The Ghost of Galileo
Page 8
To these good qualities Charles added connoisseurship and patronage of the arts and the theater. He wrote well, thought a little, and worked hard. In contrast to his father and many of his courtiers, he was sober, decorous, and healthy. In short, he had the skills, interests, and virtues to be an exceptionally good king. He was a catastrophic failure. He could not overcome hesitancy that ended in indecisiveness or impulsiveness; self-doubt that led to overreliance on under-qualified advisers; vacillation over protection of his Catholic subjects; exaggeration of his divine rights and prerogatives that alienated his parliaments; and an agility at self-deception, amounting to genius, that enabled him to ignore the magnificent discrepancies between his means and goals.
Charles’s half-educated teenage wife, Henrietta Maria, added greatly to his difficulties. She brought with her a train of priests and nobles to entertain her and a bishop to oversee fulfillment of her pledge to the pope to convert her husband. The blatant behavior of her entourage intensified pressure to enforce the laws against Catholics. Charles responded by collecting recusancy fines, prohibiting the airing of new religious opinions in speech or in writing, threatening English fellow travelers attending French and Italian chapels, and, in violation of his marriage contract, dismissing most of the queen’s entourage.99 These measures did not bring bliss to Charles’s wedded life. He did not get along with Henrietta Maria until the murder of Buckingham in 1628 opened political space for her and the birth of an heir, the future Charles II, in 1630 established her claim to it. They then fell in love, uncommonly for royalty, with one another. Many children followed. Being the stronger of the pair and as insistent on royal prerogatives as Charles, Henrietta Maria became a reliable helpmate in precipitating his downfall.
Caroline Cacophony
Arminians
Although even moderate Protestants considered Arminianism the gateway to Catholicism and genuflections, crossings, auricular confession, icons, incense, and priestly vestments so many stations on the road to Rome, Charles came to follow it as far as Andrewes went. It was he who commissioned Laud to publish Andrewes’s sermons and who chose as archbishops Laud’s guide to Arminius, Richard Neile (York, 1631), and Laud himself (Canterbury, 1633). During the first years of his reign Charles promoted a few Calvinists to please parliament; but, as he grew disenchanted with the Commons, he yielded to his political and aesthetic sensibilities and to Laud’s conception of order, decorum, hierarchy, and uniformity.100 A maverick result of this regulation was the Collection of Private Devotions (1627) published by Laud’s protégé John Cosin, which specified the number of prayers, theological virtues, good works, and acts of mercy through which anyone so minded might rise arithmetically to God. Strict Calvinists objected to Cosin’s calculations. Charles made him a bishop.
Charles hoped to silence religious opponents through a declaration, approved by his bishops in December 1628, which defined the doctrine of the Church of England as the Thirty-Nine Articles and prohibited “further curious search” into theological questions. The kernel of the declaration resembled the decree of the Council of Trent invoked against Galileo: “no man hereafter shall either print or preach to draw the Article aside in any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof, and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal or grammatical sense.”101 Neither James nor Charles would have thought it improper for their fellow divine monarch the pope to silence speculation that might, in his sole judgment, endanger his state or diminish his authority.
