Political Thought in England Tyndale to Hooker

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THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 225

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND TYNDALE TO HOOKER

EDITORS OF The Home University Library of Modern Knowledge GILBERT MURRAY, O.M., D.C.L., F.B G. N. CLARK, D.LITT., F.B.A.

Political Thought in England TYNDALE TO HOOKER

CHRISTOPHER MORRIS Fellow of King’s College and Lecturer in History in the University of Cambridge

Geoffrey Cumberlege

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON

NEW

YORK

1953

TORONTO

First published in 1953

1

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

ONULP

FOR HELEN

007619

CONTENTS FOREWORD

......

INTRODUCTION

.....

I. THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST

...

II. THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE

I 5

.

27

III. THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS .

44

IV. THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS: V. THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS: VI. THE

DEFENCE

CEEDINGS

.

INDEX

.

.68

II

.

.89

THE

.

.

.

.

.110

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

-143

.

.

.

.

172

.....

199

VIII. THE PURITAN PROTEST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I

OF

VII. THE CATHOLIC PROTEST

IX. RICHARD HOOKER

.

ix

.

QUEEN’S

PRO¬

127

215

FOREWORD I have

not

attempted

to

deal

with

theological,

economic, or legal and constitutional thought except in so far as they are directly relevant to political theory, although I have been anxious not to define my subject too narrowly. As a rule I have preferred to draw on representative and, if possible, outstanding writers of various schools rather than attempt a comprehensive survey of all minor pamphleteers. Exigencies of space would have meant the dismissal of most of such writers in a sentence apiece. I have begun with Tyndale rather than with More on my title-page because, inevitably, my main theme is the impact of Protestantism upon Tudor political thought. In my opening chapter I have tried to show how little political thought there was in England on the eve of the Reformation and how little of what there was can be called new. I have given more space to the second half of the period for the simple reason that it contains more political thought. One great Tudor thinker, Francis Bacon, has been excluded since he is dealt with in Dr. Gooch’s succeeding volume in this series.

Knox is discussed because

of his English

connections, but other interesting Scots, such as Sir David Lindsay, John Major, George Buchanan, Sir Thomas Craig, and King James VI have had to be omitted; for Scotland before 1603 was as much foreign

X

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

soil as France and exchanged more intellectual com¬ modities with France than with England. It is to be hoped that I need no excuse for including Shakespeare, the greatest of all Tudor thinkers, even if he wrote no political literature in pamphlet form. I have adopted modern spelling for all quotations (though not for book titles) holding that this makes it easier to obtain the exact meaning which a Tudor writer had for his contemporaries, who would not have found him quaint or archaic. ‘Musick’ and ‘tyger’ meant to an Elizabethan what ‘music’ and ‘tiger’ mean to us. To economize in words and to avoid euphemism I have written ‘disembowelled’ for ‘hanged, drawn and quartered ’. I am greatly indebted to the kindness and scholarship of the Provost of Oriel, who read this book in typescript and made many helpful and constructive suggestions. It is less easy to express what I owe to my wife, not only

for

certain

the

good

obscurities

sense

which

of style

and

saved from

me

from

some

mis¬

leading statements, but for her unfailing patience and encouragement.

1953

C. M.

INTRODUCTION In one sense sixteenth-century Englishmen had no political theory whatsoever, for they had no theory of what we call the State. The theories they had were theories of Society. They discussed the offices of certain persons in Society, of king or noble, priest or magistrate.

They discussed the ends, natural and

supernatural, which Society was meant to serve. They discussed the character, the origins, and the inter¬ relationship of various sorts of law which held good in Society and of various authorities with which Society confronted its members. Most of all they discussed the importance to Society of obedience to authority, although they remained aware of limits which, in a healthy society, no authority would think of over¬ stepping. The King, moreover, was only one of the authorities. There were others—the Law, the People, the Church, God, and (according to some thinkers) Conscience.

None

of these authorities had as yet

been conflated or confused with any other;

and the

problem facing social theorists was that of rendering to each authority its due. Social theory had of course a Christian setting and was supposed to have a universal application. Society was in fact generally called the Christian Common¬ wealth and many Tudor Englishmen, Protestants as well as Catholics, showed reluctance to admit that the Society they spoke of meant England and not Christen¬ dom. Nor did they find it easy to think of politics except in terms of persons. They talked more of the 2*5 A

2

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

monarch than of monarchy, more of the sovereign than of sovereignty, more of the Prince and his responsi¬ bilities than of the Crown and its functions. In the same

way,

they understood

individual

rights and

liberties more readily than Right and Liberty, for their minds did not gravitate instinctively towards the abstract and inanimate. The content of sixteenth-century thought was often * radical ’ in every sense. It was new; it was sweeping; and it ran deep. Yet the forms of thought remained conservative. Old words were apt to be used for new things, just as they were by Columbus when he called his new continent the Indies. It was still supposed that all truth was already known and this made men unwilling to recognize the new discoveries they made. For long they allowed irreconcilable concepts to lie side by side in their minds because they could not bring themselves to cast out any doctrine which had been immemorially received. Tudor Englishmen were still mediaeval

enough to persist in discussing political

matters in what to us are not political terms; and if we wish to elicit or elucidate Tudor political ideas we must accustom ourselves to finding them wrapped up in the traditional language of theology or of jurisprudence. In the sixteenth century the state became an obvious fact, and the art and craft of statesmanship were con¬ sciously pursued and practised. Yet theories of the state as such remained curiously inexplicit; and most men thought of the state as existing not in its own right but in relation to other things, as subservient not to laws of its own being but to some external law.

INTRODUCTION

3

Perhaps the men of the sixteenth century were wise in their generation. A political theory which is almost wholly social has the virtue of reminding us that the state is the servant of society and not its master. There is much to be said for preferring the concrete to the abstract and the person to the thing. It is more salutary to look at the living and imperfect ruler who actually confronts us than at the inanimate, theoretically perfect state which philosophers maybe able to conceive. Much too is gained by making an indirect approach to politics, for the most profound and fruitful of political theories have been the by-product of some theory of Man or of the Universe; and the greatest political thinkers have seen politics sub specie aeternitatis. We owe something also to Tudor conservatism, even to Tudor pedantry, because, in a century of social and religious revolution, they kept alive intellectual tradi¬ tions which might otherwise have perished. It was probably fortunate that the rebels were learned men who in breaking with one tradition turned naturally to another. If the revolts had not also been revivals, the ideas handed on to us from the sixteenth century might well have proved shallow, ephemeral, and sterile. The wisdom of the ancients might have reached us only in roundabout ways, not as a living and continuous tradition of thought.

It was the sixteenth-century

revivals—of Plato and Cicero, of Plutarch and St Paul—which shaped our inheritance in political ideas. Nearly all Tudor political philosophy was written in the form of pamphlets. It was an age of stress and violence in which sects, governments, and parties

4

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

called on the philosophers for propaganda; and the times were not propitious for the making of systematic treatises. Even Hooker’s treatise is also propaganda. Tudor thinkers were not less great because they wrote with a controversial rancour which we may find dis¬ tasteful. ‘ Bitter and earnest writing

said Bacon, ‘ must

not hastily be condemned; for men cannot contend civilly and without affectation [emotion] about things which they hold dear and precious.’ Bitterness wras all the more inevitable because sixteenth-century conflicts were conflicts about the eternal verities. The Reforma¬ tion lifted English politics on to a higher plane. It ensured that for well over a century our political parties were not mere factions and that their struggles were not solely for place and power and interest but for rival con¬ ceptions of human character and purpose. Fanaticism and intolerance were the price paid for such grandeur. Without the Reformation, English political thought might well have developed too early into a concern writh means and not with ends, into the study of new techniques for the gaining or keeping of political power. That we have come to ask why power is justified at all, that we have come to expect politicians to have views on what ought to be, not merely on what can be done, we owe to the entry of religious conflict into politics. The conflict was cruel and bitter but at least it taught us that, even in politics, we need not live by bread alone and that society may itself pursue and must allow its members to pursue the things that are not Caesar’s.

Chapter One THE The

LEGACY

FROM

THE

PAST

cardinal principles and problems, commonplaces

and assumptions of Tudor political thought are epito¬ mized in Shakespeare’s Henry V, during a symposium held round a camp-fire in the small hours of St. Crispin’s Day. There are three themes: the nature—perhaps the mystery—of kingship; the duty of subjects to obey; the responsibilities of rulers and of ruled. ‘The king is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me.’ Yet somehow ‘his affections are higher mounted than ours ’. ‘ We know enough if we know we are the king’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.’ On the other hand ‘ If the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make. ... If these men do not die well it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it, whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.’ Above all, kings and subjects alike ‘have no wings to fly from God’; and although ‘every sub¬ ject’s duty is the king’s’, nevertheless ‘every subject’s soul is his own ’. The themes are religious and they are mediaeval. The setting is in a world of mediaeval chivalry, romantic¬ ized as much here by Shakespeare as it was by Spenser in The Faerie Queene. We shall not fully understand Tudor minds unless we recognize their kinship with

6

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

mediaeval minds. The political behaviour of Tudor statesmen

was

often

enough

stark,

ruthless,

and

amoral: it would have shocked the more devout of mediaeval rulers. Nevertheless these Tudor statesmen paid lip-service at the very least to all the moral platitudes of mediaeval thought; and the intellectual framework within which sixteenth-century thinkers constructed their political philosophy was a framework accepted, often uncritically, from medieval Schoolmen. Bates and Williams at their camp-fire were perplexed but they were not more muddled than their betters had been for several centuries. Precise and subtle minds, the minds of trained lawyers and logicians, minds passionately aspiring to clarity and system, had striven to codify all the relevant maxims. Yet the legacy of the Middle Ages in political philosophy,though it was often profound and fruitful, was a legacy of disorder. The Schoolmen had tried to be all-embracing, to exclude nothing that the prophets, the evangelists, the fathers, and the mystics had revealed and to include much of Aristotle and a little of the Roman lawyers. Too many ingredients had spoiled the broth. The Scholastics wrere lacking in a sense of history and consequently tried to reconcile with Catholic Christianity precepts appropriate only to pre-Christian Jewry or to a church still threatened by a Nero or a Diocletian. In the same way later Schoolmen tried to graft upon a loosely integrated feudal society political and legal precepts which had been relevant to the centralized empires of Trajan or Justinian or to Aristotle’s compact city-state. The apparent order and unity of Scholastic thought

THE LEGACY

FROM

7

THE PAST

concealed an inner chaos. It resembled an attempt to use a junk shop as a living room. Indeed it was worse still, for some of the furniture was never fitted in at all but had to be left out in the rain. Certain obvious facts were admitted grudgingly to exist, but no satisfactory niche was ever found for them in the official theory. Theory still clung to ideas of universal empire long after national monarchies had come to be the facts that mattered.

Theory remained strictly feudal,

basing

everything upon lordship over land, long after the rise of city-states and of merchants who owned money but not land. The theorists,

too,

were over-intellectual.

They

assumed an ordered universe in which everything had its demonstrable and rational purpose, divine or human. They allowed too little for the imponderable irrationali¬ ties of folklore or tradition. The Scholastics saw rulers as beings ordained by God or elected by the people to discharge specific functions which could be defined, explained, and limited. The people, however, went on believing that kings were wielders of a potent magic, primaeval, indefinable, and almost meaningless, but none the less important. In a sense the Schoolmen were Whigs while the people remained Tory. The mediaeval Church was sometimes the enemy of super¬ stition—witness its struggle to abolish trial by ordeal. Yet superstition is not abolished however pointedly it is ignored; and Tudor political thinking was the more realistic because it took some account of superstitions and irrational sentiments and facts. Neither feudal lawyers nor Thomist philosophers believed that king-

8

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

ship was a mystery not to be rationally explained. They supposed that they knew exactly what kings were and what kings were for. But Tudor theologians and Tudor dramatists often anticipated James I in holding that kings were hedged with a magical and indefinable divinity. Nor were even the most hard-headed rulers exempt from such irrationalities. It was reported that Henry VII spared Lambert Simnel’s life because Simnel’s friends had managed to have him anointed with the holy oil which was thought to make even a pretender sacrosanct. One possible misunderstanding must be obviated. A king’s sanctity by no means set him free to rule as he liked. The priest-kings of antiquity were circumscribed by custom and tabu, sometimes to the extent of having almost every action of their daily lives laid down for them by law. The priest is not free to depart in any jot or tittle from the ritual he exists to perform. The Roman vestal virgins were exceedingly sacred but, for that very reason, had to remain exceedingly virginal. The rois thaumaturges of the Dark Ages were also rois faineants. Kings were responsible for justice; and justice was a powerful form of magic which had to be carried out if unavenged and unappeased ghosts were not to ruin the crops or cause a pestilence. And the course of justice could not be arbitrary’ but ran in channels that were fixed and known.

The primaeval

magic of

monarchy did not make monarchs absolute or irre¬ sponsible. Nor should a piece of primaeval sentiment or folklore be confused with a full-blown political theory.

THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST

9

Partly because they were prepared to accept the irrational, some Tudor thinkers can be called scientific. Science is concerned with facts even when they are ‘brute’, untidy facts which cannot be rationally explained or fitted into an orderly scheme, even when they are ugly, unedifying facts which do not conform to prevailing moral standards. A few sixteenth-century thinkers began to introduce into political theory the study of political facts regardless of the intellectual or moral consequences. By the end of the century Bacon was to write ‘We are much beholden to Machiavel and others that write what men do and not what they ought to do.’ This was not the whole truth about Machiavelli but it reveals much about Bacon. Among the facts of which Tudor thinkers took account was the element of unreason in men’s political allegiances. Sovereign king and sovereign nation were facts which had to be admitted however difficult it was to integrate them with the rationale of feudal contract or of Catholic unity. After all, hereditary monarchy is illogical and indefensible, while nationality is known to cut untidily and inconveniently across the ‘natural’ and logical boundaries set by geography or race or language. In political theory, as in constitutional fact, the Tudors and their subjects inherited from earlier centuries a hotch-potch of contradictions, ambiguities, and unanswered questions. Conflicting views had long been held simultaneously and new ideas had never swept away the old ones because anything old was thought too respectable to be abolished. Old maxims, like old laws, remained ‘on the books’ and might always

IO

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

be quoted or revived. Theoretically, too, new laws were never made. Legislation meant declaring what the old law already was and always had been. On paper all acts were declaratory acts. In the same way truth was supposedly already known. In the Litany Anglicans still pray that the magistrates be given grace to ‘ main¬ tain’ truth—not to encourage any search for undis¬ covered truth. When in 1480 Caxton published an outline of science called The Mirror of the World, it was in fact a translation of a French book written two and a half centuries before and based on Latin sources that were older still. Much the same attitude prevailed in political thought. New discoveries about government were not to be expected and all that the political philosopher might do was to make his glosses upon the recognized authorities. It was known that the authorities sometimes appeared contradictory but the contradictions, it was thought, must be apparent and not real; and it was for the philoso¬ pher to reconcile them and to elicit the whole truth which the authorities had partially revealed. Ingenuity could only be exercised in exegesis or in synthesis, for the authorities could not be wrong and must, between them, have covered all the ground. Synthesis, however, was not easily achieved. When Sir John Fortescue wrote in The Governance of England (c.

1470) that, whereas the French monarchy was

‘ regale ’ (absolute) the English monarchy was ‘ politicum et regale’, both limited and absolute, he was not, technically, guilty of a contradiction in terms. The distinction meant something to a feudal lawyer and it

THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST

II

corresponded with a good many of the facts. The English king was limited in some spheres and unlimited in others. This was not necessarily due to the alleged English genius for compromise nor yet to the alleged English incapacity for logic. It was largely because the king was king in so many different ways, because in his person so many different traditions intermingled. Constitutionalists

spoke

sometimes

of ‘the

mixed

monarchy ’1 of England; they might without injustice have called it muddled monarchy. The king was the heir, literally, of all the ages—of concepts inherited from the folklore of primitive Teutonic tribes, from the Stoic philosophers and the Roman lawyers, from Hebrew and Christian theocracy, from the military and economic requirements of an earlier feudal society. The king was many things at once—the wielder of primasval quasi-priestly magic, the Lord’s anointed and the transmitter of the wonder-working blood royal, the tribal leader and protector in time of war, the feudal overlord of all the land, the fountain of justice and of honour, the guardian of ‘ the king’s peace ’, the sovereign giver or declarer of the law, the bearer of the secular sword on behalf of Holy Church, and (in a rudimentary way) the main switch in an administrative machine that was later to be called the State. Theories as to the basis of his power were scarcely less numerous. He was the ordained of God; he was the rightful heir to a piece of real estate; he was the elect of the people. On the whole what may be called the feudal con1 The phrase has a long history dating back to Aristotle’s Politics.

12

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

ception of kingship had prevailed. The king was superior but not supreme, the greatest feudal lord, differing in degree but not in kind from other lords. All lords had estates, and the king’s, being the greatest, was the ‘realm’. His ‘dominion’ meant lordship over a ‘ domain ’, and government could be regarded as little more than the highest branch of estate management. All lords had their rights and jurisdictions, the king’s being only the highest and the best. All lords, however, had not only rights but duties; and the king, like other lords, had contractual relations with his tenants and was no less subject to the law of the land. Besides, the rights of the feudal aristocracy were no more disputable than the king’s; and the place and function of the nobles in society was held to be no less a part of the divinely planned natural order. If a king had any kind of divine right, the nobles had it too. All right had to be divine right if it was to be right at all. Some mediaeval lawyers distinguished between the king’s functions as judge and as ruler. As judge he was limited and as ruler, in his gubernaculum, unlimited. But too much must not be made of this. The dis¬ tinction over-simplifies what was in fact very confused; and it distinguishes the indistinguishable. It is hard to see what governing a mediaeval king had done—at any rate before the fourteenth century—except in his capacity as judge. Government had meant very largely the administration of justice, making the king’s writ run, enforcing the king’s peace. The King’s Council and even his Exchequer were courts of law. Justice was enforced for its own sake but was also deemed a great

13

THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST

source of revenue, and itinerant justices were itinerant tax-collectors as well. Government officials had juris¬ dictions rather than departments; and prime ministers were called justiciars or chancellors. Even the mobiliza¬ tion of the army could be done by an Assize of Arms; and Parliament was not only a High Court but the Grand Inquest of the nation. It legislated by pronouncing judgements. We might almost say that modern governing is a by-product of medieval judging. Nevertheless the growth of self-conscious national feeling was beginning to increase the importance and prestige of the king as formal head of the realm vis-a-vis foreign kingdoms. At the same time the growth of nonfeudal elements in English society (that is, of townsmen and of merchants) provided the king with natural allies in his task of keeping order—since anarchy is very bad for trade. Almost all of articulate public opinion was in favour of ending the administrative breakdown which the over-mighty feudal barons had brought about. There was a widespread feeling that the king must have a freer hand, that disloyalty was the greatest of all crimes and indeed a mortal sin. This did not mean that the public was ready for despotism, enlightened or unenlightened.

A strong

king was wanted, but a king strong enough to do his public duty rather than his private will. Men were well aware of the difference between good kings and tyrants. It was agreed that kings could not make their will stand for law and were neither absolute nor irresponsible. But it was one thing to define the limits which a king must not pass and quite another to devise actual controls to

14

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

prevent his transgression. Establishing committees of barons to keep the king in order, a sanction adopted at intervals ever since Magna Carta, had been found a remedy more painful than the disease, since it always led to anarchy and faction. Lords Ordainer and Lords Appellant had invariably turned into lords of misrule. In desperation men had fallen back on purely moral sanctions. There was, it is true, a certain naivete in arguing, as men had to do, that ‘ the fountain of justice ’ could not act unjustly without going against his own nature and that so ‘unnatural’ a happening was not easily conceived. Yet Shakespeare knew, long after¬ wards when he wrote King Lear, that his public would respond to the idea that ‘unnatural’ behaviour in man was a convulsion in nature which could be fittingly compared with an outbreak of anarchy among the physical elements. In an age of faith men could easily believe that it was almost physically abnormal for a monarch to be an ‘unnatural’ tyrant. Besides, excommunication could still carry very real terrors, and few kings can have suspended with much confidence their belief in Hell Fire. Public solemnities and ritual were more important and impressive then than now, for men still learnt pictorially. The king’s coronation oath, therefore, was not lightly forgotten or set aside. Nor was it insignificant that the king was surrounded with most magnificence not when he acted by himself but when he appeared in Council or in Parliament surrounded by his ‘natural counsellors ’. Much of his * majesty ’ was the majesty of the law which he enforced and himself, supposedly,

THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST

15

obeyed. The wickedness of rebels might be a moral commonplace but so was the responsibility of rulers. From Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (c. 1435) to the Mirror for Magistrates (1559) there was a popular literature built round the theme that tyrants and usurpers always came to a bad end. During

the

half-century between the

death

of

Fortescue (1476) and the publication of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) England acquired a new dynasty and saw considerable political change. There was also a notable revival of classical learning and much general intellectual activity. Yet, so far as is known, only two Englishmen in the whole period wrote books on politics, and both books are surpris¬ ingly conservative and mediaeval. One was Edmund Dudley’s Tree of Commonwealth (1509-10), the other More’s Utopia (1516). Dudley, who was Henry VII’s unpopular minister and founder of an illustrious house, wrote his book in the Tower while the young Henry VIII was deciding upon the author’s execution. Probably the imprisoned minister was hoping to ingratiate himself with the new king. Dudley had been a ruthless statesman associated with many of the tougher measures of Henry VII. It might be expected that Dudley’s book would be a text-book for ‘the new monarchy’, realistic, perhaps ‘Machiavellian’ in tone and content. Yet in form it is a mediaeval allegory carried almost to the length of parody. The reader learns not only what are the four roots and the five fruits of the Tree of Commonwealth and how each fruit has its bad core and its good paring;

16

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

he learns also that the parings must be eaten with ‘the sauce of the dread of God \ It may also be a mediaeval touch that one of the cores, ‘enterprise’, should have two ‘pursuivants’ or ‘messengers’, ‘discontentation’ and ‘arrogancy’; or it may be mere poetic licence. It is true that the vices of the clergy are castigated and that the king is urged to reform them; but although the king is made a defender of the faith there is no suggestion that he may re-define it. A generation later Protestant writers were to urge the king to ‘ command for truth’. Dudley urges him to foster ‘troth’ in his subjects; but by ‘troth’ he only means the honour and fidelity to the pledged word which keeps society together. Even ‘the Paynims, the Gentiles, the Turks and the Saracens love troth ’. Dudley is of course talking feudal language, as he is when he persistently calls the nobles the ‘ chivalrie ’ of the realm. Dudley traces ‘ the root of justice ’ to the king alone, but there is nothing in this that a feudal lawyer would have disputed, and Dudley goes on to urge that the king as judge shall proceed always by ‘ due order of the law ’. There is no suggestion that the king’s will is or should be law. Moreover, the king is seen as part of a universal world order, a ‘Great Chain of Being’, all of which in equal measure can claim divine sanction. In fact no¬ where else is this essentially mediawal cosmos more neatly summarized. ‘ God hath set an order by grace between Himself and angel and between angel and angel; and by reason between the angel and man and between man and man, man and beast; and by nature only between beast and beast; which order from the

THE

LEGACY FROM THE PAST

17

highest point to the lowest God willeth us firmly to keep.’ The passage foreshadows Ulysses’ great allocu¬ tion on ‘ Degree ’ in Troilus and Cressida, but the idea behind it was one of those which the Renaissance accepted without question from the Middle Ages. It is worth noting that both in Dudley and in Shakespeare the concept is used to enjoin respect, not for the crown, but for the nobility. We need not be surprised by Dudley’s use of mediaeval symbolism, if there is any truth behind the story that his master Henry VII once ordered the hanging of all the mastiffs in the kingdom, on the grounds that mastiffs will attack the lion, the king of beasts. Alore s Utopia is well known to be an enigmatic book but scholars are coming increasingly to realize that it is not a picture of More’s ideal commonweath and that its spirit, despite an obvious debt to Plato, is essentially mediaeval. The speculated

Scholastics had often

upon such questions as whether man,

by the use of reason alone without revelation, could have deduced the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. Utopia is the commonwealth that men might well construct if they were guided by pure reason—without interference from unreasoning pas¬ sions like cupidity but also without revelation. It is a state resting on Wisdom, Fortitude, Temperance, and Justice—the traditional pagan virtues. Utopia is re¬ publican and has abolished private property. It has a rigorously planned economy and even controls the size of families. It despises the military virtues. It has few and intelligible laws. It allows free thought in religion “J

B

l8

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

provided that man’s immortality and God’s existence are accepted. It sends all its citizens to bed at eight o’clock. The

implications

are

clear.

If

the

Utopians,

without the Christian revelation, can have rid them¬ selves of greed and so nearly rid themselves of war and of intolerance, ought not supposedly Christian com¬ munities to feel ashamed? ‘When I consider’, says More in his conclusion, ‘and weigh in my mind all those commonwealths which nowadays anywhere do flourish, so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men, procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the common¬ wealth.’ More was not attacking the existing institu¬ tions of society but the abuse of them. He himself of course accepted the Christian revelation and supposed it superior to unaided reason. Monarchy, property, unplanned family life, institutional religion, though none of them are found in Utopia, were all things which seemed to More to be sanctioned by the Christian revelation. For this very reason, he says, our responsi¬ bility is all the greater to see that these things are used both in a reasonable and in a Christian manner. When we recall that More himself wore a hair shirt we cannot believe that he shared the Utopians’ view that it was ‘extreme madness to follow sharp and pain¬ ful virtue and not only to banish the pleasure of life but also willingly to suffer grief without any hope of profit thereof ensuing’. That More thought Utopia could be improved upon cannot possibly be doubted. He even says so plainly on his title-page, where the

THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST

19

island in person recites in its own rationalized language a curious quatrain which is then put into Latin. In the last line Utopia says ‘Readily I impart to men my institutions: no less readily will I receive better ones.’ Perhaps it wras this which made the contem¬ porary Vicar of Croydon start organizing a mission to Utopia. Utopia is a satire, a fantasia, a jeu d'esprit. It is not a communist nor even a liberal manifesto; and More’s later and less urbane writings against heretics are not a betrayal of the Utopian idea. For one thing neither the Utopians nor the early Protestants can be called politically ‘ liberal ’. Indeed, for different reasons, both were great believers in regimentation. Although

Utopia was a product of the classical

revival, showing in particular the influence of Plato, it contains little that a medieval mind would have found hard to understand. There had been earlier classical revivals—of Cicero, of Aristotle, of the Roman Law—but mediaeval thought had shown itself capable of absorbing classical ideas without changing its own basic

assumptions.

In

one

respect, however,

the

Utopians were very far from mediaeval. Utopia was founded by Utopus, a philosopher king or lawgiver who vanished once his work w'as done, and Utopia has been a republic ever since. It has ‘principes’ but they are elected and they are only governors of towns. Hardly any of the political thought of the Middle Ages can be called republican. In spite of the confusion and contradiction to be found in mediajval political theory', in spite of its many different sources, there was

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

20

fairly

general

agreement

that

government

meant

monarchy—limited monarchy, no doubt, but none the less monarchy for that. In feudal society government was a function of lordship, and lordship naturally implied a lord. Opinions might differ on whether heredity or election gave a lord the better title, or on whether an unjust or an infidel lord might be resisted or deposed; but in no feudal community was it held that a deceased or even a deposed monarch could be succeeded

by

anything

except

another

monarch.

Jurists and philosophers ignored for centuries the inconvenient existence of republican city-states. The sanctions and traditions embodied in the Church were no

less

monarchical.

Israel

and

Judah

had

been

monarchies. Christ and the Apostles had accepted the Roman monarchy and submitted to persecution at its hands. Nor had they preached the coming of a Republic of Heaven. The Church itself had grown into a papal monarchy. The ceremony of coronation was full of religious implications and had become virtually an eighth sacrament. The rediscovery of Aristotle had done nothing to weaken monarchy. His influence militated against any idea that men in some ‘ natural ’ or perfect world would have no need of government. Man, for Aristotle, was naturally a state-obeying animal. Without government he would not be man at all, and only under government could he hope to live the good life. Aristotle cannot be called a monarchist but, since in the Middle Ages government meant monarchy, by supporting govern¬ ment Aristotle in effect supported monarchy.

THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST

21

The new classical revival of the fifteenth and six¬ teenth centuries was largely a republican revival. Plato and Cicero, Tacitus and Plutarch were all in different ways ‘ republicans ’ and, alike to Machiavelli and to the more academic Humanists, the golden age of Rome was not that of the Empire but that of the Republic. Brutus and Cassius alone had shared the bottom circle of Dante’s Hell with Satan and with Judas; but to Shakespeare—and to all others who read Plutarch—Brutus and Cassius were tyrannicides and therefore more than half heroic. The Humanists can be termed ‘republican’ for several reasons, if only in a limited sense. They were willing to think of an original and ‘ natural ’ state of society in which there was no monarch. They were willing to consider the merits of nonmonarchical systems of government. They were pre¬ pared to discuss the human as well as the divine origins of government and they believed that the first rulers had been elected on their merits by the whole com¬ munity. In one of his pacifist works Erasmus told princes, ‘what power and sovereignty soever you have, you have it by the consent of the people. And if I be not deceived, he that hath authority to give hath authority to take away again.’ The Humanists believed too that rulers w’ere meant to serve fairly obvious, rational, intelligible, utilitarian ends. No Humanist thought that kingship fulfilled some inscrutable and divine purpose too mysterious for ordinary men to understand. Nor did they think that kings differed, except in degree, from lesser magis¬ trates; when they spoke of rulers and magistrates they

22

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

usually included the nobles with the prince. The Humanists accepted princes but it never occurred to them that princes were naturally or pretematurally wise. In fact it seemed to them that princes were of all men the most in need of education. It might be said that the main contribution of the Humanists to political thought was an extensive literature on the theme de regimine principum. Unfortunately the princes chose to follow Machiavelli’s curriculum and not that of Erasmus, whose Institution of a Christian Prince was published in the same year as Utopia (1516). An im¬ portant part of Humanism was its belief that men were educable and that, given the right education for the right people, the whole of society might be regener¬ ated and replanned. An educationalist is always more than half a planner. The halcyon period of Humanism was tragically short. The Reformation and the outbreak of successive wars between the kings of Europe put the Humanists into a difficult position. Learning was admired for its supposed

practical

utility,

and

the

learned

were

expected to make themselves politically useful. Some of the English scholars were of humble origin and had had their education financed out of the royal bounty. But not all of them took readily to writing propaganda on behalf of Henry VIII. Sir Thomas More was willing to take up his master’s cudgels against Luther, but not against the Pope. The younger generation of English Humanists went different ways. Reginald Pole (Henry VIII’s cousin), their intellectual leader, threw in his lot with the Catholic cause. His friend Thomas Starkey

THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST

23

did write government propaganda but adopted a very moderate tone. Another poor scholar who had been with Pole in Italy, Richard Morison, went the whole way with the king. Stephen

Gardiner,

Winchester, produced ‘Henrician’

Bishop of

propaganda but

with obvious insincerity, and he afterwards repented. Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, was to sit for thirty years on every available fence. An interesting case is that of More’s friend Sir Thomas Elyot, who became English Ambassador to Charles V but furthered his king’s cause with marked unwillingness and poor success. In 1531 he wrote an elaborate treatise on the education of rulers, The Boke named the Governour, which might be called the political testament of English Humanism. Sweetness and light were disappearing fast while he was writing and perhaps there is an element of ‘escapism’ in his studiously academic tone. He treats political questions almost in the abstract, without reference to the con¬ troversies of the time, and his was the last of such books to be published in England for half a century or more. Elyot draws

his

ideas eclectically from

all

the

traditional sources—from Scripture, from the classics, from practical experience and observation of nature— but he puts them all upon an equal footing. He approves of monarchy as the best form of government and knows that it has scriptural authority but he is really more interested in the arguments that monarchy works best in practice, that it is ‘natural’ and that it can be observed inside a bee-hive. Far more of his very

24

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

numerous analogies and illustrations are drawn from the classics than from the Scriptures. Elyot was a great believer in ‘degree’ and was as much concerned to justify aristocracy as monarchy— although he held a poor view of the nobility of his own day, observing that ‘ to a great gentleman it is a notable reproach to be well learned and to be called a great clerk’. His object indeed is to re-educate all magistrates, especially the aristocracy. He pursued, he said, the ‘public weal’ (the good of the community as a whole) and not the ‘ common weal ’ (the good of the commons or poorer classes). He had, too, a great dislike of democracy—even of Athenian democracy. Elyot was no revolutionary:

his universe is the conventional

mediaeval universe, and more than one of his paragraphs could be used as a locus classicus for the idea of ‘the Great Chain of Being’. But he was also very much a Humanist. He admired the Roman Republic and the Roman Law. He believed in an original state of nature in which men had neither government nor property and he believed that authority and wealth had then been given to the ‘worthiest’ by communal consent. He was much opposed to Machiavellian concepts and held force and fraud to be appropriate to lions or foxes but not to man, though he noted that fraud was coming much into fashion and being taken for ‘policy’ or wisdom. Above all, Elyot had the Humanist’s belief in human nature and in man’s natural reasonableness. ‘Verily’, he writes, ‘the knowledge of justice is not so difficult or hard to be attained unto by man as it is commonly

THE LEGACY FROM THE PAST

25

supposed, if he would not willingly abandon the excellency of his proper nature and foolishly applicate himself to the nature of creatures unreasonable.’ Elyot foreshadows Hamlet by speaking of ‘the soul of man of his own kind [nature] being incorruptible, neat and clear, the senses and powers wonderful and pleasant, the virtues in it contained noble and rich, the form excellent and royal, as that which was made to the similitude of God’. But by 1531 Elyot’s liberal optimism could no longer get a hearing. The men who mattered were either cynics or fanatics. To the cynics the rank and file of men were fools who should be hoodwinked, bullied, or exploited. To the fanatics men were all incorrigible sinners whom only the sternest laws and government could keep on the straight and narrow way. For a time Ciceronian, Platonist, and Plutarchian influences receded before that of another ancient author, Paul of Tarsus. The coming of Protestantism brought with it a new outlook upon government, an outlook that was not rational and utilitarian but mystical and theocratic. The Reformers based their political views very largely on the thirteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. ‘ There is no power but of God ’; therefore we should not look for any human origins of political power. ‘They that resist shall receive to themselves damnation’; therefore in no circumstances can we justify, still less admire, tyrannicide. ‘ He is the minister of God to thee for good’;

therefore government

provides for our spiritual as much as for our physical needs. ‘He is a revenger to execute wrath upon him

26

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

that doeth evil’; therefore a bad government may be the instrument God uses to punish us for our sins. Such, in barest outline, were the views of Luther—the views which Tyndale brought back from Wittenberg. It is the more interesting to see what a Humanist, a generation earlier, had made of the same Pauline texts. Colet’s lectures in Oxford on the Epistle to the Romans, delivered probably in 1497, are the occasion from which the beginning of English Humanism might well be dated. And Colet’s approach is not that of Luther. Colet interprets St Paul in a spirit of what would now be called historical criticism. He is anxious to place St Paul’s words in their historical context, to discover exactly what they conveyed to those who first heard them. He points out how dangerous it would have been for the early Christians to fall out of favour with the Roman authorities. Wicked rulers had therefore to be suffered, as Colet expressly says, ‘for a time ’. He passes quickly from the political implications to the purely spiritual themes of returning good for evil and of living in Christian charity with all men. Nor did Colet deal as fully with this chapter as he did with several others. The young William Tyndale went to Oxford just too late to hear Colet lecture. At any rate when, thirty years later, Tyndale preached on the same text, it was a different sermon.

