The 1590s are often regarded as a period of crisis.Footnote 1 It is also commonly acknowledged that, as the decade and Elizabeth's reign neared their close, a variety of different sorts of tensions and anxieties came together, grouped around or organized by the prospect of the queen's death and the question of what would happen next. A variety of different groups and individuals made their determinations and prognostications, and started to position themselves, anxious both to ensure their own well-being in the next reign and to avert the worst consequences of their rivals and enemies securing theirs. The forms and locales in which the resulting manoeuvres and counter manoeuvres were performed and through which the resulting tensions and anxieties worked themselves out were almost as multifarious and diverse as the cast of characters involved. Puritans and their conformist rivals and opponents, different sorts of Catholic, both in England and abroad, James VI, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, Hugh O'Neil, earl of Tyrone, and George Gordon, earl of Huntly, just to name a few, were all involved in the resulting alarms and excursions.Footnote 2
Three problems traditionally attend scholarly attempts to get a handle on this topic. The first is the problem of hindsight, the second is one of sources, and the third of historiographical categories and academic specialisms. Because the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England and Great Britain passed off almost entirely without incident, it has been tempting not to take too seriously the feverish positioning exercises that the prospect of the queen's death elicited from contemporaries and thus to underestimate the destabilizing effects on the early years of James's reign of the manoeuvres and expedients that immediately preceded his accession.
In terms of sources, since the succession was a taboo subject and speculation or even loose talk and, still more, actual intervention were dangerous things to be caught doing, contemporaries frequently did not write down what they were thinking or leave much evidence even of what they were doing. The places and occasions where contemporaries did feel relatively free to express themselves on the topic of the succession were fairly few and intermittent. Those who did so tend to be viewed by the sceptical modern historian, always in search of the normal and the normative, as worryingly ‘untypical’ and/or peripheral.Footnote 3
As far as academic specialism is concerned, precisely because the different aspects of the crisis were so disparate, the cast of characters and the types of source material generated by them so diverse, different aspects of what was essentially the same conjuncture are very seldom talked about in the same breath. Discussions of the Essex revolt of 1601, the so-called archpriest controversy and the fate of the Elizabethan puritan movement, of the local effects of the war effort, and of the tensions and concerns expressed in parliament about various attempts to preserve order at a time of very considerable social and economic strain are – often for entirely sound practical reasons – usually kept apart.
The disintegrative effect of such scholarly sub-specialism has, of course, been compounded by two still prominent features of the scholarly literature: first, the relegation of all things Catholic to the margins of historical enquiry and a concomitant notion of ‘the mainstream’ as a both Catholicism- and Catholics-free zone (it is extraordinary how far Ireland is still off many scholars’ radar); and, second, the recent revisionist insistence that the history of parliament must be written as a history of the legislative process and that the process of legislation can and should be studied in something like isolation from the wider political and ideological histories of the period.Footnote 4
In what follows, we want to buck these (in our view, unfortunate) trends by pursuing what turned out to be (on the surface) a minor non-event through an unusual confluence of circumstances and sources. The non-event in question was a failed piece of parliamentary legislation and the sources are a set of parliamentary diaries, the outpourings of the illicit pamphlet press and various exchanges in manuscript responding to this little outbreak of printed commentary and polemic. From these we will tease out a series of associations and connections – ideological and cultural, political and discursive, as well as prosopographical – in order to gain a sense of the nature and depth of the accession crisis that was gripping the English nation and, indeed, much of the British Isles in the Elizabethan fin de siècle and of how that crisis was worked out, in part at least, in the public domain described by print, performance (in the pulpit and on the gallows), rumour, circulating manuscript, and news.
Of late, the politics of the public sphere, or better yet, of publicity, has emerged as a crucial concern for historians of the post-Reformation in England.Footnote 5 As Peter Lake has argued in his Bad Queen Bess? Libels, secret histories, and the politics of publicity in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the combination of an unsettled succession and the increasingly confessionalized geo-politics of the post-Reformation period created a situation in which a number of factions, some of them located at the very centre of the Elizabethan regime, others dedicated to the overthrow of that regime by any means possible, sought to appeal to, and if circumstances allowed, to mobilize, a variety of strands of opinion, or publics, behind their view of the current conjuncture and what to do about it.Footnote 6 In this article, we want to develop those claims through a case-study of a very particular exchange of views between differently constituted, that is to say, puritan and various sorts of Catholic, factions, and certain versions of the Elizabethan establishment, as they all confronted the (now inevitable) prospect of the queen's death.
I
We need to start in the House of Commons, where, in November 1601, Sir Robert Wroth, supported by Sir Francis Hastings, introduced a bill entitled ‘an act against wilful absence from the church on Sundays’.Footnote 7 The measure was intended properly to enforce the existing 12d fine on all those who disobeyed the requirement of the act of uniformity to attend church or chapel on Sundays and holy days, though in the case of the bill's proposers one imagines that their measure was aimed fairly and squarely at overtly Catholic separatists.Footnote 8 One might have forgiven contemporary observers for assuming that a statutory measure of this kind would go through not just on the nod but with positive acclamation. But this was decidedly not what happened. There were murmurs that it might lead to a double penalty for the same offence and that corrupt minor officials might exploit it for gain. After vigorous debate and a third reading, the bill was lost, albeit by only three votes.Footnote 9
Hastings then introduced another bill, ‘an act for the more diligent resort to church upon Sundays’ (the first reading was on 27 November 1601, the second on 2 December, and the third on 12 December).Footnote 10 It addressed procedural deficiencies in the levying of the fine, primarily the requirement that, as Francis Walker put it, ‘every single offence had to be taken before the queen's justices on circuit within a limited time after the absence from church had been duly noted’. This was something which the average churchwarden was not able or willing to do. The new bill would remedy this:
at any quarter sessions, or out of sessions, wherever two or three justices of the peace came together, cases of recusancy were to be tried and determined. The testimony of two or more credible witnesses was required to secure a conviction. On their information the justices of the peace could order the churchwardens to levy the fine from the offending parties
by distraint of goods.Footnote 11
However, even this seemingly straightforward procedural reform became the occasion for a remarkably wide-ranging and extremely bitter debate; a debate which divided along two main axes; the first centred on what was essentially a puritan/conformist/crypto-Catholic set-to about the reformation of manners and the second on a related set of concerns about the liberties of the subject and the potentially oppressive powers being conferred on JPs.
