The Ghost of Galileo
Page 6
Royal Religion
The key to forbearance was to set aside beliefs and practices of the several Christian sects irrelevant to such core doctrines as the Trinity and Incarnation. “Our appeal is to antiquity,” Andrewes said in explaining his master’s message, “we do not innovate…we renovate.”12 The explanation itself was hardly innovative. Justification of every significant change as a return to sound past practice was a bromide of political and social discourse; “in reforming thinges of common practice, the cleering of the olde, which is abused, and not the breeding of the new, which is untried, is the natural amendment.” So thought the Master of the Rolls, Sir Julius Caesar. Acting accordingly, one of Sir Julius’s underlings recommended denying an otherwise acceptable petition because, “as from all novelties and inventions so from this, many mischiefs and inconveniences may arise.”13
James’s doctrine that Christians of various sects might live in harmony if they ignored small variations and indifferent practices disagreed with the general view that the most stable states tolerated only a single religion. Here Oligarchic Venice—impossibly stable yet innovative, quasi-tolerant yet Catholic—was a puzzle. James followed its fortunes closely. Take the time when, ignoring Basilikon doron’s warning, “be warre of Drunkenesse, which is a beastlie vice,” James and his good brother Christian were outperforming seasoned courtiers “overwhelmed…[with] women, and indeed wine too,”14 and the Venetian ambassador asked for an audience to discuss the papal interdict. It was not a convenient time. A tipsy Christian, playing the part of Solomon in a court masque, had tripped over a naked drunken Queen of Sheba, and had to be carried to bed.15 These divine rites completed, the monarchs were as “abstemious…[as] the severest Italian” when they admitted the ambassador.16
James exhibited a “profound knowledge of [Venetian] history” and a willingness to assist Venice, “with all my heart;” as for his arms, he reserved them (the ambassador reported in disgust) for hunting.17 Ignoring James’s instructions to encourage but not promise, Wotton offered the Venetians armed intervention if necessary and a league with Protestant powers against the pope.18 In justifying his misbehavior, he invoked an astrological metaphor: the meeting of the two kings in England at a crucial time for Venice had the look of a portent. “I see when Kings meet, it occasioneth as much discourse among politiques, as amongst astrologers at the conjunction of stars.”19 The starry message as usual was open to interpretation: Christian thought the situation ripe for a threat of armed intervention.20 Fortunately none was required and James gained in reputation as a Protestant leader wise enough to overlook the adiaphora of his allies.
Bentivoglio’s report on religion in England had a coda about Christian. He was a dangerous man for Rome, violent and warlike, and yet possessed of an intellect and energy scarcely seen in Denmark, “so that it is a puzzle how he could have been born in such a cold and indolent place.”21 He speaks many languages, including Latin, wherein he converses with his ally James; but, despite this refinement, he and his quasi-independent nobles are fierce Lutherans. Christian will not allow even moderate Calvinism in his domains, although James, his great friend, presses him to do so.22
To help him find a theological position that might minimize the disharmony among the Protestant sects, James convened a virtual academy similar to the company that created the King James Bible. More than one scholar worked on both projects. The first leader of this virtual academy and also the main figure in the translation was Bishop Andrewes. He had moved around the religious landscape, from a place close to Puritanism with respect to images, Sabbaths, and predestination to a place not far from Rome with respect to liturgy, the episcopate, and good works.23 Despite his anti-Calvinist positions, Andrewes enjoyed James’s favor for the dexterity of his sermons and the strength of his championship of royal authority. Since Sir John Bankes also favored Andrewes, we must sample the flavor of his sermons.
