In May 1579, the parson of Bourton-on-Dunsmore, Richard Proude, nervously wrote a confidential letter to the most powerful man in England: William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Realizing that he was broaching the most sensitive of subjects, Proude reassured Cecil that he had kept the contents of the letter private: ‘I have written it none knowing of it, so you may burn it none seeing it.’Footnote 1 Putting on a brave face, Proude insisted that the letter, though admonitory, was written not only for Cecil's own benefit, but in order to ensure the well being of the entire English church. After all, the parson explained, he was only letting Cecil in on what was actually being spoken of him in the godly community: ‘me thinketh (wishing well to your goodness) I have committed no great fault, if any at all, but to let you to understand what is said of you, that I hear’. Proude's intent was to make plain an open secret, one that for more than twenty years had been spoken of in hushed tones and whispers, but was never publicly pronounced: Proude would admonish Cecil for his idolatrous attendance at mass during the reign of Queen Mary, and explain how the great councillor's failure to atone for this most egregious of transgressions had led him to allow the rebuilding of the Church of England on shaky foundations.
As Reformation historians have often observed, many Protestant theologians in the mid-sixteenth century agreed that attendance at the Roman Catholic mass was tantamount to the worst form of idolatry.Footnote 2 John Calvin even coined a pejorative term for Protestants who outwardly conformed, sarcastically calling them ‘Nicodemites’, after the biblical Pharisee Nicodemus, who would only visit Christ in secret.Footnote 3 Recent historians of Marian England have also noted that many of the major figures of the early Elizabethan state and church, when judged against the standards of advanced Reformed thought, were vulnerable to charges of Marian Nicodemism.Footnote 4 This included not only Queen Elizabeth, but also key members of her privy council, such as William Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, and Thomas Smith, and many of the leading members of her episcopate, including two who would become archbishop of Canterbury: Matthew Parker and John Whitgift. As Andrew Pettegree has remarked, ‘To a very large extent the Elizabethan settlement was a Nicodemite Reformation.’Footnote 5 The myth of Gloriana, which from the moment of its inception was built on the premise that Elizabeth was a providential Protestant monarch, contrasted sharply with the memory of Elizabeth the Nicodemite, who had fallen to attendance at the idolatrous mass rather than risk a martyr's death.
Therefore, it was imperative to the legitimacy of the state that this uncomfortable Marian history was sublimated and replaced with an official narrative that emphasized the martyrological tradition while upholding Elizabeth's accession as a moment of national atonement. And yet, as Diarmaid MacCulloch has observed, the Marian experience had lasting effects, and ‘cast a long shadow over the Elizabethan Church’.Footnote 6 Thomas Freeman, for example, has skilfully shown that the martyrologist John Foxe included some controversial details of Elizabeth's Marian imprisonment in the Acts and monuments, perhaps as a subtle critique of her religious policies.Footnote 7 In general, however, historians have not examined the ways in which memories of Marian conformity shaped the religious culture of Elizabethan England. Studies of puritanism, in particular, have invariably ignored the formative influence of this fraught history.Footnote 8
This article examines the ways in which the Marian experience, with its residual resentments and antagonisms, continued to inform many of the religious and political controversies of Elizabeth's reign. I argue that Elizabethan religious politics were shaped by lingering puritan distrust of those who had revealed a propensity for idolatry by conforming during the Marian persecution. Throughout Elizabeth's reign this vestigial anti-Nicodemism continued to serve as a central, yet often cryptic, component of puritan critique, driven by the Reformed belief that those with a history of idolatry should be reintegrated into the church through public repentance. Furthermore, because this mode of admonishment implicated many of the chief officers of the Elizabethan church and state, including the queen herself, it usually operated with a subtlety that could only be perceived by its target audience. In this manner, puritan polemicists could maintain a degree of discretion and plausible deniability, even as they intentionally discredited their conformist counterparts by alluding to their history of Marian idolatry. Finally, this article suggests a new framework through which to understand Elizabethan puritanism. For while there is no question that puritans pointed to the liturgical and ecclesiological failings of the English church when explaining how it was religiously deficient, it is also true that puritan understandings of why this was so often rested upon the painful yet enduring memory of Marian conformity.
I
Historians now recognize the role that anti-conformist thought played in the Marian persecution. As the work of Pettegree, M. A. Overell, and others have shown, the Protestant exile communities produced a barrage of works attacking those who conformed to Roman Catholic rites rather than accept martyrdom or exile.Footnote 9 However, these texts have primarily been understood as artefacts of the Marian persecution. What historians have not fully recognized is that while most of these anti-Nicodemite tracts were originally written in the 1550s, many of them did not appear in print until well into Elizabeth's reign, and then usually within the context of puritan controversies. The Elizabethan revival of these texts was not merely for posterity's sake, but rather was central to contemporary disputes. For instance, while Nicholas Ridley's A pituous lamentation of the miserable estate of the churche of Christ in Englande was written shortly before his execution at the stake in 1555, it was not published until the height of the Vestments Controversy in 1566.Footnote 10 The republication of Ridley's text may have been a crafty attempt to focus on Ridley's trenchant attacks on Marian Nicodemites, and thereby to diminish the memory of his defence of adiaphoric vestments during Edward's reign.Footnote 11 The same tactic was employed in Robert Crowley's A briefe discourse against the outwarde apparell and ministring garmentes of the popishe church, a work which Patrick Collinson dubbed ‘the earliest puritan manifesto’.Footnote 12 Crowley argued that the proponents of vestments were not to be trusted, because many of them had a history of unrepentant idolatry during Mary's reign:
We hope that all wise men do see, what mark the earnest solicitors of this matter do shoot at. They are not, neither were at any time Protestants: but when time would serve them, they were bloody persecutors, and since time failed them, they have borne back as much as lay in them.Footnote 13
Not only did these texts serve to associate the official church with a history of Nicodemism, but it also conflated conformist positions with the perpetrators of the Marian persecution.