On the godly side of these exchanges, the highest of the available moral ground was occupied by Carew Reynell (a former client of the recently executed earl of Essex). Reynell placed discussion of the bill directly under the wider rubric of Sabbath observance and the prospect of ‘great reformation…if this bill pass’.Footnote 12 Sir George More took a less exalted but no less godly tack, complaining that the act of uniformity simply was not doing its intended job: ‘that law is no law which takes no force’. Worse, the supposedly stricter 1580s statutes and their much heavier financial penalties for recusancy had done no good: ‘once a month coming to church excuses us from danger of the law, but not from the commandment of God, who says, “thou shalt sanctify the Sabbath day”, that is every Sabbath’.Footnote 13
More's espousal of this rather exalted view of conformity, as a matter of religion and not (just) of obedience to the queen's temporal authority, appears to have triggered a hostile reaction from those who thought that, at the most, that was all that the law on conformity should be about. The crypto-Catholic Sir Roger Owen argued that the bill imposed a double punishment for a single offence and that it gave JPs far too much power to secure convictions, quite against the letter and spirit of Magna Carta.Footnote 14
The last point was then taken up by John Bond, once a Somerset school master and now a physician of some distinction (and, significantly, not then, and never, a JP). In so doing, he was tapping into a strain of complaint about corrupt justices voiced by Edward Glascock in several recent debates, most notably one over a bill against swearing which he had said would create almost infinite room for magisterial abuse.Footnote 15 Bond interlaced secular concerns about legality and corruption with religious, indeed aggressively conformist and anti-puritan, arguments, and made it clear that he was of one mind with Glascock about JPs being given even more power.Footnote 16 In a later speech to the same bill, on 12 December, Bond described how dumping the duty of detection on churchwardens would lead to chaos and injustice.Footnote 17 All of this, said Bond on 2 December, was quite at variance with the queen's recent declaration that ‘she desired to be loved of her subjects’.Footnote 18
Ten days later, when the topic resurfaced, Bond put his conformist hat on and claimed that the bill was an ‘imputation upon our archbishops, bishops, archdeacons and other ecclesiastical governors, that they be either remiss in their authority, or else that their prerogative hath not so much power as a 12d fine’. Worse still, this sort of coercion called into question the evangelical achievements of the Elizabethan Reformation and the claim of the religion established on the loyalty of the people. There was an ‘infamy to our ministers’ implicit in the bill that, Bond claimed, would allow our ‘adversaries’ to say that ‘“this is the fruit of your labour to have preached away your audience out of the church”’. Such measures might have been appropriate at the reign's start, for ‘then the people were newly taken from massing and superstition’, but now the people were ‘planted in truth and rooted in religion’, such a proposal would positively invite the scorn of ‘the Jesuits’. The bill should be dropped.Footnote 19
What we have here is a daringly coherent and aggressive assault on what is being described, in effect, albeit with no recourse to the term itself, as a piece of puritan legislation; an assault couched in terms of the defence of the established church, of the clergy, of social unity, and Christian charity, not to mention the views of Elizabeth herself. The message here was clear enough and the response was predictably outraged. Sir George More replied to Owen's initial outburst with the dark hint that Owen's sentiments proceeded ‘out of the corruption of his heart, howsoever I mean not to search it or answer him’.Footnote 20 During the same debate, on 2 December, Sir William Knollys, the puritan comptroller of the household, struck the genuine note of the establishment at bay, expressing himself ‘sorry, after 43 years under her majesty's happy government’, that such a bill should be called into question, since ‘the old statute gives the penalty’ and ‘this new’ one merely provided ‘speedy means to levy it’.Footnote 21 Robert Johnson, Henry Doyley, and Sidney Montagu were similarly hostile.
The most extreme and sustained response came from Sir Francis Hastings. Since he was one of the bill's sponsors, this was hardly a surprise. But the stakes and the provocation were almost certainly higher than that. For Bond was also from Somerset and Hastings, a JP of some twenty-five years standing, and may well have recognized a (malicious) portrait of himself in the corrupt petty tyranny conjured by Bond as typical of the conduct of many a justice. He leapt to his feet in defence of the local magistracy and exclaimed, in response to Owen, that ‘I never in my life heard justices of peace taxed before in this sort.’ Hastings hoped that the Commons would ‘not conceive so basely of a justice of peace or their authority, who deserve well of queen and country, because it comes from him [Bond]. I say no more, I know what he is.’ Bond, said Hastings, had claimed to defend religion but in fact he was attacking it. Echoing Knollys's sentiment a few minutes before, Hastings declared it to be a disgrace that, after ‘43 years under her majesty's happy and religious government’, they should now be arguing about ‘whether it is fit to come to the church’. The wretched William Parry
desired no more, who in that place (pointing to the right side of the chair) so soon as the bill touching seminaries was brought in, called it a bloody bill, a tyrannical bill, a bill of confiscation of goods. I pray you how far stretches this grande jugum to a poor 12d? The speech was insolent and in regard of her majesty I wish it might be answered there
at which he pointed to the bar of the house, though apparently ‘the house cried, “no, no, no”’.Footnote 22
This was all but to accuse Bond of a form of crypto-popery – the outrageously aggressive comparison of him with the convicted traitor Parry compounded and rendered explicit the dark hint implicit in the claim that ‘I know what he is’, a move which echoed More's earlier references to the nameless ‘corruptions’ in Roger Owen's heart. But if Hastings accused Bond of popery only by implication, he responded ten days later rather more directly to Bond's (equally implicit) accusations of puritanism. Asserting that Bond had made a ‘politique but not [a] religious discourse’, Hastings declared the interdependence of ‘religion and policy’ for ‘as the policy is most detestable which hath not religion to warrant it, so is that religion most happy which hath policy to back and maintain it’. At this point, Hastings made an explicit reference to the archpriest controversy. He argued that this was exactly not the moment for English Protestants to divide among themselves over such basic issues, and certainly not when the papists were merely pretending to be at each other's throats in order to set good Protestants against each other – ‘I know the Jesuits and priests be out at square and be at a jar amongst themselves; I pray God it be not to make a breach among us, who be yet in unity.’Footnote 23
As for the bishops, Hastings claimed, ‘I am so far from blaming their government that I renounce that position and am very sorry that the strength of their authority stretches not so far as I could wish it in this point.’ Far from criticizing the religion established or the ecclesiastical governors of the church, ‘methinks this law should rather be a credit to the ministry that, now we having gone to church these 43 years ourselves and are so fervent in religion, desire also that others may do the like’.Footnote 24
Having thus wrapped himself in the flags of obedience and order, of true religion and anti-papal zeal, Hastings now, at last, grasped the nettle of puritanism. In a rather convoluted way, he proceeded to explain himself. Bond, he claimed, had
made a protestation that he is no papist. I appeal to you all, if I said he was. And I say he is no puritan if he be not a papist, for if there be ever a puritan in England it is a papist. I learned of Doctor [Laurence] Humfrey, who was sometimes my tutor, a division of four sorts of puritans. First, the Catholics, which hold that a man cannot sin after baptism. Secondly, the papist, which is such a merit-monger that he would not only save himself by his own merits, but by the merits of others also. A third sort are the Brownists, or Family of Love, a sect too well known in England; I would they never had so been. The fourth and last sort are your evangelical puritans, which insist wholly upon the scriptures as upon a sure ground; and of these I would we had many more than we now have.Footnote 25
And so the p-word at last entered the debate and it did so in the mouth of the person being accused of puritanism, who, in a double move, both denied that such a term could apply to him and then, having defined it (in a good sense) to his own satisfaction and in his own political interest, then proceeded wholeheartedly to embrace it, in the process typing those who used the word as an insult as enemies of true religion, obedience, and order; in short, in effect, as papists and crypto-papists.