A few months after the assassination of Henri IV, Andrews interpreted the apposite text nolite tangere christos meos, which James’s Bible made “touch not mine anointed” (1 Chron. 16:22), as the Lord’s instruction not to interfere with princes. “Allegiance is not due to him because he is vertuous, religious, or wise, but because he is Christus Domini.” No one, not even the pope, can remove a bad prince without violating divine commandment.24 Andrewes extended this prohibition to attacks by voice and by pen, and to royal families, estates, and states; “not one of them is to be touched.” Even to will “touching” the sovereign is a crime, whether by a seditious thought or a Gunpowder Plot. God had saved the king from that heinous conspiracy, and Andrewes too, for James had made him a bishop on the eve of the attempt, and he would have been blown up with the Lords.25 It does not follow, however, that because God delivered us from the powder men He has freed us from responsibilities for our actions. God has not arranged every little detail, as the Calvinists proclaim; “there is somewhat belongs to our part,” for instance, vigilance against touchers of the King’s Majesty. They can do damage before they receive the exquisite “touches of the place whither (being unrepentant) they must needes goe.”26
With this teaching Andrewes fell in with the most uncompromising champions of divine right, like Abbot’s former chaplain Richard Mocket, risen, in 1614, to Warden of All Souls, Oxford. The warden proved, from many passages in the Old Testament and the New, that nothing, not infidelity, apostasy, or despotism, can dissolve the bond between a king and his people. All the people can do is to repent the sins that brought the tyrant over them, pray to God to correct him, and look forward to the Last Judgment.27 In theology, however, Andrewes drifted far from the Mockets. He preferred a brand of Protestantism known under the awkward name of its main exponent, Professor Jacobus Arminius, who died in harness at the University of Leyden in 1609.
Although Arminianism agreed with his political theology in its rejection of extreme Calvinist doctrines of grace, James worried that the noisy antagonisms it inspired among Dutch Calvinists would counter his efforts to keep peace among Protestants worldwide. To root out Arminius’s doctrine at its source, James demanded the ouster of Arminius’s disciple and successor, Conrad Vorstius, for “monstrous…horrible…abominable” vices, one of which, “licencious libertie of disputing,” James shared with his victim; and he ordered Vorstius’s books burnt in London, Oxford, and Cambridge.28 What more could he do? He consulted Sarpi; wise Fra Paolo advised him to seek some other amusement. But James persisted in regarding disturbances in the Dutch church as inimical to ecumenism and hired a former student of the Jesuits, George Eglisham, then (1612) pushing potable gold as a cure-all for folks who did not require a licensed physician, to annihilate Vorstius.29 The semi-Jesuit quasi-quack overkilled Vorstius for his “Atheism, Paganism, Judaism, Turcism, Heresy, Schism, and Ignorance.”30 The poor man never recovered his chair and lived to see his master’s teachings damned in 1619 by the Conclave of Dordrecht, or Synod of Dort, a sort of Calvinist Trent. James liked the damnation of Dort, as did Sarpi, on the theory that it would unify opposition to Rome. Andrewes thought that mutual forbearance was the better strategy and worked hard to blunt attacks on Arminianism.31
James responded to his growing theological difficulties by ordering an end to public discussion of divisive doctrines, much as Paul V did in silencing Galileo; with the significant difference, however, that, whereas the king outlawed disputes but not opinions, the pope prohibited a single opinion but not disputes. James could not live without disputing, however, and, ignoring his ban, allowed an attack on Puritanism. The attacker, Richard Montagu, voiced the scandalous opinion that the Church of England accepted Tridentine teachings on justification by faith and the merits of good works. Attacked by Archbishop Abbot, defended by Bishop Andrewes, and encouraged by a weakening king, Montagu indicated the direction of motion of the English Church.32
Andrewes put up several more signposts. A prime example is his Easter sermon of 1620, another touching performance, based on Jesus’s words to Mary Magdalene, No
li me tangere, “touch me not” (John 20: 11–17). Mary at first mistook the risen Christ for a gardener and recognized him only when he spoke. Two disciples who did not recognize his voice identified him by his manner of breaking and blessing bread at dinner (Luke 24: 30–1). It is folly, Andrewes inferred, to set the word, that is, preaching, against the sacraments, as Puritans do, “seeing we have both, both are ready for us…thank Him for both, make use of both, having now done with one…make use of the other.” “It may be (who knows) if the one does not work, the other may.”33 A unique preacher, Andrewes, in calling for curtailing preaching!
