How to Solve a Problem like Augustine

Since the eighth century Bede’s Ecclesiastical History had informed its audiences that in 596 Augustine had landed on these shores, converted the king, established himself at Canterbury, before preaching to the people and ultimately founding an English Church. Until the Reformation it had been a given that, despite some earlier, largely aborted attempts, the Church proper had arrived with the ‘Apostle of England’. Bede reproduced his epitaph which declared that the Saint had guided Ethelbert and his people ‘from the worship of idols to the faith of Christ’.Footnote 8 Few people prior to the sixteenth century would have found much to grumble about in Bede’s account; however, as events unfolded it transpired that it contained a good deal that would prick at Reformed sensibilities. For one thing the author unambiguously states that these early missionaries were plenipotentiaries from Rome. Their mission had been instigated and directed by no less a figure than Pope Gregory the Great. If this was true then the obvious inference was that Ecclesia Anglicana was a Roman foundation and therefore owed a filial obligation to the mother Church. In addition to this discomforting notion a number of the Apostle’s activities were not designed to endear him to the Reformed soul. Augustine processed into Canterbury behind a crucifix, he founded a monastery, and he appears to have pursued the life of a cenobite; particularly inconvenient in Henrician England. Elizabeth I was not slow to identify the problem. Soon after Matthew Parker’s consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury he ran to the Queen with a letter from Calvin which suggested a union of their Churches. On the potentially divisive issue of bishops her rather tart reply leapfrogs the inconvenient Augustine. The Queen’s Council informed Calvin that they:

James Calfhill was an Oxford academic and main player on the side of the radicals in the 1565 vestiarian controversy. Writing in the same year he is clearly unimpressed with Bede’s version of events. He pointed out to the Catholic John Martial that Christianity had been firmly established well before this time with seven bishops and archbishops. Calfhill provides his own summary of events, ‘But Augustin, when he came, in place of idolatry planted superstition: and where Religion was sincerely taught, he laboured what he could, of a certain ambitious proud heart, to prevent it.’Footnote 10

In spite of this, Calfhill seems reluctant to completely relinquish claims to Augustine. After his initial outburst the author strikes a certain conciliatory note excusing Augustine’s more Roman attributes – he claims that while he came with cross (the figure was apparently merely painted), the papists now have a crucifix; besides he had the excuse that he was among pagans. Augustine’s strategy was ‘politically devised somewhat, wherewithal first he might feed their eyes, that afterward lending him their ears’. The early English Church had a wholesome liturgy and he is perplexed that the Roman church of this day does not content themselves with it. Calfhill adds, ‘He came not with Ora pro nobis: he made no intercession to Saints for us; but only sung this sweet litany.’Footnote 11

Of all of Augustine’s traducers John Bale, who earned himself the sobriquet ‘Bilious Bale’ in his lifetime, was prepared to go further than most. He derided the missionaries’ procession with their banner, painted crucifix and Latin chants: ‘Well might this be called a new Christianity, for neither was it known of Christ nor of his Apostles, nor yet ever seen in England afore. It came altogether from the dust heap of their monkery.’Footnote 12 Beside the whole enterprise had been sparked by the abominable sin of pederasty. Here Bale rehearses the famous story of Gregory coming across young Anglo-Saxon slaves in the market of Rome. He tells us that when the Pope had seen these fair-skinned beautiful boys on sale in the market he had been attracted to them and had enquired about their country of origin. Bale could hardly be more contemptuous, ‘Mark this ghastly mystery, for the prelates had than no wives … so other spiritual remedies were sought out for them.’ That is, traders procured boys for the higher clergy. Bale points out to his readers with supreme irony, ‘Yet have this bishop been of all writers reckoned the best since his time.’Footnote 13 As for Augustine, it was his task to prepare the seat for the Antichrist who was to arrive on his throne, rather predictably, in the year 666 when Boniface III attained to the bishopric of Rome.Footnote 14

Other writers are perhaps less apocalyptic but are just as unforgiving; the great luminary of English Church apologetics John Jewel, described Augustine as cruel, disdainful, proud, arrogant, ‘and in no way meet to be called an apostle’.Footnote 15 Jewel is referring to two incidents as described by Bede in which first Augustine refused to stand before a delegation of English bishops and secondly appears to prophesize the massacre of the thousand Bangor monks. It is important to note that the chronicler neither castigates him for the former nor implicates him in the latter; nevertheless many of the Reformed English commentators are reluctant to be so charitable. In 1580 the Cambridge radical William Fulke was incredulous that Augustine had the power to prophesize; instead he accuses him of procuring the massacre himself.Footnote 16 Elsewhere Fulke is unpersuaded by the famous Roman Catholic apologist, Thomas Stapleton who had argued that the miracles that accompanied the first mission were certain indication that they had enjoyed divine sanction. In true Reformed fashion Fulke is unimpressed with tales of the miraculous, stating plainly that he preferred the Word of God that ‘needeth no other confirmation’.