But Bond had already been careful to cover himself in advance from such incendiary charges. No popish fellow traveller he, he had described himself some two days earlier, on 10 December, as ‘a Devonshire man’ and ‘one that hates popery’ but also ‘defies puretism [sic]’.Footnote 26 He spoke, as he said on 2 December, ‘in the behalf of the country for which I serve. I know their grievous complaints against the execution of laws by justices.’Footnote 27
In the event, not only was Hastings's demand on 2 December that Bond be called to the bar of the House to answer for his effrontery an ignominious failure – the diarist, as we recorded, noted that ‘the house said “no, no, no”’ – but the new bill itself went down to defeat, albeit only by the margin of one vote. This provoked a further bitter exchange in which Comptroller Knollys muttered darkly about the house being ‘often troubled by physicians, meaning Mr Bond’.Footnote 28
As for Hastings, he simply could not let the matter drop. At the session's end, on 17 December, he delivered a diatribe summing up his own bitter experience of the present parliament and his deep anxieties about the present conjuncture. Identifying ‘Rome and Spain’ as England's ‘two strong enemies’, he exhorted his colleagues to ‘countenance’ ‘those justices, which serve religiously, dutifully and carefully’. ‘The boldness of the Jesuits and seminaries is greatly increased, and they be very diligent to pervert’ as their ‘often and ordinary published pamphlets’ showed all too clearly.
We had need to have special care of them, for themselves do brag that they have forty thousand true hearted Catholics (for so they call them) in England, besides their retinue, poor Catholics and neuters and I know not what. It is therefore fit we look to this dangerous case, and not to think ourselves secure because we find no harm, for it is a true position that security without providence is most dangerous. I conclude only with this desire, that those which have supreme authority will look that those which have inferior governments will do faithfully and that we may be ruled in obedience.Footnote 29
II
All in all, these are surprising exchanges, the true significance of which for the state of religious discourse and the formation and manipulation of religious categories and identities at the Elizabethan fin de siècle has not, we think, been fully appreciated. These debates represent the triumph of a rabidly anti-puritan, and perhaps even a crypto-Catholic, reaction over the reflex anti-popery and pursuit of the reformation of manners so typical of the high Elizabethan period.Footnote 30 As the differently unpleasant fates visited upon Arthur Hall, Dr Parry, and Francis Alford all show, over the years considerable effort had been put into making such sentiments all but inexpressible in the House of Commons.Footnote 31 Just how threatening this new development was to some contemporaries can be gauged from a highly unusual but almost entirely (by modern scholars) ignored pamphlet entitled Humble motives for association to maintain religion established. It was directed explicitly at the recent failure of the bill to enforce church attendance in the Commons. It asked its readers – ‘who but papists would pronounce that penalty to be extreme, plead that people are not to be compelled but persuaded to come to church and doubt whether lay men may meddle in any church matter?’Footnote 32 It thus compressed and paraphrased all the central arguments used by Mr Bond against the bill, and says explicitly in print what Hastings had not quite dared say in the Commons, all of which surely identifies the author either as someone who had been present in the chamber, or had been carefully briefed by someone else who was closely conversant with, if not actually involved in, the debates of the 1601 parliament.
The author warned, conventionally enough, against the danger of popery where the gospel was ‘not effectually preached’, but he also cited the Jesuit Robert Parsons's assertion (in his notorious A conference about the next succession) that outside of the towns the bulk of the population tended to popery – out of the mouths of Jesuits, in other words, came the clinching confirmation of the author's argument about the popish nature of the opposition to the ‘bill for coming to church’. The papists themselves were aware that ‘by execution of the penalty of 12d, the common sort would be drawn to the church much more than by’ the much larger penalty of ‘20 pounds’ a month levied by the statute of 1581, and thus ‘the popish party’ would be ‘greatly diminished’.Footnote 33
The first part of the Humble motives printed verbatim a kind of best-practice document for dealing with these problems, to wit, a petition to the queen from the (now deceased) Thomas Digges. It proposed an oath of association which bound the taker of the oath to protect and perpetuate ‘the religion now publicly professed within this realm’, with severe penalties for refusers.Footnote 34 It would come as a rude but salutary shock to anyone who hoped to kill the queen and/or re-establish some form of Catholicism; it would also distinguish the well- from the ill-affected and serve to protect the queen from ‘adversaries abroad’, the ‘spite’ of disloyal subjects and ‘the might of your successor’, whoever that might be.Footnote 35 Digges then drew a kind of topographical word map of the distribution of attitudes in religion across the country. He divided English religious opinion into four categories; ‘Protestants of religion’, ‘Protestants of state’, ‘papists of state’, and ‘papists of religion’.Footnote 36 This was fairly self-explanatory, but the point was that ‘the more the first and second are increased, the more is your safety, the more the third and fourth are augmented the more is your peril. Out of the second and third the increase of the first and fourth must grow.’Footnote 37 Thus, the trick was to expand the first two categories at the expense of the second two and, Digges claimed, his oath represented the perfect means to do just that. For ‘as despair of the future and hope of the present produces Protestants of state, so despair of the present and hope of the future produces papists of state’ and that second scenario was what the oath would prevent.Footnote 38
The scheme represented the continuation, albeit by subtly different means, of the agenda pursued by Digges, and, behind him, by Lord Burghley in the interregnum scheme of 1584–5 made famous by Patrick Collinson.Footnote 39 Digges had died in 1595 and the pamphlet described his ‘petition’ as ‘long since penned’.Footnote 40 But it was printed in 1601, as the title page proclaimed, ‘as an antidote against the pestilent treatises of secular priests’. This located the tract right in the middle of the archpriest controversy, an altercation between the Jesuits and the seminary priests to which, as we have seen, Hastings had adverted in parliament, when he warned that the seemingly bitter internecine dispute raging between the seminary priests and the Jesuits might well prove a Trojan horse, constructed by the Catholics to undermine what had been (until very recently) the rock solid anti-popery of the Elizabethan political nation and establishment.Footnote 41
The second part of Humble motives served as a gloss on the first (Digges's) part. It took the form of a lengthy address to ‘the most reverend archbishops and right reverend lord bishops of both provinces’, and maintained that, in sponsoring the appellants against the Jesuits, certain nameless elements in the regime were in fact playing into the papists’ hands, by not merely accepting the claims of the appellants about the equivalence of the Jesuitical and puritan threats but also by visibly favouring at least some papists over those who might be called puritans. Since Richard Bancroft, the virulently anti-puritan bishop of London, was known to have sponsored the appellant agitation, the pamphlet was clearly trying to exploit divisions within the establishment about the wisdom of current policy.
