​Century France’, SCJ, 22, (1991), 15–​25. Toleration, defined as a policy adopted by governments, was very rare in the sixteenth-​century. Lynn White, Jnr, ‘Jacopo Aconcio as Engineer’, pp. 426, 435–​441. Giacomo Acontio, Stratagematum satanae [Basle: P. Perna, 1565], ustc 694746; another ed. ustc 692119; Stratagematum Satanae libri viii, ed. Giorgio Radetti (Florence: Valecchi 1946). Quotations are from the English translation, Jacobus Acontius, Satans stratagems, or The Devils cabinet-​councel discovered (London: John Hancock, 1648), stc Wing A443. O’Malley, Jacopo Acontio, trans. Delio Cantimori, pp. 16, 135, 166; Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England:  A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 151–​154. Jacobus Acontius, Satans stratagems, p. 110.

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then in London. He rejected all attempts to force belief on others. But he did propose minimum essentials, his fundamenta. He would have preferred to use the Apostles’ Creed, he said, but he found that that deficient in the matter of justification (an interesting commentary on the development of doctrine during the sixteenth century). Therefore, he added a short solifidian statement, which everyone must accept. Then he considered the proper treatment of dissidents:  ‘[If] some man knowing the judgment of the Congregation, would again reduce it into Controversie, he ought to be heard, or enjoyned silence’.33 Dissident minorities would have to keep quiet ‒ be nicodemites. Aconcio died in England in 1566 or 1567. His Essortatione al timor di dio, was published posthumously in 1580, with a preface by his friend Castiglione. In this, his confession of his faith, Aconcio argued against the doctrine of predestination on grounds that a merciful God wills all people to be saved.34 This radical work, too, was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. 3

The Radical Texts of Bernardino Ochino’s Old Age

The works of Ochino’s old age were consistent with much that had gone before. His Laberinti del libero o servo arbitrio was published in Basel in 1561 and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. Ochino’s preface to her included the old man’s (probably unwelcome) reminiscences about conversations he had had with the Princess Elizabeth in London during Edward vi’s reign. He remembered that she had ‘asked him about her doubts concerning predestination’. In 1561 she probably still had doubts, but she did not reply.35 Yet their early contacts were undeniable: in those happier days the Princess Elizabeth had even translated one of his sermons, his Sermo de Christo.36 By the 1560s, however, Ochino, like his disciple Aconcio, had moved on to more dangerous themes. 33 34

35

36

Ibid, p. 130–​1. Una essortatione al timor di Dio (London:  John Woolfe [but printed abroad], [1579?]), stc 92; ustc 508675; another ed. [c 1580], ustc 807734; Diego Pirillo, Filosofia ed eresia nell’Inghilterra del tardo Cinquecento. Bruno, Sidney e i dissidenti religiosi italiani (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010), pp. 72–​74. ‘Io ricordandomi che già in Inghilterra v. Maesta avendo letti certi miei sermoni della predestinazione; e circa ciò domandandomi di alcuni dubbi’, Ochino’s Dedication to Elizabeth I of his Prediche di M.Bernardino Ochino, nomate Laberinti del libero o servo arbitrio (Basel: Pietro Perna, 1561), ustc 686399, quoted in Karl Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena, trans. H. Zimmern (London: James Nisbet, 1876), p. 251. Overell, Italian Reform, p. 42.

194 Chapter 10 These two now shared Curione’s fear that ‘new papacies’ were arising in protestant churches and in all human hearts:  ‘there’s not anyone alive who does not carry a papacy deep within his heart’, wrote Aconcio.37 Ochino feared especially the ‘new popes’ found within reformed churches: in the background was the memory of Servetus’ execution in 1553. Ochino’s last two major works, Laberinti (1560) and Dialogi xxx (1563) challenged all ‘new papacies’ and the persecutions for which they were responsible.38 In the last section of Laberinti came the blunt statement that the ‘labyrinths of free will’ were impassable: defining doctrine led to dead-​ends, from which believers should extricate themselves. That statement was a nicodemite’s charter. Worse still was his teasing tone ‘If we are obliged to think we are free, Augustine will be damned, and Chrysostom would be a great heretic if we were to believe that we are not free, and with him all the Greek doctors’. In the light of such contradictions doctrine was relative and persecution for doctrine’s sake was utterly pointless. The only way out was dotta ignoranza ‘learned ignorance’; it was best not to know. Swiss protestant leaders smelt heresy:  they warned Ochino that he must seek permission before he published again, but the old man ignored them. He had begun his final slide from orthodoxy; ‘You must know that for around forty years many churches have been reformed and that all of them think themselves entirely perfect’.39 At odds with them all, Ochino wrote the long Dialogi xxx, which appeared in Basel in 1563, close to the time when Aconcio was preparing his Stratagematum Satanae for publication. Re-​enter Basel’s Italian reformers:  it was well known that Castellio had translated Ochino’s Dialogi into Latin. It was issued by the great Italian publisher in Basle, Pietro Perna, Curione’s friend, and Curione had inspected the manuscript –​but denied having approved it.40 The dedicatee of the first section of the Dialogi xxx was Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford, an Italianist who had been in exile in the Veneto at the same time as Edward Courtenay and 37 38 39

40

‘non ce nessuno di noi che non non porti il papato dentro il suo petto’, Aconcio, Stratagematum Satanae, ed Radetti, pp. 595–​97, quoted by Caravale, Una doppia censura, p. 55; on Curione’s attack on ‘papacies’ in the plural, see above Chapter 8, p. 158. ‘et ego ne in eis novi Papae existant timeo’, Bernardini Ochini Senensis Dialogi xxx, 2 vols (Basel: P. Perna, 1563), ustc 615998, 2, pp. 283–​4, quoted by Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 138. On tensions about this issue in Zurich, ibid., pp. 151–​2, 216–​27. I am relying on Taplin’s penetrating analysis of changes in Ochino’s thought at this time, see ibid., pp. 115–​125; Ochino, Disputa … della Cena (Basle: [P.Perna], 1561), ustc 637850, pp.  258–​9, quoted and translated by Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, pp. 123–​4. Ibid., p. 131 and p. 159, note 205.

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had befriended Aconcio. Once again, Ochino was involving England, possibly angling for a second English exile. Throughout the thirty Dialogues, all controversial statements were put into mouth of Ochino’s interlocutors. The speaker ‘Ochinus’ takes the orthodox side, but so feebly that the radical opinions seem to win. He was playing ‘catch me if you can’, as he had in his all-​too-​concise comment in Temporiseur.41 This time he started a major scandal. Dialogue 21 on polygamy was the most contentious (unsafe on sex).42 But Dialogue 28 ‘whether heretics should be persecuted’ is the most relevant here. Its surprise interlocutor is Cardinal Giovanni Morone, who condemns persecution as pointless –​because it makes hypocrites not martyrs.43 Here a spirituale cardinal, recently freed from prison in the Vatican, was co-​opted to upbraid protestants on the futility of making hypocrites (nicodemites?) by persecution.44 By implication, they were just as bad as catholics. Protestants found that particularly hard to take. Ochino was condemned and banished by Zurich’s council. The city’s ministers commented that even when he had defended orthodoxy, he did so in a ‘cold or lukewarm manner that suggests that he is not serious’ –​shades of his contribution to Temporiseur? Four years later, a deeply disappointed Bullinger wrote that Ochino had turned into ‘a secret and academic proponent and teacher’ of errors. ‘Lukewarm’; ‘secret’; ‘not serious’: the adjectives suggest that Ochino’s teasing ambivalence was a complex form of nicodemism.45 Expelled from Zurich in 1563, he died in Moravia in 1564–​5. In protestant cities, his disgrace damaged all those who had collaborated with him, especially Castellio, Curione, Perna, and Aconcio.

41 42

43

44 45

See above, Chapter 9, p. 176. Translated into English in 1657 as A dialogue of polygamy, no translator, stc Wing O 126; Mark Taplin, ‘Bernardino Ochino and the Zürich Polygamy Controversy of 1563’ (unpublished M.Litt. thesis, University of St Andrews, 1995), pp. 26–​45, 52, 57; Taplin, Italian reformers and the Zurich Church, pp. 125–​169. On this Dialogue, see Massimo Firpo, ‘ “Boni Christiani merito vocantur hearetici”:  Bernardino Ochino e la tolleranza’, in H.  Méchoulan et  al, eds, La formazione storica della alterità: Studi di storia della tolleranza nell’età moderna offerti a Antonio Rotondò (Florence: Olschki, 2001), pp. 161–​244, especially pp. 161–​166 and 177. Firpo and Marcattto, Processo Morone, vol. 5, pp. 366–​79, cited by Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 131. ‘subdolus adeoque Academicus assertor et doctor’, Spongia adversus aspergines bernardini Ochini (March 1564), see Taplin, Italian Reformers, pp 160–​165, quotation at pp. 161–​2; Heinrich Bullinger, Preface to Josiah Simler, De aeterno dei domino et servatore nostro Iesu Christo (Zurich:  Christoph ii Froscauer, 1568), at sig. A5. For an incisive assessment of Ochino’s intentions, see Taplin, Italian Reformers, pp. 137–​8.

196 Chapter 10 4

Presenting Giorgio Siculo’s Work to the Queen

In the year of Ochino’s banishment from Zurich, a work by another defender of nicodemism, came into the Queen Elizabeth’s hands in the form of a present from the scholar and translator Thomas Challoner, who was then in Madrid serving as her ambassador to Spain.46 The text was by Giorgio Siculo. Carefully Challoner avoided personal responsibility. He said he had been given this text by an Italian, one of Siculo’s disciples, in flight from the Inquisition, who had asked the ambassador to keep it safe. He also noted that Siculo had disagreed with both papists and protestants. No title was mentioned, but Challoner emphasised that the text was very rare.47 His present to the Queen may have well have been Siculo’s Il Libro Grande, once influential, but banned and subsequently lost. Challoner’s contact with the wandering Italian showed that long after his execution in 1551, Siculo’s ideas were still valued by a group of devoted admirers –​which included one troubled exile from Florence called Francesco Pucci.48 5

Francesco Pucci’s Nicodemite Republic

Pucci arrived in England in September 1572, straight from the trauma of witnessing the massacre of protestants in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Day.49 That harrowing experience changed his life: ‘When the horrible killing in 1572 happened, I started crying while listening to the preachers and could not avoid crossing over’.50 By the time he sought refuge in England later that year, he had become a new-​minted protestant. But ‘crossing over’ did not solve his problems. By 1572 the Elizabethan religious settlement was rocked by fears of catholic treason following the rebellion of the Northern earls (1569); also by the papal bull, Regnans in excelsis of February 1570, which excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and said her catholic subjects must not obey her laws.51 The Queen 46 47 48 49 50 51

On Siculo, see above, Chapter 8, pp. 158–60. Challoner to the Queen, Madrid, 31 August 1563, Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 1558–​1589, 23 vols in 26(London: Longman Green, 1869), volume 6 (1563) ed. Joseph Stephenson, 1188, p. 516; I am grateful to Tracey Sowerby for alerting me to Challoner’s gift. Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande, especially, pp. 255–​296. On Pucci, see especially Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy; Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande, pp. 365–​374. Pucci’s letter to Pope Clement viii, 1592, in Francesco Pucci, Lettere, documenti e testimonianze, ed. Luigi Firpo and Renato Piattoli, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1955–​57), I, 141–​149, at p. 144, quoted and translated in Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy, p. 73. Recusancy and Conformity, ed. Crosignani, McCoog and Questier, Document 15, pp. 86–​90.

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continued to veto harsh bills against catholics but Pucci, as an Italian, would have to negotiate with a much more generally suspicious English reformation. During his first visit to England, from September 1572 until October 1576, Pucci lived in London and Oxford. His second stay, from 1579 until June 1582, was spent mostly in London. Like Aconcio, he suffered petty persecutions, like mockery and then rejection, from the French Stranger Church in London and from Oxford University.52 Pucci lived long and wrote a lot, but only one of his texts is directly about nicodemism. His controversial ‘Forma d’una republica catholica’, probably written during his second English exile, is ‘a new and dynamic revolutionary concept of secret religious nicodemism’.53 In the best nicodemite tradition, it was anonymous and remained in manuscript, but most scholars agree it is definitely Pucci’s work (some think he had help).54 His republica catholica comprised clandestine groups of laypeople, ‘men of good will’ –​making up ‘different Colleges of men who live as foreigners in other countries or as foreigners in their own’. They were encouraged to behave as nicodemites.55 People would worship according to agreed ‘fundamentals’ at home but attend whatever religious services were enforced by political authorities in their locality. Pucci’s ‘Colleges’ would carry on pretending until their ‘free and holy Council’ met and decided on right doctrine. We have met that ‘until’ before ‒ especially from Valdés, and the spirituali –​that advocacy of nicodemism for the time being, until the Council met, until the world changed for the better. Yet it was not all star-​gazing. Pucci’s suggested practical means to achieve concord sound like Acontio’s, including his ‘fundamentals of faith’. Equally Acontian is the final objective of Pucci’s republica: to unify, to stop persecution and end divisions. Close to the time when the manuscript of Pucci’s Forma was written, his Informazione della religione christiana was published. It was printed in London in 1580, by John Wolfe, despite the false imprint ‘Florence’.56 The English 52 53

54

55 56

Peter Holmes, ‘Francesco Pucci’, ODNB. ‘Una nuova concezione dinamica e rivoluzionaria del segreto nicodemismo religioso’, Luigi Firpo, ‘Nuove ricerche su Francesco Pucci’, in Luigi Firpo, Scritti sulla riforma in Italia (Naples: Prismi, 1996), pp. 207–​232, at p. 232, quoted and translated by Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy, p. 85. Gli scritti di Francesco Pucci, ed. Luigi Firpo (Turin: Memorie della Accademia delle Scienze, 1957), pp. 69–​91; Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy, pp. 80–​86; Neil Tarrant, Concord and Toleration in the Thought of Francesco Pucci, 1578–​81, SCJ, 46/​4 (2015), 983–​ 1003. Miriam Eliav-​Feldon, ‘Secret Societies, Utopias and Peace Plans: the Case of Francesco Pucci’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 14 (1984), pp. 139–​158. Francesco Pucci, Informatione della religione christiana fondata su la divina e humana ragione, secondo che la natura & la scrittura ci insegna (Florence: no name, 1580), ustc 851543; see Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy, (p. 78, n. 40).

198 Chapter 10 Calvinist controversialist Andrew Willett saw in Pucci’s Informazione the ‘pelagian’ idea that ‘that all men and everyone by the universal grace of God the father in Christ are saved’.57 He was right: universal salvation and nicodemism and a horror of persecution were related themes in Pucci’s diffuse and often contradictory writings. By 1580, Pucci had begun to hate the way Elizabethan protestants were treating the catholic minority. In December 1581 he may have witnessed the agony of the captured Jesuit priest, Edmund Campion, who was hanged, drawn and quartered. This new martyrdom affected Pucci deeply and, six months later, he left England for Antwerp.58 He had decided that Luther, Calvin and other reformers had divided and damaged the Church and was thinking of ‘crossing over’ once again.59 There we must leave the detail of Pucci’s long life, with twenty years of his weary journeying still ahead. In Prague in 1585 he was received into communion as a catholic once more and formally abjured in 1587.60 He continued to hope to influence English religion. From Prague he sent to Queen Elizabeth and William Cecil (Lord Burghley since 1571), copies of a major work proclaiming that Christ had saved all humankind.61 He ended life in the prisons of the Inquisition in Rome (1594‒1597). There he re-​met his countryman Giordano Bruno ‒ and met the philosopher Tommaso Campanella. Pucci was beheaded in 1597. Bruno did not conjure nicodemite republics, as Pucci did.62 He did not address the subject directly, but there is a significant discussion of the relationship of truth and dissimulation in the third part of the second dialogue of his Spaccio della bestia trionfante, published in 1584 while he was living in London.63 Here, Bruno introduces the figure of Simplicity: she is the ‘Handmaid of Truth’:

57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Andrew Willet, Synopsis papismi; that is, A general view of papistrie (London: Thomas Man, 1600), stc 25698, p. 784; quoted by Pirillo, Filosofia ed eresia nell’Inghilterra, pp. 64–​65, at p. 69. Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy, pp. 90–​2; on Campion’s martyrdom, see below, Chapter 11, pp. 214–15. Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy, p. 95. Ibid., pp. 100–​114. De Christi servatoris efficacitate, written in Prague, see Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy, p. 191. On Bruno and other Italians in Elizabethan England, see Pirillo, Filosofia ed eresia, especially Chapter 2, pp. 27–​85. I thank Diego Pirillo for his generous advice. Giordano Bruno, Spaccio della bestia trionfante:  … Consecrato al molto illustre et eccellente Caualliero Sig. Philippo Sidneo (Paris [ie London]: J. Charlewood [1584]), Dialogue 2, part 3, pp. 138–​140.

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sometimes the Goddess Necessity constrains her to decline towards Dissimulation … This being done by her not without Method and Order, may therefore be very well done without Error or Vice. … for sometimes Prudence hides the truth with her Garments in order to escape Envy, Blame and Outrage.64 Then Bruno quotes the popular epic poet Ludovico Ariosto’s acceptance of occasional deceit: ‘there are, nonetheless, countless instances when [deceit] has reaped obvious benefits and deflected all manner of harm and ill report and mortal perils’.65 Both Bruno and Pucci remembered those ‘obvious benefits’ of deceit, which might help achieve their larger aims. For all their inconsistencies, they both hated persecution and wanted concord, if on their own intolerant terms.66 They rejected the angry deity implied in contemporary doctrines of predestination, proposing instead a theology based on free will, with the hope of mercy and salvation for all. 6

Different Nicodemisms?

