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RELIGION AROUND

“IT APPERTEINETH TO THE EMPERIALL OFFICE”

Historian Patrick Collinson suggests that “the succession was the question of questions” in late Tudor England, and I think he is quite right. For Shakespeare, who seems uninterested in the worship of—or administration of—churches around him, religion likely became newsworthy only when the whether and how of its survival in the realm happened to relate to that “question of questions.”¹ Other English subjects lavished attention on the fate of their churches, the content of their sermons, and the controversies about their liturgies. They formed factions and registered protests, enlivening the religion around the realm and around Shakespeare. So we should begin by attending to those other subjects.

Their story starts for us six years before Shakespeare’s birth when, in 1558, Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister, Mary Tudor, as England’s queen. Elizabeth I’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was said to have steered her sovereign, then husband, King Henry VIII, toward Protestantism.² Mary, daughter of Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, looked to return the realm to Rome but had only five years to undo the work of twenty, and the five were not enough. The religiously reformed, of course, welcomed Queen Mary’s end and Elizabeth’s beginning. Some of them left England during Mary’s short reign, presumably guessing that they would be gone longer. Her death and her half-sister’s succession brought them back; some became their new queen’s new bishops.

Robert Horne was named to the see of Winchester and given custody of a few prominent Catholic officials, who, predictably, complained about confinement, their replacements, and the new regime. Horne said that the complainants conspired “to ingrafte in the mindes of subjects a mislikyng of their [new] Queen’s majestie, as though she usurped a power and authoritie in ecclesiastical matters.” He and other exiles-turned-bishops explained, during the early 1560s, that popes were the real usurpers, that “the wylie foxe of Rome,” armed with a “rable of bulls, dispensations, and indulgences,” ruled rulers for centuries. Horne put the reformed alternative succinctly: “It apperteineth to the emperiall office . . . to preserve the estate of God’s holy churches,” and, from late 1558, “it apperteineth” to Elizabeth’s office.³

And she demanded “due obedience.” Many priests acquiesced, perhaps counting on the survival of traditional liturgies or on the short shelf life of alterations proposed by the religiously reformed.⁴ But some Catholics departed and promptly plotted to return with reinforcements from abroad to topple Elizabeth’s new government. Nicholas Sander, for one, quit Oxford and crossed the Channel while the queen’s Council was finding its feet. He told anyone who would listen that Calvinists in England were few and very unpopular, but two decades passed before he joined an expedition to collect colonists in Ireland for an invasion of the realm he left. Charles Neville, the sixth Earl of Westmoreland, departed for the Continent shortly after his “rising” in the north of England collapsed in 1569. He lived as a pensioner of Spain, scheming to scupper the Tudor regime and religious reforms he despised. Thomas Norton, Neville’s nemesis and an ardent advocate of both the regime and its religious reforms, would rather have had the insurgent earl “preach the right frutes of rebellion” from a scaffold, but Westmoreland was safely away when Norton pushed through Parliament statutes, the effect of which was to punish Catholics’ sedition as treason.⁵ During the deliberations in the Commons, Walter Mildmay, who was chancellor of the exchequer and Norton’s collaborator, complained that all the trouble in England had been “procured” in and by Rome.⁶

Shakespeare was a teenager then, in 1581.

The legislation did not deter Philip Howard, first Earl of Arundel and, Richard Wilson now recalls, the “great hope of Catholic resistance.”⁷ Howard’s conversion to Catholicism in 1584 was something of a scandal, particularly after he was intercepted while sailing from Sussex the next year. Authorities accused him of planning to collude with fellow fugitives once he landed on the Continent and to offer service to Spanish troops should they agree to invade England. Howard denied it, spent years awaiting trial, then the rest of his life in prison, all the while claiming that he had only wanted to cross the Channel “for his conscience.”⁸

Conscience versus obedience to the new Tudor sovereign and her bishops: that choice soon faced certain Elizabethan Calvinists as well as their Catholic countrymen, specifically the Protestants who were impatient for sweeping religious reforms. They objected to wearing the surplice and square cap that the new Prayer Book required of the clergy. They complained that standards for candidates for the ministry were too low and that diocesan oversight, which should have ensured clerics’ competence and exemplary conduct, left much to be desired. They wanted to compose and preach sermons rather than read homilies scripted and prescribed by authorities of the established church. Authorities, for their part, tended to answer such criticism by issuing progress reports: any fool could tell, they intimated, that reformed religion was steadily gaining ground, rescuing the realm from “poperie, superstition, and the remaynente of idolatry.” By the 1580s, as a result, the laity was “farre more pliable to all good order than before.”⁹ But the most ardent Calvinists were hoping for much more than pliable people, who had conformed without being fully reformed; lay pliability signaled the failure, not success, of England’s religious reformation.

Thomas Lever tried to get that point across, tried to persuade “pliable people” that “salvation cannot be gotten by man’s works in keeping with the lawe, but it is freely given by God’s grace to the beleevers of the Gospell. The righteousnesse of the lawe of God is so heavie a yowke by reason of the infirmitie of man’s flesh[, but] the glad tidings of the gospell of Christ by reason of the grace of God be so cleere and comfortable unto the faithfull as causeth all things to bee unto them pleasant and profitable.”¹⁰ The problem was to circulate that “cleere and comfortable” message, which had traditionally been identified with the Catholic sacraments widely “understood to be sanctifying signs that caused what they signified.”¹¹ The ministry was understaffed, and the presence of many priests, lately turned Protestants, posed another problem for the recently repatriated reformers. Lever, for one, mistrusted the ministry around Coventry and appointed lay lectors to lead worship in several parishes.¹² Some of the new queen’s new bishops licensed itinerant preachers to go “up and downe the countrie as apostles,” to make sure the gospel’s “glad tidings” were compellingly delivered. However, Diocesan officials heard word that itinerants were overcharging for their services.¹³ Lay lectors, moreover, took it upon themselves to appoint replacements, in effect undermining diocesan supervision. Even as time passed and as the settled ministry was better staffed, pastors complained that parishioners were indifferent and undisciplined. Some reformers noticed that their sermons proclaiming that salvation was freely given to the faithful only infrequently had the desired effect of inspiring gratitude and of leading to lasting, meaningful improvements in the laity’s behavior. Settled pastors were known to envy itinerants, who—encountering opposition, listlessness, or mindless conformity—had the option to move on.¹⁴

To others, who were generally satisfied with the pace of reform, conformity was of paramount importance. Acknowledging that results were sometimes spotty, these satisfied others nonetheless insisted that orderly progress could be made—with less confusion and less rancor—if the critics of the established church would only cease carping at bishops and their deputies and stop pressing for the immediate implementation in England of protocols of select Swiss or south German reformed churches.

Historians once called persons satisfied with the progress of reform in England Anglicans and dissatisfied persons puritans, but revisionists objected to the old categories and were right to do so. Jacobethan reformed religious commitments were too complicated to fit into the Anglican/puritan grid. What followed its disaccreditation, however, was a contagious logophobia; many historians resisted naming attitudes toward reform for fear of inappropriately tidying up and of creating coherent factions where there was considerable confusion. Charles Prior has come up with what I think is a useful solution. He describes those satisfied with the pace and trajectory of the realm’s reform as “conformists,” because their expressions of satisfaction were accompanied by arguments for conformity as well as for patience. Prior’s “reformists,” however, were “anxious to put forth detailed reasons” for ongoing reformation. The conformists’ Prayer Book, they said, savored of Catholicism; episcopacy was obsolete (and, more important, unscriptural).¹⁵ I have adopted Prior’s solution, recycling his terms, “conformist” and “reformist,” to denote levels of satisfaction with the progress of reform in the religion around Shakespeare. But, unlike Prior, I retain the term “puritan” to refer to the religiously reformed who internalized dissatisfaction—pietists in England who became “their own greatest accusers,” as Richard Greenham urged.¹⁶ Puritans, in this application, therefore, are Calvinist pietists, whose sense of how a church’s ministry and discipline might be improved was determined by their dedication to turning parishioners into prodigal souls. In that respect, puritans, as we shall see, were remarkably similar to Catholic pietists whose devotional literature was bent on restructuring Christians’ desires by raising questions about the quality of their repentance.¹⁷

Puritans’ strategy was to throw more sermons at the realm’s religious problems. The objective was to extinguish England’s attachment to Roman religion and to awaken “drowsy” Calvinists.¹⁸ Puritans relied on preaching to prompt conflict, which was more desirable than conformity as long as the realm’s reformation was still a work in progress. And progress was possible only if conflicts between reformed Christians’ regenerate and unregenerate impulses or inclinations threw into greater relief the contrast between the reformed and unreformed practices in their churches. The latter thrived on complacency and were said to “oppresse grievously” the “zealous love for the gospell” that ought to inspire the faithful.¹⁹ To puritan Josias Nichols, that love was kindled (and kept alight) by “simple preaching . . . so mightie that it changeth the nature of a man to bee an other than hee was before, namelie, to turn from damme idols to serve the living God.” Six months of sermons—two or three a week—will “pearce” the heart, predicted Nichols, and should inspire commitments characteristic of a truly reformed faith.²⁰ Historians have collected pastors’ complaints that parishioners ordinarily favored calm and compromise; they were reluctant to pluck at their consciences and have their hearts “pearced.”²¹ Reformist Stephen Egerton, less of a complainer than some colleagues, took what could be construed as preemptive measures. He urged members of his congregation in London to bring their familiars within earshot of his “pearcing” preaching. “It is not enough . . . to come and present ourselves,” he told heads of households, “but also to bring . . . our children and servants, even the meanest among them.”²² The chance to inspire infra-personal conflicts and to sustain them along with a parishioner’s intolerance for all unreformed practices must not be missed, puritans maintained; given “this colde and frozen age of ours, [one is] loth to kill any zeal.”²³