It was within the context of the Cambridge divine Thomas Cartwright's dispute with John Whitgift in 1571 that Cartwright's former teacher, the deprived clergyman Thomas Lever, released a new edition of his anti-Nicodemite tract A treatise of the right way from danger of sinne & vengeance in this wicked world.Footnote 14 Originally written while Lever had been in exile in Geneva during Mary's reign, the book had circulated among the clandestine Protestant community in England.Footnote 15 Lever's initial intention was to admonish the vast majority of Marian Protestants who were dissimulating their beliefs, and in so doing move them to atone for their idolatry by either openly professing Christ and accepting martyrdom, or else fleeing into exile. In the 1571 edition, Lever explained that he republished the tract at the request of some in the godly community, who encouraged him to ‘put it to printing again, with some admonition meet for this time’.Footnote 16
Lever was shrewd enough to be ambiguous about whom he was admonishing, but there seems to be an implication of the queen and her officers:
I have written this Epistle or Preface, advertising and desiring all such as will read it, so to search the holy Scriptures, and their own consciences, that they may see and take occasions to pity and pray for themselves, for all men, and especially for the Queen's most excellent Majesty, and all those that be in authority under her, that we may live a peaceable and quiet life, with godliness and honesty.Footnote 17
While this in itself may seem to be a harmless and formulaic mention of the monarch and her state, when the virulent anti-Nicodemism of the text is considered then Lever's intent appears to be much more critical. He was particularly disdainful, for instance, of those who believed they could be in attendance at the idolatrous mass, but still maintain their Protestant beliefs inwardly. By ‘having good knowledge of God, and yet giving occasion of offence to the simple that lack knowledge’, Lever charged, ‘they deserve worse than a millstone to be tied about their neck, and to be drowned in the sea’.Footnote 18 It would not have been lost on readers that the target of his criticism, Protestants who had dissimulated their beliefs during the persecution, included the queen, the majority of her privy council, and many of the leading bishops of the Elizabethan church.
That Lever's indictment of Marian Nicodemites appeared while the puritan community was in a furore over John Whitgift's attempts to have Thomas Cartwright deprived, suggests that Whitgift was likely the chief target. Whitgift's own history of Marian conformity was suspect, he having remained at Cambridge rather than going into exile or openly professing his faith. This chequered past was all the more ripe for critique because of Whitgift's close association with the arch-turncoat Andrew Perne.Footnote 19 In puritan circles, Perne's name was synonymous with religious inconstancy, as Patrick Collinson has shown, largely because the Cambridge vice-chancellor had presided over both the desecration of the bones of the reformers Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius in 1556, and then at the reinterment of their remains in 1560.Footnote 20 This history appears to have also tainted Whitgift's credit among the godly. For while Perne was attacked with epithets such as Judas, Turner, and Father Palinode, Whitgift was derided as ‘Perne's boy’.Footnote 21
Even though Whitgift never publicly addressed the sensitive subject of his Marian conformity, his own understanding of the episode can be glimpsed in the first account of his life, written shortly after his death by his close friend and household officer, Sir George Paule.Footnote 22 The biography reveals that Whitgift understood his actions at Cambridge not as shameful Nicodemism, but as justifiable and expedient. As Paule tells it, Whitgift had every intention of fleeing into exile, but
D. Perne hearing of this purpose, talked with him, and found him resolute in his Religion, yielding (as D. Perne often acknowledged afterwards) many good and sound reasons therefore; whereupon the Doctor willed him to be silent, and not troublesome in uttering his opinion, whereby others might take occasion to call him in question: and he for his part, would wink at him, and so order the matter that he might continue his religion, and not travail out of the University; which accordingly, the good old man justly performed. For which his favour the Archbishop carried a loving, faithful, and true heart towards him, unto his dying day.Footnote 23
In Whitgift's version of events, Perne was to be remembered not as a time-serving persecutor, but as a benevolent protector of Protestants. This inextricable connection also explains why Whitgift took personal umbrage whenever Perne's reputation was attacked. Martin Marprelate recounts an episode in which Margaret Lawson, a woman well known in puritan circles for publicly admonishing bishops, was threatened with imprisonment by Whitgift when she broached the subject of Perne's Marian apostasy.Footnote 24 Not only did Whitgift feel obligated to protect the man who had once protected him, but their shared Marian history meant that Whitgift had to defend Perne's reputation if he wanted to defend his own.
