Читать книгу Elizabethan Controversialists - Peter Milward - Страница 6

Among scholars there is, it seems, a strange conspiracy of silence about the controversial writings of Thomas Harding. Even C.S.Lewis, who made such an extensive survey of sixteenth-century literature, including some of the controversialists, for his Oxford history, and who devoted a page or two to Jewel, only mentions Harding (giving him the Christian name of John) as Jewel’s opponent without a word on his prose. Even Catholic scholars, specialists on recusant history, oddly neglect him. Yet in his own day he was hailed by fellow Catholics as a kind of Caesar, when his Answer to Jewel’s Challenge first appeared. As the Puritan Laurence Humphrey recalled in 1584, “Hardingi liber a multis emitur, recipitur. Hardingus quasi alter Caesar proclamans Veni, vidi, vici, cum suis triumphat, sed ante victoriam.” (Iesuitismi Confutatio) In the following decade the Cambridge doctor Gabriel Harvey saw in his word-combat with Jewel an English parallel to the classical contest between Aeschines and Demosthenes. (Pierces Supererogation) Even a cursory perusal of his writings should suffice to explain both the enthusiasm with which they were welcomed by his fellow Catholics and the admiration which they elicited from later generations of Protestants if only for his vigorous prose. Even Jewel had to admit the beauty of his eloquence and the majesty of his words, though attributing them to the devil as an angel of light.

What, I wonder, is the reason for this strange neglect of so eminent an author? One is, no doubt, that he was fighting on the losing side. The Catholics indeed managed to survive and even to flourish, in spite of the increasing persecution under Elizabeth I and James I, but because of this persecution they came to prize the memory rather of their martyrs than their writers. New opponents arose, calling for new forms of defence, and so the older controversialists fell out of fashion and were no longer read This was even the case with the first and most revered of Catholic controversialists, Sir Thomas More, whose writings against Tyndale were no longer read by Elizabethan Catholics, though they continued to prize his devotional works, while his Utopia remained in high esteem on either side. Unfortunately, Harding wrote nothing save in response to Jewel, and when Jewel died in 1571 Harding also passed away the following year.

In his method of conducting controversy, moreover, there is something that discourages the casual reader who approaches the books of Harding outside the historical context in which they were written. Like Sir Thomas More (“that man of blessed memory”, as Harding calls him in his Rejoinder to Jewel) when engaging in controversy with Tyndale, Harding replies to his adversary paragraph by paragraph and point by point. Consequently, one easily loses sight of his forest of wisdom by paying too much attention to the particular trees of his theological learning. Yet this is a method which he adopts in fairness to his adversary and out of consideration for his readers, who may wish to see both sides of the discussion. His reasons he gives at length in the Preface to his Confutation of Jewel’s Apology. “The order,” he explains, “that I thought to keep is this. First, as thou mayst here see, I have put the words of the Apology as I found them translated, sometimes by whole paragraphs, sometimes by more, sometimes by fewer and brief sentences, according to the dependence and weight of the matter. Then followeth my confutation longer or shorter, according to the thing confuted. Here thou shalt find the Apology whole, sentence for sentence, word for word. That I might seem to deal uprightly, I would leave out nothing.” All the same, despite the lack of continuity such a method might seem to occasion, it serves to bring out the ebullient vigour of Harding’s style, as each thrust of Jewel’s criticism prompts him to make renewed outbursts of eloquent indignation.

In his particular way of dealing with his adversary, however, Harding provides no small material of offence to modern readers who are not necessarily unsympathetic to his cause. From the outset of both his Answer and his Confutation he professedly aims at writing “without choler, without gall, without spite” and at avoiding, so far as he can, all “glikes, nips and scoffs, bites, cuts and girds”. Yet considering the character of his adversary, he feels himself compelled at times to follow the example of “the meekest and holiest of the ancient Fathers” who, “in reproving heretics, oftentimes have showed themselves zealous, earnest, eager, severe, sharp and bitter”. The modern reader, however, is in a position to peruse the list of “glikes, nips and scoffs” sedulously excerpted by Jewel and put at the beginning of his Reply. All the same, in reading Harding’s Answer and Confutation, we may find in such strong terms, when sparsely scattered and not gathered all together, a kind of spice to his prose style. If he resorts to them, he evidently does so in the sincerity of his indignation. He speaks, as it were in the accents of Kent in Shakespeare’s King Lear, in the character of a plain man who will not mince his words in dealing with such a toady as Oswald. What Cornwall ironically remarks of Kent, “He cannot flatter, he, an honest mind and plain, he must speak truth” (II ii.104-5), is what Harding simply says of himself in his Confutation, “But now the law of upright dealing specially in God’s cause so requiring, ye must pardon us if, as among husbandmen we call a rake a rake, a spade a spade, a mattock a mattock, so among divines we call heresy heresy, and likewise falsehood, lying, slandering, craft, hypocrisy, apostasy, malice, blasphemy, every such crime, by his proper name without all glosing. Which if we did not, we should do injury to the truth.”

