Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age

by Foss, Michael

  The task of repelling the Puritan’s persistent attacks rested largely on John Whitgift, at first Bishop of Worcester and after 1583 Archbishop of Canterbury. He was such a stout defender of the Elizabethan orthodoxy that the Queen called him ‘her little black husband’. His position was that the English Church contained ‘all points of religion necessary to salvation’, and that matters beyond these essentials of faith, such as forms and ceremonies, were ‘things indifferent’ which a national Church had the right to determine. And this determination should be done by the governors of the State, for Church and State were one. ‘I perceived no such distinction’, he wrote in his Defence of the Answer, ‘of the commonwealth and the Church that they should be counted as it were two several bodies governed with divers laws and divers magistrates.’ Since he thus assumed what the Puritans vehemently denied, his arguments were not convincing to them. Nor were the writings of other Anglican apologists such as Bancroft and Bilson any more persuasive. When Whitgift became archbishop in 1583 he took energetic practical measures against the nonconformists. Licenses to preach were withheld from those who would not conform; commissions in London and under Sandys, by now Archbishop of York, in the North examined the beliefs of the ministers; and, at the orders of the Privy Council, a censorship was put on Puritan propaganda, and illicit presses were suppressed. But censorship rarely works, then as now; the Puritan printers, driven underground, soon showered the bishops with the fierce, joyous vituperation of the Marprelate Tracts. The Puritans could only be beaten down by a cool, learned, authoritative defence of the English Church, and in search of this the bishops came to Richard Hooker.

  The chance to recruit Hooker to the fray against the Puritans came in 1585 when Dr Alvey, the Master of the Temple, died and left the succession likely to fall upon Walter Travers, one of the most vehement Puritans who was already a lecturer at the Temple. Archbishop Sandys, always the good friend and patron, immediately proposed Hooker for the Mastership, a suggestion taken up by Archbishop Whitgift. And these two powerful ecclesiastics easily overrode the objections of Travers’s supporters, even though they had gained the ear of Burghley. The objections of Hooker himself had also to be overcome, the extent of whose gentle ambition it was to live and study in the country and ‘eat that bread which he might more properly call his own, in privacy and quietness’. Finally, he gave way and was installed in the Mastership in February 1585.

  The theological battle was now joined between Hooker and Travers, between the Anglican and Puritan, so that it was said at the Temple that ‘the forenoon sermon spake Canterbury, and the afternoon Geneva’. Travers was a formidable, and courteous, opponent who made his reputation some years before with his Book of Discipline. He had entered the controversy at about the time that Whitgift had left it; and since that time the Anglican argument had languished for want of a champion. The controversial debates between the two preachers at the Temple marked the arrival of the new champion, the successor to Jewel and Whitgift. Within two years Hooker had triumphed over his rival. Travers was sent to Trinity College, Dublin, where his Puritan views did not bar him from an academic position.

  The defeat of Travers was only the beginning of Hooker’s great work for the Church. The leaders of the Church, both among the clergy and the laymen, had decided on a comprehensive attack against the Puritans. A campaign was started in the House of Commons to harry nonconformists by law, a campaign which culminated in the Conventicle Act of 1593 and the execution of Barrow, Greenwood and Penry in the same year. This legislation was to be accompanied by a grand defence of the English Church, and Hooker, his arguments sharpened by the match with Travers, was given the task of writing this. Perhaps he began the task as early as 1585. The witty and lively scorn with which the Puritan pamphleteer who went under the name of Martin Marprelate had dismissed Dr Bridges’s huge, worthy and unreadable Defence of the Church of England in 1588 made a more satisfactory defence essential. The preparation of the Conventicle Act made publication necessary by 1593. Hooker set about the composition of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

  When Hooker came to the Temple in 1585, a learned scholar in his early thirties with a shy and gentle disposition, he settled immediately into the solid comfort of John Churchman’s house in Watling Street. Churchman was a prosperous member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, and in his house Hooker found the small considerations that eased his scholarly and withdrawn life. The Churchman servants saw to his wants, and the Churchman ladies kept a tender eye on the quiet bachelor to such good effect that Hooker married the daughter, Joan, in February 1588. She brought him a dowry of £700 and bore him four daughters. In spite of the recriminations heaped upon Joan by Hooker’s early biographers, the marriage seems to have been tranquil and happy. When his duties at the Temple were done, well cared for in the quietness of his wife’s home, with the active assistance of Edwin Sandys and his friends, Hooker had the first four books of Ecclesiastical Polity ready for publication in 1593.

  ‘Hooker would not have been’, Cardinal Newman wrote, ‘but for the existence of Catholics and Puritans, the defeat of the former and the rise of the latter.’ Ecclesiastical Polity was written to answer the Puritan criticism of the English Church and to show that the Puritan refusal to conform to the church laws of the land was rationally unjustified. The first four books were published in 1593, the fifth in 1597; the sixth, seventh and eighth books were roughly completed before Hooker’s death in 1600, but may not have come down to us as Hooker wrote them.