At the height of the Admonition controversy, the puritan press directed by Thomas Cartwright published a satirical attack on the archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. While Parker had absented himself from the Marian church and gone into seclusion, he was still susceptible to charges that he had shirked away from the battle against the antichrist by neither publicly professing his faith, nor going into exile. The satire was in the form of a biography of the archbishop, and it ruthlessly compared his actions in Mary's days with those who had willingly accepted martyrdom:
for from the beginning of the reign of Queen Mary until the end thereof very many good men were burned. Not for murder, theft, whoredom, or any other crime, but only for their manifest constancy in the Religion of Christ and their open professing of the name of Christ against the Pope and all his confederates. Whose death very gloriously to their praise will be remembered together with the cruelty of that time off all posterity forever.Footnote 25
While the true professors of Christ had laid open their faith, thereby sacrificing themselves in the fight against the antichrist, Parker had been enjoying a quiet retirement in the countryside. Parker had
lurked secretly for those years wherein Queen Mary reigned, within the house of one of his friends leading a poor life without any man's aid or succour, and yet so well contented with his lot that in that pleasant rest and leisure of his study he would never in respect of himself have desired any other kind of life, the extreme fear of danger only excepted.Footnote 26
The contrast was obvious: while the martyrs burned, Parker had fiddled away in his study. It was only after Mary died that Parker ‘crept out of his lurking hole into the open sight of the world’, just in time to accept the archbishopric of Canterbury.Footnote 27
II
Defining puritanism, as John Coffey and Paul Lim have mischievously observed, has long been ‘a favourite parlour game of early modern historians’.Footnote 28 Playing this game, of course, is not the intention of this article. However, by recovering the godly community's collective memories of Marian conformity, we can fundamentally reassess some of the long-held assumptions about the rhetorical and political meanings that the term ‘puritan’ conveyed in Elizabethan England. Scholars have long known that in their first iterations ‘puritan’ and ‘precisian’ were terms of opprobrium, meant to draw a comparison to one of the heretical sects of the early church: the Novatians (or Cathari, as they called themselves).Footnote 29 In one of the earliest known usages, for example, John Bale criticized the Knoxian faction during the disputes of the Frankfort exile church by calling them ‘our new Catharites’.Footnote 30 While the historian M. M. Knappen recognized that ‘puritan’ was at first used as a reference to the Novatians, he thought this only had significance insofar as it reflected ‘the current practice of dubbing opponents heretics, and adherents of old worn-out heresies at that’.Footnote 31 Patrick Collinson argued that the term ‘puritan’ originated with Roman Catholic polemicists, who used it as a blanket term of abuse against all Protestants. But like Knappen, he thought it was only a vague allusion to ‘ancient perfectionist heresies’, and therefore a ‘convenient tar with which to brush the Elizabethan Protestant establishment’.Footnote 32 Of course, on one level this was true, and appears to have been increasingly so as the word's usage became popularized and detached from the moorings of its original meaning. However, scholars have underestimated the extent to which a reference to Novatianism or Catharism had very specific and nuanced connotations within evangelical discourse in mid-sixteenth-century England. This usage arose not only because the Novatians were recognized as generic separatists with perfectionist tendencies, but largely because they typified over-rigid anti-Nicodemism in the aftermath of persecution.
The Novatians were a sect that appeared during the third-century persecutions of Christians under the Roman Emperor Decius. During the persecution, Christians were forced either to renounce their faith and make public sacrifice to the state idols, or else face execution. Those Christians who recanted their faith or fled out of fear, were deemed lapsi, and considered to be idolatrous by those who had remained steadfast. The orthodox position, asserted by Cyprian, was that lapsi should be allowed to return to the church, provided that repentance was made. However, the theologian Novatian and his followers, who called themselves Cathari, refused to readmit the lapsi, arguing that acts of idolatry were unforgivable. It was over this issue that the Novatians separated from the orthodox church.Footnote 33
Throughout the reigns of Edward and Mary, leading English Protestants argued that the Novatians’ distinctive failing was their refusal to allow forgiveness. John Hooper, for example, saw the doctrine of the Novatians as ‘damnable and naught’, because they denied ‘mercy and remission of sin to sinners’.Footnote 34 While many anti-Nicodemite authors posited that falling into idolatry through attendance at mass was likely a sign that one was reprobate, others emphasized that the mysterious nature of divine providence meant that it was impossible to know whether a period of spiritual apostasy was merely a predestined prelude to an otherwise saintly life. The weak believer or even the adversarial persecutor, like Paul before he set off on the road to Damascus, may one day realize the errors of his ways upon receipt of God's grace. To assume otherwise would be to presume to know the mind of God. This was the chief argument made by the martyr Hugh Latimer, in one of his most influential sermons: ‘As concerning the sin against the Holy Ghost, we cannot judge aforehand, but after.’ We know, Latimer explained, that Judas, Nero, and Pharaoh were guilty, because they died obstinate in their sin. The infamous turncoat Francis Spira was also certainly reprobate, since he ultimately rejected the ‘admonition of the Holy Ghost, denied the word of God, and so finally died in desperation’. Latimer insisted, however, that there was always an available remedy for such transgressions: ‘Ask remission of sin in the name of Christ, and then I ascertain you that you sin not against the Holy Ghost.’Footnote 35 That even Spira, the most notorious of Nicodemites, could have been forgiven if he would have been truly repentant, only serves to underline Latimer's point that the purpose of the anti-Nicodemite message was to push the faltering soul towards reformation.Footnote 36
This is why the admonisher should always be cautious not to fall into the folly of the Novatians, who did not allow for the reintegration of the penitent. As Latimer explained,
