I This is rather less and much more than a biography of Richard Bancroft, who was the seventy-third archbishop of Canterbury, from 1604 until 1611. First, it comes to an end when Bancroft succeeded John Whitgift as archbishop. So this is an extended pre-history of one of our more controversial prelates. A nineteenth-century historian of English religious thought considered it ‘a melancholy memorial of the times, that such a man should have risen to the primacy’.1 By contrast, R. G. Usher, the celebrant of Bancroft’s achievements in what he called The Reconstruction of the English Church, looked at Bancroft’s portrait at Lambeth and praised ‘a strong virile face with the stamp of intellect set deep in its regular features, . . . a firm mouth displaying rare willpower’. ‘Imagine the indomitable spirit, the zeal and enthusiasm that lifts a man out of the paltriness which surrounds him and marks him and his deeds with the seal of greatness, and we have before our minds the man, Richard Bancroft, leader in the reconstruction of the English Church, ablest and most influential Churchman of his generation and one of the most capable administrators the Church of England has ever known.’2
Second, this study focuses on Bancroft’s role as the arch Anti-Puritan. It concentrates on his intelligence and forensic work in the fight against a militant tendency in Protestantism, which he believed threatened the fabric and very survival of the Church of England as defined by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. It confines itself largely to the anatomy of a conspiratorial obsession. The category of ‘Puritan’ will finally die its death when historians cease to discuss what it means. But a recent Companion to Puritanism (following hard on the heels of a two-volume Comprehensive Encyclopaedia of Puritans and Puritanism, in Europe and America)3 made an important point when it opened with an essay on Anti-Puritanism. For Anti-Puritanism was antecedent to the nickname of Puritan. ‘Puritans’ were Puritans in the eye of the beholder and it is with the mocking beholder that definitions should begin.4 It may seem odd to attribute the invention to Bancroft, since in his many attacks on what we at once recognise as Puritanism he hardly ever uses the P word, preferring a range of defamatory equivalents.5 And yet, where this study approaches a biography, extreme hostility to Puritanism makes up a great deal of what we know of Bancroft in his first sixty or so years.
Or so one would conclude from the testimonial which Archbishop Whitgift wrote in a successful attempt to elevate Bancroft to the bishopric of London in 1597, which has been called ‘the most remarkable ever written for a candidate for a religious office’.6 Of the archbishop’s twenty-five bullet points, no less than sixteen concerned his client’s relentless campaign against the Puritans: ‘an especial man of his calling that the Lord Archbishop hath used for the space of nine or ten years, in all the stirs which have been made by the factious, against the good of the Church’. Whitgift has nothing to say about Bancroft’s divinity, his learning, his preaching, his pastoral qualities and general administrative competence, his fitness for the onerous burden of the bishopric of London. And nothing was said about Bancroft’s patrons, only about his eleven-year service as chaplain to the late lord chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton, which by 1597 was ancient history. And, in brief, the testimonial follows the story that we shall tell in this book. Bancroft’s first engagement was at Bury St Edmunds, ‘when the pretended Reformation was begun there’; his daytime job as a member of the High Commission, ‘in which time there have been few causes of importance dealt in, either at Lambeth or London, wherein he hath not been an assistant’; his role in detecting the infamous Martin Marprelate tractarians, and his device ‘to have them answered after their own vein in writing’; his notorious Paul’s Cross sermon of 1589; his exposure of the presbyterian plot ‘to set up their Discipline secretly in most shires of the realm’; and his role in the Star Chamber trial which followed; his publication in 1593 of two books ‘against the pretended Holy Discipline’, Daungerous Positions and A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline.7
