by John Guy
She had long privately held that the Religious Settlement, pushed through Parliament by Burghley and his allies in 1559 against vocal opposition and passing by only three votes in the House of Lords, had gone further towards Protestant doctrine than she would ideally have preferred, but she was young then and had only recently been crowned. She had accepted Burghley’s Settlement, even if she had set about diluting it somewhat by stealth. When, for instance, Archbishop Parker ordered ‘idolatries’ such as images, paintings and candlesticks to be stripped out of the parish churches ‘to the intent that all superstition and hypocrisy . . . may vanish’, she had ostentatiously reinstated the crucifix and candlesticks in her own chapel. That shocked the Calvinists, but there was more to come. Elizabeth was notably sceptical of the value of regular sermons, even though preaching the Word of God lay at the very heart of the Protestant view of salvation.2 In spite of such concerns, though, she was fully determined to unite her people around the Settlement, believing this was in everyone’s best interests. That meant enforcing conformity and obedience to her own Church of England, the church initially purged and reformed by her father Henry VIII after he married her mother and broke with Rome.
Hatton had first broached the issue of the presbyterian threat more than a decade before the queen’s letter to James. Shortly before he was promoted to the Privy Council in 1577, he had cautioned her that Parker’s successor as archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, whom she had appointed on Burghley’s advice, was a covert fifth columnist, colluding with the presbyterians and encouraging their so-called ‘prophesyings’. These were regular (often monthly) Scripture-study meetings, open to the laity as well as to clerics, to the poor as well as to the elite, at which abuses, ignorance and corruption in the official church were attacked and debated.3
Whereas Grindal had sought to use the prophesyings as a Trojan horse to stimulate a wider public appreciation of the role of a godly pastoral ministry in the church and a better understanding of cutting-edge Calvinist theology, Elizabeth condemned such exercises as illicit and dangerously revolutionary. Frequented by those she denounced as ‘puritans’ (she was one of the very first to coin this term of abuse), the prophesyings were, she believed, simply opportunities for malcontents, behaving as self-appointed local commissariats, to criticize her and the church she loved. This they had no business to do.
Twice she had summoned Grindal to an audience, ordering him to suppress the illegal gatherings: for ‘down she would have them’.4 When he refused, she threw him out of the Privy Chamber, straining relations between them to breaking point. He even, notoriously, dared to send her a 5,400-word letter informing her that, although she wore princely robes and there was ‘no earthly creature to whom I am so much bounden’, she was a mere woman who should leave matters of religion to those who knew about such things. Among his choicest observations was ‘Remember, Madam, that you are a mortal creature.’5
No one could speak to Elizabeth like that and expect to get away with it. For five months, there had been a deafening silence, during which, behind the scenes, she battled it out with Burghley and Leicester, who closed ranks in a valiant attempt to save the unlucky archbishop’s career. In 1577, she finally got her way and Grindal was disgraced and suspended. She then suppressed the prophesyings herself.6
• • •
When Grindal died, in 1583, Elizabeth ignored Burghley and promoted John Whitgift, bishop of Worcester, to be her new primate in the church. Three years later, she fast-tracked him to membership of the Privy Council. Significantly, Whitgift had secured the nomination while Leicester was absent in the Netherlands. His chief qualifications were his attacks on the presbyterians, whom he castigated in print and in the pulpit as anarchists and republicans.7
After the defeat of the Armada, Whitgift and Hatton became close allies. At Court, Leicester had been the highest-placed protector of the puritans. His death opened the way to a campaign, odious to Burghley and Walsingham, both long-standing puritan sympathizers, aimed at enforcing strict conformity to the 1559 Settlement upon clergy who were either outright Calvinists or Calvinist supporters.8 In London, the attack was led by Bishop John Aylmer, once Jane Grey’s tutor, but who had now changed sides and was Whitgift’s henchman and a cheerleader for the anti-puritans.9 Ably assisted by the most zealous of his apparatchiks, the inquisitor Richard Bancroft, Aylmer clamped down on, and put on trial, anyone who failed to satisfy Whitgift’s new and more stringently devised criteria for religious orthodoxy. This was despite Burghley’s impassioned plea that the articles and questions used by Bancroft in his interrogations were ‘so full of branches and circumstances, as I think the Inquisitors of Spain use not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their prey’. Unfortunately for Burghley, Elizabeth backed Whitgift and Aylmer to the hilt.10
Several of Whitgift’s intended victims fled to Scotland, where they were embraced by the Kirk and tolerated by James in revenge for a personal attack on him by Bancroft.11 In her letter to James written after her stay with Hatton at Ely Place, Elizabeth urged the Scottish king to send them back at once:
I pray you, stop the mouths or make shorter the tongues of such ministers as dare presume to make orisons [prayers] in their pulpits for the persecuted in England for the Gospel. Suppose you, my dear brother, that I can tolerate such scandals of my sincere government? No. I hope, howsoever, you be pleased to bear with their audacity towards yourself, yet you will not suffer a strange [i.e. foreign, meaning Elizabeth herself] king receive that indignity at such caterpillars’ hand, that instead of fruit, I am afraid will stuff your realm with venom.