Nicodemism was part of the radical Italian vision: Castellio, Curione, Ochino, Acontio, Siculo, Pucci and Bruno all stood in a tradition that Silvana Seidel Menchi called ‘il cielo aperto’, a ‘wide-​open heaven’, and universal salvation.67 This included, at the very least, an acceptance of concealing silence as something that would make for peace. Nicodemism might be a way to help the weaker brethren (Curione), a means of containing dissenters without persecution (Aconcio), or the daily practice of a secret group, awaiting the foundation of their ideal republic (Pucci). The Queen of England was dedicatee of Aconcio’s Strategemata and his Timor di Dio, of Ochino’s Laberinti and Curione’s edition of Olympia Morata’s work. The Queen had received many dedications but, like it or not, her name 64

65 66 67

Giordano Bruno, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante proposto da Gioue … Diuiso in tre dialogi, subdiuisi in tre parti. Consecrato al molto illustre et eccellente Caualliero Sig. Philippo Sidneo (Paris [i.e. London]: J. Charlewood], 1584), stc 3940; the English quotation is from the eighteenth–​century English translation, Giordano Bruno, Spaccio della bestia trionfante. Or the expulsion of the triumphant beast. Translated from the Italian of Jordano Bruno (London: n. pub., 1713), p. 151. See above, Chapter 4, p. 76. Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy, pp. 185–​87. Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, Chapter 6, ‘Il cielo aperto, ovvero l’infinita misericordia di Dio’, p. 142–​175, especially pp. 142–​145; Caravale, Italian Reformation outside Italy, pp. 225–​229.

200 Chapter 10 was trumpeted by these Italian radicals. They were looking to this Queen of Nicodemites to aid their cause, especially their pleas for an end to persecution. In this era, such pleas usually ‘served particular strategic ends’; often they came from persecuted minorities who would persecute in their turn –​when their luck changed and they regained power.68 Ochino may have been angling for a second invitation to England, but the rest of these Italian radicals do not seem to be focusing on any particular local situation or immediate objective; instead, they advocated a general change in which all ‘hypocrisy’ and all nicodemism would be made unnecessary because persecution would stop. Their vision was ahead of its time and certainly opposed to Swiss ‘orthodoxy’. Consequently in many parts of protestant Europe their texts were discouraged or banned, especially after the publication of Ochino’s Dialogi xxx ‒ a Zurich scandal, which was certainly known in Elizabethan England.69 Inevitably reputations of other Italian exiles were adversely affected by Ochino’s disgrace; Aconcio was his disciple and friend; Castellio had translated his Dialogues and Curione had ‘inspected’ a copy. In Swiss cities, Basel’s radicals became even more generally suspected than they had been before. It is intriguing that, nonetheless, some English scholars knew their work. The original of Aconcio’s Stratagematum Satanae survives in Edmund Geste’s book collection at Salisbury and in Andrew Perne’s in Cambridge.70 Perne, seen as a nicodemite turn-​coat, owned Curione’s De Amplitudine as well.71 The original of Ochino’s Dialogi xxx is in Salisbury Cathedral Library and now appears in some ten other English university collections. In most cases, provenance is not known, but there is an obvious contrast between the appearance of texts by Ochino, Curione and other ‘radicals’ in English libraries and their marked 68 69 70

71

‘the argument for toleration served particular strategic ends’, Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–​1620’, in Grell and Scribner, eds, Tolerance and Intolerance, pp. 182–​198, quotation at p. 198; Walsham, Charitable Hatred, p. 236. See Overell, Italian Reform, p. 198. Salisbury (ZC2.3.8(a)); David Selwyn, Edmund Geste and his Books: Reconstructing the Library of a Cambridge Don and Elizabethan Bishop (London: Bibliographical Society, 2017); see . No manuscript annotations by Geste appear in this text; Perne (1589), 473, in Elisabeth Leedham-​Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1986)  [hereafter elg]. Geste had stayed in England during Mary’s reign; one ms note in a work by the Erasmian George Witzel, suggests he was considering ideas of ‘suffering’ ‘the Romysh mass’, ‘with a good conscious’, Selwyn, Geste and his Books, i­ llustration 5. I am very grateful to David and Pamela Selwyn for their scholarly and spontaneous help and advice. Perne (1589), 1282, elg; ‘Perne the turncoat’, in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays; there are also two copies of Caelio Secondo Curione’s De Amplitudine in Trinity College, Cambridge: F.13.44[1]‌; and I.13.23 but provenance is not recorded.

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absence from libraries in Swiss protestant cities.72 Original editions of works of Italian radicals, frowned on elsewhere, were brought to England –​occasionally and perhaps surreptitiously. These radical texts would be more widely noticed and translated in the seventeenth​and eighteenth centuries.73 Through their dedications, the Queen of England had been associated with beliefs which she and most of her subjects did not share. Her settlement allowed nicodemism, but it was a narrowly English affair, all to do with an obedient population suppressing their ‘inner man’, and trooping quietly into church on Sundays. By contrast, Italian radicals concentrated on a wider objective, that of ending the persecution that caused nicodemism in the first place. By hindsight they, and especially Aconcio, seem to belong to the future rather than the troubled Elizabethan era. Their vision was too daring for an English nation increasingly fearful for its own survival in the growing international conflict between catholic and protestant states: this was almost certainly why their works were not translated in Elizabeth’s reign. Only one Italian nicodemite text was translated, published and then regularly reissued in Elizabethan England. 7

Il Beneficio di Cristo again

In the year 1573 an anonymous Elizabethan translator wrote a moving preface suggesting that Il Beneficio di Cristo should serve to promote unity among Christians. In this little book is that benefite which commith by Christ crucified to the christians truly and comfortably handeled: which benefit if all Christians did truly understand and faithfully embrace this division would vanish away and in Christ the christians sholde become one.74 This preface appeared three years after the papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth and one year after the massacre of protestants in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Given that recent egregious violence, its universality is astounding.

72 73 74

Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge (William Branthwaite bequest, 1619. F.27.8). and Salisbury Cathedral (H.2.3–​4). On the contrast, see, for example, listed library copies of Curione’s De Amplitudine, ustc 622859. See below, Chapter 12. ‘Preface to the English Reader’, The Benefit that Christians receive by Jesus Christ crucifyed translated out of French into English by … A. G. 1573 (London: Lucas Harrison and George Bishop, [1573]), stc 19114; Beneficio, ed. Caponetto, p. 275.

202 Chapter 10 Of course, this was not the first time reconciliation had been associated with Il Beneficio di Cristo. ‘Becoming one’ with Lutherans and reformers had been the objective of most of the spirituali in the years preceding Trent. The text’s first author, Benedetto da Mantova, was a Cassinese Benedictine monk, from an Order identified with the reconciliation of different t­ heologies; Flaminio, its second author, was closely associated with that community’s hopes to remedy and reconcile.75 Viewing Il Beneficio as a text of unity has problems, largely caused by the predestinarian phrases of its last chapter. Nonetheless, for most of the book, and especially in ­chapter 3, the themes of reconciliation and consolation were dominant. The text had attracted Pole and Flaminio, as well as those who were influenced by the spirituali in Italy but later chose exile: Vermigli, Ochino, Curione and, still later, Aconcio and Pucci. Even Edward Courtenay’s characterisation of this as a ‘little book’ which taught ‘Christ’s glory’ was, in his inimitably vague way, irenic.76 Concealment, which had pervaded the book’s history, was still in evidence in the Elizabethan translation in 1573. Readers were told, ‘Enquire not of the author; he is unknowen and to know him would do thee but litle good.’ The translator, too, remained ‘unknowen’, just ‘A.G.’ Only in the late-​twentieth century did my research into the evidence of the Stationers’ Registers prove beyond reasonable doubt that ‘A.G.’ was Arthur Golding, the famous Elizabethan translator.77 Being a nicodemite had been a lived experience for him as for most Elizabethans, accepted but not discussed. Golding had gone down from Cambridge in 1552, his degree incomplete. He stayed away during Mary’s reign and then became deeply loyal to the new Elizabethan regime and to his protestant faith.78 The list of his famous translations stretched from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to works of reformers, like the Niels Hemmingsen and David Chytraeus and, pre-​ eminently, of Calvin.79 Their theologies were mixed, but Golding was deeply sympathetic to his protestant texts, as were his publishers Lucas Harrison and

75 76 77 78 79

Collett, Benedictine Scholars, p. 204. See above, Chapter 5, p. 98. M. Anne Overell, ‘Arthur Golding’s translation of the Beneficio di Cristo’, Notes and Queries, NS, 25 (1978), 424–​26. Lewis Thorn Golding, An Elizabethan Puritan:  Arthur Golding (New  York:  Richard R. Smith, 1937). The fyrst fower bookes of P. Ovidius Nasos worke, intitled Metamorphosis, translatedout of Latin into English meter by Arthur Golding (London: William Seres, 1565), STC 18955; Gary G. Gibbs and Florinda Ruiz, ‘Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses: Myth in an Elizabethan Political Context’, Renaissance Studies, 22 (2008), pp. 557–​575.

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George Bishop, ‘men well minded towards godliness and true religion’.80 These translations of Calvin’s work appeared at a time when the English market for Genevan theology was booming and reform-​minded printers were ready to supply these large and expensive books.81 All the same, a year after the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, this loyal Elizabethan protestant hoped that his translation of the Beneficio might end divisions ‘between Christians’. That was not a ‘Calvinist’ or an anti-​nicodemite remark. Rather, it seemed to reflect the reconciling tradition of the spirituali. Although Golding translated not from the Italian original but at second-​ hand from the French version of 1545, his version has real vitality. The French title spoke of benefit to ‘christians’ –​presumably all of them; Golding made no attempt to restrict that vision to ‘true christians’, as Edward Courtenay had done.82 Golding was not making predestinarian points. Yet, in contrast to his usual practice when translating godly authors, he did not allow his full name to appear in the title or in the dedication. ‘A.G.’ may have known something of the confused history of the original. It is more likely that, as an experienced translator of religious books, he detected confused and contradictory theologies, and opted for initials only. Many Elizabethan readers were familiar with the phrase, ‘the benefit of Christ’, used in sermons and in wills. On 5 October in the year when Golding’s translation appeared –​Sir Thomas Wroth, once John Cheke’s companion in exile in Italy, signed his will, declaring his desire to ‘enjoye the benefites of Christes Death’.83 The phrase and the theme of God’s ‘benefit’ to humanity occurred in several Elizabethan editions of sermons issued near this time –​ for instance by Thomas Cranmer, William Fulke, William Perkins, and John

80

81 82

83

Niels Hemmingsen, A Postil … or exposition of the Gospels … translated into English by Arthur Golding (London: Henry Bynneman for Lucas Harrison and George Bishop, 1569), stc 13061, see Golding’s dedication to Sir Walter Mildmay, sig. A iii; David Chytraeus, A Postil … of certeyne Epistles (London, 1570), stc 5263. For Golding’s translations of Calvin, see stc 4434, 4442, 4444, 4448. MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 70–​ 81; Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 173. Du benefice du Iesu Christ crucifié envers les Chrestians (Lyons: Jean de Tournes 1545), ustc 40402, kreissued in 1548; reprinted in Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 89–​153. An Italian version was published in Tubingen before Golding began work Trattato utilissimo del beneficio di Giesu Christo crocifisso, verso i christiani (Tübingen: Ulrich I Morhart, 1565), ustc 813728. Sir Thomas Wroth (tna: pro, prob 11/​57, ff. 124v–​129r); Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Wroth, Sir Thomas (1518?–​1573)’, ODNB , accessed 19 Aug 2016.

204 Chapter 10 Foxe’s immensely popular Sermon of Christ crucified.84 Golding had chosen a theology well understood by his fellow Elizabethans. His irenic preface has been used as an epilogue to the history of religious strife in sixteenth-​century Europe.85 His translation, reissued in 1575, 1577 and 1580, would have another phase of success in the 1630s.86 Nonetheless, meditating 0n the aftermath of rebellion, executions, papal excommunication, catholic plots at home and a terrible massacre in France, Golding told of his vision that, through the benefit of Christ, ‘all Christians sholde become one’. That theme had been present in the Italian history of Il Beneficio since the conflicted 1540s. 84 85 86

See, respectively stc 5992, stc 11459; stc 19735.4; stc 19703; John Foxe, A sermon of Christ crucified at Paules Crosse the Fridaie before Easter (London: John Day, 1575), stc 11243. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation:  Europe’s House Divided, 1490–​1700 (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 708. Benedetto da Mantova, The benefite that Christians receyue by Jesus Christ crucified. Translated out of French into English by A.G. ([London]:  Lucas Harrison and George Bishop, [1575]), stc 19115; the 1577 issue does not appear in the revised stc, but see The Benefit that Christians receive by Jesus Christ crucified (London: Luke Harrison and George Bishop, 1577), ustc 515723 and Prelowski, ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, in Tedeschi, ed. Italian Reformation Studies, ed., pp. 95–​102; Aonio Paleario (misattribution), The benefite that Christians receive by Jesus Christ crucified translated out of French into English, by A.G. (London: George Bishop and Thomas Woodcocke, 1580), stc 19116; see Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 192–​94; see below, Chapter 12.

Chapter 11

Mixed Messages in Elizabethan England The infirmity of feare wrought in Nichodemus … though he professed not Christe openly … he was not of Christ rejected … yet at that time was profession as needfull and scandall as much to be avoyded as nowe.1 ‘A discourse delivered to Mr Sheldon’, c 1580.

∵ In the strange circumstances of Queen Elizabeth’s nicodemite settlement, both catholics and protestants thought their own communities were in crisis. In the background, there was Pope Pius V’s excommunication of 1570 which had declared Elizabeth I to be a ‘heretic and abetter of heretics’. Because the Queen was excommunicated, she was ‘deprived of her pretended claim to the throne’ and her subjects were absolved of allegiance to her.2 Though not enforced ‘for the time being’, that decree remained an ever-​present threat, infuriating protestants and alarming catholics, many of whom would have preferred to remain as obedient ‘church papists’.3 Yet throughout the 1560s and early 1570s, a significant group of deprived Marian clergy, prominent in Northern England, had campaigned to stop catholics attending the Queen’s protestant church.4 That anti-​nicodemite recusant message became more widespread after 1574 as catholic missionaries, trained in seminaries in the Low Countries and Rome, began to arrive in England. A further group, mostly Jesuits, came from 1580 onwards. Elizabethan lay catholics were put under intense pressure, caught in a tug-​of-​ war between the protestant government and recusant clergy. Laws of 1581, 1587 and 1593 greatly increased fines for non-​attendance, made catholics ineligible for political office, and finally ordered them to stay within a restricted local

1 2 3 4

Crosignani et al, Recusancy and Conformity, Document 19, pp. 116–​129, quotation at p. 121. Ibid., p. xx and Document 15, pp. 86–​90. Ibid., Document 16 (before April 1580), pp. 90–​100. See Frederick Smith’s important revision, ‘The Origins of Recusancy in Elizabethan England Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 60 (2016), pp. 301–​332.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_013

206 Chapter 11 area.5 Some feared for their community’s survival: ‘once these men have gone, religion in England will be finished, or virtually finished’.6 Protestant fears for faith and country were exacerbated by the papal excommunication and raised to fever-​pitch by catholics’ involvement in a series of plots against the Queen: among them, Ridolfi’s in 1571, Throckmorton’s in 1583 and Babington’s in 1586. In their (not totally unrealistic) nightmares, protestants saw a reinvigorated catholic community about to conspire with outsiders to kill the Queen and overturn their church. They criticised that church themselves, often bitterly, but they would not see it harmed by others. Together with external enemies, like Spain, the papacy, and rebels in Ireland, catholic missionaries were perceived as a threat to the Elizabethan settlement’s aspen existence. One cross-​confessional reaction to crisis was to ‘rally the troops’, to stiffen resolve by preaching and polemic:  do not, under any circumstances, be like Nicodemus; do not conform, or compromise. During the 1540s and 1550s, Calvin had goaded doubtful French protestants with his searing anti-​nicodemite polemic and Italian exiles had bombarded stay at home spirituali with their furious attacks on lily-​livered compromisers (like Pole and Morone).7 During the second half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, anti-​nicodemite teachings were proclaimed with similar fervour by catholics and protestants alike. Both groups quoted Calvin and Italian writers in defence of the view that feeble nicodemism was utterly wicked. In Alexandra Walsham’s words, ‘the abhorrence of conformity constituted a region of ideological common ground’.8 At least that was the public message. In her important study of the conformists called ‘church papists’, Walsham examined the way catholic clergy reacted to the dilemmas of laypeople, ordered to go to services of the established church and subject to increasing penalties for failing to do so. She detected something of a rhetorical disjuncture between published catholic polemic, which was firmly anti-​ nicodemite, and the more sympathetic and accommodating approach to lay anxieties that marked casuistical texts that remained in manuscript.9

5 Crosignani et al, Recusancy and Conformity, Document 21, p. 131; Alexandra Walsham, ‘England’s Nicodemites: Crypto Catholicism and Religious Pluralism’, in Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, pp. 85–​101, especially pp. 92–​93. 6 Peter Holmes, Elizabethan Casuistry (London: Catholic Record Society, 1981), pp. 61–​2. 7 On their ‘case against nicodemites’, see above Chapter 7. 8 Walsham, Church Papists, p. 38. 9 Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 70–​1. For Walsham’s later comments on this, see her Preface to the paperback edition (Woodbridge: Boydell 1999), pp. xii–​xiii.

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In cases prepared for training confessors, a gentler and more nicodemite approach to the questions of conscience surrounding outward conformity prevailed.10 This chapter draws on Walsham’s profound insights, but extends them to the protestant community as well. In that group, the difference between public discourse and private counsel was less marked, partly because they were not, as a rule, experiencing persecution. Nonetheless, I  shall argue that eminent protestants, too, argued vehemently against dissimulation in print, but in practice found absolutist anti-​nicodemism unmanageable. For some of them, too, there was a significant gap between polemic and other discourse. Public figures wavered and then accepted nicodemism when charity or politics seemed to require it. Messages became very mixed, as influential people on both sides modified the strict anti-​nicodemite line. 1

‘Anti-​Nicodemite High Alert’?