On becoming archbishop, Laud ordered his vicar general, Nathaniel Brent, the translator of Sarpi, to enforce liturgical conformity within the archdiocese. Brent detected errors as readily as Trent had multiplied anathemas. He disciplined ministers for giving communion to parishioners standing, wearing inappropriate vestments, and misplacing the communion table. These measures encouraged Puritans weak in tolerance but strong in body to escape to the new settlements in America. The archbishop worried that their number might so increase that they would invade their homeland. He could think of nothing to do about it, however, and contented himself with trying to force English communities in Europe, and children born to European immigrants in England, to worship in the rites and language of the English church.102
In June 1636, Laud improved the University of Oxford, already a model establishment, with the new statutes that John Bankes helped to draft. Sir John Coke, one of Charles’s two primary secretaries, presented them as the instructions of God’s vicar the king, the source of all laws, statutes, justice, honor, and titles in his realm, and also of all powers of persons, parliaments, courts, churches, corporations, societies, counties, and provinces. Two months later the king and queen were in Oxford as guests of Chancellor Laud. The university diverted them with three plays, one of which, Floating Island by the university’s orator, William Strode, was staged in Christ Church Hall with the elaborate machinery of an Italian masque. One courtier thought it the worst play he had ever seen, “but one he saw in Cambridge.”103
In Strode’s Floating Island characters representing Lust, Wrath, and Deceit conspire to rid their country of the laws and person of good King Prudentius. Alerted to the plot, Prudentius follows the advice of Intellectus Agens, a know-it-all concocted for academic amusement from a difficult concept in Aristotle’s De anima, to leave his crown and disappear. The evil triumvirate offers the crown to Fancie, who finds it too heavy. She acts as queen, however, and directs her courtiers to do as they please. Confusion reigns. Prudentius returns and offers his crown to anyone able to bear its weight and responsibility. No one volunteers. All sue for grace, which wise and kind Prudentius grants. The king then marries the courtiers to one another. The happiest arrangement couples Melancholy and Concupiscence, on condition that they live in the suburbs, “or new England.”104 According to a Catholic newsmonger, the play amused their Majesties, who fancied that Intellectus Agens was Laud and Concupiscence’s mate, Melancholy, a Puritan minister.105
Puritans
The noisiest of the Puritans was a lawyer, William Prynne, who injudiciously published a book against play going late in 1632. Laud’s chaplain, Peter Heylyn, “pounced upon the book…with unscrupulous malignity.” He insinuated that it insulted the queen, who participated in masques and watched plays. In an act of solidarity with their sovereigns, Prynne’s colleagues at the Inns of Court presented the king and queen with a masque, James Shirley’s Triumph of Peace (February 1634), and a feast, at the monumental cost of £21,000, organized by such heavyweight lawyers as John Selden and the Attorney General William Noy. The crowd thronging to see it was so great that the royal couple could scarcely reach their seats. The party continued until dawn.106
While the royals reveled, Prynne sat in the Tower awaiting trial. Some of his fellow prisoners were Catholics. To purge himself of contagion he wrote a poem (one of 100) affirming the role of reason in religion. He was right to say that it is wrong to obey “without inquiring the reason why ǀ As beasts obey their masters …”.107 Usually he was not so reasonable. Do you wear your hair long? A pity: you risk damnation. It has happened often.
Though he were a Modest, Sober, Chast, Industrious, or somewhat Religious person at the first…[he] will soon degenerate into an Idle, Proud, Vainglorious, Unchast, Deboist [debauched], and graceless Ruffian: His Amorous, Frizled, Womanish, and Effeminate haire, and Locke, will draw him on to Idlenesse, Pride, Effeminacy, Wantonesse, Sensualitie, and Voluptuousnesse, by degrees; and all Prophanesse, so to the eternal wrecke and ruine of his Soule. This the woefull, and lamentable experience of thousands in our age can testifie.
QED. Much the same can be said about “that Meretricious, Execrable, and Odious Art of Face-Painting,” that “Unnaturall, Detestable, Heathenish, Proud, Lascivious, Whorish, and Infernall Practice.” To stand upright in God’s eyes, we must “cut, and cast off all these Love-Locks, Paintings, Powderings, Crimpings, Curlings, Cultures, and Attires” that deform our s
ouls, “but are no luster to our bodies.”108 The language was unreasonable but not, to many of the godly, the reasoning.109
The same may be said for Prynne’s account of toasts. By drinking the king’s health, you start on a downward spiral to drunkenness, “as if you were no better than the Devill Bacchus.” Dear King Charles, do you know how serious the danger is? “Many thousand persons both are, and have been drawn to drunkenness and excesse…drinking their wit out of their heads, their health out of their bodies, and God out of their souls, whiles they have been too busie and officious in carousing Healths unto your Sacred Majesty.” Drive out those “gracelesse, swinish, and unthrifty Drunkards, the very Drones and caterpillars of a Common-Wealth"! Repair the “weake and sickly body of our State, (which reele[s] and struggle[s] like a drunken man,)”!110 Prynne produced his diatribes with the help of “a pott of Ale” served to him every three hours.111
Prynne’s Historiomastix (1632), his scourge of plays and players, made him the mutilated public face of the purest Protestantism. By refusing to follow Star Chamber’s rules of pleading, he was held in contempt. For his insults to the court and to the queen, he had both ears notched or (historians have their disagreements) one sliced off, and indefinite lodging in the Tower of London. His confinement did not abate his pamphleteering. It brought him an ideal collaborator, that Henry Burton who had been ejected from Charles’s household for criticizing Laud. Burton had devoted his consequent leisure to lobbying for the slaughter of all Catholic priests found in England, although, he allowed, even such good work as destroying the Jesuits could not alter God’s predetermination of the saved and the damned.