In the past, the pamphlet claimed, when the earl of Leicester had been in his pomp, and indeed when Digges's petition been drafted, it had been an axiom that ‘all papists were traitors in action or affection’. But with Leicester dead, under the sinister influence of the crypto-popish Sir Christopher Hatton, ‘puritans were trounced and traduced as troublers of the state’. Our puritan author (and Digges's editor) cited as his authority for all this a Latin tract of 1592, written by Robert Parsons. With Hatton's death, Burghley had, once more, turned up the heat on the Catholics, most notably in the royal proclamation of 18 October 1591. But now that ‘that lord treasurer is gone and the earl of Essex, through his fatal error, taken away, the cry is “priests be tolerable men, but puritans may not be abided”’.Footnote 42 Not only were popish books now being printed and priests allowed to trek ‘to Rome to sue an appeal with the privity and consent of some in authority’, but ‘points of popery’ were being allowed ‘to be broached in the pulpit’, while puritan preachers were silenced ‘only for preaching without license, or not subscribing further than law required, though they offer to subscribe so far’. Thus, the puritan John Udall had been left to die in prison but William Watson, the extrovert appellant cheerleader and Bancroft client, was even now being put up in some comfort in Fulham Palace by the bishop of London. All of which could only serve ‘to hearten the papists and discourage the puritan (nay, every sound Protestant)’.Footnote 43 This was a great mistake since, as ever, it was the puritans, both lay and clerical, who provided the surest bulwark against the popish threat; and, as far as the clergy were concerned, ‘(setting by non-residents and dumb dogs), you shall find ten puritans for one formalist and that one puritan doth more advance the gospel, and suppress popery, than ten formalists’.Footnote 44
On this account, the regime, or, more accurately, ill-intentioned and highly placed people within it, were watching while the English nation walked unawares into a popish nightmare. The papists, i.e. the appellants, were starting to break through the puritan/Protestant axis and were doing that by pretending to ‘hold only the puritans for their opposites’ and ‘joining puritans with Jesuits’.Footnote 45
What more evidence did one need? When Tobias Matthew, the bishop of Durham, had, during the 1601 parliament, spoken out at Paul's Cross against toleration and Richard Vaughan, the bishop of Chester, had used the same venue to inveigh as much against the seminary priests as against the Jesuits, the papists had not scrupled to accuse such men, bishops, if you please, of being puritans. (Vaughan had been, said the Humble motives, the target of the racy tract entitled A decacordon of ten quodlibeticall reasons, put together by William Watson.) Indeed, the appellants regularly ‘join…Calvinists with puritans’ despite the fact ‘that this word Calvinists comprehends Protestants as well as puritans’ and just as regularly referred to the ‘religion established’ as ‘heresy’.Footnote 46
This raised the crucial question of why anyone would believe the appellants’ professions of political loyalty and their concomitant claims to hate only the Jesuits and the puritans, against whom they represented themselves as the natural allies of the Elizabethan authorities – authorities whom they were simultaneously petitioning for some form of toleration. After all, said the Humble motives’ compiler, the seminary priests had only belatedly started to shift the blame for their own traitorous actions ‘onto the Jesuits, to ease their own shoulders’. As recently as the notorious Squire plot, the secular priests and the Jesuits had been working hand in glove.Footnote 47 Moreover, the papists had form when it came to rapid shifts of political front to further their own designs on power: ‘for when the Scottish queen lived, then her title was the clearest, but after her death, none but the infanta’ had ‘right to this crown’.Footnote 48
Hence, the supposed ‘contention between priests and Jesuits’ was a mere pretence; it had been ‘dispensed with’, that is to say licensed by Rome itself, as a ruse that ‘tends to the increasing and not diminishing of the popish party’.Footnote 49 This was a consummate smoke-and-mirrors performance whereby ‘[secular] priests…who are most in number’, in order to ‘ply their business’ found it ‘good in policy to turn the eyes of the magistrate and edge of the sword upon some, and none so fit as the Jesuit and puritan, already in disgrace with the state’.Footnote 50 Moreover, it was not hard to believe that the Jesuits would lend themselves to this charade, ‘for they be known to be machivellists and therefore careless what they do, so they may bring their principal desire to pass’. Their current standing in England was so low ‘that anything will be received against them and yet impair their credit no more than it was before’ and yet, should ‘the infanta prevail, they may make account to be glorified for their practises against this state as Thomas Becket was for his treacherous dealing against King Henry II’.Footnote 51
Anyone still in doubt as to what was really going on need only ask themselves what would happen if ‘foreign forces should arrive and invade us (though in her majesty's days)’, for ‘it would soon be seen that these priests which now flatter her majesty and speak their pleasure of Jesuits’ dealing for the infanta, would (no less diligently than the Jesuits) proclaim bellum dei, as John de Aquila [Don John Daguilla]’, the leader of the recent Kinsale expedition did ‘in Ireland and that her majesty is but an usurper and excommunicated’. Had not the founder of the seminaries, Cardinal William Allen, written ‘as his last will and testament that they are machiavellists and not Catholics (who under pretence whatsoever) do not adhere to the infanta’?Footnote 52
In its deployment of the petition by Digges and its retrospective praise for the likes of Leicester and Burghley, the Humble motives harked back to the anti-popish solidarities of the high Elizabethan regime, solidarities that had been personified, as it claimed to think, by the late lamented earl of Essex, who was described by the Humble motives’ compiler as having been brought low by the machinations of papists. The notorious Conference about the next succession ‘does cunningly insinuate and advise to make the earl away’; if only he were dead, ‘there were none of like policy, valour, resolution, authority and favour with the people to hold the Protestants together against the infanta and popery’. Thus, ‘when Squire's poison failed’ to put an end to him, ‘friends of Spain, working upon the earl's impatiency, by means and devices, drew him to that attempt of making away to present his griefs to her majesty. This is held for truth’, the tract observed, since Sir Robert Cecil had said ‘so much at’ the earl's hapless secretary Henry Cuffe's ‘arraignment’.Footnote 53 Here, the Humble motives was echoing and artfully exploiting the regime's own line, spread through the Star Chamber and the London pulpits, that the Essex revolt had been an essentially popish conspiracy.Footnote 54
The pamphlet argued that, while the halcyon age of high Elizabethan anti-popish zeal had first been disrupted by that notorious (alleged) crypto-Catholic, Sir Christopher Hatton, things were now a good deal worse. Was there not ‘some crafty Sinon of Sir Christopher Hatton's stamp…who made way to the Trojan horses, the popish books’ of the appellant agitators.Footnote 55 ‘It is to be feared that some in authority’ – and here the pamphlet was getting close to naming Bancroft and Cecil – ‘have concurrence with priests and Jesuits, and, presuming on their credit with her majesty, hope, partly by fears procured and partly by conditional absolution, indulgence or dispensation obtained, to draw her majesty to toleration’.Footnote 56 The tract was drawing a direct connection between the appellant agitation and the recent parliament, a connection which meant that someone in authority was deliberately working towards a toleration, allowing the appellants to pursue their appeal at Rome, even as they connived at the failure of a recusancy bill in the Commons, and all to win a factional battle against their own (puritan) enemies in the national church.