In a chapter entitled ‘Anti-​Nicodemism as a Way of Life’, Karl Gunther showed how protestant writers urged their people ‘to remain on something like anti-​ Nicodemite high alert, constantly preparing to resist the impending temptation to dissemble and submit to popery’.11 Preachers looked back at past falls from gospel truth, especially those of Marian nicodemites: the outspoken William Prowde even dared to remember William Cecil’s manifest shortcomings at that time. The characteristic witness of ‘war against the idols’ was out of the question in Queen Elizabeth’s nominally protestant kingdom, yet John Field advised looking to the future, thinking of ‘the time to come’ when catastrophe might require bold witness once more.12 Gunther is discussing ‘Elizabethan anti-​nicodemite literature’ and an ‘anti-​ nicodemite stance’, not life as lived.13 This was ‘a way of life’ in the sense that preachers and polemicists kept up the pressure, sticking to their message all through the reigns of Edward vi and Mary and they continued into that of

10

11 12 13

Crosignani et al, ‘Douai–​Rheims Cases’, Document 17, p. 101; ‘Allen–​Persons Cases’, ibid., p.  103; Peter Holmes, ‘The Missing Allen–​Persons Cases of Conscience’, British Catholic History, 32 (2014), pp.  1–​20; Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise:  The Political Thought of Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound:  Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–​1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 97–​130, quotation at p. 116. Ibid., especially pp. 114–​118, quotation at p. 116. Ibid., pp. 111 and 116.

208 Chapter 11 Elizabeth. It did not reflect life in parishes, assizes and pews. As in the case of the catholics, there was ‘a gap’. The titles of modern studies of popular religion suggest that many people were not ‘on anti-​nicodemite high alert’ at all. Instead they were ‘Holding their peace’, and ‘Getting Along’ and nursing an unstable and oscillating ‘Charitable Hatred’. Outbursts of anti-​catholicism were mixed with everyday practical toleration, and day-​to-​day nicodemite behaviour.14 Nonetheless the ‘alert’ sounded by polemicists was maintained by steady publication, primarily of works by the hotter sort of English protestants, but backed up by translation and publication of the master, John Calvin. His Quatre sermons were translated twice and issued, in whole or in part, four times in Elizabeth’s reign.15 The works of Italian writers were also made part of the alert. 2

Elizabethan Translations of Italian Anti-​Nicodemite Texts

Early in Elizabeth’s reign, there had been a move to ‘bring back’ Pietro Martire Vermigli in person. It was undermined by the Queen’s ‘dilatoriness’ and some crafty interventions from Pietro Paolo Vergerio.16 Finally in 1561, Vermigli refused a much-​delayed invitation to return ‒ which did not come from the Queen.17 He never came back and, surprisingly, his counsel in his Treatise of the Cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull was never again published as a stand-​alone text. That is remarkable and unexplained: English protestants were not unwilling to publish other stridently anti-​nicodemite texts and Vermigli’s work had been important to the Marian exiles very recently.18

14

15

16

17 18

Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth Century England: Holding their Peace; Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton, eds., Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–​1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Jean Calvin, Four godlye sermons agaynst the pollution of idolatries comforting men in persecutions (London: Rouland Hall 1561), stc 4438.5; another issue stc 4438; Four sermons of Maister John Calvin, translated by John Field (London:  Thomas Dawson for Thomas Man, 1579), stc 4439; Two Godly and learned sermons … translated by Robert Horne (London: Henry Car, 1584) stc 4461. John Jewell to Peter Martyr, Strassburg, 26 January 1559, ZL, vol. 1, p. 8; Doran, ‘Elizabeth I’s Religion’, p. 718; Alec Ryrie, ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, JEH, 53, (2002), 64–​ 92; David Scott Gehring, Anglo-​German Relations and the Protestant Cause: Elizabethan Foreign Policy and Pan-​Protestantism (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013). For these tussles, see Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 169–​173. See above, Chapter 9, pp. 170–2; A Bibliography of the Works of Peter Martyr Vermigli, compiled by John Patrick Donnelly, S.J,, and Robert M. Kingdon, with a Register of Vermigli’s

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The Cohabitacyon treatise was included, however, within English translations of two of Vermigli’s much longer works, his Commentaries on Judges of 1564 (from which Cohabitacyon had been extracted) and his Commonplaces, which appeared in English for the first time in 1583.19 The hotter sort of protestants took a particular interest in those parts of Cohabitacyon which decreed complete separation: not only should you not go to idolatrous churches, you should limit all your social dealings.20 If there was no sign that the ungodly were willing to be converted, ‘then no conversacion or companie is to be hadd with them farther than the necessitie of lyfe enforceth either partie’.21 There were few authentic Elizabethan separatists, prepared to split from the established church and face exile or prison. For the rest, Vermigli’s ‘no conversation or companie’ offered a home-​based separation, attracting especially the very zealous, sometimes called ‘puritans’. They used the Italian’s arguments against ‘Cohabitation’ to cut themselves off in ‘a witness of social and cultural distinctiveness’.22 They were creating a variant of anti-​nicodemism, to be turned against their co-​religionists. Vermigli’s condemnation of ‘cohabitacyon’ had been radical from the start, but this distortion exaggerated and mixed up his message. Several other Italian anti-​nicodemite works were translated and published during Elizabeth’s reign. They did not meet with roaring success but their reception was better than that accorded to the Italian radical writers examined in the last chapter.23 The intrepid translator Fabian Wythers attempted a revival of Pier Paolo Vergerio’s ‘case against Pole’. The seditious and

19

20 21 22

23

Correspondence by Marvin W. Anderson (Kirksville MI: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1990), number 17, p. 138. Most fruitful and learned commentaries of Doctor Peter Martir Vermil, Florentine … a commentary upon the book of Judges (London: John Day, [1564]), STC 24670. The Commonplaces were translated from his Loci communes, (London: John Kingston, 1576), stc 24667; The common places of the most famous and renowmed diuine Doctor Peter Martyr … translated and partlie gathered by Anthonie Marten (London: [Henry Denham and Henry Middleton], 1583), stc 24669; Torrance Kirkby, ‘Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Political Theology and the Elizabethan Church’, in Ha and Collinson, eds, Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain, pp. 83–​106, especially pp. 92–​3. Gunther, Reformation Unbound, pp. 99–​100, 112–​114. Vermigli, Treatise of cohabitacyon, a4v, quoted by Gunther, Reformation Unbound, p. 110. Patrick Collinson, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan Israel and Nicholas Tyacke, eds., From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 51–​77, quotation at p. 62. On separatists, Gunther, Reformation Unbound, pp. 119–​22. See above, Chapter 10, pp. 199–201.

210 Chapter 11 blasphemous oration of Cardinal Pole was Wythers’s translation from Latin of Vergerio’s hostile re-​publication in 1554 of parts of Pole’s own de Unitate. The preface showed that Wythers knew about nicodemite goings-​on in Italy where Pole ‘wer suspected of Lutheranysme’. Pole was guilty, he said, of ‘great and double dissimulation’; ready to ‘to dissemble and cloke even with God himself’.24 English protestants were in his sights: this was intended as a warning to all dissemblers. Dust was blown off Curione’s Pasquino in estasi, written and published well before the author’s ‘turn’ against anti-​nicodemism and towards ‘misericordia’ during the 1550s.25 The English translation, entitled Pasquin in a Traunce appeared in 1566 and was reissued in 1584. In his ‘Letter to the Reader’, the translator, one ‘W.P.’ included a short meditation on the fate of ‘Truth’ during persecution, ‘driven therefore to lye close, and secretly to walke with Nicodemus by night for feare of Jewish Christians’. W.P. presents Curione’s early work as saving Christians from such unholy concealment.26 Then Francesco Negri’s Tragedia del libero arbitrio was translated, appearing as A certayne tragedie wrytten fyrst in Italian, by F.N.B. entituled Freewyl. The translator was John Cheke’s son Henry, evidently keeping up his father’s Italian connections.27 All these Italian works –​ Vergerio’s Oration, Curione’s Pasquin, Negri’s Tragedy were anti-​papal and anti-​nicodemite; in typical Italian style, they assumed that dissimulation was a terrible sin which ended in damnation. Most of their message seemed to fit the English protestant ‘alert’, but their stress on damnation would cause difficulties.

24

25 26

27

The seditious and blasphemous oration of Cardinal Pole both against god [and] his cou[n]‌try (London: Owen Rogers, 1560), stc 20087, sigs 1 iii–​v. Wythers’s translation was not re–​issued. Oratio R Poli, qua Caesaris animum accendere conatur et inflammare … cum scholiis Athanasii (no pl; no pub., 1554), ustc 681010; see above, Chapter 7, p. 144. See above, Chapter 7, pp. 135–6 and Chapter 9, pp. 177–9. Caelio Secondo Curione, Pasquine in a Traunce (London:  Wylliam Seres [1566?]), stc 6130; same title (London: Thomas Este, 1584), stc 6131. For analysis and bibliographical details, Letizia Panizza, ‘Pasquino among Anglican reformers: the two editions in English (1566 and 1584) of Caelio Secundo Curione’s Pasquino in Estasi’, in Damianaki, Procaccioli and Romano, eds, Ex marmore, pp. 407–​27, especially pp. 410–​13; see also Overell, Italian Reform, pp. 191–​2. A certayne tragedie wrytten fyrst in Italian, by F.N.B. entituled, Freewyl, and translated into Englishe, by Henry Cheeke (London: Richard Jugge, 1573 [probably 1577?]), stc 18419; see Carlo M. Bajetta, ‘Tracing a lost context: Henry Cheke’s Freewyl’, Aevum, 71 (1997), 711–​30; Edoardo Barbieri, ‘Opere di Francesco Negri in Gran Bretagna’, in Aevum, 71 (1997), 691–​ 709; for Negri’s original, see above, Chapter 7, pp. 139–40.

Mixed Messages in Elizabethan England

3

211

Elizabethan Reactions to Spiera

There was probably no more effective goad to godly witness than the story of the despairing Italian nicodemite Spiera. Edward Aglionby’s translation of Matteo Gribaldi’s version of the story had first appeared in 1550 and was reissued in 1570.28 The tale was retold in the English translation of Vermigli’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1563).29 It reached a much more popular audience in a ‘Ballad of Master Ffrauncis’ of 1587 (now lost).30 Its dramatic potential attracted Nathaniel Woodes. His play, Conflict of Conscience, based on Spiera’s story, was printed in 1581, but appeared in two forms with radically different endings. In one, there was darkness, suicide and damnation: but in the other, happier, conclusion Spiera ‘is now converted unto God with manie bitter teares’.31 Then he dies –​happy; it was not what propagandists had had in mind. Woodes’s ambivalent play does not seem to have been staged, but we have here a sign that Elizabethans might not be prepared to take on board the whole Italian anti-​nicodemite message. There were allusions to Spiera in Foxe’s ‘Actes and Monuments’. Foxe recorded the poignant words of John Bradford and Lady Jane Grey, both of them about to die as martyrs:  Remember … the lamentable case of Spira of late’, ‘Remember Fraunces Spira’.32 Spiera also appeared prominently in Foxe’s own heartfelt ‘Admonition to the Reader’: The examples of such as reuolted from the Gospell to Papistry, be not many: … the Lord began to turne from them, & to leaue them to theyr

28

29 30 31

32

A notable and marueilous epistle of the famous doctour, Matthewe Gribalde, Professor of the lawe, in the Vniuersitie of Padua: co[n]‌cernyng the terrible iudgemente of God, vpon hym that for feare of men, denieth Christ and the knowne veritie: with a preface of Doctor Caluine (London: William Norton, 1570), stc 12366. Vermigli, Most learned and fruitful commentaries … upon the Epistle to the Romanes, trans. H. B. [Henry Billingsley] (London: John Day, 1568), stc 24672, pp. 288–​312, esp. p. 301. E. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–​1640, 5 vols (London and Birmingham: privately printed, 1875–​1894), 2, p. 472. Nathaniel Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience (1581), ed. Herbert Davies and Frank Percy Wilson (Oxford: Malone Society, 1952), esp. lines 2410–​2413, in both first and second issues; William A.  Jackson, Woodes’s Conflict of Conscience, Times Literary Supplement, 7 September 1933, p. 592; Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgements (London, 1597), stc 1659–​61; David Bevington, ‘Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 704‒17. Lady Jane Grey’s Epistle, TAMO, 1563, Book 5, pp. 988–​990; for Bradford’s letter ‘To the honourable Lord Russell’, TAMO, 1570, Book 11, p. 1855; see above, Chapter 8, pp. 163–4.

212 Chapter 11 ghostly enemy: As wee haue heard of Franciscus de Spiera a lawyer in Italy, of the kyng of Nauarre in Fraunce, of Henry Smith, and Doct. Shaxton in England, with other in other countreys mo, of whom some dyed in great sorrow of conscience, some in miserable doubt of their saluation, some stricken by Gods hand, some driuen to hang or drowne them selues.33 Here Spiera was given priority, even before King Henry of Navarre, perhaps because he fitted Foxe’s agenda perfectly as an apostate sinner who met judgement.34 He was also foreign and therefore useful; Spiera became a distraction, a way of diverting attention from the nicodemite Englishmen whom John Foxe would have preferred to forget. 4

John Foxe’s Modifications

Most anti-​nicodemites proclaimed that failure to witness was the sin against the Holy Spirit which led to damnation: ‘think how he will be damned’, Vergerio had said of Pole.35 There can be no doubt that, as a martyrologist, John Foxe was against nicodemism. Tom Freeman writes of the ‘anti-​nicodemite Calvinism of John Foxe’.36 But he rarely went in for Vergerian certainties and in some instances, Foxe’s message about nicodemites became very mixed indeed. Foxe knew about the abjurations of Lollards and Waldensians, yet, like many other first generation English evangelicals, he chose to revere them as ‘gospel’ ancestors, predecessors in the great evangelical tradition. Foxe singled out the Lollards, telling of this ‘secret multitude of true professours’: they were evangelicals’ link to the past, forbears to be proud of. And they were a ‘secret multitude’. He used the word ‘secret’ without any hint of the criticisms later flung at the secrecy of nicodemites. On the contrary, according to Foxe, Lollards had ‘fervent zeale’.37 He knew that they abjured and renounced their faith when threatened –​precisely the behaviour that Calvin, Vermigli and many more had 33 34 35 36 37

Admonition to the Reader’, TAMO 1570, Book 12, p. 2352 [2312]; ibid., 1576, Book 12. Thomas S.  Freeman, ‘Dissenters from a Dissenting Church’ in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, eds., The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 129–​157. Vergerio, Giudicio sopra le lettere di tredici uomini illustri, sig. B5 r. Thomas S.  Freeman, ‘ “As a true subject being prisoner”:  John Foxe’s Notes on the Imprisonment of Princess Elizabeth, 1554–​5’, English Historical Review, 117 (2002) 105–​116, at p. 116. tamo, 1570, Book 7, p. 984.

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condemned. It made no difference. John Foxe ‘moulded the lollards into martyrs’.38 He was equally positive about the Waldenses or Waldensians (‘valdesi’ in Italian-​speaking areas), who were also known dissemblers and false conformists. He noted their wide dispersal in Western Europe and their ‘divers names’, ‘the poore people of Lyons’ …. but most commonly they were called Waldois, of Waldo who first instructed them in the word of God.’39 Foxe knew about their secret meetings: ‘And oftentimes they assembled and met together by night in a ditch, or in a quarry or rock of stone for feare of the persecution’. ‘By night’, like Nicodemus: yet Foxe did not condemn them, instead he remembered their sufferings at the hands of ‘naughty people’.40 They had suffered in the cause of right, so they became martyrs and progenitors of courageous Italian martyrs of the sixteenth century whose stories Foxe recorded with great care.41 He accepted the secrecy and abjurations of medieval Waldensians because he saw them as part of the enduring evangelical tradition he was depicting. He faced still worse problems with the abjurations in the more recent English past: ‘M. Wisdome, D. Crome, Alexāder Seton? Tolwing, Singleton with the rest which all recanted in kinge Henries time, and yet [were] good soldiers after in the church of Christ.’42 For Foxe, these men were ‘ours’, but they had recanted; manifestly, they had once been nicodemites. Foxe managed the painful contradiction by emphasising that they had been ‘good soldiers after’. There was no word of eternal damnation. Towards Reginald Pole, seen by Wythers as a ‘double dissimulator’, Foxe also showed moderation  –​mentioning ‘his solicitous writings’ to Cranmer, noting ‘he began somewhat to sauour the doctrine of Luther, and was no lesse suspected at Rome’. By contemporary standards, any cardinal who ‘savoured’ Luther’s doctrine was a nicodemite. Yet Foxe said that Pole was ‘none of the bloody cruel sort of papists’.43 His comments appear only in the 1570, 1576 and 38

39 40 41 42 43

Susan Royal, ‘John Foxe’s “Acts and Monuments” and the Lollard Legacy in the Long English Reformation’, University of Durham, PhD, 2014, p. 157. I am most grateful to Susan Royal for allowing me to read part of her thesis and for her enlightening comments and emails. tamo, 1570, Book 7, page 1114; Peter of Waldo died near the end of the twelfth century. tamo, 1563, Book 3, p. 685. tamo, 1570, Book 7, pp. 1112. Foxe took most of this material from the Basel humanist and martyrologist, Heinrich Pantaleon, see Overell Italian Reform, p. 186. I am very grateful to Tom Freeman for his generous help on the subject of the Italian martyrs. tamo, 1563, Book 3, p. 739; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘The Importance of Dying Earnestly: The Metamorphosis of the Account of James Bainham in “Foxe’s Book of Martyr’s”‘, in Robert N. Swanson, ed., The Church Retrospective (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1997), 267–​288. tamo, 1570, Book 12, p. 2198; 1576, Book 12, p. 1891; 1583, Book 12, p. 1997.

