The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (56 page)

Not trusting him but testing him, the Dublin Council commissioned O’Neill in the summer of 1593 to disperse the forces of Maguire and bring him to obedience. That autumn O’Neill and Bagenal, as wary allies, campaigned against Maguire and defeated him at the Battle of Erne Ford. O’Neill’s wounds in the battle he alleged as proof of his loyalty, but spies told of his secret meetings with the confederates O’Donnell and Maguire. In February 1594 Marshal Bagenal wrote that O’Neill ‘doth not in any way covertly proceed’, but used his son, brothers and nephews ‘as open instruments of his wicked designments’. O’Neill’s refusal to comply with royal orders early that year to obtain the submission of O’Donnell marked the beginning of his open progress from compliance to obstruction to treason. Through 1594–5 the Ulster lords moved towards war; a war which O’Neill directed as undeclared head of the confederacy. O’Neill’s dependants fought his battles for him, and the Dublin officials failed to arrest him when they had the chance. At the Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits (so called because the English abandoned their supplies) on the River Arny in July 1594 George Bingham’s forces were routed by Maguire and Cormac MacBaron O’Neill, Hugh O’Neill’s brother. Sir William Russell arrived as the new chief governor; one of the most useless of the century. Beyond O’Neill’s deep resentment of English officials’ intervention in Ulster, he had personal grievances: he claimed that he was unregarded and unrewarded; that while Bagenal and Fitzwilliam were ‘befriended at court’ (by Burghley), his own supporters, Walsingham and Leicester, were gone. (He did not mention a ‘friendship’ with Essex which would prove fateful.) The undeclared war became general when Leinster rebels made a compact with the northern lords. At Clontibret in Monaghan in June 1595 O’Neill finally fought not with the government forces, but against them. Ten days later he was declared a traitor.

The Ulster lords had first rebelled for private causes: to defend their
lands and lordships from English incursions; and to prevent Fermanagh, Tirconnell and Tyrone from going the way of Monaghan. But in January 1596 they made a demand that so appalled Lord Deputy Russell that he suppressed it, keeping it secret even from the Council: they demanded freedom of religion, liberty of conscience. The Queen had always chosen to believe that in Ireland Catholics, loyal to Rome, might nevertheless also be accounted loyal subjects to her, and had determined not to punish allegiance to Rome. But in September 1595 a joint letter from O’Neill and O’Donnell to Philip II had been intercepted. In it they asked for aid to re-establish the Catholic religion and promised him a kingdom. As they declared religious war, the Queen regretted her policy of not forcing consciences in Ireland.

In England, this queen who had never wished to search consciences, and who had had the wisdom to wait for her subjects to recognize that in religion, as in everything else, she knew what was best for them, grew impatient and was angered by their presumption towards God and her. It was not only the Papists whom she came to reprove as ‘dangerous to a kingly rule’, but the more uncompromising spirits among the Protestants, the puritans who grew ‘overbold with God Almighty’, and thought that their private exposition of scripture allowed them to judge a ‘prince’s government’. As they continued to press for further reformation, they impugned her royal supremacy. Civil and ecclesiastical government were twin functions of the state, and to claim a right to disobey one implied a right to disobey the other. Determined to confront rather than conciliate what she called Protestant ‘newfangledness’, the Queen increasingly chose councillors and churchmen who shared her views.

