Pauls Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England,

15201640
 Studies in the History of
Christian Traditions

General Editor
Robert J. Bast
Knoxville, Tennessee

In cooperation with
Paul C.H. Lim, Nashville, Tennessee
Eric Saak, Liverpool
Christine Shepardson, Knoxville, Tennessee
Brian Tierney, Ithaca, New York
Arjo Vanderjagt, Groningen
John Van Engen, Notre Dame, Indiana

Founding Editor
Heiko A. Oberman

VOLUME 171

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/shct

Pauls Cross and the Culture
of Persuasion in England,
15201640

Edited by

Torrance Kirby
P.G. Stanwood

LEIDEN BOSTON
2014
Cover illustration and Frontispiece: A sermon preached in the presence of King James I at Pauls
Cross. The Society of Antiquaries diptych commissioned by Henry Farley in 1616 and painted by
John Gipkyn. Scharf XLIII, Way/Museum No. 304, Burlington House, London. By kind permission of
the Society of Antiquaries, London.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pauls Cross and the culture of persuasion in England, 1520-1640 / edited by Torrance Kirby,
P.G. Stanwood.
pages cm. -- (Studies in the history of Christian traditions, ISSN 1573-5664 ; VOLUME 171)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-24227-2 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-26281-2 (e-book) 1. Preaching--
England--London--History--16th century. 2. Preaching--England--London--History--17th century.
3. Sermons, English--16th century. 4. Sermons, English--17th century. 5. St. Pauls Cathedral (London,
England) 6. London (England)--Church history--16th century. 7. London (England)--Church history--
17th century. I. Kirby, W. J. Torrance, editor of compilation. II. Stanwood, P. G., editor of compilation.

BV4208.G7P38 2013
251.00942109031--dc23

2013039807

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 CONTENTS

Illustrationsix
Abbreviations and Acronymsxi
Contributors xiii
Acknowledgementsxix

Introduction1

PART ONE
SITUATING PAULS CROSS

1 Reconstructing St Pauls Cathedral, 15201640 23

John Schofield
2 Pauls Cross and Nationwide Special Worship, 15331642 41
Natalie Mears
3 Virtual Pauls Cross: The Experience of Public Preaching after
the Reformation 61
John N. Wall

PART TWO
EARLY TUDOR SERMONS, 15201558

4 The Tree and the Weed: Bishop John Fishers Sermons

at Pauls Cross 95
Cecilia Hatt
5 Pauls Cross and the Crisis of the 1530s107
Richard Rex
6 Reformation Conflict between Stephen Gardiner and Robert
Barnes, Lent 1540129
Ralph S. Werrell
7 Pauls Cross and the Implementation of Protestant Reforms
under Edward VI141
John N. King
vi contents

8 Public Conversion: Richard Smyths Retractation at Pauls

Cross in 1547161
Torrance Kirby
9 Lords and Labourers: Hugh Latimers Homiletical
Hermeneutics175
Jason Zuidema
10 The Style and Logic of James Brookss 1553 Reconciliation
Sermon187
Mark Rankin

PART THREE
ELIZABETHAN SERMONS, 15581603

11 The Challenge of Catholicity: John Jewel at Pauls Cross203

Angela Ranson
12 Pauls Cross and the Dramatic Echoes of Early-Elizabethan Print223
Thomas Dabbs
13Richard Hookers Pauls Cross Sermon245
David Neelands
14Edmund Campion in the Shadow of Pauls Cross: The Culture
of Disputation263
Gerard Kilroy
15 Thomas Bilson and Anti-Catholicism at Pauls Cross289
Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer
16 Queen Elizabeths Performance at Pauls Cross in 1588301
Steven W. May
17 John Copcot, John Whitgift, and Mark Frank: Right Cause and
Faithful Obedience315
P.G. Stanwood
18 Bancroft versus Penry: Conscience and Authority in
Elizabethan Polemics327
W. Bradford Littlejohn

PART FOUR
JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE SERMONS, 16031640

19 Preaching the Good News: William Barlow Narrates the Fall

of Essex and the Gunpowder Plot345
Anne James
 contentsvii

20 Pauls Work: Repair and Renovation of St Pauls Cathedral,

15611625361
Roze Hentschell
21 The Love-sick Spouse: John Stoughtons 1624 Pauls Cross
Sermon in Context389
Jeanne Shami
22 Sermon, Salvation, Space: John Donnes Performative Mode
and the Politics of Accommodation411
Kathleen OLeary
23 The Pauls Cross Jeremiad and Other Sermons of
Exhortation421
Mary Morrissey
24 Lost at Pauls Cross: Unrecorded Sermons439
Susan Wabuda

Bibliography453

Index475
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter 1

Fig. 1. St Pauls Cathedral from the south side in 2010 24

Fig. 2. The nave of St Pauls by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1657 26
Fig. 3. Arch-stone of the mid-12th century 27
Fig. 4. View of the choir by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1657 30
Fig. 5. The Cathedral from the east by Hollar, 1657 31
Fig. 6. Pauls Cross in the foreground of the Cathedral
viewed from the northeast 34
Fig. 7. Effigy of Sir Thomas Heneage (d. 1594), formerly
in the Cathedral Quire 36
Fig. 8. West entrance to the Cathedral with portico
designed by Inigo Jones, 163341, drawn by Hollar,
1657 37
Fig. 9. Architectural fragment of a lions head from the
upper faade of the portico designed by Inigo Jones 38

Chapter 3

Fig. 1. Pauls Churchyard looking west, from the Visual

Model 62
Fig. 2. Bishop King preaching at Pauls Cross, Society of
Antiquaries Diptych 63
Fig. 3. Wenceslaus Hollar, St Pauls Cathedral, north side 64
Fig. 4. John Schofield, St Pauls Churchyard around 1450 64
Fig. 5. View of Pauls Cross from about 50 feet, from the
Visual Model 65
Fig. 6. View of Pauls Cross from the Sermon House, from
the Visual Model 67
Fig. 7. Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych 75
Fig. 8. Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych 76
Fig. 9. Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych 78
x illustrations

F ig. 10. Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych 79

Fig. 11. Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych 82

Chapter 12

Fig. 1. Pauls Church before Wren227

Fig. 2. Pauls Cross with Booksellers, 1572228
Fig. 3. Virtual Pauls Cross Image229

Chapter 20

Fig. 1. A Complaint of Paules, page 3 (London, 1616)370

Fig. 2. Procession to St Pauls from St Mary Overie, Society
of Antiquaries Diptych, by Thomas Gipkyn for
Henry Farley, 1616374
Fig. 3. Beholde the King commeth with great joye, detail
of James I entering St Pauls, Society of Antiquaries
Diptych375
Fig. 4. Bishop King preaching at Pauls Cross, Society of
Antiquaries Diptych376
Fig. 5. Pauls spire rebuilt, Henry Farleys imagined
restoration of St Pauls with celebratory angels
blowing trumpets, Society of Antiquaries Diptych377
 ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

APC Acts of the Privy Council of England, new series, ed.

J.R. Dasent. 46 vols. (18901964)
BL British Library
Bodl. Bodleian Library
CCC Corpus Christi College, Oxford
CCCC Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
CSP Calendar of State Papers
FLE The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker,
gen. ed. W. Speed Hill, 7 vols. (19771998)
FSL Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC
GL Guildhall Library, London
HALS Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies
HH Hatfield House, Herts.
HMSO Her Majestys Stationery Office
JW The Works of John Jewel, ed. John Ayre, 4 vols. (18451850)
Lawes Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie
(1593, 1597)
LP Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of
Henry VIII, ed. J.S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R.H. Brodie
(18621932); repr. (1965)
LPL Lambeth Palace Library
LS Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop
of Worcester, Martyr, 1555, ed. George E. Corrie (1845)
Machyn The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-taylor
of London from a.d. 1550 to a.d. 1563, ed. John Gough Nichols
(1848)
MRTS Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2009)
OL 1 & 2 Original Letters relative to the English Reformation, edited
by Hastings Robinson for the Parker Society, 2 vols. (1846
and 1847)
PG Patrologia cursus completus, Series Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne
(18571866)
PL Patrologia cursus completus, Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne
(18441864)
xii abbreviations and acronyms

PRO Public Record Office

PS Parker Society
RSTC Revised Short Title Catalogue, ed. W.A. Jackson, F.S. Ferguson,
and K.F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (19761991)
STC A short-title catalogue of English books 14751640, ed.
A.W. Pollard, G.R. Redgrave, and others (1926)
USTC Universal Short Title Catalogue, http://www.ustc.ac.uk
WA D. Martin Luthers Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 80 vols. Weimar
(18802007)
Wrioth Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the
Reigns of the Tudors, from a. d. 1485 to 1559, 2 vols. (1877)
WW The Works of John Whitgift, DD, ed. by John Ayre for the Parker
Society, 3 vols. (18511853)
ZL 1 The Zurich Letters; or, the correspondence of several English
bishops and others, with some of the Helvetian reformers, during
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 15581579, First Series, translated
and edited by Hastings Robinson for the Parker Society (1842)
ZL 2 The Zurich Letters; or, the correspondence of several English
bishops and others, with some of the Helvetian reformers, during
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 15581602, Second Series,
translated and edited by Hastings Robinson for the Parker
Society (1845)
 CONTRIBUTORS

Thomas Dabbs is Professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University,

Shibuya, Tokyo. He is the author of Genesis in Japan: the Bible beyond
Christianity (2013) and Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth-Century
Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist (1991). Recent pertinent articles
include The Glamorous Echoes of Godly Print (2011) and Pauls Cross
Churchyard and Shakespeares Verona Youth in A. Shifflett and E. Gieskes,
eds. Renaissance Papers (2013).
Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer is Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury
College, Vermont. She is the author of Writing the History of the English
Bible: A Review of Recent Scholarship, Religion Compass 5.7 (2011) and
Catholics and the King James Bible: Stories from England, Ireland, and
America, Scottish Journal of Theology 66.3 (2013). Her monograph Catholic
Critics of the King James Bible, 16111911 will be published in 2014.
Cecilia Hatts critical edition of the English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of
Rochester (14691535): Sermons and Other Writings, 15201535 was pub-
lished in 2002. Recent articles include Keeping the Conversation Going:
Fisher and More and Henry VIIIs intellectual tyranny, Moreana 49 (2012)
and The Two-Edged Sword as Image of Civil Power for Fisher and More,
Moreana 45 (2008). The British Academy recently awarded Dr Hatt a grant
to edit Fishers Treatise on the Penitential Psalms (1508) and his two royal
elegies of 1509.
Roze Hentschell is Associate Professor of English at Colorado State
University. She is the author of The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern
England: Textual Constructions of a National Identity (2008); co-editor with
A. Bailey of Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 15501650 (2010), and
with K. Lavezzo of Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations
(2012). Dr Hentschell is currently researching the cultural geography of
StPauls Cathedral Precinct.
Anne James recently received her doctorate in English Literature from
the University of Alberta for her dissertation entitled Reading, Writing,
Remembering: Gunpowder Plot Literature in Early Modern England, 1605
1688 (2011). Dr James is currently a Lecturer in English Literature at Luther
College, University of Regina, Saskatchewan where she is revising her doc-
toral dissertation for eventual publication.
xiv contributors

Gerard Kilroy is Honorary Visiting Professor of English, University College

London. He has been a Visiting Fellow at St Catherines College, Oxford;
Marshs Library, Dublin; and the Folger Shakespeare Library while he com-
pletes Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life. Dr Kilroy is the author of Edmund
Campion: Memory and Transcription (2005), The Epigrams of Sir John
Harington (2009), and Advertising the Reader: Sir John Haringtons
Directions in the Margent, English Literary Renaissance 41.1 (2011).

John N. King is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus (in English

and Religious Studies) at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. He is
the author of Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of
Meaning (2010) and Foxes Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture
(2006). He is also co-editor of Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature,
Politics, and Art (2009) with Mark Rankin and of John Foxe and his World
(2002) with C. Highley.

Torrance Kirby is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Director of the

Centre for Research on Religion, McGill University. His recent books
include Persuasion and Conversion: Religion, Politics, and the Public Sphere
in Early Modern England (2013), The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political
Theology (2007) and Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (2005). He
edited A Companion to Richard Hooker (2008) and A Companion to Peter
Martyr Vermigli (2009).

W. Bradford Littlejohn recently received a PhD in Christian Ethics from the

University of Edinburgh. His research addresses the political theology of
Richard Hooker. In addition to a forthcoming co-authored article on early
Reformed views of church discipline and a book chapter on Hookers view
of Scripture and politics, he is the author of The Mercersburg Theology and
the Quest for Reformed Catholicity (2009) and editor of the Mercersburg
Theology Study Series.

Steven W. May is adjunct Professor of English at Emory University and

Senior Research Fellow in English at Sheffield University, where he leads a
project on Renaissance English scribal culture sponsored by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council. His books include The Elizabethan Courtier
Poets (1991), an edition of Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works (2004), and
Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse,
15591603 (2004).
 contributorsxv

Natalie Mears is Senior Lecturer in English History at the University of

Durham. She is author of Queenship and political discourse in the
Elizabethan realms (2005) as well as several articles on Elizabethan politics
and the public sphere. Dr Mears has edited, with Alec Ryrie, Worship and
the parish church in early modern Britain (2013) and she is currently edit-
ing, with P. Williamson and S. Taylor, National Prayers: Special Worship
since the Reformation (3 vols).

Mary Morrissey is Lecturer in English in the Department of English

Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of Politics and the
Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (2012) and Sermons, Prayer-books and
Primers in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, ed. J. Raymond
(2011). Dr Morrissey is currently editing John Donnes Sermons for Civic
Pulpits for the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, gen. ed.
P.McCullough.

David Neelands is Margaret Fleck Professor of Anglican Studies and Dean

of Divinity at Trinity College, University of Toronto. He is author of numer-
ous learned articles on Richard Hooker and other sixteenth-century
reformers including Hooker on divinization: our participation in Christ,
From Logos to Christos, ed. E. Leonard and K. Merriman (2010) and
Predestination and the 39 Articles of the Church of England in
ACompanion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (2009).

Kathleen OLeary is a Tutor of English Literature in the Culture, Mind and

Modernity programme validated by Liverpool John Moores University.
She received her PhD (Lancaster) for a dissertation about The art of
salvation is but the art of memory: soul-agency, remembrance and expres-
sion in Donne and Shakespeare (2007). Dr OLeary is currently researching
a monograph on the theme of alchemy in Shakespeares romance
dramas.

Mark Rankin is Associate Professor of English at James Madison University.

He is author of Religious Orthodoxy and Dissent in Early Modern England
(2005) and co-editor of Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics,
and Art (2009) with C. Highley and John N. King. Dr Rankin is currently
editing William Tyndales The Practice of Prelates (1530) and completing a
monograph entitled Henry VIII and the Language of Polemic in Early
Modern England.
xvi contributors

Angela Ranson is a doctoral student at the University of York. Her research

interests focus on the Church of England at the time of the Reformation.
Her recent publications include Sincere lies and creative truth: recanta-
tion strategies during the English Reformation in the inaugural issue of
the Journal of History and Cultures 1.1 (2012) and Consent Not to the
Wyckednesse: The Role of Nicodemites in the Elizabethan Settlement,
History Studies 12 (2011).

Richard Rex is Reader in Reformation History at the Faculty of Divinity,

University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Tutor of Queens College,
Cambridge. Infamous for his heretical views on Lollardy in The Lollards
(2002), Dr Rex is also author of Henry VIII and the English Reformation
(2nd edn, 2006) and The Theology of John Fisher (1991), and is perhaps best
known for his brief historical survey The Tudors (2009).

John Schofield is the Cathedral Archaeologist for St Pauls Cathedral in

London. He was an archaeologist at the Museum of London from 1974 to
2008 where he specialised in the rescue archaeology of the City of London.
He is author of The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire
(3rd edn, 1999), Medieval London Houses (2nd edn, 2003), London 1100
1600: the Archaeology of a Capital City (2011) and St Pauls Cathedral before
Wren (2011).

Jeanne Shami is Professor of English at the University of Regina and

recently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She is joint
editor with D. Flynn and T. Hester of The Oxford Handbook of John
Donne (2011), and author of John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late
Jacobean Pulpit (2003) and Women and Sermons, Oxford Handbook of the
Early Modern Sermon, eds. P. McCullough, H. Adlington, and E. Rhatigan
(2011).

P.G. Stanwood is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of British

Columbia. He has edited various Renaissance and seventeenth-century
religious and literary texts, including the posthumous books of Richard
Hookers Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1981), Jeremy Taylors Holy
Living; and Holy Dying (1989), and the sole surviving manuscript of
Lancelot Andrewess Apospasmatia Sacra, or Orphan Lectures, English
Manuscript Studies 13 (2007).
 contributorsxvii

Susan Wabuda is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University.

She is the author of Preaching during the English Reformation (2002), as
well as numerous articles on patronage and the sermon. She contributed
eleven articles to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (e.g.
Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer), and co-edited with C. Litzenberger
Belief and Practice in Reformation England: a tribute to Patrick Collinson
from his students (1998).

John N. Wall is Professor of English at North Carolina State University,

Raleigh. He is the author of Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert,
Vaughan (1988), as well as numerous articles on the setting of Donnes
sermons, including Situating Donnes Dedication Sermon at Lincolns Inn,
22 May 1623, John Donne Journal 26 (2007). He edited George Herbert:
The Country Parson, the Temple (1981) and is co-author with J. Booty and
D.Siegenthaler of The Godly Kingdom of Tudor England: Great Books of the
English Reformation (1981).

Ralph S. Werrell received his doctorate from the University of Birmingham

for a dissertation on The Theology of William Tyndale which was published
in 2006. He is also author of The Roots of William Tyndales Theology (2013)
and of a forthcoming monograph titled The Blood of Christ in William
Tyndales Theology. He is currently researching the theology of the Early
English Reformers up to Henry VIIIs break with Rome.

Jason Zuidema received his PhD in ecclesiastical history from McGill

University in 2006; he is Assistant Professor at Concordia University,
Montreal. He is author of Peter Martyr Vermigli (14991562) and the Outward
Instruments of Divine Grace (2008), co-author with T. van Raalte of Early
French Reform: The Theology and Spirituality of Guillaume Farel (2011), and
Vermigli and French Reform in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli
(2009).
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The papers comprising this volume were presented at an International

Conference held at McGill University on 1618 August 2012 on the theme
Pauls Cross and the culture of persuasion in England, 15201640. The con-
ference marked the culmination of a collaborative research endeavour
undertaken by P.G. Stanwood (University of British Columbia), Mary
Morrissey (University of Reading), John N. King (Ohio State University)
and Torrance Kirby (PI, McGill University). In addition to this present col-
lection of essays, we are jointly editing a volume of selected sermons
preached at Pauls Cross during this period, to be published in due course.
We acknowledge the generous support of the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for our programme of
research over the past four years as well as for funding of the conference
itself under a SSHRC Workshop Grant. We extend thanks also to the McGill
Centre for Research on Religion (CREOR) for sponsorship of the confer-
ence and to the Faculty of Religious Studies of McGill University for host-
ing the event. Contributors to this volume acknowledge the generous
support of their research afforded by SSHRC, the National Endowment for
the Humanities (USA), and the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(UK). We also thank the editor-in-chief of the series, Robert J. Bast, and the
anonymous reviewer for their generous contributions to this volume. The
conference steering committee owe special thanks to Francesca Maniaci,
Administrative Assistant to the Director of CREOR, and to Alex Sokolov,
Research Accounts Administrator, for their invaluable support in organiz-
ing the conference, and we are also grateful to doctoral candidates Richard
Cumming and Eric Parker in the McGill Faculty of Religious Studies for
their very able assistance.

Torrance Kirby
Montreal
Michaelmas 2013
 INTRODUCTION

Without any doubt the open-air pulpit in the precincts of St Pauls

Cathedral known as Pauls Cross can be reckoned among the most influ-
ential of all public venues in early-modern England. In a world where
sermons generally counted among the conventional means of adult edu-
cation, as vital instruments of popular moral and social guidance, not to
mention political control, Pauls Cross stands out as Londons pulpit of
pulpits; indeed it lays claim to being the public pulpit of the entire realm,
and was arguably as much a stage as a preaching station. It was an arena of
vital consequence where the conscience of church and nation found pub-
lic utterance, particularly in moments of crisis.1 Very large crowds, some-
times numbering in thousands, gathered here to listen to the weekly
two-hour sermons. On one occasion after delivering a sermon at Pauls
Cross not long after the accession of Elizabeth, John Jewel wrote in a letter
to his mentor Peter Martyr Vermigli in Zurich that as many as 6,000 people
stayed afterwards to sing metrical psalms.2 Going back to the thirteenth
century St Pauls churchyard had been a bustling public space, a privileged
venue for the announcement of royal proclamations and papal bulls to
citizens of the capital. At Pauls Cross spokesmen authorized by both
Crown and Church expounded government policy and denounced heresy

1Millar MacLure, The Pauls Cross Sermons, 15341642 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1958), 4, 18. For an account of the architecture of the precincts of St Pauls Cathedral
see P.W.M. Blayney, The Bookshops in Pauls Cross Churchyard (London: Bibliographical
Society, 1990).
2Dated 5 March 1560. The Zurich Letters; or, the correspondence of several English bish-
ops and others, with some of the Helvetian reformers, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth,
15581579, First Series, ed. H. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the
Parker Society, 1842), 71 (hereafter ZL 1). You may now sometimes see at Pauls cross, after
the service, six thousand persons, old and young, of both sexes, all singing together and
praising God. This sadly annoys the Mass priests, and the devil. For they perceive that by
these means the sacred discourses sink more deeply into the minds of men, and that their
kingdom is weakened and shaken at almost every note. Henry Machyn confirms the great
popularity of sermons of Pauls Cross in several entries to his Diary. See Henry Machyn, The
Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from ad 1550 to ad 1563, ed.
John Gough Nichols (London: Printed for the Camden Society by J.B. Nichols and Son,
1848), the entry for 3 March 1560: The sam day dyd pryche at Powlles crosse the nuwe
byshope of London master Gryndall, in ys rochet and chyminer; and after sermon done the
pepull dyd syng; and ther was my lord mayre and the althermen, and ther was grett audy-
ence. See also Machyns entries for 3 and 16 April and 23 June 1557, 10 and 17 September
1559, 26 November 1559, and 28 February and 15 June 1561.
2 introduction

and rebellion. Yet, unlike the royal Abbey of Westminster, St Pauls was
always perceived as belonging more to subjects than to princes, and this
peculiar status was to acquire increased significance over time. From the
earliest records it is clear that the cathedral churchyard was one of the
favoured settings for popular protest, a place where public grievances
could be aired. For centuries this was the meeting place of Londons folk-
moot; royal guarantee of the liberties of the City was proclaimed here in
the reign of Henry III; Pauls Cross was also a rallying point for adherents
of Simon de Montforts rebellion.3 In the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies this place was the acknowledged epicentre of a series of revolution-
ary events where matters of religious identity were concerned.
In his magisterial study of the Pauls Cross sermons, Millar MacLure
observed that The Pauls Cross pulpit was nothing less than the popular
voice of the Church of England during the most turbulent and creative
period of her history,4 although what is meant by a popular voice here is
ambivalent given the degree of government control. At times, especially
during sessions of Parliament, the auditory must have seemed a micro-
cosm of the whole realm, all England in a little room, and indeed an early-
seventeenth-century painting shows us each member of the audience in
his place, properly accoutred, groundlings and notables, pit and galleries,
and in the midst, the pulpit as stage.5 Pauls Cross frequently served as the
public face of government when Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer
orchestrated propaganda for the Henrician reformation in the 1530s in the
aftermath of Clement VIIs issuing his bull of excommunication. It was the
place Latimer preached his Sermons of the Plough in the earliest weeks of
the Edwardian reformation. Preaching campaigns at Pauls Cross bolstered
Matthew Parkers Advertisements of religious uniformity in the mid-1560s
as well as the attempts by John Whitgift and Richard Bancroft to stem the
rising tide of Disciplinarian Puritanism during the Admonition contro-
versy and later. It was popularly claimed that all the English Reformation
was accomplished from the Cross, very much under the watchful eye of
senior bishops and the tight control of the Privy Council.6 These condi-
tions, of course, by no means meet the requirements of a public sphere by

3J.R. Maddicot, Simon de Montfort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

4MacLure, Pauls Cross Sermons, 167.
5MacLure, Pauls Cross Sermons, 4, 7, 8.
6E. Beresford Chancellor, St Pauls Cathedral (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons,
1925). Perhaps a more accurate formulation would employ the plural: all the English
Reformations were accomplished from Pauls Cross. See C. Haigh, English Reformations.
 introduction3

a strictly Habermasian measure.7 Yet, between 1534 and the early 1640s,
this pulpit remained continuously at the centre of events which trans-
formed Englands religious identities, and through this transformation
contributed substantially to the emergence of a public arena of discourse
animated above all by a culture of persuasion.
Of prime significance is the fact that the transition from a late-medieval
to an early-modern religious identity was achieved to a very large extent
through persuasionarguments, textual interpretation, exhortation,
reasoned opinion, and moral advice. At the end of the reign of Elizabeth,
religious identity could no longer be assumed as simply given within the
accepted order of the world. Structures which had previously connected
a hierarchically-ordered cosmos to a parallel, interconnected religious
understanding in late-medieval sacramental culture had given way, even
among adherents of Rome, to a culture of persuasion. One has only to
peruse MacLures Register of Sermons preached at Pauls Cross, 15341642 to
obtain an impression of this epic transformation.8 At one time or another,
all of the significant players among the ecclesiastical and university estab-
lishments put in an appearance on stageJohn Fisher, Cuthbert Tunstall,
and Stephen Gardiner, Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas
Ridley, John Jewel, John Whitgift, Richard Hooker, and Richard Bancroft
are just a few of the prominent preachers who made their exits and their
entrances in the tortuous course of the English Reformations. Yet, the full
significance of their appearances is not to be interpreted solely with regard
to their official standing in traditional institutionsChurch, Parliament,
or University. Their contribution to a nascent public sphere is to be inter-
preted rather through the arena of their discoursetheir relation to the
audiences, and their reliance upon the devices of rhetoric and argument
to shape religious identity. The dynamic of stage and audience at Pauls
Cross promoted an emerging sense of religious identity shaped by the
instruments of exegesis, argumentation, and exhortation. It is through
such a dynamic that the sense of an emerging public open to persuasion
begins to take hold and to redefine religious identity.
Pauls Cross is arguably the single most important vehicle of public per-
suasion to be employed by government from the initiation of the Henrician

7Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
See also N. Crossley and J.M. Roberts, eds., After Habermas: new perspectives on the public
sphere (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
8Revised and augmented by Jackson Campbell Boswell and Peter Pauls, CRRS
Occasional Publications, no. 6. (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989).
4 introduction

Reformation down to the final years of the reign of Elizabeth. On this

claim rests a further assertion that the formation of Englands religious
identities in this period comes to depend to a high degree on the words
uttered here. The emergence at Pauls Cross of an increasingly sophisti-
cated culture of persuasion moving concurrently with public policy was
intrinsic not only to the formation of a new Protestant religious identity,
but also to the articulation of a Counter-Reformation Catholic identity. In
part this was owing to the intimate proximity of pulpit and press. The
names of dozens of printers and booksellers are identified on colophons
in the period 1530 to 1600 as dwelling in Paules churchyarde, and by rough
estimate they are in the majority. Virtually all booksellers not in Pauls
churchyard are located nearby within the sound of Bow bells. It is cer-
tainly no mere happenstance that a large part of the book trade in
sixteenth-century London was conducted within hailing distance of Pauls
Cross.9 The culture of persuasion which issued from the pulpit continued
on its course in print. Yet it would be advisable not to exaggerate the role
of print culture with respect to the pulpit. Andrew Pettegree has cautioned
that any account of how Protestantism could become a mass movement
in an age before mass literacy must be careful to relocate the role of the
book, as part of a broader range of modes of persuasion, and especially
with respect to public preaching. Scripturally-based preaching is restored
to its central place as the bedrock around which the churches harnessed
other communication media.10 Nowhere is this more accurately applied
than in the case of Pauls Cross. Yet curiously the sermon remains a much
neglected genre in the study of this period.11
In the first of three essays situating Pauls Cross, John Schofield, St Pauls
Cathedral archaeologist, offers a summary of what is currently known and
thought about the architecture and archaeology of the medieval and
Tudor cathedral in the period 15201640, highlighting recent discoveries.
According to Schofield, the cathedral buildings can now be plotted for the
first time in modern decades, and St Pauls recognised as the largest build-
ing in area in medieval Britain. The cathedral was rebuilt into its gigantic

9See Peter W.M. Blayney, The Bookshops in Pauls Cross Churchyard (London: The
Bibliographical Society, Occasional paper no. 5, 1990) which includes modern diagrams of
Pauls Cross Churchyard in 1545, 1600, 1640, 1665 & 1675 (7579), and a detailed modern
plan of the whole precinct in 1600 (facing p. 3).
10Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the culture of persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 39.
11Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
 introduction5

medieval form from 1087. As we progress through the succession of cathe-

drals on the site, the information increases and our understanding of the
building and therefore its architectural and historical significance become
clearer. The New Work (i.e. the choir) of 12691314 was presumably
intended to provide an enlarged, spacious setting for the shrine of
Erkenwald, Anglo Saxon bishop of London in the seventh century. The
architecture was similar in scale and character to contemporary parts of
other great English churches which have survived, particularly Lincoln,
Lichfield, St Albans and York; but there are also elements which suggest
precedents in France, especially the window tracery and the large rose
window in the choir gable. The chapter house and cloister of 133249 are
now displayed in facsimile south of the Wren nave, after work of 20047.
At the Reformation in the 1530s the cathedral suffered. Its fabric was
despoiled and neglected; in 1561 the spire caught fire and was afterwards
demolished. During the Elizabethan and Jacobean decades, however, the
choir of the cathedral became the site of prestigious, assertive tombs of
courtiers and high-ranking officials. This collection of post-Reformation
monuments is second only to those which survive in Westminster Abbey.
A major new element in our understanding of the development of the pre-
Fire cathedral comprises the recovery and analysis of fragments of the
Jones portico and other fragments from his restoration of the church in
163341. The majority of these fragments come from excavation of 19946.
The portico can be reconstructed from fragments, and a detailed picture
of his whole restoration is emerging from the conjunction of archaeologi-
cal and documentary study.
Pauls Cross is well-known as one of the most important points of con-
tact between the Tudor and early Stuart governments and the people: the
pre-eminent venue for public discourse, a forum to assert political control,
and site where proclamations were published. Natalie Mears explores how
Pauls Cross played a role in another instrument of control: namely spe-
cial nationwide worship. Such worship comprised petitionary prayers and
services ordered by the Crown to seek divine intervention in earthly events
such as war, famine, disease, bad weather and earthquakes as well as
thanksgivings offered in gratitude for divine aid. From 1533 to the outbreak
of civil war in 1642, sermons were only preached there for eleven of the
ninety-seven occasions of special worship ordered in England. This is
despite the fact that sermons assumed a more central part in special ser-
vices during this period and special worship was increasingly invoked in
response to confessionally charged events, such as the discovery of catho-
lic plots to assassinate Elizabeth I and the support of protestant rebels
6 introduction

abroad. Mears discusses why successive regimes did not exploit Pauls
Cross more during these occasions and explains why sermons were
preached at Pauls Cross for some occasions of special worship and not
others. Mears employs the case study of special worship and Pauls Cross
to explore further the relationship between the early modern state and
public discourse and the nature of public discourse itself, broadly defined
to include forms of actions as well as verbal/textual debate.
Central to the functioning of Pauls Cross as a venue for public discourse
between rulers and ruled in early modern England was the actual experi-
ence of hearing sermons delivered to crowds of people in an outdoor
space in the midst of urban London. Even though the importance of Pauls
Cross for English religious and civic culture has long been recognized,
basic questions about how the Pauls Cross sermon actually functioned
either remain unanswered or reflect scholars dependence on contempo-
rary accounts that inevitably reflect the internal conflicts in English reli-
gious life as much as they give accurate descriptions of how these sermons
were experienced. Working with a team of architects, acoustic engineers,
linguists, and actors, John Wall has been engaged in recreating the experi-
ence of being present for the delivery of a Pauls Cross sermon in a virtual
model of the space in which it was originally delivered. Wall informs us
how well the crowds who gathered for a sermon at Pauls Cross could have
heard the sermon being delivered, including examples of the aural experi-
ence of these sermons from different locations in the Cross Churchyard
and in the presence of different sized crowds. Walls Virtual Pauls Cross
research aims to assess accurately how many people could have gathered
in the space available and how many of them could have heard the ser-
mon being delivered with a reasonable degree of comprehension. Such
evidence will enable more accurate evaluation of the communicative
power of the unamplified voice and its power to transcend competition
from ambient noise such as the sounds of horses, dogs, birds, and the
water coursing through the citys open sewers, as well as the sounds of car-
riages and hooves beating on cobblestone streets. Wall also considers evi-
dence bearing on broader questions, such as whether the large number of
Pauls Cross sermons that were published is a testimony to the popularity
of their oral presentation or whether publication was necessary simply to
promote distribution of the sermons, since not all that many people could
hear them when they were first delivered. In order to amplify the experi-
ence of public preaching at the pulpit Cross, he uses architectural model-
ling software to integrate into a visual, three-dimensional model of Pauls
Churchyard both the extensive body of visual evidence that survives about
 introduction7

the appearance of Pauls Churchyard and the Cathedral and new archaeo-
logical evidence about the actual size of historic buildings and spaces in
this part of London. He describes how acoustic simulation software
enables recreation of the acoustic properties of this space, approximating
the experience of hearing a sermon delivered at Pauls Cross by people at
different positions in the crowd by integrating the ambient noise of early
modern London with a performance of John Donnes (15721631) sermon
delivered at Pauls Cross on 15 September 1622 recorded in original pro-
nunciation by an actor in an anechoic chamber.
In the first of seven essays on early Tudor sermons preached at Pauls
Cross, Cecilia Hatt examines two occasions on which Bishop John Fisher
(14691535) preached against the teachings of Martin Luther, in 1521 and
1526. These addresses were both substantial sermons, as was to be expected
of so celebrated a preacher; and huge crowds were present at both. Cecilia
Hatt demonstrates in her essay that the five years that intervened between
these two Pauls Cross sermons had seen significant changes in public per-
ceptions of Lutheranism which meant that not only were the reactions of
the audience less predictable in 1526 than they had been in 1521 but also
that Fishers state of mind, in which he found himself arguing for doctrinal
orthodoxy, was much more troubled. Fishers 1521 sermon against the per-
nicious doctrine of Martin Luther, put officially to print by Wynkyn de
Worde, widely disseminated and reprinted, was generally regarded as a
definitive statement of papal authority, so much so that when Henry VIIIs
religious sympathies changed he took steps to suppress it. The printing on
the other hand of the 1526 sermon seems, as its preface suggests, to have
been Fishers private initiative, and its composition shows signs of the bish-
ops anxious eagerness to assert the importance of a community of belief
against what he saw as the dangerous individualism of Lutheranism. In 1521
the sheltering and constant nature of that community had been evoked
by means of an impressive logical sermon structure and the imagery of the
tree, a strong and dependable natural phenomenon. The 1526 sermon also
uses natural imagery, but this time it takes the form of a pervasive meta-
phor of growing plants threatened by weeds, suggesting a beleaguered
community, not bolstered by exterior structures but seeking to maintain
its integrity by means of the willed adherence of its separate members.
Hatt examines the differences in both structure and language between
these two Pauls Cross sermons, as signs of a reaction on Fishers part to
popular feeling that caused him slightly to redefine his ecclesiology.
Richard Rex surveys the attempts by Henry VIIIs regime to control and
exploit the City of Londons premier pulpit in the context of the rapidly
8 introduction

shifting religious politics of the 1530s. Although the preaching at the Cross
was for the most part uncontentious and unremarkable, headline sermons
were delivered there on a number of occasions, usually to signal the posi-
tion, and in particular the changing position, of the Crown. The decade
began with sermons still endorsing the strongly anti-Lutheran line of
the 1520s. But the Cross was caught up in the pulpit wars over Henrys
matrimonial difficulties in 1532, and from 1533 it was used in attempts to
rally public support for the divorce, to discredit the Holy Maid of Kent,
to justify the executions of Fisher and More in 1535 and the break with
Rome, and to herald the iconoclasm of 1538. By sorting out the authorship
and date of the surviving Pauls Cross sermons of the 1530s, this paper sets
them more meaningfully in their political context than has hitherto
been possible.
In his discussion of the struggle between Stephen Gardiner (14831555)
and Robert Barnes (14951540), Ralph Werrell addresses Henry VIIIs
attempt to keep the peace during the 1530s and 40s during which time
there were several swings back and forth between the Catholic and the
Reformation positions. Pauls Cross inevitably became caught up in these
swings. There were instances where successive sermons were preached
which contradicted previous sermons. These shifts in theological opinion
demonstrate something of the doctrinal flexibility characteristic ofHenrys
reign where conflicting sermons were permitted on the assumption that
the preachers were thought by the authorities to be safe. Werrell exam-
ines the writings of Stephen Gardner, bishop of Winchester, and of the
reformer Robert Barnes with a view to shedding light on the Henrician
Reformation through a pulpit conflict at Pauls Cross.
The preaching of sermons at Pauls Cross epitomized dramatic changes
in religion that took place following the accession of Edward VI as a nine-
year-old boy. This is the case because the government of Edward VI con-
tinued the long-standing practice of employing this pulpit as a venue for
sermons that disseminated and defended official doctrine. According to
John N. King, the heterogeneity of the congregations that gathered there
made Pauls Cross a powerful vehicle for the manipulation of public opin-
ion. The lords who governed England during the royal minority (28 January
1547 to 6 July 1553) ordered the preaching of sermons in favour of their
sweeping and controversial Protestant reforms in theological doctrine and
ecclesiastical practice. Departing sharply from the largely political
Reformation countenanced by Henry VIII, this reformist programme
included abrogation of laws included de heretico comburendo (1401), which
ordered the burning of heretics, and the Act of Six Articles (1539), which
 introduction9

imposed the death penalty on alleged heretics who denied transubstantia-

tion, clerical celibacy, and other traditional theological doctrines. This
chapter investigates the contribution of three out of five extant Pauls
Cross sermons from the reign of Edward VI. On the occasion of the burn-
ing of books whose views ran counter to the Royal Injunctions of Edward
VI, Dr Richard Smith (1499/15001563) formally retracted his previous
defense of the Catholic Mass and assertion that unwritten human tradi-
tions based on extra-biblical authorities are as important as scripture. The
great spiritual leader of the first generation of English evangelicals, Hugh
Latimer (c. 14851555), followed by preaching his memorable Sermon on
the Ploughers, which argues in favour of a humble ministry devoted to
preaching sermons that expound the English Bible in simple terms acces-
sible to lay people. Thomas Lever (15211577) then preached during the
aftermath of an insurrection in Cornwall and Devon against the new
English liturgy and a rebellion in Norfolk against the enclosure movement
and exploitation of commoners by the gentry. He affirmed the orthodox
Tudor doctrine of political obedience of subject to ruler and asserted that
both rulers and wealthy individuals have an obligation to succour the poor
through charitable acts.
Torrance Kirby takes a closer look at Richard Smyths Retractation
Sermon, preached both at Pauls Cross and later at Oxford in 1547 shortly
after the accession of King Edward VI, and published by Reginald Wolfe in
the same year. Smiths recantation was accompanied by the ritual burning
of his two books in defence of the traditional account of sacramental pres-
ence, viz. Assertion and Defence of the Sacrament of the Alter and Defence
of the Sacrifice of the Masse, both published in 1546. There is not only the
question of Smyths renunciation of this traditional teaching in order to
conform to the newly reformed religious settlement established following
Edward VIs accession, but also his later retraction of the retractationa
double conversion, so to speakwhich resulted in his ejection from the
Regius professorship and replacement by Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499
1562), the Florentine divine invited to England in 1548 by Archbishop
Thomas Cranmer (14891556). At the core of this rather complicated
episode of Smyths retractation and public recantation at Pauls Cross is
the underlying substantive hermeneutical question of how to interpret
the mode of presence in the sacraments, viz. the how to interpret the
semiotic relation between the sign (signum) and the thing signified (res).
In his inaugural lectures at Oxford Vermigli took up this same question.
Smyths challenge to debate precipitated the famous Oxford Disputation
of 1549 which was to exercise a decisive influence on the later revision
10 introduction

of Cranmers liturgy of 1549 resulting in that of 1552, viz. the Second

Edwardine Prayerbook. By tracing the aftermath of Smyths 1547 sermon it
becomes evident how events at Pauls Cross played a key role in the unfold-
ing of the Edwardine Reformation.
Although the preachers at Pauls Cross were often well-learned men in
their own right, they did not invent a theology of reform, especially that of
the public sphere, on their own. Rather, they found support for their pro-
grams of reform in conversation with other churchmen in contemporary
centres of reform on the continent and also with those in the history of
Christian thought. Continuing with the Edwardine narrative, Jason
Zuidema takes up Hugh Latimers Sermon of the Ploughers preached in
the Shrouds on 18 January 1548 as a representative example. Zuidema
argues that like other continental reformers in the thirty years previous,
the preachers at Pauls Cross were not just interested in conveying certain
doctrines or ideas, but also in how they were conveyed. Right ideas could
not be taught to those whose interpretive framework was faulty. To use
Latimers metaphor, the goal of these sermons was not just to sow the
seed, but to plough the field.
In the concluding chapter on early Tudor sermons Mark Rankin exam-
ines the logic and style of James Brookss Reconciliation Sermon preached
at Pauls Cross on 12 November 1553 following Queen Marys accession, but
prior to the countrys reunification with the Church of Rome. Brooks (1512
1560) affords a noteworthy example of the use of public persuasion to
ensure a properly auspicious interpretation of Englands recent past. The
sermon on the story of Jairus daughter anticipates the rhetoric of later
Marian sermons, by Reginald Pole and others, which were preached to
commemorate the 1554 reconciliation of the realm to the papacy. The style
and language of Brookss argument concerning the authority of the church
to judge truth from falsehood echo similar claims made by Thomas More,
in his controversy with William Tyndale, and by Tyndale himself who wres-
tled with competing literal and figurative senses of sacred text. Rankin
demonstrates that Brooks and Tyndale both extend Augustinian theories
of biblical exegesis drawn from De doctrina christiana in Tudor England.
Brookss sermon also shares a persuasive method with Protestant propa-
gandists whose views he would have repudiated. In particular, Brooks
understands the religious changes of his day in terms of malleable genres,
such as the Judgement tale and negative royal vitae that make similar
appearances in the writings of Protestants such as John Foxe and John Bale.
According to Angela Ranson, Elizabethan Bishop John Jewel (15221572)
enjoys a distinguished reputation in the historiography of the Church of
 introduction11

England. While he is most often portrayed as a champion of the reformed

Church, mainly due to his apologetics and his correspondence, less well
known is his Challenge Sermon of November 1559, in which he rejected
specific practices of the Roman Church because they were new inven-
tions. By doing this, Jewel removed the charge of novelty that had been
laid on the Church of England and placed the burden of proof on the
Roman Church. Ranson argues that Jewel made this challenge at Pauls
Cross for two reasons: first, to provide a way for the people of England to
define themselves through opposition to other beliefs; and second, to
begin a shift in protestant polemic that focused on calling people to inter-
nalize their belief in the protestant message, not just accept it outwardly.
Pauls Cross was essential for the achievement of these goals both because
of its widespread influence, and because of the makeup of its audience.
Jewel once observed that his Challenge Sermon was addressed to the
Prince, the Council, and the whole state of the Realm. This suggests that
Jewel expected his message to spread beyond his immediate hearers. He
chose Pauls Cross as the first place to present this sermon because he
knew it would give his message a chance to reach every parish in England.
Pauls Cross, then, became both the sphere to influence and the sphere of
influence for Jewel. He met the challenge of being called to preach there,
and issued a challenge in return. At Pauls Cross, John Jewel earned his
reputation as a champion of the church.
The sermons that echoed in the public ear from the Pauls Cross pulpit
during the 1560s and 70s, with their famed theatrics, were directly related
to a simultaneous growth in the print industry in early Elizabethan
London. In a period of growing literacy, Thomas Dabbs maintains, popular
religious print became integrated with the sensational echoes of popular
religious disputes from the aural environment of Pauls Cross. Along with
the echoes of sermons from the pulpit and off the north transept and
choir of St Pauls, another echoing cycle surfaced, one in which print
echoed in the public ear and from the pulpit and back into print. This new,
thriving marketplace for Godly print, along with printing contracts
secured from the Church of England, persuaded entrepreneurial publish-
ers to engage in a more risky commercial publicationpleasure read-
ingthat was often issued under the guise of moral instruction but that
soon held a separate sway as secular entertainment for the common
reader. Although religious writers, speakers, and translators often decried
their questionable moral value, these works in fact flourished within the
profitable, echoing marketplace of religious print. Stories from William
Painters (1540?1594) Palace of Pleasure and such other works that were
12 introduction

issued for pleasurable entertainment became source texts for new plays
when the public theatres were established in the 1570s. A third echoing
cycle emerged, one that aped the Pauls Cross print and pulpit cycle: the
echo from print to secular public theatre back to print. The Pauls Cross
sermon during this period became an integral part of what the print
industry understood as an oral and aural marketing machine for a growing
common readership, one that immediately fed into the vast, gossipy echo
chamber of the nave of St Pauls, then called Pauls Walk. There, both reli-
gious and secular imprints were echoed vigorously and indiscriminately.
These print marketing echo chambers, which came to include the public
theatres just beyond the city limits, were in large part the unintentional
outgrowth of popularized piety. Whatever complaints the pious had
against pleasure reading and plays, these new echoing forms of entertain-
ment were to some degree the material offspring of reformed religion.
One of the most remembered and important sermons preached at
Pauls Cross is that of Richard Hooker (15541600). This sermon is described
briefly by Izaak Walton in his influential Life of Hooker. Others have already
shown that Waltons account is misleading: his dating is problematic, and
the significance of the sermon in Hookers career could not have been as
Walton described it. In his essay David Neelands advances a judicious
reconstruction of the matter of Hookers sermon at Pauls Crossin order
to show that Walton did not describe its significance accurately, and thus
to show that the sermon was likely to have been a more moderate pro-
nouncement on a controversial theological matter.
Gerard Kilroy describes the childhood of Edmund Campion (15401581)
as the son of an anti-Catholic publisher in Pauls Churchyard, his experi-
ence of two of the most dramatic incidents associated with Pauls Cross,
and his schooldays at Christs Hospital during the burnings in Smithfield.
Campions later refusal to preach there for the Grocers Company may
have had more causes than doctrinal reservations. Kilroy emphasizes the
detachment it must have engendered in the young Campion to observe
the state impose religious views, rather than just leave the matter to more
open debate. Campion was involved in public disputations at St Pauls,
at Christs Hospital as well as at Oxford, and these must have seemed
the only true thing in a violently changing world. Campions intimate
experience of the goings-on in Pauls Churchyard from 1540 to 1568 gives
us a vivid picture of the intensity of the debates that flowed around this
pulpit.
Anti-Catholicism featured widely in sermons at Pauls Cross, and Ellie
Gebarowski-Shafers essay contributes to recent discussions on the topic
 introduction13

by examining the career and polemical writings of Thomas Bilson (1547

1616), Bishop of Winchester and member of the final review committee
of the King James Bible. In Lent 1597, Bilson preached at Pauls Cross
on Christs descent into hell. He attacked Roman Catholic doctrine and
undue veneration of the cross, but he quickly found himself in both pulpit
and printed controversies with puritans who were scandalized at his
defense of the literal harrowing of hell. As Gebarowski-Shafer shows,
Bilsons foray into Anti-Catholic polemic (at the expense of puritan beliefs)
is connected with his literary involvement in the Rheims New Testament
controversy a decade earlier. In The True Difference Between Christian
Subjection and Unchristian rebellion (1584), he attacked Catholic teachings
and biblical translation while setting his views apart from those of puritan
Cambridge divine William Fulke (15381589), who himself had written
against Rheims translator Gregory Martin in 1583 and had previously
preached his Bachelor of Divinity sermon (now lost) at Pauls Cross on
Christs descent into hell, supporting Calvins view of this article of faith.
Gebarowski-Shafer also analyses debates on translating Acts 2:27, in which
Fulkes rigorous defense of the Genevan translation was disregarded by
Bilson, who ultimately ensured that the King James Bibles rendering of
the verse allowed for the literal understanding of Christs descent into hell.
Even special occasions at Pauls Cross are often difficult to reconstruct
in any detail. According to Steven May, this was essentially the case with
the celebration there of Englands victory over the Armada on 24 November
1588. However, two recently discovered ballads that describe the event
provide considerable new information about it. Above all, they corrobo-
rate other relevant testimony pointing to the Queens prominent role in
both the spectacle and the liturgical substance of the occasion. Apparently
Queen Elizabeth not only controlled what happened, she made the cere-
monys grand finale a uniquely personal part of the celebration. May
investigates her relationship with John Piers (1522/31594), Bishop of
Salisbury, who was honoured by being selected to preach at Pauls Cross on
that day. In addition, the ballads accounts of what happened dovetail
with other evidence, mostly from manuscript sources, to establish that
when Piers finished his sermon, the Queens own poetry, now set to music,
was performed for all to hear.
John Copcot (d. 1590), sometime Master of Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, and a stalwart defender of the English Church, preached at
Pauls Cross in 1584, principally against Dudley Fenners Counter-Poyson.
His colourful sermon was evidently widely circulated, but never printed.
It exists, however, in manuscript, in a collection put together by the
14 introduction

Restoration Archbishop Sancroft, now in the Lambeth Palace (London)

Library. P.G. Stanwood describes the occasion of this sermon, its context,
and its rhetorical significance and persuasive force. Copcot carefully lays
out what he sees to be the pillers of the Church of Rome, which in his
view feebly supported the doctrine of graceof works and meritsand
he defends the sacraments upheld by Canterbury, urging that Rome is
wanting in their right use. He also discusses and defends the episcopacy
and the English mode of church government. For comparison and the-
matic expansion, Stanwood considers John Whitgifts (15301604) Pauls
Cross sermon on the 3rd chapter of Titus. Whitgifts is a helpful reflection
on certain themes in Copcots discourse. Preached in 1583, but not printed
until 1589, Whitgift returns to the significance of the episcopacy and to the
necessity of public obedience to those in authority. His sermon does of
course mark the 25th year of Queen Elizabeths reign. Together these two
sermons define and uphold the constitution of the Elizabethan Church
and Commonwealth. Stanwood concludes his essay with a discussion of
one of the last sermons ever to have been preached at Pauls Cross, namely
that by Mark Frank (16131664), fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in
May 1642. Stanwood reveals that in his sermon style Frank was a distin-
guished successor of Lancelot Andrewes, and in sensibility an exemplary
inheritor of the conformist tradition of Pauls Cross sermons represented
by such predecessors as Copcot, Whitgift, and Bancroft.
While truth may win out in the end, the power of persuasion often
depends upon a willingness to manipulate it, particularly when it comes
to representing ones opponent. An audience must be persuaded to fear or
scorn the opposition, and this means concealing the more attractive or
reassuring aspects of their position, and insinuating unsavory aspects that
they would be quick to deny. Bradford Littlejohn argues that nowhere was
this more true than in the polemics of Elizabethan England, as conform-
ists and puritans each sought to get the rhetorical upper hand, posturing
as the friends of God, Queen, and country, and portraying their opponents
as wicked, unstable, and even treasonous. These highly-charged polemics
pose a considerable challenge for the historian, who must seek, amidst all
the rhetorical posturing, to determine what the disputants each really
believed, and what they really believed about their opponents. Richard
Bancrofts (15441610) famous sermon at Pauls Cross in 1588, and
John Penrys (15591593) reply two years later, offer an excellent case
for testing the authenticity of Elizabethan polemics on both sides of
the conformist-puritan divide. For, like so many conformist polemics, the
capstone of Bancrofts lurid portrait of perilous puritan instability is his
 introduction15

claim that they wish to abolish the royal supremacy, and may even be
prepared to engage in full-blown revolution, like their fellow Presbyterians
in France and Scotland. And if ever there were a puritan who would accept
the charge of opposing the Royal Supremacy, we might expect him to be a
radical like John Penry, one of those who would not tarry for the magis-
trate, embracing separatism in 1592. Yet, like nearly every other puritan
and separatist of his day, Penry vociferously denies the slanderous charge,
declaring, Looke whatsoever prerogative in ecclesiastical or civil causes
hee or any man livinge can truly attribute unto the civil magistrate, wee do
the same. Were Bancroft and his fellow conformists merely indulging in
dishonest demagoguery, then, to frighten their hearers away from danger-
ous revolutionaries, or were Penry and his fellows disingenuous in their
zealous affirmations of support for her Majesty and the royal supremacy?
Littlejohn suggests that a closer look at Bancrofts sermon and Penrys
response shows both men to be wrestling with a pervasive paradox of the
Reformation, the relation of conscience and authority. In their different
attempts to balance these two poles, we can perceive the basis for their
different understandings of the royal supremacy to which they both pro-
fess allegiance, and the reasons why they see one another as such serious
threats to a well-ordered Christian society.
Although numerous scholars have explored the role of the Pauls Cross
pulpit in disseminating news of current events to large and diverse
Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, their studies have usually mapped a
unidirectional flow of information from the secular and ecclesiastical
authorities through the preacher to the people. Anne James argues, how-
ever, that by interpreting the information he had been given, the preacher
also offered his political masters valuable rhetorical strategies for shaping
later narratives of these events. In other words, the preachers intermedi-
ary position enabled him to influence the understanding of his superiors
as well as his inferiors. In order to comprehend this process, we need
to read these sermons not as isolated pulpit utterances but as part of
developing communication strategies. William Barlows (d. 1613) sermons
on the execution of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex (15651601),
and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot created rudimentary narratives
of these incidents, shaping them according to existing generic conven-
tions. In the first case, Francis Bacon (15611626) developed Barlows rep-
resentation of the Earls fall as a tragedy in the later pamphlet attributed to
him, thus crafting a coherent, if unpopular, justification of the govern-
ments actions. In the second, however, the anonymous author of the
Discourse of the maner of the discouery of this late intended treason and
16 introduction

the prosecutors at the plotters trials attempted to sustain Barlows increas-

ingly inadequate depiction of the Gunpowder Plot as an apocalyptic tragi-
comedy, leading to generically fractured accounts that promoted dissent
rather than unanimity. This study, then, suggests that we may underesti-
mate the significance of Pauls Cross preachers in the development of a
public sphere if we fail adequately to contextualize their sermons among
other types of communications.
Roze Hentschell also addresses the fabric of the Cathedral and Church
Yard in her treatment of the campaign for the renovation of Pauls
launched in 1620. Scholars have long noted the increased secularization
that Londons St Pauls Cathedral precinct underwent over the course of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, the precinct was phan-
tasmagoric in its activities. The secular spaces and goings-on in and
around Pauls render the task of seeking the sacred in such a space worth-
while. Yet the precinct still drew the devout. For all the religious activity
that occurred at Pauls, we find a pervasive concern with the moral decay
taking place all around it. This degeneration came to be associated with
the physical condition of the Cathedral itself. The dilapidated state of the
church, and particularly the absent spire, which had burnt down in 1561
never to be replaced, became a material symbol for the lack of religious
fortitude of London and its inhabitants. Campaigns to repair the fabric in
general and the spire in particular took place throughout the Elizabethan
period. However, it was not until the last years of Jamess reign that trac-
tion was gained and that Inigo Joness (15731652) plans for the renovation
came to fruition. Attempts to re-imagine a repaired St Pauls were neces-
sarily also attempts to reclaim a sacred London. This chapter focuses on
several texts that argue for the repair of Pauls, in particular John Kings
(15591621) Sermon on Behalf of Pauls Church (1620). The 1620 campaign
marked a change: crucially, it had the material and rhetorical support of
the King, who began to see London as a Stuart city. As the gem in the
crown of London, James understood the importance of a cathedral fitting
of the city he imagined London could be. The sermon, in turn, is preoc-
cupied with the role the church played in Londons landscape: glorifying
the City is the cornerstone of Kings argument. Inigo Joness plans for the
Cathedral materialized as a result of the sustained and very public efforts
of King James, and Bishop Kings sermon was a key element of this effort.
Jeanne Shami explores a sermon by John Stoughton (15931639) deliv-
ered at Pauls Cross in 1624, but published posthumously in 1640 under the
title The Love-sick Spouse. The manuscript of Stoughtons sermon is one
of few Pauls Cross sermons that exists in two manuscripts (one complete
 introduction17

and one partial). Moreover, the manuscript differs substantially from the
printed version, and speaks more directly and topically to political, reli-
gious, and cultural circumstances in 1623/24, at the height of controversy
and tension precipitated by plans for the Spanish Match between Charles
and Maria Anna von Hapsburg, Infanta of Spain. Dr Shami explores how
the manuscript and sermon forms can be employed to consider how closely
manuscript practices of scriptural citation differ from those of the printed
sermon. She speaks to the early impact on preaching of the publication
of the King James Bible and probes similarities and differences of the vari-
ous extant forms of Stoughtons sermon in order to illuminate processes
of sermon delivery and transmission (including the larger compilations
in which the manuscript sources are found), as well as to uncover some
of the political, religious, and historical resonances at play in these texts.
The visceral effect of spoken language mixed with the preacher as per-
former makes the sermon more than a cerebral exercise that accompanies
reading and contemplation, but a physical one that engages the very body
of the listener. Moreover, if the body shivers and is awed by the delivery of
the preachers words, then the soul that is entangled in its sinews might
also be quaking. Kathleen OLeary examines Donnes use of performance
in his Pauls Cross sermons. She focuses on the preachers use of verbal
communication, examining how language is used to enthral listeners
whilst also developing what we might term a Protestant aesthetic. The vis-
ceral effects that the employment of carefully selected diction, phrase and
rhythmic pattern can have on listeners can transform not only the congre-
gations sense of their individual salvation but the preachers too. His ser-
mons, however, also forge an individual path, so indicative of Donne,
which places him between conflicting doctrinal positions: on the one
hand, firmly wedded to the concrete authority of the logos; on the other,
using this power of the Word to create an alternative to Catholic sensibil-
ity. Donnes attempts at using the power of language to affect his congrega-
tion both physically and by means of images is, OLeary argues, an attempt
to recreate parts of a forgotten world, to symbolise them within the semi-
otics of Protestantism and thus to create space and accommodation for
the past. The soul/body connection in the sermons extends to the rela-
tionship between the power of the Word and the past, where the Word has
the power to energise, to re-kindlea kind of recompaction.
When Joseph Hall (15741656) preached a Spital sermon in 1618,
he opened his sermon with the declaration that there is nothing more
necessarie therefore, for a Christian heart, than to be rectified in the man-
aging of a prosperous estate, and to learne to be happy here, that it may be
18 introduction

more happy hereafter. Mary Morrissey considers how the sermons at

Pauls Cross represented the London community (households, guilds, par-
ishes, and a single civic community) as a theological unit, and how actions
here might relate to ones destiny hereafter (determined, for Hall and his
fellow Calvinists, before Creation). We can examine representations of the
community overall as an entity that God might reward (with peace and
prosperity) and punish (with plague, war and famine). Such themes are
common in the national warning sermons, or Jeremiads, with which
Pauls Cross is associated. Too often, scholarly treatment of these sermons
stresses the idea of separation: God treats England differently from other
nations, and his elect within the nation are afflicted to different ends than
the reprobated majority. This idea of separation, and of a Protestantism
that fostered individualism over communal cohesion, is harder to recon-
cile with the Pauls Cross Jeremiads than it is with their New England cous-
ins. For Morrissey, we can counter-balance the notion of a godly
individualism with a second view of the community more often found in
the Pauls Cross sermons: as the context in which the individual Christian
worked at their calling, and in so doing showed their faith by their works
(as demanded in James 2:18). The means to get to heaven may be an indi-
vidual faith, but the way there is through the bonds that tie the individual
to the community. Here we see an essentially communal element to the
representation of Christian life in the Pauls Cross sermons, undoubtedly
derived from the writings of St Augustine. In The City of God, he wrote that
the Christian was obliged to do his utmost to preserve whatever flawed
semblance of true peace remained in the earthly city. And the Pauls Cross
preachers took up this challenge in the exhortations that form a crucial
element of sermons like the Jeremiads, the sermons preached before the
Bartholomews Day fair, and the Easter Spital sermons.
Susan Wabudas essay Lost at Pauls Cross considers the sermons
that we know were delivered in the 16th century at Pauls Cross, but that
otherwise have left little trace in the documentary records. Among them
were the Easter week sermons that were delivered at the pulpit cross at the
Hospital of St Mary and then were answered in a culminating sermon
at Pauls Cross every year. Candidates for degrees of BTh at Cambridge
and BD at Oxford also preached their examination sermons at Pauls Cross,
and we might wish that we had sermon notes for those early efforts
by Thomas Cranmer, or Hugh Latimer, as well as many others. Erasmus
might have refused to deliver an examination sermon at Pauls Cross, but
certainly his writings were denounced there, and we might wish we had a
better account of what was said when he was. If sermons were not always
 introduction19

well recorded, then the reactions of the members of the audience are even
more elusive: but some tantalizing bits of evidence have survived in
obscure sources that give a few indications of how the people responded
to the men in the pulpit.
 PART ONE

SITUATING PAULS CROSS

 CHAPTER ONE

RECONSTRUCTING ST PAULS CATHEDRAL, 15201640

John Schofield

Introduction

This paper describes the main features of St Pauls Cathedral and its
churchyard, including Pauls Cross, as they stood in 1520; and develop-
ments of the building and its surroundings from then until about 1640, the
opening of the English Civil War.1
The materials from which we can reconstruct the medieval cathedral,
and St Pauls Cross which lay outside it at the north-east corner, are vari-
ous. Although the Wren building, with crypts below all four of its arms, has
destroyed almost all the medieval building and its foundations, the latter
do survive in small isolated parts around it, underground. Part of the
cathedrals 14th-century cloister and the bases of buttresses which sup-
ported an octagonal chapter house are laid out in new stone south of the
present nave (Fig. 1). There are drawings, notably the series of engravings
of the outside and inside by Hollar, but these all date to just before the
Great Fire in 1666 or immediately after. A third important source is a col-
lection of architectural fragments, individual carved stones dug up at vari-
ous unknown times in the past 150 years.
Whether walking round the outside of the cathedral, or through it, a
person wishing to listen to a sermon or public announcement at Pauls
Cross in 1520 would experience at least four centuries of architecture on
the way there. Some small parts of the cathedral were even older: the
north wall of the Gothic choir contained two sarcophagi of Saxon kings,
Sebba (d 695) and Aethlred II (d 1013). But the chief periods of building the
cathedral were 1087about 1190, the 1250s, 12691314, 13329 and the 15th
century.

1This summary and discussion is based on John Schofield, St Pauls Cathedral before
Wren (London: English Heritage, 2011), which describes the archaeology and history of the
cathedral site from Roman times up to 1666. Detailed references will be found there.
24 john schofield

Fig. 1.St Pauls Cathedral from the south side in 2010.

The Romanesque Cathedral

The cathedral, founded in ad 604, was rebuilt into its gigantic medieval
form from 1087; this may have obliterated the previous Anglo-Saxon build-
ing, which would have lain either under its medieval successor or possibly
 reconstructing st pauls cathedral25

to one side. In fact we do not know what relation the Norman cathedral
had to its predecessor. In 11th-century major churches, there was a short
range of possibilities, from superimposition on an existing structure to
placing the new cathedral on a green field site clear of the existing church,
as at St Albans, where the siting and form of the Norman ancillary build-
ings may have been influenced by their predecessors. As at Winchester,
there seems to have been a wish to retain the memorials of kings and bish-
ops which had stood in the Anglo-Saxon cathedral.2
Between 1087 and about 1200 there were two building campaigns con-
cerning the transepts. The full length of the transepts (300ft / 91.5m, north
to south) with central space and two aisles was the result of the second
campaign, probably started in 110827. The transepts with three aisles
would find one parallel in the surviving south transept at Winchester
Cathedral, of about the same time. At St Pauls this incorporated an apsi-
dal chapel in the east aisle of the south transept from an earlier phase of
work, perhaps that of 1087.
The London region was where a fully-developed style of Romanesque
architecture might be expected before the Norman Conquest, and the new
cathedral would fit into this context. The presbytery of four bays and
underlying crypt place St Pauls alongside the major church projects at
Winchester and Bury St Edmunds; its long nave also suggests that its build-
ing was intended to rival or stand as an equal to Winchester. Its nave eleva-
tion may have derived from St-Etienne in Caen (Fig. 2).
The splendour of the building is indicated by architectural fragments
which have been found in the past and are now kept at the present cathe-
dral. One example is given here, which shows the potential. It is a voissoir
or arch stone of the 1150s, thus from the Romanesque cathedral or an
ancillary building in the churchyard (Fig. 3).
The measurements of the voussoir indicate an arch diameter of approx-
imately 2 metres, which would be very wide for a cloister arcade though
possible for a tomb. It is more likely to belong to a doorway, possibly multi-
ordered but certainly reasonably large in scale. Stylistically the use of
beaded stems in this kind of interlacing pattern and deeply carved is found
on the voussoirs of the cloister arcade at Reading Abbey in the 1130s, and
in related work excavated in the chapter house of St Albans Abbey, which
is datable to 115166. What stands out about the St Pauls voussoir is the
precision of the design, the delicately carved leaf terminals, and the use of

2Martin Biddle, Winchester in the early Middle Ages, Winchester Studies I (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1976), 31112.
26 john schofield

Fig. 2.The nave of St Pauls by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1657.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

a square flower as the focal point of the design, and for these reasons it is
datable to the 1150s. Much of the internal elevation of masonry and carved
detail in the cathedral was painted, but so far very few traces of Romanesque
paint have been identified on recovered fragments; some notable pieces
carved with chevron designs come from a large 12th-century doorway.
Study of the historic collection of moulded stones in the present triforium
will in the future no doubt produce more painted pieces.
Romanesque St Pauls was similar in size and concept to Winchester,
probably intentionally. Winchester was started in 1079 and almost complete
 reconstructing st pauls cathedral27

Fig. 3.Arch-stone of the mid-12th century.

within 30 years; the work at St Pauls which began in 1087 took far longer.
Winchester had architectural features associated with its royal connec-
tions, such as a western massif and a giant order of piers in the nave.
William the Conqueror kept the treasury there and at Easter wore the
crown at Winchester, previously the capital of Saxon Wessex. When
28 john schofield

William came to London, he wore the crown at Westminster. In the late

11th and for much of the 12th century, St Pauls was not much used for royal
purposes, though it had the bones of two Anglo-Saxon kings. But by 1190,
when the building of the nave reached the new west end with its towers,
the cathedral was a large church on a European scale. It should be com-
pared with the largest pilgrimage churches such as St-Sernin at Toulouse
and St James at Compostella, which are similar in date and concept.

13th Century: The New Work

The 13th and early 14th centuries were an era of ambitious building on
the cathedral and other religious sites which provided London with many
of its landmark buildings for the next 350 years. During the 13th century,
in and immediately around the City of London, there was much building
at new religious houses, and some rebuilding at those established before
1200.
At St Pauls, the crossing tower was finished in 1222, and the spire added
to it shortly after. Both these structures were precocious or innovative for
their height within Europe. My calculations suggest that the tower was
about 204ft (62.2m) high, and the spire a further 200ft (61m) high.3 Further
building followed in several stages. In 1256 the east sides of both transepts
were rebuilt and given flying buttresses. And in 1269 work began to extend
the Romanesque choir into a new rectangular form; this was called the
New Work, though it was only the largest of several building projects. Thus
St Pauls was like other large English churches which have survived: by
1400 it had a new Gothic choir and transepts, but a nave from the 12th
century, as at Peterborough, Gloucester, Ely and Norwich.
The New Work was presumably intended to provide an enlarged, spa-
cious setting for the shrine of Erkenwald; a similar extension for the patron
saint had just been finished at Ely in 1252. The architecture was similar in
scale and character to contemporary parts of other great English churches
which have survived, particularly Lincoln, Lichfield, St Albans and York;
but there are also elements which suggest precedents in France, especially
the window tracery and the large rose window in the choir gable. From
1270 to the 1290s, St Pauls was the greatest architectural undertaking in the
London area, surpassing even the works at Westminster Abbey.

3Schofield, St Pauls, 1034. The height of the tower is based on the testimony of Robert
Hooke and Hollars elevations, and the height of the spire is that recalled by Wren.
 reconstructing st pauls cathedral29

Fig. 4.View of the choir by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1657.

The interior of the New Work, as shown by Hollar in 1657 (Fig. 4), is devoid
of built-in statuary, an apparent contrast to the contemporary interiors of
the eastern arms of Ely or Lincoln, but at St Pauls it is probable that all
traces of internal statuary had been removed at the Reformation.
30 john schofield

By Hollars time the walls were bare, partly a result of Inigo Joness redeco-
ration in 163341 (of which more below). In 1609 a Herald noted 28 coats
of arms in the windows of the north and south sides of the choir.4
External views (Fig. 5) show the tracery of the rose window itself, within
a square, like the roses in the north transept of St-Denis, Paris, of 123540,
and the south transept of Notre-Dame, Paris, of 12627.5 The east front of
St Pauls was apparently also embellished with statues in niches, since
Hollar shows two tiers of niches and in the lower, larger pair, the corbels
for missing figures.
When the New Work was finished in 1314, St Pauls was the largest build-
ing in area in medieval Britain, and one of the largest in Europe. Further
construction works followed, along the sides of the building. The most
important 14th-century work was a two-storeyed cloister forming a square,

Fig. 5.The Cathedral from the east by Hollar, 1657.

4William S. Simpson, Gleanings from Old St Pauls (London: E Stock, 1889), 669.
5Also Jean Bony, French Gothic architecture of the 12th and 13th centuries (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), figs. 356 and 337 respectively.
 reconstructing st pauls cathedral31

inside which was an octagonal chapter house, on the south side of the
nave. Both these were built by mason William Ramsey in 133249, and
they are one of the earliest works in the Perpendicular style which was
thereafter to dominate royal and church work throughout England.
Because the chapter house was adapted by Wren to be his site office, it and
the lower cloister survived until about 1714. Then the lowest part of their
walls and buttresses were allowed to remain in the ground, to be discov-
ered in 1879. For a time these remains were visible south of the Wren nave.
In 20047 the area was landscaped to provide the setting for a disabled
access to the present cathedral, and the 14th-century remains, uncovered
once more, were carefully backfilled and their alignments laid out in
facsimile stone (shown from the south-west in Figure 1). The low walls
of the facsimile cloister and the buttress bases contain replicas of their
14th-century mouldings.
In comparison to the period before 1350, the constructional history
of the cathedral after the middle of the 14th century is poorly known.
There was a new south window and doorway for the south transept in
1387, and some work done on the bishops palace which lay north-west of
the cathedral. The only major constructions from 1350 up to 1530 were the
building or rebuilding of the Pardon Cloister (with Sherringtons library
along one quadrant, and Beckets chapel within the garth) in the 1420s and
the rebuilding of St Pauls Cross in the 1440s, both on the north side of the
cathedral (as was the grandest private chapel, that of John of Gaunt).
Apart from these developments, the basic structure of the main church, its
four arms, had reached its largest form around 1314 and stayed in that con-
figuration until Joness portico was added to the west end in 1633.

The Folkmoot, the Belfry and Pauls Cross

North-east of the Anglo-Saxon and Romanesque cathedral lay the folk-

moot. By the 11th century this open space was a well-known and possibly
already ancient court. It held sessions three times a year and every citizen
was expected to attend; it was the highest court in the City. In 1244 the
mayor and citizens suggested to a royal judge that a vicar choral of St
Pauls, judged guilty of a murder committed in 1226, should be outlawed by
a precept of the king at the folkmoot.6 Despite an order of Edward I that it
should be closed, the folkmoot was still used for public meetings in 1321.

6Helena M. Chew and Martin Weinbaum (eds), The London Eyre of 1244 (Leicester:
London Record Society 6, 1970), no. 45.
32 john schofield

As at other medieval cathedral or major monastic churches, St Pauls

had a separate stone belfry which stood in this north-east corner of its
precinct, near Cheapside (its site, which probably survives intact, is below
the new post-War street called New Change). The large stone belltower or
belfry, built in the 1220s but probably replacing a more ancient place for
the bell used in the folkmoot, contained four bells and had an image of
StPaul on the top of its spire. By 1243 it was a distinctive landmark in the
neighbourhood. There was a similar, probably larger belfry at Westminster
built in 124953.7 At St Pauls, as at Salisbury and Norwich, both the central
tower of the church and a separate belfry held large bells. At Norwich, the
larger, heavier bells were in the belfry, and although this is also likely at
StPauls, we have no knowledge of the character of the bells in either loca-
tion. The point has also been made, in a study of the Norwich cathedral
close, that the belfry there was in a semi-public space, between the church
and its main point of public access and contact with the surrounding
town; the bells in the belfry were especially rung on public occasions and
at festivals.8 Thus there was probably a similar historic purpose at St Pauls
which connected the sites of the ancient folkmoot, the belfry, and Pauls
Cross; the latter lay a few yards south-west of the belfry. The belfry was
disposed of by Henry VIII by 1546 and its site became secular buildings,
just north of another new building, St Pauls School.
St Pauls Cross combined several functions. It was used for outdoor ser-
mons; its location in the lay cemetery and the folk moot (which was still
functioning in the middle of the 13th century) meant it was the place for
public, especially royal or religious, announcements of national impor-
tance. In 1241, 1252 and 1261, Henry III took leave of the citizens of London
there before crossing over to France.9 St Pauls Cross itself is mentioned in
1241. Possibly the building of the Cross and the nearby belfry were related
projects in the two decades after about 1220. The Cross was damaged
in 1382 (perhaps by the earthquake of that year), possibly repaired in 1387
and rebuilt in 1448 by Bishop Kempe as a roofed pulpit for public preach-
ing. It is shown by Norden around 1610 (Fig. 6) and on the unrestored view

7Christopher Thomas, Robert Cowie, and Jane Sidell, The royal palace, abbey and town
of Westminster on Thorney Island: archaeological excavations (19918) for the London
Underground Limited Jubilee Line Extension Project (London: Museum of London
Archaeology Service Monograph 22, 2006), 712. The Westminster belfry was a massive
stone structure, about 75ft (22.8m) square and perhaps 60ft (18.5m) high.
8Roberta Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral Close: the evolution of the English cathedral land-
scape (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 18990.
9Henry T. Riley, Chronicles of the mayors and sheriffs of London: ad 1188 to ad 1274
(London: Trbner, 1863), 9, 20, 53.
 reconstructing st pauls cathedral33

Fig. 6.Pauls Cross in the foreground of the Cathedral viewed from the northeast.
Vignette from a map of Middlesex in John Speed, The Theatre of Empire of Great
Britaine (1611).
34 john schofield

of the cathedral in the dyptych by John Gipkyn probably of 1620 (see the
Frontispiece). In both representations there it has a further low wall
around it, of brick in the dyptych, which also shows seated listeners inside
it, and a stone area raised by two steps on the east side. Foundations of the
destroyed Cross were located in 1878; slightly less than the north half of a
vault or passage of octagonal plan; the outer wall of stone, with an inner
core of brick. From the configuration of the recorded parts the excavator,
the St Pauls Surveyor Francis Penrose, reconstructed the outer diameter
of the Cross to be about 37ft (11.3m), and assumed that this was the build-
ing by Bishop Kempe in 1448. The southern half of the structure had been
removed by the foundation trench for the north wall of Wrens choir. The
octagonal shape of the Cross was laid out on the present churchyard sur-
face, probably in the first decade of the 20th century, where it can be seen
(and stood on) today.

St Pauls Churchyard around the Cross

That part of the Churchyard which lay north-east of the cathedral build-
ing, with its gate to Cheapside, was sometimes called the Cross Churchyard.
This may have been because the transepts were often known as the Cross
in large churches, as much as taking its name from St Pauls Cross; no
doubt both meanings were understood and conflated. It was the only open
space adjacent to the transepts.
A bookbinder is known to have had premises in Paternoster Row, which
ran outside the north wall of the cathedral precinct, in 1312, and several
stationers are found in the cathedral churchyard shortly after 1300.
Paternoster Row contained many book artisans from the late 14th century.
There were two church courts held in the cathedral, both probably in
parts of the north side of the building, which would need scriveners and
books. This trade was transformed by the arrival of the printing press in
London in the late 15th century. Although some early bookshops were at
other locations around the churchyard, the emphasis by 1523 was certainly
in the north-eastern part, the Cross Churchyard.10 The location of indi-
vidual bookshops, and in many cases plausible suggestions as to the area
they occupied, can be made from about the 1570s.11 Archaeologically,

10James Raven, St Pauls precinct and the book trade to 1800. In St Pauls: the cathedral
church of London 6042004, edited by Derek Keene, Arthur Burns and Andrew Saint, 4301.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.
11Peter Blayney, The bookshops in Pauls Cross Churchyard (London: Bibliographical
Society Occasional Papers 5, 1990).
 reconstructing st pauls cathedral35

unfortunately, this area has been badly damaged by the digging of the
foundations of the Wren building in 167586 and burials in the area from
1666 to 1853. It is highly unlikely that any remains of the slight foundations
of the bookshops survive in the ground to be recorded.

The Cathedral from the Reformation to 1640

By 1530, St Pauls Churchyard was already the centre of the countrys book-
selling trades. Protector Somerset destroyed three arms of the Pardon
Cloister north of the nave, leaving the 15th-century library above the east
walk, in 1549; thus making space for more bookshops. The spire was hit by
lightning in 1561, taken down and not replaced. The separate belfry and the
gates disappeared; Pauls Cross was to follow in the 1640s. St Pauls suffered
in the Civil War and Commonwealth period, like many other cathedrals in
England such as Canterbury, Carlisle, Chester, Chichester, Exeter, Hereford,
Lichfield and Worcester. It was not bombarded, but it was abused and the
vault of the south transept was allowed to fall down in the 1650s. By this
time the 14th-century chapter house was dilapidated, and half the cloister
probably in ruins. Hollar would rebuild it and other parts of the cathedral
in his engravings.
Though this is the overall picture of decline of the building after the
1530s, there were two significant additions. The first is a group of presti-
gious, large and assertive tombs of Court figures placed in the choir in the
Elizabethan decades, just as there had been bishops and nobility favoured
by the monarchy in the 13th and 14th centuries. This group of tombs
included those of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (d 1569), Sir Nicholas
Bacon (d 1579) and Sir Christopher Hatton (d 1591). All were illustrated
by Hollar in the 1650s, but most perished in the Great Fire of 1666. A few
broken effigies survived and are now in the crypt of the Wren cathedral.
The example given here is that of Sir Thomas Heneage (d 1594), a favourite
courtier of Elizabeths (Fig. 7). As a collection at the time, they were sec-
ond in importance only to the royal and noble tombs in Westminster
Abbey.
A major new element in our understanding of the development of the
pre-Fire cathedral comprises the recovery and analysis of fragments of the
Jones portico and other fragments from his restoration of the church in
163341 (Fig. 8). The majority of these fragments come from excavation of
19946, when a tunnel was dug between two of the crypt spaces in the
west part of the Wren building, where we know from the building accounts
that the nearby Jones portico was dismantled in 1688 to make way for and
36 john schofield

Fig. 7.Effigy of Sir Thomas Heneage (d. 1594), formerly in the Cathedral Quire.

to provide rubble for the foundations of the new west end. Now other
stones in the historic collection, housed in the south triforium of the pres-
ent building, can be recognised as also being from Joness works (Fig. 9).
The portico can be reconstructed from fragments, and a detailed picture
of his whole restoration of the building is emerging from the conjunction
of archaeological and documentary study.
 reconstructing st pauls cathedral37

Fig. 8.West entrance to the Cathedral with portico designed by Inigo Jones,
163341, drawn by Hollar, 1657.

In about 1642 the chapter of St Pauls was abolished, and the cathedral
closed. A parliamentary ordinance of August 1643 ordered the removal
from all churches, as idolatrous, altars and altar-rails, crucifixes, crosses
and images, but there appears to be no surviving record of iconoclastic
destruction as St Pauls at this particular point, as there was for instance at
Canterbury; no doubt there was some. Like Canterbury, St Pauls was used
as a barracks in 16478, and in 16578 800 horse were quartered in it. A
partition was erected in the choir, which thereby became a preaching
place, in 1649;12 a new entrance to it made at the same time at the east end
of the north side of the choir can be seen in the north elevation by Hollar,
suggesting that the preaching place occupied the east end of the old
choir, the Lady chapel. Sawpits were dug within the church, and part of

12William Dugdale, The history of St Pauls Cathedral in London (London: Thomas

Warren, 1658), 173.
38 john schofield

Fig. 9.Architectural fragment of a lions head from the upper faade of the
portico designed by Inigo Jones.

the pavement was demolished. In 1650 the council of state directed that
the statues of King James and King Charles should be taken down and
broken up (Hollar restored them in his view).13 The inscription along the
cornice of the portico which alluded to Charles was also to be defaced.
Despite any removal of the inscription on the portico, however, Evelyn
noted after the Fire the inscription in the architrave, showing by whom it
was built, which had not one letter of it defaced!14 Joness portico became
the site of shops, and the approach to it obscured by two irregular blocks
of buildings built in the space to the west, the former open space outside
the west facade. Access around the north side, by the entrance to the for-
mer bishops palace, now London House, was narrowed to 12ft (3.7m) at

13William S Simpson, S. Pauls Cathedral and old city life: illustrations of civil and cathe-
dral life from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries (London: E Stock, 1894), 276.
14William Bray (ed), The diary of John Evelyn (Dent: Dutton, 1966), ii, 14.
 reconstructing st pauls cathedral39

the top of Ludgate Hill and 9ft (2.7m) at the north-west corner of the por-
tico. This second narrow gap, some thought, contributed to the cathedrals
catching alight in the Great Fire in 1666.
This was the setting for Pauls Cross in the years 1520 to 1640. The
reconstructed plan of the medieval and Tudor cathedral outlined here
is not only now used to show the relationship of medieval St Pauls to its
successor, in a panel of stone inlays in the south churchyard near the
cloister (in the foreground of Figure 1), but has been the basis of a more
detailed reconstruction of the Cross and its surroundings in the early
17th century.15

15See John Walls discussion of the experience of preaching at Pauls Cross in chapter
three below.
 CHAPTER TWO

PAULS CROSS AND NATIONWIDE SPECIAL WORSHIP, 153316421

Natalie Mears

Pauls Cross, one of the most important outdoor public preaching places
in England and able to accommodate audiences of approximately 6,000
people, is well known as a site of persuasion. It was there that free-standing
sermonsthat is to say, sermons not delivered as part of a religious ser
vicewere preached on issues of government policy as well as on doc
trine; where public penance and recantations were performed; where pro
hibited books were publicly burned, and where proclamations were
published. It was also an important venue for public discourse and pro
test, and a centre for news-gathering.2 Less well known is a particular
form of persuasion: occasions of special worship. These were petitionary
prayers, liturgies and fasts ordered by the crown for observance in all
churches in the kingdom at times of natural or man-made disasters
famine, disease, bad weather, earthquakes or warand the prayers and
services in thanksgiving for divine intervention in overcoming these trou
bles. At these times of crisis or celebration, the crown sought to persuade

1I would like to thank Torrance Kirby for inviting me to the conference Pauls Cross and
the culture of persuasion which stimulated me to explore the issues in this essay and also
the other conference delegates, especially Mary Morrissey and Peter McCullough, for their
comments and thoughts on my paper. I would also like to thank my colleagues Alex Barber
and Philip Williamson for their comments on earlier drafts of the essay, and Mary Morrissey
for her advice and help regarding the Corporations records in the London Metropolitan
Archives. Most of the research for this essay was conducted as part of the project British
state prayers, fasts and thanksgivings, 1540s to 1940s, led by Philip Williamson, Stephen
Taylor and Natalie Mears, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council grant
E007481/1. I would also like to acknowledge additional financial support provided by the
Department of History, University of Durham, which enabled further research to be con
ducted in London.
2Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 28, 105106, 108109; Thomas Cogswell, The blessed revolution:
English politics and the arming of war, 16211624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 2036; Millar MacLure, Register of sermons preached at Pauls Cross, 15341642,
revised and expanded by Peter Pauls and Jackson Campbell Boswell, Centre for Reforma
tion and Renaissance Studies, Occasional Publications 6 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions,
1989).
42 natalie mears

its subjects to participate in collective worship on designated days, either

to petition or to thank God for mercy and protection.3
Mary Morrissey has done much to dispel older arguments that Pauls
Cross was a national pulpit, where preachers acted as mouthpieces of the
government.4 Nevertheless, as the Cross was a place where important ser
mons were preached, it might be expected that it would be a leading loca
tion for preaching on occasions of special worship. Strikingly, however, of
the ninety-eight known occasions of fasts, special prayers or thanksgivings
ordered in England from 1533 to 1642, only eleven are known to have
prompted a sermon or sermons at Pauls Cross. Only on a further two occa
sions was the Cross a place where important announcements were made
about special worship.5 This is puzzling: why, when special worship was
observed in all, or in large parts, of the kingdom, are so few sermons known
to have been preached from one of the realms foremost pulpits?
The answer to this question does not lie solely, or principally, in prob
lems in the sources: in the register of sermons preached at Pauls Cross,
and in the texts of the sermons themselves. The register is not comprehen
sive,6 and texts have survived for only three sermons preached at the Cross

3John Cooper has used the term strategy of persuasion to describe special worship
and argued, based on a selective survey of certain occasions, that it was used to shore up
the Tudors authority: J.P.D. Cooper, Oh Lorde save the kyng: Tudor Royal Propaganda
and the Power of Prayer, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays presented to
C.S.L. Davies, ed. G.W. Bernard and S.J. Gunn (Aldershot, 2002), 179196. As I have explained
elsewhere, a more comprehensive analysis of all occasions and attention to the widespread
belief in divine providence suggests instead that special worship was a shared political
enterprise in which the crown sought the participation of its subjects, through prayer, fast
ing and almsgiving, in helping to remedy the realms problems: Natalie Mears, Public wor
ship and political participation in Elizabethan England, Journal of British Studies 51 (2012),
425.
4Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons. Contrast to Millar MacLure, The Pauls
Cross sermons, 15341642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 20, 55, 87; Patrick
Collinson, The birthpangs of protestant England: religion and cultural change in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries (London: St Martins Press, 1988), 20; Joseph Black, The
rhetoric of reaction: the Martin Marprelate tracts (158889): Anti-Martinism, and the uses
of print in early modern England, Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997), 711.
5I exclude the sermon preached by an unknown cleric on 30 May 1630 at which Charles
I and the Privy Council were present to offer thanks for the birth of the kings first son, later
Charles II (MacLure, Register of sermons, 135). As the child had only been born the previous
day and as Charles came privately to the cathedral to offer thanks, subsequently remaining
for the sermon, it seems unlikely that the preacher had time to rewrite his sermon to re-
orientate it to the subject of the princes birth. Arthur Hopton, Hoptons concordancy
enlarged (London: Anne Griffin for Andrew Hebb, 1635; STC 13781), sig. Q3r.
6MacLure, The Pauls Cross sermons; Mary Morrissey, Elect nations and prophetic
preaching: types and examples in the Pauls Cross Jeremiad, in The English sermon revised:
religion, literature and history, 16001750, ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 4358; Mary Morrissey,
 pauls cross and nationwide special worship43

at times of special worship.7 The text of a fourth, which was summarised

by a preacher at the Cross, has been identified, though in what ways it
was abridged are unknown.8 Just one of the announcements made at
Pauls Cross in times of special worship is extant.9 Despite the possible
gaps in the evidence, it seems clear that the answer lies elsewhere: in the
nature of special worship itself and the purpose of the sermons ordered to
be preached at these occasions. These issues not only change understand
ings of how the crownand its subjectsused Pauls Cross as a site of

Presenting James VI and I to the Public : Preaching on Political Anniversaries at Pauls

Cross, in R.A. Houlbrooke, (ed.), James VI and I : ideas, authority, and government (Aldershot,
2006), 10722; Torrance Kirby, The Public Sermon : Pauls Cross and the culture of persua
sion in England, 15341570, Renaissance and Reformation 31 (2008), 330; Torrance Kirby,
Signs and Things Signified: Sacramental Hermeneutics in John Jewels Challenge Sermon
and the Culture of Persuasion at Pauls Cross, Reformation and Renaissance Review 11
(2009), 5789; MacLure, Register of sermons; Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross ser-
mons, 42.
7The three sermons are William Barlow, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, on the first
Sunday in Lent: Martij 1. 1600 (London: Mathew Law, 1601; STC 1454); William Hampton,
Aproclamation of vvarre from the Lord of Hosts. Or Englands warning by Israels ruine shew-
ing the miseries like to ensue vpon vs by reason of sinne and securitie (London: John Norton
for Mathew Lawe, 1627; STC 12741), and Thomas Fuller, A sermon intended for Pauls Crosse,
but preached in the Church of St Pauls, London, the III. of December, M.DC.XXV. (London:
Nathaniell Butter, 1626; STC 11467). It is unclear how far the printed text of Barlows sermon
fully represents what was preached. On this issue see: Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls
Cross sermons, ch. 2; Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English preachers and their audi-
ences, 15901640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 3.
8On 21 July 1549, in his sermon on the gospel prescribed for the day (John 9), John
Joseph summarised the substance of Cranmers sermon given earlier that day in the
Cathedral: A chronicle of England during the reigns of the Tudors, from ad 1485 to 1559 by
Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald, ed. William Douglas Hamilton (2 vols, Camden
Society, old series, Westminster, 187577), II, 1618. The text of Cranmers sermons survives:
A sermon concerning ye tyme of rebellion now in the Parker Library, Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge (CCCC MS 102, 41119). Though Torrance Kirby has demonstrated that
this sermon was written by Peter Martyr Vermigli in The Zurich connection and Tudor politi-
cal theology (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 12530, with the text of the sermon tran
scribed 14980, the similarities between A sermon and the accounts of Cranmers sermons
in Wriothesleys chronicle and the Grey Friars chronicle are striking (compare Wrioth. 2, 17
to CCCC MS 102, 4628, 4745, and J.G. Nichols (ed.), Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London
(Camden Society, old series, 53, London, 1852), 60 to CCCC MS 102, 42340, 454, 44350,
4556). It is possible that Cranmer either commissioned Vermigli to write a sermon he
could use at St Pauls, or that the archbishop made use of an existing sermon by Vermigli
when he came sodenly to Powlles (Grey Friars Chronicle, 60). Cranmer did delegate the
preaching of a third sermon on the rebellions on 31 August to Joseph, which may indicate
that the archbishop was too busy to write his own sermons at this time: Grey Friars
Chronicle, 62. Cranmer had invited Vermigli to England in October 1547 and was resident at
Lambeth Palace in the summer of 1549 during the rebellions (Pietro Martire Vermigli
[Peter Martyr Vermigli], ODNB).
9John Foxe, Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes touching matters of
the Church (London: John Day, 1563; STC 11222), 1286.
44 natalie mears

persuasion, but also gives wider indications on the crowns communica

tive practice, that is to say, the ways in which it sought to inform and per
suade its subjects.
This essay begins by identifying the occasions of special worship when
sermons are known to have been preached at Pauls Cross, or for which
announcements were made there. It then considers the purpose of ser
mons ordered to be preached during special worship, and uses this analy
sis not only to reflect upon the apparent disjuncture between Pauls Cross
and special worship but also, more broadly, to challenge current defini
tions of political sermons. The essay then re-examines how the crown
used Pauls Cross as a site of persuasion, and offers suggestions on the
crowns changing communicative practice. In contrast to much work on
Pauls Cross, this essay considers the sermons preached during the Catholic
restoration under Queen Mary as well as the evangelical and protestant
sermons before and after her reign. Catholics, evangelicals, and protes
tants had broadly shared beliefs in divine providencethe belief which
underpinned special worshipand the preaching of sermons in the ver
nacular had been a common part of Catholic special worship since at least
the reign of Edward I.10 Reflection on similarities or contrasts between
sermons delivered under confessionally different regimes are potentially
fruitful.

From 1533 to 1642, eleven occasions of special worship are known to have
prompted at least one sermon at Pauls Cross. During Edward VIs reign,
on 21 July 1549, John Joseph, chaplain to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer,
summarized his masters sermon against the South Western and Ketts
rebels which had been preached earlier that day in the Cathedral.11 The
following year, on 31 March, an unknown preacher delivered a thanksgiv
ing sermon for the peace with France (the Treaty of Boulogne).12 Under

10J. Robin Wright, The church and the English crown, 13051334: a study based on the reg-
ister of Archbishop Walter Reynolds (Toronto, 1980), 351, 358; W.R. Jones, The English church
and royal propaganda during the Hundred Years War, Journal of British Studies 19.1 (1979),
2223, 278; D.W. Burton, Requests for prayers and royal propaganda under Edward I,
Thirteenth Century England III: proceedings of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Conference, ed. P.R.
Cross and S.D. Lloyd (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991), 32; David S Bachrach, The Ecclesia
Anglicana goes to war: prayers, propaganda, and conquest during the reign of Edward I of
England, 12721307, Albion 36.3 (2004), 3989.
11MacLure, Register of sermons, 30; Wrioth. 2, 1618.
12MacLure, Register of sermons, 31; Wrioth. 2, 34; Grey Friars Chronicle, 66.
 pauls cross and nationwide special worship45

Mary I, on 2 December 1554, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester,

announced Englands formal reconciliation to Rome during his sermon at
the Cross;13 the reconciliation was formally celebrated across the kingdom
in January and February 1555.14 On 15 August 1557, after Te Deums for the
victory at St Quentin had been sung at the Cathedral and a procession
conducted to Cheapside and back, Nicholas Harpsfield, archdeacon of
Canterbury, preached a sermon of thanksgiving.15 During Elizabeth Is
reign, Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, preached at Pauls Cross on
1November 1562 on English support for the Huguenots in France, a month
after petitionary services had begun in the parishes.16 On 26 January 1564,
Thomas Cole, archdeacon of Essex, delivered a sermon to rejoice that ye
plage wasse cleane sesyd, and that God had takyn it awaye from us;17 this
may have been part of a larger thanksgiving service at the Cathedral
planned by Grindal.18 Five thanksgiving sermons were preached for the
defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.19 The fifth of these, on 24 November,

13MacLure, Register of sermons, 31; Wrioth. 2, 1245.

