The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (41 page)

God’s absolute sovereignty over men extended not only through this
world but the next. At the heart of Protestant divinity lay the doctrine of double predestination, absolute and immutable. ‘Before the foundations of the world were laid’, according to the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563, the confession of faith of the Church of England, God had decreed ‘to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He had chosen in Christ out of mankind’. All the rest He passed by – so Calvin and all who followed him read in scripture – and these were ordained not to eternal life but, as ‘vessels of wrath’, to eternal damnation. Despite mankind’s natural depravity after the Fall, God of His mercy had saved some, though in justice He might have damned all. Only God knew whom He had elected to salvation and whom He had damned. Once called, the elect believer could stumble but never finally fall from grace. In their studies, and in university lecture halls, learned divines debated the order of the divine decrees, asked whether God foreordained as well as foreknew; compelled men or allowed them freedom to choose. These debates were as old as Christian theology, but were conducted with a new urgency as the century wore on. Although these were questions too abstruse for most – certainly for all those sunk in rustic ignorance, the ‘common sort of Christians’ – preachers preached upon these great themes, and many read scripture with anxiety as well as devotion, and looked to their preachers as prophets.

To the godly, Christ’s kingdom was not of this world. Yet, convinced of their election, they must live their lives in such a way as to vindicate God’s choice. They were warned against the presumption of identifying themselves in this world as a band born to predestinate grace. The Bible disclosed that the division between the elect and the reprobate would not be made until the Last Day; until then sheep and goats must graze together. The faith of the godly was an evangelical one: all must be brought to the truth of God’s Word and hear His promise, though not all who heard would receive it. That evangelical necessity grew more urgent with the sense that the Last Day approached.

Elizabethan Protestants saw the whole of history as a divinely predestined drama, with themselves living in the last act. They read in the Book of Revelation of the reign of Antichrist, Satan’s last and deadliest agent, and saw that calamity would precede Christ’s return. Finding prophetic meaning in contemporary events, their sense of apocalyptic crisis grew in the 1570s as they awaited the fulfilment of the struggle between the True Church and its satanic parody, the Church of this world. That conflict had changed little through its long history: the True
Church, which served God, had always been marked by suffering, exile and persecution, since Cain had murdered Abel; the False served Satan in idolatry and sin. That False Church was easily identified with the Roman Church by Elizabethan Protestants, not because every Catholic was outside God’s grace, but because the papal Antichrist had perverted doctrine.

God, who elected individuals, might also elect nations. He had chosen Israel as the bearer of His promise. England’s godly, like the Dutch, read scripture with patriotic intent, and for them England
was
Israel, London
was
Jerusalem. But there was no place for complacency. As Israel had, England tempted God by its disobedience, unthankfulness and continuing idolatry, and must expect punishment, just as punishment had fallen on Israel. Christ wept now over London, as once over Jerusalem. In John Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days touching matters of the Church
, better known as his
Book of Martyrs
, English Protestants read of their own part in the history of the True Church throughout the world, of their part in God’s plan, as the end drew close.

England’s godly had come to believe that the Queen and her people were living dangerously. When Elizabeth had ascended the throne, a Deborah to Israel, they had been jubilant. Preachers then had promised victory ‘to the little ones of the weak flock of Christ against the tyrants of the world’. In 1562 a London crowd had taunted a Catholic priest with ‘
Dominus vobiscum
[God be with you]’, because He was not. A decade later, in the emergency Parliament of 1572, the Speaker told of the miraculous change since God’s ‘merciful providence’ had brought Elizabeth to the throne: instead of war, there was peace; hypocrisy had given place to the Gospel; the persecution was ended; the currency restored. God had ‘inclined’ the Queen’s heart to defend His afflicted Church throughout Europe. But there were many who could not believe that the Gospel was truly planted, or that England’s peace and prosperity were any more than delusory. Walsingham had warned Cecil in 1568 that ‘there is nothing more dangerous than security’. There were dangers within and without, and the Queen, so one member of Parliament warned the House of Commons in 1572, was oblivious, ‘lulled asleep and wrapped in the mantle of her peril’. What sort of peace could England enjoy while her Protestant neighbours in Europe were beleaguered and persecuted? England’s godly must consider ‘the calamities of other Churches, and the ruins of ours, with the heavy judgements of the
Lord which hang over us’, insisted Thomas Cartwright, whose aims for the English Church were revolutionary.