Nor is he persuaded by Stapleton’s second argument which he calls ‘Gamaliel’s reason’. That is, if the Church of Augustine has survived for so long then this is testimony to its veracity. Fulke scathingly retorts, ‘This reason of Gamaliel would prove Mahomete’s enterprise to be of God, because it hath likewise continued 900 years.’Footnote 18

In the next century the staunch Presbyterian, Nathaniel Bacon, juxtaposed the faith of the early Britons with the fabulous deeds of their would-be apostle. Augustine, perceiving that they were stronger in their faith than he in his miracles, urged the Saxons to violence against them: ‘What the Ephod could not, the sword wrapt up therein should.’Footnote 19 Bacon is representative of an interesting trend in the seventeenth century with regard to the Saxons. Just as the English political world was experiencing a Gothic revival which traced their superior systems to their Germanic ancestors, the ecclesiastical world moved in a contrary direction. Here the Britons represented a simple, uncorrupted Church that was at the mercy of their less godly minded neighbours.Footnote 20 In Bacon’s work the Saxons were clearly accomplices to the crime of surrendering sovereignty and he called it a ‘masterpiece’ that Augustine managed to retain their hearts for Rome. ‘Thus at one draught they drank up a potion of the whole Hierarchy of Rome from the Pope to the Apparator … which was of a lasting efficacy, that it ceaseth not to work to this day, although it was slow in the first operation.’Footnote 21 The genius of Augustine was that he recognized that Saxon principles would not suffer them to be ad omnia [on top of all] for Rome, though neither would Roman canons allow them to be wholly Saxon. The solution presented itself within a third way which would, ‘preserve the municipal laws towards the Canon’. In other words the laws of the land would be adjusted to complement the Roman ecclesiastical law. The fatal outcome of this was that it allowed bishops access to the realm of civil government and thus precipitated religious decline.Footnote 22

The apocalyptically minded William Harrison saw the history of the World as a struggle between the true Church descended from Adam and the false one descended from Cain. Harrison wrote much of Holinshed’s highly influential Chronicles and in its pages he was no less conciliatory. Harrison maintains that Augustine’s single contribution was to make paganism more covert. He provides a salacious description of the practice among Saxon women of worshipping images of Priapus, cum pene intenso. Augustine’s mission ‘taught them nothing at all, but rather … made exchange from gross to subtle treachery, from open to secret idolatry’.Footnote 23

In the end the anti-Augustine lobby in the early English Reformed Church executed a very effective hatchet job on the one time apostle of England. Although the Oxford movement made some attempt to rehabilitate him as a national figure, as late as 1964 his Anglican biographer, Margaret Deanesly was apologetic in tone and she grumbled in her preface of the ‘bad press’ her subject had received since the Reformation. No doubt Deanesly’s work did much to redress this wrong but in the meantime the English Church was left without a founding father: a want, it seems, that many were determined to make good.

The Scramble for Saints

Presumably working on the assumption that theology abhors an ecclesiological vacuum, it was perhaps clear to the English Reformers that if they were going to do away with Augustine then they needed an apostolic alternative. Nor was it simply enough to substitute one figure for another, the replacement had to have certain credentials. It would, for example, be contingent upon the candidate to chronologically precede the first Archbishop of Canterbury, since in matters ecclesiastical there existed a tacitly understood dictum that older equalled better. Not only would this demonstrate a very important national antiquity but it might also suggest a purity of doctrine and practice that was associated with the early Church. The second important factor was stature. It was usually desirable for the founding father to be a saint and preferably one that could be linked directly to the person of Christ. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a small litany of candidates were presented as contenders for the mantle including, Joseph of Arimathea, St Peter, St Paul and Simon Zealot. Each had qualities and historical verification that their promoters regarded as qualifying them for the position. As Elizabeth’s response to Geneva suggests, the most obvious choice was Joseph of Arimathea whose association with England could be traced back to the ninth-century Life of Mary Magdalene by Rabanus Maurus. The legend was supplemented and endorsed by William of Malmesbury in the thirteenth century and firmly established in the national psyche by Joseph’s cameo in the ever popular Arthurian legends.Footnote 24 The various myths attached to him might be summarized as follows. During a first-century persecution of Christianity in Jerusalem, Joseph was among an auspicious party that included Martha, Lazarus and Mary Magdalene who had been cruelly cast adrift in the Mediterranean without means of navigation. In spite of a raging tempest they miraculously landed unharmed on the southern coast of France. From where Joseph, along with a party that appropriately numbered twelve, were sent as envoys of the disciple Philip to convert the Britons. Here they arrived carrying with them a precious cargo of either (depending on the version) the Holy Grail or sacred cruets containing the blood and sweat of Christ. They settled at Glastonbury and began to sow the seeds of the future English Church.Footnote 25

The tale had a lot to recommend it. First, it manages to get the faith planted in England very early on and thus out-trumped Augustine. When Elizabeth faced down a party of conservative bishops in only the second year of her reign she countered their claim that the first church settled in Canterbury was Roman Catholic and cited the testimony of the medieval chronicler Gildas; doing so she could not resist a swipe at the later conversions.