14MacLure, Register of sermons, 37; Wrioth. 2, 126; Grey Friars Chronicle, 94; Diary of
Henry Machyn, BL, Cotton MS Vitellius, F. V, fol. 42r (available online at http://quod.lib
.umich.edu/m/machyn/). A proclamation ordering this occasion is cited in John Strype,
Ecclesiastical Memorials, relating chiefly to religion, and the reformation of it, and the emer-
gencies of the Church of England (3 vols, London, 1721; 3 vols in 6; Oxford, 1822), III: 1, 2646,
but this now either untraceable or no longer extant.
15MacLure, Register of sermons, 38; Machyns diary, fol. 77v.
16MacLure, Register of sermons, 47; Grindal to Robert Horne, bishop of Winchester,
9Oct. 1562, Guildhall Library, London [hereafter, GL], MS 9531/13: 1, fol. 26r.
17MacLure, Register of sermons, 47; John Stowe, Historical memoranda in the hand
writing of John Stowe, from the same MS [Lambeth MS. 306], in Three Fifteenth-century
chronicles with historical memoranda by John Stow, the antiquary, and contemporary notes of
occurrences written by him in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. James Gairdner, Camden
Society, new series, 28; Westminster, 1881), 128. The sermon proved premature, as deaths
from the plague rose again the following month: Grindal to Cecil, 22 February 1564, BL,
Lansdowne MS 7, fols. 141r141v.
18Grindal to Cecil, 15 December 1563, BL, Lansdowne MS 6, fol. 192r. Grindal told
Cecil that I entende att that time, to have a sermon & some solempne assemblye off
the Companies att powles on some wednesdaye, to geve godde thankes. There is some
confusion over when thanksgivings were formally ordered to be observed in London and
elsewhere. This is examined in National prayers: special worship since the Reformation.
Volume 1: Fasts, thanksgivings and occasional prayers in the British Isles, 15331688, eds
Natalie Mears, Alasdair Raffe, Stephen Taylor and Philip Williamson with Lucy Bates
(Church of England Record Society, forthcoming, 2013), see occasion 1564-E.
19The sermons were preached on 20 August (Alexander Nowell); 8 September
(unknown preacher, though not, according to his ODNB entry, Nowell who preached in
the Cathedral on this day), 17 November (Accession Day; Thomas Cooper, bishop of
Winchester); 19 November (unknown preacher) and 24 November (John Piers, bishop of
Salisbury). MacLure, Register of sermons, 66. John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and
establishment of religion, and other various occurrences in the Church of England, during
Queen Elizabeths happy reign (London: John Wyat, 1709; 4 vols in 7; Oxford, 1824), II:2, 2731.
46 natalie mears

followed a thanksgiving service in the cathedral which was attended by

the queen.20 On 8 August 1596, William Barlow, Archbishop John Whitgifts
chaplain, preached a thanksgiving sermon for the victory of Lord Admiral
Howard and the earl of Essex at Cadiz.21 Three sermons were preached at
the Cross between 15 February and 1 March 1601, after the defeat of Essexs
rebellion.22 Under James VI and I, there were no sermons at Pauls Cross
during periods of special worship. Under Charles I, a sermon at Pauls
Cross was preached on 3 December 1625 by Thomas Fuller in celebration
of the retreat of the plague; thanksgivings in the parishes were not ordered
until the following month.23 On 23 July 1626, William Hampton, chaplain
to the earl of Nottingham, preached on the subjects of war and famine.
This occurred after the fast ordered by the crown had been observed in
London, Westminster and their environs (5 July) but before the fast was
observed across the rest of England and Wales (2 August).24
In addition to these sermons, important announcements about special
worship were made on two occasions at Pauls Cross. On 26 May 1555,
William Chedsey, priest of All Hallows Bread Street, London, was ordered
to declare on behalf of the privy council that there would be a sermon and
a general procession through the city on Wednesday, 29 May, for the
obtaynyng and concludynge of peace, betwene the Emperours Maiestye,

The thanksgiving service (for 19 November) was not ordered until late in the autumn: privy
council to the archbishop of Canterbury, and to the dean and chapter of York, 3 Nov. 1588,
described in Acts of the Privy Council of England, new series, ed. J.R. Dasent (46 vols; London:
HMSO, 18901964), XVI, 334; Aylmer to Hutchinson, 5 Nov. 1588, Hertfordshire Archives
and Local Studies, ASA 5/2/84, 4412.
20Huntington Library, California, MS EL 1118, fols. 17v18r.
21MacLure, Register of sermons, 723. The thanksgiving was ordered in c. August:
Burghley to Matthew Hutton, archbishop of York, 2 Aug. 1596, in The correspondence,
with a selection from the letters, etc. of Sir Timothy Hutton (Surtees Society, XVII; London,
1843), 11112; Edward Reynoldes to Essex, 1596, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 658, fols.
259r60v.
22The preachers were John Hayward, rector of St Mary Woolchurch, London
(15 February); unknown (22 February) and, on 1 March, William Barlow, rector of
StDunstan-in-the-East and Orpington, Kent. MacLure, Register of sermons, 757; Strype,
Annals, IV, 4957; John Strype, The life and acts of John Whitgift, D.D. (London: T. Horne et
al, 1718; 4 vols, Oxford, 1822), II, 441; Richard Bancroft, bishop of London, to Sir Robert Cecil,
15 February 1601, Hatfield House, Herts, CP 76/75; same to same, 21 February 1601, HH, CP
180/27; William Barlow (d.1613), ODNB; Barlow, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse. No
order for the official thanksgiving for the failure of the rising is extant though a form of
prayer was issued. See Certaine prayers collected out of a forme of godly meditations, set forth
by his maiesties authoritie (London: Robert Barker, 1603; STC 16532).
23MacLure, Register of sermons, 12930; Fuller, A sermon intended; Royal Proclamation,
22 Jan. 1626, STC 8821.
24MacLure, Register of sermons, 131; Hampton, A proclamation of vvarre; Royal Pro
clamation, 30 June 1626, STC 8834.
 pauls cross and nationwide special worship47

and the Frenche Kynge.25 The second announcement was made on

1 October 1562 to inform London citizens of Elizabeths recovery from
smallpox; thanksgiving prayers were then recited.26
On this evidence, it would appear that sermons during periods of spe
cial worship were preached at Pauls Cross primarily in the mid-Tudor
period, from 1549 to 1564. After 1564, few sermons were ordered there at
times of special worship, and these were clustered around the periods
15881601 and 162526. It would also appear that, throughout the 16th and
early-17th century, Pauls Cross tended to be used to mark thanksgivings
(eleven sermons and both announcements) rather than petitionary wor
ship;27 and that it was only from 1588 that Cross sermons for special wor
ship became fully free-standing. Before this, they tended to be connected
to the Cathedral service: summarising sermons preached there earlier (as
in 1549), acting as the final part of the cathedral service (1557, 1564), or
notifying citizens of forthcoming services in the cathedral (1555).
This is a deceptive impression, however, because it records only those
sermons which explicitly addressed the events which had prompted spe
cial worship. If we consider the purpose of sermons delivered during times
of special worship and, indeed, the very purpose of special worship itself,
a significantly different account emerges. The main purpose of these ser
mons, and of special worship itself, was either to exhort listeners to repent
and confess their sins, or to thank God for his merciful intervention in the
realms affairs. It was widely believed that events such as wars, plagues,
famines, and bad weather were signs of divine providence: divine warn
ings against the realms sins. Conversely, military victories, royal childbirth
and the cessation of plagues and famines were regarded as signs of Gods
favour or forgiveness. Without confession and repentance, God could
never be persuaded to intervene in the realms problems nor could he be
properly thanked for his mercy. Consequently, though ministers were
instructed in their sermons to entreate of such matters especially as be
meete for this cause of publique prayer during both petitionary and
thanksgiving services, they were expected to emphasise the need for their

25Foxe, Actes and monuments, 1286. In addition to making this announcement, Chedsey
was ordered to read out a letter from Philip and Mary admonishing Bonner and other
clergy for failing to punish heretics but which also defended Bonner from accusations of
cruelty against those in prison.
26This occasion has been classed as special worship by the investigators of the State
Prayers project. Privy Council to Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, 17 October 1562, GL,
Guildhall MS 9531/13.1, fol. 26r.
27It is unclear whether Grindals sermon in 1562 was petitionary or thanksgiving.
Hamptons sermon in 1626 had a thanksgiving element.
48 natalie mears

parishioners to confess and repent of their sins.28 When special worship

was ordered in 1586 in response to war and famine, Archbishop Whitgift
told John Aylmer, bishop of London, to give order specially to suche as
occupie the Crosse that in all their Sermons and exhortacons they will
earnestlye move and perswade the people to hartye repentaunce prayers
fastinge and amendement of life and liberalitye to the pore, nedye, and
afflicted members of Christe.29 John Rainoldes, lecturer in theology in
Oxford and later president of Corpus Christi College, preaching in the uni
versity town on the thanksgiving for the discovery of the Babington Plot in
1586, urged his congregation to confess him [God] sincerely and faithfully
not onely in wordes, but in deeds cast away profane songes of wanton
ness, of lightness, of vanity, and pressed them to amend their slackness in
frequenting of sermons, of praiers, of celebrating the Lordes Supper.30
Sermons at Pauls Cross which addressed the key themes of special
worshipsin, godliness, confession and repentanceare, therefore, as
relevant to an understanding of its role in special worship as those ser
mons which explicitly addressed the events that prompted this worship.
Like sermons which provided explicit information or news on the events
which had prompted the special worship, the purpose of these types of
sermons was to encourage listeners to confess and repent of their sins in
order to assuage Gods wrath or thank him for his mercy. Anthony Gibson,
for instance, preaching at Pauls Cross during a period of special worship
ordered in response to heavy rain in 1613, began his sermon by stating, if
euer there were a time when, if euer a place where, Gods Ministers and
Watch-men had need to cry aloud and not to spare, to speak boldly and
not to feare, to shew the people their transgressions, and to the House of
Iacob their sinnes; then now is the time, here is the place: the time is now,
in this our age, the place is here, in this our Land. He emphasised the
ungodliness of the realm: how many vngodly Ahabs, that haue solde them-
selues to worke wickednesse in the sight of the Lord? how many wicked
Ieroboams, that cause others to sinne? how few amongst vs Faithfull, as
Abraham was? Righteous, as Lot was? Zealous, as Iosiah was? Religious, as
Dauid was? True harted, as Ionathan was? Couragious, as Paul was? and
Deuout as Cornelius was?. He reprimanded his audience for their neglect

28A fourme to be vsed in common prayer twise a weeke (London: Richard Jugge and John
Cawood, 1563; STC 16505), sig. Aiiiv.
29John Aylmer, Bishop of London, to [William] Hutchinson, Archdeaconn of St Albans,
14 May 1586, HALS, ASA 5/2/54, 329.
30John Rainoldes, A sermon vpon part of the eighteenth psalm: preached to the public
assembly of scholers in the Vniuersity of Oxford the last day of August, 1586 (Oxford: Joseph
Barnes, 1586; STC 20621.5), sigs. C1vC2r, C2vC3r.
 pauls cross and nationwide special worship49

of Gods word, hee hath giuen vs his Mercies, but these wee haue abused:
hee hath warned vs by his Iudgements, but those wee haue neglected.31
And he justified his exhortations on the grounds that The pleasantest
Potion doth seldome purge so kindly as the bitterest Pill. Accordingly,
Euery one of vs (that are the Surgeons of soules) had neede to cut and
lance these festered sores, and by sharpe Corrasiues make them smart at
the quicke, though our Patients be impatient.32 His message was the same,
for instance, as Thomas Fullers, preaching during the outbreak of plague
in 1625. Fuller berated his audience for their sinssinnes which in former
ages were but in their Infancy, are now in ours, growne to their full height
and strengthwhich were the cause of the plague. God had shown them
much favourthis little fleece of ours hath beene dry, when all the earth
round about vs hath been ouerwhelmed with the Deluge and Inundation
of Warrebut they had become complacent and corrupt.33 [L]et vs res
olue a Christian alteration and reformation, he extolled his audience, oth
erwise though this bee remoued, yet a worse thing will befall vs, which
surely must be in the other life, for here naught worse can come.34
Including these types of exhortatory sermons into examination of the
relationship between Pauls Cross and special worship shifts the under
standing of how, when and by whom the Cross was used during such wor
ship. First, it becomes clear that sermons preached at Pauls Cross during
periods of special worship did not decline in number after 1564. It is diffi
cult to quantify this precisely, because there is no comprehensive list of
exhortatory sermons preached at Pauls Cross. Nevertheless, exhortatory
sermons were a staple genre of the Cross, notably the Jeremiads, pro
phetic sermons or sermons of national warning, that is to say, sermons
on Old Testament prophetic texts, usually Jeremiah or Hosea, which used
the histories of nations of Israel and Nineveh, as well as those of contem
porary realms, as examples the fate of sinful people.35 These developed
in the 1540s and 1550s, became more common in the 1580s, and increased
in number in the early 17th century.36 Therefore, to the tally of eleven

31Abraham Gibson, The lands mourning, for vaine swearing (London: T. S[nodham] for
Ralph Mab, 1613; STC 11829), 24.
32Gibson, The lands mourning, 56.
33Fuller, A sermon intended, 9[printed as 1]10, 1117, 20, 245, 3133.
34Fuller, A sermon intended, 289. See also 336, 40, 423.
35For the different terms used to describe this genre of sermon, see Morrissey, Elect
nations and prophetic preaching, 54 n1, and for a discussion of examples, as opposed to
types, see 4357.
36Joy Shakespeare, Plague and punishment, in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (eds),
Protestantism and the national church in sixteenth-century England (London: Croom Helm,
1987), 10123.
50 natalie mears

sermons preached at Pauls Cross during special worship from 1565 to 1642
and which explicitly addressed the events which prompted such worship,
can be added sermons by Adam Hill (September 1593) during the outbreak
of plague;37 Richard Jefferay (7 October 1604) as the first Jacobean out
break of plague declined;38 Robert Milles (25 August 1611) during petition
ary services during the summers drought;39 Gibson (11 July) and Sampson
Price (10 October) during petitionary worship after heavy rainfall in 1613;40
and Anthony Fawkner (21 May 1626) during the outbreak of plague in
162526.41
Second, including exhortatory or prophetic sermons in the relation
ship between Pauls Cross and special worship shows that, after 1564, ser
mons preached at Pauls Cross during special worship were delivered as
often, if not more often, during petitionary worship than for thanksgiv
ings. Third, it also indicates that sermons preached during periods and
on the themes of special worship were not ordered solely by the crown.
Price, for instance, had been appointed to preach by John King, bishop of
London.42 Fourth, such sermons provided an opportunity for preachers,
as well as the crown, to convey arguments about which sins had caused
Gods wrath. For Hill, these sins included idolatry (including Catholicism),
blasphemy, profanation of the Sabbath, murder, sodomy and lust.43 For
Gibson, Amongst other the sinnes of our Land and crimes of our age,
Ifinde, as none more haynous, so none more common then the abuse of
Gods holy Name, by prophane Swearing.44 It should be noted that some
preachers who preached explicitly on the subject of special worship were

37Adam Hill, The crie of England. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse in September 1593
(London: E[dward] Allde for B. Norton, 1595; STC 13465); Certaine prayers collected out of
godly meditations, set foorth by her Maiesties authoritie in the great mortalitie (London:
Ed[ward] Allde, for B. Norton, 1593; STC 16524).
38Richard Jefferay, The sonne of Gods entertainment by the sonnes of men (London:
T.P[urfoot] for Henrie Tomes, 1605; STC 14481).
39Robert Milles, Abrahams suite for Sodome (London: William Hall for Mathew Lawe,
1612; STC 17924); A forme of praier to be vsed in London, and elsewhere in this time of drought
(London: T. S[nodham] for Ralph Mab, 1611; STC 16538).
40Gibson, The lands mourning, with specific references to the weather on 98; Sampson
Price, Londons warning by Laodiceas luke-warmnesse (London: T. Snodham] for Iohn
Barnes, 1613; STC 20333); A forme of prayer to be publikely vsed in churches, during this vnsea-
sonable weather, and aboundance of raine Hosea 5.15 (London: Robert Barker, 1613; STC
16539).
41Anthony Fawkner, Comfort to the afflicted (London: [by H. Lownes] for Robert
Milbourne, 1626; STC 10718).
42Price, Londons warning, sig. A2r.
43Hill, The crie of England.
44Gibson, The lands mourning, 7.
 pauls cross and nationwide special worship51

also not always appointed by the crown, and may also have used the Cross
to articulate their own grievances. Thomas Cole was appointed to preach
by Grindal in 1564. Although he was archdeacon of Essex and dean of
Bocking, he was also a vocal opponent of the Elizabethan Settlement,
and his sermon may not have taken an official line.45 Indeed, Grindals
own sermon in 1562 may not have been official: the bishop informed
Cecil of his plans to preach on Antoine de Bourbon, the king of Navarres
political and religious vacillations and only asked the Principal Secretary
if ther be anie other matter which ye wisshe to be vttered ther for the
present state.46
This re-examination of the sermons preached at Pauls Cross during
periods of special worship raises doubts about current definitions of
political sermons. It suggests that political sermons cannot be defined
solely as those that addressed explicitly political figures and events, such
as Mary queen of Scots or the proposed Spanish Match, and/or those
that delivered news to their audiences. Because divine providence was
the dominant contemporary explanation of causation, sermonsand,
indeed, the homilies prescribed to be read if parishes lacked a preaching
ministerthat addressed issues of sin and repentance were also political
sermons. These sermons addressed both the root of the realms problems
sinmanifested in war, famine and disease, and encouraged subjects to
participate in resolving such problems through confession and repen
tance of sins.47 Such sermons were also political because they provided
opportunities, both for the crown and for its subjects, to articulate a range
of views about what constituted sin, whether this was, according to Joseph
in 1549, the neglecting [of] his worde and commandment or, for Gibson,
profane swearing.48 This definition of political sermon is not only rele
vant to those exhortatory or prophetic sermons delivered during periods
of special worship. Because divine providence was the dominant theory of
causation, any sermon that attributed local or national disasters to sins
and called on parishioners to repent can be regarded as a political
sermon, whether or not such disasters had prompted the crown to order
special worship. Thus, for instance, the prophetic sermons preached
at Pauls Cross by Thomas White and Oliver Whitbie during outbreaks of

45Thomas Cole (c.15201571), ODNB; APC, VII, 145; Three fifteenth-century chronicles, 128.
46TNA: PRO, SP12/25/23, fol. 44r.
47On the political nature of prayer, fasting and other activities ordered during special
worship, see: Mears, Public worship and political participation, 425.
48Wrioth. 2, 17.
52 natalie mears

plague in 1577 and 1637 respectively can be considered to be political

sermons.49

II

By redefining what political sermons were, the disjuncture between ser

mons preached at Pauls Cross and occasions of special worship appears
less marked. Although the number of sermons preached at Pauls Cross
which explicitly discussed the event that had prompted special worship
declined after 1564, from the 1580s the number of prophetic sermons
preached at Pauls Cross appears to have increased.50 Strikingly, however,
based on the numbers that were printed, after the mid-1560s more ser
mons appear to have been preached in the parish churches of London and
elsewhere during (and relating to) special worship; sermons that either
addressed explicitly the events which prompted special worship, or were
prophetic sermons.51 This increase cannot be attributed solely to the

49Thomas White, A sermo[n] preached at pawles Crosse on Sunday the thirde of

November 1577. in the time of plague (London: [Henry Bynneman for] Francis Coldock, 1578;
STC 25406); Oliver Whitbie, Londons returne, after the decrease of the sicknesse (London:
N.and I. Okes, 1637; STC 25371). Though petitionary prayers had been ordered on the out
break of plague in 1636, no thanksgivings appear to have been ordered when the disease
declined the following year: royal proclamation, 18 October 1636, STC 9075.
50For instance, Thomas Hopkins, Tvvo godlie and profitable sermons (London: M. Baker,
1611; STC 13771); Robert Abbot, Bee thankfull London and her sisters (London: P. Stephens
and C. Meredith, 1626; STC 56).
51Robert Wright, A receyt to stay the plague (London: Mathew Lawe, 1625; STC 26037);
Sampson Price, Londons remembrancer: for the staying of the contagious sicknes of the
plague by Dauids memorial (London: Edward Allde, for Thomas Harper, 1626; STC 20332);
Christopher Hooke, A sermon preached in Paules Church in London and published for the
instruction and consolation of all that are heauie harted, for the wofull time of God his gener-
all visitation (London: E. Allde, 1603; STC 13703); William Cupper, Certaine sermons concern-
ing the pestilence (London: R. Dexter, 1603; STC 6125.3); John Rainoldes, A sermon vpon part
of the eighteenth psalm: preached to the public assembly of scholers in the Vniuersity of Oxford
the last day of August, 1586 (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1586; STC 20621.5); John Udall, The true
remedie against famine and warres Fiue sermons vpon the firste chapter of the prophesie of
Ioel (London: Robert Waldegrave, [1588]; STC 24507); Richard Leake, Foure sermons
preached and publikely taught by Richard Leake immediately after the great visitation of
the pestilence in the fore-sayd countie (London: Felix Kingston, 1599; STC 15342); Nicholas
Bownd, Medicines for the plague that is, godly and fruitfull sermons vpon part of the twentieth
Psalme very fit generally for all times of affliction, but more particularly applied to this late
visitation of the plague (London: Cuthbert Burbie, 1604; STC 3439); John Dod, Foure godlie
and fruitfull sermons two preached at Draiton in Oxford shire, at a fast, enioyned by authority,
by occasion of the pestilence then dangerously dispersed, likewise (London: W. Hall for W.
Welbie, 1610; STC 6937.5 and subsequent reprints); John Sanford, Gods arrowe of the pesti-
lence (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1604; STC 21734). Prophetic sermons include Thomas
 pauls cross and nationwide special worship53

general increase in the publication of sermons from the late 16th century;
there must have been a reason why more of these sermons were available
for print, and why printers thought there was a sufficient market for them
to make their publication commercially viable.
It appears, instead, that the crowns communicative practicethe
ways in which it informed its subjects of important crises and celebra
tions, and encouraged them to participate in them through confession
and repentance of sinschanged from the 1560s. After 1564, and espe
cially from the 1580s, the crown sought to communicate directly with sub
jects by ordering sermons to be preached regularly in parish churches
during special worship. Sermons delivered at Pauls Cross were reserved
for the provision of additional persuasion, admonition and celebration
during times of particular crisissuch as the Essex Rebellion or the
plague in 162526or thanksgiving (Cadiz, 1596; the Armada, 1588). In
1587, for instance, the privy council ordered the bishops to ensure that all
parsons, vicars, Curates, and preachers with in your dioces vse their best
indeuoure in exhorting, and instrucinge the people committed to their
charge, to the charitable releiving of the poore and to the performance
of everie other pointe of their sayd Lordships letters even where there
are no preachers. Conveying these instructions to William Hutchinson,
the archdeacon of St Albans, Bishop Aylmer of London reiterated the
councils urgency, instructing preachers and others to take more then
ordinarie paines therein. Hutchinson was also told to ensure that all min
isters were resident in their parishes to provide services and leadership
during times of special worship.52 In 1589, Aylmer told Hutchinson that
yow shall also admonishe the ministers once in the weeke att the leaste to
preache; that the people maye be stirred vpp to prayer and fastinge
accordinge vnto their Christian devotion.53 And in 1590, in preparation
for petitionary services expected to be ordered in response to the threat of
a Spanish invasion, Hutchinson had to report to Aylmer the parishes
within his archdeaconry that lacked a preaching minister.54 In parishes
without a licensed preacher, ministers were ordered to read from the

Hopkins, Tvvo godlie and profitable sermons (London: M. Baker, 1611; STC 13771); Abbot, Bee
thankfull London.
52Although the archdeaconry of St Albans was a peculiar, Aylmers exhortations to
Hutchinson seem to have had little do with jurisdictional anomalies but were standard
letters sent out to a range of ecclesiastical officials. Aylmer to Hutchinson, 8 Jan 1587, HALS,
ASA 5/2/68, 36971.
53Aylmer to Hutchinson, 3 May 1589, HALS, ASA 5/2/89, 457.
54Hutchinson to Aylmer, 4 April 1590, HALS, ASA 5/3/104, 497.
54 natalie mears

Book of Homilies. [W]here there be no preachers, Whitgift told the bish

ops in 1586, that the parsons Vicar or Curate doe Reade to the people
suche homilies as are sett forthe in the booke which herewithall I sende
vnto yow.55 Indeed, as Whitgifts instructions show, the specific homilies
chosen to be read during periods of special worship were sometimes
printed in the official forms of prayer ordered to be used instead of the
Book of Common Prayer.56
The shift from Pauls Cross to the parish church as the principal site of
persuasion for special worship from the 1560s was brought about princi
pally by changes made in the liturgical provision for such occasions.
Between 1560 and 1564, liturgical formats for petitionary and thanksgiving
services were developed which became firmly established for use in post-
Reformation special worship until, in September 1641, set forms of prayers
for special worship were abandoned altogether (with their revival, in 1660,
after the civil war and interregnum).57 The first format, established either
in 1560 or 1563,58 made significant changes to the daily service in the Book
of Common Prayer, and required different liturgical formats for different
days of the week (Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays).59 The second for
mat, established in 1564 for the thanksgiving for the end of the plague,
provided a single liturgy based on the Common Prayer service but with
specially composed psalms, prayers and collects and specially selected
biblical readings to replace those prescribed in the Prayer Book.60 In addi
tion, the Elizabethan and early Stuart regimes continued the Edwardian

55Aylmer to Hutchinson, 14 May 1586, HALS, ASA 5/2/54, 32930.

56For example, see A forme of common prayer; to be used upon the eighth of July: on
which day a fast is appointed by His Majesties proclamation, for the averting of the plague,
and other judgements of God from this kingdom (London: Robert Barker, 1640; STC 16557).
57This development is described and analysed in detail in Mears, Special nationwide
worship, 3172.
58Only the text of the opening of the preface of the liturgy for 1560 is extant: A short
form and order to be vsed in Common prayer thryse a Weeke, for seasonable wether, and good
successe of the com[m]on affayres of the Realme (London, 1560; not STC); see John Strype,
The life and acts of Matthew Parker, the first archbishop of Canterbury, in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth (London: John Wyat, 1711; 3 vols, Oxford, 1821), I, 179). But, because it is the same
as that for A fourme to be vsed in common prayer twise a weeke (STC 16505) and the liturgical
format remained the same throughout Elizabeths reign, it is likely that the two texts were
broadly similar or the same.
59A fourme to be vsed in common prayer (STC 16505), sigs. Aiiv-Aiiir.
60A short fourme of thankesgeuyng to God for ceassing the contagious sicknes of the
plague, to be vsed in Common Prayer, on Sundayes, Wednesdayes, and Frydayes, in steade of
the Common prayers, vsed in the time of mortalitie (London: Richard Jugge and John
Cawood, 1563; STC 16507); A short forme of thankesgeuing to God for the delyuerie of the Isle
of Malta (London: William Seres, 1565; STC 16509).
 pauls cross and nationwide special worship55

practice of commissioning individual prayers to be recited in the daily

BCP service.
These liturgical developments changed the crowns use of Pauls Cross
as a site of persuasion in four ways. First, they distinguished between dif
ferent types of special worship, particularly between those occasions
which were ordered to be observed only once (mainly thanksgivings) and
those ordered to be observed multiple times (daily, thrice weekly, weekly,
monthly). Before 1564, sermons at Pauls Cross had usually been preached
at large, one-off (thanksgiving) services or when special worship was
observed only at St Pauls Cathedral, on occasions when the Cathedral was
evidently being used to represent the kingdom as a whole. After 1564,
large, one-off occasions of special worship became less common and the
cathedral was not used to represent the nation as a whole again until
1872.61 Second, although sermons had been a part of special worship since
the early 14th century, and although exhortations had formed part of
evangelical and early protestant services from 1544, the liturgical changes
in the 1560s made sermons for the first time a common and integrated part
of special worship in the parishes. Third, the sermon was not the only
activity in which parishioners were expected to participate. In petitionary
services, they were expected to listen to biblical readings, join in singing or
reciting of psalms, and undertake silent meditation, fasting, alms-giving,
and reading and studying of the scriptures. For thanksgivings, they were
expected to undertake bell-ringing and organise bonfires as well. These
activities were an helpe to prayer or the wings of prayer, which humbled
the flesh, made the heart contrite, brought prayers to the attention of
God.62 However, such activities were at odds with Pauls Cross which
largely, and especially after the mid-1560s, provided a free-standing ser
mon, divorced from other religious activities. Fourth, the new liturgies
officially allowed sermons to be replaced by homilies, taken from the Book
of Homilies, if the parish lacked a licensed preacher.63 This also militated
against Pauls Cross which had been used to provide London citizens with
a weekly sermon at a time when the number of licensed preachers was

61Order of the lords of the council, 2 Feb. 1872, London Gazette, 23825, 6 Feb. 1872.
62Thomas Becon, A new pathway vnto praier ful of much godly frute and christen knowl-
edge, lately made by Theodore Basille (London: John Gough, 1542; STC 1734), sigs. Lviiv,
CCCivr [note this is misprinted and is the second CCCiv in this gathering], Lviiiv-Miiir,
Ccccciir; Richard Whitforde, The pomander of prayer (London: Robert Redman, [1530];
STC 25421.3), sigs. Giiv-Giiir.
63HALS, ASA 5/2/84, 441; A fourme to be vsed in common prayer (STC 16505), sigs.
Aiiir-Aiiiv.
56 natalie mears

small; morning services on Sundays were ordered to end by nine oclock in

order for parishioners to attend the sermon at Pauls Cross.64
By shifting from Pauls Cross to the parish church as the principal site of
persuasion, the crown was able to reach its subjects both more directly
and more widely. However, parish sermons were more difficult to control.
Some forms of prayer provided extended prefaces or admonitions describ
ing the events which had prompted special worship, and which were to be
used as the basis of sermons.65 Even so, the crown could not exercise
the same oversight it could, when it wished to, over the appointment
of preachers and the content of sermons at Pauls Cross. So, when, from
the 1580s and the growing strength and vociferousness of puritanism, the
crown became increasingly concerned about sermon-gadding, and the
political content of sermons, it had to attempt to monitor or circumscribe
both the number of sermons being preached in parishes and their con
tent, both in times of special worship and generally. For instance, when
petitionary prayers were ordered in the summer of 1588 in response to the
Spanish Armada, the bishops were instructed to give straite charge vnto
your ministreye that they have not above one Sermon at ons anye one
daye nor that anye doe resorte from their one parrishe Churche to here
prechers in other places which hathe heretofore bred great contempte
amongest the ministerye and therefore was by my Lord his grace and
other her maiesties Commissioners forbidden the last Lente.66 In 1622,
James Is Directions for preachers further circumscribed preaching, pro
hibiting sermons on Sunday afternoon other than on subjects related to
the catechism, and preventing all clergymen from preaching on the royal
prerogative and matters of state.67 Indeed, these concerns may explain,
on the one hand, why admonitions in special forms of prayer in the 1590s
became longer, and, on the other, why more occasions in the same decade
were ordered to be observed only with additional prayers incorporated in
the Common Prayer service and not with whole new liturgies.68

64Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross sermons, 24.

65A fourme to be vsed in common prayer twise a weeke (STC 16505), sig. Aiiiv.
66Aylmer to Hutchinson, 12 Jul 1588, HALS, ASA 5/2/78, 421.
67Documentary annals of the reformed Church of England, being a collection of injunc-
tions, declarations, orders, articles of inquiry &c, ed. Edward Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1839; 2 vols, 1844), II, 198206.
68For the extended admonitions see: An order of praier and thankes-giving, for the pre-
seruation of the Queenes Maiesties life and salfetie (London: R. Newberie, 1585; STC 16516);
An order for prayer and thankes-giuing (necessary to be vsed in these dangerous times) for the
safetie and preseruation of her Majesty and this realme (London: C. Barker, 1594; STC 16525);
An order for prayer and thankes-giuing (necessary to be vsed in these dangerous times)
 pauls cross and nationwide special worship57

III

It would be easy to conclude that, despite the growing number of pro

phetic sermons at Pauls Cross in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, Pauls Cross became a less important site of persuasion for the
crown, at least for a particular form of persuasion, special worship.
Although the crown did not have full control over the appointment of
preachers at the Cross and was not able to vet the content of their sermons
(at least until the 1630s),69 successive monarchs seemed increasingly
unwilling or uninterested in competing with the dean, the bishop of
London and the citys Corporation in appointing preachers for the Cross,
other than during a very small number of notable crises or celebrations.
This would, however, be a simplification of both the practice of, and the
reasons for, ordering special worship itself and the crowns use of Pauls
Cross as a site of persuasion. It would also neglect the large number of
political sermons, both official and independent, preached at Pauls
Cross from the 1530s which were not connected with special worship
and about which Mary Morrissey has written so eloquently, including
Edwin Sandyss sermon on Mary, queen of Scots in 1571; the series of
sermons on Thomas Cartwright and the Admonition to Parliament in
1572, and those on the Spanish Match in the 1620s.70 From the Break with
Rome until the outbreak of civil war, the crowns use of Pauls Cross as a
site of persuasion evolved. During periods of special worship, it was often
used to inform the inhabitants of London of events of major political, con
stitutional or religious significance;71 to quash rumours;72 to interpret the
crises and to persuade subjects to accept these interpretations;73 and, on
occasions, it was used to influence the behaviour of the Citys inhabitants

(London, 1594; STC 16525.7); An order of prayer and thankesgiuing (necessary to bee vsed in
these dangerous times) for the safetie and preseruation of her Maiestie and this realme
(London, 1598; STC 16529). For occasions for which only prayers were ordered, see the table
at the end of Mears, Special nationwide worship, 3172. This increase was partly because
special worship was regularly ordered in the 1620s and 1630s for Henrietta Marias pregnan
cies, but the commissioning of prayers was still common in the 1590s for events such as war
and plague which had previously warranted liturgies.
69Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross sermons, 97101.
70MacLure, Register of sermons, 524, 11617, 121, 123; Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls
Cross sermons, 85 and passim.
71MacLure, Register of sermons, 66; Strype, Annals, II:2, 27.
72GL, MS 9531/13, part 1, fol. 26r.
73Richard Bancroft to Sir Robert Cecil, 15 Feb 1601, HH, CP76/75; same to same, 21 Feb
1601, HH, CP180/27; [Instructions about a sermon regarding the earl of Essex], [nd; 1601?],
LPL, LPL MS 2872, fols. 57r58r.
58 natalie mears

specifically.74 But Pauls Cross was also used by the crown to encourage
parishioners to participate in the resolution of political problems, or the
celebration of their resolution, through confession and repentance. It was
also used by some of the crowns subjects to articulate criticisms of public
behaviour and to effect change. Moreover, the crown also expanded its
communicative practices by ordering regular parish sermons (or homi
lies) during periods of special worship, rather than relying on those at
Pauls Cross. Though by no means unproblematic, parish sermons pro
vided the crown with more direct and nationwide means of persuasion.
The incidence of sermons at Pauls Cross during periods of special wor
ship points to three important issues about its role as a site of persuasion,
and about the use of sermons as forms of persuasion in early modern
England. First, the meaning of political sermon needs to be reassessed.
Because divine providence was the dominant contemporary explanation
of causation, political sermons were not just those sermons that addressed
particular figures or crises, such as Mary Stuart or outbreaks of plague.
They also included those that addressed the root cause of the realms
problems: sins and the need for confession and repentance. Thus, pro
phetic sermons and, indeed, the homilies prescribed during special wor
ship, were also political. Second, it follows that more attention should be
given to the relationship between sermons delivered at Pauls Cross and
the services in St Pauls Cathedral and in London parish churches, as well
as the sermons delivered at the Inns of Court. In special worship at least,
Pauls Cross was used as one venue for the performance of a series of
related activitiesservices, sermons, processions, and announcements
which were to be performed by all in the Cathedral, the Cross Yard and the

74For instance, in 1549 the Corporation of London feared insurrection would break
out in the City and so instigated curfews, established night watches, repaired the City
gates and commandeered ordinance and gunpowder. See LMA, Court of Aldermen,
Repertories 12 (1), fols. 91v, 95r, 98v99r, 100r, 102r, 103r, 104r105v, 107v, 110r110v, 111r, 112r,
113v, 114v115v, 117r117v, 118r, 120r, 122r. For the regimes concern about the popularity of
Protestantism in the city and Edmund Bonner, bishop of Londons slacknesse in effecting
reform see: The king to [Edmund bonner], bishop of London, 2 Aug 1549, TNA: PRO,
SP10/8/36; TNA: PRO, SP10/8/36; Articles to be sent to the bishop of London, [? 9 Aug
1549], TNA: PRO, SP10/8/37; Commission by letters patent to [Thomas Cranmer], arch
bishop of Canterbury [and others], [8 Sept 1549], TNA: PRO, SP10/8/57; Questions put to
the bishop of London, 13 Sept 1549, TNA: PRO, SP10/8/58; Richard Scudamore to Sir Philip
Hoby, 18 Jan 1550, in The letters of Richard Scudamore to Sir Philip Hoby, September
1549March 1555, ed. Susan Brigden, Camden Miscellany XXX, Camden Fourth series,
39 (1990), 10910. On the possible unpopularity of the war in 1550, especially the financial
burden it placed on the City, see: LMA, Court of Aldermen, Repertories 13 (2), fols.
527v528r, 531r, 533r, 538r.
 pauls cross and nationwide special worship59

City. After 1564, the balance shifted towards the parish church as the main
venue in which all activities for special worship were to be conducted,
including preaching. But the Cross remained an important venue for spe
cial worship at times of particular crisis or celebration. On these occasions
the Cross still often worked in conjunction with the Cathedral and parish
churches across the realm, providing an additional or focal point to ser
vices conducted in parish churches across the realm.
Third, the relationship between Pauls Cross and special worship may
also expand current understandings of persuasion. Persuasion was not
just about moving people to accept an official (or unofficial) interpreta
tion of an event, such as the rebellions of 1549. It was also concerned with
convincing subjects to participate in particular ways (prayer, fasting, alms-
giving etc) to help resolve the realms problems. The sermon (or homily)
was one of the persuasive tools that was used to encourage people to per
form these actions and to reform their behaviour. Cranmer (and presum
ably Joseph) exhorted his listeners in 1549 now let vs repent while wee
haue tyme. for the axe is layd ready at the roote of the tree to fell it downe.75
Persuasion, therefore, was not just a rhetorical activity, based on the spo
ken or written word. It could also be a whole range of participatory actions,
including, for special worship, praying, processing, singing Te Deums and,
for thanksgivings, bell-ringing and bonfires. And, as a result, persuasion
by the state easily merged with independent actions, making the line
between the two a thin and porous one. For instance, Oliver Pigg, a mem
ber of the Dedham Conference, wrote prayers for himself and his friends
to supplement the official ones during the summer of 1588.76 Others
independently organised feasts, mock-battles and other celebrations on
19 November 1588, the day of the thanksgiving for the defeat of the Spanish
Armada.77
Of necessity, this essay has been able to address these issues only briefly
and broadly, and a number of avenues for further research suggest them
selves. In particular, more attention is required on the period before 1549
which has been relatively neglected by scholars and which falls outside
the scope of this essay because no sermons appear to have been delivered
at Pauls Cross during periods of special worship during these years.

75CCCC MS 102, 4856, 4945.

76Oliver Pigg, Meditations concerning praiers to almightie God for the saftie [sic] of
England (London: R. R[obinson] for Thomas Man, 1589; STC 19916).
77David Cressy, Bonfires and bells: national memory and the protestant calendar in
Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989; Stroud: Sutton,
2004), ch. 7.
60 natalie mears

Although this is the period for which evidence is scarcest, it is also the
period when political debate was at its most vociferous, contentions
between the crown and its subjects (and, indeed, within the regime) were
at their sharpest, and when it was paramount for the crown to win over its
subjects to a new constitutional and religious order.
 CHAPTER THREE

VIRTUAL PAULS CROSS: THE EXPERIENCE OF PUBLIC

PREACHING AFTER THE REFORMATION

John N. Wall

The Virtual Pauls Cross Project1 enables us to experience a Pauls Cross

sermon as a public event unfolding in real time, in the presence of large
crowds of people, and in a space filled with the ambient noises of birds,
horses, dogs, church bells, and the sounds of the crowd.2 It encourages us
to explore the audibility of the sermon by allowing us to hear the preach-
ers voice at different distances from the preacher and with different sizes
of crowd, ranging from about 250 people to 5,000 people. This project also
allows us to explore questions about style of delivery, about the congrega-
tions response to different kinds of passages in the sermon, and about the
preachers use of the time of delivery in making his points.
The Project combines a visual model of the north east end of Pauls
Churchyard, including St Pauls Cathedral, the Pauls Cross Preaching
Station, and the Yards bookshops, with an acoustic model of the same
space. The visual model (Fig. 1) was made using architectural modelling
software;3 it integrates the surviving visual record of this part of London
in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially the work of Gipkyn (Fig. 2) and
Hollar (Fig. 3), with several sets of measurements of the actual buildings
and spaces being shown in the model. These include (1) measurements
of the Cathedral done by Christopher Wren in the early 1660s, (2) mea-
surements of the foundations of houses surrounding the Cross Yard taken

1See vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu. The Virtual Pauls Cross Project is supported by a digital

humanities start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
2For more on the sounds of worship in early modern England, see John Craig, Psalms,
groans, and dog-whippers: the soundscape of worship in the English parish church, 1547
1642, in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer
(Cambridge University Press, 2005), 10423.
3The visual model was made by Joshua Stephens, a graduate student in architecture at
NC State University, working under the supervision of David Hill, Associate Professor of
Architecture at NC State. Three more graduate students in the College of Design at NC
State worked on this project: Chelsea Sacks developed the graphics, Craig Johnson created
the website, and Jordan Gray rendered the images.
62 john n. wall

Fig. 1.Pauls Churchyard looking west, from the Visual Model.

by surveyors after the Great Fire of 1666, and (3) measurements of the
foundation of the Pauls Cross preaching station and the cathedral made
by archaeologists working over the past century in Pauls Churchyard
(Fig. 4).4 The visual model also incorporates the appearance of the sky and
the angle of the sun appropriate for the time of day and the season of the
year (Fig. 5).5
A simplified version of the visual model was then imported into acous-
tic modelling software to produce the acoustic model.6 The acoustic

4Sources for this information were chiefly Peter Blayneys The Bookshops in Pauls Cross
Churchyard (London: Bibliographical Society, 1990) and John Schofields St Pauls Cathedral
Before Wren (London: English Heritage, 2011).
55 November 1622 in our model is a damp, chilly, overcast day, with the sun low on the
horizon casting long shadows across the Churchyard. There is a light breeze. Because of
the chill in the air, people in the surrounding buildings have built fires; their smoke con
tributes to the general atmosphere of greyness. These details are provided by the website
http://weatherspark.com/averages/28729/11/15/London-England-United-Kingdom which
provides average weather conditions for every day in London, including 15 November
(5November on the Julian calendar), informing us that the sun rises at 7:20 am and sets at
4:12 pm on this day. Between 10:00 am and 12:00 noon, the sun rises from about 18 degrees of
elevation above the horizon to 20 degrees of elevation, casting, even at noon, a long shadow
across the Churchyard. The temperature typically varies from 44F to 50F. The weather is
cloudy 87% of the time and there is a 70% chance that precipitation will be observed at
some point during the dayin other words, typical late autumn weather in London.
6The acoustic model of The Cross Yard was made by Ben Markham and Matthew
Azevedo at Acentech, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
 virtual pauls cross63

Fig. 2.Bishop King preaching at Pauls Cross, Society of Antiquaries Diptych.

model enables us to hear the full text of a performance of John Donnes

Gunpowder Day sermon for Tuesday 5 November 1622, delivered in early
modern London pronunciation, in the acoustic space in which Pauls
Cross sermons were delivered. The recording of this sermon was made by
the professional actor Ben Crystal in an anechoic recording studio at the
University of Salford, in Manchester, to prevent introduction of modern
64 john n. wall

Fig. 3.Wenceslaus Hollar, St Pauls Cathedral, north side, ca. 1655.

Fig. 4.John Schofield, St Pauls Churchyard around 1450.

ambient noise or the acoustic properties of the recording studio into the
model of seventeenth-century acoustic space.7
In spite of our efforts to situate our virtual simulation of Pauls Church
yard on the best available store of data, we do not present the Virtual Pauls

7The script in early modern London pronunciation was prepared by the linguist David
Crystal. Supervising the recording were D.J. McCaul, Ian Rattigan, and James Massiglia of
the University of Salford.
 virtual pauls cross65

Fig. 5.View of Pauls Cross from about 50 feet, from the Visual Model.

Cross Project as a definitive recreation of Donnes Gunpowder Day ser-

mon for 1622.8 Far too much about that event is irretrievably lost to us to
pretend to do so. In fact, this project is deliberately based on a sermon
that, while it was intended for Pauls Cross, was, by reason of the weather,
preached in the church.9 As a result, it enables us to model the elements
of one of Donnes Pauls Cross sermons without pretending that we are
recreating in detail a specific event of the past. On that basis, we can
integrate all the information we have and all we might infer about
the place, the space, and the physical circumstances, including the light
and sound,10 together with the words of Donnes text, the manner of his
preaching style, and the behavior of his congregation into a single experi-
ential and interactive model.

8See John Donnes 1622 Gunpowder Plot sermon: a parallel-text edition, transcribed and
edited, with critical commentary by Jeanne Shami (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University
Press, 1996).
9So we are informed by the title given this sermon for its first appearance in print. See
John Donne, Fifty sermons: the second volume preached by that learned and reverend divine,
John Donne (London: J. Flesher, 1649).
10Not the smell, however. The smell must have been awful, given the open sewers, the
closely-packed urban living conditions, and the large population of dogs and horses. For
more on the smell, and other conditions of life in early modern urban London, see Emily
Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England (London and New Haven: Yale
University Press 2007). For more on the sound of early modern England, see Bruce R. Smith,
The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999).
66 john n. wall

The goal of this project is to make available for study our assumptions
about the conditions of sermon delivery and reception, reminding us that
these sermons were, originally, performances during which preacher and
congregation interacted to shape their mutual experience of the occasion
and of the sermon itself. We can then test the consequences of our assump-
tions as they are realized in the visual model and play out in the acoustic
model, always aware that we can revise the model as we develop our
understanding, incorporating new research into an unfolding process of
development.
Scholars have recently reminded us that the Pauls Cross sermon was a
regularly-occurring public event, usually but not exclusively11 held on
Sunday mornings between the hours of ten oclock and noon, and as such,
took place each time within the context of a set of expectations about
content, style of delivery, length of duration, and extent and character of
audience participation.12 Our process, in developing this project, has been
to assemble what we do know and to explore this knowledge in progress,
as a basis for reconsidering what was involved in actually staging a Pauls
Cross sermon, including such questions as the preachers need to gain and
sustain a congregations attention, his need to accommodate into the per-
formance the realities of ambient noise, and his need to deal with prob-
lems of audibility and crowd response (Fig. 6). This process has, over time,
opened up new areas of inquiry, raising questions, for example, about the
order of events surrounding the actual delivery of the sermon, how the
preacher got from the cathedral and across the Churchyard to Pauls Cross,
how he convened the gathered throng so he could begin his sermon, and
how the whole thing came to a conclusion so people knew when it was
time to leave.
Pauls Cross sermons did not happen spontaneously, we have realized;
they involved the organization of time, space, and people. These open-air
sermons were delivered without benefit of amplification, and in the heart
of a large and bustling city of at least, by 1622, 175,000 to 225,000 people.13

11The sermon at the center of this project, for example, was delivered on a Tuesday
rather than a Sunday in 1622.
12See especially Arnold Hunts The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences,
15901640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Mary Morrisseys Politics and
the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), as well as the
work of Peter McCullough and his colleagues in the ongoing project to produce the Oxford
Edition of the Sermons of John Donne.
13We do speak too easily, however, of mass communication through public preaching
to large crowds at Pauls Cross; no estimate of the size of these crowds exceeds 5,000 or
6,000, a mere 23% of the populace of over 200,000 people by the 1620s.
 virtual pauls cross67

Fig. 6.View of Pauls Cross from the Sermon House, from the Visual Model.

Crowds at these sermons ranged in social rank from the Lord Mayor of
London and his entourage (and sometimes members of the nobility, the
Court, and the Royal family) to members of the broader populace of
London who had free access to this event and who were encouraged by
governmental policy to attend.14 Wealthier members of the congregation
paid to sit in benches stored in the cathedral during the week and brought
out for the occasion (Fig. 6). Folks who chose to stand found their places
in the area of Pauls Churchyard behind or to the side of the established
seating area.
We also have had to take into account what we know about the condi-
tions of delivery for a Pauls Cross sermon. Donne scholars remind us that
Donnes sermonslike other sermons in the early modern periodwere
planned but not written out in advance.15 Donne went into the pulpit with
notes from which he drew guidance in the process of preaching, but his
sermons were, in their specifics of word choice, timing, inflection, volume,

14Officials of the Church of England asked parish clergy in London to complete their
Sunday morning worship services before 10:00 am so that parishioners could attend the
Pauls Cross sermons.
15The best account of Donnes preaching overall is Jeanne Shamis John Donne and
Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2003).
68 john n. wall

tone, and pacing, improvised on the spot, and within the conventions of
delivery, occupying one hour of time for sermons delivered inside and two
hours of time for sermons delivered outside. The texts of Donnes sermons
that surviveeither in their manuscript or printed versionswere writ-
ten out after the occasion of their performance, working again from the
original notes but susceptible to revisions, expansions or contractions,
dependent for their correspondence to the performed version on the lim-
its of memory or the temptation of yielding to second thoughts, to the
clarity of hindsight, to the knowledge that the audience for a manuscript
or printed version of a sermon was a different audience from the one for
whom it was originally delivered.
Scholarly accounts of Donnes preaching, however, merge the two, dis-
cussing his sermons as though there is complete congruency between the
orally-delivered version and the manuscript or printed version. The way
we receive these sermons today contributes to this temptation to merge
the two versions into one, to act as though the one can be conflated unre-
flectively into the other. But even if we want to separate the oral from the
written versions, of course, we face the challenge that no evidence of the
performed version comes to us independently of the written version.
There are no recordings of Donne preaching, hence any access we might
have to the performed version must come to us through the written or
printed version, inferentially, looking for traces of its performance.
As a result of the way we customarily experience Donnes sermons, they
are for us today chiefly works in print, whether the printed volume is one of
the editions of Donnes sermons published in the 17th century, or whether
it is one of the substantial volumes in the Potter and Simpson edition from
the 1950s and 60s, or the online version of that edition from the website of
Brigham Young University. They therefore come to us as highly organized
and structured theological essays; rather than unfolding, word by word, as
aural experiences in real time, they hold still, inviting us to experience
them in the quiet and solitude of our studies, where we are able to read and
reread, to go forward and backward within them, to trace out the organiza-
tional patterns and structures and follow the arguments with care.
Our sense of these texts as formal essays carries over even into efforts
to experience them as performances. In my experience, oral readings of
Donnes sermons in recent years by scholars like Peter McCullough16 and

16I have had the privilege of being present for Professor McCulloughs performances on
two occasions, one at the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 2003, and
again at the Conference of the John Donne Society in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2011.
 virtual pauls cross69

Paul Stanwood17 are regarded by theirchiefly scholarlyaudiences as

the equivalent of lectures, to be attended to quietly and attentively, draw-
ing on our years of experience and practice as formal lecture-goers.
Yet Donnes account of his contemporary audiences paints a signifi-
cantly different picture. In a sermon preached in St Pauls Cathedral,
Donne rehearses a history of congregational responses to preaching, find-
ing that congregations have, historically, approached the act of hearing a
sermon with expectations that their response will be active rather than
passive. Donne says that from the early days of the Church, congregations
had understood what was taking place was a form of theatre:

[T]he manner of hearing sermons, in the Primitive Church testified a

vehement devotion, and sense of that that was said, by the preacher, in the
hearer; for, all that had been formerly used in Theaters, Acclamations and
Plaudites, was brought into the Church, and not onely the vulgar people, but
learned hearers were as loud, and as profuse in those declarations, those
vocall acclamations, and those plaudits in the passages, and transitions, in
Sermons, as ever they had been at the Stage.18

St Augustine, Donne says, reports of his congregations that when the

people were satisfied in any point which the Preacher handled, they would
almost tell him so, by an acclamation, and give him leave to passe to
another point. In other countries, Donne claims, the people doe yet
answer to the Preacher, if his questions be applyable to them, and may
induce an answer, with these vocall acclamations, Sir, we will, Sir, we will
not.19
Such active and engaged congregational behavior is not unfamiliar in
England, Donne says: wee come too neare re-introducing this vain glori-
ous fashion, in those often periodicall murmurings, and noises, which you
make, when the Preacher concludeth any point; for those impertinent
Interjections swallowe up one quarter of his houre. Active verbal response
to the preacher on the part of his congregation is sufficiently loud and
prolonged in congregations for whom Donne preaches that it has become
a sign to some of the quality of the sermon: many that were not within

17Paul Stanwoods delivery of Donnes Second Prebend Sermon in 2012 at St Jamess

Anglican Church in Vancouver, British Columbia, is available on video: http://www
.stjames.bc.ca/index.cfm?method=pages.showpage&pageid=6505c711-25b3-a18a-c596
-f1f4434f4c83.
18Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Potter and Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 195362), X.132.
19Donne, Sermons, X.133.
70 john n. wall

distance of hearing the Sermon, will give a censure upon it, according to
the frequencie, or paucitie of these acclamations.20
For congregations in the 17th century to respond to sermonsand
especially to sermons preached from open-air pulpits like Pauls Cross
as they might to plays in the theatre should not be surprising, for, as Peter
McCullough and other scholars have reminded us, at this time pulpit and
playhouse were using similar methods to capture the same people.
McCullough also suggests that the sermon and the theatrical performance
had a two-way relationship, since compulsory church-going helped create
a culture of speaking and listening in which the new theatre of Shakespeare
could thrive, because people from all walks of life were exposed to high-
end rhetoric.21
The Virtual Pauls Cross Project provides us tools so that we may con-
sider more fully the original conditions of delivery for a Pauls Cross ser-
mon, and thus become more aware of possible avenues for getting behind
the written text to understand the content and character of its original
articulation as well as the issues involved in accounting for the relation-
ship between the sermons meaning and its original context. My own work
with this project is still in the preliminary stages; this essay will include
explorations of what I have learned in several areas, including questions of
audibility, ambient noise, crowd interaction with the preacher, the rela-
tionship between sermon delivery and the passage of time, and the ques-
tion of what we can learn about the original text of this sermon.

Situating the Text

The text for Donnes Gunpowder Day sermon for 1622 exists in two ver-
sions, one in manuscript and the other in printed form. The manuscript
version is a copy prepared by a professional scribe, presumably from a
copy of the text written out by Donne shortly after he delivered the ser-
mon; the scribal copy was then reviewed by Donne, providing corrections
in his own hand. This version was then sent to King James, where, in time,
it became MS Royal 17.B.XX in the British Library. The printed version
appeared as part of an anthology of sermons by Donne printed under the
title Fifty Sermons in London in 1649.22 Jeanne Shami,who was the first to

20Donne, Sermons, X.133134.

21http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/preaching-to-the-stalls.
22Donne, Fifty Sermons (London: J. Flesher, 1649).
 virtual pauls cross71

recognize MS Royal. 17B.XX as Donnes Gunpowder Day sermon, has con-

ducted a careful and thorough comparison of the manuscript version and
the printed version; she argues convincingly that the text of this sermon in
Fifty Sermons reflects Donnes later additions to his original manuscript
version.23
Both these versions are post-delivery versions, however, products of
Donnes reflection on, or reconstruction of, the sermon he delivered,
rather than the actual text he delivered on 5 November 1622. We have good
reason to believe that there is substantial congruence between the version
of this sermon Donne delivered on 5 November 1622 and the manuscript
version; Donne wrote out his memorial reconstruction of what he actually
said shortly after the day of delivery, apparently, at the request of King
James, and, with other note-takers in the audience, Donne had good rea-
son to make sure the version of the text he delivered was one that others
would recognize.24 Nevertheless, human memory being what human
memory is, inevitably there must be some distance between the text as
delivered and the text recorded.
Preceding them were three other versions of this sermon, or perhaps
better put, three other stages of the text. One consists of the actual words
Donne spoke from the pulpit on 5 November; the second is the set of notes
Donne took into the pulpit to enable him to deliver a coherent, structured
sermon of two hours duration. The third is Donnes mental vision of the
sermon, developed as he reviewed his text and wrote down his notes.
Izaak Waltons account is suggestive of the process that lay behind compo-
sition of that set of notes:
The latter part of his life may be said to be a continued study; for as he usu-
ally preached once a week, if not oftener, so after his Sermon he never gave
his eyes rest, till he had chosen out a new Text, and that night cast his Sermon
into a form, and his Text into divisions; and the next day betook himself to
consult the Fathers, and so commit his meditations to his memory, which
was excellent. But upon Saturday he usually gave himself and his mind a rest
from the weary burthen of his weeks meditations, and usually spent that
day in visitation of friends, or some other diversions of his thoughts.25

23See Shami, John Donnes 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon, especially her introduction,
2435.
24Arnold Hunts The Art of Hearing demonstrates that note-taking at sermons by some
members of the congregation was customary (see esp. 94114.).
25Izaak Walton, The life of John Donne, Dr. in divinity, and late dean of Saint Pauls Church
London (London: Marriott, 1658); reprinted in The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton,
Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson (Toronto: Oxford University Press,
1973), 67.
72 john n. wall

Walton imagines a Donne obsessed with sermon preparation, devoting all

his time to it, except for his Saturday day off. This can hardly be an accu-
rate account of the life of a man who was the Dean and chief administra-
tor for a large establishment like St Pauls Cathedral, with its continual
round of worship, its large staff of clergy, musicians, bell ringers, custodi-
ans, its extensive financial affairs, and the like, and all to keep up with. Nor
is it likely that Donne preached weekly, or more frequently.26 But Donne
preached frequently enough to have established a routine for sermon
composition, so while Walton exaggerates for the sake of emphasis, and to
underscore his belief that the life of a priest and Dean is wearying and
burdensome, Waltons account does suggest that sermon composition
consisted of choosing a text, developing a form or an outline of the ser-
mons content, supported by divisions of the text into parts, augmented by
readings from the Fathers, and all worked up into a coherent structure,
embodied in the notes to enable his delivery.
Donne might well have worked out the language of sections of his ser-
mon, and committed them to memory, but the specific text of his actual
sermonif Walton is to be believedwas separated from the completion
of preparation for it by at least a day, even as the writing-out of the sermon
was itself separated by at least a day from its actual delivery. A conse-
quence of preaching from notes rather than from a complete text that is
read is that the actual words of the sermonas opposed to the organiza-
tion of ideas or the terms of the argumentare original to the occasion,
are realized in performance, are part of the work of delivery. This means,
as we will see in some detail, that content is fluid, that the amount of time
spent on any given point is flexible, that sections of the sermon can be
expanded upon or contracted according to events external to the sermon
itself.
Being aware of this enables us to reconsider what we might be able to
know about an earlier form of this sermon, the set of notes that Donne
prepared to take into the pulpit. In the process of preparing the version of
Donnes sermon for delivery by Ben Crystal, two possible clues about the
contents of Donnes set of notes have emerged. Each consists of a sentence
fragment, embedded in a sequence of complete sentences but grammati-
cally independent of them; the meaning content of these fragments seems
related only tangentially to the meaning of the sentences that surround
them.

26For a discussion of Donnes preaching schedule, see my essay John Donne and the
Practice of Priesthood, Renaissance Papers 2007, 116.
 virtual pauls cross73

The first of these comes about thirty minutes into the sermon. Donne is
here reviewing the history of monarchy in Israel. He wants to defend mon-
archy, but also make something of the fact that the people of Israel
demanded that God provide a king for them before God was ready to do
that. So Donne claims that God intended for Israel to have a monarchy all
along, but by demanding a king of God before God was ready to deliver
one, the people of Israel were both asking for a good thing and showing
lack of trust in God to know the right time to provide him. Donne says,
They would not trust Gods meanes, theire was their first fault; And then
though they desird a good thing, and intended to them, yet they fix God his
tyme, they would not stay his leasure; and both these, to aske other things
then God would giue, or at other tymes then God would giue them is dis-
pleasing to him. use his means and stay his leysure. But yet though God were
displeasd with them, he executed his owne purpose; he was angry with their
manner of asking [for] a King but yet he gaue them a King.
The sentence fragmentuse his means and stay his leisurein the mid-
dle of this passage, part of which repeats the phrase stay his leisure from
the previous sentence, does not add anything to the preceding thought,
nor does it provide a transition to the next sentence; in fact, if one reads
the passage, leaving this phrase out, the passage makes perfectly good
sense. Donne says the people asked too soon for God to name a king, and
thus displeased God, but that God did what he wanted anyway, in spite of
his displeasure, and gave them a king.
I suggest that this phrase use his means and stay his leisure is in fact a
survival of one of Donnes notes to himself, somehow carried forward
from Donnes set of notes into his full draft reconstruction of the sermon.
The text surrounding this sentence fragment represents Donnes expan-
sion of this note as he performed it in the actual sermon.27 Hence, Donne
would not actually have said use his means and stay his leisure because
he has already made of that note what he wanted to on that occasion.
I think a similar thing happened at another point, later in the sermon,
about an hour and forty-five minutes into it, when Donne is pulling
together his sermons argument so it is no longer just about Josiah and
Zedekiah, but includes King James as well. Donne has suggested that
kingswhether they be good kings like Josiah or bad kings like Zedekiah
are the anointed of God and therefore should be honoured and obeyed,

27In the recording in the Virtual Pauls Cross Project, the phrase use his means and stay
his leisure is part of the sermon as delivered by Ben Crystal, but if I could record it again
Iwould have Ben leave it out.
74 john n. wall

not murdered in a pit. James, too, ought to be obeyed, not murdered. The
text says that the anointed of the Lord was taken in their pits, so Donne
uses this language to describe the three kings fates:
In Josiahs case it was a pit, a Graue, in Zedechiahs case, it was a pit, a prison.
In our Josiahs case, it was fully as it is in the Text, not in fouea, but in foueis,
plurally in their pits, in their diuers pits; Death in the Myne, Death in the
Cellar. And then it was in Foueis illorum; says the Text, in their pits, but the
text does not tell vs in whose. In the verse before, it is said our persecutors
did this, and this, and then it follows he was taken in their pits; in the perse-
cutors pitt certainely; but yet who are they?
Once more, we have a phraseDeath in the Myne, Death in the Cellar
which seems unrelated to the sentences that surround it: Donnes point is
that the biblical text applies to James as well as to Josiah and Zedekiah, as
a consequence of the specifics of the Catholic plotters conspiracy. Here,
again, I believe, the note Donne used to remind him of what to talk about
at this point in the sermon has survived as a trace of that stage of sermon
composition now buried in the text of the sermon Donne remembered
after the fact. Interestingly, Donne must have recognized the awkwardness
of this phrase in its context, because he expanded it in the printed version
of this sermon into the slightly more appropriate phrase Death in the
Myne, where they beganne, Death in the Cellar, where they pursued their
mischief.

Situating the Text: Liturgy

A regularly-occurring public event that involves a crowd of hundreds, even

thousands of people, must assemble and follow some predetermined
order of service. Donnes congregation must have come to Pauls Cross
through the several gates opening into Pauls Churchyard. The presence of
the figure of a verger in Gipkyns painting, robed and carrying his vergers
wand (Fig. 7), suggests that Donne himself would have been led from the
cathedral to the Cross by the verger, in procession. The sequence of events
must then have begun with a Call to Order. Language used in the prayer
that begins Donnes Gunpowder Day sermon locates this sermon in a litur-
gical context and helps us identify a source, and text, for such a Call to
Order. Donne asks, O Lord open thou our lips, and my mouth shall shew
forth thy praise; for thou, O Lord, didst make haste to help us. Donnes
congregation would have recognized instantly this allusion to the versicles
and responses of the Book of Common Prayers Office of Morning Prayer:
 virtual pauls cross75

Fig. 7.Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych.

Prieste. O Lord, open thou our lippes.

Aunswere. And our mouthe shall shewe furth thy prayse.
Prieste. O God, make spede to save us.
Aunswere. O Lord, make haste to helpe us.28
A few lines later, he again echoes the texts of Morning Prayer. The lines
We praise thee, O God, we knowledge thee, to bee the Lord; All our Earth
doth worship thee recall the opening lies of Te Deum, one of the Canticles
for Morning Prayer: We prayse the, O God, we knoweledge the to be the
Lorde/ All the earth doth worship the, the Father everlastynge. Soon he
echoes yet again the lines we noted before: Thou Lord openest their lip-
pes, that their mouth may shew forth thy prayse, for, Thou, O Lord, diddest
make haste to helpe them, Thou diddest make speede to save them.

28Quotations from the Book of Common Prayer are from the version of 1604, a rela-
tively light revision of the version of 1559.
76 john n. wall

Donnes congregation would, presumably, have come to Pauls

Churchyard from local parish churches, or from the Choir of St Pauls,
where daily Morning Prayer would have been said or sung.29 Donnes ver-
bal echoes of this rite at the beginning of his Pauls Cross sermon thus situ-
ate the extra-liturgical occasion of the Pauls Cross sermon within the
liturgical language, and thus the liturgical practices, of the Church of
England. For this reason, we have borrowed from the Book of Common
Prayer necessary texts to enable this Pauls Cross sermon to be performed.
First, we have supplied, from the Book of Common Prayer, the definitive
Call to Order for people formed as Christian people by use of that Prayer
Book, that is The Lord be with you/And with thy Spirit./Let us pray. In
like manner a text must be introduced, so we have the actor perform
ing Donnes sermon using the form for introducing a reading from the
Bible, again taken from the Prayer Book, where it is used to announce
readings at the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer and also at
Holy Communion.
According to contemporary accounts, the sermons at Pauls Cross ended
with another liturgical element, the singing of Psalms. In fact, the Gipkyn
painting of a Pauls Cross sermon shows the Choir of St Pauls perched
upon a balcony of the cathedral waiting the opportunity to lead the con-
gregation in singing (Fig. 8). Presumably, the gathered congregation would

Fig. 8.Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych.

29Sung, surely, in the Choir of St Pauls, by the cathedrals professional choir of men
and boys, to settings composed for use in that space. But sung not just in St Pauls; the
printed editions of the Sternhold and Hopkins musical settings of the Psalms, thought of
by church historians as the song books of reformed worship in the Church of England, also
contain settings of the Canticles and other texts of Morning and Evening Prayer, enabling
parish congregations to sing the Offices as easily as they did the Psalter. Thomas Sternhold
and John Hopkins, Al such psalmes of Dauid as Thomas Sternehold late grome of [the] kinges
Maiesties Robes, didde in his life time draw into English Metre ([London]: Edwarde
Whitchurche, [1549]).
 virtual pauls cross77

have sung the Psalms in a musical setting either from the developing prac-
tice of Anglican Chant, or, more likely, from the Sternhold and Hopkins
metrical Psalter.
Since the Virtual Pauls Cross Project has focused on the sermon, recre-
ating the singing of psalms in the acoustic space of Pauls Churchyard has
had to wait for another occasion (and more grant funding). The presence
of Psalm-singing as part of the context for the Pauls Cross sermonalong
with Donnes extensive echoes of the Book of Common Prayer earlier in
the textdoes, however, suggest that the congregation for the Pauls Cross
sermon gathered for an occasion more diverse in practiceand longer in
durationthan simply showing up for the sermon at 10:00 and heading
off for lunch when the sermon ended at 12:00. It also reminds us that the
performance of the Pauls Cross sermon was, as this point in its history, not
merely an extra-liturgical event, but one grounded in the Church of
Englands liturgical practice. While Reformed Protestantism rapidly devel-
oped a wholly sermon-centered corporate worship life, the Church of
Englands use of the Book of Common Prayer formed the context for and
shaped the performance of even so extra-liturgical an event as a two-hour
sermon delivered outdoors and in a large open space.

Situating the Text: Audibility

Claims for the importance of Pauls Cross sermons suggest that these ser-
mons were central to the development of the reformed Church of England
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this view, the occasion of
the Pauls Cross sermon was important not only for its role in debating
and defining reformed Christianity but also for the creation of a public
space and a public, urban identity in a city undergoing rapid population
growth and in a time of the expansion of centralized governmental
structures. Thus the Pauls Cross sermon is argued to be an occasion for
the gathering of the nation in microcosm, where the monarchs role as
Supreme Governor of the Church, the Church of Englands role as a
national church unifying all the people before God and king, and the City
of Londons role as the center of national cultural, political, and religious
life were acted out before a significant gathering of Londoners and visitors
to the city.
Claims for the importance of these sermons hinge on their being deliv-
ered to a significant percentage of Londons population who could actu-
ally hear what was being preached to them, relying on the strength of the
78 john n. wall

unamplified human voice in a large open space in the midst of a noisy and
bustling city of some 200,000 people as well as large numbers of horses,
dogs, birds,30 and other sources of competing sounds (Fig. 9). Certainly,
the question of audibility to some degree varied from preacher to preacher
as a question of the preachers skill in public speaking, in speaking ener-
getically, resonantly, and with good breath support for the voice. Yet we
know from contemporary accounts that there were issues with audibility;
in the passage from Donnes sermon cited earlier, he acknowledges there
were those who were not within distance of hearing the Sermon who
would decide the sermon was good or bad because they could hear and
note the frequencie, or paucitie of the acclamations of those close
enough to hear what was being said.31
The Virtual Pauls Cross Project helps us clarify the physical and audi-
tory experience of hearing these sermons. Contemporary estimates of the
size of congregations for these sermons range as high as 5,000 to 6,000
people. On the other hand, the Gipkyn painting (Fig. 10) and other visual
depictions of a Pauls Cross sermon in process never show more than about
250 people in attendance.32 Our analysis of the physical and acoustic prop-
erties of the space in Pauls Churchyard indicates that while room was

Fig. 9.Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych.

30Common sense as well as the details of Gipkyns painting remind us that these crea-
tures were very much part of the London urban scene.
31Donne, Sermons, X.134.
32Depictions of Pauls Cross sermons are of course far more representative than they
are accurate, but the Gipkyn painting shows the most folks in attendance. I have counted
the number of people shown listening to the sermon in this painting several times and
gotten different numbers each time, but never higher than about 250 people in
attendance.
 virtual pauls cross79

Fig. 10.Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych.

physically available for a crowd of 5,000 to 6,000 people in the part of the
Churchyard in front of the Cross structure itself, these numbers may well
call for some skepticism before accepting them as actual crowd counts.
Our survey of the acoustic properties of the space indicates that, while
the best sites for hearing a Pauls Cross sermon were in front of or just to
the sides of the Cross pulpit, and the closer to the preacher the better, one
could, theoretically, hear the preachers words well enough to understand
them from pretty much anywhere in the Churchyard. As one might expect,
people standing behind or, in general, out of sight of the preacher, or at the
edges of the Churchyard, furtherest from the preacher would have had the
greatest difficulty hearing. But the space itself, bounded by buildings that
reflected sound, acted as a kind of natural amplifier.
This means that a major element in the question of audibility is the
density of the crowd, and hence how noisy it might have been. The space
available for realistic listening is about 140 feet by 150 feet, or about 22, 000
square feet, comprising an irregular rectangle extending to the north wall
of the Choir of the cathedral to the preachers left, to the north transept
directly in front of the preacher, and into the larger open area between
the Cross pulpit and the booksellers shops to the preachers right.
Contemporary estimates of crowd size suggest that people each need
about 4.5 square feet of space to themselves, yielding the possibility that
about 5,000 people could fit into this space; given the fact that people were
smaller physically in the early modern period, a number between 5,000
80 john n. wall

and 6,000 does not seem unreasonable as an upper limit to the number of
people who could fit into Pauls Churchyard for a Pauls Cross sermon.33
These numbers are complicated, however, by the fact that a crowd den-
sity measure of one person for each 4.5 square feet yields a very high level
of crowd density, perhaps an unsustainable level of crowd density, espe-
cially given the fact that the people assembled were expected tomostly
stand in place for over two hours. Using a modern sense of the space per
person needed for a more comfortable, perhaps more sustainable, level of
crowd density, we might imagine allowing each person nine square feet,
which yields space for a crowd of 2,500.34 Whether the crowds actually
ranged as high as 5,000 or 6,000 people or a more reasonable crowd of half
that size, however, it is a bit sobering to realize that even the largest crowds
that could possibly fit inside Pauls Churchyard with any hope of hearing
the sermon represented, even in the best possible scenario, approximately
3% of Londons population in the early seventeenth century.
Once they arrived, however, they actually had a pretty good chance of
hearing what was being said by the preacher, so long as their fellow listen-
ers were not too noisy in their behavior. Our acoustic analysis of the space
between the Cross pulpit and the north transept of St Pauls suggests that
people could have heard the preacher well enough to understand him
even if they were standing as much as 140 feet from him. Ben Markham,
the acoustic engineer who supervised the acoustic modelling for the
Virtual Pauls Cross Project, writes in his report on the website35 that the
shape of the space around the Cross pulpitformed by the cathedral and
the booksellers shopscreated a kind of theatre for listening. [T]hanks
to sound reflections from the nearby buildings, Markham writes, listeners
at Pauls Cross at a significant remove from the speaker, likely per-
ceived speech at a level as much as twice as loud as they would have were
the speeches presented in an open field.
Also reinforcing intelligibility, Markham writes, is the style of delivery
adopted by Ben Crystal in performing Donnes sermon:
[Crystal] delivers a speech consistent with a practiced orator delivering a
speech to a great outdoor crowd: the voice is strong, the cadence measured.

33See the discussion here: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/the-curious

-science-of-counting-a-crowd.
34The discussion above says that a lightly populated crowd needs about 10 square feet
per person; I have gone with a slightly smaller number because, again, they were smaller
than we were, and perhaps were more accustomed to standing for long periods in more
densely packed crowds than we are.
35http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/engineers-report/.
 virtual pauls cross81

Speech varies in loudness continuously, but we have modeled a typical sus-

tained sound pressure level of approximately 75 dB at a distance of 3 feet
from the speaker, which is consistent with standards for loudness of raised
vocal effort. [T]he slow cadence and emphasis of certain phrases helps to
improve intelligibility by overcoming the effects of reverberation, ambient
noise, and listeners imperfect attention.

Hence, the matter of audibility in Pauls Churchyard was chiefly a matter

of the density and the vocal expressiveness of the crowd rather than the
distance one happened to be from the preacher. In addition, the world of
early modern Londonnoisy though it waswas still quieter than our
post-industrial world. Markham suggests that
instead of [todays] steady mid-day background noise level of perhaps 45 to
50 decibels or more, the steady-state ambient noise of the day was perhaps
closer to 35 decibels at the critical frequencies when people were quiet and
listening. In other words, background sound in Pauls Cross in 1622 might
have been more than 10 decibels quieter than it is nowless than half
as loud.
When the sound reinforcing acoustic properties of the space are taken
together with the lower levels of ambient noise, Markham concludes: [I]n
Pauls Cross in 1622, the signal to noise ratio was favourable the differ-
ence between speech at 140 feet (55 dB) and 1620s background sound
(roughly 35 dB) is as much as 20 dBsufficient for a high degree of speech
intelligibility.
The Virtual Pauls Cross Projects website permits the user to sample
Donnes sermon from eight different locations in the Courtyard and with
4different sizes of crowd. Especially interesting is to compare the sound
of the preachers voice when one listens from Position 2, the Dignitarys
Box in the Sermon House to the preachers left, with other positions on
the ground level of the Churchyard. The preachers voice is much clearer
from the Dignitarys Box, although more strongly reverberant, than it is
from other listening positions; obviously here as in other circumstances,
rank has its privileges.

Situating the Text: The Passage of Time

The standard length of a Pauls Cross sermon was two hours, marked visu-
ally by the passage of sand through an hour glass mounted adjacent to the
pulpit which the preacher would turn after he had declared his text and
before he launched into his sermon. This hourglass is visible in Gipkyns
82 john n. wall

painting of Pauls Cross, providing both preacher and congregation a visi-

ble marker of the preachers two-hours traffic upon the pulpit, indicating
how much of that time had elapsed and how much was still to negotiate
(Fig. 11). We now know, however, thanks to Tiffany Sterns research into the
ringing of church bells in early modern London,36 that the passage of time
during a Pauls Cross sermon was also marked by the ringing of bells; the
clock at St Pauls Cathedral rang on the quarter hour as well as on the
hour, marking the passage of time in 15-minute increments.
The Virtual Pauls Cross Project has posed the challenge of modelling
how the preacher dealt with the bells. He either talked over themor
tried toor paused when they rang. The bells must have been loud
enough to be heard over a good bit of London; that would have been part
of the cathedrals role as center of city life, as focus of the communitys
attention, as marker and organizer, of the passage of time in human affairs.

Fig. 11.Detail of Society of Antiquaries Diptych.

36Professor Sterns paper, Observe the Sawcinesse of the Jackes: Clock Jacks and the
Complexity of Time in Early Modern England, was delivered at the 2012 Convention of the
Modern Language Association, as part of the panel Clocks, Jacks, Jacquemarts: Time as
Character in Early Modern Drama.
 virtual pauls cross83

It seems unlikely, therefore, that the preacher could have talked over them.
So he paused; the pause at 15 minutes past the hour would have been fairly
brief, but it would have gotten longer with each passing quarter hour. The
pause on the hour, at 11:00, would have been of a significant length, about
a minute. Hence the bell could be an interruption to the flow of his ser-
mon as it unfolded, or an opportunity to complete a thought, treat the bell
as an underlining of that point, treat the pause created by the bell as a
chance to catch his breath, perhaps take a sip of the wine we are told
preachers kept in the pulpit at Pauls Cross, then begin the next section of
his sermon afresh.
If the latter were the case, then the preacher would need to be very
good at keeping track of time, able to anticipate the end of a fifteen-
minute time period well enough to end a section of his sermon just in time
for the bell, then be ready to launch into the next section as the echo of
thebells tolling fades away. We have evidence from other sermons that
Donne was capable of just this sort of attention to the passage of time.
Preaching at the Chapel Royal on 11 February 1627, for example, Donne
finds himself, toward the end of his allotted hour, needing to renegotiate
the terms of his relationship with his auditors. Describing the everlasting-
ness of Gods justice, Donne asserts that the news is grimas long as his
eternity lasts God shall never see that soul, whom he hath accurst, deliv-
ered from that curse, nor eased in itand just at that moment, he draws
attention to the hourglass that has been marking the passage of time dur-
ing the course of his preaching, and he informs his congregation that he is
out of time.
But we are now in the work of an houre, and no more. If there be a minute of
sand left, (There is not) If there be a minute of patience left, heare me say,
This minute that is left, is that eternitie which we speake of; upon this min-
ute dependeth that eternity.

Donne says, in effect, that he is now living on borrowed time as a preacher,

able to continue only in hope that there is left for him a minute of his
congregations patience. This precarious position is, however, one he
shares with his congregation, for they, too may be out of time as well, for
this minute makes up your Century, your hundred yeares, your eternity,
because it may be your last minute.37

37From Donnes Sermon for Lent 1627, Sermons VII.368. For more on this extraordinary
sermon, see my John Donne and the Practice of Priesthood. Renaissance Papers 2007
(Columbia, SC: Camden House; Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 116.
84 john n. wall

Donnes congregation, presumably, agreed to an extension of Donnes

contract, for the printed text of this sermon continues for three more
pages, and the moment of patience he has successfully negotiated from
his congregation becomes an opportunity for Donne to bring the sermon
to a dramaticand now positive, and hopeful, and celebratoryclose.
[B]e this your Peace, Donne says, [T]o know [that] God hath laid the
whole curse belonging to us upon him this glorious Sonne of God that
hangs upon the Crosse.
Donnes ability here to use the mutually agreed-upon conventions of
preaching to entwine his theological argument into his interactions with
his congregationshifting the news from bad to good only after asking for
and receiving from them the gift of more time, putting himself at their
mercy even as they are at Gods mercydemonstrates Donnes skill at
keeping time while preaching, since the whole point of this sermon
depends on Donnes ability to bring his hour-long argument to just the
right place at the precise moment when the sand has run through the
glass. But the effectiveness of his argument also depends on the respon-
siveness of his congregation, on their willingness after an hour of preach-
ing to grant him mercy, to extend to him more time to shift from bad news
to good. In other words, the impact of this sermon is dependent not just
on Donnes performance, delivering the word to a passive audience, but to
active collaboration between preacher and congregation.38
Donnes ability to time his delivery to fit the time available, to build
the meaning and impact of his sermon around the movement of time and
the conventions of handling time in preaching, is of course enabled by the
fact that he was preaching from notes and not from a set text. The passage
of time, marked by the movement of sand through the hourglass, imposes
the temporal structure; the preacher, working from notes, can adjust the
content of his delivery to fit the time available; he can shorten his presen-
tation or stretch it out, as the pace of times passage demands, either by
reducing or expanding the number of words he uses, or speeding up or
slowing down the pace of his delivery. This flexibility is lost when the text
is written down.
When looking for the places in Donnes sermon for 5 November 1622
where the bells should ring, I noticed that a moment of transition often
fell very close to the 15 minute break points. For example, early in the
sermon, and very close to the fifteen minute mark, Donne is summarizing
one of the chief points that he will develop later in the sermon:

38Donne liked this rhetorical move so much that he tried it again in another sermon
preached on 29 February 1628, in the same venue. But he didnt try it again.
 virtual pauls cross85

we argue not, we dispute not now: we embrace that which arises from both,
that both good Kings, and bad Kings, Josiah and Zedichia, are the anointed of
the lord, and the breath of the Nostrills, that is the lyfe of their people; and
therefore both to be lamented when they fall into dangers, and consequently
both to be preservd by all meanes, by prayer from them who are private
persons, by Counsayle from them, who haue the great honor, and the great
chardge to be near them, and by support and supplie from all of all sorts,
from fallinge into such dangers.

Having concluded this introduction, he launches into the first develop-

mental section of the sermon:

These considerations, will, I thinke, haue the better impression in you, if we

proceed in the handling of them, thus. First, the maine cause of the lamenta-
tion, was the ruine, or the dangerous declination of the Kingdome, of that
great and glorious state, the Kingdome.

Between these two statements on the Virtual Pauls Cross website, the bell
rings, marking the passage of 10:15. We have bent time somewhat to make
this happen; the goal here is to test the proposition that the bell could be
used to structure the text.
With a sermon delivered from notes, rather than a sermon read from a
prepared script, the words themselves can be made to fit the passage of
time. We could have made the recording fit the time, but the sermon had
been recorded months earlier, before I had any inkling that timing within
the course of the sermon might be important. Ben Crystal had been told
that a major agenda of the project was audibility; he had been told roughly
the dimensions of the space in which his audience would be imagined to
be gathered. He takes his delivery at a very deliberate pace, perfect, Ben
Markham and Matt Azevedo tell me, for maximum audibility in the acous-
tic space of Pauls Churchyard. His performance of the sermonexclud-
ing the opening prayer and the reading of his textcomes in at just over
two hours. But he was of necessity working with the full script, a script
based closely on the manuscript of the sermon, under the necessity of say-
ing every word in that script, a script that is not the actual script of the
sermon, but Donnes reconstruction of that sermon done after the fact, a
time no longer under the structuring pressure of times passage, of the suc-
cession of bells marking the fifteen minute intervals, no longer needing to
accommodate congregational response, a time rich with possibilities of
modification, alteration, expansion here and contraction there.
The number of times transitional moments in this sermon come close
to the 15 minute time markers has convinced me that in his actual deliv
eryon 5 November 1622, Donne structured this sermon as he composed it
86 john n. wall

in the process of delivery, working from his notes but fitting his text within
the 15 minute intervals provided him by St Pauls clock. He concluded
important points just before the bells rang out the hours and quarter
hours; he started afresh after the sounds of the bells had died away. Since
the time of the sermon delivery in this recreation was fixed by the length
of Ben Crystals performance, we have bent time to fit the sermon so as to
make the intervals marked by the ringing of the bells fit the rhetorical
organization of the sermon. I believe that on 5 November 1622, Donne did
the reverse, fitting the timing and organization of his sermon to fit the pas-
sage of time as marked by the bells in Pauls Churchyard.

Situating the Text: Style and Interaction

We return to the question of Donnes interactions with his congregation,

those folks who may have responded to the effectiveness of his presenta-
tion so strongly that they delayed his forward progress through his sermon
for up to a quarter of his houre. The Virtual Pauls Cross Project reminds
us that Donnes performance of his sermons was not the univocal delivery
of a text to a passive congregation of listeners but part of a collaborative
experience, an experience that results from the encounter of occasion,
preacher, and audience, a negotiated experience through which tradition,
expectation, intention, and response merge into a one- or two-hours traf-
fic upon the pulpit.
We know that Donne sought to engage his hearers, to change his hear-
ers, to bring themthrough both cognitive and emotional meansto
amend their lives in directions set out in the sermon. Donne once described
the performance of an effective preacher in terms of a coordinated effort
of body, feeling, and ideas, uniting matter and manner, the quality of the
voice (pleasant) and personal manner (acceptably, seasonably, with a
spiritual delight), with a holy delight, toward the goal of profit for his
congregation. Donnes contemporaries described his preaching style in
terms of its wit, its eloquence, its capacity to express and arouse feeling,
to elevate, to captivate, to motivate. His words, Walton says, did so work
upon the affections of his hearers, as melted and moulded them into a
companionable sadness.39 One Mr. Mayne says that Donne, with his
words, could charm thy audience, / That at thy sermons ear was all
our sense, that he could stir up their emotions and place them at the

39Walton, Lives, 52.

 virtual pauls cross87

discretion / Of the familiar voice, and with his look and hand and speak-
ing action could give them More sermon that some teachers used to
say.40 A Mr. Chudleigh wrote that Donne did not banish his wit when he
took orders, but transplanted it; / Taught it both time and place, and
brought it home / To piety which it doth best become.41
Donne preached for an audience well-experienced in sermon-going,
with a high regard for the quality of performance, for the techniques of
delivery, the techniques of text-handling, of division and application.
Holding their attention must have been a major concern, both through
cleverness of content and through skillful delivery, skillful performance of
the roles of priest, prophet, spiritual guide, interpreter, model and enabler
of transformation. The occasion of the early modern sermon had the
potentialfrom a pragmatic perspectiveto provide an entertaining
way to spend time on a Sunday morning, create an occasion for a large
social gathering with ones neighbors, or advance a clerical career. As
Jeanne Shami says,
in Donnes time, sermons satisfied many appetitesfor news, for entertain-
ment, for social interaction, for politics and, of course, for religious edifica-
tion. They were the mass media of their day. They fulfilled the role that
newspapers, and more recently television, now occupy as places where
breaking news was reported, and where issues of politics, religion and cul-
tural values were debated. Sermons satisfied a high cultural appetite as
well, such as that provided by the theatre. Descended from traditions of clas-
sical oratory, they were highly wrought pieces of literary persuasion that,
like Spenserian epic or Shakespearean drama, invite[d] emotional and intel-
lectual engagement between author-performer and audience. 42
Yet this occasion could also providefrom a theological perspectivean
occasion that could change lives, advance the general welfare, promote
social cohesion (especially promote support for the monarchy), and open
the way to eternal life.
Since what we have of Donnes sermon for Gunpowder Day 1622 is an
after-the-fact reconstruction, our search for congregational response must
lead through the text we have, looking for moments in the text at which

40Jasper Mayne, On Dr Donnes death: By Mr. Mayne of Christ-Church in Oxford, from

the 1633 edition of Donnes Poems, reprinted in H. Grierson, ed. The Poems of John Donne,
2vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), I.3824.
41John Chudleigh, On Dr. John Donne, late Dean of S. Paules, London, from the 1633
edition of Donnes Poems, reprinted in Grierson, I, 39495.
42Jeanne Shami, Women and Sermons, in Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington and
Emma Rhatigan, eds. The Oxford handbook of the early modern sermon (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 168.
88 john n. wall

Donne seems to prompt, or script, particular kinds of congregational

response. Accounts of Donnes style of delivery support a characterization
of Donnes preaching style as multi-vocal, varying in mode of delivery
from section to section of the sermon, if not moment to moment of his
delivery, depending on the content of each passage and its relationship to
the overall structure and argument of the sermon as a whole.
Donne could be analytic, discursive, informal, witty, joking, engaging,
declamatory, and affective, depending on what part of the sermon he hap-
pened to be in at any moment of delivery, using a style of verbal delivery
appropriate for the kind of material he was covering at that moment in the
section of the sermon he happened to be in and appropriate for the kind
of effect he hoped to have on the audience. His manner of delivery at any
moment would also be situated within an overall strategy of performance,
keeping the momentum of the sermon moving forward, keeping in mind
a larger arc of feeling, aware of the need to make the key points the most
engaging, the most emphatic. Thus we can expect that Donnes sermons
were delivered in an energetic, engaged, empathetic, emotionally expres-
sive, responsive, evocative speaking style, or, better, range of styles, always
aspiring to intimacy, to engagement, sometimes confrontational, some-
times laudatory, always lively, engaging, personable, and connecting with
his congregation.
This much we know. What we dont know, of course, except in the most
general terms, is how Donnes congregations responded to his preaching.
If Donnes comments are any indication, they responded actively, vocally,
engagingly, accepting responsibility for their side of a cooperative, interac-
tive, corporate performance. We do know that certain kinds of audience
response were scripted, for example the congregations joining in the
Lords Prayer at the end of Donnes opening prayer. If I am right that the
event drew on models from the Book of Common Prayer for openings and
closings, then congregations responses like the phrase And with thy Spirit
as the reply to The Lord be With you were also scripted. The specifics of
the congregations performance in response to other parts of the sermon
are of course lost to us; the one way we may glimpse them is through
exploring possibilities for Donnes performance, noting places where he
invites, even incites, certain kinds of response.
Starting from the accounts of Donnes preaching style, reviewed above,
we can suggest portions of his Gunpowder Day sermon that seek or invite
certain kinds of response. The version of Donnes Gunpowder Day sermon
for 1622 at the center of the Virtual Pauls Cross Project performs one set of
possible modes of delivery. Ben Crystals performance ranges from the
 virtual pauls cross89

witty to the expository to the instructional to the argumentative to the

exhortative to the incantatory; the program that enables us to hear his
performance of this sermon inside the acoustic model of Pauls Churchyard
also draws on a set of recorded crowd responses, so that as the speakers
voice becomes more energetic, the congregation responds in kind. This is
not offered as the way it was, but instead is designed to remind us, always,
that the congregation is present, engaged, responsive to the preacher.
Here are some examples of moments in Donnes Gunpowder Day ser-
mon that suggest a style of delivery that invites specific kinds of congrega-
tional response.43
1.Scripted address and response (tone of response tends to echo tone of
address)
V. The Lord be with you. R. And with thy Spirit.
2.Repetitive and incantatory (invests current moment with meaning,
links meaning of the current moment to significance of past events;
invites solemnity, awareness of the gravity of the present moment)
This is the day, and these are the houres, wherein that should have been
acted; In this our Day, and in these houres, We praise thee, O God, we
knowledge thee, to bee the Lord; All our Earth doth worship thee; The
holy Church throughout all this Land, doth knowledge thee, with com-
memorations of that great mercy, now in these houres. Now, in these
houres, it is thus commemorated in the Kings House, where the Head
and Members praise thee; Thus, in that place, where it should have
been perpetrated, where the Reverend judges of the Land doe now
praise thee; Thus in the Universities, where the tender youth of this
Land, is brought up to praise thee, is a detestation of their Doctrines,
that plotted this; Thus it is commemorated in many severall Societies,
in many severall Parishes, and thus, here, in [the shadow of] this
Mother Church, in this great Congregation of thy Children, where, all,
of all sorts, from the Lieutenant of thy Lieutenant, to the meanest
sonne of thy sonne, in this Assembly, come with hearts, and lippes, full
of thankesgiving: Now, in these hours
3.Expository (laying out points, summarizing arguments, providing guid-
ance to the organization of the sermon)

43The quotations from Donnes sermon for 5 November 1622 given here are from the
performance script for the Virtual Pauls Cross Project, here: http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/
script/. They all may be heard in the recordings of the sermon, here: http://vpcp.chass
.ncsu.edu/listen-the-sermon/.
90 john n. wall

These considerations, will, I thinke, haue the better impression in you,

if we proceed in the handling of them, thus. First, the maine cause of
the lamentation, was the ruine, or the dangerous declination of the
Kingdome, of that great and glorious state, the Kingdome.
4.Witty and playful or sarcastic (inviting laughter, establishing a sense of
being an insider, part of a community with the preacher)
Of the Autor of this booke I thinke there was never doubt made. But yet
it is scarse safely donne by the Councell of Trent, when in that Canon
which numbers the books of Canonicall Scriptures they leave out this
booke of Lamentations. For, though I make no doubt but that they had
a purpose to comprehend and inuolue yt in the name of Jeremy, yet
that was not inough; for so they might haue comprehended and inu-
olud Genesis and Deuteronomie and all between, in one name of
Moses: and so they might haue comprehended and inuolud, the
Apocalypse and some Epistles in the name of John, and haue left out
the booke it selfe in the number.
5.Energetic, emotionally charged (inviting emotional response, here a
sense of outrage at what was done, or attempted)
They made that House which is the hyue of this kingdome, from whence
all her Hony comes, that House, where Justice herselfe is conceyud, in
their preparing of good laws, and inanimated and quickned and borne
by the Royall assent there giuen, they made that whole house, one
Murdring peece: and hauing put in theyr powder, they chargd that
peece with Peers, with people, with Princes, with the King, and ment to
discharg it vpward at the face of heauen, to shoote God at the face of
God, Him, of whome God had sayd, Dij estis, you are gods, at the face of
that God who had said so: as though they would haue reprochd the
God of heauen, and not haue been beholden to him for such a king, but
shoote him vp to him and bid him take his king againe, for Nolumus
hunc regnare, we will not haue this king to reigne ouer vs.
6.Instructive, directive, drawing conclusions from the argument that have
implications for the congregation (inviting reflection, agreement, assent
to the argument)
That Man must haue a large Comprehension that shall aduenture to
say, of any king He is an yll king. He must know his office well and
his actions well, and the actions of other princes too, who haue corre-
spondence with him, before he can say so. When Christ says let your
Communication be yea yea, and nay, nay, for whatsoeuer is more
then these, when it comes to swearinge, that commeth of evill,
Saint Augustine does not vnderstand it of the evyll disposition of the
 virtual pauls cross91

Man that swears, but of them who will not beleeue him without
swearinge.
7.Exhortatory, invitational to agreement, here at the end of the sermon
(invites assent, acceptance, agreement)
But lastly, and espetially let vs preserve him, by preserving God amongst
vs in the true and sincere profession of his religion. Let not a mis-
grounded and a disloyall imagination, of coolenes in him, coole you in
your own families. Omnis spiritus qui soluit Jesum, says Saint John in the
vulgate. Euery spirit that dissolues Iesus, that embraces not Iesus
intirely, all Iesus, all his truth, and all his, all that suffer for him, is not
of God
Cities are built of families, and so are Churches too; Euery man keepe
his own family, and then euery pastor shall keepe his flock; and so the
Church shalbe free from Scisme, and the state from sedition, and our
Josiah preserud, prophetically, for euer, as he was historically, this day,
from them, in whose pitts, the breath of our Nostrills, the anointed of
the lord was taken. Amen.
Such observations perhaps give us access to the ebb and flow of priestly
presentation, and of congregational response, and thus help us track the
give-and-take of a sermon-as-event, that is being composed as it is hap-
pening, an event grounded in custom and tradition, and in the plans the
preacher made before entering the pulpit and the expectations his congre-
gation brought with them about how all this would unfold, yet open to
discovery and surprise as it unfolds in the specific moment-by-moment
realization of its composition.

Conclusion

The Virtual Pauls Cross Project asks us to view the Pauls Cross sermon
as an event unfolding in real time, in a space shaped much like a public
theatre, in the presence of a large public gathering of people who came
to enjoy a public occasion even while seeking spiritual enrichment and
theological education. Donne and his contemporaries cautioned their lis-
teners to avoid the pleasures of the theatre even as they helped organize
and participated in events that were in their own way highly theatrical,
drawing on conventions and expectations of early modern culture that
Pauls churchyard and the public theatres held in common.
This project does not offer conclusions so much as it seeks to incite con-
versation, to provoke reconsideration of our understanding of the early
92 john n. wall

modern sermon. It enables us to experience one early modern sermon as

it unfolds moment by moment, and in the process explore what we know
of the space and time of this sermon, integrating a wide range of informa-
tion into models we can experience and explore. It allows us to consider
experientially questions of text, performance, audibility, ambient noise,
crowd interaction with the preacher, the relationship between sermon
delivery and the passage of time, and the question of what we can learn
about the original text of this sermon. This Project also challenges us to
make explicit our assumptions about how events like this proceeded, and
thus to consider other possible interpretations and alternative conclu-
sions, and model them as alternative versions of these events.
Virtual Pauls Cross does demonstrate, however, what I have long con-
tended, that the meaning Donne makes in his sermons is contingent on
specific interactions between the preacher and his congregation in the
specific circumstances of their original delivery.44 Coming to grips with
that reality is challenging for traditional scholarly approaches, but is easily
accessible through digital media. The very process of bringing together the
vast array of different kinds of information, both contemporary and mod-
ern, about the setting and details of this event is itself a dramatic advance
in scholarly meaning making. To be able to make this past event available
to us experientially enables us to ask basic questions about how things
were done, indeed to understand what things needed to be done, if events
like this one were to take place. Engagement with the resources of digital
technology opens these opportunities to us.

44E.g. in Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens: University of

Georgia Press, 1988), and elsewhere.
 PART TWO

EARLY TUDOR SERMONS, 15201558

 CHAPTER FOUR

THE TREE AND THE WEED:

BISHOP JOHN FISHERS SERMONS AT PAULS CROSS

Cecilia Hatt

John Fishers first public sermon against Luther was preached at Pauls
Cross in 1521, on the Sunday within the octave of Ascension Day. It was put
into Latin by Richard Pace and presented to the Pope, who expressed his
appreciation, but the preached English version was printed by Wynkyn de
Worde, William Caxtons son-in-law and inheritor of his press. The title
page of Fishers sermon consisted of an elaborate woodcut which showed
a mitred bishop in a pulpit, preaching to a congregation. The scene is not
of Pauls Cross, but of a church interior, because the woodcut had been
designed for an earlier volume, John Fishers funeral sermon for King
Henry VII. The bottom quarter of that title page had depicted the dead
king lying in state before the preacher and people. Not many weeks after
the funeral, Henry VIIs mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, died. Bishop
Fisher preached a sermon at her months mind and Wynkyn printed this
also, using the woodcut which had been adapted to show, instead of the
kings body, a coffin covered with a pall. This must have been quite a costly
woodcut and no doubt Wynkyn was glad to be able to recycle it in this way.
Wynkyn continued to print the bishops sermons for the next couple of
decades and must have made a good profit with Fishers Treatise on the
Penitential Psalm which went into five editions. Another occasion suitable
for the special woodcut, however, did not arise until 1521, when he printed
John Fishers sermon against the pernicious doctrine of Martin Luther.
This time the printer removed the section showing Lady Margarets cof-
fin and set it up with type: The sermon of Iohan the bysshop of Rochester
made agayn the pernicious doctryn of Martyn luther within the octaues of
the ascensyon by the assingnement of the most reuerend fader in god the lord
Thomas Cardinal of Yorke and Legate ex latere from our holy father the
pope.1 The two previous sermons had their titles printed above or below

1This woodcut is reproduced in English Works of John Fisher, 15201535 ed. Cecilia A.Hatt
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 76.
96 cecilia hatt

the woodcut, but because this one has the title printed actually inside it,
there is space left on the page. To dignify the page further, Wynkyn has
added, at head and foot, ornamental head- and tail-pieces bearing the
monogram of his father-in-law, William Caxton. There is an eloquent sub-
text here: Wynkyn de Worde is reminding his 1521 readers of two things:
first, that his book comes to them from the printer who gave them the
royal eulogies, the son-in-law and successor to the great printing pioneer,
William Caxton. Secondly, he is reminding them that this sermon is from
Bishop Fisher who was Lady Margarets preacher, the John Fisher who bur-
ied the late king. The use of this woodcut, then, asserts the authority and
royal connections of both printer and preacher and their place in the
continuity of public events. It uses the invocation of a shared memory
firmly to embed the occasion, the sermon and the printed book in time-
honoured societal structures.
John Fishers 1521 Pauls Cross sermon was introduced with consider-
able ceremony:
The xij. daye of Maye in the yeare of our Lorde 1521, and in the thirteenth
yeare of the Reigne of our Soueraigne Lord Kinge Henry the eighte of that
Name, the Lord Thomas Wolsey, by the grace of God Legate de Latere,
Cardinall of Sainct Cecily and Archbishop of Yorke, came vnto Saint Paules
Churche of London, with the most parte of the Byshops of the Realme,
where he was receiued with procession, and sensid by Mr. Richard Pace,
then being Deane of the said Church. After which ceremonies done, there
were four Doctors that bare a canope of cloth of gold ouer him goinge to the
Highe Alter, where he made his oblacion; which done, hee proceeded forth
as abouesaid to the Crosse in Paules Church Yeard, where was ordeined a
scaffold for the same cause, and he, sittinge vnder his cloth of estate which
was ordeined for him, his two crosses on euerie side of him; on his right
hand sittinge on the place where hee set his feete, the Popes embassador,
and nexte him the Archbishop of Canterbury: on his left hand the Emperors
Embassador, and next him the Byshop of Duresme, and all the other Byshops
with other noble prelates sate on two formes outeright forthe, and ther the
Byshop of Rochester made a sermon, by the consentinge of the whole clergie
of England, by the commandement of the Pope, against one Martinus
Eleutherius, and all his workes, because hee erred sore, and spake against
the hollie faithe; and denounced them accursed which kept anie of his said
bookes, and there were manie burned in the said chyrch yeard of his said
bookes during the sermon, which ended, my Lord Cardinall went home to
dinner with all the other prelates.2

2MS.Cott.Vitell.B, iv, 111. Printed in W. Roscoe, The Life and Pontificate of Leo X, 4th edn.
(London: H.G. Bohn, 1846) 2, appendix lxxxvi, 6067.
 the tree and the weed97

The sermon was structured around the operation of the Holy Spirit in the
world. The text of the day was John 15.26:
Cum venerit paracletus quem ego mittam vobis spiritum veritatis qui a patre
procedit ille testimonium perhibebit de me, which he translates: whan the
comforter shall come whom I shall sende vnto you, the spyryte of trouthe
that yssueth from my father, he shall bere wytnesse of me.
After stating this text, Fisher embarks on a dramatic captatio benevolentiae
that puts before his audience a familiar, yet troubling scenario:
Full often whan the daye is clere and the sonne shyneth bryght, ryseth in
some quarter of the heuen a thyk blacke clowde that darketh the face of the
heuen and shadoweth from vs the clere lyght of the sonne. And stereth an
hydeous tempest and maketh a grete lyghtnynge and thonderyth terrybly, so
that the weyke soules and feble hertes be put in a grete fere and made almost
desperate for lacke of comforte.
In lyke maner it is in the chyrche of Christ 3
So he continues, putting the occasional storm of heresy in the context of
the continuing stability and calm of the Church. He will organise his argu-
ment against Luther into four instructions, of which the first three will
refute Luthers articles and the fourth will serve to dispel the appearance
of plausibility that attaches to the figure of Luther himself. In the first
instruction: Cum venerit paracletus quem ego mittam vobis, spiritum verita
tis qui a patre procedit, Fisher tells how Christ promised that he would be
with his church at all times and that the Holy Spirit would instruct it. This
promise pertains to the universal church of which the pope is the head,
and the bishop demonstrates the primacy of the pope, using the figures of
Moses and Aaron and Christs words about the position of Peter in respect
of the other apostles, supporting his exegesis of the scriptural passage
with quotations from Augustine, Gregory, Ambrose, Jerome and others.
The old law is a figure of the new, he says, using the analogy of a tree and
its shadow:
Whan ye se a tree stande vpright vpon the ground and his braunches spred
a brode, full of leues and fruyte, yf the sonne shyne clere, this tree maketh a
shadowe in the whiche shadowe ye may perceyue a fygure of the braunches
of the leues and of the fruyte. Euery thynge that is in the tree hathe somwhat
answerynge vnto it in the shadowe. And contrary wyse, euery parte of the
shadowe hath some thynge answerynge vnto it in the tree.4

3Fisher, English Works, 77.