214 Chapter 11 1583 editions, not in 1563. Foxe’s phrases are quoted often in studies of Pole, but they are equally important as evidence of Foxe’s own reactions. He made some attempt to mitigate and understand –​just as he did in his story of John Cheke’s abjuration which he described as ‘full of infirmitie’, a charitable allusion to weakness which presumably suggested nicodemism. In most Italian accounts nicodemism led, inevitably, to misery, despair, possible suicide and certain damnation. Foxe himself had said of Spiera and his fellow apostates that ‘some were stricken by God’s hand’, yet Foxe allowed Cheke’s death to be repentant and ‘comfortable’: ‘Whose fall although it was full of infirmitie, yet his rising again by repentaunce was greate, and his ende comfortable, the Lorde bee praised’.44 The martyrs’ truth-​telling unto death was John Foxe’s great anti-​nicodemite message and his own inimitable act of witness. But it was not absolute. Nicodemite responses were let into his story and there they found acceptance and charity:  Lollards, Waldensians, Crome and the Henrician evangelicals, Pole, Cheke  –​and also Queen Elizabeth herself. At first, he presented her ‘undeserved troubles’ in her sister’s reign as a lesser martyrdom.45 But in his notes on her imprisonment and in later editions, he implied adverse comparisons between her (relative) compliance and the godly resistance of some of her servants. He could not go much further: she was his Queen.46 Anti-​nicodemism was indeed Foxe’s dominant belief:  but in several accounts of nicodemites he softened: Lollards were his gospel ancestors, and Cheke was his brother in Christ. For John Foxe anti-​nicodemism was a doctrine, not a way of life. 5

Lord Burghley’s Prescription

In the summer of 1580, a group of Catholic missionaries arrived from Rome, led by the Jesuit priests Robert Persons and Edmund Campion. These two were moving from house to house, often in disguise, when a new Act of 1581 was passed, which levied 20 pounds for non-​attendance at church during a 44 45 46

Foxe, tamo, 1576, Book 11, p. 1876; 1583, 11, p. 1979; on Cheke’s abjuration, see above, Chapter 9. Foxe, tamo, 1563, Book 5, p. 1792 [1711]. On Foxe’s ‘significant dissonances’, see David Loewenstein, Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 103–​152, esp. p. 124. Freeman, ‘ “As a true subject being prisoner” ’, pp.  105–​116; Thomas S.  Freeman, ‘Providence and Proscription: The Account of Elizabeth in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman, eds, The Myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 27–​55.

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single month.47 This swingeing new legislation was a sign of perceived crisis, of fury about plots and of national alert. It was accompanied by fear that the whole catholic population, recusant and erstwhile-​conformist, would be induced by these missionaries to choose their faith rather than their obedience to the Queen. On 17 July 1581, Edmund Campion was caught. He was tortured severely and executed ‒ hanged, drawn and quartered; that terrible death was probably witnessed by Francesco Pucci.48 Tracts about Campion’s martyrdom circulated rapidly, first in English, then in several European languages, including Italian.49 This propaganda and the subsequent European condemnation of the English government’s policy form the context of a famous document. The Execution of Justice was published anonymously in 1583, but has since been shown to be the work of William Cecil, Lord Burghley.50 Burghley, a nicodemite in Queen Mary’s reign, now prescribed absolute nicodemism for the whole English catholic population. He presented this as essential for the preservation of the state. The government was only punishing traitors, he said, not torturing catholics for their religious opinions. He acknowledged that there were people living in the kingdom who ‘differ in some opinions from the Church of England’, but he claimed that none of them ‘are for holding contrary opinions in religion prosecuted or charged’. How then should they hold their ‘contrary opinions’? Apparently in absolute (nicodemite?) silence. In Burghley’s litany of Marian catholic clerics who had been detained but allowed to remain alive and un-​tortured in England, the word ‘quiet’ formed a constant refrain:  David Pole, once Bishop of Peterborough, ‘a very quiet subject’; Dr Tunstall, once Bishop of Durham, ‘of very quiet behaviour’ and even the last abbot of Westminster, the relatively troublesome John Feckenham, ‘a person of quiet and courteous behaviour for a great time’.51 Their quietness, in Cecil’s account, was monumental. Peter Marshall has

47 48 49 50

51

Crosignani et al, Recusancy and Conformity, Document 21, p. 131. See above, Chapter 10, p. 198. ‘ “The Flower of Oxford”: the Role of Edmund Campion in Early Recusant Polemics’, SCJ, 24 (1993), 899–​913; Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–​1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 92–​5. The execution of iustice in England for maintenaunce of publique and Christian peace, against certeine stirrers of sedition (London: [By Christopher Barker], 1583), STC 4902; The Execution of Justice in England, ed. Robert Kingdon (Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press 1965), pp. 1–​43, at p. 9; Alexandra Walsham, ‘This new army of Satan: the Jesuit mission and the formation of public opinion’, in Catholic Reform in Protestant Britain, pp. 315–​338. Execution of Justice, ed. Kingdon, pp. 10–​11.

216 Chapter 11 commented that in the Execution of Justice, Cecil turned religion into ‘a matter of internally held doctrinal propositions, divorced from speech or action in the world’.52 Nicodemites had been accused of holding their faith ‘internally’, in ‘heart’ not ‘mouth’, divorced from action, during most of the sixteenth century. Pole in particular had been accused of that quietness –​‘tacendo, dissimulando’, staying silent, dissimulating.53 Stephen Alford suggested that, in his Execution of Justice, ‘Cecil was addressing more than the treason of rebels: perhaps he was also setting to rights his own past’.54 In Queen Mary’s reign, John Cheke had advised his brother-​in-​law, Cecil, ‘to content god quietlie’. But now Cecil asked a great deal more of Queen Elizabeth’s catholic subjects. He objected to their bringing into England any material objects, ‘Romish trash’, like rosaries; he was objecting to the presence of their priests from seminaries overseas, now called ‘seedmen of sedition’. Above all, clearly still fearful of the consequences of the papal excommunication of 1570, he objected to their receiving any communications from the Pope, the head of their church. Cecil was proposing for catholics that distinction between believing and doing, which had pervaded many discussions of dissimulation –​but his version was absolute. He prescribed, for those dangerous catholic ‘others’, a religion of the heart, maintained without any of the usual ‘doings’ which they saw as essential to their faith.55 Within a year, Cecil’s Execution of Justice had been translated, published and sent to Italy as Atto della giustitia d’Inghilterra (1584).56 Almost certainly, the translator was Giacomo Castelvetro, then in exile in London. Thus Burghley’s brand of political nicodemism was sent to another land where quiet deceivers tried to avoid attracting ‘justice’ from the several Italian Inquisitions.57

52 53 54 55 56 57

Marshall, Heretics and Believers, p. 537. I thank Peter Marshall for being so inspiring on the subject of Cecil and nicodemism, and not just that. Vergerio, Giudicio sopra le lettere di tredici uomini illustri, B5r–​[B6r–​v]. Alford, Burghley, pp. 250–​51. Execution of justice, ed. Kingdon, p. 6; for ‘doings’ see above, Prologue, pp. 9–12. McCoog, “Flower of Oxford”; Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 115. Atto della giustitia d’Inghilterra (London:  John Wolfe, 1584), stc 4907; Maria Luisa de Rinaldis, ‘Giacomo Castelvetro’s Political Translations: Narrative Strategies and Literary Style’, Lingue e Linguaggi, 14 (2015), 181–​196, ; Michaela Valente, ‘ “Per La conservatione della commune & Christiana Pace …”: per una storia di obbedienza, alto tradimento ed eresia nell’ Inghilterra elisabettiana’, in Silvia Arlettaz, ed., L’Histoire en questions: Mélanges en l’honneur de Mario Turchetti (Paris: Classiques Garnier 2018), pp. 219–​232.

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In his reply to Burghley’s proposals, Cardinal William Allen, leader of English catholics, was quick to point out the problems attached to this nicodemite programme: ‘as though forsooth, there were no question pertaining to faith and religion but touching our inward belief.’ Heart, inwardness, quietness, the mantra of nicodemites … these were not enough, he said.58 The alternative was the anti-​ nicodemite witness of determined recusancy, but Allen would encounter problems with that too. 6

Catholic Anti-​Nicodemite Messages

Some Jesuits on the English mission had spent years in Rome. They had absorbed their congregation’s international culture and they knew that older European controversies were relevant to ‘this dissimulation, and trayterous dealing of ours’, as Robert Persons called it.59 They quoted European protestant polemicists to prove that it was absolutely sinful to conform. In his Epistle of Comfort, the Jesuit priest, Robert Southwell, writer, poet and translator of Italian poetry, tossed out Vermigli’s name as one of ‘the very heretickes themselves’, who had warned against being a ‘Nicodemus who came to Christ by night’. Southwell recommended that interested catholics should read Calvin’s De vitandis, written against the ‘Pseudonicodemitas’, which had included Vermigli’s contribution.60 Persons argued that conformity was so manifestly wrong that even ‘Infidels and Turks’ refused to attend Christian services. He defended this with a citation from an Italian work, noted in the margin as ‘Cur. Sec. de Hist Maho’. Presumably he meant Celio Secondo Curione’s History of the Saracens (in fact Persons had muddled up the Curiones: this title was by Celio Agostino, ‘our’ Curione’s son).61 58 59

60

61

William Allen, A true modest and sincere defence of English Catholics, printed in Execution of Justice, ed. Kingdon, pp. 51–​268, at p. 70, also see pp. xxxi–​xxxvii; Marshall, Heretics and Believers, pp. 537–​8. [Robert Persons], A briefe discours containing certayne reasons why catholics refuse to go to church (East Ham, 1580), stc 19394, p. 55v. This was issued under the pseudonym ‘I H’, John Howlet, one of several pseudonyms Persons used; Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic 1580–​1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 31–​2. Robert Southwell, An Epistle of Comfort ([London:  John Charlewood, 1587–​88]), stc 22946), fols 172v–​173r; Walsham, Church Papists, p. 37; Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; 2nd edition, 2004), pp. 56–​77. Robert Persons, under the pseudonym of John Howlet, Brief Discours contayning certayne reasons why catholics refuse to goe to church (Douai [London secret press], 1580), stc

218 Chapter 11 Generally these catholic writers drew a veil over Cardinal Pole’s nicodemite years, but many of them had been trained in the English College, which had, in Pole’s day, been the English Hospice. They knew more about that institution’s one-​time president than they wished to discuss.62 The ghost of the lukewarm Pole hovered close in Persons’ Memorial, with its unflattering references to the national reconciliation after England’s earlier schism. That had been ‘hudled up in Queen Mary’s Days’: the word ‘hudled’ suggests hiding, going into ‘a huddle’. This reconciliation had been achieved, said Persons, ‘by a certain general Absolution only without due search and consideration of what had been committed’. So, in Persons’ view, Pole’s emotional absolution of the whole English nation in 1554 was unsatisfactory. Moreover, the Marian catholic reformation, which Pole had led, was ‘shuffled up with like negligence, and only the external part was plastered without remedying the Root, the renewing the Spirit’.63 No names were mentioned, but Persons had come as close as he dared to fingering the man responsible for this ‘plastering over’. Persons did not see Mary’s church, led by Pole, as having ‘invented’ the future (counter)-​reformation of the church; far from it. It belonged to a regrettably negligent and nicodemite past.64 Persons stated his church’s total opposition to conformity very often, but perhaps most clearly in his Brief Discours of 1580, known as ‘Reasons of Refusal’. The conformity of catholics who attended the Queen’s church, was equivalent to ‘feigning’ and ‘detestable lying’; according to him ‘all dissembling of our faith (was) taken for denying our faith’.65 Thus, he clarified the missionaries’ public message –​which was every bit as anti-​nicodemite as that of the protestants.

62

63

64 65

19394, p. 52r; Celio Augustino Curione, Saracenicae Historiae libri iii (Basel: Johann Oporinus, 1567), ustc 617674. Later, Persons quoted English protestant resistance thinkers who, he said, had quoted Spiera, A treatise tending to mitigation towardes Catholike–​subiectes in England By P.R. (n.p., 1607), stc 19417, pp. 116–​117. Thomas F. Mayer, ‘A test of wills: Cardinal Pole, Ignatius Loyola, and the Jesuits in England’, in T.M. McCoog, ed., The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996), pp. 21–​39; on the airbrushing of exiles’ past conformity, see Frederick Smith, ‘Life After Exile: Former Catholic Emigrés and the Legacy of Flight in Marian England’, forthcoming in English Historical Review. Persons Memorial, pp. 2–​3, 20; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Translating Trent’, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, pp.  341–​367, at 342–​343; on Pole’s ‘reconciliation’ and Elizabethan interpretations, see Lucy Underwood, ‘ “Persuading the queen majesty’s subjects from their allegiance”: Treason, Reconciliation and Confessional Identity in Elizabethan England’, Historical Research, 89 (2016), pp. 246–​267, especially pp. 247–​9 and 264–​5. In contrast, see Eamon Duffy’s opinion that ‘the Marian church invented the counter–​ reformation’, Fires of Faith, p. 207. Persons, Brief Discours, 35r, quoted by Walsham, Church Papists, p. 29.

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219

Catholic Nicodemism?

Other catholics, however, argued for ‘yielding to the time’, echoing the teaching of nicodemites.66 Their works could not be published, so they were circulated in manuscript. One of these texts is attributed to Alban Langdale, chaplain to Anthony Browne, Lord Montague of Battle in Sussex, or possibly to the priest William Clitherow, a relative of the martyr, Margaret Clitherow. The author began by remembering ‘The infirmity of feare wrought in Nichodemus … though he professed not Christe opely … yet he was not of Christ rejected’. He advised quietness and silent withdrawal: ‘A man which dwellethe amonge the wicked muste lament the state … and withdraw hym selfe from troble as a peaceable childe of the churche, not seeking unnecessarily to provoke ire’.67 His sentiments on withdrawal echoed those the prophet Amos, quoted by Martin Borrhaus, then quoted by the protestant John Cheke during Queen Mary’s reign: all had one and the same message: times were bad, so withdraw and keep quiet.68 The Yorkshire-​born priest, Thomas Bell, was a convert from protestantism –​ to which he later returned. His proposals ‘to yeald to the extreamitye of the time thereby to escape trouble’ circulated widely and caused much concern to his brother clergy. They are known from a very detailed refutation, dating from 1588. Bell’s text was called ‘A comfortable advertisement to afflicted catholikes goinge to church with protestantes’ and it showed that he was not a straightforward defender of conformity: like Valdés, Bucer, Curione and many other ­writers, he was deeply worried about ‘scandal’ and its effect on ‘the weaker brethren’. He suggested that catholics should go to the services of the established Church but protest publicly that they did so, ‘only to give a sign of my allegiance and true loyalty to my prince’.69 Public protests were not usually associated with ‘quiet’ nicodemites, and Bell’s enemies thought his peculiar programme was very dangerous. It may be that his real crime was going public,

66 67

68 69

See, above all, Alexandra Walsham’s study, ‘Yielding to the Extremity of the Time’, in her Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, pp. 53–​84. pro, SP 12/​144/​69, fols 137r–​142v. ‘A discourse delivered to Mr Sheldon’, [Alban Langdale or William Clitherow] to Ralph Sheldon, c 1580, in Crosignani et al, Recusancy and Conformity, Document 19, pp. 116–​129, quotations at pp. 121 and 127; parts of this discourse are quoted in Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 51 –​53. Amos 5:13: BL MS Harl. 417, fol. 180r, quoted and translated by John McDiarmaid,‘ “To content god quietlie” ’, p. 198, n. 47; see above, Chapter 9, pp. 175, 182–3. Walsham, ‘Yielding to the Extremity of the Time’, pp. 63–​4; ‘Refutation of “A comfortable advertisement” ’, in Crosignani et al, Document 25 [May 1588], pp. 158–​243, at p. 160.

220 Chapter 11 making general rules from suggestions that were already being made in secret.70 If the catholics’ public polemical line was anti-​nicodemite, the qualified conformity of Bell and Langdale/​Clitherow represented an important second discourse which was ‒ despite Bell’s ‘protestation’ –​nicodemite. There was, however, a third catholic ‘message’, more private, intended for confessors but, inevitably, it leaked out. ‘Casuistry’, the art or science of applying moral laws to real-​life situations, had existed since the thirteenth century, but the dire predicament of Elizabethan catholics provided a rich fund of contemporary dilemmas for the casuists. Could a catholic servant go to the protestant church to accompany his master? Answer: this was not always mortal sin, but it would be better to find another job. Could a catholic on a journey go with fellow travellers to a heretical service if ‘he cannot separate himself from them without danger’? Answer: seek permission from the Pope, who will probably find the petition ‘just and honest’.71 The doctrine of equivocation was associated particularly with the Spanish theologian and casuist, Martin de Azpilcueta, known as ‘Doctor Navarro’. It was taken up enthusiastically by English priests, especially Jesuits, but Navarro’s doctrine made counsel still more complex, both in the confessional and outside it. Equivocation involved the use of words with a double meaning, while mental reservation used two ‘statements’, a false statement (spoken) was completed by a statement kept in the mind, which made the false utterance ‘true’: for instance, ‘I do not know where he is’ might have the reservation ‘ in such a way that I am bound to tell you’. Both ‘equivocation’ and ‘mental reservation’ were seen as permissible, especially if they saved a life, for instance, the life of a priest on the run.72 These strategies became especially important towards the end of the century, after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1587) and the failed Armada (1588), when the national perception of catholics as traitors had become unshakeable and, consequently, catholic clergy faced constant danger. In 1592 the Jesuit missionary, Robert Southwell, was betrayed by the daughter of his patron, who told the authorities that Southwell had advised her to equivocate about his (Southwell’s) whereabouts. He freely admitted it, adding that if there were to be an invasion, the Queen’s subjects would be justified if

70 71 72

Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 67; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London; New York: Continuum 2011), pp. 145–​147. These answers were careful and sometimes lengthy, see Crosignani et al,, Document 17, ‘Douai–​Rheims Cases’, p. 101; Allen–​Persons Cases’, ibid., p. 101–​110, at pp. 103–​106. Perez Zagorin, ‘The Historical Significance of Lying and Dissimulation’, Social Research, (1996), pp. 863–​912.