Chapter Two THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE In 1529 Henry VIII by opening ‘the King’s Matter’, in other words his nullity suit against Catharine of Aragon, set in motion what was perhaps the greatest connected chain of events in English history. Among many other things, it was to change the whole character of men’s outlook upon politics. The King’s policy aroused opposition; there were potential and actual rebellions. This led to a spate of propaganda denounc¬ ing in quite a new tone the evils of political opposition. The King was led to insist on becoming fully master in his own house and to set up for the first time a really unitary and sovereign state. He came near to putting England on the road to totalitarianism. But several things prevented this denouement. The King could not afford the machinery of despotism—the standing army, the police force, the large-scale professional bureau¬ cracy. The state of the roads did not allow a fully centralized administration. Localities had to be ad¬ ministered largely through the local gentry whose support had somehow to be won and kept. The traditions of the English common law were strong and deeply rooted. Parliament happened to prove a con¬ venient ally against the Pope; and constant use led Parliament to develop muscles of its own. The wholesale redistribution of monastery land created a new and

28

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

very large class of property holders with interests too strong to be ignored. As the breach with Rome grew wider it became at first possible and at last inevitable that the Protestant religion

should

take

root.

The

consequences

for

English politics and for English political thought were momentous, since it was the Protestant religion which, in the end, did more than anything else to bar the way to despotism. In the long run Protestantism was to stand for the rights of conscience against all earthly principalities and powers; but the immediate political effects of the Protestant religion were very different. For some time its political teaching was to be authori¬ tarian and its potential liberalism was to remain con¬ cealed. Luther, it is true, had begun by preaching ‘Christian Liberty’. The poor German peasants had supposed that he meant political and social liberty but, though their mistake was understandable enough, he had never meant anything of the kind. The liberty which

Luther

proclaimed

was

something

purely

spiritual. Luther’s ‘Christian Liberty’ meant liberty for men to save their souls by a direct and personal relationship with God, without the mediation of a priesthood. It meant liberty from the intolerable fear that salvation depended solely upon the successful keeping of God’s law, a success impossible for sinful men. It meant freedom from spiritual despair, freedom for a man to acknowledge that he did not deserve salvation and yet to believe that salvation could be his through the merits of a Christ who had come to save the truly

THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE

29

contrite sinner. Men were to be freed from the hopeless task of attempting to acquire merits of their own, from the vain delusion that the Visible Church could save souls by imposing discipline or penance or by perform¬ ing vicarious sacramental sacrifice.

‘No man may

deliver his brother, or make agreement unto God for him ’ and therefore men were to have the freedom and with it the responsibility for working out their own salvation and freely seeking the divine grace for them¬ selves, unhindered by ecclesiastical rule of thumb but also unaided except by the ‘inclining of the heart’ which Grace might give them. There was a sense in which the publican, frankly acknowledging his prone¬ ness to sin, was ‘ free ’ while the pharisee, trusting in his law-abidingness, was enslaved by ‘the bondage of the law’. In the words of Tyndale, ‘There is no ear so righteous that it can abide the hearing of the Law. There is no deed so good but that the Law condemneth it. . . . But Christ healeth the ear and con¬ science which the Law hath hurt.’ The true Law, the only saving Law, he says, ‘is spiritual and requireth the heart, and is never fulfilled with deeds in the sight of God; before God thou keepest the Law if thou love only ’. In other words, a man is saved not by what he does but by what he is. Protestant

political

thought

flows

naturally and

logically from this theological position. In the Middle Ages the Church had kept the civil ruler in his place by claiming to serve a supernatural end because she could and did save souls. For Protestants this argument

30

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

became invalid. Souls were saved only by each man’s relationship with God. There was no place for the Church in the actual process of salvation. The only true Church was spiritual, the Church Invisible, a ‘ kingdom not of this world ’. The Church on earth must use purely spiritual weapons and do purely spiritual work. She could preach and teach, pray and administer sacra¬ ments but nothing more. The Reformers granted that it was highly convenient—for the sake of decency and order—to have an organized and professional priest¬ hood, a Visible Church; but it was not essential, since a Visible Church cannot save souls. In any case the Church must have nothing to do with jurisdiction or coercion, since a Church which made and enforced law might seem to imply that men were saved by keeping laws; or even that for information on God’s law men should consult the Church rather than the Bible,

the only true authority.

appeared to prove that a

Moreover,

history

Church concerned with

temporal power is apt to neglect its proper spiritual office. Yet Luther and his followers did not think breaches of God’s law unimportant nor that such breaches should go unpunished in this world. It might have been strictly logical to suppose that sin, being inevitable, did not matter; but such a view was hardly consistent with Protestant psychology. The Protestants held that anyone truly in a state of grace, though he would know that salvation did not depend upon his keeping of the law, would nevertheless do his utmost to observe it and would inevitably wonder whether he was indeed

THE CALI

FOR A GODLY PRINCE

31

saved if he found himself sinning to an inordinate extent. No less naturally he would suppose that very flagrant sin in others was evidence that they were reprobates against whom the sword of the saint might be drawn in righteous wrath and justice. Keeping the law might not save souls but it could and should, for many other reasons, be enforced as far as possible. The Church, being purely spiritual, might not enforce it, and yet it had to be enforced, though by some non-ecclesiastical authority. The Protestant leaders shared to the full in the horror of anarchy so strongly felt in that age. They were also strait-laced. Being virtuous, they disliked seeing others enjoying cakes and ale. Even if the law could not save, they held that it might hinder hin¬ drances to salvation. It might restrict opportunities for temptation; it might forbid the open preaching of evil and of error; it might provide for the preaching of righteousness and truth. Again, although (theoretically) God ‘seeth in secret’, men are apt to imagine that He sees only what they see themselves. Therefore nearly all

Protestants showed concern

lest a community

should catch God’s eye by too flagrant and open breaches of the law and thus call down a visitation of God’s wrath in the form of pestilence or famine or military disaster. Open sin, then, had to be punishable by law, but by whose law and by what executioner? It was natural and indeed inevitable that the Protestants should turn for this to the civil magistrate who, as St Paul said, ‘beareth not the sword in vain’; and it is likely that

32

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

many Reformers had a more mundane arriere pensee, for they knew that secular princes had long been jealous of ecclesiastical power and jurisdiction. The new theory was not what it may appear in modem eyes, namely an appeal from Church to State for action in what was essentially a religious matter. It was an appeal from one officer to another inside a single composite

society, the Christian Commonwealth, a

society that comprised both Church and State. This mediaeval outlook on society was retained by all the early Protestants. The Reformers had few illusions about the short¬ comings of human rulers. Luther himself once said ‘Princes are commonly the greatest fools or the worst rogues on earth.’ Nor did Tyndale hesitate to speak his mind on the personal vices of Henry VIII. Why then did Protestants put their trust in princes? How can we explain their apparent assumption that the prince will be

both willing and competent to act

as

a

‘godly prince’ carrying out ‘godly reformations’ and ‘ commanding for truth ’ ? The answer must be complex. There was no other authority with any power or any motive for carrying out the Protestant programme. The only hope was that princes might be got to see the light. Tyndale’s last words at the stake were ‘Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.’ The prevailing climate of political opinion must also have been influential. On all hands men were more afraid of anarchy than of tyranny.

‘ It

is better’, said Tyndale (in The Obedience of a Christian Man, 1528), ‘to suffer one tyrant than many, and to

THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE

33

suffer wrong of one than of every man. Yea, and it is better to have a tyrant unto thy king than a shadow. . . . For a tyrant, though he do wrong unto the good, yet he punisheth the evil and maketh all men obey. . A king that is as soft as silk and effeminate . . . shall be more grievous unto the realm than a right tyrant. Read the Chronicles and thou shalt find it ever so.’ We are reminded of the Peterborough Chronicler’s verdict upon King Stephen: ‘A mild man and soft and good and did no justice.’ Besides, the Reformers, after the German Peasants

rising, were anxious to disprove

the charge that Protestants were political or social anarchists. The early Protestants would not have shared our doubts as to the qualifications of a lay ruler for inter¬ preting theological truth. For them the Bible was not only an open book but a plain one. The truth was something already known or easily knowable, and a Prince could know it as easily as anyone else. Ignorance and error could only be wilful. As Knox was to say to Mary Queen of Scots, ‘Ye shall believe God, that plainly speaketh in His Word. . . . The Word of God is plain in itself; and if there appear any obscurity in one place, the Holy Ghost which is never contrarious to Himself, explains the same more clearly in other places: so that there can remain no doubt, but unto such as obstinately remain ignorant.’ This begged the whole question, but the early Protestants could not know, as we do, what different meanings different minds can with perfect honesty extract from Scripture. The Reformers’ appeal for a Godly Prince led them 325

C

34

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

to adopt a position which is well summed up in a phrase of Thomas Bilson, an Elizabethan Bishop of Win¬ chester. ‘The opposite to temporal’, he wrote, ‘is not spiritual but eternal.’ The Protestants called for a new division of power: not the old division between prince and priest—for the priest was to have no power—but a division between the prince and God. There is, they said, or ought to be, no such thing as spiritual power—only the spiritual attraction of God’s Word and God’s Love. All coercive power is ipso facto temporal and cannot rightly be wielded by a spiritual church. Eternal government belongs to God, temporal govern¬ ment to the prince, but no government of any kind to the priest. This does not mean allowing open sin to go unpunished, only that it shall not be punished by priests or by canon law. The true Church, the Church Invisible, is not governed at all except by God. Yet the Christian Commonwealth on earth does have need of organization and of government—to preserve order and decency, to secure uniformity of religious practice, to restrain outward wickedness, to educate, to edify, and to provide men with the social framework which can make salvation more easily accessible. This kind of government, even though it will punish sins, nevertheless remains temporal government and must belong solely to the civil magis¬ trate since it involves the use of force. This is not giving Caesar the things that are God’s, because the only things that are God’s are the inward and eternal things. All else, being outward and temporal, must belong to Caesar. Such things, not being essential to

THE CALL FOR A

salvation, are ‘ adiaphora

GODLY PRINCE

35

* things indifferent ’, and may

be handled by a lay authority. The Reformers were not exactly anti-clerical. Most of them were in fact clergymen. They thought preach¬ ing a higher office than governing; and in a sense they wanted to promote the clergy by giving them a monopoly of the spiritual office in society and by reliev¬ ing them of possibly degrading contact with temporal things. On the other hand the Reformers talked of ministers rather than of priests, and they held the doctrine of ‘universal priesthood’, namely that any pious Christian can in cases of necessity preach, baptise, or absolve, or even celebrate the mass, which, said Luther, ‘would not be possible if we were not all priests ’. These ideas were not

wholly new

nor

wholly

Protestant. Some of them had been foreshadowed by Marsiglio of Padua two centuries earlier. The civil ruler had long been regarded as the secular arm of the Church.

Strictly speaking, the

Spanish Inquisition

itself was a royal, secular court; and for a hundred years in England heretics had been burnt by force of the civil statute De Heretico Comburendo. There was, however, something new in the Protestant demands. The princes were to have a kind of divine right—or at any rate a divine duty—in church government. But it was not the divine right that had once been claimed for Emperors; it was much more the kind of divine right which had been claimed for Popes. In fact most of the Reformers wanted the prince to become more absolute in church government than in civil. They

36

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

were much less interested in the purely civil order and naturally supposed that God must be so too. They imagined that God did not particularly mind how civil order was kept and had left this to man’s discre¬ tion. But God, they thought, did mind how ‘godly reformation ’ was carried out and who was to ‘ command for truth’. Therefore He had laid down precise rules, and His ruling was that the magistrate must do it. The Protestant was not appealing to a thing called the ‘ secular arm ’. He was appealing to a person—not to an office but to a man, not to Caesar’s judgementseat but to

Caesar personally. The prince was to

enforce what was in his own judgement the true faith, not merely what the ecclesiastical authorities had decreed. The Reformers had much to say of Josiah and Hezekiah, the reforming kings of the Old Testa¬ ment who had acted as ‘nursing fathers’ of Jewish theocracy. Thus the defender of the faith came very near to being its definer. Queen Elizabeth half acknow¬ ledged this herself when she told Parliament in 1586 that she was ‘fully resolved, by her own reading and princely judgement, upon the truth of the Reforma¬ tion which we have already’. Her father had always insisted on direct personal control of all doctrinal pronouncements. There was in England a very old tradition, never quite obsolete, which can be traced back to the anonymous York tractates of the early twelfth century, a tradition according to which kingship is a kind of order in the church and the king himself a kind of priest with special insight into spiritual matters. It is

THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE

37

clear that Cranmer came very near to holding this view of Henry VIII, although among contemporary Reformers Cranmer’s attitude was exceptional and extreme. In 1540 Cranmer thought that ‘ all Christian Princes have committed unto them immediately of God the whole cure of all their subjects, as well concerning the administration of God’s Word for the cure of souls, as concerning the ministration of things political and civil governance’. The prince, he thought, was as much consecrated as was the priest; and the priest received no divine right but was appointed either by the community or by the prince. A Christian prince who conquered an infidel country and happened to have no clergy with him might ‘ preach and teach God’s Word there . . . and also make and constitute priests’. Cranmer even admitted that he was prepared to change his views if the king were to change his. This was not mere time-serving, since it is probable that Cranmer genuinely believed kings to be endowed with special theological insight. What Cranmer held was not a theory of monarchy; it was a monarchical theory of church government. It had only a tenuous connection with the royalism of Stuart times. What has sometimes led to a confusion of the two is the doctrine of Non-resistance which both had in common. Yet for the early Protestants Non-resistance was not unqualified. It did not mean that a ruler could never be disobeyed, still less that he could not be criticized. Tyndale did write ‘He that judgeth the king judgeth God. ... If the king sin he must be reserved unto the judgement and vengeance

38

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

of God . . . the king is in this world without law, and may at his lust do right and wrong and shall give accounts but to

God only.’

Elsewhere,

however,

Tyndale wrote that the king is ‘but a servant to execute the law of God, and not to rule after his own imagination ’; and he could write ‘ Though every man’s body and goods be under the king, do he right or wrong, yet is the authority of God’s Word free and above the king; so that the worst in the realm may tell the king, if he do him wrong, that he doth naught, and otherwise than God hath commanded him; and so warn him to avoid the wrath of God which is the patient avenger of all unrighteousness. . . . We must rather obey God than men.’ In other words, if the prince commands something contrary to God’s Word the prince must be disobeyed. He must not, however, be resisted and any punishment he chooses to inflict must be patiently endured. This is the doctrine some¬ times known as Passive Obedience. More properly it should be called Passive Disobedience. Tyndale had no intention of giving tyrants a free hand. He says in his Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘No king, lord, master, or what ruler he be, hath absolute power in this world. . . . Their authority is but a limited power which when they transgress they sin against their brethren.’ Nor did Tyndale believe that law was simply what the king has willed. ‘One king, one law’, he wrote, ‘is God’s ordinance in every realm’; but by this he meant that the king should administer ecclesiastical as well as civil law. It is even suggested that the king should make no new laws of his

THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE

39

own at all. ‘The king is in the room of God; and his law is God’s law, and nothing but the Law of Nature and natural equity which God graved in the hearts of men.’ The

implications were

brought out even

more

clearly by the ex-friar Robert Barnes who was burnt for heresy in 1540. He admitted that in all temporal matters even wicked princes must always be obeyed. ‘ What true English heart

he asked, * would think but

that the king’s request was both godly and lawful?’ Yet, in a pamphlet significantly called Men's Con¬ stitutions bynde not the Conscience (1532), Barnes denied that a king should be obeyed if he forbade men to read the

Scriptures.

Christians

must

then

‘keep

their

Testament with all other ordinance of Christ’, but they must patiently endure persecution if it follows ‘and let the king exercise his tyranny if they cannot flee’. Barnes shows some signs of wishing to exclude the civil ruler from ecclesiastical government altogether, even in ‘things indifferent’. We must obey uncon¬ ditionally in all ‘worldlythings’ but in all other-worldly things we ought not really ‘to be subject unto any man ’; and we ought not to obey any governor, ecclesi¬ astical or civil, in any religious matter—not even in ‘things indifferent’, ‘not because it is evil to do but that it is damnable to be done as a thing of necessity’. Barnes

had

almost

anticipated

the

Elizabethan

Separatists’ view that civil and ecclesiastical govern¬ ment must be entirely separate, that the life of the church should be on a purely voluntary basis involving no govemement or compulsion of any kind and that

40

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

in religion the

ultimate

authority was

conscience

alone. The dominant note in Protestant doctrine is sounded in Latimer’s sermons. It is our duty to obey even wicked rulers, unless it involves disobeying God. ‘ If the king should require of thee an unjust request, yet art thou bound to pay it and not to resist and rebel. . . . The king indeed is in peril of his soul for asking of an unjust request; and God will in His due time reckon with him for it: but thou must . . . not take upon thee to judge him. . . . And know this, that whensoever there is any unjust exaction laid upon thee it is a plague and punishment for thy sin.’ If we have bad rulers ‘we must tarry till God correct them; we may not take upon us to reform them ’. All this was to become commonplace but when the early Protestants preached such doctrine it was relatively new. Latimer’s contemporary the Humanist Starkey, when he wrote his Dialogue (c. 1534), felt free to speak of rulers in less respectful tones, for he belonged to an older and more mediaeval tradition, even though his Italian education had given Starkey a critical and speculative freedom that is not wholly mediaeval. Starkey’s injunction to subjects is different from Latimer’s. Subjects are ‘to be content with their state so long as they be not oppressed with plain tyranny’. There were many new ideas in Starkey’s book—public schools for noblemen’s children, the abolition of plainsong and of primogeniture, the replacement of the English by the Roman law, the use of the vernacular

THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE

41

in religious services, a married clergy, a tax on bachelors, the halving of rich men’s domestic staffs, the cleaning of city streets, compulsory residence in towns for gentlemen, the establishment of English cloth and metal manufactures, reduction of the number of capital crimes. But some of his boldest ideas were not new, though it must have taken courage to revive them in a book dedicated to Henry VIII. Such were the sugges¬ tion that monarchy should be elective, that the king should do nothing without his council and should not appoint his own advisers, that the king was not free to dispense with any law.

Starkey owed something to the

Humanist republican tradition, something to Plato and Aristotle, and much more than he realized to mediasval lawyers and Scholastics. In political thought it was the Protestant innovator.

and

not

the

Humanist

who

was

the

The Reformers, like other men of their century, were perfectly well aware that rulers could be wicked men and unjust tyrants. They did not say that all kings must be presumed to be in the right. What the Reformers held was that good and bad rulers were both ordained of God. The mere fact of their existence proved this, since nothing exists unless God wills it. Yet perhaps good and

bad rulers were ordained for different

purposes; good rulers, no doubt, were appointed to carry out God’s constructive designs; but the raison d'etre of tyrants was less obvious. Some held that tyrants were tolerated by God for reasons known only to Himself. Edward Foxe, one of Henry VIII’s bishops, once wrote: ‘All power is of God, but it is a very

42

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

noisome error to put no difference betwixt power given of God and tyranny permitted of God.’ Others went further. Unjust and infidel rulers were sent to try men’s faith and their Christian submissiveness. More probably still, the tyrant was the instrument of God’s wrath to punish the sins of the people. Luther himself had said: ‘The world is far too wicked to be worthy of good and pious lords. It must have . . . tyrants. This and other chastisement are rather what it has deserved, and to resist them is nothing else than to resist God’s chastisement. As humbly as I conduct myself when God sends me a sickness, so humbly should I conduct myself towards the evil government which the same God also sends me.’ The God of the Protestants was always taking direct action in the world. If a tyrant existed it was because God had work for him to do; and if God did not want the tyrant, God could be relied on to remove him, as He had removed Sennacherib and Ahab, Nebuchad¬ nezzar

and

Herod.

The

Protestant

universe

was

arbitrary in a quite literal sense, that is, it was governed by a series of acts of will. It was arbitrary also in another sense, because acts of God’s will could not be expected to conform to any law which the human mind can formulate. God’s will was certain to appear to men as inscrutable and indeed capricious. Besides, God was constantly at work: He had not wound up the clock once for all and left it to work by the laws of mechanics. Where the Catholic philosopher looked for the laws by which God had made things work, the Protestant looked for miracles and arbitrary acts cutting across all

THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE

43

known and knowable laws. He did not expect to understand the operations of his God. All this had definite political applications. They emerge very clearly when the Protestant position is assailed in a pamphlet by Parsons, the famous Eliza¬ bethan Jesuit. God, says Parsons, ‘will not always bind Himself to work miracles ’ and therefore He cannot be relied upon to ‘take away the tyrant by sickness and other such means’. God has left many things ‘in the hands of men and of commonwealths to effectuate by way of wisdom and justice’. He cannot be expected to punish a tyrant any more than a thief. In each case ‘ God will have the realm to punish him. God hath left power on earth to do justice in His name.’ In other words, God helps those who help themselves: and the normal and natural method of self-help is to make laws against theft or tyranny and to punish anyone breaking such a law. The Catholic mind was still under the influence of the idea of Natural Law, the law God has left to be found out by human reason and the law which ought to be embodied in the ‘positive law’ of any state. The early Protestants thought that men neither could nor ought to help themselves. Men were so weak and so wicked that human justice had no value. There¬ fore no human tribunal could arraign a tyrant. Nor could a tyrant be accused of breaking Natural Law, since a law discovered only by the faulty instrument of reason could not be known with any certainty. The question to ask was not whether the tyrant conformed to any law, but whether he in some way represented

44

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

God’s will. The only law that mattered was the Revealed Law of God, the commandments dictated verbatim and in person by God Himself. If the tyrant broke God’s law, he was to be left to God’s judgement. Nor was God likely to overlook such offences. The Lord was vigilant and ‘jealous’ and it would not be pleasant for the tyrant ‘ to fall into the hands of the living God \ The pains of Hell were thought to be strong enough deterrents against misrule. Although the Protestants preached Non-resistance they were not preaching the Divine Right of Kings in its full-blooded seventeenth-century form. For one thing, theirs was far more a theory of church govern¬ ment than a theory of the state. The essence of their theory was that ‘ the Powers that Be ’ were ‘ ordained of God’. But the Powers that Be were not necessarily hereditary monarchs. The Reformers were not com¬ mitted to the principle of legitimacy. A de facto sovereign or even a republic could have, for most of them, as much divine right as a de jure king. In their philosophy anything which exists must have divine right in some degree—or it would not exist. Nevertheless Protestant Non-resistance was certainly one of the things which smoothed the way for the coming of the new hereditary divine right of James I or Sir Robert Filmer. On the other hand Protestantism was to make a contribution to the growth of liberal political ideas. This liberal side could not develop until favourable circumstances arose, but a discerning critic could have foreseen it when Luther made his stand at Worms;

THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE

45

for, in the last analysis, Protestantism is fundamentally individualistic. When the Reformers appealed from the Church to the Gospel they were in reality appealing to something in themselves. They claimed that Scripture alone contained the basic truths of Christianity. What the Church said, apart from Scripture, was evidence supplied by men and not by God. This view was challenged, by Sir Thomas More and many others. The Catholics argued that we know Scripture to be the Word of God only because the Church has told us so and that to accept the Bible is to accept the authority and traditions of the Church. Contrary to general belief, the Protestants had an answer to this challenge. They could argue that there was no Church to tell the first disciples that the Messiah was come; they had been rash enough to use their private judgement, relying on no tradition or authority. Or the Reformers could argue, as Tyndale did, that the truth of Scripture is self-evident, that Scripture would at once appear to be the Word of God to a reader who had never heard of it before, that it speaks for itself and speaks directly to the heart, that it corresponds exactly to men’s personal spiritual experience of God, that it is true because it feels true. To argue thus is admittedly to appeal to a subjective test; but religious truth has never yet been proved by an objective test, and religion must in the last resort always rest upon religious experience. It must be remembered, too, that the men of Luther’s time and Tyndale’s had not our long experience of seeing different men find radically different things in the

46

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Open Bible. Nor must we forget what was to become a vital element in Protestant theology, namely belief in ‘the witness of the Spirit’. Many Protestants held that the Third Person of the Trinity had long been virtually overlooked; that the Holy Spirit has a very real existence and is continually active; that we must be careful not to mistake for misguided individual eccentricity what may well be the voice of God the Holy Ghost. In view of their ultimate reliance on conscience or the ‘inner light’, it was inevitable that sooner'or later the Protestants should voice the claims of conscience against external authority. Anything so individualistic as the Protestant religion was bound in time to develop a politically ‘liberal’ side. So long as Protestantism was anxious to prove its respectability and so long as Protestant hopes of winning power were reasonably high, little was heard of all this. But in the 1550s Protestantism was seriously persecuted on a large scale and seemed for the first time in danger of extinc¬ tion.

Scotland and England both had persecuting

Catholic Queens. At once the Reformers changed their tune. A few of them, like Knox, began to think that there

was

something

unsatisfactory

about

female

‘regiment’ as such, while others, like Bishop Ponet, began to talk of the rights of conscience against an infidel

ruler whether male or female.

The

Non¬

conformist Conscience was making itself heard for the first time in history. Circumstances had caused the appeal to godly princes to change into an appeal on behalf of conscience against ungodly rulers. The great

THE CALL FOR A GODLY PRINCE

47

mediaeval conflicts between Church and State were over; and before long many of the churches were to become the handmaids of the State. Yet, although the Reformation helped to weaken the Church, it was in the end to confront the State with a more resilient rival, Conscience; and, if certain governments in the age of the Reformation had not outraged the religious consciences of their subjects, liberalism as we know it could not have been bom.

Chapter Three THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS There

is

a

superficial

resemblance

between the

doctrines of the Protestant Reformers and the doctrines of Henry VIII’s official propagandists. This is partly because both drew upon the anti-Papal ammunition provided by Marsiglio of Padua, by Ockham and Wyclif, or by the supporters of the fifteenth-century Conciliar movement.

Both parties were concerned

to prove that the true church cannot use force, that the clergy have no claim to speak for the whole church, that the Pope has usurped powers which properly belong to the civil ruler, that in so far as law and coercion are needed in the Christian life they must be wielded by the prince alone. But the motives of the two parties were very different.

The

Reformers were

concerned with religion, the King’s party with almost everything other than religion. Their objects were to make the King fully master in his own house, to ensure that the clergy were as much his subjects as the laity, to see that no appeal from English law courts and no money from English pockets went overseas, to mould English bishops into agents and administrators for the King and not for an Italian politician. There may well have been in some minds an airiere pensie that the King might be made solvent by a levy on ecclesiastical coffers. The political theory of the Protestants achieved, at

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS

49

any rate in Tyndale’s hands, a certain sweep and grandeur and a certain intellectual consistency. The Protestants were not in power and for that reason had time to think out their position. The men in power, the men in control of the Henrician revolution, pro¬ duced a set of political ideas that are less well assorted, less coherent, and altogether less impressive. The reasons are obvious enough. The King was not, and had no intention of becoming, Protestant; nor had the vast majority of his subjects. Henry was anxious to present as respectable and conservative a front as possible. He was content with the minimum number of political arguments that sufficed to give him what he wanted; and most of the arguments, even if new in fact, had to be disguised as old ones. He had also to feel his way. It is very doubtful how far the revolution was planned more than a step or two in advance. Papal obduracy led the King into taking up bigger and bigger sticks with which to beat the Pope. The government only drifted into revolution. Its policy was opportunist, its proceedings empirical and almost tentative, often following the line of least resistance. It changed and worked out as it went along such theories as it required. In any case, although the government moved by stages, they were rapid stages. So much action was being taken that there was little time for theory. Besides, the Reformers had some integrity, whereas most of the Henricians were time-serving politicians. The insincerity of the Henricians is almost selfconfessed. Stephen Gardiner admitted later that he had written his Henrician pamphlet De Vera Obedientia 22}

d

50

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

(1536) under the influence of fear. In any case it has a suspiciously rhetorical note compared with the cooler tone

of Gardiner’s more normal writings. Starkey

never published his imaginary Dialogue between his Humanist friends Pole and Lupset (written between 1533 and 1535). For one thing, the real Pole made it clear in 1536 that he was radically opposed to Henry’s ecclesiastical

policy;

and,

for

another,

Starkey’s

Dialogue was politically far too ‘liberal’ to suit the King’s requirements. It suggested that kings could and should be made by popular election and that tyrants might be deposed. It even dared to say, * Never attribute tyranny (of all ill the greatest) to the providence of God, except you will . . . attribute all ill to the Fountain of goodness.’ What Starkey published (in

1536) wras

something very different. It was the fully Henrician Exhortation to Unity and Obedience. The lawyer Christopher St. Germain was worldlywise to an even greater degree. He published a series of books which correspond with every stage and develop¬ ment in Henry’s breach with Rome. St. Germain’s first book, Doctor and Student (1523), had been an almost orthodox and academic treatise on the nature and relationship of laws, although it did attack certain well-known ecclesiastical abuses and displayed the common lawyer’s jealousy of the church courts. Each of his later pamphlets explores theoretically the ground which Henry was about to occupy by legislation. Two of these works (A

Treatise concernynge the Division

betwene the Spirytualtie and Temporaltie, 1532, and Salem and Bizance, 1533) provoked Sir Thomas More

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S

PROCEEDINGS

51

into replying. St. Germain’s last pamphlet, An Answere to a Letter (1535), goes as far as the King ever went and leaves to the clergy nothing beyond the actual super¬ natural power to confer grace through the sacraments. Priests are not even allowed to be the best interpreters of Scripture. He argues that the right to expound Scripture belongs to the Church, yet the clergy are ‘ but a part of the Church’; it is ‘the emperors, kings and princes, with their people’ who ‘make the Catholic Church’. But ‘for as much as the universal Catholic people cannot be gathered together to make such exposition, therefore it seemeth that kings and princes, whom the people have chosen . . . have the whole voices of the people’ and may ‘with their counsel spiritual and temporal make Scripture as is doubtful ’.

exposition

of

such

It is noteworthy that St. Germain even at his most extreme holds that kings rule by popular consent and that it is King and Parliament jointly to whom he gives ecclesiastical supremacy. He is not preaching the divine right of kings and he is not making the Protestant appeal to the personal judgement of a godly prince. Yet St. Germain’s doctrine was carried perhaps a little further by the King himself when he told Parliament in 1545 that if ‘a preacher erreth or teacheth false doctrine, come and declare it to some of our Council or to Us, to whom is committed by God the high authority to reform and order such causes and behaviour: be not judges yourselves’. A Protestant could hardly have said more. King Henry’s claim to royal supremacy hinged on

52

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

certain distinctions long known to canon lawyers. There were, it was held, two kinds of authority ysed in

a

Christian

community—Potestas

Ordinis,

the

purely spiritual power of a priest to consecrate and to administer sacraments, and Potestas Jurisdictionis or power to command and coerce. This latter was sub¬ divided into Jurisdictio Poli (the right to order or dispense with penances or vows or other matters concerning a man’s inner life and relationship with God) and Jurisdictio Fori (the right to deal with all purely external ecclesiastical matters). Yet Jurisdictio Fori covered a wide field. It had legislative, judicial, and coercive aspects, the legislative including the power to define doctrine. To the canonists all these powers were ecclesiastical and none could be vested in a layman. But King and Parliament rode roughshod over canonist teaching. What they did was to annex for the King, by degrees, the whole of the Jurisdictio Fori, not omitting the right to define doctrine. The claim was formally a modest one and it enabled them to argue that the King was by no means setting up to be a priest. In a sense the King got the substance while graciously foregoing the shadow. So long as he could say who should be bishops, the King did not mind who con¬ secrated bishops. If he was free to reduce the seven sacraments to three (as he did in effect by the Ten Articles of 1536) he had no wish to administer a sacrament in person. The arguments adduced to support Henry were not always conclusive or consistent and they begged certain questions but they served their purpose. To Starkey

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS

53

the outward organization of church life was a ‘thing indifferent’ which did not affect salvation and there¬ fore might just as well be left to the civil ruler. But in Gardiner’s view order and organization were essentials of the Christian life, and God had seen to it that we knew where to find them. We should look for them to the civil magistrate, since the clergy must confine themselves to the purely spiritual and may not coerce or organize. To obey is part of our religious duty and to obey our sovereign is to obey God’s representative. The English Church is another name for the English realm; they are identical in personnel. It follows that the head of the realm must be head too of the Church, at least in all matters involving order and organization. Nor is it likely that God has meant rulers to neglect the religious life of their realms. ‘Must every man in his private care seek the kingdom of God and must a prince in his administration neglect it?’ Naturally God has made religion a first charge for princes. ‘They should not only rule the people but also rule them rightly . . . and look unto the Lord’s vineyard.’ Gardiner here adopts a studied theocratic tone. Disorder is made an offence against God, almost a form of heresy, whereas we know from Gardiner’s letters that his usual objection to heresy was that it produced civil disorder. Most of the Henricians agreed to maintain that the Pope’s supremacy had been usurped and was the result of historical accident; or that, if the Pope had ever rightly held it, he had forfeited his right by mis¬ behaviour. Gardiner compared him with a lame man claiming to be a champion runner because of his

54

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

descent from former champions. At best Papal authority was only a tradition of men, ‘a thing indifferent’, unsupported by Scripture and not essential for salva¬ tion. It was easy to point out that Hebrew kings in the Old Testament and Christian Roman Emperors had exercised ecclesiastical supremacy in some sort and had ruled theocratically. Edward Foxe, Bishop of Hereford, in his book De Vera Differentia (1534), took up an almost Protestant position. The clergy, he said, had a certain authority; they were experts whom the king might, if he wished, consult; but they had no ‘dominion’ and no ‘juris¬ diction’. In an aside he even mentions a mediaeval text which suggests that an English king had actually consecrated hishops. In general the Henricians cannot be called unmediaeval. Their position was often identical with that of mediaeval Imperialists. Almost all their arguments are to be found in Marsiglio of Padua, whose work they knew and used and republished with suitable omissions.1 Some of their views resemble Dante’s. On the other hand they paid nothing beyond lip-service to any idea of the unity of Christendom. Luther and Calvin showed considerably more belief in the Church Universal. The Henricians were extremely vague as to whether the King was to be head of the Catholic Church in England or rather of some kind of Church of England. Their position was not unlike that of the Gallicans in seventeenth-century France. 1 Passages on the popular origin and basis of government were omitted.

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS

55

On certain other points the Henricians were also, perhaps deliberately, vague. The King was supreme in all temporal things; but what were temporal things and what were not? Could the right to define heresy be a temporal thing? Again, was it King in Parliament or the King by himself who should be Head of the Church? Foxe and Gardiner implied that it was the King alone. Indeed Gardiner was to write to Somerset, when the boy Edward became king, saying that the Church could really have no head until the King came of age. St. Germain emphatically vested the Supremacy in King in Parliament. He granted that King in Parlia¬ ment could make no decision contrary to the Law of God, but this made little difference since he also granted in effect that King in Parliament could decide what the Law of God was. Starkey inclined to much the same opinion, though he spoke ambiguously of church laws being authorized by ‘common counsel’ or ‘common authority’, which might refer equally to the common consensus of Christendom or of the realm. There were times when the government played with the idea of calling Parliament a kind of General Council for the Church in England. A few of the more con¬ servative

Henricians,

like

Bishop

Tunstall or the

historian Edward Hall, thought that the Supremacy belonged to the King in Convocation or to the King and his Bishops jointly, on the grounds that it could not properly go to a lay body. The question which all Henricians begged was the real nature of ecclesiastical supremacy. They claimed to be giving the King something purely political and

56

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

to be taking from the Pope something not in the least spiritual. But of course, from the time of More and Fisher, devout Catholics insisted that Papal supremacy was not a political matter, nor the result of historical accident, nor yet a ‘thing indifferent’. To them it was an essential of the Catholic Faith and no one denying it could be a Catholic. The Pope was regarded as the sine qua non of the unity of a church outside w'hich there was no salvation; and in his keeping was the pov'er of the keys which Christ Himself gave to Peter. Any claim that England was now Catholic but not Roman Catholic had to face this crucial issue. Nor was it only learned and intellectual Catholics who were disturbed. Quite ordinary simple folk were worried about the future of their souls. They had long been told that no one but the Pope could let them into Heaven. Who could do it now? Was the King so great that he could save their souls ? In the end this was to be an important factor in bringing about doctrinal changes, for it became necessary to preach a new theology telling men that they could save their own souls by faith in the Merits of Christ. By 1536 Cranmer wras already report¬ ing to the King that he had been preaching that ‘ it was too much injury to Christ to impute the remission of our sins to any lawTs or ceremonies of man’s making’. People, he says, have been asking whether those Papal law's w'hich the King has retained have been kept because they ‘remit sin’. Cranmer has told them that these laws are to be respected and observed solely as ‘ laws of the realm ’, that the King is quite free to make other laws for the Church, and that sins are not

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS

57

remitted through the keeping of any laws but ‘ by the death of Our Saviour’. In other words, Cranmer has had to preach Protestant theology to pacify the people. On the whole the government preferred to keep the argument on a fairly superficial, legalistic level. Indeed it is a measure of how legalistically the mind of the government could work that Henry VIII solemnly proceeded against St. Thomas a Becket for having falsely pretended to be a saint. Needless to say, the King

obtained

damages.