4Fisher, English Works, 79.
98 cecilia hatt

The tree image appears again in the second instruction, Ille testimonium
perhibebit de me: What meruaylous vertue, what wonderfull operacyon
is in the bemes of the sonne whiche dothe quycken and make lyfely
many creatures the whiche before appered as deed!5 This instruction is
addressed to Luthers principle of sola fides. Just as the tree puts out leaves
and blossoms under the influence of the sun, so does the operation of
faith, hope and charity cause a person to blossom into good works. Without
the leaves and blossoms we should conclude that the tree was dead and
likewise with the human being who performs no good works. Also, in a
passage drawing on Robert Grossetestes and Albertus Magnuss work on
optics, Fisher stresses how the rays of the sun are not strong in themselves
but, joined together, they are powerful and effective.
His third instruction, on the text Et vos testimonium perhibebitis, quia ab
initio mecum estis, addresses Luthers sola scriptura: church tradition is
also a source of knowledge and in support of this principle, Fisher quotes
Origen, Damascene, and Dionysius. He cites also the operation of the Holy
Spirit on church councils, the antiquity of ceremonial traditions and,
bringing in something that fascinated him in his Hebraist studies, the
Jewish cabala. The fourth and final instruction of this sermon offers an
answer to the argument that Luther is a sincere and virtuous teacher.
Fisher continues with the beginning words of the chapter that follows:
haec locutus sum vobis vt non scandalizemini. Absque synagogis facient vos
sed venit hora vt omnis qui interficit vos arbitretur obsequium se praestare
deo. (This I haue tolde you before to the entent that ye shall not quale in your
fayth, for they shall deuyde you from theyr synagoges, and the tyme shal
come that euery man that mordereth you shall thynke that he dothe therby
grete seruyce vnto God.)
He points out that many heretics have been sincere and learned men
and are all the more dangerous for that:
Now than chrysten man, whan thou herest that Martyn Luther is a man of
grete lernynge and hath grete redynes in scryptures and is reputed of vertu-
ous lyuynge and hathe many grete adherentes, thynke that many suche
hath ben before hym in the chirche of Chryst, that by theyr lernynge and
mistakynge of scryptures hathe made suche tempestes in the chirche byfore
this tyme.6
He has reminded us of the image of the storm cloud that opened his ser-
mon, but this time lets the scenario play out to the climax:

5Fisher, English Works, 83.

6Fisher, English Works, 93.
 the tree and the weed99

O christen man, here this gracyous warnyng of our sauyour Christ, marke
well what he saith. I haue warned you, sayth he, of these thynges before
bycause that whan they fal ye shall not be ouerthrowen in your soules by
them. As though he sayd, whan ye shal se the stormes aryse, whan ye shal
behold the thick black clowdes aloft that shal darken al the face of the heuen
and shadow from you the clere light of the sonne and shewe a false glys-
teryng light that yssueth out of the clowde from the spirite of that tempest,
and ye shall here terryble comminacyon of theyr thonderynge.7
It is an impressive picture: the unfailing laws of nature mirror the onto-
logical order of Gods creation, itself mirrored by the order of human insti-
tutions which are shadows of that order expressed in scriptural types.
Heresy and unbelief may threaten and terrify, but the faithful need only
trust to the promise of Christ which will guide the way of the church into
final peace and security:
Who that thus often warned wyll yet gyue faythe to Martyn Luther, or to any
other suche herytyke, rather than too Christ Iesu and vnto the spyryte of
trouthe, whiche is left in the chyrche of Chryst vnto the worldes ende, specy-
ally to enforme vs of the trouthe? This man gothe fer wyde from the streyght
waye and is neuer lyke to entre in to the port of euerlastynge rest whiche all
we desyre and couet to come vnto.8
Five years later, on 11 February, Quinquagesima Sunday 1526, the bishop of
Rochester preached another sermon at Pauls Cross, later printed under
the title A sermon concernynge certayne heretickes; whiche than were
abiured for holdynge the heresies of Martyn Luther that famous hereticke/
and for the kepyng and reteynyng of his bokes agaynst the ordinance of
the bulle of pope Leo the tenthe. The title is slightly misleading; the argu-
ment of Fishers sermon was directed in a general way against Luther and
his followers, not principally against the abjured individuals present. A let-
ter to Wolsey from John Longland, the bishop of Lincoln, suggests that
Fisher had been asked in January to preach:
I assertaignyd him the King ouer this your pleasour that wuld be att the
Crose hauinge the Clergy with you. ther to haue a notable clerk to prech afor
you a sermond contra Lutherum, Lutherianos, fautoresque eorum, contra
opera eorum et libros, et contra inducentes eadem opera in regnum And
his Grace thinks My Lord of Rochester to be moste meete to make that
sermon afore you, bothe propter auctoritatem, grauitatem, et doctrinam
personae.9

7Fisher, English Works, 94.

8Fisher, English Works, 97.
9MS.Cott.Vit.B.v.fol.8; L&P 4 995; Ellis, 1st Series (1824) 1, LXV.
100 cecilia hatt

This letter is dated 5 January 1526, and it is likely that Fisher had written
his sermon early, for it does not contain much direct reference to Barnes
and the others; at the end of each section Fisher turns to the brethren that
be abjured with a few impromptu words, which are for the most part
equally applicable to the congregation in general. The sermon was
preached against the background of a hunt for heretical literature, the
main target being the octavo edition of Tyndales New Testament, but
books by Luther, Huss and Zwingli were known to be in circulation as well.
Those abjured included four Hanse merchants who were found to have
Luthers books in their possession. On 8 February they were examined by
Wolsey and others, who asked what they knew of Luthers writings, what
they thought of them and whether they could read Latin. All four admit-
ted to knowledge of the writings and holding heretical opinions but said
they would henceforth be guided by the Church. On the following Sunday
they stood outside St Pauls to listen to the bishop of Rochesters sermon
and to abjure their heresy. The fifth man was Robert Barnes, the prior of
the Cambridge house of Augustinian friars, who was at that time thirty-
one years old. On the previous Christmas Eve, Barnes had preached at the
University church in Cambridge, at first against the practice of litigation
and then going on to make swingeing criticisms of various clerical faults.
He was called before the University authorities. According to Barnes,
Wolsey recommended him to submit himself to his authority rather
than to the law. Barnes was reluctant to do this but was finally persuaded
to abjure: although he subsequently did espouse the Lutheran cause,
Barnes was not a Lutheran in February 1526. He later published a Suppli
cation to Henry VIII, in which he voiced various grievances against the
English bishops, particularly against Fisher, who had offended him by say-
ing he was not learned because Barnes had misunderstood one of the texts
he quoted.
One gets the impression from the Supplication that Robert Barnes was
rather a disputatious man, and that Fisher had found their discussion very
trying, not just because of the frustrating nature of the argument but
because of what Fisher saw as the irresponsibility of Barnes enterprise.
Much of his criticism of Robert Barness sermon was not on the grounds of
heresy but of ill-advisedness; to give rash utterance in public to private
grievances, he thought, was a failure of charity as it was of common pru-
dence, which confused the faithful and gave succour to the malicious.
Fishers comment on one of Barnes pronouncements, that it was not
heretical, but it was folly to speak thus before the butchers of Cambridge,
is very expressive of this point of view.
 the tree and the weed101

This is an important point to bear in mind when considering the differ-

ence between the 1521 and 1526 sermons. The predominant mood of the
earlier sermon had been reassurance: Luthers rebellion needs not to be
heeded or feared because such things are commonplace. They have been
predicted and they will pass away. It was not a question so much of the
content of the heretical writings or teachings, disturbing though that
might be, it was important that the people, especially the uneducated or
ill-educated, should know where to look for guidance. By the time of the
1526 sermon, however, it is clear that Fisher was gravely worried about the
effect that the controversies were having on the faithful. Heresy was not
just a matter of erroneous opinion: by seeming to discount logic and scorn
authority it attacked the stability of the mind itself, and in doing so desta-
bilised society as well, as he pointed out, invoking the unrest and violence
that had been taking place in Germany.
As has been remarked, even the physical appearance of the 1521 ser-
mon, against the pernicious doctrine, made a statement about its rooted-
ness in the establishment and the time-honoured customs of society. In
1526, the sermon concerning certain heretics looked quite different. It was
prefaced by a personal letter from Fisher to the reader, My dere brother or
syster in our sauior Christe Iesu/ who so euer ye be. The letter informs us
that Fisher himself had the sermon printed, which makes it, as far as we
know, unique among his surviving English sermons. The reason was that
my wyll and mynde is that some frute myght ryse by the same vnto the
christen people/ whiche be the spouse of Christe. Vnto whom (though
vnworthy) I am ordeyned a minister for my lytell porcion.10 This sense of
pastoral responsibility powers the entire sermon. Heresy and wrong opin-
ions grow easily and fast, like weeds, he says, and it behoves them who
have care of the faithful to resist the spread of these dangerous ideas. He
adds I haue put forthe this sermon to be redde/ whiche for the great noyse
of the people within the churche of Paules/ whan it was sayde/ myght nat
be herde.11 This is an interesting detail: people may have been heckling
Fisher, or they may have been shouting at Barnes and the abjured mer-
chants, or at both. At any rate, we get the impression of a rowdy and con-
fused gathering, the sort of thing that was becoming increasingly common
at Pauls Cross. Fisher goes on to make a remarkable offer:
And if parauenture any disciple of Luthers shall thynke/ that myn argumen-
tes and reasons agaynst his maister be nat sufficient: Fyrst let hym consider/

10Fisher, English Works, 145.

11Fisher, English Works, 147.
102 cecilia hatt

that I dyd shape them to be spoken vntyll a multitude of people/ whiche

were nat brought vp in the subtyll disputations of the schole. Seconde. if it
may lyke the same disciple to come vnto me secretely/ and breake his mynde
at more length/ I bynde me by these presentes/ both to kepe his secreasy/
and also to spare a leysoure for hym to here the bottom of his mynde/ and he
shal here myne agayne/ if it so please hym: and I trust in our lorde/ that
fynally we shall so agre/ that either he shal make me a Lutheran orels I shal
enduce hym to be a catholyke/ and to folowe the doctryne of Christis
churche.12
Apart from the bold promise that he would keep the secrecy of a Lutheran
sympathiser, this declaration is significant because of its terminology. In
using the words Lutheran and Catholic, Fisher is now signalling that he no
longer regards Luther and his teachings as a temporary anomaly, but as a
category of persons that exists in his society. He was one of the earliest
users of the noun Catholic, which did not become common until the end
of the century.
The 1526 sermon begins with an extended prelocution, a form of which
Fisher had made effective use in the past. The utility of a prelocution or
protheme was that a preacher could use it to introduce an extra text which
gave depth or variety to the matter of the sermon proper. On this occasion,
however, the prelocution text is the text of the day, Lk.18:3543, the story
of the healing of the blind man at the wayside, who keeps crying out, Son
of David, have pity on me. He takes the text of v. 42. Respice/ fides tua te
saluum fecit, which he Englishes as Open thyn eies/ thy faith hath made
the safe. A more usual translation, which Fisher might well have used on
a different occasion, would be Your faith has made you whole, but safety
is an important issue in this sermon. This section, on the healing of the
blind man, is informed by the metaphor of darkness and light. One might
pick out as key passages the two sentences, a certain blind man sat by the
way side, begging and And immediately he saw, and followed him, glorify-
ing God. The significance of this is that the blind man was initially sitting
out of the way but on having his sight restored he followed in the way of
Jesus and the disciples. The remaining part of the sermon expounds the
parable of the sower, from Luke chapter 8. Alongside this parable we have
also reverberating in our minds another parable, from Matt.13:2430, of
the wheat and the tares, where the word for tares or cockle is zizania, a
word famously associated with heresy in the Fasciculi Zizaniorum of the
previous century, an anti-Wycliffite text attributed to Thomas Netter of

12Fisher, English Works, 147.

 the tree and the weed103

Walden, himself a Pauls Cross preacher in his day. This recalls Fishers
words in the prefatory epistle, about weeds taking hold:
where they haue enteres [ = entress, i.e. entry] ones in any grounde/ it is
veray herde to delyuer that grounde from them: euen so it is of these here-
sies/ they nede no plantynge/ they nede no wateryng/ they nede no lowkyng/
nor wedyng/ but rankly sprynge by themselfe of a full lyght occasion.
Contrary wyse it is of true doctryne of God/ this is lyke vnto the good herbes/
whiche wil nat euery where lightly growe/ but they must be set or sowen in
a chosen erthe/ they must be watred/ they must be weded/ and haue moche
attendaunce/ orels they wyll anone myscary.13
John Fisher divides the sermon proper into four collections, of the sower,
the seed, the good earth and the increase of fruit. The second, third and
fourth collections are themselves also divided. The preacher chooses to
stress certain things. One is the unity of the seed: working with the analogy
of Ezechiels wheels within wheels, Fisher shows that the Old Testament
and the gospels make one roundel, the epistles another and the exposi-
tions of the Fathers another, but all the roundels are inside and contribut-
ing to each other. Another feature is the disposition of the good earth,
which is ready prepared to receive the seed, and which shows its goodness
by the fruit that it brings forth. Quoting Augustine, Fisher makes a very
characteristic comment:
What am I sayth he? verily nothyng els but the cophyne or the hopper of
hym that soweth. The preacher may well reherse the wordes of scripture: but
they be nat his wordes/ they be the wordes of Christe. And if our sauiour
Christ speke nat within the preacher the sede shalbe but caste in vayne.14
Pervasive though the agricultural metaphor is, Fisher does not allow it to
overpower the prelocutions image of light: when he later remarks that the
church is in the clere bryghtnes of faith, the visual effect of the former
image is still operative. Similarly, the figure of the sower in the main part
of the sermon is not allowed to remain merely analogous; the soil, the
weeds and stones and general agricultural aspects of the story for a while
suggest a vast metaphor, or rather a symbol of metaphysical reality, an
expression of actual divine operation, in much the same way as the storm
image of the 1521 sermon had been used to expound a physical fact as well
as metaphorically to illuminate a spiritual one: this sower is the sonne
of god, our sauiour Christe Iesu: and he is the very spirituall sonne of the

13Fisher, English Works, 146.

14Fisher, English Works, 156.
104 cecilia hatt

worlde That spreadeth his comfortable beames vpon the soules of

men.15 The light, we may say, is the primary image of Gods truth, while
the images of the sower-parable are valuable for their structural impor-
tance. The relationship expounded, between God the caller and the called
human being, and the treatment of the processes involved in believing or
not believing, have the highest possible Scriptural authority, being part of
Christs own exposition. Throughout his life, Bishop Fisher took the light-
giving and nourishing action of the sun as an image of the creative and
salvific action of God, and in this respect his attitude was no different in
1526 from what it had been in 1521. Nevertheless, his later sermon incorpo-
rates an acknowledgment that some people were envisaging a new reli-
gious identity, unmediated by existing ecclesiastical structures. Fishers
prelocution had asked two questions: What faith is sufficient for justifica-
tion? and What constitutes faith? For him the answer to the first ques-
tion lies within the Church. Hand in hand with justification comes unity, a
unity that embraces the past and the future, the Old and New Testaments
and which can be found only by a deliberate turning to the leadership of
the Church. The implications of this last point help to answer his second
question. Faith, according to Fisher, is an individual action of the will
which is validated by becoming a collective action. Belief, intellectual
effort and subsequent action are all part of a joint consciousness, which,
although it owes its being to the freely-given grace of God, is capable of
meritorious work in that it is free to reject grace and therefore free to
accept it. The authenticity of the Lutheran account of God, however, must
depend on the directly revelatory quality of a persons religious experi-
ence. This was quite contrary to Fishers conviction that the particularity
of human reason had a role to play in salvation history and that everything
in creation has, simply by virtue of being created, the potential for tran-
scendent reference. In so far as the Reformed epistemology regarded any
recourse to the findings of a natural aesthetic or rational ethic unneces-
sary to the believer, this prescinded from intellectual society in general,
and even, in a way, from a church.
It is generally assumed that, of Fishers two printed Pauls Cross ser-
mons, the earlier is the more successful and it is certainly true that its
structural clarity is more exposed, more available to view, so to speak. In
my edition of these sermons I have tended to acquiesce in that judgement.
However, on maturer consideration, the 1526 sermon now seems to me to

15Fisher, English Works, 156.

 the tree and the weed105

demonstrate some of Fishers greatest strengths: his use of the prelocution

and subsequent grasp of a complicated structure, his control over the
images and the degree to which they proliferate within the sermon. More
than this, the sermon concerning certain heretics shows us Fishers pastoral
character, straining every nerve faithfully to discharge his episcopal duty,
to meet the dissenter at the intellectual point where she happens to be.
Setting aside for a while the shelter of structural authority, John Fisher
directly addresses the one-to-one encounter between Christ and the
human individual, the private moment of choosing or rejecting belief, as
he would term it. The nurturing community of believers had been evoked
before by his imagery of dependable natural phenomena. Now the equally
natural, but less comforting, metaphor of growing plants threatened by
weeds offers a picture of a changed grouping, still a community, but one
not bolstered by exterior structures, seeking to maintain its integrity by
means of the willed adherence of its separate members.
Charles Taylor has coined the term social imaginary which he explains
as a common understanding that makes possible common practices and
a widely shared sense of legitimacy.16 In the mental environment within
which Fisher grew up, a text, whether of Scripture or anything else, was
not in the first instance an object of critical survey, but another rendering
of truths which people had all their lives been taught orally, visually and
imaginatively. The picture of a light shining to guide some people and
throwing others into relief, the scene of a field of wheat being weeded,
watered and harvested, were part of a social imaginary within which they
could watch an argument taking shape, and thus in which legitimacy
owed much to the processes of logic. That a teaching should remain
unchanged for centuries argues powerfully for its validity; temporal conti-
nuity reinforces the use of typology, a significant part of the bishops argu-
ment. Such an environment took for granted the continuity of the Church
Militant, Suffering and Triumphant, the correspondence between exter-
nal sign and internal verity, which found its expression in medieval sacra-
mentalism; the procession from reason to will to action, all perceived
in the light of the knowledge of God. It was a correspondence expressed
also in the continuity of body and spirit: Fisher would have complained
that the Lutheran doctrine of the uselessness of good works put an enmity
between the two. This made up the social imaginary of the 1520s, a

16See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007), 146
etpassim.
106 cecilia hatt

community of time as well as of place. Fisher, perhaps more than most,

seems to have glimpsed what it might be like if that imaginary became,
in Charles Taylors term, disembedded. Perhaps at this distance in time
we cannot sufficiently appreciate how horrifying that vision must have
seemed to him.
 CHAPTER FIVE

PAULS CROSS AND THE CRISIS OF THE 1530S

Richard Rex

Long before the reign of Henry VIII, the role of Pauls Cross in shaping
English opinion, in London and beyond, had been well established. It was
from Pauls Cross, on 22 June 1483, that Dr Ralph Shaw presented Richard
IIIs case against the right of his nephews to succeed to the throne.1 A gen-
eration earlier, in 1440, a nervy government had put up a friar to preach
there when popular agitation threatened to make a saint of a man burned
for heresy.2 In 1382 a friar had followed up the synodical condemnation of
John Wycliffe with a sermon reporting the reconciliation of a Wycliffite
sympathiser, Sir Cornelius Cloyne, won back to the orthodox doctrine of
the eucharist after a miraculous vision of the consecrated host as bleeding
flesh.3 So it is hardly surprising that this pulpit was used to inaugurate
Henry VIIIs campaign against Luther in May 1521, when John Fisher,
Bishop of Rochester, preached a lengthy sermon to accompany the prom-
ulgation of the papal condemnation of Martin Luther. The burning of
Luthers books in sight of the booksellers whose shops lined the square
was a pointed message, as was the public announcement that Henry had
himself written a book refuting Luthers heresies. The ceremony was
attended by the cream of church and state, and Cardinal Wolsey held up a
copy of the kings book for the crowds to cheer.4 However, while events
such as this underline the role of Pauls Cross as a platform for the regime,
it is important to remember that prior to 1534 the Cross was by no means
under direct royal control. It was from Pauls Cross that the Abbot of

1Charles Ross, Richard III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 88.
2R. Rex, Which is Wyche? Lollardy and Sanctity in Lancastrian London, in Martyrs
and Martyrdom in England, c. 14001700, ed. Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer
(Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 88106, at 95.
3Knightons Chronicle, 13371396, ed. G.H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),
26063.
4Richard Rex, The English campaign against Luther in the 1520s, in Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, ser. 5.39 (1989), 85106. For Fishers sermon, see the critical edition
in English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (14691535): sermons and other writings,
15201535, ed. Cecilia A. Hatt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 48144; and in chap-
ter one above.
108 richard rex

Winchcombe, Richard Kidderminster, provoked the church-state crisis of

1515 by arguing that the 1512 statute restricting benefit of clergy was con-
trary to divine and canon law.5
The 1530s were to see some sharp changes of direction in religious poli-
tics, as Henry turned successively against his wife, the pope, his second
wife, the monasteries, and graven images. These changes were all reflected
at Pauls Cross, and the political tensions of a decade of crisis and contro-
versy led the Crown to seek increasing control over that pulpit. That said,
we should not forget that most of the preaching there in the 1520s and
1530s, as at any time, was probably routine and unremarkable. Theologians
from Oxford and Cambridge were obliged to preach there as a condition
of graduation.6 In the 1530s over 100 graduates from Cambridge needed
to take their turn.7 Not one of these graduation sermons is definitely
recorded, nor are any of them known to survive.
Indeed, few Pauls Cross sermons of any kind survive from the 1530s,
and while we know of several dozen others, the story that can be pieced
together is necessarily patchy. Nevertheless, a thorough re-examination of
the evidence for Pauls Cross preaching in this decade enables us to offer a
fuller picture than has previously been sketched. This is partly because
new evidence has come to light, including the discovery of a previously
unidentified Pauls Cross sermon in manuscript, and partly because many
of the papers and sources on which Millar MacLure based his handlist of
sermons for these years have been misdated, miscalendared, and misin-
terpreted in ways that have obscured the full import of the evidence.8 It is
now possible both to correct MacLures list and to clarify numerous details
in a way that gives a fuller understanding of the struggles in and over that
pulpit between the Bishop of London (John Stokesley), the kings Vicar

5Relationes quorundam casuum selectorum ex libris Roberti Keilwey (London: T. Wight,

1602), STC 14901, fol. 181r. The best modern account of this crisis is J.D.M. Derrett, The
Affairs of Richard Hunne and Friar Standish, in Thomas More, The Apology, ed. J.B. Trapp,
in The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 9 (New Haven & London: Yale University
Press, 1979), 21546, esp. 22527.
6See D.R. Leader, The University to 1546, in A History of the University of Cambridge, vol.1
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 174; and S.L. Greenslade, The Faculty of
Theology, 295334 of The Collegiate University, ed. J.K. McConica in The History of the
University of Oxford, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), at 31112.
7See Grace Book , ed. W.G. Searle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pas-
sim. Cambridge theologians required to preach at the Cross included Nicholas Shaxton in
1530 (247), George Day in 1533 (272), Matthew Parker in 1535 (296), and John Scory in 1539
(33738).
8M. MacLure, The Pauls Cross Sermons, 15341642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1958), 18488, gives a list of the sermons delivered there in the 1530s.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s109

General in Spirituals (Thomas Cromwell), and the latters cats-paw, John

Hilsey, Bishop of Rochester. And this in turn leads us to the startling con-
clusion that preaching at Pauls Cross became in the 1530s an exercise
fraught with risk.
The new decade opened with the religious policy of the 1520s still in full
swing.9 On the first Sunday of Advent 1531, a new list of forbidden books
was proclaimed at Pauls Cross, doubtless with a suitable sermon.10 The
following year, however, saw a change. As Henrys matrimonial problems
became public knowledge, pulpit wars broke out across the land, and
Pauls Cross was the premier battleground. In March 1532 Henry had
someone arrested for preaching against the divorce in the great church.11
Later that year an unnamed abbot (possibly Dr John Capon, alias Salcot,
Abbot of St Benets Hulme, who was to become Bishop of Bangor in 1533,
a frequent preacher at the Cross) preached there in favour of the divorce,
inspiring an Observant Franciscan to offer to refute him from the same
pulpit.12 And Thomas Abells published attack on the kings case, his
Invicta Veritas, attracted considerable interesteven the king read it,
until the mounting fury evident in his marginalia got the better of him.
Abell himself had preached publicly to the same effect and ended up in
custody as a result.13 On Sunday 3 November, another Observant Friar,
John Forest, was using Pauls Cross to oppose Henrys policy. It might seem
strangely prescient that he forecast the pulling down of churches as a con-
sequence of what was afoot, but he was probably developing a thin end of

9See Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989), 15163 for the struggle against heresy in the city of London in the 1520s.
10Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J.S. Brewer,
J.Gairdner, and R.H. Brodie (London: Longmans, 18621932), vol. 5, appendix 18 (hence-
forth cited as LP with volume and item numbers).
11LP 5.879, Chapuys to Charles V, 20 March 1532. Chapuys presumably meant St Pauls.
Susan Brigden identifies this preacher as Dr Coke in London and the Reformation, 209.
Laurence Cooke had succeeded the early evangelical Dr Thomas Farman as rector of All
Hallows, Honey Lane, in autumn 1528. For Cookes presentation to All Hallows on 31 Oct.
1528, see Novum Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense, ed. G. Hennessy
(London: S. Sonnenschein, 1898), 77. Cooke was imprisoned in the Tower, and was still
there in October 1532. See LP 5.1467, Whalley to Cromwell, 23 Oct. 1532.
12LP 5.142, John Laurence to Cromwell, no date, reports the offer made by Friar
Robinson.
13LP 5.1256, Chapuys to Charles V, 26 Aug. 1532, reports his arrest and the efforts to sup-
press his book. LP 5.1325, Dr Ortiz to Cobos, Rome, ca. Sept.1532, shows that Abell was also
an active preacher. LP 6.19, Chapuys to Charles V, 3 Jan. 1533, notes Abells release on condi-
tion of keeping silent. See Thomas Abell, Invicta Veritas (Luneberg [i.e. Antwerp]: [M. de
Keyser], 1532. STC 61). For Henry VIIIs annotations, see Henry VIII: Man and Monarch, ed.
S. Doran (London: British Library, 2009), 135, with images from Henrys copy, now in
Lambeth Palace Library.
110 richard rex

the wedge argument from the dissolution of the priory of Holy Trinity,
Aldgate, which had taken place back in February.14 Forests own decision
to deliver this frankly provocative sermon may have been inspired by
Henrys decision to take Anne Boleyn with him to his cross-channel sum-
mit conference with Francis I of France at Boulogne. The trip was plainly
designed to harvest diplomatic support for the divorce, and the publica-
tion just beforehand of The Glasse of the Truthe, a punchy vernacular dia-
logue that argued strongly against marriage to a brothers widow, left no
one in any doubt as to Henrys intentions.15 Cromwells informant, a dissi-
dent friar named Richard Lyst, advised that the Chancellor of St Pauls be
forbidden to allow Forest to preach there again.16 This was the first hint of
some attempt to take control of the venue.
There was never any doubt as to the capacity of the crown to put chosen
men into the Pauls Cross pulpit on special occasions. One such was Easter
Day (Sunday 13 April) 1533, when the Cross was used to announce for the
first time the kings hitherto secret marriage to Anne Boleyn. According to
the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, disgruntled listeners left the
square in droves at this announcement, which took the form of prayers for
King Henry and Queen Anne. Henry himself was livid at this public dis-
sent, and personally berated the Lord Mayor, giving orders that no such
thing was ever to happen again.17 The audience, as well as the preacher,
were to be under control.
The preacher who had broken the news was a leading friar, Dr George
Browne (later Archbishop of Dublin), and the sermon he preached that
day probably survives. For a Pauls Cross sermon setting out the arguments
against marriage to a brothers wife is found among the State Papers (cal-
endared at February 1534).18 This sermon has recently been ascribed to
John Stokesley and redated to July 1535, on the alleged grounds that it
corresponds closely to an account given by Chapuys of a sermon preached

14LP 5.1525, Richard Lyst OFM Obs to Cromwell, 7 Nov. 1532. The Sunday before that was
3 Nov. 1532. See Brigden, London and the Reformation, 213 for Forests allusion to the sur-
render of Holy Trinity, Aldgate. For the surrender itself, see LP 5.823, 24 Feb. 1532.
15R. Rex, Redating Henry VIIIs The Glasse of the Truthe, The Library, 7.4 (2003), 1627,
shows that the tract was indeed published in autumn 1532, and not, as has been suggested,
in 1531.
16LP 5.1525, Richard Lyst OFM Obs to Cromwell, 7 Nov. 1532.
17LP 6.391, Chapuys to Charles V, 27 April 1533. This testimony may of course be coloured
by Chapuyss own undisguised hatred of Anne.
18SP6/6, fols. 9098 (calendared under 1534 at LP 7.266). The text has helpfully been
edited by A.A. Chibi, Henry VIII and his Marriage to his Brothers Wife: the Sermon of
Bishop John Stokesley of 11 July 1535, Historical Research 67 (1994), 4056.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s111

by Stokesley on Sunday 11 July 1535.19 However, the arguments for this attri-
bution do not stand up to close scrutiny. According to Chapuys, Stokesleys
sermon not only argued against the validity of Henrys marriage to
Catherine but also denounced the authority of the pope and those who
suffered death in its defence (most notably John Fisher and Thomas More,
who had been executed on 22 June and 6 July respectively).20 But the man-
uscript sermon in question confines itself exclusively to the subject of the
marriage. While it does deny the capacity of the pope to issue a dispensa-
tion for marriage to a brothers wife, there is not a word against papal
authority as such. And its entirely matter-of-fact references to various
popesusing that titlemake it unlikely to be later than December 1533,
when Henrys government ordered Englishmen to talk, henceforth, not of
popes but of bishops of Rome.21 There is not even a hint of a break with
Rome, still less of anyone having suffered death on that account. When
Stokesleys own chaplain, Simon Matthew, preached a sermon on the
supremacy in June 1535, he referred to the pope exclusively as the bishop
of Rome (11 times), and denounced Fisher and More by name for their
dampnable opinions.22 In any case, the clinching argument against the
identification of this manuscript with Stokesleys 1535 sermon is the bish-
ops firm, polite, and disingenuous refusal to furnish Cromwell with a writ-
ten copy of his text, on the grounds that he always preached extempore
and that it would be damaging if a printed version were issued which dif-
fered, as it must inevitably do, from what he had actually said.23

19Chibi, Henry VIII and his Marriage, 4043. Although Chibi identifies the hand of the
manuscript as Stokesleys (4243 and note 19), comparison of its script with that of per-
sonal letters signed by Stokesley reveals several distinctive differences in letter formation,
besides one very marked difference in spelling: in his correspondence, Stokesley spells the
word other as odre (see below, at note 45), while the manuscript sermon invariably uses
the form oother, suggesting that the writers pronounced the word in rather different ways.
Chibi also suggests that the sermon provides information that could refer only to Stokesley
(p. 43), implying that only Stokesley could have written it. However, this information is
merely a reference to the determinationys off universitees, which was of course a printed
book available in the public domain.
20Chapuys to Charles V, 11 July 1535, LP 8.1019.
21See Chibi, Henry VIII and his Marriage, 53, for pope Damasus, Gelasius the pope,
and pope Celestin. For the instruction not to say pope, see LP 6.1510, Chapuys to Charles
V, 9 Dec. 1533; and for more on this see R. Rex, The Crisis of Obedience: Gods Word and
Henrys Reformation, Historical Journal 39 (1996), 86394, at 87980.
22See Simon Matthew, A Sermon made in the cathedrall churche of saynt Paule at
London, the XXVII. day of Iune, Anno. 1535. (London: Berthelet, 1535. STC 1765), passim, for
the bishop of Rome; and sig. C8r for doctour Fysshare and syre Thomas More.
23Thomas Bedyll to Cromwell, 15 July 1535, SP1/94, fol. 50r (LP 8.1043), reporting
Stokesleys demurrer. See also Stokesley to Cromwell, 17 July 1535, SP1/94, fols. 98r-99v (LP
8.1054), at 98r, explaining his refusal to supply a written text.
112 richard rex

Everything about the sermon seems to point towards April 1533. It can-
not be earlier, as it makes explicit reference to Convocations declaration,
agreed at the beginning of that month, that marriage to a brothers wife
was contrary to divine law. It also seems to allude to the Act against
Appeals to Rome, which had passed in March 1533.24 Moreover, it is hard
to believe that the sermon can postdate the annulment of Henrys first
marriage on 23 May 1533, for if Cranmer had already delivered his judge-
ment, it would have been strange for a sermon such as this not to mention
it. Its argument, which can be easily summarised, looks very like an
attempt to prepare public opinion for the imminent annulment. After an
introduction outlining the necessity of the law to counteract the effects of
the Fall, it draws the classic distinction between the moral, judicial and
ceremonial aspects of the law of the Old Testament, emphasising that the
moral law is immutable. The Levitical laws regulating marriage are classi-
fied as moral rather than judicial, and from this it follows that sexual inter-
course with a brothers wyff carnally known before off hys oother brother
is a greet offence agaynst Godd (47). The preacher then buttresses
his argument with evidence from scripture (4849) and church councils
(4952) before arguing that no human authority can dispense from this
prohibition and that it is the duty of the metropolitan bishop to enforce
this law within his jurisdiction (5255). Although it finishes with a brisk
dismissal of the familiar objections to the royal case from Deuteronomy
and other scriptural texts (5556), it is the insistence on the duty of arch-
bishops to enforce the Levitical law which ties it firmly to the tribunal
Cranmer was about to convene at Dunstable.
Pauls Cross would be used to equally dramatic effect towards the end of
1533. On 23 November, John Capon preached there to denounce the Holy
Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, who at that time was easily the most
outspoken and most widely known, and arguably the most dangerous,
opponent of the divorce.25 Elizabeth Barton was a nun of St Sepulchres

24The preacher expresses his confidence that listeners of hygh discretion and lernyng
will have been satisfied by the awtenticall order whych after grett deliberation hath been
takyn both in the convocation and in the parleamentt (Chibi, Henry VIII and his Marriage,
47; further references in brackets in this paragraph are to this edition). Between 26 March
and 4 April 1533 Southern Convocation debated the principle of marriage to a deceased
brothers wife and the question of whether the marriage between Arthur and Catherine
had been consummated. See D. Wilkins, Concilia Magn Britanni et Hiberni (4 vols.
London: R. Gosling, F. Gyles, et al, 1737), vol. III, 75657.
25Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London, ed. J.G. Nichols (London, 1852. Camden Society,
53), 37. L.P. Whatmore, The Sermon against the Holy Maid of Kent and her Adherents,
English Historical Review 58 (1943), 46375, presents the text in modernised spelling.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s113

in Canterbury whose experience of illness and miraculous healing in the

1520s had left her with a sense of being a vehicle of divine revelation to her
contemporaries. Her visions, miracles, and prophecies won her a wide fol-
lowing not only among the common people but also among the clergy and
aristocracy. Around 1530 her revelations had developed a political edge as
they offered dire warnings about the dangers that would ensue if Henry
repudiated Catherine and married Anne. Her wide influence made her a
very real threat, and she was arrested in 1533 with several of her closest
associates. Under imprisonment and interrogation she apparently con-
fessed her imposture, and the result was her public humiliation at the
Cross. The Holy Maids appearance as a penitentlike so many heretics
before herwas an emphatic proclamation of Henrys triumph. Capons
sermon portrayed her as a wilful fraud, deluded by a sense of her own
importance and manipulated for malicious ends by a cabal of corrupt
monks and friars. In a tirade whose keywords are false and feigned, he
ridiculed her visions and prophecies, insinuated that her relations with
her spiritual advisers were far from purely spiritual, and made it omi-
nously clear that placing any credence in her would be construed as trea-
son. Her false miracles and feigned revelations, he concluded, had done
more than anything else to foment opposition to Henrys divorce and new
marriage.26 According to Chapuys, the Holy Maids humiliation was to be
repeated on the two following Sundays, after which she was to be taken
away to repeat it further in other places. But his information was perhaps
imperfect, as the show was already in Canterbury on Sunday 7 December,
where Nicholas Heath delivered a lightly amended version of Capons
sermon.27
An intriguing coda to this story shows that the regime was now keeping
a close eye on Pauls Cross. It has not previously been realised that John
Rudd, a former fellow of St Johns College, Cambridge, offered some ill-
judged comments in mitigation of the Holy Maids offences in a sermon at
the Cross on Sunday 28 December, and found himself a prisoner in the
Counter by Tuesday. Until now this episode was thought to have taken
place some months later, as the letter in which he explained himself, and
sought some much-needed help, has hitherto been dated to March 1534.

26Whatmore, Sermon, 475. The words false and feigned (with variants) appear 32
times each in the text, much more than any other pejoratives deployed.
27LP 6.1460, Chapuys to Charles V, 24 Nov. 1533. See D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer
(New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1996), 106, for the events in Canterbury and
for some helpful observations on the text of the sermon, which was amended by Cranmer
himself.
114 richard rex

But that letter should properly be assigned to 30 December 1533.28 By his

own account, Rudd was concerned that, notwithstanding the nuns con-
fession of her misdeeds, various false insinuations had been made against
her by Capon, which Rudd had then used in his own sermon as an exam-
ple of the sort of malicious gossip he was urging his audience to avoid. His
explanation is somewhat tortuous and far from straightforwardly or
entirely convincing. The fact that he was a former fellow of St Johns
College will not have helped him. One of his contemporaries on the fel-
lowship, Henry Gold, had become one of the nuns closest associates, and
was to share her terrible fate, while the college as a whole was marked as
suspect in the regimes eyes by the influence within it of John Fisher, who
had overseen its foundation and continued to watch over it keenly until
his own imprisonment in spring 1534.29 Rudd probably remained in cus-
tody for some months, as a letter from Thomas Cranmer to Thomas
Cromwell of 28 April 1534 reports that Rudd had been persuaded to take
the oath to the succession.30 This may imply some initial reluctance on his
part. But the Holy Maid and her associates, including Henry Gold, had
been butchered on Monday 20 April, with their severed heads then dis-
played on poles at the city gates.31 That was a powerful object lesson, and
John Rudd made his submission almost immediately.
Ever since Millar MacLure first compiled his handlist of sermons
preached at Pauls Cross, it has been thought that autumn 1534 saw an

28SP1/82, fol. 236 (LP 7.303), John Rudd to Electo Chestrensi, dated crastina diui Tome.
Rowland Lee was elected Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (a diocese confusingly known
as Chester in late-medieval England) on 10 Jan. 1534 and consecrated on 19 April. This led
James Gairdner (editor of LP 7) to identify the feast of St Thomas as that of Thomas Aquinas
on 7 March, the only feast of a St Thomas between those dates. However, this feast is only
rarely found in English calendars, and even then takes second place to the feast of Felicity
and Perpetua the same day. I have never seen an English document dated by the feast of
St Thomas Aquinas. As Lees promotion had been rumoured for months (LP 6.1109
and 1226, 10 Sept. and 6 Oct. 1533), and he was being called Elect of Chester from mid-
November (LP 6.1433, 1514, and 1531), crastina diui Tome evidently refers to the feast of St
Thomas of Canterbury, 29 Dec. As Rudd wrote of having preached Superiore dominica,
that puts his sermon on Sunday 28 Dec., making it a much more immediate response to
events.
29See R. Rex, The Sixteenth Century, in St Johns College, Cambridge: A History, ed.
P. Linehan (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 592, at 529 for Fishers relationship with the
college. See SP1/233, fols. 187 onwards (a badly damaged tax assessment of the University
of Cambridge, ca. 152223), at fol. 195r for a list of the fellows of St Johns, which includes
both Henry Gold and John Rudd.
30See Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. J.E. Cox (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1846. Parker Society. The Works of Thomas Cranmer, vol. II),
287. See also Brigden, London and the Reformation, 257.
31C. Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England, ed. W.D. Hamilton (2 vols. London 187577.
Camden Society, new ser. 11 & 20), vol. 1, 24.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s115

episcopal propaganda offensive in favour of the royal supremacy launched

from that pulpit.32 In fact this was not the case. The idea was based on a
claim made thirty-five years later by John Foxe in his account of the year
1534: Duryng this Parlament tyme, euery Sonday preached at Paules
Crosse a Byshop, which declared the Pope, not to be the head of the
Churche.33 But Foxes chronology here is unreliable. There is no other evi-
dence for such a series of sermons having been preached in autumn 1534,
and it is inconceivable that such a high-profile series could have passed
entirely unnoticed at the time. That said, there was such a series of ser-
mons by bishops, and it was noticedbut not in autumn 1534. The ser-
mons Foxe dates to 1534 were preached in early 1536, as we know from the
precise dates given in Charles Wriothesleys chronicle.34 We shall return to
them in their proper place.
Preaching of the royal supremacy did not begin in earnest until Henry
sent an encyclical letter to his bishops on 3 June 1535, instructing them to
arrange sermons against the usurped authority of the bishop of Rome.35
The earliest surviving sermon of this campaign was preached on Sunday
13 June 1535 (although thanks to a printers error the date has hitherto
been taken as 27 June) by Dr Simon Matthew, a canon of St Pauls, and
itwas printed shortly afterwards (30 July 1535).36 Described as preached

32MacLure, Pauls Cross Sermons, 184.

33John Foxe, Actes and Monumentes (London: John Day, 1570. STC 11223), 1200. It is evi-
dent from his placement of this report that he thought these sermons were given during
the Parliament of early 1534 which passed the Act of Succession, and not where MacLure
placed them, during the autumn Parliament that passed the Act of Supremacy. Foxe does
not mention these sermons in his earlier 1563 recension.
34Wrioth. 1, 3435. Foxe does not mention these sermons under 1536, though MacLure
lists them correctly under that year in Pauls Cross Sermons, 18586.
35G.R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 23132,
and references there. Elton ascribes the encyclical to Cromwell, but his references show
that it went out under Henrys name.
36Simon Matthew, A Sermon made in the cathedrall churche of saynt Paule at London,
the XXVII. day of Iune, Anno. 1535. (London: Berthelet, 1535. STC 17656). The dating of the
sermon is not as straightforward as the title-page might suggest. The colophon is dated
30July 1535, so if both these dates were correct, the printing would have been turned round
exceptionally quickly. But Matthew took as his text 1 Peter 5:67 (sig. A.ii.v), taken from
the epistle for the 3rd Sunday after Trinity (1 Peter 5:611), which in 1535 fell on 13 June.
Moreover, Matthew recited the text of 1 Peter 5:511 almost verbatim (interestingly enough,
closely following Tyndales version), observing that This is the englyshe of the Epistle, that
we rede this present sonday (sig. A.v.v). Finally, in alluding to John Fisher and Thomas
More (C7v-C8r), Matthew speaks of them in the present tense, praying that our lord gyve
them grace to be repentaunt (C8r). This prayer would have been redundant in the case of
Fisher had the sermon been preached on 27 June, as Fisher was executed on 22 June. It is
therefore clear that Matthew preached his sermon on 13 June and the printer simply got
the date wrong.
116 richard rex

in the cathedrall, it is presumably a Pauls Cross sermon delivered

indoors because of heavy summer rain.37 Its agenda is too obviously
public for it to have been a rival sermon to anything preached outdoors
that same day, and the preacher was a regular performer at the Cross.
Dr Matthew, who often appears in the records of the 1530s as Dr or
Mr Simons, was a Cambridge theologian who enjoyed the patronage of
John Stokesley, Bishop of London.38 His sermon is almost certainly the
one referred to by Thomas Bedyll in a letter to Cromwell of July 1535, in
which he explains why Stokesley was reluctant to supply a written version
of his own extempore sermon of 11 July, and adds that Mr Simons would
have sent his sermon already except that he was preparing another Pauls
Cross sermon for the following Sunday (18 July).39
Simon Matthews Sermon made in the cathedrall churche of saynt Paule
is therefore the first surviving pulpit expression of the new ideology of
unquestioning obedience to the prince which was to lie at the heart of the
Henrician Reformation. This point is pressed from the start. However
great the spiritual privileges Christians enjoy, they have no reason to
thynke them selfe at liberte to disobey their superiours.40 Matthew steers
a careful course through barely charted territory, emphasising the unity of
the Christian church across many nations (A7v-B2r) while observing that
Christ aloneand definitely not the Bishop of Romeis the head of that
church (B2r). Scriptural testimony in favour of political obedience is then
cited from Peter, Paul, and the gospels (B3r-6r) before Matthew turns
finally to an assault on papal claims. The classic Petrine text of Matthew
16:18 (Thou art Peter, and upon this rock ) is interpreted in what was
becoming classically Henrician fashion as addressed to the apostles col-
lectively rather than to Peter alone (C1v-3v). Matthew illustrates this with
a well-judged analogy, arguing that Peters role among the apostles was

37Stokesleys sermon of 26 April had been delivered indoors for this reason, as was the
custom when it was wet; and May that year was the wettest May in living memory. See
Brigden, London and the Reformation, 234, note 110. (It sounds as though the English sum-
mer weather in 1535 was akin to that of 2012.)
38For Matthews London benefices, see A.A. Chibi, Henry VIIIs Conservative Scholar:
Bishop John Stokesley and the Divorce, Royal Supremacy and Doctrinal Reform (Bern: P.Lang,
1997), 142, note 121. I am unable to explain why Matthew was frequently referred to as
DrSimons or Dr Symons, but there is one other similar case. Until his consecration as
Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner was often referred to as Dr Stephens.
39Thomas Bedyll to Cromwell, 15 July 1535, SP1/94, fol. 46r (LP 8.1043). Stokesleys
sermon of 11 July 1535 is the one that Chibi erroneously identified with the text at SP6/6,
fols. 9098 (LP 7.266), for which see above at notes 1819.
40Matthew, A Sermon made in the cathedrall, sig. A3v. Further signature references to
this sermon in this paragraph are given in brackets in the text.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s117

akin to that of the Recorder of London as an appointed representative or

spokesman for the city in its dealings with its true lord, the king. He
adduces patristic evidence for the thesis that bishops, like their predeces-
sors the apostles, are essentially equal in authority (C4v-7r). At once
lamenting and condemning the intransigent opposition to the royal will
displayed by John Fisher and Thomas More (C7v-8r), he insists that his
audience should neither follow their example nor fear any excommunica-
tion issued by the pope (C8r-v). That said, he urges restraint upon his fel-
low preachers, reproving the wild talk of the harlotte of Babylon, or the
beaste of Rome typical of those he regards as fitter to preche at Paulis
wharfe then at Paulis crosse (D1v; a turn of phrase which surely shows that
his own sermon was indeed intended for delivery there). The peroration
reiterates the need for obedience to God and king (D2r-v).
Matthews sermon had a second context in a pulpit debate over prayer
for the dead that, as Susan Wabuda has shown, was played out at Pauls
Cross and elsewhere in 1535.41 He criticises the preacher from the previous
week for ostentatiously omitting the customary prayer for the souls of the
faithful departed and reminds his hearers that he has himself in times
paste confirmed the validity of such prayer with both scriptural and
patristic evidence.42 This comment not only suggests that Matthew was
already a regular preacher at the Cross, but also places his sermon in an
ongoing exchange there. Shortly afterwards, Bishop Stokesley sought to
appoint Matthew to preach there again, on Sunday 18 July, in place of
Cranmers nominee, the Provincial of the Blackfriars, John Hilsey. This was
because Stokesley suspected that Hilsey would mainteigne his undiscrete
faschion of remembrance of the soules departed.43 Stokesley had himself

41S. Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2002), 5558. Chibi, Henry VIIIs Conservative Scholar, 14144, gives a help-
ful account of the preaching on this topic at Pauls Cross, but errs at some points, largely
owing to the miscalendaring of several of the documents in the case.
42Simon Matthew, Sermon, sig. A5v-A6r: And all though the laste sonday the preacher
coude not fynde in his conscience to pray for the soules departed, saying, that he thought
his prayer shuld nothynge auayle them: yet I will desyre you to praye for them. (This pas-
sage is another of the internal indications that this sermon was meant for Pauls Cross.)
43Stokesley to Cromwell, 17 July 1535, SP1/94, fols. 98r-99v (LP 8.1054), at 98v. Stokesley
referred to Hilsey only as this prouinciall of the freres. James Gairdner (editor of LP 8)
reckoned this was George Browne, Provincial of the Austin Friars, but Susan Brigden
rightly corrected this to Hilsey in the light of Hilseys undated letter to Cromwell, mistak-
enly calendared a year early at LP 7.1643 (from which we learn that Hilsey had been nomi-
nated to preach by Cranmer). See Brigden, London and the Reformation, 234. This letter
belongs to 1535 because of its reference to hym that came from Norwych (see below,
note 46).
118 richard rex

preached in defence of prayer for the dead on the Sunday before May
Day (Sunday 25 April),44 and Hilseys indiscretion was obviously aimed at
him. But the bishop evidently still felt that Pauls Cross was under his con-
trol, and therefore sought to keep Hilsey out of his pulpit and stop heresy
being preached in his diocese. However, at the last minute, Cromwell
intervened in this tussle and, at Hilseys instigation, overruled Stokesley to
appoint a third preacher in place of both the previous nominees. This
intervention has previously escaped attention owing to a misreading of
the bishops difficult handwriting. Stokesley noted that Cromwell had pro-
vided an odre for the pulpit, and this had been interpreted as though
Cromwell was providing an order. But Stokesley means an other, that is,
another preacher.45 This other can be identified as Edmund Harcocke OP,
Prior of the Norwich Blackfriars, who was in trouble that summer over his
preaching about the royal supremacy in his home city, which was deemed
to have been less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic.46 His appearance at
the Cross was presumably acceptable to Cromwell because it not only
compelled Harcocke himself to make his position clear but also took the
focus off prayer for the dead (which he would have reckoned a side issue),
and put it firmly back on the headline topic of the moment: the royal
supremacy.

44Foxe, Actes and Monumentes (1570), 1439, specifies the day, but gets the year doubly
wrong, giving it as 1534 while adding that it was about the first begynnyng of Queene Anne
Bullen! Foxes interest in this sermon is that it elicited a response from one Thomas Meriall
which led to his appearance as a penitent at Pauls Cross on 19 Nov. 1535. See Brigden,
London and the Reformation, 272 for the case and for the correction of the date.
45LP 8.1054, summarising Stokesleys letter, gives order. But order makes little sense in
the context, as Stokesley goes on to air his misgivings about what will be in the sermon.
Once odre is read as other, the confusion and obscurity are dispelled. See SP1/105, fol. 198r
(LP 11.186), for a similar use of odres (for others) in a letter of Stokesleys.
46Stokesley to Cromwell, 17 July 1535, SP1/94, fols. 98r-99v (LP 8.1054) at 98v for
MrSymons and 99r for Cromwells intervention. The identification of the third preacher
as Harcocke (a Dominican, and therefore subject to Hilseys provincial jurisdiction)
depends on two letters. The first is Hilsey to Cromwell, undated but dateable to 17 July 1535,
SP1/88, fol. 72r (LP 7.1643), in which Hilsey tells Cromwell of Stokesleys efforts to stop him
preaching the next day (i.e. Sunday 18 July), but adds that he had not intended to do so,
wishing instead to have hym to preche that came from Norwych. The second is Richard
Ingworth to Cromwell of 1 May 1535 (SP1/83, fol. 182r, mistakenly calendared under 1534 at
LP 7.595), which reports that Harcocke had preached unsoundly in Norwich on Easter
Monday (and encloses a copy of the sermon). See also Roger Townsend to Cromwell,
20May (SP1/84, fol. 69r, mistakenly calendared under 1534 at LP 7.694); and a report of
another of Harcockes sermons, preached on 5 May 1535 (LP 8.667). This is the only docu-
ment that gives the year. Piecing together Harcockes story is made very difficult by the
absence of clear or full dates on several of the documents in the case, which has led to their
being bound and calendared in inappropriate places.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s119

Stokesleys attempt to hinder evangelical preaching at the Cross back-

fired heavily. For Cromwell did not confine himself to overruling the bish-
ops authority on that one occasion, but, on 20 October 1535, transferred
responsibility for the selection of preachers at Pauls Cross to Hilsey.47
Hilsey, in turn, was very much under the thumb of Cromwell and Cranmer.
Thus Cranmer nominated his own chaplain, Dr Francis Mallet, to preach
there on the fourth Sunday of Epiphany (30 January 1536). Mallet had
already done sterling work preaching the supremacy through Canterbury
diocese in autumn 1535.48 The chaplain, it turned out, was the warm-up
act for the bishop. Cranmer himself preached at the Cross a week later on
6 February, raising the rhetorical temperature by explaining at inordinate
length that the Pope was that same Antichrist who was to herald the Last
Judgement and the end of the world.49
Cranmer thus introduced that series of Pauls Cross sermons by bish-
ops, which (as noted above) was misdated to 1534 by John Foxe. At first
sight it seems puzzling that this weighty series of sermons was delivered
more than a year after the enactment of the royal supremacy. But the
explanation probably lies in the death of Catherine of Aragon on 7 January
1536. The point of these sermons was to emphasise that her death did not
herald the reconciliation with Rome for which many yearned. Such hopes
were understandable. After all, it was Catherine who was the problem:
once she was dead, there was no longer any reason to oppose Henrys mar-
riage to Anne. What the Lenten sermons of 1536 show is that the Break
with Rome was a solution that had outgrown its problem. What had begun
as an expedient had become a principle. Henry was more in love with his
royal supremacy than with any of his wives.
The names of the bishops who followed Cranmer were Hilsey, Longland,
Tunstall, Latimer, Shaxton, and Capon (Bishop of Bangor). The most

47Brigden, London and the Reformation, 23435, citing BL Add. MS 48022, fols. 8788.
As Brigden shows, this was just part of a wider process by which Cromwell undermined
Stokesleys jurisdiction in his own diocese (23538).
48Cranmer to Cromwell, 18 Jan. 1536, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas
Cranmer, 31819. Mallets sermon may have been in fulfilment of the Cambridge grace for
his DD, which was granted in 1535, after his appointment as Master of Michaelhouse. See
Grace Book , 300. Cranmer thanks Cromwell for his help with this in the above letter.
49Pole to Priuli, 24 March 1536, in Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, 5 vols. (Brixi: J.-M.
Rizzardi, 174457), vol. I, 44049, at 444, citing a letter from England of 25 February which
reported that three bishops had preached about papal authority, adding that the first of
them was Cranmer, who had argued Episcopum Romanum esse Antichristum, & eundem,
qui diem Judicii, & finem sculi sit prcessurus (calendared at LP 10.631, where dated
3April 1536). See LP 10.283, Chapuys to Charles V, 10 Feb. 1536, for an earlier summary of
Cranmers argument.
120 richard rex

notable absentee was Stokesley. In this context, it is worth noting a report

from the interrogations of Geoffrey Pole in autumn 1538. According to
him, Stokesley once complained that he was but a syfer, for the Lord Privy
Seal first [i.e. Cromwell], and then the bishop of Rochester [i.e. Hilsey],
have appointed heretics to preach at Pauls Cross.50 Even Stokesley would
hardly have regarded Longland and Tunstall as heretics, but he would not
have been impressed with the other preachers that spring, as they were all
committed evangelicals. This roster of preachers was a slap in the face for
the bishop, a public demonstration that he no longer controlled the pulpit
outside his own cathedral.51
Stokesley would have been even less likely to nominate the man who
followed the bishops: Robert Singleton, chaplain to Anne Boleyn, who
gave an outspokenly evangelical sermon on 26 March. He held up the
example of Josiah as a refurbisher of the law and a hammer of idolatry,
freely used an evangelical vocabulary of promyse (353) and the lybertie
and frenesse of the gospell (352), and emphasised the incapacity of fallen
human nature for good, teaching a doctrine of grace that bordered on
faith alone. In addition he poured open scorn on shrines and pilgrimages
(359), monastic vows (364), and the cult of the saints (367). This sermon
has previously been dated either to 2 April 1535 or to 2 April 1536, but
ascertaining its true date of delivery is vital to understanding its signifi-
cance both in itself and as a case-study in the increasing delicacy of
preaching at the Cross.52 The title page states that the sermon was given
on the fourth sonday in lent 1535. Lent IV fell on 2 April in 1535 (new
style), and this at first sight seems the only possible date for the sermon,
because in 1536 Lent IV fell on 26 March, one day after the start of the new
year in the old style calendar (25 March) still widely used in Tudor
England. However, it is inconceivable that such an outspokenly reformist
sermon could have been given at Pauls Cross in spring 1535 without spur-
ring Stokesley into action: a bishop who was enraged at Hilseys hesitancy
over prayer for the dead would have been apoplectic at Singletons strident
assault on traditional religion. In any case, in spring 1535 this sermon

50LP 13.ii.695, no. 2.

51For a fuller account of this series of sermons, and in particular of Latimers contribu-
tion, see Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation, 13134.
52M. MacLure, Register of Sermons Preached at Pauls Cross 15341642, rev. & augm. by
J.C. Boswell & P. Pauls (Ottawa, 1989), 20, dates Singletons sermon to 2 April 1536, but
Torrance Kirby gives 2 April 1535 in his invaluable recent edition of this rare text: Robert
Singletons sermon at Pauls Cross in 1535: the true church and the Royal Supremacy,
Reformation and Renaissance Review 10 (2008), 34368, esp. 348. Further references to this
edition in this paragraph and the next are given as page numbers in brackets.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s121

would have been too far ahead of the royal agenda, which was dominated
at that time by the need to establish the royal supremacy. It therefore
seems likely that 1535 is a printers error, explicable by the fact that
26March was only one day into the new calendar year.53
Singletons sermon, which was manifestly intended to herald a pro-
gramme of church reform, fits firmly into the context of early 1536. Strongly
royalist and evangelical, it is rather like the sermon Hugh Latimer was to
preach a few months later at the opening of the 1536 Convocation.54
Singletons scorn for the monastic vow of chastity (they avowe that thinge
that is nat in their power) and his invocation in that context of Sodom
and Gomorrah (364) chime with the presentation to Parliament that
spring of the carefully distilled and edited findings of the monastic visita-
tions that Cromwell had set in motion. The fact that Singletons sermon
was almost immediately put into print with the combined arms of Henry
VIII and Anne Boleyn on the title page seems to confirm its programmatic
character. Very few Pauls Cross sermons of this decade were afforded the
accolade of publication in print. However, the fact that this sermon sur-
vives in only one copy suggests that it became a casualty of the dramatic
events that shook the Court in May. The sudden fall of Anne Boleyn,
brought to the scaffold on charges of adultery, incest, and treason, meant
that a pamphlet with her arms emblazoned on the front would retain
little market value. Whether the sermon was officially suppressed or
the bookseller simply cut his losses, it looks as though this pamphlet never
made it to market. And for a moment, at least, Annes fall made the
prospects look bleak for the sort of reform Singleton stood for. It inspired
a conservative backlash at the 1536 Convocation which in turn even
brought Stokesley back into play at Pauls Cross. Cromwell, though only
a layman, had chosen to assert his authority as Henry VIIIs Vicar General

53Moreover, as the regnal year began on 22 April, the sermon would have been preached
in one regnal year (27 Henry VIII) but not printed until the next (28 Henry VIII). It would
have been very easy for the printer to think of it as having been preached last year and
therefore to date it 1535.
54Wilkins, Concilia Magn Britanni et Hiberni, vol. III, 803, notes that this sermon
was preached at the opening ceremony, which seems to have been on 15 June. It was pub-
lished next year as Concio quam habuit Hugo Latimer (Southwark: James Nicolson for
John Gough, 1537. STC 15285). See also the English translation, The sermon that Hugh
Latimer made to the clergie in conuocation (London: Berthelet, 24 March 1537. STC 15287).
The delay between preaching and printing can be accounted for by the events of autumn
1536. The outbreak of the Pilgrimage of Grace in October would have made it unwise to
pour oil on the flames by publishing Latimers sermon, while the eventual discrediting of
the rebels early in 1537 probably made publication of this aggressively evangelical polemic
seem more appropriate and timely.
122 richard rex

in Spirituals, and to put the bishops in their place, by presiding at some

sessions of the 1536 Convocation.55 When Convocation broke up on 20
July, he told Stokesley to send him a list of possible preachers to serve at
Pauls Cross until Michaelmas, a task the bishop leapt to perform.56 This
may well explain why Simon Matthew was once more in the pulpit on 6
August.57
The autumn of 1536 doubtless saw sermons in favour of the royal
supremacy and against treason and rebellion. Cromwells injunctions of
1536 were being promulgated from September, and his first injunction
stipulated that for a quarter of a year sermons on the supremacy were to
be given weekly in every English church.58 There is no reason to suppose
that this would have been flouted at Pauls Cross, and once the Pilgrimage
of Grace had broken out in early October, a strong message about the obe-
dience subjects owed to their king would have been even more timely.
Such was presumably the burden of the sermon that Hugh Latimer
reported preaching at the Cross the Sunday after Cromwell had left London
for Christmas.59
The outbreak and dispersal of the Pilgrimage of Grace perhaps strength-
ened Cromwells hand once more, for Hilsey himself was firmly back in
charge of the Cross by Easter. In Lent he submitted to Cromwell his plans
for the customary cycle of sermons in Holy Week and Easter week, which
began at Pauls Cross on Good Friday, continued at the Spital (St Marys
Hospital, just outside Bishopsgate) on Easter Monday, Tuesday, and
Wednesday, and was wrapped up by the rehearsal sermon at Pauls Cross

55Wilkins, Concilia Magn Britanni et Hiberni, vol. III, 803. For the conservative
moves at the 1536 Convocation see R. Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, 2nd edn.
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 117.
56SP1/105, fol. 198r (LP 11.186), Stokesleys covering note to Bedyll (the list itself does not
survive) is undated, but endorsed July in a contemporary hand. It is fixed to summer 1536
by its reference to Cromwells departour from the chapitour house. Cromwell presided at
the closing ceremony of Convocation in St Pauls on 20 July 1536. See Wilkins, Concilia
Magn Britanni et Hiberni, vol. III, 803. When Convocation met at St Pauls, it did so in
the chapter house.
57For Matthews (as Mr Symondes) at Pauls Cross, see LP 11.325.
58T. Cromwell, Iniunctions gyven by thauctorities of the kynges highnes (London:
Berthelet, [1536]. STC10085. Cambridge University Library Sel.3.196). The first injunction
requires all clergy to preach on this subject for the space of one quarter of a yere nowe next
ensuyng, ones euery sonday, and after that at he least wise twise euery quarter of a yere.
59Latimer to Cromwell, 27 Dec. 1536, in Hugh Latimer, Sermons and Remains of Hugh
Latimer, ed. G.E. Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Society,
1845), 37577, at 376. Cromwell was at the Rolls (between London and Westminster) on
Sunday 24 Dec. (LP 11.1363), which was probably the day of Latimers sermon, although the
date cannot be fixed with certainty.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s123

on Low Sunday.60 Hilsey proposed to start the Easter sermons himself on

Monday, followed by Edward Crome and John Bird, with his own chancel-
lor finishing off on the Sunday. For the Good Friday sermon he proposed
Simon Matthew, subject to an admonycion from Cromwell to make sure
he toed the line. If Matthew went off message, Hilsey added, he would be
corrected by the others in their subsequent sermons.61
A Good Friday sermon that can be confidently ascribed to Simon
Matthew is still extant, and is almost certainly the one he delivered on this
occasion, for it goes out of its way to dispel any abiding suspicions among
the audience that the preacher was still in some sense a papist.62
Matthews authorship is initially indicated by a reference made to the ser-
mon he had preached at St Pauls in June 1535. In order to demonstrate his
anti-papal credentials, the preacher reminds his audience that commaun-
dyd I haue putt a sermon yn pryntt to be communicat to all the worlde
whych remaynyth emong youe. and so farre as I know noo man haue soo
doon hythertoo butt I (146v). Simon Matthews 1535 sermon was undoubt-
edly the first, and for some years the only, sermon against the pope printed
in England. Stephen Gardiner and Richard Sampson had both published
works on this theme, but theirs were described as orations and were
printed in Latin:63 the preachers comment in this case plainly implies
that his earlier sermon had been printed in English. The identification of
Matthew as the author is conclusively corroborated by a comparison of
the sermons hand with that of an autograph letter from Simon Matthew
to Thomas Cromwell of 3 April 1538. Not only are the hands identical in
letter formation, but, because the sermon is a lengthy text, it actually fur-
nishes exact matches for dozens of the 130 different words used in the
letter.64
The sermon begins as an entirely traditional reflection on the passion
and death of Jesus, but it soon develops into a complex response to the

60For this annual mini-series, see Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation,
44. The original evidence is in John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. C.L. Kingsford, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vol. I, 167. It is not clear why the Easter Sunday sermon at
Pauls Cross (see e.g. above, notes 1719) was not regarded as part of this mini-series.
61Hilsey to Cromwell, no date, SP1/117, fol. 117r (LP 12.i.726).
62SP1/91 fols. 134r152v. For his disclaimers see fols. 146r, I can nott persuade soom men.
butt that I shulde styll be a papyst; and 146v, yett I haue been and styll am callyd a papyste
by sooch as by noo meanys wyll oothre wyse reporte me. Further references to this sermon
in this and the following two paragraphs are given as folio numbers in brackets.
63Stephen Gardiner, De Vera Obedientia Oratio (London: Berthelet, 1535. STC 11584);
Sampson, Oratio (London: Berthelet, [1535]. STC 21681).
64SP1/131, fol. 10r (LP 13.i.669), Matthew to Cromwell, 3 April 1538, from Prescott in
Lancashire (one of Matthews benefices).
124 richard rex

tensions of the Henrician Reformation as experienced by a theologian of

essentially Catholic convictions. Throughout his discourse Matthew seeks
on the one hand to demonstrate authentically loyal, that is, antipapal, cre-
dentials and on the other to hold the line of orthodoxy against the
encroachments of the kind of evangelical preachers who were taking
advantage of the situation for their own ends: men like Hilsey, Crome, and
Bird, with whom he was yoked for Easter duty in 1537. Therefore, having
opened with an explanation of the liturgical meaning of Good Friday as a
celebration of the day on which Jesus had chosen to suffer death to redeem
fallen humanity from sin (134r-37v), he proceeds to emphasise the impor-
tance of meditation upon Christs passion and death as a means of con-
forming the self to the pattern of Christ and thus to the will of God
(137v-38r). But into these threads he weaves some stern rebukes to evan-
gelicals, denying the total depravity of fallen humanity and affirming both
the sacrifice of the Mass and the real presence.65 The first half of his ser-
mon ends with a lengthy recollection of the passion which emphasises
that the Christ who suffered is fully and entirely present in the consecrated
host (140r-42v).
Matthew is conscious that he is to some extent on trial in this sermon,
and is therefore careful to manufacture an opportunity to turn his atten-
tion to the crucial issue of the 1530s, the usurpyd jurisdiction of the bishop
of Rome (146r). His crablike approach to the subject commences with a
familiar enough topic, taking Christ in his passion as a model of patience
in adversity. The world, he observes, always persecutes the innocent (143r-
46v), and he is himself an object lesson, in that heretics are continually
slandering him as a papist in order to undermine his effectiveness as a
bulwark of orthodoxy.66 This link licenses him to embark on a lengthy dis-
quisition in refutation of papal pretensions (146r-50v), after briefly vindi-
cating his own antipapal credentials by referring his listeners to his
published sermon on the subject, and reminding them that his was the
only such work printed in English (146v). His argument against papal pri-
macy, as in his 1535 sermon, focusses on the equality of the apostles, and
therefore of their successors, the bishopsto whom, he emphasises, good
Christians should show due obedience in spiritual matters (149v). Mere
custom, he concludes, cannot prevail against scriptural truth, though even

65SP1/91, fols. 136r (for towardnes to vertue) and 138v-139v (real presence and sacrifice
of the Mass).
66SP1/91, fol. 146v, complaining about those who have long tyme labourde to bryng
me owtt off credence. and putt me to silence. ore utterly to bryng me to confusion. for that
I shulde nott detecte ther fraudulent heresys.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s125

here he strikes a glancing blow at evangelicals by defending those oon-

wrytton veritees handed down from the apostles to the church (150r-v).
Conscious that his argument has taken him some way from Good Friday,
he manages to close the circle by proposing, in almost evangelical fashion,
that the papacy has led Christians to dishonour the passion of Christ by
placing their hopes of salvation in indulgences (150v-51r). Thus recalling
himself and his audience to the liturgical moment, he brings his sermon
to an end by urging penance and patience as the path to eternal glory
(151r-52v).
Pauls Cross took on renewed public importance through 1538, as it was
used to pursue Henry VIIIs crusade against idolatry. It was Hilsey himself
who opened the campaign on 24 February with a sermon against the
famous Rood of Grace, which had been brought from Boxley in Kent to be
burned in London that day. Bonfires of images replaced the bonfires of
books familiar from the previous twenty years, and Wriothesleys chroni-
cle records the most notable acts of iconoclasm. Thus Hugh Latimer
preached at the burning of the image of Darvell Gadarn on 12 May 1538.
The symbolic importance of this event was heightened still further by the
fact that it also saw the hanging and burning of the dissident Observant
friar John Forest, who had himself been a noted preacher at the Cross in
former years. The year of iconoclasm was brought to a close when the Holy
Blood of Hailes, one of the most widely venerated relics in medieval
England, was burned at the Cross on the last Sunday before Advent,
24November. It was Hilsey, fittingly, who preached.67
There may, though, have been practical as well as symbolic reasons why
Hilsey preached that day, for the following year he was complaining to
Cromwell about his difficulties in persuading anyone other than his own
chaplains to occupy the pulpit. The sole exception was Dr John Bird, he
reported, who agreed only after much importunity. So he urged Cromwell
to adopt his plan (no longer, sadly, extant) for managing the pulpit, and to
require Stokesley to implement it.68 Hilsey does not explain why he was
having such problems, but we can hazard a guess, namely that it was the

67Wrioth. 1, 7580 for the events at Pauls Cross that year. For more on these events see
P. Marshall, The Rood of Boxley, the Blood of Hailes and the Defence of the Henrician
Church, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995), 68996; and Papist as Heretic: the
Burning of John Forest, 1538, Historical Journal 41 (1998), 35174.
68Hilsey to Cromwell, 23 July 1539, SP1/152, fol. 176r. LP 14.i.1297 does not summarise
Hilseys message entirely accurately: Dr Bird was not one of Hilseys chaplains, nor does
Hilseys letter identify him as one. Bird was a former Carmelite who would dally with evan-
gelicalism for a few years before returning to Catholicism under Mary.
126 richard rex

result of the doctrinal tensions that had been mounting throughout the
1530s, and which had just been sharpened by the Act of Six Articles. The
Six Articles would have discouraged those whom Hilsey might have wished
to preach; while the conservatives were perhaps unwilling to collaborate
with him either on doctrinal grounds, or because they saw his role as a
usurpation on the rights of the bishopor, of course, both. Moreover, it
was becoming clear that learned clerics were especially vulnerable to doc-
trinal or political harassment from their enemies at Pauls Cross. As early
as summer 1534 an essentially conservative preacher, Edward Leighton (a
Kings Chaplain and a canon of King Henry VIIIs College in Oxford), was
anxiously assuring Cromwell that he had not said anything that was nott
trew or elles onbeseming a preicher of the worde of God.69 Bitter enemies
with sharp ears and ready tongues evidently lay in wait to trouble preach-
ers. Henry Gold, one of the earliest victims of Henrys new religious policy,
had no doubt preached at the Cross quite often: his London parish church,
StMary Aldermary, was just down the hill from the cathedral, and several
sermons of his survive among the State Papers.70 An unnamed bishop was
being criticised at Pauls Cross for conservatism by an evangelical in
February 1537, while a conservative was decrying Hilseys evangelical
preaching that summer.71 And when Simon Matthew preached on 6
August 1537, he was soon delated to Cromwell by William Marshall.72
Bachelors and Doctors of Divinity figure disproportionately among those
gaoled or even executed in the 1530s and 1540s, with royal wrath falling
impartially and unpredictably on heretics and papists alike. To preach at
the Cross was to give a hostage to fortune. No wonder, then, if preachers
started to shy away from this increasingly dubious privilege. Only under
the regimes of Edward and Mary, when tight royal control of the pulpit
was harnessed to an unambiguous doctrinal stance, could the full poten-
tial of Pauls Cross as an instrument of propaganda be actualised. Preachers
on either side, I suggest, were afraid to speak their minds in case the other

69Leighton to Cromwell, 16 July 1534 (SP1/85, fol. 49r. LP 7.981). For Leightons career as
a comfortable pluralist of conservative persuasions see BRUO IV, 349.
70Novum Repertorium, 300 for Gold at St Mary Aldermary. See LP 7.523 for his sermon
notes. Although no trace of it survives in the Grace Books, Gold had taken his BD
at Cambridge in the 1520s, probably in 1527. See LP 5.1700, William Longforth to Gold,
25 March (no year), and the helpful comments of MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 31.
SoGold presumably preached at the Cross to fulfil his graduation obligations.
71LP 12.i.530 and LP 12.ii.530.
72SP1/ 106, fol. 22 (LP 11.325), Marshall to Cromwell, 18 Aug. 1536, enclosing notes that he
hoped would lead to action against Matthew. He had hoped to delate another conservative,
William Buckmaster, for a sermon on Sunday 13 August, but Buckmaster did not turn up.
 pauls cross and the crisis of the 1530s127

side might cobble together some charge of heresy or treason on the basis
of an unguarded or misreported word. Certainly the events of 1540 were to
demonstrate how dangerous preaching at the Cross could be, as 30 July
saw the simultaneous execution of three heretics and three papists, all
six of them noteworthy preachers who had doubtless performed at the
Cross in their time.73

73Wrioth. 1, 12021. For more on these events, see R. Werrell in chapter 3 below.
 CHAPTER SIX

REFORMATION CONFLICT BETWEEN STEPHEN GARDINER

AND ROBERT BARNES, LENT 15401

Ralph S. Werrell

Introduction

According to Robert Barnes, Pauls Cross was a cockpit in which the

Henrician religious traditionalists and the evangelical avant-garde fought
their battles. The cock fight between Barnes and Stephen Gardiner during
the Lenten season of 1540 is the subject of this paper. Assessments of
Henry VIIIs attitude towards the Reformation have frequently been sim-
plistic. After his break with Rome in the 1530s, England was set on a course
leading to the full-scale Reformation of Edward VIs reign. But Henry had
to lead the English into the direction he wanted them to go. There were
areas where he could force his will, as he did in getting the clergy to yield
to him, and to remove the pope from supremacy in England. But there
were many occasions where he had to tread carefully. The memory of the
Wars of the Roses was alive, and there were families that had a better claim
to the English crown than Henry VII had. Henry VIII still had to keep the
balance of power, and following his break with Rome, the balance was still
delicate between two major parties, which now became not so much
political as religious, between the Catholics and the reformers. Henry had
to secure a balance between those who wanted a return to some form of
traditional Catholicismeven, for some, a restoration of the power of the
papacy and, on the other hand, those who wanted a move towards a
Reformed Church. The motives of some were probably less towards their
religious beliefs but more to gain from the dismantling of the Church,
which possessed great wealth.
It is not likely that Henry VIIIs personal religious beliefs fluctuated
between catholic and reformed extremes. Rather, Henry embraced a hybrid
religion that tried to hit a mean between the traditionalist and evangelical

1I thank Dr Jonathan Willis, of Birmingham University, for his most helpful comments
on this paper.
130 ralph s. werrell

poles.2 Politically this approach made sense, but religiously it was full of
tensions. The balance of the evidence suggests that Henry would have liked
to move, in many ways, towards further reformation of the English Church
of which he was the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England.3
Otherwise he would have been more balanced in the choice of tutors for
his son, Edward. We also get a glimpse of this in the aftermath of the Pauls
Cross sermons. In 1539, the passing of the Six Articles Act is often consid-
ered as indicative of Henrys move towards a more traditional Catholic the-
ology: the event of Lent 1540, however, raise certain questions about such
an inference. Apart from Barness thinking that it was safe to preach justifi-
cation by faith only, by 1540 Henry showed he was even-handed by balanc-
ing the execution of three reformers with the deaths of three Catholics.
Henrys message to the Catholic faction was that even though they had
managed to get rid of Cromwell and three reformers they were not to read
too much into itthe Catholic party also was vulnerable.
The Lenten Sermons at Pauls Cross in 1540 had further repercussions.
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer used that pulpit to preach against the
Bishop of Winchester; and also Henrys subsequent protection of Thomas
Cranmer. George Joye confuted Stephen Gardiner, and refuted the Bishop
of Winchesters false articles. Stephen Gardiners reply to Joye followed,
justifying what had happened. We will only be able to consider these as
they have bearing on the sermons of Lent, 1540.

Pauls Cross Sermons, Lent 1540

Robert Barnes was not a likely choice as a preacher at Pauls Cross that
Lent, even though he had recently been in the service of Henry VIII in

2See Peter Marshall, Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus: The Intellectual Origins of a

Henrician Bon Mot, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52.3 (2001), 512. Henry VIIIs
appearance before the assembled houses of parliament on Christmas Eve 1545 was perhaps
his finest hour. In what has been called a pioneer royal Christmas broadcast. Henry
illustrated the breakdown of fraternal love among his people: the one calleth the other
Hereticke and Anabaptist, and he calleth hym again, Papist, Ypocrite and Pharisey; rival
preachers inveigh against each other without charity or discrecion. To the kings mind, the
blame for this deserved to be apportioned to all sides, and to reinforce the point, Henry
brought forward one of the more curious metaphors of contemporary religious discourse:
some be to styff in their old Mumpsimus, other be too busy and curious in their newe
Sumpsimus What the king was invoking appears to represent the rhetoric of reformist
Christian humanism, decisively appropriated into more overtly evangelical discourses,
though still to an extent countenanced by the anticlerical and antipapal attitudes of con-
servative lay elites.
3H. Gee and W.J. Hardy, eds., Document Illustrative of English Church History (London:
MacMillan and Co., 1896; repr. 1921), 244.
 reformation conflict between gardiner and barnes131

Germany. Bishop Bonner would never have considered a reformer as

a suitable preacher unless he was commanded to do so by a superior
power. In fact, Thomas Cromwell had told Bonner to appoint Barnes,
Gerrard and Jerome to preach at Pauls Cross during Lent, and Barnes
was appointed to preach on the First Sunday. There is a question over
who instigated the replacement of Barnes by Gardiner for that first Lenten
sermon that year.
Stephen Gardiner was the Bishop of Winchester, and although he was a
Catholic he had accepted Henrys supremacy as Head on Earth of the
Church of England, and so was a natural choice as a preacher at Pauls
Cross. He was of the Kings Counsel at the court when Henrys marriage to
Catherine of Aragon was pronounced null and void. In 1535 he signed the
declaration repudiating papal jurisdiction in England, and followed this
with his De Vera Obedientia, a very able defence of the Royal Supremacy,
where he wrote of those who objected to Henrys supremacy, The king
(say they) is head of the realm, but not of the Church. O what an absurd
and foolish saying is that! As though, because the people begin now to
believe in God, it were a just cause, why they should be no more in subjec-
tion to the king.4 This was, perhaps, a snide remark directed against
Luthers doctrine of the Two Kingdoms.
For most of Henry VIIIs reign Gardiner held positions of authority. In
1540 he was instrumental in pushing the attack on Thomas Cromwell that
led to Cromwells arrest and execution. According to Routh, Gardiner
disliked a good deal of Henrys treatment of the Church, but he was invalu-
able to the king as a proof to the outside world that the Church had
not fallen away from the old faith.5 He remained in favour with Henry,
but he misjudged Henrys position. For when he led the attack against
Archbishop Cranmer, and the Catholics tried to destroy Cranmer, Henry
caught wind of this plot, and, in the strongest and clearest manner, the
king showed his support for Cranmer, and so prevented anyone attacking
his Archbishop again.
Eventually Gardiner lost the Kings support. As John Guy once observed,
the key document is Henry VIIIs will. When the two extant versions of this
are compared, it is clear that Hertfords coup was approved by a king who
very much knew to whom he wished to bequeath the government of his son

4Gardiner, De Vera Obedientia (Rome [Wesel?]: [J. Lambrecht for H. Singleton?], 1553;
Leeds: Scolar Press, 1966), fols. xixxx.
5C.R.N. Routh, Whos Who in Tudor England, 14851603 (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole
Books, 2001), 148.
132 ralph s. werrell

and kingdom. The day after the Howards arrests Henry altered his will so as
to oust Gardiner and Norfolk from the regency Council.6
Whether Henry had wanted to do this earlier (perhaps after the episode
with Cranmer) we will never know: but towards the end of his life he
needed to establish control of the Regency Council. Thus Henry, after his
death, had ensured that Edward, through his education, and the guidance
of his Regency Council, would move the Church towards a more Reformed
position. By 1540 Barnes had had a chequered career. He had escaped
being burnt at the stake, but only by being put under house arrest. Then,
when it was discovered that he was still spreading the cause of the
Reformation, his liberty was further restricted. He faced being retried for
heresy and condemned to death. In order to escape this fate Barnes pre-
tended to be drowned, leaving his clothes on the riverbank whilst he
escaped to the Continent. There he became a close associate of Martin
Luther, and his theology became distinctly Lutheran.
When it became politically convenient for Henry to see if he could form
closer links to Protestant Germany, Barnes was called upon to be Henrys
ambassador, and given safe conduct when he returned to England. It was
then that Cromwell instructed Bishop Bonner to appoint Barnes to preach
at Pauls Cross; and Barnes was duly listed to preach on the First Sunday in
Lent. It is highly unlikely that a man of Barnes temperament would take
kindly to being told that he had to give way to Gardiner, and that the ser-
mon that Sunday would be traditionalist rather than evangelical in tone.
There is very likely some truth to the suggestion that Barness replacement
as preacher was part of a larger plot to undermine Thomas Cromwell. As
James Muller wrote,
There can be no doubt that Gardiner was heartily opposed to Barnes opin-
ions, but it seems equally certain that his objection to Barnes at this time
was primarily an objection to his patron. He judged the moment had come
to strike at Cromwell and saw that Cromwells most vulnerable point was his
support of radical reformers.7
Barnes had shown a few years earlier how he could be provoked when he
attacked Cardinal Wolsey, and Stephen Gardiner was going to provoke him
in the same way. It would now be possible for Gardiner to achieve a double
blow for the Catholic Party. As Korey Maas wrote, From the mid-1530s
especially, the patronage of Vicegerent Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop

6John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 198.
7J.A. Muller, Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction (London: SPCK, 1926), 84.
 reformation conflict between gardiner and barnes133

Thomas Cranmer combined with Barness own notably unrestrained

preaching throughout the realm to make him a lightening rod for conser-
vative criticism.8 Gardiner himself wanted to preach at Pauls Cross that
First Sunday in Lent instead of Barnes. There is a question over who insti-
gated the replacement of Barnes by Gardiner for the first Lenten sermon
that year. That his move was part of the plot to get rid of Cromwell seems,
to me, very probable for Gardiner knew if he preached before Barnes, he
would be able to inflame Barnes against him.
On the Saturday, before the First Sunday in Lent, Gardiner went to
Lambeth, for what seems to have been an ordinary meeting for him. He
wrote,
When I had done my business at Lambeth, which ended not afore five of the
clock that Saturday, my chaplain, then waiting for me, told me he had been
so bold over me to appoint me to preach the next day at Pauls Cross, adding
how he thought better to disappoint Barnes on the morrow than some other
Catholic man appointed on other Sundays.9
It is unlikely that Gardiners chaplain could have taken that decision, or
carried it off, without Gardiner himself instigating it. Of course, Bonner
would have preferred a Catholic preacher rather than a reformer, but, in
the political situation at the time, without someone of Gardiners stature
behind him, he was powerless to make the change himself. Therefore,
I agree with Burnets remark. But Gardiner sent Bonner word that he
intended himself to preach on Sunday at St Pauls Cross.10
Gardiner was going to preach on the most important doctrine of the
Lutheran ReformationJustification by faith. Most of what we know
about Gardiners sermon is found in his A Declaration of such true articles
as George Joye has gone about to confute as false.11 When Gardiner knew he
was preaching the next day, he wrote,
I gathered my wits to me, called for grace, and determined to declare the
gospel of that Sunday, containing the Devils three temptations, the matter
whereof seemed to me very apt, to be applied to the time, and good occa-
sion, to note the abuse of scripture among some, as the Devil abused it to
Christ, which matter indeed, I touched somewhat plainly, and in my judge-
ment truly.12

8Korey Maas, Confession Contention, and Confusion: the Last Words of Robert
Barnes and Theological Identity, Sixteenth Century Journal 42.3 (2011), 690.
9Muller, Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction, 85.
10Gilbert Burnet, Reformation, vol. 1, 475.
11(London: John Herford, 1546).
12Stephen Gardiner, A Declaration, fol. V.
134 ralph s. werrell

John Foxe tells us something about that sermon:

Gardiner therefore, determining to declare the gospel of that Sunday con-
taining the devils three temptations, began amongst other things to note the
abuse of scripture amongst some, as the devil abused it to Christ; and so,
alluding to the temptation of the devil, wherein he alleged the Scripture
against Christ 13
We get a clearer picture of one of the main issues raised in Gardiners ser-
mon in Burnets Reformation: in his sermon [Gardiner] treated of justifi-
cation, and other points, with many reflections on the Lutherans.14
Gardiner attacked Barness teaching in his Sentenciae. Quoting Hilary,
Barnes had stressed that faith Alone justifies and proceeded to invoke
Ambrose of Milan, who wrote that saints, without labouring or working
have their iniquities remitted and sins covered, not on account of works of
penitence, but ONLY by believing.15 And so, in his sermon, Gardiner
stressed that the friars of the Reformation no longer sold heaven but
offered it freely: as heaven needs no works at all, but only belief, only,
only, and nothing else.16
Gardiners statement about his sermon accused the reformers of turn-
ing the scriptures backward. There is no forward in the new teaching, but
all backward. Now the devil teacheth, come back from fasting, come back
from praying, come back from confession, come back from weeping for
thy sins. And all, I said, is turned backward. Gardiner supported the
break with Rome, but linked the reformersin some waywith turning
back to an unreformed position.
The devil deceived man with his lies: And therefore coveteth to have
man idle, and void of good works and for that purpose procured out
pardons from Rome, wherein heaven was sold for a little money the
devil used friars for his ministers. Now, having lost that way to sell heaven,
the devil tells us heaven needs no works at all, but only belief. Those who
said that we obtained heaven, not by our works but by our belief, set forth
this the devils craft, were called ministers. Now there were no more friars,
but amongst the ministers be some of those that were friars.17 He contin-
ued, the Devil perceives it can no longer be borne to buy and sell heaven

13John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London: Adam and Co, 1873), 5.2, 430.
14Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, 4 vols.
(London: Scott, Webster and Geary, London, 1837), vol. 1, 475.
15Korey Maas, The Reformation and Robert Barnes (Woodbridge: Boydell Press,
2010), 43.
16Foxe, Actes &Monuments, 5.2, 431.
17Muller, Stephen Gardiner, 85 ff.
 reformation conflict between gardiner and barnes135

(both the merchandise is abhorred, and the ministers also, we cannot

away with friars, nor can abide the name).18 The result was the reformers
had thrown the baby out with the bath water. Justification by faith meant
the reformers removed the need for good works; heaven is given so freely
that men shall not need for heaven to work at all, whatsoever opportunity
they have to work.19
Of course Gardiner did not do justice to the reformers teaching, when
he said that good works had no place in a Christians life. He said the dif-
ference between the reformers Church and the Papal Church was not
whether a Christian got into heaven freely or by buying his way in; but
whether money passed hands or not, it was the Devils ministersthe
friarswho did the transaction. This was a veiled attack on Luther as
much as an attack on Barnes.

29 February 1540

It probably seemed safe for Barnes to preach against Stephen Gardiner,

as suggested in a letter from John Butler to Heinrich Bullinger dated
24February 1540; Meanwhile, the word is powerfully preached by an indi-
vidual named Barnes, and his fellow-ministers. Books of every kind may
safely be exposed to sale.20 According to Korey Maas, it was in response to
[Gardiners] attack that Barnes preached his own critical sermon from the
same pulpit two weeks later.21
Barnes had no choice left him; his sermon also had to be on Justification
by Faith, giving the Reformed answer to Gardiners Catholic teaching. It
would probably not have caused too many headacheshe could also have
gained some points if he had stressed that the doctrine of Justification by
Faith was scriptural and disagreed with the popes teaching. Barness ser-
mon not only dealt with justification by faith, it did what Gardiner hoped:
it contained a personal attack on the Bishop of Winchester. If Barnes had
stuck solely to his explication of the doctrine of justification by faith and
shown that the reformers held firmly to the Scriptures, and sought only to
remove the accretion of Catholic tradition from the Word of God, he prob-
ably would have been able to survive Gardiners attacks.

18Gardiner, A Declaration, f. vi.

19Gardiner, A Declaration, f. vi.
20OL 2, 627.
21Maas, Reformation and Robert Barnes, 49.
136 ralph s. werrell

In George Joye confuteth / Whinchesters false Articles, Gardiner states the

doctrine of justification by faith as preached by Barnes:
This thinge do I tell you (saith Paul) leste any man (as nowe wolde Winch.)
deceyue you with his apparent Popish perswasions. This full iustificacion by
onely faith Paul expresseth clerely in these words also. This owr euerlasting
liuing preist & interrcessour Christe abydeth for euer vnto this ende / euen
absolutly / fully / and perfitly with oute any fall or breache to saue all them
that thorowe him by faithe come to God the father.22
However, Barnes felt he had to attack Gardiner personally. As Foxe
describes it:
Taking the same text of the gospel which Gardiner had done before, was, on
the contrary side, no less vehement in setting forward the true doctrine of
Christian religion, than Winchester had been before in plucking men back-
ward from truth to lies, from sincerity to hypocrisy, from religion to supersti-
tion, from Christ to Antichrist. In the process of which sermon he proceeding,
and calling out Stephen Gardiner by name to answer him, alluding in a
pleasant allegory to a cock-fight; terming the said Gardiner to be a fighting
cock, and himself to be another: but the garden cock (he said) lacketh good
spurs: objecting moreover to the said Gardiner, and opposing him in his
grammar rules; thus saying, that if he had answered him in the schools, so as
he had there preached at the Cross, he would have given him six stripes:
declaring furthermore what evil herbs this Gardiner had set in the garden of
Gods Scripture, &c.23
Gardiner complained about Barnes sermon, and the case was referred to
the King; and Barnes, understanding that he did not have the Kings sym-
pathy, requested time to consider Gardiners arguments.24 The King had
told Barnes that he must apologise to Gardiner, which he subsequently did
on the 11 April. On the 21 May, Barnes referred to the matter in a letter to
John pinus:
A fierce controversy is going on between the bishop of London, Gardiner,
and myself, respecting justification by faith and purgatory. He holds that the
blood of Christ cleanseth only from past sins previous to baptism, but that
those committed since are blotted out partly by the merits of Christ, and
partly by our own satisfactions. He adds too, that voluntary works are more
excellent than the works of the ten commandments. As to purgatory, he says,
that if a woman shall have caused masses to be celebrated, and shall have

22George Joye, Confutation of Winchesters false Articles, fol. 1.

23Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 5.2, 431.
24Maas, Reformation and Robert Barnes, 38.
 reformation conflict between gardiner and barnes137

bestowed alms for the soul of her husband, she may boldly demand his soul
in the day of judgement, and say that she has paid the price of his redemp-
tion. But I, on the other hand, in opposition to all these things, vindicate the
efficacy of the blood of Jesus Christ my Lord; but hitherto I stand alone in
doing it.25
On 7 March, William Jerome preached at Pauls Cross on the same text.
Then once again on 14 March, Thomas Gerrard preached on the same
theme. The people attending the Pauls Cross sermons that Lent had thus
heard three sermons contradicting the Bishop of Winchesters sermon of
the First Sunday in Lent. Although neither Jerome nor Gerrard attacked
Stephen Gardiner, many people would think that as they preached the
same doctrine at Robert Barnes, they agreed with everything that he had
said, including his attack on the person of Gardiner; and that could be
used against them as well as against Barnes.
On 11 April 1540 Barnes, Jerome and Gerrard recanted their errors at
Pauls Cross. When Barnes made his recantation, he also asked Gardiner
for his pardon. Barnes asked Gardiner to indicate his forgiveness by raising
his hand, and, according to Foxe, he had to ask a second time for this sign
before Gardiner responded. According to Foxe
Then Barnes, entering into his sermon, after his prayer made, beginneth the
process of a matter, preaching contrary to that which before he had recanted;
insomuch that the mayor, when the sermon was finished, sitting with the
bishop of Winchester, asked him whether he should from the pulpit send
him to ward, to be forthcoming for that his bold preaching, contrary to his
recantation.26

The Plot against Thomas Cromwell

This was not the end of the dispute, for in May 1540 another change in the
preacher at Pauls Cross was effected. Bishop Sampson of Chichester, who
was supposed to preach, was arrested, and Cranmer preached the oppo-
site of what Gardiner had preached in Lent.27 It seems clear that the fate
of Barnes, Jerome and Gerrard was more political than religious for, as
Susan Brigden observes,

25OL 2, 616 ff.

26Foxe, Actes &Monuments, 5.2, 433.
27Millar McLure, The Pauls Cross Sermons, 15341642 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1958), 189.
138 ralph s. werrell

If Cromwell were to be removed ostensibly for his dangerous sympathy to

heretics there could be no better way to illustrate his complicity in a hereti-
cal movement than to purge three radicals. Barnes, Garret and Jerome were
exempted accordingly from the general pardon for crimes committed before
15 July 1540 and condemned by attainder, without trial. That their deaths
proceeded from such an enactment rather than by the Act of Six Articles,
whichhad they been guiltywould have acted equally swiftly and inexo-
rably, again points to the political motive behind their fall. It also suggests
that the extreme charge of sacramentarianism could not have been proved
against them.28

Barness Martyrdom

Although this paper concerns the sermons at Pauls Cross, it would not be
complete until we hear Barnes speaking on the 30 July 1540 before his mar-
tyrdom. Barnes commenced with an affirmation of his faith in the Trinity,
the Incarnation, that Christ, the second Person of the Trinity became man,
and then followed this Creed with the following statement as recorded by
John Standysshe in his Lytle treatyse:
And I believe he lived here among us: and after he had preached and taught
his Fathers will, he suffered the most cruel and bitter death, for me and all
mankind, and I do believe that this his death and passion was the sufficient
price and ransom for the sin of the world: And I believe that through his
death he overcame the devil, sin, death and hell. And there is no other
satisfaction unto the Father but this his death and passion only.
After commenting on this Standish again quotes Barnes: And that no
work of man did deserve anything of God but only his passion as touching
our justification. Then, later, Wherefore I trust in no good work that ever
I did, but only in the death of Jesus Christ. Because he had been accused
by Gardiner in his sermon of denying that there was a place for good
works, Barnes continued,
Take me not here that I speak against good works. For they are to be done;
and surely they that do them not shall never come to the kingdom of God:
we must do them because they are commanded us of God to show and set
forth our profession, not to deserve or merit, for that is only the passion of
Christ.29

28Susan Brigden, Popular Disturbance and the Fall of Thomas Cromwell and the
Reformers, 15391540, The Historical Journal 24.2 (1981), 267.
29John Standysshe, A Lytle treatyse . Against the protestacion of Robert barnes at ye
time of his deth (London: Robert Redman, 1540).
 reformation conflict between gardiner and barnes139

After Barness death his memory was not only kept alive by conservative
and evangelical balladeers; it was increasingly made the subject of more
substantial treatments than were possible in halfpenny broadsides.30
Robert Kolb begins his article, Gods Gift of Martyrdom, with a quotation
from Luther referring to Barnes martyrdom. It is a special joy for me to
hear that our good and pious table companion and house guest has been
so graciously called by God to pour out his blood for the sake of Gods dear
Son and to become a holy martyr.31

30Korey Maas, Last Words of Robert Barnes, 693.