It doesn’t much matter that Bancroft very rarely uses the word ‘Puritan’. Whatever he chose to call them, ‘those of the new humour’, ‘our new men’, Bancroft was responsible, more than anyone else, for depicting the religious landscape of Elizabethan England in the stark dualism of ‘us’ and ‘them’, laying down for four centuries to come the seismic divide of ‘church’ and ‘chapel’. So far as we can tell, the nickname of ‘Puritan’ was first given currency, in print, by exiled English Catholics. Thomas Stapleton referred in 1565 to ‘the Puritans of our country’, while John Martial a year later spoke of ‘hot Puritans of the new clergy’, ‘a plain Puritan and notorious protestant’.8 But these writers had perhaps already picked up on the gossip among quarrelling Protestants in England, which had begun at about the same time. John Stow, a barely reconstructed Marian Catholic, wrote, with a certain licence, of the ‘many congregations of Anabaptists in London, who called themselves Puritans or Unspotted Lambs of the Lord’.9 Thomas Harding may have picked this up when he wrote, in Louvain a year later, ‘Now last of all creepeth forth one Browne at London, with his unspotted congregations, otherwise called Puritans. As we come last, say they, so we are purest and cleanest of all others.’10
But Harding brought in his Puritans at the end of a catalogue of European heretics, a gazetteer of sects all claiming to be the greatest. The point of this rhetorical polemic was to represent the endless tendency of Protestants to divide ad infinitum, into an endless chaos of deviance. Thus Richard Bristow found the essence of schismatic heresy in the very fact that Protestants adopted all sorts of names, ‘Lutherans, Calvinists, Protestants, Precisians, Unspotted Brethren, and Puritans’. Later Bristow added to his shopping list: ‘Fellows of Love [the Family of Love], Superilluminated Porklings’.11 By piling up lists of deviance this was a polemical strategy quite different from the powerful dualism of the right way and the wrong way. It closely resembles the Elizabethan coney-catching literature, in which the reader is introduced to a teeming variety of subcultural and semi-criminal elements.12 It had its own appeal. As Sir Nicholas Bacon would advise Parliament, that religion, ‘which of its own nature should be uniform, would against his nature have proved miliform’.13 This tradition would lead in due course to Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena (1646), an elaborate exercise in polemical milliformity.14
For some time ‘Puritans’ competed on a level playing field of milliformity with other entities. An anonymous writer protests against such ‘despiteful names’ as ‘Puritans, unspotted brethren and such like’, ‘Anabaptists, Donatists, Arians . . . Puritans and I cannot tell what’.15 Often the word hardly appears. Mark Byford in his study of contentious religion in Elizabethan Colchester never came across it, and Christopher Dent in his study of religion in Elizabethan Oxford manages to avoid the word.16 The fact that the first letter of Puritan is ‘P’ made it a potential winner. For reasons so far unexplained, the sixteenth century was fascinated by the alliteration of words beginning with ‘p’, from John Heywood’s The playe called the foure pp to the martyrologist John Foxe’s remark about ‘preachers, printers and players’ troubling Bishop Stephen Gardiner.17 ‘The Quintessence of Wit’, a libel circulated in Wells in 1607, has these lines: ‘Softe who goes there, what p. P and P, poxe, punk and Puritan? The devil it is/ . . . for Sir, some times we see/ pox plagueth punk, for Puritans amiss.’ ‘Glister’, the ‘paraperonpandectical doctor’ in Thomas Middleton’s play The Family of Love, was noted for ‘his precise, Puritanical and peculiar punk, his potcary’s drug’.18
This had nothing directly to do with Richard Bancroft, although Bancroft too preferred his ‘p’: ‘Precisians’, which never passed into common currency. But Bancroft, more than anyone else, was responsible for dramatising one single enemy of the established order in church and state, which would come to be known as Puritanism. It had its origins and source in Calvin’s Geneva, and it spread its malevolent, destabilising force towards the British Isles, first to Scotland and thence to England. The radical otherness of international Calvinism was more than one aspect of Bancroft’s world view. It became his obsession. And it will take the rest of this book to find out how this obsession began and developed into the lodestar of the future archbishop’s career.