Others in England liked sacraments better than sermons: expatriate priests and Jesuits who, from the late 1570s, secretly returned to England; resident recusants who welcomed and hid them from authorities; and an assortment of conformists as well. Most reformists, particularly the puritans, took fondness for sacraments to be characteristic of unreformed religion. Baptisms and Eucharists without preaching, “the principall part of [reformists’] ministry,” were “polluted”; “as the seale without the writing, so itt is nothing for the sacrament without the sermon within it.”²⁴ So the reformists argued, and one of their petitions went so far as to identify sermons as “the only meanes whereby [God’s] kingdome is established.”²⁵ But the conformists answered that frequency was the enemy of quality and that the insistence on more preaching encouraged the realm’s preachers to “handle matters verie rawlie” in the pulpit.²⁶

Several years (and pamphlets) into his controversy with reformist Thomas Cartwright, John Whitgift, later bishop of Worcester—the diocesan with jurisdiction over reformed church discipline in Shakespeare’s Stratford—noted that “none” of his conformist colleagues “denyeth that hearing the Worde of God is the usual and ordinarie meanes . . . God useth to worke faythe in us and that therefore preachers be necessarie.” Still, he all but endorsed the remark that “the whole of London” could be well served by just four industrious preachers: “If any hath sayd that some of those which use to preach often by their loose negligente, verball, and unlearned sermons have brought the word of God into contempte, or that foure godlie learned, pithy, diligent, and discreet preachers might do more good in London than forty contentious, unlearned, verball, and rashe preachers, they have said truely and their saying myghte well be justifyed.”²⁷ Later and throughout his career—in Worcester and, from 1583, as archbishop of Canterbury—Whitgift contended that it was unreasonable to expect a sermon with every sacrament. Such frequency would leave preachers no time for other pastoral work. Whitgift also held that each bishop ought to be trusted to make determinations about the quality and quantity of the pulpit oratory in his diocese and that episcopal discretion was by far the most important element in the formulation and implementation of policies for the administration and reform of the church. But many reformists wanted local congregations to have the final say, assuming that reformed, right-minded parishioners, whose “eies [were] opened from darknes to light” by “simple preaching,” could provide for their own edification. They would comprehend, for example, that ceremonies dazzled rather than informed. They would also “discerne by” that “light,” puritans predicted, that “the true church” ought not to concentrate power in the hands of bishops.²⁸

Implacable reformists insisted that bishops cared more for their estates, revenues, and respectability than for parishioners’ regeneration. Bishops promoted pluralism, turning a blind eye, according to their critics, to the exceptionally poor service that parishes received when an incumbent in one had other parishes to serve. But to excuse pluralism, conformist bishops and their apologists explained that “petit and meane salarie[s]” on offer in the smaller parishes were insufficient to stock pastors’ studies—not to mention their cupboards. Poverty kept the best and brightest from the ministry.²⁹ Conformists conceded that pluralism, if left unmonitored, would become “the very cut-throate of the preaching of the gospel,” although they were confident that the bishops and their deputies would recognize and remedy abuses promptly and that the church could afford some pluralists too busy to preach as often as reformists required. Conformists said that sermons in strategic locations would suffice. There was nothing in the Bible about putting pulpits in every parish. Besides, for centuries, England had a number of parishes thirty or forty miles across, much larger than any two or three parishes served by Jacobethan preachers.³⁰

But reformists were unimpressed by conformists’ history lessons. Dudley Fenner, probably the most highly regarded theologian among the dissidents in the 1580s, held that no Christian in a reformed church ought to “goe above five myle to hear a sermon.”³¹ For it would be a shame to deprive a religion of the Word of the Word—namely, of the gospels’ “glad tidings” intimately as well as learnedly, eloquently, and, above all, frequently preached. When “want of maintenance” became a sticking point in small parishes, parishioners, “eies opened,” reformists claimed, would find solutions that fit local circumstances without sacrificing sermons.³²

To conformists, such confidence in local improvisation was silly and sometimes sinister. They suspected reformists’ lay patrons of plotting parish coups. If parishes were kept small and “maintenance” modest, few competent and commanding figures would stay in the ministry. The exodus of the best would enable lay elites to capture control, and the underpaid, overworked pastors who remained would prove to be no match for parishes’ lay leadership intending to experiment with unorthodox administrative arrangements that empowered sheep to hire or fire their shepherds. So, all the reformists’ talk of sermons and size seemed subversive to conformists.³³

From the 1580s, highly placed conformists continued to question their critics’ motives and methods. Reformists were reputed to love to argue, to be “in great choller,” and to “wear[y] themselves in factious discourse.”³⁴ John Aylmer, Whitgift’s principal coadjutor, had been one of those allegedly choleric critics in the 1560s but confided that his opposition to episcopacy at the time had been a symptom of sickness; he spoke intemperately about episcopacy in a fit and while “braynsick.”³⁵ He recovered and joined other conformists—“Judases,” according to many reformists, diocesan officials who “maime and deforme the Body of Christ.”³⁶ Peter Lake now senses “resentment” and “desperation” in those accusations, for the 1580s were not going at all well for the bishops’ critics. Their petitions in Parliament were regularly rejected, their patrons at Court were dying, and Whitgift was named to the queen’s Council. Reformists were losing what little leverage they had while conformists positioned themselves to influence significantly—and to their critics’ disadvantage—what “apperteineth to the emperiall office.”³⁷

Resentment and desperation prompted barbed editorials on the established church and its leadership that issued from dissidents’ secret presses in late 1588 and 1589. A fictive, irreverent, and witty vigilante, Martin Marprelate, hurled insults at the more prominent conformists, a few of whom commissioned pamphleteers to respond in kind. Whitgift and his conformist colleagues also set out to persuade the government to consider martinists as dangerous as “massing priests,” who were still pouring into England and supposedly planning to escort the realm back to Rome and to give it over to Spain.³⁸ Richard Bancroft can be said to have captained the anti-martinist enterprise. He had a reputation for effectively suppressing subversives. Whitgift reported how diligently Bancroft had been in Bury, silencing reformist preachers and magistrates.³⁹ Felicity Heal now calls him the regime’s Rottweiler, referring to his ferocious defense of the realm’s established church’s interests. He was especially good at disarranging the affairs of forward Calvinists and lay-low Catholics.⁴⁰ He supported the appellants among the latter, a faction of Catholic accommodationists, who labored to discredit the English Jesuits. Bancroft also wrote against the reformists, equating their religious disaffection with political disloyalty. In sum, he assiduously guarded against having the authority that “apperteineth,” by statute, to Jacobethan government and to the religious establishment removed to Rome or—what seemed likelier if the queen’s subjects fell under the spell of the puritans’ religion around Shakespeare—transferred to local congregations.⁴¹

We have summoned specimens of the sentiments of conformists, reformists, puritans, and Catholics into something of a staging area, because it seemed prudent to start studying the religion around the realm with manageable, if misleadingly tidy, classifications. Moreover, introductions and preliminary classifications of this sort should prove useful as we attend to various confessionally freighted developments that were sufficiently sensational to give pause to a curious, perceptive, accomplished playwright: Queen Elizabeth’s apparent antagonism to preaching; anxieties about the succession stirred by her courtships; the detention in England of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots; the saber rattling that accompanied nearly all late Tudor references to Spain; the Essex insurgency; efforts to enlighten the new king, James I, in and after 1603; and the “powder plot.”

“IN THESE DOUBTFULL TYMES”

In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated the queen of England. To her religiously reformed subjects, the bull relaying Rome’s verdict, Regnans in Excelsis, was “directly contrary to God’s word.” Pius and many of his predecessors “dreamed” that they were “supreame monarch[s] of the world” with power to “loose” or separate subjects from their sovereigns. But it was a “blasphemous” dream; on that, conformists and reformists agreed.⁴²

The fallout from Regnans should have favored reformists, who had long complained about conformists’ “papistrie.” But the realm’s conformist bishops gravely labored to distinguish their position from that of their medieval and papist predecessors, whose loyalties were often split between monarch and pope. The queen’s bishops were the queen’s—and were angry when reformist rivals implied otherwise. Even Edmund Grindal, as sympathetic with reformists’ protests for more preaching as any highly placed prelate—and more sympathetic than most—came to dislike what looked to be lodged in the “busy head” of the Cambridge controversialist Thomas Cartwright, which was “stuffed” with “singularities,” with ominously odd ideas about church government. Cartwright had complained about “lordly” bishops as if he and reformist friends had not gotten their livings and licenses to preach from such domineering diocesan executives. Such sauce!⁴³

But licenses of outspoken dissidents were often suspended, and bishops deprived many reformist critics of their livings. Yet, notwithstanding suspensions and deprivations, authorities were incapable of regulating everything said from the pulpits. As the bishop of London, Edwin Sandys was responsible for selecting the ministers to preach at St. Paul’s Cross and announced his intention to exclude “fanaticall spirits.” But an occasional preacher there scandalized crowds, Sandys irritably admitted, because his fellow bishops had not adequately screened the candidates they recommended to him.⁴⁴