Her letter ended with an appeal to James ‘not to give more harbour room to vagabond traitors and seditious inventors, but return them to me or banish them [from] your land’.12
Elizabeth believed her hard-line approach to be justified by the sensational clandestine distribution over the past two years of seven scurrilous tracts ridiculing Whitgift and Aylmer. Printed on a portable press that was constantly on the move and written by a relay of up to three, or perhaps as many as four, separate authors under the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate, these lampoons were supremely witty and irreverent, packed at every turn with mockery, parody and merciless satire at the expense of the bishops. Imitating the idioms of the stage and the vocabulary of the gutter, the Marprelate tracts scandalized the queen and the elite, and (it should be said) most of the puritans, too. Who exactly wrote them will never be known for certain: two country squires with seats in Parliament, Job Throckmorton and George Carleton, are among the names most regularly proposed. The tracts were liberally spattered with references to stews, brothels, strumpets, ‘trulls’ (concubines) and ‘whorehunters’, and among an inventive range of punning wordplay was ‘bumfeg’, used as a verb to mean ‘flog’, ‘Catekissing’ for ‘catechizing’ and the graphically lewd ‘fykckers’ for ‘vicars’.13
One of the later tracts, usually known as ‘Martin Junior’, included a eulogy to the most eloquent presbyterian of all, Thomas Cartwright. No other puritan would be mentioned so often, or with such obvious approval.14 Once a Cambridge professor of divinity, he had given a celebrated course of lectures in 1570 on church discipline as it was set forth in the Acts of the Apostles, only to be dismissed from his post when Whitgift was the university’s Vice-Chancellor. Now out of a job, Cartwright had taught alongside Theodore Beza in Geneva, gaining first-hand experience of presbyterianism. Later, he ministered to the merchant congregation of the English church in Antwerp, where Calvinism had taught itself to be astonishingly resilient in the face of persecution. On his return to England in 1585, he had the bewildering experience of being arrested by Aylmer and released shortly afterwards by an indulgent Burghley. Early the following year, Leicester found him what seemed to be a safe haven as master of his hospital in Warwick.15
Once back in England, Cartwright made his name as a puritan controversialist. He repeatedly confronted Whitgift in print, arguing that t
he government of the church should be purely autonomous, without interference from the civil magistrate or Parliament, and that episcopacy was not an institution of apostolic foundation. By denying that the queen could be the ‘Supreme Governor of the Church’, and by demanding that religion be removed from her supervision entirely, he infuriated Elizabeth. Daringly, he questioned in print whether monarchy was God-given, claiming instead that Parliament and the people granted rulers their authority, and it was thus to Parliament that the queen was properly accountable. He even insisted that, as a woman ruler, Elizabeth was not, as she always believed herself to be, an absolute sovereign, but shared her authority with her privy councillors and Parliaments.16
• • •
In early September 1589, directly after a lengthy audience with Elizabeth, Hatton had set out to arrest and prosecute Cartwright, along with eight other puritan leaders. His aim was to convict them, first, of charges of religious heterodoxy before a tribunal of ecclesiastical commissioners headed by Whitgift, and then of sedition in the Court of Star Chamber.17 These were to be exemplary trials, modelled on Henry VIII’s show trials at the time of his break with Rome: the aim was to crush radical Protestant dissent root and branch. As Hatton justified the move to Parliament, the puritans were ‘of a very intemperate humour’: their disaffection annoyed the queen even more than that of the Catholics. They lacked ‘all grounds of authority’ but ‘they affect an unspeakable tyranny.’ In short, they were felons and traitors in all but name.18
Elizabeth was counting on Hatton to prove that Cartwright and his friends had been involved in what she denounced as a ‘conventicle’, or seditious conspiracy, so that they could be imprisoned, perhaps even hanged. But the proceedings before the ecclesiastical commissioners dragged on for more than a year. Whitgift, who had scoured the highways and byways of Surrey and Kent with Lord Cobham, a noted anti-puritan, searching for ‘Martin Marprelate’, failed abysmally to deliver the necessary knockout blow. As a result, it was not until the week beginning Monday, 10 May 1591 that the prisoners were finally before the Star Chamber, where Hatton presided over a hand-picked panel of privy councillors and justices.