II In 1592, Bancroft’s colleague and fellow detective, the civil and ecclesiastical lawyer Richard Cosin, published a book with a sensational title: Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation.19 The hare-brained event which provoked Cosin’s book (the so-called Coppinger–Hacket conspiracy) hardly merited the accolade of a conspiracy. But the sixteenth century, as much or even more than the twentieth and twenty-first, was obsessed with conspiracy theories. Periods of ideological conflict breed such theories like fungus growing on decaying wood. In later sixteenth-century England, the dominant conspiracy theory had to do with the menace of international Catholicism, galvanised into an unprecedented outburst of political and ideological energy by the Protestant Reformation: in a word, ‘popery’. The pope, no less than the Antichrist, according to an almost orthodox doctrine, was believed to be at the heart of a grand international conspiracy, above all a campaign mounted against England, the only major player on the European stage which had embraced Protestantism as the state religion. It was believed that a grand strategy had been hatched in 1567 at Bayonne, in a diplomatic coming-together of ultra-Catholic Spain and a powerful faction in France, the house of Guise. What was the evidence for this sinister design? After the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France (1572), in which thousands of Protestants were indiscriminately slaughtered, what need was there of further witnesses?
If any conspiracy theory can be said to have had its rational feet firmly on the ground, this was just such a theory. In England there were plots aplenty to shorten the life of Queen Elizabeth, some of them mounted in favour of Mary Stewart, a deposed queen and Catholic exile-cum-prisoner in England, with a strong claim to the English throne – and she did nothing to discourage them. The Jesuits insisted that their mission was merely religious, to raise the spiritual alarm against heresy and sin. The Elizabethan authorities claimed, with some justification, that on the contrary their aims were political, their politics the politics of tyrannicide and invasion. Robert Persons, the leading English Jesuit, knew that the restoration of Catholicism in England depended upon regime change. The Elizabethan state retaliated with a kind of war against terror, evoking a cult of martyrdom which was the mirror image of John Foxe’s celebration of the Protestant Marian martyrs. Then, in 1588, came the Spanish Armada, followed by further invasion scares. Finally, in November 1605, a terrorist outrage on an unprecedented scale was narrowly averted: the Gunpowder Plot. No wonder Elizabethan England has been described as ‘the beleaguered isle’.20
Richard Bancroft was one of those, along with James I, who worked hard to make a strategic distinction between the November the Fifth bombers and the bulk of more ‘moderate’ Catholics. It no doubt helped that, as we shall see, his own background, and inclinations, were divergent from militant Protestantism, leaning towards more conservative tendencies. The anti-Catholic conspiracy theory had a great deal of substance going for it. But we, with Bancroft, are concerned with an alternative and altogether less plausible conspiracy theory, the opposite of the first: the conspiracy of international Calvinism to take over, if not the world, that part of the world of most concern to Bancroft: Great Britain. Here it may be useful to make a distinction which Bancroft, for his own polemical purposes, normally chose not to make, between a radical, aggressive Calvinism, Puritanism on an international scale, and a more moderate, theological Calvinism, more at ease with established ecclesiastical and political structures. The latter was almost common ground in the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical establishment, and it appears that Bancroft had no quarrel with that near-orthodoxy, whether or not it would be appropriate to call him some kind of Calvinist. If we can believe Humphrey Leech, a minor canon of Christ Church, Oxford who went over to Rome in 1608, after preaching a sermon in which he denounced Calvin as a ‘blasphemous interpreter’, he had appealed against his vice-chancellor to Archbishop Bancroft, only to receive no support from one who had ‘sworn on the words of Calvin’. At the end of his life Bancroft would support the claims to Canterbury of the young and thoroughly Calvinist bishop George Abbott. He was becoming increasingly concerned about the growth of crypto-Catholicism at Court and in the universities. The so-called ‘Calvinist consensus’ characteristic of the Church of England in the years of Bancroft’s ascendancy was broad enough to include, for public purposes, even Richard Bancroft, who made his profound distrust of the Calvinist dogma of predestination very apparent at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604.21
It is necessary to define the Calvinist ‘Discipline’, which was another matter altogether, and with which Bancroft had his own obsession. It was his Moby Dick. According to a persistent strain of reformist thinking, ‘discipline’ was an identifying mark of the true Church, along with pure doctrine and the proper administration of the sacraments. In general, ‘discipline’ meant no more than that Christian conduct mattered too, and should be regulated, a matter for church as much as for state. According to its prime exponent, Martin Bucer, the reformer of Strasbourg and, briefly, a professor in Cambridge, a man should not live for himself but for others, which was the title of his very first publication.22 This was a theological expression of the values of the city state: self-reliance and collective responsibility, all for the common good. Here was a kind of religious republicanism, not easily compatible with the state of monarchy which prevailed in most parts of Western Europe. Nor did Bancroft find it easily compatible.