Sandys is an enigmatic figure. Although he tried to cork criticism coming from the pulpits, reformists had reason to reserve him a place alongside Grindal as one of preaching’s most devoted episcopal advocates. For, during the 1570s, Sandys developed “evasive tactics” to save the sermons that were the centerpieces of the in-service training exercises called prophecies when the queen and regime initially tried to suppress them. Prophesying, at that time, had both a public and a private phase. Crowds in some market towns listened to consecutive sermons on an identical biblical passage, after which the clergy from the region assembled privately to swap comments and, presumably, suggestions for improvements. Sandys seems to have agreed with patrons of prophesying who claimed that candid exchanges about exegesis could only improve preaching in the parishes. Grindal—of whom more in a moment—was opposed to calling a halt.⁴⁵ Regnans, the pope’s excommunication, after all, made it imperative to get religiously reformed responses to “papistry” into market-day conversations, if only because the Christians from the realm’s “blynde corners”—that is, from parishes without curates or with curates who rarely, if ever, preached—would take in more Catholic propaganda than Protestant preaching, were the exercises or prophecies they overheard on their trips to market suspended or suppressed.⁴⁶

But the queen and her Council were told that preachers removed from their pulpits for having criticized the established church had taken advantage of the opportunities prophesying afforded to cram market-day sermons with invective and to impress passersby with everything that they thought wrong with the established church. In 1574, Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, ordered the exercises in Norfolk discontinued, claiming the diocese was infested with “puritaynes.”⁴⁷ The following year, Richard Fletcher, while visiting a parish in Parker’s diocese served by his father, heard laymen, “in exercise,” complain about the ministry. The younger Fletcher fretted that prophecies encouraged “every artificer” to play “reformer and teacher.” Any “pragmaticall prentise” apparently could pronounce on “the government and reformation of the church.”⁴⁸ Prophesying was common in Leicestershire, a day’s ride from Stratford and Shakespeare. Eusebius Paget, known for his acerbic editorials on episcopacy and suspended from the ministry in 1571 and 1574, preached during other exercises at Southam, Warwickshire, closer to the bard-to-be.

Shakespeare was still young, yet it would have been hard for him to have missed the splash that Grindal made when, almost immediately after succeeding Parker as archbishop of Canterbury in 1576, he fell from favor, attempting to save the prophecies. He claimed that his suffragans could supervise prophecies and would prohibit “immodest speech” and “irreverent gesture.” “Worldly-minded” “mislikers of godly reformation,” he averred, despised prophesying because their sins were the subjects of the barbed public sermons.⁴⁹ But four of Grindal’s fellow bishops categorically refused to endorse his spirited counteroffensive against the exercises’ most unreserved critics. Those four were joined by John Aylmer, archdeacon of Lincoln, who named Gilby and Paget as the principal mischief makers during market-day oratory. Gilby circulated a list of officials’ “corruptions”; Paget depicted the realm’s bishops as “Pharisees.”⁵⁰

The queen ordered that “assemblies callid exercises cease and not be usid.”⁵¹ Grindal objected and berated her, proclaiming that a prince’s proper place was within and not above the church, an opinion that killed his career. He was sequestered and kept from Court, forgotten by power brokers. Aylmer, succeeding Sandys as bishop of London in 1577, took on a number of Grindal’s responsibilities, nominating the Court preachers and presiding over the Ecclesiastical Commission. Prophecies were suppressed, resurfacing in some places as clerical conferences with reduced emphasis on the public phase. We know that Aylmer was especially vigilant. He wanted no defiance of the queen’s cease-and-desist on his watch. As a precaution, he arrested Thomas Randolph, who was visiting London from Oxford, where he was known in 1578 to be preaching enthusiastically “touchynge that which they call exercise.”⁵² Randolph was released, yet the intimidation and incarceration look to have had the intended prophylactic effect. Critics of the conformists reported that a “hush” in Aylmer’s precincts replaced the sounds of a truly reformed religion at work.⁵³

But things could change in an instant, and Aylmer would have been well aware of that. During the 1540s and early 1550s, he talked regularly with leading evangelical reformers who came to England from the Continent at the invitation of Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury. Aylmer was impressed, figuring that England had become a model as well as a magnet for reformers. Then King Edward VI died before reaching the age of twenty, and his half-sister, Mary Tudor, took over. She labored to make England Catholic again. Aylmer left. Five years later, when news of Mary’s death and Elizabeth’s succession reached him in Saxony, he returned to England and wrote ecstatically about “the divine and godly majestie” that the new ruler of the realm possessed. He came within a millimeter of worshipping her, allowing that the Persians, although they overdid it a bit, had the right idea, falling “flat on their faces before theyr sovereign.” “Thynges would grow to confusion,” Aylmer suggested, unless subjects’ respect for their new queen’s title and supremacy was unstinting.⁵⁴

That was 1559; Elizabeth was twenty-five years young. Each of her two immediate predecessors, Edward VI and Mary I, had only five or so years to reshape religious policy, but Elizabeth seemed robust enough to make a long run and a large family. Still, in the 1570s, she turned forty and more, unmarried, and her heir apparent was a Catholic, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, all of which made Elizabeth’s religiously reformed advisers apprehensive. They heard about Masses in Mary’s chapel and were frightened by what her militant and ultra-Catholic kin in France, the Guises, might be planning. Reformists and conformists at Court comprehended how completely the fate of their faith “apperteineth to the emperiall office.” So they tried to exclude Mary from the succession and to prevent the two royal cousins from meeting.⁵⁵

William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary, later Lord Burghley, and his ardently reformist colleagues at Court were determined to ruin Mary Stuart’s chances and were assisted, to that end, by the Queen of Scots herself, who, husband hunting, set her sights on the son of King Philip II of Spain. Philip had married Mary Tudor more than fifteen years before and was thus associated with her persecution of the realm’s religiously reformed subjects. Hence, he was terribly unpopular in Elizabeth’s England. Moreover, Mary Stuart’s suspected complicity in her second husband’s murder and her affair with a married man who became her third scandalized Elizabeth. Reports execrating the Queen of Scots spread south, where English Scots-watchers learned about her “outragious crueltie,” “unappeisabill haitrent,” and “plane trecherie.” Cecil, one sees, had help.⁵⁶

Mary Stuart fled to England in 1568, following her partisans’ defeat in the Scottish civil wars. She could not be repatriated without discouraging England’s allies there who had seized the advantage over the pro-French faction—sure beneficiaries, if the Queen of Scots were to go home. But her residence (or, to be precise, her confinement) in the north of England created problems for Elizabeth’s government and church. Catholics there showed signs that Mary’s presence had them looking past Elizabeth. Neither she nor her Council, particularly Cecil, appreciated having a rival so close.

Shakespeare was too young to have taken in Mary Stuart’s having been taken in, but certainly what followed—intrigue, romance, rebellion, and death—was talked about long after. Schemes to rescue her proliferated from the time of her arrival to that of her execution in 1587. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, meant to marry her, acquire immense influence as lover of the next-in-line, and displace William Cecil as Elizabeth’s most trusted. Mary liked the idea and applied to the pope to have her most recent (third) marriage annulled, but Elizabeth, who learned of her cousin’s courtship late in the game, thought that Cecil was not the only one whom the two planned to displace. And Tudor courtiers may have thought the planned usurpation plausible rather than preposterous, knowing what historians have lately rediscovered—specifically, that Elizabethan Catholicism was “vigorous” and not “moribund.”⁵⁷ Norfolk’s friends in the north, fearing that they would become casualties when their queen turned on the duke and his intended, rose preemptively in rebellion in 1569 and were swiftly routed. Trials of the propertied, papist rebels were delayed while Elizabeth’s lawyers and Bishop Pilkington of Durham squabbled about the spoils of war, but hundreds of humbler rebels promptly were executed.⁵⁸

Norfolk did not directly participate in the insurrection, so he was released soon after his arrest. But Mary’s overtures continued, and after Elizabeth was excommunicated in 1570, King Philip II of Spain stepped smartly into the conspiracy. He promised to ferry a small army from the Netherlands to reinforce the English Catholics once Elizabeth was captured or killed, Mary freed, and Norfolk wed to her.⁵⁹ But Norfolk was rearrested and executed. Mary was spared, inasmuch as Cecil was unable to shake Elizabeth’s conviction that evidence of her cousin’s complicity was insufficient to kill a queen.

The Queen of Scots remained in custody for the next sixteen years. Cecil and Francis Walsingham, who became what we might call the realm’s foreign secretary and secretary of defense as well as the regime’s chief intelligence officer, tried to isolate her diplomatically while doubling their efforts to find Elizabeth a suitable husband. The best candidate was Henry, Duke of Anjou and younger brother of France’s King Charles IX, although their indomitable mother, Catherine de Medici, mistrusted the English. And the English Calvinists mistrusted the French, particularly Anjou, who had quartered with Mary Stuart’s Guiscard uncles, regarded by many on both sides of the Channel as Henry’s “handlers.” Nonetheless, Cecil warmed to the possibility of a wedding and a French alliance, whereas influential others on Elizabeth’s Council were opposed to it.⁶⁰

Treasuring “the quieteness” of her estate, which depended, she thought, on her religiously reformed subjects’ obedience, the queen made a point of refusing consent to Anjou’s stipulation that, “at his coming,” he and his attendants be permitted to hear Masses. But Elizabeth enjoined Walsingham to be emphatic during prenuptial negotiations so that there might be “no misconceiving gathered of our answer whereby the duke might hope of a sufferance.” Word got out, and public debate followed. One anonymous pamphleteer, who favored the Anjou match, inferred from the apostle Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians to “give no offense” that the queen “may tolerate Mass” to indulge the weak. But Elizabeth concluded differently. She agreed that other rituals might be observed if Anjou’s attendants were discreet; they “shall not be molested,” she pledged, but the Mass was “repugnant to the Church of God,” “to the Word of God.”⁶¹