Inevitably the

Henrician

pamphlets did not go very deep. Most of them were ephemeral propaganda, designed to justify or to explain the latest move in the government’s campaign. There was great need for rapid publication. Events were moving fast and the times were critical. Indeed it is possible that in the 1530s England ran as great a risk of foreign invasion and of civil war as she did fifty years later. In fact the crisis did culminate in armed rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace. From the time of the rising the royal propaganda took on a new tone, since it had to be addressed to new and simpler listeners. Little more was heard of the subtleties of ecclesiastical supremacy. The King’s annexation of the Church was now virtually a fait accompli and all the convertible were now converted to it. A different preaching was necessary for the uncon¬ verted and the unconvertible. They had simply to be told that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the King’s policy, it was always sin to disobey the magistrate. And not only sin but criminal folly. The new propa¬ ganda was much more purely political. It harped

58

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

straightforwardly

on

the

horrors

of anarchy

and

disorder, on the need for national unity, on the harmony that should result from every man’s abiding in his proper station. For the malcontents had social as well as

religious

grievances.

The

dissolution

of

the

monasteries accompanied, and partly caused, a great social upheaval which gave to many men new and not always welcome masters. The new masters were often hard-headed and hard-hearted. There was rack-renting and there was more enclosure. Nor did rising prices, heavy taxation, and the debasement of the coinage do anything to ease the situation. In the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), and still more in Ket’s rebellion and other disturbances under Edward VI, the strongest element was the peasant’s agrarian discontent.

Consequently the

government’s

propa¬

ganda had not only to preach subservience to the Lord’s Anointed but had more and more to couple with it the text ‘ Servants obey your masters ’. Cranmer asked the Western rebels in 1549, ‘Will you now have the subjects to govern their king, the villeins to rule the gentlemen and the servants their masters? If men would suffer this, God will not.’ In the same year the great scholar Sir John Cheke (in his True Subject to the Rebel) was bidding the Norfolk followers of Ket to be faithful ‘not only to the king, whose subjects ye be, but also to your lords, whose tenants ye be. ... A great sort of you more need of one gentleman than one gentleman of a great sort of you.’ Obedience to all kinds of magistrates was recom¬ mended in the first place ‘ for conscience sake ’ but also,

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS

59

even by the devout Bishop Hooper (in his Annotations on Romans XIII, 1551), ‘ for their utility and commodity in the commonwealth. . . . And for this commodity and necessary use we be bound to obey them. For through their diligence, labour and pains, under God, we eat, hear the Word of God, labour, bring up youth, households be in quietness the goods thereof, with cities, towns, and villages of the realm.’ When Willoughby and Chancellor set sail in 1553 to find the North-East Passage their instructions, drawn up by old Sebastian Cabot now Governor of the Merchant Adventurers, ordain ‘ always obedience to be used and practised by all persons in their degrees, not only for duty and conscience sake towards God, under whose merciful hand navigants above all other creatures naturally be most nigh and vicine, but also for prudent and worldly policy and public weal ’. Not all of the government propaganda was devoted to bidding men keep to their appointed stations and touch their caps to the gentlefolk. Besides the theme of ‘ degree, priority and place ’ there was another and almost contrary motif. The situation was complicated and not a little paradoxical. The bewildered and discontented peasants were not in fact trying to overturn the social order. They were trying to restore it. It was the govern¬ ment party who were the revolutionaries. The Pilgrim¬ age of Grace was largely a protest against the new upstart men such as Cromwell and Cranmer whom the king delighted to honour, against the ‘villein blood’ on the Council. Many of the rebel petitions demanded the dismissal of King Stork and the return of King Log.

60

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

They insisted that the King should consult only with his

‘natural

counsellors’,

the

established

feudal

nobility. The feudal nobility, however, had bled themselves white in the Wars of the Roses and had never been able to recover full social prestige or political influence. It was partly their own fault, as Skelton lamented in

Colin Clout: But noblemen bom To learn they have scorn, But hunt and blow on hom, Leap over lakes and dykes, Set nothing by politics. The government, especially in Wolsey’s time, had taken advantage of this to keep them in the wilderness, as Skelton went on to say: Therefore ye keep them base, And mock them to their face. The * new monarchs ’—and they include the Yorkist monarchs—had ruled largely through the ‘new men’; and the ‘new men’ had seen in the ‘new learning’ a means of equipping themselves for government service and thus rising, through royal favour, to social and political power. They recognized and welcomed the social fluidity that economic change was bringing about; and they advocated frankly equality of edu¬ cational opportunity and the career open to talent. When the King’s School, Canterbury, was refounded (in 1541) Cranmer insisted that ‘poor men’s children are many times endowed with more singular gifts of

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS

61

nature . . . and also commonly more given to apply their study than is the gentleman’s son delicately educated ’. God, he said, ‘giveth His gifts both of learning and other perfections in all sciences unto all kind and states of people indifferently’; and it was not for men to be more exclusive. Many of ‘ our best-born children’, he said, were ‘very dolts . . . and without all manner of capacity’. If the gentleman’s son was ‘not apt, let the poor man’s child apt enter [in] his room ’. Cranmer also reminded his colleagues that neither he nor they were ‘gentlemen born’ but had ‘our beginning that way from low and base parentage; and through the benefit of learning and other civil knowledge for the most part all gentle ascend to their estate ’. Although lip-service continued to be paid throughout the century to the idea that society was graded hier¬ archically with each class in a fixed status, the facts were otherwise and had long been recognized. As early as i486 a heraldic treatise, The Boke of St. Albans, noted without protest that ‘ in these days openly we see how many poor men by their grace, favour, labour, or deserving are made nobles; some by their prudence, some by their manhood, some by their strength, some by their cunning, some by other virtues ’. It also took note of the reverse process, for it explained that the four Evangelists, though poor, were descended from the noble Judas Maccabaeus; their families had come down in the world, for ‘by succession of time the kindred fell to poverty . . . and then they fell to labours and were called no gentlemen’. In 1500 a

62

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Yorkshire knight had complained to the Mayor of York of a certain alderman as ‘ a carl which ye know is come lightly up and of small substance and will be made glad shortly to know his neighbour for his better But the Mayor had no hesitation in replying that ‘All this City knoweth that he worshipfully hath been and borne charge as the King’s Lieutenant within this City.’ Government circles were always somewhat in two minds. In times of disturbance they were apt to preach the virtues of stability and fixed status. At other times they winked at or even encouraged the process by which most of their own number had risen in the social scale. Although the parvenu is notoriously given to snobbery it is a little surprising to find the ‘ new man ’ William Cecil, in a memorandum of 1559, so openly deploring the decay and inefficiency of the older gentry. He insisted that the sons of nobles should stay at the University at least until eighteen and that one third of University scholarships should be reserved for ‘ the poorer sort of gentlemen’s sons ’. This, he hoped, would end ‘the wanton bringing up and ignorance of the nobility’ which ‘forces the Prince to advance new men that can serve, which for the most part neither affecting

true

honour,

because

the

glory

thereof

descended not to them, nor yet the common wealth (through coveting to be hastily in wealth and honour), forget their duty and old estate and subvert the noble houses to have their rooms themselves’. Cecil was neglecting

the

advice

of the

pamphleteer

Robert

Crowley who (in The Way to Wealth, 1550), although

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS

63

he urged the poor to rest content and attribute their sufferings to their sins, yet told the rich ‘grudge

not

to see the people grow in wealth under you Eventually Cecil’s view was to prevail and Queen Elizabeth herself must have thought that the social revolution had gone far enough when she rebuked Sir Philip Sidney for having, as a mere knight, fought a duel with the Earl of Oxford. She was also displeased with

Essex

for

having

cheapened

knighthood

by

conferring it so freely on his officers in the Cadiz expedition of 1596. In the first half of the century the government had more perhaps to fear from the feudal classes and had therefore been fairly openly the poor man’s friend. Wolsey’s unpopularity with the rich had certainly been much on this account. Hall, in his Chronicle, admits that Wolsey ‘ punished lords, knights, and men of all sorts for riots and maintenance ... so that the poor lived quietly’; but Hall twists this into an accusation that Wolsey encouraged the poor to air imaginary grievances, so that * they complained without number and brought many an honest man to trouble and vexation ’. When the government was confronted with open rebellion by the feudal classes it did not hesitate to justify its use of the ‘ new men ’.To Norfolk’s suggestion that only nobles were capable of keeping order in the North, the Council replied: ‘If it shall please His Majesty to appoint the meanest man ... to rule and govern in that place’, his authority ought to secure obedience ‘without respect of the very estate of the personage’. And the King himself added: ‘We will not

64

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

be bound of a necessity to be served there with Lords. But we will be served with such men, what degree soever they be of, as we shall appoint the same.’ An anonymous government pamphleteer, in his answer to the Pilgrimage of Grace, argued that ‘A king in his realm may promote whom he liketh ... be he never so poor’ and such a person must be honoured and obeyed ‘as though he were born to inherit the greatest Dukedom .

.

. not for himself, but because God

commandeth us to do so, as one that is advanced by the King that is God’s Minister’. The writer is trying to stretch the divine right of kings to cover the career open to talent. Originally, he says, all men were equal but God had promoted the most ‘ virtuous ’ to be rulers; and rulers, in turn, had promoted others to authority, disregarding ‘base birth’ and taking account only of ‘virtue, wisdom and qualities’. The government supporters more than once admitted an original equality or an equality of men in God’s sight. ‘Before God’, said Starkey in his Exhortation, ‘ there is no regard of person nor degree.’ But they gave no countenance to the idea that equality was an attain¬ able or desirable objective for their own society. That indeed savoured of Anabaptism and was a thing accursed. Starkey hastened to condemn all who judged ‘inequality in possession of things ... to be plain against Nature and manifest injury’ and all who supposed that ‘the liberty of a Christian man, free from

all

bondage

of

law’

had

any

temporal

meaning. The propagandist who made fewest concessions

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS

65

either to a Christian equality or to the feudal kind of inequality was Sir Richard Morison, author of several pamphlets in support of Henry VIII. Of humble origin himself, he had been in Italy with Pole and Starkey and is known to have read and admired Machiavelli. There is Machiavellian realism in Morison’s frank claim ‘ that they rule that best can, they be ruled that most it becometh so to be

In the first draft

of his Remedy for Sedition (1536) he wrote that those qualified to rule were the men ‘ that Nature hath . . . endowed with greater gifts or Fortune set in higher degree’. But he toned this down in the printed version and spoke of ‘those that Nature hath endowed with singular virtues and Fortune without breach of law set in high authority’. He claimed too that nobility resided ‘ but where virtue is ’ 1 and is not a matter of ‘whose son a man may be’; and that men will be deprived of legitimate ambitions if ‘whatsoever we do, we must be tried by our birth and not by our qualities ’. Morison praised King Henry for encouraging his subjects to ‘contend who may obtain most qualities, most wit, most virtue; and this only to be the way to promotion and have nobility to consist ’. If men of birth are deficient in these qualities ‘they must needs . . . content themselves with that they be able to do, of what parentage soever they be ’. Indeed he cannot have expected high qualities of those who inherited their wealth, since ‘Poverty hath been the inventress of all 1 Much lip-service was paid to this commonplace during the sixteenth century, but Morison took it with unusual seriousness. 225

E

66

POLITICAL THOUGHT

IN

ENGLAND

good crafts and of all other things that ever give ornaments or bring commodities unto man’s life.’ Morison insisted as much as anyone that society must be stratified, that the low man must obey the high man and that such obedience is ordained of God. Yet his definition of what should make a high man is not a feudal definition and, when he writes of the ‘virtue’ which entitles a man to bear rule, Morison is thinking not so much of feudal honour as of virtuosity or at least of Machiavellian virtu, that is, of the efficiency and drive and business aptitude which brought the ‘new man’ to the top. Morison’s denunciations of sedition sprang partly from a highly realistic, almost Marxist analysis of its causes and results. Even ‘ in time of peace’, he asked (though again in manuscript, not in print), ‘be not all men almost at war with them that be rich ? ’ He traced rebellion to an economic cause and he condemned it for an economic reason. Where other men saw rebellion as the destroyer of physical security, as a threat to life and limb, Morison saw it as the destroyer of wealth, as a threat to property. ‘Wealth cannot be where rape is permitted, nor rape lack where order is broken’; and again, ‘who can there be rich where he that is richest is in most danger of poverty ? ’ Men may rebel in order to escape from poverty but their means will inevitably defeat their end, for ‘ cheese is no medicine to drive away rats; neither sedition a mean to make men wealthy’. Even in his much more rhetorical Exhortation to Stir All Englishmen to the Defence of their Country (1539) Morison shows that he thought of patriotism not only as a duty but as a

THE DEFENCE OF THE KING’S PROCEEDINGS

67

good investment. ‘Let us therefore work lustily now, we shall play for ever after. Let us fight this one field with English hands and English hearts, perpetual quietness, rest, peace, victory, honour, wealth, all is ours.’ Morison’s attitude is revealing, for in it what had been latent in the Henrician revolution can be seen coming to the surface. * God ’, wrote Morison of Henry, * hath made him as all his noble progenitors of right ought to have been, a full king, that is, a ruler and not ruled in his own kingdom.’ But in order to make him a ‘full’, a sovereign king, it was necessary not only to break with Rome but to break with feudalism. The king could not be sovereign if there were any immunities, whether ecclesiastical or lay, outside his jurisdiction or any areas where his writ did not run. He had to be free to rule through a new aristocracy whose title was simply service to the crown and whose power was of grace and not of right, depending solely on the royal favour. There had to be an end not only of the mediasval church and its sacerdotal autonomy but an end too of mediaeval society with its hierarchical fixity of rank. The constitutional and religious revolutions could not be completed without embarking on a social revolution. Nor was the royal supremacy secure until there was a powerful class holding monastery land and therefore having a vested interest in the Reformation.

Chapter Four THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS: I When the dust of the Henrician revolution settled

there grew up a conception of society that was to remain fairly generally accepted for half a century, a body of commonplaces and assumptions that filled the background of the minds alike of pamphleteers and of poets. It can be heard as an undercurrent in sermons and homilies, in parliamentary speeches, in law-suits, in descriptions of England like William Harrison’s, in constitutional surveys like Sir Thomas Smith’s, in educational treatises, in history books, in The Faerie Queene, in the chronicle plays, in Bacon’s Essays, in the works of William Shakespeare and of Richard Hooker. It went to make up what has been called * the Elizabethan World Picture’. In many respects the picture

was

still

conventional

and

medieval.

In

many respects it was hazy in outline. Many contradic¬ tions were still unresolved, many questions shirked or begged. But a certain coherence in the design can be perceived, and certain elements of novelty and boldness which justify us in calling it specifically ‘Elizabethan’. It first appears in the famous Mirror for Magistrates (1559), a book so popular that it was reprinted, with numerous additions, six times before 1587. This

book

consists

of

a

series

of stories

by

various hands. The first editor and chief contributor

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

I

69

was William Baldwin, clergyman, schoolmaster, and producer of court theatricals under Edward VI and Mary. Another contributor was George Ferrers, lawyer, courtier, ‘Master of the King’s Pastimes’ and, as member of parliament, once the central figure in ‘ Ferrers’ Case’ (1543) which won for the Commons the right of freedom from arrest. The stories are in verse connected by little essays or prose links pointing out the moral. Most of the verse is doggerel except for two lovely contributions by the young Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. The stories, mainly drawn from fifteenthcentury English history,

are about bad kings—or

occasionally bad subjects—who came to bad ends. The basic assumptions of the Mirror are those which lay at the root of almost all Elizabethan thought about government.

Order

and justice

are

of

enormous

importance and divinely ordained. Magistrates and princes, because their function is to keep order and do justice, are God’s lieutenants and cannot be resisted without fatal results to the community and also to the rebels—fatal both in this world and in the next. But bad rulers are tyrants and will come to a bad end even though God may have sent them as a punishment for the sins of the people. They are, however, accountable to God alone, which makes their responsibility the more grave. God will certainly see that they get their deserts and God is a severer taskmaster than man. In the long run God destroys the tyrant. This often occurs through the tyrant’s overreaching himself so as to provoke rebellion. Yet, though God uses rebels, He also punishes rebellion and the rebel too will come to a

70

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

bad end. A good prince, unlike the tyrant, does not make his ‘lust’, or will, stand for law. He rules by divine sanction but he will also rule constitutionally. He accepts and observes the fixed, known, funda¬ mental laws and customs of the realm. A good ruler is also legitimate, not a usurper; but there are various ways of acquiring legitimate rule, and one of them is by popular election, although hereditary succession is the best way. Lastly, all right is in some sense divine right and all magistrates—nobles as well as kings— have some divine sanction. Most of the verse preaches non-resistance of the usual kind: Full little know we wretches what we do When we presume our princes to resist. We war with God, against His glory too, That placeth in His office whom He list. Therefore was never traitor yet but missed The mark he shot at, and came to fearful end, Nor ever shall till God be forced to bend.

Or again: Who that resisteth his dread sovereign lord, Doth damn his soul by God’s own very word. A Christian subject should with honour due Obey his sovereign though he were a Jew: Whereby assuredly] when subjects do rebel, God’s wrath is kindled and threateneth fire and hell.

On the other hand: Hell haleth tyrants down to death amain. Was never yet nor shall be cruel deed Left unrewarded with as cruel meed.

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

I

71

The prose passages are subtler both in style and matter. For one thing, we are clearly told that it is not kings alone who have divine right. * For as Justice is the chief virtue’, says the dedication, ‘so is the ministra¬ tion thereof the chiefest office; and therefore hath God established it with the chiefest name, honouring and calling Kings and all officers under them by His own name, Gods. Ye be all Gods, as many as have in your charge any ministration of justice. ... In the mean¬ time my Lords and Gods (for so I may call you), I most humbly beseech you favourably to accept this rude Mirror.’ The people are told to ‘ live in love and obedience to the highest powers, whatsoever they be, whom God, either by birth, law, succession or universal election, doth or shall authorise in His room. . . . For, by all these means God placeth His deputies. And . . . there is no means so good, either for common quiet of the people or for God’s free choice, as the natural order of inheritance by lineal descent: for so it is left in God’s hands, to create in the womb what prince He thinketh meetest for His purposes: the people so know their princes and therefore more gladly and willingly receive and obey them.’ Kings, then, may succeed by various kinds of right, including popular election; and the case for hereditary succession is not mystical but utilitarian, based on convenience—including God’s convenience. All rulers are bearers of ‘God’s office’; ‘and it is He which ordaineth thereto such as Himself listeth; good when He favoureth the people and evil wffien He will

72

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

punish them. And therefore whosoever rebelleth against any ruler whether good or bad, rebelleth against God and shall be sure of a wretched end. . . . Yet this I note by the way concerning rebels and rebellions. Although the Devil raise them, yet God always useth them to His glory, as a part of His justice. . . . And therefore whatsoever prince desireth to live quietly without rebellion must do his subjects right in all things.’ The author was clearly anxious to have a good many things both ways. The usual reservation was also made that if the prince commanded ‘unjust things’ contrary to God’s law, he might be disobeyed though not resisted. We must ‘ receive quietly at the prince’s hand whatsoever punishment God shall suffer to be laid upon us for our refusal. God will suffer none of His to be tempted above their strength.’ Princes in fact are superior but not supreme, for there is a law which can command men’s first obedience. The point of view represented by the Mirror was ambiguous, inconsistent, not wholly logical, but it is understandable enough. Fear of disputed succession and of civil strife was very real in Tudor England. Probably the alleged horrors of the Wars of the Roses were much exaggerated by Tudor propagandists but men had before their eyes the terrible examples of the German and French wars of religion. This led them to adopt an almost hysterical attitude towards rebellion. There had in fact been several rebellions in Tudor England, and the government, with no police or regular army, was very ill-equipped to meet them. All the more reliance had to be placed on propaganda. Law and order

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

73

I

were still precarious and could not yet be taken for granted; and therefore their praises were sung by Tudor writers to an extent that must now seem redundant and in a tone that must now seem forced. Nor had lawabiding habits as yet become second nature to most Englishmen.

It

was

therefore

necessary

to

bring

religious sanctions to reinforce the utilitarian arguments for obedience. Such an attitude left subjects singularly helpless against bad rulers. Most people were well aware of this; they compensated themselves by some very plain speaking about those tyrants who were dead, by very plainly pointing out that tyrants did seem to come to bad ends and by hoping that this would be well and truly noted. No wonder the Mirror for Magistrates was a best-seller, for it must often have been comforting. The hysterical note can be heard most clearly in the Homilies or set sermons which the government ordered to be read in churches. The most relevant are the Homily on Obedience (1547) and that on Rebellion (1571). IHe that nameth rebellion’, says the latter, ‘ nameth not a single or one only sin . . . but he nameth the whole puddle and sink of all sins against God and man, against his prince, his country, his countrymen, his parents, his children, his kinsfolk, his Jriends, and against all men universally.’ ‘For where there is no right order ’, said the earlier Homily, ‘ there reigneth all abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and Babylonical confusion. Take away kings, princes, rulers, magistrates, judges and such estates of God’s order, no man shall ride or go by the highway unrobbed, no man shall sleep in his own house or bed unkilled, no

74

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

man shall keep his wife, children and possessions in quietness, all things shall be common; and there needs must follow all mischief and utter destruction both of souls, bodies, goods and commonwealths.’ For the

Homilists

rebellion

meant

not

merely

physical danger and economic disaster; it knocked the bottom out of their universe; it broke vital links in ‘the Great Chain of Being

Political and social order were

part of a whole cosmic scheme of correspondences. ‘ Almighty God ’, began the 1547 Homily, ‘ hath created and appointed all things in heaven, earth and waters, in a most excellent and perfect order. In heaven He hath appointed distinct and several orders and states of archangels and angels. In earth He hath assigned and appointed kings, princes, with other governors under them, in all good and necessary order.’ The author then ranges through the whole of astronomical, animal, vegetable and even meteorological creation. There is a corresponding hierarchy in the microcosm of each man’s ‘soul, heart, mind, memory, under¬ standing, reason, speech . . . and singular corporal members of his body’. All these are ‘in a profitable necessary and pleasant order’; and similarly ‘every degree of people in their vocation, calling and office, hath appointed to them their duty and order’. Treason, as Ulysses was to say, will ‘untune that string’, and inevitably chaos will come again in every sphere, not merely in the political. Even ‘the bounded waters’ will cease to know their place. There will be an end, too, of family life as well as of psychological balance in the individual, for ‘appetite’ will usurp the place of reason.

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

I

75

To an Elizabethan audience it would not have seemed an accident that King Lear’s madness was accompanied by a commotion in physical nature. Over and over again an Elizabethan writer will contrast human anarchy with the celestial harmony. The

poet

Michael

Drayton,

for

instance,

cannot

describe the rebellion against Edward II (in his poem Mortimeriados or The Barons' Wars, 1596) without referring to the stars in their courses and ‘the Great Chain of Being ’: ‘ O powerful Heaven, in whose most sov’reign reign All thy pure bodies move in harmony, By thee in an inviolable chain Together link’d, so tied in unity That they therein continually remain, Swayed in one certain course eternally: Why his true motion keepeth every star, Yet what they govern so irregular?’

The Homilists made use of more mundane argu¬ ments as well. Treason never prospered, they said, but always ‘ came by the overthrow and to a shameful end’. Only ne’er-do-wells rebelled, ‘the most rash and hare-brained men, the most greatest unthrifts that have most lewdly wasted their own good and lands, those that are over the ears in debt ’. Therefore ‘ let no good and discreet subjects follow the flag or banner displayed ... by rebels, though it have the image of the plough painted thereon, with “God speed the plough” written under in great letters, knowing that none hinder the plough more than rebels’. Was not rebellion the cause of the decay of ‘great and noble

76

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

families of dukes, marquises, earls and other lords . . . now clean extinguished and gone?’ Nor was there a greater cause of pestilence and famine. One of Richard Morison’s arguments against the Pilgrimage of Grace had been that plague was raging in the rebellious North, while the loyal South remained immune. Rebellion

therefore was

‘ worse

than

the worst

government of the worst prince that hitherto hath been’. In any case subjects cannot be allowed to use their private judgements in deciding who is or is not a bad ruler, for there will always be some discontented subjects who ‘do wish for a change’ and so ‘no realm should ever be without rebellion’. ‘Even the wicked rulers have their power and authority from God’; and it may well ‘belong of the wickedness of the subject that the prince is undiscreet or evil’, for he may be an instrument of God’s wrath. ‘Let us either deserve to have a good prince or let us patiently suffer and obey such as we deserve.’ The Homilies were written in particularly troubled times and were frankly intended as propaganda. For these reasons they constitute an extreme case

and

they stake out extreme claims. Few other Elizabethan writers went quite as far. Yet, extreme as they are, it is worth noting what the Homilies do not say. Although they are couched at times in almost mystical terms, they contain no mysticism about the sanctity of the blood royal—possibly because Tudor legitimacy was not quite unchallengeable—nor yet about the sanctity attaching to the Lord’s Anointed as such. In other words they do not preach the full-blooded theory of

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

I

77

the divine right of kings, the theory held by James I or Louis XIV. It is ‘the Magistrate’ whom men are to obey, and ‘ the Magistrate ’ need not mean the King. Indeed it could mean the local justice of the peace. In Leicester’s army orders in 1586 it meant the com¬ manding officer. Nor is anything said in the Homilies about kings being absolute in the sense of ruling irresponsibly, outside or above the law. In fact it is implied that there are bad rulers, and that bad rulers are bad just because they do not rule through the law. Law is not what the king wills but w’hat God and Nature have fixed immutably for mankind; and the good king, even though he holds ‘ God’s office ’, exists to enforce rather than to make the law. Again, there is almost as much in the Homilies about the nobility as there is about the king. It is the whole social order, not merely monarchy, which God has ordained. Much that the Homilists almost certainly believed but left unsaid emerges in a contemporary work, the very first of a long line of political pamphlets in defence of Queen Elizabeth.

This was An Harborozve for

Faithfull and Trewe Subjects (1559) by John Aylmer, a Protestant exile who was to become Bishop of London in 1577. The book wras written to answer Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women and it argues that a woman ruler need not be hedged with any less divinity than a man. There is much personal praise of the young Queen—some of it possibly misplaced, for we are told of her great dislike of jewellery and fine clothes and also that * she never meddled with money but against her will, but . . .

j8

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

thought to touch it was to defile her pure hands consecrated to turn over good books, to lift up unto God in prayer and to deal alms to the poor’. There is also much of the Homilists’ teaching on the social cosmos, ‘the chiefest work of God by Nature’, and on the dangers of disobedience. In fact Aylmer goes further still, for he says that even to grudge the Queen her taxes may well lead to all her subjects becoming French galley-slaves and to the violation of all their womenfolk by ‘the pocky French’ or ‘the piddling Scots ’. And there is the Homilists’ teaching on * degree ’. ‘ We be all Adam’s children ’, says Aylmer, ‘ but Adam’s children be distinct in degree, even by the ordinance of God’; yet Aylmer is careful to reserve the Queen’s right to put ‘mean men’ on

her council if she

wishes. Where Aylmer differs in emphasis from the Homilists is over the relation between the ruler and the law. ‘That city’, he says, ‘is at the pit’s brink wherein the magistrate ruleth the laws and not the laws the magis¬ trate.’ Nor is it ‘in England so dangerous a matter to have a woman ruler as men take it to be. For first it is not she that ruleth but her laws.’ It might be dangerous ‘if . . . the regiment were such as all hanged upon the King’s or Queen’s will, and not upon the law’s writ, if she might decree or make laws alone without her senate ... if, to be short, she were a mere monarch and not a mixed ruler. . . . England is not a mere monarchy, as some for lack of consideration think, nor a mere oligarchy, nor democracy, but a rule mixed of all these, wherein each one of these have or should

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

I

79

have a like authority.’ Again, ‘ She maketh no statutes or laws, hut the honourable court of Parliament. She breaketh none but it must be she and they together or else not.’ And Aylmer praises as ‘good fathers of the country’ those parliamentarians ‘that in King Henry VIII’s days would not grant him that his proclamations should have the force of a statute’. It is all the more striking that Aylmer should take this constitutionalist line since, in writing against Knox, he might have been provoked into more ardent royalism. We must remember that ‘ parliament ’ then connoted very little of what it does now. It was still much more the king’s parliament than the people’s. It was there to help the king get on with his business. It was the largest, grandest, most heavily reinforced version of his Council. In the words of ‘Fleta’, a legal writer of Edward I’s time, ‘the King has his Court in his Council in his Parliaments’. When Henry VIII, in Ferrers’ Case (1543), confirmed the Commons’ claim to freedom from arrest, he told them that the king never stood so high as he did in his parliament, but he also told them that their privilege was an extension of his own, that they got it because the king’s servants must be free to go about his business. Parliament was also in fact as well as name a law court. It thought of itself as not \ so much calling new laws into existence but saying what the old law was and how it applied to new cases as they arose. Bacon, in Calvin’s Case (1609), spoke of statutes as ‘judgements in Parliament by way of declaration of law’. Even the Acts of Supremacy pretend not to be making the sovereign head of the

80

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

church but to be pointing out that he always had been or should have been. In a sense to say, as Aylmer did, that the King ruled through and with Parliament was only another way of saying that he ruled through and with the Law. Parliament, like the other courts, was the means by which the law became known. Even in 1581 when Parliament had grown stronger, Charles Merbury in his Briefe Discourse of Royall Monarchie wall not allow that the sovereign is in any way ‘subject’ to the estates of the realm, for this would pervert monarchy to aristocracy. ‘ Our prince is not to receive his power from any (except from God the giver of all power). For if he receive it from any other higher prince, then is he not the principal and supreme magistrate . . . but our prince, who is the Image of God on earth ... is not to acknowledge . . . any authority greater than his own.’ Therefore the people ‘in all well-ordained kingdoms . . . have no other than a voice supplicative’, the nobles ‘only a voice deliberative ’, and the prince alone ‘ a voice definitive ’. He is, however, ‘subject unto laws both civil and common, to customs, privileges, covenants and all kinds of promises’, though only ‘so far forth as they are agreeable unto the law of God’. We are not told what authority decides what the law of God is. Merbury,

a very

‘Italianate’

English

diplomat,

steeped in Aristotle (and possibly Bodin) had been out of the country for many years. His monarch is only in part a portrait of the actual English monarch and is also, in part, a portrait of the kind of monarch Merbury would have liked to see. Merbury’s view is

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

I

81

fundamentally different from that taken by Sir Thomas Smith, secretary of state, ambassador, scholar, pro¬ fessor of civil law, who was much nearer to the centre of English affairs. Smith’s De Rcpublica Anglorum was written (in English) in 1565 but was not published till 1583. In it Smith says ‘the most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the Parliament’, but he also says ‘the prince is the life, the head, and the authority of all things that be done in the realm of England’. The contexts are different, it is true. The prince is * absolute ’ in war-time and for certain purposes such as appointing other magistrates or coining money. Parliament is ‘absolute’ as a court of law, and, perhaps, for general purposes in time of peace. By ‘absolute’ Smith means having no legal superior or not being subject to appeal. His book is far more of a lawyer’s than a political theorist’s. Half of it is devoted to the workings of the judicial system, while much of the rest is a verbatim transcript of William Harrison’s account of English class divisions and of their legal functions (Smith must have read Harrison’s manuscript). Smith was so much the practical lawyer that he was hardly even interested in legal theory and does not mention natural law. He was certainly not interested in the non-legal aspects of government. He does not consider the relations of Church and State and only once does he mention the Council in its executive capacity. The parliamentary supremacy he speaks of is a legal, not a political supremacy and he is concerned with parliament almost solely as a court. It is clear that 2*5

F

82

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Smith has no answer to the problem of sovereignty and indeed that he only stumbled on the problem halfaware. In any case, in Smith’s day, a conflict between king and parliament was almost inconceivable and we must remember that ‘ parliament ’ was a shorthand term for ‘ king in parliament So little of a political theorist was Sir Thomas Smith that, although among so many other things he was a divine,

he never mentions the divine sanction of

government. Once, admittedly, he does touch on the great political question of his day. ‘ When the common wealth is evil governed by an evil ruler and unjust . . . if the laws be made ... to maintain that estate, the question remaineth whether the obedience of them be just and the disobedience wrong . . . and whether a good and upright man and lover of his country ought to maintain and obey them, or to seek by all means to abolish them.’ Smith’s answer is evasive and incon¬ clusive in the extreme. He notes that great men, such as Brutus and Cassius, have risen against tyrants but that such action has caused ‘many commotions’. He notes also that the common people usually judge of this * according to the event and success ’ while the learned consider the motives and the circumstances. Finally he comes half off his fence and admits ‘certain it is that it is always a doubtful and hazardous matter to meddle with the changing of the laws and government, or to disobey the orders of the rule or government ’. He does not say that it is wicked, or dangerous either to souls or bodies—only that it does not always succeed. The lawyer’s mind is often incapable of the higher ranges

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

I

83

of thought or perhaps, through professional caution, unwilling to attempt them. Without doubt there was general agreement among Elizabethans that the king was not absolute in any but a highly technical sense, that he was not above the law, that law was not what he willed, that in so far as he ever made law, he made it in and through his parliament. Even so there was much that was ambiguous and there was some room for other views. At the opening of Elizabeth’s first parliament Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, in announcing the government’s policy, said: ‘Although divers things that are to be done here in Parliament, might by means be reformed without Parliament; yet the Queen’s Majesty . . . meaneth not at this time to make any resolutions in any matter of weight before it shall be by you sufficiently and fully debated, examined and considered.’ That is to say, if the Queen chooses to work through parliament it is an act of grace and she reserves the right to do other¬ wise at some other time. It paid the Tudors to keep the constitution ambiguous and elastic, to let nothing get too well defined. Queen Elizabeth in particular was adept

at

using

Council,

Parliament,

Convocation,

Bishops, or her own private prerogative by turns, and at playing all of them off against one another. She never let it be seen under which constitutional thimble she had, at any given moment, got the pea. Normally, unless circumstances were quite peculiar, the Tudors proceeded in recognized constitutional ways and played their game according to the rules. The rules of course had never become inconveniently

84

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

definite or rigid. Once, it is true, Henry VIII put out a feeler to see whether the game could be played under quite different rules. Prompted by Thomas Cromwell, who would probably have liked to see Roman Law adopted in England, the King sent for Stephen Gardiner, the greatest English expert on Roman Law, and interviewed him in Cromwell’s presence. We have Gardiner’s account of the conversation. Cromwell began it. ‘ “ Come on, my Lord of Winchester, answer the King here, but speak plainly and directly and shrink not, man! Is not that that pleaseth the King a law ? Have ye not this in the civil law, Quod principi placuit, and so forth?” 1 ... I stood still and wondered in my mind to what conclusion this should tend. ... I would not answer my Lord Cromwell but delivered my speech to the King, and told him I had read indeed of kings that had their will always received for a law, but, I told him, the form of his reign, to make the laws his will, was more sure and quiet. “ And by this form of government ye be established”, quoth I, “and it is agreeable with the nature of your people. If ye begin a new manner of policy, how it will frame no man can tell.’” Elsewhere Gardiner reports that he has had difficulty in explaining to the Emperor’s ambassador ‘that the kings of this realm were not above the order of their laws’. An Elizabethan lawyer, John Manwood (in a treatise on the Forest Laws, 1592), actually says that the king must keep the law ‘because the law doth 1 Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem, i.e. the will of the ruler has the force of a law.