The Queen’s point is obvious, not only does Joseph predate the Roman mission by centuries but the contrast in their respective approaches could not be starker. The English Church is represented by Joseph who is before anything else a preacher; he reflects the humble godliness that is once more restored to the core of Elizabeth’s Church. Augustine is a monster, guilty of usurping power and subjugating an independent national Church.

Aside from Joseph’s obvious antiquity he has the added advantage that his mission bypassed Rome. Reformed writers are quick to pick up on the significance of this. In the late sixteenth century Elizabethan divines were already used to looking to the Greek fathers as a source of primitive doctrine and practice.Footnote 27 By extension some authors were happy to forge an Anglo-Graeco alliance and reflecting this trend William Harrison has Joseph bring with him the rites of the Asiatic and Greek Churches.Footnote 28 John Foxe, the sixteenth-century author of the immensely popular Actes and Monuments, was also satisfied when he read his Bede that the English Church celebrated Easter in the manner of the Eastern Church for a thousand years; proof positive that its origins ought not to be traced to Rome.Footnote 29 Such ecumenical overtures had their peaks and troughs and this one appears to have been exhausted at the beginning of the next century, the sale of Greek books was hit by a slump and Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621 disparagingly described the Greek Church as ‘semi-Christian’.Footnote 30 In this atmosphere there was much less of a compulsion to have Joseph provide an occidental bridge.

Because of their theological disposition other writers preferred to stress aspects of the legends that resonated with Reformation principles. For John Bale the most salient point of Joseph’s story rested squarely on the matter of celibacy. Writing in 1546 he makes much of the issue explicitly stating that Joseph and his followers entered the realm, ‘both with their wives and children’.Footnote 31 After that time their ministers held their wives according to the first order of God. Bale directly relates the inversion of this natural order to the first entry into the English Church of sin and corruption. Surprisingly, he does not blame Augustine for this innovation but prefers to trace its roots to the cult of druids who ‘dwelt in forests like hermits’.Footnote 32

A century later other writers preferred to stress a type of proto-Protestantism that they read into the accounts which clearly endorsed their Reformation as a revival of an original unsullied faith. The great Church historian, Thomas Fuller, was sceptical of the more fabulous accoutrements to the legends but he was impressed by the simplicity of Joseph’s life which he contrasted favourably with more decadent Churches. Fuller described the early evangelists as living in a bare, wattle Church which the more modern, ornate churches ought to reverently do homage to. He also notes with pleasure that the English patriarch was buried plainly without a sepulchre, meaning that superstition could not then be attached to his relics.Footnote 33 The antiquarian, Simonds D’Ewes put it more directly when he stated, ‘the Protestant Religion flourished here near upon four hundred years, before Augustine the Monk, the first Popish Archbishop of Canterbury, poisoned the purity of God’s worship with his burthensome trinkets and ceremonies.’Footnote 34

For all of these reasons it is easy to conceive why Joseph provided such an attractive alternative founding father for the English writers: he was untainted by association with Rome and with a little manipulation he could be made to appear in a guise conducive to Reformed principles. However, with regard to his polemical utility there were other features that had to be passed over in a rather embarrassed silence. For one thing, the legends, as befitted their medieval origin, were replete with the usual relics and works of wonder. In addition, there were also an uncomfortable amount of references to the monastic nature of Joseph’s foundation which were in danger of rendering it useless to those who wanted to hold it up as some kind of Reformed Church blueprint. At the start of the seventeenth century Sir Robert Cotton was involved in an initiative to place antiquarian research on an official footing and at this time he was commissioned to write a memorandum entitled The Primacy of England and Spain. The work was not published until 1642 and in spite of its rather magnanimous title its primary intention was to demonstrate the ascendancy of the former nation. Here it is interesting to see that Cotton hedges his bets, offering Joseph, but also Simon Zealot and Aristobulus (mentioned sixteen times in Paul) as Episcopus Britannovum. In this work we see an author who is pulling slightly away from Joseph and is content to name a number of alternatives so long as they can be directly associated with Scripture. As could Spain’s St James of course, though Cotton assures his audience that his was a severely limited conversion as, ‘he gained only nine souls’. He smugly adds that shortly after this, the country was tainted with heresies, first Priscillian, then Gothish Arianism, before it was defaced with ‘Moorish Mahometism’.Footnote 35

Joseph’s claim also suffered because of the lack of credible documents, indeed the fact that it survived for much of the seventeenth century is testimony to its value as a legend.Footnote 36 In the end it was disposed of in what Glanmor Williams called ‘the honest atmosphere of the best seventeenth-century scholarship’.Footnote 37 As the century progressed, James Ussher, the great scholar of the established Church in Ireland, was the first to express his unease. The Primate of Ireland informed his readers that the Glastonbury tales were no older than the Normans and ‘plainly redolent of the superstition of later times’.Footnote 38 By the end of the century Edward Stillingfleet’s Origines Britannicae dealt the final death blow to the credibility of Joseph and among the more informed sector of the Church of England he fell from grace.Footnote 39