  Hooker’s work is marked with the modesty, reason and judiciousness of the man. The tone is always sweet and calm: ‘I am not hasty’, he wrote, ‘to apply sentences of condemnation.’ And the easy, flowing writing is a model of Elizabethan prose, one of the few books that can be read with pleasure despite its portentous subject. In his English way he was cautious and practical, looking not for the ideal, but for what was possible. ‘In polity’, he wrote, ‘as well ecclesiastical as civil, there are and will be always evils which no art of man can cure, breaches and leaks more than man’s wits hath hands to stop.’ He distrusted large generalities and sought exact cases, for ‘they that walk in darkness know not whither they go’.

  Hooker was not primarily a theologian; as the title of his book implies, his work had as much to do with politics as with faith. He was concerned with reason, human nature and law. After considering the ecclesiastical laws of England, he found them not inconsistent with the law of God revealed in the Scriptures. It was part of his task to show that in England commonwealth and Church were one. After a full and steady examination he reached the required conclusion: ‘We hold, that seeing there is not any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth; nor any man a member of the commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England … no person appertaining to the one can be denied to be also of the other.’ And again, more succinctly, ‘with us one society is both Church and commonwealth’. If the validity of the argument be admitted, then it follows inescapably that Parliament, the governor of the commonwealth, has the right to govern the Church: ‘to define of our church’s regiment, the parliament of England hath competent authority’.

  The work, which made no money, brought Hooker fame instead. At the request of Clement VIII the first book was turned into Latin, and when the Pope had read it he was amazed: ‘There is no learning’, he is reported to have said, ‘that this man hath not searched into, nothing too hard for his understanding: this man indeed deserves the name of an author.’ Alas, the Puritans were less impressed; for Hooker was talking about politics and they were talking about faith, and the two never met. Despite the stately elegance of the exposition, the Ecclesiastical Polity showed the same flaw as the works of Jewel, Whitgift and all those apologists who put the stability of the commonwealth above the calls of faith. In asserting the right of Parliament to legislate for the Church, Hooker, like the others, assumed what he had to prove. But the very reasonableness of Hooker’s writing echoed th
e reasonableness and political good sense of Elizabeth’s religious compromise. While the countries on the continent were engaged in the ferocious battles of the Wars of Religion, comparatively few people died for their faith in England. After the revolt of the northern Earls in 1569, many Catholics were executed, but the Tudors had always used a heavy hand against rebellion. Jesuit missioners were caught and condemned for treason, and several Puritans died under the penal laws. The Elizabethan State was sacrosanct and beyond criticism, and this was perceived even by those Englishmen who suffered for their opposition to the state religion. They went to the scaffold declaring themselves patriotic Englishmen and loyal subjects of the Queen.

  In 1591 Hooker gave up the Mastership of the Temple. He exchanged benefices with Nicholas Baldgay, rector of Boscombe in Wiltshire, and was also made prebend of Netheravon. Once more it seems he held these positions in absentia, for there is no record of his attendance at either place. And at this time he most needed to be free in London; his great book was coming into shape, and his counsellors and advisers among the church leaders were daily at his apartments pressing the work forward. When the first four books of Ecclesiastical Polity were ready and printed, Hooker was at last allowed to retire to the country quietness that he had always wanted, and there to finish his work at a more leisurely pace. In 1595 he became parson of Bishopsbourne, and spent the rest of his short life among the pleasant Kentish fields, three miles from Canterbury.

  The shy scholar was an exemplary priest. He had not been at Bishopsbourne a year, Walton wrote, ‘but his books, and the innocency and sanctity of his life became so remarkable, that many turned out of the road, and others—scholarly especially—went purposely to see the man’. They saw an obscure, harmless man in a coarse gown, small and stooped with ‘his face full of heat-pimples, begot by his inactivity and sedentary life’. His uneventful life was not without its small tragedies; both his sons, Richard and Edwin, died in infancy. But in the handsome parsonage at Bishopsbourne he wrote and studied and went the placid rounds of the country parish priest.

  ‘The life of a pious clergyman’, Hooker used to say, ‘was visible rhetoric; and so convincing, that the most godless men did yet secretly wish themselves like those of the strictest lives.’ The duties of the parish priest were fully and clearly laid down in the new ordinances of the Anglican Church. On Sunday, Morning Prayer was at 7 a.m., followed by Communion, and in the early evening before the light failed, there was Evening Prayer. The priest wore ‘a comely surplice with sleeves’ and was to possess a cover for the paten and a communion cup, both of silver. He needed also certain books, in particular ‘the Book of Common Prayer with the new Kalendar, a Psalter, the English Bible in the largest volume, the two tomes of the Homilies, and the Paraphrases of Erasmus translated into English’. The priest had a duty to preach, and Hooker did so every Sunday. ‘His sermons were neither long nor earnest, but uttered with a grave zeal and an humble voice: his eyes always fixed on one place, to prevent imagination from wandering; insomuch, that he seemed to study as he spake.’ With careful attention, he taught the catechism, watched the attendance at communion, regulated the singing (avoiding overuse of the organ which was considered too Catholic), warned the slack and irreverent, and tolled the bell for the dead. He saw that unmarried mothers made a public confession of their fault before the congregation, he supervised the churchwardens, and on Rogation Days walked the bounds of his parish with his parishioners; ‘in which perambulation he would usually express more pleasant discourse than at other times, and would then always drop some loving and facetious observations to be remembered against the next year, especially by the boys and young people.’