Here I have occasion to speak against the Novatians, which deny remission of sins. Their opinion is, that he which cometh once to Christ, and hath received the Holy Ghost, and after that sinneth again, he shall never come to Christ again; his sins shall never be forgiven him: which opinion is most erroneous and wicked, yea, and clean against scripture. For if it should be so, there should nobody be saved.Footnote 37
This historical example became increasingly relevant in the 1550s, as some Protestants began to view Mary's heresy prosecutions as the new Decian persecution. Marian Protestants, for example, often translated and referenced the consolatory works of the third century bishop, Cyprian, who was himself martyred in the persecution.Footnote 38 This history was also well known from the writings of the church historian Eusebius, and during Elizabeth's reign it received detailed coverage in Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs’.Footnote 39
This historical allusion seems to have had particular influence on John Whitgift, who often castigated Thomas Cartwright and his followers as Novatians or Cathari.Footnote 40 Historians have often seen Whitgift's usage of the term as an acknowledgement of a puritan tendency towards separatism, and this certainly was one aspect of the usage. However, Whitgift's conceptualization of the puritans as the new Novatians was also tied into an understanding that both groups were characterized by an antipathy to those who had conformed during persecution. Whitgift made this comparison explicit in his Defence of the answer to the admonition:
For why will they not come to our sermons or to our churches? Why will they not communicate with us in our sacraments, not salute us in the streets, nay, spit in our faces, and openly revile us? Why have they their secret conventicles? You know all this to be true in a number of them. I know not why they should do so, except they think themselves to be contaminated by hearing us preach, or by coming to our churches, or by communicating otherwise with us: which if they do, it argueth that they persuade themselves not only of such an outward perfection, but of such an inward purity also, that they may as justly for the same be called Puritans, as the Novatians were. You know that the first occasion why Novatus did separate himself from the church was because he could not obtain the bishoprick of Rome, which he ambitiously desired. You know also that his pretence was because the bishops did receive those into the church which had fallen in the time of persecution.Footnote 41
By drawing this comparison, is it possible that Whitgift was alluding to the lingering puritan distrust of Protestants, like himself, who had conformed during Mary's reign?
This interpretation seems probable, particularly when we recognize that while Whitgift was writing the Defence of the answer he was also embroiled in a lengthy controversy at Trinity College, Cambridge, that centred on the same issue. The dispute began in January 1573, when one of Cartwright's colleagues, the brash puritan minister John Browning, preached a sermon at Great St. Mary's, in which he argued that Protestants who had attended the idolatrous mass could never be granted redemption, even if they had repented their apostasy. After the sermon, the college heads were in an uproar, and accused Browning of ‘tending to the favouring of the heresy of Novatus’, because he had denied ‘restitution and repentance to such as were fallen’.Footnote 42 Browning's sermon had expounded on Luke 9:62 (‘And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God’) in order to dispute the belief that it was ‘lawful to receive a massmonger repenting unto the church’. Such ‘as had so revolted from the truth’, Browning argued, could never be reintegrated into the faith, and therefore should not be ‘received as chief pillars or stayes of the church’.
To the chagrin of many in the pews, Browning specifically attacked ‘some particular man’ who ‘in the time of our Josias’ (King Edward's reign) did ‘renounce the works of darkness’, but then fell to attendance at mass during Mary's reign. However, Browning's most inflammatory statement, if the manicule scribbled into the margin of Cecil's copy of the charges is to be believed, was an argument that the man in question should be executed as an idolater: ‘taking the example of Josias (which as he said sacrificed all the Chymaryns), he said that if Josias were alive [the man] should be the first that should be sacrificed’.Footnote 43 Browning also ‘added to this effect, that he hoped that god would put the same mind unto the prince, or else stir up such a one as would follow Josias’ example’.Footnote 44 Not surprisingly, Whitgift and the other college heads, who were also denounced in the sermon, promptly suspended Browning from any further preaching until he was willing to retract his words. When Browning defied their ban and continued to preach openly on the topic, he was detained and imprisoned in the Tolbooth. Vice-Chancellor Thomas Byng (who had himself conformed during Mary's reign) then sent Browning off to be examined by the privy council, on the basis that the sermon ‘soundith to the touching of great matters’.Footnote 45 Cecil took the issue seriously, and had Browning examined directly by Sir Thomas Smith, who compelled him to recant the seditious and heretical nature of his sermon by declaring that he was no longer ‘in the opinion of Novatus’.Footnote 46
III
Despite such attempts to quash this line of critique, memories of Marian conformity continued to colour puritan assessments of the government's religious aims. It would feature prominently, for example, in a document that has largely escaped historical attention, and that we introduced at the beginning of this article: Richard Proude's 1579 admonition of William Cecil. Like Browning, Proude was no fringe separatist, but a well-respected member of the puritan community. His godly bona fides had been established for decades: a grizzled veteran of the Marian persecution, he had been a close friend of the martyr John Bradford, visiting him during his imprisonment in King's Bench and smuggling his correspondence to members of the Protestant underground.Footnote 47 Proude's escape from the Catholic authorities in Kent had even been memorialized in Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs’.Footnote 48 For much of Mary's reign, Proude had been a member of the exile congregation in Aarau, before returning to England early in Elizabeth's reign.Footnote 49 In 1560, he was ordained by Edmund Grindal, and eventually made parson of Bourton-on-Dunsmore. By 1573, Proude's refusal to wear the surplice set off a decade-long dispute with his churchwarden, who took umbrage at Proude's persistent nonconformity.Footnote 50 This history may partially explain why it has traditionally been assumed that Proude's admonishment of Cecil was over the issue of vestments, even though the subject is scarcely mentioned in the text.Footnote 51 This misreading began with the seventeenth-century historian John Strype, who appears to have intentionally misrepresented the letter. Strype even printed a purported transcription of the text, which historians have long relied on.Footnote 52 However, a comparison of Strype's transcription with the original manuscript reveals that he purposely censored the letter's contents by removing references to the anti-Nicodemite programme pursued by the secret London congregation in the early years of Elizabeth's reign.Footnote 53