Elizabeth was not in an ecumenical mood. She restated her terms: as soon “as Monsieur will forbear the Mass, she will assent to the marriage.”⁶² But Monsieur would not “forbear,” and when the duke dug in, his mother and brother supported him. Then, startlingly, Queen Catherine offered her youngest son, François Hercule, Duke of Alençon. Elizabeth was twenty years older than the new Valois candidate, who, being further down the line of succession in France, might be persuaded that a realm across the Channel was worth relinquishing the Mass. But the English Calvinists may have had a different reason for welcoming Alençon to England. Mary Stuart wrote letters to Elizabeth and others that made it clear what the realm would get, should some mishap carry off the reigning queen. Mary confided that the Catholic Church was her chief consolation in 1571.⁶³ Predictably, the religiously reformed at Court, unconsoled by Mary’s consolations, believed that a young, impressionable French husband was preferable to a robustly aggrieved Scottish Catholic queen. The Earl of Leicester, for one, was encouraged to perceive a “full determination in her Majestie to like of” her new option.⁶⁴

“Full determination”? We know that Elizabeth lavishly entertained French envoys who formally put Alençon’s proposal, but there is no telling how close she came to accepting it, for, as Shakespeare neared adolescence, she was learning to become a grand master of matrimonial deliberations.⁶⁵ Her conduct mystified her courtiers at the time and scholars thereafter, although she gave every indication of anticipating a first meeting with François Hercule when a shocking “accident” in France left thousands of Calvinists dead. Thomas Smith, from Paris, referred to the slaughter in August 1772 as an accident, to suggest that the murders were sudden and unpremeditated.⁶⁶ The French Court expressed outrage, yet word circulated in France and across the Channel that Catherine and King Charles approved the massacre and might also have orchestrated it. English reformists thought the Valois capable of such cruelty—“beastlie butcherie.”⁶⁷ Whatever the extent of Valois complicity, refugees arriving in England told stories of French Calvinists’ suffering that put conversations with Alençon’s agents on hold.

From the English Protestants’ perspective, the massacres put the Valois Court on the wrong side of the Reformation, and that development moved the Earl of Leicester, patron of some of the realm’s outspoken reformists, to press his suit. He staged erotic entertainments during Elizabeth’s visit in 1575 to his castle at Kenilworth, fifteen miles from Stratford and young Shakespeare, entertainments that probably passed then—and are regarded now—as an “elaborate allegorical proposal of marriage.”⁶⁸

But the queen rejected Leicester’s offer and encouraged her young French suitor to try again. For Alençon’s stock was rising steeply among the religiously reformed in England. He became the new Anjou as soon as his brother succeeded Charles as King Henry III, and he was known to have helped French Calvinists extort Valois concessions. True, he was also infamous for subsequently abandoning them, but English reformers were unprepared to despair of him as an altogether unsuitable suitor. For one thing, he was much less resolutely Roman Catholic than his brother Henry had been during previous prenuptial negotiations. Alençon/Anjou, moreover, was making friends of the Calvinist insurgents in the Low Countries, who played a critical role in England’s defense by distracting the Spanish. Possibly Elizabeth figured that she, the religiously reformed in her company, and their rebellious Dutch coreligionists fighting King Philip’s forces and regents could convert the new Anjou, promising him power he could never hope to possess while his brother lived.⁶⁹ It seemed necessary to preoccupy the Spanish in the Netherlands, because any peace favorable to Spain there would tempt Philip and his most aggressive regent, Don John of Austria, to send troops to England to liberate Mary Stuart.⁷⁰ She was waiting for just that, berating would-be rescuers who, to her mind, had been “deferring the matter so long.” Her letters—reprimanding, pleading, and coaxing—were often intercepted. In late 1578, “confidences” she composed helped Cecil, Leicester, and Walsingham dramatize the danger to Elizabeth and impress upon her the need to increase her “gracious assistance” to the Dutch. Gradually and grudgingly, those three advisors—Walsingham, last of all—also came to see the advantages of having Anjou participate, as Elizabeth’s surrogate, across the Channel.⁷¹

But developing indifference to her Valois suitor’s Catholicism and the English Court’s effort to sanitize his reputation, which perplexed expatriate Catholics on the Continent, worried ardent reformists in England.⁷² After all, the new Anjou was “a spark” from the French “family which hath been a firebrand in Europe”—no friend to advocates of reformed religion and utterly untrustworthy in foreign affairs. So said John Stubbs in what Walsingham called a “lewde booke lately published”; Stubbs’s implacable, influential critic thought the book subversive as well as lewd because it was sure to provoke reformist preachers to “intermeddle” in “matters of state not incident to their profession and callinge.”⁷³ Perhaps at her Court’s urging, Elizabeth invited Anjou for an intimate interview and suggested secrecy. The duke came incognito but word got out, and the anti-Anjou literature did as well, warning that England was being “swallowed” by France. Stubbs made much of the secrecy; he complained that the new Anjou was practicing an “unmanlike, unprincelike . . . fearful, suspicious, disdainful, needy, French kind of wooing.” His “lewd book” claimed that the proposed marriage “was the straightest line that can be drawn from Rome to the utter ruin of our church.”⁷⁴ Richard Cox, bishop of Ely, who experienced firsthand the disagreements dividing reformers during the Marian exile, on their return, and for the next twenty years, claimed that the match would be yet another doloris causa, another reason for Calvinists to grieve.⁷⁵

Cox was discreet. Stubbs published and had his hand severed as punishment for sedition. Philip Sydney ventured to protest—but delicately. His appeal to Elizabeth mentioned “the knot of religion” in England that, for nearly three decades, all but choked the realm, until Elizabeth, after sifting the “two mighty factions,” committed herself to the cause of reform. From the 1560s, her realm’s religiously reformed had counted on her leadership. How could she, “without excessive trouble, pull out of the party so long maintained”? It had developed into “your chief, if not your sole strength,” Sidney told her. “How [Calvinists’] hearts will be galled, if not aliened when they shall see you take to husband a Frenchman and a papist.”⁷⁶

When the queen finally ended the decade-long courtship with François Hercule d’Valois, she expressed regret that enduring opposition from the reformed “faction” had trumped her great affection for her suitor. But Spain’s ambassador to England, Bernard de Mendoza, detected little regret and hardly any affection; there had been more feigning than feeling, he reported, when the queen and duke discussed and dissolved their engagement.⁷⁷ Many reformists were relieved to see the back of the latter, although they favored his ambitions to continue campaigning against Spanish forces in the Low Countries. (Their feelings were shared by the Dutch commander, Prince William, long after Anjou’s imprudence and impatience—as well as the Francophobia in several parts of the Low Countries—made him something of a liability.)⁷⁸

Elizabeth seemed content with the result. She turned churlish when her subjects presumed to offer premarital counseling.⁷⁹ And conversations about the succession, which invariably accompanied speculation about plausible husbands, were unwelcome. They were especially untimely during “doubtfull tymes,” that is, after Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped to England—and while “seminarie men” and “massing priests” traveled through the realm and agitated against Elizabeth’s settlement of religion. She and Calvinists at Court were convinced that expatriate priests returned to England in the late 1570s and the 1580s to implement regime change. Young Shakespeare may have heard about their intrigues—or have heard them intrigue—as they passed through Warwickshire on their way to more hospitable territory to the north. One of their Northamptonshire hosts, Thomas Tresham, tried to calm government fears. Expatriates—many of them Jesuits—had more to fear from the late Tudor administration, he said, than Tudor officials had to fear from them: “massing priests” and missionaries, Tresham elaborated, were “lambs among wolves.”⁸⁰

Perhaps Tresham knew that Jesuit missionaries’ commissions explicitly prohibited them from commenting on England’s politics, on the road and even in reports they sent to Rome. But the realm’s reformers equated the Jesuits’ mission with espionage. To refortify the old faith was to discountenance the new and to sabotage church reform and political regime. Before Tresham offered his line on “lambs,” pamphleteer William Charke announced that whoever “smiteth our [reformed] religion woundeth our commonwealth.”⁸¹ Richard Bancroft explained that Jesuits were executed for “moving her Majestie’s subjects to rebellion,” not for religious conviction.⁸²

Captured Jesuits were said to be particularly dangerous. During interrogations, they pretended to be curious about the arguments for reform to get interrogators to identify texts they trusted, whereupon the interrogated would smuggle the titles to eager collaborators who relayed them to Rome so that the next Catholic council could condemn the authors and burn their books. And, during arguments, Jesuits and other missionaries allegedly challenged religiously reformed interrogators to demonstrate that doctrinal declarations that the “true” church was invisible did not preclude responsible management of congregations’ affairs. When proof was provided and valued, visible leaders of reformed congregations on the Continent were named, the Catholics passed along that information as well, turning admired advocates of reform into targets. The conclusion to be drawn from such tales: the missionaries and “massing priests” were shrewd, treacherous villains, even when apprehended.⁸³

On the loose, they were doubly dangerous predators who stalked entire households and “devour[ed] parents, children, masters, and servants.” A comprehensive crackdown was called for, according to Bishop Tobie Matthew; how sad, he said, that conformists and reformists in the realm relentlessly quarreled with each other while England was infested with papists! How could the religiously reformed watch without wailing (ingemiscere) while predatory missionaries made a meal of the realm’s families and turned them back to Catholicism?⁸⁴