31Robert Kolb, Gods Gift of Martyrdom: the Early Reformation Understanding of
dying for the Faith, Church History 64.3 (1995), 399.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

PAULS CROSS AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PROTESTANT

REFORMS UNDER EDWARD VI

John N. King

The preaching of sermons at Pauls Cross epitomized dramatic changes in

religion that took place following the accession of Edward VI as a nine-
year-old boy.1 This is the case because the government of Edward VI con-
tinued the long-standing practice of employing this out-of-doors pulpit at
St Pauls Cathedral as a venue for sermons that disseminated and defended
official doctrine. The heterogeneity of the congregations that gathered
there made Pauls Cross a powerful vehicle for the manipulation of public
opinion. The Protestant lords who governed England during the royal
minority (28 January 1547 to 6 July 1553)first Edward Seymour, Duke of
Somerset and Protector of the Realm, who was the young kings eldest
uncle, and second his successor John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and later
Duke of Northumberlandfostered a sweeping and controversial pro-
gram of Protestant reform in theological doctrine and ecclesiastical prac-
tice. It veered away from the Anglo-Catholic theology countenanced by
the largely political Reformation effected by Henry VIII.2
Under Edward VI, royal edicts and Parliamentary legislation ordered a
radical alteration of official religion and replacement of the Roman-rite
Mass with a Protestant worship service in the vernacular. Royal Injunctions
issued in the name of King Edward (31 July 1547)3 went beyond revival of
the attack against pilgrimages and veneration of relics and religious
images in the Royal Injunctions of 1536 by ordering clergy to preach offi-
cially authorized sermons from the Book of Homilies4 if they were not

1I am indebted to consultation with Torrance Kirby and Sarah-Grace Heller during the
course of the preparation of this essay.
2On Englands multiple Reformations, See Christopher Haigh, English Reformations:
Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 14.
3RSTC 10087.5, et seq.
4Certain Sermons or Homilies (STC 13638.5, et seq.). This book was published in con-
junction with the Edwardian Injunctions: Injunctions geuen by the moste excellente prince,
Edward the VI by the grace of God, Kynge of Englande, Fraunce, and Ireland: defendour of the
faith, [and] in earthe vnder Christe, of the Churche of Englande [and] of Irelande the supreme
142 john n. king

licensed to compose sermons in their own name. Reversing the prohibi-

tion on Bible reading by low-ranking individuals, the Royal Injunctions of
1547 furthermore enjoined the clergy to provide copies of the Great Bible
and the new English translation of Erasmuss Paraphrases of the New
Testament (154849) for unrestricted reading by parishioners. Parliament
went on to abolish the chantries, to drop insistence on clerical celibacy,
and to abrogate heresy statutes detested by Protestants, including the Act
of Six Articles (1539), which imposed the death penalty on alleged heretics
who denied transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, and other traditional
theological doctrines. These laws included de heretico comburendo (1401),
which ordered the burning of heretics.
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer presided over the abolition of the Latin
rite and promulgation of a vernacular church service in the first Book of
Common Prayer, which came into use on 9 June 1549. Although this cau-
tious document rejected transubstantiation, it largely followed the Latin
use of Sarum and retained the Mass and wearing of clerical vestments. In
response to criticism lodged by theologians such as Martin Bucer and
Peter Martyr Vermigli, the first prayer book underwent revision in the sec-
ond Book of Common Prayer. Published after 27 October 1552) and in the
face of the Prayer Book Rebellion (June-August 1549), which arose in
Cornwell and Devon in protest against the new English liturgy, the second
prayer book went on to disestablish the Mass, forbid the wearing of cha-
subles, and order the replacement of high altars with a table placed in
naves of churches for the celebration of Holy Communion in the form of
a communal meal. In order to placate militant divines associated with
John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, the Privy Council ordered the inser-
tion into the 1552 prayer book of the Black Rubric, which denied that
kneeling at communion implied transubstantiation, the Real Presence of
Christ, or any form of adoration. Not long before the death of Edward VI,
the government issued the Forty-two Articles, which deny purgatory, insist
on justification by faith alone, and define the Eucharist in Zwinglian terms
as a commemoration of the Passion rather than a repeated sacrifice.
Although these changes in official religion underwent reversal under
MaryI (155358), they provided the foundation for the Elizabethan settle-
ment of religion (1559).
During the first year of Edwards reign, preachers at Pauls Cross focused
on a variety of issues related to the abandonment of Anglo-Catholic beliefs,

head: to all and singuler hys louinge subiectes, aswel of the clergie, as off the laietie (London:
Richard Grafton printer to His Most Royall Maiestie, 1547).
 pauls cross and implementation of protestant reforms143

practices, and rituals that remained in place at the end of the old regime.
For example, Hugh Glasier, Cranmers commissary for Calais, called for the
disestablishment of the Lenten fast on the ground that it was a human tra-
dition that lacked biblical warrant. William Barlow, Bishop of St Davids,
attacked the veneration of religious images in a Lenten sermon and a sec-
ond sermon delivered on 27 November. During the latter address, he
preached against the great abhomination of idolatrie in images by mock-
ing an image of the Virgin Mary wrapped in a winding cloth and a puppet-
like image of the Resurrection in which Christ emerged from the tomb,
gave a blessing with his hand, and turned his heade. Following the sermon,
boys smashed these idolls into pieces.5 During the same month, Nicholas
Ridley preached against transubstantiation and the Roman-rite Mass.6
On 15 May 1547, Dr. Richard Smith (or Smyth; 1499/15001563) was
required by the privy council to deliver the first of two recantations of
views contained in theological treatises that he had published while serv-
ing as royal lecturer in theology and Regius Professor of Divinity at the
University of Oxford and as a prebendary of Christ Church, Oxford.7 His
recantations withdrew previously orthodox positions on religious author-
ity, transubstantiation and the Mass, fasting during Lent, clerical celibacy,
and other doctrines and practices that were in the process of undergoing
reversal during the new Protestant regime. The burning of copies of his
newly forbidden books accompanied these addresses, which took place
respectively at Pauls Cross and at Oxford. The importance of Smiths
renunciation of his views was such that Reginald Wolfe published sepa-
rate octavo editions of these sermons. Within days of its delivery, the
printed version of the London recantationA godly and faythfull retracta-
tion made and published at Pavles crosse in London, the yeare of oure lorde
God 1547. the 15. daye of May, by Mayster Richard Smyth Doctor of divinitye,
and reader of the Kynges majestyes lecture in Oxford. Revokyng therin

5Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, from a. d.
1485 to 1559, 2 vols. [Camden Society, vols. 11 and 20] (Westminster: Printed for the Camden
society, 187577), vol. 2, 1.
6See Millar MacLure, Register of Sermons Preached at Pauls Cross, 15341642, rev. and
augmented by Jackson Campbell Boswell and Peter Pauls (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions,
1989), 2829.
7Originally funded by Westminster Cathedral, the Regius Professorship of Divinity at
the University of Oxford underwent transfer to Christ Church at the time of its refounda-
tion in 1546 under new Henrician statutes. See G.D. Duncan, Public Lectures and
Professorial Chairs, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3: The Collegiate
University, ed. James McConica, 344346. See also Charlotte Methuen, Oxford: Reading
Scripture in the University, in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli, ed. Torrance Kirby,
etal. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 81.
144 john n. king

certeyn Errors and favltes by hym committyd in some of hys bookes (hereaf-
ter referred to as Retractation)went on sale at Wolfes premises, marked
by his sign of the Brazen Serpent, which was within sight of the out-of-
doors pulpit where Dr. Smith delivered his recantation. Wolfe stood to
make money from the sale of highly charged topical material, but he also
acted in a quasi-official capacity as one who published books on behalf of
Archbishop Cranmer and received appointment as Royal Bookseller and
Stationer and as Kings Printer in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew during the
reign of Edward VI.8
Wolfe hastened the printing of A playne declaration made at Oxforde the
24. daye of July, by mayster Richarde Smyth, Doctor of divinite, vpon hys
Retractation made and published at Paules crosse in London, in the yeare
of our lorde God, 1547. the 15. daye of May9 (hereafter referred to as
Declaration) by having compositors reimpose type left standing from the
printing of the Retractation. Because type was an expensive commodity in
short supply at early modern printing houses, printers could not afford to
leave type standing for a long period of time.10 In all likelihood, therefore,
the printing of the Declaration followed soon after that of the Retractation
and long in advance of Smiths delivery at Oxford, even though the
preacher claims that his expansion of his Pauls Cross sermon reflects his
thinking following his retorne from London immediatly after my Sermon
which I made last at Pawles Crosse accordynge to my bounden deuty and
promys (A2r). It seems equally likely that marketing reasons would have
led Wolfe to withhold from selling the Oxford version until after the date
of its delivery.
In preaching on Psalm 116:11 (Vulg. Ps. 115:2)The holy Prophet David
(good christen audience) saith right truly: Omnis homo mendax. That is to
wytt: Every man is a Lyer of his owne corrupted natureSmith invites a
skeptical response to his exposition of a highly equivocal text. Some listen-
ers at Pauls Cross and readers of the Retractation may have tittered at the
irony of his selecting this very text on the occasion of his recantation.11

8In actual fact, Wolfe printed few Greek books and did not own a fount of Hebrew
type. See E. Gordon Duff, A Century of the English Book Trade (London: Blades, East, and
Blades, 1905), 17172; and Andrew Pettegree, Wolfe, Reyner [Reginald, Reynold] (d. in or
before 1574), ODNB.
9RSTC 22824.
10Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 116.
11Indeed, these words drew a hearty laugh from the audience when I presented a short
version of the present essay as a paper at Pauls Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in
England 15201640, an International Conference sponsored by the Centre for Research on
Religion, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 1618 August 2012.
 pauls cross and implementation of protestant reforms145

At the very least, he invites suspicion that he is cynically playing with the
logical paradox that he actually believes the views that he is about to
retract. And he appears to pay lip service to the Protestant doctrine of sola
scriptura (by scripture alone). He leaves himself open to further suspi-
cion concerning intellectual arrogance by modelling his address on retrac-
tations delivered by patristic authorities: The which thing how trew it is,
theldest and best writers in the Christen Church, doo evidently declare,
because they all have erred in their bookes (A2r).12 As we shall see, the
early reception of this address indicates that both Protestants and
Catholics believed that his retractation was disingenuous. Indeed, the
most recent full-length study of Smith declares that his retractation is a
masterpiece of equivocation.13
In contrast to other sermons delivered at Pauls Cross, in which preach-
ers engage in exegesis or topical application of set scriptural texts, Smiths
Retractation constitutes a public withdrawal of positions that he had
embraced in print. In particular, he retreats from positions that he had
taken in treatises that he had completed during the waning days of the
reign of Henry VIII. Indeed, A brief Treatyse settynge forth divers truthes
necessary both to be beleved of chrysten people, and kepte also, whiche are
not expressed in the Scripture but left to the church by the apostles tradition
in the vernacular (1547) was published soon after the kings death on
28January 1547. Referring to the last-named treatise by the familiar title
ofmy boke of Traditions,14 he retracts his previous assertion that Christ
and his Appostles taught and lefte to the church many things without wri-
tyng which we must both beleve stedfastly and also fulfyll obediently
under payne of dampnation ever to endure (Retractation, B3v). In so
doing, the reader witnesses a stark collision between the axiomatic
Catholic belief that unwritten traditions constitute authoritative prescrip-
tions concerning matters of faith and religious practice and the equally
axiomatic Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, whereby the Bible is held
to be an all-sufficient source on matters of faith and worship. Under
theold regime, Smith had argued in favour of apostolic succession and

12See below concerning Smiths allusion to St Augustines Retractationum libri duo.

13J. Andreas Lwe, Richard Smyth and the Language of Orthodoxy: Re-Imagining Tudor
Catholic Polemicism (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 35. I am indebted to Torrance Kirbys
address, Public Conversion: Richard Smyths Retractation Sermon at Oxford and Pauls
Cross in 1547, which he delivered at Pauls Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England
15201640, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 1618 August 2012. See chapter eight below.
14STC 22818, A4r. Although the exact date of publication is unknown, it seems likely
that Thomas Petyt, the printer and bookseller, had moved toward production of this book
while Henry VIII remained alive.
146 john n. king

traditions that Christ revealed to the Apostles in oral form and that the
Apostles transmitted to posterity in non-written form. For Smith such tra-
ditions possessed validity equivalent to biblical teachings, though the
very fourme of woordes be not there. They included belief in the baptism
of children, Christs Harrowing of Hell, the Trinity, and the descent of the
Holy Spirit (Retractation, B4v).
Smiths Retractation anticipates views that the Royal Injunctions of
31July 1547 would promulgate only one week after his Oxford recantation.
In keeping with this official doctrinal pronouncement, Smith accepts the
doctrine of sola scriptura (by scripture alone), whereby the Bible is held
to be the sole source concerning matters of faith and worship. In support-
ing the Royal Supremacy, Smith renounces the inerrancy of apostolic suc-
cession and papal authority and observes that bishops and the clergy lack
authority to make any Lawes or Decrees besydes Gods Law over the peo-
ple without the consent of the Princes or, quite novelly, that of the peo-
ple (Retractation, B1v). With reference to the traditional observance of a
Lenten fast, he invokes the absence of a scriptural warrant in withdrawing
his previous insistence that it is an essential element of religious belief
(Retractation, B3v). Contemporary Protestant apologists were attacking
observance of the Lenten fast.15
During the latter part of Retractation, Smith withdraws from positions
that he had taken in A defence of the blessed masse, and the sacrifice therof
(1546).16 In particular, he affirms the Protestant position that the Passion
constituted an all-sufficient redemptive sacrifice:
But our Savyour Christ made his sacrifice upon the Crosse parfectly, abso-
lutely, and with the most hyghest perfection that could be, somuch, that
after that one oblation and sacrifice for syn made by hym but once only,
nother he nor any other creature shuld at any tyme after, make any mo obla-
cions for the same. (Retractation, D1r)
In so doing, he confesses that he had incircumspectly and rashly write
and set furth too the people that Christ was a priest following the order
of Aaron, rather than the order of Melchizedek, when he underwent cru-
cifixion (D1v; Heb. 5:56, 7:11). Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest
of God Most High, gave bread and wine to Abram (later Abraham), whose

15E.g., A Dialogue Between Lent and Liberty (1547?), a fragmentary treatise attributed to
Robert Crowley, who had some links to the circle of Protector Somerset.
16RSTC 22815. Published during the same year, The assertion and defence of the sacra-
mente of the aulter (RSTC 22820) espouses views that are in fundamental agreement with
those stated in Smiths Defence.
 pauls cross and implementation of protestant reforms147

payment of tithes (Gen. 14:1720) acknowledged Melchizedeks superior-

ity to Abraham and the levitical priesthood descended from him (see
Heb.7:7). Following St Paul, Christians understand Melchizedek as a pre-
figuration of Jesus and his conferral of bread and wine to the disciples dur-
ing the Last Supper. According to Smiths Defence Melchizidek dyd beare
the figure and image of christ the very preist [sic] (D6r). Smith retracts his
assertion that the Mass is a repeated sacrifice in which the elements of
bread and wine undergo transubstantiation into the body and blood of
Christ. His Assertion had declared: Melchisedech dyd sacrifice with breade
and wyne, because we shulde lerne therby, that Messias our savyour the
sonne of god, and the king of justice, shuld come and use like thinges in
his sacrifice (Retractation, D3v)
Printed from standing type, the core of Smiths Declaration is identical
to the text of the Retractation. Additional material consists of the prologue
and epilogue that he added to the Oxford sermon.17 Smith explains that he
adds prefatory remarks because of his failure adequately to explain his
major points or his audiences failure to comprehend then. He backped-
dles when he insist that his sermon is but a Retractation and not a
Recantation (A2v) because recantation connotes the withdrawal of erro-
neous opinions, particularly with regard to formal public confession of
mistaken religious beliefs. Retractation has a softer sense that connotes
revision or reconsideration of previously stated views in a manner that
falls short of an express confession of religious error.18 To a theologian like
Smith, the latter term would necessarily bring to mind St Augustines Liber
Retractionum libri duo, in which he reflected upon and added corrections
to his previous works late in life.19
Smith furthermore denies that he delivered his address as a mouth-
piece for others: that the retractacion send abrode in my name was either
none of myne, or elles that I was compelled and forced to agre unto it
(A3r). Finally, he insists on the doctrinal orthodoxy of his remarks: I do
not deny the holy sacrament of the aulter, nor the Sacrament of baptisme,
nor finally any other thinge comprised in the body of holy scripture as

17In addition, five glosses added to the body of the printed text stress the authority of
the Bible and the invalidity of traditions that lack a basis in scripture (C3v4v, D1r-v).
18John Strype indicates that Smith wrote also letters to his friends, denying he had
made a recantation. See Ecclesiastical Memorials; Relating Chiefly to Religion, and the
Reformation of It, 3 vols. (London: John Wyat, 1721), 2.39.
19Aurelius Augustine, Opera omnia, Retractionum libri duo, in Patrologia Latina 32,
583656. Augustine, The Retractations, trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 1968).
148 john n. king

necessarie matter of our belief (A3v). Smiths added epilogue consists of a

short, albeit pointed, exposition of the doctrine of justification by faith
alone in its declaration that onely20 fayth in Christ doth thus justifie, is
true, catholyke, and a necessary doctrine to be taught to christen men in
this maner (E4v) . This conclusion differs in no material respect from the
teachings in Of the True and Lively Faith and Of Good Works (attributed
to Thomas Cranmer) in the forthcoming Book of Homilies. As if in response
to Catholic charges that Protestant reformers are propounding newly
invented doctrinal formulations for which historical precedent is lacking,
Smith cites patristic antecedents for his assertion that this saieng, that we
be justified by onely fayth in Christ, is no newe invented saieng or proposi-
tion, but many tymes used of the best and most auncient doctours (E3v).
The Declaration closes with a formal denial of the doctrine of justification
by good works:
And in veray deede all our workes fastynge, praiers, almes deades [i.e.,
deeds], paines, tormentes, povertie, abstinence, and all kynde of suffring,
which a man is able to do or abyde, is not able to deserve or to get remission
of sinne, For it is only the mere mercy and great liberalite of almightye god,
thorowe onely [i.e., only] deathe of his sonne Jesus Christ, that freely par-
doneth our offences, and maketh us acceptable to him. (E5v)
To say that Smiths recantation sermon attracted widespread attention
at home and abroad would be an understatement. In his contemporary
chronicle, Charles Wriothesley notes that Smith professed a new sincere
doctrine contrarie to his old papisticall ordre, as his articles in writing
playnelie sheweth.21 Little more than one week after he preached at Pauls
Cross, Odet de Selve, French ambassador to the court of Edward VI,
included a report concerning this event in a letter of 23 May to Henri II. In
addition to citing Smiths recantation as a prime example of the heretical
inclination of the new Protestant regime in England, he reports that
printed copies were read by Londoners and members of the royal court:
Sire, I can tell you that in recent days there has been a preacher who recanted
to me publicly in our great church here concerning things he had earlier
preached according to the tradition of the church. He had spoken most
irreverently concerning the sacraments and the saints, and most licentiously
about the Lenten fast and about every ecclesiastical constitution. Without
delay a fine sermon in English had been printed and sold publically in this

20This spelling preserves the sense of the OE word nlc (i.e., one + ly), which pro-
vides the etymology of only.
21Wrioth. 1.184.
 pauls cross and implementation of protestant reforms149

city and to the lords of this court. Concerning Protector [Somerset], Sire,
many persons reckon that he not only favors such things, but that he is also
initiating them.22
De Selves prolixity, tortuous grammar, and use of the passive voice con-
tribute to an oblique writing style that may be typical of the ambassadors
personal indirectness or the style in fashion at the French court. His sug-
gestion that Richard Smith communicated with him directly exaggerates
de Selves involvement in local affairs in London, given the fact that he
seems to believe that the preacher recanted inside the cathedral rather
than at Pauls Cross.
Smiths recantation and its aftermath contributed to his reputation for
inconstancy among both Protestants and Roman Catholics. In this he dif-
fers from Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who never swerved
from his beliefs despite his reputation for equivocation and deviousness.
Even Gardiner held Smith in low esteem according to a letter of 6 June
1547 to Protector Somerset, in which the bishop declares that a priest in
his diocese brought a copy of Smiths Godly and faythfull retractation with
speede, and made by meanes to have it broughte to my knowledge And
when I saw Doctor Smiths recantacion begin with Omnis homo mendax,
so Engleshed and such a new humility as he woulde make all the doctors
of the Church liers with him selfe it enforced me to write unto your
Grace for the ease of my conscience; geving this judgement of Smith, that
I neither liked his tractation of unwritten verities, ner [i.e., nor] yet his
retraccion, and was glad of my formar judgement, that I neyver had famili-
aryty with him.23
At the end of Edward VIs first regnal year, the great spiritual leader of
the first generation of English evangelicals, Hugh Latimer (c.14851555)
preached as many as eight sermons at Pauls Cross during January 1548.
Prior to this burst of activity, he had last preached at this pulpit on 12 May
1538. At that time, he decried John Forests denial of the Royal Supremacy

22Sire, vous puys dire que ces jours passs y a eu ung prescheur lequel publiquement
comme ma est rcit sest desdict en la grande glise dicy des choses quil avoyt autres-
foys presches selon la tradition de lglise et a parl le plus irrvremment des sacramentz
et des sainctz et le plus licentieusement du caresme et de toutes les constitutions ecclsi-
astiques quil est possible, et incontinent a est icy imprim ce beau sermon en angloys et
se vend publicquement en ceste ville et aux seigneurs de ceste court. Du protecteur, Sire,
plusieurs estiment que non seulement il favorise telles choses, mais quil les introduit.
Translated from Correspondance Politique de Odet de Selve, Ambassadeur de France en
Angleterre (15461549), 145.
23The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. James Arthur Muller (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1933), 293.
150 john n. king

not long before the friar was burnt alive for this infraction.24 Latimer had
been forced into silence and resigned appointment as Bishop of Worcester
because of his opposition to the Act of Six Articles (June 1539). At the time
of Henry VIIIs death, Latimer was in prison in the Tower of London during
the aftermath of the Anne Askew affair. Restored to favour during the
reign of Edward VI, he became an influential royal counselor and preacher
at the court of the boy king.
On 18 January 1548, Latimer preached his memorable Sermon on the
Ploughers in the Shrouds, which was a crypt beneath St Pauls Cathedral
where Pauls Cross sermons were delivered when rainfall disrupted preach-
ing out of doors.25 Delivered not long after the issuance of the Royal
Injunctions of Edward VI, this sermon argues in favour of the program of
religious reform that they set forth. Identifying the ideal cleric with a hum-
ble husbandman, this sermon calls for clerical reform and the redress of
social and political corruption in a long georgic tradition associated with
Piers Plowman and the Erasmian ideal cited in John Foxes account of how
William Tyndale faced down an unreformed cleric and stated: I defy the
Pope and all his laws, and further added that if God spared him life, ere
many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of
the scripture, than he did.26
Latimers introduction makes it clear that this sermon is the fourth in
his series of expositions of the Parable of the Sower (Luke 8:415). The first
three homilies, whose texts are not extant, explored the tropes of seed as a
figure for scriptural doctrine appropriate for congregational preaching
and sown fields as a figure for godly congregations. The Sermon on the
Ploughers brings Latimers application to a conclusion by exploring his
identification of the sower as a figure for a humble preaching ministry.
With familiar autobiographical detail, he reflects upon his own experience
with plowmen in his native Leicestershire.
Decrying non-preaching prelates who receive benefices from multiple
clerical appointments while they hire curates to discharge clerical duties
at the parochial level, Latimer broadens the sense of prelate to include
responsibility for the cure of souls that technically falls within the remit
of bishops and other high-ranking officials, but is typically discharged by

24See John Stowe, Annales (1615), Ddd3r; MacLure, Register, rev. Boswell and Pauls, 22.
25See Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 1011.
26John N. King, ed., Voices of the English Reformation: A Sourcebook (Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 273.
 pauls cross and implementation of protestant reforms151

curates at the parochial level. He therefore takes issue with the standard
use of prelate to denote a primate at the apex of the ecclesiastical hierar-
chy. It is in this sense that Richard Smith had employed the term at Pauls
Cross during the course of recanting his claims concerning the autorite of
Bysshoppes in makyng lawes and ordenances (B1r).
Latimer favoured colloquial plainness, homely diction and figures of
speech, and an anecdotal style for which he gained renown. His insistent
consonance renders his words memorable to a socially stratified audience
heavily reliant on oral instruction. The preachers recourse to alliteration
and rhyming prose can have a humorous, indeed a satirical effect, as in his
emphatic linkage of indolent loitering (i.e., wasting of time) with the lord-
liness of transgressive prelates who have grown rich through holding mul-
tiple benefices and farming out their pastoral duties to ill-trained clerics at
the parish level. In defining the ideal prelate as a humble preacher (i.e., a
sower), Latimers use of alliteration underscores his distorted mirror imag-
ing of preaching clergy dedicated to pastoral care and negligent clerics
who violate their calling by dedicating themselves to personal enrichment
through the accumulation of multiple benefices and clerical absenteeism,
rather than devotion to pastoral care:
Therfore preache and teache, and let your ploughe be doyng, ye lordes I saye
that lyve lyke loyterers, loke well to your offyce, the plough is your office and
charge. If you live idle and loyter, you do not your duetye, you folowe not
youre vocacion, let your ploughe therfore be going and not cease, that the
ground maye brynge foorth fruite How then hath it happened, that we
have had so manye hundred yeres, so many unpreachynge prelates, lordyng
loyterers and idle ministers? (B3r3v)

Listeners encountered alliteration run wild in Latimers riot of words:

They are soo troubeled wyth lordlye livyng, they be so placed in palacies,
couched in courtes, ruffelyng in their rentes, dauncyng in their dominions,
burdened with ambassages, pamperyng of their paunches lyke a Monke that
maketh his Jubilie, mounchynge in their maungers, and moilyng in their gay
manoures and mansyons, and so troubeled with loyterynge in theyr
Lordeshyppes: that they canne not attende it Well, well. (B6v7r)

The preachers likening of false prelates to monks, who had not walked
abroad since Henry VIIIs dissolution of monastic houses, attacks clerical
aggrandizement in a manner familiar from late-medieval anticlerical sat-
ire of the kind familiar from Piers Plowman and Chaucers portrayal of the
Monk and a variety of unsavoury clerics in the General Prologue of The
Canterbury Tales:
152 john n. king

For ever sence the Prelates were made Lordes and nobles, the ploughe
standeth [i.e., remains at rest], there is no work done; the people sterve. Thei
hauke, they hunt, thei card, they dyce, they pastyme in their prelacies with
galaunte gentlemen, with theyr daunsyng minyons, and with their freshe
companions, so that ploughyng is sette a syde. And by the lordyng and loy-
tryng, preachyng and ploughyng is cleane gone. (B4v)

Latimer abandons alliteration when it might undercut the blunt sobriety

of his jeremiad against the failures of wealthy Londoners. His citation of
Jeremiah 48:10Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord with slack-
ness; and cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshedduring
the course of his harangue against false prelates broadens into a broad-
side attack against London as a city dominated by prosperous merchants
whose avarice leads them into ungodliness. After all, the Hebrew prophet
levelled this particular oracle against Moab, whose enmity toward Israel
associates it with irreligion. Latimer accordingly likens London to Nebo,
a Moabite town whose destruction Jeremiah prophesies Woe to Nebo,
for it is laid waste! Fusing his appeals for religious reform and social
justice, Latimer invokes Londoners to repent and demonstrate religious
fidelity:

So that, that place of the prophet was spoken of them that wente to the
distruction of the cityes of Moab, among the whiche there was one called
Nebo, whiche was muche reproved for idolatrie, supersticion, pryde, ava-
ryce, crueltie, tiranny, and for hardenes of herte, and for these sinnes was
plaged of God and destroied. Nowe what shall we saye of these ryche citi-
zens of London? What shall I say of them? shal I cal them proude men
of London, malicious men of London, mercylesse men of London. No, no,
I may not say so, they wyl be offended with me than. Yet must I speake. For
is there not reigning in London, as much pride, as much covetousnes, as
muche crueltie, as muche oppression, as much supersticion, as was in Nebo?
Yes, I thynke and muche more to. Therefore I saye, repente O London.
Repent, repente. (A8r-v)

In opposition to racking scriptures, Latimer advocates dissemination of

their plain literal sense. His advocacy of the use of similitudes in sermons
accords with Tyndales denial of four-fold interpretation of scriptures and
advocacy of the literal sense as the only permissible interpretation. In his
view, allegory may inhere within the literal sense even though it is forbid-
den as an alternative mode of interpretation. His position accords with
that of a contemporary rhetorician for whom allegory is permissible so
long as it is subordinated to the literal sense: in any article of the faithe, it
 pauls cross and implementation of protestant reforms153

is and must be only the literall sense that proveth.27 In a similar vein,
Latimer likens preaching to meat rather than strawberries that come but
once a yeare and tarye not longe, but are sone gone (A6r).
Although Latimer was accused of sacrilege for likening the Blessed
Virgin Mary to a saffron bag (a sachet of seasoning whose essence under-
goes depletion during the course of cooking), he denies that he ever
employed this controversial trope: It hath bene saied of me. Oh Latimer,
nay, as for him I wil never beleve hym whyle I lyve, nor never trust him, for
he lykened our blessed Ladye to a saffrone bagge, where in deede I never
used that similitude (A3v). Nevertheless, he goes on to claim that such a
comparison need not connote disrespect to the mother of Jesus Christ.
Indeed, this figure of speech would have honoured the Virgin Mary by
praising her for being imbued with the essence of her offspring:
But in case I had used this similitude, it had not bene to be reproved, but
myght have bene wythout reproche. For I might have sayed thus, as the saf-
frone bagge that hath bene full of saffron, or hath had saffron in it, doth ever
after savoure and smel of the swete saffron that it conteyned: so oure blessed
Ladye which conceyved and bare Chryste in her wombe, dyd ever after
resemble the maners and vertues of that precious babe which she bare
(A3v4r).
Latimers sardonic praise of the Devil as a model plowman typifies his use
of similitudes that are both humble and outrageous. In satirizing the der-
eliction of duty of haughty prelates who hire deputies to discharge their
duties, he lodges a two-sided complaint that urges them to emulate the
Devil, whom he ironically praises as the least idle of plowman:
The Devill is dilygente at his ploughe. He is no unpreachyng prelate. He is
no Lordelye loyterer from his cure, but a busie ploughe man, so that amonhe
[sic] all the prelates, and amonge al the packe of them that have cure, the
Devill shal go for my money. For he styll applyeth his busynes. Therefore ye
unpreachynge prelates, learne of the devill to be diligent in doyng of your
offyce. (D6v).
Resorting to runaway alliteration and word repetition, yet again, he com-
piles a satirical catalog that slides into sarcasm as he drives home his
critique:
Where the Devyl is resydente and hath his ploughe goyng: there away with
bookes, and up with candelles, awaye with Bybles and up with beades,

27Richard Rex, ed., A Reformation Rhetoric: Thomas Swynnertons The Tropes and Figures
of Scripture (Cambridge: RTM Publications, 1999), 165.
154 john n. king

awaye with the lyghte of the gospel, and up with the lyghte of candelles, yea
at noone dayes. Where the Devyll is residente, that he maye prevayle, up
with all supersticion and Idolatrie, sensing, paintynge of ymages, candels,
palmes, asshes, holie water, and new service of mennes inventyng, as though
man could invente a better waye to honoure God with, then god hymselfe
hath apoynted. Doune with Christes crosse, up with purgatory picke pursse,
up with hym, the popishe pourgatorie I meane. Awaye with clothing the
naked, the pore and impotent, up with deckynge of ymages and gaye gar-
nyshynge of stockes and stones. Up with mannes tradicious and his lawes,
downe with Gods tradycions and his most holye worde. (C3v4r).
The Sermon on the Ploughers survives because John Day and William Seres
published two octavo editions not long after its delivery. It seems certain
that Day and Seres were cashing in on high demand for copies of Latimers
sermon soon after its delivery. The second edition attests to the patronage
of Catherine Brandon (ne Willoughby), dowager Duchess of Suffolk, by
bearing her coat of arms on the verso of the title page. She was a notable
patron of Protestant reformers, who received dedications to many printed
books. Her coat of arms appears in other books printed and published by
Day and Seres during the reign of Edward VI, including English transla-
tions of the Apocrypha and New Testament (STC 2087.5 [formerly 2791a]
and 2853) as well as treatises by William Tyndale and the Swiss reformer,
Pierre Viret (STC 24441a and 24784). It may be that Thomas Some tran-
scribed the Sermon on the Ploughers, possibly at the behest of the Duchess
of Suffolk, just as the texts of other sermons have survived due to their
transcription by Some, Augustine Bernher, who served Latimer as amanu-
ensis, and other admirers. Some gathered the edition of Lenten sermons
that Latimer preached at Whitehall Palace in 1549. The disappearance of
the majority of Latimers sermons attests to the preachers apparent disre-
gard for their survival.
During the remainder of 1548, sermons at Pauls Cross tended to focus
on consolidation of recent changes in religion. Millar MacLure errs in stat-
ing that Stephen Gardiner preached at Pauls Cross on 29 June 1548.28 In
actual fact, he preached at the Chapel Royal at Whitehall.29 London
records indicate that alle thoys prechers that prechyd at Powlles crosse
at that tyme spake moche agayne the bysshoppe of Wynchester.30 They

28MacLure, Register, rev. Boswell and Pauls, 29.

29See John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant
Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, 17273.
30John Gough Nichols, ed., Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London (London: Printed for
the Camden Society, 1852), 56.
 pauls cross and implementation of protestant reforms155

included Richard Cox, Almoner and schoolmaster to Edward VI, who criti-
cized Gardiner for contemptuouslie and obstinatlie reneging on his
agreement to deny unwritten verities and preach, in the manner of Richard
Smith, in favour of recent changes in religion. Nonetheless, Cox called
upon the congregation to pray for Gardiners conuersion to the truth, and
not to rejoyce of this his troble, which was godlie donne.31
Thomas Lever is the final preacher whose Edwardian sermons at Pauls
Cross remain extant. Unlike Hugh Latimer, who came of age long before
Martin Luther is said to have tacked his Ninety-five Theses on the door of
Castle Church in Wittenberg (1517), Lever (15211577) was born during the
year when Luthers books were burnt in London and the Kings Printer,
Richard Pynson, published Assertio septem sacramentorum under the
name of Henry VIII. It rejects Luthers reduction of the traditional system
of seven sacraments on the ground that only three (Holy Communion,
baptism, and, for the time being, confession) possessed scriptural warrant.
An associate of Latimer and a university man like Smith and Latimer,
Lever matriculated at St Johns College, Cambridge, where he became a
fellow and college preacher. His evangelical sympathies propelled his rise
in favour as a preacher at the court of Edward VI.
During the year prior to his appointment as master of St Johns College
by order of the boy king, Lever delivered a Pauls Cross sermon in the
Shrouds because of inclement weather on 2 February 1550. He did so
against the backdrop of social disorder that gave rise to the Western
Rebellion that began in Cornwall and Devon in June 1549. Motivated by
devotion to the old religion, dissidents attacked the Edwardian religious
settlement and recent imposition of the English liturgy promulgated in
the Book of Common Prayer. John, Lord Russell, took the lead in lifting the
siege of Exeter on 6 August and defeating the rebels on 17 August. A rising
in Norfolk began on 12 July 1549 under the leadership of a wealthy tanner
and property owner named Robert Kett. Establishing an encampment at
Mousehold Heath outside of Norwich, the rebels opposed exploitation of
commoners by the gentry and enclosing of common land in order to con-
vert it from agricultural use to the profitable grazing of sheep owned by
wealthy landowners. (It is worthy of note that Latimers Sermon on the
Ploughers attacks two kinds of enclosing, namely the fencing in of worldly
land to the detriment of subsistence farmers and the misdirection of cleri-
cal income that should properly be dedicated to the sowing of scriptural

31Wrioth. 2.4.
156 john n. king

seed.32) Even though this insurrection was tinged with anti-clericalism,

the rebels accepted the Book of Common Prayer. John Dudley, Earl of
Warwick, crushed Ketts Rebellion on 27 August. These events enabled
him to engineer the deposition of Protector Somerset, whose execution
Dudley engineered in 1552, not long after his own creation as Duke of
Northumberland. He dominated the government until the death of
Edward VI.
In the course of opening up the Epistle designated by the Book of
Common Prayer (Rom: 13:17), Lever enunciates the orthodox Tudor doc-
trine of political obedience of subject to ruler. Meditating upon the recent
insurrections, he repeatedly warns against divine vengeance. Lever looks
to the Old Testament for precedents for divine vengeance against a dis-
obedient people, in the manner of Latimers likening of London to the
Moabite town of Nebo in the Sermon on the Ploughers Citing the twin
examples of Sodom and Ninevah, whose residents respectively disobeyed
and acceded to divine commandments,33 Lever warns the English to fol-
low the model of Ninevah rather than Sodom:
Then if you fele, knowe, and have experyence, that Englande by reason of
covetousnes is full of division, is full of contempte of goddes mercye, is full
of Idolatrye, is full of pryde, Flatter not youre selves in youre owne phansies,
but beleve the word of God, whiche telleth you truelye that Englande shall
be destroyed sodainly, miserably, and shamefullye. The same destruccion
was tolde to the Sodomites, was tolde to the Ninivites: was deserved of the
Sodomites, and was deserved of the Ninivites: but came upon the Sodomites,
and was tourned from the Ninivytes. And why? For because the Sodomytes
regarded not goddes threatenynges and were plaged wyth gods vengeaunce,
the Ninivytes regarded goddes threatnynges, and escaped gods vengeaunce.
(A6v7r).
Lever exhorts the English to avoid destruction in the manner of the
Sodomites: Repent, lament and amend your lives, as did the good
Ninivites. For if ye spedely repent, and myserably lamente, and be ashamed
of your vainglory, covetousnes, and ambicion, ye shal cause covetous, sedi-
cious, proude, and vicious England, sodenly, miserablye yea and shame-
fully in the syghte and judgement of the world, to vanysh away (A7v).
Although Lever asserts that Englands suffering is a divine affliction that
results from widespread disregard of true religion recently restored
through reading and preaching of the English Bible, he assures congregants

32B5v6r.
33Gen. 19:128; Jonah 3:410.
 pauls cross and implementation of protestant reforms157

that repentance and obedience will forestall divine vengeance and result
in providential deliverance that accords with the cyclic historical pattern
inscribed within Deuteronomy and the Former Prophets. In defending the
Edwardian religious settlement, Lever attributes recent turmoil in Norfolk
and the West Country to the twin evils of civil disobedience by common-
ers and profiteering by the wealthy: pore men have been rebels, and ryche
men have not done their duetie. Bothe have done evyll to provoke goddes
vengeance, neyther doth repente to procure gods mercye. He drives home
his critique of the wealthy with no fewer than thirty-six references to cov-
etousness. A recurrent pattern of doubling runs through the entire ser-
mon, whereby he blames both commoners for dissidence and wealthy
individuals (and rulers) for failing to share their wealth with the poor. He
connects the two sides of his argument in claiming that rebellion consti-
tutes the worst form of covetousness.
Even though the preacher denies that the apostolic model of commu-
nal ownership provides a precedent for the levelling of wealth or social
distinctions, he nonetheless asserts that prosperous individuals have an
obligation to share their wealth through charitable acts. In a refrain famil-
iar from Latimers preaching and tracts written by Robert Crowley, Lever
blames both rulers and wealthy individuals for failing to fulfil their obliga-
tion to succour the poor.34 Once again, non-preaching clerics and absen-
tee holders of multiple benefices share the blame. Reflecting upon the
dissolution of monastic houses under Henry VIII and recent completion
under Edward VI of the dissolution of chantries endowed for the singing
of perpetual Masses for the dead, Lever blames both rulers and wealthy
individuals for breaking a promise to fulfil the monastic ideal of support-
ing the poor and inculcating learning.
Levers appointment to preach again at Pauls Cross on 14 December
1550 reflects his stature as an energetic reformist churchman who had
preached a series of Lenten sermons at the royal court during the same
year. In this renowned sermon, he covered familiar ground in admonish-
ing the wealthy for exploiting the poor and echoing Latimers chastise-
ment of worldly clerics for idleness and hypocrisy. To these charges,
he added a critique of the government, now led by John Dudley, Earl of

34Geoffrey Elton lays to rest the notion that Latimer, Lever, Crowley, and others were
members of a coherent party that favoured social reform in a 1979 essay entitled Reform
and the Commonwealth-Men of Edward VIs Reign; republished in Studies in Tudor and
Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews, 4 vols. (London and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 197492), 3:23453.
158 john n. king

Warwick, who had deposed Protector Somerset during January of the

same year, for its failure to support education in both grammar schools
and the universities. 35 Levers attack on the Wicked Mammon alludes to
William Tyndales popular and influential Parable of the Wicked Mammon
(1528).
Lever and his fellow reformers knew well that the implementation of
the Edwardian settlement of religion was contingent on the survival of
Edward VI, who acceded to the throne as a sickly minor. During the
remaining years of his reign, preachers at Pauls Cross continued to decry
the survival of forbidden religious practices. Matthew Parker preached
in favour of national unity and obedience to the laws of the land in early
1551, and Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, preached an exceedingly
long sermon following the introduction of the second Book of Common
Prayer on 1 November 1552. In addition to sermons on theological topics,
one preacher gave thanks for a peace treaty with France and Hugh Latimer
spoke concerning the absence of appropriate sanitation in St Pauls
churchyard.36
The death of Edward VI on 6 July 1553 led to the succession of his half-
sister, Mary I (15531558), who came close to restoring the Church of
England to the status quo ante prior to Henry VIIIs divorce from her
mother, Catherine of Aragon. Indeed, Queen Mary in effect attempted to
bring about a Hapsburg succession through marriage to her cousin, Philip
of Spain. Following Smiths resignation from his lectureship and removal
from the Regius Professorship at the University of Oxford, he attended lec-
tures on 1 Corinthians delivered by his successor, Peter Martyr Vermigli
(154849). According to Strype, he took notes, as tho he had been one of
his diligent and glad auditors. But all this was dissimulation, because he
challenged Martyr to engage in theological disputation, and then fled to
Louvain before it took place.37 After the death of Edward VI, Smith
returned to England and Mary I appointed him to serve as her chaplain
and as Chancellor of the University of Oxford. After withdrawing from the
royal court not long after the fall of Protector Somerset, Hugh Latimer
dedicated himself to service of the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, at whose

35A sermon preached at Pauls crosse, the .14. day of December, 1550. In addition to two
editions published by John Day during 1551, John Oswen published a third edition, perhaps
during the same year (RSTC 1554615546.7). In 1548 Oswen had relocated his printing
establishment from Ipswich to Worcester, where he published quasi-official publications
for the population of Wales under the terms of a royal patent.
36MacLure, Register, rev. Boswell and Pauls, 3133.
37Ecclesiastical Memorials, 2.40.
 pauls cross and implementation of protestant reforms159

home in Lincolnshire he preached a series of sermons that were later

printed by John Day. Refusing to go into exile under Mary I, he underwent
trial and conviction as a heretic at the University of Oxford. As Chancellor,
Richard Smith preached from a portable pulpit when Latimer was burnt
alive in the company of Nicholas Ridley in Broad Street, Oxford. Smith
also presided at the heresy trial of Thomas Cranmer. After supporting John
Dudleys attempt to bypass Lady Mary in a failed attempt to alter the line
of royal succession in order to engineer the accession to the throne of
Lady Jane Grey, Thomas Lever went into exile in continental Europe,
where he associated with prominent Protestant reformers in Strasbourg,
Zurich, and Geneva. Returning to England after the death of Mary I and
accession of her half-sister, Elizabeth, on 17 November 1558, Lever neither
resumed the mastership of St Johns College, Cambridge, nor returned to
favour at the royal court. His radical religious convictions and involvement
with the nascent Puritan movement blocked him from advancing in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

PUBLIC CONVERSION:
RICHARD SMYTHS RETRACTATION AT PAULS CROSS IN 1547

Torrance Kirby

One of the key forms of conversion that contributed substantially to the

intellectual transformation of Europe and its world during the early mod-
ern period is the purposeful turn of humanist scholars and reforming
theologians alike towards the Forms themselves. I refer to the conscious,
indeed fervent embrace of the Platonic epistemology of illumination
exemplified by Erasmian reform. Underpinning many of the early-modern
forms of conversion is a conversion in the the deep assumptions of the
theory of cognition. In a blistering attack on the egregious moral abuses of
the late-medieval Church in his Enchiridion militis Christiani of 1503,
Erasmus draws a telling parallel between Platos theory of knowledge and
his own philosophia Christi.1 The philosophers turning away from the
fleeting images of sensuous phantasy on coming out of the Cave, and fac-
ing toward the brilliant luminosity of the intellectual SunPlatos Form
of the Goodrepresents for Erasmus a humanist model of conversion to
what he terms quick and vigorous adulthood in Christ, that is a religious
life characterized by inward clarity of cognition strongly contrasted with
perfunctory observance of external ceremony and arcane ritual. In the
peroration of the fifth rule of the Enchiridion, an especially vivid passage
reminiscent of Pico della Mirandolas Oration fuses the epistemological
imagery of Republic and the erotic metaphor of the souls ascent to
the intellectual heaven in Phaedrus with Jacobs dream of angels ascend-
ing and descending a ladder between heaven and earth;2 with
a characteristic nod in the direction of Lucretius, Erasmus sums up his
case for religious reform as consisting first and foremost in metanoia, a
radical conversion of the mind, rendered here in the translation published

1On Erasmus and the Philosophia Christi as a life centered on Christ and characterized
by inner faith rather than external rites, see Erika Rummel, The Erasmus Reader (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1990), 138154.
2Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the dignity of man; translated by A. Robert
Caponigri (South Bend, Indiana: Regnery Gateway, 1956), 1719.
162 torrance kirby

in 1533 commonly attributed to William Tyndale, but more probably by

Nicholas Udall:
Thou therfore my brother / leest with sorowfull laboures thou shuldest not
moche preuayle / but that with meane exercyse myghtest shortely waxe
bygge in Christe and lusty / dyligently embrace this rule / & crepe not alwaye
on the grounde with the vncleane beestes / but always sustayned with those
wyngis which Plato beleueth to springe euer a fresshe / through the heate of
loue in the mynde of men. Lyfte vp thy selfe as it were with certayne steppes
of the ladder of Iacob / from the body to the spyrit / from ye visyble worlde
vnto the inuysible / from the letter to the mystery / from thynges sencyble to
thynges intellygible / from thyngis grosse and compounde vnto thynges syn-
gle and pure. Who so euer after this maner shall approche and drawe nere to
the lorde / the lorde of his parte shall agayne approche and drawe nyghe to
hym. And if thou for thy parte shalte endeuoyre to aryse out of the darknesse
and troubles of the sensuall powers / he wyll come agaynste the plesauntly
& for thy profyte / out of his lyght inaccessyble / and out of that noble
scylence incogytable: In whiche not only all rage of sensuall powers / but
also simylytudes or ymagynacions of all the intellygyble powers dothe cease
and kepe scylence.3
In 1504 Erasmus sent a copy of his Handbook to his humanist colleague
John Colet, the Dean of St Pauls, together with an account of his general
purpose: I composed it not in order to show off my cleverness or my
style, but solely in order to counteract the error of those who make reli-
gion in general consist in rituals and observances but who are astonish-
ingly indifferent to matters that have to do with true goodness. What
I have tried to do, in fact, is to teach a method of morals, as it were, in the
manner of those who have originated fixed procedures in the branches of
learning.4 Erasmuss call to ethical and religious reform is founded upon a
radical epistemological conversion. I could see, he states,

3Desiderius Erasmus, Ratio seu methodus compendio perueniendi ad ueram theologiam:

Paraclesis, id est adhortatio ad sanctissimum, ac saluberrimum Christian philosoph
studium (Basle: [Johannes Froben], 1521), republished (Strasbourg: Felicem, 1522). An
English translation of Erasmuss original Latin text, attributed to William Tyndale, appeared
in 1533: A booke called in latyn Enchiridion militis christiani, and in englysshe the manuell of
the christen knyght replenysshed with moste holsome preceptes, made by the famous clerke
Erasmus of Roterdame (London: Wynkyn de Worde, for Iohan Byddell, 1533). See Douglas
H.Parker, The English Enchiridion militis christiani and Reformation Politics, Erasmus in
English 5 (1972), 16- 21. While John Foxe maintained that Tyndale made this translation
while a tutor in Gloucestershire in the mid 1520s, David Daniell attributes the translation to
Nicholas Udall: see William Tyndale: A Biography (London and New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994), 72. See Anne M. ODonnell, Editing the independent Works of William
Tyndale, in Erika Rummel, ed., Editing Texts from the Age of Erasmus (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1996), 55.
4Erasmus, Epistle 181:53, quoted by Erika Rummel, Erasmus Reader, 138.
 public conversion: richard smyths retractation163

that the common body of Christians was corrupt not only in its affections,
but in its ideas Abraham long ago dug wells in every country seeking veins
of living water; and when the Philistines filled them with earth they were
dug anew by Isaac and his sons, who, not content with restoring the old
wells, dug new ones besides Nor are we quite free of Philistines nowadays,
who get more pleasure from earth than from fountains of living water.5
The prescribed cure was to be nothing less than a return back to the
sourcesa radical conversio ad fontes! In the first instance this was to be a
return to the ancients, and most especially to the Greeks. The classical
turn was not, however, an end in itself, but was plainly understood as
instrumental in preparation for the return to what Pico called the living
waters of the Sacred Oracles, that is to say to the Holy Scriptures.6
Erasmuss Enchiridion epitomizes a far-reaching conversion of the the-
ory of knowledge which underpins two grand projects of the 16th
centurynamely, the humanist challenge to scholastic method and the
Protestant reformers challenge to the traditional assumptions governing
the doctrine and practice of the late-medieval Church.7 For Erasmus,
following Plato, metanoia is to turn from the impermanent sensuous
appearancesliterally the phainomenatowards the permanent reality,
namely the forms or ideas. The preliminary mode of knowing proper
to fleeting appearance is designated by Plato as phantasia or doxamere
sensuous opinionwhile the mode of cognition proper to the converted
and illuminated soul is a tethered rational understandingepisteme.
The sense of turning around in the Latin conversio brings with it an addi-
tional sense of subversion, alteration, or radical change.8 Pliny the Younger
speaks of conversio as a complete alteration of point of view or opinion,9
while both Cicero and Quintilian employ the term in the formal language

5From Erasmuss prefatory epistle address to Paul Volz, Abbot of Hugshofen, Epistle
181:53, quoted by Erika Rummel, Erasmus Reader, 138, 139.
6Sed in primis ad fontes ipsos properandum, id est grcos et antiquos. Erasmus, De
ratione studii ac legendi interpretandique auctores (Paris: G. Biermant, 1511) in Opera omnia,
vol. 2 (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1969), 120.11.
7Charles G. Nauert, Humanism as Method: Roots of conflict with the Scholastics, The
Sixteenth Century Journal, 29. 2 (1998), 427438.
8See, e.g., Cicero, De divinatione, 2.2.6: moderatio et conversio tempestatum; idem,
Oratio pro L. Flacco, 37, 94: conversio et perturbatio rerum. The following classical citations
are derived for the most part from the definitions of metanoia in A Greek-English Lexicion
compiled by H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, New Edition ed. Stuart Jones (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1968) and of conversio in A Latin Dictionary, ed. C.T. Lewis and C. Short (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962).
9Pliny the Younger, Epistul 9.13.18: tanta conversio consecuta est.
164 torrance kirby

of rhetoric, namely as the transition from one species of composition to

another, or the rounding out of a period.10
Christs first speech on coming out of the wilderness as recorded in the
Gospel of Matthew echoes the admonitory cry of John the Baptist:
, Repent ye, for the king-
dome of heuen is at honde, as Tyndale, and subsequently the King James
Version translate.11 And finally, looking briefly to the early Church Fathers,
Augustine employs the term conversio theologically when he describes in
profoundly Platonic fashion the alteration in the orientation of love
(amor) away from the fleeting goods of the earthly city where the will is
constrained by its lust of domination (libido dominandi) and love of self
(amor sui), towards the permanence of the heavenly city where the con-
verted rational soul finds in the love of God (amor Dei) an object adequate
to the fulfillment (fruitio) of its nature in whose image and likeness it is
made.12

Richard Smyths Retractation Sermon of 1547

In the heady, combative atmosphere of late-scholastic and humanist

scholarship in mid-Tudor Oxford, all of these classical, scriptural, and
patristic senses of metanoia and conversio were commonplace. The epis-
temological significance of conversion Erasmus attaches to the concept of
conversion in his Enchiridion, may assist us constructively in interpreting
a representative event of formal public conversion early in the reign of
Edward VI, namely in Dr Richard Smyths Retractation Sermon preached
at Pauls Cross in London on 15 May 1547,13 and preached again two months
later on 24 July at the University of Oxford.14 At the time, in his capacity as
Regius Professor of Divinity and Prebendary of Christ Church, Smyth held

10Quintilian, Institutiones Oratori, 10.5.4; Cicero, de Oratore, 3.54.207.

11Matt. 4:17.
12Augustine, De civitate Dei, 14.28. See also 7.33 and 8.24 conversio ad verum Deum
sanctumque.
13Richard Smyth, A godly and faythfull retractation made and published at Paules crosse
in London, the yeare of oure lorde God 1547, the 15 daye of May, by Mayster Richard Smyth
Doctor of diuinitye, and reader of the Kynges maiestyes lecture in Oxford. Reuokyng therein
certeyn Errors and faultes by hum committyd in some of hys bookes (London: [Reynolde
Wolfe], Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum, 1547).
14Richard Smyth, A playne declaration made at Oxforde the 24. daye of July, by mayster
Richarde Smyth, Doctor of diuinite, vpon hys Retractation made and published at Paules
crosse in London, in the yeare of our lorde God, MDxlvii the xv. daye of May (London:
[Reynolde Wolfe], 1547).
 public conversion: richard smyths retractation165

one of the most prestigious academic appointments in the realm. Such

was his intellectual distinction that later, during the subsequent reign of
Edwards sister Mary, Smyth was elected Chancellor of the University of
Oxford. Most likely owing to his prominence in the university, Smyth was
singled out by the Privy Council to preach a sermon retracting certain tra-
ditional teachings on the nature of religious authority and the sacraments
that had been published in two books in the previous year, in order to
signal the determined shift of religious policy under the new regime. In
effect, Smyth was called upon to disavow publicly doctrines and opinions
that until only a few months previously, that is in the final year of the reign
of King Henry VIII, had represented something close to the accepted stan-
dard of doctrinal orthodoxy.15 Regime change inevitably brought the ques-
tion of conversion in its wakeand with it the necessity for Smyth to
make a decisive adjustment to his primary doctrinal assumptions if he was
to continue in possession of his eminent academic situation, not to men-
tion the enviable emoluments pertaining thereto as a Canon of Christ
Church. Smyths Retractation Sermon provides an instructive case for
weighing the public religious and political implications of conversion in
the course of Englands multiple Reformations, as well as an opportunity
to examine their dependence upon shifting epistemological assumptions
concerning conversion such as those proposed by Erasmus in his
Enchiridion.
Smyths career maps an exhilarating sequence of public conversions
followed by later retractions which provides an exemplar of the rapid
adaptation necessary for those who hoped to survive recurring changes of
regime between 1530 and 1560, and of course later as well. Numbering
among the leading intellects of his day, Smyth graduated BA from Merton
College in 1527 and was shortly thereafter elected to a fellowship of his col-
lege. He read for the BD degree which he received in 1533, and was subse-
quently inducted to the nearby living of Cuxham. Three years later in 1536
Smyth was appointed reader of the Kynges maiestyes lecture in Oxford at
King Henry VIIIs newly constituted college, formerly Cardinal College
which had been suppressed in 1531 after the fall of Wolsey, and refounded
by Henry in 1532. In 1546, a year before Smyths Retractation sermon, the
college was renamed Christ Church (Aedes Christi) in acknowledgement
of its elevation to the status of Cathedral in a jurisdictional transformation

15For a full discussion of the career of Richard Smyth and his recantations see J. Andreas
Lwe, Richard Smyth and the language of orthodoxy: re-imagining Tudor Catholic polemi-
cism (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), esp. 3440.
166 torrance kirby

of the English Churchthis fluctuating transmutation of the college dur-

ing its first twenty years itself provides an interesting example of institu-
tional conversion in the context of the tumultuous course of Englands
Reformations.16 While Smyth was an undergraduate during the 1520s
Wolsey had already begun the process of dissolving numerous monaster-
ies in order to convert their endowments to support his magnificent col-
legial foundation.17 The significance of this conversion of the wealth of
monastic communities to the service of the university with its emphasis
upon the new learning cannot have been lost on Smyth who set out an
elaborate conservative defence of ecclesiastical traditions and privileges
in the final year of Henrys reign and in fact published after the kings
demise early in 1547.18 Following the accession of Edward VI, Smyth was
called upon to burn his book along with two others in defence of the doc-
trines of transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the Mass19 in the context
of a formal recantation at Pauls Cross on 15 May 1547.20
In his Retractation Smyth formally recanted his traditionalist late-
Henrician brand of orthodoxy and stated his willing adherence to the new

16On the question of the plurality of Tudor Reformations, see Christopher Haigh,
English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993). Peter Marshall discusses Henry VIIIs own attempt to address this matter in his
Christmas Eve address to Parliament in 1545, in Marshalls view perhaps Henrys finest
hour. Mumpsimus et Sumpsimus: the intellectual origins of a Henrician Bon Mot, Journal
of Ecclesiastical History 52 (2001), 512520.
17The Priory of Wallingford near Smyths parish at Cuxham was among thirty monastic
houses dissolved by Wolsey in order to found his college in Oxford and a Grammar School
in his birthplace at Ipswich.
18Richard Smith, A brief treatyse settynge forth diuers truthes necessary both to be
beleued of Chrysten people, & kepte also, whiche are not expressed in the Scripture but left to
ye church by the apostles traditio[n] (Lo[n]don: in Paules Churche yearde, at the synge of
the Mayde[n]s hed by Thomas Petit, 1547).
19Richard Smyth, The assertion and defence of the sacramente of the aulter. Compyled
and made by mayster Richard Smythe doctour of diuinitie, and reader of the Kynges maiesties
lesson in his graces vniuersitie of Oxforde, dedicate vnto his hyghnes, beynge the excellent and
moost worthy defendour of Christes faythe (London: Iohn Herforde for Roberte Toye, dwell-
ynge in Paules church yarde at the sygne of the Bell, 1546). Richard Smyth, A defence of the
blessed masse, and the sacrifice therof prouynge that it is auayleable both for the quycke and
the dead and that by Christes owne and his apostles ordynaunce, made [and] set forth by
Rycharde Smyth doctour in diuinitie, and reader of ye kynges highnes lesson of diuinitie, in his
maiesties vniuersitie of Oxforde. Wherin are dyuers doubtes opened, as it were by the waye,
ouer and aboue the principall, and cheyfe matter (London: John Herforde, 1546). See Lwe,
Richard Smyth, 186200.
20Charles Wriothesley notes in his Chronicle of the Grey friars of London that on the
fiftenth daie of maie, 1547, Doctor Smyth of Wydyngton [i.e. Whittington] College
recanted and burned two bookes and there professed another sincere doctrine contrarie
to his old papisticall order. See A Chronicle of England during the reigns of the Tudors, from
a. d. 14851559 ed. W.D. Hamilton (Westminster: Camden Society, 187577), 184.
 public conversion: richard smyths retractation167

Reformed standards favoured by Protector Somerset, Archbishop Thomas

Cranmer, and the majority of the Councilin effect a public, though as
events transpired, insincere conversion. Smyths Retractation Sermon is
described by Andreas Lwe as a masterpiece of equivocation.21 Smyth
chose to preach on a decidedly ambiguous text from Psalm 116, 2 Omnis
homo mendax22every man is a liara passage quoted by Paul in
Romans 3:4, and made much use of by Martin Luther in his explication of
the forensic doctrine of Justification by faith.23 With typically dialectical
emphasis Luther asserted in a scholium on Romans that God alone is true;
all men are liars (solus Deus verax, omnis homo mendax) to which he then
added his trademark soteriological gloss: Just as in former times David left
behind all the means by which Solomon built the temple, so also in this
grace Christ left behind the Gospel and other writings so that by these and
not by human decrees the church is built.24 Given the recent controversial
association of his chosen sermon text in continental theological debates,
Smyths discourse goes directly, and indeed both deliberately and play-
fully, to the very substance of the Reformation controversy which had pre-
cipitated his recantation, namely to the vexed question of divine versus
human authority in the constitution and government of the Church.
Given the context of his making a public recantation, the scripture pas-
sage omnis homo mendax carried a heavily ironical, and in the view of
some a distinctly cynical flavour. Even a traditionalist Henrician Catholic
like Stephen Gardiner, wily Bishop of Winchester, who might reasonably
be considered to have had some degree of sympathy for Smyths conserva-
tive Henrician stance, wrote to Edward Seymour complaining about
Smyths evident lack of sincerity:
And when I sawe Doctor Smithes recantacion begin with Omnis homo
mendax so engleshed and such a new humility as he woulde make all the
doctors of the church liers with him selfe, knowing what oppinions were
abrode, it enforced me to write vnto your grace for the ease of my
conscience.25

21Andreas Lwe, Richard Smyth, 35.

22Richard Smyth. A godly and faythfull retractation made and published at Paules crosse
in London, Aii.
23See, e.g., Luthers scholion on Romans 8, Weimarer Ausgabe 56, 385.
24For a discussion of omnis homo mendax theme, see Kenneth Hagen, Luthers
Approach to Scripture as seen in his Commentaries on Galatians, 15191538 (Tbingen: Mohr,
1993), 1928.
25And when I sawe Doctor Smithes recantacion begin with Omnis homo mendax so
engleshed and such a new humility as he woulde make all the doctors of the church liers
with him selfe, knowing what oppinions were abrode, it enforced me to write vnto your
168 torrance kirby

Under the circumstances, one could hardly blame Gardiner for seeking to
distance himself from Smyth.
In A Playne declaration, the preface to the second edition of the sermon,
Smyth openly admits that his attempt at retractation at Pauls Cross had
been received scepticallyand this reading is supported by John Foxe in
his reports of correspondence between Edward Seymour and Stephen
Gardiner concerning the Pauls Cross event. In his letter to Seymour,
Gardiner takes considerable care to distance himself from Smyth: I nether
liked his tractation of vnwritten verities, more yet his retractacion, & was
glad of my formar Iudgement, that I neyuer had familiaryty with him.26
Nonetheless, in a somewhat ironic inversion of expected roles, Seymour
ever willing to see the best in his adversariesapplauds the sincerity of
Smyths recantation and expresses his incredulity at Gardiners cynicism.27
Winchesters more judicious assumption of Smyths equivocation, on the
other hand, was doubtless motivated by his own clear interest in seeking
to disassociate himself from Smyth. In a sermon preached before the
young King Edward in June 1548, Gardiner attempted his own high-wire
balancing act when, against the express wish of Somerset, he simultane-
ously defended the Royal Supremacy and the doctrine of Transubstantia
tion.28 For this audacious attempt to reassert the conservative provisions
of the late-Henrician doctrinal consensus, Gardiner shortly found himself

grace for the ease of my conscience: geuing this Iudgement of Smith that I nether liked his
tractation of vnwritt verities, more yet his retractacion, & was glad of my formar
Iudgement, that I neyuer had familiaryty with him, I sawe him not (that I wot these iii yeres
ne talked with him these vii yeres, as curious as I am noted in the comm welth). And wher
as in his vnwritten verites he was so mad to say, Byshops in this realme may make laws,
Ihaue witnes that I said at e word, we should be then dawes, and was by & by sory that
euer he had written of the sacramt of the alter, which was not as it was noysed, vntouched,
with that Woord, all men be liers which is a maruaillous word, as it soundeth in our tong
when we saie a man were better haue a thief in his house then a lier. John Foxe, Actes and
Monuments (London: John Day, 1563), IV, 795.
26John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London: John Day, 1563), IV, 795.
27Seymour wrote to Stephen Gardiner just days later, on 21 May 1547, expressing his
incredulity at Gardiners dissatisfaction with Smiths retractation: As it apered, you be so
angrye wyth hys retractions that you cannnot abide his beginning it appered vnto vs
then of him taken but godly we would haue wished your lorship to have written against
his booke before, or now with it, if you thinke that to be defended whiche the author him-
self refuseth to averre. Your Lordship writeth so ernestly for lent, which we go not about to
put awsaye, no more then when Dr Smith wrote so ernestly that euery man should be
obedient to the bishops, the magistrates by and by went not about to bring kings and
princes, and others, under their subjection. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, IV, 735736.
28The sermon of the bishop of Winchester before the kings maiestie 29 June 1548, on
Matthew XVI.13. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 127.5.
 public conversion: richard smyths retractation169

confined to the Fleet, and later to the Tower of London where he remained
a prisoner till the end of Edwards reign.
After being deprived of his chair at Oxford in 1548, Smyth fled across the
Channel to the University of Louvain where, on another public occasion
he formally retracted his Retractation, and then proceeded to compose a
series of polemical tracts attacking the doctrinal views of leaders of the
Edwardian Reformation, including Thomas Cranmer and the great
Florentine biblical scholar Peter Martyr Vermigli who, recently arrived in
England from Strasbourg, had displaced Smyth as Regius Professor at
Cranmers invitation.29 Later in 1553, in the wake of the accession of Queen
Mary I, Smyth returned to England, and was restored to his previous posi-
tion at Oxford where, as Chancellor of the University, he presided at
Cranmers trial for heresy in 1555 during which Smyth enjoyed the
vindication of having his own writings on Transubstantiation and the
Eucharist employed as the judicial yardstick of orthodoxy. Smyth preached
publicly at Oxford on the occasion of the burning for heresy of Nicholas
Ridley and Hugh Latimer, and employed this opportunity in the pulpit
with an attempt to secure their recantations and conversions.30 The wood-
cut image of this occasion in Foxes Actes and Monuments is the only
extant likeness of Smyth. The whirligig of time, however, had not yet com-
pleted the cycle of her revenges. Following the accession of Elizabeth
Smyth attempted to flee to Scotland but was apprehended and compelled,
once again, to recant and subscribe the Oath of Supremacy; and on this
occasion his conversion was short-lived as he was able to make his escape
to Louvain and was soon instituted as Reader of Scripture at the recently
founded Catholic University in Douai where he spent the remainder of his
career until his death in 1563. By the time he had done, Smyth had achieved
the feat of publicly supporting and recanting five distinct religious estab-
lishments (or as many as seven if three distinct religious regimes under
Henry VIII are included in the calculation).

Argument of the Retractation

The central question Smyth addresses in his godly and faythfull retracta-
tion concerns the ultimate source of religious authority, particularly as it

29On Vermigli and Smyth in Oxford see Charlotte Methuen, Reading Scripture in the
University, in Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank James, eds., A Companion to Peter
Martyr Vermigli (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2009), 7194 and Torrance Kirby, The Zurich
Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2007), chap. 3.
30Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), Bk XI, 1793.
170 torrance kirby

concerns the relative weight to be attributed to the revealed scriptures and

human traditions. Speaking directly to his audience towards the end of his
retractation, Smyth invokes the hermeneutics of the New Learning when
he attributes his error to
the frailty of mans nature, and to my negligent marking, hauing at that tyme
[i.e. in writing his books in defense of the churchs traditional pre-reformed
doctrines] rather a respecte to a fantasy that then I had in my mynde, than
to the trew and infallyble doctrine of scripture.31
In the Platonic epistemology summarized by Erasmus in the Enchirdion,
phantasia is the mode of knowing proper to enchained dwellers of the
Cave who, trapped in the flux of becoming, have knowledge only of sensu-
ous shadows, mere fleeting reflections of the true reality of the forms.
Smyth suggests that it is only by an ascent to the higher knowledge of the
infallible doctrine of scripture that one might hope to recognize, as
Erasmus put it in the Enchiridion, the true being which stands behind the
becoming, by looking as it were upon the divine light of the Sun. In this
allusion to the Platonic epistemology, Smyth identifies ecclesiastical tradi-
tions with a lower knowledge, while the light of the Scripture assumes the
clarity of the philosophers vision. As such, Smyths Retractation appears
to agree, at least on the surface, with Erasmuss humanist account of epis-
temological conversion away from thralldom to the objects of phantasie
in the form of the sensuous externals of human traditions and back to the
sources of the Sacred Oracles of Scripture.
In the opening passage of his sermon Smyth invokes the exemplar of
Augustines Liber Retractationum, a book composed near the end of his
life.32 If Augustine did it, shall I now be ashamed to acknoledge my self
to haue ben deceyued in my Booke of Tradition? Smyth asks rhetorically.
If retractation of theological opinions was common practice among
the early Church Fathers, then surely such a course cannot be all that seri-
ous a matter now; if Augustine, then also Smyth.33 Smyths co-called
Booke of Tradition titled A brief Treatyse, setting furth diuerse truthes, nec-
essary both too be beleued and Christen people, had been published shortly
after the accession of Edward, the same year as his retractation at Pauls
Cross, and set forth an argument defending the observance of certain

31Smyth, Retractation, Diir.

32Aurelius Augustine, Opera omnia, Retractationum libri duo, in Patrologia Latina 32,
583656. Augustine, The Retractations, translated by Sister Mary Inez Bogan (Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968).
33Smyth, Retractation, Aiiir.
 public conversion: richard smyths retractation171

human traditions, precepts, ordinances, rites and ceremonies not con-

tained in Scripture, but as being nonetheless necessary to salvation. This
was one of Smyths books described by Charles Wriothesley (call me
Risley) as having been ritually burnt at Pauls Cross at the time of Smyths
recantation: which booke I do Reproue and Reuoke in dyuers faultes in
it.34 Thus, the first part of the Retractation sermon consists of Smyths
repudiation of the six principal points on the necessity of human tradi-
tions to salvation which he had set out previously in the argument of
A brief Treatyse, combined with a second major part in which he revokes
his traditionalist teaching concerning the Sacrifice of the Mass. Taken
together these two main parts of the Retractation comprise the principal
theological questions then in dispute as evidenced by numerous sermons
preached at Pauls Cross at that time.
In his Booke of Traditions Smyth defended the autorite of Bysshoppes in
makiyng lawes and ordenances in such manner as to impugne the juris-
diction of both Prince and Parliament.35 In so doing he implied that eccle-
siastical tradition was authoritative independently of the consent and
auctoritie of the Prince and people, and thus constituted a direct chal-
lenge to the Act of Supremacy.36 In the Retractation Smyth sets out to toe
the new Edwardine line:
Secondly, I say and affirme that no Bysshop nor none of the clergy assem-
bled togither haue auctoritie to make any Lawes or Decrees besydes Gods
Law ouer the people without the consent of the Princes and the people: and
if they do make anye suche, no man is bounde to obey theym.
Thirdly, I say that in those countryes, where by the auctorite of the Prince
they haue made any suche Lawes, thauctorite of those Lawes, doth not
appende and hang of the Bisshops and the Clergy, but of the princes and
cheif heds in euery country.37
Fourthly, I say and affirme that within this Realme of England and other
the kinges Dominions, there is [B.ii.r] is no Law, Decree, Ordinaunce or

34Smyth, Retractation, Aiiiir.

35Smyth, Retractation, Aiiiiv.
36The parliamentary sessions of 15331534 made decisive moves against the papacy
with the formal enactment of the Royal Supremacy. In strictly constitutional terms, a series
of statutes beginning with the Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome (1533), followed by the
Act of Supremacy (1534), and culminating with an Act Extinguishing the Authority of the
Bishop of Rome (1536) accomplish the revolution which established Henry VIIIs headship
of the Church. The preamble of the Act of Supremacy famously declares that England is an
empire, governed by one Supreme Head, namely the King, and that under his rule the
Church was wholly self-sufficient without the intermeddling of any exterior person or per-
sons. 24 Henry VIII, c. 12; 26 Henry VIII, cap. 1; 28 Henry VIII, c. 10.
37Smyth here affirms the formal Submission of the Clergy, 25 Henry VIII cap. 19; Statutes
of the Realm III, 460461.
172 torrance kirby

constitution ecclesiasticall in force and auaileable by any mans auctority,

but only by the kynges maiestyes auctority or of his Parliament.38
Having treated the jurisdiction of Crown, Parliament, and Clergy, Smyth
then proceeds to repudiate the authority of human tradition in the form
of the spurious Clementine Epistles, forgeries exposed as such by humanist
historical scholarship a century previously, namely by Nicholas of Cusa
and Lorenzo Valla.39 For centuries the False Decretals, as they came to be
called, had provided the foundation for papal claims to supremacy of
authority over the Emperor and other princes. Yet according to Smyth in
his Booke of Traditions, these decretals must be taken for the Appostles
doctrine and techyng. In his Retractation, Smyth proclaims his conversion
from Scholastic obscurantism to the hermeneutics of the New Learning:40
Now hauynge red many thynges, whiche at that tyme I had not diligently
marked and wayed: I doo thinke, affirme, and confesse that doctrine to be
not trew, but a wayne, unlawfull, uniust, and unportable berdeinn to
Christen consciences: and that those Canons pretended to be of thappostles
making and gatherd of saint Clement, not to be made of thappostles.41
Finally Smyth recants his assertion that numerous ritual customs and
practices prescribed by ecclesiastical tradition but not found in Holy
Scripture must be observed under payne of dampnation42 and goes on to
affirm the classic Reformed position concerning the sufficiency of
Scripture alone to salvation. Many of the ecclesiastical customs Smyth
lists in his Retractation as being in dispute belong to the category of the
very religious practices that Erasmus had censured in the Enchiridion as
belonging to the sphere of phantasia, the sensuous imagination: viz. the
hallowyng of the water in the font, the thrise dippyng of the Chylde in the

38In this Smyth affirms the Act of Supremacy itself, 26 Henry VIII, cap. 1; Statutes of the
Realm III, 492493.
39Smyth, Retractation, BiivBiiiv and Ciiv. The Clementine Epistles are included among
58 out of 60 apocryphal letters or decrees attributed to the popes from St Clement (8897)
to Melchiades (311314) and are now known to be forgeries. See the excellent and highly
accessible account is the essay by E.H. Davenport, The False Decretals (Oxford: Blackwell,
1916), xxii. Cf. also William Shafer, Codices pseudo-Isidoriani: a palographico-historical
study, Monumenta iuris canonici, Series C: Subsidia vol. 3 (New York: Fordham University
Press, 1971). With the possible exception of Hincmar in the 9th century and the guarded
expression of the Synod of Gerstungen, no one raised a voice against the forgeries until
Valla and Cusanus in the 15th century. See Philip Schaff, The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia
of Religious Knowledge, Vol. IX (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1953), 347.
40Smyth, Retractation, Biiv.
41Smyth, Retractation, Biiir.
42Smyth, Retractation, Biiiv.
 public conversion: richard smyths retractation173

water at the Christenyng, the puttyng on of the Chrisome, the Consecration

of the Oyle, and Anoyntyng of the christened chylde, the hallowyng of
the Aulters, the prayeng towardes the East, the Sensyng of the aultare,
theWasshyng of the handes, and sayeng Confitoer, and lifting up of the
Sacrament of the Masse, the makyng of Holy water 43 In Smyths
Retractation, all of these rituals, ceremonies and traditional practices are
to be deemed adiaphora, and therefore rendered subject to the authority
of the kings majesty, either to receive or to abrogate, and his subjects may
use his said lybertie without any daunger of synne or scruple of con-
science, either to the kynges maiestie which gaue lybertie, or to him
whiche hath obteyned the lybertie or Dispensacion.44 All of this Smyth
ascribes to a conversion away from a respecte to a fantasy that then I had
in my mynde, than to the trew and infallyble doctrine of scriptureyet,
as Gardiner shrewdly observed, the entire discourse of the Retractation is
construed under the crafty aegis of the sermon text Omnis homo mendax.

43Smyth, Retractation, BiiivBivr.

44Smyth, Retractation, Ciiiv.
 CHAPTER NINE

LORDS AND LABOURERS:

HUGH LATIMERS HOMILETICAL HERMENEUTICS

Jason Zuidema

One month after the death of Henry VIII in late January 1547, Hugh Latimer
was released from the Tower of London, apparently by the terms of the
general pardon issued in the name of Edward VI on his coronation day.1 It
is unclear what Latimer did following his release until the close of 1547
when we see his name among several prominent English reformers, John
Knox, Matthew Parker, Edmund Grindal and others who had, since July,
been re-licensed to preach under the ecclesiastical seal. Latimer had not
preached in eight years, ever since renouncing his bishopric of Worchester
in 1539 and spending several difficult years under house arrest and impris-
onment, silenced by Henry VIIIs concern with the increasing diversity of
doctrine in his realm.2 Though he had not ministered publicly for the bet-
ter part of a decade, his presence in the pulpit was not diminished.3
Testifying to the importance of Latimers voice behind the new govern-
ment and its reforming agenda, Latimer was one of the first to occupy the
pulpit at Pauls Cross. Indeed, in January 1548 (possibly late December
1547) Latimer was called on for as many as four Sunday sermons and four
mid-week sermons.4 The four mid-week sermons compared agricultural

1Allan G. Chester, Hugh Latimer: Apostle to the English (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1954), 162. See also the details provided in Sermons and Remains of
Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, 1555, ed. George E. Corrie for the
Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), I.xii and II.xxxxi. Cited
hereafter LS.
2Lucy Wooding, Henry VIII (London: Routledge, 2009), 25057. Also see her From
Tudor Humanism to Reformation Preaching, in The Oxford Handbook of The Early Modern
Sermon, ed. P. McCullough, H. Adlington and E. Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 34144.
3Latimers activities in this period are described in part in Susan Wabuda, Shunamites
and Nurses in the English Reformation: the Activities of Mary Glover, Niece of Hugh
Latimer, in Women in the Church, Studies in Church History 27, ed. W.J. Sheils and Diana
Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 335344.
4Chester, Hugh Latimer, 163. The 16th-century chronicler John Stow adds some detail of
other sermons: In the I. of January doctor Latimer preached at Paules crosse, which was
176 jason zuidema

labour to the Church, the last of which, the only sermon from January 1548
extant, focused specifically on the image of the plougher.
Latimer was already well known as a forceful, if not controversial
preacher. His most recent stay in the Tower was not his first. In fact, he had
run afoul of the more conservative clergy on a number of occasions since
his first attraction to the ideas of reform in 1524.5 Under the influence of
Cambridge scholars Thomas Bilney and George Stafford, both important
catalysts for the renewal of the Church, Latimers perspectives began to
shiftthough perhaps not as radically as he would later remember.6
Though these men wished to preach Christ, as influenced by humanists
like Erasmus, they began to argue points of doctrine and a practice that
landed them into trouble.7

the first sermon by him preached in almost eight yeeres before, for at the making of the
sixe articles, he being bishop of Worchester would not consent unto them, and therefore
was commanded to silence, and gave up his bishoprike: he also preached at Pauls crosse on
the 8. of January; where he affirmed, that whatsoever the cleargie commanded, ought to be
obeyed, but he also declared that the cleargie are such as sit in Moyses chaire, and breake
not their masters commission: adding nothing thereto, nor taking any thing there from:
and such a cleargy must be obeied of all men, both high and lowe. He also preached at
Paules on the 15. and on the 29. of January. John Stow, Annals of England (London: John
Windet, 1603), 1002. Though he acknowledges that Chester and Stow list more, MacLure
notes only five entries in his 1958 register of sermons at Pauls Cross: Millar MacLure, The
Pauls Cross Sermons, 15341642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 192. No addi-
tional information is given in the updated register based on MacLures: Register of Sermons
Preached at Pauls Cross, 15341642, rev. ed. Peter Pauls and Jackson Campbell Boswell
(Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), 289. The sermon on the plougher examined here is the
fourth mid-week sermon preached by Latimer in January (see text history below). Since it
was preached on January 18 in the third Wednesday of January 1548, it can be inferred that
he preached at the Cross on the last Wednesday of December 1547. However, as cited
above, Stow highlights that the 1 January sermon was his first. We have no additional infor-
mation with which to solve this apparent discrepancy.
5Latimer recounts his conversion while a student at Cambridge in a sermon before
Katherine of Suffolk in 1552: Master Bilney was the instrument whereby God called me
to knowledge, for I may thanke him, next to God, for that knowledge that I have in the word
of God. For I was as obstinate a Papist as any was in England, insomuch that when I should
be made Batcheler of divinity, my whole Oration went against Philip Melanchthon, and
against his opinionsThen Bilney took me aside and taught me more than I had learned to
that pointSo from that time forward I beganne to smell the word of GOD, and forsooke
the school doctors: and such fooleries. Hugh Latimer, Fruitfull Sermons (London: Thomas
Cotes, 1635), 125r.
6On the state of ideas for reform at Cambridge in this period see: Alec Ryrie, The Gospel
and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), ch. 5. See also a 16th-century testimony in LS II. xxviixxxi.
7Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2002), 81 and Michael Pasquarello, Evangelizing England: The Importance of the Book of
Homilies for the Popular Preaching of Hugh Latimer & John Wesley, The Asbury Theological
Journal (Oct, 2004), 154.
 lords and labourers 177

Nonetheless, the Crown had often protected him, particularly for his
vocal support of Henrys wish to annul his first marriage. He was rewarded,
one could say, with the bishopric of Worchester in September 1535.8
Though he renounced that position in 1539 and suffered imprisonment
in the following year, he continued to receive a pension related to this
position on which he lived until he was burned at the stake in the Marian
persecutions in November 1555. Most commentators consider the Sermon
on the Plougher to be one of Latimers best. Allan Chester, the most
comprehensive modern biographer of Latimer, notes, The Sermon on the
Ploughers is generally, and quite properly, regarded as one of the finest of
Latimers extant sermons.9 Though judgments of homiletical perfor-
mance are often too subjective for the historian, this sermon was clearly
influential in its own time and continued to confound and inspire by its
many printings in the decades and centuries following.10 Yet, how should
we understand it? Beyond a simple description of Latimers rhetoric or
recitation of his metaphors, how ought we situate this sermon in the wider
history of the English Church in the Edwardian period?

Setting, Argument and Impact

The earliest witnesses and printings of the Sermon give a few clues to its
immediate setting. It was preached on Wednesday, 18 January 1548 in the
shrouds of Pauls Church in London. In times of inclement weather, as it
is wont to be in London, the speaker and important guests at the sermon
took refuge in the undercroft of St Pauls Church.11 As with most of these
sermons preached at the Cross, there was a central text that occasioned

8For Latimers work as bishop see: Susan Wabuda, Fruitful Preaching in the Diocese
of Worchester: Bishop Hugh Latimer and His Influence, 15351539, in Religion and the
English People, 15001640: New Voices, New Perspectives, ed. Eric Josef Carlson (Kirksville,
Mo.: Truman State University Pres, 1998), 4974.
9Chester, Hugh Latimer, 163.
10One example of the nachleben of Latimers sermons is in Steven Kenneth Galbraith,
Latimer revised and reprised: editing Frutefull sermons for pulpit delivery, Reformation 11
(2006), 2946.
11On location and significance of preaching from the shrouds see the work of St Pauls
archeologist John Schofield, St Pauls Cathedral Before Wren (Swindon: English Heritage,
2011), 114, 211 and figure 4.57. Schofield notes that though some claim the shoruds were on
the grounds of the medieval cloisters, the likely location was the Church of St Faith at the
end of the west crypt under St Pauls choir where listeners could actually attain shelter
from inclement weather. On the significance of sermons preached there see also Mary
Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 11; Chester, Hugh Latimer, 165.
178 jason zuidema

his remarks, in this case, the Jesus Parable of the Sower found in the
Gospel of Luke.12 Though he does not comment on the text in any close
exegetical manner, agrarian metaphors are a springboard for his remarks.
An outline for the sermon is not readily apparent for the listener or the
reader.13 A just analogy would be that of increasingly powerful waves roll-
ing over a sand castle on a beach: what Latimer thought were biblically
inspired ideas washing out the shoddy foundation of the religious estab-
lishment of his time. The 19th century editor Edward Arber admitted the
lack of structure, as his table of contents could only list a series of 20
important arguments and sayings from the sermon even though he care-
fully edited Latimers sermon for print.14 While employing a bit of specu-
lation, Allan Chester remarked in his edition of the sermon: But the fault
was largely Latimers own, for he had a darting rather than a logical mind.15
Susan Wabuda, for her part, gives theological justification for this wander-
ing: For Latimer preaching represented the mystical meeting place
between the earthly and the divine. The sermon was an aural revelation of
the truth of God made possible by the action of the Holy Spirit working
upon him as he stood in the pulpit. Only rarely (as in the case of his con-
vocation sermon, delivered in 1537 as the Bishops Book was being pre-
pared) did he write his sermons before, or even after, he delivered them.16
While I would question whether Latimer would agree that his sermons
were aural revelation, as such, it seems clear that his preaching was a
deeply Spiritual exercise for Latimer.
After the standard opening appeal to 2 Timothy 3:16 on biblical inspira-
tion and authority (and therefore his authority), Latimer proceeds to
explain that this fourth sermon on the parable of the Sower will turn its
focus from the seed (ie. the doctrine preached) to the sower or plougher
especially in conjunction with Luke 9:62: No man that putteth his hand to
the plough and loketh backe, is apte for the kingdom of god. Latimer
maintains that the image of the plougher in this verse has suffered from
serious rackyng, that is, its meaning has been twisted by those who claim

12Latimer was not the first to preach on the Parable of the Sower at Pauls Cross. In 1526
Bishop John Fisher used this parable to condemn the doctrine of Martin Luther.
13Chester, Hugh Latimer, 163.
14Hugh Latimer, Sermon on the Ploughers, ed. Edward Arber (London: Alex Murray and
Son, 1869), 2.
15Allan Chester, Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer (Charlottesville, University Press of
Virginia, 1968), xxviii.
16Susan Wabuda, Latimer, Hugh, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 32
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 636.
 lords and labourers 179

it is about monks who leave their cloisters.17 Latimer, in contrast, argues

that this text is directlie spoken of diligente preachyng of the worde of
God. For preachynge of the Gospel is one of Goddes plough workes, and
the preacher is one of Goddes plough men.18
Though comparisons of preachers to farm labourers might be offensive
for some, says Latimer, they are legitimate and help us think rightly about
the labour of the preacher. Like a ploughman, a preacher should be busy
in all seasons and ready for all types of workthe preachers is a right
busie work.19 Two key problems arise from this misunderstanding of the
preachers work: faithful preachers are not enough appreciated financially
and unfaithful preachers, those who preach only rarely, if at all, live in
comfort. Latimer confronts these two problems in memorable turn of
phrase:
Great is theyr busines, and therefore greate should be theyre hyre. They have
great laboures and therfore they ought to have good liuinges, that they maye
comodiously seade theyr flocke, for the preachynge of the worde of God
unto the people is called meat. Not strauberies, that come but once a yeare
and tary not longe, but are sone gone: but it is meat. It is no deynties.20
Indeed, Latimer suggests that since London has never been as bad as it
was then, such as loyter & liue idelly, these unpreaching prelates, need to
stop lording and start following their true vocations.21 Like in the Old
Testament, faithful prophets need to call the people to repent.22
A major problem with the present situation, from Latimers point of
view, is that these prelates, who he defines as any who hath any spirituall
charge in the fayethfull congregation, and who so ever he be that hath cure
of soule,23 is not trained to preach, but to participate in administration
and politics: For ever sence the Prelates were made Loordes and nobles,

17[Hugh Latimer], A notable sermo[n] of ye reuerende father Maister Hughe Latemer,

whiche he preached in ye Shrouds at paules churche in Londo[n], on the. xviii. daye of Ianuary,
1548 (London: John Day and William Seres, 1548, [STC 15292a]), A.iii.recto.
18A notable sermo[n], A.iii.recto.
19A notable sermo[n], A.v.recto.
20A notable sermo[n], A.vi.recto.
21A notable sermo[n], B.iii.recto.
22Latimers use of Old Testament types in relation to his prophetic critique of contem-
porary England sustains Mary Morrisseys thesis in Elect nations and prophetic preaching:
types and examples in the Pauls Cross Jeremiad, in The English Sermon Revised, ed. Lori
Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000),
4358.
23A notable sermo[n], A.iv.verso. Chester asserts that this definition is Latimers own.
Selected Sermons, 31 note 3.
180 jason zuidema

the ploughe standeth, there is no worke done, the people sterue.24 Latimer
waxes eloquent here:
They are so troubled wyth Lordelye lyuynge, they be so placed in palacies,
couched in courtes, ruffelynge in their rentes, daunceynge in their domin-
ions, burdened wyth ambassages, pamperyuge of ther panches lyke a monke
that maketh his Jubilie, mounchynge in their maungers, and moylynge in
their gaye manoures and mansions, and so troubled with loyterynge in
their Lordeshyypes: that they canne not attende it. They are otherwyse
occupyed25
The consequences of being otherwise occupied are substantial. The duty
of the spiritual ploughman requires the full attention of a person. Likewise
the duty of the physical ploughman, including political care of the realm,
requires whole persons. Hence, these ecclesiastics are confusing the
church and society. They should focus on care of souls and leave the care
of the commonwealth to well-trained public officials.26
Yet, the consequences of the neglect of prelates and bishops of their
plough ought not to be limited to these. The main consequence of other
bishops not doing their job is that a foreign one has taken up the slack.
Who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in England? Latimer asks. One
might think it is the Bishop of Rome. Not so. It is the Devil! He is never out
of his diocese and ever at his plough.27 And his office is to hinder religion,
to mayntayne supersticion, to set up Idoatrie, to teache al kynde of popet-
rie, he is readye as can be willed, for to sette forthe his ploughe, to devise
as manye wayes as can be, to deface and obscure Godes glory.28 Indeed, all
the false piety Latimer would associate with conservative Roman Catholics
has its roots in the Devils episcopal work, especially the confusion of the
Mass.
Though Scripture, in Latimers reading, argues that Christ already
offered himself for the redemption of humanity, the Devil worked hard to
evacuate Christs death and convince people that another daily oblation
was necessary for remission of sins. Rather than the thanksgiving sacrifice
of obedience of good workes and healpynge oure neighbours, the Devil,
with that Italian bishop, have robbed some parte of Christes passion
and crosse, and hathe mingeld Christes death, and hath bene made to be

24A notable sermo[n], A.iv.verso and B.iv.verso.

25A notable sermo[n], B.v.recto.
26A notable sermo[n], B.vii.recto.
27A notable sermo[n], C.ii.recto.
28A notable sermo[n], C.iii.recto.
 lords and labourers 181

propitiatorie.29 It is good, says Latimer, that the new King has counselors
who take such matters seriously. However, if there are still unpreaching
prelates, they must learn from Scripture or the Devil how perilous are the
times.30
This brief overview of the sermon gives us a glimpse of the content, but
also the style and rhetoric. Most commentators rightly note the plainness
of Latimers style, with the vivid and forthright use of metaphors or anec-
dotes.31 Though he was very serious about his subject matter, he had a rare
wit and humour for a Pauls Cross preacher.32 In a later sermon, Latimer
would comment on his own style: I have a manner of teaching, which is
very tedious to them that be learned. I am wont ever to repeat those things
which I have said before, which repetitions are nothing pleasant to the
learned: but it is no matter, I care not for them; I seek more profit of those
which be ignorant, than to please learned men.33 It would seem this popu-
lism was successful for Latimer would continue to preach multiple times a
week for the duration of the reign of Edward VI.34
The success of this sermon was not only on the day of delivery, but also
through the impact of the print editions in the months and years that fol-
lowed. Though we are not sure what source they used for their work,35 the

29A notable sermo[n], D.ii.verso.

30Compare Latimers rhetoric with that of Thomas Lever two years later: Truly
Frenchmen and Scottes be but feble ennemyes, and at certayne tymes do sclenderly assalt
castels, towers, and such manner of holdes. The devyl sekiug lyke a roryng Lyon, whome he
may devoure, nyghte & day, wunter and sommer, wyth a wonderful sort of wycked spirits,
dothe ever besyge byshopryckes, shyres, townes, and parishes. Thomas Lever, A sermon
preached at Pauls Crosse, the. xiiii. day of December (London: John Day, 1550).
31On Latimers style see: Hugh Latimer, The Sermons, ed. Arthur Pollard (Manchester:
Fyfield Books, 2000), xii; MacLure, Pauls Cross Sermons, 146 and 164; Pasquarello,
Evangelizing England, 154; Wabuda, Latimer, Hugh, 636; Susan Wabuda, Preaching during
the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 12939; Chester, Hugh Latimer,
165 and 194; O.C. Edwards Jr., A History of Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004),
ch. 12; and Pierre Janton, Lloquence et la rhtorique dans les Sermons de Hugh Latimer:
tude de lart et de la technique oratoire (Paris: PUF, 1968).
32See Chester, Select Sermons, xxviii.
33LS I.341.
34In the introduction to a later edition of Latimers sermons, the editor, Augustine
Bernher, remarked: In the which his painful travails he continued all king Edwards time,
preaching for the most part every Sunday two sermons, to the great shame, confusion, and
damnation of a great number of our fat-bellied unpreaching prelates. In LS I.320. See also
Wabuda, Latimer, Hugh, 637.
35Nothing in the volume indicates the source of the printers copy for the sermon. It
may have been based on Latimers own manuscript, or it may have been made from notes
taken by a member of the audience, as was the copy for the sermons which were printed in
the following year. Chester, Hugh Latimer, 165. In a later book Chester suggests that the
anonymous member of the audience could be Thomas Some. Chester notes, Some was
182 jason zuidema

printers John Day and William Seres produced at least two distinct print-
ings in 1548.36 These are some of the earliest editions of a printer who
would become one of the most distinguished in 16th-century England.37
Though the two versions of the text are almost exactly comparable, includ-
ing the appearance of identical words at the foot of each recto page, there
is a distinct font, as well as varied spelling and punctuation in these two
editions. The single sermon would soon be bound with others preached in
the subsequent few years by Latimer, but especially in larger volumes of
all Latimers printed sermons in the Elizabethan period.
The most notable difference between the two printed in 1548 was the
inclusion of the arms of Katherine Brandon, the Duchess of Suffolk, on the
verso of the title page. The Duchess had recently emerged as the most
important patron to the hotter type of protestants, to borrow the appro-
priate phrase of Susan Wabuda.38 As Wabuda writes, Katherines limitless
purse funded the printing of his sermons from 1548 onwards, and it was
this, with the unflagging efforts of [Augustine] Bernher as amanuensis,
that ensured their ultimate survival.39 Besides funding the printings,
Latimer preached frequently in her chapel at Grimsthorpe in Linconlshire
in the early 1550s.40 Supported by Katherine, this and other of these most
accessible sermons of Latimer were some of the publishers best-selling
volumes.41
The Latimer sermons are a good example of the growing inter-
relationship of the spoken word at Pauls Cross and the printed volumes.
Indeed, Pauls Cross was not just in the shadow of St Pauls Cathedral, but

expert in a kind of shorthand, but he ruefully confesses, in the dedication of the printed
text to the Duchess, that his skill was inadequate to keep pace with the torrent of the
preachers eloquence. Allan Chester, Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer (Charlottesville,
University Press of Virginia, 1968), xxviii.
36STC 15291 (with the arms of the Duchess of Suffolk on verso of title page) and STC
15292a (without the arms of the Duchess of Suffolk). The Short Title Catalogue entry for
STC 15291 notes: This edition has the arms of the Duchess of Suffolk on verso of title page.
Probably later than the edition without the Suffolk arms.
37On the activities of John Day in these years, especially in conjunction with Latimer,
see the first chapter of Elizabeth Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and
the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Of the partnership of Day and Seres,
Evenden writes: How or why these two men chose to come into partnership is unclear but
it is likely that each admired the others Protestant credentials and ambitions. 9.
38Wabuda, Hugh Latimer, 637.
39Wabuda, Hugh Latimer, 637. Augustine Bernher, a Swiss (Foxe says Belgian), who
worked for the cause of reform well into the reign of Elizabeth.
40Chester, Hugh Latimer, 186. See also: Theodora Wickham, A Study of Some Sixteenth
Century Sermons Preached Before the Monarch During the Tudor Era, (MA thesis,
University of Waikato, 2007), ch. 3.
41Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage, 14 and 18, 185.
 lords and labourers 183

also within eyesight of many of the citys book printers and sellers.42 It is
suitable to highlight Latimers sermon as one that benefitted from the
inter-relationship of printing and preaching. As the century wore on, the
spoken word, printed word and diverse audience opinion echoed around
the Pauls Cross plaza, giving cheap source material for printers and
providing written accounts of the reforming or conserving ideas of the
preachers.

Key Concerns

No doubt, Latimer thought he was preaching the pure Word of God. Yet, he
also wished to push a social agendathere is little doubt that he was
enthusiastic in his support for the Injunctions of 1547 and the projects for
reform under Edward VI. As Chester notes, Latimers invitation to preach
at Pauls Cross so early in Edwards reign is a remarkable testimonial to the
value which the government attached to his preaching.43 From this ser-
mon and the details we can glean concerning the others preached in the
same month, we see Latimers concern for preaching, Scripture reading in
the vernacular, support for clergy, and the reform of all Roman Catholic
fantasies and idolatry.44 For this reason Latimers sermons were deemed
appropriate for Pauls Cross. As Mary Morrissey argues for these sermons
generally: preachers used the literary conventions for preaching as one of
the resources that allowed them to intervene in political controversies
without breaking the fundamental rule that the preachers message comes
from God, not the monarch.45 Though preaching at the cross had been an
increasingly dubious privilege in the latter years of Henry VIIIs reign
because of the shifting doctrinal landscape, the new governments push
for reform was clearer and so reforming preachers could speak their mind
freely.
Further, through choice of the ploughman metaphor, Latimer also
touched on a perennial grievance. As Andrew McRae has noted, In a
wave of mid-Tudor publications that combined traditional social morality
with Protestant agitation, the honest labourer emerged as a powerful

42See Peter Blayney, The bookshops in Pauls Cross Churchyard (London: The
Bibliographical Society, 1990), esp. fig. 16.3.
43Chester, Hugh Latimer, 163.
44Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 15766.
45Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, xiii.
184 jason zuidema

spokesman for complaint.46 Though Latimer would develop his social cri-
tique further in subsequent sermons, we see his sensibility to the plight of
the common person.47 Yet, the limits of his populism were drawn follow-
ing the uprisings of 1549. He was not the most vocal critic of those upris-
ings, but his critique was widely known.48
Yet, a proper frame for Latimers sermon ought not just take into
account the English situation. Latimers critique is that of the continental
reformers, even though it is difficult to trace exact continental influences
on his thought. No doubt, he had digested the basic criticism of the inver-
sion and confusion of works from Luther on. In his argument, the conser-
vative theologians do not understand the seed (ie. the fayth that maketh a
man rightuous without respecte of workes49) and so are confused about
what a Christian must do (ie. they give all respect to works). In this sense,
the works define the seed and put all attention on what seems to be holy
rather than what truly is holy.
In particular, there is an inversion of necessary and voluntary works.
Necessary works are those that define the Christian life; they flow from the
justification by Gods grace through faith. Voluntary works are those that
can accompany the necessary, but are not in themselves essential to the
Christian life. This was no new distinction in Latimers thought: he had
already preached it in his sermons on the cards in 1529 and confessed it
before Convocation in 1532.50 To use an analogy that Latimer might have
appreciated: confusion on works would be like taking great care of the
dirty bath water instead of the clean baby. Water is good, but it is no baby.
This is essentially what Latimer is saying in relation to one of the most
significant of these necessary works: preaching. In a later sermon Latimer
would remark: I am Gods instrument but for a time, it is he that must give
the increase, and yet preaching is necessary: for take away preaching, and
take away salvation.51 The kind of preaching Latimer is promoting is no

46God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 15001660 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. On the imagery of the plough in the 16th century, see
pages 645.
47See Chester, Hugh Latimer, 37, note 11.
48Compare with Thomas Lever, A sermon preached at Paules crosse. See also Andy
Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), chapter 1. See also Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics
and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 4246.
49A notable sermo[n], A.v.verso.
50Chester, Hugh Latimer, 44, 7778.
51[Hugh Latimer], Fruitfull Sermons: Preached by the right Reverend Father, and constant
Martyr of Iesus, Master Hugh Latimer, newly imprinted with others not heretofore set forth in
 lords and labourers 185

small thingit went to the heart of the support structures of the English
Church.52 Latimer, like others before him, judged that a renewal of preach-
ing needed to take place in priestly education and in the practice of eccle-
siastical leadership.53 With other reformers of his generation, the renewal
of the priestly office, especially the renewal of preaching, was key to true
reform.54
Yet, we would suggest that Latimers preaching had another impact,
quite apart from whether one agreed with his application of Scripture.
Until this point in English reform, it was difficult to make clear distinc-
tions between theological campseven Latimer was difficult to count
clearly with one or another of the continental schools of reform.55 How
ever, with government assent, Latimer could now discuss and preach
openly. He, and many other leaders of the Edwardian Church, would asso-
ciate more with the StrasbourgHelvetian models of doctrine and church
structure, especially under the influence of the recently arrived Martin
Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli. On the hot-button issue of the presence
of Christ in the Eucharist, for example, there was a growing satisfaction
with the solutions these theologians were proposing to the awkward stale-
mate between Wittenberg and Zurich. The continental reformed opinions
were being brought into England by the same press as the sermons of
Latimer. Among others texts from Day and Seres in these years, we see
those of John Calvin, Pierre Viret and Antoine de Marcourt.
In particular, Latimer was an integral player in a process that would
increasingly define the Early Modern era. As Norman Jones as argued: By
the 1550s the English were living in a world which was irretrievably multi-
theologicalBy 1580 they were living in a world where very few people had
clear memories of a time without religious confusion.56 Though ideas of

print, to the edifying of all which will dispose themselves to the reading of the same. (London:
Thomas Cotes, 1635), 53 verso.
52The seriousness of Latimers critique is understood in its practical impact. As Wabuda
writes: We can count among the ironies of the Reformation in England the fact that the
reformers insistence that good works were a sign of grace, not the means of salvation itself,
meant the traditional apparatus of funding sermons was injured. If the bidding prayer
could not help the dead, why should testators leave money for their names to be prayed for
publicly? Preaching during the English Reformation, 61.
53Latimer can be placed in a longer line of those calling for episcopal reform. See:
Kenneth Carleton, Bishops and Reform in the English Church, 15201559 (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2001), 83.
54Compare with the interesting analysis of Rosemary ODay, Hugh Latimer: prophet of
the kingdom, Historical Research 65 (1992), 25876.
55Compare with Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, xvxvi.
56Norman Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002), 3.
186 jason zuidema

tolerance or multi-culturalism were still relatively foreign to his world, he

was a player in the formation of a society in which it was (unfortunately)
normal to encounter thoroughly different theological ideas among people
in ones own area, even, in ones own family.
Latimer preached his understanding and application of Scripture, but
also, I argue, notified lords and labourers that listening is no longer a pas-
sive activity, but, like preaching, an important work. They can no longer
take for granted what is preached, but need to understand what is being
said (or not being said). In this way, Latimer speaks of a hermeneutic for
reading the plain words of Scripture, but also a hermeneutic for listening
to the words of a sermon. All the more reason, Latimer would contend, for
preachers to take their work seriously in a growing culture of persuasion.
 CHAPTER TEN

THE STYLE AND LOGIC OF JAMES BROOKSS 1553

RECONCILIATION SERMON

Mark Rankin

In 1561, the querulous controversialist John Bale said that Queen Mary
Tudors bishop of Gloucester, James Brooks, had bene detected and
proued a Sodomyte in Oxforde.1 Bales antagonistic caricature is unsur-
prising given his longstanding disdain for members of the Catholic clergy,
whom he vilified extensively in his Acts of English Votaries (1546) and other
works.2 Bale shares this contempt toward the clergy with other early Tudor
polemicists and propagandists. For his part, the Bible translator William
Tyndale, in his Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), dismissed members of
the clergy as bad readers who permitte & sofre you to reade Robyn hode
& bevise of hampton / hercules / hector and troylus with a tousande histo-
ries & fables of love & wantones & of rybaudry.3
According to Tyndale, clerical misreading extended from folk legends
and romances to misplaced methods of biblical exegesis. Catholic clerics
had promulgated a four-fold exegetical method which derived from
Augustines De doctrina christiana and underwent further development in
the writing of St Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians. This
method paired the literal, or historical, sense of the text with what might
be described as its figurative sense. Notions of figurative reading had
undergone subdivision into allegorical, tropological, or moral, and ana-
gogical, or soteriological, methods of reading. In the Obedience Tyndale
dismisses this entire category of figurative reading. Allegories, he writes,
are [t]he greatest cause of which captivite and the decay of the fayth and
this blyndnes wherein we now are.4 Tyndales dislike of allegories follows

1John Bale, A retourne of James Cancellers raylinge boke upon hys owne heade, Lambeth
Palace Library MS 2001, fol. 18r.
2John Bale, The actes of Englysh votaryes, comprehendynge their vnchast practyses and
examples by all ages (Wesel [i.e. Antwerp: S. Mierdman], 1546). STC 1270.
3William Tyndale, Obedience of a christen man (Marlborow in the lande of Hesse [i.e.
Antwerp]: Hans Luft [i.e. Marten de Keyser], 1528), C4r. STC 24446. In this paper I expand
brevigraphs using italics and omit the abbreviation sig. in signature references.
4Tyndale, Obedience of a christen man, R4v.
188 mark rankin

Martin Luther, who urged the reader as much as possible [to] avoid alle-
gory, so that he may not wander in idle dreams.5 Tyndale goes on to con-
tend with contemporary theologians, whom he calls sophisters who
promulgate, as he puts it, their Anagogicall and chopologicall sence.6
Tyndale shows no patience with tropological reading when he character-
izes these so-called [c]hopologicall sophisters, according to a printed
marginal gloss, as seekers after what he describes as some choplogicall
sence.7 In Tyndales view, reading the Bible for moral meaning distorts the
manifest literal sense.
In his Pauls Cross sermon of 12 November 1553, which he preached to
urge the nations restoration to Catholicism, James Brooks also opposed
those whose hermeneutic chopped the literal sense. This similar use
of the chopping metaphor in Brooks and Tyndale affords my point of
departure for the present essay. In the sermon Brooks supplies an anec-
dote concerning a certain Demosthenes, who was cook to the fourth-
century eastern Roman emperor Valens. This Demosthenes interrupts a
conversation between the emperor and St Basil of Caesarea in order to
correct the latter in his erroneous reading of the Bible. Brooks describes
Demostheness comments as chopping in lumpes of scripture beselye.
Such chopping, for Brooks, identifies Protestantisms misplaced insis-
tence upon the doctrine of sola scriptura and the primacy of individual
Bible reading. Brooks paraphrases Basils reply to Demosthenes, saying,
what you choppelogike, how long haue you been a chopper of Scripture?
Meddle with chopping of your hearbes and leaue your choppyng of scrip-
tures hardely.8 Brooks goes on to argue that if shoemakers are most quali-
fied among all others to make shoes and physicians are similarly qualified
to practice physic, then Roman Catholic doctors are best informed to
determine the meaningof the Bible. Those who are qualified to read the
text ought to do so, and those who lack qualification should trust others
reading over their own.

5Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 80 vols. (Weimar: Heinrich
Bhlau, 18802007), 42.174; English translation Luthers Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, 56 vols.
(St Louis: Concordia Publishing, 195586), I, 233. Cited in Brian Cummings, Protestant
Allegory, in Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Allegory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177.
6Tyndale, Obedience of a christen man, R5r.
7Tyndale, Obedience of a christen man, R5r.
8James Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, made at Paules crosse the
.xii. daie of Noue[m]bre, in the first yere of the gracious reigne of our Souereigne ladie Quene
Marie by Iames Brokis (London: Within the late dissolued house of the Graie friers, by
Roberte Caly, 1553), B7rv. STC 3838.
 style and logic of brookss reconciliation sermon189

Brooks and Tyndale join other sixteenth-century readers in viewing the

act of reading as an experience of cutting and ingesting. The poet John
Skelton wrote this way in 1528 against the recently tried heretics Thomas
Bilney and Thomas Arthur: Wolde god / for your owne ease / That wyse
Harpocrates / Had your mouthes stopped / And your tonges cropped /
Whan ye Logyke chopped / And in the Pulpete hopped / And folysshly
there fopped.9 Early in the 1540s the Bible translator Miles Coverdale
accused his adversary of misreading the Bible in this fashion: Euen as ye
peruerte the wordes of holy scripture / so do ye with .S. Augustine / As ye
choppe and chaunge with it / so do ye with him.10 Queen Elizabeth her-
self, in her copy of a 1580 Geneva New Testament, inscribed the front fly-
leaf to this same effect: I walke many times into / the pleasant fieldes of
the / holye scriptures. Where / I plucke vp the goodlie / greene herbes of
sentence / es by pruning: Eate them / by reading.11 The chopping meta-
phor proved fluid in encompassing the physical and sometimes problem-
atical nature of reading. Sixteenth-century readers of the Bible in particular
encountered allegories, parables, and other genres which do not easily
reduce to an explicit literal signification, forcing them to chop their way
through a text. The resulting ambiguity challenged Protestant reformers
keen to emphasize the primacy of literal reading.12 Tyndale for his part
insisted that the scripture hath but one sence which is ye literall sence
and further argued that all allegories found within the Bible signify some
literal sense to be found elsewhere within the text.13 Paradoxically, the
reader who identifies the literal sense may simultaneously investigate the
allegorical sense. Which allegories I maye not make at all the wilde adven-
tures, Tyndale reports, but must kepe me with in the compasse of the
fayth and ever apply myne allegory to Christ and vnto the fayth.14

9John Skelton, Honorificatissimo, amplissimo, A replycacion agaynst certayne yong

scolers (London: Richard Pynson, 1528), A4v. STC 22609.
10Miles Coverdale, A confutacion of that treatise, which one J. Standish made agaynst the
protestacion of D. Barnes (Zurich: Christopher Froschauer, 1541?), k6v. STC 5888.
11Bodl., shelf mark Arch G.e.48. STC 2881.5. Cited in John N. King and Aaron T. Pratt,
The materiality of English printed Bibles from the Tyndale New Testament to the King
James Bible, in Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (eds.), The King James Bible after
400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 84.
12On this phenomenon see James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism
and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2007), ch. 3: Salvation, Reading, and Textual Hatred.
13Tyndale, Obedience of a christen man, R1v.
14Tyndale, Obedience of a christen man, R3r.
190 mark rankin

Brooks also prevaricates when he differentiates between literal and

figurative reading. Brookss sermon, on Matthew 9:18, interprets the story
of Jesus raising Jairuss daughter from the dead as an allegory of Englands
hoped-for reconciliation to the Church of Rome. What Brooks calls the
mistical sence of this story may be found, in his words, without preiudice
to the leter.15 Brooks opens his exegesis of this text by describing the love
of the Catholic Church for England, which is akin to the love of a mother
for her child. Brooks shows how the Church possesses authority to care
for, revive, and instruct England in matters of religion. In a transitional
section, Brooks then comments upon Englands present state of schism
before describing three causes of its perceived spiritual death. These con-
cern its lack of unity with the Catholic church, its failure to embrace
proper doctrine, and its failures in charitable living. The sermon concludes
with an analysis of tyrants, whose demise affords examples of divine retri-
bution against bad rulers. Brooks is confident that Marys accession to the
throne will bring about the spiritual revival which he desires.
The sermon reveals Brookss awareness of the fully rhetorical nature of
reading.16 It employs a full range of tropes and devices in order to increase
its persuasive appeal and instruct in proper reading.17 Brooks sarcastically
employs antimetabole, or repeating the same idea in inverse order, for
instance, in noting the stoute stedfastnesse, & stedfast stoutenesse dis-
played by both Arian heretics and contemporary Protestants.18 Brooks
also relies upon asyndeton, or the deliberate omission of conjunctions,
combined with anaphora, or the repetition of the same or opening words
in successive phrases, in order to express his distaste for unsupervised
Protestant Bible reading. Such reading makes readers, he says, the more
blinde, the more bold: the more ignoraunt the more busie: the lesse wittie,
the more inquisitiue: the more fooles, the more talkatiue.19 Anaphora
functions alone when Brooks laments recent uncertainty in religion.
[H]aue not we had chaunge in doctrine, he writes, chaunge in bookes,
chaunge in tounges, chaunge in aultares, chaunge in placyng, chaunge
in gesture, chaunge in apparaile, chaunge in breade, chaunge in geuyng,

15Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, A2r.

16On the rhetorical nature of reading and marking books in the sixteenth century, see
William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 45, 27.
17On the use of tropes and figures, see Sylvia Adamson, et al. (eds.), Renaissance Figures
of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
18Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, D5r.
19Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, B6v.
 style and logic of brookss reconciliation sermon191

chaunge in receyuyng, with many changes mo, so that we had still chaunge
vpon chaunge, like neuer to haue lefte chaungyng, til al the hole world had
cleane been chaunged?20 The sermon frequently resorts to epistrophe, or
the conclusion of repeated phrases with the same syntactic structure, as
when Brooks derides the Protestants approach to the Bible: haue not wee
ben likewise by them assaulted wt the word of ye lord, he says, urged with
ye word of ye lorde, pressed wt the word of ye lord, ye when the lorde (our
lord knoweth) ment nothing lesse?21 Brooks urges his audience through
the use of epizeuxis, or the strident repetition of a word or phrase, when he
implores, [y]ou are dead, you are dead, you are dead. Hither to your
mother, good brethren.22
Brookss use of these and other figures helps us more fully to appreciate
the sophistication of his chopping metaphor. Having held a fellowship at
Corpus Christi College, the leading humanistic foundation in Tudor
Oxford, Brooks was trained to view intellectual questions in utramque par-
tem (i.e., on both sides of the question), and he applies this training to his
use of this metaphor. Throughout the sermon Brooks threads together
complex layers of signification in negotiating the competing demands of
literal and figurative ways of reading. He appears simultaneously to value
both ways of reading, to chop the text, as it were, in order to arrive at the
desired interpretation, tendentious though it may seem, but always in
support of his charge that the nation be reconciled with the Church of
Rome. The resulting puzzle of Brookss chopping helps make this sermon
such a richly provocative text. More than any other component of this ora-
tion, which Brooks revised for publication following its initial pulpit deliv-
ery, this particular metaphor places Brooks in conversation with Tyndale
and shows him wrestling with the same challenges posed by Bible reading
during an age of sharply divided confessions.
Brooks relies upon the literal sense when interpreting some of his proof
texts. For example, if Christs controversial words at the consecration of
the Mass, Hoc est corpus meum, were but a figure, argues Brooks, than
coulde euery other man carie his owne body in his owne handes toe,
euen as wel as Christ.23 They must accordingly take on literal signification.
Brooks emphasizes the primacy of these words literal sense, saying that if
they be not playne inoughe, I can not tell, what is playne inough.24 [T]his

20Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, D6v.

21Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, D2v.
22Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, F7r.
23Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, E8v.
24Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, E5v.
192 mark rankin

is my bodie, he continues, not a figure of my bodye, but my bodie. This is

my blude: not a figure of my blude, but my bloude.25 This example directly
addresses the tension between literal and figurative reading; Protestants
certainly gravitated toward the latter when recognizing that Christ often
described himself metaphorically.26 At the same time, and paradoxically,
Brooks recognizes the non-literal sense of these highly charged words.
Everyone, he says, exists metaphorically as spiritual infants and cannot
actually cannabilize Christs body. For this reason Christ, for Brooks, quali-
fieth his bodie and bloude, he altereth it, he transformeth it, he exhibiteth
it, vnder another forme, vnder ye forme of breade and wyne. Christ does
this in the same way that a wetnurse transforms the substance, but not
the essence, of food into the form of breast milk.27 Evidently Brooks
wants to have his cake and eat it too. Tyndale also finds himself needing
to hold simultaneously the literal with the allegorical sense. This [sic;
i.e. thus] doeth the litterall sence prove the allegory and beare it / as the
foundacion beareth the hous, he says.28 Despite the paradoxical nature of
this approach to dichotomous reading, nether Tyndale nor Brooks views
the simultaneous emphasis upon the literal and figurative senses as a
contradiction.
In fact, Brooks seems much more interested in how one reads than in
prioritizing one kind of reading over another. He blends the literal and the
figurative, and he abandons the literal sense entirely as often as he insists
upon its preeminence. He develops his sermons governing metaphor of
the nursing mother, for instance, despite the fact that Jairuss wife, who
functions also as the dead girls mother, plays a minor role in the source
narrative and does not figure at all in the verse Brooks has selected to
expound. In his discussion of Matthew 24:28, Brooks again works against
the grain of the literal sense. Given by the Vulgate as ubicumque fuerit cor-
pus illuc congregabuntur aquilae (Where the body is, there will the eagles
be gathered together), this text records Christs words concerning the
apocalypse. Brooks deploys the passage, rather improbably, in a list of
metaphors designed to illustrate the nurturing nature of the Church. The
sense of the text itself is obscure given the fact that aquilae (i.e., eagles)

25Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, E6r.

26Cf. Tyndale: So when I saye Christ is a lambe / I meane not a lambe that beareth
woll/ but a meke and a paciente lambe which is beaten for other mens fautes. Christ is a
vine / not that beareth grapes: but out of whose rote the braunches that beleve / sucke the
sprite of lyfe. Obedience of a christen man, R2v-3r. Tyndale cites John 1:29 and John 15:5.
27Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, F1v.
28Tyndale, Obedience of a christen man, R4v.
 style and logic of brookss reconciliation sermon193

typically do not scavenge for food. This hermeneutical difficulty may have
prompted divergent interpretation in Tudor commentary. Closely follow-
ing Tyndales own translation of this passage, the 1557 Geneva translation
of the New Testament, for example, describes eagles feeding upon carrion
as a sign of the imminence of apocalypse. It renders this passage, For
where soeuer a dead carkas is, euen thyther wyl the Egles resort, and
appends the gloss, In despite of Satan the faithful shal be gathered and
ioyned with Christe, as the Egles assemble to a dead carkas.29 The image
of scavenging eagles gathering in the same manner as Christ and his fol-
lowers affords at the least a non sequiter. Brookss own interpretation does
not necessarily improve upon the Geneva glosss logic. For Brooks, the
Church of Rome guards the carcass for the eagles use; the church is, he
says, thonlye keper of the carcas, that is to witte, of all trueth, wherunto
the Egles, that is, ye high lerned of ye churche, hath alwaies haunted and
fedde vpon.30 In this reading the carcass signifies truth, and the eagles
signify bishops and other divines who control its interpretation. Brooks
offers at one level a standard typological reading, which draws out the
moral, or tropological, sense of the passage. After all, the text says nothing
about the guarding of the carcass, nor does it tell us how long the eagles
have been feeding upon it; such points in Brookss logic (and that of the
Geneva glossators) acquire symbolic signification. At a more fundamental
level, these examples show Brooks emphasizing the literal and figurative
senses of successive passages at differing times.
The dilemma of balancing the literal and figurative senses of reading
dates back at least to St Augustine, whose De doctrina christiana wrestles
with the relative emphasis to be given to both kinds of reading. Given
their interest in this subject and given Augustines prominence, both
Tyndale and Brooks would certainly have known of his work, which was
first printed in Krakw in 1476.31 Ten editions, either in full or part, had
appeared by 1528, and another 22 before 1553.32 Augustines discussion
of the role of signs and allegories in the reading of the Bible helps to frame
Brookss treatment of these issues in his sermon. Readers, for Augu
stine,must undertake the challenges posed by any text which demands
figurative reading. Casual readers, he says, are misled by problems and

29The newe testament of our lord Jesus Christ (Geneva: Conrad Badius, 1557), f. 43r. STC
2871. Compare Tyndales New Testament: Translated in 1534, ed. David Daniell (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 53.
30Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, C4r-v.
31Universal Short Title Catalogue (www.ustc.ac.uk), no. 240415. Hereafter USTC.
32Source of data USTC search 15 August 2012.
194 mark rankin

ambiguities of many kinds, mistaking one thing for another. In some

passages, he continues, they find no meaning at all that they can grasp
at, even falsely, so thick is the fog created by some obscure phrases. At
a literal level carcasses and eagles appear to offer little insight into the
apocalypse, and so Brooks seeks out substantial meaning in obscure text.
What is more, in subsequent discussion of tropes and figurative devices,
Augustine argues that knowledge of such tropes is needed when reading
sacred text. This knowledge is especially useful when dealing with ambig-
uous reading, in his words, because when a meaning based on the literal
interpretation of the words is absurd we must investigate whether the pas-
sage that we cannot understand is perhaps being expressed by means of
one or other of the tropes. This is how most hidden meanings have been
discovered.33 The reader, then, for Augustine is free to move between the
literal, and frequently obscure, sense of the text and its figurative, more
highly rhetorical, sense, which often contains fruitful meaning. Movement
between these ways of reading is precisely what Brooks undertakes in his
aquilae example and throughout his Pauls Cross sermon more generally.
Brookss balanced approach to literal and figurative reading resounds
with Tyndales own method. This similarity to Tyndales method is signifi-
cant. Despite Tyndales rejection of the four-fold method of scholastic
exegesis, which included figurative reading, and his explicit distaste of
allegory, Tyndale is forced, as we have seen, to recognize the legitimacy of
both literal and allegorical ways of reading. Brookss method of figurative
reading appears to follow Tyndales plan. Brooks says at the opening of
his sermon that the Old and New Testament represent the pappes of
mother church, and the breast milk is the true sence of the word of God.34
This true sence corresponds to what Brooks later calls the euident plain
textes, which he says both English Protestants and Arian heretics had
rejected.35 Paradoxically, these plain texts do not always lead to a literal
understanding, even if Protestants insisted on embracing the plain literal
sense of texts. Brooks often seeks out other, less plain senses of meaning
in the same way that Tyndale simultaneously accepts and rejects alle
gorical reading. We see Brookss approach not just in his discussion of
scavenging eagles, but also in his discussion of clerical celibacy, when
Brooks quotes from Origen to defend the chastity of clergy. The passage

33Augustine, On Christian Teaching, tr. and ed. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 32, 88.
34Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, A3v.
35Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, D2r.
 style and logic of brookss reconciliation sermon195

in question affords an exposition of 1 Corinthians 7:5, in which St Paul

advises husbands and wives not to pursue celibacy except by mutual con-
sent for a short while. Brookss logic here bends toward figurative under-
standing, but at the literal level it represents misunderstanding. According
to Origen, says Brooks, the continuall Sacrifice is letted by suche as geue
themselues vnto Mariage matiers. For this reason, he continues, none
ought toffre the continual sacrifice, but soche onely, as hath vowed con-
tinuall, and perpetual chastitie.36 This point may be more or less persua-
sive, but what is noteworthy about this example is Brookss specific use of
Origens reading of the Pauline text, which opposes celibacy, to defend the
very position, celibacy, which the text would seem to oppugn.
In addition to Augustinian and perhaps Tyndalean methods of reading,
Brookss polemical method reveals his indebtedness to other analogous
texts and genres in which the challenges of reading take center stage. The
sermon certainly shows the influence of Thomas Mores Dialogue concern-
ing heresies (1529), for example. In that work More creates a persona of
himself who counsels the young man whose opinions had been adversely
affected by the reading of heretical books. Brookss opening point, that the
church cannot be vanquished by persecution, follows More in arguing
that the Old Testament Hebrews were members of the same true church,
only under a different name. What persecutions hath she suffred, first in
tholde time before the commyug [sic] of Christe, when she was rather a
Synagog then a churche, Brooks asks.37 Brooks quotes Tertullians De prae-
scriptionem haereticorum in order to argue that the early church fathers
are not likely all to have erred, a point also made by More.38 Indeed, there
is evidence that Brooks had adopted a similar stance toward Henry VIII as
did Mores former circle of associates. They went into exile during Edwards
reign and would go on to produce works commemorating the former
chancellor during Marys reign.39
Similarity between Brooks and More on reading methods draws atten-
tion to the ways in which Brookss sermon functions in the manner of the

36Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, G8r-v.

37Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, A4r. Compare Thomas More,
Adyaloge of syr Thomas More knyghte (i.e., A Dialogue Concerning Heresies), in Thomas
M.C. Lawler, et. al. (eds.), The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 6, 2 pts. (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 6:1.25253.
38Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, A6v.
39On the program to commemorate More during Marys reign, see Eamon Duffy, Fires
of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2009), 17987.
196 mark rankin

best prose polemic of his day. After all, polemic (a genre which has been
too oft disparaged by some scholars) relies upon and attempts to deploy
sophisticated methods of reading.40 This genre frequently affords a valu-
able vehicle for tracing the reading of influential books and thereby track-
ing the spread of the ideas contained within those books. Brookss
response to Henry VIII in his sermon offers a case-in-point. Brooks cites
Henrys anti-Lutheran treatise, the Assertio septem sacramentorum, for
example, as evidence that the church cannot judge wrongly. As Brooks
puts it, this is the book with which the king had choked Martine Luther
wyth all. Nevertheless, in this same place, Brooks adds parenthetically,
and disapprovingly, GOD pardon his [i.e., Henrys] soulle.41 Brooks devel-
ops this disapproval in his concluding listing of tyranny, when, in a pas-
sage about divine vengeance against England, he mentions what he calls
the il gouernaunce of certeine wycked rulers.42 In all likelihood he
intends both Edward VI and Henry VIII here. Brookss concluding com-
ment, on Henrys divorce from Katherine of Aragon, further suggests his
dislike of Queen Marys father. Brooks describes the divorce as the most
vniust and vngodly diuorsemente and says that it was thoriginal cause of
breche of al good order, al good liuing all good beleuing, all godlines, and
goodnesse.43
Brookss somewhat schizophrenic reading of Henrys Assertio, a book
he admires written (at least ostensibly) by an author he does not, echoes
similar readings of the Assertio and its author throughout the period. In
his prefatory dedication to Henry VIII in the first complete printed English
Bible, for instance, Miles Coverdale argues that by awarding Henry VIII the
title fidei defensor for writing the Assertio, Pope Leo X had predicted
Henrys yet-to-be-seen support for the circulation of the vernacular Bible.
The applicability of Leos implicit prediction is of the holy goost, says
Coverdale, since the one who spoke it knew not what [he] said.44 The
trenchant Elizabethan Jesuit propagandist Robert Persons, in his Treatise
of three conversions of England (1603), similarly praises Henry for bringing
into being certaine things rather to terrifie the pope than to make anie

40Among other examples of polemic in this period is the common and evocative refu-
tation-by-reprinting technique whereby a writer reprints his adversarys work in the act of
refuting it, thereby paradoxically publicizing ideas which the writer rejects.
41Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, B5v.
42Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, I5v.
43Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, I7rv.
44Biblia: the bible, that is, the holy scripture, ed. Miles Coverdale (Antwerp, 1535) (i.e., the
Coverdale Bible), + ii r. STC 2063.
 style and logic of brookss reconciliation sermon197

change of Religion.45 Nevertheless, in his News from Spain (1593), Persons

provides an account of an exceedingly unflattering likeness of Henry VIII
as the antitype of the medieval Henry II. This episode appeared on a tab-
leau vivant erected at the English Catholic seminary at Seville to com-
memorate the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury, whose execution Henry II
had ordered. This display contained three tiers, and the first level reveals
Henry II slaying Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, with Henry
VIII, very fatt and furious, observing. The second and third levels display
Henry VIII digging his own passageway to hell, where he is eventually tor-
mented by demons.46
As a polemicist in this sermon, Brooks deserves recognition alongside
other writers whose creative use of genre and invective advanced the
cause of Catholicism against Protestantism. Brookss censure of Henry
closely echoes that of Nicholas Harpsfield, biographer of More and arch-
deacon of Canterbury under Mary.47 He probably completed the majority
of his biography while exiled in Louvain during Edwards reign, and he
added, as an appendix, A treatise concerning the pretended divorce of
HenryVIII and Catherine of Aragon. Brooks concludes his sermon with a
discussion of the fates of tyrants that indicates his familiarity with a num-
ber of texts associated with the Harpsfield circle, including Harpsfields
own Treatise, an anonymous, vituperative vita of Henry VIII, and the prin-
cipal source of both these works, Reginald Poles 1536 letter to Henry now
known as the Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione.48 Pole went on to
become Marys Archbishop of Canterbury. As is also the case in all three
of these works, Brooks locates his criticism against Henry as the culmina-
tion of a substantial list of tyrannical prototypes, drawn from the Bible
and classical sources. In so doing, Brooks locates his sermon in the specu-
lum principis tradition of cautionary tale which dates back at least to
Boccaccios De casibus virorum illustrium (c.135560). Brookss list includes,

45Robert Parsons, A treatise of three conversions of England, 2 vols. in 3 parts ([Saint-

Omer]: Franois Bellet, 160304), 1.236. STC 19416.
46Robert Parsons, Nevves from Spayne and Holland conteyning. An information of Inglish
affayres in Spayne vvith a conference made thereuppon in Amsterdame of Holland ([Antwerp:
A. Conincx], 1593), f. 12r. STC 22994.
47Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith, 18186.
48Nicholas Harpsfield, A Treatise on the Pretended Divorce of Henry VIII and Catharine
of Aragon, ed. Nicholas Pocock (Westminster: Printed for the Camden Society, 1878). On
the Vita Henrici VIII, see BL, MS Sloane 2495. Reginald Pole, Pro ecclesiastic unitatis defen-
sione (Rome: Antonio Blado, c.1539). Eamon Duffy, Hampton Court, Henry VIII and
Cardinal Pole, in Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds.), Henry VIII and the
Court: Art, Politics and Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 197213.
198 mark rankin

among other despots, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, whom Brooks

describes as a spoiler, & rifler who despised to redeme his spoile & other
his offences.49 Brookss list also includes Herod the Great, whom Brooks
calls a cruel murderer of innocentes50 and the Roman emperor Julian the
Apostate, who, according to Brooks, spoiled many a churche: abused the
holie vessels most vnsemely: and defoiled the holi aulters with his owne
vrine.51 Each of these three figures featured prominently in the develop-
ing Catholic anti-regal iconographical tradition concerning Henry VIII
that evolved in late-Tudor England.52
Their and other like enormities prompt Brooks to mention the il gouer-
naunce of certeine wycked rulers as ultimate examples of tyrannical king-
ship.53 Brooks of course must be circumspect in not identifying the queens
father explicitly as one of these rulers. Nevertheless, it seems all but cer-
tain that he has Henry VIII in mind here. Indeed, it is not difficult to see
how someone opposed to the Henrician Reformation would describe the
king after the fashion of Nebuchadnezzar, Herod, or Julian. I have not
been able to locate any narrative of Henry VIII urinating on altars, but
he oversaw the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the execution of More
and others who had opposed him. Brookss list closely echoes similar lists
from the 1530s and 50s which draw attention to these tyrannical proto-
types as explicit figures of Henry VIII. Pole, for instance, had explicitly
described Henry as a second Nebuchadnezzar, who follows that pagan
predecessors treatment of three youths by throwing Englishmen to the
fire.54 The anti-Lutheran German controversialist Johannes Cochlaeus
also compared Henry to Nebuchadnezzar, in his sarcastic 1535 work, De
matrimonio serenissimi Regis Angliae, Henrici Octavi, Congratulatio.55 In
his dedicatory preface to Pope Paul III, Cochlaeus supplies a series of royal
antitypes to Henry, including Nebuchadnezzar, erring kings who had
invariably received an opportunity to repent. Henry, however, will not
receive the luxury of a second chance. [T]he joy of the heretics concern-
ing the sins of the king of England is assuredly malignant and inhumane,

49Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, I1v-2r.

50Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, I3r.
51Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, I3v.
52This tradition affords the subject of the second chapter of my monograph-in-prog-
ress, Henry VIII and the Language of Polemic in Early Modern England.
53Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, I5r.
54Pole, Pro ecclesiastic unitatis defensione, IXr. Cf. Daniel 3.
55Johannes Cochlus, De matrimonio serenissimi Regis Angli, Henrici Octavi,
Congratulatio (Leipzig: Michael Blum, 1535).
 style and logic of brookss reconciliation sermon199

Cochlaeus argues, for when that king sins conscientiously, truly he perse-
veres in the sins of the devil.56 The Vita henrici VIII likewise calls Henry a
latter-day Julian, for both monarchs, according to this text, [c]ommaun-
ded religious people to breake their vowes, [and] Church treasures [to be]
brought into ye kings treasury.57
Brooks, then, crafts his sermon with the genres of hostile vitae in mind.
He also incorporates the Judgment tale. It features prominently in John
Foxes influential martyrology, The Book of Martyrs, in a segment titled
The severe punishment of God upon the persecutors of his people and
enemies to his word, with such also as have been blasphemers, contem-
ners, and mockers of his religion.58 Indeed, Brookss sermon is noteworthy
for its use of vituperative satirical lists in the manner of Protestant contro-
versialists such as John Bale and William Turner. The notion that the true
church has been hidden, for example, leads Brooks to decry the filthie
sinke, and swillowe of all these tragedies whiche hathe raged well nighe
ouer all Christendome, oute of the which hath roked of late so many stink-
yng filthie contagious Heresies.59 Bale could scarcely have written more
colorful prose. Indeed, in his own Retourne of James Cancellers raylinge
boke with which I began this essay, Bale incorporates a substantive and
disgusting caricature which supposedly details the manner of the death of
Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. Drawing on the traditions of the
Judgment tale and of the myth of Gardiner as Protestant villain par excel-
lence, Bale says that Gardiners bellye swelled lyke a great bottle made of a
gotes skynne.60 In his list of metaphors to describe the Church of Rome,
Brooks likely responds either to Bales commentary on the book of
Revelation, The Image of Both Churches (c.1545), or to Martin Luthers
September Testament (1523), which featured apocalyptic woodcuts by
Lucas Cranach the Elder.61 Both Bale and Cranach had equated the Church
of Rome with the Whore of Babylon from Revelation 17, but Brooks refutes

56malignum profecto & inhumanum est gaudium hreticorum de peccato regis

Angli, cum humanum sit peccare, Diabolicum vero in peccatis perseuerare. Cochlus,
De matrimonio, A3r.
57BL, Sloane MS 2495, ff. 22r-v.
58John Foxe, The Book of Martyrs (London: John Day, 1583), sig. BBBBB1vBBBBB4r.
59Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, B2v.
60Bale, A retourne, fol. 38r. Michael Riordan and Alec Ryrie, Stephen Gardiner and the
Making of a Protestant Villain, Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003), 103963.
61John Bale, The image of both churches, after the reuelacion of saynt Johan the euangelyst
([Antwerp: S. Mierdman], 1545?), STC 1296.5. On Cranachs illustrations to Luthers
September Testament, see Martha Driver, Iconoclasm and Reform: The Survival of Late
Medieval Images and the Printed Book, in The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late
Medieval England and Its Sources (London: British Library, 2004), 185214.
200 mark rankin

this charge. Not only does the church keep the carcas for the eagles to feed
upon, but, according to Brooks, that church is not such as the babilonical
strumpet beareth in her phial, able to poyson the hole worlde.62 Brooks
closes the sermon by heralding Mary Tudor as a latter day Judith and
Esther, Old Testament prototypes of just queenship. He also describes her
as a second Helen, finder of the True Cross and mother of Constantine, the
Roman Emperor who halted persecution of Christians. Protestant as well
as Catholic propagandists described both Queen Mary and Queen
Elizabeth in these terms.63
England formally reconciled with the Church of Rome in 1554, a year
after James Brooks delivered his Pauls Cross sermon. With his appeal for
reconciliation, Brooks uses the story of Jairuss daughter to describe
Englands apostasy. The style and language of Brookss argument concern-
ing the authority of the church and especially the relative importance of
literal versus figurative reading of the Bible echo similar claims made by
Thomas More, William Tyndale, and other reformation polemicists.
Similarity among Brooks and these early and mid-Tudor exegetes demon-
strate the ecumenism of Augustinian theories of biblical exegesis in Tudor
England. Both Protestant and Catholic commentators wrestled during this
era with how they might balance competing literal and figurative senses in
the reading of sacred text. In so doing, they echoed Augustines own dis-
comfort with the problem of how to derive true meaning from Bible read-
ing. Brookss sermon also reveals a certain degree of overlap in polemical
method with Protestant propagandists whose views he would have repu-
diated. In particular, the genres of cautionary Judgment tale, negative
royal vitae, and the mirror for princes tradition shape Brookss treatment
of contemporary religious turmoil in a manner similar to their appearance
in writings by Bale, Foxe, and a number of other writers.64 Brookss rich
sermon certainly deserves to be read alongside the best works of Henrician,
Edwardian, and Marian propaganda. Its author deserves recognition as a
splendid propagandist who incorporates genres of satire and complaint
more thoroughly than many of his contemporaries.

62Brooks, A Sermon very notable, fruictefull, and Godlie, C4r.

63John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 89, 219, 226, 246.
64Irena Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends,
Disciples and Foes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) affords valuable context for the extent of hos-
tile vit in Reformation Europe.
 PART THREE

ELIZABETHAN SERMONS, 15581603

 CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE CHALLENGE OF CATHOLICITY:

JOHN JEWEL AT PAULS CROSS

Angela Ranson

John Jewel preached at Pauls Cross nine times between his return from
continental exile on the accession of Elizabeth and his death in 1571.
His first sermon took place in November 1559, and contained within it a
challenge that sparked a decade of controversy. Over the next ten years,
twenty English divines produced approximately sixty works that either
attacked the claims of Jewels Challenge Sermon or defended them. The
central issue was that of catholicity, for both sides claimed to represent
the true universal church. This was not a new argument: the question of
who was truly catholic had been going on since before Englands break
with Rome in 1534. However, over the course of the controversy Jewel
managed to define the term catholic in a way that emphasized its connec-
tions to the primitive, apostolic church. This allowed him to include the
newly established Church of England in the universal church, and yet
maintain its distinction as an English institution. As this chapter will
argue, Jewel began this process in his Challenge Sermon, through his
portrayal of himself, his unique negative method, and his treatment of his
audience.
The sermon was made up of fourteen articles, which all demanded evi-
dence that certain sixteenth-century practices of the Roman Church had
existed in the first six hundred years after Christ. The mass was Jewels
main target, through which he attacked all other traditions of the Roman
Church. He questioned the validity of private mass, reserving and adoring
the sacrament, the use of images, conducting common prayers in a strange
tongue, denying the people a vernacular Bible, and calling the pope a uni-
versal bishop. When he preached the sermon a second time, he expanded
the fourteen articles into twenty-six, which were all included in the text
of the sermon that was published in 1560. This written text was attached
to the letters that Jewel had exchanged with Henry Cole, who was the first
responder to the challenge. In it, Jewel acknowledged that he was writing
what he said in the sermon as best as he could remember it, not providing
204 angela ranson

a transcript. He also commented on the initial reaction to his sermon,

which will be discussed later.
Jewel drew on all of his past training and experiences to effectively per-
suade people with his Challenge Sermon. He was well trained in rhetoric
and disputation due to his education at Oxford in the 1540s, and elements
of both lend the sermon charm and emphasis. He had also developed an
adversarial mentality during his years working with Peter Martyr Vermigli
which proved equally as important. Jewel and Vermigli had first met at
Oxford during the reign of Edward, and then Jewel worked with Vermigli
in Strasburg and Zurich while in exile. Both men thought not in terms of a
via media religion, but in terms of us vs. them. This point of view allowed
Jewel to place particular people and beliefs either on the right side of
religion or the wrong side, which was central to his self-portrayal and
greatly influenced his treatment of his audience.
This mentality also gave him the courage of his convictions. Not only
did several English divines who supported the Roman church challenge
him, but several divines of the English church also questioned his meth-
odology. Some worried that Jewel had gone too far with his challenge, and
would find it impossible to support. Alexander Nowell, for example, was
not sure that Jewels stance was entirely defensible, since he gave his ene-
mies so much scope.1 This was not an uncommon opinion: Jewel himself
noted wryly in a letter to the Earl of Leicester that his friends were con-
cerned because I was overseen to lay out the matter in such a generality.2
Even later historians were not sure of the wisdom of Jewels structure; John
Strype said that Jewel roused up enemies for himself by not limiting the
Catholics to proofs from the Scripture, but allowing them to argue from
the Fathers.3 Despite such adverse reactions, however, Jewel never wavered
from the stance he took in the Challenge Sermon.
To present such a sermon was certainly a bold move. Patrick McGrath
describes it as a self-confident challenge which could have been made
only by a man who was completely sure of his own position, and suggests
that this self-confidence came from Jewels extensive study of the scrip-
ture.4 However, the next section will show that the self-confidence and

1Alexander Nowell, A reproufe, written by Alexander Nowell, of a booke entituled, A

proufe of certayne articles in religion denied by M. Iuell (London: Henry Wyckes, 1565), A2v.
2John Ayre, The Works of John Whitgift, vol 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1853), 624.
3John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (London: John Wyatt, 1711), 181.
4Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford Press,
1967), 5051.
 the challenge of catholicity: john jewel at pauls cross205

skill that made the Challenge Sermon so effective involved more than
knowledge of the scriptures. Jewel came up with a new approach to per-
suading people through eloquence, using his training in rhetoric, his edu-
cation in disputation, and his experience in exile, as well as his scriptural
knowledge. The next section will examine Jewels methodology, and show
how all of this allowed him to present the Church of England as part of the
primitive, apostolic, universal church.

Gods Messenger

The foundation of Jewels unique approach was his portrayal of himself.

Although he had the authority of the crown to preach and acted as the
churchs official apologist, Jewel did not claim that authority. Nor did he
claim the authority of his own learning. Instead, he spoke as a messenger
for God and a conduit of divine authority. As he said in the Challenge
Sermon, I have received of the Lord, that thing which I also have delivered
unto you. He associated himself with St Paul, suggesting that as Paul had
written to plead with the Corinithians, so he was pleading with the English.
As he phrased it, I gave you not any fantasy or device of mine own, but
that thing only that Christ had before delivered me.5 This approach
allowed him to do two things: advocate for the purity of the sacraments in
the Church of England, and provide a long history for a church that was
seen as brand new. This provided an impetus for Jewels us-vs.-them meth-
ods of persuasion, as well as both legitimacy and authority for the English
Church.
Significantly, Jewel also brought in an element of prophecy. He called
their time the last age of the world, and often referred to these latter
days.6 Suggesting that he was speaking for God in advance of the apoca-
lypse enhanced his self-portrayal as a messenger from God, and rendered
a certain degree of urgency to his appeal. Jewel used that sense of urgency
to simplify the message. He claimed that he would not take the time to
speak about larger issues, such as transubstantiation or the real presence,
but focus instead on specific practices that would prove that there were
errors and abuses in the mass. In this too, Jewel connected himself with
StPaul. In the passage Jewel used as his text, 1 Corinthians 1734, Paul also
focused on right practices. Paul was very specific about the attitude people

5John Ayre, ed., Works of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, vol 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press for PS, 1835), 3, 4. Cited hereafter JW.
6JW 1:4.
206 angela ranson

should hold toward the sacrament of communion, and about the impor-
tance of universal participation. Also, Paul ended the passage by saying
that these right practices had to be maintained until Christ returned at the
end of days.
Jewel echoed these themes, and that shows the freshness of his
approach. Instead of following along the same reforming path of arguing
against transubstantiation and purgatory, Jewel focused on particular, vis-
ible traditions that were relatively new. He placed them in historical con-
text by questioning whether they were part of the original practices
originated by Christ and reinforced by Paul. This had an immediate effect:
as Rosamund Oates puts it, Jewel set the polemical agenda for the next
decade: historical analysis, rather than theology, was to be the mainstay of
future debates.7 After this, the use of historical events and sources placed
in their historical context became a major part of the argument regarding
the legitimacy of the Church of England, and the perception of it as a dis-
tinct part of the universal church.
Jewels emphasis on the universality of participation was also part of his
fresh approach. For decades, various reformers and traditionalists had
been debating the meaning of Christs statement in the Eucharist: This is
my body, which is given for you. Jewels sermon was very focused on the
right form of the Eucharist, but he did not so much as mention this ques-
tion. Instead, he focused on the second part of Christs statement: Do this,
in remembrance of me. He connected the abuses of the early church that
had prompted Pauls letter to the Corinthians with the abuses in the
Roman church of their time, and pointed out that the people of God had a
duty to reject these abuses and come together as members of the universal
church. As he said, people who bore the name of Christ, and trusted to be
saved by his blood, should communicate together, and solace themselves
in remembrance of his death.8 This was essentially Jewels definition of
us. He made the English people part of the universal church through their
faith in Christ, instead of through membership in a particular church. He
also assumed that everyone listening, regardless of their specific beliefs,
had the potential to be part of us, if they believed in Christ. Through this
definition, Jewel used individual participation in the sacraments to engage
his entire audience.

7Rosamund Oates, For the Lack of True History: Polemic, Conversion and Church
History in Elizabethan England, in Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional
Relations in Early Modern England Essays in Honour of Professor W.J. Sheils, edited by
Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 137.
8JW 1:7.
 the challenge of catholicity: john jewel at pauls cross207

Once Jewel had drawn in his listeners this way, making his message real
and relevant for all of them, he employed his skills in rhetoric to persuade
them. Jewel used many rhetorical devices during his career, both in spo-
ken and written polemics. In the Challenge Sermon, he focused on two:
emotional appeal, and the challenge. The first, emotional appeal, was the
most prevalent in sixteenth-century polemic. It was in fact so prevalent,
and done with such skill, that some people considered it duplicitous.9
Harding eventually grew impatient with Jewels emotional appeals during
their debate; in his Rejoindre he summarized Jewels Replie by saying that:
there is much idol sport, and some sad hypocrisy, with many a crying-
out: Blessed be God, O Master Harding, Alas Master Harding, etc; there be
strange phrases, there be affected terms, there be pinching nips [and] irk-
some cuts. Harding claimed that Jewel had a threefold purpose for appeal-
ing to the emotions in this way: to discredit the person of the adversary, to
call a colour of truth upon the cause, [and] specially to delight and please
the baser sort.10
Harding may well have effectively summarized Jewels goals in this
claim. Jewel did intend to discredit the Roman church and persuade his
audience that he spoke the truth, and he did deliberately use emotional
appeal to do so, arranging it within the structure of the Challenge Sermon
in a place that was typical for spoken rhetoric of the time. His emotional
appeal took place after the exposition and persuasion, in order to suggest
the right interpretation of his audiences new knowledge.11 Jewel first
established himself as a messenger for God, then presented information
that made the English people part of the universal church. Finally, he drew
on their emotions by referring to the recent past.
And if there be any here, that have had, or yet have, any good opinion of the
mass, I beseech you for Gods sake, even as you tender your own salvation,
suffer not yourself wilfully to be led away: turn not blindly to your own con-
fusion. Think with yourself, it was not for nought that so many of your breth-
ren rather suffered themselves to die and to abide allcruelty, than they
would be partakers of that thing that you reckon to be so holy. Let their
deaths, let their ashes, let their blood, that was so abundantly shed before
your eyes, somewhat prevail with you, and move you.12

9Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 57.
10Harding, A Reioindre to M. Iewels replie (Antwerp, 1566), ***3r.
11David K. Weiser, The Prose Style of John Jewel, Salzburg Studies in English Literature
9 (Austria: Institut fr Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1973), 14.
12John Jewel, The true copies of the letters betwene the reuerend father in God Iohn
Bisshop of Sarum and D. Cole vpon occasion of a sermon (London: John Day, 1560), 175v-176.
208 angela ranson

This direct appeal to the emotions of the audience, and the deliberate rec-
ollection of a shared traumatic experience, was designed to clarify what
was and was not a part of the English churchs true religion. If people
maintained their loyalty to the mass, they rejected the sacrifices of their
brethren, a term which suggested both a religious affiliation and a kinship
relationship. In this, Jewel not only showed his adversarial mentality, but
also how his experience in exile under Mary had affected him. He had
been acquainted with many of the martyrs who had died for their faith at
that time, including Thomas Cranmer, whom he had held in high regard.
In many ways, his work in the Challenge Sermon and the resulting contro-
versy was an attempt to maintain what the martyrs had established in the
English Church.
To Jewel, the Marian martyrs were part of us because of their steadfast
faith in Christ, and the people who had survived the persecution during
the reign of Mary had an obligation to continue their work. This attitude
comes through most clearly when Jewel mentions Mary herself. Being
English and someone who believed in Christ, she was by default part of
us. However, she had also persecuted the universal church, which made
her part of them. Jewel sidestepped around this by acknowledging that
Marys religion had been wrong, in contrast to the religion of her brother
and sister, but denying that she could be blamed for it. She knew none
other religion, and thought well of the thing that she had been so long
trained in.13 Thus, the persecution could be blamed on them, who had
deceived everyone so thoroughly that they had even fooled an English
prince.
Jewel developed the motif of deception to explain his enemies reaction
to his sermon. He said that since he had preached it, his adversaries had
been conspiring against him: they whisper in corners that he had said
more than he was able to justify and make good.14 This attempt at decep-
tion led Jewel to re-emphasize his second and most important rhetorical
device: the challenge.
If any learned man of all our adversaries, or if all the learned men that be
alive be able to bring, any one sufficient sentence, out of any old catholic
doctor, or father: Or out of any old general council: Or out of the holy scrip-
tures of God: Or any one example of the primitive Church, whereby it may
be clearly and plainly proved, that there was any private mass in the whole
world at that time or that there was then any Communion ministered unto

13JW 1:7.
14JW 1:20.
 the challenge of catholicity: john jewel at pauls cross209

the people under one kind: Or that, the people had their common prayers
then in a strange tongue, that they understood not: Or that, the Bishop of
Rome was then called, an universal Bishop, or the head of the universal
churchor that the lay people was then forbidden, to read the word of God
in their own tongue. If any man alive were able to prove, any of these arti-
cles, by any one clear, or plain clause, or sentence, either of the scriptures: or
of the old doctors: or of any old general Council: or by any example of the
primitive church: I promised then that I would give over and subscribe unto
him.15
Jewel challenged all learned men, both those who represented us and
those who represented them, to prove through patristic and Biblical
sources that the practices of the Roman Church were part of the primitive
universal church. He clearly delineated the sources of the challenge, limit-
ing them to the writers and councils of the first six hundred years of the
church. He also offered his enemies a great prize if they were willing to
take it on: his own submission. In the published text of the sermon, he
made note that no one had responded in the year since he had first
preached it. Even Cole had not actually answered the challenge by proving
the articles with Biblical or patristic sources; he had just attempted to
change the terms. The rest of Jewels adversaries had done nothing but
make claims in hidden corners that his challenge was unsupportable,
which led Jewel to point out that if that were so, I marvel that the parties
never yet came to the light, to take the advantage.16
Challenging ones opponents was an important part of polemic because
it allowed the author to make a stand over a particular point or issue.
Inone sense all polemic was a challenge, since it was considered unac-
ceptable to leave any polemical work unanswered. This was the all-
encompassing challenge of polemic. From within it, polemicists issued a
more direct form of challenge to provide special emphasis. For example,
Thomas Cranmer presented Stephen Gardiner with a challenge in his
book Answer to a Cavillation. He said that he, Cranmer, would maintain
that he had the correct interpretation until Gardiner could prove that
these authors spake one thing, and meant another, and that qualities and
accidents be substances.17 This was an unanswerable challenge due to its
subjectivity, and did not really expect a literal response. It was meant both
to discredit Gardiner and to halt any possible misinterpretation the reader

15Jewel, True Copies of the Letters, 163164.

16JW 1:20.
17Henry Jenkyns, ed, The Remains of Thomas Cranmer, vol 3 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1833), 469.
210 angela ranson

might develop. Thus, it was important more for its dramatic tone and
implied conviction than for its actual content. Such drama was the com-
pelling part of this sort of polemic. As Peter Matheson puts it: no small
part of the entertainment value of Reformation literature was its war
game character: ritual challenges, calls to battle, [and] epic stories of
heroism.18
Jewels challenge had a grander scope than many sixteenth-century rhe-
torical challenges, as can be seen when Jewels challenge is placed in con-
text with other challenges of the 16th century. For example, Thomas Mores
use of the challenge was far more specific in his Confutation, which he
published in order to refute the work of William Tyndale. He said that
there was never a time when it was appropriate for a monk to marry a nun,
and challenged Tyndale to prove him wrong. Wherein if Tyndale dare say
that I lie, let Tyndale as I often have said, bring forth of all the old holy
saints, someone that said the contrary, which I am very sure he can not.19
Thomas Cranmer used the device of the challenge in a similar way, when
he demanded in his Defense that the papists show some authority for
their opinion, and let them not constrain all men to follow their fond
devises, only because they say.20 Both of these are aimed at a particular
person or small group of people. Jewel, however, challenged all learned
men to prove him wrong, and had a far longer list of issues for his adversar-
ies to consider.
Jewels challenge also moved beyond the typical in its scale. Many other
challengers simply asked for their opponent to show proof that rendered
their own point incorrect. Jewel took it to the next level and challenged his
opponents to change his entire world-view. This put Jewel and the Church
of England on the offensive. This has often been called Jewels negative
method, for Jewel challenged his opponents to prove him wrong, instead
of claiming to be right. He actually refused to be placed on the defensive.
At the end of his letter to Cole, Jewel said that he did not defend the reli-
gion of the English church because that was not the point. The point was
for the Roman church to defend itself, so to conclude as I began, I answer
that in these articles I hold only the negative.21 To hold the negative was

18Peter Matheson, The Rhetoric of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 45.
19Thomas More, The second parte of the co[n]futacion of Tyndals answere in whyche is
also confuted the chyrche that Tyndale deuyseth (London: William Rastell, 1533), xc.
20Thomas Cranmer, A defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the
body and bloud of our sauiour Christ (London: Reginald Wolfe, 1550), 58v.
21Jewel, The true copies of the letters, B1.
 the challenge of catholicity: john jewel at pauls cross211

part of Jewels self-portrayal: he presented himself as a messenger of the

truth, not an instigator of doctrine.
Jewel maintained his negative position throughout the controversy
when arguing with Harding, which annoyed Harding into demanding will
you never leave that peevish kind of argument deduced of negatives?22
The answer, though unspoken, was definitely no. Arguing from the nega-
tive in the Challenge Sermon was strategic. It drew Jewels enemies out
onto uncertain ground. Harding, in his frustration, attacked Jewel for
preaching his negative articles at Pauls Cross, saying that Jewel should
not have rested his argument on such questions of light importance. Jewel
immediately responded to that, asking pointedly why the negative would
be so offensive to his opponents, if not because they were incapable of
proving him wrong. Then he said:
You say, I have sought up certain small questions of light importance,
wherein the ancient doctors have not travelled, as not daring to enter into
matters of greater weight. How be it, it seems over much for you to limit and
appoint each man what he should preach at Pauls Cross. Neither is it much
material, whether these matters be great or small: but whether you, by
colour of the same, have deceived the people.23
It can be seen in this passage that Jewel, in his guise of a messenger of God,
was working out a strategy that he had begun at Pauls Cross. He had delib-
erately structured his Challenge Sermon using the negative in order to
provoke his adversaries into challenging it, for the negative allowed Jewel
to attack the Roman church on what J.W. Blench calls historical and ratio-
nal grounds without opening himself up to similar attacks.24
Also, using the negative in the Challenge Sermon formed the founda-
tion for Jewels definition of them, through the continuing motif of decep-
tion. As the passage above reiterates, they deceived the people through
the practices Jewel listed in the challenge articles. They denied the peo-
ple a vernacular Bible, refused to allow universal participation in the
Communion in both kinds, introduced new man-made traditions, and
placed the pope as head of the universal church. None of these were small
matters to Jewel. They represented the falseness of them, which we, as
the English inheritors of the apostolic universal church, had to resist.

22Harding, Rejoindre, 20.

23John Jewel, A replie vnto M. Hardinges ansvveare by perusinge whereof the discrete, and
diligent reader may easily see, the weake, and vnstable groundes of the Romaine religion
(London: Henry Wykes, 1565), q 5.
24J.W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), 292.
212 angela ranson

This negative method reflected Jewels training in rhetoric, his knowl-

edge of Biblical and patristic sources, and his skill at engaging the audience.
As a messenger of God, he could take such an authoritative position as to
challenge the entire church to prove him wrong. He could set up the
church he defended as representative of the apostolic church that had
been led by another messenger for God, St Paul himself. Finally, he could
connect emotionally with his audience and make them feel the weight of
their history of persecution. This was not the full extent of his methods of
persuasion, however. As the next section will show, Jewel recognized the
variation in his audience. This enabled him to expand his definition of us
and simultaneously speak to those who supported him, those who were
uncertain of him, and those who opposed him.

Gods People

As noted above, Jewel built strong walls between right and wrong, and
aligned the English on the side of the right. He acknowledged that the
English had drifted over to the side of the wrong in accepting the mass
during Marys reign, but maintained that they truly belonged on the side
of the right due to the right religion formed in Edwards time, which
Elizabeth had restored. She had brought back the holy communion, to the
same order that was delivered and appointed by Christ, and after prac-
ticed by the apostles, and continued by the holy doctorsfor the space of
five or six hundred years throughout the whole catholic church of Christ.25
That meant that the Church of England that had been established in 1559
was a legitimate part of the universal church, because it practiced the
right use of the sacraments. Jewel could therefore call the people back to
the primitive church because in doing so he was also calling them back
into its descendent, the Church of England. This was how Jewel estab-
lished the English church as both part of the universal church and dis-
tinctly English.
Jewel knew his audience; he knew that he was talking to people who
had heard it all before. He also knew that many people in his audience, of
all classes and vocations, were unwilling to invest in yet another new form
of religion. Others were willing, but uncertain whether or not it was the
right thing to do. Parish visitation records show just how complicated

25JW 1:5.
 the challenge of catholicity: john jewel at pauls cross213

Jewels task of persuasion was. The varying levels of devotion were care-
fully recorded, so men and women gained such labels as well-ordered in
religion, loyal in religion, conformable or unconformable.26 Among the
clergy, beliefs were similarly diverse, and the clergy were more likely to be
openly hostile than the laity. Jewel said in a letter to Peter Martyr that if
obstinacy were found anywhere, it was altogether among the priests, those
especially who had once been on our side. They are now throwing all
things into confusion, in order, I suppose, that they may not seem to have
changed their opinions without due consideration.27
Since he was aware of this great variation, Jewel knew that he had to
speak to several different types of people at once. As he said, he had to
show the people that have forsaken the mass, for what cause and how
justly they have forsaken it, and also unto them that as yet delight in it,
what manner of thing it is that they delight in.28 He rose to this challenge
by creating a contradiction, treating his audience as simultaneously the
lost and the found. They were both the sheep that had strayed, and the
holy nation set up to judge the straying sheep. He called the lost back to
the right use of the sacraments, pleading with them to align their beliefs
with the primitive universal church, which was the mystical body of
Christ. At the same time, he set up the found as judges of the visible
church. He gave them the authority to evaluate Roman practices, espe-
cially the mass, and set up the structure of the Challenge Sermon so that it
clearly presented Biblical and logical evidence for their consideration.
Throughout the sermon, Jewel continually engaged the part of his audi-
ence that he set up as judges, requesting them to evaluate the information
they had received. In the following passage, for example, he required them
to consider the information about the mass provided by the Roman Church.

Of all that holy supper, and most comfortable ordinance of Christ, there was
nothing for the simple souls to consider, but only a number of gestures and
countenances: and yet neither they nor the priest knew what they meant.
Think you that this was Christs meaning when he ordained the communion
first? Think you that St Paul received these things of the Lord, and delivered
the same to the Corinthians? O good brethren, Christ ordained the holy
sacrament for our sakes, that we might thereby remember the mysteries of
his death, and know the price of his blood.29

26John Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics: The Growth of Protestantism in East
Anglian Market Towns (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2001), 6, 26.
27ZL 1, 45.
28JW 1:5.
29JW 1:9.
214 angela ranson

This theme of think you was often repeated, although Jewel sometimes
altered it to think we, which further encouraged the implication that they
were all in a position to determine truth or falsehood in the mass. Jewel
also continually used terminology that suggested a court case. He set up
the Roman church as the opposing counsel and the mass itself as the
defendant, then presented Roman arguments as well as his own so that
the audience could more indifferently judge of both.30 He also used meth-
ods of disputation, specifically the constructs of logical argument, to
expose logical fallacies in church traditions. He provided an entire list of
such fallacies, such as: Christ was buried in a shroud of linen cloth, ergo,
the corporal must be made of fine linen. Many of the lay people have
the palsy, and many have long beards, ergo, they must all receive the com-
munion under one kind. Christ was the rock, ergo, the altar must be
made of stone.31 Then he pointed out that these traditions had been cre-
ated by the Roman Church, and contrasted them with the practices of the
Church of England that came out of the word of God.
In setting up some people as judges, Jewel gave these members of his
audience a certain status that they did not always receive. The writers
and preachers who spoke for the Roman church in opposition to Jewel,
such as Thomas Harding, John Rastell and Nicholas Stapleton, often mea-
sured faith by obedience instead of by participation. A commonplace of
their writings was that the reader or listener could judge the value of what
they said, but not actively question or evaluate the message itself.
Stapleton, for example, described true Catholics as people which have
learnedto subdue their understanding to the obedience of faith.32 John
Rastell said that the peoples devotion would be acceptable to God if they
believe whatsoever the church teaches.33 Jewel, however, actively encour-
aged his audience to question. Instead of dictating what his audience
should believe, he would present information and evidence in a way that
at the very least created the illusion that they could draw their own
conclusions.
The entire structure of the sermon was arranged to allow this. It began
with a detailed description of the work done by St Paul to maintain the
purity of the Eucharist. Jewel explained what the Eucharist should be,
contrasted it with the mass, and blamed the Roman church for corrupting

30JW 1:14.
31JW 1:15.
32Thomas Stapleton, The History of the Church of England (Antwerp, 1565), 8v.
33John Rastell, A Confutation of a Sermon Pronounced by M Jewel (Antwerp, 1564), 90.
 the challenge of catholicity: john jewel at pauls cross215

it. Then he presented a solution, saying: Thus, whensoever any order given
by God is broken or abused, the best redress thereof is to restore it again
into the state that it first was in at the beginning.34 The new church that
had begun under Elizabeth made such a restoration possible. Jewel com-
pared the accession of Elizabeth to the deliverance of the Jews out of
Egypt, and pointed out the folly of the people who had wanted to turn
back instead of following Moses to the Promised Land. It was similar, Jewel
said, to the folly of the English people who wanted to return to the mass,
even though Elizabeths church had restored the use and form of the Holy
Communion to the state it had been in during the time of the primitive
church. Those people who wanted to return to the mass would not, as he
said, hearken or inquire to come to knowledge. And so in the midst of the
light, they remain still in darkness.35
The people who were still in darkness were the lost, and Jewel embed-
ded another metaphor into his sermon for this part of his audience. They
were on a battleground, one where Gods people were being deceived and
mocked, which brought him back to the motif of deception.36 He blamed
their Roman adversaries for refusing to accept the truth, and mourned
over some deceived English people who spread rumours that the mass
was actually a blessed and a catholic thing.37 Then he promised that these
enemies would not prevail.

Even so, good people, is there now a siege laid to your walls: an army of doc-
tors and councils show themselves upon a hill: the adversary that would
have you yield, bears you well in hand that they are their soldiers and stand
on their side. But keep your hold: the doctors and the old catholic fathers
are yours: you shall see the siege raised, you shall see your adversaries dis-
comfited and put to flight.38

This part of Jewels audience was lost and confused, and needed encour-
agement. Jewel spoke gently to them, promising that a more peaceful time
was coming. This again reflects his self-portrayal as a messenger and a
prophet, and his conviction that the English were us, either because they
were already members of the universal and apostolic English Church or
because they had the potential to be, through their faith in Christ.

34JW 1:4.
35JW 1:5.
36JW 1:23.
37JW 1:20.
38JW 1:22.
216 angela ranson

Jewel did not treat his audience as a unified body simply because
they were all on what he considered the right side; he recognized their
diversity and spoke to it. However, in one way Jewel did unify them. He
pitted them all against their common enemy, the Roman Church, and gave
them new weapons of legitimacy and authority with which to fight it.
These weapons were theirs because the Church of England was part of the
true catholic church: the invisible universal church that maintained the
right use of the sacraments, allowed universal participation as the apos-
tolic church had done, and was part of the wider reform movement. As
Jewel said, the light of the gospel is now so mightily and so far spread
abroad, that no man would lightly miss his way (as afore in the time of
darkness), and perish wilfully.39 Through this idea, Jewel connected the
English church to the wider circle of reformed churches. He kept them
separate and distinct by creating a parallel with Israel instead of with
Lutheran or Swiss reformed churches, but he also included England in the
world that had newly heard the gospel, and so come out of the time of
darkness.
Jewel managed to speak to a large, complex and potentially hostile
group of people in his Challenge Sermon, through his eloquence and his
awareness of the different groups of people who were listening. He had
two very specific purposes in doing so: to establish the legitimacy of the
Church of England, and to inspire devotion in his listeners. He accom-
plished the first by rejecting the Roman Church and establishing the
Church of England as the true descendant of the apostolic church, but it is
much harder to tell if he accomplished the second. Although it is next to
impossible to know the minds and hearts of Jewels listeners, it is at least
possible to trace the influence of the sermon itself.

Influence of the Challenge Sermon

The Elizabethan audience was made up of people who belonged to what

Andrew Pettegree calls the second generation of reform. The first genera-
tion of reform happened during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI,
and involved painful decisions on the part of English people to reject
the traditional church and accept the new learning based on nothing
more than the good faith and charismatic authority of preachers who had
often emerged from a comparatively lowly position in the local clerical

39JW 1:3, 4.
 the challenge of catholicity: john jewel at pauls cross217

hierarchy. The second generation of reform had to adapt to new reformed

churches which had crown support. At this point in the process of refor-
mation, people could adhere to the new religion that emerged
during the reign of Elizabeth without any real mental engagement,
because it was simply the new official church.40 To men like Jewel, who
advocated individual participation and personal accountability, this was
not acceptable. Thus, he played to a different trend that was developing
in English society: self-awareness and what Stephen Greenblatt calls
self-fashioning.41
At this time, the individual conscience was becoming more important.
As Stephen Chavura put it, the individual was roused with a duty to work
out his own salvation directly before God.42 The result was an increasing
awareness of personal responsibility, which Alexandra Walsham calls a
mixed blessing. It gave the clergy a certain level of influence, but at the
same time could create a virtual priesthood of believers andopen a
Pandoras box of private interpretation.43 Jewel accepted this participa-
tion and took that risk. By leading the audience to a particular conclusion,
instead of pushing them to it, he recognized this shift in English society.
He also recognized the value of rhetorical eloquence, logic, and a multi-
layered structure in persuading people through these new ideas, which he
employed to great effect.
The result was that Jewels Challenge Sermon and the resulting contro-
versy had a great influence on the religious atmosphere of the 1560s. As
Torrance Kirby phrases it, the Challenge Sermon caused an unprece-
dented commotion Pauls Cross reverberated repeatedly with repercus-
sions for years afterward.44 It was, at the time, more influential than
discussions of some of the internal problems of the early Elizabethan
Church, such as the issue of the wearing of clerical vestments. Despite the
popularity of this issue in modern historiography, the clerical vestments
were not the main topic of the Pauls Cross sermons during the 1560s.

40Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005), 12, 6.
41Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
42Stephen Chavura, Tudor Protestant Political Thought 15471603 (Leiden: Brill
Publishing, 2011), xii.
43Alexandra Walsham, The Spider and the Bee: The Perils of Printing for Refutation in
Tudor England, in Tudor Books and Readers, edited by John N. King (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 163164.
44Torrance Kirby, The Public Sermon: Pauls Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in
England, Renaissance and Reformation 30.4 (2006), 13.
218 angela ranson

As Mary Morrissey notes, the majority of preachers campaigned against

the corruption of the Roman Church and the need for moral reforma-
tion, making that a more relevant issue at the time.45
The Challenge Sermon became an on-going means of persuasion for
both those who wished to maintain the mass in England, and those who
wished to abolish it. Both sides assumed that the sermon had affected
peoples religious perceptions, or at least had the potential to do so. Thus,
they both felt the need either to discredit the articles of the sermon, or
provide evidence for them. The resulting controversy was continually
reinforced through further sermons at Pauls Cross, making the Cross the
focal point from which this entire argument about catholicity was both
defended and attacked. It was a battle with a significant prize: as Felicity
Heal points out, they were all fighting for the soul and body of the English
nation.46
Both sides acknowledged the importance of Pauls Cross itself. Jewel
used Pauls Cross not only to present his own message, but to keep his
opponents accountable. He felt it necessary to speak against the argu-
ments Dr Richard Smyth preached regarding patristic authority, because
they were open and known lies and he did not want to risk letting his
audience believe them.47 He also held his main opponent, Thomas
Harding, accountable to his past using Pauls Cross, saying that the Cross
at Pauls, and other like places of great concourse, can well record that
Harding had once preached the message of reform. Harding also fre-
quently mentioned the role the Cross played in spreading the word. He
was scornful of it, saying that from there Jewel made the world the witness
of his foolishness.48 This may well have derived from his bitterness that he
did not have access to the Cross, since he continually pointed out that he
was not allowed to preach there. It also could have been an attempt to
intimidate Jewel into submission. In another passage, Harding pointed
out that there would be no Pauls Cross on Judgement Day, which meant
that Jewel and his fellows would no longer have an audience after their
own liking, where they may freely sell their smokes and glorious toys for
the peoples vain praise and favour, where they may allure unto them and
beguile light believing souls.49 This suggests that Harding was trying to

45Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 197.

46Felicity Heal, Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the
National Past, Huntingdon Library Quarterly 68.1/2 (2005), 117.
47Jewel, Replie, 46.
48Harding, Rejoindre, 302.
49Harding, Confutation, 305v.
 the challenge of catholicity: john jewel at pauls cross219

prick Jewels conscience, and make him more careful about what he said
to such a large and influential audience, since he would one day be judged
for it.
Hardings opinions of Jewels work at the Cross show that Jewels meth-
ods of persuasion were perceived as effective. As Arnold Hunt points out,
Harding and his fellows would not have accused Jewel of being a shame-
less crowd-pleaser if Jewel had not shown skill in engaging an audience.50
In his study of the Pauls Cross sermons Millar MacLure also noted Jewels
skill in the pulpit. He said that the preachers of force and distinction at
Pauls Cross tended to be of two types: the forceful, often homely and col-
loquial city preachers such as Hugh Latimer and Henry Smith; and the
more formal, sober and gracious eloquent men like John King and Mark
Frank. MacLure singled Jewel out as one of the eloquent men, saying that
the regular and solemn fall of the clauses in Jewels Ciceronian eloquence
was more moving than the eccentricities of some of the Pauls Cross
preachers who based their style on wit.51
Jewels eloquence was an important part of his methods of persuasion,
and it was effective in part because Jewel knew his audience. The combi-
nation of the two inspired the content of the Challenge Sermon, where
Jewel made difficult theological concepts real and relevant for his audi-
ence by focusing on particular practices rather than on abstract controver-
sial issues. These specific practices targeted the things that Jewels
audience disliked, and essentially justified their dislike. It gave them a
clear picture of what they were supporting by devoting themselves to the
new Church of England, and what they had to reject.
This was not the establishment of a via media religion. Jewel did not try
to say that the Church of England displayed the proper balance between
continental reformed churches and the Roman church. He did not justify
episcopacy or clerical vestments or even the royal supremacy. Instead, he
focused on basic doctrine. This is what we believe, and this is what we
stand against. This is right, and this is wrong. These claims inspired a great
reaction, which suggests that Jewel may have managed to effectively per-
suade people at Pauls Cross. Not everyone agreed with him, but a large
number of people were at least affected by him.

50Arnold Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, in The Oxford Handbook of the
Early Modern Sermon, edited by Peter McCullough et al (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 372.
51Millar MacLure, The Pauls Cross Sermons 15341642 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1958), 163.
220 angela ranson

Conclusion

After the Challenge Sermon gave him a reputation as an eloquent and

engaging preacher, Jewel quickly rose to a position of influence in the
Church. He repeated his challenge from the pulpit twice more after its ini-
tial presentation at Pauls Cross; first, at court on 17 March 1560, and finally
once again at Pauls Cross on 31 March 1560. The sermon then became the
first Elizabethan court sermon to be published, and it was printed by John
Day, who also printed Foxes Acts and Monuments.52 Jewel was made
Bishop of Salisbury, and approximately a year later he was commissioned
by William Cecil to write the official apology of the Church of England.
This apology was published in 1562, quickly translated into several lan-
guages, and used by representatives of the English crown to justify the
decision not to send delegates from the English Church to the Council of
Trent.53 Jewel also contributed to the Thirty-Nine Articles, edited The
Second Book of Homilies, and was chosen to preach at the celebrations
when the rebellions of 1569 were over.
Five divines chose to support Jewel in the controversy that arose out of
the Challenge Sermon, and their decision to do so was, at least in part, due
to the inspiration of Jewel himself. In 1567, Alexander Nowell said that
John Jewel well deserved the state and name of a bishop and of a jewel. A
year later, another English divine named Edward Dering referred to Jewel
as our Alexander in Christian war and godly courage.54 This suggests that
Jewel had a certain status amongst the learned divines of the Elizabethan
church, which is further supported by sources written by Jewels enemies.
Thomas Dorman said that there were some in England with whom [Jewel]
is in such credit, that they believe verily each word that proceeds from
[his] mouth, to bear for truth the weight of the gospel.55 Thomas Harding,
Jewels nemesis, admitted bitterly in 1566 that Jewels preaching had made
people believe that Jewel was a great clerk, a pillar of the gospel, a peerless
fellow.56
Both sides recognized that the central issue of the controversy was that
of catholicity. Both sides claimed to represent the true universal church,

52Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean
Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 94.
53John E. Booty, John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England (London: SPCK, 1963), 56.
54Alexander Nowell, A confutation, as wel of M. Dormans last boke entituled a disproufe
(London: H. Bynneman, 1567), 6v.
55Thomas Dorman, A Request to M. Jewel (Louvain: Ioannem Foulerum, 1567), 2.
56Harding, Rejoindre, C1.
 the challenge of catholicity: john jewel at pauls cross221

but their definitions of universal changed due to Jewels re-definition of

the term catholic. He connected the English to the holy nation of Israel,
and the English church to the church of Paul. This provided his audience
with a history, which weakened the Romanist claims to antiquity. It also
provided his audience with a sense of the authority and legitimacy of the
English church, due to the way they had restored the right practice of the
Holy Communion. These connections allowed Jewel to include the newly
established Church of England in the universal church, and yet maintain
its distinction as an English institution.
The claims in the Challenge Sermon were provoking enough to gener-
ate interest, eloquent enough to persuade, and designed perfectly for the
venue at which the sermon was presented. They caused a decades worth
of controversy, which various divines used to define the beliefs of the
Church of England more and more clearly as the years went by. Jewel
inspired both his fellows and his enemies through the Challenge Sermon,
and won his reputation as champion of the church. However, he also did
more than that. Through the Challenge Sermon, he established the means
by which others could fight with him.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

PAULS CROSS AND THE DRAMATIC ECHOES

OF EARLY-ELIZABETHAN PRINT

Thomas Dabbs

Before the Elizabethan period, the Pauls Cross pulpit was at times used for
dramatic and even volatile church events that fell outside the strictures of
the sanctuary. It had been the site of book burnings, emotionally charged
trials for heretics, and public attacks on heresy. A fiery sermon from Pauls
Cross could incite a riot and, if we are to believe John Foxe and others,
even an impromptu demonstration in the art of knife throwing.1 During
the Elizabethan period the drama intensified as the standing hostilities
between Rome and reform remained, and new and intractable interfaith
conflicts emerged and were addressed from the pulpit. These sermons
took on a new dramatic flare, presented as they were to large, often unruly
audiences within a populace that was growing more literate and that had
more immediate access to the religious print material that flowed around
and through these events.
Despite the shaky relationship the print industry endured with the one
true church in all of its forms during the 16th century, from the 1560s and
70s, with the increase in supplemental print material, the well-attended
sermons at Pauls Cross gained a broader, more intense and enduring cul-
tural impact as they resonated print knowledge sold by booksellers nearby.
Indeed, Mary Morrissey holds that we may postulate an element of sym-
biosis in the relationship between the booksellers of Pauls Churchyard
and the preachers who delivered sermons at the Cross.2 The idea of such
a symbiosis can be advanced by mapping the physical and cultural
environs of Pauls Cross churchyard, then tracking the print histories
of pertinent sermons and related religious writing, and finally by plac
ing these texts as accurately as possible within the Pauls Cross sermon
environment.

1John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, vol. 2 (London: John Day, 1570), Book 10.3. See also
STC (2nd ed.), 11223.
2Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 2.
224 thomas dabbs

This task is too large to complete here, although a convincing diagram

may be drawn that shows the semi-accidental emergence of an unprece-
dented broadcast medium, one that demonstrates how these pulpit ser-
mons intensified their dramatic efficacy by echoing fresh and local print
with amplified orations that would be re-echoed from printed works sold
from booksellers within the same locale. This argument will be encom-
passed by the idea of this echo effect, and the word, echo, will be stretched
to the range of its meanings, starting on the most literal level and then
graduated up the latter of abstraction.
It is also possible to the advance the idea of a symbiosis between Pauls
Cross and the emergence of a new type of public theatre event in what
Andrew Gurr calls the amphitheatre playhouses that appeared during the
early Elizabethan period.3 Arguably from 1567, with the construction of
the Red Lion theatre east of the city limits, but certainly by 1577, when the
Theatre and Curtain were established next to each other to the north in
Shoreditch, there was a remarkable cultural development in the unprece-
dented appearance, just outside the City of London, of theatres that were
staffed by professional companies and patronized by the general public.
We know from anti-theatre sermons and other religious writing that these
theatres put on well-attended plays that, by 1580, according to Gurr, took
on a plainly commercial function that offered fresh possibilities to an
urban audience.4 The most influential, albeit perhaps the least tasteful
site for early Elizabethan theatrical innovation was among adult playing
companies that began performing in these new commercial venues. Semi-
or fully private dramas staged at court, at private theatres, or at schools
and universities will not be considered in this discussion because the
focus here will be on the cultural impact of mixing new and popular print
with mass audiences at public events, both at Pauls Cross and from the
stages of the large public amphitheatres.
Similar to the public sermon events at Pauls Cross, public plays began
to resound recent print from the stage during the early Elizabethan period.
We know that these plays adapted novel and popular stories or collections
of stories that had recently appeared in the bookshops of St Pauls. Many
of them, including the story of Romeo and Juliet, were translations of
exotic tales and so-called histories from the continent. Though of a differ-
ent character than strict religious writing, it will be forwarded here

3Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeares London (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1987; rpt. 2004), 14.
4Gurr, Playgoing, 14344.
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print225

that these stories and the plays adapted from these stories grew out of
and were sustained by the same resounding mixture of print with public
event that powered the reverberating religious environs at Pauls Cross
Churchyard proper and generally around St Pauls.
Over the past thirty years, there have been literary studies that have
broadly linked the Reformation pulpit with the early modern stage. Some
fine connections have been made, but one wonders if using the term, pul-
pit, in such an abstract and general manner sometimes finds scholars of
early modern drama guilty of seeing the vast complexities of Reformation
religion in singular and one-dimensional terms.5 Also these broad studies
of cultural trends or theories of linguistic inspiration that connect church
and stage tend to assume a latter day dichotomy and even an equivalency
between Reformation religion and early modern drama while examining
a culture in which a hard and clear dichotomy or equivalency of this
nature never existed. Church historians have not missed the auditory and
textual connections between sermons and plays or their close inter-rela-
tionship with the art of performance and the early modern print industry
and have recently exposed convincing material links between these cul-
tural forms.6 This study, though, will focus on the Pauls Cross sermon
environment alone and its relationship with specific early books, book-
shops, and public amphitheatres.
Peter Lake, using the dark materials inherent to early modern murder
pamphlets, brilliantly pioneered the effort of detailing the relationship
between specific sermons and play texts by showing where cheap print
made its way into both sermon and play. Lake views the pulpit and
stage as being in competition with one another essentially for the same
audience.7 Though there certainly was the feel of competition between
religious and secular interests, a closer look at the physical environment
at Pauls Cross from the early Elizabethan period on out points more to a
collaboration rather than an outright competition between the Pauls
Cross pulpit and the public stage, an unwilling collaboration that grew
out of the commercial successes achieved by the religious print industry.

5See for example such studies as Brian Crockett, The Play of Paradox (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) and Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the
Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
6See, for example, the articles by Emma Rhatigan, Kate Armstrong, and James Rigney
in a recent edition, unassumingly entitled The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern
Sermon, edited by Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
7Peter Lake, The Antichrists Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), in particular Chapters 9 and 10.
226 thomas dabbs

From the efforts of more recent scholarship on St Pauls and its environs,
it now seems plausible to show precisely how the Pauls Cross pulpit was,
from the early Elizabethan period, strongly connected and entwined with
the secular stage, and also map how the localized environment of the
pulpit and churchyard and attendant bookshops even prompted the
development of large public playhouses and spurred on the creation and
execution of public play events.8
The audience that attended public events during the Elizabethan
period should be considered in terms of a canon of studies on aural
London and the stage.9 Recently, though, it has become possible to dia-
gram the precise way in which the acoustic and geophysical environs of
the cathedral influenced changes in discourse and consciousness, the
exact routes that connect the echoing relationships between print, Pauls
Cross, and stage. To chart the path of these relationships, it is necessary to
take a quick pedestrian tour through the re-created Pauls Cross church-
yard of the Elizabethan period, with its growing number of bookshops,
and attempt to hear within the space between pulpit and bookseller. The
growth in the number of bookshops of course signals a significant rise in
literacy but more significantly the increased presence of booksellers indi-
cates that the interaction between the literate and the semi-literate or illit-
erate had reached a critical mass, a point where newly printed works were
broadcast and would inspire sustained public response within this con-
centrated area.10 From this populace there arose echoes of consciousness,
or what might be termed extra-aural reverberations of the mind between
public forum and print.
The image of the St Pauls precinct, circa 1500, shown here is set of
course well before our period, before the cathedral was plundered and

8On the cathedral before Wren, see John Schofield, St Pauls before Wren (Swindon:
English Heritage, 2011). For a history of St Pauls to 2004, see St Pauls: The Cathedral Church
of London, 6042004, ed. Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, Andrew Saint (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004).
9Bruce R. Smith, in his seminal work on auditory London, briefly mentions the envi-
rons of St Pauls in The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Smiths work prompted further research on
the soundscapes of the theatres. See Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping
Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007),
Kenneth Gross, Shakespeares Noise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), Wes
Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002), and Keith Botelho,
Renaissance Earwitnesses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
10See David Cressy on the spillover from the literate to the illiterate in Literacy and the
Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), 150.
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print227

Fig. 1.Pauls Church before Wren.

Source:St Pauls. The Cathedral Church of London: 6042004 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004),
42, fig. 20.

much of the church holdings were sold off. It does give us, though, a fine
visual of space and proximity in the cathedral area, and also will work here
to show us something of how things changed during the Reformation
when we consider how prominent the print industry became in this pre-
cinct. Most important to this discussion is the Pauls Cross pulpit and the
surrounding churchyard on the northeast side of the cathedral. But the
west side of the cathedral is also pertinent and should be considered first.
In 1557, after receiving a royal charter, the Stationers Company relo-
cated to Peter College, just across from the great west entrance of St Pauls.
Throughout Pauls Churchyard, the print industry enjoyed a marked
increase in the already substantial presence that the freemen of the com-
pany had gained around St Pauls after the selling off of church grounds.
During the early Elizabethan period key printers secured lucrative patents
from church and state, and they were also helped by the successful mar-
keting of religious texts from the concentrated environs in and around
St Pauls and specifically from Pauls Cross Churchyard.
Millar MacLure reflects on the Pauls Cross sermons as taking place
during those days when amplifiers were happily unknown.11 But a recent

11Millar MacLure, The Pauls Cross Sermons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 8.
228 thomas dabbs

reproduction of the aural environs at Pauls Cross demonstrates that the

walls of the cathedral served as broad ranged and effective amplifiers for
preachers delivering sermons from Pauls Cross. Publishers during that
time would have been delighted to have known modern electronic ampli-
fiers. As John Wall and his team at the Virtual Pauls Cross Project have
recently revealed to us in astonishing detail, the Pauls Cross pulpit was
positioned in such a way that the voice of the speaker, if projected prop-
erly, could in fact strongly amplify a strong voice from two sides of the
cathedral and from the surrounding bookshops.12
This was a feat that some speakers admitted they were incapable of, but
that others, including Bishop Bourne of the knife throwing incident and
attendant riot, were probably good at carrying off. Peter M.W. Blayneys
exacting research completes the circle by diagramming the crescent of
buildings increasingly occupied by booksellers and that would have
flanked the preacher to the right and behind the pulpit.

Fig. 2.Pauls Cross with Booksellers, 1572.

Source:Peter M.W. Blayney, John Day and the Bookshop That Never Was, in Material
London, c. 1600 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 327, Diagram 16.3.

12The Virtual Pauls Cross Project, http://virtualpaulscrossproject.blogspot.com (11

November 2012) and in particular the diagrams and audio of John Donnes Gunpowder Plot
sermon at http://virtualpaulscrossproject.blogspot.com/2012/08/wall-delivers-paper-at
-pauls-cross.html (11 November 2012).
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print229

He concludes that the bookshops were not at all like the little booths
and stalls that many have envisaged.13 In fact Blayney holds that among
the buildings that flanked Pauls Cross in the 1572 image reprinted
here, some had three stories, but most had four, not counting garrets.14
Walls team has confirmed this observation, showing us that Pauls Cross
Churchyard was the single most influential amphitheatre in early modern
London and one that echoed popular print well before the public theatres
covered below. Included here is one of the images of Pauls Cross
Churchyard from the Virtual Pauls Cross website.15

Fig. 3.Virtual Pauls Cross Image.

Source:The Virtual Pauls Cross Project. Web. http://virtualpaulscrossproject.blogspot.jp/
search?updated-max=2012-08-21T11:44:00-07:00&max-results=7.

13Blayney, Pauls Cross Churchyard in 1572, in John Day and the Bookshop That Never
Was, 327, Diagram 16.3.
14Blayney, John Day and the Bookshop That Never Was, 328. For evidence of the grad-
ual encroachment of bookshops within Pauls Cross churchyard throughout the Elizabethan
period, see also Figure 11. Pauls Cross Churchyard in 1600 in Blayney, The Bookshops in
Pauls Cross Churchyard (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1990), 76.
15John Wall, The Virtual Pauls Cross Project. Web: http://virtualpaulscrossproject
.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=20120821T11:44:0007:00&max-results=7.
230 thomas dabbs

It was a space that, though acoustically disperse, would still have

broadly amplified and echoed sound. The speaker was aimed at the north
transept some 30 meters away. Also, as the figure of the preacher in the
Pauls Cross diptych suggests, the speakers voice could also be projected
toward the row of bookshops between 30 and 60 meters away. At 10 meters
tall or better the buildings were well able to amplify the voice of a strong
speaker throughout the churchyard.
The voice of the pulpit preacher resounded from the bookshops that
were embedded along the outer walls of the choir and the north transept
and also from the outer walls of the line of bookshops that encircled the
pulpit beneath Paternoster Row. The sermons also drew from and
resounded print works that sold from these and other nearby shops,
including Englished Bibles perhaps, but certainly hymnals, prayer books,
religious tracts and, important but slow in coming, print copies of prior
sermons from the Pauls Cross pulpit. Lake traces the use of popular pam-
phlet material at Pauls Cross sermons from the late 1570s, specifically
when the stage came under attack with a flurry of warnings from pam-
phleteers.16 But the use of sensational images in sermon and print occurred
from the beginning of the Elizabeth period as sermons from Pauls Cross
glorified Protestant martyrs while sensationally demonizing the clergy of
the Roman church.17
The print industry also began to promote a new iconography by way of
Foxes Book of Martyrs, published by the grand wizard of religious print
marketing, John Day. Foxes work was imposing in size and forbidding in
cost, but on a more pedestrian level, Day printed, as John N. King points
out, single-text editions or small collections in inexpensive octavo for-
mat as a way of testing the market for the larger books he issued by such
Protestant luminaries as Foxe, Hugh Latimer, and Thomas Becon.18
These cheap print market tests also helped to bolster the names of these
luminaries as the reception of their works echoed among the readers
in Pauls Cross Churchyard, whether they could afford the larger books
or not.
In a prior article, I have argued that Day in fact helped to glamorize
what we might now view as the distinctly unglamorous field of Protestant

16Lake, Antichrists Lewd Hat, 32223.

17See MacLure, Pauls Cross Sermons, 20405 and such examples as a September 1563
sermon in which the preacher calls for the gallows for the Marian bishops and a November
1565 sermon in which the Archdeacon of Essex likened priest to apes.
18John N. King, Foxes Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 83.
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print231

sermons and writing.19 Day certainly understood the glamour of the

interaction between the Pauls Cross pulpit and surrounding bookshops.
The Good Friday sermon that Foxe delivered from Pauls Cross was
published and re-issued in both English and Latin by Day as an affordable
quarto entitled A Sermon of Christ Crucified, in 1570, the same year that the
upgraded and expensive Book of Martyrs came out in two volumes.20 The
cheaper publication, along with the Days similar sponsorship of other
such (affordable) Pauls Cross celebrities as Thomas Becon, demonstrates
that Foxe was well aware of how to create and maintain the reciprocal
buzz of a writers name within the compressed pulpit and print environ-
ment of Pauls Cross Churchyard.21 Though Days print shop was at
Aldersgate, he did secure a bookshop in the early 1570s near the northwest
door of the cathedral, and near the action. Days interest in constructing a
controversial bookshop within the Pauls Cross churchyard itself near
Pauls gate reflects that he fully understood the importance of having a
strong foothold in that reverberating location.22
In an important Pauls Cross sermon delivered in 1535, Robert Singleton,
the avant-garde evangelical, defended the legislative position of Thomas
Cromwell, confirming Henry as head of the Church of England and mark-
ing a pivotal point of reformed thinking in church history. Torrance Kirbys
introduction to an edition of Singletons sermon offers a brief history of
Pauls Cross and includes John Jewels 1560 statement in a letter to Peter
Martyr that as many as 6,000 people attended Jewels Pauls Cross ser-
mon.23 One imagines that Singletons apology for the crown and reform,
like Jewels apology, would have drawn a goodly crowd, too. However,
24years later, Jewels challenge sermon on 26 November 1559, would be
an entirely different event, even though both Singleton and Jewel were
speaking from Pauls Cross on behalf of the Church of England, even
though both were marshalling biblical antecedents to level criticism
against the Roman church.
By the time we get to Jewel, source material for his sermon was on offer
probably adjacent to or just next to the churchyard at one or more of the

19Thomas Dabbs, The Glamorous Echoes of Godly Print, in Renaissance Papers 2010
(Rochester: Camden House, 2011), 12333.
20First imprint, STC (2nd ed.), 11242.6.
21King, Foxes Book of Martyrs, 83. King identifies Becon as Foxes protg.
22See Peter M.W. Blayney, John Day and the Bookshop That Never Was, in Material
London, c. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 32243.
23Torrance Kirby, Robert Singletons Sermon at Pauls Cross in 1535: The True Church
and the Royal Supremacy, Reformation & Renaissance Review: Journal of the Society for
Reformation Studies 10.3 (2008), 34368.
232 thomas dabbs

bookstores along Paternoster Row, or perhaps even one of the bookstores

attached to the church. From the mid-1550s until the mid-1570s the English
Church in Geneva issued an important list of titles prepared by Marian
exiles. An affordable and transportable English New Testament came out
in 1557, followed by a full Bible in quarto in 1560 and 1561. Gordon Campbell
asserts that this Geneva Bible, with its glossary notes and roman type,
from this early edition forward was for private study, for the individual
rather than for the church.24 The Stationers Company did not approve an
indigenous edition of the Geneva Bible until 1570s, but Bibles were
imported and were at least distributed if not sold in London. The demand
for these Bibles would have been high, and David Daniell confirms that
the earlier Geneva printings were freely available in England much ear-
lier than the London printings of the 1570s.25 It follows that these Bibles
were abundant among the congregants at Pauls Cross in 1559.
The delivery of Jewels challenge sermon may have been one of the first
times in English history when the preacher found, for better or for worse,
that he could preach to a mass audience, well-populated with people who
had access to an affordable and readable Bible and who would have
already been somewhat familiar with the material that was drawn from
the Bible in a sermon. And also of historic importance to the English-
speaking world is the fact that this same sermon was echoed by an imme-
diate print version of the true copies of Jewels dispute over the same
sermon with Henry Cole. This contentious octavo was quickly issued by
John Day in 1560 and would have been on offer near the Pauls Cross pul-
pit.26 Jewels Apologia Ecclesi Anglican, translated into English, came
out in quarto the same year.27 The then post-event appearance of afford-
able printed works in contest with one another and Englished for public
consumption, the rapid repetition or reverberation of these disputes, was
yet another sign that the Pauls Cross environment was entering a new and
more intense era of public broadcasting.
And the public, too, was part of the broadcast. In the same letter to
Peter Martyr, Jewel mentions the mass congregation engaging in the new-
fangled practice of singing metrical psalms: you may now sometimes see
at Pauls cross, after the service old and young, of both sexes, all singing

24Gordon Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Version (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 26.
25David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003), 265.
26STC (2nd ed.), 14612.
27STC (2nd ed.), 14581.
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print233

together and praising God.28 Jewel repeated his sermon on 31 March 1560,
and Henry Machyn recorded psalm singing after sermons delivered on 3
March and 17 March of the same year.29 It is difficult to imagine a large
congregation, indeed in Jewels case, 6,000 people, bursting out in song
spontaneously and singing melodies in unison. One wonders if there was
clerical leadership that employed the lining out technique that
Christopher Marsh identifies as being then used in parish churches. In this
case a line of words is called out first, then sung by the group, a laborious
way of singing hymns, but dramatic enough given that this act was an
affront to the Roman Mass and even to the Book of Common Prayer.30
Still there had to be a common printed text. Marsh holds that it seems
that people, after all, learned the Sternhold and Hopkins tunes during the
1560s.31 John Days lucrative full edition of Sternhold and Hopkins metri-
cal psalms did not come out until 1562, after Jewels sermon and the other
psalm-singing episodes, but Day published a truncated version of metrical
psalms in 1560, and one wonders if this edition was not concurrent with
the singing of psalms in March of that year.32 There were, of course, the
earlier Geneva imprints which would have followed the same course into
London and into the Pauls Cross Churchyard as the Geneva Bible. All of
these popular source texts echoed throughout Pauls churchyard, from the
sermon, within the minds of those who heard the sermon, from the voices
that sang in unison after the service.
And religious print reverberations prompted by these sermons contin-
ued to agitate the print marketplace at Pauls Cross Churchyard. The
exchanges that sounded and resounded from John Jewels challenge and
the responses from his two adversaries, the aforementioned Cole and
Thomas Harding, are well known to church historians. The Harding
exchanges were more durable. Harding, the exiled former treasurer of
Salisbury cathedral and one with perhaps far more than a mere bone to
pick with Jewel, who was then Bishop of Salisbury, took up Jewels chal-
lenge in a pro-Catholic printed work that resounded in the City of London

28ZL 1, 71. See also Arnold Hunts coverage of Jewel in Preaching the Elizabethan
Settlement, The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter McCullough,
Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 37071.
29MacLure, Pauls Cross Sermons, 202.
30Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 553. There is a demonstration of the lining technique on
Track 45 on the accompanying CD.
31Marsh, 422. See also Marshes thorough discussion of Sternhold-Hopkins and psalm
singing, 40852.
32STC (2nd ed.), 2427 (STC 90608).
234 thomas dabbs

from the continent. Hardings belated Answer to Master Jewels Challenge

came out in 1564, and the two locked polemical horns in what Gary Jenkins
terms tedious and pedantic volleys until they both died in the early
1570s.33
For these volleys to be meaningfully received among the common
folk, something else had to happen, or else the common folk would have
become as disenchanted with the Pauls Cross sermons and resulting
answers as a number of modern critics have. The physical environment of
the cathedral, in particular Pauls Cross Churchyard with its preaching
events and bookshops, the contained and dramatic buzz of fresh print,
sustained this dry hot religious debate. Both speaker and listener needed
the precise locale, one that inundated all with the finer points of spiritual
contest. If the masses could be engaged by these exchanges of public event
with fresh, but less than exciting religious print, how hard would it be to
draw a crowd with dramas that echoed from more compressed venues and
that adapted sensational romances distributed by the same bookshops
that sold religious print?
Arnold Hunt has recently probed into the idea of repetition as integral
to what he terms the art of hearing.34 In this culture of persuasion, repeti-
tion in oral exchanges was incumbent in order to make the listener get it.
Repetition is essential to the art of hearing, and also to the art of persuad-
ing the hearer to remember and be motivated by what has been said. In
addition to the verbal repetition of the speaker, in the theatre of the newer
consciousness, is the repetition of what the hearer has already read or has
had read to him as print echoes in memory. There is also another repeti-
tion when the print version of what has been heard is read or performed.
The echo of print when heard from sermon or play and the echo of print
when one reads or hears about what has been spoken, what has been per-
formed. At some point it sticks, like that old hymn in our head.
At Pauls Cross, from the accession of Elizabeth the sermon is now
reverberating print material from recently established bookshops very
near the pulpit itself. The preacher is now drawing much more from popu-
larly received texts and taking them out for a test run with a more informed
audience through each sermon. As Hunt has reconfirmed, the ever-
attendant buzz or even rancor of audience response was part of the aural

33Gary W. Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church: The Dilemmas of an
Erastian Reformer (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 73, see also 7385.
34Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 15901640
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 7273.
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print235

dialectic of a preaching performance.35 As print echoed from sermons, so

it would echo in the minds of congregants who would encounter printed
responses to what they heard soon enough in surrounding bookshops. In
this environment, certain repeated themes and stories would become well
known and gain popular appeal, would indeed become fashionable and
glamorous.
Some years ago MacLure made the connection between the Pauls Cross
1616 diptych and the Elizabethan public theatre. He remarks that at Pauls
Cross, the sermons, proclamations, processions, and penances were all
theatrical, after comparing the scene at Pauls Cross with the Elizabethan
theatre, with its groundlings and notables, pit and galleries, and, in the
midst, the pulpit as stage.36 This remark was imaginative and right-
minded, as the recent reconstructed views of this theatrical space con-
firm. Given that the view at the time of the Pauls Cross diptych was much
the same at the beginning of the Elizabethan period, it is reasonable to
assume that Pauls Cross and its echoing environs at least partly inspired
the designers of the new theatres that were constructed roughly a decade
or two after Elizabeth came to power.
Perhaps more influential on the physical design of the early public the-
atres were public inn yards, for instance the Bel Savauge, with its close
quarters and standing space, that would have provided better structural
and acoustic models for the Red Lion in 1567 or the Theatre in 1576. The
exact architectural features of inn yards and of the early public theatres,
the precise details of early stages and how they were assembled and used,
are difficult to reconstruct, but certainly the acoustics of new amphithe-
atres would have been far more compressed than they were at Pauls Cross.
Even so, the big venue was the Pauls Cross Churchyard, the theatrical
enclosure that was unique in English speaking history in that it came to
contain the reverberations of the bookshops, the swirling buzz of the liter-
ate and immediate response to fresh and controversial print.
Of course preaching and sung services, or congregational singing, are
dramatic events and of course dramatic events influence other dramatic
events. While examining how early modern secular drama came to be, it is
often difficult to parse the secular from the religious, and one even won-
ders if such a dichotomy ever truly existed. The church had a long and

35Hunt, Art of Hearing, 6. See in particular Donnes observation on the preacher com-
monly being interrupted by a buzz of conversation, taking up as much as one quarter of
his houre.
36MacLure, Pauls Cross Sermons, 4.
236 thomas dabbs

fruitful relationship with drama and had been, in terms of the folksy
morality and mystery plays and even the classically informed school dra-
mas, a more consistent and reliable sponsor of the public dramatic tradi-
tion than the crown or the aristocracy. In the Elizabethan age certain
reformed pastors did begin to speak out against secular drama, and they
strongly spoke against plays and play going on the Sabbath, but the church
continued to support drama, specifically with the sponsorship of chil-
drens companies. Arguably, church and religious initiatives promoted the
new public drama even from the soundings against plays from the pulpit.
But what the Pauls Cross Churchyard arena singularly contributed to
the development of the new secular amphitheatre and its experimental
plays was that it demonstrated the immediate efficacy of staging recent
print that was locally available and known about, of echoing for a mass
audience new and generally shared knowledge. There was nothing inno-
vative in the notion that large crowds could be drawn with stage spectacle
and sensation in a fairly large and amplifying theatre venueit was not
difficult to draw in a crowd to watch a bear being destroyed by dogs.
What was new was the readily available and well-known printed material
within the shops that are standing at attention around the speaker and
audience.
Gurr marks in particular the period 1567 to 1576 as seeing the profes-
sional playing companies stamp their first durable footprint on London.37
What the theatre and the playing companies lacked initially, though, were
plays that could draw a large, paying public. So, as will be outlined below,
they went for the obvious, like their Pauls Cross contemporaries, by com-
bining fresh, well-known, and local print with stage spectacle. The Pauls
Cross environment gave theatre innovators and playwrights the idea, not
for the amphitheatre, but for the amphitheatre that drew crowds by
resounding the popular print marketplace.
Lake charts texts going from print or pamphlet to pulpit and back again
as preachers worked to sensationalize their religious message to make it
more enticing to the public ear. He also shows how the stage is added to
this cycle of print and offers abundant examples of why the pulpit, the
stage, and the pamphlet press should be seen as being in competition for
essentially the same audiences and a good deal of the same ideological
and cultural terrain.38 The lions share of the murder pamphlets Lake con-
siders are 17th-century publications, but we have seen above that there

37Gurr, Playgoing, 11.