III
The Humble motives not only recalled the lost certainties of the recent past, it also mimicked the mode of argument of three recent and notorious Catholic books. The first was the Philopater tract of 1592 (Elizabethae, Angliae reginae…) – a lengthy Latin screed produced by Robert Parsons in response to Burghley's rabidly anti-Catholic proclamation of October 1591; the second was Newes from Spayne and Holland of 1593, which had acted as advance publicity for the Humble motives’ third main Catholic source and interlocutor, Robert Parsons's Conference about the next succession of 1594.Footnote 57 In so doing, the Humble motives was not merely seeking to refute the arguments of these texts, nor even to use them to unmask the nature of the latest popish conspiracy – although it did indeed try to do both those things. It was citing them almost as authorities, reliable guides to the current conjuncture and models of the most effective way to analyse it.
The head line claim of these Catholic texts (and in itself this was not exactly new) was that English religious opinion could be divided into three main groups – Protestants, papists, and puritans. Catholics were recognizable by their ideological solidarity but, despite the extreme bitterness of the division between Protestant and puritan, it was puritanism which appeared to be on the up, both within the privy council and in London. (Newes from Spayne took the form of a debate between Catholics and politiques about just how strong the puritan party really was, and whether it might be put down and controlled during the final struggle to succeed Elizabeth; this was a debate in which equally plausible arguments were deployed by each side and readers were left to draw their own conclusions.Footnote 58) But if ‘the matter’ of the succession did ‘come in difference between them’, the Conference declared that the birds-of-a-feather Protestants in both France and Holland would be more inclined to back the puritans than what it called the ‘Protestants’ in England ‘for that in truth they are more conform[able] to the puritan religion’.Footnote 59
But Parsons claimed that ‘those…which are recusants and discover themselves unto the world’ were but the tip of an iceberg composed, for the most part, by others ‘who go not so far forwards as to discover their religion (at least wise to put themselves within danger of laws) and yet, in mind, will and judgment are they nothing behind the rest’.Footnote 60 This was pretty rich, of course, coming from the pen of the ideologue who for years had denounced conformity and church popery. But even better was the fact that the Catholics’ ranks were swollen yet further by the crowds of ‘all that be offended, grieved or any way discontented with the present time’. To top it off, there were simply no major puritan foreign powers, ‘princes and states’, in the way that there were Catholic ones; and that left out of account the ‘known inclination that way of Ireland’ and even of some of the Scots.Footnote 61
Parsons had first had recourse to this style of argument in the early 1580s. Then, he had been concerned to argue that so deep and pervasive were the religious divisions in post-Reformation England that political stability could only be ensured through a policy of liberty of conscience, extended towards Catholics, who were, in fact, far more loyal, orthodox, and quiescent subjects than their great enemies, the puritans.Footnote 62 Thomas Digges's distinctions between Protestants and Catholics of religion and state were a direct response to and critique of exactly such claims. Directed at what Parsons and others portrayed as the inherent unity and strength of Catholic opinion, Digges's taxonomy sought, as we have seen, to break the hard core (‘Catholics of religion’) off from their church papist and fellow travelling penumbra of support and sympathy (‘Catholics of state’) and thus render the latter a fruitful recruiting ground for Protestants, at first of state and then perhaps even of religion. As for the category of ‘Protestants of religion’, this was designed to play down the actual or potential division between puritans and conformists of which Parsons and his associates made so much, in favour of a basic Protestant solidarity in the face of the Catholic threat.
Designed for the mid-1580s, Digges's text was here being re-appropriated to meet the new situation at the century's end when these relatively coherent symmetries were being disrupted by the appellants’ claim, in public and in print, that there was a natural equivalence between the danger from puritans and Jesuit clergy.