The Church of England no longer suffered persecution, but it was assailed in other ways. The Gospel had been in England for two generations, but it was still in bondage to anti-christian ceremonies. Further reformation was needed. By the 1570s evangelicals had grown disillusioned and impatient, believing that a false sense of security was sapping the Church of its vigour and that the survival of popish remnants was leading to the revival of popery. Which were those remnants? The vestments – the ‘conjuring garments’ which ministers were still forced to wear, making them look like priests; praying towards the East; private Communion and baptism; holy days dedicated to saints; bowing at the name of Jesus; the churching of women after childbirth; candles; the sign of the cross in baptism; the ring in marriage. All these ceremonies and symbols might have seemed trivial, indifferent, but to the godly they were not, for they were the idolatrous means by which Satan tried perpetually to seduce the faithful.

The contention was not – said John Field, a London minister and most ardent reformer – over ‘a cap, a tippet, or a surplice’, but for great matters concerning a ‘true ministry and regiment of the Church according to the Word’. During the 1560s the controversy between the Church establishment and its more radical opponents had centred on the issue of vestments. These symbols of popery could not be worn by shepherds in the True Church. Why should the godly make concessions to barely reconstructed papists? Yet vestments were enjoined by royal injunction and neither bishops nor, more importantly, the Supreme Governor could compromise. The Queen wrote sternly to Archbishop Parker in January 1565 demanding ‘one rule, one form and manner of order’. The vestiarian controversy raised fundamental questions of religious liberty and authority, of private conscience and public order. For Protestant radicals Christian liberty lay in total conformity to God’s Word, but that liberty conflicted with obedience to the Lord’s anointed. So much was clear by the mid 1560s. London was, as before, the heartland of religious radicalism and crowds gathered to defend defiant ministers and taunt their oppressors. Pulpits were silenced and nonconformists suspended or imprisoned. The Prayer Book itself they judged papistical: it enjoined superstitious ceremonies; it contained prayers that all may be saved, which no Calvinist could admit as true; it constrained the essential preaching function of the clergy whereby the elect were
called. Reviling the Prayer Book, some godly congregations ceased using it, in defiance of statute.

Their opponents found new names for these radical spirits: ‘unspotted brethren’, ‘precisians’ and, increasingly, ‘puritans’. According to John Stow, London’s chronicler, they called themselves ‘unspotted lambs of the Lord’, ‘puritans’. But they did not: these were the names of their enemies, the language of sectarianism. Stow himself was a Catholic, who had been under suspicion after the Northern rising. Among such neighbours, understanding would be difficult. These ‘hotter sort’ of Protestants recognized each other and others recognized them by the intensity of their religious life, the extremity of their spiritual effort.

