Читать книгу Elizabethan Controversialists - Peter Milward - Страница 7

A main objection raised by the Catholic apologists to Jewel’s Challenge was that in his enumeration of 27 articles he had deliberately avoided the principal points in controversy and had aimed at throwing them mere bones to gnaw upon, lesser points, as Harding had protested, “concerning order rather than doctrine”. Jewel’s subsequent Apology afforded them larger scope for reply, but it, too, shirked the fundamental issue of the English Reformation, which wasn’t so much theological as political. In his Confutation of Jewel’s Apology, to be sure, Harding raised the issue more than once, as when he demanded of the Anglican bishop, “By what authority do you usurp the administration of doctrine and the sacraments?” and, more generally, “With what authority may one realm undo the custom of the whole Church?” But he failed to develop the point, beyond calling the Church of England as by law established a “parliament religion, parliament gospel, parliament faith”.

It was, however, Jewel’s colleague on the Episcopal bench, Robert Horne of Winchester, who ventured to raise the issue a few years later in 1566. The occasion was a manuscript declaration of “scruples and stays of conscience touching the Oath of Supremacy” which the former Abbot of Westminster, John Feckenham, had drawn up during his imprisonment while under house arrest at the other’s palace at Waltham. This document Horne now used as a convenient means of defending the Anglican position on the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, while attacking the Catholic opposition, under the guise of an Answer.

In the following year a Catholic rejoinder was published at Louvain from the pen not of Harding, who was then preoccupied with his controversy against Jewel, but of a younger scholar, Thomas Stapleton. Like many of his fellow Lovanists, Stapleton had been educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, and was already engaged with them in a corporate task of refuting the whole Anglican position. From the beginning his share in the task had been the modest one of translating from Latin certain writings that seemed to have a bearing on the main issue. One was The Apology of Fredericus Staphylus, an eminent convert to the Catholic cause from Lutheranism, who devoted much of his book to an exposition of the radical excesses of the German reformers. Another was Bede’s History of the Church of England, as bearing witness to the substantial agreement between the English Church of that time (six centuries after Christ) and the contemporary Catholic Church. Together with his translation of Bede Stapleton published a treatise of his own entitled A Fortress of the Faith, showing how “in all points of doctrine, of ceremonies and of ecclesiastical government mentioned and by occasion reported in this History… our first faith agreeth and concurreth with the faith of the first six hundred years and the primitive Church”. But now, he complains, “a new faith is pretended, a new gospel is preached, a new religion is commended and commanded”. These writings of his were all published in the same year 1565, and from them he went on to take a more active part in the hue and cry against Jewel, with his Return of Untruths published in the following year. Following his adversary’s example in enumerating 255 untruths in Harding’s Answer, Stapleton produced no fewer than 562 untruths in two articles alone of Jewel’s Reply.

Now, however, his attention was diverted from Jewel, who was already under fire from other Lovanists, to the publication of Horne’s Answer to Feckenham. Considering that Feckenham, like Cole before him, was in no position to defend himself, and having received various “instructions” from friends in England to this purpose, Stapleton undertook his defence, and he entitled his work, with a play on his adversary’s name, A Counterblast to M.Horne’s Vain Blast. Already in his Preface to Horne, he emphasizes the fundamental nature of this controversy, which has the same effect of sharpening his style as Jewel’s Apology had on that of Harding. “The matter you have taken in hand to prove,” he tells Horne, “is of such and so great importance as no matter more now in controversy. It is the castle of your profession, the key of your doctrine, the principal fort of all your religion. It is the pillar of your authority, the fountain of your jurisdiction, the anchorhold of all your proceedings. Without right of this supreme government by you here defended, your cause is betrayed, your doctrine dissolveth, your whole religion goeth to wrack.” Coming as he does from Jewel to Horne, Stapleton resorts to the same method of enumerating his adversary’s untruths, which, he announces “amount to the number of six hundred four-score and odd. They be so notorious and so many, that it pitieth me in your behalf to remember them. But the places be evident and cry corruption and may by no shift be denied.” As for his method, he has thought it good, he confesses, “in a matter of such importance to be rather tedious, to make all perfect, than short and compendious, to leave aught imperfect.” Finally, turning from his Protestant adversary to his possibly uncommitted reader, he makes this urgent appeal into which he concentrates the substance of his book. “Now, good reader, as thou tenderest thy own salvation, and hopest to be a saved soul in the joyful and everlasting bliss of heaven, to consider and weigh well with thyself the importance of this matter in hand. First, religion without authority is no religion. For no true religion (saith Augustine) can by any means be received without some weighty force of authority. Then if this religion whereby thou hopest to be saved have no authority to ground itself upon, what hope of salvation, remaining in this religion, canst thou conceive? If it have any authority, it hath the authority of the prince, by whose supreme government it is enacted, erected and forced upon thee. Other authority it hath none. If then that supreme government be not due to the lay prince, but to the spiritual magistrate, and to the one chief magistrate among the whole spirituality, thou seest thy religion is but a bare name of religion, and no religion in deed.”