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

I

85

make him a king'. Most of this found fairly general support. It was much less clear, and was to remain uncertain

for another century, whether parliament

could be the sole and ultimate judge of what was law or whether parliament was itself bound to observe fundamental, divine, natural, customary, or common law. Christopher St. Germain, in Doctor and Student, had held that no statute could enact things contrary to ‘the law of nature and of reasonable creatures’, for they would be ‘things void and against justice’. He also held that if a statute were made ‘ against the law of God . . . as if it were ordained that no alms should be given for no necessity ’, then such a statute ‘ were void ’. Such too was the opinion of the great Common Lawyer Sir Edward Coke, who argued on more than one occasion that ‘ in many cases the law will control acts of parlia¬ ment and sometimes adjudge them to be utterly void’. He opposed the idea that either king or parliament should be ‘sovereign’, for that would have made them superior to the law. ‘Sovereign power’, he was to say in the great debate on the Petition of Right (1628), ‘is no

parliamentary

word ... we

shall

weaken

the

foundation of laws, and then the building must needs fall; take we heed what we yield unto. Magna Charta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.’ Other opinions were no less tenable; and Burghley is reputed to have said that ‘ he knew not what an act of parliament could not do in England’. The whole matter is too technical and controversial to be elaborated here. On the whole the pattern of Elizabethan thought

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changed very little; but there were holes in it and loose ends which circumstances occasionally exposed. Two happenings in particular imposed considerable strain on upholders of the orthodox position. One was the expulsion of Mary Queen of Scots by her Protestant subjects, together with her subsequent trial and exe¬ cution in England. The

other was the revolt of

the Netherlands against England’s Catholic enemy Philip II. John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, the first official apologist of the Elizabethan church, made a brave effort to wrestle with the problem of Mary Stuart. In his Defence of the Apology (1570) he stated the orthodox tenet boldly. ‘We teach the people ... to be subject to the higher powers not only for fear, but also for conscience. ... If the prince happen to be wicked or cruel or burdenous we teach them to say . . . “Tears and prayers be our weapons.”’ But Jewel is careful to say that only rebellion ‘by private authority’ is forbidden, that is, unofficial rebellion by private individuals. He admits that in certain circumstances the subject might ‘arm himself against his prince by the common advice and by the public authority of the realm’; he admits also that ‘the kingdoms and states of the world have sundry agreements and compositions’ and that in some states it might be constitutional for the estates to resist. He also quotes St. Peter: ‘It is better to obey God than men.’ After some further hedging Jewel lets himself go. He thinks it only ‘ reason that parricides, murders, and shedding of blood, especially blood royal, rapes, incest,

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

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and suchlike should not pass without all controlment. Surely God hath not suffered such great faults to escape unpunished even in princes . . . for princes also are God’s

subjects,

against whom,

for their

offences

against His Majesty, He proceedeth ... by such ways as to His heavenly wisdom it seemeth good’—and sometimes this has meant that ‘ God, by stirring their own subjects against them, deprived them of their princely estates ’. God therefore was probably using the Scottish nobles as His instrument. When the time came for Mary to be put on trial in an English court, the Crown lawyers made no bones about it. The Queen had been legally deposed by her own subjects and therefore her plea was groundless when she claimed to be an anointed sovereign responsible to no human tribunal. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (written c. 1580-83) alongside its light fantastic idylls, contains long and prosy political disquisitions of a highly orthodox kind. There is an oppressively perfect and priggish ideal king, Euarchus. There is a horrific picture of the anarchy that broke out in Arcadia when ‘the many¬ headed multitude’ got out of hand and ‘every man commanded,

none

obeyed’.

There

are

elaborate

orations in defence of constituted authority and of hereditary

monarchy.

There

is

almost obsequious

deference to the sanctity of kings. On the other hand we know from his biographer and friend Fulke Greville that Sidney held tyrants to ‘ be not nursing fathers but stepfathers, and so no anointed deputies of God but rather lively images of the Dark Prince, and sole

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

author of dis-creation and disorder’. It may also be significant that, in the last part of Arcadia, Euarchus advocates the execution for supposed crimes of two supposed foreign princes—they are really his own son and nephew—on the grounds that ‘universal civility, the law of nations ’, should be maintained even against princes and that, although princes bear ‘ a sacred name to which any violence seems to be an impiety ’, yet * as there is no man a father but to his child, so is not a prince a prince but to his own subjects

It seems likely

that Sidney had the Queen of Scots in mind. By similar devices propagandists like Bishop Bilson contrived to defend Queen Elizabeth’s divine right because she was godly and to defend the revolt of the Netherlands against the ungodly Philip. For at no time did the Elizabethans allow theory to get out of their control. It had always to be the handmaid of their practical requirements. In spite of much parade of theological learning, theirs was an earth-bound genera¬ tion; and the theologians themselves were worldlywise. Bishop Aylmer gave their game away when he wrote ‘The Scripture meddleth with no civil policy further than to teach obedience. And therefore what¬ soever is brought out of the Scripture concerning any kind of regiment is without the book, pulled into the game place by the ears, to wrestle whether it will or no.’

Chapter Five THE

ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

II

Political and legal niceties did not much attract the

poets and dramatists—although we should not forget the Archbishop’s interminable exposition of the Salic Law in the first act of Henry V. Yet in Tudor England verse was liable to be used for any purpose—for a treatise on husbandry like Thomas Tusser’s or on silkworms like Thomas Moffett’s, or for a guide-book to England like Drayton’s Polyolbion. And the poets, whatever they wrote, could not avoid having the same commonplaces and assumptions as other men of their time. It was a time when politics were thought par¬ ticularly important and when everyone was politically minded. It was also a time in which learning and literature were expected to be useful and, in particular, politically useful. We ought not then to be surprised at finding Spenser, for instance, full of political allusions and purposes. Indeed he wrote a whole poem, Mother Hubberd's Tale (c. 1580), attacking Burghley and his plan to marry Elizabeth to the Due d’Alencpon. The poets wrote, quite consciously, to edify and even to preach—and the sermons were very often political sermons. Arcadia, as we have seen, is full of them even though Sidney first wrote it for the private amusement of his sister. In his Apologie for Poetrie (1581) Sidney defended poetry partly because it wras so useful politi-

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cally: ‘ Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometimes out of Melibceus’ mouth can show the misery of people under hard lords or ravening soldiers? And again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest.’ Even Shelley once wrote ‘ I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science and, if I were well, certainly I would aspire to the latter.’ The ‘pure’ poet living in his ‘ivory tower’ out of touch with worldly affairs is a very modern conception, if indeed he has ever existed. If the poet’s eye was to glance ‘from heaven to earth and earth to heaven’ it was bound to take in some politics on the way—especially what Coleridge called ‘that kind of politics which is inwoven with human nature’. Besides, certain political themes w’ere obvious romantic and dramatic material. Princes are so much greater and more glamorous than ordinary mortals and, when they fall, fall so much farther and harder; and so much else is involved in their fall. Consequently half the Elizabethan plays are about princes; and when Bottom is told he is to act Pyramus he naturally asks, ‘ What is Pyramus ? Is it a lover or a tyrant ?’ The Elizabethan poets were, in a way not wholly paradoxical,

both

Humanists

and

Puritans.

They

inherited the Humanists’ belief in education, par¬ ticularly in the education of rulers: and they shared the Puritans’ belief in vocation. The poet wras to lead a ‘dedicated’ life. Most of them belonged also, like the Puritans, to the ‘forward’ party in politics, the party of romantic patriots who believed that England

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could and should defy ‘the three corners of the world in arms’. Poetry was to be one of ‘the trumpets that sing to battle ’ and poets were to be among the acknow¬ ledged legislators and educators of the world. The Elizabethan had a sense for the connection that un¬ doubtedly exists between the arts and political morale. Already Queen Elizabeth’s old tutor Roger Ascham had written that Apollo was ‘god of shooting’ as well as ‘author of cunning playing upon instruments’ and that Pallas ‘ also was lady mistress in wars Poets and artists were not yet so bent on ‘selfexpression’ as to lose interest in the public weal. The reason may be that the public weal did not yet seem secure. In a society that seemed more stable it would become possible for Dr Johnson to say ‘Why, sir, public affairs vex no man’—and perhaps more than half mean it. One day a great poet and artist, William Blake, was to write ‘ I am really sorry to see my country¬ men trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is com¬ pelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.’ Whether or not a modern mind can sympathize or agree, there can be no doubt that nothing could be less intelligible to an Elizabethan. The contrasting Elizabethan attitude is perhaps best summarized in a passage from Ben Jonson’s Discoveries. ‘After God, nothing is to be loved of man like the Prince; he violates Nature that doth it not with his

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whole heart. For when he [the prince] hath put on the care of the public good and common safety, I am a wretch and put off man if I do not reverence and honour him in whose charge all things divine and human are placed. Do but ask of Nature, why all living creatures are less delighted with meat and drink (that sustain them) than with venery (that wrastes them): and she will tell thee the first respect but a private, the other a common good, propagation.’ At the Merchant Taylors’ School Spenser had sat at the feet of Richard Mulcaster, a great if long-winded writer on education. In his Elementarie (1582) Mul¬ caster says, ‘As those which serve in public function do turn their learning to public use, which is the natural use of all learning, so such as live to themselves ... do turn their learning to a private ease, which is the private abuse of a public good. For the common weal is the measure of every man’s being.’ Spenser began The Faerie Queene with an avowedly didactic purpose—‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous or gentle discipline ’. Mulcaster saw the whole of life as a search for peace and stability. ‘Every private man travaileth in this world to win rest after toil, to have ease after labour and not to travail still as being a thing exceedingly uncomfortable if so be it were endless. . . . Ease after labour is the common end of both private and public, of both all and some; because everyone in the natural current of all his doings hath as well a general respect for the common quiet, which maintaineth his private, ... as unto himself for to work his own rest. . . .

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

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Nay, is our whole life in this miserable world any other thing than a toilsome course to come to some rest ? . . . The general end of any whole is a blessed peace, the great benefit of a mighty protector, as in the same state the particular end of every private person is a blessed contentment, the great benefit of a merciful God.’ There may be an echo of Mulcaster’s teaching in Spenser’s apostrophe: Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, Ease after war, death after life, doth greatly please:1

or, again, in the last unfinished stanzas of The Faerie Queene where the poet prays to see the end of ‘Mutability’: Then gin I think on that which Nature said, Of that same time when no more change shall be, But steadfast rest of all things, firmly stay’d Upon the pillars of Eternity, This is contrair to Mutability ; For all that moveth doth in change delight: But thenceforth all shall rest eternally With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight. O that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabbath’s sight!

Spenser shared

Plato’s

pessimism,

assuming

all

change to be change for the worse. Stability, though unattainable, was above all things to be sought; and in the political world stability meant observing degree, priority, and place. In the fifth book the Knight Artegall, ‘Champion of Justice’, has to overthrow a 1 It is true that these words are put in the mouth of * Despayre’.

94

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

giant who is a Leveller weighing all things in his scales and reducing all to an absolute equality. Therefore the vulgar did about him flock, And cluster thick unto his leasings vain; Like foolish flies about an honey crock; In hope by him great benefit to gain. And uncontrolled freedom to obtain.

Poets like Spenser, writing for the few, could afford to be esoteric and allusive; but the dramatists, with a wider public and a need to get immediate effects, had to be more open. Some of the earlier Tudor dramatists leave us in no doubt of their political intentions. Bishop

Bale’s

Interlude

or

Morality King Johan

(begun c. 1536) is nothing but Protestant and Royalist propaganda of the crudest kind; and the King is not only a Protestant hero but a Protestant martyr. ‘Verity’ sums up the moral in a final sermon: For God’s sake obey, like as doth you befall, For in his own realm a king is judge over all, By God’s appointment, and none may him judge again But the Lord Himself: in this the Scripture is plain. He that condemneth a king condemneth God without doubt; He that harmeth a king to harm God goeth about.

Sackville and Norton in Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex (1561)—sometimes called the first Senecan tragedy in English—were no less didactic. They were anxious to convince not only the people but the Queen herself of the folly of failing to settle the succession to a throne. Interwoven with this theme is the Homilists’ teaching on obedience:

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

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These mischiefs spring when rebels will arise To work revenge and judge their prince’s fact. This, this ensues when noblemen do fail In loyal troth and subjects will be kings. And this doth grow, when, unto the prince, Whom death or sudden hap of life bereaves, No certain heir remains, such certain heir As not all only is the rightful heir But to the realm is so made known to be; And troth thereby vested in subjects’ hearts, To owe faith there where right is known to rest. The

authors,

it is interesting to

note,

want the

succession fixed during the sovereign’s lifetime because they have ‘ of parliament no hope at all ’. A parliament held posthumously will not be ‘of force’ without the prince’s ‘ lawful summons and authority ’. The second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicle (1587) and the war with Spain began the vogue for chronicle plays. These were highly patriotic but perhaps less directly political in tone and purpose. Where they are didactic they add little to the teaching of the Homilies or of the Mirror for Magistrates. Yet one of the best of them, Woodstock (c. 1592), allows a rebellion to prosper and to seem justified. Political orthodoxy is better represented by Thomas Heywood. Most of his Edward IV (c. 1599), for instance, is rendered wooden and naive by its sententious royalism; and the play comes to life only in a less orthodox scene where the Tanner of Tamworth, an engaging proletarian, transfers his allegiance from de jure to de facto king. In Heywood’s Royal King and Loyal Subject (c. 1600) orthodoxy is carried to nauseating lengths. The play contains a

96

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

fable in which a falcon which has killed an eagle is first crowned for her bravery and then beheaded by the common executioner ‘as one no better than a traitor unto the king of birds’. Moreover, the loyal subject’s loyalty is tested by a supposedly noble king by means of a series of the most revolting and entirely unmerited afflictions. Marlowe perhaps was different. He was an enfant terrible, suspected of heterodox views on religious and sexual matters and on the lawful use of human power. In Edward II (1592) his politics are almost ostenta¬ tiously correct. The rebels make out the usual case that they are opposed only to the King’s evil counsellor; and Edmund, Earl of Kent, is soon repenting of his share: Proud traitor, Mortimer, why dost thou chase Thy lawful king, thy sovereign, with thy sword? . . . . . . Rain showers of vengeance on my cursed head, Thou God, to whom in justice it belongs To punish this unnatural revolt!

And later, O miserable is that common-weal, Where lords keep courts and kings are lock’d in prison.

But in Tamburlaine (1587-8) the hero three

times

challenges the virtues of hereditary kingship. boasts I am a lord for so my deeds shall prove, And yet a shepherd by my parentage.

He

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

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97

He tells his youngest son If thou exceed thy elder brothers’ worth And shine in complete virtue more than they, Thou shalt be king before them. And, again, he makes his captains kings, telling them to Deserve these titles I endow you with By valour and by magnanimity. Your births shall be no blemish to your fame; For virtue is the fount whence honour springs, And they are worthy she investeth kings. Chapman was more sophisticated both in style and thought; he could be orthodox and heterodox by turns. In The Conspiracy of Biron (1608) the chief character is a hero-villain cast in Marlowe’s mould, who boasts There is no danger to a man that knows What life and death is; there’s not any law Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful That he should stoop to any other law. He goes before them, and commands them all, That to himself is a law rational. In The Gentleman Usher (1602) Strozza, a character who is meant to win our sympathy, shows very little trust in princes. He asks: And what’s a prince ? Had all been virtuous men, There never had been prince upon the earth, And so no subject; all men had been princes: A virtuous man is subject to no prince But to his soul and honour; which are laws That carry fire and sword within themselves, Never corrupted, never out of rule. 225

G

98

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Chapman was a follower of Seneca, a ‘Neo-Stoic’ believing in the self-sufficiency of the heroic mind. But he also held the Stoics’ belief in a universal, over¬ riding moral law. In his later play Chabot, Admiral of France, there is a long argument between king and minister as to whether a subject can disobey a king in the interest of a higher justice. Chabot claims that he serves his master only for ‘that good in your rule that justice does you’ and says: Myself am nothing, Compar’d to what I seek; ’tis justice only The fount and flood both of your strength and kingdom’s. Shakespeare presents a much more complicated problem. He shared in the assumptions of his age and he repeats them freely; but he transcends them also. Since he was so much greater as a dramatist than his rivals it is much harder to detect his own personal opinions. Entering so fully into all his characters, he is able to present with sympathy almost all political points of view; and no party may with any certainty claim Shakespeare for its own. When Shakespeare speaks from inside Ulysses or inside Henry IV he is all for law and order; but, inside Falstaff, Shakespeare is an anarchist and it is ‘old father antic the law’. Inside Coriolanus he can be an oligarch, inside Brutus an academic liberal, inside Mark Antony a demagogue, inside Richard Crookback a ‘Machiavel’. Inside Jack Cade or the tribunes, Shakespeare is a labour leader. Inside Timon or Thersites or Lear in his madness, Shakespeare is a nihilist. He beholds ‘the great image

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

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of authority’ and sees that ‘a dog’s obeyed in office’. Perhaps too there is truth of a kind in Dr Johnson’s provocative assertion that Shakespeare ‘is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of social duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him.’ It is well known that Shakespeare is often thought of as a particularly ardent royalist. He was said by Hazlitt to have ‘a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question . . . and to spare no occasion of baiting the rabble’. But this is to ignore certain facts which can only be very briefly listed here. For one thing, it would have been neither popular nor politic to appear disloyal. Shakespeare is not more notably royalist than the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates and of several chronicle plays. King John, for instance, is closely modelled on a chronicle play called The Troublesome Reign of King John] but Shakespeare’s Bastard is more a plain patriot and less of a royalist than the Bastard of the earlier play. The latter made a long stock royalist tirade which Shakespeare has sunk without a trace: ’Tis shame and worthy all reproof To wrest such petty wrongs, in terms of right, Against a king anointed of the Lord. Why, Salisbury, admit the wrongs are true, Yet subjects may not take in hand revenge, And rob the heavens of their proper power, Where sitteth He to whom revenge belongs.

IOO

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Perhaps Shakespeare needed this speech for another play on which he was engaged at much the same time, a play in which John of Gaunt says: God’s is the quarrel; for God’s substitute, His deputy appointed in His sight, Hath caused his death; the which if wrongfully Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift An angry arm against His minister.

Gaunt acts as a kind of chorus to Richard II and, without doubt, his patriotism is Shakespeare’s own. It may therefore be significant that he is more of a royalist than his counterpart in Woodstock who says: We will revenge our noble brother’s wrongs; And force that wanton tyrant to reveal The death of his dear uncle, harmless Woodstock. . . . We’ll call King Richard to a strict account For that and for his realm’s misgovemment.

Yet Richard II may not have seemed to the Eliza¬ bethans so obviously a royalist play. Friends of Essex bribed the players to perform the play on the eve of his rebellion (1601) and the Queen herself complained that it was ‘played forty times in streets and houses’. We forget that, although the King has the best poetry and seems to us a romantic and attractive figure, this comes of reading; and a play then was something to be seen, not read. What the audience sees in Richard II is a weak king failing to rise to the occasion and getting publicly dethroned. The deposition scene was left out of the printed versions until 1608.1 Richard II may be

1 In present-day Abyssinia the films of Hamlet and Macbeth cannot be shown unless, in each case, the death of the King is cut out.

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

II

IOI

poetical, but he is also a neurotic who generally fails to act. So did the vacillating Elizabeth appear to many of her subjects, who had not learnt from later historians to speak of her * masterly inactivity

She herself said ‘ I

am Richard II, know ye not that?’ For reasons which are not very clear, ‘ Richard the Second ’ had been one of her court nicknames. Shakespeare’s chief patrons were a great court official and later a king. They must have expected of him a certain amount of royalism; but, if they were discerning, they would have had some disappointments. It may be significant that the most royalist utterances in Hamlet come from the mouths of Claudius and of Rosencrantz. Nor is Julius Caesar a very royalist play. Caesar is not heroic and, if Brutus is at all a traitor, he is a traitor not to Caesar his sovereign but to Caesar his friend. The play as a whole is republican in sentiment, after the manner of Plutarch. It may be doubted also whether one for whom kingship was wholly steeped in sanctity could have burlesqued the royal titles quite as Shakespeare does in Armado’s pompous letter in Love's Labour Lost—‘ Great Deputy, the Welkin’s Vicegerent, the sole dominator of Navarre, my soul’s earth’s god’. Nor need we take too literally Falstaff’s allusion to the popular belief that ‘the lion will not touch the true prince’. Even Edward III may not have been wholly serious when, in claiming the French throne, he suggested to Philip of Valois that the question should be decided by each of them exposing himself to hungry lions and seeing which got eaten. At times a Shakespearean character does seem to be

102

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

speaking straight out of the Homilies. The Bishop of Carlisle does so in Richard II. For him the king is the figure of God’s majesty, His captain, steward, deputy elect, Anointed, crowned.

And he foresees as the results of rebellion just those evils which the Homilies predict. But then he was a bishop and other sentiments would scarcely have been in character. Camillo in The Winter's Tale refuses to kill Polixenes, even at King Leontes’ bidding, on the ground that of ‘ the thousands that have struck anointed kings’, none had ‘flourished after’. But Camillo was a courtier of unimpeachable respectability and such views would be expected of him. It is more striking when the rebel Morton, after Shrewsbury, explains to Northumberland that his son had But shadows and the shows of men to fight; For that same word, rebellion, did divide The action of their bodies from their souls; And they did fight with queasiness, constrain’d, As men drink potions, that their weapons only Seem’d on our side: but, for their spirits and souls, This word, rebellion, it had froze them up, As fish are in a pond.

This, however, is evidence less of Morton’s guilty conscience than of Shakespeare’s obvious interest in morale, the morale of armies, parties, courts, states, and all other groups of men. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’ Lear’s kingdom catches corrup¬ tion from its rulers. Morale is higher inside Troy than

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

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in the Grecian camp, higher in Macduff’s army than inside Dunsinane, higher in the English camp than among the Frenchmen before Agincourt. The soldiers in Antony’s army become aware that the god Hercules has left him. The scene between Hotspur and Glendower shows us that the rebels are unlikely to support one another in the field. Shakespeare was never content with brilliant isolated portraits. Each of his plays has its own landscape, climate, aura, because the characters make it by their inter-action, because

Shakespeare

always feels the

invisible atmospheric cobweb men make between them. That is why Shakespeare is a superb interpreter of group psychology and an almost unrivalled observer of political behaviour. He made original contributions to sociology if not to political philosophy. Shakespeare takes the greatest pains to show the effect of his tragedies upon First and Second Citizen. He deals with princes and captains partly because their fate involves a whole community. The cease of majesty Dies not alone, but, like a gulf doth draw What’s near it with it; it is a massy wheel, Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortis’d and adjoin’d; which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.

If Shakespeare can be said to preach at all, he can be said to preach the responsibility of rulers. Rulers, he

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

is always saying, must accept this responsibility even if it means abandoning Falstaff or Cleopatra. Rulers must not be treacherous or cruel like John or Richard III; must not use their power to indulge their private lusts like Angelo; must not be usurpers like Henry IV or Macbeth or Claudius; must not be hot-tempered or vain like Lear, or suspicious like Leontes;

must not

be deceived by evil counsellors like Othello; must not put their personal pride before their patriotism like Coriolanus; must not be self-dramatizing like Richard II; must not be too much given to abstract principle and too impervious to facts like Brutus; must not even be bookworms like Prospero, nor carry even holiness to the point of ineptitude like Henry VI. Shakespeare constantly reminds us that the king’s government must be carried on. After the fall of princes some ordinary but efficient person usually comes in to dispose of the corpses and to look after First and Second Citizen. Such is the function of Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet. Albany bids Kent and Edgar ‘rule in his realm and the gor’d state sustain’. Othello ends with a civil servant saying that he will have to send in his report, Macbeth with the new king arranging for his coronation and for the return of political exiles. Nor is it clear that Shakespeare wholly despised First and Second Citizen. The common soldiers make some telling points in their argument with the disguised Henry V. Even the mob in Julius Caesar has generous passions and has to be called back by Mark Antony to hear what it is to get from Caesar’s will. Jack Cade’s

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

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followers are brutal, ignorant, and silly but at least their hatred of learning and of lawyers is made understand¬ able. The plebs in Coriolanus are ill-advised but they are not unprovoked and they are not more fickle than the hero. Moreover, the play contains a study of senatorial

psychology

which

scarcely

redounds

to

senatorial credit. Orthodoxy might suggest that the many-headed multitude was always wrong, but Shake¬ speare had to break away from orthodoxy at least far enough to make the multitude one composed of in¬ telligible human beings. He was too great a dramatist not to find a conflict between right and right more satisfying

for

his

purposes

than

a

crude

conflict

between right and wrong. This is not Shakespeare’s invariable rule. Some of his greatest tragedies contain characters whose malig¬ nancy is unmitigated; and in Henry V no mention is made of the excuse which Cambridge had for his dis¬ loyalty, namely his excellent title to the throne. Even when rebels are given an understandable excuse their rebellion is not by any means condoned. Bolingbroke was provoked into usurping a bad king’s throne; but his own head will always lie uneasy and his guilt will eventually bring down his dynasty. Orthodoxy seems to weigh as heavily on Shakespeare’s conscience and to demand from him perhaps rather more than a fair hearing. It may be significant that the passage most plausibly attributed to Shakespeare in the play Sir Thomas More is

More’s

harangue to the

riotous

Londoners on the sinfulness of rebellion. It recalls in full the teaching of the Homilies—

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

What do you, then, Rising against him that God himself installs, But rise ’gainst God ? What do you to your souls In doing this ? First and Second Citizen may be human beings and may have their grievances but they must know their place. Shakespeare does seem to have thought that society was delicately balanced and that law and order were precarious things. Once ‘ degree ’ is ‘ untuned ’, he knows ‘ w7hat discord follows ’. If an irresponsible ruler ‘from curb’d licence plucks the muzzle of restraint’, Shakespeare—or at any rate King Henry IV—knows that ‘ the wild dog will flesh his tooth in every innocent ’. Ulysses too may be speaking for Shakespeare when he argues There is a mystery—with whom relation Durst never meddle—in the soul of state, Which hath an operation more divine Than breath or pen can give expressure to. Machiavelli had set the fashion for believing that government is a subtle, complex art above the heads of ordinary mortals, that its practitioners should be exempt from normal standards and allowed to proceed in accordance with ‘ reason of state ’, which was some¬ how different from normal reason. In the age of Burghley and of Bacon and of Elizabeth’s own tortuous diplomacy such a belief was natural enough. In more liberal ages the belief has faded but, whenever it has looked as if First and Second Citizen are coming into power, the belief has been revived by a Burke or by some other haughty and authoritarian spirit.

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS:

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Yet Shakespeare did not allow his rulers to be ‘ Machiavellian ’in the vulgar sense, that is, irresponsible, cynical, worldly-wise, unscrupulous, hard-boiled. He would have rejected the implications of what is said by Bosola the villain in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (1613): ‘ Princes ’ images on their tombs do not lie, as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks, as if they died of the tooth¬ ache; they are not carved with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but as their minds were wholly bent upon the world, the self-same way they seem to turn their faces.’ Shakespeare’s princes are more other-worldly. Not only does the idealized Henry V pray on the eve of

Agin court;

even

Claudius

prays

convincingly.

The regenerated Prospero goes back to rule Milan but has first to be redeemed by prayer and he promises that ‘ every third thought shall be my grave ’. It may not be entirely fanciful to suppose that, among all the layers and levels of his last play The Tempest, there lies concealed Shakespeare’s political testament. It touches on two themes that are recurrent in the history of political thought. One is the theme of an imagined ‘state of nature’ which once existed, a state from which, for good or ill, political society has taken us away. The other is the theme of a Utopia, an imagined society remoulded nearer to the heart’s desire. Sometimes the twTo are intertwined, for the regeneration of society can be seen as the return to a state of nature conceived of as a lost golden age. The Tempest is a play about a desert island, about a state of nature: and it contains, in Caliban, a study of

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

the ‘natural* man. Yet Caliban is not a noble savage. He is, says Prospero, ‘a devil, a bom devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick*. Prospero appears to accept the doctrine of original sin and it is notable that Prospero himself gives up his ‘natural magic’ and drowns his book. Caliban, because he is pathetic and poetical, may seem at first half noble; but eventually his bestiality is exposed and he himself says ‘ I’ll be wise hereafter and seek for grace’—a very orthodox theo¬ logical sentiment. In the same way Gonzalo’s anarchist Utopia, the commonwealth in which nature produces everything without anyone’s having to do any work, is at first attractive. But neither Shakespeare nor Montaigne (from whom Gonzalo is quoting without acknowledge¬ ment) can really have desired a realm where not only was there no trade, no manufacture, no government, no social rank, no marriage, but where also there was no wine and ‘letters should not be known’. It was no more Shakespeare’s ideal state than was Jack Cade’s commonwealth in which the pint pot was to hold a quart, although even higher priority was given to killing all the lawyers. Gonzalo’s kingdom was ‘natural’ but not wholly satisfactory, because Nature is not complete without Nurture. Like Plato’s Republic, The Tempest is, among other things, a treatise upon educa¬ tion. Everyone in it from Caliban to Prospero needs to be re-educated, regenerated, and reformed—except Miranda whose original virtue makes her a counterpart to Caliban. The state of nature, Shakespeare seems to say, is not normally golden and most men are naturally

THE ELIZABETHAN ASSUMPTIONS: II

109

sinners who shouid ‘seek for grace’. Sinners have to be kept in order and therefore need law and govern¬ ment. After all, the Church had taught for many centuries that government is God’s remedy for human sin. It would seem that Shakespeare accepted this without much question. Only, being so supreme a dramatist, he knew more still of human nature. And, knowing it, he knew that magistrates and politicians also sin, that no man is really good enough to govern; and, therefore, that governors and governments, though always necessary, can always be reformed.

Chapter Six THE DEFENCE OF THE QUEEN’S PROCEEDINGS Queen Elizabeth’s religious settlement did not lead directly to any new political ideas. What it did was to bring about a coalescence of the Protestant concept of a godly prince commanding for truth with the Henrician concept of a sovereign who was fully master of all his subjects and of all his courts whether ecclesiastical or civil. The new Queen meant to have neither more nor less constitutional power in religious matters than her father. The change of title from Supreme Head to Supreme Governor of the Church was admitted by one of her own bishops to ‘amount to the same thing’. It was meant to pacify a few potential malcontents by making quite plain the purely political nature of the supremacy. The Queen was not setting up to be any kind of priestess, a claim which would have been blatantly uncanonical. Elizabeth had every reason to exercise her natural caution, for her situation was extremely delicate, not to say dangerous. The country was unsuccessfully at war with France and Scotland; and Spain was still her ally.

England had negligible military or economic

strength in isolation and it was essential to prevent the Catholic powers from uniting against her. No help could be expected from the small, struggling, dis-

THE DEFENCE OF THE QUEEN’S PROCEEDINGS

III

united forces of continental Protestantism. The majority of Englishmen were still more or less Catholic in sentiment and some of them at least were unlikely to remain loyal if the Pope chose this moment to declare Elizabeth illegitimate. On the other hand the Spanish connection and the fires of Smithfield had aroused wide and deep resent¬ ment. Most men of substance owned monastery land. The Protestants, although a minority, were numerous and vigorous, with firm roots in the towns and in the business community. Their leaders had returned from exile well organized and well equipped to take the initiative in the war of propaganda. Nearly all of the able and learned divines had Protestant sympathies. Pole and Gardiner were dead, while the surviving Marian bishops were mostly old, weak, unpopular, and of doubtful loyalty. The Queen could not embrace Catholicism

without

virtually

declaring

herself

a

bastard. She had been brought up by Protestant tutors and her own life had been in danger under Mary. She was indeed herself something of a Protestant martyr: and she dared not wholly disappoint the men who had suffered and plotted for her during Mary’s reign. There were few moderates left, few who were con¬ cerned (like the Henricians) merely to get rid of Papal jurisdiction. To gain any Protestant support Elizabeth had inevitably to go further than her father had gone from basic Catholic doctrine. The country, too, was tired of the religious whirligig. A quick settlement was demanded, and any new policy would have to appear permanent and final. Yet any

112

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compromise would need time to win supporters; and compromise there would obviously have to be. The commonwealth was disordered and disunited; it needed and expected a clear lead and a firm hand. Yet it was obvious that any definite policy whatsoever would create numerous malcontents; and serious persecution of such malcontents would be unpopular and dangerous. The government had to decide how far and in what matters

dissentient

minorities

should

be

coerced,

knowing that any compromise, any concessions, or any leniency would certainly lay the government open to the charge of sacrificing religious truth for reasons of state. To most of the Queen’s Catholic subjects Catholicism was primarily a ritual matter. It meant the rites they saw the parish priest performing in the chancel every Sunday—above all, the Mass. In such things simple men are apt to be conservative. The Queen’s Protestant subjects were mostly among the better educated and to them Protestantism was primarily a doctrinal matter. It meant the reformed faith, the new theology of the process of salvation. To these ardent spirits no religion would have been acceptable which was not committed to Predestination and to Justification by Faith Alone. These facts explain much in the character of the socalled Elizabethan compromise. The Queen did not take any via media. It would be much truer to say that she took two different extremes. In such things as ritual and vestments she was so conservative as to appear very nearly Catholic. In theology she adopted a position

that was almost completely Protestant.

THE DEFENCE OF THE QUEEN’S PROCEEDINGS

II3

Certainly it was Protestant enough to induce the returning exiles to write in jubilant tones to their former hosts in Zurich or in Frankfort. To the Protestants, then, it seemed obvious that they had got a godly princess. Comparisons between Elizabeth and Deborah or Judith became rife; and soon the arguments of Luther and of Tyndale were being repeated endlessly and with scarcely any modification, the arguments for the right and duty of godly magis¬ trates to carry out godly reformation and to govern theocratically. Once again it was claimed that princes had God’s approval, sanction, ordination, even more in

ecclesiastical

matters

than

in

temporal.