It is interesting to note that Origines dismisses the Glastonbury tradition on what appears to be sound, even modern historical criticism, only to replace Joseph with the even less convincing figure of St Paul. Perhaps a slip in Stillingfleet’s otherwise admirable historicity, but one that had surprising longevity surviving in the Anglican Church until as late as the nineteenth century. The author of Origines did not conjure the apostolic figure out of thin air; Paul’s champions had been presenting him as founder of the English Church since 1565 when John Jewel put him forward rather tentatively alongside Joseph and Simon Zealot as a list of likely candidates. Jewel provided Nicephorus, the ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, as his source: he apparently mentioned Paul stopping in England on his way to Spain.Footnote 40 At the beginning of the seventeenth century the saint resurfaced as a nominee when the issue became polemical. In 1601 the bishop of Llandaff, Francis Godwin, seemed more confident than Jewel when staking a claim for Paul. He cites the writings of Theodoret and Sopronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, where he claims to find verification that the apostle to the Gentiles came to England in order to preach the Gospel after his first imprisonment.Footnote 41 Two years later the Jesuit Robert Parsons writing from exile turned the issue into a confessional one with a treatise describing three conversions of England, all of them Roman in origin. Using the same source as Godwin, Parsons argues that Britain was part of the partition of the World made by the disciples for the purposes of evangelism. Peter was given the western parts including Italy, Spain and France and crucially, ‘these islands also received the same benefit from him’. Parsons goes on to claim that the fact that Peter was here preaching, ordaining clergy and founding churches was recorded in Greek antiquity by Simeon Metaphrastes. He reminds his audience of the implications, ‘And this is another point of obligation betwixt England and Rome … to wit that the first Bishop of Rome went in person to convert our country.’Footnote 42

A few years later the highly regarded and moderately toned Remaines by William Camden was prepared to accept that both Peter and Paul had played a part in establishing the British Churches, nevertheless the author is not beyond making his own political point. Stretching his Tertullian somewhat, he refers to a passage which tells us that Christianity was planted in parts beyond access to the Romans. This, the great historian confidently informs us is Scotland, ‘a kingdom held of God alone, acknowledging no superiors, in no vassalage to Emperor or Pope’.Footnote 43 In 1606 the Dean of Exeter, Matthew Sutcliffe entered the fray with a direct attack on Parsons. Working his way through each of the Jesuit’s conversions he arrives at Peter and summarily dismisses him. For proof, the Dean points to Scripture, in particular Galatians 2, in which we read that the conversion of the uncircumcised was committed to Paul. In addition, it is possible to trace in the direction of Peter’s letters his obvious commitment to the circumcised. Sutcliffe asks, ‘How could he, that preached to them in Asia spare so much time as to make a journey to preach to them in Britain?’ Finally, he urges, Peter had not preached anywhere that he had not also founded churches, ordained bishops and teachers, and yet nowhere do we read of this in English antiquity.Footnote 44

Then in 1605 the clergyman and controversialist Francis Mason added his voice to the Protestant cause in a book that set out principally to defend the English Church episcopacy against Romanist attacks. His publication on the consecration of bishops takes the form of a dialogue between two characters, the stout English cleric ‘Orthodox’ and the sadly misinformed seminary priest, ‘Philodox’. On the question of the national conversion the latter is persuaded by his reading of The Three Conversions when he tells his companion that some say it was Simon, Aristobulus or Joseph but, ‘the best opinion is, that it was Saint Peter’, Father Parsons having proved this out of sundry authorities. Orthodox clearly favours Joseph but before he gets to him he sinks the idea of a Petrine mission and proffers a Pauline alternative. First, he brushes aside the evidence that describes the conversion of Italy, Spain, Africa, Sicily ‘and the islands that lie betwixt them’, with the inconvenient geographical fact that Britain is by no means so positioned.Footnote 45 He points out that Parsons himself affirms that Paul passed into Britain in the fourth year of Nero, that is, the year 59. As for Aristobulus a ‘scholar’ sent from Peter, Orthodox asserts flatly that if such a person existed then it stands to reason that he would have been sent by Paul who was after all the Apostle to the Gentiles.Footnote 46