Proude began his admonition by reminding Cecil that during Edward's reign he had been known as a leading proponent of the godly. Proude reminisces, ‘Your bringing up in true religion, things published by you to the comfort of the brethren, that hath bewrayed the smacking that ye have of the sight of sin and wrath of God against sin, hath made me ever to love and reverence god for you in my heart.’Footnote 54 These positive signs, Proude claims, had left him optimistic that Cecil would long continue in a state of godliness. However, these hopes were dashed during Mary's reign, when it was discovered that Cecil had betrayed God by attending mass: ‘But afterwards the report went, that ye did openly revolt from your religion and fell to go to idolatrous service: and so, by your dead doings therein, consented to all the blood of the prophets and martyrs that was shed unrighteously in Manasseh's days.’Footnote 55 Cecil's Marian Nicodemism, therefore, represented not only a personal failing, but was also a mark of complicity in the persecution of the godly.
In a passage that Strype censored, Proude explains that although Cecil should have made complete repentance for this idolatry, he instead chose to be obstinate in his sin. Proude writes:
And now in Josiah's days ye came not to God's persecuted church, that he builded, maintained, and defended from time to time, against the force of the wolf and the lion, which was not corrupted nor polluted with Idolatry; and wherein was the word of god purely preached, the sacraments godly ministered, and discipline without partiality executed, and hearty prayers to God was made for God's afflicted church (by the which I persuade myself, and for the suffering of the just of that church), that both ye and others now in great authority, and the whole land beside, fared the better.
Remarkably, it appears here that Proude does not mean ‘God's persecuted church’ in a figurative sense, but is specifically referring to one of the secret Protestant congregations that had existed in London during Mary's reign and early in Elizabeth's.
Scholars have long known that during Mary's reign there was a clandestine London congregation that had followed the Genevan service, while also asserting a strict discipline. Anyone who was known to have committed idolatry by attending mass was refused admittance, unless they were willing to make public repentance in front of the entire congregation.Footnote 56 Even though the evidence is scant, scholars have also known, mainly from an August 1559 letter from the returning exile Thomas Lever to the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger, that this secret church had continued into Elizabeth's reign.Footnote 57 In this letter, Lever reported to Bullinger that the secret London congregation had need to remain in existence because Elizabeth had ordered the mass to continue until a new religious settlement was put into effect by order of parliament.Footnote 58 This delay in abolishing the mass infuriated many of the godly, and so the secret congregation persisted, despite a royal proclamation forbidding all unlicensed preaching. Even those Protestants with more patience than Lever viewed this waiting period as a time of intense anxiety. One London vicar, for example, happily recorded Elizabeth's accession date in his diary, but then ruefully noted each month that the idolatrous service was allowed to continue: ‘December, Jan., Feb.: still Latin Church Service and Mass; yea and March and April, May, unto the 24 of June 1559’.Footnote 59
Although the secret church had no official sanction, Protestants began to flock to the congregation now that there was no longer any threat of prosecution. However, Lever explains that all those who had gone to mass were compelled to make public repentance for their idolatry. He writes, ‘no strangers were admitted, except such as were kept pure from popery and even from the imputation of any evil conduct; or who, ingenuously acknowledging their backsliding and public offence, humbly sought pardon and reconciliation in presence of the whole assembly’. For Lever this was the only way in which the Marian Nicodemite could be fully reconciled with the true church. He contrasted these eager penitents with those who shamelessly continued to tarry for the magistrate:
For while these things were taking place among private individuals, without the sanction of any public authority, behold, at the very same time masses were being celebrated with all the idolatrous superstition of popery among persons distinguished for their influence, their wealth, and their public offices, and this with the whole authority of law, proclamation, and practice.Footnote 60
Now, more than twenty years later, Proude was still blaming Cecil for not seeking repentance from this secret congregation. Proude writes:
Ye came not I say thither, as others did that were in your fault, as ye ought to have done (for god had not then no other church in this land but that, that was so commonly known) and then there to later show your sorrowful heart for your fault, confessing therein your open falls and sinning in idolatry.Footnote 61
While historians have long been aware that some Protestants at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign personally chose to make public repentance for their Marian idolatry, it has not been known that some expected all persons with a history of conformity to make public repentance before being reintegrated into the Church of England. Proude's letter reveals that the secret London congregation was functioning as a sort of spiritual half-way house for Nicodemites, where even councillors such as Cecil were expected to purify themselves before rejoining the officially sanctioned church. Proude explains that repentance for idolatry must be done publicly, because it is the only way to prove that the idolater has sincerely reformed, and not merely changed his faith for reasons of political expediency.