In keeping with his challenging title, Stapleton maintains the language of knightly combat throughout his volume. Taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Horne, he boldly defies him, declaring, “In all this book there is not as much as one word of Scripture, one doctor, one council general or provincial, not the practice of any one country throughout the world counted Catholic, that maketh for such kind of regiment as M.Horne avoucheth.” Even before coming to deal with the main issue, the Oath of Supremacy, he sees it implied in his adversary’s title, which Feckenham was over-ready to grant him for courtesy’s sake, “Bishop of Winchester”. For indeed, he affirms, “ye are but an usurper and an intruder, as called thereto by no lawful and ordinary vocation nor canonical consecration.” From this he goes on to complain, with not a little of Harding’s eloquence, that the faith of Englishmen should be made to depend, as now it does, on the proceedings of a lay parliament. “O poor and silly help, O miserable shift, that our faith should hang upon an act of parliament, contrary as well to all acts of parliament ever holden in England before as to the canons and fathers of the Catholic Church. A strange and wonderful matter to hear in a Christian commonwealth, that matters of faith are parliament cases, that civil and profane matters be converted into holy and ecclesiastical matters, yea, and what worse is, that laymen that are of the fold only, not shepherds at all, and therefore bound to learn of their Catholic bishops and pastors, may alter the whole Catholic religion, maugre the heads of all the bishops and the whole convocation. This is to trouble all things. This is, as it were, to confound together heaven and earth.”

In reply to Horne’s accusation of treason against the Catholics, Stapleton insists that their refusal to take the Oath is “only for conscience’ sake, grounded upon the canons and laws of the holy Church and the continual practice of all Christian and Catholic realms, finally upon holy Scripture, namely that saying of St.Peter, Oportet obedire Deo, magis quam hominibus. God must be obeyed more than men.” All they desire of the Queen, he adds, is “to be borne withal, if we cannot upon the sudden, and without sure and substantial grounds, abandon that faith that we were baptized in and (as we are assured) all our ancestors”. Then, turning from defence to attack, he points out that, so far from the Catholics being traitors to their sovereign, it is the Protestants who have always shown themselves both in theory and in practice addicted to treason, whenever it is to their advantage. He recalls how much trouble was stirred up by them in Queen Mary’s time, though now these traitors have been canonized by John Foxe in that “devilish dirty dunghill” of his Book of Martyrs. He relates similar troubles caused by them in Germany, France and the Low Countries, and he adds his own eye-witness account of their recent turbulent behaviour in Antwerp. Referring to these “outrageous enormities”, he exclaims, “what tongue can express, what pen can decipher sufficiently the extremity thereof?” One night, in particular, has seared itself on his memory, when “the zealous brotherhood followed the chase, that they left not one church in Antwerp, great or small, where they hunted not up good game and carried away flesh good store. Chalices, patens, cruets of gold and silver, copes and vestments of silk and of velvet, fine linen and coarse, none came amiss…. To describe particularly the horrible and outrageous sacrileges of that night, an eternal document of the gospel-like zeal of this sacred brotherhood, would require a full treatise of itself.” Not that the new religion in England enjoys the full support of the Protestants, seeing that “not only the Catholics, but the very patriarchs of the new evangelical brotherhood”, including both Luther and Calvin, reject and condemn it. By them it is only supported for the time being, as a convenient means of displacing the Catholics, but the time will surely come when they will rise against what one of their leaders, John Knox, has rejected as “the monstrous regiment” of women.

Finally, with regard to the Oath itself, Stapleton emphasizes that, whereas a man might be persuaded for worldly reasons to take it, “Yet to declare the same in conscience no man can possibly… without manifest perjury, except his conscience be persuaded thereto.” “Now to persuade the conscience,” he continues, “requireth either a sudden revelation or miraculous inspiration from God… or else a tract of time to be instructed, informed and taught that which we never learned before.” Such an oath, he insists, “though a thousand acts of parliament should command it,” is not only unreasonable but forces Englishmen to incur “the horrible crime of perjury, and that of double perjury, which God will never suffer unrevenged without hearty repentance.” This decree was, moreover, passed by a lay parliament which did “utterly disobey the doctrine of all their bishops and enact a new contrary to theirs”. It gave a totally unprecedented permission to the secular prince to “alter our religion, set up a new, stop the shepherds’ mouths, play the shepherd himself”. Such indeed is the absurdity of this Oath that it makes all Englishmen “strangers from the whole body of Christendom beside, as though we had a proper Christ, a proper Gospel, and looked for a proper heaven, in which the other christened nations should find no place”.