38Lake, Antichrists Lewd Hat, 484.
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print237

were appropriations of hot printed matter much earlier at Pauls Cross. Of

course from the early Elizabethan period onward, the primal, eldest source
for sensational and dark stories of violence and murder is the Bible itself
as it entered into the common consciousness with more force than ever
before.
When the attacks on the public stage from the pulpit began, there was
indeed a feeling of competition for audiences among some church spokes-
men, but the parameters for competition had already been set within the
Pauls Cross Churchyard among feuding ministers, who, with their dra-
matic disputes, promoted themselves as they did their opponents. Indeed,
the Pauls Cross pulpit, with the attendant religious controversy and fre-
quent dramas of public penances, seemed to couple with the sensational
romances and melodramas eventually staged at the public theatres. Both
pulpit and theatre helped to drive the print industry. The print industry
gave both public forums new material, and, in turn, fresh responses to this
material, as if all were functionally in partnership in driving up demand.
However, the most powerful competitions that emerged were the raging
conflicts of religious reform that were manifest at Pauls Cross from the
early Elizabethan period onward. Indeed, the very foundation of the
Church of England came under attack from the pulpit during well-
attended sermons; controlling the sermon was difficult, as Morrissey
shows, and sometimes trusted speakers unexpectedly railed against the
ecclesiastical policy of the main church.39 Any competition between ser-
mon attendance and stage attendance were secondary to the interfaith
conflicts that raged during the early modern period.
Church history and theatre history are equally conjoined, though, by
the mutually beneficial relationship they both enjoyed with the highly
localized print marketplace at St Pauls, surrounded by the echoing
environs of public reception, not just at Pauls Cross Churchyard, but also
in the vast nave of the cathedral, Pauls Walk, along with the semi-enclosed
area around the west door of the cathedral and other spaces. As men-
tioned above, print contracts secured from the Church of England and
other official sources provided a secure financial base for key freemen of
the Stationers Company. The offices of the company even faced the west
door of the cathedral. Also the commercial successes of early Elizabethan
cheap religious print, pioneered by John Day, lent entrepreneurial
publishers the necessary confidence to engage in the risky commercial

39Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 789.

238 thomas dabbs

publication of pleasure reading, including translated stories and histories

that were issued just beyond the mandates of moral instruction.40 These
works predictably were promoted by the reaction to them within the ever-
agitated environs of religious and moral discourse at Pauls.
In the 1570 edition of The Schoolmaster, by Roger Ascham, published by
John Day, Ascham complained that it is pity, that those which have author-
ity and charge to allow and disallow books to be printed, be no more cir-
cumspect herein than they are in response to what Ascham called the
bawdy Italian stories that were on offer during the 1560s. Ascham goes on
to say that ten sermons at Pauls Cross do not so much good for moving
men to true doctrine, as one of those books do harm, with enticing men to
ill living.41 Here is an early fine example of the symbiosis between Pauls
Cross and early Elizabethan print as Ascham makes the contrast between
what he sees as bawdy stories and pious sermons that were on offer in the
same locale.
When tracking the additions and reprints to certain of these pleasure-
reading editions, it appears from the string of prints and reprints that such
collections as Painters Palace of Pleasure, originally issued by Richard
Tottel, sold well. Tottel, now known mostly for his famous miscellany of
poets, was first a legal printer, but was also a prime mover and innovator in
the effort to promote pleasure reading. The reception of these stories
would have sounded in the echoing confines in and by St Pauls as people
read and talked about them, as others heard the buzz in St Pauls
Churchyard, Pauls Walk, and around the great west door.
The first volume of the first edition of Painters histories was brought
out in 1566 and was to be sold at the long shoppe at the weast ende of
Paules.42 The second tome was brought out by Nicholas England with no
indication where it was to be sold, but it is marked as being imprinted in
Paules Churchyarde with another imprint in Pater Noster Rowe that fol-
lowed in 1567.43 Arthur Goldings translation of Ovids Metamorphoses
first appeared in the 1560s, and though it had the veneer of moral instruc-
tion, was perhaps even more alluring than Painters translations as exotic
pleasure reading. It was sold from the shop of William Seres, at the west

40The pleasure reading that appeared before Pauls Cross sermons were more routinely
published indicates perhaps that the successes of these volumes helped to prompt the
risky enterprise of publishing sermons.
41Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: John Day, 1570), I3v. The spelling has been
modernized.
42STC (2nd ed.), 19121.
43STC (2nd ed.), 19124.
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print239

end of Paules church, probably the same long shoppe mentioned above.44
If so, then Seres shop, one of the early homes to patents from the Church
of England, was mixing the business of religious printing with the read
ing of bawdy stories and with what became, on the pleasure reading
side, two of the great sources for the secular theatre and, in particular,
Shakespeare.
A number of fine examples of pure pleasure reading, or at least pleasure
reading under the auspices of self-betterment, surfaced in the 1560s and
70s. Much of it sold from somewhere in St Pauls precinct, but Painter and
Golding stand out in showing how pleasure reading was to the early public
amphitheatre what the Bible and other distinctly religious print was to the
Pauls Cross sermon. We also know from such commentaries as Stephen
Gossons Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582) that playwrights in the 1570s
and early 1580s began adapting plays from such controversial volumes
years earlier than Shakespeare and his contemporaries did from the late
80s onward. Well before Shakespeares early plays appeared, Gosson lists
Painters Palace of Pleasure, indignantly, as one of the books ransackt to
furnish the Play houses in London.45
E.K. Chambers labeled Clyomon and Clamydes and Common Conditions
as examples of this ransacking and of the characteristic debris of early
Elizabethan drama. It has been mostly assumed since Chambers that the
non-extant drama of the period was not preserved for good reasons.
Chambers observation rests on Phillip Sidneys evaluation of a typical
drama of the period, but, to be fair, we do not know much about most of
these plays beyond their titles.46 By expanding into non-extant titles or
so-called lost plays identified from play lists and other sources, more evi-
dence can be gathered to support the notion that adaptations of popular
stories and themes from the bookshops of St Pauls were the main fare at
London amphitheatres, particularly from the Theatre in the 1570s, and
from the Red Lion even earlier.
It is probable that a play entitled The Story of Samson was performed
at the Red Lion in 1567.47 A potentially spectacular show, one suspects
it broke from the standards of biblical morality plays while adapting a

44STC (2nd ed.), 18956.

45Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp.,
1972), D6v. See also STC (2nd ed.), 12095.
46E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923;
repr. 2009), 41.
47Roslyn L. Knutson and David McInnis, eds., The Story of Samson, Lost Plays Database
(Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2009). Web. http://www.lostplays.org/index.php/
Samson,_The_Story_of.
240 thomas dabbs

popular and indeed dark Bible story to the newly constructed and rela-
tively large amphitheatre. The Bible was certainly not produced as plea-
sure reading or as a cheap pamphlet, but one cannot control the echoing
public reception of tales from its various books any more than the
Calvinist, Arthur Golding, could control the uses of his translation of Ovid.
The well-known story of tragic love from Judges would have been located
at Pauls Churchyard along with the tragic Ovidian story of Pyramus and
Thisbe that Shakespeare later farcified.
Still we need more direct evidence to establish that playwrights were
instructed by the interaction between the Pauls Cross pulpit and the sur-
rounding booksellers. True salvation for this argument can be found in
Gossons list of printed works. Though giving playmaking a go, he appar-
ently was not so good at it. Gosson did become a Pauls Cross preacher
himself in later life and through his ungainly and dubious achievements as
a young man, resoundingly links the Pauls Cross pulpit style of adopting
popular print works to the secular amphitheatres use of the vibrant print
marketplace at St Pauls.
Among other examples from Painter, the third novel of the second vol-
ume of the Palace of Pleasure, first on Gossons list of ransacked books, was
probably used for a lost play entitled, A Greek Maid, which seems to be
the story of the rape and revenge of Timoclea of Thebes. The plays asso-
ciation with Leicesters men suggests that it was played at the Theatre in
1579.48 That another edition of volume two of Painters Palace of Pleasure
was brought out near this time is evidence of the awareness that this story
would soon enjoy another print run. The Aethiopian History, listed by
Gosson, was reprinted in 1577 for Francis Coldock at the Green Dragon
bookshop in Pauls Cross Churchyard. It looks like this history echoed from
the theatre quickly. Records show that Howards (later the Admirals) men
performed a play entitled The Queen of Ethiopia during 1578.49 And it is
possible that this play was part of the Theatres reparatory of that year or
soon after.
The Golden Asse collection, also on the list, must have been the source
for the play, Cupid and Psyche, that Gosson says was plaid at Paules.50
We do not know precisely what type of theatre this would have been.
Likely a juvenile performance it would have been private or semi-private

48Knutson and McInnis, A Greek Maid, A, Lost Plays Database, Web: http://www
.lostplays.org/index.php/A_Greek_Maid#Theatrical_Provenance.
49The Queen of Ethiopia, Lost Plays Database, Web: http://www.lostplays.org/index
.php/Queen_of_Ethiopia,_The.
50Gosson, D5v.
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print241

and not germane to this discussion. However such derivative romances

were then also the staple of the public amphitheatre. As with Painter,
there seems to be here an echoing reciprocity between print and stage:
The Golden Asse was reportedly put on offer in 1571 at Abraham Veales
shop that Blayney situates behind Pauls Cross next to St Pauls School.51
Shortly after the stated production of Cupid and Psyche, The Golden
Asse collection was released again and reportedly sold at the same shop
in 1582.52
These echoes from print to theatre to print precedent more in the future
from playwrights who were listening in on and well aware of the benefits
of re-sounding well-known stories from the book inventories of St Pauls
bookshops. Indeed, along with adapting Painters work years later,
Shakespeare echoed the theme of love at first sight (and of course the Ass)
in the Cupid and Psyche story in A Midsummer Nights Dream, and there
are more than hints of this story in Romeo and Juliet.53 Both of these plays
were performed at the Theatre in the 1590s, and both resounded again in
print from the quartos that followed their performances.
Though Gosson was and is much maligned for his stance against poetry
and certain dramas (and what he felt was the non-English fashion of
gender confusion), he is the echo of print at Pauls Cross Churchyard
incarnate. Not only does he point directly to popular pleasure reading
that resounded as it was adapted for public theatre, he also marked
another reverberating exchange back in the churchyard as sermons began
to become critical of plays and play going, or, better, as Pauls Cross ser-
mons inadvertently promoted a cultural form that mimicked the way of
preaching and hearing at Pauls Cross. To echo Desdemonas father,
Brabantio, when reluctantly giving his daughter to Othello, the preachers
of Pauls Cross gave that which with all their hearts they would have kept.
And in their efforts to condemn the theatre, they continued to give to the
theatre.
In his confutation of plays, Gosson represents, even in his title, the
actual echoing conflict of having the five-act sounds of rowdy public plays
in one ear and the vociferous moral turpitude of recent, play damning
from Pauls Cross sermons in the other, the culmination in stereo of the

51Blayney, The Bookshops in Pauls Cross Churchyard, 57.

52STC (2nd ed.), 719a.
53For more on this connection, see William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Rene
Weis (London: Metheun, 2012), 41. Weis references Helen Hacketts discussion in her edi-
tion of A Midsummer Nights Dream (New York: Penguin, 2005), liv-lv. See also Marjorie
Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 1981), 170.
242 thomas dabbs

clamorous efforts in this culture to engage large crowds. In Pauls Cross

fashion, popular print also resounded from a public stage. Gossons printed
response sold from the signe of the Sunne at the entrance to Pauls Cross
Churchyard.54 He reiterates the condemning voice of recent sermons
delivered publically, printed, and put on sale, announcing that these plays
sound some kind of liberty in our ears.55 He further condemns what he
sees as unruly plots and themes that are made plausible to the barbarous,
and carrieth a sting into the ears of the common people.56 And he also
critiques the bombast and lack of verisimilitude in such plays as The
History of Caesar and Pompey that had been recently amplified at the
Theatre, echoing a recent translation of Appians history on sale locally.57
Phillip Sidney, whose views were diametrically opposed to Gosson on
the eternal value of the art of poetry, joins Gossons critique at this point.
Sidney states that there are those who have not without cause cried out
against the plays of this period, and remarks on one such play he wit-
nessed himself that produced a hideous monster with fire and smoke.
Such plays, it seems, tried and failed to make up for in bombast and spec-
tacle what they lacked in classical unity and believability.58 Sidney, along
with Gosson, seems to be hearing the echoes of sermons as well as plays
when, shortly after his theatre critique, he marks how pitiful it is when
preachers misuse rhetorical devices.59 Perhaps this comment might have
been specifically directed to Pauls Cross speakers. We do know that the
sermons, though not held by the educated to the standards of classical
unity, did not shy away from crowd-pleasing spectacle.
Still these early amphitheatre plays and their less than pious ambitions
were, in Gossons view and in the view of other credible observers, a plague
on the art of hearing so adamantly encouraged from Pauls Cross.60 Sting
ing ears or not, many would have read or heard about the source of the
dramas within recent times, within a theatre environment in which com-
mon print knowledge directly from Pauls Churchyard was resounded

54According to its entry in the STC, the Confutation was sold at the Goshawk in the
Sun, STC (2nd ed.), 12095. According to Blayney this was the corner shop at Pauls Gate. See
The Bookshops in Pauls Cross Churchyard, 45.
55Gosson, Confutation, B6r.
56Gosson, Confutation, F1r.
57Gosson, Confutation, B2v.
58Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, 3rd ed., rev. R.W.
Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 111.
59Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 114.
60William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden,
2006), 3.2.1012.
 pauls cross and the echoes of early-elizabethan print243

with unprecedented immediacy and at a high volume. Many of the same

people would have also heard the preachers crying out against plays using
the Bible and other religious sources that were selling from the same
bookshops as the sources of these plays. And they may have read or heard
about the damning reviews from Pauls Cross and from other fiery cri-
tiques whose commentaries were printed and sold in and around Pauls
Churchyard.61 As public sermons echoed into more and more print, so
would the pleasure reading of Pauls echo from the local amphitheatre
into more print in response to the new, public theatre.
Gossons writings picked a localized dispute with pleasure reading and
play going. The details of this dispute, along with the difficult details of the
Marprelate controversy during the late 80s, fall outside the scope of this
discussion, but all of these examples show how the early Elizabethan
echoes of print at Pauls Cross Churchyard continued to re-echo from pub-
lic event into more print within a close and intense proximity. The trend
we see, from the 1580s, of publishers frequently engaging in the risky pub-
lication of both sermon and play after the fact had not fully developed yet,
but the localized reciprocity between event and printed work shows us
how these risky print ventures became feasible. Eventually the publishers
would undertake, in the manner of John Day and John Foxe, the unwieldy
and unheard of venture of publishing expensive folio versions of the com-
plete works of a playwright.
The sermons resounding within the attendant print environment
would have survived without the public theatre, but the public theatre
would have had little chance to reverberate through history without the
cathedral and print industry fueled by religious conflict. The next genera-
tion of playwrights, chiefly Shakespeare, inherited and fully put to use
what was by Shakespeares time an established way of cobbling plays, to
use Gossons pejorative term, by resounding popular print circulating in
and around St Pauls. This method for crafting new plays from fresh popu-
lar print was the unintentional offspring of the early Elizabeth preaching
environment around Pauls Cross. Though the large public amphitheatres
were necessarily and by law built beyond the city limits, they were still
very nearby geographically and in public consciousness. Indeed, to the

61Whites 1578 sermon in which he stated dramatically that plays caused the plague was
reportedly on offer at the Green Dragon in Pauls Cross Churchyard at the same shop that
sold one of the sources for plague-causing plays, the An thiopian historie written in Greeke
by Heliodorus: very wittie and pleasaunt, Englished by Thomas Vnderdoune (London: Henrie
VVykes, for Fraunces Coldocke, dwellinge in Powles Churcheyarde, at the signe of the
greene Dragon, [1569?]).
244 thomas dabbs

dismay of churchmen, the trumpets from the theatres that called playgo-
ers to an afternoon of revelry could be heard throughout the City of
London. The echoes of print that provoked and promoted the plays sound-
ing from these theatres, that evoked responses to them, came from and
returned to the reverberating and repetitious print environs of St Pauls,
and from this locale echoed into the vast, global circumference of cultural
memory.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

RICHARD HOOKERS PAULS CROSS SERMON

David Neelands

How Do we Know that Hooker Preached at Pauls Cross?

Despite the fact that it is one of the most remembered and important ser-
mons preached at Pauls Cross, there is in fact very little certainty about
the sermon of Richard Hooker. It was not mentioned in the earliest bio-
graphical notices of Hooker, in Camden and in Fuller.1 Nor was it men-
tioned in the first biography of Richard Hooker, written by John Gauden
and published in 1662.2
Izaak Walton, whose biography of Hooker was first published in 1665,
makes the Pauls Cross sermon a crucial incident in Hookers life, estab-
lishing him as a controversial author identified as anti-Calvinist and inci-
dentally leading to a bad marriage that would ultimately maim his work.3
Waltons words are:
about which time he entered into sacred orders, being then made Deacon
and Priest; and, not long after, was appointed to preach at St Pauls Cross.
In order to which Sermon, to London he came, and immediately to the
Shunamites House; (which is a House so called, for that, besides the stipend
paid the preacher, there is provision made also for his lodging and diet for
two days before, and one day after his Sermon) which was in or about the
year 1581. And in this first public appearance to the world, he was not so
happy as to be free from exceptions against a point of doctrine delivered in
his sermon; which was, That in God there were two wills; an antecedent and
a consequent will: his first will, that all mankind should be saved; but his
second will was, that those only should be saved, that did live answerable to
that degree of grace which he had offered or afforded them. This seemed to

1William Camden, Annales: the true and royall history of the famous empresse Elizabeth
Queene of England France and Ireland &, true faiths defendresse of diuine renowne and
happy memory (London: Benjamin Fisher, 1625) and Thomas Fuller, The Church-History of
Britain (London: John Williams, 1655).
2See David Neelands, John Gauden, first biographer of Richard Hooker: an influential
failure, in Perichoresis, 3.2 (2005), 125136.
3The life of Mr. Rich. Hooker, the author of those learned books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity (London: J.G. for Rich. Marriott, 1665).
246 david neelands

cross a late opinion of Mr. Calvins, and then taken for granted by many that
had not a capacity to examine it, as it had been by him before, and hath been
since by others of great learning, who believe that a contrary opinion
entrenches upon the honour and justice of our merciful God. How he justi-
fied this, I will not undertake to declare; but it was not excepted against (as
Mr. Hooker declares in his rational Answer to Mr. Travers) by John Elmer,
then Bishop of London, at this time one of his auditors, and at last one of his
advocates too, when Mr. Hooker was accused for it.4
An account of the incident indeed survives in Hookers rational Answer to
Mr. Travers, The Answere of Mr. Richard Hooker to a Supplication preferred
by Mr. Walter Travers to the HH. Lords of the Privie Counsell, first published
in 1612 but composed just after the controversial events involving Walter
Travers at the Temple church in March 1585.5 In this tractate, we have the
one surviving contemporary account that Walton apparently used. And
here indeed Hooker brings into the discourse the presence of John Aylmer,
the Bishop of London, in his defence of the views expressed in the Pauls
Cross sermon:
That which I taughte was att Pawles Crosse. I see not which waye my Lord
of London who was presente and heard it can excuse so greate a faulte, as
paciently without rebuke or controlmente afterwards to heare any man
there teache otherwise then the Word of God doth, not as it is understood by
the private interpretacion of somme one or two men, or by a speciall con-
struccion receyved in some fewe bookes but as it is understood by all the
churches prefessinge the gospel, by them all and therefore even by our owne
also amonges others. A man that did meane to prove that he speaketh would
surely take the measure of his wordes shorter.6
So we can say, with some certainty, that Richard Hooker did preach at
Pauls Cross, and that the Bishop of London was present for the sermon.
Judging by the norms of such Pauls Cross sermons, it was probably pre-
ceded and followed by prayers, and possibly sung psalms, it began about
10 am, and lasted about two hours. The mayor and corporation of the
city of London were probably in attendance. And it would not have been
unusual for the crowd in attendance to express their approval or disap-
proval loudly.

4 Izaak Walton, Life of Hooker in John Keble (ed.), The Works of Richard Hooker (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1877), 1: 223.
5The answere of Mr. Richard Hooker to a supplication preferred by Mr Walter Travers to
the HH. Lords of the Privie Counsell (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612).
6Answere to the Supplication 78, in The Folger Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker
[FLE], vol. 5, ed. Ltitia Yeandle (Belknap Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts 1990),
5:236.719.
 richard hookers pauls cross sermon247

When Did it Take Place?

When we come to address the date, there is considerably less certainty.

Walton says vaguely in or about the year 1581.7 On what did Walton base
that opinion? As we now know, Richard Hooker was ordained deacon, by
Bishop Aylmer, on 14 August 1579, at Fulham Palace.8 Thus it can be noted
that Hooker had a presence in London well before the preaching of the
sermon at Pauls Cross. No documentary evidence of the date of his ordi-
nation to the priesthood has yet been discovered. It may be assumed that
this took place about a year later, in accordance with the rubrics in the
Ordinal (unless the Bishop supplied a faculty for an earlier ordination
based on some reason of conveniency).9
Based on (a) an entry in the Corpus Christi College Statutes that sug-
gests that MAs leaving Corpus will preach at Pauls Cross if possible,10
(b)the known fact that Hooker left Corpus no earlier that the Fall of 1584,
(c) the letter dated 4 December 1584 from Richard Bishop the printer indi-
cating that Hooker had been in London that year,11 and (d) the linking of
three of Hookers supposed errors from this sermon with the longer list
related to the Temple Sermons of March 1585, a tentative date of Fall 1584

7Although C.J. Sisson radically questioned Waltons larger narrative of the stay of
Hooker at the Churchman House, he accepted the date of 1581. C.J. Sisson, The Judicious
Marriage of Mr. Hooker and the Birth of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1940), 25.
8London Book of Ordinations, Guildhall MS 9535/2. Georges Edelen, A Chronology of
Richard Hookers Life (FLE 6.xxi).
9Some have proposed an ordination date as late as 1584, at which time Hooker was
presented to his first known living (Drayton Beauchamp) and appears to have left his posi-
tion at Oxford. FLE 6.xxii. Since Samuel Harsnett was invited to preach in 1584 shortly after
his ordination, there is no reason to assume that Hooker would not be invited to preach
soon after his ordinations, whenever they may have been.
10The Corpus Christi College Statutes seem to indicate that MAs who are priests, when
they leave Corpus, are obligated for ten years thereafter to preach seven times a year in
public to the people in some city, town or borough, or large parish, at seasons specified in
statute, and one or more of these sermons is to be at St Pauls Cross, or the Hospital of the
Blessed Mary in London, if he can obtain room and facilities there. Manuscript note of
Georges Edelen. Edelen adds Note that if he left CCC in 1584 that would explain when he
gave the Pauls Cross sermon& why he was in London that fall according to Byshops let-
ter. Its true MAs, after the completion of their necessary regency had within five years to
preach publicly but the places specified are in Oxford: St Peters in the East or St Frideswides
Cross. Thus there is no reason that Hooker would not have been invited to Pauls Cross
before he left Oxford. Edelen was dependent on The Foundation Statutes of Bishop Fox for
Corpus Christi College in the University of Oxford a.d. 1517, trans. G.R.M. Ward (London:
Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1843), 124, 129.
11Letter to John Rainoldes from London printer George Bishop indicating Hooker had
delivered Rainoldess manuscript. CCC MS C 318 (FLE 6.xxii).
248 david neelands

for Hookers sermon at Pauls Cross has been proposed,12 a date that is now
often taken as established.13 The date, however, cannot be known with any
precision in our current state of information. The Pauls Cross sermon was
clearly a living memory in 1585, as we shall see, yet a date closer to Waltons
vague in or about 1581 may be more probable.

What was the Subject?

With respect to the subject of Hookers sermon, we can speak with some
certainty, although his biblical text (if, as is almost certain, he had one)
and the precise topic remain unknown. Hooker himself indicated (a) that
the subject of the sermon was the matter of predestination, (b) that he
had retained a written copy of the sermon, and (c) that the matter was
carefully and fully argued in the sermon:
Towching the firste pointe of his [Travers] discoverye which is aboute the
matter of predestination, to sett down that I spake (for I have it wrytten) to
declare and confirme the severall braunches thereof would be tedious nowe
in this wrytinge where I have so many thinges to towche, that I can but tow-
che them onely. It was not hudled in amonges other matters in such sorte
that it could passe without notynge, it was opened, it was proved, it was
some reasonable tyme stood uppon.14
In the aftermath of the Temple controversy of 1585, Hooker describes con-
ferences he had with Travers that included discussion of three opinions
that had apparently been expressed in the offending Pauls Cross sermon:
In the other conference he questioned aboute the matter of reprobation
mislyking firste that I had termed god a permissive and no posityve cawse of
evell which the schoolmen do call malum culpae. Secondly that to their
objection who saie If I be elected do what I will I shalbe saved I had aunswered
that the will of god in this thinge is not absolute but conditionall to save his
electe beleving fearing and obedientlye servinge him. Thirdly that to stop
the mouthes of suche as grudge and repine againste god for rejectinge
castawaies I had taughte that they are not rejected no not in the purpose and
counsell of god without a forseen worthynes of rejection goinge though not
in tyme yett in order before.15

12By Georges Edelen, FLE 6:xxii.

13See Philip Secor, Richard Hooker, Prophet of Anglicanism (Toronto: Anglican Book
Centre, 1999), 115.
14Answere to the Supplication 7, FLE 5:235.29236.10.
15Answere to the Supplication 22, FLE 5:252.30253.9.
 richard hookers pauls cross sermon249

As has been shown elsewhere, Hooker more or less accepted these opin-
ions as his own.16 Furthermore, versions of these opinions occur in only
one of the several surviving contemporary documents listing Richard
Hookers theological errors, the one that speaks of at divers times deliv-
ered by Master Hooker in his publicke sermons rather than one that spe-
cifically describes a sermon in March 1585 at the Temple, which suggests
they were delivered publicly, but outside the Temple.17
Waltons version of Hookers controversial opinion described above
the attribution to God of two wills, an antecedent and a consequent
does not appear on the surviving list, although a more careful version of
that view can be found in the Lawes of Eccesiasticall Politie published eight
years later, and that may be Waltons source for the detail.18 Thus the sub-
ject, though not the title or text can be known. Hookers sermon dealt with
a doctrinal matter, not a matter of discipline as had many Pauls Cross ser-
mons, the matter of predestination. And in some sense Hookers account
does deal with upholding the honour and justice of our merciful God, in
Waltons phrase, in this matter. The sermon included a well developed
argument, carefully argued at length. It was also, claimed Hooker, (a) not a
position that went beyond Scripturenot otherwise then the Word of God
doth, but (b) rather was consistent with the consensus of orthodox
churchesas it is understood by all the churches prefessinge the gospel, by
them all and therefore even by our owne also amonge others, and (c) not
based on idiosyncratic opinionnot as it is understood by the private
interpretacion of somme one or two men, or by a speciall construccion
receyved in some fewe bookes. We will return to these three points in
assessing the public significance of Hookers Pauls Cross sermon.

John Aylmer, Bishop of London, One of his Auditors,

and at Last One of his Advocates too

In the quarrel at the Temple, which would eventually involve Archbishop

Whitgift, there was another witness brought in by both Hooker and

16David Neelands, Richard Hooker and the Debates about Predestination, 15801600,
in Torrance Kirby (ed.), Richard Hooker and the English Reformation (Dortrecht: Kluwer,
2003), 47.
17A shorte note of sundrie unsounde pointes of Doctrine at divers times delivered by
Master Hooker in his publicke sermons, Lansdowne MS 96, no. 14, (L2), f. 50r-v. These points
are not included in Harleian MS 291, ff. 184v-185r, Doctrin preached by master Hooker in the
Temple the fyrste of marche 1585[/86], which refers to a precise date at the Temple. FLE
5:282292, especially 286.1115.
18Neelands, Debates about Predestination, 4950.
250 david neelands

Travers, John Aylmer (15211594), who had been bishop of London since
about 1576. Nearly thirty-five years older that Hooker, he had examined
and ordained him, he had invited him to preach at Pauls Cross, and he had
been present at the sermon and approved of it. He had also licenced
Walter Travers, Hookers kinsman and opponent, despite Travers irregular
non-episcopal ordination.19
John Aylmer was a veteran of the Reformation in England. Already a
senior cleric by the time of the accession of Queen Mary in 1553, he had
been a Cambridge scholar, a protge of the future Duke of Suffolk, and
tutor in Greek to his daughter, Lady Jane Grey, the future queen. But, as his
eighteenth-century biography John Strype would put it,
Under [the reign of Queen Mary], uneasy and unsafe for him and all others
that had conscientiously adhered to the reformed religion, he soon fled away
into Germany, and with several others of the best rank, both divines and
gentlemen, he resided in Strasburgh, and afterwards at Zurich in Helvetia;
and there in peace followed his studies, and heard the learned Dr. Peter
Martyrs Lectures, not long before the Kings Reader of Divinity in Oxford.20
John Aylmer was among the Marian exiles with the Zurich connection,
with Bullinger and Peter Martyr, a connection that relates to our current
topic. Moreover, he was not averse to the Lutheran and Evangelical world,
or even perhaps to Italy. As Strype puts it,
While Aylmer thus continued abroad in exile, he took the opportunity of
improving himself by travel, visiting almost all the Universities of Italy and
Germany; and had much conferences with many the best learned men. At
last he was stayed at Jene, an University erected by the Dukes of Saxony; and
should, if he had not come away, have had the Hebrew lecture there 21
At the very end of his exile, he took on the task of a loyal defence of the
new Queen Elizabeth from the intemperate tract of one of the English
exiles in Geneva, The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regi-
ment of women.22 The author turned out to be John Knox, the Scot, whose
targets were initially not Elizabeth but her sister and cousin, the two
Catholic Queen Marys. In his An Harborowe [harbour] for faithfull and
trewe Subjects, against the late blown Blaste, concerning the Government of
Wemen. Wherin be confuted al such reasons, as a Straunger of late made in

19Walter Travers, A Supplication to the Privy Counsel [sic], FLE 5:195.2122.

20John Stype, Life of John Aylmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1821) (chapter 1), 7 [first
published 1701].
21Life of Aylmer (chapter 1), 1011.
22([Geneva: J. Poullain and A. Rebul], 1558).
 richard hookers pauls cross sermon251

that behalfe: with a briefe Exhortation to Obedience,23 John Aylmer used

forms of argument that Hooker would later use in his defence of the
English establishment, especially the relativizing of New Testament texts
apparently limiting the spiritual jurisdiction of women, by suggesting that
St Paul wrote what he did because of the behaviour of some particular
women and restricted the public ministry of women in the Corinthian
church because of particular circumstances. Aylmer, like Hooker for
that matter, took for granted that women are naturally weaker than men,
but not all women are the same. In the case of Elizabeth, God had made
the decision about the succession of a woman, and further, the English
parliamentary monarchy, as a mixed rule of oligarchy, aristocracy and
democracy, would provide remedy for displays of weakness in a female
sovereign.24
His expressed opinion in that work defending Henry VIIIs use of gov-
ernment by proclamation independent of parliament, like his opinion
about the luxury of bishops offered before he became one, would be an
embarrassment for him in the hands of Martin Marprelate. But the consti-
tutionalism would anticipate the political theories of the eighteenth cen-
tury, and would not be alien to Hookers treatment of the role of the Queen
in parliament in terms of the royal supremacy.25
What is more significant in the present instant is Bishop Aylmers inter-
est in the competence of the clergy, and the measures he maintained to
ensure their learned and sound opinions. As Strype describes him,
In his ordination of Ministers he was very punctual and careful: admitting
none to Orders but such as himself did examine in his own person in points
of divinity, and that in the Latin tongue, in the hearing of many; whereby it
came to pass, that none lightly came at him, but such as were graduates, and
of the Universities.26
Perhaps Richard Hooker was personally examined by Aylmer before his
ordination by him. Aylmer was, however, unpopular for his disciplining of
clergy for unsound views on church polity, and thought that good preach-
ing, including the Pauls Cross sermons, was a defence for the Church of
England, the present established Church, both its doctrine and disci-
pline. He attempted, in 1581, and with the support of the government, to

23(Strasbourg [i.e. London: John Day], 1559).

24Life of Aylmer (chapter 13), 177.
25Lawes VIII.2.7, 9, 11, 12.
26Life of Aylmer (chapter 14), 185.
252 david neelands

increase the funds for the Pauls Cross sermons, but was met with resis-
tance from the mayor and aldermen:
Our bishop was instrumental, anno 1581, in setting on foot a very useful
practice in London; namely, that a number of learned, sound preachers
might be appointed to preach on set times before great assemblies; chiefly,
I suppose, for the Pauls Cross sermons; their pains to be spent mainly in
confirming the peoples judgements in the doctrine and discipline of the
present established Church, so much struck at and undermined by many
in these times; and for the encouragement hereof certain contributions to
be made, and settled on them by the city. This motion was so approved of
at Court, and by the Queen especially, that Mr. Beal, a clerk of the Council,
was sent from above to the Bishop, bringing with him certain notes and
articles for the more particular ordering of this business, which he and
ecclesiastical Commissioners were to lay before the Mayor and Aldermen.
Sir John Bench was then Mayor; who, it seems, with the Aldermen, did not
much like this motion, for the standing charge it must put the city to. For
after much expectation, the Mayor gave the Bishop answer, that his brethren
thought it a matter of much difficulty, and almost of impossibility also.
Notwithstanding to draw them to this good purpose, the Bishop had
appointed divers conferences with them; but after all concluded, (and so he
signified to the Lord Treasurer,) that unless the Lords wrote directly unto
them, to let them know it was the Queens pleasure, and theirs, little would
be done in it; and so a good design overthrown by the might of mammon, as
he expressed it. But withal he offered that himself and the rest would, if it
pleased them above, proceed farther and do what they could, thinking it pity
so good a purpose should be hindered, where there was so much ability to
maintain it.27
Even his senior colleagues, over whom he did not have jurisdiction, felt his
criticism for neglect of his mandate to deliver the Pauls Cross sermons:
And in the Convocation that sat in February 1586,28 the Bishop complained
of the Dean of Norwich [from 15731589, George Gardiner] and some others
for not preaching at Pauls Cross, according to monition; it having been of
long time customary for the Bishops of London to summon up from the
Universities, or elsewhere, persons of the best abilities to preach those pub-
lic sermons, wither the Prince and Court, and the magistrates of the city,
besides a vast conflux of people, used to resort. For the due providing there-
fore for these sermons, and for the encouragement of the preachers that
should come up, this Bishop was a great benefactor.29

27Life of Aylmer (chapter 5), 5758.

28This was the same Convocation that authorized the Decades of Henry Bullinger, the
senior pastor of Zurich, to be required reading for all the unlicensed clergy. See below.
29Life of Aylmer (Additions), 201.
 richard hookers pauls cross sermon253

In addition to informing his choice of Pauls Cross preachers and his

expectations of them, Aylmers concern for confirming the peoples judge-
ments in the doctrine and discipline of the present established Church, so
much struck at and undermined by many in these times, also informed
one of the tasks he urgently took on in 1580, when a Jesuit mission, includ-
ing Edmund Campion, attractive and credible Londoner, and former
Oxford scholar (who in his Church of England phase had himself refused
to preach at Pauls Cross), arrived in England and began its work to solidify
the people to the form of religion abolished twenty years earlier by the
Act of Uniformity. Unlike the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis of 1570, and for
that matter, unlike John Knoxs earlier First Blast of the Trumpet, the man-
date of the Jesuit mission of 158081 did not challenge the legitimacy of
Elizabeths rule but, more embarrassingly, the unseemliness of the doc-
trine and discipline of the present established Church, by exposing the
unsavoury and contradictory sayings of the continental reformers that
had apparently inspired the reforms of the English church and were
defended sporadically by that churchs leaders.
Campions Challenge to the Privy Council, commonly known as
Campions Bragg, made clear that his challenge was not treasonous but
rather a matter of the doctrine of the Church, and offered a challenge that
he be allowed access to iii sortes of indifferent and quiet audiences. The
second of these would be the Doctors and Masters and chosen men of
both Universities, wherein I undertake to avow the faith of our Catholike
Church by proofs innumerable, Scriptures, Councils, Fathers, History, nat-
ural and moral reasons. Campion went on to claim that I know perfectly
that no one Protestant, nor all the Protestants living, nor any sect of our
adversaries (howsoever they face men down in pulpits, and overrule us in
their kingdom of grammarians and unlearned ears) can maintain their
doctrine in disputation.30
For this learned audience, Campion produced a Latin tract Rationes
decem, Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name
of the Faith and Presented to the Illustrious Members of Our Universities.
The tract was printed quickly and well, and four hundred copies of it were
found on the benches of the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford on
the day of Commencement, 27 June 1581. This sudden appearance of this

30Edmund Campion, Challenge to the Privy Council found in Ten Reasons Proposed to
His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name of the Faith and Presented to the Illustrious
Members of Our Universities, by Edmund Campion, translated by J.H.P. [John Hungerford
Polley] (London: Manresa Press, 1914), 711.
254 david neelands

embarrassing book caused a great sensation and Campion was hunted for
intensely.
The embarrassment of the book was its concatenation, under ten top-
ics, of the positions of leading continental Protestants, especially Luther,
Calvin and Beza, often in their own words, with reference to their printed
texts, and strongly suggesting that the leaders of the Reformation pro-
posed unacceptable views, and often contradicted each other. The ten top-
ics included basic topics of systematic theology and the creeds. The texts,
though often taken without context, were convincing and the subsequent
treatment of Campion probably did little to cast doubt on his arguments
among many. He was captured, and questioned by Privy Councillors,
engaged in four public disputations on 1, 18, 23 and 27 September 1581, with
notable theologians, and finally on 1 December 1581 was hanged, drawn
and quartered at Tyburn, none of which actions diminished his credibility
in the eyes of many.31
Bishop Aylmer was alarmed to say the least by this challenge and offered
a cogent plan in line with his general purpose in sermons to confirm the
peoples judgements in the doctrine and discipline of the present estab-
lished Church. His advice was sought by the Lord Treasurer Burghley, and
offered. Aylmer particularly noted that
he knew that there were divers nvi [literally, moles or skin blemishes] in
[the reverend fathers of the Reformation] as lightly be in all mens writings:
as some things were spoken by Luther hyperbolically, and some by Calvin;
as in the doctrine of the Sacrament, which he afterwards corrected, and in
predestination. The Jesuit, the Bishop subjoined might herein soon be
answered, if they would but look in the end of the Master of the Sentences,
where they should find under the title of Errorum Parisiis Condemnatorum,
that their own Peter Lumbard, Thomas Aquinas, Gratian among the
Schoolmen, and Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, Hierome, and other among
the Fathers, to be condemned, yea errasse contra fidem, to have erred against
the faith, as he termed it. And yet the rest of their doctrine was holden
for Catholic; and not the whole Catholic doctrine condemned for a few of
their nvi.32

31In the same year, the first volume of Robert Bellarmines Disputationes de Controversiis
Christian Fidei adversus hujus temporis Hreticos, also referred to as De Controversiis)
appeared. This work, by another Jesuit, provided a full systematic treatment of all the con-
troversies of the Reformation period, offering a careful and historically accurate defense of
the Roman positions, and setting the agenda for defence of non-Roman churches for gen-
erations. It might be seen as a much more thorough and universal extension of Campions
tracts. It continued to provide a challenge for defenders of the Church of England.
32Life of Aylmer (chapter 3), 3233.
 richard hookers pauls cross sermon255

When Aylmer at last found a copy of the book, he was particularly moved
by the eighth reason, the Paradoxes, and proposed a response involving
two approaches: (a) acknowledgement that none of our Church meant to
defend Luthers hyperbola, or all things that had passed the pens of Calvin
or Beza: for quisque suo sensu abundet33 and (b) that a malicious collec-
tion of their writers and Schoolmen be drawn up so that it could be shown
that the Church of England had learned to swear by the dictates of no
master but of Christ.34
Among the hyperboles, certain portentous errors of self-opinionated
men, noted by Campion in the Paradoxes, were Calvins opinion, God is
the author and cause of evil, willing it, suggesting it, effecting it, com-
manding it, working it out, and guiding the guilty counsels of the wicked
to this end. As the call of Paul, so the adultery of David, and the wicked-
ness of the traitor Judas, was Gods own work; anothers opinion that
when Christ, praying in the Garden, was streaming with a sweat of water
and blood, He shuddered under a sense of eternal damnation, He uttered
an irrational cry, an unspiritual cry, a sudden cry prompted by the force of
His distress; Calvins account of Christs suffering on the Cross when
Christ Crucified exclaimed, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me,
He was on fire with the flames of hell, He uttered a cry of despair, He felt
exactly as if nothing were before Him but to perish in everlasting death, an
offensive interpretation that Calvin enforced against critics with ridicule;
the many and varied attempts to alter the Apostles Creeds reference to
Christs descent into Hell; the loss of the image of God in man because of
Adams Sin; the adequacy of a righteousness that blotted away sin exter-
nally rather than overcoming it through grace; the insistence that faith
includes assurance of ones perseverance; the impossibility of sexual con-
tinence in a man, and the vaunting of marriage over virginity; the insis-
tence that baptism has no effect and is merely a token of salvation; the
requirement only to bury the conscience in order to receive Communiona
series of intemperate and extreme expressions of Protestant theology that
could be explained away perhaps, but on the surface were undoubtedly

33A common expression, apparently a reference to Romans 14.5 (Vulgate) unusquisque

in suo sensu abundet, literally, Let everyone abound in his own sense. Perhaps this is a
reference to authors taking extravagant liberties of expression among matters that are oth-
erwise indifferent, that is, not determined by Scripture and tradition.
34Life of Aylmer (chapter 3), 34. It should be noted that, although Aylmer thought the
Church should not defend Luthers hyperboles, Aylmer had visited Jena in Saxony, and
maintained a strong admiration for Luther himself, as is shown in his elaborate praise of
Luther (chapter 14), 183.
256 david neelands

embarrassing, especially to the wider non-university audience Campion

had identified.35
Aylmers advice was not entirely heeded, and the credibility of the
Church of England undoubtedly suffered on account of the mishandling
of Campions challenge, but Aylmers three points would have some trac-
tion in the apology for the doctrine and discipline of the present estab-
lished Church, so much struck at and undermined by many in these times
that Aylmer at precisely this time sought to enlarge in the Pauls Cross ser-
mons. That apology would (1) acknowledge that there were errors included
in all good authorities, (2) avoid defending overstatements and exaggera-
tions from the reformers, and (3) stick to a defence of a simple Christianity,
carefully and accurately identifying the errors of detractors.
Hookers sermon on the matter of predestination would fit precisely
into such a programme. It would stick to a defence of a simple Christian
account, and avoid the hyperboles of Calvin and Bezaa speciall con-
struccion receyved in some fewe bookes, as he had claimed. For that matter,
his sermon on Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect would avoid the Calvinist
hyperbole on assurance; his Learned Discourse on Justification would
acknowledge common ground with papists and their errors, affirm Luthers
view of Justification and Calvins view of Sanctification, along with
Augustines view of Glorification, and all without reference to anything
but the authority of the simple common Christianityas it is understood
by all the churches prefessinge the gospel, by them all and therefore even by
our owne also amonge others, as he had also claimed.36 With respect to
the sacrament of the Eucharist, Hookers approach would carefully iden-
tify papist error, refuse to perpetuate errors about papists, and stress to a
surprising extent common Christian agreement.37 Yet such an approach
would draw criticism from Travers and others who wanted more precision,
and would opt for the increasingly popular hyperboles.
By contrast, at least one other Pauls Cross sermon of the period
addressed predestination, but its intemperate reference to a harsh

35Ten Reasons, 121130.

36The same principles would inform his extended treatment of the development of the
theology of grace, including predestination, in the Pelagian controversy and its aftermath,
found in the Dublin Fragments composed at the end of his life. See David Neelands,
Predestination in Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden, The
Netherlands: Brill, 2008,) 185219 (especially 201204).
37At the end of his life, in the Dublin Fragments, Hooker returned to the account of the
presence of Christ deriving from Bullinger. See David Neelands, Christology and the
Sacraments in Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden, The Netherlands:
Brill, 2008), 369402 (especially 391n112).
 richard hookers pauls cross sermon257

Calvinian gospel brought censure from none other than Archbishop

Whitgift, apparently for causing controversy by criticizing authority rather
than simply expounding Christian teaching.38

The Zurich Connection and the Grounds of Persuasion

One other connection might be noted, namely the Zurich connection.

During his exile Bishop Aylmer had spent a considerable time in Zurich,
and knew both Peter Martyr Vermigli (14991562) and Heinrich Bull
inger(15041575) there. Bullingers views on predestination, and Martyrs,
had previously been of significance in the English Reformation. And
Bullinger was a continuing correspondent of many, as he had been with
Lady JaneGrey and her family and circle to which Aylmer had belonged.
Coincidentally, neither Martyr nor Bullinger were singled out by Campion
in the Paradoxes. And it was Bullingers Decades that in February 1586
the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury authorized as required
reading for the clergy not licenced to preach.39
Martyr had been chosen to be on the commission to reform ecclesiasti-
cal law, a commission that had also produced the draft Forty-two articles of
Religion. Article 17 Of predestination and election bears many marks of
Martyrs published views on predestination, including his opinion that
Scripture speaks always of election when it refers to predestination, and
never damnation.40 Martyr had, in fact, maintained a plain and simple
approach to the doctrine of predestination, avoiding Calvins hyperboles
of unconditional reprobation and security of assurance, as Hooker also
would.
Bullingers role was less obvious than Martyrs, but important. In
September 1552, Bartholemew Traheron, also a member of the commis-
sion on the ecclesiastical law, and a known advocate of Calvins views on
various matters, wrote to Heinrich Bullinger to ask for Bullingers views

38In 1583 Richard Harsnett [15611631] was ordained, and soon after disciplined by
Archbishop Whitgift for preaching against predestination at St Pauls Cross on 27 October
1584 Sermon against predestination, on the text of Ezekiel chapter 33, verse 11 [Say to them,
As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the
wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will
you die, O house of Israel?].
39The Decades of Henry Bullinger translated by H.I., ed. Thomas Harding for the
Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 18491852), 1.viii.
40David Neelands, Peter Martyr Vermigli and the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church
of England, in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009),
355374, especially 36162.
258 david neelands

respecting predestination and the providence of God, since certain indi-

viduals [probably including Bishop John Hooper] who lived among
you some time, that you lean too much to Melanchthons views.41
Bullingers extended response, Epistola 1707, The Letter of Henry Bullinger
to Bartholomew Traheron the Englishman concerning the Providence of
God and his Predestination, Election, and Reprobation, and of Free will, and
that God is not the author of sin 1553 deals in its title with the perennial
problem in the hyperbole of John Calvinthe suspicion of Gods author-
ship of sin in Calvins account of predestination, which nearly thirty
years later would appear in Campions Paradoxes. The proposition that
God is not the author of sin, built right into Bullingers title, pointed to a
potential embarrassment in Calvins account of grace and predestina-
tion. With respect to Calvin, Bullinger asserts that he was endowed with
great gifts, yet driven by his zeal to assert the purity of divine grace,
Calvin wrote
that God not only foresaw the fall of the first man and in that the ruin of his
posterity, but also managed it by his own will: further, that he created them
for destruction to become organs of his wrath, that they should come to
their end now to take away their faculty of hearing his word: now more to
blind and numb to his proclamation &c.42
Yet, notes Bullinger, these opinions can be found in Church Fathers.
Bullingers own account depends on his attitude that I have never
wished to agree with the opinion of any private man. Rather, I have fol-
lowed that opinion in teaching, the opinion which I see has been pre-
served in the church in a holy and orthodox way ever since from the time
of the apostles. That is, individual opinions at variance with the long con-
sensus of the community from the time of the apostolic witness are to be
avoidedthe very position advocated later by Aylmer and illustrated in
Hooker.
It might be useful to compare the phrase preserved in the church in a
holy and orthodox way ever since from the time of the apostles with the
standard for determining the limits of orthodoxy in the Act of Supremacy
of 1558: scripture and its interpretation among ancient Christian writers

41OL (1846), 325. Traheron goes on But the greater number among us, of whom I own
myself to be one, embrace the opinion of John Calvin and being perspicuous, and most
agreeable to holy scripture.
42Epistola 1707, columns 489490, Calvini Opera 14.480490. Translated by the Rev. Dr.
William Craig, 2009. See Cornelis P. Venem Heinrich Bullingers Correspondence on
Calvins Doctrine of Predestination, 15511553, in The Sixteenth Century Journal 17.4 (1986),
435350.
 richard hookers pauls cross sermon259

and the first four councils.43 Bullinger in similar fashion had prefixed an
account of the patristic creeds and the first four councils to the first book
of the Decades, that it might manifestly appear that the doctrine and faith
of the Protestant churches, which was by many ill-reported of undeserv-
edly condemned as heretical, was perfectly agreeable with the teachings
of the apostles and of the primitive church.44
To avoid the conclusion that God is the author of sin, Bullinger acknowl-
edged that God does all, but that much of what he does is done providen-
tially, through the media he has ordained. Thus what human beings do is
also done by God since he created them and gave them wills; but they are
permitted to do things that God does not will. This use of the scholastic
distinction between first and second causes, and the insistence, found in
scripture, that much of what transpires is permitted but not directed by
God, provides a ready freedom from the hyperbole that God is the author
of sin:
In fact the providence of God does not throw the order of nature [rerum]
into confusion, it does not abolish the duties of life, nor do away with our
diligence in domestic economic or politics (col. 482).
God works all those things that are fitting to his nature. He does not will
sins, or impel to sins because they are contrary to his nature. Therefore he
does not work sins, but permits them to happen. That permission is in the
divine providence and not separate from it (col. 483).

Further, Gods grace enabled human beings to act freely and sometimes
virtuously:

Regenerate man is of free will, not by the power of nature but by virtue of
divine grace (col. 486).

As for predestination, the elect are subject to Gods undeserved mercy and
the damned to Gods deserved justice:

The cause of election and predestination is nothing other than the good and
just will of the God who saves the elect undebite, but who condemns and
rejects the reprobate debite (col. 487).

Yet those who are elect are those who actually come to faith:

43See 20, in Documents of the English Reformation, ed. Gerald Bray (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 327.
44Decades of Henry Bullinger I.12. Compare Gratian, Decreti I, dist. 25 in Corpus iuris
canonici, ed. Richter (Turnhout: Brepols, 1959), vol. I, columns 3435.
260 david neelands

Therefore God has chosen from eternity those whom he willed. But accord-
ing to the decree and intention of God he willed those who believe. And the
former are predestined to death and destruction, the latter to life and salva-
tion (col. 487).
And those who are lost are to blame for the grace they have rejected:
that they do not believe and indeed perish, we do not cast the fault on God
or his predestination, but on man himself repelling the grace of God and not
receiving the heavenly gifts (col. 488).
there is in man an inborn corruption which rejects the word of God. But
if man accepts the word of God, that is of grace which illuminates (col. 488).
we urge the more those universal promises and bid all to hope well.
Indeed predestination, shut up from eternity in the secret counsel of God
was at length revealed to us by the prophets, but especially through Christ
and his apostles, that manifestly God is the lover of men, that he wishes well
to men (col. 48889).
Further, wrote Bullinger, paradoxical and hyperbolic treatments of pre-
destination are not useful; they may lead to doubt in the faithful:
lest arguing too precisely about the hidden judgements of God, of the pre-
destination and election of God, we introduce doubt into the minds of both
the simple and the experienced equally, which we shall never again thereaf-
ter be able to extinguish: from [which doubts] soon follows hatred of God,
despair, and blasphemy, as if God who calls all and offers his gifts to all
wished to give to none but a few and even to mock the others and send them
empty away. And therefore the divine promise and truth would also come
into peril. Therefore thus I am accustomed to expound, moderately, of
course, of predestination in a religious and orthodox way (col. 490).
And, for Bullinger, Calvins overstatements are not to be adopted, despite
Calvins brilliance. Especially those that would have astonished the
ancients:
Because Calvin, our honoured brother in the Lord, tried in every way to
assert the purity of divine grace, who would find fault with the holy purpose
[literally institute] of the man? Because he entered anywhere in his own
writings that God not only foresaw the fall of the first man and in that the
ruin of his posterity, but also managed it by his own will: further, that he cre-
ated them for destruction to become organs of his wrath, that they should
come to their end now to take away their faculty of hearing his word: now
more to blind and numb to his proclamation &c.: who would not see these
things to be so propounded that the Fathers [veteres] would scarcely recog-
nize them (col. 48990).

Thus all three of the points alleged as errors against Hooker in his Pauls
Cross sermon could be found in the Letter of Bullinger to Traheron of
 richard hookers pauls cross sermon261

thirty years earlier. And all were prevented by avoiding the idiosyncratic
hyperboles of gifted individuals, and adopting the long consensus of the
Church, from the time of the apostolic witness in Scripture. This was pre-
cisely Aylmers suggested programme against the assault of Edmund
Campion in 1581.

Date and Significance of Hookers Sermon

To conclude, we can suggest, in the first place, that Hookers sermon and
his understanding of it is entirely consistent with the programme of
Bishop John Aylmer to respond to the accusations against the Church of
England, to confirm the peoples judgements in the doctrine and disci-
pline of the present established Church, and especially to avoid the hyper-
boles of outspoken individual reformers, the extreme, unnecessary and
difficult to accept variances from received Christian teaching. And the ser-
mon may have been inspired directly by Bishop Aylmer.
In the second place, Hookers sermon may be seen as offering a moder-
ate Zurich approach, used previously by Zwingli and Bullinger (an
approach for that matter consistent with the brief note on Predestination
at Trent against the rash presumptuousness of personal certainty of assur-
ance and unconditional perseverance). This may mean that the sermon
should not be interpreted simply as anti-Calvinist as Walton might sug-
gest after the quarrels of the Commonwealth, and as Harsnetts sermon in
1584 certainly was; rather the sermon might be interpreted as the plain
truth, without hyperboles, of the common understanding of the matter of
predestination. Thirdly, the sermon is more likely than not to have been
delivered in or around 1581 (at the time of the Jesuit mission), as Walton
said. Finally, for that matter, the sermon adopted apologetic principles
that informed Richard Hookers approach to disputed theological ques-
tions for the rest of his life.
In introducing the task of his treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall
Politie (1594), Hooker acknowledged the difficulties of persuasion of the
general public: He that goeth about to perswade a multitude, that they are
not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and
favourable hearers; 45 For Hooker, that is, the enterprise of Bishop
Aylmers purpose would require work and care. The Pauls Cross sermons
in general, and Hookers in particular, may be seen as such an enterprise of
persuasion.

45Lawes I.1.1; 1:56.79.

 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EDMUND CAMPION IN THE SHADOW OF PAULS CROSS:

THE CULTURE OF DISPUTATION

Gerard Kilroy

On 14 July 1568, the governing body of the Grocers Company met:

Where as at a Courte of Assistents holden this month 9 July yt was then
thought good by the same courte that Edmond Campian, one of this
Companies scollers, being suspected to be of no sound judgement in reli-
gion should come and make sermon at Paulls cross betweene that and
Candelmas next and now consydering that by the first grante the scoller
shuld ones in a year preache at paulls crosse and the said Campian haath
allready had his exhibition ij yeares at midsummer last past and yet to the
companies knowledge not made one sermon anywhere; Wherefore after
good and indifferent deliberation they concluded that the said Campian
shall betweene this and the second Sunday after Michaelmas next make one
sermon at Paulls crosse which if he refuse to doo then his exhibition to cease
and be bestowed upon another.1
Campions detailed negotiations with the Grocers Company, still extant
in beautifully neat minutes, reveal a close triangular relationship between
the city companies, Pauls Cross, and the university of Oxford. The original
scholarship of 6 13s 4d had been granted on 28 September 1566, when
Laurence Humfrey, the President of Magdalen, and Thomas Godwin, the
Dean of Christ Church, Sir John White and Sir William Chester had
requested the Grocers that Edmond Campion Master of Arts and student
in St Johns Colledge in Oxford shall have the said benevolence so long
as he shal ones in the yere preche at paulls crosse.2
Sir William Chester is not surprising, but it is interesting to see the two
most powerful figures in Oxford, Dr Humfrey, an ardent Calvinist oppo-
nent of vestments, and Dr Godwin, a fervent protestant, recommending
Campion to the city aldermen. The recommendation comes within a
month of the Queens visit to Oxford, between 31 August and 6 September

1Orders of the Court of Assistants, Grocers Company Records MS 11.588 (Guildhall

Library, London Metropolitan Archives), 185.
2Orders of the Court of Assistants, GL MS 11.588, 156.
264 gerard kilroy

1566, when Campions fellow Oxford MAs chose him to open the thirteen
hours of disputations in front of Queen Elizabeth.3 Yet for four months
from July 1568, Campion struggled to avoid preaching at Pauls Cross.
Finally, on 14 October, the Grocers recorded that they had received a letter
from him in which
he thanked them for the benefit he had receyved at their handes and frankly
yielded up the same unto them (aledging that he dare not, he cannot, nei-
ther was it expedyent he shuld preche as yet, declaring in his letter dyvers
reasons for the same). Whereupon after reading of the said letter it was
ordered by this court that the exhibition shall be bestowed upon some
other scoller 4
Scholars have explained Campions reluctance mainly in the light of the
Grocers suspicion that he was of no sound judgement in religion. But if
his religious beliefs were shifting, those seem initially to have stayed within
the religion now established. For, in March 1569, he did three things that
suggest he was confidently pursuing a career in the more traditional wing
of the church. On 3 March 1569, he compounded for the first fruits of the
parish of Sherborne, in Oxfordshire, then in the diocese of his friend, the
Bishop of Gloucester, Richard Cheney, where the living was worth 15 6s
8d.5 Campions sureties were two stationers from Pauls Cross Yard:
Humphrey Toye and William Norton. He seems to have been ordained
deacon at about this time, and on 19 March he supplicated for the degree
of Bachelor of Divinity.6 Something changed over the next four months.
He did not come forward on 11 July, when the Act was held, and on
6 October 1569 he was first granted a Travelling Fellowship, a standard
way at St Johns of avoiding ordination.7 For some unknown reason, he did
not take up the Travelling Fellowship, and the date was changed on the
certificate from 6 October 1569 to 7 August 1570.8 At least six of the sig-
natories are known to have had Catholic sympathies: Henry Russell,
Francis Willis, Thomas Jenkins, William Wiggs, Henry Shaw and John

3For a full account of Queen Elizabeths visit to Oxford and of Campions participation,
see Kilroy, The Queens Visit to Oxford in 1566: A Fresh Look at Neglected Manuscript
Sources, in Recusant History 31.3 (2013), 331373.
4Orders of the Court of Assistants, GL, MS 11.588, 188.
5Clerical Database, E. 334/8 (GL, London Metropolitan Archives), fol. 69.
6W.H. Stevenson and H.E. Salter, The Early History of St Johns College, Oxford (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1939), 181 and 184. No record can be found of his ordination, presumably
by Bishop Cheney of Gloucester.
7Stevenson and Salter, Early History of St Johns College, 185.
8Stevenson and Salter, Early History of St Johns College, 185. The original document sur-
vives in Reg. Coll. i. 73.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross265

Case. Campions father had published an anti-Catholic book, Newes from

Rome about 1550, and had been close to two Cross Yard neighbours, Robert
Toye, the father of Humfrey, and Thomas Petyt. If Campion was moving
further from his fathers stance, he seems, in March 1569 at least, merely to
be shifting towards Cheneys conservative position on the Councils of the
Church, free will and the Eucharist, all of which were anathema, as
Campion himself said in a letter to Bishop Cheney, to Laurence Humfrey,
Charles Sampson and Thomas Cooper, his antagonistae (enemies).9
Campion grew up in the Cross Yard, and it may be that behind his reluc-
tance was also a boyhood memory of violent altercations at Pauls Cross.
London had been the stage on which four successive monarchs presented
the whirligig of religious change imposed on the population. As Campion
was starting at Pauls School, he would have felt the impact of the 1547
injunctions of Edward VI. On 16 November 1547, they beganne that night
to take downe the roode with all the images in Poules Church, leading
to the death of a workman when the great cross fell down, and on 27th
November, there preached at Poules Crosse Doctor Barlowe, with before
the pulpitt the imag of our Ladie, which had been hidden by the parishio-
ners.10 The 153 boys of St Pauls School, Campion perhaps among them,
were made to listen to his sermon aginst idolatrie in images After the
sermon the boyes brooke the idolls in peeces.11 Campion, whose father
must have died around 1550, joined Christs Hospital when it opened its
doors to fatherless boys on 23 November 1552.12 The new Queen, Mary
Tudor, entered London on 3 August 1553, and it was Campion, now a Blue
Coat boy, who on a great stage, where all the children of Christes Hospitall
sat, with all the governors and officers, on his knees made an oration to

9Paolo Bombino, Vita et Martyrium Edmundi Campiani (Mantua: Osannas, 1620), 33.
10Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, from
a. d. 1485 to 1559, 2 vols (London: Camden Society, 1877), vol. 2, 1 (hereafter Wrioth.).
11Wrioth. 2, 1.
12John Howes MS., 1582, A brief note of the order and manner of the proceedings in
the first erection of The Three Royal Hospitals of Christ, Bridewell and St Thomas the Apostle,
introd. William Lempriere (London: Septimus Vaughan Morgan, 1904), 6. For a full discus-
sion of Campions schooling, see Sir Michael McDonnell in his monumental article,
Edmund Campion, SJ and St Pauls School, Notes and Queries 194 (1949), 4649, 6770,
9092. He repeats the evidence for his being at St Pauls more succinctly in, The Registers of
St Pauls School 15091748 (London: privately printed, 1977), 27. See also A[nthony]
M[unday], A Discouerie of Edmund Campion, and his Confederates, their most horrible and
traiterous practises, against her Maiesties most royall person, and the Realme (London:
Edwarde White, 1582), STC 18270: Edmund Campion, as it is by men of sufficient credit
reported, at what tyme he spent his studie heere in Englande, both in the Hospital, and also
at the uniuersity of Oxenford: was alwaies addicted to a meruailous suppose in himselfe,
sig. G1v-G2r.
266 gerard kilroy

her highnes in Latin.13 On Monday 15 January 1554, the Lord Chancellor

announced to the Mayor, Aldermen and forty heade commoners of the
Cittie, the Queens decision to marry the King of Spain, and coupled it
with a demand that they ensure that Gods religion be better kept within
the cittie that they might be a spectacle to all the realme, which they had
yett verie slacklye sett forth14 London was to be the stage on which a pat-
tern of the revived religion would be played, in processions, sermons and
large competitions in public disputation.
Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of
Winchester, attempted to re-impose orthodoxy at the beginning of Marys
reign with a concerted campaign of preaching, the focus of which was
Londons major preaching venue Pauls Cross.15 Bishop Bonner made sure
that there was the highest possible attendance, the Lord Mayor and alder-
men in their robes leading the way, and even attempted to silence London
streets by telling churchwardens that during the Pauls Cross sermons there
should be no ryngynge of belles, playinge of Children, cryenge or making
lowd noyse, rydynge of horses, or otherwyse, so that the Preacher there or
his audience was troubled thereby.16 All did not pass quietly, for on Sunday
13 August 1553, only ten days after Marys entry into London, an incident at
Pauls Cross, described in several contemporary chronicles, shows how
major currents crystallized round this stone pulpit, especially during the
dog-days of August, always the riot season. Dr Gilbert Bourne, Bonners
chaplain, mounted the pulpit to denounce the long imprisonment of his
bishop during Edwards reign. Bourne managed to rouse the indignation of
his audience in such a way that they were showtyng at hys sermon, as yt
[were] lyke madpepull.17 The crowd tried to drag him from the pulpit and
someone threw a dagger at him, which struck the wooden post of the
pulpit and rebounded back againe a great waye.18 When the Lord Mayor,

13Wrioth. 2, 94; Bombino, Vita et Martyrium, 23.

14Wrioth. 2, 106.
15Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2009), 19.
16Duffy, Fires of Faith, 19, citing Edmund Bonner, Interrogatories set foorth by the kyng
and quenes maiesties commissioners upon which Churchwardens shall be Charged
(London: Robert Caly, 1558), RSTC 10117, no. 47.
17The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-taylor of London from a.d. 1550 to
a.d. 1563, ed. John Gough Nichols (London: J.B. Nichols for the Camden Society, 1848), 41,
cited by Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 7. I should like to acknowledge a profound debt to the seminal work
of Mary Morrissey and Arnold Hunt on Pauls Cross.
18John Stow, The Annales or General Chronicle of England, continued by E. Howes
(London: Adams, 1615), STC 23338, 614; The Chronicles of England, from Brute vnto this present
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross267

Sir George Barnes, and Aldermen failed to restore order, John Rogers and
John Bradford, two evangelical preachers who were later to be among the
first martyrs of Marys burning, found themselves trying to restrain the
crowd of young men and women.19 After the dagger was thrown, Bradford
gave up trying to calm the crowd and, with the helpe of John Rogers, man-
aged to convey M. Bourne out of the audience into Paules Schoole.20
This busines was so heynously declared to the Quene and her Counsell, that
my Lord Mayor and Aldermen were sent for to the Quenes Counsell to the
Tower the 14 and 15 of August, and yt was sore layd to theyr charge, that the
liberties of the city had lyke to [haue] bene taken away from them, and to
depose the Lord Mayor, straightly charginge the Mayor and Aldermen to
make a direct ansere to them on Wednesday the 16 of August whether they
would rule the city in peace and good order, or ells they would sett other rul-
ers ouer them.21
The Mayor, Sir George Barnes, summoned the Commons of the liuerye to
pass on the warning, and the Common Council pledged loyalty and a
tough line on offenders. The Privy Council gave clear instructions for
young apprentices and servants to kepe their parishe churches the holie
daye, and for no curate or non other man to preache or make any open or
solemne reading of Scripture in their churches, unless licensed to do so.22
These edicts reveal that the authorities associated the trouble with young
evangelicals, set free from authority by reading the Bible in English, and
that they feared the power of sediciouse preachers, several of whom were
arrested, including John Bradford and John Rogers, who had actually res-
cued Dr Bourne.23 On the following Sunday, 20 August, when Dr Watson
(Chaplain to the Bishop of Winchester) preached,
by the queenes appoyntment, and for feare of the like tumult certain Lords
of the Counsell repaired to the sermon, and Sir Henry Gernigam, Captain
of the gard, with two hundred of the guard, which stood about the preacher
with halberts. Also the Maior had warned the companies of the Cittie to be
present in their liveries.24

yeare of Christ, 1580 (London: Henry Bynneman, 1580), STC 23333, 1068. Chronicle of the
Grey Friars of London, ed. John Gough Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1852), says that he
was pulled owte of the pulpyt by vacabonddes, 83.
19Wrioth. 2, 98.
20John Stow, The Annales (1615), 614.
21Wrioth. 2, 98.
22Acts of the Privy Council, 15521554, vol. 4, ed. John Roche Dasent (London: HMSO,
1892), 13 August 1553, 317.
23Acts of the Privy Council, 15521554, 16 August 1553, 321.
24Stow, Annales (1615), 614. See Chronicle of Grey Friars, 83; Morrissey, Politics and the
Pauls Cross Sermons, 7.
268 gerard kilroy

These two Sundays in August represent two aspects of the Cross: a visual
representation of civic hierarchy and social order, from the Privy Council
down to the Livery Companies, it could also be a flashpoint of riot and dis-
order, in which even radical preachers were unable to contain the crowd.
Worse was to come in the following year, 1554: The 10. of June, doctor
Pendleton preached at Pauls Crosse, at whom a gunne was shot, the pellet
whereof went very neere him, and light on the Church wall. But the
shooter could not be found.25 The shot narrowly missed both him and the
Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas White, who was sitting beneath him. It was a
violent introduction outside Campions front door not just to the whirligig
of political and religious change and the strength of the reform movement
in London, but also to the volatile nature of London audiences.
If the audience in the Cross Yard was representative of London street
culture, preachers had to be paid. Once funding for the Pauls Cross ser-
mons had dried up, preachers from the two universities were reluctant to
incur the expense of travelling and lodging for what must have been at
least four days. Mary Morrissey has shown that between June 1565 and
November 1566 (when Campion accepted the Grocers scholarship), most
of the preachers at Pauls Cross were London ministers and senior clerics;
only eight out of seventy preachers are described as from Oxford and
Cambridge.26
In 1591, William Fisher declared in his sermon that the lerned men,
from both universities who preached at Pauls Cross were hardely, and
unwillingly drawn hither because of the cost involved.27 John Aylmer,
Bishop of London, complained to the Privy Council that men out of both
universities and other places that bee called to preache there, are soe
hardly drawne unto that place that those which by my appoyntment have
the chardge to call the said preachers cannot have twoe amongst tenne
of them that be soe sent for.28 Campions reluctance to mount the pulpit,
however, was probably influenced more by two current controversies,
both at their height between 1566 and 1568. The manuscript accounts of
the Queens visit to Oxford in 1566 show how closely intertwined in these

25Stow, Annales (1615), 624; see Chronicle of Grey Friars, 90.

26Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 30, citing sermon notes in Bodl.
MS Tanner 50.
27Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 30, citing William Fisher, A Godly
Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the 31. day of October 1591 (STC 10919), sigs. C4C6.
28Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 30, citing John Strype, Historical
Collections of the Life and Acts of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Aylmer (Oxford:
University Press, 1821), 360.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross269

years were the affairs of the city of London and the University of Oxford.29
The controversy over clerical vestments in church reached its peak in
156566. Charles Sampson, dean of Christ Church, had been removed in
1565, because of his opposition to vestments, and replaced by Thomas
Godwin; Humfrey survived at Magdalen, only because the crown had no
direct control of his appointment, but the Queen greeted Humfrey, who
came to welcome her, with an acerbic comment: Master doctoure
umphrey me thinckethe this gowne becummeth yu verye well & I marvell
that you are so straighte laced in thes poyntes but I cam not nowe to
chide.30 The anti-vestiarian Bishop of Winchester, Robert Horne, was the
visitor of several Oxford colleges and, with the help of his commissary,
George Ackworth, was seizing recusant books and weeding out of New
College, Corpus, Merton, in the years 1566 to 1568, all remaining papists.
The controversy, which in Oxford looks like academic politics, was
enough to inflame the population in London to serious disorder. The
Zurich exiles must have so effectively preached against vestments for the
first seven years of the Elizabethan settlement, that when Archbishop
Parker (at the Queens behest) published his edicts on 26 March 1566,
insisting on vestments, London congregations reacted angrily. On Sunday
7 April, there were violent arguments and such quarylynge and conten-
cion was bewen the mynystars and parishioners that the doors of many
churches were closed.31 On Whit Monday, 3 June, the Scott, a preacher at
St Margarets Pattens, who had previously inveighed against capps, surpli-
sis, and such like, obeyed the Archbishop and wore a surplice into the pul-
pit, whereupon a certayne nombar of wyves threw stons at hym and
pullyd hym forthe of the pulpyt, rentyng his syrplice and scrattyng his
face, &c.32 The following day, 4 June, two to three hundred women (with
bags, bottles and spices for a banquet) came to London Bridge to accom-
pany and encourage a march of readers and ministers leaving London
for xxj days to appeal to Bishop Horne in Winchester in protest at the
instructions.33 On 26 January 1567, when Bishop Grindal himself came to
preach at St Margarets Old Fish Street, the people (especially the wymen)

29For a full account see Kilroy, The Queens Visit to Oxford.

30CCC MS 257, fol. 117; Bodl. MS Twyne 17, 158.
31James Gairdner, ed., Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles with Historical Memoranda by
John Stowe (London: Camden Society, 1880), 138.
32Stow, Memoranda, 139; quoted by Arnold Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan
Settlement, in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, eds. Peter McCullough, Hugh
Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: University Press, 2011), 373.
33Stow, Memoranda, 140. The diocese of Winchester then stretched as far as Southwark.
270 gerard kilroy

that ware in the sayde churche unreverently howtyd at hym with many
oprobrious words shouting Ware horns in reference to his cornered hat.34
It is no wonder that when Grindal invited John Foxe to preach, Foxe com-
plained that
on top of which, I am summoned to Pauls Cross, this famously renowned
theatre, where I shall, like some ape among courtiers, be greeted with gri-
maces, or howled off by the hisses of the mob. (ad Crucem insuper vocor Divi
Pauli, tam celebre videlicet theatrum, ubi tanquam simia inter purpuratos, vel
sannis excipiar, vel sibilis explodar multitudinis.)35
John Stows Memoranda give the impression that London sermon audi-
ences were a volatile and often violent Protestant mob that even the
preachers themselves were not fully able to control.36 Stows accounts not
only register disgust at the strong anti-Catholic tone of the sermons at
Pauls Cross, but also show that London congregations in general were
extremely radical.37
The angry participation of London congregations reminds us how
much ecclesiastical and theological controversy existed beyond the
boundaries of print in the realm of the spoken word. This was also true of
the other controversy of the 1560s. In 1559, Bishop Jewel had launched his
Challenge sermon at Pauls Cross, sparking off one of the biggest contro-
versies of the age. Although the controversy ran to a total of sixty-four
books, we can only understand the Jewel controversy if we see it, as Arnold
Hunt argues, not just as a textual exchange but as a pulpit event.38
Throughout the 1560s, preachers at Pauls Cross attacked the printed works
of Jewels opponents, all New College contemporaries of Campions, now
in Louvain. Undoubtedly, the most successful preacher was Alexander
Nowell, Dean of St Pauls, who was simultaneously attacking Thomas
Harding at Pauls Cross, and both Thomas Dorman and Nicholas Sander in
print.39 He provides, incidentally, fascinating bibliographical evidence of
the availability in London of texts by the Louvain exiles, as when he says
in his Confutation of Dorman and Sander:

34Stow, Memoranda, 140; Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, 373.

35John Foxes Collection of Papers, BL MS Harley 417, fol. 129r (my translation).
36Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, 373.
37Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, 372.
38A.C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose (London: Sands & Co, [1950]), 6266, lists
the controversy in print. See Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, 37476, for the
pulpit aspects.
39Alexander Nowell, A Confutation, as wel of M. Dormans last Boke entituled A Disproufe.
&c as also of D. Sander his causes of Transubstantiation (London: Henrie Bynneman, 1567).
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross271

This booke of Doctor Saunders hath ben very rare to be gotten or seen amon-
gest us, upon what occasion I doe not know, but I could never see but onely
two copies of it, one of which remained not in my sight one halfe hour, the
other I obteined of the bishop of London, which was at Easter last past this
yeare, 1567, and before that time of very truthe I could never have any vewe
or survey of it, howbeit I had heard very much of it.40
At the Cross, he had to apologise for an earlier, inadequate, sermon against
Hardings latest book: he explained that, although he had had the book
only for two days, he had answered it because the book was come in all
mens hands almost.41 In their turn, Dorman and Harding accused Jewel of
launching his challenge in a Pauls Cross sermon because he did not dare
to put his ideas to the test, and adventure the triall of them with making
your matche with learned men, and in the meane tyme set them forth by
sermons busyly among the unlearned and simple people.42 As Hunt says,
This view of Jewel as a shameless crowd-pleaser makes little sense unless
we see the controversy not just as a textual exchange but as a pulpit
event.43 John Martial, another New College exile, attacked James Calfhill,
the Calvinist student of Christ Church, for acting as a crowd stirrer: at
Poules crosse the precher talking against the papistes, saieth, the Lord
confounde them, to which the prentises and dentye dames answer
Amen.44 For this unruly audience a peculiarly aggressive and populist
style of preaching predominated that was despised and derided by the
Louvain theologians.45 The Great Controversy initiated by Bishop Jewels
Challenge sermon in 1559, was, therefore, conducted not just in print
between the Bishop of Salisbury and the New College exiles now in
Louvain, but in the pulpit at Pauls Cross, where Bishop Jewel and Dean
Nowell would attack the latest Louvain book as soon as it circulated in
New College and London.46 This was a triangular debate in which Oxford,

40Nowell, A Confutation (1567), fol. 150v. Fellows of New College, Oxford clearly had no
such difficulty: see Jennifer Loach, Reformation Controversies, in History of the University
of Oxford, vol. 3, The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1986), 36396 (386).
41Bodl. MS Tanner 50, fol. 38v, cited by Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement,
375.
42Thomas Dorman, A Proufe of Certyne Articles in Religion, Denied by M. Juell, Sett furth
in Defence of the Catholyke Beleef therein (Antwerp, 1564), 127; cited by Hunt, Preaching the
Elizabethan Settlement, 372.
43Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, 372.
44John Martial, A Replie to M. Calfhills Blasphemous Answer Made Against the Treatise
of the Crosse (Louvain: Fowler, 1566), 60, cited by Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan
Settlement, 376.
45Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, 382.
46Loach, Reformation Controversies, HUO, vol. 3, 386.
272 gerard kilroy

Louvain and Pauls Cross were key, but sharply differentiated, points.47
The former New College fellows may have been in exile, but they elicited a
visceral response from Jewel. On 27 October 1567, a month before Nowells
confutation, Jewels A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande
was published.48 In Jewels annotated copy, still extant in Magdalen
College, Oxford, marginal handwritten apostrophes to Harding reveal the
passionate, personal quality of this debate: they answer Hardings printed
reply, as if written words in the marginal space mimic the words echoing
in the air around Pauls Cross.49
Campion was at the two schools, St Pauls and Christs Hospital, which
were a central part of the civic structure of the city of London. The most
important sermons in the London calendar were the five Easter sermons.
John Stow says that:
time out of minde, it hath bin a laudable custome that on good friday in the
after noone some especial learned man by appoyntment of the prelate doth
preache a sermon at Paules crosse, treating of Christs Passion. And upon the
three next Easter holidayes, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the like
learned men by the like appointment doe use to preach on the forenoon at
the said Spittle, to perswad the articles of Christs resurrection, and then on
low Sunday before noon one other learned man at Paules crosse is to make
rehersall of those fowre sermons, either commending or reproving them,
as to him by judgment of the lerned divines is thought convenient. And
that done he is to make a sermon of himselfe, which in all were five Sermons
in one.50
The aim was clearly to set up theological disputation, but the Spital ser-
mons were also colourful civic occasions:
At these Sermons so severally preached, the Maior with his Brethren the
Aldermen are accustomed to be present in their Violets at Paules on Good
Friday and in their Scarlets, both they and their wives, at the Spittle in the

47Hunt, Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, 372.

48John Jewel, A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande, Conteininge an
Answeare to a certaine Booke lately set foorthe by M. Hardinge, and Entituled, A Confutation
of &c (London: Wykes, 1567), STC 14600.
49The copy is in Magdalen College Library, sheflmark 0.17.8, and was presumably
inherited by Dr Humfrey. This book has 742 folio pages, but from 126 to 132, where the
subject ispapal supremacy, Jewel has filled virtually every marginal space with apostro-
phes to M. Hardinge.
50John Stow, A Survay of London (London: John Wolfe, 1598), STC 23341, 129130; The
Survey of London: now completely finished by A[nthony] M[unday], H[ugh] D[yson]
(London: Bourne, 1633), STC 23345, 176. See A Survey of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge
Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), vol. 1, 167, cited by Morrissey, Politics and
the Pauls Cross Sermons, 21.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross273

Holy daies (except Wednesday in Violet), and the Maior with his Brethren,
on Low Sunday at Paules Crosse.51
In St Marys Spital, there was even a two-storey house, built on the south
side in 1488, in whose loft the Ladies and Aldermens wives doe stand at a
large window or sit at their pleasure, and the crowds (not surprisingly with
such an operatic setting) were even greater than at the Cross.52 So impor-
tant was the presence of Christs Hospital that, in 1594, when a new pulpit
was built, a large house on the east side of the said pulpit was then builded
for the governors and children of Christes Hospital to sit in.53 In 1557,
DrHenry Pendleton and Dr John Young were the star preachers, with the
Lord Mayor, Aldermen, alle the masters of the hospetall with grenstayffes
in ther handes, and all the chylderyn of the hospetall in bluw garmenttes,
and aboyff xx M. [20,000] pepull of old and younge on Easter Monday,
and the holl cete boythe old and yonge, boythe men and women, on
Easter Tuesday.54 Campion, in blue coat, would have been there for the
sermons; he might have stayed for the game of barley break, when ever
was master parsun in the fyre, but probably not for drinking in the Swan,
or dinner in Westminster with the Duke of Muscovy, which followed.55 On
12 April, only seven days earlier, Campion would have been in Christs
Hospital itself, which was only three hundred feet from Smithfield, where
Thomas Loseby, Henry Ramsey, Thomas Thyrtell, Margaret Hyde and
Agnes Stanley were burned as a group; the noise, smell and smoke must all
have enveloped the consciousness of the boys and their teachers.56
The participation of Christs Hospital in the Spital sermons is a reminder
that the sermon culture was itself part of a larger culture of disputation
that began with inter-school competitions. We know that Campion won
such competition on several occasions.57 Both the use of competitions
and the emphasis on speaking were the direct inheritance from the educa-
tional programme Erasmus set down in 1511 for the founder of St Pauls

51Stow, Survay of London (1598), 130; Survey of London (1633), 176.

52Stow, Survay of London (1598), 129; Survey of London (1633), 176 (which adds that,
before the Ladies, the Bishop of London and other Prelates used to sit in the loft).
53Stow, Survay of London (1598), 130; Survey of London (1633), 17677.
54Machyn, Diary, 13132; cited in Duffy, Fires of Faith, 19.
55Machyn, Diary, 132.
56John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 2 vols (London: John Day, 1583), STC 11225, vol. 2,
2161.
57McDonnell, Edmund Campion, 6770, makes a convincing case. There seems no evi-
dence, however, of any competition in 1553 or 1554. I suggest that Campion won competi-
tions, in 1552 while he was at St Pauls, and in 1555 while at Christs Hospital.
274 gerard kilroy

School, John Colet, De Ratione Studii.58 It was a culture that rapidly spread
across the entire system of grammar schools in England, and indeed
throughout Europe.59 In a 1564 edition of the schoolbook edited by
Erasmus, Brevissima Insitutio, a schoolboy has written at the top of the
first page, Summativa est ars bene loquendi [The central aim of all is the
art of speaking well].60 This rivalry in ars bene loquendi, in and away from
the schoolroom, was to be extremely helpful to Campion.
John Stow begins his survey Of Schooles and Houses of Learning with
the suggestion that the importance of disputation goes back to the reign
of Henry II:
Upon Festivall dayes, the Maisters made solemne meetings in the Churches,
where their Schollers disputed Logically and demonstratively: some bring-
ing Enthimems, other perfect Sillogismes, some disputed for shew, others to
trace out the truth: cunning Sophisters were thought brave Schollers, when
they flowed with wordes.61
Stows account gives pride of place to scholarly disputation in churches,
and gives one a vivid sense of the public profile of the four London free
schools in the period, and of the competition, official and unofficial,
between them.
As for the meeting of the Schoolemaisters, on festivall dayes, at festivall
Churches, and the disputing of their Schollers Logically, &c., whereof I have
before spoken, the same was long since discontinued: But the arguing of the
Schoole boyes about the principles of Grammer, hath beene continued euen
till our time: for I my selfe in my youth haue yearely seene on the Eve of
S. Bartlemew the Apostle [23 August] the schollers of diuers Grammar
schooles repayre vnto the Churchyard of St Bartlemew, the Priorie in
Smithfield, where vpon a banke boorded aboute under a tree, some one
Scholler hath stepped vp, and there hath appoased and answered, till he
were by some better Scholler ouercome and put downe: and then the ouer-
comer taking the place, did like as the first: and in the end the best apposars
and answerers had rewards, which I obserued not but it made both good

58Erasmus, De ratione studii, ac legendi, interpretandique auctores libellus aureus, Offi

cium discipulorum ex Quintiliano. Qui primo legendi, ex eodem, 2nd edn (Strasbourg:
Schurer, 1513). This is the earliest copy in the Folger Shakespeare Library.
59The influence of Erasmus is discussed at more length in my edition of The Epigrams
of Sir John Harington (Burlington VT and Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 2627.
60This copy is in the Folger Shakespeare Library, which also has an earlier copy from
1557. The book, A Short Introduction of Grammar Generallie to be Used, was published anon-
ymously, but William Lyly was always regarded as the principal author (London: Reginald
Wolfe, 1564), STC 15613.8.
61Stow, Survay of London (1598), 53; Survey of London (1633), 63. See Stow, Survey of
London (1908), vol. 1, 7475.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross275

Schoolemaisters, and also good Schollers, diligently against such times to

prepare themselues for the obtayning of this garland.
I remember there repayred to these exercises amongst others the Maisters
and Schollers of the free Schooles of S. Paules in London, of S. Peters at
Westminster: of S. Thomas Acons Hospitall: and of S. Anthonies Hospitall:
whereof the last named commonly presented the best schollers, and had the
prize in those dayes.
This Priorie of S. Bartelemew, being surrendred to Henrie the 8. those dis-
putations of schollers in that place surceased. And was againe, onely for a
year or twaine, in the raigne of Edward the 6. reuiued in the Cloystre of
Christes Hospitall, where the best Schollers, then stil of S. Anthonies schoole,
howsoever the same be now fallen, both in number and estimation, were
rewarded with bowes and arrowes of siluer, giuen to them by Sir Martin
Bowes, Goldsmith. Neuertheless, howsoeuer the encouragement fayled, the
[schollers of Paules, meeting with them of S. Anthonies, would call them
Anthonie pigs, and they againe would call the other pigeons of Paules,
because many pigions were bred in Paules Church, and Saint Anthonie was
always figured with a pigge following him] children mindfull of the former
vsage, did for a long season disorderly in the open streete prouoke one
another with Salue tu quoque, placet tibi mecum disputare, placet? and so
proceeding from this to questions in Grammar, they vsually fel from that to
blowes, [with their satchels full of bookes,] many times in so great heapes
that they troubled the streets, and passengers: so that finally they were
restrained [with the decay of Saint Anthonies schoole].62
The school competitions, in the churches, at Smithfield, Christs Hospital,
and on the streets of London, show that Pauls Cross was not an isolated
phenomenon, but a synecdoche for a culture that permeated the whole of
London life, from the school bench and pulpit to the courtroom and the
scaffold.
It was no accident that in the first disputation granted to Campion in
the Tower of London on 31 August 1581, and obviously intended to shame
Campion in front of a large crowd, Campions first opponent was the vet-
eran preacher of Pauls Cross, Alexander Nowell. Significantly he spoke in
English, and not in Latin, the normal language of academic disputation,
although Campions first biographer, Paolo Bombino, makes clear that
Nowell slips into Latin for insults: ita latine magna voce peroravit, impu-
dentissime mentiris Campiane [and so, in Latin, in a loud voice, he con-
cluded, You, Campion, lie most impudently].63 The crowd in the Tower

62Survay of London (1598), 56, with additions [in square brackets] from Survey of
London (1633), 65. The later version charts the changing position of London schools, and
changes the heaps of boys to heaps of satchels and books.
63Bombino, Vita et Martyrium, 22728; trans. Bodl. MS Tanner 329, fols. 95v96r.
276 gerard kilroy

chapel, responded with all the vulgarity normal at Pauls Cross. Bombino,
who had access to a manuscript account written furtim [secretly] of an
eye-witness, records the moment during the afternoon session when the
crowd, now much greater, had been stirred up to believe that Campion
could not speak Greek:
and to the end they might fall agayne to make themselves mery with jesting
and hissing at Campian, they pitchd more willingly upon the Greeke. wher-
fore with their eyes and whole aspectes, swimming as a man may say, and
sauced with saucie laughter, they ran many of them by heapes, to thrust
Basill upon Campian. Now began the whole multitude of people, that were
present, to murmur, and rayse upon themselves, as it were, upon tiptoes,
ready to clappe their handes, by way of derision. When Campian, without
any trouble, or shew of distemper at all, takes up the booke, and with a
serene and setled countenance (as if he had minded nothing lesse, then
them that watchd to disgrace him) began to read the place designed;
whereby he first repressed those eyes of theirs, that were so boldly cast upon
him, then restrayned their laughter wherewith they were brimfull, and even
ready to have burst forth. But when after they saw him (with the selfe same
confidence and constancie) read the whole place in Greeke, and render it
word for word in English, so, not only properly, but even elegantly, that he
seemed, as well to all his enemies, as friendes, equally maister of both lan-
guages; his enemies began to wax pale, to hang their heads, and never aftew-
ard would so much as well endure to behold him, or the multitude about
him. Meanewhile, Campian with a resolute countenance closed the booke,
and redelivrd it, with these wordes: you henceforth I suppose, will beare me
witnesse, I somewhat understand Greeke. At which speech the whole audi-
ence were even ready to have given their applause, but suddaynely turnd it
into a kind of festivall and soothing murmur, admiring no lesse his modesty,
then learning; and as the common sort, are for the most part, on either side,
immoderately changeable, they exceeded no lesse in too much favouring
and applauding him then they did before in disgracing and hissing at him.64
This eyewitness account helps us understand why disputations were so
popular, and alerts us to a paradoxical feature of Elizabethan audiences.
Although this debate was probably unusual in being conducted mainly in
English, and not in Latin, the fact that the audience enjoys the ebb and
flow of the Greek discussion reminds us that learning itself was popular in
early modern England, perhaps in the kind of way that sporting skill is
now, or that poetry is at almost every level of Irish society.

64Bombino, Vita et Martyrium, 23536; Tanner, fol. 100r-v. As the festivall and soothing
murmur seems to be an addition of the translator, there is the possibility that he was pres-
ent. For a full discussion, see Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, Playing the Champion: The Role of
Disputation in the Jesuit Mission, in Thomas.M. McCoog, SJ, ed., The Reckoned Expense:
Edmund Campion and the Early Jesuits, 2nd edn (Rome: IHSJ, 2007), 13963.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross277

From the Cross to the Scaffold

Pauls Cross, then, was the principal theatre in a London where competi-
tive civic disputation and controversial sermons were popular. If the
Queen and the state used the pulpit to promulgate policy, the audience at
Pauls Cross became skilled at making its views known, so the Privy
Council used the Cross Yard to gage public reaction to its policies. On
Sunday, 27September 1579, for example, a Royal Proclamation was issued
at Pauls Cross banning John Stubbes book, The Gaping Gulf, and the
preacher was instructed by John Aylmer, Bishop of London, and Sir
Christopher Hatton, to use the Sunday sermon to attack the seditious
book. The following day, Monday 28 September, Aylmer wrote to Hatton
to tell him that the preacher had done as instructed, but that the crowds
reactions were complex:
Whereat the people seemed even as yt were with a shoute, to geve God
thankes, & as farr as I could perceave, tooke yt very well, that she was
comended, for her zeale, and constancie. I have understoode synce the ser-
monde, that as the people well lyked of the commendation attributed to her
majestie, with the greate hope of her continuance so to saye playnlye, they
utterlye bente theire browes at the sharpe and bitter speeches, which he
gave againste the author of the booke, of whome they conceave, & reporte,
that he is one, that fearethe God deereleye, lovethe her majestie, intred into
this course, beinge caryed with suspicion & jealousye of her persone, &
safetye.65
The crowd has made its finely discriminated views known to a senior
member of the Privy Council within twenty-four hours of the Royal
Proclamation. Aylmers letter also reveals that the Privy Council is relying
on London pulpits to control a population it fears. Of the people of
London, I hope well, that by the good instructions of the prechers they wyll
staye themselves from all outerages.66 Aylmer goes on to tell Hatton that
many ministers outside London are preaching against the marriage, the
furder off the wourse, that he has brought a number of them into London,
but that he dare not bring more for fear that they will make his owne
flocke aware of how much grudgynge and gronynge abroade there is.67

65BL Add. MS 15891, fol. 8v. The letter is printed in Sir Harris Nicolas, ed., Memoirs of the
Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton (London: Bentley, 1847), 132134. See Arnold Hunt,
The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audience, 15901640 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 7.
66BL Add. MS 15891, fol. 8v; Nicolas, Sir Christopher Hatton, 133.
67BL Add. MS 15891, fol. 8v-9r; Nicolas, Sir Christopher Hatton, 133.
278 gerard kilroy

When proclamations and sermons failed to win the argument, the state
turned to public executions. One month later, on 3 November 1579, John
Stubbe lost his right hand, as William Camden narrates:
From there they proceeded to a scaffold set up in the market place at
Westminster, where Stubbe and Page had their hands cut off by a butchers
knife being struck by a mallet on a chopping-block. The printer was spared.
I remember because I was present, that when Stubbes right hand had been
cut off, he took off his hat with his left hand and in a clear voice said, Long
live the Queen! The crowd that was round the scaffold was completely silent,
whether in horror at this new and unusual punishment, or in pity for a man
of unspotted life, or from hatred of a marriage which most men sensed
would be destructive for religion.
These events occurred in the first days after the arrival of Anjou in
England, and while he was lingering here, the Queen, in order to take away
the fear that had seized hold of the popular imagination that the religion
was about to be changed, and Papists tolerated, gave in to insistent entreat-
ies and allowed Edmund Campion, the Jesuit, as I have said, Luke Kirby and
Alexander Briant, seminary priests, to be put on trial, and prosecuted, under
the Treason Act of the 25th year of Edward III, for planning an attack on the
Queen and the Realm.68
Camden makes Anjou the bridge to Campions execution, passing neatly
over two years of ineffective marriage negotiations with the word linger-
ing (haereret).69 Camden shows that the Queen and the state first tried to
silence (with a meat cleaver) the opposition to the marriage, but when the
crowds at Pauls Cross and Westminster turned silence into a form of sul-
len resistance, the Queen and her Council threw Campion to the wolves at
Tyburn, in an attempt to placate the very people whom they had outraged
with a butchers block at Westminster.
Campions refusal to preach at Pauls Cross draws attention both to the
close links between the University of Oxford and the city of London, and
to the manipulation of the spoken word by the state. In an age of political
uncertainty and religious flux, the state tried to win the argument in the
public sphere with spectacular viva voce disputations. The monarch and
the state needed to humiliate Campion before the London crowd in large
public speech acts, whether in the Tower, Westminster Hall or Tyburn.

68William Camden, Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum (London: Stansby,

1615), STC 4496, (my translation) 326.
69For a full account of the way three contemporary chronicles link the Anjou marriage
negotiations both with the mutilation of Stubbe and the execution of Edmund Campion,
see my A Tangled Chronicle: the Struggle over the Memory of Edmund Campion, in The
Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England, eds Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist
(Burlington VT and Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 141159.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross279

OnFriday 21 July 1581, the Sheriff of Berkshire brought the captive Jesuit,
Edmund Campion, to London. In the country, the Sheriff had led a digni-
fied progress, with Campion accompanied by sixty armed horsemen of
the Berkshire trained band; but when they reached Colebrook on the edge
of London, Campions hands were tied behind his back and a paper put in
his hat-band saying, EDMUND CAMPION SEDITIOUS JESUIT, and they
were told to wait till Saturday, market-day, so that the crowds, stirred up by
cheer-leaders in advance, could jeer at the captive priest as he passed.70
The journey through London was to be a spectaculum, as we know it was
from the diary of Richard Stonley, who records on 23 July: And this day
report was made that one Campion [was] a I[e]suyt was brought through
Chepside & so to the Tower & viij others, w[i]th a paper vpon his hatte,
writtne this ys Campion the Chef Capten of the Iesuytes.71 Stonley also
recorded Campions final journey along Cheapside as he and his two com-
panions were dragged to their execution past his boyhood house and
between his two schools:
This day After morning preyer cu[m]inge thorough Chepside ther came one
Edmond Ca[m]pyon (blank) Sherwyn & (blank) drawen vpon hurdles to
Tyborne & ther suffred execuc[i]on at w[hi]ch tyme a pamphlet boke was
redd by wey of Adu[er]tisment agenst all thos that were sausye flaterers
favorers or whisperers in his cause.72
Campions own power of speech was capable of swinging the balance of
justice. Before Campions first disputation in the Tower, Bombino tells us,
Now, not just London but the whole of the kingdom was excited by the
prospect of such a great spectacle (tanti spectaculi).73 On the cart at
Tyburn, Campion used scripture to show he was aware that his execution
was a politically manipulated spectacle:
Spectaculum facti sumus Deo, Angeli[s], & hominibus saying, These are the
wordes of S. Paule, Englished thus: We are made a spectacle, or a sight unto

70From the letter of Robert Persons, SJ to Claudio Aquaviva, SJ on 30 August 1581 (CRS
39), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, SJ (London: Catholic Record Society,
1942), 9293. The scene was etched in the European consciousness by the copperplate
engraving added by Richard Verstegan to Robert Persons, De Persecutione Anglicana
Epistola. Qua explicantur afflictiones, rumna, & calamitates gravissim, cruciatus etiam &
tormenta, & acerbissima martyria, qu Catholici nunc Angli, ob fidem patiuntur. Qu omnia
in hac postrema editione neis typis ad vivum expressa sunt. 8o. (Rom: George Ferrarius
[English College], 1582), A&R 876.
71Folger MS V.a.459, fol. 10v (I am grateful to Alan H. Nelson for his transcription of
these extracts).
72Folger MS V.a.459, fol. 33v.
73Bombino, Vita et Martyrium, 215.
280 gerard kilroy

God, unto his Angels, and unto men: verified this day in me who am here a
spectacle unto my lorde god, a spectacle unto his angels and unto you men.74
Even here speech was contested. When Campion was interrupted by Sir
Francis Knowles and the sheryfs were urging him to confess his treason
against her majestie, he answered, I besech you to have patience and suf-
fer me to speake a worde or too.75 But, on the orders of the Privy Council,
Thomas Hearne, a scolemaster, read An Advertisement, putting the states
case in a lowde voyce unto the people.76 While this was going on, Lord
Charles Howard put to Campion questions on his loyalty:
At the upshot of this conflict he was willed to aske the queene forgivenes,
and to praye for her. He meekely answered: wherein have I offended her? In
this I am innocent, this is my laste speache, in this give me credite, I have and
do pray for her. Then did the Lord Charles Howard aske of him: for which
queene To whom he answered, Yea for Elizabeth your queene and my
queene, unto whom I wish a long quiet raigne, with all prosperity.77
Even amidst this cacophony of conflicting voices, Campions words made
a critical impact. They won over Lord Charles Howard sufficiently for him
to save Campion from being disembowelled while still alive, and to report
well of him to the Queen:
A certain gentleman, one of the principal men at court, on his return to the
palace from the execution, was asked publicly by the Queen where he had
come from. He replied From the death of the three Papists. And what is
your opinion of them? she said. To which he replied, They seem to me to be
very learned men and steadfast, and to have been put to death for no fault;
for they kept praying to God for your majesty, they pardoned everyone, and
they protested under pain of the loss of souls in eternity that they had never
even thought of doing any evil act against the state or against your Majesty.
On hearing this, Is that so? said the Queen. Very well, that has nothing to do
with us; let the men who condemned them see to it.
This same gentleman, Hayward [Howard] by name, though he was a thor-
ough heretic, yet being present at the martyrdom and seeing the executioner
approaching to cut the halter and perform the butchery on Fr. Campion
while alive, as is the custom, drove him away in great wrath, threatening him
with death if he dared to touch him before he had drawn his last breath.78

74[Thomas Alfield], A true reporte of the death & martyrdome of M. Campion Jesuite and
preiste ([London: Richard Rowland Verstegan, 1582]), STC 4537, A&R 4, sig. B8vC1.
75[Alfield], A true reporte, sig. C1.
76Anon., An Advertisement and defence for Trueth against her Backbiters, and specially
against the whispring Favourers, and Colourers of Campions, and the rest of his confederats
treasons (London: C. Barker, 1581), STC 153.7 (formerly STC18259).
77[Alfield], A true reporte, sig. C2v.
78Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons (CRS 39), 134.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross281

If Pauls Cross was a theatre, it was nothing to this drama of life and death,
played with speech and sword at Tyburn, in front of an audience of many
thousands. The Spanish Ambassador reported on 4 December that there
had been three thousand horsemen and a great number of footmen con-
trolling the crowd.79 Published exactly a month later, the earliest extant
printed account, LHistoire de la Mort, simply states that: Se trouva au
demeurant un si grand nombre de gens a sa mort, que jamais navoir este
veu le semblable, & ce avec une plaincte & gemissement incroyable.80
After Campions death, it was not over what Campion had written that
the state argued with his supporters, but over what he had said, who had
won the arguments in the Tower disputations and whether his trial had
been just.
Conflicting discourse did not cease with Campions death. In Oxford, in
a diary entry for 25 January 1582, Richard Madox, a Fellow of All Souls,
noted how John Conrad had a lybel about the hard usage of Campion,
how our Walton was used for saying that Campion was hardly delt withal,
and the Warden had been summoned to Lambeth.81 Nor did the contro-
versy die down. Four years after the execution, a former chaplain, Gregory
Gunnes (alias Stone), was arrested at Henley on 7 June 1585, and examined
on 8 June before Sir Henry Neville and William Knollys. At the time of his
arrest in 1585, he had just returned to Oxfordshire from London, and
unluckily struck up a conversation with Evan Arden, a servaunt unto
Mr Treasorer of the household (Sir Francis Knollys, who had presided
at the execution), at the sign of the Bell. Gunnes had praised Edmund
Campion as the only man in all England. When Arden asked how a traitor
could be so praised, Gunnes had prophesied that a chapel would be built
at Tyburn: O saye not so for the day will come, and I hope to see yt, and
you may to, that there shalbe an offeringe where Campion did suffer you
shall see a religious house buylte there, for an offeringe.82 Gunnes had
been a chaplain at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then beneficed at
Yelford, but given up his respectable ministry for his Conscience about

79CSP Spanish, 15801586, No. 175, 23132.