The Humble motives thus reprinted Digges's petition to illustrate the right way to play on the real divisions within and amongst English papists rather than, as the likes of Bancroft appeared to be doing, merely swallowing whole a certain Catholic style of (apparent) loyalism, and a characterization of the politico-religious scene in which conformist Protestants, anti-puritans, crypto-Catholics, and the appellants could and should unite against a two-headed Jesuit and puritan monster.Footnote 63 In the face of the appellants’ vision of an irredeemable split between so-called puritans and so-called Protestants, the compiler of the Humble motives tried to reassert the ideological and political commonalities which united all true English Protestants against what remained at bottom, a monolithic, indelibly papalist and Hispanophile, popery.Footnote 64
IV
We can seek both to confirm the accuracy of our analysis and to establish the reach of the Humble motives by looking at the responses which it elicited. In Rome, Robert Parsons received both a précis that emphasized the tract's claim that the division between the Jesuits and secular clergy was a mere ruse of the pope to mislead the Protestant authorities about the real nature of Catholic intentions and also, enclosed with his friend's Henry Garnet's letter to him of 9 March 1602, a complete copy of the pamphlet. Garnet remarked tersely that ‘we expect all manner of persecution here’ because of the appellants’ scribblings, for ‘so far we may gather by the new puritan pamphlet’.Footnote 65 A newsletter from Rome, dated 27 April 1602, reported the appearance of ‘Mr Digges his book’ to show that the puritans ‘would have him [William Watson] hanged also as Martin Marprelate was’.Footnote 66
There were two major tractate responses to the Humble motives: Anthony Copley's Another letter to Mr A. C. his dis-jesuited kinsmen (1602) and A briefe censure upon the puritan pamphlet entitled Humble motives for association to maintain religion established (1603).Footnote 67 Both of them, not unreasonably, read the Humble motives as a ‘puritan’ attempt to make the lives of English Catholics even more miserable than they already were. Following the same, somewhat threatening, logic that the Humble motives had used to defend puritans, Copley observed ‘how dangerous a thing it is to a state to drive so great a part of subjects as Catholics are…to desperation’, even though, unlike puritans, Catholics were loyal to the queen. But luckily ‘not they [the puritans] but Protestants steer the present state’ and the Protestants, ‘how foolishly soever this memorialist would make their religion all one’, had a very different attitude to Catholics from the contempt and hostility they (quite rightly) reserved for puritans. For while the Humble motives might target ‘Catholics of religion’, the villains of the piece were ‘the Jesuit party, which is indeed Spanish’ and they could circumvent ‘any…oath or other external sign’, ‘according to the laws of their mental reservation and equivocations…which permits them any dissimulation’. And so the measure would leave the source of real danger, ‘the puritans and Jesuits’, untouched, while persecuting, indeed threatening, to render dangerously desperate the silent majority of essentially loyal English Catholics, a group for whom, ‘setting [the] Jesuits aside’, Copley and the appellants affected to speak.Footnote 68
Writing in 1602, the appellant sympathizer Copley was seeking to play his response to the Humble motives for partisan advantage in the late stages of the archpriest controversy. Very early in 1603, as that controversy was ending, but while Elizabeth was still alive, A briefe censure sought by contrast to defend what, despite everything, it desperately wanted to present as a united Catholic cause though, equally, against a puritan conspiracy.Footnote 69 In the best Bancroftian, hyper-conformist mode, all puritans were simply assimilated to the radical sectarian and presbyterian fringe.Footnote 70 It was simply axiomatic that ‘every puritan is directed and infallibly assisted of the spirit and may control at their pleasure all popes, princes, councils and parliaments and consistories, of all times and places’.Footnote 71 The only authority that the puritans recognized was that of their ‘reformed seignory and eldership’.Footnote 72 Was it not ironic that the Humble motives was an appeal ‘from parliament and prince’, ‘to the Protestant bishops (a parcel thereof)’, precisely the group ‘whom in so many rhymes, libels and invectives’ the puritans had excoriated for as long as anyone could remember.Footnote 73 In addition, puritanism and Calvinism were joined at the hip. Both were essentially foreign and seditious. While the Humble motives had said that the Catholics wanted to ‘gull’ the Scottish king, our author emphasized how much James VI hated puritans, as his recent work Basilikon Doron made clear.Footnote 74 The Essex rebellion was cited here (as indeed it was by appellant writers) as proof positive not of Catholic but of puritan sedition, i.e. the polar opposite of the account in the Humble motives. The reader was urged to ‘examine the lamentable and repining words, actions, gestures and behaviours of all the puritans at the time of his [Essex's] desolate end’.Footnote 75 By contrast, if Catholics had really plotted so hard to kill Elizabeth, why on earth was she still on the throne after forty-four years?Footnote 76
If the Humble motives got the attention of Parsons in Rome, it also attracted that of the privy council in London. Writing to Sir Robert Cecil, Bishop Bancroft noted the pamphlet's appearance and reported an exchange with the lord chief justice and hard line anti-papist, Sir John Popham, on what it meant. Popham predictably regarded it as a ‘cunning fetch contrived by the Jesuits’, but Bancroft begged to differ.Footnote 77 The Cecil papers contain an epitome of the tract's main arguments, pointing out that the author ‘had his distinction…of Protestants out of Doleman's book of succession [the Conference]’. ‘These Trojan horses, the popish books’, denounced by the tract, were glossed as ‘the late books set out by the secular priests against the Jesuits’ and the contention that such books were being connived at by ‘persons in authority [who] have concurrence with priests and Jesuits’, and sought ‘to draw her majesty to toleration’ was underscored, as was the decidedly threatening claim that the puritans should not be provoked because ‘they are mighty and many’.Footnote 78
Over the next year or so, the council responded to the line laid out in the pamphlet, using a range of media. Exactly how seriously they took it was demonstrated by the resort to treason trials of Catholics as the accession of James VI got closer. Between late March and mid-April 1602, there were six high-profile Catholic victims, principally of the mid-1580s treason statute. Amongst them was one Jesuit, Francis Page, but also James Duckett, a printer used by the appellants to produce the Jesuit Robert Southwell's Humble supplication.Footnote 79 In a newsletter of 28 April 1602, Richard Blount explained to Parsons that ‘the cause of this sudden execution of priests was to satisfy in some sort the puritans and others abroad who think much that the council should now favour priests and especially use them as instruments for the compassing of their worldly plots’. This was proof, incidentally, of the claim that Garnet made in March about how the appellants were (literally) dicing with death in provoking such people as the author of the Humble motives.Footnote 80 In a like vein, the newsletter writer ‘Anthony Rivers’, almost certainly the earl of Worcester's secretary William Sterrell who had absolutely no time for any of the appellants, reported that the appellants’ proctors in Rome had been putting it about that they had the council's warrant to negotiate with the Roman curia for a ‘toleration in religion’ (that is, in England) and in return secure the ‘revocation’ of Rome's censures of Elizabeth. The council had felt compelled to ‘show that it is false’. Also, the ‘puritans’, appalled at Bancroft's ‘familiarity with Watson and others’, imputed ‘ill affection in religion to the principal of the council’, and so ‘a little to restrain them’, Duckett and the others had been brutally dispatched, with Popham personally securing the queen's direct verbal instruction to proceed.Footnote 81