Enough wailing survives in sermons and pamphlets to suggest that it was an important part of the reformed religion around the realm. And the regime considered it necessary to keep close watch on prominent Catholics’ estates to prohibit politically subversive cults from forming, even when Jesuits and other missionaries were not present. The queen’s bishops’ agents combed the countryside for mementos of the expatriates’ missions, cherished in Catholics’ households as if they were relics of saints. Might Catholic families compose “a partie strong at home” ready to assist invaders—“divers princes Catholike”—to free the Queen of Scots from prison and place her on the throne?⁸⁵ To prevent that fifth column from rising, the queen’s Council routinely “call[ed] principall recusantes out of their country” and settled them far from neighbors. Thomas Tresham, for example, was taken from his home and confined in Ely, where the bishop’s facilities, along with Nicholas Bacon’s castle, were converted into prisons.⁸⁶ The wardens there and elsewhere were warned to “abstain from angry and opprobrious words,” for insults would only stiffen the prisoners’ “obstinacie,” which recusants misconstrued as “constancie,” as divinely inspired courage and thus as proof of the rectitude of the Catholics’ cause.⁸⁷ Elizabeth received at least one memorandum urging moderation as well; it promised that Jesuits’ “credit will soone quaile” if the realm’s authorities, “from the highest counselor to the lowest constable,” would only see to it that laws requiring subjects to attend reformed churches and attend to sermons were strictly enforced. “For my part,” the author confided, revealing sentiments that would pass today as enlightened, “I wish no lessening of their number, but by preaching.”⁸⁸

Yet, notwithstanding the admirable wish of that unidentified adviser, arrest, confinement, interrogation, torture, and sometimes the gallows constituted the fate of many expatriates on their return. Walsingham deployed a platoon of spies on both sides of the Channel, so the missionaries were wise to travel disguised. Their secrecy and that of their hosts, of course, made their mission seem more sinister to Calvinists. And captured missionaries contributed, to that end, by insisting, during interrogations, that popes possessed power “generally to discharge any Christian prince’s subjects” of their duty to obey their sovereigns. Calvinists’ antagonism and fears only increased on hearing the Jesuits’ various, ostensibly evasive replies to interviewers’ standard question, as when Christopher Southworthe, under arrest in 1579, “answereth that he cannot tell what he shoulde or woulde do” in the event of an invasion.⁸⁹ Edmund Campion, in 1581, could not promise to “take the queen’s parte.” He could only say that he would pray that Catholicism prevailed.⁹⁰

Religiously reformed pamphleteers worried that the expatriate missionaries’ disaffection could go viral. They worried as well that the missionaries’ “false face of holiness” would incline less zealous and less insightful Calvinists to overlook their “underminings of our good subjects.” Expatriate Catholic “seminarie men,” returning from the Continent and journeying from shire to shire, “train” the laity “to treason.”⁹¹ Caught encouraging the trainers and trainees, Mary Stuart was unrepentant. Walsingham tried to persuade his queen to make her cousin pay the ultimate price for her conspiring with the Catholic subversives, but Elizabeth did not wish to learn how Europe’s princes might “stand affected” if she and England resorted to regicide: “Shall their pittie be extended to the guilty”?⁹²

Yet Mary’s complicity in what proved to be her last bid to be rid of Elizabeth sealed her fate. By 1586, her stature was significantly diminished. Her son had come of age and, as King James VI of Scotland, had “demoted” his mother. Mary was no longer Queen of Scots; she was queen mother. And James’s signature on a treaty with Elizabeth, John Guy says, made his mother “disposable.” More desperate—and hence more explicitly than in earlier correspondence—Mary consented when approached by would-be assassins. Walsingham, who may have cooked up the conspiracy to incriminate her, at the very least let it develop to a point. Elizabeth was briefed and, in 1587, reluctantly acquiesced to having her cousin executed. Mary died, ready, she proclaimed, to make the supreme sacrifice “for the restoration of the Catholic church.”⁹³

It is still difficult to tell how many of Elizabeth’s subjects yearned for that “restoration” in the late 1580s, when Shakespeare was settling in London. Thirty or so years earlier, Catholic resurgence might not have required colossal effort; the established English reformed church had only a tenuous hold over the imaginations of influential and affluent laymen. But three decades of reformed preaching and polemics seem to have taken a toll on Catholic sentiment. Calculating that toll with precision, however, is impossible. It may well be, as James McDermott thinks, that those years of reformation, counter-reformation, and conspiracy merely made “most Englishmen believe it was better to have a single religion, and that someone else should decide which one.”⁹⁴

“OURS WERE BUT FISHER-BOATS”

King Philip II of Spain did not bother to hide his desire to become that “someone else.” He offered himself as husband to Elizabeth soon after Mary Tudor’s death left him a widower, but his unpopularity in England made acceptance of that offer unlikely. So, when Mary Stuart fled from Scotland and settled to its south in the late 1560s, Philip appeared content to support her candidacy. English sources reported that his endorsement of Mary Stuart’s schemes for the “deprivation, death, and destruction” of her cousin was unfaltering.⁹⁵ England retaliated, as we learned, by encouraging and subsidizing rebellious Dutch subjects and by turning a blind eye as English privateers pilfered Spanish cargoes in the Atlantic. The undeclared war on Spanish trade incensed Philip, yet, as long as the Queen of Scots lived, he was patient, trusting that his problem with Elizabeth’s regime would be solved without direct Hapsburg intervention. But his patience died with Mary. He ordered his admirals to assemble an armada and asked his Guiscard allies in France to secure ports on their side of the Channel and to prepare to reprovision his fleet. And he told his commander and regent in the Low Countries, the Duke of Parma, to have troops ready to be ferried to England.

Calvinists in England saw Rome’s hand in the plan. Thomas Rogers fumed that “Spaine loveth this whore,” the Church of Rome.⁹⁶ Historians, however, ordinarily acquit Pope Sixtus V of having prodded King Philip to invade. Indeed, the consensus is that Philip persuaded the pope that Elizabeth’s England was ripe for the picking. Sixtus, of course, supported Spain’s initiatives in 1588, and the English assumed that their Catholic countrymen would do so as well. Local officials were ordered to arrest Catholics whose “obstinacie of errour” would lead them to make common cause with the invaders.⁹⁷ But at least one crew of officials confided that “the more obstinate or less is a thing most hard for us to set down.”⁹⁸ Local authorities, that is, seemed to be groping for standards to measure loyalty in advance of a crisis that could test them. Alexandra Walsham now calculates that for every persistent Catholic recusant—or refusenik—there were three who attended the realm’s reformed churches, awaiting deliverance from heretical preaching in “the embrace of the ecclesiastical establishment.” Walsham calls them “church papists.”⁹⁹ All that the authorities could do about the potential threat posed by these camouflaged Catholics in regions known to have been resistant to religious reform in the past was to alert troops to the danger. Levies in Lancashire could have been so told, because they kept close to home even when the Spanish armada was sighted. Deployment of the local Lancashire militia may have been meant as a disincentive, as a tactic to ensure that enemies within would not start acting out.¹⁰⁰

Surveys identified likely landing sites, but locals were laggard in fortifying the coastline. England was unprepared for an invasion. There were only two permanent garrisons in the 1580s, at Dover and Berwick. Traditionally, the able-bodied were called to arms when distress dictated, but arrangements for their training and provision were barely adequate in 1588. Celebrating that spectacular year, poets forgot the citizen soldiers’ unpreparedness and planed the rough texture of the ordeals of recruits who thought “themselves thrise happy made” to exchange the creature comforts of their homes for the queen’s service.¹⁰¹ From this distance, it seems fair to speculate that the armed amateurs were happier still presuming that England’s superiority at sea improved the chances of their avoiding contact with the enemy.

They and their queen counted on trained, energetic mariners, worthy vessels, and excellent ordinance. Spain and Philip counted on Parma, who secured the Scheldt estuary, an excellent staging area for the invasion of England. Fresh troops from Italy joined the Spanish veterans of the Dutch wars. The first challenge for the armada’s admiral was to bring his ships safely to the Scheldt. He was to play defense, passing through the Channel; the objective was not to engage the enemy but to get to Flanders and Parma. But weather ruined the armada’s chances. “The Protestant winds” gave the Spanish ships no option but to turn up the east coast of England and abandon the plan. English mariners harassed their enemy and snagged strays until munitions were exhausted: “Ours were but fisher-boats,” theirs “a monstrous fleet.” But God saved the queen.¹⁰²

English officials seem to have been taken aback by the unwillingness of resident Catholics to rebel when the armada was sighted. Did deployments of armed loyal subjects discourage them? Were they waiting for Parma’s troops to land? Or did they “love popery well but [were] loath to lose by it,” as a reformist later summarized, and thus waited to see the balance tip before weighing in?¹⁰³ One can also argue that the Jesuit missionaries were to blame. Catholic Christopher Bagshaw’s scorn for the “intermedl[ing]” of expatriates during the 1580s suggests as much. Bagshaw resented the Jesuit vanguard and referred to “seminarie men” as “thornes in [the] sides” of Catholic priests, who never left England. The Jesuits’ contempt for what had survived of the English Catholic ministry, “when they first came hither,” he went on, fed the order’s self-importance. The “attempt of 1588” was prominent on Bagshaw’s bill of complaints. He was certain that missionary “wretches” “were either procurors, perswaders, or agents” promoting Spain’s schemes, which, he thought, went some distance in discrediting Catholicism. Those “wretches,” he predicted, “shall be had in perpetuall detestation.”¹⁰⁴

Yet the resident Catholics’ quiescence in 1588 only imperceptibly, if at all, caused their stock to appreciate. Religiously reformed officials were still unsure that the reformed status quo was secure. The very next year, as Shakespeare was settling in London, local constables scoured the city from Holborn to Hampstead looking for papists.¹⁰⁵ The Calvinists who continued to count Catholics among their friends made certain when they visited them that they were long gone before their hosts made preparations to hear Mass. And the more ecumenically inclined among the religiously reformed, if we may take Edmund Spenser as representative, were concerned that intrepid “prestes . . . will undoo” their Catholic colleagues.¹⁰⁶ Hunts for missionaries, or “seminarie men,” in the countryside persisted. Catholic recusants there were only allowed enough weaponry to defend their properties; if a fifth column were to arise, authorities wanted to ensure it would be lightly armed.¹⁰⁷