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they equivocated to save Her Majesty’s life. The parallel between the safety of the Queen and that of catholic priests cannot have gone down well with his judges. After torture and protracted imprisonment, he was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1595 and was regarded as a martyr immediately. Southwell’s life illustrates both the terrible pressures and the range of mixed messages: from his borrowing Calvin’s and Vermigli’s polemic to prove that conformity was ‘sinful and damnable’, to his defence of equivocation when it was used to save a priest’s life.73 By the early 1590s, Cardinal William Allen, leader of English catholics, was a very troubled man. The invasion of England, for which he had plotted, and on which he had pinned his hopes, had failed in 1588. He had often cautioned missionaries leaving for England ‘not alwayes to be rigorous, never over scrupulous’.74 In 1592, he said he was disturbed by ‘the excessive troubles and paynes and perils’ facing English catholics. In an open letter to both laity and clergy, he asserted the orthodox anti-​nicodemite view that Catholics should not ‘communicate’ with protestants in their services. But then he softened his counsel. Addressing the clergy in particular, he wrote: I would have you use great compassion and mercyfulnes towards suche of the laytie especialie for mere fear or saving their family, wyfe and children from ruyne are so far only fallen as to come … sometymes to their churches or be present at the tyme of their service. ‘Mere fear’; Allen was making the connection between fear of persecution and nicodemism which we have encountered often in this book. Later in his letter, he said again that his clergy should ‘use mercie’; ‘no more severity is to be required of the penitent then in any other sins that be subject to the sacrament of penance, and perhaps [less] all circumstances well and discreetly weighed’. ‘Perhaps less’: in anti-​nicodemite polemic, nicodemism was the sin that could not be forgiven, but not according to William Allen. He was careful to add that ‘on the other side’, the clergy should not defend ‘that it is lawful to communycate with protestantes’. In summary, conforming by going to church was a still

73

74

Southwell’s justification of equivocation is an instance of ‘offensive dissimulation’ or ‘honest dissimulation’, defended especially by Jesuits, see Stefania Tutino, ‘Between Nicodemism and ‘Honest’ Dissimulation: the Society of Jesus in England’, Historical Research, 79 (2006), pp. 534–​553, especially pp. 536, and pp. 544–​547; Zagorin, Ways of Lying, pp. 165–​220. Thomas Knox, The Letters and Memorials of William Cardinal Allen, 1532–​1594 (London: Nutt, 1882), p. 34, quoted by Eamon Duffy, ‘William Allen’, ODNB.

222 Chapter 11 a sin, but it should be met with mercy. Allen said he had put the matter to the Pope Clement viii, who, in cases of ‘feare and weakness’, took the same view.75 Anti-​nicodemism was indeed ‘ideological common ground’ shared by protestant and catholic writers, but ‘using mercie’ was also important. Writers from both groups revisited a debate that had been going on in Europe for decades; they quoted Italian writers, especially Vermigli, and condemned archetypal nicodemites, like Francesco Spiera and Reginald Pole. On both sides, however, there were ‘gaps’:  a dominant ethic was undermined by nicodemism creeping in around the edges. Protestant writers ‘on anti-​nicodemite high alert’ had the charitable Foxe rescuing nicodemite reputations when it suited his story and the political Cecil cynically prescribing ‘quiet’ behaviour for catholics, even though both he and they regarded nicodemism as evil. Among catholics, there was a discrepancy between what was proclaimed in printed polemic and what was advised in ‘cases’ prepared for confessors. Cardinal Allen’s ‘mercyfulnes’ in 1592 sounded strangely like the counsel of Caelio Secondo Curione in 1552: nicodemites should ‘ask pardon of the Lorde and committing themselves to the mercy of God’.76 Misericordia, mercy, that theme of Italian radicals, was also heard among Elizabethans. Both catholics and protestants thought that nicodemism was a sin, but they did not allow that to interfere with their consolation of sinners. 8 Postscript English negotiations with Fra Paolo Sarpi and Archbishop Marcantonio De Dominis between 1607 and 1620 are not part of the history of Tudor England. Yet they reveal such clear continuation of Elizabethan mixed messages about nicodemism that they are worth a brief postscript: In 1607, the zealous, if gullible, English ambassador to Venice, Henry Wotton, described the Servite theologian Fra Paolo Sarpi as ‘a sound Italian protestant as yet in the habit of a friar’.77 That was tantamount to saying that Sarpi was a nicodemite. From that same year, Wotton was plotting with Sarpi to set up ‘a sort of secret congregation in Venice’. There was a whiff of dissimulation

75 76 77

Crosignani et al, Recusancy and Conformity, ‘William, Cardinal Allen to Catholics in England’, 12 December 1592, Document 27, pp. 261–​2. Curione, ‘An excellent admonition [against] papisticall services’, in Temporysour, sigs H vi–​vii; see Chapter 9, above, p. 177. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1907) 1, p. 339.

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about the plans as Wotton described them to Giovanni Diodati, a leading Italian exile in Geneva: for their services they would ‘extract a sort of liturgy from the actual Roman missal’, they would ‘leave aside the most difficult and contested articles of our faith’. This communication was in cipher.78 In the city of the spirituali and the Beneficio, and of many Italian nicodemites, they aimed to convert a later generation of Venetians to the protestant faith –​secretly. Sarpi had lived most of his life in that catholic republic, but he distrusted the papacy to the root of his being. Quarrels between Venice and the papacy, nominally about jurisdiction over the clergy, had reached boiling point with the imposition of a papal Interdict on Venice in 1606. The great theme of Sarpi’s s correspondence was the need for Venice to enter into anti-​papal alliance with France and the protestant powers, including England. That alliance would finally destroy papal power and restore Venice to her proper place on the international stage.79 Reflecting on his own complicated position, Sarpi wrote to a friend ‘I am compelled to wear a mask. Perhaps there is nobody who can survive in Italy without one’: he also said he was ‘like a chameleon’ and that one should ‘remain masked with all people’.80 Nonetheless, English diplomats and spies were prepared to use him. They were awake to potential political advantage and apparently not shocked by his dissimulation. Gradually they turned away from interest in his religious beliefs to concentrate on the political advantages of publishing his anti-​papal texts. The Full and satisfactorie answer to the late unadvised bull, Sarpi’s condemnation of the Venetian Interdict, was published in English in 1606.81 Two years later, he began to write his best-​known work, the History of the Council of Trent, which interpreted the Council’s history as a relentless and unjustifiable assertion of papal power. More secret negotiations began, intended to bring the manuscripts of Sarpi’s great history book to England. These bore fruit when 78

79 80

81

Archive du Musée Historique de la Réformation, Geneva, Mss Suppl. 11/​17, translated and quoted by Simone Maghenzani, ‘The Protestant Reformation in Counter-​Reformation Italy, c. 1550–​1660: An Overview of New Evidence’, Church History, 83 (2014), 571–​589, at pp. 571–​2. David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 36; see also pp. 10, 57, 133–​134. ‘Personam coactus fero, licet in Italia nemo sine ea esse possit’ … ‘velut Chamalaeon’, Paolo Sarpi to Jacques Gillot, 12 May 1609, in Paolo Sarpi, Lettere ai Gallicani, ed. Boris Ulianich (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1961), p. 133; Wootton, Sarpi, p. 119 –​21; ‘Stare così mascherato con tutti’, Paolo Sarpi, Opere, ed. Gaetano and Luisa Cozzi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1969) p. 92–​3, quoted by Wootton, Sarpi, p. 37; James Johnson, Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic (Berkley: University of California press, 2011). Paolo Sarpi, A full and satisfactorie answer to the late unadvised bull (London: John Bill, 1606), stc 21759.

224 Chapter 11 the Italian version was smuggled into England and published pseudonymously in London in 1619; translations into Latin and then into English appeared, also pseudonymously, in 1620.82 Throughout all the cloak-​and-​dagger operations to bring the text to England, Sarpi’s identity remained concealed. He never converted, saying mass daily to the end of his life.83 His ‘doings’ suggest that he was a consummate nicodemite. His English minders, all of them committed protestants, appeared untroubled on that score. Sixty years earlier, Calvin, Vermigli, Vergerio and many others had presented nicodemism as so wicked that it led to damnation. Seventeenth-​century English diplomats treated Sarpi’s likely nicodemism as useful –​and his writings as still more so. The case of Marcantonio De Dominis, who had been Archbishop of Spalato (Split), an area then ruled by Venice, raised related questions. He was one of several famous serial converts in the first half of the seventeenth century, most of whom had periods of ‘floating’ between religious confessions –​which was, as we saw, characteristic of nicodemites.84 Decisions about how and when to jump usually necessitated a preparatory phase of nicodemite quietness. First the Archbishop converted from catholic to protestant. Having criticised the papacy and resigned his archbishopric, he travelled to England in 1616. There he was much feted, a prize for protestantism. Yet ‘De Dominis had his own vaguely ecumenical programme’; he hoped for a reunion in which a community of churches would share a common faith based on ‘fundamentals’.85 His own writings circulated widely and he was involved (peripherally) in the publication of Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent. In 1622, however, De Dominis re-​converted to catholicism, claiming that his earlier conversion had not been due to ‘faith not fained’ –​the double negative suggests that he thought he had been ‘faining’.86 He returned to Italy and, in 1624, he was imprisoned by the Inquisition and died in prison of a fever. 82

83 84 85

86

Paolo Sarpi, Historia del Concilio tridentino (London: John Bill [1619]), stc 21760; The historie of the Councel of Trent containing eight bookes (London: Robert Barker and John Bill, 1620), stc 21761; Petri Suavis Polani Concilii Tridentini, libri octo (London: Bonham Norton and John Bill, 1620), stc 21764. Wootton, Sarpi, p. 121. See above, Prologue, pp. 11–12. Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 55–​6. Questier, Conversion, pp. 8–​9, quotation at p. 55; William B. Patterson, King James vi and i and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 220, 258–​59;; William B.  Patterson, ‘Marco Antonio de Dominis, (1560–​1624)’, ODNB; Diego Pirillo, The Council and the Papal Prince: Trent seen by Italian Reformers . The second manifesto of Marcus Antonius de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatio [sic] (Liege:  Guilliaume Houius, 1623), stc 7001, f.  A  3v; Questier, Conversion, p.  55; Hilary

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English reactions to these two Italians were conflicted. Immediately De Dominis returned to catholicism, disappointed English clerics raged and sneered, calling him ‘a man for many masters’. His second conversion was despicable because it pushed him in the ‘wrong’ direction:  only then were his ‘shiftings’ seen as a problem.87 Sarpi’s obvious ‘masks’ were accepted because they might serve the international protestant cause. In these two instances nicodemism was no longer regarded as wrong per se.

87

Gatti, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe: From Machiavelli to Milton (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press [2015]), pp. 128–​132. Richard Neile, M. Ant. de D[omi]nis, Archbishop of Spalato, his shiftings in religion: a man for many masters (London: John Bill, 1624), stc 18421.

Chapter 12

Echoes In 1611 John Florio listed the books he had used in preparing his Italian-​English dictionary entitled Queen Anna’s new world of words. Among his source texts were: Trattato del beneficio di Iesu Cristo crocifisso; L’alfabeto Cristiano and Le cento e dieci divine considerazioni of Juan de Valdés; also two of Acontio’s early works which were sympathetic to nicodemism, the Dialogo di Giacopo Riccamati and his Somma brevissima dela Dottrina Christiana. Florio omitted the Stratagematum Satanae from his list, probably because that work’s open condemnation of persecution was too avant-​garde. But the ‘Spiera Comedia’ was there, destined to become ever more popular.1 John Florio, son of Michaelangelo, once minister to Italian strangers in Edwardian London, had lived both in Italy and London. He knew this literature very well and he seems to have had a canny sense about authors and books which had been and might still be of interest in England: Il Beneficio and Valdés and Flaminio, and the daring Aconcio, and the despairing Spiera made famous by Vergerio: all these have been important case studies in earlier chapters. John Florio had produced a cast-​list of contributors to the shared discussion of nicodemism. This chapter will trace the later translation and publication of these Italian texts in England, picking up their echoes, especially in the period before the Civil War. The Epilogue will suggest that while ideas and challenges usually came from Italy, English readers had unique chances to test them out and put nicodemism into practice. 1

Francesco Spiera Again, and Again

John Tedeschi, eminent historian of Italian culture wrote: ‘A purely mechanical count of editions would assign Petrarch a place in English literature a rung or two below that held by Francesco Spiera’.2 A  keyword search for ‘Francis

1 Queen Anna’s nevv vvorld of words, or dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues, collected, and newly much augmented by Iohn Florio …. Whereunto are added certaine necessarie rules and short obseruations for the Italian tongue (London: Edward Blount and William Barret, 1611), stc 110099; Pirillo, Filosofia ed eresia, pp. 14–​15. 2 Tedeschi, ‘The Cultural Contributions of Italian Protestant Reformers in the late Renaissance’, in Bussi, ed. Libri, idee e sentimenti religiosi nel Cinquecento italiano, pp. 81–​108, cited by Pirillo, Filosofia ed eresia, p. 15, note 49.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004331693_014

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Spira’ (the anglicised version of his name) on websites of early modern English publications confirms Tedeschi’s assessment. Spiera’s misery was a magnet for English readers until well into the nineteenth century. Most of this interest depended on understanding his story as a judgement tale: Spiera became an archetype of sinners and backsliders on their way to hell. As told in seventeenth-​century England, his fate had nothing to do with events in the Veneto in the late 1540s. New names were attached to stories uncannily like Spiera’s, Alexandra Walsham noted that ‘the deathbed paroxysms of the Wealden apothecary that William Rogers … bear a striking resemblance to the tortuous inner struggles of that most famous of spiritual renegades, the Venetian lawyer, Francis Spiera’.3 Preachers’ warnings against speculation about damnation were usually ignored. In his study of the complex task of Being Protestant Alec Ryrie wrote ‘By the early seventeenth century, large numbers of Protestants were certainly haunted by the fear that they might be irrecoverably damned’.4 That fear was fuelled by Nathaniel Bacon’s Fearfull Estate of Francis Spiera, published in 1638. Bacon used the collection of stories edited by Curione in 1550, but his text was not a translation, rather a compilation, with lively additions from Bacon himself. This version was reissued about fifty times and re-​worked still more.5 It was among the ‘few books and little learning’ of John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrims Progress. This was ‘a book that was to my troubled spirit as salt when rubbed into a flesh wound … especially that sentence of his was frightful to me, “Man knows the beginning … of sin but who bounds the issue thereof” ’. Actually Spiera did not say it, but Bacon did. Despite his own imprisonment from 1661, Bunyan continued to fortify his readers by his references to Spiera.6 A leading Quaker, John Crook (1617–​99), told 3 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 326–​7. 4 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 28; see also pp. 31–​39. 5 Nathaniel Bacon, A relation of the feareful estate of Francis Spiera in the yeare, 1548 (London: Philip Stephens and Christopher Meredith, 1638) stc 1178, see also stc 1178.5, 1179; stc Wing B357–​B 366A. On the culture of despair, John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially, pp. 37–​39, 229–​230, 300–​301; Michael MacDonald, ‘ “The Fearful Estate of Francis Spira” ’: Narrative, Identity and Emotion in Early Modern England,’ Journal of British Studies 31 (1992), 32–​61; Brian Opie, “Nathaniel Bacon and Francis Spira: the Presbyterian and the Apostate”, Turnbull Library Record 18 (1985), 33–​50; Nehemiah Wallington copied out the text in 1635, Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s World (Stanford, CA 1985), p. 202. 6 The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Graham Midgley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 5 pp. 151 and 173; ibid., ed. Richard Greaves (1981), 9, p. 167; M. Anne Overell, ‘Recantation and Retribution: “Remembering Francis Spira”, 1548–​1638’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory,

228 Chapter 12 in his autobiography how, in his youth, he was in despair of his own salvation; in ‘unexpressible misery; All which was heightned by Francis Spiera’s book, which came to my hand’ (this was almost certainly Bacon’s version): ‘I thought it so to resemble my present condition … for when I had read but a little, I cast it from me and durst not look at it any more’.7 Spiera’s experience became a pattern, misery and terror like his had to be met and endured on the hard road to salvation. In the later-​seventeenth century, a torrent of re-​worked versions appeared (‘Second Spiras’, ‘Third Spiras’, ‘thirtieth editions’.8 These reincarnations were apostates only in the sense that they had fallen from right-​living; they were guilty of atheism, profanity, disbelief in immortality, ‘backsliding’‒ but especially ‘atheism’, which meant many different things. Damnation and despair were all they had in common with the first Francesco Spiera: he became an Italian scapegoat, bearing very up-​to-​date English sins. For much of the late-​ seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spiera’s nicodemism and apostasy was pianissimo, almost drowned out. Refusal to buy into the story’s dubious theology still came from the educated. The work of the Elizabethan scholar and preacher William Perkins remained popular and he had cut Spiera down to theological size, noting that the Italian was not special: what had happened to him, might happen to any ‘child of God’. Perkins resisted the damnation attached to the tale, arguing that the story ‘doth inconsiderately taxe him [Spiera] for a castaway’.9 Thomas Rogers, too, swung back to Christian forgiveness; Spiera was among the desperate and

eds, Retribution, Repentance and Reconciliation (Woodbridge:  Boydell, 2004), pp.  159–​168; Overell, ‘Exploitation of Spiera’, pp. 634–​635. 7 John Crook, A short history of the life of John Crook (London: T. Sowle, 1706), ecco 5820, p. 14; my thanks to Alec Ryrie for sending me this reference. 8 1665, 1672, 1675, 1678, 1681, 1682, 1683 and 1688. Important examples are: The Second Spiera: being a fearful example of an atheist who had apostasised from the Christian Religion and dyed in despair at Westminster … by J. S. [edited, or rather written by, Richard Sault] (London: John Dunton 1693), stc Wing, S733BA; A true Second Spiera . . [an] account of some backslidings of Mr. Haniel Halford [Attributed to Thomas Sewell] (London: Joseph Marshall, 1697), Wing S2825A; Kenneth Sheppard, Anti-​Atheism in Early Modern England, 1580–​1720:  ‘The Atheist Answered and his error confuted’ (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015), for Spiera literature see ibid., Chapter 5 and especially pp. 183–​4, note 7. 9 William Perkins, A golden chaine: or The description of theologie containing the order of the causes of saluation and damnation, according to Gods word ([Cambridge]: John Legat, 1600), stc 19646, p. 613; William Perkins, The combat betvveene Christ and the Diuell displayed: or A  commentarie vpon the temptations of Christ (London:  E E[dgar], 1606), stc 19748, p.  51; Walsham, Providence, p. 104.