John Whitgift had come to the see of Canterbury in 1583, on the death of the disgraced Grindal, with high views of his authority and a determination instantly to restore uniformity of liturgical observance. In this he challenged all those godly puritan ministers who had preached the Word but used the Prayer Book only in part, if at all. In November 1583 Whitgift ordered all clergy to subscribe to articles to which no puritan, no ‘precisian’ could, in conscience, consent. These men might allow the royal supremacy, as charged, but never that the Prayer Book contained nothing ‘contrary to the word of God’, nor could they bind themselves to use it, for it still contained all those ‘popish’ remnants
which they found anathema – bowing at the name of Jesus, the language of priesthood, the sign of the Cross in baptism, the ring in marriage, saints’ days. Failure to subscribe meant suspension, even deprivation, and banishment from the evangelical duty which had made them take up the prophetic ministry in the first place. Three or four hundred ministers could not subscribe. Whitgift’s assault closed the ranks of all those who demanded further reformation, who had been in some disarray, and confirmed many in their conviction that the office of bishop was anti-christian. Extremists, inspired to militancy, threatened to break the ostensible peace of the Church. Their refusal to subscribe, so they insisted, was not a fastidious scruple about things indifferent, but concerned ‘great and weighty causes of God’s kingdom’. To allow that the Prayer Book was concordant with the Word, that nothing in it needed changing, would only confirm the popish majority in their ignorance and error; while to stand against it was in itself a form of edification. Faced with the extent of schism, even Whitgift faltered, and he allowed subscription with reservation. Casuistry was a puritan as well as a Catholic art. From 1584 the most resolute non-conformists were marked men. The authorities knew who and where they were: they were the leaders of what had become a puritan movement.

Within the wider community of the godly, the majority were moderates, who longed for further reformation but either would not challenge authority to win it or believed that the True Church was unattainable in the corruption of this world. Without the establishment of a learned preaching ministry of ‘diligent barkers against the Romish wolf’ no reform would come, and the demand for a true preaching ministry was at the heart of the puritan quest for a reformed Church and society. A moderate puritan campaign began to win a hearing for their cause; in Parliament, in Convocation (the assembly of the clergy), in the Privy Council, even from the Queen, who they still believed must listen. But within Elizabethan puritanism was a group, no less than revolutionary, which was prepared to ‘tarry for the magistrate’ only for a time. These were the presbyterians, who wished to erect the ‘only discipline and government of Jesus Christ’, to establish a hierarchy of presbyteries ‘conferences’, ‘exercises’ or ‘
classes
’ where like-minded clergy would meet – and provincial synods, and to have a Church ruled, seemingly democratically, by pastors, elders, doctors and deacons. In their reformed Church neither the royal Supreme Governor nor the bishops would have any part or power. In the Parliaments of 1584–5 and
1586–7 presbyterians introduced the most radical of bills, proposing to erect a godly discipline and bring in the Genevan service book as official liturgy. This presbyterian platform threatened not only the established Church but also the campaign of moderate puritans for a preaching ministry. It failed. The presbyterians were accused of anarchy: there was nothing anarchic about their discipline nor the ordered lives of their godly community, but their subversion of royal authority and their constitutional challenge were undoubted. While Elizabeth claimed that her authority in Church and state was God-given, in the Commons some asserted that Church government was subject to common law, statute and Parliament. In July 1590 the Queen wrote to James VI, warning him that his kingdom and hers were being infiltrated by a ‘sect of perilous consequence,’ ‘such as would have no kings but a presbytery’.

The presbyterians’ attempt to erect their system of church government by statute had failed. They moved then to convert the Church of England by stealth, outside and against the law. ‘It is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass which we desire,’ avowed John Field, their undaunted leader. The plan through the 1580s was to establish a church within the Church, ‘presbytery within episcopacy’. Presbyterians proceeded secretly in order to allay the suspicion of schism. In every county where there were radical ministers in any number, conferences were held, all in touch with headquarters, the London conference. Yet Elizabethan puritanism was a spirit more pragmatic and inclusive by far than presbyterianism. Moderate puritans were not concerned principally with church government but with the establishment of a preaching ministry. Even in the Dedham
classis
, whose activities are best known, many felt that the discipline was not the essential, apodictic, mark of the Church.