Further confirmation of this dynamic comes in a lengthy royal proclamation of 5 November 1602, which maintained that, while the dispute between the two Catholic interest groups in the archpriest business had been genuine enough, the authorities had always been entirely undeceived about the desire of all the Catholic clergy to combine ‘themselves together in this our realm for the advancement of our enemies’.Footnote 82 John Chamberlain, for one, believed ‘her majesty had never any such meaning, nor any of her council durst ever make such a motion’ as this of a toleration.Footnote 83 This, of course, was just what the author of the Humble motives wanted to hear, although the proclamation also denounced ‘some other natures (apt to innovation and affected much to their own opinions)’, who ‘have broken forth, on the other side, into factious invectives in print against our present government, whereunto they impute such remissness, as if no care were had by any but a few of themselves to preserve religion’. All of which can be read as a scarcely veiled allusion to the overt argument and, even more, to the tacit implications, of the Humble motives.Footnote 84
The proclamation did not entirely do the trick. In February 1603, Francis Barnaby reported that an alleged sighting of the leading appellant, Christopher Bagshaw, ‘entering into a garden behind Burghley House’, had been reported to Lord Chief Justice Popham. This reignited the rumours ‘that all this bred between us and the Jesuits is nothing else but a feigned quarrel to blind men's eyes, whilst some greater and most dangerous plot is in working’; which allegations had put ‘my lord bishop of London and others, who have been our best friends’, ‘in great fear and jealousy that they should fall into some disgrace by this means’.Footnote 85 When Thomas Darling, one of the demoniacs exorcized by the notorious puritan John Darrel, was dragged into Star Chamber for denouncing a sermon preached by John Howson in Oxford in 1602, it emerged (according to Blount) that he had also ‘taxed’ Lord Buckhurst and Cecil, ‘of papistry, as also’ Sir John Fortescue, Whitgift, and Bancroft and said that there were ‘good laws…but none executed and a good proclamation lately set forth against priests but it proved ridiculous’ because the Catholics were still being countenanced by Bancroft ‘and others’.Footnote 86 The council duly made an example of Darling; he was to be ‘set on the pillory’ both in Cheapside and in Oxford, and to have one ear cropped in either venue. But Sterrell reported that, because the countess of Warwick had performed the ‘kind part of a zealous sister’ and interceded with the queen, while the sentence had been carried out in London, on 18 February, Darling had been spared a repeat performance in Oxford. In marked contrast, John Chamberlain noted that, only the day before, the priest William Richardson had been ‘executed at Tyburn’, a fate which itself came a mere four days after his arrest at Clements Inn (on 13 February). Richardson's gallows speech fingered Lord Chief Justice Popham as the driving force behind this prosecution.Footnote 87 Again according to Sterrell, Sir Francis Hastings at this point had ‘obtained liberty for three…puritans in the Clink, and came himself to see them enlarged without delay’.Footnote 88 All of which encapsulated perfectly the strand of opinion appealed to and disseminated by the Humble motives and exemplified in the activities of Popham, the countess of Warwick, and Hastings.Footnote 89
V
That last mention of Hastings takes on a renewed significance now – for the author of A briefe censure in effect hinted that Hastings was the author of the Humble motives. The Catholic pamphlet remarked that ‘upon the very day and at the very hour (as was supposed)’ of the earl of Essex's beheading, down ‘in Somersetshire, where a prince of these pretenders of perfection reigns, and of whose pure breath this pamphlet savours, all houses of Catholics were forcibly entered, with great numbers conducted by puritan leaders, and without any commission showed, rifled, ransacked and spoiled, without restitution of such injuries’.Footnote 90 Elsewhere, the Briefe censure addressed the author of the Humble motives directly. Referencing that tract's deployment of an anecdote about the recently deceased, but furiously anti-popish, earl of Huntingdon, it asserted that ‘you are well acquainted with that family, watch-words, ward-words and their appendices’.Footnote 91 Sir Francis Hastings was not only the brother of the earl of Huntingdon, he had also published A watch-word to all religious, and true hearted English-men.Footnote 92 This work repeated the standard, Cecilian popish conspiracy theory, centred on the alliance between the pope and Spain. Coming out in 1598, that tract constituted an implicit commentary upon the debate then raging in the council and, indeed, as Alexandra Gajda has shown, in the public sphere described by circulating manuscript and rumour, about whether to pursue peace with Spain. This was a debate in which Essex took a stand on the side of continuing the war, a stand publicized through the circulation in manuscript of his famous ‘Apology’.Footnote 93 Hastings's tract constituted a full-on statement of the puritan version of the Essex project. It glossed the earl's crusade against Habsburg universal monarchy in terms of a virulent anti-popery rather than in the far more politique terms employed by the earl's Catholic and crypto-Catholic followers. They, by contrast, cited their stubborn opposition to the Spanish monarchy's ambitions as a means to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime and, hence, as an argument for toleration for at least a certain sort of Catholic. Hastings's screed then received a reply from none other than Robert Parsons, in his A temperate ward-word to the turbulent and seditious wach-word of Sir Francis Hastinges, and it was upon the titles of these tracts, as well as on Sir Francis's kinship with the earl of Huntingdon, that the author of the Briefe censure was clearly playing.Footnote 94 (The Briefe censure also appears to make a sarcastic reference to Hastings's problems with his eyesight.Footnote 95)
The Briefe censure was thus outing Sir Francis Hastings as the author of Humble motives or, rather, was putting into print what some contemporaries were already saying; for example, back in April 1602, Richard Blount had reported to Robert Parsons that ‘I think you have received a puritan pamphlet’ – presumably the Humble motives which had been sent off, as we saw, in March by Garnet. It was, Blount claimed, ‘very lately written’ and had ‘much discontented the state, but most of all the bishop of London’, who was ‘dangerously charged with high treason for licensing and favouring the appellants and their appeal’ and, ‘as it is thought, Sir Francis Hastings has had his finger in it’.Footnote 96
This allows us to bring our argument full circle. We can now ground Mr Bond's dark hints about the abuse of magisterial power in his native Somerset in Catholic allegations about Hastings's brutal exercise of his powers as a JP against the local Catholic community. We can also locate the exchanges in the 1601 parliament within a wider ideological context, one framed by the recent Essex debacle and the archpriest controversy. This considerably raised the stakes when it came to discussing how English Catholics should be treated, given that everybody knew that, at that very moment, elements amongst the English Catholic clergy were being protected and patronized by central figures in the establishment. In that atmosphere, the likes of John Bond and Roger Owen had been able not only to take on, but to outface Sir Francis Hastings in the House of Commons itself.