Despite his Arminian views, liturgical preferences, confrontational style, and muted enthusiasm for sermons, James appointed Andrewes Dean of the Royal Chapel. That was in 1619. The new dean immediately refitted most royal chapels for services in the old Catholic manner and purged the royal household of its Puritan chaplains.34 He was bold enough to reprimand James for demanding that, regardless of the place the service had reached when he entered church, the sermon should thereupon begin.35 Thus did Andrewes and his allies purify ritual and prepare the way for Laud, who, as co-editor of ninety-six of Andrewes’s sermons, confirmed the connection. Laudians expected that temperate preaching, solemn liturgy, and clerical leadership would “preserve truth and peace together,” and assure the proper relation of inferior to superior.36
Andrewes was charitable to others and, charity beginning at home, kept a good table for himself. It is worth recording for those who can profit from it that he mastered the ancient languages by declining and conjugating them while he walked back and forth between Cambridge and London. He also knew a dozen modern languages, picked up in his youth from foreign friends of his merchant-sailor father, and Arabic, from a professional teacher of “oriental” tongues. Good cheer, good health, and polyglot reading made “his Sermons…inimitable, his writings…unanswerable.”37 Sir John Bankes studied them carefully.
Bankes’s Religion
The future Attorney General and Chief Justice grew up in Keswick in Cumberland, where he was buffeted by wind from several pulpits. Catholicism loomed large in the north, and the old ceremonies lingered in Protestant churches. Perhaps the extended Bankes family included recusants, if Christopher Bankes, who entered the English College in Rome in 1642, was the relative he claimed to be.38 Even zealous Archbishop Sandys had not been able to eradicate the old ways in his archdiocese and he had left it at his death in 1588 more exposed to recusancy and more crowded with crosses than he had found it. Ten years later the newly appointed Bishop of Carlisle, Henry Robinson, whose diocese included Cumberland, recorded his surprise at the extent and stubbornness of recusancy, the prevalence of unreformed liturgy, the ignorance of the clergy, and the lawlessness of the Scottish borderlands.39 To combat the last of these evils he made common cause with the chief enforcer of border order, the Catholic Lord William Howard, who would be a major patron of Bankes. To combat the other disgraces, Robinson brought in sound new preachers from the south. Many came from Queen’s College, Oxford, which Robinson had headed for seventeen years before his elevation to the episcopate in 1598. He had the reputation of a strong preacher and a good administrator.40
One of Robinson’s recruits from Queen’s was his brother Giles, whom he installed as vicar of Keswick’s parish church, St Kentigern in Crosswaithe, where John Bankes was born in 1589.41 Among those Vicar Giles tried to draw to his church was a large community of German miners, many of whom, however, preferred the Lutheran preacher Queen Elizabeth had allowed them to import. The Bankes family had close ties to nonconformist miners forged by Bankes’s merchant father, also named John, a relationship later cemented by the marriage of Bankes’s only sibling, his sister Joyce, into their leading family.42
These were not ordinary miners. They possessed “no lesse judgment than industry in sundry excellent and choice experiments,” which, together with their relative civility, qualified them as exemplary in a popular manual for the making of English gentlemen.43 The Bankes family had some mining interests themselves, and later John Bankes owned graphite deposits around Keswick that gave him a monopolistic, if not an artistic, interest in black-lead drawing.44 Mining was never far from the noses and minds of the citizens of Keswick. Smoke from the smelters and lawsuits between Germans and locals over land, water, and timber insured it. The German community in Keswick showed young John not only variety in religion and power in technology, but also the merits of foreigners, diligence, and the common law.
Cumberland boys who studied in Oxford did so at Queen’s. Bankes entered in 1605 into the nourishing environment Robinson had created as provost: a godly Protestantism that accepted bishops and did not automatically disdain more liberal viewpoints. Not only was the religious tone of Queen’s familiar; Bankes also found at least one of his relatives there, his brother-in-law, David Heckstetter, who had left mining and Lutheranism and become a fellow of the college.45 Despite these comforts, Bankes stayed only two years in Oxford. Thence he proceeded to Gray’s Inn to prepare for a legal career. That did not shield him from Bishop Robinson, who had joined Gray’s four years earlier.