Furthermore, Cecil's failure to make proper repentance was not just a personal matter, but had directly led to the building of the Church of England on an unstable foundation:
it is said and reported, ye gave your consent to the building of God's house or church, that was not builded in all points so perfectly as the other that he himself had builded without any lawful or godly magistrate, and left in those days for an example, as I suppose, for you to have followed.
While Proude chose not to explicitly mention the queen's own history of conformity, this is implicit in his attack on Cecil's failure to provide honest counsel:
Also it [is] said, that you from time to time fearing to exasperate the prince and to make her worse in religion, hath spared your plainness, and hath not dealt with her so plainly from time to time as your knowledge hath required, both touching god's church, her own preservation, and the safety, [and] profit of the commonwealth, to the increase of God's gospel to us and our posterity for evermore.Footnote 62
This critique of Cecil's poor counsel also reminds us that Proude may not have been primarily concerned with Cecil, but may have been using him as a proxy to criticize the queen's own history of Marian Nicodemism.
IV
In his landmark work The Elizabethan puritan movement, the late Patrick Collinson argued that puritanism, as a politico-religious force, was borne largely in reaction to the ‘half-way religious settlement of 1559’. Drawing from a little-known admonition of Queen Elizabeth by the puritan William Fuller, Collinson used the phrase ‘but halfly reformed’ as an axiomatic encapsulation of the nature of puritan discontent with the policies of the Church of England.Footnote 63 This phrase has since become an oft-quoted short-hand for the nature of Reformed critique of the Elizabethan church.Footnote 64 This traditional reading of Fuller's admonition has in part stemmed from reliance on a version of the text that survived in the Seconde parte of a register, and was printed in an excerpted form by Albert Peel in 1915.Footnote 65 However, it has gone unnoticed that the original manuscript, the one presented by Fuller to the queen in 1585, has survived among William Cecil's papers at Hatfield House.Footnote 66 A close reading of this source reveals that Fuller's book was not only, as historians have usually described it, a generalized critique of the official church's policies. Rather, it was a specific attack on the queen's personal religious history as the root cause of England's malformed reformation. For Fuller, it was Elizabeth herself who was ‘but halfly reformed’.
In understanding Fuller's admonition, it must first be recognized that he was no fringe radical or social outlier, but had long been associated with many of the leading Protestant families of England. During Edward's reign he was a member of Queen Catherine Parr's household, and had even been an attendant of the Princess Elizabeth. He was friend to the privy councillors Sir Walter Mildmay and Sir Thomas Parry, and through marriage he was associated with the Dudley family.Footnote 67 His godly credentials were also impeccable. Along with John Knox, Christopher Goodman, Miles Coverdale, and Anthony Gilby, he had been an elder of the English congregations in Frankfort and Geneva during the Marian exile. While in Geneva, he was advised directly by John Calvin himself, who encouraged him to return to England and continue the drive for Reformation. Although this association with Geneva had hindered his prospects at court early in Elizabeth's reign, he quickly became one of the most prominent and active members of the London puritan community.Footnote 68 In 1562, Fuller appears as a communicant at the French Stranger church of London, itself a hotbed of Reformed thought.Footnote 69 When in 1574 the puritan Thomas Wood wrote to William Whittingham to complain about the recent arrest of those who had refused to subscribe to the prayer book, he noted sadly that ‘of which number our brother Mr Fuller is one’.Footnote 70 A letter from Thomas Wilcox to Anthony Gilby confirms that Fuller was imprisoned in the Counter for several months, before being eventually remitted to house arrest.Footnote 71
However, this nonconformist religious activity does not appear to have limited his lengthy career in government service. Working for the court of exchequer, Fuller viewed his service to the crown as being inextricably tied to his godly faith:
the almighty hath given me lii [fifty-two] years, to love his true religion, & hate the world's false belief & Idolatrous service. And moreover, at & since the suppression of Abbeys, faithfully to serve in my vocation (first under mine uncle, & after as an officer) your Majesty's dear father, brother, sister, & your highness, without enriching of my self thereby, or any of my kin and friends, & to do other things also, which care likewise not of the works of the flesh.Footnote 72
In 1570, he can be found as an auditor for the exchequer, working under the supervision of Sir Thomas Gresham to survey the possessions formerly held by Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset.Footnote 73 Fuller's 1574 imprisonment for religious nonconformity appears to have had little effect on his standing with the government, as he can again be found reporting directly to Cecil on the business of the exchequer in 1582.Footnote 74
Embracing the role of financial adviser to the crown, Fuller used this as his entrée to the court. As Fuller reported in his book, he first gained an audience with the queen in 1579, on the pretext that he wanted to present his thoughts on various acts of parliament, ‘by force of which much land & revenue, and many sums of money, were unrighteously had from your Majesty’.Footnote 75 This first meeting initially went well, as the queen remembered Fuller from her Hatfield days, and was also pleased by his financial advice. However, Fuller then asked if he could also present his thoughts on religious matters. She told him to summarize his opinions into ‘brief notes’, and then present them at a later date. But Fuller, afraid that ‘I should speak too late of God's chief matters, if I should tarry’, and ‘fearing also God's wrath’ if he would remain silent, did not depart until he delivered a short written admonition that he had already prepared.Footnote 76