Burton and Prynne were strict sabbatarians. They collaborated in attacking Laud and his lieutenants for approving The Book of Sports, drawn up in King James’s time, which itemized wholesome entertainments allowed on Sundays after services, “thereby so provok[ing] God, that his wrath in sundry places has broken out to the destruction of many.” Burton and Prynne gave fifty-six examples of individuals struck dead or otherwise punished for “such monstrous impieties” as Sunday sports, to which they added, on the authority of that Jesuitical servant of anti-Christ, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, Turks and the plague.112 Still, games and Turks were not nearly as dangerous as Laud’s prayer book and his bishops’ usurpation of authority. Burton delivered this alert in sermons on Guy Fawkes Day, 1636.113 He soon joined Prynne in jail. Rounding out his cull of the professions, Laud tossed in scholarly John Bastwick, MD, a graduate in medicine from Leyden and Padua. Bastwick had made a hobby of hounding bishops.114
Star Chamber sentenced the triumvirate to facial mutilation, followed, after recovery, by indefinite imprisonment in different dungeons. Charles’s viceroy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, a close ally of Laud, and, as will appear, a patron of both John Bankes and Maurice Williams, reckoned the treatment of the triumvirate lenient. “To be shut up and dark kept all their lives is punishment mild enough for such savages…A prince that loseth the force and example of his punishments loseth the greatest part of his dominions.” Lacking Wentworth’s power of ratiocination, the people of London were disgusted by the barbarity of the punishment and impressed by the fortitude of the sufferers. Perhaps most damaging to the king and his archbishop, the martyrs’ status as gentlemen distinguished in their professions earned them the sympathy of classes unmoved by the fates of ordinary miscreants.115
Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne went off to their prisons in triumph; the people lined the streets and showered them with gifts. Prynne’s path to prison ran through Chester. The mayor gave him a civic dinner and tapestries for his cell. Prynne and Burton returned in even greater glory when released by parliament in 1640. A hundred carriages, 1,500 or maybe 2,000 horsemen, and a crowd of 10,000 welcomed them to London. Robert Woodford, a Puritan country lawyer, was there. “Oh blessed be the Lord for this day; those holy livinge Martirs Mr Burton & Mr Prynne came to towne, & the Lords providence brought me out of the Temple to see them, my hart rejoyceth in the Lord for this day its even like the returne of the Captivity from Babilon.”116 Parliament appreciated Prynne’s bombastic style and appointed him its historiographer for the Civil War.
Most Puritans spokesmen of course did not rant like Prynne. The reverend John Geree’s précis, Character of a Puritan (1646), is a fine example of their humane style. Geree’s Puritan worships following God’s directions, not “after the traditions of men.” He is frequently at private prayer, but also requires preaching, preferably without “vain flourishing of wit.” He keeps the Sabbath. He wants his church to be decent, not magnificent, and free from “sensual delight” and bishops. He “abhor[s] the Popish doctrine of opus operatum,” the idea that good works might help the worker to salvation. Although wishing to act gravely in all things, “yet he denye[s] not himselfe the use of God’s blessing, lest he should be unthankfull,” and so allows himself to marry. The bottom line, however, is not far from Prynne’s: the Puritan’s life is perpetual warfare, “wherein Christ [is] his Captaine, his armes, prayers and teares.” So armed, the Puritan is “immoveable at all times, so that they who in the midst of many opinions have lost the view of true religion, may return to him, and there find it.”117 The language is gentle but the message unbending.