The bishop had not come to learn the law but to participate in the inn’s social life. The Inns of Court then were much like Oxbridge colleges, places of miscellaneous learning and entertainment, “the noblest nursuries of humanity and liberty,” according to Ben Jonson, who supplied some of their merriment. If not noble, at least they were gentlemanly, since, by order of King James, only men so qualified could be members. The inns also offered prolonged thorny study for those who intended to earn their living by the law. These plodders were not in the majority. Like the colleges, the inns housed many young men who did not pursue degrees; almost 90 percent of those admitted sought only knowledge useful for running the estates they would inherit. They kept the inns lively and helped pay for entertainments on a royal scale. Christmas feasts at a single inn could cost £2,000 or more, over twenty times the yearly earnings of a superior artisan in London.46 There were a few at Gray’s who by brilliance or birthright spent much of their time playing and yet became successful lawyers. An example, whose career ran parallel and character counter to Bankes’s, was John Finch, who entered Gray’s six years before Bankes and would proceed him by the same interval in climbing the ladder of the law.
Formal instruction at the inns was in the hands of readers (instructors) and benchers (seniors), about twenty in all, and barristers (alumni in legal practice), perhaps sixty. The standard career required seven or eight years of residence at an inn to barrister and twenty-five years to bencher and reader. In keeping with this schedule, Bankes was called to the bar in 1614 and became reader in 1630–1. He held the highest office at Gray’s Inn, Treasurer, from 1631 to 1636. He thus was in command when the Crown threatened inn mates who feasted on flesh during Lent with a punishment suitable to “the haynousnesse of soe high a contempt.”47 From ordinary barrister, a chosen few might rise to serjeant-at-law after nomination by the Chief Justice of Common Pleas and examination by the existing serjeants. At every promotion the lucky candidate had to give his inn a feast. Readers’ revels could cost £1,000 for the three-week term. The honor of serjeancy could be ruinous. In addition to the cost of the feast, the new man had to make a contribution to the king, some £600 in 1623, and give presents, including gold rings and livery, to administrative officers and Crown servants, and all the nobles and Members of Parliament present at the revel.48
Bankes became a serjeant in 1641. He had ascended owing to his “extraordinary discipline in his profession, his grave appearance, and excellent reputation,” his “great abilities and unblemished integrity,” and, no doubt, his generosity in feasting; in short, “an uncorrupted lawyer ǀ Virtue’s great miracle.”49 He had pursued a parallel course of teaching and practicing before taking up his readership at Gray’s Inn. His lectures there extolled common law, “the common ancestor to all laws,”50 and thus senior to the codes followed in civil, maritime, ecclesiastical, and prer
ogative courts. It was a proposition he often asserted when serving in Parliament. How he deployed it then against the Crown will appear in its place; here it is enough to know that he owed his parliamentary career to the Howards. The connection probably arose through Lord William’s need for a good lawyer familiar with Cumberland to help with business associated with his castle at Naworth some 35 miles from Keswick. Evidence of their business connection comes from Howard’s ledgers, which also support the guess that Bankes’s annual income around 1620 amounted perhaps to £500.51
The lord and the lawyer got on well, since Catholic William had a Protestant work ethic, and, as we know, strove to introduce something like law and order into the borderlands.
[William] Howard, than whom knight
Was never dubbed, more bold in fight
Now, when from war and armour free
More famed for stately courtesy,
had occasion for continuing legal advice, since, to the annoyance of local JPs, he insisted on proceeding in accordance with the law. When his business brought him to London and the house of his nephew, the Earl of Arundel, he enjoyed the company of the learned, for Lord William was also a fair scholar, an exemplary antiquarian, and a book collector. One of his last acquisitions was Sarpi’s Trent in its third edition, published in 1640, the year of Lord William’s death. It joined a library of Catholic devotional works and some diatribes of De Dominis, an assortment consistent with William’s anti-Roman Catholicism.52 We may take him as representative of the vast majority of James’s loyal wealthy Catholic subjects. James protected him from the recusancy laws, and he protected other Catholics from the king.53