The Catholic missionary, Richard Broughton also attempted a plea for Peter in 1624 and in doing so he dismissed the usual list of Protestant candidates along the way. The so-called Simon ‘Zelot’ was not to be confused with the Apostle. Protestants who regarded him as a martyr after his apparent crucifixion in England kept his feast day on 10 May, ‘Whereas the whole Christian world celebrates it on 28 October.’ Besides, he was martyred in Persia ‘divers thousands of miles from here’. Broughton continues his attack by turning on Joseph who ‘was no apostle’. It might be the case that he was here, but twenty years after the country had received the faith.Footnote 47 There then follows a detailed account of Peter’s rather convoluted journey to England. First he went at the instigation of a revelation to Jerusalem at the death of Mary. This done, he returned to Rome via Egypt. He was then consecrated bishop and priest in Milan before travelling to Britain. After he had stayed ‘a long time’ and brought many nations to Christ, an angelic vision gave him his final instruction, ‘Oh Peter the time of thy Resolution is at hand, and thou must go to Rome, in which when thou hast suffered death by the cross thou shall receive the reward of justice.’Footnote 48 This endorsement of Peter’s candidacy is perhaps the most resolute and the author states that no man except an infidel would deny it. The inferred obligation is clear, of all the nations baring Jerusalem, Rome and Antioch, ‘we are the most engaged to honour and reverence this most glorious Apostle and his successors in his holy See.’Footnote 49

The subject appears to have become a hobby horse for Broughton and some years later he is developing his original point. This time, in a work entitled Monastichon Britanicum he is presenting the first missionaries as models of monastic virtue. Here Peter becomes the embodiment of Counter-Reformation values as he pursues a life defined by celibacy, fasting and prayer. This work tells us that Peter founded the first monastery at Antioch. Then, after coming to Rome he determined to continue his good work and ‘bring this sacred institution, not only to the Romans, but also to the other Western nations, and amongst them to our Britains’.Footnote 50 As for Paul the author is willing to admit that he was also in England, though he too preached monasticism as ‘the life of perfection’.Footnote 51 Writing in 1655 Broughton excited little response from the opposition. By this stage in history the rest of the combatants in the scramble for saints seem to have retired exhausted from the fray, happy to assume their national patron was Paul but with little appetite left to defend him.

King Lucius and the First Christian Kingdom

If the apologists for the early established Church felt vulnerable with the mythical quality of the Glastonbury traditions or the papal provenance of Augustine there did exist a rather convenient alternative in the form of an apparent second-century English ruler. King Lucius provided the established Church’s apologists with a foundation myth which had at its centre a monarch who might be employed to legitimatize their own state-sponsored Reformation. In addition, by virtue of his conversion being so early on in Christian history, they could pounce on the valuable conclusion that England was the first Christian nation.Footnote 52 From this it was only a short step to assuming her people also to be God’s newly chosen elect. The tendency to portray England as Israel became increasingly important in this era of developing national consciousness.

The twelfth-century chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth, tells us that Lucius, son of Coilus, being impressed by the miracles of Christians, desired conversion. To this effect he wrote to Pope Eleutherius who duly sent him two emissaries, Faganus and Davianus. On their arrival they baptized the king and various people who were keen to follow his example. Next they rededicated their temples to the one true God and his Saints and thus ‘put an end to paganism throughout almost the whole island’.Footnote 53 The great Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, cast a sceptical eye on English foundation myths in his great history inducing a violent reaction in literary England and earning him the derogatory tag ‘Polydorus Italus’.Footnote 54 However, his Anglia Historia resuscitated the Lucius story in 1533, lionizing him as a national hero who brought his people to the light of God.

Vergil was not intent on scoring polemical points but it is easy to see how attractive this tale would have been for the emerging Reformers, and a discovery made during the time of Henry VIII’s ‘great matter’ had potential to add to its allure. This serendipitous find happened during the following decade when Thomas Cromwell recruited a cabal of historians and writers to assist the King’s cause. As Edwin Jones has indicated, ‘Cromwell was perhaps the first, but by no means the last, to see that the use of history, representing the memory and identity of a nation, is the most powerful weapon in the armoury of the propagandist.’Footnote 56 The pens of these men were responsible for luring the country away from a communal sense of Christendom toward a sense of nationhood. When these scholars lighted upon a volume in the London City Custumals they found that it included the Leges Edwardi bonis Regis, the laws of Edward the Confessor. In this they discovered a letter that purported to be from Eleutherius and in it he provides an interesting reply to Lucius’s request to send over to England the Roman laws. The Pope tells him plainly that since he has only recently received the laws of the Old and the New Testament he need have no other, ‘Out of them, by God’s grace, with the council of your realm, take ye a law and by that law, through God’s sufferance, rule your kingdom of Britain. For you be God’s vicar in your kingdom.’Footnote 57 The last sentence might have been written by Henry himself and its value was quickly seized upon by the Crown’s defenders. The preparatory draft of the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeal referred to kings, ‘called and reputed vicars of god’. Yet in spite of this initial excitement early anxieties about the myth and the letter quickly set in. The final draft of the Act does not make reference to the document. The obvious problem was, of course, that the source was wholly dependent on the authority of the Pope. John Bale’s work owed much to its Cromwellian sponsorship and in 1546 he was prepared to refer to the Lucius conversion but only on his own terms. According to The Actes of English Votaryes, Lucius was a good man, yet worldly minded, and though inclined toward the Gospel he regarded it as wanting authority, ‘so long as it was ministered but of simple and poor lay married men’. Once Bale had established this caveat he was happy to celebrate the occasion when in 179, ‘That of all provinces Britain was the first to receive the Christian faith with public ordinance.’Footnote 58