As a JP and parliament man of long standing and vast experience, the brother of Claire Cross's ‘puritan earl’ of Huntingdon, Hastings was the epitome of the puritan or perfect Protestant elites created and sustained by the so-called ‘monarchical republic’ of Elizabeth Tudor; that is to say, by the emergently confessional state, formed during the 1570s and 1580s by the dynamics of religious change, confessional conflict, dynastic uncertainty, and war with the greatest power in Europe. This was precisely the sort of central and local state which Digges's various petitions to the queen had been designed to purge and perfect.Footnote 97 Hastings, in short, was a stalwart of a high Elizabethan establishment, characterized by a rock solid anti-popery and a continuing commitment to various moderate puritan schemes for further reformation. As such, by the end of the 1590s, amongst others,Footnote 98 he was beginning to feel the earth move under his feet, as nearly all the fixed points, the personal connections, and ideological solidarities, around which his career and sense of identity had been organized, started to shift or even to dissolve. As the reign neared its end, the question of the succession and the possibility of various deals to be done both with Spain (notably in the negotiations at Boulogne in 1600Footnote 99) and at least with certain sorts of English Catholic raised their (to Hastings) decidedly ugly heads.
If the Humble motives is anything to go by, Hastings saw the current conjuncture as the culmination of a long-standing process of decline started by that crypto-Catholic snake in the grass, Sir Christopher Hatton, whose activities had been enabled initially by the death of such central figures in the high Elizabethan regime as the earl of Leicester. While Burghley had still been alive, and with Essex the rising star in the political firmament, all might yet have been well; although even then Hastings had clearly been worried enough by the threat of peace negotiations with Spain to turn to print in 1598, restating, in his Ward-word of that year, all of the central pieties and platitudes of high-Elizabethan Hispanophobe anti-popery. But now, with first the death of the lord treasurer and then the tragic fall of the earl of Essex, no one was left to stop the rot. The result was the secret dealings and pseudo-official accommodations with certain self- described ‘Catholic loyalists’ – a category, of course, in which Hastings simply did not believe – that had just gone spectacularly public in 1601 with a sudden burst of officially enabled print. It was surely all this, as much as the unchecked impertinence of his neighbour and parliamentary colleague, Mr Bond, which prompted Hastings's resort to public and illicit print.
In trumpeting the strength and the loyalty of the puritan interest and warning of the extreme ill-wisdom of ditching the godly for the uncertain embrace of various popish wolves in sheep's clothing, and in doing all this through the medium of illicit, unlicensed print, Hastings was doing for the puritans just what first Robert Parsons and Richard Verstegan, and then the appellants, had been doing on behalf of their very different versions of English Catholicism. He was also fulfilling (very accurately) Parsons's prediction of what the puritans would do, when confronted by the imminent prospect of the queen's death and the consequent struggle over the succession and the nature of the new regime.
It comes, therefore, as small surprise that, in the next reign, Hastings emerged as a central figure in the mobilization of puritan opinion, both in and out of parliament, in an effort to frame the emerging Jacobean settlement in church and state in the puritan interest.Footnote 100 In 1604, at the point when the new regime was reneging on James Stuart's extensive promises made to Catholics around the time of the accession,Footnote 101 Hastings and other puritan MPs came up with a draft bill (the text of which is no longer extant) intended to give legal expression to precisely the analysis of religious identity and popish error that Hastings had laid out in parliament in 1601. (Whereas in 1601 he had described the four types of puritan as ‘Catholics’, ‘papists’, ‘Brownists or family of love’, and ‘evangelical puritans’, now Hastings described them as Cathar heretics, Catholics, Anabaptists, and Protestants.) Hastings's bill provoked an attack from a known anti-puritan MP, John Good, who was not inaccurately shouted down as a papist. Good was a crypto-Catholic whose father had, at one stage, been Mary Stuart's doctor. He was also, however, completely conformist and he attacked Hastings's bill because it ‘serves but as a bridge to pass over the known puritans indeed, to certain obscure and imagined sectaries’, thus protecting the majority of puritans in the national church who, Good claimed (on the authority of Richard Hooker no less) deserved to be outed and excluded. Hastings proceeded to flood the rest of the session with proposals for protecting moderate puritans and he was central to the passage of the 1604 recusancy statute. Thereafter, he resorted to a petitioning campaign and his involvement in the Northamptonshire petition of 1605 led to the loss of both his place on the Somerset bench and his militia colonelcy.Footnote 102
For our purposes, though, the important point is that, just like Parsons, and indeed the appellants, both in his exchanges with Mr Bond in the House of Commons in 1601, and (if he was the author) in the Humble motives, Hastings was seeking to control the discursive structures, the language and assumptions, in which the contemporary religio-political scene was to be understood and acted upon. Central to that effort were attempts to define and control quotidian but key terms such as ‘puritan’ and ‘papist’. The fact that, in making his pitch, Hastings was prepared not merely to refute but also to cite, with seeming approval, secret histories and ‘libels’, written by the likes of Parsons and Verstegan, using exactly their style of politique political analysis, is particularly telling. It certainly shows that texts such as A conference or Newes from Spayne, and even the Philopater tract, produced in exile for an English audience by Parsons and his ilk, did not want for a readership in England.
Indeed, the manoeuvres performed by all these people provide us with wonderful evidence of the extent to which, by the end of the 1590s, virtually everyone who mattered was, to some extent, living in the mental world of Robert Parsons; using the same techniques of analysis and persuasion, the same combination of apparently prudential analysis of the balance of forces between religiously defined interest groups, with an intensely ideological, indeed savagely parti-pris, manipulation of the categories and identities being used to drive the analysis.Footnote 103 Not only were a range of different people – various sorts of Catholics, both Jesuits and appellants, loyalists and Hispanophiles, various sorts of Protestants, both conformists, such as Richard Bancroft, and puritans, such as Sir Francis Hastings, not to mention James VI himselfFootnote 104 – all thinking like this; they were increasingly making pitches cast in such terms in public and in print and busily citing one another as they did so.
Hastings's public performances (both before and after the accession) encompassed parliament, illicit print, and manuscript petition, with his performance in the one venue or genre reflecting back on and amplifying his performance in the other and all of them playing off wider bodies of rumour and opinion. That such an erstwhile pillar of the Elizabethan establishment felt compelled to adopt such expedients speaks volumes about the seriousness, public-ness and intense ideological ambivalence of the (perceived and actual) succession/accession crises that attended the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the beginning of that of James I, and about the nature and extent, both the possibilities and the limitations, of the ‘post-reformation public sphere’.Footnote 105