God’s

primary concern was with the saving of souls but princes had a part to play—indirect but still important —even in this, for they could hinder hindrances to salvation; they could prevent and punish the preaching of doctrines or the open commission of sins which ‘killed the soul’. They could do much, even in purely temporal matters, to turn away God’s wrath from their communities, and to order and discipline society in such a way as to show forth God’s glory. The demand for theocratic action by the prince is discernible

even in those Protestants who insisted

most strongly that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world and that true religion must be propagated by the Word rather than the sword. Such, for instance, was Edvard Dering, an eminent preacher who eventu¬ ally got into trouble for Puritan views. In a letter to Burghley (in 1573) he argued that ‘the government of the church is only a spiritual government’; that 225

H

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

it must proceed always ‘ by the foolishness of preaching . . . and with the weak strength of the sound of words to overthrow the forces of the hearts of men’; that to set up a Visible Church with coercive power, on the Catholic model, would be to ‘erect a kingdom of this world which the Gospel hath condemned’. But it emerges that Dering is not really opposed to all use of force in religious matters. He is opposed only to the use of force by clergymen and in particular by bishops. He admits that law and discipline are needed, not merely to restore civil tranquillity and justice but to defend the Church and punish sin. Force cannot save souls from perdition but it can and should protect a Christian society from public shame. In so far as sin is also injustice or indecency it is amenable to human jurisdiction and must be punished by a godly prince, to whom ‘God hath committed the seat of justice’ for this very purpose and ‘ at whose hands God will require it, how they have defended His Church, given praise unto well-doing, and revenged the sins of all trans¬ gressors’. It had to be assumed that, since the prince had been provided by the Lord, the prince was likely to prove godly. Similarly Archbishop Sandys allowed, in his Sermons, that ‘conscience cannot be forced; yet unto external obedience in lawful things, men may lawfully be compelled ’. ‘ For, though religion cannot be driven into men by force, yet men by force may be driven to those ordinary means whereby they are brought to the knowledge of the truth.’ The Protestant, once he was in power, was inclined to have things both ways. He

THE DEFENCE OF THE QUEEN’S PROCEEDINGS

115

still talked of a purely spiritual church. Souls were still to be saved only by the Merits of Christ, not by con¬ forming to the Law. And turning to Christ had still to be a free act in response to the hearing of His Word. Yet the magistrate had also to ‘ command for truth ’, to insist that the true Word and no other was being preached and to ‘ compel them to come in ’ and hear it. The horse could not be made to drink but could at least be brought to the water. This argument was pushed very far by Robert Some, Master of Peterhouse, in A Godly Treatise (1588). ‘ Faith ’, he says, ‘ cometh by hearing of the Word . . . therefore refusal to hear hinders both the beginning and growth of Faith.’ Princes should care more for their subjects ’ souls than for their bodies and therefore ‘may not suffer them to poison their souls’. Nor may they suffer ‘ idolatrous ’ practices ‘ in England which is a holy land ’. The accent is puritanical, although Some was writing against the Puritan John Penry. He was writing too in the year of the Armada but held that ‘ the greatest enemies of the English nation are the sins of the English nation’. The prince therefore must purge the nation of its sins so that ‘the Lord will go forth with our armies’ and ‘cover both prince and people with the shield of His Justice’. Besides, Some notes that those who sin against God ‘ are easily induced to disobey their prince ’ which is no less a sin. In fact Some went further than most Elizabethans in claiming that ‘ magistracy is not a device of man, but an ecclesi¬ astical constitution and ordinance of Almighty God’, that it was an actual order in the Church, a ‘ ministry ’.

1X6

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

‘ By a ministry

he adds, ‘ I understand not only the

ministry of the Word and sacraments . . . but that ministry which concerneth the relief of the poor and the civil government.’ Some’s was an extreme case. Not every Anglican held this belief in the peculiar magic of monarchy as such. Most of them attached divine right to the whole social order.

When Archbishop Parker read John

Knox’s views on tyranny he was alarmed. ‘ If such principles’, wrote Parker, ‘be spread into men’s heads . . . and referred to the judgement of the subject, of the tenant, of the servant, to discuss what is tyranny, and to discern whether his prince, his landlord, his master is a tyrant, . . . what Lord of the Council shall ride quietly minded in the streets among desperate beasts ? What master shall be sure in his bed-chamber ? ’ And when a later Archbishop,

Richard

Bancroft,

railed against the Presbyterians his attitude was much the same. He feared that a Presbytery would agree none too well with monarchy but he was no less afraid that the Elders were intended to act as agents and informers for the Ministers, with the special object of spying upon the nobility and gentry. ‘What’, he cries, ‘would the people, think you, say when they should see those noblemen and gentlemen come to the pastors with their caps in their hands ? But you must remember always that they hate Superiority. Equality that is it which pleaseth them.’

To most Anglicans it was

‘Superiority’ which mattered; and ‘Superiority’ was no less manifest in squirearchy than in monarchy itself. Even Hooker defended the practice of noblemen’s

THE DEFENCE OF THE QUEEN’S PROCEEDINGS

I 17

keeping domestic chaplains, on the ground that it was unreasonable to expect the rich to go to church with the poor. ‘For we are not to dream’, he wrote, ‘of any platform which bringeth equally high and low unto parish churches’: it would be ‘so repugnant to the majesty and greatness of English nobility ’. The full and classical statement of the theory of the Godly Prince is that of Thomas Bilson, Headmaster and later Bishop of Winchester, in The True Difference between Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (1585). For him the ‘superior powers ordained of God’ did not necessarily mean a prince or monarch, ‘ but all politic states or regiments ’. It did, however, mean the ruling power in the state rather than the local squire. Other Anglicans before Bilson had written much on what the prince could and should do in church govern¬ ment, particularly Bishop jewel in his Apology of the Church of England (written, originally in Latin, in 1562). But most of them gave few reasons why the prince possessed such powers, unless quotations from the Old Testament on reforming and theocratic Hebrew kings can be called reasons. Bilson made a more serious attempt at argument and proof. The religious life of a Christian commonwealth, says Bilson, is bound to have certain external, temporal manifestations and accretions such as ritual, organiza¬ tion, discipline. They are not essentials for salvation but they are valuable and necessary for other reasons. The true church is a Church Invisible and may not control such temporal things. ‘The things that are God’s’ are purely inward and spiritual. All else is

118

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temporal and belongs to Caesar. Even such things as sacraments are ‘temporal and not eternal. . . . They serve for the Church on earth, not in heaven. . . . Things eternal be neither under the priest’s power, nor the prince’s but reserved only to God.’ What the Catholic calls * spiritual ’ is either ‘ eternal ’ and therefore God’s alone, or else ‘ temporal ’ and therefore Caesar’s. In any case ‘ spiritual power ’ would be a contradiction in terms since the Spirit cannot work by force. ‘The soul of man can neither be forced nor punished by man.’ Yet there is a wide field where force is required. In particular it is needed if a church has to be reformed, if provision is to be made for the preaching of true doctrine and the silencing of falsehood, if outward conformity to Christian truth and Christian morals is to be secured. The prince alone may take any such action in defence of the faith. But this monopoly of force is made the basis of a prince’s right to define the true faith. God would not have given him the power to reform religion and enforce truth unless God had enabled him to know what they are. Bilson gives to the clergy, a little grudgingly, the right to be regarded as the foremost experts on the faith; but he gives to the prince the right and indeed the duty to test and check the experts’ opinion by the use of his own judgement. Here the Protestant doctrine of ‘ universal priesthood * is applied. All Christians are ‘churchmen’, not merely the clergy; and every Christian’s conscience is as good as any other’s. The Bible is ‘open’ alike to laity and clergy, and not least to the prince who must read and

THE DEFENCE OF THE QUEEN’S PROCEEDINGS

119

interpret it for himself. Bilson’s appeal to Caesar is an appeal in part to the office and in part to the man. The prince shares with all Christians the power to perceive the truth and, by virtue of his office, he alone is able to enforce it. The prince has every right to restrain the public profession of heresy and has no need to justify himself on the ground that heresy is also treason. On the other hand only outward obedience is required; there is to be no ‘making of windows into men’s souls’ and no ‘ forcing of conscience ’. Bilson admits that ‘Jews, Turks, and infidels ’, who have never been inside the Church, may not be persecuted, for they cannot be schismatics who mar the unity of the Church by leaving it. Yet error as such is to be punishable as an offence against Christ and His truth. ‘Heretics of all sorts and sects may be compelled to follow truth ... to forsake their heresies and forbear their idolatries wherewith Christ is dishonoured and His truth defaced.’ Besides, no Christian prince can tolerate two religions in one realm without serving both Christ and Antichrist; and the open profession of heresy is dangerous not only to unity and order but to the spiritual welfare of in¬ dividuals. It may ‘kill souls’, and the prince’s duty to protect souls is more important than his duty to protect bodies. It follows that a tolerant prince is not a ‘godly prince ’. To Bilson it was the theocratic function of the prince that really mattered and really enabled the prince to claim divine right. Magistracy, he said, was ordained by God for the propagation of ‘ good ’, but ‘ temporal

120

things

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

be

neither

good

nor

evil

but

altogether

indifferent, because no man’s law is the rule of good and evil but only God’s’. Therefore, as the bringer of political benefits, the prince is the creature of expediency, deriving his authority from human agree¬ ment and not from divine institution. The prince has divine right only in those things which he does for God; and God is not much interested in bodies. We may arrange for bodily protection in any way we like. ‘For God hath not put the goods, lands, bodies and lives of men into princes’ hands to clothe their backs and fill their bellies.’ These things are left to man’s discretion and here princes may be subject to control. ‘ In temporal things, princes may not dissolve the laws of their progenitors, nor frustrate the liberties of their people against reason and justice.’ Bilson even says that if a prince 1 neglect the laws established by common consent of prince and people, to execute his own pleasure’ and if, in consequence, ‘the nobles and commons join together to defend their ancient and accustomed liberty, regiment, and laws, they may not well be counted rebels ’. The people may act to ‘ preserve the foundation, freedom and form of their common¬ wealth, which they foreprised when they first consented to have a king’; and properly constituted bodies like the Spartan Ephors may ‘assist’ or if necessary restrain a tyrannical prince. When Bilson says ‘the law of God giveth no man leave to resist his prince’, he refers only to those occasions when the prince is acting theocratically in church government, when he is * commanding for

THE DEFENCE OF THE QUEEN’S PROCEEDINGS

121

truth’. By such distinctions Bilson could defend at the same time the right of his own government to coerce the recusant and the right of the Dutch rebels to resist Philip of Spain. He could also make his own Queen appear in theory what she already was in fact, more absolute in church government than in civil. Bilson did not stand alone. Indeed much of his doctrine had already been stated with even greater prolixity in The Supremacie of Christian Princes (1573) by Dr John Bridges, later to be Dean of Salisbury, Bishop of Oxford, and legitimate butt for Martin Marprelate. Bridges gives to the godly prince divine right because of his theocratic function. Yet Bridges admits, like Bilson, that in civil matters a prince’s will must be restrained by law, that both prince and priest draw their authority from consent and that both were ‘made for the people’s cause’. He notes, too, that in some states ‘the prince’s regiment is but conditional’ and the prince is responsible to electors and ‘ peers and estates in his signiory’ who may even depose him. In church government, however, the magistrate is re¬ sponsible to none but God. Whereas a bishop may be ‘ the

Lord’s

Angel

or Messenger ’,

the

magistrate

himself is ‘the Lord’s Anointed or the Lord’s Christ in authority’. But this divine right is not hereditary right, since an infidel claimant to the throne may be rejected

in

spite of a good title;

although, once

appointed, even an infidel ruler must normally be retained. Bridges and Bilson may have been laying claim to more powers for the prince in church government

122

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

than the Queen herself had any serious intention of using. Archbishop Whitgift, who was a member of her Council, is probably more representative of the govern¬ ment’s real

attitude.

Writing

against

the

Puritan

Cartwright, Whitgift alleged that Christian practice ‘ before the usurpation of the Bishop of Rome ’ had been ‘ to give Christian princes supreme authority in making ecclesiastical orders and laws, yea, and that which is more, in deciding matters of religion, even in the chief and principal points’. Yet he admitted that ‘no godly princes having godly bishops and ministers’ would in practice ‘alter or change, determine or appoint, any¬ thing in matters of religion without their advice and counsel ’. The prince, however, needed the right to act on his own initiative in case of dissension among the experts; in such a case, says Whitgift, ‘shall not the prince determine the controversies, as Constantinus, Theodosius, and other godly emperors did ? ’ In 1583 Whitgift preached a sermon at St Paul’s which is a model of Tudor orthodoxy and almost an epitome of official political doctrine. ‘Obedience is no thing indifferent . . . but for fear and for conscience sake also.’ The magistrate is God’s ‘Vicar and Vice¬ gerent ’, and ‘ whether the man be good or bad, he must be obeyed. To do ill comes from the man himself, but his power is of God.’ Bad rulers are a punishment ‘ for the sin of the people’. Magistrates can and should punish the wicked, secure ‘goods or life’, and prevent that ‘equality of persons’ which ‘engendereth strife’. Yet Whitgift grants that only those ‘commandments of the magistrate being not against the Word of God’

THE DEFENCE OF THE QUEEN’S PROCEEDINGS

123

are ‘binding in conscience’. If the magistrate requires a breach of God’s law, ‘it is better to obey God than men’. No person is exempt from the prince’s juris¬ diction. ‘Christ was an ecclesiastical person, and the Head of the Church and yet He was subject.’ On the other hand ‘ we give princes supremacy in ecclesiastical causes; but not to execute ecclesiastical functions; as to preach, minister the sacraments, or consecrate bishops, as certain wayward persons affirm ’. The office of princes in church government ‘ is to see God served and honoured and obeyed by their subjects’. God would not have committed to them both tables of the law or called kings ‘nursing fathers ... if they had nothing to do in the church ’. The official pronouncements of the Queen and her lay ministers were much less theocratic. They claimed repeatedly that they would not persecute any religious opinion as such and would only punish those who withheld their allegiance or those who broke the laws of the realm; and the laws demanded nothing beyond outward

conformity

and

occasional

attendance

at

Anglican services. The Queen would not ‘have any of their consciences unnecessarily sifted’. She would not indulge in heresy-hunting and she required of the unorthodox nothing except that they should refrain from causing open dissension and disunity or offences against decency and order. Yet in the defence of her ‘Proceedings’ after the Rising in the North (1569), she reserved the right to see that all her subjects lived ‘in the faith and obedience of Christian religion and to see the laws of God and man which are ordained to that

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

end to be duly observed’. This was ‘an office and charge . . . properly due to all Christian monarchs’. She claimed also the right ‘to reform . . . our policy in any manner as truth shall guide and lead us; which truth is to be by us understood, known and received as Almighty God shall please to reveal it’. Such claims begged all the questions. The character of ‘Christian religion’ was assumed to be self-evident and un¬ ambiguous. It was implied, too, that the prince was in a better position than anyone else to perceive theological truth. Furthermore, the Queen admitted that when she dealt with ‘manifest’ rebels she might think fit to examine ‘their secret opinions in their consciences, for matters of faith’. It is true that Elizabeth warned Parliament in 1585 against being ‘overbold with God Almighty, making too many subtle scannings of His blessed will’; but she did not mean that mortals cannot know the will of God. She claimed to know it very well herself. She meant that a parliamentary claim to know it was an infringe¬ ment of her own prerogative as godly prince. Certainly the government could blow hot as well as cold. It had at times to appease the blood-lust of its more fanatical supporters and this could be done by finding victims whom every party execrated. The best way of all was to burn Anabaptists, who were both politically dangerous and theologically disreputable, since they attached some importance to the actual words of Jesus upon war and property. Here persecution could be repre¬ sented as saving society and also pleasing God; and only the poorest of the poor and the most Christ-like

THE DEFENCE OF THE QUEEN’S PROCEEDINGS

125

of the Christians could possibly object. Therefore when the Queen ordered the burning of two Flemish Ana¬ baptists in 1575 she went out of her way to emphasize that they were ‘justly adjudged and declared to be heretics and therefore as corrupt members to be cut off from the rest of the flock of Christ, lest they should infect others professing the true Christian faith’. She was in fact ‘commanding for truth’.

The

victims

perished ‘in great horror, crying and roaring’. Only one protest had been made—by Foxe the martyrologist, to his eternal credit; and even Foxe had admitted that the men deserved death, though he pleaded for some other mode of execution. It is clear too that, as the Queen declared in 1570, overt recusants could be examined about their inner thoughts and could be charged with heresy as well as sedition. Barrowe the Separatist in his account of his own trial (1586) reports that ‘the Archbishop . . . said I was a strower of errors and that therefore he committed me’. Nor, if the government had been persecuting only for sedition, could it have disem¬ bowelled

the

Jesuit

Edmund

Campion.

It would

certainly have had no answer to Campion’s ringing challenge:

‘We seduced the Queen’s subjects from

their allegiance to her Majesty! What can be more unlikely? We are dead men to the world; we only travailed for souls;

we touched neither state nor

policy.’ This was true, for the charge of treason could not be brought home to him; but his examiners had found that he held many regrettable religious views. He suffered partly for the very reason that he ‘ travailed

126

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

for souls’; that is, because he propagated error and was thought likely to ‘ kill souls Whether the Puritan and Catholic victims of Eliza¬ beth’s laws suffered for treason or for their faith is a vexed question. It can be answered only by pointing out that any distinction between religion and politics is,

for the sixteenth

century,

a

~ETsp

distinction.

Obedience to the prince’s laws naturally included obedience to those laws which he made for the main¬ tenance of what he thought the true religion. Such laws might technically be civil but their effect was theocratic. Besides,

it was still thought that no man’s civil

obedience could be relied on unless his religion taught him that it was mortal sin to disobey. All men therefore had to be religious; and, since it was assumed that only one religion could be true, no ruler could be satisfied unless his subjects held his own religion. In an age when religion mattered so seriously, a man who differed from his prince over religion seemed likely enough to desire another prince. Besides, princes might well believe that God would hold them responsible for national apostasy and visit with His wrath a guilty community where God was not honoured. The fusion of religious and political considerations was inevitable and inextricable. ‘So natural’, wrote Richard Hooker, ‘is the union of Religion with Justice, that we may boldly deem there is neither where both are not. For how should they be unfeignedly just whom religion doth not cause to be such; or they religious, which are not found such by the proof of their just actions?’

Chapter Seven THE CATHOLIC PROTEST It is a measure of the skilful tactics employed by Henry VIII that the Catholic protests against his policy were for the most part too little and too late. The King had almost rushed the opposition off its feet. It may also be a measure of how relatively slight a hold the Pope had over thoughtful Englishmen at the time. Protests and indeed martyrdoms there were; but the temper of the times and the government’s propaganda made it appear that to side with the Pope was to be at best unpatriotic and at worst a traitor. Nor had the Popes of the early sixteenth century rendered their cause either easy or attractive to defend. The two greatest Papal champions were Cardinal Pole and Sir Thomas More. Yet Pole’s book Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione (1536) came out too late to be effective and much of it was virtually wasted in personal vilification of the King;

while More,

magnificent as he was, was not wholly logical, and he could on occasion stoop to an argumentum ad hominem that did him too little credit. Few impartial observers would allow that he won his battles with Tyndale; and, even allowing for the conventions of his day, he was in controversial manners the less amiable of the two. Nor did More invariably take his stand upon high principle. When, for example, he wrote his Supplication

128

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

of Souls (1529), to confute an anti-clerical pamphlet by one Simon Fish called The Supplication of the Beggars, More defended clerical property on somewhat un¬ edifying grounds. He argued that, when Fish has had his way and dispossessed the clergy on the grounds of idleness, he will inevitably go on to attack the non¬ clerical idle rich and ‘make another bill to the people against merchants, gentlemen, kings, lords and princes, and complain that they have all, and say that they do nothing for it but live idle and that they be commanded in Genesis to live by the labour of their hands in the sweat of their faces, as he saith by the clergy now’. In other words, More is concerned for gentlemen’s property as well as for the honour of Holy Church. Naturally most of the controversy in the time of Henry VIII centred round the question whether or not the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome was an essential doctrine of the Christian faith.

It involved much

bandying of scriptural and patristic texts and some argument upon constitutional law but did not at first involve much that can be called political theory. So long as Catholics in England had to vindicate their loyalty to the King on all points other than the Pope’s supremacy, the nature of the King’s authority could not be called in question. Cardinal Pole, however, was safe in Italy and therefore could afford to go deeper. He saw that ultimately the real question was whether or not there was a higher law than the King’s. He brought the issue into line with the teachings upon Natural Law of the great Scholastics. The King’s law should conform to Natural Law, and kings only existed

THE CATHOLIC PROTEST

129

to serve the Natural end of providing bodily security, whereas the Church served the Supernatural end of saving souls. The priest serves God, and the king only serves the people. ‘A king’, Pole wrote, ‘exists for the sake of his people; he is an outcome of Nature in labour; an institution for the defence of material and temporal interests. But inasmuch as there are interests beyond the temporal, so there is a jurisdiction beyond the king’s. The glory of a king is the welfare of his people; and if he knew himself and knew his office, he would lay his crown and kingdom at the feet of the priesthood, as in a haven and quiet resting-place. To priests it was said “Ye are gods and ye are the children of the Most High.” Who then can doubt that priests are higher in dignity than kings? In human society are three grades—the people; the priesthood, the head and husband of the people; the king, who is the child, the creature and minister of the other two.’ Pole appealed openly to the English people to rebel, to ‘remember the time when kings who ruled over you unjustly were called to account by the authority of your laws . . . The king is but your servant and minister.’ More’s position was less simple. He had told Parlia¬ ment in 1529 that the royal authority derived ultimately from the people ‘ so that his people maketh him a prince, as of the multitude of sheep cometh the name of a shepherd ’. He admitted, however, in a letter from prison to his daughter Margaret, that a king had a perfect right to punish any breach of his law and that, almost always, to break the king’s law was also to commit sin. ‘As for the law of the land, though every man being 225

I

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

born and inhabiting therein is bounden to the keeping, in every case upon some temporal pain, and in many cases upon pain of God’s displeasure too; yet,’ More continues, ‘ is there no man bounden to swear that every law is well made, nor bounden upon the pain of God’s displeasure to perform any such point of the law as were indeed unlawful’, that is, contrary to the higher law. On the other hand, at his trial, More was willing to allow that Parliament could make the Princess Elizabeth heir to the throne, although in his eyes she was a bastard. Yet he thought it wrong for Parliament to say that Catharine was no longer Queen; and certainly it was for God and not Parliament to say who was Head of the Church. He felt bound to obey King in Parlia¬ ment on any matter that was not a matter of faith; but for More the lawfulness of Catharine’s marriage and the supremacy of the Pope were both matters of faith. He said, too, that his indictment was ‘grounded upon an Act of Parliament directly repugnant to the Laws of God and His Holy Church’; and again, ‘for one Council or Parliament of yours (God knoweth what manner of one) I have all the Councils made these thousand years. And for this one kingdom, I have all other Christian realms.’ The point at issue, as he saw it, was whether or not a Christian king could, for any cause whatever, mar the unity of Christendom. He saw, too, that in fact, if not in theory, Henry was setting himself up to be the highest earthly authority on heavenly things. More held it contrary to the divine purpose that men’s natural and supernatural ends

THE CATHOLIC PROTEST

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should both be served by one unconsecrated person. There were to be Two Swords, and not one; nor was it right that both Swords should be in one man’s hands. Nor could the higher rightly serve the lower. A king could not be put above Christ’s Vicar without causing God to serve Mammon. The appeal to a higher law, particularly to the Law of Nature, was easier for the Catholic than for the Protestant. It was the divine Will, far more than the divine Law, which operated in the Protestant’s universe. The Law was what condemned us and it was only Grace and Mercy which could save us. Moreover, law embodies reason and is found out by reason; but, to a Protestant,

reason was

a faulty and a dangerous

instrument compared with revelation. For the Catholic, however, the divine Will is revealed largely through divine Law; nor does Grace supersede Nature, but rather supplements it; nor is reason something to be replaced by revelation, but a light given us by which to see revelation more clearly. Reason is a human faculty, but is not wholly contaminated by human sin nor wholly impaired by human weakness. It is planted in our breasts by God, enabling us to interpret and to amplify His revealed Word. Certainly it was the Catholic rather than the

Protestant thinkers who

preserved during the sixteenth century and handed on the great and fruitful mediaeval concept of Natural Law. Throughout the century the English Catholics took their stand upon the same principles. They appealed continually to what seemed to them the ‘ natural ’ order, and the words ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ rose con-

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tinually to their lips. It was ‘unnatural’ for example that king and parliament should interfere in what was ‘naturally’ the sphere of canon law. When Cuthbert Scott, Catholic Bishop of Chester, opposed Elizabeth’s church settlement in 1559, he argued that ‘if . . . Parliament had not authority to meddle with matters of the Common Law which is grounded upon common reason, neither with the Chancery, which is grounded upon considerance

[equity], which two things be

naturally given unto man, then much less may it intermeddle with matters of faith and religion far passing reason’. To Catholics it seemed ‘natural’ enough that religion should be in the hands of a purely religious organization. Any amalgamation of church with state, still more any domination of the church by the state, seemed to be ‘unnatural’. It was to forget that men do not live by bread alone and that they have another King besides Caesar. ‘ Natural ’, though it had many other meanings also, was

the

sixteenth-century

word

for

self-evident.

From the Catholic point of view it was ‘natural’ that there should be one visible, universal Church which Christ ‘naturally’ founded and ‘naturally’ meant to be self-governing. Royal Supremacy over a national church would herald the breaking-up of the ‘natural’ unity of Christendom. If religious observance or belief is made dependent on a prince’s will, successive princes may impose different religions and thus not only the unity but the continuity of the faith will have an end— ‘ a thing most monstrous and unnatural, a very gap to bring any realm to the thraldom of all sects, heresy,

THE CATHOLIC PROTEST

13 3

paganism, Turkism or Atheism that the prince for the time being by human frailty may be subject unto

The

words are those of William Allen in his Defense of the English Catholiques (1584). Allen, later to be made Cardinal, was the organizer of the English Catholic seminaries at Douai, Rheims, and Rome. Parliament, said Allen, could not give ecclesiastical supremacy to the civil ruler, because ‘ an earthly commonwealth . . . cannot give that which they have not by any natural faculty’. Parliament was ‘a mere temporal court ’, he argues in his Apologie of the Two English Colleges (1581). Its power is ‘derived from the prince and the commonwealth civil, unto whom neither by the Law of God nor of Nature the defining of such matters do belong’; and parliamentary laws defining religious faith or practice would 1 limit God’s constant and permanent truth to the mutability of temporal statutes, to mortal men’s wills and fancies ’. According to Allen, the authority of the Church rested on the revealed law of God, on specific divine institution, whereas the state’s authority was a matter of convenience, resting on consent and derived from Natural Law which God allows men to discover for themselves by reason. ‘The Church . . . must have and hold that form of regiment and commonwealth which Christ immediately instituted, and was not chosen, made or created by the people’s ordinance and consent (which is the origin of all other human states and forms of polity).’ Here the Catholic, by adopting the idiom of Natural Law, has half anticipated the Whig theory of civil government. It is implied that if the

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government does not conform to the natural justice it was founded to secure, it may be overthrown. In particular if a civil ruler does anything to hinder his subjects’ attainment of their supernatural end, salva¬ tion, he has clearly forfeited all right to rule. * God had not sufficiently provided for our salvation and the preservation of His Church and holy laws, if there were no way to restrain apostate princes.’ And where ‘the temporal power resisteth God, or hindereth the proceeding of the people to salvation, there the spiritual hath right to correct the temporal and to procure by all means possible that the terrene kingdom give no annoyance to the state of the Church’. The means to be used may range from excommunication to actual deposition, but in all cases it is the Church and not the people who is to decide on the means and on whether or not there is occasion for their use. Nor does Allen claim that the Church should inter¬ fere unless the Prince is endangering religion; secular tyranny is not made the Church’s business. The Pope is only given a watching brief to see that princes do no damage to their subjects’ souls. Allen had little interest in secular government. He praised Mary Tudor for executing Cranmer as heretic rather than as traitor; and he attacks Elizabeth for saying that her Catholic victims are punished for treason and not heresy. This, says Allen, must prove either that she dare not call Catholicism a heresy or else that she is openly dis¬ claiming any desire to do what a prince should, namely, to see that her subjects live their secular lives in such a way ‘as eternal joys be not lost or put in hazard’.

THE CATHOLIC PROTEST

13 5

Elizabeth had shamelessly followed reason of state and made all spiritual considerations ‘ but accessory Other English Catholics went further, notably the famous Jesuit Robert Parsons in his Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of England (1594). Parsons was the real power behind Cardinal Allen and behind all the Catholic plots against Elizabeth; and he had a genius not only for political organization but also for political thought. The purpose of his book was to prove the right of the Spanish Infanta to the English throne, but he tried to prove much else as well— possibly too much. Government by a foreign ruler, he argues, is not necessarily bad since good government is better than self-government; yet he also insists on the principle of consent. The community is entitled to choose and if necessary to change both its form of government and its actual ruler. Monarchy is normally the best form of government, and the King’s authority was originally ‘from God by His first institution’; but it is also ‘ a thing created by man ... by man’s election and consent ’. God founded society and uses it for His ends but He has chosen to work through man-made laws and institutions. In Old Testament times God interfered directly but now God allows communities to arrange their political affairs for themselves; and such arrangements ‘oftentimes are His own special drifts and intentions though they seem to come from men’. Scriptural precedents are therefore no longer relevant, and princes should not base their claims upon texts in Samuel or Kings. Even if God instituted monarchy, that is no reason

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for a monarchy to be strictly hereditary, still less absolute.

Monarchy

takes various

forms

and

the

English form is * mixed ’; the English king must consult his Council and can make no law without consent of Parliament. He is restricted also by the rule of law; and law, ‘being once made, remaineth so still, without alteration or partial affection, being indifferent to all and partial to none, but telleth one tale to every man ’. Fundamental or Natural Law lays down that some things belong to all; some to none, ‘as churches and sacred things’; ‘and some are proper to particular men ’ who have rights and property without which they would be slaves and not free men. If such rights are assailed, above all those of the Church, the ruler has forfeited all right to rule, for he is defeating the ends he exists to serve; and ‘the first, chiefest and highest end that God and Nature appointed to every common¬ wealth was not so much the temporal felicity of the body as the supernatural and everlasting of the soul’. A tyrannical and more especially an infidel ruler may therefore be deposed. Parsons held that a private individual, having once ‘given his voice to make his prince’, must remain ‘subject’ and obedient; whereas ‘the whole body . . . is not inferior but superior to the prince; neither so giveth the commonwealth her authority and power up to any prince that she depriveth herself utterly of the same, when need shall require to use it for her defence for which she gave it’. The community therefore, acting as a whole, may take any necessary action to preserve

its

rights,

including

its

right to

eternal

THE CATHOLIC PROTEST

137

salvation. On the other hand Parsons does turn to the private individual’s conscience in the last resort. He makes conscience his test of religious truth. * Seeing that to me there can be no other faith or religion available for my salvation than only that which I myself do believe, for that my own conscience must testify for me. ... He which in any point believeth other¬ wise than I do . . . is an infidel, for that he believeth not that which in my faith and conscience is the only and sole truth.’ Parsons admits that an individual’s conscience can be wrong; nevertheless he says ‘ for any man to give his help, consent or alliance towards the making of a king whom he judgeth or believeth to be faulty in religion . . . is a most grievous and damnable sin to him that doth it, of what side soever the truth be ’. It is interesting that a Catholic should turn to con¬ science rather than to the authority of his Church as a touchstone of religious truth. Most Catholics reserved for the Pope the right to declare a ruler to be an infidel and to absolve his subjects from their allegiance; and this is what Pius V did in the case of Elizabeth by the Bull Regnans in excelsis in 1570. The Bull forced English Catholics to choose between their patriotism and their religion; and some, in putting their religion first, were prepared for all the logical consequences—as Bishop Fisher had been, long before, in frankly hoping that Charles V would invade England. These Catholics came in fact to think it their religious duty to assassinate a woman who was in their eyes not a legitimate sovereign but a usurper, a tyrant, and an infidel. Nor were the plotters isolated and irresponsible

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fanatics, for they sought and obtained official sanction from the Vatican. In 1580 an English Catholic lawyer called Humphrey Ely informed Sega, the Pope’s Nuncio in Spain, that * certain nobles ’ in England were willing to kill the Queen if they could be assured that to do so was no sin. Sega himself did his best to set their minds at rest and soon he was reinforced by a letter from Galli, Cardinal of Como, the Papal Secretary of State. ‘ There can be no doubt’, wrote the Cardinal, ‘that so long as that criminal woman of England holds the two noble kingdoms she has usurped from Christendom and so long as she remains the cause of such great injury to the Catholic faith and of the perdition of so many million souls, whosoever (with the due intention of doing God service) removes her from this world, not only would commit no sin but would actually acquire merit—all the more since the condemnation still holds good which Pius V of holy memory passed against her. And so if those English nobles do indeed resolve to undertake so high an enterprise, your Lordship can assure them that it will involve no falling into sin.’ It is possible that the Vatican would have shown more hesitation if the Queen could not have been deemed a usurper or if the assassination had not been planned by nobles; yet, even so, the Cardinal had gone far enough. Many English Catholics remained loyal, and some, like Sir Thomas Tresham, expressed genuine horror of the Papal attitude. ‘We for our parts’, he wrote, ‘do utterly deny that either Pope or Cardinal hath power or authority to command or license any man to consent to mortal sin or to commit or intend any other act

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contra Jus Divinum. Much less can this disloyal, wicked and unnatural purpose by any means be made lawful, to wit, that a native-born subject may seek the effusion of the sacred blood of his anointed sovereign.’ One Jesuit reported to Parsons from England in 1587 that he had attended a gathering of Catholic gentlemen who were all agreed that, since war with Spain ‘ was thought necessary by her Majesty and the Council in the behalf of our country ... a good subject ought to look no further into the matter ’ but should fight the Spaniards ‘as being enemies to England and not as Catholics’. When the Jesuit showed these gentlemen a pamphlet by Allen commending the surrender of a Dutch town (Deventer) to the Spaniards by an English Catholic officer, they simply refused to believe that Allen could ‘have overshot himself so foully’. There was also much dissension between Jesuits and Seculars among the English Catholic clergy, and a Secular priest called Wright can be found maintaining that English Catholics could, with a good conscience, take arms to defend their country against the King of Spain, since Philip was not a true Catholic crusader but clearly had ulterior motives. Politicians, Wright notes, often ‘wear religion after the manner of garments which they change again according to time and place ’. A Spanish conquest of England would make Spain an over-mighty power, dangerous to other Catholic countries and to the Pope himself; ‘ for it is known how irreverently the Spaniards deal with the Church’ and even ‘ how propense the Spaniards are to Mahometism ’. A Spanish victory would make Catholicism for ever

140

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

hateful to the English; nor would English Catholics escape the Spanish fury, since Medina Sidonia1 is reputed to have said ‘he thought no English man a Catholic but esteemed them all for Lutherans’. Re¬ bellion against a heretical ruler could only be justified if it was unanimous; and in all ‘ doubtful matters ’ the prince must be assumed to know best, since ‘ a prince, being set in a watchtower, seeth very many things which are secret from subjects who dwell in the valleys’. Besides, even if ‘the unrighteousness of governing will make the king guilty, the order of serving will render the soldier innocent’. As Bates said before Agincourt, ‘ If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.’ Few English Catholics subscribed to the doctrine of tyrannicide, taught by Mariana and some other Jesuits, but many were forced by their position into adopting Parsons’ not very Catholic plea for the rights of conscience and for religious toleration.

It was the

natural and inevitable plea for a minority party facing persecution. ‘Liberalism’ comes less easily to a party in power. Nevertheless it is much to the credit of Elizabethan Englishmen that now and then a solitary voice was heard, even among Anglicans and even in Parliament, on the side of toleration. For instance, Edward Aglionby, Member for Warwick, in

1571

opposed a bill compelling Catholics to receive the Anglican

sacrament.