English Catholics abroad were undaunted, insisting that their families at home would welcome and amply assist the next invasion. Student orations at Valladolid, the new base on the Continent for the English mission in the 1580s, referred to King Philip as the perfect candidate to “take [God’s] quarrel in hand.” He alone was ready to “cut down and exterpate the proud and murthering mindes of the bloody Lutherans and Calvenists.”¹⁰⁸ Leading resident recusants may have been anticipating as much. On occasion, constables stumbled across Catholics concealing thousands of pounds of gunpowder “against the day of the invasion.”¹⁰⁹ Would Philip, Parma, and their fanatical English friends succeed in ridding the realm of its “innocent maiden queen, whose glorious life hath . . . dishonourably been sought and thirsted after, these many years”?¹¹⁰

Elizabeth’s counselors urged her to make the Spanish threat her foremost concern. Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, was one of the most insistent.¹¹¹ He had been to war with Spain, having accompanied Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and his stepfather, to the Netherlands in 1585. Essex’s Apologie, written in 1603, describes England’s “great actions” abroad, celebrating the heroics of his comrades in arms, particularly those of Philip Sidney, who was killed in battle and promptly “canonized” as a Protestant martyr. Sidney left Essex his sword, and, years later, Essex married Sidney’s widow. In the interim, he tended to go off chasing an elusive, decisive engagement with Spain.¹¹² Endlessly cash-strapped, he was drawn by Francis Drake to the Iberian coast. Dutch mariners joined the expedition, giving it the appearance of a Calvinist crusade against Philip, “the principal maytener of papal religion.”¹¹³ Essex’s critics claimed that desperation, specifically fears of bankruptcy, rather than selfless religious devotion led him to war. But his admirers did not pause to probe for motives; Anthony Wingfield, for one, marveled at the earl’s “exceeding forwardness,” by which Wingfield meant courage under fire or daring—not greed or impudence.¹¹⁴

But Essex was impudent and, on his return to England, imprudent. Shakespeare would have heard of it, for Essex was inclined to offend everyone who advocated improved relations with Spain. He was notorious in London during the early 1590s and the most controversial figure frequenting Elizabeth’s Court. He opposed William Cecil, by then Lord Burghley, the queen’s principal secretary, who suggested that the Spanish should be humored and used to keep French ambitions on the Continent in check. Elizabeth concurred with Cecil, yet Essex refused to relent. He wanted Spain robbed of its American treasures and wholly disabled. He appealed to panicky English preachers apprehensive about parishioners “falling away into poperie” once a second Spanish armada was sighted.¹¹⁵ Finally, his efforts and his partisans’ apprehensions won over Elizabeth and Cecil, who grew concerned that “overmuch toleration” of English Catholicism could, on Spain’s second coming, result in “the great defection of [her] subjects.”¹¹⁶

In 1596, Elizabeth and Cecil approved Essex’s plans for an expedition, a preemptive strike at what appeared to be Spanish preparations to invade England the following year. Lord Admiral Howard commanded the fleet; at Cadiz, Essex stormed ashore and took the city in an afternoon. Historian R. B. Wernham now describes the skirmish as “improvised” and “untidy,” although Howard was hyperbolic—“I do assure you,” he said, “there ys not a braver man in the worlde than the erle is.”¹¹⁷ But Essex was disappointed. He wanted to make Cadiz the English Calais in Spain, “to dwell in a port of the enemies,” to sink or capture their treasure ships at will, and to humiliate the enemy, adding the insult of an English presence to injuries that would keep Philip from funding another invasion of England or Ireland.¹¹⁸ But English troops wanted to go home, and Essex deferred to their wishes—obeying also a directive he received from queen and Council to return to the realm.

The next summer, he was off again, yet with too few men to garrison a port. Hence, he remained at sea, tacking around the Azores and hoping to intercept Spain’s treasure fleet. The result, he hoped, would enable England “to make warr upon him with [Philip’s] owne money.”¹¹⁹ But when Essex found the galleons snug in harbor, their cargo safely ashore, he had no choice but to return to England to face his rivals in government carping at his failure, yet again, to do Spain “asmuche hurte as myght have [been] don.”¹²⁰ And Essex was criticized for conversing with radical reformists, the more stubborn of whom were suspended from their ministries for refusing to answer questions under oath or, as commonly, for refusing to swear oaths to reply truthfully to accusations, the origins of which were kept secret.¹²¹

Conformists defended their subpoenas. Liturgical nonconformity was reason enough, they said, to inquire further into reformists’ conscientious objections to the established church’s Prayer Book, to the pace and trajectories of the realm’s religious changes, and to the oath itself. Secrecy was appropriate, because there was no telling to what extremes overzealous reformists might go. “If zeal not be governed, it inclineth verye quicklie to vices,” so accusers ought to be shielded from reprisals. And who could argue that regimes had neither the right nor the duty to discover how its critics intended to “allure the people” and turn the multitude against the prevailing church government—against its courts, sanctions, and bishops?¹²²

It looked as if conformists, with their accusations, inquiries, and oaths, were lining up England’s more stubborn dissidents so that bishops and their commissioners could run the table and clear the realm. Reformists, who had wanted to become their bishops’ consultants, to assist diocesans to “discerne” which of their judgments “be just and agreeable to God’s word,” could only have been disappointed by the unflinching enforcement of conformity that, they predicted, would discourage worthy candidates for the ministry and “disgrace” many conscientious clerics already in service.¹²³ The oaths proved to be their undoing, and some seceded from the established church. A number of their radically reformist colleagues, however, censured them for their secession. Eusebius Paget pointed out that the apostle Paul had not forsaken the Corinthian church because it had “blemishes.”¹²⁴ Humphrey Fenn, preaching at Coventry, fairly close to Stratford, when not in prison, pledged to press for liturgical and polity reforms, only “so far as the laws and peace of the present estate of our church suffer it.”¹²⁵ Thomas Cartwright “signed” that pledge and declared a truce of sorts with conformists, “notwithstanding we be of different judgment in some controversies of our church”; George Gifford, in Essex, declined to talk with radicals who refused to pray alongside him.¹²⁶

Conformists do not seem to have been terribly impressed by reformists’ recoil from the radicals, for the separatists’ critics continued to criticize what they saw as the “misgovernment” of their dioceses. Some reformists, without diocesan executives’ authorization, convened local and regional conferences, over which mere ministers presided as if they were bishop-substitutes-in-waiting, waiting for current bishops to be removed—as one would remove “blemishes”—from the church.¹²⁷ Furthermore, conformists’ suspicions about a significant subversive faction were no doubt corroborated by depositions of witnesses who had heard Thomas Cartwright and other reformists at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1589 proclaim that they were wholly “against the superioritie and government of bishops.”¹²⁸

Perhaps to answer charges that such sentiments about bishops exhibited ingratitude, the reformists offered rave reviews of the progress of religion in the realm. Rood lofts, they cheered, had been dismantled; wall paintings of saints were whitewashed; purgatory had been exposed as an eerie, dreadful hoax. England’s priests faced the laity from their communion tables and spoke English. For all that, reformists and conformists alike could take credit. But, during the final few decades of the sixteenth century, only the former celebrated a development that the conformists generally deplored. The culmination of decades of the reformists’ networking in large swatches of the realm was evident to all, as historian Peter Lake notes: the “levers of power” locally were now in the hands of pastors and laymen who favored an accelerated reform of the realm’s churches.¹²⁹

Still, Whitgift and his favorite lieutenant, Richard Bancroft, had the queen’s ear, and she was pleased to hear the mantra of conformists satisfied with the shape of their church’s liturgy, the rubrics of its Prayer Book, and “superiority” in its ministry (episcopacy): pastors were “not called to rule this churche of England,” Whitgift explained, “but to obey.”¹³⁰ He was persuaded that if the reformists’ views prevailed, England’s bishops would be no more than backup; parish consistories would select preachers, who needed only to repair to their bishops, as they might drop by registrars, to put their incumbencies in the public record. “Not called to rule . . . but to obey,” Whitgift said, yet reformists looked to “rule” the hearts and minds of their parishioners and, Bancroft accused, to tug those “harts from the present governement of the church.” And from the government of the realm! One catches Bancroft wondering, in 1595, whether reformist agitators were experimenting with a discipline—a polity and “practice”—that could bring their realm to the brink of civil war: “I doo but aske the question.”¹³¹

KING JAMES I: RELIGION “WELL SETLED”

When we left him earlier in this chapter, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was steering from the Azores back to England, still entertaining what historian Paul Hammer describes as “lofty ambitions” for international fame and influence.¹³² Essex expressed them along with his antipathy toward Spain with a self-assurance that increasingly put off his queen. She reprimanded him, after which he sulked and refused to attend Court. Essex argued that attendance was not part of “the indissoluble dutie which I owe to her Majestie.”¹³³ Elizabeth would have been angrier still had word reached her that he blamed her indignation on others, specifically on his rival, Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son and later Lord Salisbury, who questioned Essex’s loyalty. To answer the charge, he volunteered to lead reinforcements to Ireland, and, monumentally miscalculating, he boasted that he would hastily humble Hugh O’Neill, the rebellious Earl of Tyrone and his queen’s nemesis there.