Not surprisingly, Fuller got a chilly reception when he returned to court to further discuss his religious views. He describes his encounter with an unnamed privy councillor:
And after I had made ready those brief notes, I sued again to his honour to help me to your Majesty's speech. At length…his honour told me plainly, that he could not so do, & said, that that which I had written did trouble them all, & was enough, to put your Majesty in despair. And when I demanded this: hath her Majesty showed my writings? His honour made me no answer, but turned to talk with another.Footnote 77
Realizing that the queen had no intention of ever hearing his full admonition, Fuller departed from the court. While he was content that he had done his own godly duty, he was horrified at the perils that would undoubtedly beset the nation due to the queen's obstinacy. He had no doubt that ‘your Majesty's refusing of my said godly offer would greatly kindle God's wrath, & hasten his plagues, as have plainly appeared since, by his manifest threats, of his terrible strokes, already prepared: which assuredly will light upon us, without repentance & amendment’.Footnote 78 An apocalyptic turn was unavoidable, because there was ‘no likelihood that any of them that should, will hazard to tell your Majesty plainly, what be the causes thereof, & the remedies for the same’.
Seven years later, as Fuller's health began to decline, he decided he would make one last-ditch effort to admonish the queen. He would get the chance on 2 July 1585. Obtaining an audience with the queen's maid of honour, Elizabeth Leighton, Fuller asked for leave to deliver a ‘book’ to the queen.Footnote 79 When the queen approved, Fuller returned the same night with the book in hand, and the queen was reported to have read it the next morning. In the book, Fuller reminded the queen that he had been one of her servants at Hatfield during her brother Edward's reign, and recalled her reputation for godly learning. He had even attended her at the beginning of Mary's reign, and ‘did wait on your highness in all your heavy journeys, made from the time of the decease, of your highness’ said brother, till you met your Majesty's said sister, at Havering, and so rode with her, to the Tower’. Once Elizabeth was imprisoned, Fuller fled into exile to the continent, where he split his time between Frankfort and Geneva. When he first went into exile, he had been optimistic for England's future, but then word began to spread among the exiles that Elizabeth had conformed to Roman Catholic rites:
from Hatfield House, I was advertised, by godly friends, that had woeful hearts: First, that your Majesty went, to the Antichristian Abomination, and travailed to bring all your family also thereunto. And Secondly: afterwards, that your Majesty in process of time was so marvellously altered, in mind, manners, and many things, that there was no hope of any such reformation (when your Majesty should come to the Crown) as was before hoped for.Footnote 80
By yielding to the mass at a time when the godly were being martyred or driven into exile, the queen had committed the gravest of atrocities. She had worshipped ‘a false god of bread’, which was ‘the most deceitful and hurtful Idol & Idolatry’, and was therefore guilty of the sin that was ‘most injurious to God, & abominable in his sight, that ever was’. Despite this antichristian conformity, God had shown himself to be doubly merciful by both allowing Elizabeth's life to be spared, and then by placing her on the throne. Fuller explains,
In this our time, (after great and sharp persecution, for that Idol and Idolatry) our gracious God in great mercy towards your Majesty & his whole Church, preserved your life, (that were unworthy, by reason of your yielding to that Idolatry) and set you up, upon this mighty Imperial seat.Footnote 81
However, these gifts from God had come with very specific conditions. In particular, Elizabeth should have immediately made public repentance:
For where your Majesty, in the beginning of your Reign, when our good God, had delivered you out of the Antichrist's bondage, and put the whole power here, into your own hands: And when your Majesty and your states & people, should have performed the first step, for a godly repenting Queen, and right Christian rulers and people, that is, in general assemblies, have confessed, and bewailed, the yielding to Idolatry, and other public abominations and sins of the former wicked persecuting time, and have prayed for pardon and remission, and for greater grace and strength thenceforth.Footnote 82
Furthermore, this public repentance should have been followed by an open vow never again to fall into such idolatry, and the mass should have been immediately abolished from the realm. But, Fuller asks rhetorically, ‘What was done, O gracious sovereign, instead of that holy and first dutiful step? What?’ Eschewing repentance, the queen did ‘that which of all things, was most abominable before God, and most grievous and offensive to godly hearts and reformed Churches, and most pleasant and acceptable, to all Antichristians and Neuters’. For Fuller, this ‘most horrible thing, was your majesty yielding to be crowned and anointed at a most monstrous and Idolatrous Mass, and by Antichristian Bishops, instead of God's holy prophets’.Footnote 83 Therefore, Elizabeth's coronation was no occasion for celebration, but marked a moment of egregious backsliding, in which Elizabeth had shirked her agreement with the Lord, and returned yet again to idolatry.