Catholics
Even with the best of wills, Charles could not have kept his contracted promise to protect Catholics from persecution. Poverty as well as politics forced his hand: “for as it concerneth Religion, so it [also] has relation to his maiesty’s Profite.”118 When lenient, Charles released priests from prison and recusants from fines with writs that might bear the explanation, “at the instance of our dearest consort the queene.”119 Henrietta Maria indulged her religion publicly. She maintained opulent chapels, which bold aesthetes came to see for their beauty and frequented to their peril, and reaped many proselytes.120 Several of Charles’s senior ministers had already come over, or so it was rumored: Cottington and Francis Windebank, and the Lord Treasurer Richard Weston, all of whom would die Catholics. If the queen’s “religious zeale and constant devotions” succeeded, the king would be next.121 “We never had a greater calme,” an English agent of the Vatican reported, “since the queene came in than now.”122
This upbeat report dated from 23 July 1633, a month after the Cardinals’ expert in heretical depravity had signed the sentence against Galileo; a few weeks later, on 4 and again on 17 August, Urban, apparently acting on the report, offered Laud a cardinal’s hat. The new archbishop turned down the second offer with less than a resounding refusal. “My answer again was, that something dwelt within me, which would not suffer that, till Rome were other than it is.”123 He informed Charles of the offer. It did not disturb the détente then developing between king and pope, or discussions between Cottington’s group and cardinals Bentivoglio and Barberini.124
The pope’s agent in the queen’s entourage, Gregorio Panzani, kept the good news flowing. He wrote that most Protestant bishops would happily combine with Catholics “for the ruine and rooting out of Puritanes” and that the king, both universities, and the nobility were likewise flexible. Catholics, though few in number, included people possessed of great wealth and high office. Charles might almost be counted among them, since, Panzani reported, he and most of his nobility “beleeve all that is taught by the Church, but not by the Court, of Rome.”125 Urban knew enough about England to replace Panzani with a more astute courtier. He was George Conn, who took up his post in July 1636 and has an important role in our story.126
Conn was a scion of a noble Scottish family, a historian of Scotland, a panegyrist of Charles’s grandmother Mary Queen of Scots, and an intimate of the Barberini. He was also a man of the world, having served secular princes for years before entering clerical life in 1623, and, as Cardinal Barberini’s secretary for Latin correspondence with German states, knew more about the affairs of the Palatinate than Charles.127 Conn had every reason to expect that Urban would be as eager for the reconversion of England as he. On
the very day of his inauguration, the pope had found time to open the question. Urban: “What news of King James and Prince Charles? Does there appear to be any hope of their conversion to the faith of their forefathers?” Conn: “[T]he offspring of Maria Stuart…they will return to the Church…never has a King or Queen of Scotland died separated from it.”128 James had not yet made himself an exception to this rule.
Conn prepared for his mission by composing an account of the points at issue between Protestants and Catholics. He would draw only on Scripture, he wrote; Protestants had nothing to fear from him, “nothing to suspect, nothing to fear, everything sincere, safe, and hopeful.” On the question of predestination, however, Conn showed his steel. Protestants who doubted the compatibility of God’s foreknowledge with human free will presumptuously measured God’s mind by theirs. “Is there anyone so dull and stupid as to insist that free will cannot agree with God’s prevision?” Do not be duped by logic! “Impious and pertinacious sloth should be beaten with sticks until…it is willing to abstain from syllogisms.”129
When Henrietta Maria became aware of Conn’s willingness to do without syllogisms and his other merits, she urged Urban to make him a cardinal and to send him to quiet the perennial disputes among English Catholics. Perhaps she also knew that Conn had had a hand in marrying her to Charles; for, when Urban tried to impose conditions on the license, Conn kept the English negotiators usefully informed about Vatican strategy.130 Urban did not accede to the queen’s desire to make Conn a cardinal. The gambit of enticing Laud with a cardinal’s hat had not worked and it would have been wasteful to give a Scot one before securing Charles.131 Conn soon showed his acumen and diplomacy by winning the support of the secular faction of English Catholics, perhaps with the help of his brother, who served the queen.132