Such are the characteristics of Harding’s controversial prose which have militated against his posthumous reputation as a writer and have led so many to neglect his writings. His very indignation combined with his deep theological learning imparts to his words that majesty and eloquence which even his adversaries admired in his time. In its uniqueness it is a quality not to be described but to be illustrated with direct quotations, so that, like Casca’s hands, it may speak for itself.

To begin with, in his opening Answer to Jewel’s Challenge, Harding demands of his adversary what has moved him “to show such courage, to use such amplification of words, so often and with such vehemency to provoke us to encounter, and as it were at the blast of a trumpet to make your challenge?” In particular, he echoes the earlier question of Cole, which had already been published by Jewel, “why you treat not of matters of more importance than these articles be of, which yet lie in question betwixt the Church of Rome and the Protestants”. Thus, he adds, “craftily you shift your hands off those greater points, wherein you know scriptures, councils, doctors, and examples of the primitive Church to be of our side, and cast unto us, as a bone to gnaw upon, this number of articles of less weight, a few excepted, to occupy us withal”. Still, after having made this initial protest, Harding accepts the terms of his adversary and replies to him point by point, according to the 27 articles offered by Jewel.

Dealing as he does with briefly stated articles, Harding restrains his temper and even shows a measure of balance and humour in his replies. Concerning the new English service, for example, he expresses his fear that “the new learned boldness is not so acceptable to God as the old simple humility. It were good the people having humble and reverent hearts understood the service, I deny not. Yet all standeth not in understanding.” Subsequently, considering the many criticisms which have been made by the English Protestants against the plurality of Masses in Catholic churches, when they have taken away the Mass itself, he can’t help comparing them to thieves. “Verily,” he comments, “this kind of men fareth with the Church much like unto strong thieves, who having robbed an honest wealthy man of all his money, say afterwards unto him uncourteously, Ah carl, how camest thou by so much old gold?” He then proceeds to anticipate the reply which Jewel and his associates will doubtless be devising from the moment they receive this Answer of his. “And now perhaps you enter into meditation with yourself and conference with your brethren, to frame an answer to this treatise, and by contrary writing to fortify your negatives. Well may you do so. But to what purpose, I pray you? Well may you make a smoke and a smother to darken the light for a time, as men of war are wont to do to work a feat secretly against their enemies. But that cannot long continue. The smoke will soon vanish away, the light of truth will eftsoons appear.”

In this first of his controversial writings Harding maintains a certain distance from his adversary, without giving way to any excessive heat of disputation as he proceeds from one article to the next. But in his subsequent Rejoinder to Jewel’s Reply he betrays a darker mood, stung as he has been by the other’s mocking taunts. “Thorough his whole book,” he cries out against Jewel, “he intermedleth his scoffs and mocks, as it were his very purpose with such sauce to make it pleasant and to give his readers, specially those that be delighted with that kind of merry divinity, an appetite not only to taste of such cates but also to feed of them their fill.” In particular, he objects to the “jolly sport” mingled with “sad hypocrisy” in his adversary’s frequent resorts to such exclamations as “Blessed be God, O Master Harding, Alas M.Harding”, with other such strange phrases and affected terms, “pinching nips, irksome cuts, scornful scoffs and spiteful mocks”. Unfortunately, this leads Harding himself to forget his original intention of meekness and to get his own back, not without satirical eloquence, in the form of this imaginary description of the Bishop of Salisbury in the pulpit. “Your sightly state and condition, your rhetorical persuasions in the pulpit with a holy holding up of the hands, and casting up of the eyes to heaven, and with your lamentable crying out of your Do’s, which you use very commonly, weening thereby to persuade the simple, your stout asseverations, your favour of the common people and others that clap you on the shoulder, your vain pulpit buzzing, your Gloria Patri at Paul’s Cross – all this hath made many a one believe that M.Jewel was a great clerk, a pillar of the Gospel, a peerless fellow.”

It is, above all, in his Confutation of Jewel’s Apology that Harding both rises to the height and plunges into the depth of his controversial eloquence. Now, in face of his adversary’s shameless muck-raking against the Roman Church, he can no longer wear his robe of majestic calm. He feels constrained to speak out in plain honest language against this “new divinity”, which he castigates as “a gross gospel, a carnal gospel, a belly gospel”. He is no longer content to deal with its exponents on the level of theological argument, but he emphasizes time and again what their innovations have brought about in practice. For one thing, they have merely fostered “such confusion of opinions and infinite variety of doctrines, as breedeth in the people a mere paganism, a heathenish looseness, and a very Epicurean atheism”. For another, they have provoked endless “trouble and broil” in almost all the lands of Christendom, “the smart thereof so keepeth it in fresh memory as I need not to rehearse, and as it were with a rough hand touch the wound that is yet raw”. He accuses the Protestants of having unscrupulously furthered their cause by tempting the greed of the German princes, “who foresaw their permission of your proceedings should fill their coffers”, of having attracted “so many malapert prentices, pleasant courtiers, discoursing parliament Machiavellists, and all other whatsoever flesh-worms, merchants, idle artificers to embrace your gospel”, and of having “torn the whole coat of Christ” with their division from the one Church and their multiplication into innumerable warring sects, which have long since appeared in Germany and are about to appear in England. “Such mighty Samsons, such constant Laurences,” he adds with sarcastic reference to the leading Puritan divines at Oxford, “your jolly Gospel breedeth. They lack but a multitude of companions that at their hiss would leap out of their shops and say, Thus we will have it and who saith nay?”