80LHistoire de la Mort que le R. P. Edmond Campion Prestre de la compagnie du nom de
Iesus, & autres ont souffert en Angleterre pour la foy Catholique & Romaine le premier jour de
Decembre, 1581 (Paris: Chaudire, 4 January 1582), A&R 197, sig. D2. [Transl: There was pres-
ent at the death such a great number that no one had ever seen the like, and that with a
wailing and groaning that defied belief.]
81Folger MS M.a.244, 56.
82Alan Davidson, Roman Catholicism in Oxfordshire from the Late Elizabethan Period
to the Civil War (c. 1580c.1640) (PhD thesis at the University of Bristol, 1970), 377, citing
CSPD 12/179/7, i and ii.
282 gerard kilroy

vij yeares paste, and since then been nowhere conversant, but vagrant
heere and there.83
In London, on 28 December 1581, Oliver Pluckett was hauled before a
wardmote in St Andrews Holborne for saying that in the disputations the
said Campyon was both dyscrett, and learned, and dyd saye verie well. The
Foreman of the Wardmote, Mr ffox, gave his verdict:
Neighbor Olyver yf you thinke soe well of hym that is judged for treason we
doe not thinke well of you. And therefore I would wysh you to gve place to
another for this tyme, where withall, the said Pluckytt seaming to be well
contented said withall my heart, you cane not doe me a greater pleasure.
And soe departed the howse.84
These prosecutions, and the fact that the Elizabethan state tried to censor
the written word only 39 times, but intervened 211 times against spoken
lybels, might suggest that it thought the spoken word five times as danger-
ous as the printed word.85
Pauls Cross was supposed to be a place where a preacher lately come
from Oxford, and funded by the City fathers, would be heard by an hon-
ourable audience.86 In this world dominated by the spoken word, there
was a clear hierarchy of discourse. Highly emotive and inflammatory
speech in English belonged to Pauls Cross, the popular pulpit, and the
scaffold; trials and executions were populist spectacles organized by the
state. In Campions trial, the Queens Council mocked Campion for using
the syllogistic language of the schooles.87 Campions refusal to preach at
Pauls Cross reveals some of the dangerous political currents that swirled
around the base of a pulpit where public policy and proclamation could
wrestle with a crowd that was highly volatile, but also adept at utterly
outfacing and subverting the power of the state.
When Campion accepted the Grocers Scholarship in 1566, he must
have thought (since it was a condition of the scholarship) that he could
preach at Pauls Cross; by 14 October 1568, perhaps under the growing
influence of Richard Cheney, Bishop of Gloucester, perhaps swayed by his

83Davidson, Roman Catholicism in Oxfordshire, 377. Gunnes claimed that he had

never been out of England, but he had been reported at Rheims, CSPD 12/168/35.
84BL MS Lansdowne 33, no 63, fol. 153v.
85Cyndia Susan Clegg and Randall McLeod, eds., The peaceable and prosperous regi-
ment of blessed Queene Elisabeth: A Facsimile from Holinsheds Chronicles (San Marino CA:
Huntington Library, 2005), 2 and 16 (note 6).
86William Stepney, The Spanish Schoole-maister (London: Harrison, 1619), STC 23257,
fol. 6v, cited by Hunt, Art of Hearing, 321.
87BL Add. MS 6265, fol. 18v.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross283

loyalty to the New College exiles, he seems to have fully shared their con-
tempt for Pauls Cross preaching. In the version of Campions 1580 Letter
to the Privy Council (usually known as the Brag) that is among Foxes
papers, we find a slight but significant variant:
I know perfectly that none of those protestants, no nor all the protestantes
lyvinge, nor any secte of our adversaries (how so ever they face men downe
in their pulpettes and overrule us in their kingdome of grammaryans and
unlearned eares) can mayntayne their doctryne in disputacion.88
Their pulpettes seems a fair jibe when the pulpits, especially in London,
were being used to promote not just approved theology but monarchical
marriage plans and government policy.
The states uncertainty about how to manage public perception of the
trial is revealed by the fact that two drafts of Campions indictment sur-
vive.89 In the end, the Privy Council, having given a second warrant for
him to be tortured at the end of October, decided to try to minimise the
celebrity status of the trial, by charging him with nineteen other defen-
dants, five of them absent, for conspiracy in partibus transmarinis (over-
seas).90 This was a risky strategy, since, as the defendants were quick to
point out at the trial, most of them had not met before.91 They were, nev-
ertheless, indicted under the treason statute of 1352. The fifteen present
defendants were divided into two groups, and Campions trial on 20
November in Westminster Hall drew an immense crowd from all ranks of
society: many simply to see and hear.92 The conduct of the trial and the
surprising verdict of guilty at the end of eight hours, were to be the subject
of fierce debate all over Europe for many years.93

88BL MS Harley 422, fol. 134v.

89BL MS Lansdowne 33, no. 64, fols. 154r156v is a draft of indictment of Campion
alone; this was clearly abandoned, and another prepared in which he is one of many,
no.65, fols. 157v164r.
90The actual indictment is in PRO, Coram Rege Rolls, K.B. 27/1279, Crown side, rots. 2
and 3. See Cause of the Canonization of Blessed Martyrs John Houghton, Robert Lawrence,
Augustine Webster, Richard Reynolds, John Stone, Cuthbert Mayne, John Paine, Edmund
Campion, Alexander Briant, Ralph Sherwin and Luke Kirby (Vatican Polyglot Press, 1968),
292. These two warrants for torture are dated 30 July 1581 and 29 October 1581, Acts of
the Privy Council, 15811582, vol. 13, ed. John Roche Dasent (London: HMSO, 1896), 14445
and 249.
91John Hungerford Pollen, Acts of English Martyrs Hitherto Unpublished (London:
Burnes and Oates, 1891), 38. This is Thomas Fitzherberts account from Archives of
Westminster Cathedral, A.II, 185ff, also quoted in Cause of the Canonization, 333.
92Bombino, Vita et Martyrium (my translation), 267.
93For a full account of this, see my, A Tangled Chronicle, in The Arts of Remembrance in
Early Modern England.
284 gerard kilroy

Campion had drawn all eyes to him as he mounted the rostrum to begin
the disputations in front of the Queen in Oxford in 1566.94 Fifteen years
later, at the start of the first disputation in the Tower of London, his
body damaged by racking, he again drew all eyes to him.95 At the pre-
trial arraignment, Campion again won sympathy when having his hands
wrapped in a furred cuffe, he was not able to lift his hand so high to take
the oath.96 Finally, when he entered Westminster Hall for the trial, slightly
later than the rest, Bombino says that you would have thought a new
planet had appeared, so much does he draw all eyes towards him as if the
trial put only one man in jeopardy.97
Campions London background made him at ease on a public stage,
whether welcoming Queen Mary or preaching to Rudolf II in Prague. It is
not an accident that the three men whose martyrdoms in very different
periods instantly caught the imagination of the whole of Europe were all
Londoners: Thomas Becket, Thomas More and Edmund Campion.
Campion, the son of a bookseller, rose up, like Becket and More, through a
network of London merchants and patrons, which enabled him to move
among princes and Emperors abroad, and nobles and gentry in England.
Part of the reason why the state could not ignore Campion, any more than
they could ignore John Stubbe, was the vocal base of support in the legal
and mercantile community that made up the heart of the city of London.
At two key moments in the early 1570s, after he had left Oxford, Campion
styled himself a Londoner. Soon after arriving in Douai, Campion pur-
chased a three-volume edition of the Summa of St Thomas Aquinas, pub-
lished by Christopher Plantin in 1569. On the title page we find: Edm.
Campianus anglus londinensis, and the date of purchase, 3 August 1571.98
When, on 23 August 1573, Campion joined the Society of Jesus, he began
his profession document: Vocor Edmundus Campianus, Anglus Londinensis
My name is Edmund Campion. English and a Londoner 99

94John Bereblock, in Folger MS V.a.109, fol. 10rv; printed in Plummer, Elizabethan

Oxford, 131. For a full account see Kilroy, The Queens Visit to Oxford.
95Bombino, Vita et Martyrium, (my translation) 218.
96William Allen, A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII. Reverend
Priests,executed within these twelvemonethes for confession and defence of the Catholike
Faith. But under the false pretence of Treason ([Rheims: Foigny], 1582), STC 369.5, A&R 7,
sig.d8r.
97Bombino, Vita et Martyrium, 267 (my translation).
98S. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Totius Theologi (Antwerp: C. Plantin, 1569). The copy
belongs to the Society of Jesus, and is now in the library of Heythrop College, London.
99Joanne Schmidl, Histori Societatis Jesu Provinci Bohemi, 2 vols (Prague:
Klementinum, 1747), vol. 1, lib. IV, 338.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross285

Camden was the first historian to see that the regional backgrounds of
Robert Persons (Somersettensis) and Campion (Londinensis) were cen-
tral to their different approaches, but saw this as issuing in different char-
acter traits rather than missionary policy. So Persons is vehemens, ferox
natura & moribus incultioribus [passionate, fierce in his personality and of
uncultivated morals] while Campion is vir suavis & politissimus [a charm-
ing and very cultivated man].100
Yet Campions London background was also central to his missionary
outlook. The reactions of the audience on the stage that was London made
Campion vividly aware of the power of public opinion, and especially of
the strong opposition, after the Marian burnings and the Spanish mar-
riage, to a return to Catholicism. Campion, by his refusal to preach at Pauls
Cross in 1568, may have escaped being howled off the stage in the Cross
Yard, but, in the end, he had to win over similar audiences in the first
Tower disputation, the trial in Westminster Hall, and his execution at
Tyburn. The spoken word had an importance in early modern England
that is almost outside our experience, and Pauls Cross comes into focus
only when we see it as part of a larger culture that was particularly strong
in London. Campion challenged the academics of the two universities to a
formal Latin disputation, but he was given a one-sided vernacular debate
in the Tower before a crowd that could have come straight from the Cross
Yard. The Privy Council wanted to humiliate the academic champion in
London. The conflicted relationship of Edmundus Campianus Londinensis
with Pauls Cross shows us that, while the spoken word was the dominant
medium from school to the scaffold, it was unusually populist and com-
bative in the city of London. Fr William Hartley, a former St Johns College
chaplain, left Campions Latin challenge, Rationes Decem, quite properly,
on the seats in St Marys Church, Oxford, on 27 June 1581.101 Yet when the
Bishop of London was asked by Lord Burghley to provide names of those
he thought could answer Campion, he said that none of our church mean
to defend Luthers hyperboles or all thinges that have passed the pennes
of Calvin or Beza.102 The Regius Professors of Divinity in Oxford and
Cambridge, Laurence Humfrey and William Whitaker, published their
responses in print only after Campions death; it was the Pauls Cross
preacher, Alexander Nowell (who was Whitakers uncle), who tried to

100Camden, Annales (1615), 299.

101Bombino, Vita et Martyrium, (my translation) 141.
102BL MS Lansdowne 33, No. 19, fol. 38r, another letter of Bishop of London of 25 July
1581: His opinion touching Campions Cavilles.
286 gerard kilroy

outface a thrice-tortured Campion in the Tower of London. It was another

nephew of Nowells, Dr Hammond, who supervised Campions interroga-
tions on the rack, and who also censored the Campion passage in the
Continuation of Holinsheds Chronicles in 1587.103 The enforced confes-
sion of names on the rack, and the compulsion later to publish in print
their version of what was said, is an indication of the importance this soci-
ety gave to the spoken word. Whether in the torture chamber or the Tower
Chapel, Westminster Hall or Tyburn, the spoken word was the chosen
medium. Yet this was a form of speech corrupted most obviously, on the
rack and on the scaffold, by the naked exercise of power, and the uneven
dealing in the disputations and the trial. At the end of the trial, Campion
categorizes the speech and discourse of this whole day as consisting on
the one hand of presumptions and probabilities, and on the other of the
testimony of the two principal, and completely untrustworthy, witnesses:
What truthe may yew expect from their mouthes? the one hath confessed
himselfe a murtherer, the other well knowne a detestable Atheiste. A pro-
phane heathen, a destroier of twoe men allreadie.104
Campion was himself a product of the Cross Yard, born of a stationer
father and educated at St Pauls School. He was familiar both with the loud
debates of Pauls Cross and the changing face of type, from black letter to
pica roman.105 Yet Pauls Cross, surrounded by the publishers and printers
of the Cross Yard, was not a phenomenon that existed on its own, but a
synecdoche of a whole society that still gave precedence to the spoken

103Clegg and McLeod, The peaceable and prosperous regiment, Clegg, 10 and 17, note 46;
see McLeod, 64 for diagram of cancellation. The Campion cancelland was sig. 6M3
(1328/1329) mainly written by Abraham Fleming, who seems to have been reluctant to
execute this particular cancellation. For further exploration of the Campion censorship,
see my, A Tangled Chronicle, in Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England.
104Bodl. MS Add. C. 303, fol. 73; BL MS Harley 6265, fol. 22. Both texts are identical in
this passage, but I have here followed the spelling and punctuation of the Bodl. MS (which,
unfortunately, lacks several pages at the beginning), since it is a better text.
105Edmund Campion, Rationes Decem: quibus fretus, certamen adversarijs obtulit in
causa fidei, Edmundus Campianus ([Stonor Park: S. Brinkley et al, 1581]), STC 4536.5, A&R
135.1, was the fourth book to be printed on the Greenstreet House press, but the first to be
in roman type. Since this is the only one in which Campion directly participated, it seems
likely that, having spent so much time in Rome and Prague, Campion chose the type that
had become standard on the Continent, but was only just becoming fashionable here. Sir
John Harington, in his first edition of Orlando Furioso (London: Richard Field, 1591), STC
746, had to ask Field for the same font, pica roman, as Puttenham, BL Add. MS 18920,
fol. 336r. See my Advertising the Reader: Sir John Haringtons Directions in the Margent,
English Literary Renaissance 41.1 (2011), 64109 (6465, and 94) and Steven K. Galbraith,
English Black-Letter Type and Spensers Shepheardes Calender, in Spenser Studies 23
(2008), 1340.
 edmund campion in the shadow of pauls cross287

word. It regarded public speech acts, whether they were sermons, disputa-
tions, trials or executions as powerful, and perhaps exciting, theatrical
events, but discriminated subtly between the varieties of human dis-
course: in the pulpit, the law court, St Marys, Oxford, Westminster Hall or
the Tower of London. Of course, it wished to record discourse in manu-
script and print, as the battle over true reports of what was said at
Campions trial and at the disputations testify.106 The written text, in print
and manuscript, was important, but it was often used in conjunction with
viva voce debate. Campion asked leave on the scaffold to speak a word or
two: it was the last public speech act in a rhetorical career that began (at
the age of thirteen) with greeting Queen Mary in 1553, and that included
speaking in front of Queen Elizabeth and the Emperor Rudolf II. At Pauls
Cross, he might not have been howled off the stage, but Mr Campion in
speech so polished and eloquent as to have few equals, was still waiting
for that serious academic disputacion when his last worde or too fell on
unlearned eares.107

106For a full account, see my, A Tangled Chronicle, in Arts of Remembrance in Early
Modern England.
107Thomas Francis Knox, ed., The First and Second Douai Diaries of the English College,
Douay (London: 1878), 166, cited by McCoog, The Role of Disputation, 149. See BL MS
Harley 422, fol. 34v.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THOMAS BILSON AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM AT PAULS CROSS

Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer

Attacks on Roman Catholic beliefs and practices featured widely in orally-

delivered sermons, their printed versions, and associated controversial
literature for several decades, beginning with John Jewels Challenge ser-
mon of 1559.1 By the 1580s, anti-Catholicism had diminished in scale as a
specific focus in Pauls Cross sermons, yet it still featured as an occasional
topic, and a frequent aside, in the common combination of doctrine,
exhortation, and confutation.2 The printed text rather than the pulpit had
by the 1580s become the primary medium by which to wage inter-religious
warfare. By then, verbal battles at Pauls Cross were being fought between
supporters of the Elizabethan Episcopal establishment and puritans,
many of them advocates of a Presbyterian form of church government.
Consequently, bishops preaching from the Cross, such as Thomas Bilson
Bishop of Winchester, often borrowed polemical techniques from anti-
popery sermons and literature to use in arguments against their puritan
opponents. Bilson does this in his 1597 Pauls Cross sermon on Christs
descent into hell, where he treats a contentious doctrine found in the
Apostles Creed and disputed by many puritans with allusions to anti-
Popery, even though his real opponents are radical puritans.3 There are
interesting connections here as well to the Rheims New Testament contro-
versy of the 1580s, with which Bilson was involved, and to revisions made

1The Challenge sermon was delivered twice at the Cross and an additional time else-
where. Indeed the best evidence of Pauls Cross sermons comes from manuscript notes of
sermons from May 1565 to 1566, of which 18 were confutational sermons, and an additional
four treated anti-Catholic subjects on the side.
2Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 175.
3See Thomas Bilson, The effect of certaine sermons touching the full redemption of man-
kind by the death and bloud of Christ Iesus wherein besides the merite of Christs suffering, the
manner of his offering, the power of his death, the comfort of his crosse, the glorie of his resur-
rection, are handled, what paines Christ suffered in his soule on the crosse: together, with the
place and purpose of his descent to hel after death: preached at Paules Crosse and else where
in London, by the right Reuerend Father Thomas Bilson Bishop of Winchester. With a conclu-
sion to the reader for the cleering of certaine obiections made against said doctrine (London:
290 ellie gebarowski-shafer

in the King James Bible of 1611, in which he had a hand as a member of the
final review committee.
Thomas Bilson was born in 1547 and educated at Winchester school and
New College, Oxford, where he would have been during the great contro-
versy of the 1560s.4 He became prebendary of Winchester in 1576, received
his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1581, and was regarded by his student
Thomas James, the first librarian at Oxfords Bodleian Library, as one of
the profoundest scholars England had produced.5 This explains, in part,
why he was chosen to serve on the final revision committee of the autho-
rized King James Bible in the months leading up to its publication in 1611.6
Before becoming a bishop in the 1590s, he was involved in the Rheims
New Testament controversy. This was sparked by the appearance in 1582
of the Catholic translation of the New Testament by Gregory Martin of
StJohns College, Oxford then licentiate in theology at the English College
at Rheims, France. Following in the Counter-Reformation tradition
ofCatholic polemical Bibles dating back to Luthers early catholic oppo-
nents, this version of the New Testament included not just a vernacular
translation from the Latin Vulgate but also copious annotations denounc-
ing Protestant heresies, alleging that false and heretical corruptions had
been deliberately made in Protestant English translations of the Bible. In
the same year, also from the pen of Gregory Martin, a treatise on the sub-
ject was published under the title A Discoverie of the Manifold Corruptions
of the Holy Scriptures by the Heretikes of our Daies.7 The Rheims New
Testament and A Discoverie formed a companion set of sorts and in con-
junction with the arrival of Jesuit priests in England, and Edmund

Peter Short for Walter Burre, and are to be sold in Paules Churchyard at the signe of the
Flower deluce, 1599).
4At Oxford, he received aid from the benefaction of Robert Nowell (brother of
Alexander, dean of St Pauls), made on his death in 1569. William Whitaker was another
beneficiary of the Nowell trust. James McConica, The Collegiate Society, in idem (ed.), The
History of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), III, 725. On the
great controversy see Angela Ransons discussion of John Jewels Challenge Sermon in
Chapter Eight above.
5Thomas Bilson, ODNB, quoted by Gordon Campbell in Bible: The Story of the King
James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2923.
6He had also been too ill to serve on a translation committee, says Campbell, Story of
the King James Version, 47, 64.
7Gregory Martin, A discouerie of the manifold corruptions of the Holy Scriptures by the
heretikes of our daies specially the English sectaries, and of their foule dealing herein, by par-
tial & false translations to the aduantage of their heresies, in their English Bibles vsed and
authorised since the time of schisme. By Gregory Martin one of the readers of diuinitie in the
English College of Rhemes (Rheims: Iohn Fogny, 1582).
 thomas bilson and anti-catholicism at pauls cross291

Campions Rationes Decem, also known as Campions brag,8 they prompted

many establishment replies and counter-replies from the Catholic camp.
Not by Gregory Martin, however, who died in 1583.
The Rheims New Testament controversy brought Bilson together with
puritans such as William Fulke and Thomas Cartwright, in defense of the
Bishops Bible and the Geneva Bible against these Catholic attacks on
their credibility and faithfulness to the Greek and Hebrew originals, and
most importantly, the validity of the Bible as the rule of faith in the
Church of England. Catholic writers and controversialists had been
accused publicly of mistranslating and misquoting their selections from
the fathers, and using them to prove their doctrines. Every error was
treated by Protestant opponents, in public sermons and in print, as proof
of the unreliability of the Catholic author or theologian and of a grander
plot by the Roman Catholic Church to conceal the truth and keep the
laity in ignorancethe very stereotypical image of Catholicism and late-
medieval religion that the last few generations of scholars have been
trying to set right!
Soon, though, in some impressively thorough and intensely polemical
work coming out of the English seminary at Rheims, Catholics suddenly
had Protestants by the nose. Gregory Martin showed how early versions
such as the Great Bible had seemed to translate with a bias against church
traditions like the veneration of sacred images and doctrines such as pen-
ance but then changed those readings to the more usual and common-
sense ones in the Geneva Bible and/or Bishops Bible. Common examples
are congregation being changed back to church and worshipping of
images changed back to worshipping of idols. This, Martin alleged,
showed that the Church of England was formed, in the 1530s, on a false
translation of the Biblea Bible that remained corrupt, he said, for its
continued use of repent instead of do penance.
Stepping up first to the anti-popery plate in this literary battle was
William Fulke, puritan professor of divinity at the University of Cambridge.
He was on the puritan side of the Vestiarian Controversy in the 1560s and
subsequently preached a sermon at Pauls Cross in 1568. This was done, as
we would say now, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Bachelor of Divinity. Common custom at the time, this mandatory

8BL MS Harley 422. Edmund Campion, Rationes Decem: quibus fretus, certamen adver-
sarijs obtulit in causa fidei, Edmundus Campianus ([Stonor Park: S. Brinkley et al, 1581]), STC
4536.5.
292 ellie gebarowski-shafer

assignment helped to guarantee a steady, if poorly paid, supply of preach-

ers for the two-hour slot, which was not for the faint-hearted or those
without considerable preparation time on hand and oratorical experience
under their belts. In his sermon at the Cross, Fulke preached on the same
subject Bilson tackled there again in 1597: namely Christs descent into
hell.9 This sermon is now lost, but he probably advanced a more or less
Calvinist view of the article, the very same one Bilson would later attack:
that is, not only is Purgatory a false doctrine, but there was no literal
descent into hell (also known as the harrowing of hell) by Christ. Instead,
Fulke said in reply to Martin, He suffered the pains of hell while suffering
on the Cross.
This same book by Fulke is also a compelling example of how puritans
used anti-Catholicism to endear themselves to the establishment while
subtly advancing their own views. Attacking the Church of Rome was one
of the few means by which they were allowed much power in the church
hierarchy, a cause all Protestants could unite behind and one in which
puritans could in many cases check their own controversial teachings at
the door. Sermons at Pauls Cross worked in a similar way. Bishops allowed
puritans like Richard Stock, Francis Marbury, and Henoch Clapham to
enter the Pauls Cross pulpit to preach anti-papal diatribes, but not to harp
on contested doctrines.10 The Rheims New Testament controversy does
not seem to have featured at the Cross specifically. In 1586 one sermon
addressed Edmund Campions Rationes Decem, although it is lost to us
now as well.
In contrast with the 1560s, when sermons at the Cross did engage with
specific Catholic arguments and worked to discredit them, often by attack-
ing the quality and translation of Patristic sources, there was by the 1580s
a focus on exhorting an audience that already was presumed to be stand-
ing on the right side, against popery. By then, Pauls Cross sermons were no
longer geared to convert but to address Protestants and extol to them,
among others, the virtues of godliness and unity.

9William Fulke, A defense of the sincere and true translations of the holie Scriptures into
the English tong against the manifolde cauils, friuolous quarels, and impudent slaunders of
Gregorie Martin, one of the readers of popish diuinitie in the trayterous Seminarie of Rhemes
(London: Henrie Bynneman, 1583), 204. The Englishe meeter vppon the Creede, except it
be drawen to an allegorie, in my iudgement, can not be defended, which iudgement I
declared openly at Paules crosse foureteene or fiueteene yeares agoe. Maister La|timers
errour of Christ suffering torments in hell, af|ter his death, is iustly reprehended, by whome
soeuer it be.
10Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 183.
 thomas bilson and anti-catholicism at pauls cross293

It is to printed controversies, then, that we look to find point-by-point

refutations. And the Rheims New Testament controversy is an excellent
case study here, since Protestant replies such as Fulkes tended to reprint
the whole Catholic work they were refuting plus their own, usually longer,
answers to each point. Fulkes response to the Rheims New Testament pre-
sented Martins translation in parallel columns with the Bishops Bible
translation, and following each chapter were every marginal note and
exegetical comment, reprinted and answered with few pains taken for
brevity. It was a long but moderately successful work, owing as much to its
symbolic defeat of popery as to the analytical and theological qualities of
the work itself, going through some four editions by the mid 17th century.
Puritan leader Thomas Cartwrights confutation, delayed from publica-
tion until 1618, functioned in much the same way, in the latter case belat-
edly commemorating his scholarly acumen and reminding moderate
opponents who the true champions of the Church of England were, over
and against her Roman Catholic rivals.
We learn more of Fulkes puritan position on Christs descent into hell
from his refutation of Martins A Discoverie, published in 1583 and titled, A
Defense of the Sincere and True Translations of the Holy Scriptures into the
English Tongue against the Cavils of Gregory Martin.11 In the seventh chap-
ter of the work, Fulke answers Martins allegations about heretical transla-
tions against Purgatory, Limbus Patrum, and Christs descending into
Hell.12 Martin had said that English translations deny all third places, that
is, places of afterlife other than heaven and hell, by following the render-
ing of a quotation from Psalm 16 in Acts 2:27 by Theodore Beza, Calvins
successor in Geneva: Quoniam non derelinques *cadauer meum *in sepul-
chro, that is, because you will not leave my body in [the] grave. This is said
of Christ and was traditionally translated, thou wilt not leave my soul in
hell, often taken as scriptural evidence for Purgatory among Catholics, or
at the very least as the descent of Christ into hell in more traditionalist
varieties of Protestantism. Puritans, however, tended to deny the literal
descent into hell, even though it was one of the articles of the Church of
England.13 The Geneva Bible clearly appears to be influenced by Bezas
and Calvins teachings on the subject, with its reading, Because thou wilt
not leave my *soule in grave. The side note on the word soul comments
Or, life, or, persone, and hints at Bezas more radical translation, body in

11See note 8 above.

12William Fulke, A defense of the sincere and true translations, 203210.
13See Articles III and VIII of the Articles of Religion.
294 ellie gebarowski-shafer

[the] grave. In both cases, these readings, of obvious appeal to puritan

sympathizers, seemed to take away scriptural support for any kind of
descent into, or harrowing of, hell.
Showing his puritan leanings even while attacking Catholic exegesis,
Fulke defends the Genevan translation. In his answer to Martin, he frames
the very same puritan understanding of Christs descent into hell that
Bilson later attacked in his 1597 Pauls Cross sermon. Fulkes view on
Christs descent into hell was that he
descended into no prison after his deathyethe descended into hell by
suffering in soul the pains due to Gods justice for the sins of all whom he
redeemed, and by vanquishing the devil, and all the power of hell, in work-
ing the redemption of all the children of God.14
This was Fulkes way of both affirming the doctrine of the Church of
England on Christs descent into hell, and denying the Catholic doctrine of
Purgatory as a middle place where Christ descended in order to redeem
the patriarchs, the so-called Limbus Patrum. Here, and throughout the
book, Fulke drives home the point that English translations of the Bible
are correct, that all the variations are due to very sound philological rea-
sons, and ultimately that the Bible, indeed the English Bible, constitutes
the one true rule of faith for the Church of England. This distinctively puri-
tan view was disputed by establishment figures who gave more authority
to ecclesiastical tradition. Bilson, of course, was one of those people: as
anti-Catholic as Fulke was, but with different goals and strategies.
Thomas Bilson, an establishment man who became a bishop in 1596,
entered the Rheims New Testament controversy with his 1584 book, The
True Difference between Christian subjection and Unchristian Rebellion.15
Bilsons anti-Catholic refutation style, compared with that of Fulke and
other puritans involved in the same written controversy, is night and day.
His point is not to defend English Bibles per se, but to defend the
Elizabethan Settlement, politics and doctrine, against popish attacks, and
to show that the Church of England is truly catholic itself, in accordance

14Fulke, A defense of the sincere and true translations, 198.

15Thomas Bilson, The true difference betweene Christian subiection and unchristian
rebellion wherein the princes lawfull power to commaund for trueth, and indepriuable right to
beare the sword are defended against the Popes censures and the Iesuits sophismes vttered in
their apologie and defence of English Catholikes: with a demonstration that the thinges
refourmed in the Church of England by the lawes of this realme are truely Catholike, notwith-
standing the vaine shew made to the contrary in their late Rhemish Testament: by Thomas
Bilson warden of Winchester. Perused and allowed by publike authoritie (Oxford: Ioseph
Barnes printer to the Vniuersitie, 1585).
 thomas bilson and anti-catholicism at pauls cross295

with the scriptures and the ancient writers of the church. Different from
Fulke, Bilson is not concerned with defending the Bible as the rule of faith,
nor with defending English Bibles to the teeth. This becomes significant
later on, when we find Bilson on the final review committee of the King
James Bible, whose translation shows some significant changes to read-
ings Fulke and other puritans had upheld against Catholic criticisms in
the 1580s.
Bilson attacks what he calls a whole sworme of Boie-priests, who have
been sent into England to reduce the Realme to the Romish obedience,
which they call the faith of their fathers. But he doesnt refute his target
texts point by point, the way Fulke did. Instead, he refutes, in a lively dia-
logue format, only the points that claim that the measures of religious
Reform in England are heretical, against scriptures, and against the
Fathers. Perhaps a jab at Fulkes long-winded approach, Bilson says he
chose this format, for avoiding of tedious repetitions. My intent was to
discusse the things, and not to hold on a brable in words 16
I now return to Bilsons 1597 Lenten sermon at the Cross, which
addressed Christs descent into hell. A sermon directed specifically at a
Protestant lay audience, it is different from the aforementioned printed
controversial texts, which were much denser in content, relentlessly
polemical, and served multiple readerships, both lay and clerical. The two
genres were coming closer together than ever before, however, with
Richard Bancrofts inauguration of anti-puritan sermons at Pauls Cross in
1589. This meant that preachers took the techniques of anti-Catholic
preaching and redeployed them against puritans.17 Pauls Cross became a
platform from which to defend the Elizabethan settlement from oppo-
nents within, not just from without. Anti-Catholicism did not disappear
but it also changed in function: in print and in pulpit sermons, it served as
a vehicle for moderates to take jabs at puritans. Preachers like the newly
installed Bishop Bilson had to confute on two fronts: against popery and
against puritans, the more radical sort advocating for Presbyterian church
government, without bishops.
In his Lenten sermon, Bilson attacked Roman Catholic doctrine and
undue veneration of the cross yet quickly found himself in a controversy
with puritans who were scandalized at his defense of the literal harrowing

16See Bilsons Dedicatory Epistle addressed TO THE MOST EX|CELLENT, VERTVOVS

AND NOBLE PRINCESSE, ELIZABETH, in The true difference betweene Christian subiection
and unchristian rebellion.
17See Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 193.
296 ellie gebarowski-shafer

of hell. So quickly indeed that even during the publicly delivered sermon
itself, someone seems to have started the panic deliberately, to cut off
Bilson in the middle of his speech. This bizarre incident was reported by
Sir John Harington. Quoted from Mary Morriseys book: a sodaine and
causeless feare was raised in the audience, by the frawd or folly of some
one auditor, and:
this fear so incredible possest not only the whole multitude, but the Lord
Mayor and other Lords present, that they verily believed that Pauls church
was at that instant falling downe; whereat such a tumult was raised, as not
only disturbed their devotion and attention, but did indeed put some of the
gravest, wisest, and noblest of that assemblie into evident hazard of their
lyves.18
Harington for one believed this was done deliberately, because Bilsons
doctrine was unwelcome to many in London, especially radical puritans
and semi-separatists.
At Easter of the same year, Bilson preached a Spital sermon to defend
his views against a host of puritan counter-attacks, especially by one
Henry Jacob.19 Bilsons sermons were published in 1599, on the long side
for the trajectory from pulpit to print. And, as was the case with many
printed sermons, it was much more detailed than the original 2-hour ora-
tion, the time for which was mercifully reduced to 1.5 hours in the Laudian
period.20 Specifically against Catholics, Bilson says:
The Church of Rome hath wedded a great part of her deuotion to the crosse
of Christ, but vnder that name she adoreth the matter and forme of the
crosse: as for the force and ef|fects of Christs death, which is remission of our
sinnes, satisfaction of Gods wrath, and donation of eternall life, she prodi-
gallie imparteth that to her pilgrimages, pardons, & pur|gatorie, yea to the
works and praiers of quicke and dead; and so magnifying the signe and wood
of the crosse, she dishono|reth the merite and fruit of Christ crucified. But of
her painted and carued crosses, the scripture maketh no mention21
Bilson focuses the bulk of his sermon against those who refute the doc-
trine of Christs descent into hell and say he suffered the full pains of the
damned in hell while on the cross. He directs the rest of it against radical
puritans and semi-separatists, who dont believe Christ literally descended

18Quoted in Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 103.

19Thomas Bilson, The effect of certaine sermons touching the full redemption of mankind
by the death and bloud of Christ Iesus (London: Peter Short for Walter Burre, 1599). See note
3 above.
20Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 100.
21Bilson, The effect of certaine sermons, 4.
 thomas bilson and anti-catholicism at pauls cross297

into hell. In classic sermon rhetoric, he enumerates what the pains of hell
do mean:
The paines of hell (if I be not deceiued) make a fourefold impression in the
soules of men; a carefull feare, which decli|neth them; a doubtfull feare,
which conflicteth with them; a desperate feare which sinketh vnder them,
and a damned feare which suffereth them.22
Later he provides six causes of Christs agony on the cross, every one of
them, he says, more likely and more godlie than this [puritan] devise of
hell paines.23
Bilson also employs numerous Latin quotations, from the Bible and the
fathers, including Tertullian, Athanasius, and Cyrilso much for the now
thoroughly outdated notion that Protestants abandoned the fathers and
the use of the Vulgate.24 Bilsons frequent quotations from the Vulgate do,
however, suggest an extra layer of anti-puritanism and pro-establishment,
catholic confidence, since writers and preachers like Fulke had worked so
hard in the 1580s to disparage the Vulgate and the English Catholic transla-
tion from it published at Rheims. Bilsons use of the fathers is certainly an
anti-puritan strategy, since he rails against Henry Jacobs, his puritan oppo-
nent who scornefullie reiecteth the iudgement of the Fathers when I alle-
age them.25 All this while also employing anti-Catholicism and setting
aside the establishment position from that of Roman Catholicism, where
the authority of later fathers were accepted and there was an insistence on
the superiority of the Vulgate to the Greek and Hebrew texts, which, to be
fair, Catholics also consulted when making their vernacular translations.
Finally, Bilsons work on the King James Bible comes to bear on this
discussion. The bishop opposed the convening of the Hampton Court
conference, but once it was called he attended and served as a leading
delegate, along with Archbishop Whitgift and Richard Bancroft, Bishop of
London.26 He would have been on the opposite side of the conference
table, facing puritans Rainoldes, Chaderton, Knewstub, and Sparks, who
hoped in vain to get approval for the Geneva Bible to be the official Bible
of the Church of England. The translation project resulting in the

22Bilson, The effect of certaine sermons, 9.

23Bilson, The effect of certaine sermons, 17.
24On this point, see Gebarowski-Shafer, Augustine and Apocalypticism in the Rheims
New Testament Controversy, in Augustine and Apocalyptic, ed. Kim Paffenroth and Kari
Kloos (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).
25Bilson, To the Christian Reader, The effect of certaine sermons, B2.
26S. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London: SPCK, 1962), 64; Patrick
McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (New York: Walker, 1967), 348.
298 ellie gebarowski-shafer

Authorised Version was the unexpected result, which has received much
attention in the many conferences and quatercentenary publications of
2011.27 Yet very little was said about Thomas Bilson. Nonetheless, he did
play an important role in the project when he served on the final revision
committee, along with translator Miles Smith, a moderate puritan who
became bishop of Gloucester. Unfortunately, we have no record of the rea-
sons for or the potential arguments surrounding the changes that were
made after the general meeting of the translators, but it has been sug-
gested that Bilsons high church views and zeal for the Establishment bal-
anced the puritan leanings of Miles Smith.28
During the translation process, many readings were changed that Fulke
and other puritans had defended and that seemed to support puritan
teachings. Many of these changes were mandated in Article Three of
Bancrofts Rules to be Observed in the Translation of the Bible, where
scholars were instructed to keep the old Ecclesiastical Words, specifying
that the Word Church was not to be translated Congregation.29 Fulke and
Cartwright had vigorously defended previous English translations as being
accurate, even when they differed from one another. In contrast, the com-
mittee translators largely ignored the previous generations impassioned
apologetics. They changed various readings that seemed to give Mary
more cause for veneration, and others that allegedly gave priests and
clergy more authority.30 In still other places, words that had been used to

27See E.G. Bagley (Gebarowski-Shafer), The King James Bibles 400th Anniversary in
Retrospect, at Oxford Biblical Studies Online, ed. Michael Coogan (April 2012), http://
global.oup.com/obso/focus/focus_on_king_james. Recent book-length studies on the
making and reception of the KJB include David Norton, The King James Bible: A Short
History from Tyndale to Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Gordon
Campbell, The Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 16112011 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010); and Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones, eds., The King James Bible
after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
28G.S. Paine, The Learned Men (New York: Crowell, 1959), 24. Smith protested that after
he and Bilson had finished their revision work, Archbishop Bancroft, who was so potent
there is no contradicting him, unilaterally made fourteen additional changes! We do not
know what all these changes were, but at least one of them was the adding of what Smith
called the glorious word bishopric in Acts 1:20, in reference to Judas, so that the passage
read, His bishopric let another take. Quoted in Paine, The Learned Men, 128. Since Smith
protested against this important change by Bancroft, he probably stood against the
Archbishop and/or Bilson on other changesperhaps against some of the theologically
significant revisions in the Authorized Version, of which there were many.
29Alfred W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible (London: Oxford University Press, 1911),
5354.
30E.g. Luke 1:42 and 1 Timothy 4:14. See E.G. Bagley (Gebarowski-Shafer), Appendix of
Controversial Translations in English Bibles and Other Relevant Versions, Heretical
 thomas bilson and anti-catholicism at pauls cross299

cast Catholic teachings in a dark light were modified, such as traditions

which was previously used only with negative connotations, such as in
reference to traditions of men, then avoided when used in a positive
sense. According to Martin, this had been done in the early years of
Protestantism in order to undermine unwritten apostolic traditions.
Notwithstanding current imprints of Fulkes New Testament, the word
tradition was restored in several key passages in the new but ill-received
establishment Bible.
These changes related specifically to the debate over Psalm 16:10 and
Acts 2:27, thou wilt not leave my soul in hell. Here, Fulkes rigorous defense
of the Genevan translation and the Calvinism of Theodore Beza were dis-
regarded by members of the second Oxford company of translators who
were responsible for the Gospels, Acts, and the Book of Revelation. Just as
Bilson had preached against the Geneva Bibles soul in grave in favour of
the Bishops Bibles soul in hell, he would have been pleased to oversee
the retention of the traditional wording of hell in that key passage.31
Knowing what Bilson and others did about controversies ranging from
printed anti-Catholic texts to anti-puritan sermons and related literature,
this choice was significant, and it helped to maintain direct scriptural sup-
port for Christs literal descent to hell, and of course to take a subtle jab at
puritans who kept Fulkes refutation of the Rheims New Testament in
print and saw Cartwrights Confutation through to the press in 1618.
By the 1620s, much changed at Pauls Cross, not least the nature of anti-
Catholicism, which was specifically discouraged in the Directions for
Preachers.32 The heyday of the Cross was over, but the fashion of ranting

corruptions and false translations: Catholic criticisms of the Protestant English Bible, 1582
1860 (Oxford University: DPhil thesis, 2007), 3536, 734.
31I include here a sample of comparative translations of Acts 2:27. For a fuller list with
original annotations from the relevant versions, see the appendix of my DPhil dissertation,
4244:
Vulgate, Erasmus, Pagninus Quoniam non derelinques animam meam in inferno
Wycliffe For thou schalt not leeue my soule in helle
Tyndale 1534, Matthew, Great Because thou wilt not leve my soul in hell
Castalione quoniam tu animam meam non relinques in Orco
Beza Quoniam non derelinques *cadauer meum *in sepulchro
Geneva Because thou wilt not leaue my *soule in graue | [Or, life, or, persone.]
F rench Geneva Car tu ne delaisseras point *mon ame au sepulchre | [c. Que mon
corps soit laiss en pourriture.]
Bishops Because thou wylt not leaue my soule in hell
RNT Because thou wilt *not leaue my soul in *hel
AV Because thou wilt not leaue my soule in hell
32Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 188.
300 ellie gebarowski-shafer

against Roman Catholicism continued, and it wasnt uncommon for an

attack on Catholics to turn into, or provide a mask for, attacks on puritans,
and later, Arminians. There are conflicting accounts as to whether
Arminian doctrine was preached from Pauls Cross. Richard Montague
wrote in 1625 that he would never venture to preach there, while Thomas
Gataker said in 1630 that Arminian points were frequently preached at
Pauls Cross.33 Montague himself was burned by his own anti-Catholic
writing in the Gagger controversy of the 1620s, when he refuted a Catholic
book and outed himself as an Arminian. It is clear that anti-Catholicism,
in the pulpit and in print, served many purposes, attacking enemies of the
Church of England, both from within and from without.

33Morrisey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 101.

 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

QUEEN ELIZABETHS PERFORMANCE AT PAULS CROSS IN 1588

Steven W. May

On Tuesday the fifth of June 2012, Queen Elizabeth II journeyed to St Pauls

Cathedral for a thanksgiving service celebrating her sixty years on the
throne. Some 424 years earlier, on 24 November 1588 her namesake, Queen
Elizabeth I, had likewise attended services at St Pauls, to thank God for
Englands victory over the Spanish Armada. The royal participation in
these two ceremonies differed in this crucial respect: the first Elizabeth
actually composed a part of the service performed at the Cathedral in
1588, something that, so far as I know, Elizabeth II did not attempt last
June.
We have long known that Elizabeth Tudor may have contributed some-
thing to the Armada victory celebration. The calendar of John Henry
Gurneys manuscripts published in 1891 described a poem beginning Look
and bow down thine ear, O Lord as made by her Majesty and sung before
her at her coming from Whitehall to Pauls through Fleetstreet in 1588.
Sung in December.1 The text is clearly a very personal, first-person expres-
sion of thanksgiving for victory. Its title, however, casts some doubt on
when and where the poem was sung. The Queen did pass along Fleet
Street to St Pauls, but the celebration took place in November, not
December. Moreover, Elizabeth made her way to the Cathedral from
Somerset House, not Whitehall. Another text of the poem in John Rhodess
Countrie Mans Comfort (1637), likewise attributes it to the Queen at the
time of the Armada, with the additional information that it was per-
formed at Saint Pauls crosse in London (sig. D6v). Rhodes also credits
Elizabeth with the unique text of a second poem written on the same
occasion. This is a metrical prayer for protection beginning Deliver me,
O Lord my God, from all my foes that be (sig. D6r-6v). It obviously

1Historical Manuscripts Commission, Twelfth Report, Appendix, part 9 (London: HMSO,

1891), 128. Edited from this document (now National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, MS
SNG/4) in Steven W. May, ed. Selected Works of Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2004), Poem 9. I am grateful to John King, Peter McCullough, Mary Morrissey, and
John Wall for very useful advice and information regarding various aspects of this paper.
302 steven w. may

preceded the thanksgiving poem. Rhodess book was entered in the

Stationers Register in 1588, although no copy of that first edition is known.
Given that his attribution to the Queen of Look and bow down supports
that in the National Maritime Museums manuscript text, her claim to this
second poem appears trustworthy as well. But were either of these hymn-
like verse prayers actually performed at some point in the Armada thanks-
giving festivities?
One obstacle to such a performance is Elizabeths concern for privacy
with regard to her writings in verse or prose, especially her prayers. At the
time of the Cadiz Raid in 1596, Secretary Robert Cecil surreptitiously sent
a copy of the Queens prayer for the expeditions success to its command-
ers, the Earl of Essex and Lord Admiral Howard. In his letter Cecil empha-
sized the risk he has taken to acquaint them with the prayer: That which
was only meant as a secret sacrifice to one I have presumed out of trust to
participate [that is, share] with two. It came to my hands accidently; I dare
scarce justify the sight, much less the copy.2 He concludes by asking them
to keep what he has sent them in the strictest confidence.
An even greater breach of royal privacy occurred in the following year
with regard to Elizabeths prayer for the success of the 1597 naval expedi-
tion against Spain. John Whitgift, a Privy Counseller and Archbishop of
Canterbury much-favoured by the Queen, published her prayer in a pam-
phlet of similar devotional works, the rather ironically entitled Certaine
Prayers set foorth by Authoritie. Elizabeths composition appeared first in
the collection opposite the royal arms and in a different font from the
other prayers in the volume. But it was nowhere ascribed to Elizabeth. She
was nevertheless highly offended; Secretary Cecil conveyed her displea-
sure in a letter to Whitgift:
May it please your Grace,
I have presented unto the Queen your book of printed prayers she hath
willed me to give you many thanks for the same But I must tell you withal,
that she is much troubled that her own prayer is in print, and therefore hath
commanded me to require you in any wise to make stay of it, and that the
same may be taken out of all the books that are printed. This I hope your
Grace will effect, and hereof I mean (when I shall see you) to speak with you
further.
In a postscript, Cecil added: I assure you her Majesty requests this very
earnestly to be done.3 As a result, Whitgifts book of prayers survives in

2Bodl. MS Tanner 76, f. 30r (spelling modernized).

3Lambeth Palace Library, Fairhurst MS 3470, f. 195r (spelling modernized).
 queen elizabeths performance at pauls cross in 1588303

four different states only two of which include Elizabeths prayer. Under
standably, editors of the revised Short-Title Catalogue assumed that the
Queens prayer was added to the pamphlet, not deleted from it. They thus
identify them as later editions, whereas Cecils letter reveals that they
belonged to the earlier states of the text.4
Accordingly, although Elizabeth has been credited with four substantial
contemporary collections of prayers, three printed and one in manuscript,
their authenticity as either her own work or, with regard to the printed
volumes, published with her approval, invites skepticism. While all four
collections include prayers addressed to God in the Queens voice, only
two include prayers she is likely to have composed, and only one of these
seems likely to have been published with royal approval. The lost manu-
script termed Queen Elizabeths Prayer Book can be dismissed at the out-
set. It is manifestly not her work, for its handwriting bears no resemblance
to anything she is known to have written.5 Henry Woudhuysen confirmed
this rejection from the canon by identifying the scribe as a Cambridge
student, John Palmer, who obviously prepared the book as a gift for the
Queen.6
With regard to the printed books, Elizabeth no doubt sanctioned the
publication in 1569 of Christian Prayers and Meditations in English, French,
Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Latin (STC 6428). The book was published by a
royally favoured printer, John Day, and one meticulously hand-colored
copy of it was presented to the Queen.7 As the editors of her Collected
Works note, the royal arms appear on the books first and last leaves, while
the woman kneeling in prayer illustrated in the frontispiece is labeled
Elizabeth Regina.8 For all its royal trappings, I doubt that Elizabeth wrote

4A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland 14751640,

first compiled by A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, 2nd ed. begun by W.A. Jackson and F.S.
Ferguson, completed by K.F. Pantzer, 3 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 197686)
hereafter cited as STC. Cecil showed the Queen either STC 16528a or 16528a.5, with her
prayer opposite the royal arms. Her prayer was excised from the subsequent editions, STC
16528 and 16528.5.
5The original survives only as British Library MS Facs. 218, with an introduction signed
J.W. (John Southwood), 1893 (f. iii verso). The facsimile was edited by Adam Fox with a
translation of the foreign language prayers as A Book of Devotions Composed by Her Majesty
(Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1970).
6The Queens Own Hand: A Preliminary Account, in Elizabeth I and the Culture of
Writing, ed. Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo (London: The British Library, 2007), 19. [127].
7Now Lambeth Palace MS 1049.
8Elizabeth I Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1434n. Translations of prayers in foreign lan-
guages attributed to the Queen are quoted from this edition.
304 steven w. may

any of its eighteen prayers set forth in her voice (in English, French, Italian,
Spanish, Latin, and Greek), for their content is suspiciously unElizabe-
than. Their common, dominant theme is Elizabeths, and Englands, adher-
ence to the true (Protestant) religion, and the necessity not only of
preserving that faith but of promoting it in other lands. She prays, for
example, that enlightened religion may prevail with all her people at a
time when Satan is making every effortto hinder the course of Thy
Gospel (146). She implores God to make deliverance and restoration of
Thy Churches throughout the earth (149), and that I might be made Thy
instrument for replanting and establishing in this part of the world.
Thyworship, and most holy religion (154). She asks God that I may know
Thy way upon the earth, welcome Thy holy and true worship and con-
vey this to the people who are my subjects (162). In the final Greek prayer
she asks God to protect freely willed religion, to destroy superstitious
fear to spy out the worship of idols, and to save her from those who
hate meAntichrists, Pope lovers, atheists, and all persons who fail to
obey Thee (163). Other themes in these prayers seem equally out of step
with Elizabeths political and spiritual priorities. She refers several times
to the importance of true pastors, and expulsion of false shepherds from
the Church (148, 160). Her Calvinism is witnessed by confessions of her
hopelessly sinful nature.9 An emphasis on predestined salvation and faith
in the existence of Gods elect also emerges in several passages: having
received me into Thy Church among the number of Thy children (145);
especially mayst Thou have pity on Thy elect (149). These prayers have all
the earmarks of composition by one or more ordained Anglican clergy-
men who expressed the priorities they wished the Queen to adopt, not
necessarily those at the forefront of her governing philosophy or agenda.
A collection of Latin prayers published in 1563 under the title Precationes
priuat[ae] Regiae E. R. (STC 7576.7), have a greater claim to authenticity,
but not to authorized publication. These include prayer in Elizabeths
voice that refers explicitly to her near-fatal bout of smallpox in 1562. She
also prays to rule wisely and justly over her people, and she thanks God for
her royal origins (favourite themes in the Queens prayers and speeches).10

9The most striking case, in the second Latin prayer, has Elizabeth confessing that my
youthindeed my cradlebreathed forth nothing but the dung of that prior life, whence
yet again I have had to await your coming as a Judge angry with me. See Elizabeth
I Collected Works, 159.
10These seven prayers are translated into English in Elizabeth I Collected Works, ed.
Marcus et al., 13543. The editors describe other contents of the book as, second, Elizabeths
commonplace book (sigs. Fii r-Kvi r), and third, Lists of the civil and ecclesiastical offices
 queen elizabeths performance at pauls cross in 1588305

We know that in these years Elizabeth continued her training in Greek

and Latin under Roger Aschams tutelage.11 This could explain the prayers
language. Perhaps her recovery from a life-threatening disease moved
her to allow the publication of these private devotions as a form of
thanksgivingor perhaps she merely tolerated publication after the books
printer, Thomas Purfoot, acquired these copies of her prayers. Purfoot was
a rather obscure printer, not a royal patentee as was Day. The book is care-
fully set forth in a diminutive decimo-sexto format, but its miscellaneous
contents mark it as an ad hoc, opportunistic production. It was not entered
in the Stationers Register. The prayers occupy signatures A2-F1, some
seventy-nine pages. Purfoot brought it closer to full book length by
appending seventy-four pages of Latin Sententi, or sayings excerpted
from the Bible, Church Fathers, and classical authors. These are arranged
under commonplace headings beginning with De Regno (rule, sig. F3),
and continuing with entries under justice, mercy, counsel, peace and war.
The subjects are appropriate for princely consideration, but nothing con-
nects them overtly with Elizabeth. The Sententi are followed on signa-
tures K7-M8v with listings, also in Latin, of the lands and offices of church
and state that comprise the kingdom of Elizabeta Regina Angli. Anno. D.
1562. These include among other lists, all the bishoprics, classes of
noblemen, and the principal financial and legal offices of the realm. The
entries are generously spaced on these twenty pages. Purfoot thus employs
two types of filler to bring the volume to a competent size, giving it a
miscellaneous character inappropriate for the make-up of a royally sanc-
tioned book of devotions.
The third printed book of prayers, published in 1582, has the best claim
to both the authenticity of its prayers attributed to Elizabeth and the like-
lihood that she approved its publication. Variae Meditationes et Preces piae
(STC 17774), was set forth by Christopher Barker, who describes himself on
the title page as her majestys Typographus and humble servant. The
assertion was literal. During the 1570s, Barker became a protg of the
Queens Secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham. In 1575, Barker gained a patent
to publish the Geneva Bible, and two years later he purchased the office of

of the realm (135). Mueller and Marcus edit the Latin prayers with their prefatory verses
from Scripture in Elizabeth I Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 10923.
11Ascham recounts how he went vp to read with the Queenes Maiestie in the Greke
tongue on the evening of December 10, 1563 when Sir Richard Sackville interrupted
their study to request that he write a treatise on education that became The Scholemaster;
Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (1904; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), 177.
306 steven w. may

Queens printer with the valuable patent to publish all bibles in English.12
He duly entered the Variae Meditationes in the Stationers Register on 12
April 1582. The book opens with two Latin prayers, Precatio Reginae ad
Dominum Iesum, followed by Precatio Reginae pro Subditis (sig. A4r-8v).
The remaining contents, both prayers and religious instruction, are unat-
tributed, but given Barkers status, the two prayers here attributed to the
Queen are no doubt authentic and set forth with royal assent.
The prayers attributed to Elizabeth in these four volumes thus present
rather inconsistent testimony to her attitude toward publication of her
prayers or prayers intended for her use. She manifestly did not compose
the prayers set forth in her person in the manuscript prayer book that was
composed as a gift for her. While the 1569 Christian Prayers and Meditations
was no doubt published cum privilegio, the copy Elizabeth owned was
most likely another gift book of devotions for her use, not a collection of
her own compositions in whole or part. She probably did compose the
Latin prayers in the 1563 Precationes, but the books miscellaneous con-
tents suggest that its publication was unauthorized. Barkers authorized
publication of her two Latin prayers in 1582 could indicate that she
objected only to publication of her English prayers; those in Latin (as set
forth by Purfoot as well) presumably would have been read by a suffi-
ciently discerning, educated audience of her subjects. But there is this fur-
ther complication regarding her attitude toward her English prayers.
Oblivious to Cecils warning about Elizabeths proprietary regard for her
prayer for the expedition of 1596, during her reign John Norden included it
in at least three editions of his very popular Pensive Mans Practise (1596
1600). Norden was a prominent surveyor as well as devotional writer, but
neither he nor his English printers during these years (John Windet,
Robert Robinson, John Oxenbridge, and Richard Bradocke), enjoyed any
particular royal favour. Nevertheless, and unlike Archbishop Whitgifts
Certaine Prayers of 1597, their work went uncensored.
Perhaps, then, Elizabeths inconsistent policies regarding the publica-
tion of her own prayers left room for her to condone an anonymous,
public performance of her Armada hymn at St Pauls in 1588. The likeli-
hood is bolstered by the fact that she was not secretive about all of her
writings. On at least two occasions she was, in Harold Loves phrase, a
scribal publisher.13 In 1576 she sent a fair copy of her closing speech in

12David Kathman, Barker, Christopher, ODNB.

13The Culture and Commerce of Texts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1998). See especially Chapter 2, Publication in the Scribal Medium.
 queen elizabeths performance at pauls cross in 1588307

Parliament to her godson, John Harington. Others may have been favoured
with copies of this speech as well, for it circulated widely and survives in
at least a dozen manuscripts.14 Elizabeth seems also to have released into
scribal circulation a much more private work, her poem on the defeat of
the Northern Rebellion in 1570. This defiant work begins, The doubt of
future foes exiles my present joy. It excoriates those who rose up against
her and threatens to behead any future rebels, particularly Mary, Queen of
Scots. Elizabeth chastised Lady Willoughby for secretly copying a draft of
this poem from her writing tablet. However, textual analysis of a dozen
contemporary manuscripts reveals that this poem descended from the
archetype along not one, but three independent lines of transmission. In
other words, it was copied from the original version not only by Lady
Willoughby, but by two other scribes. These other copies could have been
made later, and from a revised version or versions of the poem, but it is
hard to imagine that anyone except the Queen could have authorized mul-
tiple releases of her work.15 Finally, with regard to Elizabeths first Armada
hymn, Rhodes entitled it An Antheme often Sung in the Royall Chappel of
our late Queene Elizabeth.16 Indeed, a contemporary musical setting for
the poem is attributed to Dr. John Bull, who had been appointed gentle-
men of the Chapel Royal in 1586.17
Thus Elizabeth did not consider her personal compositions, whether
prayers, poems, or speeches, entirely private. The question is would she
have allowed even an anonymous public performance of her Armda
thanksgiving hymn? Given the emotional environment surrounding
Englands conflict with the Armada, and its unexpectedly wholesale dis-
persal and defeat, I think Elizabeth might well have been moved to take

14Sir John Harington, Nug Antiqu, ed. Henry Harington (London: J. Wright, 1804),
1:1278; May, ed., Selected Works, Speech 7.
15For a preliminary analysis of the textual transmission of this poem see Steven W. May,
Queen Elizabeths Future Foes: Editing Manuscripts with the First-Line Index of
Elizabethan Verse (a Future Friend), in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, III, ed. W. Speed
Hill (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 2004), 112.
16A briefe summe of the treason intended against the King & state, when they should haue
been assembled in Parliament. Nouember. 5. 1605 Fit for to instruct the simple and ignorant
heerein: that they be not seduced any longer by papists (London: E[dward] A[llde] for
Edward White, and are to be solde at his shop neere the little north doore of Saint Paules
Church at the signe of the Gunne, 1606), sig. C3v-4. The first person singular viewpoint of
Rhodess text in The Countrie Mans Comfort is here revised to first person plural. In the
second edition of the Briefe some (STC 20960.5), also published in 1606, Rhodes added four
more lines of poulters couplets to the hymn. Presumably, his 1588 text preserved the
Queens voice as does the 1637 reprint.
17Bodl. MS Rawl. poet. 23, 141.
308 steven w. may

this extraordinary step. The rhetoric of her poems on this occasion shows
how intensely she reacted to that summers events. Public pronounce-
ments on the victory overwhelmingly attributed it to Divine intervention,
as in the Queens second poem, He made the winds and water rise/ to
scatter all mine enemies. Europes richest and most powerful nation,
champion of Catholicism in league with the Pope, had sent its invincible
Armada against a relatively weak, Protestant England. Englands victory
confirmed the doctrine, espoused by the English church and state almost
from the moment of Elizabeths coronation, that England nurtured the
true Christian Church pitted against the forces of anti-Christ, namely, the
Pope. On this momentous, emotionally charged occasion, the Queen
would have been understandably moved to compromise her sense of
private piety by contributing her verse prayer to the worship service.
Herown words effectively describe the event: Look and bow down thine
ear, OLord, from thy bright sphere behold and see, / Thy handmaid and
thy handiwork amongst thy priests offering to thee/ Zeal for incense
reaching the skies,/ Myself and scepter sacrifice.
If this poem was indeed sung before the Queen during the celebration,
when and where did the performance occur? Two broadside ballads that
describe the Thanksgiving festivities provide significant new information
about what happened that November 24. No copies of the printed broad-
sides seem to have survived, but both were copied into what is now British
Library MS Add. 82370. This very interesting anthology of verse and prose
was compiled by John Hanson of Rastrick, Yorkshire, before his death in
1599.18 These ballads served, as was often the case, as singable news reports.
They provide many eye-witness details about the procession and cere-
mony that appear nowhere else. The first ballad reports, for example, that
the citizens played music On Dyverse Instrumentes during the procession
to the Cathedral. Could they also have arranged to sing her poem, as the
Gurney manuscript describes, at her coming through Fleetstreet? This
seems highly improbable, in terms of both staging and given the testimony
of another eye-witness, the Jesuit Henry Garnet. He describes how an
unceasing uproar of the vast crowds echoed all round her while all along
the way there were bands of musicians playing in appointed places.19
This celebratory commotion was no place to offer up a royal hymn to God.

18Arthur F. Marotti and I have published the two ballads from this manuscript as a
spin-off of our book-length study of its highly miscellaneous contents, in Two Lost Ballads
of the Armada Thanksgiving Celebration, English Literary Renaissance 41 (2011), 3163.
19Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet 15551606 and the Gunpowder Plot (London and New
York: Longmans, 1964), 82.
 queen elizabeths performance at pauls cross in 1588309

No descriptions of what happened at the service in St Pauls point toany

liturgical opportunities for the Queens compositions to have been per-
formed there. A welcoming party of leading clergy headed by theBishop
of London and the Dean of St Pauls greeted the Queen at theCathedrals
west door. They escorted her under a rich Canapy down the west aisle to
a private, enclosed stall. There she heard the service. Then, according to
John Stow, she was brought to a closet of purpose made out of the North
wal of the church, towards [that is, facing] the pulpit crosse.20 From this
vantage point she listened to the sermon delivered by John Piers, Bishop of
Salisbury. His was the fifth sermon at Pauls Crosss on the subject of the
Armada since the previous August 20.21 Piers was also a royal almoner,
suggesting that Elizabeth influenced the choice of preacher on this his-
toric national occasion. He was elevated to the Archbishopric of York in
the following year.
At this point, events unfolded as described only in the first ballad from
the Additional Manuscript. As Bishop Piers finished his sermon, the ballad
states that:
The Ear[l] of oxford openyng then
The wyndowes for hyr grace
The Chyldren of the hospytall
She sawe before hyr [f]ace (ll.17376)

The identity of these children is uncertain, as is the purpose of their sud-

den confrontation with the Queen at this point in the ceremony. The chil-
dren most ready at hand were, of course, the boys of St Pauls. Originally,
the cathedral had nurtured children in a grammar school, a song school,
and a hospital or almonry for the poor supervised by an almoner. From at
least the thirteenth century the almoner of St Pauls had been responsible
for the nurture and training of these charity boys or almonry boys.
Cathedral statutes of 1263 state that the almoner was to supervise eight
boys fit for the service of the Church whom he is to have instructed either
by himself or by another master in matters pertaining to the service of the
Church and in literature, that is, Latin grammar.22 By Elizabeths reign,
these pueri elemosinarii, now ten in number, had long formed the nucleus

20The Annales of England (London: Ralfe Newbery, 1592), sig. 4P1v.

21Millar MacLure, Register of Sermons Preached at Pauls Cross 15341642, revised and
augmented by Jackson Campbell Boswell and Peter Pauls (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions,
1989), 66.
22A.F. Leach, St Pauls School before Colet, Archologia 62.12, 2nd ser. (1910), 1967.
310 steven w. may

of the boys of the song school.23 It was doubly appropriate for Oxford to
introduce them as a childrens choir to the Queen. As Lord Great
Chamberlain on state occasions he could claim some responsibility for
ceremony and entertainment, as did the Lord Chamberlain of the royal
household on a regular basis. Moreover, under the Earls patronage Pauls
Boys had joined with Oxfords boys to perform John Lylys plays at court
during the Christmas seasons of 158384 and 158485. They quite plausi-
bly appeared before the Queen on this occasion for the specific purpose of
singing her own hymn as a fitting and personal conclusion to the thanks-
giving ceremony.
However, these children may have had nothing at all to do with St Pauls
Cathedral. Professor Peter McCullough of Lincoln College, Oxford, and
Canon of St Pauls Cathedral, informs me that St Pauls school was never
referred to as a hospital. The children of the Hospital designated instead
the orphaned children of Christs Hospital, who resided in the former
Greyfriars Monastery on Newgate Street (a site renamed Christchurch
after the Dissolution).24 Edward VI was instrumental in founding this
institution late in 1552, along with the St Thomas and Bridewell hospitals
for adults. The children of Christs regularly took part in London civic pag-
eantry. In Fool upon foole (1605), Robert Armin describes how On Easter
Munday the auncient custome is, that all the children of the Hospitall
goe before my Lord Maior to the Spittle [Hospital], that the world may
witnesse the workes of God and man, in maintenance of so many poore
people.25 Machyns Diary records their presence at London funerals in
1553, 1555, 1562 and 1563; they numbered 100 children on the second occa-
sion and are described as boyth boysse and wenchys in 1563. A sermon at
St Marys on 19 April 1557 was attended by the Lord Mayor, twenty-three
aldermen, and alle the chylderyn of the hospetall in blue garmenttes.26
It would thus be quite normal for the children of Christs Hospital to be
present in the churchyard for the Armada thanksgiving sermon, but they
were not known as choristers and it is not clear that any of them were suf-
ficiently trained to sing Elizabeths poem on this solemn occasion.
This conflicting evidence points toward two possible scenarios which
I find difficult to arbitrate. There was no reason for the balladeer to single
out the sudden appearance before the Queen of The Chyldren of the

23E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923; rpt.
1961), 2:911.
24Private communication, December 16, 2012.
25STC 772.5, sig. C4.
26Diary of Henry Machyn, 32, 99, 131, 291, 305.
 queen elizabeths performance at pauls cross in 1588311

hospytall, that is, Christs Hospital, unless they were to play some part in
the ceremony. Even if assembled some one-hundred strong for the occa-
sion, they would have formed only part of the crowd in the churchyard
that afternoon among many other of the Queens subjects. Although these
children never performed plays at court or in public, as did Pauls Boys, the
children of the Hospital received a similar education. John Stow records
that after attending Bartholomew Fair in 1555, the Lord Mayor and alder-
men came to Christs Hospital within Newgate, where they heard a dispu-
tation betweene the Schollers of Paules Schoole, Saint Anthonies Schoole,
and the Schollers of the said Hospitall.27 Upon her entrance into London
as Queen on 14 January 1559, Elizabeth had encountered the children of
the Hospital at St Dunstans Church, where one of them greeted her with a
Latin oration: The child after he had ended his oration, kissed the paper
wherein the same was written and reached it to the Queens Majesty, who
took it and declared her gracious mind toward their relief. As good as her
word, on 4 March following Elizabeth sent to Christs Hospital 10 for the
childrens use.28 Perhaps she nurtured a sentimental attachment to the
Hospital on account of its founding by her half-brother, Edward VI. If so,
she might have commissioned an ad hoc choir of these children to sing her
hymn, whether or not singing formed a part of their schooling.
On the other hand, it is possible the balladeer expanded the customary
phrase in referring to these children as of the hospytall when they were
instead the children of St Pauls. The problem he faced was to work them
into his poem in an iambic tetrameter line, which is easy enough for The
Chyldren of the hospytall. But the Children of Pauls do not readily lend
themselves to this meter: The Children of St Pauls School is a syllable
short; The boys of St Pauls School is short by two syllables while The
StPauls school boys (or children) destroys the lines rhythm. The boys of
the Cathedral school will do it, but they were always termed the boys or
children of Pauls, not of the Cathedral. Its choir boys were, however, still
part of an eleemoysonary foundation, as were the children of Christs
Hospital. The master of the Cathedral song school had always been its
almoner. In his will of 1582, for instance, Sebastian Westcott, master of the
song school who became schoolmaster of Pauls by 1557, described himself
as almoner of St Pauls dwelling in the almonry.29 The boys of Christs

27The Chronicles of England, STC 23333, 1580, sig. 3Z2v.

28The Queens Majestys Passage and Related Documents, ed. Germaine Warkentin
(Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 93, 124.
29Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 2:12, 15n.
312 steven w. may

Hospital, and those of St Pauls were thus very similar beneficiaries of reli-
gious institutions and might be described as of the hospital in that words
sense as A charitable institution for the housing and maintenance of the
needy (OED hospital, n. 2a).
Whether of Christs Hospital or St Pauls Cathedral, the children who
confronted the Queen before her face when Oxford opened the windows
were surely present for some purpose beyond mere display. In addition to
opening and closing prayers, the singing of psalms at Pauls Cross sermons
had been introduced during Elizabeths reign, and Rhodess title to the
hymn of thanksgiving specifies that it was performed at Saint Pauls
crosse. The second ballad in the Additional Manuscript confirms that
there was, indeed, singing after the sermon:
And when he hade the Sermon done
And psalmes Ryght solemply were songe
Hyr heighnes shewd hyr selff amonge
Hyr people th[e]re of London
(f. 25v)
Tantalizing but inconclusive evidence suggests that the royal musician
William Byrd was commissioned to set the Queens hymn to music for this
performance. A setting of the work attributed to Byrd survives in British
Library MS Add. 31992, f. 43v. Its text, however, is limited to the incipit,
and the score is in lute tablature, not the multi-part setting appropriate
for a boys choir. Still, Byrd obviously did have access to Elizabeths poem.
He had been a gentleman of the Chapel Royal since 1572. In 1575 the
Crown favoured him with a joint patent for publishing music. The Queen
thereafter intervened to protect Byrd, a devout Catholic, from the harsh
legal penalties levied against recusants. He was an obvious choice to
provide music for the Queens hymn of thanksgiving so that the children
could sing it to her.
The logistics of their performance, whatever they sang, create addi-
tional problems. While the royal closet in the north wall of the Cathedral
faced the Cross, John Wall has concluded in a research report on the
Virtual Pauls Cross website, that the preacher at Pauls Cross faced west-
ward, toward the North Transept, and stood in a small pulpit a step out
from under the roof line of the Cross structure itself.30 In that case, the
Queen, looking north toward the Cross, must have turned at least slightly

30http://virtualpaulscrossproject.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/st-pauls-cathedral-rises-again
.html.
 queen elizabeths performance at pauls cross in 1588313

to the left in order to view Bishop Piers in profile as he delivered the ser-
mon. Was the choir, perhaps, stationed in a room along the east wall of the
north transept? Afterward, Oxford opened the rooms windows to reveal
the Children poised to sing the Queens hymn before her face.
Their presence across the churchyard, however, would lack the imme-
diacy implied by their sudden appearance before her face. It would also
require the Lord Great Chamberlain to leave the royal presence in order to
open windows in the east wall of the north transept. A more likely sce-
nario, perhaps, has Elizabeth listening to the sermon in the privacy of the
closet, her person shut off from prying eyes by its windows. After the ser-
mon, the children were placed in the churchyard before the royal enclave.
Only then did Oxford open the windows so that the choir appeared before
her face.
Other scenarios are no doubt possible, and the case for their singing
the Queens hymn to her on this occasion is admittedly circumstantial.
Itderives, however, from the following evidence: 1. A contemporary manu-
script claims that Elizabeths hymn of thanksgiving for the Armadas defeat
was sung before her at some point in the thanksgiving ceremony. 2. John
Rhodes specifies in print that this occurred at Pauls Cross, while the
second Armada ballad states that psalms were sung after the sermon in
the churchyard. 3. After the bishops sermon, The Chyldren of the
hospytall appeared before the Queen to perform some concluding part in
the ceremony. 4. The royal musician William Byrd had access to the
Queens poem and set it to music, granted that his extant setting would
not be suitable for performance by a choir. 5. The first-person voice of
Elizabeths hymn describes such a concluding events basic contours: it
asks God to look down on His handmaid, among His priests, offering to
Him her devotion, herself, and her scepter of rule. It is reasonable to con-
clude, I think, that the Queen arranged for her hymn to be performed by
either the Children of Christs Hospital or the Children of St Pauls to pro-
vide an especially personal, royal closure to the Thanksgiving celebration.
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

JOHN COPCOT, JOHN WHITGIFT, AND MARK FRANK:

RIGHT CAUSE AND FAITHFUL OBEDIENCE

P.G. Stanwood

Among many defenders of the reformed English Church in the years after
the Elizabethan Settlement (1559), stand a number of lively proponents.
One of them is John Copcot (ca. 15471590), who spent much of his life in
Cambridge, where he eventually became master of Corpus Christi College
in 1587, on the recommendation of Lord Burghley. Another is the well-
known John Whitgift (ca. 15321604), Elizabeths archbishop of Canterbury
from 1583. Closely aligned with Whitgift is Richard Bancroft (15641610),
who succeeded Whitgift at Canterbury (1604). And finally, even as preach-
ing at Pauls Cross was nearing its end in the Laudian years, we meet the
little-known, but estimable Mark Frank (1612/131664). All of these men
held similar beliefs about obedience, hierarchy, and the episcopacy,
regarding it as necessary for a strong and unified church, and all urged
their doctrinal views in sermons at Pauls Cross.
Let us first consider John Copcot, whose Pauls Cross sermon of 1584
is a typical example in defence of the Elizabethan Settlement against
its Puritan detractors, and a condemnation of the disciplinarians.1 While
Whitgift was addressing the boldly abusive Marprelate tracts with help
from the strenuous invective of Richard Bancroft, Copcot appeared at
Pauls Cross in 1584 to answer the Counter-poison, also of the same year.
This was a work probably by Dudley Fenner (c. 15581587). Fenner, a pro-
tege of Thomas Cartwright, was an outspoken advocate of the godly min-
istry. He urged that the government of the church belonged to all people,
and that they should choose from among themselves their own ministers.
Copcot is answering Fenners attack on a convocation sermon that
Copcot had given on 1 Tim. 5:17.2 His Pauls Cross sermon is longover

1See Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), esp. 20514.
2Most of Fenners attack deals with the eldership, with verse 17 giving the admonition:
Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour, especially they who
labour in the word and doctrine.
316 p.g. stanwood

18,000 words, including many marginal notes that cite numerous authori-
ties. The sermon was never printed; and the only known manuscript copy
is in the Lambeth Palace Library (MS 374), likely made by an unidentified
scribe soon after the sermon was preached. It was probably circulated, just
as another Copcot sermon (not at Pauls Cross): It goeth from hande to
hande amongst those who delight in it.
Copcots sermon is on Psalm 84 (85): 1 (A Psalm for the sons of Korah):
Lord, thou hast been favourable unto thy land: thou hast brought back the
captivity of Jacob.3 This text is little explored, except implicitly, and it
disappears in the elaborate discussion that follows. Copcot is concerned
in the early part of his sermon with the right translation and transmission
of scriptural texts. Concerning scriptural integrity, Copcot charges the
Church of Rome with linguistic mismanagement and manglingnotable
qualities of the Rhemish bible. Consequently, the Romanistes joyne with
Christe diverse thinges which God never commaunded and yet require
them, with that rigor that they deny, many may be saved without them.
Therefore they corrupt the gospell (128r).
Copcot quickly moves to a discussion of faith and works, carefully dis-
tinguishing Roman claims from appropriately reformed views. They say
that we have no merit of our own, and Copcot elaborates:
Our workes and the merits of Saynctes are necessarye to merite righteousnes,
salvation and everlastinge life. But there is neither lyne nor letter in the
whole Bible which either wholy or in parte attributeth any deserte of
redemption, of justification, of salvation, and our eternall inheritance to the
worke of any Saint or Angell. Our naturall corruption is suche so longe as
here we live, that it doth staye and pollute all that which we doe by his grace,
so that it is imperfect, and not accepted of God, but in Christ, who covereth
our imperfection when we cleave unto him by a true faithe (128r).
Copcot now addresses the sacramental deficiencies of Rome, where the
cup is denied, where baptism is sullied by many additional inventions,
such as exorcism, oil, and salt. Nevertheless, the Church of Rome is still the
church of God, even though it is not a true church. For such a church, we
must look to the reformed church in England. Copcot is happy to assert
that
Wee maye be accused for want of discipline but he that with a single
eye looketh into the estate of our Churche shall finde as good discipline, as

3Vulgate: Magistro chori. Filiorum Core. Psalmus. Propitius fuisti, Domine, terrtu;Bene
vertisti sortem Iacob.
 john copcot, john whitgift, and mark frank317

agreable to the worde, and practise of the most auncient Churches as in anye
citie, countrie, or commonwealthe under heaven; but that forme of disci-
pline which some strive for and want in our Church, wee have not (134r).
Fenner, of course, sees Copcot as one who urges tumultuous and insin-
cere dealing; for one who can find agreement with the Papistes should be
ashamed
in stead of incountringe with the truth, in steed of overthrowing the con-
sent of people in Church-elections, to make warre against a meere populer
Election and in steede of manly buckling with the substantiall pointes of
Church-election, with the foreleading of the Presbytery, with the due con-
sent of the people, cowardly to betake himself unto the changeable circum-
stances of the same; as who should present, the Elders or the people; howe
the people shoulde signify their consent by lifting up their handes, or other-
wise by themselves or by proctors, and divers such other.4
Copcot in his confutation is moving into a vast comparison between the
English establishment and its conformity with the universal church, of
which the Church of Rome is one though defective part, and the false
reformist claims of the puritans, who ignorantly trouble the polity of
church and state. Copcots refrain is familiar and typical of all right believ-
ers; no further church reform is needed because the English church is
already fitly reformed.
The language of invective and controversy so well displayed in these
sermons, and through much of early modern literature, seems largely to
have been lost in later times: Milton might have been one of the last who
could fashion deadly insults. Yet Copcot is vigourously dismissive of
Fenner and of all his associates. He is surely thinking of but not naming
the youthful author of the Counter-poison, the work that Fenner probably
wrote in the year before he died at the age of 30. Copcot says that there
are some who minister the sacraments that cannot preach the word,
who know little of the judgement of the primitive church or the ancient
fathers, such as Augustine, who had inspired the ministry of godly men
at the beginning of Elizabeths reign. But now, with a glance toward
Fenner and his fellows, there is verbosity, teaching before learning with
vayne woordes that give greate occasion of offences to the weake (136v).

4See Fenner, A Defence of the Reasons of the Counter-poyson, for maintenance of the
eldership against an aunsvvere made to them by Doctor Copequot, in a publike sermon at
Pawles Crosse, vpon Psal. 84. 1584 ([Middelburg: R. Schilders], 1586). The work is attributed
also to William Stoughton, or to Henry Jacob. It is one in the brief series of attacks and
responses over Copcots Pauls Cross sermon. The quotation appears at sig. C5r-v. See STC
10772 (cf. 10770). incountringe with the truth = encountering, i.e. embracing the truth.
318 p.g. stanwood

I should wish, Copcot continues, that they had suche discretion, as to con-
sider what they should utter before they did speake (137r). These are such
as have daylye some newe devise or other to broache, that they maye pro-
cure followers and favorers for their owne maintaynance, and the trouble
of others: few of these will heare the word out of the mouth of anye,
onlesse they be of theire owne vayne (147r).
Fenner, with several other strongly puritan supporters in Kent, had
refused to subscribe to Archbishop Whitgifts articles, and indeed he met
with Whitgift in person. After this meeting, he was suspended from his
ministry. Copcot is of course mindful of these events, and of Fenners bit-
ter attack on him (and on Whitgifts authority) in the Counter-poison.
Nothing of fresh consequence appears in Fenners tract, but he does con-
demn Copcot for his tumultuous and insincere dealing, his contrarietie
with him selfe, his agreement with the Papistes. Fenner tirelessly urges the
necessity of popular election in ecclesiastical government, condemning
Copcot for cowardice and insincerity; for right thinking reformers must
know that bishops cunningly and selfishly claim power for themselves.
In 1583, the year before Copcot preached his sermon, Archbishop
Whitgift had forcefully outlined the theory of submission, setting forth
the traditional view of the reformed church in England. Whitgift is saying
what many English churchmen believed, but he fiercely condemns the
disobedient, those he names as the Papist, the Anabaptist, the conceyted
and wayward person. He takes his text from Pauls warning to Titus
(3:12):5 Warn them to be subject to rule and power, to obey magistrates,
to be ready to every good work. To blaspheme no man, to be no fighters
The sermon, preached in the 25th year of the Queens accession, was not
printed until 1589, at about the same time as the Marprelate tracts were
appearing.6 This sermon, like Copcots, is principally concerned with dis-
cipline; and it raises the spectre of non-conformity, mostly by fiercely rail-
ing against it. Like Copcot, he offers little if any theological consideration
of opposed viewsRichard Hookers carefully constructed arguments of
the 1580s, for example, were unusual in the climate of these last years of
the 16th century; and Hookers full response to the Elizabethan Settlement

5Vulgate: Admone illos principibus, et potestatibus subditos esse, dicto obedire, ad omne
opus bonum paratos esse: neminem blasphemare, non litigiosos esse, sed modestos, omnem
ostendentes mansuetudinem ad omnes homines.
6See A Most godly and Learned Sermon, Preached at Pauls Crosse the 17 of November
1583 (London: Thomas Orwin, 1589). See also Joseph Blacks excellent edition (with intro-
duction and commentary) of The Martin Marprelate Tracts (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
 john copcot, john whitgift, and mark frank319

would wait until the very end of the century. His treatise Of the Lawes of
Ecclesiastical Polity (1593, 1597), encouraged and supported by Whitgift
himself, had little effect on continuing disputes.7
Whitgifts accession sermon is brief, likely much abbreviated in the
printed text, with portions lost in the time between delivery and publica-
tion. In its present form, the sermon consists largely of extended quota-
tions, not only scriptural but also patristic, with long passages from St John
Chrysostom, whose text Whitgift freely translates: It is passing ill where
there is no governement, for that is the occasion of great harme, as also the
beginning of trouble and confusion8 (B2v). Whitgift draws also on the wis-
dom of Gregory Nazianzen, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Augustine, all of
whom in their time dealt with dissent and insolence. Basil saith, Whitgift
reminds his audience, that in his time, whosoever could raile most of the
Bishops in their sermons, (as manie yong Preachers then did) were best
liked of the people, and coumpted most perfect, and most holy (D1r). The
implied analogy points to the alleged inadequacy and misinterpretation
of current heretical preaching. Thus Whitgift constructs his sermon on
the presumed ugly similarity of the present with the sad experience of the
past. Contention, indeed, persists across the centuries, only changing
names and objectives. Yet Whitgift ends with surprising irenicism, not by
excluding any persons, but exhorting all (even Anabaptists) to consider
one another, to provoke unto love, and good workes, not leaving our mutu-
all societie, as the manner of some is (D7v).
Richard Bancroft was one of the least conciliatory and most outspoken
of Pauls Cross preachers, attitudes which he shows in a famously strident,
fiercely anti-puritan and anti-presbyterian sermon of 9 February 1588, on
a text from 1 John 4. This sermon may be a culmination of what we have so
far seen; for in defending the episcopacy and urging obedience to it and to
the state, Bancroft condemns and casts adrift all who would challenge the
established order. False prophets are heretics and schismaticsthe
Admonitionists, Martinists, Anabaptists, and any with puritan viewsall
these Bancroft excludes from the English Church. Other preachers might

7See Hookers Tractates and Sermons, ed. Laetitia Yeandle and Egil Grislis, The Folger
Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. Introduction to the Commentary by Grislis, 61955.
One misses Richard Hookers Pauls Cross sermon (of 1584? David Neelands has essayed a
kind of reconstruction in chapter ten above); and one laments the entire absence of
Lancelot Andrewes, while yet being grateful for the several and eloquent performances by
John Donne throughout his ministry (1616, 1622 [2], 1627 [2].
8See Chrysostom, Homily 34, In Epistolam ad Hebros 13: Malum quidem est ubi nullus
est Principatus, et multarum cladium hc res existit occasio, et confusionis. PG 63.231.
320 p.g. stanwood

subsequently reflect similar views, but few might again hammer so heavily
as Bancroft.
Bancroft, with Whitgifts encouragement, was unflagging in his antago-
nism toward non-conformists of all sorts, and championed the established
church and the episcopacy, suggesting its divinely ordained status.9 At the
time of his Pauls Cross sermon, he was already busily engaged in attempts
to uncover Martin Marprelate. But Martin is only one of many false proph-
ets that he condemns in his forceful sermon on the text from 1 John 4:1:
Dearly beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be
of God: For many false prophets are gone out into the world. Bancroft
divides the text into three parts: prohibition, commandment, reason, but
he determines that the last should be first. What marks the rhetorical
shape of the sermon is its great capacity for easy digression and the use of
few rhetorical schemes, but frequent similes and metaphors, with images
of corruption and confusion.
There are now amongst us Arians, Donatists, Papists, Libertines, Ana
baptists, the Family of Love and many more sectaries and schismatics, and
atheists, too, and those who merely stand aside to gaze. All are false and
hypocrites, according to the Scriptures and to the Fathers, and properly
likened to trees which have nothing but leaves, bicause they are fruite-
lesse, and also
to the mermaides bicause they hide their errours under their counterfeit
and faire speeches: to Helena, of Greece, for that they moove as great conten-
tion in the church as she did troubles betwixt the Grecians and the Trojans:
to the diseases called the leprosie and the cankar, in that their corruption
taketh deepe roote and spreadeth so farre: to a serpent that is lapped up
togither, bicause they have many windings and contradictions: to the fish
named a Cuttle, for that they infect men with their blacke and slanderous
calumniations: to snakes or adders, the poison of aspes being under their

9See W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, A Reconsideration of Richard Bancrofts Pauls Cross

Sermon of 9 February 1588/9, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 20 (1969), 25366.
Traditionally, Bancroft was first to urge the jure divino theory of episcopacy. But Cargill
Thompson demonstrates that Hadrian Saravia better deserves this claim, for his De Diversis
Ministrorum Evangelii Gradibus (London: Georgius Bishop & Radulphus Newberie, 1590)
was much more influential than Bancrofts sermon on the divine origin of the episcopacy.
The Sermon shows [Bancroft] in process of evolution from the traditional Elizabethan
concept of church government as a thing indifferent which he appears to have held in the
early 1580s to the new theory of the dominical origin of bishops which he took over from
Saravia in the 1590s. (266) See also Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, on
Whitgift, Marprelate, Bancroft, esp. 208. Quotations are from the Huntington Library copy
of the first corrected edition, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the 9. of Februarie 1588,
by Richard Bancroft (London: I. Jackson for Gregorie Seton, 1589), STC 1346.
 john copcot, john whitgift, and mark frank321

lips: to the viper, bicause they regarde not to wound and destroie their
mother the church: to tigers and lions, for that they are verie cruell and
fierce: and to diverse other such thinges as ought to make them odious to all
that love the truth (B3r-v).
In upholding episcopal privilege and the three-fold orders of ministry,
Bancroft soon turns to a defense of the Book of Common Prayer, while also
condemning ignorance. In these days, dull minds are covered by Thicke
clouds and mistes of palpable darkness; and such foolish prophets like to
say that some of the most famous and learned men of this realm
Cranmer, Ridley, Bucer, Peter Martyrlaboured in vain. Now, says
Bancroft, two or three yeeres studie is as good as twentie. It is woonderfull
to see, how some men get perfection. One of fower or five and twentie
yeeres old, if you anger him, will sweare he knoweth more then all the
ancient fathers. And yet in verie deede, they are so earnest and fierce, that
either we must beleeve them, or else account their boldnes to be, as it is,
most untollerable (E5v-r).
So much and more has Bancroft to say of the Admonitionists.10 He
affirms with determined and heavy force that the doctrine of the church
of England, is pure and holie: the government thereof, both in respect of
hir majestie, and of our Bishops is lawfull and godlie: the booke of com-
mon praier containeth nothing in it contrarie to the word of God (G5r-v).
Bancroft is moving toward the exhortation, offering accusation, interroga-
tio, apostrophe, and sermocinatio, whereby he gives speech to those who
dare to object.11 He ends by calling on terms well known to the rhetori-
cians and homilists of his day. Will you give yourselves over to an unbri-
dled course [pursued by hypocrites and apostates], the ende wherof
you know not? Shall men of such inconstancy lead you from the truth,
and make you to imbrace those thinges, which you know to have been
condemned with one consent by all the ancient fathers for heresies?
[S]tand fast, and keepe the instructions which you have beene taught
(H8r-v).
Obedience remains a prominent theme in subsequent Pauls Cross ser-
mons; but Bancroft set a high mark for the episcopacy, excluding and

10The Admonition controversy is well documented in Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of

the Origin of the Puritan Revolt (with a reprint of An Admonition to the Parliament of 1572
and kindred documents), ed. W.H. Frere and C.E. Douglas (London: SPCK, 1954).
11See Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), esp. chap. 8, Religious discourse. And see also the excellent discus-
sion of Richard Hookers rhetoric by P.E. Forte in Hookers Tractates and Sermons, FLE
5:67482.
322 p.g. stanwood

unchurching its critics as false prophets. Such views persist in a very late
Pauls Cross sermon. In 164142, in Lauds archepiscopate, there is new and
special urgency, as opposing forces were gathering. Let us finally reflect on
Mark Frank; in style he is a distinguished successor of Lancelot Andrewes,
and in sensibility an inheritor of the Copcot, Whitgift, Bancroft tradition.
A fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and a Restoration Master of the
house, Franks sermons were published posthumously in 1672. He preached
at Pauls Cross, probably in May 1642, Sir Richard Gurney being then Lord
Mayor, on a text from Jeremiah 35:1819, concerning the faithful obedi-
ence of Jonadabs posterity: Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel,
Because you have obeyed the commandment of Jonadab your Father, and
kept all his Precepts, and done according unto all that he hath commanded
you. Therefore thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, Jonadab the
Son of Rechab shall not want a man to stand before me for ever.12 This
unusual text may have been particularly appropriate for the sad times in
which Mark Frank addressed the Lord Mayor and aldermen. Jeremiah
admired the Rechabites, not for their fanatical religious faith, but for their
unquestioning allegiance and loyalty to their forefather Jonadab and his
precepts; ignoring Rechabite beliefs but championing their faithfulness,
Jeremiah wishes that the people of Judah might likewise be inspired by
such devotion.
Mark Frank surely saw in this text a situation nearly analogous to his
own circumstances, for he found in it a story of obedience and doctrinal
loyalty that had neither end nor diminution. Frank was preaching at an
especially dangerous and unsettled time, in the dark days when opposing
forces of Parliament and King were gathering. Strafford had been executed
in May 1641, the Irish Rebellion followed in October, the Grand Remon
strance in November, the Kings attempt to arrest the Five Members of
Parliament in early January 1642, and his own departure from London only
days later. Frank was offering in his Pauls Cross sermon of early May a

12The sermon is dated by Millar MacLure, October 10, 1641. See The Pauls Cross Sermons
15341642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 255; and see MacLures comments on
Frank, 11415. But Kenneth W. Stevenson (in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
gives 4 May 1642, a much more likely date, for it suits the political situation of the sermon.
I quote from my copy of the first edition of 1672: LI sermons preached by the Reverend
Dr. Mark Frank: being a course of sermons, beginning at Advent, and so continued through
the festivals: to which is added a sermon preached at St Pauls Cross, in the year forty-one, and
then commanded to be printed by King Charles the First (London: Andrew Clark for John
Martyn, Henry Brome, and Richard Chiswell , 1672) [Wing F2074A]. Franks Sermons
appeared only once more (slightly modernized) in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology,
vols. 4142 (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1849).
 john copcot, john whitgift, and mark frank323

Royalist-inspired response before an increasingly embattled audience. He

opens his sermon with a strong but ironic statement of purpose, even as
he will unveil, often in sharp and excitable terms, the universal meaning of
the text: I cannot say, the Text is fit for the time, but, I am sure, tis needful.
A Text of Obedience never more. A little of that well practised would make
us understand one another, set all together again, Tis needful for That:
and thats as much as peace, Plenty, and Religion is worth (sig. 4C3v).
Obedience is the key to a fit polity and a circumspect life.
Frank carefully examines his text, unfolding its terms and discovering
what he understands to be parallels between the situation of the
Rechabites and his own present. The sermon is organized with immense
care, and with the kind of close verbal analysis and oratorical manage-
ment that characterizes the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes. And one hears
Franks voice, his acute sense of his audience whom he cajoles, pleads,
condemns, praises. There are many sharp, often witty passages in which
he forcibly draws on the analogy of the obedient Rechabites, on the one
hand, and those persons who would now be selfishly disobedient, on the
other. Some of our age would have told them, they might have excused
them being the seed of the Godly. Tis a part of their Commendation that
they thought not so (sig, 4D1r). Obedience has inward and outward
expression, but it is always necessary in sustaining peaceableness and
good order. Authority usd to be a Logical Argument to guide our reason:
and have we lost our Logick too, as well as our Obedience?
Frank turns from the Rechabites to ourselves, carefully pulling the
pieces of his text into current affairs. Jonadab was a father, whose precepts
were fully obeyed: This Father was commended in three ways, all describ-
ing obedience: Natural, Civil, Ecclesiastical. The Rechabites understood
that Father was so by nature, and were obedient to his judgement, and to
his rule. Yet in our time obedience is much compromised, for we acknowl-
edge only ourselves. Every Magistrate every Father of a Family: Some of
these have their Statutes to be kept; all of them their commands to be
obeyed. Such are secular powers, but there are spiritual ones as well, such
as take order for your Souls, as the other for your Bodies, and Estates, your
Bishops and Clergy:
Bishops are Fathers by their Title, the Fathers of the Church; so the first
Christians, so all since, till this new unchristian Christianity started up.
Fathers in God, tis their stile; however some of late, Sons of Belial, would
make them Fathers in the Devil, Antichrist: perhaps, that they might make
them like themselves. Strange Antichrists to whom Christ hath left the
Governing of his Church these 1500 years! (sig. 4E2r).
324 p.g. stanwood

Frank is becoming highly exercised as he surveys his London audience,

not all of whom would have held Royalist sympathies, and condemns the
tumultuous times. Perhaps he is nowhere more outspokennearly inco-
herent with ragethan in this application of his text:

Your Inferiour Magistrates have almost every where found disrespect. And
whether your Bishops and Clergy have been used like Fathers, if the usage
they have had of late, the tumults about their houses, the riots upon their
Person, the daily insolencies the whole Clergy have met with in your streets,
never seen till now in a Civill Common-wealth, in any ordered City upon the
most contemptible men, if the injuries done their Persons in the Churches,
at the very Altars, once Sanctuaries against violence, now thought the fittest
places for it, in the very administration of the Sacraments, in their Pulpits,
both among you and abroad the Kingdom: in a word, so many slanderous,
malicious accusations without ground, entertaind with pleasure, besides
the blasphemies upon the whole Order, if these cannot tell you, after-ages
will determine, and in the interim let the world judge (sig. 4E2v).

There is little hope in Franks sermonthe Civil War was beginning to

break out even in the precincts of St Pauls; Frank offers faint hope
amidst his catastrophic view of contemporary London and England. He
concludes,

If you will return, and hear, and hearken, and submit to your ancient Fathers,
your King and Church, your Magistrates, and Clergy, observe, and keep, and
do your ancient Laws and Customs, I dare warrant you, what God promises
to the Rechabites, he shall perform to you. Your City shall flourish, your
places be renowned, your Liberties encrease, your persons rise up in honour,
your estates prosper, your affairs succeed, your children be famous, your
Posterity happy, your Religion display the glories of her first primitive purity,
and all go on successfully for ever (sig. 4F1r).