Echoing Richard Proude's admonition of Cecil, Fuller also complained that Elizabeth had allowed the mass to continue in England, even after her coronation. This was further confirmation that the queen was obstinate in her idolatry:
that your Majesty was crowned, so as is aforesaid, and had still the antichristian Abomination, and had, and did still, many other grievous things, yet did tolerate the secret reformed Churches, in London etc.: My first good hope, and great rejoicing was quite quenched and extinguished, and was turned into so great heaviness, mourning, and lamentations, for the great evils, which I was sure must needs come from the same.Footnote 84
It was this failure to expiate the sin of idolatry through public repentance, along with her continued preference for ‘Antichristians and Neuters’ over the godly, that caused her to become increasingly cold towards true religion: ‘That but halfly, by your Majesty, hath God been honoured, his Church reformed and established, his people taught and comforted, his enemies rejected and subdued, and his lawbreakers punished.’Footnote 85
Emphasizing the importance of this message to England's future, Fuller threatened to publicize his arguments if the queen would not heed his admonition and allow him to provide her directly with godly counsel:
I dare not, before God, but offer my humble, Christian, and dutiful service, and to declare, what horrible destruction I so threatened, and what present and durable remedies I see for the same. Which, if your Majesty should refuse to hear in secret, (as God forbid), then, I fear, I shall be enforced (for discharge of my conscience and duty, to God, and your Majesty, and to his Church, and my country) to utter the same, otherwise than I fain would, though it be never so perilous.Footnote 86
The queen made no comment as she read the book, but William Cecil was said to have stood by horrified as he realized Fuller's purpose. As Fuller described the scene, ‘thereupon my Lord Treasurer [William Cecil] coming to her Highness, she told him of it, and it lying in a chair, as he went out he took it with him’. When the queen returned to find that the book had been hidden from her, she was not happy: ‘then her Majesty coming to the chair, asked the Lady [Leighton] for the book, and she answering that my Lord took it, her Majesty willed her to call for it and said, I will have it again, but the Lady durst never ask it’.Footnote 87 Shortly after this encounter, Fuller received word that the queen planned on sending a representative to discuss the book's contents. He sent a reply through Lady Leighton, stating that these matters were not fit to be disclosed to ‘a second person’. Rather, Fuller requested that he be granted a secret meeting with the queen, so that he could ‘explain which way Your Highness may yet, if it please you, greatly decrease and keep under the kingdom and power of Antichrist’.Footnote 88 If a private audience could not be arranged, Fuller hoped that at least he could meet instead with some privy councillors of his choosing. While there is no evidence that this meeting ever occurred, this letter does show that the government felt that Fuller's charges, and in particular his threat to publicize them, had to be managed carefully.
V
While there was a Protestant consensus that Mary's reign had been a period of wanton idolatry and persecution, the durability of the anti-Nicodemite message suggests there was still profound disagreement over the extent to which this past had been resolved. As Elizabeth's reign progressed, puritan dissatisfaction with her religious programme seemed to confirm what some had feared all along: the English church had been built on unstable foundations. My intent here is not to deny that many English Protestants sincerely viewed Elizabeth's accession as a moment of providential deliverance from the Marian persecution. Rather, I want to suggest that as much as this official narrative was about remembering the past, it may have also been meant to obfuscate an uncomfortable history of conformity that some wished to be forgotten. As Andy Wood has recently argued, ‘the formation of official historical memories might involve the erasure of certain key events or the sanctioning of a forgetting process, producing a kind of conceptual haze in which difficult memories are elided or shadowed by dominant social forces’.Footnote 89 In contrast to the prevailing narrative of Elizabethan triumphalism, therefore, the admonitions penned by godly critics such as Fuller and Proude were representative of a puritan collective memory that maintained a very different understanding of the Marian past.
Recognition of this disjunction also suggests that some points of puritan contention may have been proxies for underlying divisions and anxieties that, for various reasons, were not appropriate to broach publicly. For example, while a controversial object such as the queen's chapel crucifix could be excused by royal apologists as a trivial keepsake, it could also assume a more ominous valence to those who remembered Elizabeth's unrepented history of Marian conformity. Those rare moments when the official history was called into question are also telling. Burghley's awkward attempt to keep Fuller's book hidden from the queen, for example, not only shows the lengths that some in the government were willing to go to preserve this collective pretence, but it also reveals the perceived fragility of this facade. While Elizabeth's reign undoubtedly heralded a political and religious sea change, it must also be recognized that the crisis of conformity that had been wrenching apart the English Protestant community during Mary's reign did not simply vanish on 17 November 1558, but continued to shape the political and religious culture of early modern England.