Reflecting on such harsh words, which I have admittedly taken out of their argumentative context and arranged together, if not quite so densely as Jewel, one can’t help feeling that, for all his eloquence, the author has allowed himself to get carried away by his fierce indignation. He seems to have so far forgotten his opening profession of mildness as to indulge in a mere game of tit for tat. Just as Jewel has raked up the muck of the Catholic past, so Harding is, it seems, doing the same with the Protestant present. So we feel tempted to consign both of them to the metaphorical muck-heap they have made for each other, or to a more merciful oblivion. But before we in turn go so far, we may do well to consider the differences in their respective positions and their resort to the language of abuse. Jewel is after all the challenger, and Harding the defender. Jewel is taunting him and abusing his Church, which is for him the whole of Christendom, whereas Harding is retorting with indignation from his place of exile and reminding him of the all too evident defects of the Protestant Reformation. In a sense, it is a descent to “tit for tat”, but Harding might truly plead that the first “tat” of provocation has been given by Jewel.

Then, in his reply to Jewel’s Defence, under the further title of A Detection, Harding himself comes to deal with these doubts. For Jewel prefaced his answer to the Confutation with another list of what he sarcastically terms “certain principal flowers of M.Harding’s modest speech”, and by presenting them out of context he has given his readers the impression that this is the main buttress of the other’s argument. Harding, therefore, devotes not a few pages of his reply to a justification of his seemingly intemperate language, maintaining that he is referring not so much to personalities as to objective realities. From the beginning, in his Answer to Jewel’s Challenge, he has (he says) “inclined unto more the soft and gentle way”, but in his Confutation he has been forced by the slanderous tone of the Apology to temper mildness with severity and vehemence, “being moved with due zeal and just grief of mind to see your ungodly dealings”. As for Jewel’s particular accusation against him of having resorted to “uncourteous and uncivil speech”, he protests as follows with rustic humour and eloquence. “Why, sir, if ye screech like frogs, must we say ye sing like nightingales? If ye crow like proud cocks, must we say ye mourn like simple doves? If ye bite us like mastiffs, must we say ye lick us like gentle spaniels? If ye consume us and devour us like ravening wolves, must we say ye profit us like good sheep? Must we tell the world that your serpents be fishes, your snakes be lampreys, your scorpions be crevices, briefly that your deadly poison is wholesome treacle? What were this but to please men, and to deceive God’s people?”

All the same, no less than his Anglican adversary, Harding is now beginning to tire of a controversy that has kept him busy for some five or six years – and to what avail? At the beginning of his Preface to the Detection he quotes the famous words of Ecclesiasticus, which may well serve as epigraph to the controversies of the Elizabethan age, “There is no end of making more books, and the often breaking of a man’s brain about such study is a great punishment to the body.” He then continues, “If any doubt hereof, let him set himself awork earnestly about writing in such sort as I speak of, and he shall say as I do, I doubt not. And therefore it behoveth them that give themselves to writing to have not only health but also good strength of body.” In fact, barely three years elapsed from the publication of these words than the author found himself, too, on his death-bed, doubtless worn out from his controversial labours. The final comment, however, on his lifework may be left to his young friend Richard Hopkins, who followed Harding’s advice in undertaking the English translation of Louis de Granada’s treatise Of Prayer and Meditation. In his Preface Hopkins recalls his words of fruitful advice, “Master Doctor Harding (a man for his great virtue, learning, wisdom, zeal and sincerity in writing against heresies, of very godly and famous memory) persuaded me to translate some of those Spanish books into our English tongue, affirming that more spiritual profit would undoubtedly ensue thereby to the gaining of Christian souls in our country from schism and heresy and from all sin and iniquity than by books that treat of controversies in religion, which (as experience hath now plainly tried) do nothing so well dispose the common people’s minds to the fear, love and service of almighty God as books treating of devotion and how to lead a virtuous life do.”

Bibliographical Note

1 An Answer to Master Jewel’s Challenge, by Doctor Harding. 1564 (RC 5)

2 A Confutation of a book entitled, An Apology of the Church of England, by Thomas Harding Doctor of Divinity. 1565 (RC 14)

3 A Rejoinder to M.Jewel’s Reply, by perusing whereof the discreet and diligent reader may easily see the Answer to part of his insolent challenge justified… By Thomas Harding Doctor of Divinity. 1566 (RC 8)

4 A Rejoinder to M.Jewel’s Reply against the Sacrifice of the Mass… By Thomas Harding Doctor of Divinity. 1567 (RC 9)

5 A Detection of Sundry Foul Errors, lies, slanders, corruptions and other false dealings, touching Doctrine and other matters, uttered and practised by M.Jewel in a book lately by him set forth entitled, A Defence of the Apology etc. By Thomas Harding Doctor of Divinity. 1568 (RC 16)