Why? At first, even in the teaching of John Calvin, the traditional rule of bishops was held to be a legitimate form of discipline, particularly in territorial churches such as Poland and England, which enjoyed a monarchical constitution. ‘No bishop, no king’, James I’s mantra, was something which Calvin would have understood, and which he respected in his dealings with England in the reign of Edward VI. But under Calvin’s successor as the leading minister of Geneva, Theodore Beza, discipline came to be equated more narrowly with the supposedly scriptural ministry of pastors, doctors, deacons and elders, its rationale being parity. Bishops and the top-down hierarchy which they represented were now rejected as relics of the popish past. This was the doctrine imported into Scotland by a secondary wave of reformers and Geneva alumni, headed by Andrew Melville. The open letter which in 1576 Beza dispatched to the Scottish chancellor, known from its published appearance as De triplici episcopatu, was a kind of manifesto. According to Beza, diocesan episcopacy, the third kind of episcopacy, was actually devilish. Beza’s explosive letter was soon printed in England as The Judgement of a Most Reverend and Learned Man from beyond the Seas, concerning a Threefold Order of Bishops. Bancroft may have considered this a declaration of war from Geneva against the episcopal Church of England; not that anyone in Geneva or anywhere else was advocating violence as a means of abolishing episcopacy and establishing Presbyterianism; and, as Stalin might have said, Geneva, unlike the Catholic powers, had no regiments to mount against episcopalian England. But Bancroft understood that there were other ways of waging war.23
So Bancroft reacted as if England were under threat. In 1593, a year after the appearance of Richard Cosin’s Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation, he wrote two books of his own, although his authorship was concealed, an open secret only acknowledged in Archbishop Whitgift’s testimonial of 1597. (William Watson, one of the English Catholics with whom Bancroft had close dealings in the later 1590s, possessed, among other books, what he called ‘the bishop of London’s Genevian platform’.)24 These books were Daungerous Positions and Proceedings . . . under Pretence of Reformation, and for the Presbityeriall Discipline and A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline. The chapter headings of Daungerous Positions laid out Bancroft’s chronological and progressive conspiracy theory, culminating in certain sensational events in a London street a little before he, and Cosin, wrote. We begin with Calvin’s Geneva, a short chapter called ‘Genevian Reformation’. Then we move to John Knox’s Scotland: ‘Scottish Genevating for Discipline’; and so to ‘English Genevating for Reformation’, followed by cumulative chapters on ‘English Scottizing for Discipline’ – the bulk of the book. These chapters come to their logical fruition with ‘English Scottizing for Discipline by threatenings’, and, finally, ‘by force’.25
The Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline is constructed on rather different lines, an analysis of what Bancroft took to be the essential tenets and infrastructure of Presbyterianism. For the moment we shall stay with Daungerous Positions. No more tendentious history of the churches calling themselves Reformed, and especially of their representation in the British Isles, was ever perpetrated. Bancroft’s Geneva chapter was short and sour. The way in which the city had treated its legal sovereign, the bishop, was indicative of the conduct of all who followed its ideological example (‘but contrary to the judgment of all other reformed churches’): ‘that if kings and princes refused to reform religion, the inferior magistrates or the people, by direction of the ministry, might lawfully and ought (if need required) even by force and arms to reform it themselves’. The logic of that was that Geneva ought to have remained a Catholic city, under the rule of its prince-bishop. Revolution in the name of religion was what duly followed in Scotland, under the sinister leadership of John Knox, ‘a man trained up at Geneva’, the architect of a Reformation which was wholly lacking in legality; so, legally, a Catholic Scotland too.26