Hatton chose the date to begin the Star Chamber hearings with a certain dark finesse: he timed it to be the very same week in which Burghley, still one of Cartwright’s secret admirers for his views on the sovereignty of Parliament, would be otherwise engaged, entertaining the queen at Theobalds. He did this knowing that if a judge missed the first ten days of a trial, as Burghley inevitably would while the queen was his guest, he was disqualified from sitting in the case later on.19
When asked by the Queen’s Attorney, Sir John Popham, whether Elizabeth could be the Supreme Governor of the Church, as Parliament had enacted in 1559, Cartwright’s brilliant lawyers stonewalled the court. Thereafter, Cartwright and his co-accused repeated time and time again their mantra that they ‘were not bound to answer’. The most they would do was to ‘acknowledge Her Majesty’s supreme authority according as in Her Highness’s Injunctions and laws in that behalf is expressed’.20 These were weasel words: although from the opposite side of the religious divide, they conceded little more than Thomas More had famously done when Henry VIII had put him on trial for treason in 1535. More had told his judges then that Henry might have broken with the pope and declared the monarch to be the Supreme Head of the Church, but whether either step was valid in law or theology was a matter for the whole of Christendom to resolve.21
Next, Cartwright was questioned as to whether the form of government established by the Settlement was in conformity with the Word of God and whether the sacraments were rightly and justly administered. He refused to answer. Finally, he was asked whether the rites and ceremonies laid down in the Book of Common Prayer were ‘such as no person ought therefore to make any schism, division or contention, or withdraw himself from the church’. Seeing the trap, he at once replied that no one should ‘make any schism or withdraw himself’. On the other hand, whether the Elizabethan church’s form of government, or its rites and ceremonies were lawful ‘as they are used’, he did not consider himself bound to answer, since the question ‘is a matter of judgement, not of fact’.22
With the examinations and cross-examinations of the defendants and witnesses taking so much longer than he had envisaged, Hatton could brief Elizabeth only rarely during the summer and early autumn of 1591. The need to pin specific criminal offences on the puritan leaders was considered to be of sufficient importance to keep the Star Chamber in special session during the normal summer break. Hatton managed a flying visit to Cowdray to confer with the queen in mid-August, but he was unable to join her at Portsmouth or Elvetham, instead sending a jewel in the shape of a bagpipe, ‘which she weareth on her ruff and with [which] doth she make much sport, remembering your Lordship by the name of her “Mutton”.’23 He kept in touch with the main body of the Privy Council, which travelled with the queen on her progress, by letter, using Robert Cecil as his intermediary.24
In the end, Elizabeth would be cheated of a victory and denied the proof she had demanded of a great puritan conspiracy. The case against Cartwright and his co-accused began to collapse in October, when Hatton, the driving force behind the prosecution, was no longer able to control the diabetes from which he had suffered for a number of years. He died at Ely Place on 20 November, from what Camden in his Annales, probably accurately, called ‘a flux of his urine’.25 A few days before, Elizabeth had visited him and gently fed him broth. He was just fifty-one.