Such were the principal arguments of Stapleton against Horne on this substantial point of difference between the Catholic exiles and the Protestant party in England. Yet, whereas Jewel had immediately responded to Harding, Horne remained strangely silent in the face of his opponent’s criticism. There was some talk that the newly appointed Dean of St.Paul’s, Alexander Nowell, who had just emerged from a minor controversy with another Lovanist, Thomas Dorman, might undertake the major task of refuting Stapleton, but nothing came from his pen. It was not till 1573 that John Bridges, later Dean of Salisbury and Bishop of Oxford, published a combined refutation of the English Counterblast and Sanders’ more formidable Latin De Visibili Monarchia Ecclesiae under the title of The Supremacy of Christian Princes.

In his dedication to Queen Elizabeth Bridges reaffirms the importance of the controversy, but he strangely exaggerates the number of books it has provoked. “There is no controversy,” he declares, “at this day betwixt us and the enemies of the Gospel more impugned than this one of the Supremacy, nor more books compiled, more libels scattered, more vaunts made of truth on their party, more slanders devised of our doctrine and your Majesty’s title, more secret conspiracies and open treasons against your royal person and state of the realm, than our adversaries make only for this Supremacy.” In fact, Stapleton’s book had been the first to take up the matter at any length, in sole response to Horne’s challenge, and since then it had been followed up only by the more influential and sensational Latin treatise of Sanders in 1571. Anyhow Bridges finds himself faced with the task of explaining “the reasons why this answer came forth no sooner”. He was merely waiting, he pleads, first for Horne, then for Nowell, to come forth with their answers. Why they failed to do so, he has never inquired of them but merely assumed that they must have considered the book “not worth the answering at all (as in very deed, to the learned marker, it is not)”. After all, he adds, who is this Stapleton but “a lusty younker” and “a very unfit match for so grave a bishop” with his “scold’s and scorner’s rhetoric”? Now, however, considering that many have misconstrued their silence, Bridges has taken up his pen on their behalf not only against Stapleton’s book but also against the more recent and weighty Latin treatise of Sanders.

As Stapleton did with the name of Horne, so Bridges takes the title of Stapleton’s book and plays with it at some length. Terming it “a very blast blown out to encounter the grave and pithy answers” of Horne, he professes to have gathered together “all those blasts wherewith his Counterblast is puffed up, and have sorted them in several winds and blasts”, for their more effective refutation. In it he has, he declares, found nothing but “vain words and a vain title of a vain book… proceeding of a vain head”. Yet for all the abundance of his word-play and the heaviness of his humour, Bridges comes at length to the point of the Anglican position when he tells his adversary, “As ye detract your duty from your prince, so ye ascribe a great deal too much to your pope.” He denies that “all articles or any article of faith depends on the prince’s government, but the prince’s government depends on them, to oversee them dutifully set forth.” Rather, he maintains, so far from the prince claiming any absolute supreme government, “it is your pope only that taketh this absolute supremacy on him, and you that give it him.” He is therefore unable to see any difficulty or danger of perjury in taking the Oath of Supremacy, which is rather the clear duty of any Christian subject. As for the misdeeds with which Stapleton has charged the Protestants, he protests that “we shall have all laid in our dish, nought shall be left behind concealed that any Protestants unadvisedly ever did or spake”. Rather, when it comes to muck-raking, he can give his opponent many similar tales of Papist misdeeds, but of such mutual abuse there is no end.

So this particular controversy came to an end. Neither Stapleton nor Sanders attempted to answer Bridges. Their minds were preoccupied with other matters during the new decade. A new situation had arisen with Allen’s founding of his seminary or English College at Douai in 1568, and then the rising of the Northern Earls in 1569. Stapleton himself was one of Allen’s first assistants in his enterprise, and was soon busy lecturing in divinity at the University of Douai. From now on all his published writings were in Latin. As for Sanders, his zeal for the Catholic cause in England led him in an increasingly political direction, till he came to be regarded by the English government as the arch-traitor. On the Anglican side, Horne never again took up his pen in controversy but was tireless in taking practical action against the Papists in his diocese. As for Bridges, he turned his controversial pen from the Catholics to the Puritans in his celebrated Defence of the Government Established in 1587 – celebrated not so much for its arguments as for its length, which drew upon its author the merciless ridicule of Martin Marprelate – as remains to be seen in detail.

Bibliographical Note

1 An Answer made by Rob.Bishop of Winchester, to a book entitled The Declaration of such Scruples and Stays of Conscience concerning the Oath of Supremacy as M.John Feckenham by writing did deliver unto the L.Bishop of Winchester, with his resolutions made thereunto. 1566 (RC 38)

2 A Counterblast to M.Horne’s Vain Blast against M.Feckenham, touching the Oath of Supremacy… By Thomas Stapleton Student in Divinity. 1567 (RC 39)

3 The Supremacy of Christian Princes, over all persons throughout their dominions, in all causes so well ecclesiastical as temporal, both against the Counterblast of Thomas Stapleton, replying on the reverend father in Christ, Robert Bishop of Winchester, and also against Nicholas Sanders his Visible Monarchy of the Roman Church, touching this controversy of the Prince’s Supremacy. Answered by John Bridges. 1573 (RC 40)