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mistaken, who ‘thinke how God, he neither can nor will forgive them’.10 In his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, Robert Burton saw Spiera’s despair as ‘most mad’.11 Spiera’s story was still well-​known in 1744. Samuel Richardson’s heroine Clarissa had a fine note of contempt for the tale: in flight from her horrid family, she received a book parcel: ‘A Drexelius on Eternity, the good old Practice of Piety and a Francis Spira. My brother’s wit I suppose. He thinks he does well to point out death and despair to me.’12 These resisters were the educated, the lucky ones. Most memories of Spiera in the English-​speaking world are revealed in the words of one fifteen-​year-​old girl who said she feared she ‘should go to Hell, like Spira, not Elected’.13 Spiera’s original sin, his apostasy from true faith, surfaced conveniently whenever English protestantism was seen to be in special danger. There were cheap collections issued in the (ungodly?) northern industrial cities in the early nineteenth century. Then, with perfect timing in the year 1845, when John Henry Newman and Henry Ward left the Church of England for that of Rome, Spiera was presented as An Everlasting Proof of the Falsehood of Popery.14 2

Il Beneficio di Cristo in London

The Beneficio’s success could not match Spiera’s but Arthur Golding’s translation appeared three more times, in 1631, 1633 and 1638.15 In this conflicted 10 11 12 13 14

15

Thomas Rogers, The faith, doctrine, and religion, professed, & protected in the realme of England (Cambridge: John Legatt, 1607), stc 21228, pp. 68–​69. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1932), 3, 407. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or the History of a Young Lady, 4 Vols (London; Dent, New York; Dutton, 1965–​7) 2, Letter lxxiv, Clarissa to Miss Harlowe, pp. 256 and 262. Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, p. 38. Nathaniel Bacon, A relation of the fearful estate of Francis Spira (Leeds, n. p., 1811); another issue (Leeds: Davies and Booth, 1816); An Everlasting Proof of the Falsehood of Popery, being a relation of the fearful estate of F. Spiera [By N. Bacon], repr. from the edition of 1682 (Manchester: J. Gadsby, 1845). Aonio Paleario (misattribution), The benefit of Christ’s death (London: John Legat 2 for Andrew Hebb, 1631), stc 19116.5 and see estc S94589; [Benedetto da Mantova], The benefite of Christs death, or the glorious riches of God’s free grace which every believer receives by Jesus Christ, and him crucified. First compiled and printed in the Italian tongue: and afterwards translated and printed in the French tongue: and out of French into English, by A.G. (London: I.L[egat] for Andrew Hebb, 1633), stc 19117; same title (London: E.G[riffin] for Andrew Hebb, 1638), stc 19118; A Bibliographical Catalogue of Italian Books Printed in England 1603–​1642, ed. Soko Tomita and Masahiko Tomita (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 357–​8.

230 Chapter 12 decade, Golding’s irenic preface may have appealed to stationers and to readers seeking a basis for reconciliation. The title of the editions of 1633 and 1638 was changed: The benefite of Christs death, or the glorious riches of God’s free grace which every believer receives by Jesus Christ, and him crucified. The predestinarian chapter of the book was ignored and Il Beneficio di Cristo was being interpreted as granting salvation to all ‘believers’, not some of them: this was close to universal salvation ‒ salvation for all who had some faith. Don Benedetto da Mantova and Marcantonio Flaminio would almost certainly have been well satisfied. 3

Juan de Valdés and Little Gidding

The Divine Considerations of Juan de Valdés was translated by Nicholas Ferrar probably when he was in withdrawal from the political scene in Little Gidding, his country house in Cambridgeshire. Between 1613 and 1615, Ferrar had been in the Netherlands, then Venice; he studied for a short time in Padua and went to Rome. He might have come across the work of Juan de Valdés in any of these places.16 Ferrar’s friend, the poet George Herbert, contributed a preface to the translation and ‘Briefe notes on Valdesso’s Considerations’. Ferrar’s brother, John, brought the book to press in 1638, the year after Ferrar’s own death and six years after Herbert’s.17 It had taken nearly a century for an English translation of Valdés work to appear. ‘It is true, there are some things which I  like not in him … neverthelesse I wish you by all meanes to publish it.’ wrote Herbert. The whole production exudes anxiety about heresy. As well as Herbert’s ‘Brief notes’, there were the warnings of the printer to Oxford University, Leonard Lichfield.18 Why the line-​ up of critics? Papistry? Heresy? Nicodemism? Probably all of these. Geneva had woken up very late to the problem of Juan de Valdés. Calvin did not get round to reading the Italian’s Divine Considerations until 1563, two years before

16 17 18

Joyce Ransome, ‘Prelude to Piety: Nicholas Ferrar’s Grand Tour’, Seventeenth Century, 18 (2003), 1–​24, esp. 6–​9. Nicholas W. S. Cranfield, ‘Nicholas Ferrar’, ODNB. The hundred and ten considerations of Signior Iohn Valdesso …. Written in Spanish, brought out of Italy by Vergerius, and first set forth in Italian at Basil by Coelius Secundus Curio, anno 1550 … Afterward translated into French, and printed at Lions 1563 and again at Paris 1565. And now translated out of the Italian copy into English, with notes. Whereunto is added an epistle of the authors, or a preface to his divine commentary upon the Romans [trans. Nicholas Ferrar](Oxford: Leonard Lichfield 1638), stc 24571.

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his death in 1565. Thereafter Calvinist condemnations of the text had come thick and fast.19 The names of Curione and Vergerio were prominent in the title of Ferrar’s translation, ‘written in Spanish, brought out of Italy by Vergerius, and first set forth in Italian at Basil by Coelius Secundus Curio, anno 1550’. Ferrar translated ‘out of the Italian copy’. Herbert thought it wonderful that God had opened the eyes of Valdés ‘in the midst of popery’ but then came his qualifications: Valdés had commented that Christ, too, had prayed with doubtfulness, but Herbert thought this was ‘more then I can or dare say’.20 The Spanish humanist’s reliance on the Holy Spirit to the detriment of Scripture caused most trouble. Valdes claimed direct individual inspiration ‘they that know God by mens relation, have a false opinion of him, and they that know him by the holy spirit, have a good’.21 So much for all traditions, teachers and preachers; Valdes ‘spirit’ was independent of them all, even of scripture. Consideration 63 caused horror, ‘That the holy Scripture is like a candle in a darke place, and that the holy spirit is like the Sunne’. Herbert’s response was ‘Too slight a regard of the Scriptures’. The demotion of scripture was something that no good seventeenth-​ century protestant could swallow. ‘There is no more to be said of this Chapter but that his opinion of the scripture is unsufferable’.22 The Holy Spirit is mentioned more than a hundred times in the Considerations: he was the believer’s companion, his refuge, justifier of all his doings ‘those who being the Sonnes of God are governed by the spirit of God, and therefore are free, and exempt from all humane law, as God himselfe is free and exempt.’ The implications were and are breathtaking. This special ‘government’ by the spirit is one strong reason for depictions of Valdés as the originator of Italian nicodemism, who had made all his followers ‘free’ to deceive. Herbert saw that the dangers were political as well as spiritual: ‘Worldly learned men cannot judge spirituall mens actions, but the Magistrate may’.23 Civil War was raging when a second edition of Ferrar’s English version of the Divine Considerations appeared in 1646.24

19 20 21 22 23 24

See Firpo, Tra Alumbrados, pp. 118–​123; Firpo, Valdés, pp. 201–​205; Maghenzani, ‘Protestant Reformation in Counter-​Reformation Italy’, p. 580. Considerations, trans Ferrar, Consideration 59, p. 152; ‘Briefe Notes’, unpaginated. Copy of a letter written by Mr George Herbert, unpaginated; Consideration 37, p. 85. Consideration 63, p. 157; ‘Briefe Notes’, unpaginated, see Consideration 68, p. 169. Consideration 62, page 156; and ‘Briefe Notes’, unpaginated. Divine considerations treating of those things which are most profitable, most necessary and most perfect in our Christian profession by John Valdesso (Cambridge: for E. D. by Roger Daniel, 1646), stc Wing V22.

232 Chapter 12 4 Aconcio’s Stratagems in London and Oxford The seventeenth-​century English revival of Aconcio’s Stratagems was led by individuals searching for reconciliation. Christopher Potter, Willliam Chillingworth and John Goodwin were all drawn to Aconcio’s ‘fundamentals’ as a way of making peace and ending persecution. Potter, Provost of Queens College Oxford, was interested in Italian thinkers. In 1626 he translated Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Quarrels of Pope Paul V. with the State of Venice.25 Then Potter became prime mover in the English printing of the Latin version of Aconcio’s Stratagemata, which had first appeared in Basel in 1565. No less than three editions, called ‘Doctour Potters Stratagems’ appeared in Oxford in the course of one year, 1631.26 Potter and his friend, William Chillingworth, hoped that Aconcio’s suggestion of settling a few fundamentals of faith might prove a way of calming bitter controversies:  about predestination, about the doctrine of the Trinity and the question of how much tolerance could be offered to those who did not believe in that doctrine. They were called ‘Socinians’ after Fausto Sozzini, nephew of Lelio, who had been a friend of Ochino and Aconcio.27 Chillingworth’s own history of doubt and conversion lay behind his attraction to Aconcio: ‘I know a man that of a moderate Protestant turn’d a Papist … The same man afterwards upon better consideration, became a doubting Papist, and of a doubting Papist, a confirm’d Protestant.’ Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants appeared in 1638 after he had returned to the Church of England. In that work he said his own dislike of coercion of conscience was ‘no singularity of mine but the doctrine I have learnt from divines of great learning and judgement. Let the reader be pleased to peruse the 7th book of Acontius de Strat. Satanae and Zanchius, his last oration’.28 He took up these Italians’ 25

26 27

28

Paolo Sarpi, The history of the quarrels of Pope Paul V with the state of Venice (London: John Bill, 1626), stc 21766); Andrew Hegarty, ‘Christopher Potter’, ODNB; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed:  Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 155–​7, 250. The three editions of Stratagematum Satanae appeared in 1631, all printed by William Webb, stc 93, 92.7, 92.3, and one followed in 1650, see stc Wing A 444. The best guide is Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: the Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 13–​20, 71–​73; on the presbyterian controversialist Francis Cheynell’s rejection of Acontius, ibid., pp. 172–​4; Francis Cheynell, The rise, growth, and danger of Socinianisme together with a plaine discovery of a desperate designe of corrupting the Protestant religion … by Fr. Cheynell (London: Samuel Gellibrand, 1643), stc Wing C3815. William Chillingworth, The religion of protestants a safe way to salvation (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1638) stc 5138, Chapter 5, para. 103, p. 303 and Chapter 4, the Answer to the Fourth Chapter (marginal note to p. 234); see also stc 5138.2, stc 5139; the moderate

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themes, especially their emphasis on mercy and on a heaven ‘wide enough to contain men of conflicting views’.29 Here was the seventeenth-​century English version of ‘il cielo aperto’ –​universal salvation, and the haunting accompanying themes of mercy –​‘misericordia’ and ‘de amplitudine’ ‒ of Erasmus, then Marsilio Andreasi of Mantua, then Curione, then Aconcio, then Pucci ‒ and then the doubting Chillingworth. The first four books Aconcio’s Stratagems appeared in English in 1648, entitled Satans Stratagems or the Devils cabinet discovered, a publication instigated by a ‘coalition of intellectuals –​printers, booksellers, military commanders and sympathetic politicians ranged against the imposition of a rigid religious uniformity’.30 John Goodwin, independent minister and radical tolerationist, wrote the introductory epistle. In 1651, this English translation of the Stratagems was reissued with a new title.31 During a long civil and religious war, Aconcio’s text was being used by a radical minority to urge Englishmen to find peace, by accepting ‘fundamentals’. What of those who could not agree even with those fundamentals? They would have to keep silence, be nicodemites, as Aconcio himself had once allowed.32 5 Epilogue The figure of Nicodemus was inescapable in England, in Italy and throughout most of sixteenth-​century Europe; he might be depicted as good or (more often) bad, but his name was always used with reference to the dilemmas posed by religious persecution. For contemporaries, Nicodemus did not represent a theory or a view of the world, an ‘ism’ in the modern sense. Instead, in the mysterious story in which he ‘came to Jesus by night’, preachers and writers of the period found a model and a label for the many ways in which people

29 30

31 32

Girolamo Zanchi had once been Vermigli’s colleague in Lucca in the early 1540s; Warren Chernaik, ‘William Chillingworth’, ODNB. Mortimer, Reason and Religion, p. 71–​73, quotation at p. 73; on Chillingworth’s inconsistencies, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed, pp. 166–​67. Iacopo Aconcio, Satans Stratagems or the Devils cabinet–​councel discovered … together with an epistle written by Mr John Goodwin … (London: John Maycock, for G. Calvert, 1648), Wing stc A443A; Tai Liu, ‘John Goodwin’, ODNB; John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-​Century England (Woodbridge UK; Rochester NY: Boydell, 2006), pp. 38–​39. Darkness discovered or the Devils secret stratagems laid open … Written by Jacobus Acontius (London; William Ley, 1651), stc Wing A442. See above, Chapter 10, p. 193.

234 Chapter 12 could avoid being straightforward. A great range of related actions and similar responses became attached to Nicodemus: these are best understood as a great spectrum of behaviour. At one pole of the spectrum, there was lying, a word rarely used by contemporaries, but apparent especially in the abjurations soon retracted.33 Then there came a series of gradations: dissembling, hedging and trimming, evading, ducking and suddenly departing from the scene of decision or danger. Towards the other pole of the spectrum are ‘milder’ behaviours, like dithering, rune-​reading, seeking a modus vivendi, being ‘gradual’, inscrutable, refusing to be understood.34 The small ‘doings’ we encountered at the start of this book were by far the most common, especially the eternal waiting and unfathomable quietness. People moved from one mode to another as circumstances changed. Small secrets were apt to snowball into major deceits. All were symptoms of ‘the dilemmas and deviousness forced upon good men in an age of religious violence’.35 Fear was palpable and pervasive in the lives of nicodemites ‒ as it was for many others in the mid-​sixteenth century, including most of the martyrs. Arguably, fear was a central incentive for those who kept deep religious secrets, but we should not depict their lives and their actions as simply an expression of that fear. All the nicodemites in the preceding chapters had once said, written or done something that distanced them from the majority. In many cases, and especially in that of Reginald Pole and the spirituali, they sought reconciliation between catholics and reformers. Henrician evangelicals sought some understanding and rapprochement between ‘The Gospel and Henry viii’. In the reign of Queen Mary, William Cecil conformed, but also acted to help protestants in exile and the printers of protestant texts. In that age, such aspirations and activities needed bravery and independence of mind. We are not encountering spineless cowards without any thought beyond survival and their own fear. That was the anti-​nicodemites’ partisan presentation. Nicodemites had, or had once had, high hopes of change and worked to realise them. But this was a society that persecuted difference, usually calling it heresy. So, gradually, many began to shield their opinions and sought ‘to make themselves obscure’.36 Just as the biblical Nicodemus ‘came to Jesus by night’, his sixteenth century epigones exhibited similar secretive, but not always dishonourable, traits. Their tortuous

33 34 35 36

See above, Chapter 2. Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 29. Eamon Duffy, ‘William, Cardinal Allen’, Recusant History, 22 (1995), pp. 265–​290, quotation at p. 266. Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, p. 91.

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adaptations were prompted by successive reformations and the rapid turnover of spiritual power. Different professional and social groups evolved their own ways of deceiving and their own justifications for doing so. ‘Pastoral nicodemism’ was observable in the clergy, protestant and catholic alike. Haigh saw them as ‘liturgical hermaphrodites’, but they presented themselves as guarding their flock, waiting in quietness.37 Examples include Giorgio Siculo, advocating guilt-​free nicodemism to save his remote mountain congregation, and Elizabethan catholic clergy ‘not seeking unnecessarily to provoke ire’.38 According to contemporary codes, diplomats were a special group; like Vanni, they were marooned, miles from home, struggling to stay loyal and on-​message whenever their monarchs changed religion. Converts, too, especially serial converts, became secretive and went quiet while they decided how and when to jump. Ochino admitted to being cautious for at least a year before leaving Italy (later he called it ‘oblique artifice’).39 Aconcio’s ‘mind was vexed’ for a long time, Pucci took months to ‘cross over’ and then crossed back again some ten years later.40 They had to be nicodemites –​at least temporarily, while they withdrew prior to making a life-​changing decision: reculer pour mieux sauter. Scholars found words for their deception. Erasmus called it ‘holy cunning’, Sarpi had his ‘mask’, Cheke thought the good kept silent ‘for want not of zeal but of a fit occasion’.41 But what of those who could not be so subtle? Bernard Cottret wrote: ‘To feign or dissimulate supposes a shrinking from received ideas and accepted practices: this ambivalence is not possible for the more humble’.42 But when liturgies, hymns and familiar words were changed, even the very humble might know ‘ambivalence’ or at least confusion. Some died in doomed rebellions; most just did as they were told, frightened and without words to justify or explain. We have been concerned with many Italian texts, from Il Beneficio di Cristo to Aconcio’s Stratagems. English translations of these works appeared but English texts about nicodemism, later translated and known in Italy were much rarer. William Cecil’s cynical manifesto, The Execution of Justice, is an exception.43 English input was usually practical rather than literary or theoretical. 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Haigh, English Reformations, at p. 253. See above, Chapter 8, pp. 158–60; ‘A discourse delivered to Mr Sheldon’, c 1580, in Crosignani et al, Recusancy and Conformity, Document 19, p. 127. See above, Chapter 1, p. 25. See above, Chapter 10, pp. 196–8. See above, Chapter 2, p. 20; Chapter 11, p. 223; for Cheke’s justification, see McDiarmid, ‘ “To content god quietlie”, p. 198. Cottret, Calvin, p. 270. See above, Chapter 11, pp. 215–16.