Here it should be explained that Bancroft’s demonic perception of Geneva and all its ways was shared by some other Elizabethans, among them the queen herself (thanks to Knox’s ill-judged and badly timed attack on the principle of female rule) and Richard Hooker;27 but that it was by no means representative of Protestant England. (In December 1581, Beza had made Elizabeth (or the Cambridge University Library) a present of the problematical fourth- to sixth-century manuscript of the New Testament known ever since as the Codex Bezae, but had received no acknowledgement, which he considered a deliberate snub.) In 1582 Geneva was besieged by the duke of Savoy, Charles-Emmanuel, the first of several attempts to take the city by force. Geneva appealed to England for help. The agent for the city, one Jean Malliet, was warned not to expect much encouragement from Elizabeth, but his cause was warmly endorsed by the Privy Council, with individual donations of as much as £40, a significant sum at the time. The earl of Leicester, white-lying through his teeth, assured Malliet that his mistress regarded Geneva as ‘a lamp which had enlightened almost all the churches of Europe’. The cause was committed to the bishops, some of whom promoted it energetically. The archbishop of York, Edwin Sandys, swore that he would stake his shirt on the campaign. In Kent subscribers were numbered in their hundreds, representing a cross-section of county society. A poor vicar in Hertfordshire managed to contribute ten shillings ‘to help these godly people, troubled for the gospel of Jesus Christ’. At the other end of the scale, the earl of Bedford spent three hours with Malliet, recalled the hospitality of Geneva extended to English exiles in Queen Mary’s days, and protested that the city was as dear to him as his native country. In the event, Malliet returned with the tidy sum of £5,730 7s 6d. This response was all the more impressive in that the crisis was already more or less over even before Malliet arrived in London in October 1582. Charles-Emmanuel had for the moment given up, which was known to the queen, thanks to her ambassador in Paris; so that she protested that her own financial needs were greater than those of Geneva, which in a sense was true.28 As for Bancroft, I doubt whether he coughed up as much as a penny to save Geneva and its great religious experiment.
But let us return to Bancroft on Scotland. In all its detailed implementation, the Scottish Reformation had been choreographed from Geneva, ‘their new Rome, or Metropolitan City’. Bancroft’s reading of recent Scottish history persuaded him that just as the Anabaptists in Germany had begun with attacks on the bishops and clergy but had ended with attempts to overthrow the civil magistrates, so with these Scottish Presbyterians. George Buchanan, the principal Scottish anti-monarchical ideologue, had compared princes to ‘children’s puppets, which are garishly attired’. The Scots had devised ‘a mere counterfeit plot of a new Popish tyranny’, which they proposed to export to England. Bancroft knew from experience (an episode discussed in a later chapter) that he ought not to insult beyond certain limits the church and kingdom of Scotland, which led to some contortions towards the end of his Scottish chapter. ‘So as whatsoever was done amiss by them . . . I do . . . ascribe it to their ministers of the Geneva learning.’ In other words, Bancroft did not blame the Scottish king, James VI, who in the event of Queen Elizabeth’s death would almost certainly become his lord and master. But if James was not indicted as a promoter of Presbyterianism, Bancroft was in danger of insulting him as too weak and ineffective to do anything about it. We need look no further for the reason why these books were published anonymously.29