There could be no concessions, said radicals like John Field, to the crypto-Catholic remnant within the Church: ‘If all the world might be gained with a little breach of God’s Word, it were not to be done.’ If the Church would not reform itself, how would reform come? Reformers looked to Parliament, and found sympathy among some, but no answer. William Strickland, who led the puritan campaign for the reformation of the Prayer Book, was sequestered from the House of Commons and silenced in 1571. Puritans pinned their hopes upon the Parliament of 1572, but a message came from the Queen that the Commons must not ‘deal in any matters of religion’ unless proposed by the bishops. ‘The Lord of Hosts, great in counsel and infinite in thought… was the last session shut out of the doors’, lamented Peter Wentworth in the Parliament of 1576. In London, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, impatient for reform, wrote
An Admonition to the Parliament
and ‘A View of Popish Abuses’ in 1572. Intending to show how far the English Church diverged from the True Church, they now advocated not reform, but revolution; ‘altogether [to] remove whole Antichrist’. The
Admonition
attacked the whole hierarchy – archbishops, bishops, cathedral clergy: ‘that proud generation whose kingdom must down’ – because their ‘tyrannous lordship cannot stand with Christ’s kingdom’. Instead of the old hierarchy, it proposed a system of presbyterian synods and elders in every congregation. An austere form of public prayer would replace the Prayer Book. The ‘ancient presbytery of the primitive Church’ and Calvin’s Geneva were the models for this Church on a hill. A long controversy followed this presbyterian challenge, conducted from the pulpit, in Parliament, through the press and petitions. The University of Cambridge was divided by the controversy: John Whitgift answered and Thomas Cartwright defended. The godly despaired as further
reformation was thwarted: this was a sign of the sins of the time, a punishment for a people ‘so far from God’s blessings’.

Not doctrine, but discipline divided the godly; Protestants, puritans and presbyterians. Yet any division among the godly was dangerous. Protestants must be united if militant Catholics were to be defeated. In France and in the Netherlands persecuted Calvinists understood that imperative, and in 1571 their Churches, in both countries, held national synods which defined doctrine and discipline and, attesting a common faith and consensus, provided an organization to sustain a ‘Church under the cross’. They looked to their Protestant brethren abroad for the aid which must save them, and looked first to the leading Protestant nation, England. There the godly ‘cause’ had captured so many of the establishment, but not, crucially, the Queen.

England’s peace had been preserved so far not, as Elizabeth liked to think, by policy, but, said the godly, by ‘God’s special favour’. ‘Calamities’ had beset the great Catholic powers, but as their troubles ceased to distract them, England had better beware. This was the fear of many Elizabethans. They never forgot the menacing meeting of the Duke of Alva and Catherine de Medici at Bayonne in 1565, believing that a pact had been made there to extirpate the Gospel and advance the power of Rome. Against that threat, the only recourse was the ‘common cause of religion’ throughout Europe, a Protestant league to defend the faith. The ‘defence of His afflicted Church’ should prevail over all other considerations in foreign policy; not just through principle but through pragmatism. If Elizabeth allowed the Protestants of France and the Low Countries to be destroyed, then her turn was next. The sea that was England’s wall could not protect her. Elizabeth remained unpersuaded by such arguments. While some within her Council urged principle, she preferred to let policy rest upon contingency. Not for her the great cause, the adventure for conscience. For her, the course urged by the ideologues, the forward Protestants – including Leicester, Walsingham, Mildmay and Sir Francis Knollys, Treasurer of the Chamber – offered, through terrifying escalation, a war easy to begin but impossible to end. When the threats on all sides were so great, and defence so difficult, when costs in men and money were incalculable, why seek war when temporizing could deflect it? Elizabeth came to regard the arguments of these forward Protestants at first with indifference, then with cold hostility.

Innately conservative, Elizabeth remained mesmerized by the threat from the ancient enemy, France. Yet the power of France, devastated by three civil wars in a decade, was hard to calculate; it was harder still to know how she would use it, especially when the wars were interrupted in August 1570 by a fragile truce. The leaders of the Huguenot and Catholic factions played upon the hatred between the royal brothers Charles IX and his heir Henry, Duke of Anjou in order to advance rival policies of momentous consequence: intervention in the Netherlands, thereby provoking war with Spain; or amity with Spain and the advance of the Roman faith. ‘I will have no other champion [of Catholicism] here but myself,’ vowed Charles IX in July 1571, as the Guises prepared Anjou for that role. Yet Charles’s equivocation made French politics ever more precarious, for he was himself under the influence of the Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny. By the end of 1571 the fraternal enmity which even the machinations of their mother, Catherine de Medici, could hardly prevent threatened to turn to fratricide. A foreign war would at least distract the French nobility from the renewed civil war which always threatened so long as no end was found to the long vendetta between the Guises and Coligny except death.