In the next decade it is as if the Roman Catholics have sensed this Protestant unease with Lucius and decided to turn it into an Achilles heel as they claimed the ancient king for their cause. First came Cardinal Pole’s historic speech in 1554 which inaugurated the reconciliation with the papacy. Pole referred to the conversion of England, that did not happen piecemeal, ‘but altogether at once, as it were in a moment’.Footnote 59 The confessional tables were, of course, turned in 1558 but this seems to have made Lucius no less pertinent to the Catholic cause. A year into Elizabeth’s reign and the Abbot of Westminster, John Feckenham informed the House of Lords that there ‘were two sundry kinds of religion’. If anyone was desirous to determine which of these was the true faith then the Abbot advised them to apply three brief rules. Which of them was the most ancient, which the most steadfast and finally, which of them breeds the more humble, obedient subjects. His speech went on to plead for a religion that had been in the country for 1400 years going back to Lucius.Footnote 60

James Pilkington responded for the Reformers in 1563 accusing the papists, ‘in their subtlety’, of making men believe that England had ever received religion from Rome; ‘and therefore we must fetch it from thence still’. Pilkington reminds his audience that there are many different dates advanced for the apparent reign of Lucius, which may cause ‘a forward man’ to doubt; though he is quick to add the disingenuous assertion that he would not be so precise. This note of scepticism does not prevent Pilkington from employing the letter to furnish his own polemical point. Making much of the ‘God’s vicar’ tag, he asks his opponents how they can be so disobedient to kings when they see the pope grant so much to them. For good measure he draws a distinction between this early faith of the Britons and that of the present papist, ‘…yet would to God they would follow that gospel, religion, laws and counsel, that Eleutherius gave King Lucius!’Footnote 61

Not all English Reformers were quite so uncomfortable with Lucius and Robert Horne provides a useful contrast with Jewel. Horne credits the King with not only being the first to politically receive the faith, but also with drawing his people to God and banishing all manner of profane worship. For this he must be exalted and Horne provides the appropriate panegyric.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, gathered around him a circle that set itself the task of confronting the question of English Protestant identity. A Church that was detached from Rome at its inception was very attractive, and they were happy to turn to Lucius to supply the necessary independence.Footnote 63 In his preface to the Bishops’ Bible (1568), Parker is at pains to establish that Eleutherius readily gave over the care of the Church of England to the king in his own kingdom. The preface also manages to make the narrative more Anglo-centric by replacing the original Roman envoys with two English legates, Elvanus and Medvinus. The Pope consecrated the former a bishop and the latter was made a public teacher. It was by their preaching that Lucius and the nobility received baptism.Footnote 64 Early in the next decade John Stow was keen to expand on this Anglicization when he calls the English emissaries, ‘two learned men of Scriptures’. Stow was so detached from religious controversy that he was accused of harbouring Roman Catholic sympathies and he is sufficiently conciliatory to allow the ‘famous clarkes’, Faganus and ‘Deruvianus’, back into the text. Together with their English counterparts they converted 28 temples into Cathedrals and furnished them with bishops.Footnote 65 In 1601 Francis Godwin appears to have unearthed more information that further embeds the story deeper into the national psyche when he tells us that Elvanus was an ‘impe’ (an offspring of a noble house)Footnote 66 and a disciple of the holy College of Avalon, thus making a valuable link with the Glastonbury legends. On their return with their Roman colleagues they sought out Glastonbury and after repairing it they lived there together for the space of nine years.Footnote 67 Francis Mason is anxious to wrest any credit for their elevation from the papal grasp, in doing so he presents a British Church that is well established before the intervention of Rome. Mason labels Elvanus, the ‘Bishop of Britain’ and his companion as a ‘Doctor’. He claims that at their time of being sent out not only were they preachers but famous miracle workers, ‘Which showeth that when they were sent Ambassadors to Eleutherius, they were no novices, but profound Divines and practised teachers in the School of Christ.’Footnote 68 In 1631 the poet John Weever compiled his magnum opus after travelling the country collecting funeral monuments. He was quite comfortable to describe Lucius as the first Christian King of this island, ‘and indeed the world’. Weever develops the history further, adding that in 179 Lucius founded the first church, not in Canterbury, but at the heart of England, London, ‘that is to say, the Church of Saint Peter upon Cornhill, and made that church the Metropolitan, and chief church of the kingdom’. This project is crowned by Elvanus, who built a library near by and converted many druids, presumably to furnish it with scholars.Footnote 69 After this, Christianity was always professed somewhere in the land, but especially in Wales. The author reproduces the appropriate monument:

Attitudes towards the Lucius myth were not only dependent on individual predilections, but might also owe something to the political climate. John Foxe had initially displayed some doubt when it came to Lucius but in Timothy Bright’s abridgement of Actes and Monuments, published in 1589, the year after the Armada there is no such reserve. This volume positively bristles with patriotic fervour as it celebrates England as the first Reformed Kingdom. Bright tells us that the year of conversion was 180 and that Lucius reigned 77 years until he died without issue in 201.Footnote 71 The poet John Milton also provides an intriguing example of how historical writing might owe something to the political climate. In 1641 when he published his Of the Reformation in England, patriotism infuses his writings with a good measure of English idealism. In this frame of mind he asks the prelates to look back at Eleutherius ‘and see what he thought of the policy of England’. Milton tells the bishops that the Pope, ‘bids him [Lucius] betake himself to the old and new Testaments, and receive direction from them how to administer both Church and Commonwealth’.Footnote 72 Disillusionment with the Commonwealth set in when only months after the execution of Charles, Parliament began to readmit MPs who had opposed the action and the Poet is less inclined toward nationalism.Footnote 73 His History of Britain was completed sometime in 1649 and it repeats the Lucius story only to add rather grumpily, ‘these things have no foundation’. He is equally disparaging of the papal communication dismissing it as an ‘improbable letter’.Footnote 74 Eventually, the figure of England’s convert King gave way under the weight of more serious scholarship. He had in his career as a mythological monarch provided good services to a range of causes. As Felicity Heal pointed out:

Giants and Gods: The Question of a Pre-Christian Antiquity

There were a few Reformed writers who were not satisfied to merely trace England’s sacred origins as far back as the apostolic age. Bolder spirits were tempted to trace their country’s claim to be an elect nation as far back as the postdiluvian repopulation programme that Genesis 10 tells us was set in motion by Noah, a figure considered to be the original of contemporary monarchy. The little-known myth of the giant Samothes emerged in the mid sixteenth century and references to it might be found in writers as popular as Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare.

The legend tells us that when Noah was dividing the world between his three sons he gave the portion in the west (here regarded as Europe) to his third son Japheth. In turn Japheth divided his inheritance among his sons and Samothes, who is referred to in the Bible as Meshech, was allotted Britain and France. Dutifully the son, who is rather curiously portrayed as a giant, set out to occupy and repopulate his territory. Of the two lands it would seem that he favoured England, which he named Samothea, and here he created a land that excelled in both the political arts and learning. Other Samothean kings ruled this halcyon state until their dynasty was destroyed with the invasion of Albion, another giant and the son of no lesser figure than Neptune. The usurper provided his newly acquired kingdom with his own, more familiar name. Unfortunately for Albion he was to die at the hands of Hercules, who seemed to regard the dispatching of giants as a divinely ordained duty. The Samothean accounts that we have come to us via some very respectable Reformed writers and it is curious to see how comfortably they appear to be with such an odd amalgam of biblical history and pagan mythology. John Bale provided many a counterblast to papist idolatry but he is happy to inform his readers that ‘Albion was a giant, like as afore said Samothes was afore him, but also for that his father Neptunas was than take fore the lord or great God of Sea.’Footnote 76

The Samothes myth has a twofold potential. First, it allows the kings of England a direct descent from Noah and therefore tacitly bolsters an underlying assumption that for Israelite we may now read English. Foxe’s Actes and Monuments had done much to imbed this notion in the national psyche as he presented English history not on the basis of destiny (which implied a degree of fortune) but rather in the certainty of God’s election.Footnote 77 This assumption is corroborated by the authors who presented the Samothean legends and it is not difficult to imagine that such a biblical endorsement would have provided a valuable antidote to the concerns of a people whose world was changing radically. Secondly, the legend comes packaged in a useful allusion to a golden age. The description in Holinshed tells us that Samothes imparted to his people a ‘knowledge of the stars, the order of inferior things, and many other matters incident to moral or politic government’. He even goes as far as suggesting that the Samotheans had their own alphabet from which the Greeks derived their own. For good measure he tells us that Aristotle described this proto-English race as a sect of philosophers, ‘passing skilful both in the law of God and man, and for this cause exceedingly given to religion’.Footnote 78

Sir Philip Sidney’s immensely popular Arcadia written in 1577 has a Samothean, named rather eponymously Philisides, who provides an elegiac account of his native land.