Conscience,

he

argued,

was

something ‘eternal, invisible, and not in the power of the greatest monarchy in the world in any limits to be 1 Commander of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

THE CATHOLIC PROTEST

141

straitened, in any bounds to be contained, nor with any policy of man, if once decayed, to be again raised This was different from the official government policy of not making windows into men’s souls because it was politically dangerous to do so. It was different also from Sir Walter Raleigh’s more legalistic argument when he opposed a bill to persecute the Brownists in 1593. ‘ For it is to be feared’, he said, ‘that men not guilty will be included in it; and that law is hard which taketh life or sendeth into banishment where men’s intentions shall be judged by a jury and they shall be judges what other men meant.’ But Raleigh was not pleading for real toleration, since he went on, ‘but that law [that] is against a fact, that is just; and punish the fact as surely as you will ’. In 1601 a similar bill drew from Dr. Bond, Member for Taunton, a further protest but, again, it was not a protest on behalf of conscience. What Dr. Bond had in mind was that too much would be put in the hands of magistrates who administered one law for the rich and another for the poor, ‘for will any think that a Justice of Peace will contest with so good a man as himself? No, this age is too wise.’ Dr. Bond was howled down by a House that would brook no criticism of a Justice of the Peace, a fact which suggests that the Doctor had put his finger on a tender spot. The true case for toleration had to come from those not tolerated; and the Catholics performed a valuable service by combining the plea for conscience with the appeal to Natural Law.

Natural Law and Natural

Rights are not now fashionable concepts; but the attack

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

on them has been mainly an attack on the name rather than the idea behind it. Strictly speaking, we cannot prove that Nature teaches any morals or gives men any rights; but the belief that she had done so was for many centuries a highly civilizing force; and no one has yet thought of a more satisfactory way of maintaining that a government ought not, for example, to make it a capital crime to be born with red hair. It may be significant that the modern government which most blatantly rejected all vestiges of the old idea was the government which made it a crime to have been bom a Jew.

Chapter Eight THE PURITAN PROTEST The

origins of English Puritanism are obscure, and

much depends on how it is defined. Defined overloosely, Puritanism can be discerned in Froissart’s account of how the English took their pleasures sadly; it can be read into Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s Parson's Tale; it can be traced through the long line of English mystics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries or through the persistence of Lollardy so long after Wyclif’s day.

Defined more strictly, the roots of

Puritanism can best be found among the English Protestants who left England in Mary Tudor’s reign to escape persecution and to preserve their party solidarity until the tyranny was overpast. Some were men of substance, men of the new propertied class created by Henry VIII’s revolution, committed by vested interest to the new religion, anxious to con¬ solidate their gains and possibly greedy for further ecclesiastical spoils. Some were religious intellectuals attracted by a creed which did not shirk logical con¬ clusions and made no concessions to the ‘ superstitious ’ requirements of weaker brethren. Some were selfconstituted

spiritual aristocrats drawn instinctively

towards that form of Protestantism which emphasized the high place of the Elect both here and hereafter. It is noteworthy that one of the earliest Puritans, the Oxford

144

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

divine, Laurence Humphrey, was also the author of a book called Of Nobilitye (1563) 1 which is at once an appeal for a reformed and reforming aristocracy and also

a

belated

Humanist

treatise

on

noblemen’s

education. Some found in Puritanism a way of carrying over the religious life into this world’s activities, a way of not burying their talents, of sanctifying strenuous work in their ‘ calling ’, of being ‘ not slothful in business, serving the Lord ’. Exile made the Puritans tougher and sterner and gave them also the bitterness of frustration. Deprived of opportunity for action, they took the more to theory; and contact with the leaders of what might be called the Protestant International in Switzerland and the Rhineland made the exiles more doctrinaire than is usual among Englishmen. When they returned they seemed to speak with authority and not as the scribes; and yet they resembled the scribes in that their authority was what someone else had written in a book. It might be Calvin’s Institutes, although at first it was more often the Decades of Henry Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor at Zurich. There is indeed a letter to a former exile from a Zurich divine suggesting that for once the English might think of something for themselves. From a distance it is easy to criticize; but we must remember that Puritan can be the name given to those who take religion seriously by those who do not. For these men the reformed religion was true, and not 1 Originally written in Latin, with the title Optimates, and published at Basle in 1559.

THE PURITAN PROTEST

145

rather true; important, and not rather important; and, if important at all, more important than anything else. If it was right to get rid of Popery, it was right to get rid of all Popery; and, if it was right to do it at all, it was right to do it at once. Inevitably they resented the Elizabethan compromise, knowing as they did that the concessions made to Catholics were dictated by political considerations. The first Puritan protest was mainly a protest by Protestant clergy against the sub¬ ordination of religious truth to reason of state. They were not impressed by talk of practical danger or of administrative difficulty. All such hesitations, they thought, could only be evidence of lack of faith in the power of the Lord to look after His own. The Puritans had been called upon to face a major problem in political thought even before their return from exile. They had imbibed the pure milk of orthodox Protestant doctrine as to the Christian’s duty towards the civil magistrate—the doctrine of Luther and of Tyndale. The godly magistrate had to be obeyed and the ungodly had not to be resisted. And both were certainly ‘ ordained of God

the ungodly as a punish¬

ment for sin. This doctrine had been promulgated at a time when Protestant hopes of coming into power still ran high. The situation in the time of Mary Tudor was different, for the Protestants found themselves per¬ secuted in England and in Scotland. The majority of the English exiles remained orthodox or at least non¬ committal. They were still hoping for a turn of the wheel. A vigorous minority, however, performed a rapid and radical change of front. The leaders of this 22$

K

146

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

party were John Ponet1 (once Cranmer’s chaplain and Bishop of Winchester under Edward VI), John Knox, Christopher Goodman (an Oxford professor),

and

Anthony Gilby (a lesser divine from Cambridge). The three last worked in concert at Geneva and argued that no woman and no ‘idolater’ could merit the proper obedience due to magistrates. Ponet at Strasbourg ranged much further. He wrote in fact a most brilliant little book called A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (1556). It was reprinted twice by the parliamentary party on the eve of the Civil War—understandably enough, for the book contains in a nutshell all the best arguments for resistance to a tyrant. Ponet might well be called the acutest of English

political

thinkers

between

Tyndale

and

Hooker. He wrote, too, more racily than any Tudor political thinker since Sir Thomas More. Ponet begins in a deceptively orthodox way. Govern¬ ment, and incidentally property, are necessary because of the Fall. It is rank Anabaptism to suppose that man is ‘clean without sin or that (if he will) he may so be’. The Fall condemned man to labour, and, ‘that he should be the more forced to labour, the distinction of . . . mine

and

thine

was

(contrary

to

Plato’s

opinion) ordained ’. The ‘ worldlings’ are wrong in thinking reason alone to be the origin of society. God founded society as a remedy for the Fall, but God’s rule for social behaviour is the Law of Nature, con-

1 Ponet was also no mean scientist and mathematician. He designed the original of the complicated sundial at Queens’ College, Cambridge.

THE PURITAN PROTEST

147

firmed and supplemented by the revealed Law of God. Here Ponet is more Catholic than typically Protestant. He makes the Law of Nature the ‘ touchstone ’ for all other laws. If a government makes a regulation about employing men in making pins, this is either to enforce the natural law against idleness or the natural law against killing—by starvation. Of course ‘laws without execution be no more profitable than bells without clappers’; but laws can be made or executed in various ways, and experience proves that a ‘ mixed ’ state is best. All states, however, should have ‘one end, that is, to the maintenance of justice, to the wealth and benefit of the whole multitude, and not of the superiors and governors alone’. If a government fails to fulfil this natural law, that govern¬ ment can be ‘changed’.

Rulers are not ‘transub¬

stantiated into Gods’ but have God’s authority only in so far as they rule according to law and without oppression; and God has also authorized constitutional means for removing tyrants—for instance, parliaments. Yet Ponet is not a democrat. Parliament should proceed, he says, ‘ advisedly, not by the more voices but by the more discreet heads’. Some men are more ‘meet for one purpose than another’; each man has his own social function and not everyone can govern. Any man neglecting to fulfil the functions he undertakes for others is guilty of a breach of trust and may therefore be removed or punished. Here Ponet has anticipated Locke’s concept of trusteeship. Infidelity in a ruler is the worst breach of trust, for it may ‘destroy men’s souls \ God’s laws may never be dispensed with, and

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man-made law only in ‘matters indifferent’, that is, in matters not affecting salvation. Even in ‘matters indifferent’, laws may only be dispensed with if the community consents. Rulers have no ‘fullness of power’ or ‘prerogative’ to override any law on their own initiative. ‘For the country and common wealth is a degree above the king . . . And common wealths may stand well enough and flourish albeit there be no king.’ Ponet disposes skilfully of Romans XIII. When St. Paul said ‘Let every soul be subject to the Powers that Be’ he meant, says Ponet, every soul—not excluding the clergy or even the magistrates; and by the ‘ Powers that Be ’ he meant ‘ all those persons that execute justice, be he Kaiser, King, Mayor, Sheriff, Constable, Borseholder 1 or never so low ’. ‘ Powers ’ also include the laws, which magistrates themselves must obey. Again, though the ‘ordinance’ is ‘of God’ yet the person exercising authority is ‘ another thing ’. ‘ The man may be evil and not of God.’ It is ‘a great blasphemy’ to say that God ever allows tyranny or sends it to punish us or means us to obey it. Tyranny, it is true, occurs when we have forsaken God, but we can only return to God by getting rid of the tyrant. Ponet admits that ‘there is not express positive law for the punishment of a tyrant among Christian men’; nevertheless there are good scriptural and historical precedents for such punishment; and Ponet is not above praising Cardinal Pole (whom he calls ‘ Carnal Phoole ’) for pointing this

1 Borseholder means petty constable. This was ignorantly changed to ‘ horseholder ’ in later editions.

THE PURITAN PROTEST

I49

out. In any case, it can be done by the Law of Nature; and God must approve since He advises the rejection of an offending member for the sake of the whole body. Nor have the ‘ Powers that Be ’ any authority over ‘ the soul and conscience, but only over the other and worst part of men, that is, the body’. All men, including rulers, may err; and therefore ‘it is not the man’s warrant that can discharge thee but it is the thing itself’, namely, the thing commanded. We must obey God rather than men. Some of this had been said by earlier Protestants, though perhaps less trenchantly or clearly; but Ponet broke new ground when he said that Christians ought not to obey ‘men’s commandments’ either if they are ‘contrary or repugnant to God’s commandments’ nor yet if they are ‘ contrary to civil justice or to the hurt of the whole state’. In other words, the tyrant no less than the infidel is to be disobeyed. Nor does Ponet leave this decision to properly constituted authorities such as Parliament. The private individual, guided by his own conscience, is to decide for himself; for the Holy Ghost has ‘ printed in man’s heart ’ the laws both of God and of Nature and will tell men when to disobey. With Ponet both the Law of Nature and Conscience were somewhat elastic terms. It was, for instance, contrary to the Law of Nature for Mary Tudor to give up Calais or Berwick; and it was ‘Conscience’ which told Ponet that he should go into exile and not ‘tempt God with tarrying’ in England to face persecution. Ponet can be unscrupulous in argument or hysterical in denunciation but normally he keeps his head. As a

150

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

rule, he says, the private individual should not take it upon himself to kill the tyrant, although a private person may have such a duty should he find the tyrant in the very act of betraying the country, or about to murder an innocent, or in bed with the private person’s own wife or daughter. Or again, he may resort to tyrannicide if all else has failed, that is, if the Church and the nobility have neglected to deal with the male¬ factor. Lastly, the private individual may ‘have some special inward commandment or surely proved motion of God’, a ‘call’ like that of Jehu or Judith or the Judges of Israel. ‘Conscience’ is once more made the ultimate resort. The proper authority, however, for the removal of tyrants is normally the nobility. In fact the nobility originated in tyrannicide. ‘Whereof’, asks Ponet, ‘ came the name of nobility, or how were those that be called heroical or noble personages divided from others ? ’ It was not ‘ for their lusty hunting and hawking, for their nimble dicing and cunning carding, for their fine singing and dancing’; it was ‘because they revenged and delivered the oppressed people out of the hands of their governors who abused their authority’. Ponet by no means confines himself to abstract generalities. He can be a shrewd observer of practical politics. Not content with saying that rulers must respect their subjects’ property, he adds that some rulers have been known to cloak their avarice by pretending to further the public good, for instance, by taxing strong drink. He notes, too, that rulers, in their lust for power, tend to defeat their own ends by relying on unscrupulous men who, like mercenary soldiers, are

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151

not really trustworthy. Ponet knows that rulers are generally

Machiavellian

but

he

does

not

merely

denounce them; he seeks to prove that dishonesty is not the best policy. Oppression, he says, does not really pay, as the Spaniards have found in the Indies where the natives, finding a slave’s life not worth living, are ceasing to procreate themselves. He knows too that tyranny can grow from small beginnings. Rulers must not be obeyed even in the smallest illegality, for ‘the nature of wicked princes is much like the moldwarps which, if they be suffered to have their snouts in the ground and be not forthwith letted, will suddenly have in all the body ’. The number of possible political ideas is very limited and, once they have been adumbrated, the greatest political permutations

and

philosopher

can only make new

combinations.

Strictly

speaking,

Ponet’s ideas were not new. He belongs, in a sense, to the mediaeval school of Natural Law. Yet his achieve¬ ment is indeed considerable, and his mind may well be said to have worked on old material in an original way. He had, in effect, outlined almost the whole of the Whig political philosophy more than two centuries before it came into its own. In his little book can be found implicitly the Original Contract and explicitly the Rule of Law. He came near to stating the principle of Equality before the Law, for he speaks of ‘ that equality . . . concerning the use and benefit of the laws, whereby commonwealths be maintained and kept up ’; and again, ‘what equality . . . should there be, where the subject should do to his ruler all the ruler would,

152

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

and the ruler to the subject that [what] the ruler lusteth ? ’ Ponet’s main tenet is that rulers no less than subjects have the duties of Christians and of citizens to obey the laws of God, of Nature, and of men. Governors are only the agents men employ to carry out the laws. Their position is one of trust and it may be forfeited, for ‘all laws do agree that men revoke their proxies and letters of attorney when it pleaseth them, much more when they see their proctors and attorneys abuse it’. Locke himself never said anything more salutary. Knox, Goodman, and Gilby were much less subtle and profound, and their special pleading is much more obvious. Goodman’s book How Superior Powers oght to be Obeyd of Their Subjects (1558) is a long and tedious sermon on the text * We must obey God rather than men.’ His interests are almost exclusively religious rather than

political.

He

argues simply

that the

obedience which matters is obedience to God and that the real rebel is he who obeys an ungodly ruler. Nor should resistance be left to the nobility, for the nobles may betray their trust; and the common people will not be excused by God for leaving such high matters to their social superiors. ‘All things are as plain and evident to all sorts of men and women, wrhich profess Christ unfeignedly, as before His time they were to the Prophets themselves.’ In places Goodman says that the tyrant, no less than the infidel, forfeits his right to be obeyed; but elsewhere he disclaims any purely political objective. He warns the people not to use religion as a pretext for seeking private gain or promotion. Here it

THE PURITAN PROTEST

153

is interesting to notice Goodman’s discussion of Wyatt’s rebellion. God, he says, let the rising fail although God was ‘well-pleased therewith’. Wyatt is,

doubtless,

happy now in heaven and, anyhow, causes should be judged by their justice not by their success. Above all, Wyatt may have failed because ‘he pretended rather the cause of his country than of God’s religion which ought always to be preferred ’. Gilby’s Admonition to England and Scotland (1558) sounds a more definitely Puritan note. His complaint is that the Royal Supremacy has been preferred to God’s. In Henry VIII’s time, he says, ‘nothing was heard but “the King’s Book” and “the King’s Pro¬ ceedings”, “the King’s Homilies” in the churches, where God’s Word should only have been preached. So made you your King a God, believing nothing but that he allowed.’

Otherwise Gilby does little but

castigate the religious and social shortcomings of the two realms and exhort them to repentance. John Knox moved slowly and reluctantly towards political radicalism or indeed towards political thinking. At first he hesitated to give up orthodox Protestant teaching on submission to the powers that be; but by 1554 his conscience was troubled and he consulted Bullinger at Zurich. Could a minor, he asked, or a female rule, by divine ordination ? Should a ruler who commands ‘idolatry’ be obeyed? Would the nobility be

justified

in

resisting

an

ungodly

magistrate?

Bullinger was non-committal but by 1557 Knox had begun to make up his own mind. He was already hoping that God would raise up some Jehu. In that

154

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

year he wrote The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. He was now certain of one thing at least, that for a woman to rule was to subvert the natural order. Circumstances had already forced him to turn from pure theology towards Natural Law. Yet he still refrained from drawing all the inferences and from openly calling for rebellion. A year later in his Appellation, addressed to the Scottish nobility, he was much more explicit, although he fell far short of Ponet’s range and depth. Knox still hardly thought of politics, as we understand them, at all. Occasionally he spoke of tyranny or injustice but it was ‘idolatry’ in the ruler that really roused and interested him. Knox makes his appeal primarily to the nobles and tells them they are only privileged ‘to be called Gods’ if they do God’s will; otherwise they ‘differ nothing from the common sort of men’. Yet, if the nobles fail, action becomes the duty of any and every Christian citizen.

If rulers are wicked the whole

community will be visited with God’s wrath and there¬ fore the ruler’s wickedness is the community’s concern. It will not do to tell God 1 we wTere but simple subjects ’. At the end of his Appellation Knox inserted four propositions round which he meant to construct a ‘Second Blast of the Trumpet’. He has moved a little farther to the ‘left’, for he now holds that ‘it is not birth nor propinquity of blood that maketh a king lawfully to reign’; that no ‘manifest idolator’ can be ‘ promoted to any public regiment ’ or office in a Christian society; that ‘neither oath nor promise’ can bind a Christian people to obey ‘ a tyrant against God ’;

THE PURITAN PROTEST

that

‘any manifest wicked

155

person’ who has been

‘ignorantly* chosen to rule may ‘most justly’ be deposed by the electors. The electors appear to be the nobles, for Knox may have abandoned the divine right of kings but can hardly be said to have become a very radical ‘Christian democrat’. He remained basically an oligarch and, still more, a theocrat. Once Knox himself came to power in Scotland, what he wrote of the civil magistrate in the new Kirk’s Confession was altogether different. Magistrates are once more ‘ Lieutenants of God, in whose session God Himself doth sit and judge’. Anyone attempting to ‘confound’ established government ‘we affirm . . . to fight against God’s express will ’ and to ‘ resist God’s ordinance ’. There is but one cautious phrase. ‘ Princes and rulers ’ are God’s lieutenants while they ‘ vigilantly travail in the executing of their office’; nothing is said of what happens when they cease to do so. Knox was never remarkable for tact; and his un¬ fortunate views on female regiment naturally ruined the prospects of his party in England when Elizabeth came to the English throne. Calvin himself was to disown Knox and disclaim Knox’s views, but in vain. Ponet, who had never attacked female regiment and was a master of political strategy, might have brought about a reconciliation; but Ponet died before Mary Tudor; and it is doubtful whether Ponet was in any sense a Calvinist. Knox is important because he marks the first break¬ away

by

a

Calvinist from

Calvin’s own

political

teaching. Contrary to general belief, Calvin continued

156

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

for almost all his life to preach non-resistance to the Powers

that

Be—possibly because in Geneva the

power was his, possibly to avoid the charge of Anabaptism. The passage that he added to a later edition of his Institutes does not allow the individual to resist. It only says that in certain states there is established constitutional machinery for restraining tyrants; and Calvin adds the obvious comment that, where this is legal, it is legal for Christians to avail themselves of it. The passage also commends Daniel, not for resisting (which Daniel had not done) but for disobeying Nebuchadnezzar; and disobedience, without resistance, the Protestants always had allowed. Moreover, the books of Knox and Goodman had been published at Geneva without Calvin’s knowledge or permission. It was Beza and the later Huguenot Calvinists who first allowed resistance and indeed came to preach the sacred right of insurrection. Once Elizabeth was on the throne, the English Puritans perceived that in her they had at least a semigodly or potentially godly princess; and they rapidly reverted to orthodox Protestant teaching. No more was heard for half a century of Ponet’s revolutionary ideas. In any case most of the returned exiles looked for inspiration to Zurich rather than Geneva. At first Puritan hopes ran high. Many of their leaders became bishops. The new English theology appeared to be Zwinglian. The ‘rags of Popery’ left in liturgy and ritual

were

thought

purely

temporary

expedients.

The bishops, however, were to disappoint the rank and file. Some were unable and some unwilling to push

THE PURITAN PROTEST

157

the Reformation farther. Whether the bishops were bullied or dissuaded by the politicians, whether they found

themselves

powerless,

whether

they

were

corrupted by power or convinced by administrative experience, the results were the same. The Puritans therefore moved from the attack on vestments to an attack on episcopacy itself; and, having failed to capture the Church from the inside through Convocation, they began to appeal to influential lay friends at Court or in Parliament. From about 1572 the Puritan movement gradually ceased to be a clerical protest against the secularization of religion and came eventually to be a lay protest against sacerdotal influence in the state. Peter Wentworth’s high words to Archbishop Parker, ‘ Make you Popes who list, for we will make you none ’, foreshadow the execution of Archbishop Laud by the Puritan squires. When the bishops were seen to be enforcing the hated vestments, the Puritans began to question the right of a bishop to enforce anything at all. Bishops, they claimed, are not mentioned in the Bible. Bishops were liaison officers between church and state, and therefore personified the subordination of the church to the state. The bishops admitted as much themselves. Parker could write to Burghley, ‘ I refer . . . altogether to your own considerations, whether Her Majesty and you will have any archbishops or bishops, or how you will have them ordered ’; and Whitgift was to say that the bishops ‘ must not claim for themselves any greater authority than is given them. . . . For if it had pleased Her Majesty, with the wisdom of the realm, to have

158

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

used no bishops at all, we could not have complained justly of any defect in our Church.’ Episcopacy did not become more than ‘ a thing indifferent ’ in official eyes until

Richard

Bancroft1

in

1588

claimed

divine

institution for the bishop’s office. It was just because the bishops represented secular or royal control that the Puritans could be called seditious and accused of saying, or at least implying, ‘No bishop, no king.’ The government had chosen to make adherence to the established

Church

the

practical

test

of political

reliability; and the established Church was episcopal by royal command. The government therefore can hardly be blamed for its suspicions.2 The Puritan’s basic assumptions were shared by most of his opponents although the Puritan showed more courage or more logic in accepting the con¬ clusions. Both sides were agreed that Scripture was the test of religious truth;

that all of the Scriptures

carried the same weight, the Pentateuch being no less inspired or inspiring than the Gospels; that Scripture was unambiguous and could not contradict itself; that any difficulties could be resolved by Conscience and that all

‘good’

consciences must agree;

that the

constitution of the Church in the time of the Apostles was perfectly clear and perfectly relevant. Even among Anglicans few besides Hooker and Whitgift allowed for evolution or comprehended that the differences in social structure between the first and the sixteenth century 1 Archbishop of Canterbury, 1604-10. 2 It is interesting, however, that Elizabeth allowed Presby¬ terianism to be established in the Channel Islands.

THE PURITAN PROTEST

159

were real and important. Both sides also^ attached as much importance to systems of church government as we do to economic systems. Both sides were agreed, too, that a sinful community was courting a visitation of God’s wrath. This, among other things, led the Puritans to demand the holy Discipline, the allegedly Apostolic form of theocracy. Lip-service was still paid to the idea that the true church was a kingdom not of this world and should not make use of force for spiritual purposes. The Puritan, however, was reluctant to put his trust in the power of the Word alone. In the background there were historical and personal factors. Luther, a great preacher, had believed that if the Word was freely preached the true church would at once get established. Calvin, a great organizer, believed that once the true Discipline was organized, the true church would stay estab¬ lished. Calvin did not think, any more than Luther, that Discipline could save souls; but he did think that Discipline could ‘serve God’, that it could punish offences which ‘ dishonoured ’ God or offences which might call down God’s wrath. There was to be no question of letting the ‘reprobate’ go undisciplined; the only question was who should exercise the dis¬ cipline. Ostensibly Calvin’s answer was the same as Luther’s—the civil magistrate. But ‘the magistrate’ meant different things to Luther and to Calvin. Luther was to some extent the tool of the German princes, whereas in the city-state of Geneva Calvin had the magistrates under his thumb. Lutheranism has been

l6o

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

called the Protestantism of princes, and Calvinism might well be called the Protestantism of municipal councils. This enabled Calvin to reintroduce what was really the equivalent of a Visible Church, as it were by the back door. In practice he found himself as reluctant to part with the temporal sword as was Sir Bedivere to give up the sword Excalibur. Nominally Calvin’s system put the laity in control; his church was governed, in so far as governing wras required, by the lay Elders. This wras partly because the pastors might not use force and partly because, to a Protestant, the devout layman is a potential priest. No doubt it was also partly because Calvin could trust the Elders of Geneva. Nominally both Elders and Pastors were elected by the Congregation; but, again, the Congregation of Geneva could be relied on to vote as it should. In practice the actual working of Calvin’s Church was highly oligarchic. The people voted only for the acknowledged ‘ Saints ’. Calvin might be called the inventor of dictatorship by plebiscite and perhaps, too, the inventor of the one-party state. Transplanted elsewhere, the Calvinist system could produce different results; and the habit of proceeding by popular vote can breed a different frame of mind in different circumstances. Sooner or later in most Calvinist com¬ munities there arose tensions and conflicts between the democratic and the oligarchic forces. In the long run Calvinism played its part in the spread of the voting habit over the Western world; and Puritan selfreliance was to have its connections with the demand for self-government in the Puritan countries. In a very

THE PURITAN PROTEST

l6l

roundabout way ‘no bishop’ could really lead to ‘no Icing’. Calvin himself, however, and no less his chief English disciple, the Cambridge professor Thomas Cartwright, took an extremely high view of the civil power. For Luther it had been in a sense a non-Christian thing, arising solely from the Fall, as a consequence of sin, and a thing irrelevant to the spiritual life. For Calvinists the magistrate had a more positive value. He became the guardian of God’s honour and the chastiser of breaches of the moral law. Up to a point Church and State were regarded as separate societies,

each a

societas perfecta complete in itself; but the Church had to do more than preach and teach. To be complete the Church needed the godly discipline; and the discipline was in effect to be exercised by Church and State together, the Church laying down the rules and the State carrying them out. It was almost a reversion to the mediaeval Papalist’s conception of society. For all his high importance to God, the magistrate was none the less kept in his place. It was the office, not the man, that mattered. The man himself might be excommunicated and was as much subject to correction as anyone else. His only real claim to authority was Presbyterian orthodoxy; nor was any preference given to monarchy as such. The Church had to have a fixed and permanent constitution; but the magistracy might have different forms and might be changed. ‘ Although her authority ’, wrote Cartwright of the Queen, ‘ be the greatest on earth, yet it is not infinite, but it is limited by the Word of God.’ In fact what the Puritan gave to 225

L

162

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

the magistrate were not so much rights as duties and, principally, the duty to enforce the godly discipline and carry out the godly reformation. This, it is true, involved the duty to reform the Church if the ministers should have gone astray:

but this did not give the civil

government a free hand to impose any system of church government it thought fit. The Calvinist had always to assume that God’s wishes were ascertainable and were, in fact, Presbyterian. Although he was appealing to Parliament, Cartwright would not allow that Parliament could legitimize anything ungodly. Episcopacy might have parliamentary sanction but Cartwright doubted ‘ whether this egg of the bishops’ election, laid in Popery, could by the sitting upon of the Parliament (although never so

godly) lose the poisoned nature it

had

before ’. On the other hand

Cartwright,

always

hopeful

of capturing Parliament or of persuading the Queen through

Walsingham

or

Leicester,

consistently

preached ‘tarrying for the magistrate’, that is, waiting until the magistrate should proceed to a more godly and thorough reformation. Pending that reformation, the saints were to obey the law as far as conscience allowed; and, where conscience demanded disobedience, the magistrate’s punishments were to be patiently en¬ dured. The Church on such occasions, he said, ‘so refuseth that it disobeyeth not, in preferring obedience to the great God before that which is to be given to mortal men. It so resisteth that it submitteth the body and goods of those that profess it, to abide that which God will have them to suffer in that case.’

THE PURITAN PROTEST

163

Cartwright was almost certainly honest in disclaiming any seditious intention, or even any concern with politics at all. It was the Pharisees, he pointed out, who accused Christ ‘ that He was no friend to Caesar, and went about to discredit Him to the civil magistrate’. But church government and civil, he said, were not ‘ neighbours ’ but ‘ dwelt almost as far asunder as Rome and Jerusalem ... so that the house of the Archbishop may be burnt stick and stone, when not so much as the smoke shall approach the house of the civil magistrate Cartwright’s failure to see the political implications of his teaching was

probably genuine intellectual

blindness. Advocating as it did the election of Elders and Ministers and also the ‘parity’ of all Ministers, Cart¬ wright’s party laid itself open to the charge of wanting elected rulers and social equality in the state. Arch¬ bishop Sandys, for instance, accused the Puritans of preaching ‘a mere popularity’, that is, rule by the people. The charge was ill-founded. Cartwright made it clear that it was only in church government that the representative principle was required. He had more right, he said, to a say in the choice of ‘ a governor of whom the everlasting salvation or damnation of my soul doth depend, than [in the choice of] him of whom my wealth and commodity of this life doth hang ’. In any case, it was not the whole people but only the heads of church-going families who should have the right to vote. Cartwright also denied having taught that there should be officers like the Spartan Ephors to depose unsatisfactory rulers, although he followed Calvin in

164

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

accepting the existence of such officers ‘ where the law of the land do establish such an authority’. Yet he could not rebut Whitgift’s charge that, in demanding capital punishment for blasphemy, idolatry, or adultery, Cartwright

was

dictating

to

the

magistrate

what

positive laws he should make and depriving the crown of its prerogative of pardon. The Puritans, if they had had their way, would certainly have made toleration unconstitutional. Their appeal to conscience was in practice a still small voice drowned by their much noisier appeal for Discipline. There was substance too in Whitgift’s charge that Cartwright made Scripture ‘ a nose of wax ’, interpreting it according to preconceived ideas. Whitgift argued that the Apostolic Church need not be a model to be followed in perpetuity; and he made the obvious point that in Apostolic times the magistrates were not Christian. Nor was it difficult for Whitgift to prove that

Cartwright

was

assuming

two

contradictory

things, that the Church needed discipline and yet that all men of good will were of one mind and naturally inclined to keep God’s law. ‘Your imagination’, said Whitgift, ‘ is of such a perfection in men as though they needed no law or magistrate to govern them.’ Here the disputants were at cross purposes. Cartwright thought of the Church as a Church of the Elect and of the Discipline as discipline of the Reprobate. For Whitgift the Church meant the national united front in religion, while Discipline meant the Queen’s right to preserve compromise and order by enforcing outward conformity upon dissidents and extremists.

THE PURITAN PROTEST

165

The Puritan insistence that the Church should be ‘ a gathered Church ’ (a Church, that is, of the Elect alone) gradually led to the emergence of the Separatist move¬ ment. The claim of the Elect to control society was slowly abandoned in favour of the claim that society should leave the Elect alone. It had become clear that the government was not going to instal the rule of the saints, that it might indeed persecute the saints. Inevitably the saints began to discover that freedom matters more than power. At first, naturally, the saints demanded freedom for saints and not for sinners; but by the time the doctrine had passed, as it did, through Milton’s hands, it had come to mean something in¬ finitely greater—freedom to be wrong, even about the most important things. Separation meant three different things—separation of the saints from sinners, of the inwardly converted from the outwardly conforming; separation of the Church from the State; and partial separation of each local autonomous congregation from central control, ecclesiastical or civil. From about 1567 there grew up what would now be called splinter groups among the Puritans, small devoted circles gathering round some man of outstanding spiritual quality and leadership, like Richard Fitz and his ‘Congregation’ in London. Soon there were others—at Northampton and at several places near London and in East Anglia. The most important was that of Robert Browne at Norwich. Browne, after a period of exile, eventually more or less recanted and obtained a rectory in the established Church; there is some evidence that his sanity did not

166

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

remain unimpaired. He died in prison; but he was there awaiting trial for an assault, not for recusancy. He may have owed his life to his kinship with the Cecils. His chief successors, Henry Barrowe, a London lawyer, and the Welshman John Penry, were less fortunate and were hanged as felons or ‘traitors’ in 1593. The ‘ Open Bible ’ and the appeal to ‘ conscience ’ or ‘the inner light’ had begun to do their work. The Protestant Sect and the Non-Conformist Conscience had made their first appearance in English history. In due time they were to free the slaves, reform the prisons, and pass the Factory Acts. Those who use ‘sectarian’ as a term of abuse should remember these things; and also that the Founder of Christianity told us that in His Father’s house there are many mansions. The sects at first were not very ‘ sectarian ’; nor did they plead directly for the rights of individual consciences. It was still assumed that all good men were agreed on what was true and that all bad men must be punished for their sins. There was no attempt to abandon the Presbyterian theocratic ideal and little attempt to abandon Presbyterian intolerance. The sects, however, had lost patience with the Presbyterian tactics, with the policy of ‘tarrying for the magistrate’. That is why Browne called his book Reformation without Tarying for Anie (1582). If the magistrate would not complete the Reformation, the saints must complete it on their own*. If the government would not set up the true Discipline, the faithful must draw apart and discipline themselves. There was an apocalyptic flavour in much of their preaching; the righteous were to escape from

,

THE PURITAN PROTEST

167

Sodom and the regenerate were to gather together and await God’s imminent judgement. At first sight the Separatists seem somewhat confused, for they appear to call on magistrates for strict enforce¬ ment of God’s law and yet to deny that conscience can be forced and that magistrates have anything to do in or for the Church. There is an explanation. They saw that any close connection between Church and State ended in equating the whole realm with the Church. This meant the inclusion of the unregenerate; also inevitable compromises and ‘ tarryings ’ for reason of state. ‘ Have they not’, asked Browne, ‘open abominations and wicked men amongst them, which they say must be tolerated because they are incurable.’ In a state church, said Barrowe, true reformation will be prevented ‘by Machiavel’s

considerations

and Aristotle’s

politics’

and ‘ I know not how many politic inconveniences in way of bar.’ And he said to Burghley, ‘Briefly, my Lord, I cannot come to your church because all the, profane and wicked of the land are received into the body of your church.’ The true Church must exclude ‘common pebble chalk stones which cannot be used to any sound and sure building’. Magistrates, he thought, could and should ‘publish’ and ‘maintain’ the Gospel without making commonwealth and church identical. Rulers could and should assist the Church without ‘planting’ it, that is, without determining its membership, ‘ which the Eternal and Almighty Ruler of heaven and earth keepeth in His own hands ’. For this reason Church and State were formally to be separate; and episcopacy was hateful to the Separatists

168

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

just because it represented the formal connection. At Barrowe’s trial the Chancellor pointed to the Arch¬ bishop and said ‘What is that man?’ and Barrowe writes, ‘The Lord gave me the spirit of boldness so that I answered “He is a monster, a miserable com¬ pound, I know not what to make him; he is neither ecclesiastical nor civil, even that second Beast spoken of in the Revelation”.’ In episcopacy was seen an attempt to revive the conception of a Visible Church. Henry VIII’s bishops, said Browne, were to be com¬ mended for having ‘run their own swords against the wall and broken them ’, but now, he noted, Elizabeth’s bishops ‘would snatch unto them the magistrate’s sword’. The true Church is invisible and should not use the sword at all. To ‘compel them to come in’ would only bring in the Reprobate. ‘It is’, wrote Browne, ‘ the conscience and not the power of men that will drive us to seek the Lord’s kingdom’; and ‘to compel religion ... by laws and penalties belongeth not ’ either to magistrates, ‘ neither yet to the church ’. The Church was to be a purely voluntary society. ‘The Lord’s people is of the willing sort. They shall come unto Zion and enquire the way to Jerusalem, not by force or compulsion, but with their faces thither¬ wards . . . and they themselves shall call for the covenant.’ Penry, indeed, showed a certain inclination to carry over the idea of covenant into his conception of the state itself. ‘It is the crown and honour of princes ... to be in covenant with their subjects, that they will preserve them from violence and wrong. . . . Our princes have preferred the observing of those

THE PURITAN PROTEST

169

equal covenants, whereby they are tied unto their people, before the accomplishing of their own private affections.’ This was not the normal Separatist view. Browne in fact used the covenant to authorize the magistrate to exercise a certain discipline, for he allowed the magistrate to compel the converted to keep their own covenant with God. The Separatist view of the magistrate’s position is complex and perhaps ambiguous. The magistrates, said Browne, ‘have no ecclesiastical authority at all, but only as any other Christians’. Kingship is not an order in the Church, as some Anglicans held, and magistrates have no ‘authority ... to be prophets or priests or spiritual kings ’. Their only concern with the Church is ‘civilly and as civil magistrates’ and, in so far as the Church ‘is in a commonwealth, it is of their charge: that is, concerning the outward provision and outward justice, they are to look to it’. In all spiritual affairs the magistrate, as much as any other member of the Church, is to be ‘overseen’ by the pastor; if it were otherwise, the sheep would be giving guidance to the shepherd. Yet in the magistrate’s own sphere of purely ‘ civil ’ justice there is much that indirectly he can and should do for the Church. Here Browne is not very clear but Barrowe is quite specific. The magistrate, though he cannot ‘ plant ’ a church or force anyone to join it, must repress manifest error and the preaching or practice of idolatry in any part of the community. Moreover, the magistrate’s laws should be exactly modelled on the law of Moses. In the sphere of ‘things indifferent , not covered by revealed law, the magistrate should make

170

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

no laws at all but leave everything to the pastor. Wherever a magistrate has failed to do his duty, both the Church and the individual conscience are free not to ‘tarry for the magistrate’, for the Founder of Christianity ‘sued not to courts and parliaments, nor waited upon princes’ pleasures’. Penry, as usual, went further and actually recalled Magna Carta—a very rare occurrence in the sixteenth century. ‘Her Majesty’, he wrote, ‘ hath granted, in establishing and confirming the Great Charter of England . . . that the Church of God, under her, should have all her rights and liberties inviolable for ever.’ All the Separatists made conscience the final test. Browne wrote, ‘ the magistrate’s commandment must not be a rule unto me of this and that duty, but as I see it agree with the Word of God ’. They enjoined obedience to God rather than to men but, like almost all Protestants, they also taught non-resistance. The private individual, said Barrowe, though he must abstain from ‘doing or consenting to any unlawful thing commanded by the prince’ on pain of forfeiting salvation, must not even take it upon himself ‘to reform the state’, still less to resist or rebel which would be ‘most unlawful and damnable by the Word of God ’. The Separatists knew that any governmental ruling in religious matters was likely to trouble their consciences and tempt them to rebel. This may have been one reason why they were so anxious that the government should never give such orders, why in fact the Separatists demanded separation. Barrowe and Penry were no traitors—not even technically as some of the Jesuit martyrs were. Certainly

THE PURITAN PROTEST

I7I

they had no affiliations with any foreign power. Only if it is always wrong to disobey a law on grounds of conscience were they even reprehensible. For all their narrowness and fanaticism they were none the less protomartyrs in the cause of the rights of conscience and of religious toleration. They sowed the seeds from which Milton’s Areopagitica was one day to blossom. The sects they founded were in time to become the spearhead of the Great Rebellion; but the opposition leaders of those later days could not have found in Browne or Barrowe any arguments for insurrection. To justify actual rebellion they had to go back to the ideas of Goodman, Knox, and above all Bishop Ponet. It was, too, with the voice of Ponet that Thomas Jefferson was one day to write: ‘What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance ? . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’

Chapter Nine RICHARD HOOKER The

best arguments for the Puritans had been the

character and condition of the Established Church. The ‘Elizabethan Settlement’ had settled very little and had merely papered the worst cracks. Its com¬ promises had been meant to tide over an immediate crisis and were dictated by purely political considera¬ tions. A minimum of outward order had been secured but no religious party had been effectually placated. The Anglican Via Media was not planned: it had to grow; and even after thirty years it did not appear to have taken root. The social alliance of squire and parson had still to be cemented, and the mellowing influence of the Book of Common Prayer was not yet apparent. The government had hoped that by the use of delaying tactics, by leaving almost every thorny subject alone, and by resisting every pressure group, it could give the ordinary moderate Englishman his chance to develop a religion suitable for the English soil and climate. Religion, however, is more than a pattern of social behaviour. It requires both intellectual content and spiritual inspiration, since it claims to be an inter¬ pretation of the universe and a way of life. These were somewhat lacking in the Anglican Church. Its first official apologist, Bishop Jewel, had been too negative.

