Unless it was in their interests to let loose the demagogues, early modern authorities struggled to contain confessional conflicts. Prince William of Orange argued for the prohibition of hedge preaching during the 1570s to keep the Calvinists' quarrels with Catholics in Antwerp indoors. His sometimes ally, Queen Elizabeth I of England suppressed prophesying in the same decade to deny opportunities to the critics of her established church to complain (or to stoke lay complaints) during their sermons in her realm's market towns. Some pulpit polemic was certain to stir drowsy sermon-goers, and pamphlets circulated to identify religious practices and ideas that distinguished the unreformed from the reformed and distinguished the ardently reformed, who referred to themselves as “godlier,” from their purportedly, partially reformed brethren. Even widely circulated devotional manuals and catechetical treatises could be barbed. Hence, predictably, regimes' attempts to keep discussions (and criticisms) of state-sanctioned divinity from spinning out of control—from appearing, unlicensed or initially unnoticed, on the page or onstage—were unsuccessful. Abrasive hedge preachers and frantic prophesiers frequently were apprehended easily, but chroniclers, historians, and dramatists smuggled religious views into what they created; David Womersley ably draws much of that out.
He has an eye for the protagonist, in fact or fiction, whose virtues were implicitly compared to those of Christ and other biblical figures. He has an ear for “the theological resonance” of seemingly secular drama and even of “knock-about comedy” (362). What Womersely would have us conclude is that discussions of orthodoxy and heresy and of Christianity's connections with politics were all but ubiquitous.
The illustrations Womersley collects for readers tend to persuade that, as he claims, religious controversy was “the motor of historiographic production” (10) and that the Tudors' history plays reflected and refracted the religion around the dramatists. Nonetheless, an occasional passage and interpretation suggest that, while running the examples he racks on the table and illustrating “the intense topicality” of a play, Womersley can be caught miscuing. For example, from the summer of 1599 into 1600, King Henry IV of France was considered to be a candidate to succeed Queen Elizabeth I. Shakespeare was then preparing Henry V for the stage, and, Womersley says, was arguing for Lancastrian legitimacy, rejecting by innuendo Salic law, and thus undermining the French king's chances. The reason: Henry of Navarre's (Henry IV's) notorious prejudice that Paris was worth a Mass—his willingness to trade reformed religion for recognition as king. On this count, Womersley's effort to prove the “intense topicality” of the play seem forced (354).
Generally, Divinity and State delivers more effectively. It catches John Bale tinkering with Henry V, clipping the virtues ascribed to him by his sources and understating the monarch's military achievements to present him to Protestants as “a puppet worked by the priests” to hound Lollards and, more damaging still, an English sovereign “serviceable to the pope” (98–99). Those authors Womersley identifies as “hard Protestants”—John Foxe, of course, foremost among them—were especially adept, excising from or adding to their sources. And there was no party line that prescribed vilification. Some Protestant partisans might labor at “the attenuation of Henry [V]'s moral stature” (105), whereas others coupled him with the conciliarists who complained about papal corruption and advocated structural reforms. Shakespeare found a place for him among critics of intercessory prayer.
This notice shifts King Henry V's presence in several Tudor histories and plays to offer an impression of how Womersley ushers readers into a world “saturated with religious implication” and effectively delineates a “Protestant vigilance behind [the] adjustment of words” (49). He is particularly astute when analyzing textual variations in the narratives of England's national past and the confessional contexts that explain them. Historians of English religion and politics need no help figuring out why Richard Grafton changed that part of Thomas More's Richard III which defended the rights of those seeking sanctuary, rights that “bothe kynges and popes soo good” (More)—“bothe kynges and byshoppes” (Grafton)—confirmed, yet Divinity and State gives us greater appreciation for discussions that authorities might have wished off the stage, for the chronicles' and historical plays' (im)pieties, and for “the relation of state religion to the individual conscience” (135).