The Council provided everything he imagined he would need: money, infantry, and transport. But, landing in Ireland, Essex realized his preparations had been inadequate. He had too few troops to hold Armagh while invading Ulster. To Elizabeth’s dismay, he promptly came to terms with Tyrone and returned to England to ward off criticism, which tallied his time in Ireland, the low yield from his Azores expedition, and even his tactics at Cadiz as failures. And complaints about his unruly soldiers who, while waiting for passage to England, “pestered both Dublyn and diverse marytime partes” probably beat him back to Court. Essex’s critics feasted on his humiliations.¹³⁴

They were “bad instruments,” he said, vowing to “remove [them] from about her Majestie’s person.”¹³⁵ To that end, he summoned friends to London and schemed to “surprise the Court with power.” He trusted that reformists in the city would rally to his cause, yet they appear to have been mystified by the ostensibly uncoordinated “rising” he staged in early February 1601, which failed abysmally. Essex was charged with having colluded all the while with Tyrone and was beheaded by the end of the month.¹³⁶

The importance of all this for a politically and confessionally nonaligned playwright living in London at the time is hard to gauge. Literary historian James Shapiro persuasively argues that Shakespeare tremendously admired the Earl of Essex and smuggled him into his Henry V.¹³⁷ Perhaps the playwright trusted Essex’s claim that he had acted against Cecil to defend himself and secure the succession for King James VI of Scotland. The latter did not make the mistake of endorsing Essex’s initiative. Instead, he continued to cultivate his friendship with Cecil, Elizabeth’s—and soon James’s—chief counsel, who reassured the king that “when that day (soe grievous to us) shall happen which is the tribute of all mortall creatures, your shippe shalbe steered into the right harbour.”¹³⁸

That “grievous” day did come two years later, in late March 1603. In early April, the king of Scotland started south. He reached Berwick on the sixth of that month and York on the sixteenth. Thomas Cecil, Robert’s older brother, choreographed the welcomes en route. By the middle of May, England’s new sovereign was at Whitehall. The Catholic community in his new realm did not know what to expect from James, who doubtlessly was well informed about the infra-confessional conflicts that had divided it for nearly ten years. Bishop Bancroft was credited with the “greatest blow that the papists received in all Queen Elizabeth’s tyme,” because he often stoked animosities that resulted in an uninterrupted war of words among church papists, resident priests, Jesuits, and “appellant” Catholic clergy.¹³⁹ Jesuits were determined to out priests who, they said, disgraced their calling. Resident priests rallied around the accused and berated their accusers for arrogance and corruption. Reconciliation seemed unlikely after Jesuit William Weston refused to associate with priests imprisoned with him at Wisbech in 1595 and appealed to Rome to appoint an archpriest for England to investigate clerical misconduct. George Blackwell, who had ties to the Jesuits, was sent and instructed to refashion English Catholicism in the order’s image.¹⁴⁰

That was Thomas Bluet’s take on Rome’s and Blackwell’s purpose. Bluet, who had denounced Weston at Wisbech, lamented that the papacy entertained the illusion that English Catholics would be better off lined up behind “puritane Jesuits,” who were “right Donatists in resemblance” and who camouflaged their lust for control with their pleas for reform.¹⁴¹ John Colleton, another critic of the Jesuits, remembered that resident priests “welcomed [expatriate Jesuits] first entering into our labors . . . with all honor” and “acquainted them with our friends and places,” only to have the missionaries (“wolves”) impeach the “tender affections” of their clerical benefactors and turn the laity against them.¹⁴² But the bitterness of Colleton, Bluet, and other “discontented brethren” did not weigh heavily on Robert Persons, the leader of the Jesuits’ mission in the early 1580s, who, back in Rome, endorsed Weston’s request for the appointment of an archpriest and touted the nominee’s integrity. Persons protested that the order’s Catholic critics were “few in number” and “grene in credit.” Their accusations left only “little scratches,” hardly worth pondering. What disturbed Persons was that those “few,” “grene,” “discontented” critics had associated themselves with Richard Bancroft, who expected to reap rewards for the religiously reformed from demoralizing divisions within the English Catholic community.¹⁴³

At issue were the Catholics’ chances of winning concessions from the new king. Rome first tried extortion, directing “all Catholikes in England” to withhold obedience from him until he resolved to bring his new realm back to the universal church.¹⁴⁴ Appellants were least likely to oblige the pope. For a generation or more, they had made a point of “not exasperating [their Calvinist] adversaries.”¹⁴⁵ We would be correct to think of appellants as accommodationists; they agreed with recusants that their realm’s reformed religion was badly deformed, and they trusted that time would tell against it, but appellants inferred from the history of the Christian traditions that Catholics could count on God to reconcile hostile governments to their faith’s survival and spread. Appellant accommodationists, searching history for examples of patience, thought that they found in Bishop Hilary of Poitiers an exceptional model and a theologian who, as far as they knew, persistently yet politely explained Nicene Christology to Emperor Constantius in the fourth century. Had there been Jesuits then, appellants intimated, Hilary would have been condemned for his failure to “exasperate” the authorities.¹⁴⁶

For their part, the Jesuits looked for different ways to appease authorities in England. They, too, appealed to history, arguing that—unlike the phantom, invisible church religiously reformed rivals advocated—the very visible Catholic churches had stabilized the authority of their government partners throughout the history of the Christian traditions. And had not the Catholic hierarchy, by its existence and its insistence on obedience, compellingly conveyed to lay subjects the “inmerit of transgressing,” whereas the fideism of reformed religion, undervaluing merit, had invited insolence? King James, therefore, would serve himself and his subjects well by allowing his new realm’s Catholics the right to practice their religion “if not [with] approbation . . . without molestation.” In turn, the Catholic clergy would reintroduce the concept of merit—specifically, the merit and virtue of political obedience—into theology. Elizabeth, the Catholic plaintiffs complained, tried “to wear us out” with edicts, fines, and forfeitures, but “the truth [was] as cleare as the sunne on our side.” James, they said, should let that sun shine to rebuild or “reedify what the misinformed anger of a woman destroyed.”¹⁴⁷

But James was suspicious of the Catholics’ ambitions to “reedify” the realm and of their warbling about “truth as cleare as the sunne.” Without conceding that they had gotten a raw deal from his predecessor, he nonetheless intimated that there might be relief in store, though he also confided to Cecil his worries that his early overtures to the recusants could have prompted their “bragging that none shall enter to be king thaire but by thaire permission.”¹⁴⁸ Cecil answered by explaining the “dyfference[s]” in English Catholics’ “spirits”: few were bold; most were various shades of conciliatory; all were hopeful. The new king’s criticism of the old regime was readily accepted—notably, the observation that Cecil’s father, Lord Burghley, the queen, and her Council had been long on laws yet short on what James called “exemplaire execution” or enforcement. But Cecil recommended “charitable relief,” which, he clarified, did not mean that Catholics—“enemies to the gospel”—would be encouraged to revive the old faith’s hold on the realm, but that sufficient measures should be put in place to make them “friends to [King James’s] good fortune.”¹⁴⁹

Cecil was anxious that “charitable relief” not be misconstrued by England’s Calvinists. Hence, he probably saw to the circulation of the new king’s categorical declaration that, if forty thousand armed Catholics gave him a choice between pikes and peace, he “would rather dye in the field than condiscend to be false to God.”¹⁵⁰ James, however, was less melodramatic when, in 1604, he addressed his first English Parliament and acknowledged that there were a number of “quiet, well-minded men” among Catholic “layickes.” Yet he estimated that many of their coreligionists, who were “nursed or brought up . . . upon such venim in place of wholesome nutriment,” became “factious stirrers of sedition and perturbers of the commonwealth.” The king regretted punishing “well-minded men” for confessional attachments, he said, but he believed he was forced to do so in self-defense. Catholic Masses and “murthers” of religiously reformed princes on the Continent seemed to him to be closely connected; “stirrers” and “perturbers” in France and Holland used the sacraments to consolidate fellow Catholics’ support for the “dethroning” of their sovereigns. James agreed to meet Catholic petitioners in his new realm partway, “so that all novelties might be renounced on either side”—that is, by Calvinists and Catholics—but he left unspecified what he would weigh as novel and expendable. He did specify and stress how he deplored irrepressibly regicidal Catholics on the Continent. In England, their coreligionists must not, he said, take his gentle disposition as a sign that he was weak, for he welcomed opportunities to “tread downe their errors.”¹⁵¹

One could characterize James’s and Cecil’s as mixed messages. There was not much in them to console the Catholic accommodationists. True, their new king’s queen had been received into their church, and Cecil was still counseling “charitable relief.” Might there have been a vein of live-and-let-live beneath King James’s gruff talk of “tread[ing] downe errors”? Maybe so, but what surely would have complicated any translation of the new regime’s irenic inclinations into policy was the response anticipated and occasionally heard from the religiously reformed. Tobie Matthew, bishop of Durham, warned that Cecil’s and James’s efforts to appease or “quiet” the Catholic accommodationists had caused “great jollity” among Catholics of all stripes, because the relaxation of restrictions on the practice of the traditional faith was almost certain to lead to the growth of the unreformed community “in number, courage, and influence.” The growth and “jollity,” Matthew continued, were doubly difficult to overlook at a time when the king and his Council were silencing the realm’s more forward reformists. Confiding that he “mislike[d] their zeal,” Matthew also acknowledged that he was dismayed to see their hopes for a more effective preaching ministry—hopes he shared—shattered while English Catholics’ hopes for tolerance or more seemed to be encouraged. Had the realm’s authorities forgotten that Catholicism had been (and still was) “opposite and contrary” to the religion established in King James’s old and new territories?¹⁵²