Shakespeare seems to take it for granted that his audience will know the legend. When the courtier Poins remarks to Prince Hal that everyone who pricks their finger claims they shed royal blood the Prince replies, ‘Nay, they will be kin to us, but they will fetch it from Japhet.’Footnote 80 Referring to the Philisides passage, Katherine Duncan-Jones says of the reference:

Blair Worden has placed this Samothean reference in a political context. It was, he claims, written at a time when Sidney’s country lay idle as the Catholics of the Netherlands and France threatened religious persecution. It should therefore be read as a poetic call to arms as the author urges England to emulate better times when Samothea was ‘an honour to the world’.Footnote 82

Graham Parry has identified John Bale as the first to introduce Samothea to an English-speaking audience in his Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum in 1547, though he was in fact writing about them before this work in Actes of the Englysh Votaryes published in 1546.Footnote 83 In his work on early modern antiquarians in 1956 Stuart Piggot maintained that Bale had simply invented the character, but this is not in fact true.Footnote 84 Bale’s fetches his information from the distinctly un-Reformed, Annius of Viterbo, a Dominican Friar and creator of fake antique sources. His forged Commentariis Berosi, purports to be the work of Berosus, a Chaldean priest and chronicler from the fourth century bce.Footnote 85 The standard perspective on Bale’s attempted introduction is that it was only taken up by writers with more zeal than judgment. William Harrison and Raphael Holinshed usually provide the most overt examples. The usual account of the legend tells us that as the century progressed the Samotheans died a death, killed off by more sober minded scholars.Footnote 86 The forgery was first dispatched on the continent by the Portuguese humanist Gaspar Barreiros who John Stow quotes when he dismisses the Samotheans as ‘mere fable’. If indeed the descendants of Noah did people this land then any records of such an event are ‘irrecoverable’. The tale relied solely on a ‘small pamphlet falsely forged, and thrust into the world’.Footnote 87 By the beginning of the next century Camden is even more damning, claiming that Annius, ‘in the manner of a crafty retailer’ has sold credulous persons ‘his own fictions and vain inventions’.Footnote 88

In fact, a closer examination of even those authors who are considered to champion the Samothean’s cause reveals a rather different story. Bale, for example, may be more reluctant than others to entirely relinquish the giant race but he is very far from regarding them as paragons of a more virtuous age. In discussing Bale commentators have tended to overlook his Englysh Votaryes which provides a rather scandalous account of the Samotheans as the author is quick to pursue his favourite hobby horse of sexual decadence. He tells us that in their temples the Samothean priests kept virgins whom they chastised physically if they neglected their duties. Bale clearly identifies them as the precursors of Roman idolatry: ‘Venus was than their great Goddess, and ruled all in that spiritual family, as she hath done ever since.’Footnote 89 Holinshed retraces the legend but only after he tells us that the origins of all nations are doubtful, he adds the warning, ‘I wish not any man to lean to that which shall be here set down, as to an infallible truth.’Footnote 90 In the preface to the same volume even the historically eccentric Harrison is inclined to caution when he describes the Samotheans as something, ‘which unto me doth not seem a thing impossible’. As for Sidney, in a second article written 13 years after the first, Duncan-Jones was willing to admit that the poet, ‘Like many Elizabethans of his generation … may have regarded the earlier Tudor cult of Ancient Britain as a bit of a joke.’Footnote 91 Indeed this is also probably the best way of reading Prince Hal’s retort, imbedded as it is in a comic run of play. It is not difficult to envisage the first Tudor audiences as being entirely in on Shakespeare’s quip that English men were foolish enough to trace their royal descent to one of the sons of Noah. Duncan-Jones described the Samotheans as a forgotten myth; it would appear from the contemporary evidence that England’s Noachian ancestry was not being taken seriously some time before it had slipped from the national consciousness.

The Shifting Sands

A pattern runs through the histories of these ecclesiastical foundation myths. They surfaced in the sixteenth century and provided for a need in the English Reformed Church which had largely grown hostile to Augustine of Canterbury. Various figures were attractive because of a variety of attributes: Joseph was ancient and unsullied by Rome; Lucius was a useful proto-type for the monarch as head of the national Church; and the Samotheans might provide a useful link to the original chosen people. However, if they had their qualities in the eyes of the Reformed they also had their flaws and in the face of developments in scholarship only St Paul made it beyond the seventeenth century. The brand of antiquarian history that these tales were largely dependent on was being usurped by a fresher approach to the discipline. Camden may have included a nod towards England’s mythical past in his work, but he had learnt the value of good sources and he was happier scouring the country’s Roman sites for solid primary evidence. In 1629 the great Francis Bacon had put forward his plea for a scientific methodology in his Novum Organum and Selden was liberating history from the constraints of fundamentalist interpretation. In this atmosphere authors grew more questioning of their sources. It was not the case that they cared less about who founded their Church; it was just that they were less confident with some of the more dubious sources. St Paul’s candidature acquired a tacit quality, he is accepted but few commentators show much desire to do more than simply identify him. Ultimately, it would seem as if the English Church had realized the folly of trying to trace a national ecclesiastical birth, let alone advance its cause as the new Israel. It is as if Paul was only standing in for a few centuries because the other candidates proved unsatisfactory. Then in the nineteenth century he too is relinquished as the English Church finally accepted the Reformation principle that a true Church ought to seek a surer foundation than the shifting sands of myth and fable. It was perhaps attractive for a time for English churchmen to regard themselves as elected, a ‘World without the world’; one can only hope that this desire gave way not only to more robust scholarship but also the more worthy ambition to be part of a much larger family.