On 11 December, Popham sent Burghley a confidential memo on the status of the case in response to a motion from the prisoners’ lawyers asking for bail. Popham was still confident of a conviction, believing he had witness testimony proving that Cartwright and his friends had plotted to ‘win the people’ over to their cause. In Elizabeth’s eyes, such rabble-rousing constituted sedition pure and simple.26
But the Queen’s Attorney was too bullish. Around New Year 1592, the Star Chamber judges halted the prosecutions. On 9 January, the queen’s kinsman Sir Francis Knollys, a privy councillor whose puritan sympathies were even stronger than Burghley’s and who had attended every session of the trial with growing repugnance, explained that the decision had been taken for lack of evidence. Otherwise, ‘Cartwright and his fellows had been hanged before this time.’27 Now turning eighty and plagued by failing eyesight, Knollys had a thick skin – his ancestral badge was an elephant – so he cared little if his opinions reached the ears of the queen.28
Later, Knollys wrote again to Burghley, filling in the blanks. Shortly before Hatton had died, he explained, the Chief Justice of England, Sir Christopher Wray, himself no friend of puritans but a man who believed in fair play, had rounded on the ailing Lord Chancellor in the Star Chamber. He had urged Hatton to drop the case until he ‘should have matter to prove some seditious act de facto to be committed’. Wray convinced his fellow judges that Hatton had no grounds in law for a guilty verdict.29 What most irked Knollys, however, was that, although Cartwright was never convicted of anything, he and his fellow puritans were left to rot in prison on grounds of suspicion alone.
• • •
Elizabeth’s dilemma was that she wanted to be both a Protestant defender of the faith and an upholder of the ideals of God-appointed monarchy at the same time. Cartwright’s case proved this was impossible. Seeing that her Protestant credentials would be at risk if the outside world came to think she had victimized men of Cartwright’s distinction for reasons of sheer prejudice, she washed her hands of the affair. It is striking that when Knollys politely asked to discuss these issues with her in confidence, she slammed the door in his face.30
With some difficulty, Burghley engineered the release on bail of the Star Chamber prisoners. But if this was a significant defeat for the queen, she prevailed elsewhere. When Chief Justice Wray died a few days before Cartwright’s discharge, she promoted Popham to the vacancy, choosing a rising star in the legal profess
ion, Sir Thomas Egerton, another anti-puritan, to replace him as Queen’s Attorney. And in the spring of 1593, Whitgift secured her firm backing in Parliament for a savage law against the puritans.31 The new law would ensure that, for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign, Protestants who boycotted services in their parish churches on grounds of conscience, attended unlicensed gatherings ‘under colour or pretence of any exercise of religion’ or questioned the queen’s authority would first suffer imprisonment, then banishment abroad. Dissident Protestants were now to be lumped alongside Catholics as the enemy within. To escape these sanctions, Cartwright fled to Guernsey, with Burghley’s covert assistance, putting himself beyond Whitgift’s reach.
It would take a ‘madman’ (or so Burghley privately described him) to salvage Elizabeth’s reputation as a Protestant defender of the faith. At the climax of Cartwright’s trial in the Star Chamber, an illiterate Northamptonshire maltster, one William Hacket, otherwise said to be a lunatic, proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ and announced that the end of the world was nigh. A convert to puritanism, Hacket had come to believe he was a reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet Daniel after wrestling with the fiercest of the lions in the queen’s menagerie at the Tower of London without being mauled. A week or so later, he declared himself to be the ‘king of Europe’. It was, he declared, his intention, with two accomplices, to free Cartwright from prison, kill Whitgift and overthrow the queen.
Swiftly arrested by the royal pursuivants in his lodgings, Hacket was tried and convicted of treason. Dragged on a hurdle drawn by horses to a gallows in Cheapside, near St Paul’s, he continued to protest that he was the new Messiah, then ‘fell to railing and cursing of the Queen’s Majesty most villainously’.
For the horrified Londoners watching the scene, it was enough. From now on, dissident puritans, whoever they were and wherever they came from, were to be tarred with the brush of blasphemy and insurrection.32