Matthew either misperceived or—more likely—exaggerated the new government’s kindness to Catholics. His remarks about their resurgence and rejoicing were almost certainly intended to nudge his new king to stay Elizabeth’s course. Moreover, Matthew overstated the king’s determination to disadvantage reformists. England’s first Stuart sovereign was never as opposed as its second—his son and heir, Charles—to reformist critics of the Prayer Book and of its conformist partisans. But James seems to have sensed that a few reformists, unable to “avoyd all singularity” and bitter toward bishops, would set off one schism after another. Hence, the new king supported the interrogations and deprivations Whitgift originated and the old queen allowed twenty years earlier.¹⁵³ Petitions asking that the Council halt the proceedings and reinstate those reformist ministers Elizabeth’s commissioners had deprived were not answered favorably. Prominent London preacher Stephen Egerton proposed new procedures, suggesting that bishops and their deputies be excluded from the commissions sifting the accusations against nonconformists and that panels of laymen determine whether pastors exceeded their authority and “used new forms” instead of simply, selectively, and inoffensively omitting what they considered Catholic and objectionable.¹⁵⁴

Too much in the new king’s new realm seemed unresolved when he summoned several conformists and reformists to a conference at Hampton Court in autumn 1604. From all reports, what could have become an occasion for polemical pyrotechnics was rather subdued. Reformists gained no ground. James was unsympathetic when they aired requests for relief from what they called episcopal tyranny. The king was wary of proposed alternatives to diocesan administration. He feared that congregational consistories and assertive local leadership would end with the kind of decentralization that could destabilize England’s secular—as well as religious—regimes. “They pleade for [appeal to] my supremacie,” he said, referring to reformists’ deference, but, he added, “I know what would become of my supremacie” once bishops “were out” and reformist agitators “in place.”¹⁵⁵

We have no idea what Shakespeare knew about, or whether he cared about, the Hampton Court conference, yet he and James’s new theater company, the King’s Men, had been at the site before the delegates were invited. And the company returned more often than did the reformists. The results of the king’s meeting, of course, were no secret. Reports circulated in manuscript as well as in print. James was known to have confirmed royal support for highly placed prelates, whom reformists derisively called “ruling bishops,” and to have rejected reformists’ argument that the Bible, “the all sufficient word of God,” made no provision for executives “ruling” churches.¹⁵⁶ Yet he conceded that the bearing and behavior of many English bishops were as off-putting and papist as their critics had claimed. His sensible Scots subjects, he said, would turn thuggish at the sight of English executives’ sumptuous stoles and pretentious processions. “If I were not with you,” strolling through Edinburgh, he told his new realm’s prelates, “you should be stoned to death.”¹⁵⁷

With their king’s imprimatur, however, they continued to hound nonconformists. In Royston, parishioners complained about the dismissals of the “faithfull pastors, through whose ministry we have bin . . . brought from darkenes into light.”¹⁵⁸ Yet James trusted that the religiously reformed community, as a whole, enjoyed greater security and tranquility as a result of bishops’ vigilance. Praestat ut pereat unus quam unitas—better to send one intractable preacher packing than to jeopardize church unity. Church unity depended on conformity. Nonconformity could disturb the peace of parishes, dioceses, and entire regions of the realm for generations. So, James concluded, his bishops were simply doing their duty to church and crown when they and their deputies probed to find out whether the “affections” of subordinates tended to be “quiet or turbulent.” And concluding at Hampton Court that reformists’ proposals for change were both “turbulent” and “frivolous,” the king declared that he found the religion in his new realm “well setled” and suggested that he meant to keep it that way.¹⁵⁹

Cecil and King James disappointed and often distressed the “forward” (or “frivolous”) reformists, several of whom pinned their hopes on Prince Henry. They speculated that, if only the king called off his bishops’ campaigns against conscientious nonconformists, the centenary of the reformation in the 1630s—during the reign of his son—would see the completion of work that the Tudors had started. The eighth Henry “pull’d down abbeys and cells”; the ninth would see to it that England knew no more of “bishops and bells.”¹⁶⁰ The ninth’s father, James, hardly would have approved the rhymester’s abbreviation of his tenure, but he listened less and less to reformists’ appeals, favored conformist preachers—notably, Lancelot Andrewes—and kept his distance from what historian Kenneth Fincham describes as “the excessive evangelicalism” around the realm.¹⁶¹

As for some English Catholics’ fin de siècle hopes for relief from a new regime, they were dashed in 1604, when James made his debut in Parliament and pronounced himself well-pleased with England’s well-settled, reformed religion. A few devotees of the old faith were so disconcerted that they conspired to blow up Parliament with king and prince in its chambers. Robert Catesby, the ringleader, expected to gallop to Wales with a posse of accomplices after the fateful explosion, anticipating that armed coreligionists would join them to await in Wales the arrival of the reinforcements Guy Fawkes had been recruiting during his travels abroad. The conspirators, with their new English army and their foreign friends formed, in Catesby’s imagination, a juggernaut. They would kidnap and crown James’s daughter; England would return to Rome.¹⁶²

Wilder coups have been known to succeed, but, in this instance, there was a leak, and Fawkes was discovered with incriminating kegs of powder before Parliament convened in early November 1605. Other conspirators were apprehended in the Midlands; Catesby was cornered and killed. Historians have tried ever since to chase down facts over the many furlongs of fiction that hyperactive imaginations have associated with the “powder plot.” Were Catesby and Fawkes deranged? Did expatriate missionaries and resident priests endorse the plan? Could Robert Cecil have masterminded the conspiracy or merely let it run to discredit Catholicism and rally support for the new regime? Were other authorities correct to think that a few ruthless fanatics under the sway of sinister Jesuits had taken England to the very brink of disaster?¹⁶³

The government might have blamed Spain—yet again—had English envoys, months before, not come to provisional terms that promised a period of peace between the two old enemies. Something approaching Spain-fatigue apparently had set in, and seasoned veteran Richard Leveson—who fought against the armada in 1588, during the Cadiz expedition, in the Azores, and against the Spanish troops in Ireland—was dissuaded from undertaking yet another expedition.¹⁶⁴ With the new king reconsidering England’s old animosities, it was a terrible time to recycle anti-Hapsburg rhetoric, so the Jesuits were left to take the blame. Conspirators refused to implicate them, although Henry Garnet, the Jesuit superior in England, acknowledged that one of the would-be assassins mentioned the plot during confession. Garnet’s defense did not impress interrogators, who were unpersuaded that confidences of the confessional were inviolable. It was wrong (and papist), they claimed, to rank the secrets of the confessional above the safety of one’s religiously reformed country.¹⁶⁵ Garnet insisted that he had disapproved of the plot and had begged overeager conspirators to leave the reconversion of the realm to Providence. He failed; then they failed. Finally, he failed again, in another forum, to persuade English magistrates that he and fellow Jesuits had nothing to do with the homicidal intent of Catesby, Fawkes, and their friends. Garnet was executed, and English Catholics waited anxiously for the measures they were certain that reformed officials would devise to “roote out all memory of Catholike religion by sudden banishment, massacre, imprisonment, or some unsupportable vexations and pressures.”¹⁶⁶

The old faith’s leading spokesmen were far from idle. Archpriest George Blackwell was quick to condemn, publicly and stridently, those egregiously irresponsible fringe figures whom he blamed for having concocted “a detestable and damnable practice,” “odious,” he added, “in the sight of God.”¹⁶⁷ Blackwell and other accommodationists may have been consoled to hear it denounced by Justice Coke as “the Jesuits’ treason,” yet no Catholic would have drawn comfort from the comments of another magistrate who belligerently referred to the plot as “an anatomye of poperie.”¹⁶⁸

Cecil let out that the new king was not contemplating “new severities.” He admitted, however, that “this fiery treason” “inflamed” the realm’s religiously reformed and confessionally indifferent subjects alike against “the generalitie of the papists”—so much so, he speculated, that “the greatest violences . . . under colour of publicke safetie” would be construed as “effects of care and providence.” But Cecil was certain that James would safeguard “publicke safetie” gently, reserving the rod for “the particulars”—convicted conspirators—and showing mercy to Catholic subjects who deplored and denounced the crime of those “particulars.” The Roman church could make that benevolence easier for all to accept, not just during the crisis at hand but as permanent policy, Cecil said, if popes stopped encouraging assassins and endorsing “grosse usurpation[s]”: officials everywhere, who “doe not approve papal jurisdiction yet would faine . . . a charitable opinion of their [Catholic] subjects,” would not risk the dangerous disapproval of others if the papacy restrained Jesuits. The officials to whom Cecil referred undoubtedly included his king.¹⁶⁹

The powder plot proved to the religiously reformed that their religion was celestially sanctioned as well as “well setled.” God had delivered the church in 1534 in Parliament, where the realm’s first reformers “shooke off the bonds and fetters of the Romane corruption.” If the conspirators had brought the edifice down on the heads of the dignitaries within, one could infer God’s displeasure. But, with Westminster spared, England’s reformed religion well settled, and the king’s regime and family prospering, Cecil said, one should presume exactly the opposite.¹⁷⁰

On the next few anniversaries of the powder plot’s discovery, sermons reinforced what Cecil would have had them presume—and, if the archdeacon of Canterbury was right, they also “rowse[d] up the drowsie spirits of the people,” “premonish[ing]” them to oppose extremists.¹⁷¹ Did Shakespeare hear the “rows[ing]” pulpit oratory? Did he take notice of the printed sermons? Maybe not, but knowing something about the religion around the realm, we are now in a better place to inquire about the religion around Shakespeare.