  And the duties of the priest extended beyond the church and into every corner of the parish. Education and charity were in the care of the church. Priest and churchwardens were responsible for schoolmasters: were they licensed, loyal and well-behaved? Did they have the grammar book of Henry VIII, and the Latin catechism of Elizabeth? Priest and churchwardens were also the supervisors of hospitals and almshouses, and Hooker, as Walton relates, was ‘diligent to enquire who of his parish were sick, or any ways distressed, and would often visit them, unsent for’. He reconciled quarrels and prevented law-suits; he gave advice and consolation, ‘insomuch, that as he seemed in his youth to be taught of God, so he seemed in this place to teach his precepts as Enoch did, by walking with him in all holiness and humility, making each day a step towards a blessed eternity’. His own conduct was austere and self-denying. He observed the fast days strictly, and in Ember Week took the key of the church door and locked himself in for several hours a day.

  In the winter of 1600, after about five years in his parish, Hooker caught a cold journeying by water from London to Gravesend. Though he was not yet old, being only forty-six, his health did not recover. He could not sleep and then lost his appetite so that ‘he seemed to live some intermitted weeks by the smell of meat only’. Feeling that his end was near, he gave all his time to the still incomplete Ecclesiastical Polity; in his last sickness his constant enquiry was whether his books and papers were safe. When he was assured that they were, he replied, ‘Then it matters not; for no other loss can trouble me.’ He knew very well that his book was the unique achievement of his quiet, orderly and obscure life. He died on 2nd November 1600.

  It has been said that, from the point of view of religion, the Elizabethan settlement settled nothing. ‘Now and ever’, wrote Cardinal Allen in 1584, ‘when the superiority temporal hath the pre-eminence and the spiritual is but accessory, dependent and wholly upholden of the other, error in faith is little accounted of.’ The Queen wished it that way. Knowing the wide divergence of religious opinion among her subjects, buffeted by half a century of controversy, she cast the net as wide as possible. The state Church had no distinctive doctrine or theology, unclear laws and little order. It was designed this way so as to catch as many different views as possible. For a clergyman to conform to it was not difficult; one must sign certain papers when compelled to do so by the bishop, read parts of the prayer-book, wear a surplice occasionally, and say nothing out loud against the royal supremacy. Indeed, the doctrine of the royal supremacy was the one certain doctrine of the English Church.

  Such a scheme could never satisfy religious temperaments for long, and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign men of strong faith were already in revolt, moving towards either the Protestantism of Calvin or Knox, or a kind of Anglican Catholicism. But in the early days of the Queen’s reign, the reasonable Elizabethan compromise had the admirable effect of keeping fierce religious passions damped down, and so England avoided the horrific religious bloodshed which the continent of Europe witnessed in these years. The Tudors, in particular Henry VIII and Elizabeth, had given England nationalism as its new religion, and in this patriotic age when England at last blossomed into a land whose enterprise and spirit matched any in Europe, most Englishmen were content with the new Tudor faith.

  And it may also be said that Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, as a religious document, was as unsatisfactory as the religious settlement. But it had the same reasonable virtues. In his easy, lucid way, Hooker pointed out that the beliefs of the English Church were not inconsistent with primitive Christianity, and that the good man was as likely to be saved there as anywhere. He also pointed out that, for better or worse, there was a particular relationship between Church and State in England, and that this was not to the disadvantage of the Church. His examination of this aspect, practical, shrewd and sympathetic, was the part of his work that his successors turned to. His mark is upon most later thinkers who consider the English polity and the bond between citizen and State. To have been forerunner and teacher to Hobbes, Locke and Hume is one part of his fame; to have been an ideal example of the Elizabethan clergyman is the other, and quieter part.

  9

  Sir Philip Sidney

  THE DAWN OF a new age breaks with grief and questionings. The sixteenth century in England saw civil disturbance a
nd religious strife, bodies at the gallows, the axe ringing on the block; violence on the roads, thriving crime, the towns bursting and pestilent; the poor dispossessed, the rising gentry rapacious, the great consumed by greed and ambition. ‘I set this down’, wrote the priest John Gerard after the torture inflicted on him in 1597, ‘in this last age of a dying and a despairing world.’ Geoffrey Fenton lived his life in ‘seasons so perilous and conspiring’. Men blind to everything but the pain of the present lamented the passing of a golden antiquity. ‘We have fallen into the barren age of the world’, wrote a contemporary of Shakespeare, Bacon and Raleigh; ‘there is general sterility.’ A few of deeper judgment saw the real virtues of the time. Gabriel Harvey in a letter to Edmund Spenser spoke truly of the past ‘when all things were rude and imperfect in comparison of the exquisite finesses and delicacy that we are grown into at these days’. And he continued: ‘England never had more honourable minds, more adventurous hearts, more valorous heads or more excellent wits than of late.’ Nothing bore out his thesis so well as the life of Sir Philip Sidney.