RICHARD

*73

HOOKER

He had explained quite admirably why Englishmen could no longer believe in Roman Catholicism but he had not made it very clear what they had decided to believe instead. Nor was the new Church producing men of saintly life. Most of its leaders were mere administrators and Worldly Wisemen.

The Queen

sometimes kept sees vacant in order to enjoy their revenues, and many nobles looked on incumbencies as perquisites for their poor relations. Archbishop Parker had protested mildly but was a nepotist himself. Erastianism 1 had demoralizing effects. In 157^ Aylmer, now a bishop and now somewhat disillusioned with the Queen he had defended against Knox, admitted ruefully to Sir Christopher Hatton ‘ I preach without spirit. I trust not of God but of my sovereign which is God’s lieutenant and so another God unto me.’ Perhaps the worst failure of the Anglican Church was its failure to produce an educated clergy. Many of the clergy were admittedly unfit to preach, and the

government

was well satisfied

if each parish

heard one sermon every quarter. Archbishop Grindal complained in 1576 that it was ‘thought that three or four preachers may suffice for a shire’. No wonder that the Puritans, with their

belief in the power

of the Word, were ill-content. The ‘ Prophesyings ’ which they organized, to the Queen’s annoyance, were not—as is sometimes supposed—revivalist meetings, but the equivalent of seminars or 1 refresher courses to see 1 Erastianism, fathered not quite correctly on the German Reformer, Thomas LUber or Erastus, means the complete control of religious matters by the secular power.

174

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

that ministers were properly instructed. The only faults of the Prophesyings were their implied criticism of the Established Church and their lack of official sanction. Grindal had excellent reasons for refusing to suppress them. The Puritan staked much on education, for he made men responsible for their own salvation and wished them to be educated up to the task. It is significant that the abler young men from the universities were more attracted, on the whole, either by the Old Religion —even though it involved eating the bread of exile— or else by the Puritan fervour. It is even more significant that, in all the wealth of Elizabethan poetry, the only religious lyrics of serious merit are those of the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell. Nor ought we to be surprised that poets like Spenser and Sidney, for all their passionate loyalty, had Puritan sympathies. Puritanism could supply the high seriousness and the crusading ardour for which men of such mettle looked. The noble High Church ideals of Donne and Herbert and of the Caroline divines should not be read back into Elizabethan Anglicanism. Hooker was the first to make of Anglicanism some¬ thing more than a political expedient, and the first to give it a positive intellectual content. Whitgift had already tightened up its discipline, but only by un¬ popular inquisitorial methods. Besides, Whitgift’s own theology was Calvinist and he was too obviously a politician to become a centre for religious loyalty. Moreover, Whitgift’s brutality was infectious. Even his chaplain the ‘saintly’ Lancelot Andrewes could

RICHARD HOOKER

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make a cruel joke in execrable taste when he inter¬ viewed the imprisoned Barrowe.

For close imprison¬

ment you are most happy. The solitary and con¬ templative life I hold the most blessed life. It is the life I would choose.’ Barrowe had good reason to reply, ‘You

speak

philosophically

but

not

Christianly.’

Hooker, although he worked with Whitgift, remained a chivalrous opponent. He resigned his post as Master of the Temple because it brought him into personal conflict with the Puritan Travers and this, he wrote, had ‘proved the more unpleasant to me because I believe him to be a good man’. Travers might be his adversary ‘ but not mine enemy, God knows this to be my meaning’. Hooker retired to a country parsonage and there wrote The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The first four books appeared in 1593, the fifth in i597> ^ast three posthumously and in imperfect form.1 Hooker died in 1600 at the age of forty-six. He had been for nearly all his life an obscure Oxford don or a humble parish clergyman, unprepossessing in appearance and almost pathologically bashful. Yet his book is of major im¬ portance in the history of religion and of thought; it might well be called the earliest philosophical master¬ piece written in the English language. Hooker’s book is long and leisurely, and he allowed himself ample space in which to deploy his forces. His effects are cumulative and his theme is complex. 1 The important eighth book—on the relationship of Church and State—was not printed until 1628, although part of it had been plagiarized in a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, who possessed a manuscript copy.

176

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Therefore any attempt to summarize or simplify will do him scant justice. It is often the actual process of his argument that is impressive; and, without such support, his conclusions may seem bald or obvious or jejune. Many of his views may also appear unoriginal, for many were old views subtly refurbished. Taken one by one they may be thought stale or commonplace but, inter¬ locked in Hooker’s subtle and elaborate way, they give him a real claim to be regarded as an original thinker. Again, Hooker thought and wrote in paragraphs rather than in sentences. He built his wall out of very large bricks which are difficult to pull out or lift about. Only lengthy quotations therefore could do justice either to his style or to his thought. Few great books have been more limes de circonstance than Hooker’s, and part of his greatness lies in his having constructed a whole picture of the universe and of society—a picture that is extremely consistent and comprehensive—in

spite of being engaged

in the

defence of a particular church at a particular moment against particular enemies. It was a work of propaganda, a large-scale pamphlet to justify the government’s persecution of Protestant non-conformity; and yet it is a work of systematic philosophy as well. Hooker was able not only to save the intellectual and perhaps the spiritual life of an ailing church but to revitalize a great tradition in political thought at the same time. He succeeded in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Hooker’s task was not easy. The Puritans’ position was logical and coherent, and they could draw on the great armoury of Calvin’s Institutes; so Hooker’s

RICHARD

HOOKER

177

counter-attack had to be at least as broadly based. He had also to admit half the Puritan case. Elizabeth’s government did enforce certain traditional practices that were not enjoined in Scripture, practices that were also to be found at Rome. And these practices had been retained for political reasons, ostensibly as an interim measure. ‘ Interimistical traditioners’

had been the

name used for the Anglicans by one Puritan pam¬ phleteer. Hooker was forced to argue that, in spite of all this, the retention of such practices might still not be wrong. ‘ To say that in nothing they may be followed which aie of the Church of Rome, were violent and extreme. ... As far as they follow reason and truth we fear not to tread the self-same path. . . . We had rather follow the perfections of them whom we like not, than in defects resemble them whom we love.’ Hooker of course drew on mediaeval sources. His philosophy of law is near to that of St. Thomas Aquinas and his theory of the relations between Church and State is near to that of Marsiglio of Padua. ‘ If’, Hooker wrote later, ‘ I used the distinctions and helps of the Schools, I trust that herein I have committed no un¬ lawful thing.’ Yet the old wine was poured into new bottles; and Hooker was certainly a Protestant. In fact the Protestant theology of salvation may as well be learnt from Hooker’s Discourse of Justification as any¬ where. He agreed with the Puritans on how souls were saved and he agreed with them in thinking the saving of souls to be the most important of all things. Dis¬ agreement began over Hooker’s view that certain other things, though less valuable and less important, were of *25

M

178

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

great value and importance all the same—such things as order, tradition, authority, social convenience and, above all, law. To the Puritan argument that Scripture was the only source and test of truth, that God had revealed Himself only in His written Word, Hooker replied in effect that God revealed Himself in many ways. We could and should avail ourselves of ‘all the sources of light and truth with which man finds himself encompassed’. We ought to use all our faculties because all are given us by God and because they all aim at some good. Man cannot consciously seek evil, and sin is only the result of preferring a lesser to a greater good. Hooker rejected the Puritan belief in man’s total depravity. Above all, he said, we ought to use our reason. We may trust tradition and authority as well as Scripture, but only when it is reasonable so to do. Hooker did not enjoin the blind acceptance of authority. ‘ For man to be tied and led by authority, as it were with a kind of captivity of judgement, and though there be reason to the contrary not to listen unto it, but to follow like beasts the first in the herd they know not nor care not whither, this were brutish.’ Unlike Cardinal Newman, Hooker did like to choose and see his path. To Hooker, however, there was a certain presumption that what most men have found acceptable for a long time is likely to be found reasonable, that what has survived the vicissitudes of history has deserved to survive. ‘The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God Himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, Nature herself must needs have

RICHARD HOOKER

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taught; and God being the Author of Nature, her voice is but His instrument. ... By force of the light of Reason, wherewith God illuminateth everyone which cometh into the world, men being enabled to know truth from falsehood and good from evil, do thereby learn in many things what the will of God is; which will Himself not revealing by any extraordinary means unto them, but they, by natural discourse attaining the knowledge thereof, seem the makers of those things w'hich indeed are His, and they but only the finders of them out.’ Nothing in the Puritans angered Hooker more than their treatment of ‘ the star of reason ’ as ‘ no otherwise to be thought of than if it were an unlucky comet’ or ‘as that star in the Revelation called Worm¬ wood which, being fallen from Heaven, maketh rivers and waters in which it falleth so bitter that men tasting them die thereof’. Hooker insists that reason supple¬ ments direct revelation and that Natural Law, found out by reason, supplements Divine Law proper. The function of reason is to discover law, and God has given us reason for this very purpose. This is how Hooker reaches his main theme, which is the character of Law. His philosophy indeed is par excellence a philosophy of law. Book I of the Ecclesiastical Polity comprises Hooker’s great diagram of the hierarchy of all the laws in the universe. He was restoring law to a universe which most earlier Protestants had in a sense rendered lawless. In their universe there was only one law, the Law of God, wrhich men cannot understand and which must therefore seem to men arbitrary and capricious. But

l8o

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND %

Hooker’s universe was the older mediaeval universe conceived

as

a series of ascending spheres—each

sphere having its own appropriate law, the law of its own being, yet striving after some more perfect law. Here God alone is perfect and a law unto Himself, and therefore all law but God’s is incomplete. It follows that all other laws may be improved or changed. Hooker’s universe is not rigid but allows room for growth. He had a strong sense of history and looked for the roots of everything in a historic past. Yet he looked forward also to developments that might still take place. His laws are not only laws which we can discover; they are also laws which, in some fields, we can change. Only Divine Law is fixed, and Divine Law does not cover changing things. All changing things are ‘things indifferent’, that is, things which are desirable or convenient but not essential. They include, for example, all the outward ceremony and organization of the Church, things which may be useful or edifying but do not save souls. In all such matters, although we may not ‘lightly esteem what hath been allowed as fit in the judgement of antiquity . . . from which un¬ necessarily to swerve, experience hath never as yet found it safe’, nevertheless ‘all things cannot be of ancient continuance ’ and ‘ the Church being a body which dieth not, hath always power, as occasion requireth, no less to ordain that which never was than to ratify what hath been before’. For Hooker law was not wholly based upon reason; it rested upon instinct too. Here he followed Aristotle in thinking it part of man’s nature to live the social life

RICHARD

HOOKER

181

and therefore to evolve law. Man is naturally a social animal and, in a sense, naturally law-abiding or at least law-seeking.

But anything natural comes short of

perfection, and of course Hooker believed also in the Fall of Man. Man, though naturally ‘ reasonable ’, is not naturally good. Therefore Hooker was not in the least anxious that man should return to a state of nature which would not provide ‘a life fit for the dignity of man ’. 4 This ’, he says, 4 was the cause of men’s uniting themselves at the first in politic societies.’ Society implies government and government implies law. Men are still wicked and we 4 make complaint of the iniquity of our times, not unjustly; for the days are evil’. But they are 4 most happy days ’ compared with 4 those times wherein there was as yet no manner of public regiment established ’. Hooker held a theory of the social contract, but one of a very subtle kind. He thought of the contract less as a historical or pre-historical event than as something morally and philosophically implied.

He writes of

society as an order which is either 4 expressly or secretly agreed upon ’, and by4 secretly ’ he meant implicitly. He suggests too that society may not have been artificially created so much as organically grown, for he speaks of men ‘growing upon composition and agreement among themselves’. In other words, he treads warily between thinking of the state as an artifact and thinking of it as an organism. The theory of contract, properly understood, is a metaphor and has suffered much at the hands both of defenders and assailants who have taken it too literally. It is not disposed of by showing

182

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

that no formal contract ever actually occurred. All the theory claims is that the state is best thought of as if it rested on a contract. Society, government, and law, in Hooker’s eyes, all rest on and imply consent. ‘ Laws they are not, there¬ fore, which public approbation hath not made so’; but this public approbation need not be direct. It may be given through representative bodies, or it may have been given once for all by our ancestors, thus binding their posterity. ‘In many things assent is given, they that give it not imagining that they do so, because the manner of their assenting is not apparent.’ Besides, ‘ the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithence [since] standeth as theirs who presently are of the same societies, because corporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors do live still’. Membership of a state involves the obligation to obey its laws, which are, at least theoretically, ‘ the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is • the law even your deed also ’. There is almost an anticipation of Rousseau’s doctrine here. Laws, Hooker goes on to say, may of course be repealed, but only ‘by the authors thereof themselves’; and only ‘when the whole doth deliberate what laws each part shall observe, and not when a part refuseth the laws which the whole hath orderly agreed upon ’. Again, ‘the public power of all societies is above every soul contained in the same societies. And the principal use of that power is to give laws unto all that are under it; which laws in such case we must obey, unless . . .

RICHARD

HOOKER

183

the law of Reason or of God doth enjoin the contrary. Because, except our own private and but probable resolutions be by the law of public determinations over¬ ruled, we take away all possibility of sociable life in the world.’ At first sight this appears almost totalitarian, but Hooker has admitted that positive laws which are demonstrably contrary to Divine or Natural Law may be disobeyed. He has assumed also that the laws he has in mind will all deal solely with ‘things indifferent’. In things not indifferent, no doubt, conscience may well enjoin disobedience. Hooker also admits, a little grudgingly, that a good man may sometimes have to be a bad citizen. Yet, like almost all other thinkers of his day, Hooker will not allow the outraged conscience any right to resist or rebel. Hooker is clear that the normal community was, before government was established, perfectly free to choose any form of government. It had, ‘under God’s supreme authority, full dominion over itself’ and ‘full power to guide itself in what kind of societies soever it should choose to live’. On the other hand Hooker admits that in special circumstances God Himself may have founded certain states, either by direct institution or indirectly when He allowed states to be set up by conquest. More often, however, the state was founded by agreement, and although the contract, once made, cannot be unmade, nevertheless the fact that there once was a contract carries certain implications. The ruler is at least morally bound to rule in the public interest and to observe the rule of law. ‘ Original influence of power

184

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

from the body into the king is cause of the king’s dependency in power upon the body.’ Although monarchy is probably the best form of government, God has not positively commanded ‘ that the Christian world should be ordered by kingly regiment ’. Like all his contemporaries, Hooker was well aware that a king can be a tyrant. In one place he suggests that it may have been experience of tyranny which led men to ‘ come unto laws ’. This implies that occasionally the form of government may be changed. He says, too, that by the Law of Nature ‘ the lawful power of making laws . . . belongeth so properly’ to the whole com¬ munity ‘that for any prince or potentate to exercise the same of himself’, without divine commission or popular consent, ‘it is no better than mere tyranny’. In other words, Hooker reserves for the people the power of actually making law, as Marsiglio of Padua had done; and elsewhere Hooker seems to confine the legislative power of the sovereign to the right of veto. ‘ It resteth principally in the strength of a negative voice ’, for the sovereign cannot be expected to enforce a law which has not had his own assent. We must remember that sixteenth-century minds were reluctant to think of the making of new law as part of the normal work of government. Hooker’s sovereign enforces the law, but does not create it. It cannot be said that Hooker believed in the divine right of kings, except in so far as he held the orthodox view that all right was ultimately divine, that obedience to all law and all authority is enjoined by God. Hooker did not think monarchy essential nor that a monarch need

RICHARD

HOOKER

185

be absolute; and he specifically denied that government originated in the patriarchal power of heads of families —a belief soon to become popular among royalists. On the other hand he allowed that the community may, if it wishes, set up an absolute monarch, in which case it will render itself helpless. Even in a constitutional monarchy ‘ dominion ’ cannot be * withdrawn ’ from the ruler, once it has been given, unless it happens to ‘ escheat ’ through failure of heirs. Nor will Hooker have any truck with the theory that the contract is renewed by each king’s coronation oath. ‘When the multitude have once chosen many or one to rule over them

then the people’s right

is ‘ derived into those many or that one so chosen . . . that which they did, their rulers may now do lawfully without them’. Moreover, although it was men who chose the ruler, it is God who compels them to obey. ‘ God doth ratify the works of that sovereign authority which kings have received by men’; and ‘unto kings by human right honour by very divine right is due ’. Hooker implies, too, that part of our obligation to laws and government is our obligation to our own past. His sense of history emerges even in his theory of contract—which

is

notable,

seeing

that

the

con¬

tractual theory is normally associated with somewhat unhistorical thinking. Hooker knew that rulers could misbehave, and the only comfort he had to offer their subjects was the pious hope that normally the ruler will want to behave well. ‘ It must be presumed that supreme governors will not . . . oppose themselves and be stiff in detaining that, the use whereof is with public detriment.’ Yet if this

186

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

hope should prove vain there is no question of the bad ruler’s forfeiting his sovereignty. ‘ Such things there¬ fore must be thought upon beforehand that power may be limited ere it be granted

but Hooker does not make

it at all clear how any such limitations could be enforced. He falls back on the vague and naive assumption that if the ruler disregards ‘ the order of law

then ‘ it should,

I suppose, not long be safe for him to do so’. Yet Hooker also says: ‘ I do not see how the body should be able by any just means to help itself.’ No doubt Hooker was conscious of the need to support his own Queen’s government. He knew that the opposition to her came from small minorities and that her rule was supported by the bulk of articulate public opinion. To most Tudor thinkers a serious clash in England between governor and governed was hardly more than an academic hypothesis. It was generally assumed that the interests of ruler and subject must coincide and that rectitude was a ruler’s best policy. Sir Thomas Smith had asserted quite boldly that ‘to be just ... is the profit of the ruling and most strong part ... As there is profitable and likelihood of profit, so there is Right and likelihood of Right.’ The danger of tyranny was clearly seen by Hooker but he was prepared to risk it. ‘ What may we look for, considering the frailty of man’s nature, if the world do once hold it for a maxim that kings ought to live in no subjection?’ Yet tyranny is the lesser of two evils, being undoubtedly preferable to anarchy; and anarchy is unavoidable unless there is a sovereign. ‘There must

RICHARD HOOKER

187

be some unpunishable, or else no man shall suffer punishment’; and jurisdiction ‘must have necessarily a fountain that deriveth it to all others and receiveth it not from any; because otherwise the course of justice should go infinitely in a circle every superior having his superior without end, which cannot be

Although the

sovereign exists to serve the public interest, he must have full power to enforce it against the particular interests of private men or corporations. Hooker in fact had a far better grasp of the problem of sovereignty than had most of his contemporaries. Sovereignty had somehow to be combined with the rule of law. In England, says Hooker, ‘ what power the king hath, he hath it by law; the bounds and limits of it are known ’. But, though sovereign power may have its limits, it ought to be not ‘the most but the best limited power’; that is, it should not be the power ‘ which may deal in fewest things ’ but simply the power whose ‘dealing is tied unto’ the rule of law. The sovereign must be supreme in all ‘ causes ’. He must not be confined to a certain area, for that would leave a field in which he is not sovereign; instead he should be confined to certain methods. Nothing and no one may be ‘unsubject to the king’s power’, yet ‘unto all his proceedings the law itself is a rule ’. The sovereign is expected only to use legal machinery but makes no promise not to enter certain fields. He must be free to make the rounds of his estates, otherwise trespassers will be able to poach on his preserves; no trespasser is promised immunity, but all are promised an orderly prosecution according to law. The courts will enforce

188

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

good law, but all courts must be the sovereign’s. There must be no conflict of allegiances or of jurisdictions, for the sovereign always has first claim. He may have to run his course without knocking over any hurdles, but he is not to be troubled with any competitors. For Hooker the sovereign is the king in parliament, not the king alone; and Hooker also distinguishes between the person and the office of the ruler. The king may be an infant, but his office will retain its authority. This involves Hooker in one of his few internal con¬ tradictions,

for

he

argues

elsewhere

that

royal

supremacy in church government could not be exercised if the king was personally not a Christian. The limitations Hooker imposes upon the sovereign are all moral limitations and it is never explained how they could be enforced. He makes the orthodox point: ‘Happier that people whose law is their king in the greatest things, than that whose king is himself their law’; but he can provide no sanction to make the ruler keep the rules. It is not only to the law that the ruler is subordinated. He is also, in ways not specified, sub¬ ordinated to the whole community, to the general will. He is ‘major singulis, universis minor'. He is dependent ‘upon that whole entire body, over the several parts whereof he hath dominion’. In other words he is supreme over all individual persons or corporations, but not over the community as a whole, still less over the law; and there is no suggestion that law is simply what the sovereign wills. The king’s power ‘ is termed supremacy, as being the highest, not simply without exception of anything. For what man is there so brain-

189

RICHARD HOOKER

sick as not to except in such speeches God Himself, the King of all kings of the earth?’ This reservation leads Hooker to make the con¬ ventional point that kings are all the more responsible to God for not being amenable to earthly tribunals. ‘The general laws, which all mankind is bound unto, do tie no less the king than others, but rather more. For the grievousness of sin is aggravated by the great¬ ness of him who committeth it: for which cause it also maketh him by so much the more obnoxious unto divine revenge, by how much the less he feareth human.’ Elsewhere,

in

a

fragmentary

sermon

on

civil

obedience, Hooker seems to imply that divine right is to be attributed to the laws rather than to rulers, although he is careful to add ‘howbeit too rigorous it were that the breach of every human law should be held a deadly sin: a mean there is between those extremities if so be we can find it out’. This search for a ‘mean’ is very characteristic. Hooker

feared

logical

extremes

and

over-simple

generalizations. ‘General rules’, he said, ‘are, by reason of the manifold secret exceptions which lie hidden in them, no other to the eye of man’s understanding than cloudy mists cast before the eye of commonsense. . . . With gross and popular capacities nothing doth more prevail than unlimited generalities, because of their plainness at the first sight: nothing less with men of exact judgement.’ Much of Hooker’s objection to the Puritans was due to their contempt for compromise and to their insistence on allowing no exceptions.

190

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Nothing but the best seemed to be good enough for the Puritans, but Hooker was doubtful whether what was really best was either knowable or attainable. He knew that the best can be the enemy of the good, and he was prepared to accept many things which, if not demon¬ strably perfect, were demonstrably good. ‘AH things’, he said, ‘are of God which are well done.’ He was prepared also to accept what was good and true ‘in gross , even though it fell short ‘ in some particular points To confute the Puritans, Hooker had to do much more than accuse them of being doctrinaires. He had to prove that they cut at the roots of all political obligation. He had therefore to argue that disobedience to ecclesiastical laws undermines society as much as a breach of any other law. This involved showing that Queen Eliza¬ beth’s ‘ecclesiastical polity’ was not inconsistent either with the laws of God or with ‘ the law of reason ’; if this was so, neither conscience nor reason could require men to disobey. Compared with all other Tudor controversialists Hooker was courteous, moderate, and fair. He used a gentle irony where others, like Bancroft, indulged in crude abuse. He kept his temper and expected his opponents to keep theirs. ‘Think ye are men, deem it not impossible for you to err.’ He even granted many of their points. ‘The word Presbyter’, he allowed, ‘doth seem more fit, and in propriety of speech more agreeable than Priest with the drift of the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ.’ But Hooker’s real point was that ‘whether we call it a Priesthood, a Presbytership, or a

191

RICHARD HOOKER

Ministry, it skilleth not’. It was, he argued, a ‘thing indifferent’ like everything else

that stuck in the

Puritan gullet; and in all ‘things indifferent’ there is or should be a presumption in favour of doing the bidding of the law. Where Hooker and the Puritans differed was over the question, what was and what was not a ‘thing indifferent’.

In

Hooker’s view ‘things

indifferent’

included not only ceremonies but the whole of ecclesi¬ astical organization and government, even episcopacy itself. This view was to cause much discomfort to Hooker’s great Anglo-Catholic editor John

Keble.

Hooker even said that episcopacy, although it had apostolic tradition behind it, was only a ‘ custom ’ and might therefore be abolished if the bishops abused their position. But the Puritan would find this colder comfort still, because it invalidates his premise that the ‘ Discipline ’ allegedly prescribed in Scripture was ipso facto essential to any church claiming to be Christian. For the Puritan, discipline and organization were by no means ‘things indifferent’. Nor did Hooker accept the Puritans’ demand that the church should be a ‘ gathered church ’ of the Elect alone. He attacked their implicit separation of Church and State. For Hooker the Church of England meant all English subjects,

including reprobate Englishmen.

restoring the

mediasval conception

of a

He was Christian

Commonwealth, of which Church and State were two different aspects but were identical in membership or personnel. In a sense he was reverting also to the Henrician position of Stephen Gardiner or Christopher

192

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

St. Germain, but Hooker’s motives were not exclusively political. He was not merely asserting the royal claim to full sovereignty over the English clergy. He was an Erastian

but something

more.

He

was

genuinely

anxious that the care of religion should be a first charge upon civil rulers. ‘ A gross error it is to think that regal power ought to serve for the good of the body and not of the soul, for men’s temporal peace and not for their eternal safety: as if God had ordained kings for no other end and purpose but only to fat up men like hogs and to see that they have their mast.’ Civil rulers could and should control and administer ‘ the outward government which disposeth the affairs of religion so far forth as the same are disposable by human authoritv’. This is not to give civil rulers any purely spiritual functions, for ‘the headship which we give unto kings is altogether visibly exercised and ordereth only the external frame of the Church’s affairs. . . so that it plainly differeth from Christ’s, even in very nature and kind’. Royal supremacy, in other words, is only a supremacy in ‘ things indifferent ’. In church government as in civil, Hooker asserts the principle of consent. The royal supremacy is the supremacy of King in Parliament; and Parliament gives to ecclesiastical laws the assent of the community, the ‘public approbation’ needed to make valid law. This naturally follows from Hooker’s identification of Church and Commonwealth. He does not ignore Convocation, which he thinks is the body best suited for dealing with the technicalities of public worship; but he holds that King in Parliament alone can give such regulations the

RICHARD HOOKER

193

force of law, since King in Parliament alone is sovereign and since King in Parliament alone embodies the consent of the whole Church, the Church being (by definition) the whole community and not merely the clergy. ‘ The Parliament is a court not so merely temporal as if it might meddle with nothing but only leather and wool.’ A Puritan might well call this Erastian and see in it a serious danger of subordinating religion to reason of state; and it must be admitted that Hooker provides no actual machinery to keep Caesar from interfering with the things that are God’s. As usual Hooker relies on purely moral sanctions. A Catholic could make the same objection and could also ask why the Christian Church cannot cut across national frontiers. Hooker’s only reply to this is essentially a political argument, namely, that the sovereign must have first claim upon the allegiance of all his subjects, lay or clerical, if the door is not to be opened to sheer anarchy. Hooker cannot meet the point that to the Christian there may be worse things than political anarchy. He admitted frankly that error was preferable to contention and disunity; but he assumed that error could arise only over ‘things indifferent’ or over things which are indeterminable. He could not conceive of disagreements over what he regarded as the essentials of Christianity. He was aware that in ‘things indifferent’ there were bound to be national differences unless and until some kind of international league of national churches could be set up. In the meantime, ‘let every church keep as near as may be’ to a universal order. This was un225

N

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

satisfactory and perhaps not altogether ‘Catholic’ but it was better than the former ‘ tyranny and oppression ’ of the Pope, ‘that one universal Nimrod who alone did all

There is perhaps a hint here and there in Hooker

that Englishmen—or rather the English government— have got Christianity right and that all others have got it wrong, that God reveals Himself ‘first to His Englishmen Hooker had his limitations and occasionally shirked an issue. It was not so simple a matter as he suggested, to determine what were ‘things indifferent’ or what were the ‘essentials’ of Christianity. Obviously, too, he over-simplified a really complex issue by making the membership of Church and State identical; for this ignores the plain fact that we are compelled to join a state but not necessarily to join a church, that we are born into the one but baptized into the other. Even in Tudor times it was no more than a legal fiction to say ‘there is not any man of the Church of England but the same is not also a member of the Commonwealth, nor any man a member of the Commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England ’. Even Elizabethan England had a handful of men who were Christian enough to be Anabaptists or humane enough to be Socinians.1 Elizabeth granted a pension and naturaliza¬ tion as an English subject to the great Socinian apostle of unlimited toleration, the Tyrolean Jacob Acontius— although no doubt she valued his technical accomplish¬ ments as an engineer more highly than his liberal views. 1 The Socinians, founded by the brothers Sozzini, were Unitarians and believers in complete freedom of conscience.

RICHARD

HOOKER

*95

Hooker had a genuine belief in reason, but in practice what he found reasonable was what tradition, authority, and the majority supported. He had little sympathy w'ith those whose reasoning took them into the camp of the minority. He admitted that ‘to prescribe what men shall think belongeth only unto God’. But he begged the whole question by asserting that in England ‘the law doth not make that to be truth which before was not’; and he made the government and not the individual the judge of what was reasonable and what was true. That he asked only for outward conformity and asked it for avowedly political reasons makes him fundamentally as Erastian as Elizabeth herself. Never¬ theless his Erastianism had its liberal and charitable side. Hooker’s conception of the Church was broader than the Puritan’s; it embraced many whom the Puritans

spurned.

‘They

labour’,

he

wrote,

‘to

appropriate the saving power of the Holy Ghost, they separate from all apparent hope of life and salvation thousands whom the goodness of Almighty God doth not exclude.’ Already the Puritans were foreshadowing the old lady who said ‘The Universalists believe that all men shall be saved, but We hope for better things.’ It is easy to explain Hooker’s limitations by the exigencies imposed on him through having to defend a particular government at a particular time. His belief in growth and change might have enabled him to say that other circumstances might one day make possible or desirable a different relationship between Church and State. He must, however, be given full credit for rising so often above the immediate controversial

196

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

issues of his day, for saying so much that is of universal application. Hooker’s achievement is indeed astonishing. He had found a way to harmonize Protestant theology with the great tradition of Natural Law. He had restored a great deal of the belief in reason and of the belief in man which most earlier Protestants had discarded. In this respect he was more a man of the Renaissance than a man of the Reformation. He had managed, however, to believe in reason without insisting, like Plato or like Bentham, that everything must be replanned according to reason. That is to say, he combined respect for reason with respect for tradition and history and the principle of growth. He wTas not the kind of philosopher who ignores all the facts and wTho is not interested in howr things actually work or how they have actually grown. Many streams of thought converge in Hooker— Aristotle’s belief in the variability of human institutions, in man’s natural sociability, and in law as disembodied wisdom; the Stoics’ belief in man’s capacity to discern a universal moral law; St. Augustine’s belief in man’s insufficiency without a government to remedy his sin; St. Thomas’s belief in the harmony of man’s natural and supernatural ends; Marsiglio’s belief in the identity of Church and State and in the community as the ultimate source of law; the Roman lawyer’s belief in un¬ trammelled sovereignty; the feudal lawyer’s belief in contract and consent. As a result, Hooker became a channel of com¬ munication through which the voice of mediaeval Catholic philosophy could make itself heard to the

RICHARD HOOKER

197

coming generation of Protestant Whigs, to such men as Locke and Algernon Sidney. It says much for Hooker’s breadth of mind and range of sympathy that he could combine in his outlook so much liberalism and so much conservatism without serious internal contradiction. It is significant that Locke and Burke could both find in Hooker something which appealed to them, as Hobbes and Rousseau also might have done. In a sense the basic and more valuable ideas of these men can all be found in Hooker and, what is more, can all be reconciled in Hooker. For Hooker is truly comprehensive in a very grand and very subtle way. He is both a Humanist and a Protestant, both a Thomist and an Augustinian, both a rationalist and a traditionalist; he believed both in authority and freedom, both in consent and obligation, both in law and sovereignty, both in uniformity and toleration, both in Church and State, both in human nature and in the Fall. All the older traditions were fused into a temporary unity by this one man’s mind, although they were soon to separate again. Hooker’s synthesis could not be permanent but, if it had not been made, many of the traditions his thought em¬ bodied might have been lost and might not have fertilized, as they have done, the modern political mind. Few lines of descent in the whole history of thought are clearer or more openly acknowledged than the line which runs from Hooker to Locke and from Locke to the Philosophes of eighteenth-century France. And if it be thought that this rationalist line was permanently cut by Burke, let it be remembered that Burke diverged

198

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

from Locke by going back to another side of Hooker. If Locke was influenced by Hooker’s belief in natural law, in reason, and in the necessity for consent, Burke was to return to Hooker’s sense of history, to his belief that tradition and authority were reasonable, that men cannot dispense with government, and that constitu¬ tions are organic things. Hooker was a very great political philosopher judged by any standards. And he was so partly because he subordinated politics to higher things, because he left room

for

the

imponderable

and

the

indefinable.