Preaching was. The moderates feared that the mission of the ‘diligent barkers against the Romish wolf’, never more urgent, would be put in hazard by the presbyterian hardliners. In a spirit of compromise, puritans in most places had adapted the organization and liturgy of the Church of England to their own reformed purposes: churchwardens and sidesmen metamorphosed into elders and deacons; the Prayer Book was suitably ‘mangled’, and its ‘anti-christian’ elements excluded, so that it could form the basis of a worship in which the Word took precedence over sacraments. Listening to epic sermons, following their preachers from text to text in their Geneva Bibles, singing psalms, and conforming their
lives to Christ’s prescriptions, most puritans hoped to worship truly while still remaining within the fellowship of the Church of England, within its formal communion and the social community of the parish. Their hope, if not their expectation, was that they could transform the Church from within, as the godly leaven in the unregenerate lump, and that their neighbours, too, would turn to the Lord. A few set their children apart from the less than godly rest by giving them emphatically Christian names: Fear-God, Zealous, Perseverance. John Penry, for whom the Church increasingly bore the mark of the Beast, called his daughter, born in hiding in Scotland, Safety. There was no general will to call out a gathered Church of the godly few from out of the profane multitude. It was a religious duty not to separate. But some took a dangerous path away from the established Church. Reading in scripture of a new Jerusalem, ‘they thought they were themselves that new Jerusalem,’ wrote Richard Hooker, the most brilliant critic of the sectaries.

The failing presbyterian campaign was harmed by friends as well as enemies. From October 1588 a series of pamphlets appeared from a secret press; the name of the pseudonymous author expressed their subversive purpose – Martin Marprelate. These were satirical masterpieces, ridiculing not only the bishops’ pomposity and pretensions, but also their essential function. Whitgift was the ‘pope of Lambeth’, betrayer of the Reformation. The bishops weighed in to reply. Bishop Cooper’s ponderous response (‘a horse may carry it if he be not too weak’, wrote Martin) was promptly answered with
Hay [Have you] any work for Cooper
. Dr Richard Bancroft, the Lord Chancellor’s chaplain, preached a menacing sermon in February 1589, when the new Parliament met, attacking puritans as ‘false prophets’, and asserting a high view of episcopal authority. Martin was never discovered, but his publishers were, and he fell silent in the summer of 1589. The search for Martin uncovered the secret networks of the
classes
, the prototype of synodical government. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners (or Court of High Commission) investigated the presbyterian leaders and called upon them to swear the self-incriminating
ex officio
oath, by which they were forced to answer their interrogators in full. This was a civil law procedure; against the principles of common law. Here was the English Inquisition at work, protested the godly. Why should the Queen’s loyal Protestant subjects be persecuted, they asked, when the danger from Jesuits and papists was so much greater?

Speaking in Parliament in March 1587, Lord Chancellor Hatton had drawn ominous comparisons ‘betwixt the Pope and the puritans’; both were the Queen’s insidious enemies, equally dangerous to her and her laws, subversive of property as well as of religion. Marprelate had accused Whitgift, ‘your Canterburiness’, of favouring papists and recusants over puritans. The puritans lamented the penal laws against them, and the sermons which charged them with being friends to anarchy and which coupled them with Jesuits and recusants. In 1593 a Government bill introduced to increase the penalties against Catholic recusants to virtual expropriation was extended to include puritan recusants, the sectaries. The House was aghast. ‘Men not guilty’ would be endangered, warned Ralegh. When on 6 April Whitgift, fearing the defeat of the bill in the Commons, rushed forward the hanging of two sectaries, Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, the Commons’ alarm about the ‘lawless’ proceedings of the bishops seemed proven. The new commission in London which sought out puritan sectaries and ‘popish malefactors’ marked the new mood of repression. Spies and priest-takers were at work. At the end of May 1593 Christopher Marlowe, whose own allegedly anarchic religious views were under investigation, was murdered. Among his companions was Robert Poley, a government informer. When Ben Jonson, who as a Catholic was no stranger to the world of spies and priest-takers, wrote a poem ‘inviting a friend to supper’, he promised an evening of unshadowed friendship, safe from named informers: