St Bernard and St Bridget

The correspondence of the first of these items with the description given by Bale of Doctrina Barnardi et Brigidae is close enough in itself to render their identification highly probable. For corroboration, however, it is worth noting that St German had a special interest in St Bridget of Sweden. John Guy has already commented on St German's devotion to her, in the context of a manuscript from the early 1530s which he headed with the invocation ‘Jesus, Maria, Birgitta’.Footnote ⁵ St German's translation of these opuscula of Bernard and Bridget is particularly interesting in the light of his growing aversion to some elements of ‘traditional religion’ during the 1530s. Bernard of Clairvaux and Bridget of Sweden were both members of religious orders: Bridget founded her own, and Bernard's role in the Cistercians was arguably more influential than that of their founder. And the texts St German chose for translation were of particular relevance to the contemplative life. Bridget's revelations were among the most popular devotional writings of the later Middle Ages, and those St German selected concerned the love of God, the active and the contemplative life, the conversion of the infidel, and advice for those planning pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Two of these selections from St Bridget are also cited in A lytell treatyse agaynst Mahumet, the second of the anonymous works here ascribed to St German.

Bernard's Golden epistle, as the title page says, was sent to ‘a yong religious man’. It is not to be confused with another ‘Golden Epistle’ or ‘Golden Letter’, namely that classic of spiritual writing which was often erroneously ascribed to Bernard, but was in fact the work of William of St Thierry. Bernard's own Golden epistle was available in two English versions in the 1530s, usually attached to the translation of the Imitatio Christi by Richard Whitford. The other version was by Whitford himself, but it was not accompanied by the revelations of St Bridget. St German's version is found in A boke newely translated out of Laten in to Englysshe called the folowynge of Cryste (London: R. Redman, [1531?] [STC 23964]). It was also included, apparently by mistake, in a compilation of Whitford's devotional compositions and translations issued by the same printer: A werke of preparacion vnto communion (London: Redman, [1531?] [STC 25412]). The error is evident from the inclusion of Whitford's own version of the Golden epistle, together with an explanatory note observing that this has been added because the previous version was not Whitford's.Footnote ⁶ As the title of Godfray's edition of the Golden epistle (STC 1915) actually alludes to the work's inclusion in editions of the Imitatio, the translation is likely to have been originally produced for that purpose, and only later issued as a separate title. In any case, a date of 1531 for St German's version is likely, although none of the surviving printings gives a date. Given that parts of St German's translation also appear in the next work to be considered, A lytell treatyse agaynst Mahumet, which certainly dates from 1531, it is likely that the translations of Bernard and Bridget appeared a little earlier.

A lytell treatyse agaynst Mahumet

The correspondence between the title of the anonymous work against Islam, A lytell treatyse agaynst Mahumet and his cursed secte, and the tract attributed to St German by Bale, In Mahumetem et eius sectam, leaves little room for doubt about the attribution, which has indeed been suggested before.Footnote ⁷ Confirmation, if needed, is available from chapter xxiii of St German's dialogue Salem and Bizance, which follows almost word for word the argument of chapter x of A lytell treatyse agaynst Mahumet, a numerological – and somewhat premature – speculation about the imminent demise of Islam.Footnote ⁸ As John Guy has observed, St German made a habit of recycling his own work.Footnote ⁹ This chapter also enables us to date the treatise, as the calculation is taken down to the year 1531 (in Salem and Bizance St German alters the reference to 1533).Footnote ¹⁰ The occasion of the work was doubtless the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529, which struck fear into the peoples of western Europe. Its purpose was to offer reassurance and hope: reassurance in its knockdown (almost knockabout) commentary on Mohammed's life (a recitation of the medieval Christian myth) and on the Qur'an (a brief rehearsal of some internal contradictions accompanied by a few observations on its more startling disagreements with the Bible); hope in its predictions of Islam's collapse. St German's account of Mohammed and Islam was based on a few standard late medieval authorities, notably the Fortalitium fidei (composed by the Spanish convert from Judaism, Alfonso de la Espina) and Bernard von Breydenbach's Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (a text which is also cited, in similar terms although on a different subject, in St German's Answere to a letter of 1535).Footnote ¹¹ His argument for the imminent downfall of Islam was drawn from Wolfgang Aytinger's commentary on the revelations of St Methodius.Footnote ¹²

These two first works disclose an interest in private revelations, apocalyptic, and the more arcane areas of theological speculation which we would probably not have deduced from the rationalist legal philosophy and robust anticlericalism of his other early publications, still less from the unorthodox leanings of his later works. They show that St German's religious background was thoroughly traditional, albeit learned. Not that the St German of the treatise against Islam is entirely unfamiliar. He treats Islam as a rival form of law, and is distinctly unimpressed by its claims. His critique of Moslems for their reluctance to allow rational discussion of the Qur'an is reminiscent of his later critique of the Catholic clergy for seeking to smother healthy criticism and honest discussion with blanket accusations of heresy. Moreover, he inveighs against the prohibition on translating the Qur'an, contrasting it with what he presents as the Christian readiness to have the Bible rendered into any language in order to make it accessible to all.Footnote ¹³ In the context of the ban on Tyndale's translations, this reveals a principled exponent of the vernacular Bible, though this does not necessarily imply evangelical religious inclinations, as both Henry viii and Thomas More had also expressed approval in principle for vernacular Scripture by this time.Footnote ¹⁴ St German himself wrote only one work in Latin (the first version of his dialogue on English law), and his decision to write on common law in English (rather than the Anglo-Norman jargon of legal education in the Inns of Court) was a declaration of intent.Footnote ¹⁵ The introduction to his treatise against Islam, like the title page of his rendering of Bernard and Bridget, emphasised his wish to write for a literate lay audience.Footnote ¹⁶

The decision to translate selections from Bernard and Bridget bespeaks an attachment to traditional religion. Interest in special revelations such as those of St Bridget and the Pseudo-Methodius was by no means uncommon in late medieval Christianity, but such revelations were dismissed by the Reformers as demonic delusions or mere frauds. St German's other works of the early 1530s are equally conservative in their devotional and doctrinal colours, even if increasingly outspoken about ecclesiastical abuses and increasingly radical on church law and government (though this radicalism owes nothing to the Lutheran dichotomy between Law and Gospel). The 1532 Treatise concernynge the diuision betwene the spiritualtie and temporaltie upholds indulgences in principle even while criticising them in practice, and endorses Gerson in criticising the abuse of images even while upholding their proper use.Footnote ¹⁷Salem and Bizance (1533) likewise testifies to thoroughly traditional religious inclinations. St German refers unselfconsciously to ‘our lady’, and in mentioning Marseille observes that that is ‘where saint Marie Magdalen lieth’. He accepts in principle the benefits of obits, trentals and chantries, and also accepts the doctrine of indelible character in priestly ordination.Footnote ¹⁸ In short, there is nothing in his writings before the break with Rome to indicate any deviation from traditional doctrine. However, by 1537, as John Guy has shown, St German had become critical of several aspects of the cult of the saints and ecclesiastical ceremonies.Footnote ¹⁹

Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde

The case for identifying the Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde with the treatise which Bale entitled Quod clerus non conderet leges rests primarily on the second half of the title of the printed work, which states that it addresses the question of ‘what auctoryte the clergye haue to make lawes’. This is a sufficiently close compromise between the wording of the title and the thrust of the treatise (Bernard, who clearly gets the better of the exchanges, argues that the clergy have no such power) to make the identification probable.

The case has been complicated, however, by the fact that the Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde has recently, if tentatively, been ascribed by J. Christopher Warner to John Rastell.Footnote ²⁰ Warner is aware of Henry Bradshaw's opinion that St German was the author, and indeed himself notes that the tract evinces certain similarities with St German's A treatyse concerninge the power of the clergye, but prefers Rastell on the basis of the titles with which Bale credited him. Warner's chief argument against Bradshaw's ascription is that ‘from 1531 to 1535, all the books that have been identified as his [St German's] were printed by Berthelet', but, even if true, this would hardly constitute a compelling argument. In fact, the two pamphlets already discussed in this article are both exceptions to this rule.Footnote ²¹ Berthelet was exceedingly busy in the early 1530s, so that it would hardly be surprising if one or two of St German's works were printed in other workshops.

Warner's case for attributing this dialogue to Rastell seems rather insubstantial. The fact that it appeared from Rastell's press, which may not be intended as an argument for his authorship, would obviously furnish insufficient grounds in itself, for most of the surviving books which Rastell printed were not written by him.Footnote ²² Nor can the fact that Rastell may have written books as part of the regime's propaganda campaign in the 1530s do more than establish a possibility of authorship. Warner notes the titles of two now unknown works attributed to Rastell shortly afterwards: ‘Abrasionem papismi’ (‘the erasure of popery’), credited to him by Bale; and ‘The Church’, credited to him in a list of forbidden books promulgated by Bishop Bonner in 1542. But Warner does not show that either of these manifests any particular connection with the title or content of the dialogue in question. Nor is there any good reason to believe that either of them actually represents anything Rastell ever wrote.Footnote ²³ The ‘Abrasionem papismi’ (for which Bale gives no incipit) is probably a mere conjecture, based on the fact, which Bale reports, that Rastell, originally a Catholic polemicist, changed sides.Footnote ²⁴ No surviving book has yet been plausibly identified with ‘The Church of John Rastall’, and as Rastell was more of a printer than an author, Bonner's list (which is more interested in censorship than authorship) may merely be referring to an anonymous treatise from Rastell's press.

Warner's argument therefore rests on some resemblances between this text and Rastell's known writings: a taste for dialogue as a form and a method; the citing of a commonplace from Aristotle; and a critique of the use of the term ‘church’ to refer exclusively to the clergy (a critique which Warner judges uncharacteristic of St German).Footnote ²⁵ But these arguments are far from compelling. For St German, too, both employs the dialogue form and cites Aristotle.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, in much the same terms as Bernard, he habitually voices his objections to the way that the word ‘church’ was in common parlance used to denote the clergy, a usage he puts down to clerical arrogance. Bernard objects to the manner in which clergymen ‘sey they be the very churche of Christ and exclude all other from the church as thoughe all temporall men … were but as abiectes and cast outes’. In the Addicions of Salem and Byzance St German argues that the ‘liberty of the church’ so vigorously defended by the clergy is by no means a specifically clerical prerogative, as ‘al the people of Englande make the churche of Englande’; in A treatise concernynge diuers of the constitucyons prouynciall he devotes most of a brief chapter to this question, arguing that it is a ‘great ouersyght’ in the clergy to call themselves the church, ‘for all Catholyke people make the churche’; and in the Answere to a letter he doubts whether ‘the clergy can proue that they be the catholique churche’.Footnote ²⁷ The point is made several times in Thinges necessary to saluacion, in which he admits that his concern over the issue amounts to a personal foible. For the figure of the ‘Doctor’ (who clearly represents St German's own views) observes that ‘thowe knoweste my conceyte, that bisshops and prestes make not the churche’.Footnote ²⁸

This concern with the nature of the Church is just one of several parallels between the Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde and other works of St German's. For example, the discussion of ius regale and ius regale politicum is akin to that in the Answere to a letter.Footnote ²⁹ The dialogue's definition of the law of nature as the ‘lawe of naturall reason’ is also characteristic of St German's legal thought,Footnote ³⁰ as is the closing argument of the treatise, namely that if the clergy had the power to make binding law and used this power to pass laws contrary to existing public laws, then they would be encouraging disobedience to the authority of the king. This authority is then derived directly from God in an argument buttressed with a pair of scriptural citations which appear together in fuller lists of similar texts in later treatises of St German's.Footnote ³¹

If Rastell had written the Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde, then Bale would probably have credited it to him under a recognisable version of its title, as he was very well informed about the books published by Cromwell's associates. For example, his Catalogus records unpublished manuscripts by both Christopher St German and Thomas Swynnerton which survive only among the state papers.Footnote ³² So, given the reasonably good match between Bale's ‘Quod clerus non conderet leges’ and both the subtitle (‘what auctoryte the clergye haue to make lawes’) and the argument of the Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde, the case for an attribution to St German seems altogether stronger.

Dating the Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde is a challenge. Warner plausibly proposes a date c. 1532, and links it to the controversy occasioned by St German's Treatise concernynge the diuision.Footnote ³³ The best evidence for the date comes from Clement's opening words:

This is a pithy summary of the first substantial article of the Supplication against the Ordinaries of 1532, which voiced wide-ranging criticisms of many aspects of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Clement's subsequent defence of the clerical power to make laws as founded upon the Scriptures and the consensus of the Church is an equally accurate summary of the Answer of the Ordinaries. So the Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde is indeed to be seen as a contribution to the debate occasioned by the Supplication and the Answer, and therefore either contemporaneous with St German's Treatise concernynge the diuision betwene the spiritualtie and temporaltie (towards the end of 1532), or more probably just after it, in 1533.Footnote ³⁵

Publication in 1533 would make sense of the dialogue's subtle hesitations about the authority of the pope, as well as of the pope's continued appearance as ‘pope’ rather than ‘bishop of Rome’, the formulation officially preferred from December 1533 onwards.Footnote ³⁶ Clement, who is clearly set up for a fall throughout the dialogue, cites various affirmations of papal supremacy from the canon law: ‘one of these lawes sayeth thus. Because Chryst wolde that the church of Rome shulde haue the preemynence, Therefore what so euer it dothe ordayne, euery man is bounde to obey to the see of Rome’. And he adds, ‘another lawe sayeth that he that taketh from the churche of Rome any priuylege is an heretyke’. In reply, however, Bernard does not take on papal power directly, but merely observes: ‘it semeth that those lawes were made rather to mayntayne the popes auctoryte, and to colour your foly than for any indyfferency’.Footnote ³⁷ Elsewhere, Bernard explicitly refuses to challenge Clement's reading of Matthew xvi. 18: ‘Bycause thou spekest of the interpretacyon of scripture, thereby lyeth a great longe tale which nowe I wyll let passe tyll a nother tyme.’Footnote ³⁸ The effect is to sow the seeds of doubt, and to imply that papal authority rests on human law rather than the word of God. At the same time, much of the illustrative material cited (the scriptural texts inculcating the divine origin of royal power, the story of King Lucius and Pope Eleutherius, and various Anglo-Saxon laws made by kings to regulate spiritual affairs) overlaps closely with material found in the Opus eximium, de vera differentia regiae potestatis et ecclesiasticae (London 1534 [STC 11218]), some of it perhaps derived from the regime's propaganda ‘database’, the Collectanea satis copiosa.Footnote ³⁹ Ideas are certainly being floated, probably (given their apparent provenance) with official sanction, which would later be used to argue openly for the replacement of papal with royal supremacy. This looks more like 1533 than 1532.

The striking resemblance between a section of the Dyaloge and the Opus eximium poses a knotty chronological problem, in that the Dyaloge seems to have been published earlier than the Opus eximium yet seems to have drawn upon it. For the Anglo-Saxon laws cited in English in the Dyaloge follow the same order as those cited in Latin in the Opus eximium, which seems to have been printed and published in January and February 1534.Footnote ⁴⁰ As the Opus eximium gives fuller versions of some of the texts, besides four further texts not found in the Dyaloge, and as an English work is in any case more likely to draw on a Latin work than vice versa, the notion that the Opus eximium might have depended on the Dyaloge can be effectively ruled out. Yet the most natural explanation, that the Dyaloge drew on the printed Opus eximium, makes the Dyaloge's reticence on the papacy very hard to explain. The Opus eximium argues determinedly against a papal interpretation of Matt. xvi. 18, and its publication inaugurated Henry's all-out offensive against papal authority.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, if the Dyaloge had appeared later, in 1534, there would have been no reason for it to shy away, as it so overtly does, from a polemic against the papacy which would not only have strengthened its argument but also suited the moment. The most satisfactory explanation is that the author of the Dyaloge had access to a manuscript draft of the Opus eximium. In fact, the first fifteen folios of the volume that now holds the Collectanea consist of a manuscript version of that section of the Opus eximium setting out royal power, which might well have been a draft of the text, and might even have been the Dyaloge's source.Footnote ⁴² In any case, the close resemblance between the Dyaloge and the Opus eximium at this point is a strong indication that the author of the Dyaloge was close to the intellectual centre of Henrician policy-making in the early 1530s.

A treatise concernynge generall councilles

The Treatise concernynge generall councilles has gone unrecognised as St German's work because in 1961 it was ascribed by Paul Sawada to the Scottish evangelical theologian Alexander Alesius, an ascription then taken up by the revised STC.Footnote ⁴³ Sawada's study of two anonymous manuscript discussions of general councils preserved at Hatfield House correctly identified one of them with the treatise published in 1538. However, his attribution of these manuscripts to Alexander Alesius and Henry Cole was essentially speculative. It was based upon some draft instructions for the ambassadors Edmund Bonner and Simon Heynes, despatched to Charles v in 1538 to explain to him Henry viii's position on Pope Paul iii's attempt to convene a general council. Bonner and Heynes were advised to make use of various pamphlets and writings, including works by Alesius and Cole.Footnote ⁴⁴ Sawada's thesis faces an immediate and almost insuperable obstacle in the fact that the two Hatfield treatises are in English: only documents in Latin would have been of any use to those representing Henry viii's views to the imperial court.Footnote ⁴⁵

The circumstantial case for attributing one of the manuscripts (Hatfield House, ms 46) to Henry Cole may have something to be said for it, as the text is dripping with references to canon and civil law, which Cole had studied for many years at Padua. But Sawada's corollary that ‘the second treatise … must have been written by Alesius’ is far from cogent, and cannot stand against the arguments for St German's authorship. Firstly, the manuscript version is not in the hand of Alesius. Sawada argues that both Cole and Alesius were ‘busy men with secretarial staffs’ and could therefore not ‘be expected to have done their own fair copying’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Alesius, however, was neither wealthy enough to have nor busy enough to need a secretarial staff.Footnote ⁴⁷ His exposition of the first twenty-five Psalms, dedicated to Henry viii and compiled in 1536, is laid out in his own hand, and the manuscripts of his other surviving unpublished works are likewise autographs.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although Sawada suggests that the theology of the Treatise manifests distinctly ‘protestant’ tendencies, there is in fact no hint in it of the overt Lutheranism displayed in Alesius's psalm commentary, which draws heavily on the commentaries of both Luther and Melanchthon.Footnote ⁴⁹ Moreover, Alesius was a Scot, and is not known to have published anything in English. The apparent exception, his treatise Of the auctorite of the word of god, was actually composed in Latin, and only later translated into English by one Edmund Allen.Footnote ⁵⁰ But the Treatise concernynge generall councilles is most certainly an English text – not a composition in the Lowland Scots which was presumably Alesius' native tongue. Finally, the decisive argument against Alesius' authorship is that Bale does not credit him with anything like it despite having been a close friend of his since the 1530s, when they were both working under the aegis of Thomas Cromwell. Bale's Catalogus includes a subsidiary dedication to Alesius and John Knox which prefaces the work's fourteenth ‘century’, a section dedicated to Scottish authors. If Alesius had written this pamphlet, Bale would certainly have known.Footnote ⁵¹

The case for St German's authorship might look at first sight no better than that for Alesius'. Hatfield ms 47 is not in St German's hand either: it is in ‘formal Secretary hand’, whereas St German's hand, as both Thomas More and John Guy noted, was small and cramped.Footnote ⁵² However, St German was not only wealthy enough to employ clerks or scribes, but certainly did so. The manuscript ‘Little treatise concerning writs of subpoena’, which John Guy edited, was partly in autograph, and partly in a clerk's hand.Footnote ⁵³ And while portions of St German's dialogue Thinges necessary to salvacion are in autograph, it is mostly in a scribal hand. Indeed, St German's crabbed hand probably made a scribal fair copy essential for anything he wished others to read. A fair copy like Hatfield ms 47 is therefore more likely to represent the work of St German than of Alesius.

The title of the treatise in itself offers some support to the case for St German. There are, besides this one, three anonymous treatises listed in STC whose titles begin with the words ‘A treatise concerning’. They are:

• A treatise concernynge the diuision betwene the spiritualtie and temporaltie (STC 21586–7);

• A treatyse concerninge the power of the clergye (STC 21588)

• A treatise concernynge diuers of the constitucyons prouynciall and legantines (STC 24236).

As all three have been convincingly attributed to St German, the title can be said to be typical of his style.Footnote ⁵⁴

The theology of the treatise is more appropriate to St German than to Alesius. Alesius was by this stage a thoroughgoing Lutheran, as is evident from his exposition of the Psalms. Yet the theology of the Treatise concernynge generall councilles makes no references to justification by faith alone or to other distinctively Lutheran doctrines. It departs from Roman Catholic teaching on some issues, affirming, for example, that confirmation and auricular confession were of human rather than divine institution, and implicitly reducing confirmation from a sacrament to a ‘sacramental’ by maintaining that ‘if they that do it be in grace, it maye do good, and elles it wil do lytel good’ (i.e. that their efficacy is ex opere operantis rather than ex opere operato).Footnote ⁵⁵ Even more adventurously, it hazards the opinion that according to the Ten Commandments, ‘it wold appere, that the settyng vp of them [images] is therby clearly prohibite’, a position in line with the Henrician injunctions and iconoclasm of 1538.Footnote ⁵⁶ But on the vexed question of ‘satisfaction’, while emphasising that penances prescribed by priests in confession are also of human institution, it insists that the divinely commanded ‘good deedes’ of prayer, fasting and almsgiving increase ‘merite and rewarde in heuen’, anathema to evangelicals.Footnote ⁵⁷ Although belief in papal supremacy is categorised as heresy, a tendency which, as Peter Marshall has shown, was peculiar to this moment of English history,Footnote ⁵⁸ the rhetoric of the papal ‘AntiChrist’ is conspicuously absent. In short, the treatise stands firmly within the spectrum of Henrician orthodoxy in the 1530s, stopping well short of Lutheranism. If it was the work of Alesius, he was exercising unwonted restraint.

John Guy has already shown how not only themes but entire passages recur from one St German text to another, enabling us to attribute further writings on the basis of those already known. Several of the theological themes explored in the Treatise concernynge generall councilles crop up in other writings of St German's. Close parallels exist between the Treatise concernynge generall councilles and known works of St German's. Thus the scriptural texts with which he establishes in chapter i that the power of kings comes immediately from God overlap heavily with the similar battery of texts cited in the Treatyse concerninge the power of the clergye.Footnote ⁵⁹ The argument of the Treatise concernynge generall councilles is often close in substance, and even in wording, to that advanced in the manuscript Thinges necessary to salvacion.Footnote ⁶⁰ In both texts a very unusual argument is advanced to explain why Christian kings and princes in fact rightfully possessed the power to convene church councils when this power had been in the hands of the clergy in the era of the primitive Church. In Thinges necessary to salvacion St German justifies this with reference to the two closely related Gospel texts, Matt. xvi. 19 and Matt. xviii. 18. The first of these (‘Whatsoever thou bindest upon earth shall be bound in heaven’), he proposes, ‘was spoken to petre yn the name of all the Appostles and of the vniuersall churche, till kinges were conuerted that were hedes over the churche’, while the second (‘Whatsoever you bind upon earth shall be bound in heaven’) applied ‘fro the tyme that kinges were conuerted’, as ‘that texte was spoken to the vniuersall churche to contynue to thende of the worlde vnder the gouernaunce of kinges and princes’.Footnote ⁶¹ (This strenuous interpretation is defended chiefly on the a priori grounds that ‘if bothe the said textes shulde be vnderstande to be spoken to the Appostles and both to be of oon lyke effecte, then the oon or the other of theym was surplusage and spoken in vayne, specially seing that bothe the said textes were spoken by oon self evangeliste and so nighe to gethere’.Footnote ⁶² ) Only rarely in the long and tortuous annals of scriptural exegesis can anything more bogus than this have been produced, and it is hard to imagine anyone other than the proud progenitor of this absurdity as having had the gall to put it forward not only in manuscript but also in print. That this idiosyncratic argument from Thinges necessary to salvacion appears in summary in the Treatise concernynge generall councilles is almost enough in itself to show that both were the work of one man.Footnote ⁶³

The Treatise concernynge generall councilles is the work which most changes our understanding of St German's public career and ecclesiological position. John Guy has argued that 1534 was a turning-point in St German's life. Hitherto, he had been quite closely involved in the formulation and presentation of government policy on ecclesiastical matters. However, Guy continues, it is ‘clear that St German valued his independence, because in July 1534 he declined to cooperate with Henry viii's circle of propagandists assembled at Blackfriars, London, when they requested his help’.Footnote ⁶⁴ He associated this decision with St German's growing uneasiness with the caesaropapist tendencies evident in Henry viii's own understanding of his royal supremacy, and found confirmation of St German's ‘detachment, even isolation, from the official party’ in the facts that his publications after 1534 appeared from the press of Thomas Godfray rather than that of the royal printer Thomas Berthelet, and that he published nothing at all after 1535.Footnote ⁶⁵

Some aspects of this interpretation need to be modified now that we know that St German published an item of royalist propaganda with the king's printer as late as 1538. On closer examination, the letter which seemed to show him distancing himself from royalist propagandists actually shows him shying away from the proposed Henrician revision of canon law.Footnote ⁶⁶ The names of those mentioned in the letter as having hoped for St German's assistance – Thomas Thirlby, John Oliver and Edward Carne, among others – were in fact the canon lawyers charged with compiling the first post-Reformation code of canon law for the Church of England – a text which was never promulgated and which lay unrecognised until rediscovered by F. Donald Logan.Footnote ⁶⁷ St German's reservations about this project are hardly surprising in the light of his radical common law ideology, which left no room at all for an autonomous ecclesiastical legislature or judiciary, a point made perfectly clear in the Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde. As the ultimate failure of the project may well come down to the equally deep-rooted anticlericalism of Thomas Cromwell, St German's refusal, far from alienating Cromwell, probably represented a shrewd or informed insight into his real agenda. Cromwell, after all, forbade the study of canon law at both Oxford and Cambridge in the injunctions which he imposed upon the universities in 1535.Footnote ⁶⁸

Moreover, the fact that several of St German's writings in the mid-1530s were published by Thomas Godfray rather than Thomas Berthelet seems less significant in the light of Mary Rhinelander McCarl's recent study of Godfray's output, which shows that he was producing a steady flow of royalist and mildly reformist texts in the early 1530s. He was not the king's printer, but he certainly was a royalist printer, and one might conjecture from the character of his output that he was assisting the king's cause by taking on part of a propaganda burden which was simply too heavy for any single publisher.Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, McCarl argues that Godfray enjoyed the patronage and protection of Thomas Cromwell himself,Footnote ⁷⁰ and the fact that he published numerous texts by both William Marshall and Christopher St German adds force to her thesis.

The Treatise concernynge generall councilles, then, furnishes evidence in itself that St German remained close to the heart of things in the mid-1530s. For when the question of general councils was made sharply topical by Paul iii's attempt to summon one, he was among several scholars commissioned to write in justification of Henry viii's refusal to have anything to do with the plan. But the re-attribution has further significance in that it also links St German with an important body of manuscript material among Cromwell's papers in the Public Record Office. The textual interrelationships were first pointed out by G. D. Nicholson, but, building on Sawada's work, he concluded that Alesius was responsible for this body of writing.Footnote ⁷¹ As these manuscripts included the dialogue Thinges necessary to salvacion which Guy has since credited to St German, the ascription to the same author of the Treatise concernynge generall councilles leads to the conclusion that it was St German, not Alesius, who produced this bundle of interrelated papers, which includes a number of draft statutes. As an experienced common lawyer who is known to have drafted statutes, St German is a far more credible candidate for authorship than the Scottish theologian.Footnote ⁷² One such draft statute in turn connects this body of material with an earlier work of St German's. An answer to a letter (1535) includes an innovative argument for using parliament and statute to resolve disputes about the meaning of Scripture, at least in the absence of a general council. The argument specifies some two dozen disputed scriptural texts concerning the authority and wealth of the clergy, and these all figure in a surviving draft statute for the official exegesis of Scripture which can probably be dated to 1536.Footnote ⁷³ The survival of this substantial draft suggests that serious consideration was being given to this policy. Although it was not in the event implemented, St German's Answer might therefore be seen as testing the water for it. Finally, the interrelationships between St German's published works and the manuscripts in the state papers give good reason to conclude that St German was an important figure in the king's, or at least Cromwell's, counsels not simply in the early 1530s but right up until his death in 1539.

The Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde and the Treatise concerning generall counsailles afford powerful corroboration for John Guy's analysis of St German's ambiguous position on the royal supremacy, as both treatises advance scriptural justifications for royal authority over the clergy while presenting essentially communitarian accounts of the nature of political power. Guy argues that St German's parliamentary legal philosophy sat uncomfortably with the doctrine of the royal supremacy, particularly in the theocratic form beloved of Henry himself and of his clerical advisers (notably Stephen Gardiner and Edward Foxe). There was, as St German himself pointed out, a difference between ius regale (pure or absolute kingship) and ius regale politicum (kingship exercised through or with representative consultative institutions whose consent was required for legislation).Footnote ⁷⁴ English government, for St German as for Sir John Fortescue before him, was by ius regale politicum. The doctrine of the royal supremacy in the Church, however, was based on divine law as revealed in the Scriptures, particularly in Old Testament material relating to kingship (suitably edited and interpreted, of course). The trouble was that the biblical evidence indispensable for justifying the royal supremacy said nothing about popular consent or parliamentary representation.

Instead of committing himself to a frontal assault on this problem, St German executes a brilliant flanking manoeuvre. In his Answer to a letter (1535), he first establishes that the Scriptures prove the full sovereignty of the king over lay and clerical subjects alike, along with the royal cure of souls. This section of the argument says nothing about parliament. Then, in discussing the exercise of that power, he abruptly introduces the vocabulary of ‘king in parliament’, offering no theoretical justification for why nor any practical explanation of how a power which resides in kings by divine law is now suddenly shared by the political nation. At first sight, therefore, the Answer to a letter seems to be caught in two minds, suspended between what Walter Ullmann called the theocratic ‘descending theme’ of government and the Aristotelian ‘ascending theme’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the light of the considerable body of evidence for his views now available, though, it becomes apparent that St German is attempting a remarkable squaring of the ideological circle. The key lies in his advocacy of the authority of parliament in resolving disputes over scriptural interpretation. Basing the royal supremacy on the Bible seems unequivocally theocratic. But if the interpretation of Scripture depends on the authority of parliament, then so, by extension, does the royal supremacy. It is unlikely that St German would have wished to bring this to the attention of Henry viii, but it is even less likely that he was unaware of the implications of his own argument. The royal supremacy may well have looked to St German like something of a time bomb, but giving parliament the power to define the interpretation of Scripture was the perfect way to defuse it.

The Treatise concerning generall counsailles resolves another difficulty identified by Guy in St German's thought, the inconsistency between the advocacy of parliament as the appropriate institution for resolving disputes about Scripture in 1535, and the preference for a general council expressed in Thinges necessary for salvacion.Footnote ⁷⁶ For in the Treatise concerning generall counsailles St German maintains that general councils can legislate for the Christian world only with the prior consent of all Christian princes, collectively exercising their God-given responsibility for the welfare of the souls of their subjects.Footnote ⁷⁷ This is just one of many conditions that he requires a general council to fulfil in order to be recognised as duly constituted: conditions so demanding that St German himself elsewhere doubts whether any general council in church history has in fact been duly constituted.Footnote ⁷⁸ It is difficult to resist the conclusion that, for him, the general council was an ideal to which only lip-service had to be paid – a conveniently unattainable ideal, a cynic might add – while parliament was the real locus of ultimate authority.

The fact that four more of Bale's titles have proven to be identifiable with extant texts suggests that it may be worth keeping an eye open for the few remaining lacunae. Currently, thirteen out of sixteen titles listed by Bale can be identified. One more, the Apologia adversus Morum, is almost certainly a typical Bale doublet for one of the known replies to More (Salem and Bizance and The addicions of Salem and Byzance) that he lists under their proper titles. We can be reasonably confident of this because St German's Addicions of Salem and Byzance, the last word in their controversy, appeared in 1534, after which Thomas More was immured in the Tower of London, where he abandoned polemic for more reflective writings. That leaves the following two titles unaccounted for:

• Quid ecclesia sit

• Dialogus de utraque potestate

The treatise on the Church is unlikely to be a doublet, and there are indications that it may have been a successor to the Dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde. For that text ends with the words ‘Here endeth the fyrst dyaloge’, and when Bernard raises the question of the definition of the Church in that dialogue, Clement replies ‘As for thys matter what is the churche, I wyll dispute it with the another tyme. For it is a degressyon from our matter that we talked of before.’Footnote ⁷⁹ Clement's description of the subject matches Bale's title so exactly that two possible conclusions stand out: either Bale read this dialogue with some attention and deduced from it the existence of a successor under that name; or Bale actually saw a second dialogue, now lost, in which St German delivered on Clement's promise – in which case one might even hazard the guess that it too was printed by John Rastell, explaining the reference to ‘The Church of John Rastall’ in Bonner's list of forbidden books.

The Dialogus de utraque potestate might also be thought a doublet, were it not for the fact that Bale specifies that it was a dialogue. For it does not sound like any of St German's surviving dialogues, while his extant discussions of spiritual and temporal power are all written in a single voice. Bale's precision as to the dialogue form suggests that he may actually have seen the work, either a manuscript or yet another printed dialogue (now lost or unidentified) from the 1530s.

In any case it can be stated with confidence that all but at most two of St German's known writings have now been traced.