Hooker believed that men were right to pursue the political life and right to be guided by reason in so doing; but he believed also that men could and should transcend both politics and reason. * For man . . . doth further covet, yea oftentimes manifestly pursue with great sedulity and earnestness, that which cannot stand him in any stead for vital use; that which exceedeth the reach of sense; yea, somewhat above capacity of reason, somewhat divine and heavenly, which with hidden exultation it rather surmiseth than conceiveth: somewhat it seeketh, and what that is directly it knoweth not, yet very intentive

desire

thereof doth so incite it, that all other known delights and pleasures are laid aside, they give place to the search of this but only suspected desire.’

BIBLIOGRAPHY Articles in periodicals are not included in this biblio¬

graphy, nor books confined to the general history of the period. Naturally many books listed under one topic may be relevant for others. Books marked * have out¬ standingly useful bibliographies. General

*J. W. Allen: A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1928). The chapters on England are balanced, masterly, and indispensable. *F. le V. Baumer: The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship (Yale, 1940). A thorough and authoritative survey of the first half of the period. #W. K. Jordan: The Development of Religious Toleration in England, Vol. I (London, 1932). Ranges more widely than its title suggests. Very scholarly. L. Einstein: Tudor Ideals (London, 1921). Diffuse but interesting, too little known and not easily obtained. #C. H. Mcllwain: The Political Works of James I (Harvard, 1918). Has a long and valuable introduction on the Tudor background. J. N. Figgis: Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (in Vol. Ill of the Cambridge Modern History (1904)). A brilliant summary, perhaps the author’s masterpiece. J. N. Figgis: From Gerson to Grotius (Cambridge, 1907 revised, 1916). Good, but slight on England.

200

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

J. N. Figgis: The Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge, 1896). A lively pioneering work now seriously out of date. A. J. and R. W. Carlyle: Medieval Political Theory in the West, Vol. VI, 1300-1600 (Edinburgh, 1936). The English material is scattered in this scholarly work. Less interesting than some of the earlier volumes. W. S. Holdsworth: History of English Law, Vol. IV (London, 1924). Excellent. Contains much non-technical matter and the best account of how Tudor England was organized. A. F. Pollard: Factors in Modern History (London, 1907). Brilliant and far more relevant than its title suggests. R. Mohl: The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Columbia, 1933). Comprehensive in its particular field. Much valuable contemporary material can be found in J. R. Tanner, Tudor Constitutional Documents (Cam¬ bridge, 1922); in Gilbert Burnet, History of the Reforma¬ tion (ed. N. Pocock, seven vols., Oxford, 1865); in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, popularly known as ‘ Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’ (ed. J. Pratt, eight vols., London, 1870); and above all in John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials and Annals of the Reformation (Oxford, 1820-40).

The Legacy from the Past

Sir John Fortescue: The Governance of England (ed. C. Plummer, Oxford, 1885). Edmund Dudley: The Tree of Commonwealth (ed. D. M. Brodie, Cambridge, 1948).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

201

Sir Thomas More: Utopia (ed., with R. Robynson’s translation, by J. H. Lupton, Oxford, 1895). •Erasmus: The Education of a Christian Prince (ed. and translated L. K. Born, Columbia, 1936). With useful discussion of earlier and con¬ temporary works on the education of rulers. Sir Thomas Elyot: The Boke named The Governour (ed. H. H. S. Croft, two vols., London, 1883; and Everyman Edition, 1907). Reference should also be made to *S.

B. Chrimes: English Constitutional Ideas of the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1936). K. W. M. Pickthom: Early Tudor Government: Vol. I Henry VII (Cambridge, 1934). F. W. Maitland: English Law and the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1901). A brilliant essay although its thesis—that Roman Law came very near to being adopted in Tudor England—is not now generally held. H. Maynard Smith: Pre-Reformation England (London, 1938).

R. W. Chambers: Sir Thomas More (London, 1935). An outstanding, sympathetic biography, par¬ ticularly valuable for its reinterpretation of Utopia. H. W. Donner: Introduction to Utopia (London, 1945). A useful summary. The Call for a Godly Prince

William Tyndale: The Obedience of a Christian Man (ed. with other important works of Tyndale’s, by H. Walter in Tyndale’s Doctrinal Treatises (Parker Society, 1848)). Very important. Thomas Cranmer: Miscellaneous Writings (ed. J. E. Cox, Parker Society, 1846).

202

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Hugh Latimer: Sermons (ed. G. E. Corrie, Parker Society, 1844; and Everyman Edition, 1906). John Hooper: Early Writings (ed. S. Carr, Parker Society, 1843) and Later Writings (ed. C. Nevinson, Parker Society, 1852). Robert Barnes: Men's Constitutions Bynde not the Con¬ science (1532) in Works of Tyndal, Frith and Barnes (London, 1573). Charles Beard: Hibbert Lectures on the Reformation (London, 1883). Still the best general introduction. G. de Lagarde: Recherches sur 1'esprit politique de la Rdforme (Paris, 1926). Much the best account of Protestant political thought in general but has virtually nothing on England. E. Troeltsch: Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (Tubingen, 1923), translated by O. Wyon as The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (two vols., London, 1931). A great book. Vol. II is the more relevant. J.F. Mozley: William Tyndale (S.P.C.K., 1937). An admirable, sympathetic biography. E. G. Rupp: Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition (Cambridge, 1947).

Suggestive and corrects numerous Anglo-Catholic errors. H. T. Kerr: A Compend of Luther's Theology (London, 1943)-

A very skilful selection from Luther’s voluminous works.

Reference may also be made to A. C. McGiffert: Protestant Thought before Kant (London, 1911) and to a work by various hands entitled

BIBLIOGRAPHY

203

The Catholicity of Protestantism (ed. R. Newton Flew and R. E. Davies, London, 1950). Both admirable summaries of Protestant theology which correct misapprehensions.

The Defence of the King’s Proceedings

Stephen Gardiner: De Vera Obedientia (ed. and trans¬ lated P. Janelle as Obedience in Church and State (Cambridge, 1930)). Stephen Gardiner: Letters (ed. J. A. Muller, Cambridge,

1933)-

A magnificent piece of editing and of great interest. Thomas Starkey: Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (ed. J. M. Cowper, E.E.T.S., 1871). A lively and attractive work but more notable for social criticism than for political thought proper. Thomas Starkey: An Exhortation to Christian Unity (London, 1536). Christopher St. Germain: Doctor and Student (in Latin, London, 1523; in English, much enlarged, 1530; latest edition by W. Muchall, Cincinnati, 1874). Christopher St. Germain: A Treatise concernynge the Diuision betwene the Spirytualtie and Temporaltie (London, 1532; reprinted as appendix to The Apologye of Syr Thomas More, which answers it, ed. A. I. Taft, E.E.T.S., 1930). Christopher St. Germain: Salem and Bizance (London,

1533)Christopher St. Germain: An Answere to a Letter (London, 1535). This last represents St. Germain’s final and most extreme position. Edward Foxe: Opus Eximium de Vera Differentia Regiae Potestatis et Ecclesiasticae (London, 1534; translated by Lord Stafford as The True Dyfferens betwen the

204

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Regall Power and the Ecclesiasticall Power, London,

).

1548 Sir John Cheke: The Hurt of Sedition or The True Subject to the Rebel (London, 1549). (Reprinted in Vol. Ill of Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1587.) Sir Richard Morison: A Remedy for Sedition (London, 1536; reprinted with a foreword by E. M. Cox, London, 1933). A little-known but important work. Morison’s authorship has recently been proved. *W. G. Zeeveld: The Foundations of Tudor Policy (Harvard, 1948). Interesting, especially on Morison, but of uneven quality and probably exaggerates the originality and importance of Starkey. P. Janelle: L’Angleterre catholique d la veille du schisme (Paris, 1935). Acute, scholarly, and deals much with political ideas. #G. Constant: La Reforme en Angleterre, Tom. I Le Schisme anglican, Henry VIII (Paris, 1930; trans¬ lated as The Reformation in England: The English Schism by R. E. Scantlebury, London, 1934). Perhaps the most scholarly and impartial history and includes political thought. K. W. M. Pickthom: Early Tudor Government: Vol. II Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1934). The fullest treatment of the constitutional issues. A. F. Pollard: Henry VIII (London, 1905), and Cranmer (London, 1904). Still the standard biographies.

The Elizabethan Assumptions

A Mirror for Magistrates (ed. L. B. Campbell, Cam¬ bridge, 1938). Very important.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

205

Homilies appointed to be read in Churches.

Especially the Homilies of 1547 on Obedience and of 1571 on Rebellion. Often reprinted. John Aylmer: An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects (Strasbourg, 1559). Entertaining. Charles Merbury: A Briefe Discourse of Royall Monarchic (London, 1581). Sir Thomas Smith: De Republica Anglorum (London, 1583) (ed. L. Alston, Cambridge, 1906). Written in English despite Latin title. Sir Philip Sidney: Arcadia (ed. A. Feuillerat, two vols., Cambridge, 1922). John Bale: King Johan (Camden Society, 1838). Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton: Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex (in Works ed. R. W. SackvilleWest, London, 1859; and in Minor Elizabethan Tragedies, ed. A. Thorndike, Everyman Edition, 1910). Richard Mulcaster: The First Part of the Elementarie (London, 1582; facsimile reprint, Oxford, 1925)-

Woodstock (ed. A. P. Rossiter, London, 1946).

The introduction contains interesting material relevant for political thought. The Shakespeare Apocrypha (ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke, Oxford, 1908). This contains several chronicle plays, and others can be found in the works of Peele, Marlowe, Heywood, Chapman, and Greene. Michael Drayton: Mortimeriados, or The Barons' Wars (London, 1596; reprinted in Morley’s Universal Library, 1887). E. M. W. Tillyard: The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943). A stimulating essay; one of the few books that are too short.

206

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

A. O. Lovejoy: The Great Chain of Being (Harvard, 1936). Not very easy reading but possibly the best history of an idea ever written. Hardin Craig: The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature (Oxford, 1935). Widely ranging, scholarly, and fascinating; but not elementary. A. L. Rowse: The England of Elizabeth: The Structure of Society (London, 1951). Comprehensive, vigorous, and learned. C. H. Mcllwain: The High Court of Parliament (Yale, 1910) and Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern (Cornell, 1947). Invaluable for Tudor constitutional theory. Occasionally controversial. *R. V. Lindabury: A Study of Patriotism in the Eliza¬ bethan Drama (Princeton, 1931). A very useful compilation. E. M. W. Tillyard: Shakespeare’s History Plays (London, 1944)-

Most interesting. Theodore Spencer: Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (London, 1942). A brilliant study. John Palmer: Political Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1945). An acute and vigorous work. The Defence of the Queen’s Proceedings

Matthew Parker: Correspondence (ed. J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne, Parker Society, 1853). The Zurich Letters (ed. H. Robinson, two vols., Parker Society, 1842-5). An important collection giving the correspond¬ ence between English and Swiss Protestants. John Jewel: Works (ed. J. Ayre, four vols., Parker Society, 1845-50).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

207

Queen Elizabeth's Defence of her Proceedings in Church and State (ed. W. E. Collins, Church Hist. Soc.,

1899). The Queen’s reply to the Northern rebels after the rising of 1569. Lord Burghley: The Execution of Justice in England (London, 1583; reprinted in Somers’ Tracts, Vol. I, and Harleian Miscellany, Vol. II). John Bridges: The Suprernacie of Christian Princes (London, 1573). Over 1,400 pages of black letter. Thomas Bilson: The True Difference between Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (Oxford, 1585; London, 1586). Very important but very long. Robert Some: A Godly Treatise containing and deciding Certaine Questions (London, 1588). John Whitgift: Works (ed. J. Ayre, three vols., Parker Society, 1851-3). J. Strype: The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, Vol. Ill (London, 1718; Oxford, 1822). Contains other important documents. F. W. Maitland: The Anglican Settlement (in Vol. II of the Cambridge Modern History, 1903). A masterly survey. J. V. P. Thompson: Supreme Governor. A Study of Elizabethan Policy and Circumstance (S.P.C.K., 1940). A remarkably sound and concise summary. W. H. Frere: The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (London, 1904). The best general account. Scholarly but does not always conceal an Anglo-Catholic standpoint. *A. F. Pollard: The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth (Vol. VI in The Political History of England (London, 1910)). Excellent. The best history of the period.

208

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

No biography of Queen Elizabeth, least of all the brilliant one by J. E. Neale, displays much interest in her religious views. The Catholic Protest

Sir

Thomas More: Dialogue concerning Tyndale (London, 1578; ed. W. E. Campbell and A. W. Reed, London, 1927). Sir Thomas More: The Apologye of Syr Thomas More (London, 1533; ed. A. I. Taft, E.E.T.S., 1930). Reginald Pole: Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione (Rome, 1536). Some passages translated in J. A. Froude, History of England, Vol. Ill (London, 1858). William Allen: A True, Sincere and Modest Defense of the English Catholiques (Ingolstadt, 1584, and reprint, two vols. in The Catholic Library, 1914). William Allen: An Apologie and True Declaration of the Institution of the Two English Colleges (Rheims, 1581). Robert Parsons, under the name of ‘ R. Doleman’. A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of England (? Antwerp, 1594).

Very important. A. O. Meyer: England und die catholische Kirche unter Elisabeth (Rome, 1911; translated by J. R. McKee as England and the Catholic Church under Elizabeth,

London, 1916). The standard work. Scholarly and fair. J. H. Pollen: The English Catholics in the Reign of Elizabeth (London, 1920). Is almost as valuable. Reference may also be made to P.

Hughes: Rome and the England (London, 1942).

Counter-Reformation

in

BIBLIOGRAPHY

209

W. Schenk: Reginald Pole Cardinal of England (London,

195°)-

J. A. Muller: Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction (S.P.C.K., 1926). Scholarly and balanced. R. Simpson: Edmund Campion (London, 1867). Still the standard biography but not impartial. Prints valuable excerpts from Campion’s trial.

The Puritan Protest John Ponet (or Poynet): A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (Strasbourg, 1556; facsimile reprint in W. S. Hudson : John Ponet, Advocate of Limited Monarchy, Chicago, 1942). Extremely important. John Knox: Appellation (Geneva, 1558) and The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Geneva, 1557). (Both in Works, ed. D. Laing, Edinburgh, 1846-8, Vol. IV; the latter also in A Miscellany of Tracts and Pamphlets, ed. A. C. Ward, World’s Classics, 1927.) Christopher Goodman: How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd (Geneva, 1558; facsimile reprint, New York, I932)Anthony Gilby: An Admonition to England and Scotland (Geneva, 1558; also in Knox, Works, ed. Laing, Vol. IV). Ed. W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas: Puritan Mani¬ festoes (Church Hist. Society, 1907). Very valuable but now a very scarce book. Contains the Admonitions to Parliament and other important documents. Has an unnecessarily antiPuritan introduction. Thomas Cartwright: His controversial writings are interspersed in the Works of Archbishop Whitgift (ed. J. Ayre, three vols., Parker Society, 1851-3). O 225

210

The

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (ed. R. G. Usher, Camden Society, 1905)-

An edition of the Minute Book of the Dedham * Classis ’ with other relevant documents. The text does not always support the editor’s anti-Puritan allegations. He is prejudiced against all opposition to constituted authority. Richard Bancroft: Daungerous Positions and Proceedings (London, 1593; partially reprinted by Usher in The Presbyterian Movement (see above)). Richard Bancroft: A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (London, 1593). Both works are hysterical denunciations of the Puritans but sometimes provide the only available evidence about the movement. Have been taken too seriously. Robert Browne: A Booke which shewcth the Life and Manners of All True Christians (Middleburg, 1582; extracts reprinted in W. Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, New York, 1893). Robert Browne: A Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie (Middleburg, 1582; ed. T. G. Crippen, Congregational Historical Society, 1901). Henry Barrowe: A Brief Examination of Me Henry Barrowe (London, 1586; reprinted in Harleian Miscellany, Vol. IV). Henry Barrowe: A Brief Discourerie of the False Churche (? Dort, 1590). Henry Barrowe: Mr

Henry

Barrowe's

Platforme

(London, 1593). A Parte of a Register (Middleburg, 1593) and The Second Parte of a Register (ed. A. Peel, Cambridge,

wts)-

Very valuable collections of miscellaneous Puritan pamphlets. The first is exceedingly rare.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.

Bun-age: The Early (Cambridge, 1912).

English

2II

Dissenters,

Vol.

II

Contains other useful documents. *W. Haller: The Rise of Puritanism (Columbia, 1938). Brilliant and penetrating, but mostly confined to the seventeenth century. #M. M. Knappen: Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939). A learned and comprehensive survey. C. H. Garrett: The Marian Exiles (Cambridge, 1938). A most painstaking compilation of voluminous evidence. Slightly prejudiced against opposition to authority, and perhaps exaggerates the allegedly sinister motives of the exiles. A. Dakin: Calvinism (London, 1940). A useful summary. A. F. Scott Pearson: Church and State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth-Century Puritanism (Cambridge, 1928). Mainly a study of Cartwright’s views. Valuable but perhaps over-emphasizes Cartwright’s ‘TwoKingdom theory’. W. Pierce: An Historical Introduction to the Marprelate Tracts (London, 1908). Learned and vigorous. Probably the best sym¬ pathetic account of Elizabethan Puritanism. #R. G. Usher: The Reconstruction of the English Church (New \ork, 1910, two vols.). Learned and vigorous but strongly anti-Puritan and regards Bancroft as a heroic figure.

Valuable material can still be found in D. Neal: The History of the Puritans (London, 1732-8 four vols.). B. Brook: The Lives of the Puritans (London, 1811 three vols.). Both books should be used with caution. 225

O*

212

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

The best biographies are Lord Eustace Percy: John Knox (London, 1937). Remarkably interesting and too little known. A. F. Scott Pearson: Thomas Cartwright and Eliza¬ bethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 1925). F. J. Powicke: Henry Barrowe, Separatist (London, 1900). F. J. Powicke: Robert Browne, Pioneer of Modem Con¬ gregationalism (London, 1910). W. Pierce: John Penry, His Life, Times and Writings (London, 1923). Richard Hooker

The best edition of Hooker’s Works is John Keble’s, Oxford, 1836; revised by R. W. Church and F. Paget, Oxford, 1888, three vols. See also R. W. Church, Introduction and Text of Book I of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity (Oxford, 1876); and F. Paget, Introduction to Book V of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity (Oxford, 1899). Book VIII has been admirably edited by R. A. Houk (Columbia, 1931), with an important introduction. Books I to V (ed. R. Bayne, 1907) are in the Everyman Library (two vols.). E. T. Davies: The Political Ideas of Richard Hooker (S.P.C.K., 1946). A clear and useful summary. There are good essays on Hooker by J. F. Stephen in Horae Sabbaticae, Vol. I (London, 1892), and by N. Sykes in Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Thinkers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (ed. F. J. C. Heamshaw, London, 1926). C. J. Sisson: The Judicious Marriage of Mr Hooker and the Birth of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Cambridge, 1940). Makes some scholarly bibliographical discoveries

BIBLIOGRAPHY

2I3

and exposes as legendary some of Isaac Walton’s Life of Hooker. A. P. d Entreves: The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought (Oxford, 1939). Ends with a brilliant lecture on Hooker. P. Munz: The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought (London, 1952). Is interesting on the debt of Hooker to earlier philosophers.

INDEX Acontius, Jacob, 194 Aglionby, Edward, 140-1 Alempon, 89 Allen, William, Cardinal, 1335. 139. Anabaptism, 64, 124-5, 146, 156, 194 Anarchy, horror of, 31, 58, 66, 72-4, 87, 93-4, 186-7,

Browne, Robert, 165-71 Brownists, 141 Brutus, 21, 82, 98, 101, 104 Bullinger, Henry, 144, 153 Burghley, Lord, 62-3, 85, 89, 106, 113, 157, 166, 167 Burke, Edmund, 106, 197-8

Cabot, Sebastian, 59 193 Andrewes, Lancelot, 174-5 Calvin, John, 54, 144, 155-6, Aquinas, St. Thomas, 177, 159-61, 163-4, 176 196-7 Calvin’s Case, 79 Aristotle, 6, n n., 19, 20, 41, Campion, Edmund, 125-6 80, 167, 180, 196 Canon Law, 52, 132 Ascham, Roger, 91 Canterbury, King’s School, Augustine, St., 196-7 60-1 Aylmer, John, Bishop, 77-9, Cartwright, Thomas, 161-4 88, 173 Caxton, William, 10 Cecil, William, see Burghley ‘ Chain of Being, the Great ’, Bacon, Francis, 4, 9, 68, 79, 16-17, 24, 74-5 106 Chapman, George, 97-8 Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 83 Charles V, 23, 137 Baldwin, William, 69 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 143 Bale, John, Bishop, 94 Cheke, Sir John, 58 Bancroft, Richard, Arch¬ ‘ Christian Commonwealth ’, bishop, 116, 158, 190 32, 34. 52, 114, 117-18, 191 Barnes, Robert, 39 ‘Christian Liberty’, 28, 64 Barrowe, Henry, 125, 166-71, Church Invisible, 30—1, 34, 175 39. 48, 53, 113-15, 117-18, Becket, St. Thomas, 57 159, 168 Bentham, Jeremy, 196 Church Visible, 29-30, 114, Beza, Theodore, 156 132, 160, 168 Bilson, Thomas, Bishop, 34, Cicero, 3, 19, 25 88, 117-21 Coke, Sir Edward, 85 Blake, William, 91 Coleridge, S. T., 90 Bodin, 80 Colet, John, Dean, 26 Bond, Dr. John, 141 Common Law, 27, 50, 70, Bridges, John, Bishop, 121 85. 132

2l6

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Conscience, 28, 40, 46-7, 59, 114, 118-19, 122-5, 137, 140-1, 149-S0, 158, 162, 164, 166-8, 170-1, 183, 190 Consent, see Election Contract, Original, 21, 120,

Divine Right of Whole Social Order, 12, 17, 58-9, 69-71, 73-4, 76-7, 116-17, 128, 135, 148, 184-5, 189 Donne, John, 174 Drayton, Michael, 75, 89 Dudley, Edmund, 15-17

136, 147, 151-2, 154-5, 168-9, 181-5, 196 Education, 22, 24, 60-1, 90-1, Convocation, 55, 83, 157, i°8-9, 144, 173-4 192 Edward III, 101 Coronation, 14, 20 Edward VI, 55, 58, 69, 146 Council, the, 12, 14, 41, 51, Election, Popular, of Rulers, 59, 63, 78-9, 81, 83, 116, 21, 41, 5°, 7°-i, 120-1, 129, 122, 130, 136, 139 133, 135-6, 154-5, 163, 182, Cranmer, Thomas, Arch¬ 183-5, 192, 196-8 bishop, 37, 56-9, 60-1, 134, Elizabeth I, 36, 63, 77-8, 83, 146 88-9, 91, 94, 100-1, 106, Cromwell, Thomas, 59, 84 110-12, 121-2, 123-6, 130, Crowley, Robert, 62 132, 134-5, 137-8, 155-6, 161-2, 168, 173, 177, 186, 190, 195 Ely, Humphrey, 138 Dante, 21, 54 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 23-5 ‘Degree’, 17, 24, 58-9, 61-2, Ephors, Spartan, 120, 163-4 64, 66, 74, 78, 93-4, 106 Episcopacy, 52, 55, 157-8, De Heretico Comburendo} 35 162, 167-8, 191 Deposition of rulers, ioo-i, Erasmus, 21-2 134, 138, 147-8, 155 Erastianism, 173, 192-3, 195 Dering, Edward, 113-14 Essex, Earl of, 63, 100 ‘Discipline’, 159-62, 164, 166, 168-9, 191 Ferrers, George, 69, 79 Disobedience, duty of, 38-9, Feudalism, 6-7, 9, 10-13, 16, 72, 82, 98, 129, 134, 148-9, 20, 63, 67, 196 151-2, 154-5, 162, 171 Filmer, Sir Robert, 44 Divine Law, 29, 39, 42-4, 55, Fish, Simon, 128 72, 80, 85, 115, 122-3, 129- Fisher, John, Cardinal, 56, 3i, 133, 139, 147, 149, 152, 137 164, 169-70, 179-80, 183, Fitz, Richard, 165 190 ‘Fleta’, 79 Divine Right of Kings, 12, Fortescue, Sir John, 10, 15 25-6, 35-7, 4i, 44, 51, 58, Foxe, Edward, Bishop, 41-2, 64, 69-71, 74, 76-7, 87-8, 54. 55 92, 94-7. 99-102, 115-16, Foxe, John, 125 121, 135-6, 139, 145, 155, Frankfort, 113 183-5 Froissart, 143

INDEX Galli, Cardinal, 138 Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop, 23, 49-50, 52, 55, 84, III, 191 Geneva, 146, 156, 159-60 Gilby, Anthony, 146, 152-3 ‘ Godly Prince ’, 32-3, 36-7, 46, 51, no, 113-15, 117-25, I45> t55-6, 161-2, 169 Goodman, Christopher, 146, 152-3, 156, 171 Greville, Fulke, 87 Grindal, Edmund, Arch¬ bishop, 173-4 Hall, Edward, 55, 63 Harrison, William, 68, 81 Hatton, Sir Christopher, 173 Hazlitt, William, 99 Henry VII, 8, 15, 17 Henry VIII, 15, 22, 27, 32, 37, 41, 48-52, 55, 57, 63-5, 67, 79, 84, 127-8, 130, 143, 153, 168 Herbert, George, 174 Heywood, Thomas, 95-6 Hobbes, Thomas, 197 Holinshed, Raphael, 95 Homilies, 68, 73-7, 78, 94-5, 102, 105-6, 153 Hooker, Richard, 4, 68, 11617, 126, 146, 158, 175-98 Hooper, John, Bishop, 59 Humanism, 19, 21-6, 40-1, 90, 144, 197 Humphrey, Laurence, 144 Infidel Ruler, 39-40, 42, 46, 88, 121, 132-4, 136-7, 140, 147-8, 152-5 International Law, 88 James I and VI, 8, 44 Jefferson, Thomas, 171 Jewel, John, Bishop, 117, 172-3

86-7,

217

Johnson, Samuel, 91, 99 Jonson, Ben, 91-2 Justice, 8, 11-13, 14, 16, 24-5, 69, 71-2, 85, 96-8, 114, 126,

147, 149, 153-4, 169, 187 Justification by Faith, 28-9, 56-7, 112, 115, 177 Katharine of Aragon, 27, 130 Keble, John, 191 Ket’s Rebellion, 58 ‘ King’s Matter, The ’, 27 Kingship, Magic of, 5, 7-8, ii, 21-2, 36-7, 101, 116 Knox, John, 33, 46, 77-9, 116, 146, 152, 153-6, 171, 173 Latimer, Hugh, Bishop, 40 Laud, William, Archbishop, 157 Law, see Canon, Common, Divine, International, Natural, Positive, Roman ‘Law, the Rule of’, 12-13, 14, 16, 38, 41, 43, 70, 77-8o, 83-5, 120-1, 136, 147-8, 151, 183-4, 186-9, 196 Legislation, 10, 79-80, 184 Leicester, Earl of, 77, 162 Locke, John, 147, 152, 197-8 Lollardy, 143 Luther, 22, 26, 28, 30, 32, 35,

42, 44-5, 54, ii3, 145, 159,

161 Lydgate, John, 15

Machiavelli, 9, 15, 21, 22, 24, 65, 66, 98, 106-7, 151, 167 Magna Carta, 14, 85, 170 Manwood, John, 84 Mariana, 140 Marlowe, Christopher, 96—7 ‘Marprelate, Martin’, 121 Marsiglio of Padua, 35, 48, 54, 177, 184, 196

2l8 Mary,

86-8

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND Queen of Scots,

Mary Tudor,

69,

in,

143, 145. 149, iS5

33, 134,

Medina Sidonia, 140 Merbury, Charles, 80-1 Milton, John, 165, 171 Mirror for Magistrates, The, 15. 68-73, 95, 99 ‘ Mixed Monarchy ’, 11, 78-9, 136, 147 Monasteries, Dissolution of, 27-8. 58, 67, hi Montaigne, 108 More, Sir Thomas, 15, 17-19, 22, 45, 50, 56, 127-31, 146 Morison, Sir Richard, 23,

65-7, 76

Mulcaster, Richard, 92-3

Papal Jurisdiction, 52, 53-4, 56, hi, 128, 130, 134, 137 Parker, Matthew, Archbishop, 116, 157, 173 Parliament, 13, 14, 27, 36, 51, 55, 69, 79-83, 85, 91, 95, 124, 130, 132-3, 136, 140-1, 147, 149, 157, 162, 188, 192-3 Parsons, Robert, 43, 135-7,

13.9, 140 Passive Obedience, 38 Paul, St., 3, 25-6, 29, 148 Penry, John, 115, 166, 168, 170 Peter, St., 56, 86 Petition of Right, 85 Philip II, 86, 88, 121, 139 Piers Plowman, 143 Pilgrimage of Grace, 57, 58-9,

64, 76 Pius V, Pope, 137, 138 Natural Law, 39, 43, 77, 81, Plato, 3, 17, 19, 21, 25, 41, 93, 108, 196 85, 92, 97-8, 128-9, 131-6, 141-2, 146-7, 149, 151-2, Plutarch, 3, 21, 25, 101 Pole, Reginald, Cardinal, 154, 178-9, 183-4, 196, 198 Nature, State of, 21, 24, 10722-3, 50, 65, hi, 127-9, 8, 181 148 Netherlands, 86, 88, 121, 139 Ponet, John, Bishop, 46, 146Newman, Cardinal, 178 52, 154-6, 171 Nobility, the, 12, 17, 22, 24, Positive Law, 43, 129, 148, 40, 58, 60, 65, 70, 75-7, 80, 164, 169-70, 183 87, 92, 95, 116-17, 120, 121, Presbyterianism, 116, 161-3, 128, 138, 144, 150, 152-5 166, 190-1 Non-resistance, 25-6, 37-8, Property, 17-18, 24, 64, 65-6, 39-40, 42, 44, 69-70, 72, 122, 124, 128, 146, 150 86-8, 94-5, 99-100, 105-6, ‘ Prophesyings’, 173-4 139, 145, 153, 155-6, 162, 170, 183 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 141 Norfolk, Duke of, 63 ‘Reason of State’, 106, 112, Norton, Thomas, 94-5 140,. 145, 1.57, 193 Rebellion, Sinfulness of, 13,

Ockham, William of, 48 Oxford, Earl of, 63

15, 25, 32-3, 40, 57-8, 69-70, 72-6, 86, 94-5. 99-100, 102, 105, 115, 138-9, 1 89-90

INDEX Recusancy, 125, 141 Regnans in Excelsis, 137 Republicanism, 17, 19-21, 101, 148 Resistance, Right of, 20, 82, 86, 100, 120-1, 129, 136-8, 140,

146,

149-5°.

153-4.

156 Responsibility of Rulers, 5, 8, 12, 15, 37-8, 40, 44, 69, 77, 87, 103-4, 121, 185-6, 189 Richard II, 100-1 Rising in the North, 123 Roman Law, 6, 11, 19, 24, 40,

219

Simnel, Lambert, 8 Skelton, John 60 Smith, Sir Thomas, 68, 81-3, 186 Socinians, 194 Some, Robert, 115-16 Somerset, Protector, 55 Southwell, Robert, 174 Sovereignty, 9, 26, 44, 48, 67, 80-2, 85, no, 184-8, 192-3, 197 Spain, no, 135, 139-40 Spenser, Edmund, 5, 68, 89,

92-4, 174 Starkey, Thomas, 22-3, 40-1,

84, 196 Rousseau, 182, 197 Royal Supremacy, 48, 52-7, 67, no, 123, 128, 132, 153, 188, 192

50, 52-3, 55, 64, 65 Stoic Philosophy, n, 98, 196 Strasbourg, 146 Supremacy, see Royal Supremacy

Sackville, Thomas, 69, 94-5 St. Albans, The Book of, 61 St. Germain, Christopher, 50-1, 55, 85, 191-2 Sandys, Edwin, Archbishop, 114-15, 163 Scholastic Philosophy, 6-7, 17, 41, 128, 177 Scotland, 46, 87, no, 145,

Tacitus, 21 ‘Tarrying for the Magis¬ trate’, 162, 166-7, J7° Ten Articles, 52 Theocracy, 25, 30-1, 34-6, 53-4, n3-t5, 117-26, 134, 155, 159-62, 164, 166-7, 192 ‘Things Indifferent’, 35, 39, 53-4, 56, 120, 122, 140, 148, 158, 169-70, 180, 191-4 Toleration, 17-18, 119, 123, 140-1, 165, 171, 197 Travers, Walter, 175 Tresham, Sir Thomas, 138-9 Troublesome Reign of King John, The, 99 Tunstall, Cuthbert, Bishop,

155

Scott, Cuthbert, Bishop, 132 Scripture, Authority of, 33, 39, 45-6, 51, 54, 88, 117-19, 128, 135, 157-8, 164, 177-8, 191 Sega, 138 Seneca, 94, 98 Separatists, 39, 165-71, 191 Shakespeare, 5, 14, 17, 21, 68, 74-5, 89, 9°, 98-109, 140 Shelley, P. B., 89 Sidney, Algernon, 197 Sidney, Sir Philip, 63, 87-8, 89-90, 174

23, 55 Tyndale, William, 15, 26, 29,

32-3, 37-8, 45, 49, 113, 127, 145, 146

Tyrannicide, 21, 25, 138, 140, 150

220

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Tyranny, 13-14, 15, 50, 69-70, 73, 76, 116, 120, 129, 134, 146-52, 154-5. 184,

‘Universal

38-44, 82, 91, 136-8, 186

Priesthood’,

35,

5i, 118-19

Utopia, 15, 17-19, 22, 107

Walsingham, Sir Francis, 162 Webster, John, 107 Wentworth, Peter, 157 Whitgift, John, Archbishop, 122-3, 125, 157-8, 164, 168,

174-5

Wolsey, Cardinal, 60, 63 Woodstock, 95, 100 Wrath, Divine, 25-6, 31, 42, 44, 69-72, 76, 87, 113, 115, 122, 126, 154, 159, 189 Wright, 139-40 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 153 Wyclif, John, 48, 143

York, 62 York Tractates, 36

Zurich, 113, 144, 153, 156 Zwinglianism, 144, 156

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