236 Chapter 12 Most Englishmen seeking refuge in Italy ‒ from Pole’s ‘flock’ to the Marian exiles in the Veneto were waiting, watching for what might happen in England, ‘slumbering’ between deliveries of the posts, in Philip Hoby’s phrase: they kept their heads down.44 The most significant English contribution to this exchange was to provide a ‘laboratory’ of real-​life nicodemism, created by exceptionally frequent religious change. As Tudor monarchs and their ‘reformations’ changed at alarming speed, countless dilemmas ensued. Was it right to conform? Was it better to wait, to go into exile or to die? Then, into this vortex came Italian exiles and Italian texts. They were translated, quoted –​and sometimes just sent by their authors unasked:  Il Beneficio and Vergerio’s polemic were known in Edward vi’s reign; Vermigli’s Cohabitacyon and Curione’s Excellent Admonition were printed by Marian exiles, intended for readers who had stayed in England and conformed.45 Into Queen Elizabeth’s ‘nicodemite settlement’ Aconcio and Ochino lobbed their crucial question: what is the point of persecution if it only makes hypocrites and nicodemites?46 The progression from persecution to fear, and then to nicodemism, is unmistakeable. In both Italy and England, the mid-​1550s was a time of persecution: the Inquisition’s grab for power in Rome; Pope Paul iv’s pontificate and his pursuit of the remaining spirituali; the burning of Servetus in Calvin’s Geneva; Queen Mary’s executions of English protestants, also by burning. That fearful decade made many martyrs –​and also many nicodemites. For catholics in England, persecution in the later decades of the reign of Elizabeth came a close second. Those two eras of crisis were times of turning, when the debate about nicodemism changed. Anti-​nicodemite messages became distorted, sometimes mocked. Slowly, unsystematically, a defence of nicodemism appeared. Often this defence was absorbed into other controversies: into works which said that persecution was wrong (Castellio, Curione, Aconcio and Ochino) and that all men might be saved (Curione and Pucci). These daring books were read in Latin or Italian by doubting and sometimes ‘turn-​coat’ scholars like Perne, Geste and Chillingworth. Later, authors identified with the slow birth of English tolerance, such as John Milton and John Locke, also read Ochino and Aconcio.47 These texts were not about nicodemism but they had momentous

44 45 46 47

Philip Hoby to Mason, Padua, 6 June 1555, csp Foreign (1553–​58), 383. See above Chapters 6, 7 and 9. See above Chapter 10, pp. 192–5. See above, Chapter  10; Overell, Italian Reform, p.  202; John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.  320‒325; Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton’s Italy:  Anglo-​Italian Literature, Travel

Echoes

237

implications for it. Take away persecution and nicodemites need not fear (or even exist). Take away eternal damnation and that special hell reserved for nicodemites also vanished. We rarely notice the short life of Italian anti-​nicodemite texts published in England. By the seventeenth century, the only one still re-​appearing regularly was the story of Spiera, albeit in many distorted forms. What happened to the rest? To Vergerio’s many pamphlets? To Vermigli’s powerful counsel against ‘Cohabitacyon’? Vergerio’s propaganda was already being sneered at when Queen Elizabeth came to the throne.48 After its appearance in 1555, Cohabitacyon, Vermigli’s only work directly about nicodemism, was never published again as a stand-​alone book.49 It appears that these Italian publications had their moment in the lukewarm English sun, and then faded –​a process helped by the martyrologists, especially John Foxe who spread a related message about witness to faith in a poignant and accessible ‘story’ form. By contrast, during the unquiet 1630s, there was a cluster of publications of works by Italian nicodemites or favourable to them: Valdés’s spiritual secrets, Aconcio’s Stratagems, the Benefit of Christ. Decades of quiet English familiarity with Italian opinions made possible this small revival. It took place in an ambivalent English society, where reconciliation was needed but religious war and civil war were brewing. On the other hand, ‘a qualified intolerance’ was already a work in progress, alongside ‘charitable hatred’, and patchy, irritable tolerance, and regular flare-​ups of anti-​catholic hatred. England’s ‘long nicodemism’, born of eccentric religious change, had helped make ready for a society able –​sometimes –​to turn a blind eye: ‘To tolerate is to permit or endure, to abstain from taking steps to restrain something and to refuse to make a fuss’.50 These were complex positions, difficult to achieve in the early modern era,

48 49

50

and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (New  York and London:  Routledge, 2017), pp. 86–​97. See Chapter  7, p. 145–6; only one of Vergerio’s anti-​papal works was published in seventeenth-​century England, Consilium quorundam episcoporum Bononiæ congregatorum (London: William White, 1613), stc 3218. There was much Elizabethan interest in Vermigli’s scriptural commentaries, but the last works by Vermigli listed in the whole English Short Title Catalogue are his Loci Communes of 1583 and his Common places of the same year, stc 24668 and stc 24669, possibly partly because these were expensive works to produce. Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-​ Catholicism’, in Arthur F.  Marotti, ed., Catholicism and Anti-​Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 85 –​115; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 56–​60; quotation from Walsham, Charitable Hatred, p. 269.

238 Chapter 12 but nicodemites had been enduring and ‘refusing to make a fuss’ for a century and more. Their contribution, in England as in Italy, was characteristically un-​heroic. They deceived in hope, largely for the sake of survival, and they survived, or at least the vast majority did. The few Italians who argued publicly that dissimulation was right –​like Giorgio Siculo and Francesco Pucci –​were not so fortunate. Queen Elizabeth’s subjects feared that she would not survive because of conspiracies and attempted invasions. But she did. ‘England’s Nicodemites’, the church papists and the conforming catholics, also survived.51 Some cracked under pressure and became recusants; some turned into zealous protestants; the others merged with that larger remnant still ‘abiding’ somewhere near the back of England’s parish churches. Their survival was achieved because nicodemism was largely a matter of enduring and not saying much. Polemicists condemned it; practitioners got on with it but almost all of them lived in fear. Many were self-​seeking and slippery –​not admirable, like people who were prepared to die for their faith. Yet nicodemites were legion, more than all the martyrs and exiles; perhaps more than all the contented churchgoers. Their ‘doings’, performed quietly, day in, day out, made a haphazard contribution to the erratic development of a policy we now call toleration. It proved difficult to go on persecuting those who would not witness, who went on conforming deceitfully, waiting for a change of government, a chance of reconciliation, and for mercy –​in silence. 51

Walsham, ‘England’s Nicodemites’, in Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, pp. 85–​101.

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Unpublished Dissertations

Reimer, Jonathan Mark, ‘The Life and Writings of Thomas Becon, 1512–​1567’ (University of Cambridge, PhD, 2016) Royal, Susan, ‘John Foxe’s “Acts and Monuments” and the Lollard Legacy in the Long English Reformation’ (University of Durham, PhD, 2014) Taplin, Mark, ‘Bernardino Ochino and the Zurich Polygamy Controversy of 1563’ (University of St Andrews, MLitt, 1995)

Index abjuration (recantation) 8, 29, 73, 152, 156, 166, 184, 212–​14, 234 Aconcio, Giacomo 185–​6, 188, 190, 193–​4, 197, 199–​202, 226, 235–​7 and new papacies 194 Satan’s Stratagems 190–​93, 199–​200, 232–​3 Act of Six Articles (1539) 29 Act of Uniformity (1559) 186 adiaphora (matters of indifference) 20 see fundamentals Aglionby, Edward 150n, 155, 161, 163, 209 Alford, Stephen 216 Allen, William, Cardinal 217, 221–​2 ambiguity see Nicodemites ambivalence see Nicodemites Ammonio, Andrea (Cosma della Rena) 78 Amos, prophet 18, 176, 176n, 183 Andreasi, Marsilio 178, 233 Anne, Duchess of Somerset 97 anti-​nicodemites 1–​6, 11, 19, 24–​6, 40, 77, 83, 117, 133–​4, 149, 164–​70, 234–​6 English anti-​nicodemites 205–​8, 212–​14, 217–​222 Italian anti-​nicodemites 27, 31, 68, 131–​49, 150–​64, 170–​7, 208–​9, 237 see Calvin, Bullinger, Negri, Vergerio, Vermigli Azpilcueta, Martin de, ‘Doctor Navarro’ 220 Aquinas, Thomas 19 Ariosto, Ludovico 76, 199 ars moriendi 154–​6 Ascham, Roger 84, 87, 144–​5 Atanagi, Dionigi 142 Augustine, of Hippo 19, 31, 194 Bacon, Nathaniel 227 Badoer, Federico, Venetian ambassador 104 Balserak, Jon 2, 148, 176n Bartlett, Kenneth 100, 107n, 109n Basel 27–​8, 130, 135–​6, 143, 157–​8, 165–​6, 172, 175n–​78, 189–​94 protests against burning of Servetus 179–​80, 182–​5 Becon, Thomas 170

Bell, Thomas 219–​20 Bible 16, 35, 53, 58–​9, 64, 69–​70, 74, 152, 189 used in debate about nicodemism 10, 18–​19, 26, 143, 156, 176, 183, 219 Bindoni, Bernardino 117 Bishop, George 203–​4 Bishops’ Book 29 Bizzarri, Pietro 30, 91n, 110–​111, 181, 183 Bobadilla, Nicolás 62 Bonner, Edmund, Bishop of London 71, 80 Bonvisi, Antonio 103 Book of Common Prayer (1549) 30, 168 (1552) 30, 169 Borrhaus, Martin 156–​7o, 175–​6, 183–​4 Bradford, John 31, 150, 162–​4, 211 Brigden, Susan 42n, ​43n, 77, 81n Bruno, Giordano 198–​99 Brussels 103–​4, 146, 167, 184 Bucer, Martin 10, 46, 64, 132, 151, 169, 175, 219 Consilium theologicum privatim conscriptum 167–​8, 183 Bullinger, Heinrich 132–​3, 138, 146, 168–​9, 172, 184, 195 Bunyan, John 227 Buonarotti, Michelangelo 55 Burton, Robert 229 Calandra, Endimio 93 Calvin, Jean (John) 1–​12, 26, 112, 146–​9, 172–​3, 168–​9, 177, 180, 184, 198, 202–​3, 212, 224 and Beneficio di Cristo 25, 64–​5, 115, 121–​26 and Francesco Spiera 150, 156–​60 and protest about execution of Servetus 143, 147, 179–​80, 190, 236 and spirituali 46, 65, 117, 230–​1 De vitandis superstitionibus … ad pseudonicodemos 169, 175–​177, 217, 221 early anti-​nicodemite works 40, 117, 132–​3, 143, 148, 168 Excuse à messieurs les nicodemites 2, 11, 83, 96, 133, 148–​9, 206 Quatre Sermons 168–​9, 208

274 Index Calvin, Jean (John) (cont.) reception of his anti-​nicodemite works in England 133, 168, 208 reception of his anti-​nicodemite works in Italy 83, 122, 132, 151 Cambridge 30, 69, 116, 178, 200–​02 Cambridge Connection 145n Cameron, Euan 16n, 23 Campanella, Tommaso 198 Campen, Jan van 36, 59, 129 Campion, Edmund 198 Capito, Wolfgang 10 Caravale, Giorgio 25n, 189n Carew, Peter 89–​90, 94, 101 Carley, James 70n Carnesecchi, Pietro 21n, 24, 46, 52–​59, 62–​5, 74, 85, 93, 116, 120–​1 Carranza, Bartolomé 73, 75 Casa, Giovanni della 99, 119, 135n Casale, Gregorio 79 Cassinese Benedictines 57, 61, 66, 117, 120–​23, 158, 202 Castellio, Sebastien 143, 147, 178–​9, 189–​90, 194–​5, 199–​200, 236 de hareticis an sint persequendi 179n Castiglione, Baldassare 77 Castiglione, Gian Battista 99, 109n, 191–​3 casuistry 206n, 220 Catechism 30 Catto, Jeremy 16n, 70n Cecil, William, Baron Burghley 87, 144, 146, 167, 183–​4, 186, 191, 198, 207 Execution of Justice, 215–​17 Challoner, Thomas, English ambassador 196 Charles v, Emperor 39–​40, 56, 86, 101, 103–​4, 138, 141, 144 Cheke, John 130 abjurations 72–​3, 184 de ecclesia and nicodemism 166–​9, 178–​85, 183 in exile 88–​90, 104, 107 kidnapping 43, 106, 110 Chillingworth, William 238–​9 Chrysostom, John 178, 194 church papists 1n, 3n, 9–​10, 187, 205–​6, 238 Chytraeus, David 202 Clitherow, Margaret 219 Clitherow, William 219–​20

Cockburn, Patrick 158–​61 cognitive dissonance reduction 94 Cole, Henry 38, 69 Colonna, Ascanio 140 Colonna, Vittoria 10n, 46, 50, 54–​7, 63, 66 Commendone, Giovanni Francesco 86–​87 concealment, concealing see Nicodemites concord 4n, 10, 192n, 197n, 199–​200 conformity 4, 8, 28, 30, 100, 111, 141, 144, 166–​8, 174, 183, 186–​187n, 206–​7, 217–​21 confusion 29, 59, 115–​126, 235 Contarini, Gasparo, Cardinal 25, 56–​7, 60, 62–​3, 79, 117 convers0s 17–​21 converts, conversion 11–​12, 17–​18, 30, 126, 134, 188, 219, 223–​4, 235 Cooke, Anthony 88, 180n, 191 Cottret, Bernard 3, 235 Coughton, Warwickshire 42–​3 Courtenay, Edward, Earl of Devon 12, 49, 78, 90–​91, 95–​112, 167, 202–​3 translation of Il Beneficio di Cristo  126–​13o Coverdale, Miles 163–​4, 169n Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury 8n, 12, 29–​31, 34, 45, 98, 130, 137, 142, 164 burning of 12, 75, 90–​1, 95 Homily of Salvation, teaching on salvation 30, 123, 125n, 129–​30, 203 recantations 12, 72, 75, 184, 213 Crome, Edward 3n, 29, 71, 213–​4 Cromwell, Thomas 37–​45, 50, 55, 80–​81, 94, 167 Crook, John 227 Curione, Celio Agostino 217 Curione, Celio Secondo 24, 26–​8, 132–​8, 140, 143, 147, 178–​80, 182–​4, 188–​202, 210, 217–​9, 236 De amplitudune beati regni dei 179, 183–​5, 190, 200–​201, 233 Editor of stories of Francesco Spiera 157–​8, 227 Excellent Admonition 172–​8, 184–​5, 222 Translator of Valdés Considerationi 24, 173, 231, 233 Curione, Orazio 178 De amplitudine misericordiae dei 178–​9

Index damnation 6, 19, 125, 133, 136, 143, 150, 156–​64, 210–​14, 224, 227–​9, 237; see salvation Damula, Marc’Antonio, Venetian ambassador 88–​9 Demosthenes, Orations 181 despair 11, 26, 135, 149–​50, 154–​5, 160–​1, 164, 214, 227n–​228 Dickinson, Emily 7 Diodati, Giovanni 223 Diodati, Niccolò 80, 87 diplomats, diplomacy 5, 8, 39, 42–​3, 56n, 76–​96, 103, 141, 223–​5, 235 dissimulation see Nicodemites ‘honest’ (‘offensive’) dissimulation 221 ‘right’ dissimulation 238 Dominis, Marcantonio de 222–​5 Donzellini, Girolamo 84–​7, 95 Dore, Martin 109 Dudley, John, Duke of Northumberland 48, 100 Dudley’s Conspiracy 107 Duffy, Eamon 67n, 71, 154n, 218n, 234 Edward vi, King of England 12, 30, 47–​8, 72, 76, 78–​9, 82–​4, 97–​100, 126, 128–​30 Edwards, John 72n, 74n Eire, Carlos M. N. 1n, 4, 58n, 148 Elizabeth i, Queen of England 196, 205–​8, 214–​216 As Princess Elizabeth 167, 189, 193 Erasmian education 189 Queen of Nicodemites 185–​204 English Carthusians 21, 39 English Hospice in Rome (later English College) 47–​8, 52–​55, 117, 218 equivocation, see Nicodemites Erasmus, Desiderius 9, 15, 20–​23, 78, 135–​6, 151, 172–​9, 189, 233, 235 and fundamentals 20 and holy cunning 15, 20 Enchiridion 58 Hyperaspistes 20 Eucharist (communion) 16, 52, 124–​5 Evangelicals  French 4 English 3n, 9–​10, 29–​31, 51, 142, 161, 166, 187, 212–​4, 234

275 Family of Love 188 Feckenham, John, Abbot of Westminster 215 Fenlon, Dermot 6, 52n, 67 Ferrar, Nicholas 24n, 230–​32 Ferrara 26, 90, 106–​09 Firpo, Luigi 197 Firpo, Massimo 3n, 18n, 21n, ​22–23, 48n, 60, 66, 195n Flaminio, Marcantonio 9, 24, 35–​7, 46, 53–​65, 71–​4, 140–​42, 182, 185, 202, 226, 230 authorship of Il Beneficio di Cristo 115–​28 book list of 50, 52, 57, 60, 65, 124 Fletcher, Catherine 93 Florio, John 226 Forest, John 19n, 28–​9 Foxe, John 52, 71–​3, 75, 144–​5, 164, 167, 184, 204, 211, 237 and nicodemites 211–​14, 222 Freeman, Thomas 212, ​213n, ​214n Fulke William 203 fundamentals ( fundamenta) 20, 193, 224, 232–​3; see adiaphora Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop of Winchester 99–​102, 105, 111, 127, 142, ​143n Geste, Edmund 200, 236 Giannetti, Guido, da Fano 30, 79–​82, 87, 95, 98, 128, 181–​3 Giberti, Gian Matteo Bishop of Verona 53–​6 Gigli, family 78 Ginzburg, Carlo 116, 173 Il nicodemismo 4 Golding, Arthur 201–​04, 229–​30 Goldwell, Thomas, Bishop of St Asaph 38, 45n, 55, 63, 67–​9, 87n Gómez de Silva, Ruy 90, 104 Gonzaga, Ercole, Regent of Mantua 26, 49, 56, 79, 82n, 87, 93, 134–​5 Gonzaga, Giulia 22–​4, 59, 74 Goodman, Christopher 148 Goodwin, John 232–​3 Grey, Lady Jane 85n, 100, 162–​4, 211 Gribaldi, Matteo 131–​4, 150–​61, 211 Guicciardini, Francesco 77 Gunther, Karl 171n, 207–​9

276 Index Haemstede, Adrian van 191 Harding, Thomas 163 Harrison, Lucas 201–​03 Harvel, Edmund 35–​41, 85 Hemmingsen, Niels 202–​03 Henry viii, King of England 12, 33, 37, 39–​45, 54–​6, 67, 81, 85, 97, 127 diplomacy of his divorce 34, 43, 78–​80, 94 oaths 28–​9 understanding of doctrine of justification 30 see Pole, de unitate Herbert, George 230–​31 Hoby, Philip 88, 90, 102–​07, 111, 180, 236 Hoby, Thomas 88, 90, 107 and n, 139, 180–​1 Holy Spirit 23, 53, 231 Hooper, John 142, 168n Horne, Robert 168, 208n Hutchison, Ann 70n Il Beneficio di Cristo 9–​12, 64, 98, 131, 152, 162, 190, 226, 235–​6 Courtenay’s translation 97–​100, 111–​112, 126–​3o doctrinal confusions 68, 98, 121–​126, 185 Golding’s translation 201–​04 in seventeenth-​century England  229–​230 sources and preparation 24–​5, 36, 59, 64–​5 Index of Prohibited Books  ‘Pauline’ (1559) 120 Venetian (1549) 99, 119, 131 Inquisitions 27, 50, 52, 64–​5, 72, 93, 118, 159, 179–​182, 196, 216, 224 Roman 23, 51n, 64, 66, 85, 116, 120–​21, 198, 236 Venetian 12, 26, 40, 85, 135, 151–​7 Jan Łaski 138–​9 Jesuits 62–​3, 64n, 70, 198, 203, 214–​221 Jewell, John 208n Joseph, of Arimathea 179 Julius iii, pope (Giovanni Maria del Monte) 31, 66, 137, 143, 181 justification by faith alone see salvation

Kempis, Thomas à 61 Imitation of Christ 60–​61, 70, 122, 125 The folowinge of Chryste 70 Killigrew, Henry 107, 109 King’s Book (Act for the Advancement of True Religion) 29 Knox, John 148 Lando, Ortensio 84–​6, 95 Langdale, Alban 219–​20 Latimer, Hugh 31–​4, 162 Lily, George 35–​41, 55–​7, 63, 67–​9 Locke, John 236 Lollards 16–​18, 21, 212–​14 Loyola, Ignatius 62, 67n, 74, 125n, 218n Lucca 26, 54, 78–​80, 82, 84, 92, 170–​71 Luther, Martin 6, 12, 20–​7, 33, 37, 46, 50, 52, 59, 64–​5, 75, 122–​5, 151, 198, 208n, 213 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 4n, 8n, 22n, 130, 186n Machiavelli, Niccolò 77 Mantova, Benedetto da 25n, 158, 202, 230 Marcellus ii, pope (Marcello Cervini)  118–​19, 123, 143 Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, 45n, 54 Marillac, Michel de 81 Marshall, Peter 9n, 16, 19n, 29n, 42n–​43n, 215–​16 martyrologists 6, 237 Mary i, Queen of England 12, 31, 48–​51, 55, 79, 101–​12, 136, 141–​7, 150 Marian persecution and nicodemism 67–​76, 85–​95, 165–​68, 178–​85 Mary, Queen of Scots 220 Mason, John, English ambassador, 88–​9, 91–​4, 108, 184 Massacre on St Bartholomew’s Day 196, 201–​4 Mayer, Thomas F., 9n, 33n, 73, 121 McDiarmid, John 7n, 31n, 167n, 173n, 178n, 181 Meditationes vitae Christi 62 Melanchthon, Philipp 25, 64–​5, 115, 122, 125, 129, 151, 175n, 189 Menchi, Silvana Seidel 199 Erasmo in Italia 23n metaphors for nicodemism 31

Index Milton, John 236 misericordia (mercy) 62, 123, 178–​9, 185, 188, 210, 222, 233–​8 Moors, concealment of religion 18 Morata, Olympia 189, 199 More, Thomas 7, 21, 31, 92 Morison, Richard 35–​41, 44, 49–​50, 84, 102, 129, 138, 143, 178–​80 Morone, Giovanni, Cardinal 22n, ​23, 57, 66, 73–​4, 118–​21, 137–​44, 182, 190, 206 in Ochino’s Dialogi xxx 195 Musculus, Wolfgang 11 Temporisour (Proscaerus) 11, 146, 165, 174–​6 Namaan, the Syrian 18 Navagero, Bernardo 73 Negri, Francesco 132–​5, 139, 148–​9 Della tragedia intitolata libero arbitrio 21, 139–​41, 210 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, 229 new popes, new papacy 158, 194 nicodemism 1–​12, 22–​4, 27–​8, 57, 68, 75, 77, 95–​112, 123–​5, 141–​7, 172–​3, 183–​201, 230–​1, 235–​8 catholic nicodemism 219–​222 laboratory of 236 metaphors for 21, 31, 176 nursery of 33–​51, 37, 178 pastoral nicodemism 167–​8, 183–​4, 235 political nicodemism 215–​16, 224–​5 Nicodemites, behaviour of  absenteeism 8, 53, 60, 72 ambiguity 24, 116, 174n ambivalence 55, 74, 172, 195, 235 being gradual 7, 10, 24, 190, 234 being inscrutable 37, 39, 145, 234 being obscure 7, 100, 109, 234 concealment 8, 18–​19, 25, 41, 53, 103, 180, 190, 199, 224 dissembling 28, 133, 171, 218, 234 dissimulation 6, 10, 15, 17, 19, 28, 42, 44, 77, 79n, 159, 171, 173, 187, 199, 207, 210 dithering 94, 234 ducking 72, 109, 177, 234 equivocation 3, 220–​1 floating 11, 224 hedging 234

277 preaching ‘Christ masked’ 25 rune-​reading 234 running away 234 secrecy 17n, 41, 55, 60, 74, 119, 141, 212–​13 seeking consolation 9, 16, 54, 58, 63–​4, 75, 185, 188, 202 silence 18–​19, 22n, 53, 66, 92, 141, 176n, 188, 193, 199, 215, 233, 238 telling it slant 7, 183 trimming 234 volte-​face 8, 76, 89, 93–​5 waiting 9, 21, 23, 26, 31, 37, 40–​41, 68, 86, 112, 134, 137, 142, 159, 177, 182–​3, 234 wearing masks 223–​5 Nicodemus  bad Nicodemus 3 figure of 2, 233 good Nicodemus 2–​3, 174–​6 Gospel of Nicodemus 3 Ochino, Bernardino 10 Dialogi xxx and attack on persecution 195, 200, 236 hatred of new papacies 194 in England 30–​31, 137 in Italy 10, 24–​5, 54–​6 in Zurich 175, 184, 191–​4 Laberinti 194 Ovid, Metamorphoses 202 Oxford 30, 69, 72, 90, 138, 161, 166, 197, 215n, 230, 232 Padua 11, 53, 90–​1, 134–​5, 151–​5 English exiles in 5, 11, 33–​41, 45, 98, 106–​110, 180–​81, 230 Page, William 87–​8 Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of Canterbury, 167, 184, 186 Parks, G. B. 43, 47n Parr, Catherine, Queen of England 127 Pasquin, Pasquino 133–​6 Curione’s Pasquino in estasi 136, 210 pasquinades 133–​5, 136n, 140, 172–​3, 190 Pate, Richard 56, 81, 83, 93 Paul iii, pope (Alessandro Farnese) 137, 141 Wonderful News of the Death of Paul iii 81n, 140

278 Index Paul iv, pope (Gian Pietro Carafa) 72–​4, 89, 120, 126, 143, 145, 181–​2, 236 as Cardinal Carafa 37, 66 Perkins, William 203, 228 Perna, Pietro 194 Perne, Andrew 200, 236 persecution, and nicodemism 1, 4–​12, 15, 21, 136, 147–​9, 195, 207, 210, 214–​216, 226, 232 by catholics in Italy 27, 159, 174 by protestants in Geneva 143, 147, 190 hatred of 136, 143, 179, 186–​95, 197–​200 of catholics in Elizabethan England  219–​221 of Lollards and Waldenses 16–​18, 213 of protestants in Marian England 12, 49, 71–​73, 161–​65, 182 year of persecution 166–​7 Persons, Robert 187, 214, 217–​18 Peryn, William 70–​71 Peto, William 45n, 55–​56, 67–​70, 73, 83 Pettegree, Andrew 1, 6, 144, 167, 200n Philip ii, King of Spain 48, 72–​73, 102 Philpot, John 31, 173 piety 52–​53, 58n, 75, 99, 108, 229–​230n nicodemite piety 53–​65, 74 see spirituality Pio da Carpi, Rodolfo 43 Pole, David, Bishop of Peterborough 215 Pole, Reginald, Cardinal 6, 12, 31, 86n, ​87, 97–​9, 103, 105, 108 at Council of Trent 27, 65–​6 and Il Beneficio di Cristo 117–​21, 127–​30 anti-​nicodemites’ case against 131–​49 apologia 74 circle of 33–​51, 81, 83, 130, 178 contemporary assessments of 52, 72–​5, 213–​14, 218 de unitate 38–​41, 44, 209–​10 dissimulation of 6, 44, 67, 210 explanatory letter to Otto Truchess 68 in Marian England 68–​75, 80, 91–​2, 184 piety of 9, 52–​75, 234 Politi, Ambrogio Catarino 25n, 59, 117–​19, 124, 140, 145, 167 Ponet, John 129, 142–​3, 148 Potter, Christopher 232–​3 Poullain, Valérand 175 Pownall, Robert 176

Prayer Books, see Books of Common Prayer Priuli, Alvise 52, 58, 61, 68, 73, 117, 167 Prowde, William 207 Pucci, Francesco 185, 188–​189n, 192, 196–​9, 215, 233–​8 Quadra, Alvaro de, Spanish ambassador 187 Racaut, Luc 148n recantation see abjuration reconciliation 6, 10, 26, 72, 116, 124, 158, 188, 202, 218, 230, 234 recusants 187, 205, 215, 217, 238 Regensburg, Colloquy of 57, 60, 72 Regnans in excelsis 196 Renard, Simon, Imperial ambassador 102 Rhaetian republic 135 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa 229 Rivius, Joannes 85 Rogers, John 142 Rogers, Thomas 228 Russell, Francis, Duke of Bedford 88, 90, 102, 107–​108, 110, 163, 191, 194 Ryrie, Alec 6–​8, 32n, 228 Being Protestant, 227 The Gospel and Henry viii 3n, 17, 29, 234 salvation, doctrines of 15n, 27, 68, 98, 122, 129, 151, 228 and Council of Trent 27, 52, 66, 119, 141 justification by faith alone (sola fide) 12, 21–​3, 27, 35, 50, 57, 60, 66, 115–​17, 124, 142 predestination 123–​5, 159–​61, 179, 188–​90, 193, 199, 232 reprobation 123, 125, 157–​158, 229 restoration (Cassinese teaching) 122, 158–​60 universal salvation (il cielo aperto) 123, 147, 190, 198–​9, 230, 233 Sarpi, Paolo 222–​25, 232, 235 Satan’s stratagems see Aconcio, Giacomo Schivenoglia, Aloisio 49 Scrymgeour (Scrimger), Henry 2n, 153 secrecy see Nicodemites seminaries 69, 205, 216 Seripando, Girolamo, Cardinal 65

279

Index Servetus, Miguel, execution of 143, 179, 194, 236 controversy about execution, 143, 147, 179–​80, 182, 185, 190, 194 Seymour, Edward, Duke of Somerset 81 Sforza, Buona, Queen of Poland 90–​1, 107, 109 Siculo, Giorgio 2n, 158–​62, 164, 196, 199, 235, 238 silence see Nicodemites Simoncelli, Paolo 131n, 141–​4 Sleidan, Johannes 164 Somerset, Fiona 11, 16 Southwell, Robert 217, 220–​21 Sozzini, Fausto 191, 232 Sozzini, Lelio 191 Spiera, Francesco 11, 22, 135, 143, 149–​164, 226–​229 ‘Second Spieras’ 228 spirituali 6, 9, 23, 25–​7, 29, 70 and n, 73, 79, 106, 111, 173, 190, 197, 223, 234–​6 and il Beneficio di Cristo, 64–​5, 115–​126, 202–​03 and Pole 53–​66, 74, 234 and Throckmorton 46–​51 and Vergerio 68, 134–​7, 140–​3, 147–​9 spirituality 58–​9, 61, 69–​70, 122; see piety Starkey, Thomas 33–​4, 36–​9, 41, 92, 129 Dialogue between Pole and Lupset 33, 46, 65 Stranger Churches 139, 191, 197 Strassburg 90, 124, 167, 170–​72, 174, 178, 183–​4 Suárez de Figueroa, Gómez, Count of Feria 75, 145 suicide 150, 156–​60, 211, 214 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels 8 Taylor, Rowland 142 Tedeschi, John 226 Ten Articles (1536) 29 Theatines 37, 53 Theobald, Thomas 45 Thomas, William 47, 84, 139 Throckmorton (Fragmarton, Fragamarton), Michael 41–​51 among spirituali 46–​48 book list 37n, 50–​51, 57–​61, 118, 124 in Italy 35–​8, 48, 53, 55, 69, 108 nicodemite agent 40–​46, 48–​50

Throckmorton family, of Coughton  42, ​43n Throckmorton, George 42 Throckmorton, Robert 43 toleration 4, 180, 188, 192, 197n, 200n, 208, 232–​3, 236n, 238 Tournes, Jean de 126 Trent, Council of, doctrine of salvation see salvation Truchess, Otto, Cardinal 68 Tunstall, Cuthbert, Bishop of Durham 215 Turchetti, Mario 192n Udall, Nicholas 97n, 127 Valdés, Juan de 3n, 10, 31, 46, 53–​60, 237 Alfabeto Cristiano 122 and Beneficio di Cristo 115, 122–​5 and nicodemism 18, 23–​5, 60, 75, 142, 173, 190, 197, 219 Considerationi 65, 173, 226, 230–​32 Vanni, Pietro 12, 67, 76–​95, 78, 100, 104–​12, 167, 181–​3, 235 Venice 5, 11–​12, 24–​6, 34–​40, 56, 76, 82–​95, 106–​112, 115–​16, 130, 134–​5, 152, 166, 180–​4, 222–​4 Vergerio, Pier Paolo 10, 231, 237 and Francesco Spiera 153, 156–​9, 164, 226 and Il Beneficio di Cristo 115, 119, 121 his case against nicodemites 68, 131–​49, 209–​10, 212, 224 in exile 157, 172, 208 in Italy 10, 24, 35, 115, 134–​5 Vermigli, Pietro Martire 1, 8, 10, 56, 208, 233n, 237n against nicodemites 132, 146, 169, 175, 177, 184, 217, 221–​2, 224 and Spiera 161, 164, 211 Cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull 1, 165, 170–​2, 184, 208–​9, 237 Commonplaces 209, 237n in England 30–​1, 98, 128, 130, 137–​8, 161–​2, 166 in Italy 10, 24–​6, 202 in Strassburg 170 in Zurich 184, 188, 192, 208 Viterbo 11, 24, 42, 46, 52–​65, 67–​71, 74

280 Index Wabuda, Susan 6, 29 Waldenses (Waldensians) 16–​18, 213 Walsham, Alexandra 206–​7, 227 Wanegffelen, Thierry 21n Willett, Andrew 198 Willoughby, James 37n, 70n Wilson, Thomas 98–​9, 107, 110–​11, 181n Wolfe, John 197, 216n Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal 78–​80, 93 Woodes, Nathaniel 211 Wotton, Henry 78, 222–​23 Wright, David F. 2, 132n

Wroth, Thomas 88, 180, 191, 203 Württemburg, Christoph, Duke of, 141, 146 Wyatt, Thomas 42n, 4​ 3n, 59, 64, 77 Wyatt, Thomas, the younger 89, 101 Wyclif, John 16 Wythers, Fabian 209 year of three popes 120, 143, 181 Zagorin, Perez 3n, 19n Zuliani, Federico 3 Zurich 175n, 178, 188, 191–​2, 194–​5, 200