There is desperation in Franks sermon; for the call to obedience, and to a

faith that esteems the certitude of allegiance and hierarchy, seems empty
in view of the critical occasion. Sir Richard Gurney, the Lord Mayor who
was likely in Franks audience, and strongly sympathetic to the court party,
was increasingly beset by a radical opposition, and he would be impeached
in July 1642. Frank preached one of the last of the Pauls Cross sermons,
which had already by the early 1640s lost much of their popularity. We may
imagine that Frank was speaking to a well-disposed, perhaps small audi-
ence in the Cathedral itself, and in predictable terms that encouraged the
beliefs of one side against the other; and Frank himself disappeared until
the Restoration. Nevertheless, in spite of the desperate political situation
 john copcot, john whitgift, and mark frank325

and the strident urgency of his sermon, Frank managed to compose a

work, still in the mode of the best and most traditional rhetorical art,
ordered as Andrewes himself would have recognized. Pauls Cross was
ever a vehicle for all sorts and conditions of persons, throughout the inevi-
table and restless, even revolutionary trans-shifting of time.
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BANCROFT VERSUS PENRY:

CONSCIENCE AND AUTHORITY IN ELIZABETHAN POLEMICS

W. Bradford Littlejohn

Although no stranger to controversy, the pulpit at Pauls Cross witnessed

few more incendiary sermons than that of Richard Bancroft in February
1588/9, Deerly beloved, beleeve not every spirit.1 This sermon provoked
remonstrance from contemporaries as diverse as Welsh radical John Penry,
Sir Francis Knollys, and King James VI, and is still debated among scholars
today. For a long time, it was chiefly reputed as the inception of the
doctrine of jure divino episcopacy,2 although modern scholarship has
dramatically qualified this interpretation.3 It has also been highlighted
as an initial statement of the charge Bancroft was to embellish richly in

1A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 8. of Februarie, being the first Sunday in the
Parleament, Anno. 1588. by Richard Bancroft D. of Divinitie, and Chaplaine to the right
Honorable Sir Christopher Hatton Knight L. Chancelor of England (London: E. B. [Edward
Bollifant] for Gregorie Seton, 1588, i.e. 1589).
2The concern that Bancroft had gone too far in his claims for episcopacy was raised by
critics at the time including Lord Burghley and Francis Knollys. See Stuart Barton Babbage,
Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London: SPCK, 1962), 2829; W.D.J. Cargill Thompson,
Sir Francis Knollyss Campaign Against the Jure Divino Theory of Episcopacy, in C.W.
Dugmore, ed., Studies in the Reformation: Luther to Hooker (London: The Athlone Press,
1980), 11819. It became enshrined in the historiographical tradition by the ill-informed
statements of John Strype in his 1718 Life and Acts of John Whitgift and his 1728 Annals of the
Reformation. From there it was subsequently picked up and embellished upon by later
writers well into the 20th century. For a good overview see W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, A
Reconsideration of Richard Bancrofts Pauls Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/9, Journal of
Ecclesiastical History 20.2 (1969), 25357.
3See for instance Norman Sykes, Old Priest and New Presbyter (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1956), 2426; Cargill Thompson, A Reconsideration, 25860; Cargill
Thompson, Sir Francis Knollyss Campaign, 99101. Cargill Thompson, however, warns
against downplaying the significance of Bancrofts sermon in this regard too much. See A
Reconsideration, 26066. See also Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism
and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988),
9596, for an example of the sermon continuing to be invoked as part of the development
of the doctrine of iure divino episcopacy. Collinsons balanced statement in 1967 remains
perhaps the best verdict: Bancroft did not go so far as to assert directly the ius divinum of
episcopal government, but it is significant that some at the time and many since have read
the highest doctrine of episcopacy into his words. See Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan
Puritan Movement (London: J. Cape, 1967), 397.
328 w. bradford littlejohn

Dangerous Positions and Proceedings (1593), that Presbyterianisms rejec-

tion of the royal supremacy was seditious and politically dangerous.4 More
recently, Mary Morrissey has argued that the sermons distinctiveness lies
in the fact that it is the first Pauls Cross sermon that adopts the confuta-
tional genre (typical of anti-papal sermons, particularly in the 1560s) in
order to attack the Puritans.5 The objective is no longer to appeal to the
Puritans, but to reveal them as a threat to be shunned, and a political
threat as much as a religious one.
This is certainly true, but it remains to be asked why Bancroft sought to
do so; his opposition to Puritanism, I would argue, though rhetorically
exaggerated to stir his hearers to action, stemmed from his genuine con-
viction, shared with many other conformist leaders, that they posed a
threat to church and commonwealth.6 If nothing else, Bancroft consid-
ered the recent Marprelate tracts ample proof that Puritans held no
authority to be sacredif Puritans could justify such savage attacks
on the bishops, what was to stop them from going after Her Majestys
authority as well?7 Although zeal for episcopal prerogatives, concern over
Puritan diminutions of the royal prerogative, and Martinism as intolerably

4See for instance Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 397; Edward O. Smith, Jr.,
The Elizabethan Doctrine of the Prince as Reflected in the Sermons of the Episcopacy,
15591603, Huntington Library Quarterly 28.1 (1964), 811; Joseph Black, The Rhetoric of
Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (158889), Anti-Martinism, and the Uses of Print
in Early Modern England, The SixteenthCentury Journal 28.3 (1997), 71819. Bancroft was
particularly bold in this sermon in his indictment of the Scottish Presbyterian Church,
claiming that their seditious behavior toward their prince showed what England could
expect if the Presbyterians there had their way. These claims, based on inaccurate sources,
created such a backlash in Scotland that Bancroft was forced to issue a formal apology to
James VI. For a full account, see Owen Chadwick, Richard Bancrofts Submission, Journal
of Ecclesiastical History 3.1 (1952), 5873.
5Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 197, 20714.
6Morrisseys emphasis on Bancrofts rhetorical shrewdness can at times imply that he
is consciously fabricating a case against the Puritans, merely presenting them as a threat
when he really knows they are not. Indeed, much of the recent vogue for rhetorical analysis
among historians of this period runs the risk of displacing attention too much from what
the author thought to what he wanted his audience to think. Both dimensions are impor-
tant, of course, but we must not allow attention to the second to lead us to treat polemic as
mere rhetoric, rather than taking seriously the genuine concerns that motivated the inter-
locutors in this period. For some good methodological remarks on this front, see Peter
Lake, Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice, in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation
England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Studies in Modern British History, vol. 13),
ed. Peter Lake and Kenneth Fincham (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2006), 9294.
7See for instance Bancroft, A Sermon, 68. On the Marprelate tracts as the context for
Bancrofts sermon, see Black, Rhetoric of Reaction, and Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls
Cross Sermons, 20714.
 bancroft versus penry329

disrespectful public speech were all crucial components of Bancrofts fear

of Puritan sedition, there is a more fundamental problem at stake, I would
argue, which runs throughout the text of Bancrofts Sermon. At the root of
Puritan rebellion, Bancroft will argue, is a warped understanding of the
relationship between conscience and authoritya relationship that
bedevilled all the European reformations, not least Englands.
To see how contemporary Puritans perceived and responded to
Bancrofts accusation of sedition, we need look no further than John
Penrys Briefe Discovery, published in 1590.8 Penry was a member of the
Puritan left-wing, and indeed, was suspected of involvement in the writing
and production of the Marprelate Tracts, so much so that he was at this
time hiding in Scotland.9 When he returned to England later in 1590, he
was quickly imprisoned as part of the crackdown of 159092, and was
eventually executed along with Barrow and Greenwood as a separatist. As
one of only three Protestant dissenters to lose their lives for the cause dur-
ing this period, Penry is clearly not just your ordinary middle-of-the-road
Puritan.10
With the exchange between Bancroft and Penry, then, an arch-conser-
vative vs. an arch-radical, the historian has the opportunity to see the bat-
tle between Puritan and conformist thrown into the sharpest relief. Here
we have Bancrofts ringing accusation that the Puritans are seditious schis-
matics being answered by a man who is soon to be imprisoned and exe-
cuted for sedition and schism. If the seditious implications of Puritanism
are anywhere to be seen, we would expect to find them from a man like
Penry. And yet the most remarkable thing about Penrys reply is the
absence of such sedition; indeed, it is at times almost sycophantic in its
devotion to Her Majesty. Even on the key question of the royal supremacy,
Penry protests, Looke whatsoever prerogative in ecclesiastical or civil
causes hee or any man livinge can truly attribute unto the civil magistrate,
wee do the same (39).11 When we consider that Penry was at this point of

8A Briefe Discovery of the Untruthes, and Slanders against Reformation, and the favour-
ers thereof, contained in D. Bancrofts Sermon [] (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1589/90).
9Penry was indeed the leading suspect in the hunt for Marprelate at the time, and
while suggesting a more complex authorship, most modern scholarship has confirmed that
he was likely deeply involved. See Owen Chadwick, Richard Bancrofts Submission, 59;
Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 39196. See also D.J. McGinn, John Penry and the
Marprelate Controversy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966).
10William Pierce, John Penry: His Life, Times, and Writings (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1923) remains the most comprehensive treatment of this fascinating man.
11Throughout, I will use original spelling and punctuation, except that I will render
consonantal is as js and us as vs.
330 w. bradford littlejohn

his life on the verge of separatism, often defined as the rejection of the
ideal of a national church and Her Majestys supremacy over it,12 this pro-
testation is truly remarkable.
Indeed, Penrys sermon highlights the difficulty that confronts modern
scholars attempting to make sense of the political threat posed by
Puritanism. Bancroft is convinced that Puritanism is inherently seditious,
papist in its denial of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and
papist also in its tendency toward a monarchomach doctrine of resistance;
left unchecked, the Puritans may turn to tyrannicide to advance their
agenda. Bancroft has not lacked his modern embroiderers, ready to
develop this theme, such as Michael Walzer, who argued for a revolution-
ary impulse at the heart of Puritanism.13 Most scholars have been more
reserved, but many still think that Puritanism leaned toward popular gov-
ernment.14 Moreover, although Puritan attitudes toward the civil magis-
trate were complex and characterized by strong internal tensions, their
desire to curtail the royal supremacy, and to separate church from com-
monwealth, have seemed as obvious to many modern scholars as they did
to John Whitgift, who complained in the Answere to the Admonition, it is
the mark you shoot at, to spoil the magistrate of all authority in things
indifferent, especially in ecclesiastical matters.15 If Presbyterianism clung
to the ideal of the queen as head of a reformed national church, the sepa-
ratists were certainly a threat, with their call to reformation without tarry-
ing for the magistrate.
And yet, scholars have increasingly recognized the difficulty of actually
finding clear statements of Puritan sedition.16 It is disclaimed at every
point, not only by more moderate figures like Chaderton, or moderating
radicals like Cartwright, but even by left-wing Puritans and separatists like
Barrow and Bradshaw, and as just mentioned, Penry. In The Communion of

12See Stephen Brachlows discussion of this frequent assertion in The Communion of

Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 15701625 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 24950.
13The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1965).
14See for instance Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 5360. Notably, however, Stephen
Brachlow argues that even radicals like the early Jacobean congregationalists made no
steps toward populism: It would be a serious distortion of their own selfunderstanding to
suggest that the Jacobean radicals therefore held populist political views. Congregational
in church polity, they made it clear that they believed a monarchical state, as Brad
shaw said, was the most appropriate civil polity for English society. See Communion of
Saints, 245.
15In John Ayre, ed., The Works of John Whitgift, DD, PS 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 185153), II: 73.
16See for instance Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 7379.
 bancroft versus penry331

Saints, Stephen Brachlow showed convincingly that even the most radical
figures show no desire to give up the Reformation ideals of the godly
prince or the cura religionis, and seem to honestly believe that their theory
detracts in no way from the rightful prerogatives of the magistrate.17 Were
conformists such as Bancroft, then, merely indulging in cheap slander
when they tarred the Puritans with accusations of sedition, Anabaptistry,
and popery, the easiest ways to discredit an opponent in Elizabethan
England? To an extent, perhaps, but not entirely.
Of course, obviously not all claims to support the royal supremacy
amounted to the same thing, and Cartwrights or Penrys version would
have certainly limited the constitutional scope of the Queens jurisdiction.
But we must look a little beneath the surface of the charge of sedition,
I suggest, to discern the underlying fears that gnawed Bancroft and the
conformists, which the quote from Whitgift above gestures toward.
Essential to the Elizabethan settlement, and in Whitgifts mind, to
Protestant theology as a whole, was the magistrates right to command in
adiaphora, things indifferent, which were by nature not supposed to
affect the conscience;18 and yet the Puritans were complaining that their
consciences compelled them to dissent.
The question of authority over conscience had been rendered urgently
pressing for the sixteenth-century by the Protestant rejection of papal
authority and proclamation of Christian liberty. The Word of God alone
could bind the conscience, Luther had taught, and beyond the Word
lay adiaphora, in which the magistrate could command outward actions,
but not consciences.19 Luthers teaching was itself, as Susan Schreiner
has argued in her recent book Are You Alone Wise?, an attempt to resolve
late medieval struggles over the search for certitude by anchoring the

17See Brachlow, Communion of Saints, ch. 7. Although James I took the puritan theory
of royal limitations as a serious threat to his prerogatives, the radicals were convinced that
neither their political theories nor their nonconformist practices disparaged royal suprem-
acy in the least (245).
18For an excellent and thorough discussion of the doctrine of adiaphora as it was devel-
oped in the early Protestant Reformation both on the continent and in England, see
Bernard Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1977). Torrance Kirbys essay, Relics of the Amorites:
The Civil Magistrate and Religious Uniformity, in The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political
Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 20333, offers an excellent introduction to the issues sur-
rounding adiaphora as they stood early in the Elizabethan era.
19The classic statement of the Protestant doctrine of Christian liberty was of course
Luthers treatise The Freedom of a Christian, although perhaps the most precise and sys-
tematic discussion can be found in Calvins Institutes of the Christian Religion Bk. III, ch. 19.
See also Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, and Verkamp, The Limits Upon Adiaphoristic
Freedom: Luther and Melanchthon, Theological Studies 36.1 (1975): 5276.
332 w. bradford littlejohn

Christians certainty in a transcendent source.20 But by rejecting any infal-

lible earthly epistemological authority, the question of certainty resur-
faced: who was to offer binding interpretation on what was in the Word
and what was merely adiaphora?21 Who was to determine the truth, who
was bound to submit to their determination, and how did such submis-
sion square with the Christian individuals freedom of conscience? This
preoccupation drove radicals like Penry, who sought the desired certainty
in the determinations of learned ministers, as well as conformists like
Bancroft, who sought it in the decrees of lawfully established authorities.
It was this that underlay their futile debates about the royal supremacy; as
Brachlow notes,
If left-wing puritans were willing to acknowledge royal supremacy, provided
the prince submitted to the supremacy of the Word, the really crucial ques-
tion, then, was not whether the final authority lay with the magistrate or the
Bible, but who was to provide the final court of appeal in relevant matters of
biblical interpretation.22
Debates over royal supremacy, over presbytery and episcopacy, were in the
end merely the waves on the surface caused by this tectonic shift which
the Reformation had set in motion.

Bancrofts Argument

We can see this preoccupation with what I am calling epistemological

authority in the very text that Bancroft has chosen, 1 John 4:1: Dearly

20Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The conflicts that played out in England should
thus be understood not as a peculiar problem created by Tudor politics, as they often are,
but as manifestations of the general crisis of epistemological authority that both gave birth
to and was intensified by the Reformation.
21One recent scholar to recognize this epistemological questiondiscerning Gods
will, as he puts itat the heart of Tudor politicaltheological controversies, is Daniel
Eppley. See Defending Royal Supremacy and Discerning Gods Will in Tudor England
(London: Ashgate, 2007), particularly his excellent analysis of the faultlines over authorita-
tive interpretation between Whitgift and Cartwright in ch. 4. Eppley notes that, contrary to
frequent assertions, the debate between Puritans and conformists was not fundamentally
over whether there was such a thing as things indifferent in the church, or even over
whether Scripture provided general rules to direct them, but over what rules Scripture pro-
vided, and who was to interpret them. Whereas Puritans such as Cartwright argued that
certain Pauline principles of edification and non-offensiveness, interpreted and applied by
individual ministers, always took precedence, Whitgift argued that Romans 13, the call to
submit to the magistrates judgment, must always take precedence (14954).
22Brachlow, Communion of Saints, 237.
 bancroft versus penry333

beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be of God:
for many false prophets are gone out into the world. The choice of this text
is quite remarkable at first glance, this being the sort of passage we would
tend to expect to find on the lips of a Puritan. The central clause, try the
spirits, in particular sounds a Puritan theme, a warning against simply
accepting as binding the word of the authorities, and calling for Christians
to test every word of man against the word of God. As Susan Schreiner has
shown, the preoccupation with trying the spirits and the invocation of
this passage, had been a recurrent theme for Catholic, Anabaptist, and
Protestant writers for at least a century.23 Cargill Thompson notes, in par-
ticular, that continental reformers had often employed this text against
Anabaptists.24 Nonetheless, the choice of such a text presents a noticeable
contrast to the common strategy of conformist sermons, which frequently
leaned heavily on calls to obedience like Romans 13 or Titus 3.25 Bancroft
is thus making a daring move: rather than immediately calling his hearers
to submit their judgments to the prince, who speaks with the authority of
God, he is inviting them to exercise judgment as to who speaks from God
and who does not. In fact, I would suggest, it is a self-conscious move to
turn the tables on Puritan dissent, one made possible by the outrageous-
ness of Marprelates scurrilous tracts. Up till now, Puritan claims have
been fairly sober invocations of Scripture; now, Martin Marprelate has
asked the public to hear frightful attacks on the character of those in
authority, and Bancroft sees an opportunity to convince the public that if
we are to fall to a trial of whose word deserves to be believed, the Puritans
are very untrustworthy witnesses. In the process, Bancroft seeks to wrest
texts such as 1 John 4:1 away from the Puritan agenda and its call to try
everything at the bar of Scripture. Such an agenda, argues Bancroft, is ipso
facto seditious. It relies on private interpretation, setting oneself up as an
epistemological authority above bishops and princes.26

23Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?, ch. 6.

24Cargill Thompson, A Reconsideration, 261.
25Note for instance the contrast in approach with Accession Day sermons preached by
Whitgift and Sandys in this period, as seen in Smith, Jr., The Elizabethan Doctrine of the
Prince, 46, 1517.
26This was a regular charge of conformist apologists. In the Vestiarian Controversy,
Archbishop Parker had complained, But (belyke) you wyll have every man to understande
as much as the Prince and councell knoweth and intendeth; or els you wyll set the subject
at his choyse. Moreover, here is perylous auctoritie graunted to every subject, to determine
upon the Princes lawes, proclamations, and ordinances, that when they shall see them
(many tymes otherwayes then they are in deede) unprofitable, then shall they, nay they
must not do and accomplyshe the same. Matthew Parker, A Briefe Examination for the
tyme, of a certain declaration lately put in print [] (London: R. Jugge, 1566), 14r. A few years
334 w. bradford littlejohn

In the sermon, he actually works through the passage in reverse. He

spends the first thirty-two pages of the printed version27 demonstrating
that the situation described in Johns time clearly applies in his time as
well: false prophets are everywhere to be found in England. He then spends
the next eighteen pages (3349) elaborating on the apostles advice to trie
the spirits whether they be of God. Then we have thirty-five pages (5084)
in which he marshals damning evidence to show that once tried, the
Puritans are spirits that clearly do not deserve to be believed, before he
moves toward his conclusion, exhorting the magistrates to suppress these
dangerous people (8598); only then, after his opponents have been thor-
oughly discredited, does he finally offer, almost as a postscript a brief sub-
stantive argument in refutation of their historical claims regarding the
equality of ministers (98103).
The logic of his argument is thus: Beware, there are false prophets and
seditious spirits out there, among them these Puritans; accordingly, you
must be careful whom to believe; and as the Puritans have shown in many
ways that they do not deserve to be believed, we can only conclude that
they are false prophets that must be suppressed. In the opening section,
he argues that false prophets are all those who resist God-given authori-
ties, and this includes those who make constant appeal to Scripture, but in
novel, idiosyncratic, and self-serving ways, insisting that theirs only is the
true interpretation. Accordingly, he is at pains in his early arguments to
show how they have no Patristic pedigree for their understanding of the
structure of Church government. Tertullian is quoted, They murder the
Scriptures to serve their own purpose.28 Having represented these false
prophets as so irrational, then, he must provide some explanation of why

later, Whitgift declared to Cartwright, It is not every private mans part to define what is
order and comeliness in external matters being indifferent, but is proper to them only to
whom God hath committed the government of his church; whose orders and laws (not
being against the word of God) whosoever doth disobey, disobeyeth both God and the
prince; as you do in disobeying the princes laws in these matters. WW II: 55.
27We have no way of knowing precisely how closely the printed version matched what
was preached on the day, but the title page of Bancrofts sermon does tell us, wherein some
things are now added, which then were omitted, either through want of time, or default in
memorie. Mary Morrissey argues in ch. 2 of Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons that,
although such additions were common, the differences between the oral, written, and
printed copies of a sermon did not prevent contemporaries from seeing them as different
versions of the same oration (35); a relatively close correspondence between oral and
printed versions seems the more likely in cases, such as this one, when the sermon was
printed shortly after being preached.
28Cdem scripturarum faciunt ad materiam suam, as Bancroft quotes it on p. 11
(ad materiam suam cdem scripturarum confecit is the original), from De Prscriptione
Hreticorum, c. 38.
 bancroft versus penry335

they would pursue such a baseless agenda. He offers four motivations, all
of which are forms of the fundamental vice of autonomy that he is seeking
to highlight: contempt of bishops, ambition, self-love, and covetousness
(1428). In other words, the only reason that individuals will insist on pri-
vate interpretations of Scripture contrary to those commonly received is a
desire for private advancement. We may thereby infer the converse: those
who are public-spirited, seeking the public good, will defer to public inter-
pretation of Scripture. This thus sets the stage for the central argument,
focusing on the exhortation to Trie the spirits whether they be of God.
By the time we come to this injunction, then, Bancroft means us to be
confident that it cannot possibly mean what a Puritan might mean by it
that individuals are bound to weigh every command against their own
assessment of Scripture. We have already been given a litmus test: submis-
sive spirits are of God, seditious spirits are of the evil one. Yet as a
Protestant, Bancroft cannot deny the doctrine of Christian liberty, which
says that Scripture alone and no human authority can bind the conscience.
Of course the standard conformist argument here will be that the matters
disputed by the Puritans are adiaphora, and hence left open by Scripture,
so that Christian liberty is not in question; but Bancroft clearly recognizes
that for the Presbyterians, on the matter of church government, this is to
beg the question. Who then can determine authoritatively the teaching of
Scripture? Bancroft thus knows that he is on dangerous ground and must
tread carefully: That which I have to saie of this matter will be subject to
slanderous toongs: I praie you therefore conceive me rightly, and do not
pervert my meaning (33). At this point Bancroft invokes the ideal of a via
media, but interestingly, it is not a via media between Rome and
Protestantism. Rather, he insists, it is the via media of the magisterial
reformers between Rome and radicalism; the Puritans, he will argue, are
not super-Protestant but sub-Protestant:
Some forbid the children of God to proove any thing. Others command them
to be ever seeking and prooving of all things. But neither of them both in a
right good sense, do deale therein as they ought to do. A meane course
betwixt these two is to be allowed of and followed: which is, that we proove
some things, and that we receive without curiositie some other things being
alreadie examined, prooved and tried to our hands (33).
The first error, he says, is that of Rome, with her hated doctrine of implicit
faith; on this view, Christians must simply take the church authorities
word for it and seek no further in Scripture themselves: If a man have the
exposition of the church of Rome touching any place of Scripture, although
he neither know nor understand, whether and how it agreeth with the
336 w. bradford littlejohn

words of the scripture, yet he hath the very word of God (3536). Although
this teaching is hardly the threat he is worried about at the moment, he
spends several pages dwelling upon it, so that, by exposing its grosseness
he may clearly differentiate his own recommended meane course from it.
He then turns to expose what he considers to be the Puritan error, which is
that of those who are alwaies learning (as the apostle saith) but do never
attaine to the truth. That which pleaseth them to daie, displeaseth them to
morow (38). They consider themselves to be learned masters of Gods law;
they despise the teachings they are given; they wring and wrest the
Scriptures according as they fansie (39). They are always calling upon their
followers to Search, examine, trie, and seeke: bringing them thereby into a
great uncertainty (39; at this point the self-conscious irony of Bancrofts
use of the trie every spirit passage is clearly evident). Against this, he
brings the testimony of Augustine, Faithfull ignorance is better than rash
knowledge,29 citing also Gregory Nazianzen and Jerome for support.
This rebuke of curiosity thus sets the stage for his statement of what he
considers the golden mean:
That when you have attained the true grounds of Christian religions, and are
constantly built by a lively faith upon that notable foundation whereof the
Apostle speaketh, which is Jesus Christ, being incorporated into his mystical
body in your baptisme by the holie Ghost: and afterwards nourished with
the heavenly food exhibited unto you in the Lords Supper: you then content
your selves and seeke no farther; according to the saieng of Tertullian We
need not to be curious after wee have apprehended Christ Jesus, nor inquisi-
tive after we have received the Gospel. And again When once we believe,
we do not desire to seeke any farther (4142).30
No wonder Bancroft was worried that he would be subject to slanderous
toongs; this does not sound very different at all from the popish doctrine
that he has just criticized. To be sure, he does not try to keep Scripture
from the laity, going on to say, Reade the Scriptures, but with sobrietie;
but he grants authoritative interpretation to the church: God hath bound
himselfe by his promise unto his church of purpose, that men by hir good
direction might in this point be relieved. To whose godlie determination in
matters of question, hir dutifull children ought to submit themselves with-
out any curious or willfull contradiction (42).

29The quote from Augustine, Melior ergo est fidelis ignorantia quam temeraria scien-
tia, comes from his Sermo 27.4 CCL 41, 362.
30Nobis curiositate opus non est post Christum Iesum nec inquisitione post euange-
lium. Cum credimus, nihil desideramus ultra credere [Bancroft quotes as qurere]. From
De Prscriptione Hreticorum, ch. 7.
 bancroft versus penry337

Bancrofts diagnosis of the problem, and his prescription of the golden

mean, is in fact remarkably similar to that of Henrician reformer Thomas
Starkey in his Exhortation on Unitie and Obedience, a work which set the
stage for future conformity with its dual rejection of popery and liber-
tinism and call for extensive magistratical authority in adiaphora. This
realm of adiaphora, in which Starkey calls for implicit faith and quiet sub-
mission to authority, is immense, encompassing for Starkey everything
beyond the Nicene Creed alone.31 Bancroft appears to concur with this
sweeping rejection of lay theological reflection, which places him in an
awkward position for an orthodox Protestant, given that Starkey in the
1530s classed English Lutherans among the arrogant libertines.
To fortify his Protestant credentials, therefore, Bancroft summons to his
aid two of the greatest Protestant theologians, appealing first to the
authority of Calvin and then Melanchthon. He invokes Calvins commen-
tary on the very passage he is considering in order to warn against a Puritan
construal of the command to trie the spirits whether they be of God: he
restraineth the words to a due consideration of certain circumstances. For
as there he addeth, Gold is tried by the fire, and by the touchstone, but yet
of those who have skill so to trie it: for unto those that have no experience
therein, neither the stone nor the first serveth to any purpose (45) Calvin,
he says, distinguishes between public and private trial of doctrine, and
says that public must take precedence, For if authoritie and libertie of
judging shall be left to private men, there will never be anie certaintie set
downe, but rather all religion will wholie become doubtfull (46).32

31Scrupuloous and exact knowlege of thinges conteyned in goddis scriptures, is noth-

inge so necessary to induce them to obedience, as is mekenes and humilitie, which is
among many other thinges to them whiche be rude, the chiefe way, wherby they maye
attayne to the trewe sense of goddis worde and doctrine. For the which cause as I thynke in
the counsayle of Nece, the summe of our feythe, conteynynge suche poyntis as be neces-
sary to every mannes salvation as a thynge sufficient to be had in hart and mynde of all
men, without ferther enserce or inquisition, in the reste ever gyvynge obedience to the
order and custome in every countrey receyved with concorde and unitie. So that we may
judge, as hit appereth to me, that to the unlerned people and bodye of everye commynaltie,
withoute ferther knowledge, sufficiente hit is, every manne doying his office and dewtie, as
he is called, and by goddis provysion therto appoynted, here in this worldly polycie, sted-
fastely to hange uppon the commune order, leanyng therto constantely, ever comforted
with the same feythe and expectation of the everlastynge lyfe, hereafter to be hadde in
immortalitie. See Exhortation to Unitie and Obedience, facsimile reprint (Amsterdam:
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1972), 7r7v. For a good introduction to this fascinating and elu-
sive Henrician political theorist, see Thomas F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal:
Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
32See Calvins Commentaries, ed. and trans. Joseph Haroutonian, vol. 45: Commentary
on James, Peter, 1 John, Jude (available at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom45.html).
338 w. bradford littlejohn

Accordingly, every good Christian polity, he says, requires of its minis-

ters subscription to publicly established articles of religion. Is this a
violation of Christian liberty? Well yes, according to some, says Bancroft,
such as the notable heretike Andreas Osiander, who said, O tyrannie,
O cruelty, christian liberty is heerby restrained; a yoke & bondage
laid upon mens consciences: godlie mens mouths heereby shall be
stopped, a cry, says Bancroft, that is now frequently heard in England.
Against such libertinism, Bancroft brings in no less an authority than
Melanchthon, who in his refutation of Osiander, argued that subscrip-
tion to publicly determined doctrine cohered with Christian liberty.33 In
this section, then, Bancroft has sought to cleverly turn the tables upon
the Puritans: he invokes a passage central to their protest, shows that it
cannot possibly mean what they use it for, and turns it against them, by
implying that when we trie the spirits by the appropriate meansthe
voice of the church and public authorityit is the Puritans who are
shown not to be of God (and indeed, not of the Reformation either). The
remainder of his sermon serves merely to further confirm this devastat-
ing verdict.

Penrys Response

Has Bancroft successfully maintained a golden mean? Peter Lake, for one,
doesnt think so, recounting this passage in Anglicans and Puritans? as evi-
dence of the extremity of quietism and authoritarianism to which the
conformist rejection of the ideal of edification tended. On this evidence
there was no room left in Bancrofts view of the world for any sort of active
(and conventionally protestant) lay piety.34 In his response to Bancroft,
Penry clearly shares this bleak assessment, saying that this doctrine of
yours, tendeth whollie to remoove an able Ministerie out of the church
(32). Indeed, he goes further, and unsurprisingly insists that far from

In fact, Bancroft is somewhat one-sided in his use of Calvin here, for Calvin goes on to
remind us that councils (the public trial of doctrine) may err, and accordingly makes much
more clear than does Bancroft that conscience must defer to this public trial only for the
sake of good order in the forum politicum; this does not obviate the need for private trial
by each individual in the forum conscienti.
33Bancroft here cites from Melanchthons Oratio in qua refutatur calumnia Osiandria,
reprehendetis promissionem eorum, quibus tribuitur testimonium doctrin, in Declama
tionum D. Philippis Melanthonis omnium [], ed. Johannes Caselius, Georg Cracow, and
Petrus Lotichius (Strassburg: Theodosius Rihel, 1570), 56473.
34Anglicans and Puritans, 128.
 bancroft versus penry339

carving out a golden mean, Bancroft has simply replicated the popery that
he claims to oppose:
You account the Papists to be false Prophets, because they will suffer the
people to trie nothing, but teach them wholly to depend upon them: you do
wel in it. But if this touching [the authority of] councels, be not to join hand
with them, in the point wherein you pretend to be their adversary, and if this
be not to teach men to beleeve, as their mother the church doth, let the
reader judge? (34)
There are two options, says Penry. Either Bancroft must believe the church
cannot err, which would make him papist outright, or else that she is sub-
ject to error; if the latter, to what end should we stand to her determina-
tion in matters of question, any further then we are assured, that her
decrees are according unto the word? It is accordingly necessary to trie
whether her determinations bee according unto the word, and to reject
them, if they bee otherwise. Penry minces no words in his assessment of
Bancroft, saying that he is not far from a close papist, how vehement so
ever you speake against them (35).
Surprisingly, Penry makes no effort to counter the quotations from
Calvin or Melanchthon directly, but he does address the issue of confes-
sional subscription, which Bancroft had claimed the Puritans considered
an infringement of their Christian liberty. Not at all, says Penry: It is not
onely lawfull but necessary, that all men, of what state soever they bee,
should be required, yea, and compelled by the Magistrate, to subscribe
unto true religion. This we doe willingly confesse: Howbeit, we hold it
unlawfull to subscribe in that forme that our Bishops do exact at our
hands (36). In other words, as Penry goes on to explain, subscription is
wonderful, so long as it is subscription to the truth. When they oppose
terms of subscription that they consider anti-Christian, including the pro-
phanation of the Sacrament by women, with other manifold abuses, wee
are presently cried out uppon, as being giddie Spirits, and men that cannot
bee content with any good order established by lawe (37).
At this point, one cannot but sympathize with both Bancroft and Penry.
Bancrofts charge that the Puritans consider required subscription to be
ipso facto a violation of Christian liberty is clearly unfairhardline
Puritans are in fact every bit as zealous for uniformity as the conformists
are. But Penrys response is clearly question-begging; if ministers will sub-
mit only to terms of subscription that they consider to be true according
to the Word of God, this is as much as to say, If I agree with you, Ill agree
to agree with you; but if not, I must disagree. And yet how could it be oth-
erwise, given the Protestant doctrine of Christian liberty? The conscience
340 w. bradford littlejohn

was to be bound by Scripture alone, and must not a minister therefore

withhold his assent from anything which seemed to him contrary to
Scripture?35

Defining the Royal Supremacy

When conflict over the doctrine of the royal supremacy surfaces explicitly
in the debate between Bancroft and Penry, it is thus, as we suggested
above, upon this battle-line of epistemological authority that it plays out.
Looke whatsoever prerogative in ecclesiastical or civil causes hee or any
man livinge can truly attribute unto the civil magistrate, wee do the same
(39), Penry protests. He goes on to argue that, unless Bancroft claims for
the magistrate powers that formerly belonged to the Pope, such as remit-
ting sins, or invests her with authority to preach the word, administer the
sacramentes, take the charge of watching over the maners of the people
ordain ministers etc., or authorizes her to make laws contrary to the law
of God, then they occupy the same ground, and Bancroft has no reason to
object to the Puritan teaching on the royal prerogative. He willingly grants
that her majesty and Parliament alone have power to enact godly laws
concerning religion, and to enforce them upon the ministers and people.
Does Bancroft really mean to imply that the Queen has authority to enact
ungodly laws, contrary to Scripture? Penry certainly hopes not. As Eppley,
Brachlow, and others have pointed out, it is just this that made the differ-
ence between the two parties so elusive, and so difficult to resolve.36 All
were agreed that the magistrate must, as a matter of course, rule according
to the Word of God, and that if she commanded contrary to it, a subjects
allegiance to God must come first. But how was she to determine what
laws were according to the Word of God? For Penry, the answer was obvi-
ous: just as her majestie in worldly matters, is to give eare unto the Lawiers
which have skill in that facultie (4041), so she will of course take advice

35Daniel Eppley makes the same point of Whitgifts argument against Cartwright, say-
ing Because he accepts the internal, self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit as the
ultimate source and standard of a right understanding of scripture, Whitgift also concedes
the foundational claim of the Presbyterians that the subjective insight of the individual
Christian under the guidance of the Holy Spirit is the highest criterion of a correct biblical
interpretation. A Christian who feels led by the Spirit to an interpretation of scripture in
accord with Cartwrights must, on Whitgifts own principles, hold to that interpretation no
matter how many opposing arguments or human authorities can be mustered to the con-
trary. See Defending Royal Supremacy, 15960.
36See Brachlow, Communion of Saints, ch. 7; Eppley, Defending Royal Supremacy, ch. 4.
 bancroft versus penry341

in spiritual matters from those learned in suchthe true ministers of the

wordin the matters of God is she to establish nothing in the church,
but that which the true ministers and true governors (if they may bee had)
shall shew unto her to be according unto the worde of God (41).
Of course, while Penry perhaps intends this protestation of innocence
in good faith, it is certainly a bit disingenuous. The problem is not that he
makes the clergy the Queens legislative advisorsindeed, Richard
Hooker will in fact make a very similar argument in Book VIII, chapter 6 of
his Lawes regarding the need for the magistrate to consult with the clergy
on matters spiritual (although of course he is talking primarily about the
bishops, not a select group of credentialed Puritan pastors and presby-
ters). But for Hooker, the Queen is bound from the standpoint of prudence
to take such counselthis is the most naturall and religious course in
making of lawes37but it is not absolutely necessary. The counsel of
ministers thus remains just that: counsel. Parliament and the Queen still
reserve the right to assent to it or to veto it, and without such assent it
is not law for the realm, however convinced some may be of its godly
necessity.38 Penry, however, appears to invest so much interpretive author-
ity in the hands of true ministers of the word that the magistrate has no
choice but to assent:
her majesty and the Parliament are bound to establish and erect amongst
their subjects, al such lawes and ceremonies, as the true ministers of the
word, shall proove by the Scriptures of God, to be meet and necessary for the
government of the temple, and house of the Lord, within this kingdome: and
that they are bound to see, that no form of religion or Church-government be
in force amongst their subjects, but that alone which by the word of God
may be proved lawful (41, italics mine).
No wonder, then, that leading conformists saw this as no better than
poperya demand that the laity and those in civil authority quietly sub-
mit to all determinations of the clergy, with no right to interpose their own
convictions. Seen this way, it appears that Penrys model of epistemologi-
cal authority is little better than that of Bancrofts which he resists; he has
merely flipped it around: where Bancroft denies to ministers the right to
withhold assent from the interpretive decisions of the magistrate and the

37Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, VIII.6.11. In W. Speed Hill and P.G. Stanwood,
eds., The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press, 1981), 403.
38See Lawes VIII.6.68, VIII.6.1014 for Hookers careful spelling out of this
relationship.
342 w. bradford littlejohn

bishops, Penry denies to the magistrate and bishops the right to withhold
assent from the interpretive decisions of the ministers. Both sides, seeking
some definitive resolution to the adiaphora problem, have reached the
point where the Protestant doctrine of Christian liberty in its full form is
no longer usable. Some definitive sentence is necessary; an authoritative
interpreter must be established, and all others must submit.
The conventional preoccupations with Bancrofts sermon as an asser-
tion of the prerogatives of episcopacy, or a battle with the Puritans over
the royal supremacy, understood primarily as a jurisdictional question,
can lose sight of the deeper epistemological crisis that plays out in its
pages, and those of Penrys response. This clash vividly illustrates the
impasse at which conformists and Puritans both found themselves on the
vexed question the Reformation had bequeathedthe relationship of
conscience and authority, law and liberty. As Peter Lake suggests, the qui-
etistic and authoritarian thrust of conformist polemic by the late 1580s
had reached a kind of crisis point, in which the authentic spirit of
Protestantism has been lost, and persuasion no longer seemed feasible.39
The next four years would see two fresh approaches to this question: first,
the Privy Councils rejection of a culture of persuasion for one of intimi-
dation, and second, Richard Hookers attempt to take up the task of per-
suasion on a far larger scale than the pulpit of Pauls Cross would allow,
and to painstakingly unravel the knot of conscience and authority.40

39See Anglicans and Puritans?, ch. 3.

40Hookers attempt to resolve the Puritan crisis of conscience is a prominent theme of
my forthcoming PhD dissertation, The Freedom of a Christian Commonwealth: Richard
Hooker and the Problem of Christian Liberty. Existing articles that helpfully address the
subject along similar lines to my own view are M.E.C. Perrott, Richard Hooker and the
Problem of Authority in the Elizabethan Church, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49.1
(1998): 2960; and Robert Eccleshall, Richard Hookers Synthesis and the Problem of
Allegiance, Journal of the History of Ideas 37.1 (1976): 11124.
 PART FOUR

JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE SERMONS, 16031640

 CHAPTER NINETEEN

PREACHING THE GOOD NEWS: WILLIAM BARLOW NARRATES

THE FALL OF ESSEX AND THE GUNPOWDER PLOT

Anne James

In the introduction to his pamphlet justifying the execution of the second

earl of Essex, published anonymously, Francis Bacon distinguishes
between the evidence necessary for a legal conviction and that required to
satisfy the public appetite for knowledge. Essexs trial should have pro-
vided sufficient satisfaction, but because false and corrupt Collections and
Relations of the proceedings continue to circulate, it is requisite that the
world doe vnderstand aswell the prcedent practises and inducements to the
Treasons, as the open & actuall Treasons thselves.1 In other words, while a
judge only requires proof that certain actions were committed, the public
insists on understanding how and why they were committed. To satisfy
this demand, Bacon needed to create a narrative, and he found the rudi-
ments of one in William Barlows sermon preached at Pauls Cross on the
Sunday following Essexs execution. Less than five years later, Barlow was
to supply a narrative framework for another official pamphlet when he
preached on the Sunday following the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot.
On both occasions the authorities provided Barlow with instructions as
well as details of the events, but allowed him some degree of latitude in
constructing interpretations that would be acceptable to both his political
masters and his audience. The preachers response to this challenge was to
plot the events according to existing generic codes, creating memorable
scenes for his hearers and readers. So successful were his efforts that secu-
lar apologists adapted them for their own pamphlets, Bacons account of
Essexs revolt and the anonymous Discourse of the maner of this late
intended treason that recounted the Gunpowder Plot.
Generally speaking, scholars have paid more attention to the relation-
ship between the instructions Pauls Cross preachers received and the

1Francis Bacon, A Declaration of the practises & treasons attempted and committed by
Robert late Earle of Essex and his complices (London: Robert Barker, printer to the Queenes
most excellent Maiestie, 1601), A3r, A3v.
346 anne james

sermons they preached than to the reception of the sermons. Negative

reactionsexpressed through royal disfavour or even imprisonment
have left more obvious traces than positive ones. Such responses, however,
may be detected in subsequent texts that model their interpretative
frameworks on the sermons. From this perspective, Barlows sermons can
be seen to have exercised considerable influence on subsequent official
versions of two significant political events in early seventeenth-century
England. These cases suggest that the sermons not only disseminated
political information to popular audiences, but also played a vital role in
shaping interpretations that could be used by subsequent polemicists.
Barlow accepted the commission to preach on 1 March 1601 after Abdias
Ashton, one of the other ministers who had attended the earl, refused the
task. In his introduction to the printed sermon, he admitted that he had
hesitated to preach on an occasion that seemed more a matter of state
than of divinity. As an agent of the crown, Barlows duty was to justify
Essexs execution; as a preacher his role was to explicate a scriptural text
and apply it to the current crisis. Barlow chose as his text the first half of
Matthew 22.21, Give vnto Caesar the things of Caesar, curiously omitting
the second half of a well-known verse.2 John Mayer, in his 1622 commen-
tary on Matthew, observes that Jesus added and to God things of God lest
his disciples think they should give themselves to Caesar, while Richard
Ward in a later series of questions and answers on the gospel explains that
our duties to Caesar and God are complementary; however, since Caesar is
an inferior magistrate, our primary duty is to God.3 In the first of only two
citations of the complete verse, Barlow paraphrases it conventionally as
giue vnto Caesar tribute, whose money it is, giue vnto God your selues,
whose people you are, then adds in explanation:
But first Caesar, and then God, for they two haue interchangeably borrowed
names: it pleaseth God to bee called a King in heauen, Psa. 20. and the King
is called a God on earth, Psa. 82. therefore hee which denieth his dutie to
the visible God, his prince and Soueraign, can not performe his dutie to the

2The printed version of the sermon misidentifies the text as Matthew 21.22.
3John Mayer, A Treasury of ecclesiasticall expositions, vpon the difficult and doubtfull
places of the Scriptures collected out of the best esteemed interpreters, both auncient and
moderne, together with the authors judgement, and various observations (London: J[ohn]
D[awson] for John Bellamie, 1622), 257; Richard Ward, Theologicall questions, dogmaticall
observations, and evangelicall essays, vpon the Gospel of Jesus Christ, according to St Matthew
(London: [Marmaduke Parson et al] for Peter Cole, 1640), 284. The only source Barlow cites
in the margin is Saint Basil.
 preaching the good news347

God inuisible. Certainely, a mind inclined to rebellion, was neuer well pos-
sessed of religion.4
Even a tyrant is Gods minister, and anyone who wants to kill or depose a
ruler is guilty of both irreligion and treason. By downplaying the second
part of Jesuss command, Barlow makes clear that the correct way to please
God is to obey temporal authority.
The opening of the sermon contextualizes the verse within the chapter
through images of hunting, describing the series of hostile questions Jesus
faces as nets and snares set by various enemies including the Pharisees
and Herodians, who thought he could answer the question of whether it
was lawful to pay taxes only by committing either treason or blasphemy.
Jesus avoids this trap with his astute answer, and Barlow, walking a similar
razors edge, clearly hopes to emulate Christs example by satisfying both
his political masters and his religious conscience. Nevertheless, he must
have known that the text was not innocent of associations with Essex.
In 1599, John Richardson had found himself under house arrest for an
18 November Pauls Cross sermon on this text that was suspected of com-
paring the relationship between Essex and the queen to that of Seneca
and Nero.5
Dividing his text into three parts, Barlow begins by explaining that
Give refers to the Christians primary duties of willingly and cheerfully
offering alms to the poor and obedience to superiors. Caesar is any ruler,
whether kind or cruel, legitimate or tyrannical, and exposing him or her to
any fear or danger, even without intending murder or deposition, consti-
tutes both irreligion and treason. This definition is broad enough to
include Essexs actions, whatever his intentions had been. Edging into
application, Barlow condemns Robert Parsons for corrupting Essex by
dedicating his book on the succession to him.6 Honour, obedience, fear,
subsidies, and prayers are the things of Caesar, but Barlow pleads lack of

4William Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent: Martij
1.1600. With a short discourse of the Late Earle of Essex his Confession, and Penitence, before
and at the time of his death (London: Mathew Law, 1601), B3r.
5Arnold Hunt, Tuning the Pulpits: The Religious Context of the Essex Revolt, in The
English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 16001750, ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and
Peter McCullough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 9192. The synopsis of
Richardsons sermon appears in PRO, SP 12/276/107, The National Archives, London. See
also Richardsons answers to his examiners: Examination on oath of John Richardson, DD,
MS 2004, fol. 9, Lambeth Palace Library, London.
6Published under the name R. Doleman, A Conference abovt the next svccession to the
crowne of Ingland, divided into two partes ([Antwerp: A. Conincx], 1594).
348 anne james

time for both preparation and delivery to justify not expanding on each of
these duties.
Once the hourglass has been turned, Barlow applies his doctrine of obe-
dience to the occasion by creating a narrative that justifies the earls exe-
cution but allows his followers to believe that his soul has been saved.
Cecil had supplied much of the material for this part of the sermon, but
Barlow accommodated it to the archetypal Christian narrative of fall and
redemption.7 He anticipates this structure in his preface to this second
part when he reminds his auditors that the earl, a man of many talents,
had soared in his highest pitch of fauour with the queen at the time of the
Cadiz victory celebration.8 [H]ad he beene contented to haue beene a
certaine great man, great among the rest; and not affected with Magus,
Act. 8. to be the onely great man, and none to be great but he, he would
have continued soaring. Instead, like all overreachers, he fell (a verb
Barlow repeats frequently in this part of the sermon) and, hath ouer-
throwne many of all sortes with himselfe.9 While Essex blames his fall on
vanitie and lewd counsell, Barlow insists twice that he suffers from the

7Cecils instructions survive in State Papers, Domestic, SP 12/278/126, The National

Archives, London (calendared in CSPD 15981602, 59899). Mary Morrissey notes that
these instructions represented a tactical shift from the directions given to preachers in the
immediate aftermath of the failed rebellion. Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 89. Another several pages of notes apparently
intended for Barlows use in composing the sermon survive in Lambeth Palace Library
along with a copy of Barlows sermon emended by Archbishop Whitgift prior to publica-
tion. The handwriting on these pages has not been identified but may be Whitgifts. Their
author instructs the preacher to emphasize that the queen had been generous to Essex and
that he had been insolent in return, that nevertheless she was so farre from disgracinge
him as shee rather heaped on him honor and gifts of infynite proffitt, that Essex had scorn-
fully denied any intent against the queen at his arraignment but had later admitted what
danger he should haue brought the realm unto if his proiect had taken place, and that he
had finally called witnesses to hear his confession. The notes conclude that Barlow may
end with his own recollections of Essexs penitence wherein nothing can bee better sett
downe, then as you have allreadie done it vnder your owne handes, suggesting that Barlow
had already written his account of the execution. Papers Mainly concerning Robert
Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, MS 2872, fols. 5758, LPL. Barlow clearly followed some of
these instructions as well as those from Cecil. Hunt points out that Barlow also seems to
have used Stephen Egertons 15 February Blackfriars sermon as a source. Hunt, Tuning the
Pulpits, 99102. Despite the evidence that Barlow received advice from several quarters, he
insisted that his information was the result of his own visits to the court during the period
of Essexs imprisonment.
8Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent, B8v. Barlow
had preached the victory sermon at Pauls Cross, which was one of the reasons that he was
selected to preach in 1601, the authorities believing that the condemnation would have
more weight coming from a former supporter.
9Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent, C3r.
 preaching the good news349

more grievous sin of pride.10 Nevertheless, Essexs story, unlike those of

Satan and other overreachers, must end not with obduracy and damna-
tion, but with repentance and salvation.
Having already assured his audience that Essexs soule, no doubt [is]
with the saints in heauen, Barlow needs only to conduct his auditors to
the pinnacle of Essexs pride by describing his defiance after his arrest
and then to lead them through the stages of his penitence.11 Cecils
instructions required Barlow to emphasize the threat to the queen, and
he uses his commentary on Essexs confession to offer his audience a
vivid word picture describing Elizabeth at the mercy of armed Catholics,
inviting them to imagine how frightened she would have been, and to
thinke what it would have been like for her to see her chambers running
with blood.12 Although imagining the queens death is treason, and
despite his own promise to speak only of what he has witnessed, Barlow
relies heavily on cultivating the imaginations of his hearers, sweeping
them up in the possibility that they could have been harmed or killed as
the revolt unfolded. He must show his auditors not only that Essex
deserved death for his disobedience to Caesar, but also, as per his instruc-
tions, that the earl does not deserve their support, having merely courted
the people for his personal ends. To this end, Barlow suggests a parallel
for Essex in the life of Coriolanus, relying on Plutarch to describe him as
a gallant young, but a discontented Romane.13 Although Barlow does not
develop the analogy, his auditors could hardly have been unaware that
while Plutarchs portrait described a Roman of great ability and courage,
Coriolanus was no friend to the lower classes. The preacher then describes
Essexs overnight transformation from defiance to penitence and his
good death as a repentant sinner. The proofs of the earls penitence are
his request for humility and his admission of pride, the sin he had previ-
ously refused to confess.14 Barlow thus assures Essexs followers of his
eternal welfare. Even if this crumb of comfort did not satisfy many of his
hearers, the preachers narrative of Essexs fall and redemption served a
homiletic purpose, while his defence of secular obedience satisfied the
authorities.15

10Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent, C3v.
11Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent, C3v.
12Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent, Dv-D2v.
13Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent, C3v.
14Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent, D7v.
15The defensive tone of Barlows preface indicates that he had been stung by criticism,
and he recites some of the rumours that his performance had been subjected to.
350 anne james

Having acknowledged the need for an interpretative framework, Bacon

adapted Barlows dramatic account into a self-consciously theatrical de
casibus tragedy in his anonymous pamphlet, A Declaration of the Treasons
of the late Earle of Essex, and his Complices.16 The first act of this play takes
place in Ireland, although Essex may have been plotting treason even
before that time.17 Like Barlow, Bacon emphasizes the honours the queen
heaped upon Essex, which became nothing els but wings for his ambition
because he aspired vnto a greatnesse, desiring only power.18 In Ireland,
Essex drawing now towards the Catastrophe, or last part of that Tragedy,
for which he came vpon the Stage in Ireland, his Treasons grew to a
further ripenesse, and he made a secret bargain with Tyrone.19 Blunt and
Southampton have attested to dissuading Essex from returning to England
with an army, So as nowe the worlde may see how long since my Lord put
off his vizard, and disclosed the secrets of his heart to two of his most
confident friends, falling vpon that vnnaturall and detestable treason,
whereunto all his former Actions in his gouernement in Ireland, (and
God knowes howe long before) were but Introductions.20 Thereupon he
planned the second act of this Tragedy which was, that my Lord should
present himselfe to her Maiestie as prostrating himselfe at her [Elizabeths]
feete, and desire the remoue of such persons, as he called his enemies,
from about her.21 The earls alleged plans for distributing his men about
the palace read like a set of stage directions, enabling the reader easily to
visualize the action intended, and perhaps to forget that it never actually
occurred.22 The tragedys third act takes place at Essex House on Sunday
8 February. Bacon situates this days events carefully in both space and
time, beginning with Essexs mustering of his friends at 8 a.m. and con-
cluding with his surrender at 10 p.m. While most of the action occurs at

16Bacon, of course, could draw upon other sources, including his own previous rela-
tions with Essex and his presence at and participation in Essexs arraignment.
17In contrast, the Lambeth Palace Library manuscript of instructions to Barlow had
advised him not to discuss Essexs conduct in Ireland (LPL MS 2872, f. 57r).
18Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, A4v.
19Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, Cr.
20Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, C4r-v.
21Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, Ev.
22Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, Dv. In this case, we can see a clear
line of development from Cecils instructions through Barlows sermon to Bacons pam-
phlet. Cecils instructions required Barlow to include this detail to show that Essex must
have expected blood to be shed if the plans had been carried out. Barlow repeated the
information, using it to show how frightened the queen would have been, whereas Bacon
uses it in a more damaging way to show intentionality, explaining that the men were to be
in place before a signal was sent to Essex House for the earl to approach the palace.
 preaching the good news351

Essex House, the real stage for this act is London, around which Essex pro-
cesses in a parody of a royal progress or coronation procession as he seeks
followers. Speeches and dialogue enliven the account as the Lord Keeper
delivers the queens message, Essex is proclaimed traitor in the streets, and
the earl negotiates the conditions of his surrender.
This account characterizes Essex as a tragic hero whose flaw is ambi-
tion, a manifestation of pride.23 God often punisheth ingratitude by ambi-
tion, and ambition by treason, and treason by finall ruine begins the text,
enabling Bacon to avoid producing specific religious or political motives.24
Instead, the author emphasizes the providential course of events. When
Essex returned from Ireland, his heart thus fraughted with Treasons, and
presented himselfe to her Maiestie: it pleased God, in his singular proui-
dence ouer her Maiestie, to guide and hem in her proceeding towards him,
in a narrow way of safetie betweene two perils, and she placed him under
house arrest.25 Similarly, although the queens sending for Essex on
7 February may have seemed sudden to men, God had in his diuine proui-
dence long agoe cursed this action, with the Curse that the Psalme spea-
keth of, That it should be like the vntimely fruit of a woman, brought foorth
before it came to perfection,26 and during the actual revolt, it pleased God,
that her Maiesties directions at Court, though in a case so strange and sud-
den, were iudiciall and sound. Finally, providence turns Essex from a great
man into an example of disloyaltie.27
The tragic mode suits Bacons secular and legal purposeslike Barlow
he needs to acknowledge Essexs greatness to satisfy his supporters and to
justify his own earlier friendship, but unlike Barlow he is not required to
assert the earls final redemption. Essex simply mounted to the top of
Fortunes wheel before beginning his inevitable decline. Bacon dismisses
in a single paragraph Essexs confession of his great, his bloudy, his cry-
ing, and his infectious sins, which Barlow had lingered over.28 Bacon
will only grudgingly admit that Essex seems to have experienced a kind
of remorse and quote his assertion that he has become a new man since
the trial.29 Whereas Barlow concentrates on Essexs reconciliation with

23Shakespeare and Fletcher describe the sin of the fallen angels as ambition in Henry
VIII (3.2.441), quoted in the OED from the 1623 Folio. The first known performance of the
play took place in 1613.
24Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, A4v.
25Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, Dr.
26Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, E3r-v.
27Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, F3v.
28Bacon, A Declaration of the practises and treasons, I3r.
29Bacon, A Declaration of the practices and treasons, I3r.
352 anne james

God, Bacon concludes somewhat acidly that he continued to blame his

confederates and died without farewells to family or friends.
In his Pauls Cross sermon, then, Barlow shaped the Essex event into a
Christian narrative of fall and redemption that Bacon rewrote as de casi-
bus tragedy. Both sermon and pamphlet narratives were imaginative con-
structions of motives and actions shaped by familiar literary patterns as
well as by the events themselves. Both reflected official concerns with per-
suading auditors and readers that Essex had sought, at the very least, to
frighten the queen, and that he had only courted the common people for
his own advancement. The strategy of relying upon men who had previ-
ously supported EssexBarlow by preaching the Cadiz victory sermon
and Bacon through their earlier friendly relationswas entirely success-
ful neither with Essexs supporters nor with those who had commissioned
their efforts. While Barlow lost Elizabeths favour, he rose to prominence
again under James; conversely, in 1604 when Essexs reputation had
rebounded in the new reign, Bacon found himself compelled to justify his
harsh stance against the earl by publishing his Apologie, in certaine impu-
tations concerning the Late Earle of Essex.30
Only a few years later, Barlows interpretative skills were tested again,
but this time by chance, since he had already been scheduled to preach on
10 November 1605 before the Gunpowder Plot was discovered. In his pref-
ace to the printed sermon, the preachers friend explains that while Barlow
had received detailed instructions for the Essex sermon, in this case the
late receiuing of the Instructions which in that short space could not bee
many meant that he had obtained his information chiefly from the parlia-
mentary speeches of James and Lord Chancellor Egerton the day before
and his instructions from a conference with Salisbury later that evening.31

30According to John Manningham, Elizabeth reprimanded Barlow in 1602 for attempt-

ing to enter her presence and thereby reminding her of Essexs death. The Diary of John
Manningham of the Middle Temple (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976),
87. Bacons Apologie consists primarily of attempts to show that the author tried to act as a
mediator between Essex and the queen; however, vestiges of his approach in the Declaration
remain when he compares Essex to Icarus, and in his frequent use of the adjectives fortu-
nate and unfortunate to describe the earl. Sir Francis Bacon his Apologie, in certaine impu-
tations concerning the late Earle of Essex (London: F. Norton, 1604), B2r and passim.
31William Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember
being the next Sunday after the discouerie of this late horrible treason (London: John
W[indet], 1606), A3v-A4r. No written instructions appear to have survived in this case.
Jamess speech was subsequently printed, and the outline of Egertons is recorded in the
Journals of the House of Lords, vol. 2: 15781614, 357. Whether Barlows preface was in fact
written by a friend or by the preacher himself, the strategy indicates that he was still
smarting over the reception of the Essex sermon, an indication reinforced by the defensive
tone of the preface and its references to the previous occasion.
 preaching the good news353

As on the former occasion, Barlow had apparently been told which aspects
of the situation he was to emphasize but was left free to select an appro-
priate text and to apply it within those guidelines. His choice of text,
Psalm 18.50 (Great Deliuerances giueth he vnto his King, and sheweth mercy
to his annointed Dauid and to his seede for euer), complements Jamess
approach of focusing on his individual deliverance as the means by which
the nation is delivered. Barlow makes his narrative more immediate, how-
ever, by reminding his audience that they were among the plots intended
victims.
In opening his text, Barlow proposes a much more complex structure
than he had employed in the earlier sermon. Rather than crumbling the
text, he divides the Psalm into two parts, intensive and extensive: the
first refers to the nature of the deliverances (great deliverances); the sec-
ond refers to how they are distributed or communicated (to David and his
seed). The first part subdivides into their double nature (plurality of num-
ber and greatness or magnitude) and their double quality (their internal
or essential wholesomeness and their external or accidental magnificence
or becomingness to God). The second or extensive part is divided into the
personal (the kings deliverance as an eminent person, a sacred person,
and a person approved by God) and the successive (undefined number
and unlimited time of the deliverances). Although in the printed version
he uses the headings The First Part and The Second Part, in fact these are
the two subtopics of the first part. He does not actually approach the sec-
ond part until after he has described the plot and its anticipated results,
and only then to outline what he planned to say but cannot because he
has run out of time. The printed sermon also indicates two breaks where
Barlow had read first Fawkess confession and then papers concerning
the confession along with his own notes on them.32 In the first part,
he catalogues both the number and magnitude of Davids deliverances
and the honours he received from God. Moving from this part of the expli-
cation into application, he declares that All these of Dauids were great
indeed, but compared to this of our gracious King: (the last, I trust, for
a worse there cannot be) is but as a minium to a large, whether we

32Fawkess confession was the only one available at this early date. Mark Nicholls sug-
gests that the papers alluded to might be an outline that had been presented to parlia-
ment the previous day: Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1991), 26. Lori Anne Ferrell argues that Barlows excuses regarding lack of preparation
do not justify the disorganization and stylistic flaws of the printed edition, suggesting that
Barlow wanted to maintain the sense of excitement and immediacy of the original deliv-
ery. See Government by Polemic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 75.
354 anne james

consider therein, eyther the Plot it selfe, or the Con-comitance with it, or
the Consequences of it.33
Under the heading Plot, Barlow recounts not so much the actual events
as those the plotters had allegedly intended. Following the lead in Jamess
speech, he begins by emphasizing the cruelty of the plotters plans, but as
in the Essex sermon he imagines the results of a successful plot in more
immediate and sensational detail than his source. Calling fire and water
the cruelest killers, the king noted that whereas Noahs flood had merely
purged the world, the fire prophecied to mark the end of time would con-
sume it. Backing away from this apocalyptic vision, James later called the
plot a Tragedy (B3v), enumerating the groups of people who would have
been killed while attending the opening of parliament. Barlow, however,
develops the kings hints of an apocalypse by observing that the devil is
reputed to have discovered gunpowder and envisioning a fierie massacre
in which individuals would have been torn parcell-meale as if by beasts.34
Whereas James had limited the destruction to king and parliament, the
preacher presented a more frightening vision, in which (beside the place
it selfe at the which he aymed) the Hall of Iudgement, the Courtes of
Recordes, the Collegiate Church, the Cittie of Westminster, yea, White-Hall
the Kinges house, had been trushed and ouerthrowne.35 The impenitent
Fawkes is the Diuell of the Vault, an epithet that would shortly be taken
up by the author of a popular poem recounting the event.36 Like Satan,
Fawkes wanted to kill souls as well as bodies, but he is worse than Satan,
for this Diuill, with his traine would at once haue pulled downe all the
glorious Starres, both fixed, and erraticall (those that are fastened to the
Court, and those which come and goe as they are called and dismissed)
yea euen the Sunne & the Moone themselues, not from heauen to earth,
but to the bottomlesse pit, as much as in him lay.37 In the following
section, as he describes in more detail the consequences of a successful

33Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember, C2v.
34Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember, C3r. James
had described the apocalypse with a similar emphasis upon the cruelty of Satan and the
Antichrist in his Fruitefull Meditation, Containing a plaine and easie Exposition, or laying
open of the 7. 8. 9. and 10. verses of the 20. chap. of the Reuelation, in forme and maner of a
sermon, first published in Scotland in 1588 and reprinted in London in 1603.
35Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember, C3r.
36Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember, C3v. The
poem is: I.H. [John Heath, Fellow of New College, Oxford], The Divell of the Vault or The
Unmasking of Murder (London: E. A[llde] for Nathnaiell [sic] Butter, 1606).
37Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember, C4r.
 preaching the good news355

plot, Barlow develops the apocalyptic mode established by his allusion to

Revelation 12.4.
Here the preacher envisions the kind of reverse creation described in
Johns prophecy by introducing a series of images in which the various
lights of the kingdom are extinguished, leaving it in Cimmerian dark-
ness.38 While most attempts to change government unfold slowly, this one
would have occurred in the twinkling of an eye, echoing Pauls descrip-
tion of the general resurrection in 1 Cor. 15.52.39 This benighted nation
would then have been open to foreign invasion by the Catholic emissaries
of Antichrist or a domestic usurper. Whereas James had emphasized his
personal deliverance, Barlow demonstrated forcefully that none would
have remained unaffected by this event had it taken place. If the kings
speech was a measured response to the discovery, designed to prevent
panicked reprisals against domestic Catholics and to avoid jeopardizing
the new peace with Spain, then Barlows sermon was the equivalent of
tabloid journalism.
Nevertheless, Barlows apocalyptic rendering was not merely the prod-
uct of a vivid imagination. His methods were different than the kings
because his audience was not a select group of parliamentarians but the
whole city of London; however, his underlying strategy was similarto
demonstrate that Guy Fawkes and the other plotters did not represent
ordinary English Catholics.40 In his speech, James had insisted that many
honest men, seduced with some errors of Popery, may yet remaine good
and faithfull Subiects.41 By portraying Fawkes as Satan, Barlow insisted
upon his singularity, not quite exonerating other Catholics but certainly
suggesting that Fawkes did not represent the majority of his coreligionists.
At the same time, Fawkess social status presented Barlow with a difficulty
that became apparent as he contemplated the magnitude of the plot. The
perpetrator of this averted catastrophe was not a great man but a man
described several times by James as a wretch, and reduced still further by
Barlow to vermine of the basest sorte working underground like a mole.42

38Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember, D3r.
39Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember, Dv.
40At this point, Fawkes was still considered the most important of the plotters, or at
least of those who had survived.
41His Maiesties Speach speach in this last session of Parliament Together with a dis-
course of the maner of the discouery of this late intended Treason (London: Robert Barker,
1605), C2v.
42Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember, Dr. The
social status of the plotters continued to trouble the authorities. Convinced that a noble-
man must be involved in such a horrendous scheme, they imprisoned Henry Percy, Earl of
356 anne james

After reading Fawkess confession, the preacher reiterates, in a dazzling

display of accumulatio, his astonishment that
this darkenes, this blindenes, this prophanes, this superstition, this weakenes,
this lawles fury, had with this blowing vp bin blown in & ouer this whole
nation, a thing which neither the greatest Potentate of the world, with his
strongest inuasion, nor the most dangerous rebel, though most popular &
powerfull, coulde haue brought to passe after many repulses, & in many
years, namely, to take away at once, the hope of succession, the Oracles of
wisedome, the Chariots of Israel, the Beau-peeres of Learning, the buttresses
of strength, the guardians of iustice, the glory of the Nobilitie, and in one
word, the Flower of the whole Kingdome. (D2r)
Neither an Essex nor an Armada could have caused the destruction that a
man of lowly birth has almost accomplished simply by stockpiling gun-
powder and threatening to set a match to it. In the previous days speech,
James had described the plot as this great and horrible attempt, whereof
the like was neuer either heard or read, and Barlow agrees that there are
no adequate classical or biblical parallels, not only for the magnitude and
cruelty of the design but also for the status of the perpetrators.43 As Paul
Connerton suggests, naming something categorizes it, and the plot both
requires and resists classification.44 Nevertheless, by emphasizing the fail-
ure of the plot and the low social status of the man considered at this
point to be the chief plotter, both the king and Barlow had already ges-
tured towards another familiar literary genre that could be effectively used
to shape plot narratives.
By early December, a pamphlet containing the kings 9 November
speech and an anonymous Discourse of the maner of this late intended
treason had been rushed into print. In The Printer to the Reader, Robert
Barker, the kings printer, disingenously claimed that the Discourse mys-
teriously appeared when he was about to print the speech. Contemporaries
seem to have attributed the narrative to James, and the entire pamphlet
became known as The Kings Book. In his Answer to certaine scandalous
Papers, Salisbury praises this Princely and religious worke in which
his Maiestie (like to those kings of whome Seneca speaketh, that doe more
good by Example then by Lawes) hath increased our obligation, by leauing

Northumberland, in the tower until 1621. In the absence of solid evidence against the earl,
however, the authorities increasingly focused upon the Jesuits as the more important
conspirators.
43His Maiesties Speach, B2r.
44Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 27.
 preaching the good news357

vnder his owne hand, such a plaine & perfect Record of his own true thanke-
fulnes to Almighty God, for his so great and miraculous graces; as neither the
present Time, nor ages to come can euer be so ingrate, as not to retaine the
same in perpetual memorie.45
Based on its inclusion in James Montagus collection of the kings writings,
Thomas Bayley Howell, in his Collection of State Trials, also assumed
Jamess authorship.46 When David Jardine revised this work later in the
century, however, he speculated that the Discourse might be Francis
Bacons work. More recently, Mark Nicholls has concurred that stylistic
elements may support Jardines conclusion, although he recommends
caution in attributing authorship.47 The pamphlet appeared before
Barlows sermon, which had been entered in the Stationers Register on
11 December, but was not printed until 1606, and seems to have helped
Barlow to resolve the dilemma of Fawkess status.
In the preface to the sermon, likely written after December, Barlow or
his friend calls the plot this late Tragi-comical treason, (Tragical, in the
dreadeful intention: Comicall in the happye and timely Detection thereof).48
The writer of the Discourse had similarly concluded that the plot was a
Tragedie to the Traytors, but tragicomedie to the King and all his true

45Robert Cecil, An Answere to Certaine Scandalous Papers, scattered abroad vnder colour
of a Catholicke Admonition (London: Robert Barker, 1606), A3v-A4r. Although this evidence
seems fairly conclusive, it is possible that Salisbury was referring to the speech rather than
the Discourse.
46Thomas Bayly Howell, Cobbetts complete collection of state trials and proceedings
for high treason and other crimes and misdemeanors from the earliest period to the present
time : from the ninth year of the reign of King Henry, the Second, a.d. 1163, to [George IV,
a.d. 1820] (London : T.C. Hansard for R. Bagshaw, 18091828), vol. 2, 1809.
47Nevertheless, Nicholls suggests that the author of the Discourse used Bacons Essex
pamphlet as a model. Dana Sutton proposes the pamphlet on Dr. Parrys treason as a
model. Sutton is correct that Parrys was the first pamphlet in the genre that Bacon later
developed. I would suggest, however, that the genre evolved not only through these two
pamphlets, but also through Jamess own narrative of the Gowrie conspiracy in Scotland.
Mark Nicholls, Discovering Gunpowder Plot: The Kings Book and the Dissemination of
News, Recusant History 28.3 (2007), 40102; Dana Sutton Miltons In Quintum Novembris,
anno tatis 17 (1626), Choices and Intentions, in Qui Miscvit vtile Dvlci: Festschrift Essays for
Paul Lachlan MacKendrick, edited by Gareth Schmeling and Jon D. Mikalson, 34975
(Waconda: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1998), 357; Howell, Cobbetts Complete Collection of State
Trials, 195; David Jardine, Criminal Trials supplying Copious Illustrations of the Important
Periods in English History during the Reigns of Queene Elizabeth and James I, v. 2 (London:
M.A. Nattali, 1847), 45; A True and Plaine Declaration of the Horrible Treasons, practised by
William Parry the traitor, against the Queenes Maiestie (London: C[hristopher] B[arker],
1585); [James I], The Earle of Gowries conspiracie against the Kings Maiestie at Saint Ionstoun
vpon Tuesday the fift day of August (London: Valentine Simmes, 1603).
48Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember, A3r.
358 anne james

Subiects.49 Although this genre would shortly acquire a narrower defini-

tion, at this time it still described any action that blended comic and tragic
elements and in which high and low characters might both appear. The
Discourse begins in the comic mode, describing a Vnited and truely
happy Isle flourishing in a most happie and plentifull Peace, as well at
home as abroad, sustained and conducted by these two maine Pillars of all
good Gouernement, Pietie and Ivstice, no forreine grudge, nor inward
whispering of discontent any way appearing.50 So secure was the king that
he had gone hunting. Tragedy threatens in the form of a blowing vp of
powder, which might bee performed by one base knaue in a darke corner,
but the plot is foiled thanks to Jamess ability to decipher the cryptic warn-
ing letter sent to Lord Monteagle.51 Representing the plot as a tragicomedy
not only accounts for its failure and for Fawkess low social status, but it
also suits Jamess political purposes by looking back to the stability pro-
vided by his peaceful accession and forward to the benefits of the political
union that he wants to establish.
The suppression of the Midlands revolt, which Barlow had treated
briefly since the news had only filtered into London the night before his
sermon, allows the writer to develop a comic denouement more fully.
Although the rebellion presented a potential tragic hero in the young and
dashing Sir Everard Digby, the writer dismissed Digby to concentrate
instead on the rebels inglorious end. Like Barlow, the author sees their
accidental burning with their own gunpowder as providential, for they
presently (see the wonderfull power of Gods Iustice vpon guiltie con-
sciences) did all fall downe vpon their knees, praying God to pardon them
for their bloody enterprize and they opened the gates to the sheriff,
whereupon
these resolute and high aspiring Catholikes, who dreamed of no lesse then
the destruction of Kings and kingdomes and promised to themselues no
lower state then the gouernment of great and ancient Monarchies; were
miserably defeated, and quite ouerthrowne in an instant, falling in the pit
which they had prepared for others.52
Their falls, however, are not tragic but merely humiliatingthose not
killed are taken and led prisoners by the Sheriffe the ordinarie minister of
Iustice, to the Gaole, the ordinarie place, euen of the basest malefactors

49His Maiesties Speach, M4r.

50His Maiesties Speach, E2v, E4v.
51His Maiesties Speach, F4v.
52His Maiesties Speach, M3r, M3rv.
 preaching the good news359

and finally gaped at by crowds of women and fools who regard them as
monsters as they are transported back to London.53
This comic ending, however, in no way mitigates the plots potential for
destruction. Echoing and expanding upon Barlows imagined catastrophe,
the author represents the planned explosion as not merely the nations
destruction, but its eradication:
The hall of Iustice; The house of Parliament; The Church vsed for the
Coronation of our Kings; The Monuments of our former Princes; The Crowne
and other markes of Royaltie; All the Records, as well of Parliament, as of
euery particular mans right, with a great number of Charters and such like,
should all haue beene comprehended vnder that fearefull Chaos. And so the
earth as it were opened, should haue sent forth of the bottome of the Stygian
lake such sulphured smoke, furious flames, and fearefull thunder, as should
haue by their diabolicall Domesday destroyed and defaced, in the twinckling
of an eye, not onely our present liuing Princes and people, but euen our
insensible Monuments.54
Here, Jamess enumeration of the groups of people who would have been
killed in the explosion, expanded by Barlow to a list of the national institu-
tions that would have been destroyed, is further refined to express the
threat of losing not only the nation but even the records and monuments
verifying that it once existed. These retrospective apocalyptic imaginings
serve political as well as rhetorical ends. Patricia Parker notes that
The traditional function of Apocalypse is to portray the enemy as already
defeated, in a vision of the end which places us outside the monsters we
are still insideas Job at the end of his trial is shown the externalized forms
of behemoth and leviathanand, by this act of identifying or naming,
proleptically overcomes them.55
To imagine the apocalypse as James, Barlow and the anonymous author of
the Discourse do is to envision an end to Catholic plots, and at least for a
time the Gunpowder Plot was seen as a conspiracy that could not be sur-
passed in either scope or wickedness.
These two examples suggest that Pauls Cross sermons during political
crises not only provided information to listeners, and later readers, but
that they also shaped interpretations of these events that helped to create
new texts. The political and religious authorities may have instructed

53His Maiesties Speach, M3v.

54His Maiesties Speach, E3v.
55Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979), 77.
360 anne james

Barlow on what to say, but they allowed him to determine the best way to
say it. Barlows response was to perform his own act of plotting, using tra-
ditional genres to make Essexs story one of fall and redemption and the
Gunpowder Plot an averted apocalypse with overtones of tragicomedy.
Secular writers took up these narratives and adapted them to their own
purposes. In the first case, Bacon used Barlows cues to create a tragic nar-
rative that, while unpopular, complemented the preachers story of fall
and redemption; in the second, Barlow, working dialogically with James
and the writer of the Discourse, helped to establish an interpretation of
the Gunpowder Plot that has lasted, although not without challenges, into
the twenty-first century. Pauls Cross preachers, then, were not merely pas-
sive conduits for information but vital to the creation of interpretations
that turned news into narratives.
 CHAPTER TWENTY

PAULS WORK: REPAIR AND RENOVATION OF

ST PAULS CATHEDRAL, 156116251

Roze Hentschell

A work so much stupendious that the people

Thought it would nere finished be, therefore did call
Imperfect Works the building of St Paul.
Search through the Universe and youl not see
Another pile so full of Majestie.

William Boghurst, Londinologia, sive, Londini encomium2

In the late 16th century, the phrase to make Pauls work of something
became colloquial for a botched or an always unfinished project.3 The
phrase has its origins in the sustained yet unsuccessful efforts to repair
and renovate Londons St Pauls Cathedral after the 1561 fire that destroyed
the spire and damaged the roof. The church fell into disrepair in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and was the subject of several
reconstruction attempts, none of which came to fruition. It was not until
Charles I took the throne that a complete restoration of the church, led by
Inigo Jones, was planned. This essay is an attempt to weave together the
sometimes competing narratives surrounding the renovation efforts in
the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. I use those royal qualifiers deliber-
ately, as the monarchs were generally involved in attempts at refurbishing.
The question I attempt to answer is this: why, given the participation of

1The writing of this essay was enabled by a Faculty Development Award from the
College of Liberal Arts at Colorado State University. I would like to thank Barbara Sebek for
her characteristically generous and helpful reading of earlier portions of this essay. I would
also like to thank the participants at the Pauls Cross and the Culture of Persuasion confer-
ence at McGill University as well as two anonymous readers.
2William Boghurst, Londinologia, sive, Londini encomium (1666), BL Sloane MS 904,
fols. 5368.
3The OED notes that The origin of Pauls work is unclear; it is perhaps connected
with the phrase work of (St) Pauls occurring in some wills , referring to building works
at the cathedral. Pauls, n. OED Online, Oxford University Press. <http://0-www.oed.com
.catalog.library.colostate.edu/view/Entry/139022?> (accessed July 2012).
362 roze hentschell

the state, would such efforts fail? I argue that in the Elizabethan period,
renovation was unsuccessful because the efforts towards reconstruction
and the rhetoric surrounding these attempts were not consistently pre-
sented as a crucial civic project with national implications. While the early
years of renovation had tepid support of the queen, the church fabric was
not regarded by the crown, clergy, and city as a significant priority.
Squabbles over where financial responsibility lay further delayed efforts.
There was no consensus over who owned Pauls, nor was there a consistent
narrative about what Pauls meant to the church of England, the city of
London, and the nation as a whole.
In the early years of Jamess reign, public interest in the condition of the
church fabric gained ground. Secular writers, principally Henry Farley,
demonstrate the cultural interest in the renovation, even as their concern
for the church did little to enact improvements. By 1620, the restoration
effort took hold and James became intensely involved with the project. He
appeared at Pauls to hear a sermon preached by Bishop John King arguing
for its repair. This sermon served a crucial purpose: it expressed Jamess
arguments to a large audience of civic and religious officials with the
dilapidated church as its backdrop. Soon after, he set up a commission to
carry out the planning for and work of renovation. James understood that
St Pauls Cathedral must be regarded as a collective responsibilityand
glorious symbolof the church, city, and state.
While the rebuilding of Pauls was central to his efforts to present
London as a Stuart city, Jamess failure to follow through and stay con-
nected to the project resulted in its further delay. Both contemporary writ-
ers and historians of Pauls fabric have cast the Jacobean episode in the
renovation efforts as another sad chapter in its long story. The letters of
John Chamberlain, in particular, give us insight into how the renovations
were viewed in this vein in the period. It is crucial to see, however, that
Jamess participation in the efforts laid the important groundwork for
Charles I, which ultimately led to Joness massive reconstruction project.4
Revisiting the history of repair endeavors in the Jacobean period allows us
to understand the important symbolic role material structures have in
shaping civic identity in general, and in particular, the crucial role St Pauls
played in the early modern understanding of London.

4As Vaughan Hart explains, part of the Stuart interest in Pauls stemmed from a desire
to restore the Cathedrals eminence over that of Westminster Abbey and became the cen-
tral symbol for the celebration in classical terms of the kings central Protestant role as
Defender of the Faith. Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2011), 80.
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls363

The Fire of 1561 and the Elizabethan Aftermath

While there had been a church on the site since the seventh century, the
building that early-modern Londoners called St Pauls was a grand Norman
cathedral, completed in the early 14th century with a spire reaching 498
feet, taller than the top of Wrens current dome.5 On 4 June 1561, between
four and five in the afternoon, the spire was struck by lightning. As Bishop
Pilkington of Durham wrote less than a week after the event, smoke was
espied by divers to breake oute under the bowle of the said shaf of Paules.6
Within approximately fifteen minutes, the cross and eagle at the top of the
spire had fallen onto the roof of the south transept and burning timbers
lit the roof on fire.7 Several authoritiesthe lord mayor, the Bishop of
London, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and the Lord Treasurer
immediately gathered to discuss strategies for dealing with the crisis. One
proposition was to shoot down the remainder of the steeple with cannon
fire. Rejecting that dangerous plan, they thought beste to geat ladders &
scale the churche & with axes to hew down a space of the roofe.8 Before
they could carry out this complicated scheme, most of the part of the
highest roofe of the churche was likewise consumed.9 The fire raged on
until about ten oclock. While the spire was completely destroyed and the
steeple and roof sustained significant damage, the interioraside from
the communion tablewas spared as were other buildings in the pre-
cinct. Later that night, the civic and church authorities were joined by the
queen herself, just in the third year of her reign. Pilkington reports that
assone [as soon] as the rage of fier was espied by her majestye and others
in the court, of the pitifull inclinacion & love that her gracious highnesse
dyd beare both to the said church & the citie, sent to assyst my Lord Mayor
for the suppressing of the fyre, who with his wysdome, authority & dili-
gent travayl did very much good therein.10 Just as the queen exhibited

5The spire previously had been struck by lightning in 1444; it was repaired by 1462.
Maija Jansson, The Impeachment of Inigo Jones and the Pulling Down of St Gregorys by
St Pauls, Renaissance Studies 17 (2003), 71646.
6The main narrative of the fire, The True Report of the Burnyng of the Steple and
Chruche of Poules in London, was written on 10 June by Pilkington. It is transcribed in W.
Sparrow Simpson (ed.), Documents Illustrating the History of S. Pauls Cathedral (London:
Camden Society, 1880), 120125.
7Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal: 15191583 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1979).
8Pilkington, True Report, A3v.
9Pilkington, True Report, A4r-v.
10Pilkington, True Report, A5r-v.
364 roze hentschell

pitifull inclinacion & love to the church, so too did the mayor exert his
own wysdome and authority.
Despite this initial show of cooperation, responsibility for the repairs
was at issue. As Christopher Kitching explains, [h]ow money should be
raised was from the outset intimately associated with the question of
whose responsibility the cathedral was: the nations, the Citys, that of the
church at large, the clergy, the bishop or the dean and chapter.11 Though
the church fabric had generally been under the auspices of the clergy, the
civic response was swift. On 10 June, the same day that Pilkingtons pam-
phlet was published, the city voted to levy a tax on the citizens to raise
3000 marks (2000 pounds) toward the cost of rebuilding.12 All citizens
not only those who used or attended services at Paulswould shoulder
the burden for its repair, indicating that the mayor saw the church as a
civic responsibility. The mayor and bishop were summoned to court at
Greenwich on 16 June13 and less than a week after the incident, Elizabeth
asserted that we think surely no private citizen or good subject can think
any cost better bestowed upon their own private houses than upon that
Temple.14 She had William Cecil draft a letter on her behalf to the
Archbishop of Canterbury and lord mayor. The letter required the lord
mayor to exact a tax on citizens and a benevolence on Londons wealthy,
while the archbishop was to get contributions from the clergy by such
means as he saw fit.15 The queen herself gave a thousand gold marks
(approximately 666 pounds) and 1,000 marks worth of timber for roof
repairs.16 In the earliest written history of St Pauls, William Dugdale makes
mention several times of how the renovation of the fabric was always a
combined effort between sovereign and citizen. After noting the queens
contribution, he goes on to list contributions from citizens.17 Other funds
came in from the City of London, Bishop Grindal, the dean and chapter,
members of the Court of Common Pleas, the officers of the Kings Bench,

11Christopher Kitching, Re-Roofing Old St Pauls Cathedral, 156166, The London

Journal 12.2 (1986), 12333.
12Kitching, Re-Roofing, 124.
13Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 157.
14Qu. in Kitching, Re-Roofing, 129.
15Qu. in John Summerson, The Works from 1547 to 1660 in The History of the Kings
Works, Vol. 3, 14851660, Part 1, (London: HMSO, 1975), 55183.
16See Summerson, The Works, for a discussion of the procurement and payment of the
timber for the project. See also Collinson, esp. ch. 8, for a thorough account of the raising
of funds for the repair and Grindals role in it, both as bishop and archbishop.
17William Dugdale, The History of St Pauls Cathedral in London (London: Thomas
Warren, 1658).
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls365

and eighteen dioceses. Significant repairs were completed and significant

money was spent and, by the first of November, in time for Lord Mayors
Day, the cathedral was again usable.18 In 1566, after the transepts were
reroofed,19 work on the church was halted and accounts were closed.20
Though sketches and perhaps models for a new spire were made, it was
never reconstructed.21
The missing spire was only the most obvious of problems. By the end of
the sixteenth century, the roof leaked and several sections of the masonry
were cracked.22 The cellars of the shops and homes in the churchyard
compromised the churchs foundations.23 The church interior was
besmirched by smoke from the chimneys of the churchyard structures;
children from Pauls School broke windows while playing in the yard; and
the stairs at the south door had been damaged by the cartwheels of a glass-
maker who had rented out the chapel underneath the south aisle.24 A 1580
inquiry to look into the state of the repairs was set up by the lord mayor
who concluded that since initial repairs of 1562, walls [were] laid open
and greatly spoiled with rain, the gutter leads cut off and other defaults
permitted.25 Another inquiry in 1584, this time led by Lord Chancellor
Christopher Hatton, discovered that modest repairs had been carried
out in the intervening years and that some money was put back into the
general fund by selling off surplus timber.26 It turns out that the majority
of the lumber given by the queen had not been used at all.27 Despite
Elizabeths push for an inquiry, her interest in the project seems to have

18Pauls always served an important role in Lord Mayors Day and the inaugural pageant
would include Pauls in the days festivities. See Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in
Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
19G.H. Cook, Old S. Pauls Cathedral: A Lost Glory of Medieval London (London: Phoenix
House, 1955).
20Vaughan Hart, Inigo Joness Site Organization at St Pauls Cathedral: Ponderous
Masses Beheld Hanging in the Air, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53
(1994), 415.
21The queens surveyor, Jon Revell, would have been involved in the project. He gave the
queen a New Years gift in 1561/2 of a marchpane [marzipan] with a model of Powles
church and steeple in [the] paste. Summerson believes that this gift may have had refer-
ence to a drawing or model of the new spire. The Works, 64.
22Ann Saunders, St Pauls: The Story of the Cathedral (London: Collins & Brown, 2001), 21.
23Hart, Inigo Jones, 214.
24David J. Crankshaw, Community, City and Nation, 15401714, in Derek Keene, Arthur
Burns, Andrew Saint (eds.), St Pauls: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004 (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 4570.
25Qtd. in Kitching, Re-roofing, 130.
26Kitching, Re-roofing, 130.
27Summerson, Works, 66 n. 1.
366 roze hentschell

waned completely and no further renovation attempts appear to have

been pursued during her reign.
Although we will never be certain, it is tempting to speculate why the
cathedral repairs were not a state priority in this period. Indeed, the young
queen had other crises to reckon with in the early 1560s, including the
return of Mary Queen of Scots from France after the death of her husband,
Frances Francis II; Englands increasing involvement in attempts to stem
the persecution of the Huguenots; and a massive plague outbreak in
London. During the later years of her reignwhich coincide with the
surveys of the 1580sconflicts with Spain in the Low Countries and at
sea, colonization efforts in Ireland, and overseas exploration efforts surely
diverted Elizabeths attention as well as financial resources. Moreover,
St Pauls was not particularly important for state affairs. Londons royal
services usually took place in Westminster Abbey and the only King bur-
ied at Pauls was Ethelred the Unready.28 Indeed, the queens only known
appearance there was in 1588 to hear a sermon of thanksgiving for the
defeat of the Spanish Armada.
But we might consider other possibilities as well. Perhaps Pauls
remained too much a symbol of Englands Catholic past. As Kitching
notes, it is remarkable anything at all was done for its benefit: Perhaps,
indeed, no other cathedral in similar straits would have been spared a
second thought with the reign so young and the destruction of so many
monasteries and collegiate churches still so fresh in the public memory.29
Counter-reformation rhetoric cast the initial destruction of the cathedral
as Gods punishment for turning away from the true church and several
pamphlets were published debating this subject.30 Perhaps the secular
activities of the precinct rendered the church too heavily trafficked and

28L.W. Cowie, Pauls Walk, History Today 24 (1977), 4146.

29Kitching, Re-roofing, 131.
30Bishop Pilkingtons sermon, preached on 8 June, exhorted the auditory to a general
repentance of vicious behavior, which he remarks upon in The True Report. John Morwen,
the Marian Prebendary of Pauls, interpreted the fire as Gods disappointment in reform
efforts in An Addition with an Apologie to the Causes of Burning of Pauls Church (London:
Richard Jugge, 1561). Pilkington responded with the massive Confutation of an Addition
(London 1561). For the Protestant/Catholic debate, see also J. Newman, Inigo Jones and
the Politics of Architecture, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in
Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 229255; Eamon Duffy,
Bare Ruined Choirs: remembering Catholicism in Shakespeares England, in Richard
Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (eds.), Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian
Shakespeare (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 4057; and
Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls367

too far removed from its sacred purposes to warrant the sort of wide-scale
commitment needed to renovate it.31 Even by 1561, the nave of Pauls and
the surrounding precinct was infamous for the various secular and seem-
ingly illicit activities that took place there. At least part of the problem was
that it was not clear what Pauls was or to whom it belonged. The nature of
the church itself was problematic: Was it a Norman papist cathedral? Was
it a London parish church? Was it a symbol of the queen, the Supreme
Head of the Church of England? Further, its relationship to its immediate
and civic surroundings was not clear. To what extent was it part of the
larger precinct and its secular buildings and activities? How important
was it to London and its suburbs? St Pauls cathedral dominated the
London skyline, and the precinctcovering twelve and a half acres
took up a significant portion of central London. To view it merely as a
temple, as Elizabeth regarded it, simply underestimated its role in the
larger urban landscape. The lack of organization surrounding the recon-
struction was potentially a symptom of a lack of a cohesive narrative
about the church, the precinct, and their significance to London and the
nation at large.

The Early Jacobean Period: Henry Farley

After a period of complete neglect, in 1606 King James visited Pauls in the
company of Queen Annes brother, Christian IV, the King of Denmark
and, like many other visitors to London, ascended the 300 stairs to the top
of the steeple.32 The view from the steeple provided its visitors with a
magnificent panorama of London and a royal visit signified a desire on
the part of the king to display the glory of the city. However, in entering
the cathedral and climbing its stairs, James would have experienced the
dilapidated condition firsthand. Perhaps as a result of this visit, in 1608
James asked the bishop and lord mayor to carry out yet another survey of
the cathedral to evaluate the cost of general repairs and a new spire,

31The Burning of Pauls, a 1561 ballad, blames the immoral behavior of Londoners for
the fire, a trope that would resonate for decades to come. In W. Sparrow Simpson (ed.),
Documents Illustrating the History of S. Pauls Cathedral (London: Camden Society, 1880),
1267.
32William Benchley Rye (ed.), England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and
James the First (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1865; reissued 1965). Rye references but does not
include a text by the German Valentin Arithmus, called Notes on London and Westminster
1617, written in Latin. Christian IV was a patron of Inigo Jones, who attended him on this
visit and also worked for a time in Denmark.
368 roze hentschell

which a young Inigo Jones was asked to design.33 The repairs were esti-
mated to cost 22,537, half of which was designated for the new steeple.34
Nothing appears to have come of this effort as the kings finances were in
trouble and Joness chief patron had died.35 While action as a result of the
survey stalled, it seems to have ushered in a newfound public interest in
the church repairs that would eventually lead to serious renovation
efforts.36
Ten years after Jamess visit to the roof of Pauls, a London scrivener
named Henry Farley published The Complaint of Paules to All Christian
Soules.37 The subtitle, An Humble Supplication, to Our Good King and
Nation, For Her New Reparation, makes clear the texts aim. Initially pre-
sented as a petition to Lord Mayor John Jolles in 1615, Farley published it in
1616, by which time he had already been an avid proponent of repairing
Pauls.38 When James took the throne in 1603, Farley began to petition suc-
cessive Lord Mayors to save Pauls from further decay. In 1616 he commis-
sioned three painted panels of Pauls from the artist John Gipkyn to
accompany the Complaint. Later, Farley was imprisoned in Ludgate for
debts incurred petitioning Parliament for the repairs. And finally, Farley
published Portland Stone in Pauls Churchyard (1622), a text arguing for the
use of only the finest stone to rebuild the church. While it is unclear
whether or not Farleys sustained interest in the renovation of Pauls and
tireless efforts to gain the ear of the proper authorities ultimately led to
significant national interest in the refurbishing in the following decade,
Farley makes important arguments that would later be taken up by more
official proponents of the cause, principally James I.

33Joness main patron in 1608 was Robert Cecil. Gordon Higgott, The Fabric to 1670, in
Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, Andrew Saint (eds.), St Pauls: The Cathedral Church of London,
604-2004 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 17190. John Schofield tells
us that Jones himself is not mentioned in the estimate of 1608 and not much can be
gleaned as to the intentions or the nature of the dilapidations then apparent from the
estimate for repairs (housed in Guildhall Library). John Schofield, St Pauls Cathedral Before
Wren (Swindon: English Heritage, 2011), 193.
34Higgott, The Fabric, 147.
35Higgott, The Fabric, 174.
36Also in 1608, Thomas Dekkers The Dead Terme was printed. The imaginative text is a
dialogue between the cities of London and Westminster, and is primarily a complaint of
the ignominies suffered by the cities as a result of the vicious behavior of their inhabitants.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss it at length, though it provides important
insight in how Pauls figured in literary texts of the period.
37For a discussion of Farleys sketchy biography, the diptych, and outer cover he com-
missioned, see Pamela Tudor-Craig, Old St Pauls: The Society of Antiquaries Diptych, 1616
(London: London Topographical Society, 2004).
38Tudor-Craig, Old St Pauls, 8.
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls369

Initially Farley locates the renovation of St Pauls in a constellation of

other projects deemed worthy by city and royal officials:
I Poore Paules dejected and distressed, yet (being in the best prospect, and
taller than al my fellows) do see or at least may see many stately monu-
ments, houses, and other things builded and done within these few yeeres,
some for Honour, some for profit, some for Beautie, some for pleasure, some
for health and recreation, some for Royall entertainments and sports, and
many for charitable uses;
And I have seen the Globe burnt, and
quickly made a phoenix.
Q. But who sees me? A. Who sees thee not?39
The personified Pauls argues for reconstruction here based on his promi-
nence in Londons cityscape; he is more visible and taller than all other
buildings. Farley also suggests that if the London authorities can see fit to
build secular structures, and even license the public Globe Theatre, which
was burned down and repaired quickly, then the Christian souls among
the court, clergy, and citythree of the pamphlets addresseesmust
also deem the repairs of Pauls necessary and righteous. His concluding
question who sees me? suggests that Pauls denigrated state has been
ignored. But more, it suggests a phenomenological curiosity, suggested by
the reply, Who sees thee not?: St Pauls is such a fixture in the landscape,
so naturally a part of London, that it has been rendered invisible. This is
made manifest in the shape of the text, which is typeset in such a way to
suggest the spireless shape of the steeple (Fig. 1). The steeple is represented
by the white space of the page, a present absence. Farleys text, then, is an
attempt not only to give voice to, but also materialize the space of the
church. The absence that the typescript and the missing steeple represent
must nevertheless be felt as if it were a phantom limb.
The long prologue of Pauls Compliant consists of a series of verses in
which Pauls himself sends the book to the various audiences that he
thinks needs to read it: the court, clergy, city, and country. Farley appears
to understand that any efforts for renovations must necessarily be a multi-
lateral affair. He first sends the book to the court to ask for help among
the noblest and worthiest hearts, especially to James so that he
would pittie me,
And so to order, by His great command,
That I may be repaired out of hand;

39Henry Farley, The Complaint of Pauls to All Christian Soules (London: Laurence Lisle,
1616), 1.
370 roze hentschell

Fig. 1.A Complaint of Paules, page 3 (London, 1616).

 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls371

Else I shall weare away and crack and fall,

To my great sorrow and my lovers all.40
The aim to gain the attention of the King is bolstered by the argument that
Pauls is a national treasure, worthy of the sovereigns notice. Pauls further
urges his book to tell the king that
Although I ragged am, and torne,
As if I were, to all the rest a scorne;
Yet Christiandome throughout can truely tell,
That I for Name and Fame doe beare the Bell;
And nerthelesse that I am calld poore Paules,
I feed (with choicest delicates) more Soules,
Then any Three (the greatest Churches) doe,
In England, and in Great Britain too.41
Although portions of Pauls have become secular urban spaces, there is
still enough of the sacred to deem it worthy of attention and repairs; it
continues to feed more soules than all the churches in England. This
reminder of Pauls national prominence as a sacred space sets the tone for
the text. Farley not only argues for the repair of a London landmark; he
sets Pauls up as a symbol for Londons and Englands rectitude.
While Farleys principal audience is the King himself (as well as the
royal family; Pauls also sends his book to Queen Anne and Prince Charles),
he understands that he must also have the ear or the clergy and of city
officials. In his second verse to the clergy, he makes a similar gesture.
Pauls tells his book to indicate to the clergy that
I am their church of greatest note,
Although I weare a poore and ragged coate;
And stand in fairest Citie of this Land,
And with great state was builded to Their hand.42

If the clergy are deemed secondary in their importance as audience mem-

bers to Pauls Complaint, the argument that necessitates their attention is
similar. Pauls shabby exterior should not obscure the notion that the
church is the gem in the crown of the great city of London. Pauls also
sends his book to the city, which will find
innumerable many,
That for my good, will do as much as any;

40Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 1.

41Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 2.
42Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 7.
372 roze hentschell

No place so famous as that Royall Towne,

For works of Worth, Honour, and Renowne.43
London is figured here not simply as a great urban center, but as a Royall
towne, worthy to be a national capital, filled with great civic achievements
as well as with citizens who care to protect it. Finally, his book is sent to
the country, where he believes that even the poorest rustic will have a
mite to spare for the renovation efforts.44 In his prologue, Farley makes
the crucial gesture of knitting together country, city, church, and state as
entities that must collaborate to save Pauls from further abuse. The
rebuilding of Pauls requires private sacrifice for the public good. The reno-
vation is cast in religious terms, as a new edifice will result in the edifica-
tion of city, church, and nation.
Because the text is chiefly an attempt to get James to pay attention to
the decrepit cathedral, much of the poem is an argument for why its repair
would glorify the king and his family. The text proper, which begins after
nineteen pages of front matter, is a poem describing Pauls unfortunate
state as well as its importance as a church and civic structure. Pauls
laments a bygone era, when men worked for the benefit of the glorious
church. By contrast, he expresses disappointment in the repeated unsuc-
cessful efforts to revive renovations:
Sometimes a view is made upon my wants,
And then (twixt hope and fear) my heart it pants,
But all in vaine I hope, (alas my grief,)
Surveyours gone, then this is my relief:
To undertake so high a work to mende,
Great is the charge (saie some) and to no end,
For (but to shew) to what use will I serve,
Whereby such cost on mee, I should deserve?45
The surveys done on behalf of Pauls were clearly well known, and here
Pauls is excited for the attention, just as he is disappointed in the knowl-
edge that nothing will come of the viewing. While Pauls sees that the
reasons for halting renovations are largely financial ones, Farleys text
aims to endow Pauls with a valueto city, church, and nationthat
moves far beyond the monetary.
The poem ends with a long dream narrative in which Farley imagines
what a renovated church would look like. It is here that Farley can fully

43Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 8.

44Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 11.
45Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 22.
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls373

integrate the several entities that he feels must participate if the renova-
tion is to be successful. In particular, he lingers on the description of an
imagined rebuilt spire. The dream presents a vision of four pinnacles
beneath the spire, each with sculptures within. One depicting James is
accompanied by the motto, Evil come to ill intenders, / Good to all true
faiths defenders.46 A sculpture of a bishop is likewise imagined in his
reverence and his commitment to a godly church: His motto reads, To
my savior Ile be true, / And this church shall have her due.47 The third
pinnacle contains a statue of the lord mayor, part of his motto saying, So
by our truth and industry / God makes our Citie multiply.48 Londons secu-
lar, civic achievements are cast as Godly. Finally, the fourth sculpture is of
a farmer with the motto, Plaine I am as you may see, / Yet the Best growe
rich by me.49 Without the country rustics, the nation cannot be wealthy.
This glorious vision of the rebuilt spire becomes a restoration of Gods
rightful place in London, a marriage of word and architecture to glorify the
Almighty. But the special emphasis placed on several sectors of the realm,
fixtures of the architecture themselves, is a crucial part of the vision.
Rendered in stone, the monarch, the lord mayor, and the farmer are as
much part of the church as is the bishop.50
While Farleys Complaint has received little critical attention over the
years, the painting he commissioned to attend the text, in the London
Society of Antiquaries, has become one of the most important contempo-
rary renditions of Old St Pauls. Farley paid John Gipkyn, an artist for
the Lord Mayor shows, to create a diptych presenting the church as it
was and as it could be.51 The outer cover of the diptych depicts a spectacu-
lar procession led by James, Anne, and Prince Charles, across London
Bridge, along Cheapside, to St Pauls (Fig. 2). In the top left of the painting,
we see James enter the churchyard through a triumphal arch on the top
of which is inscribed, BEHOLD THE KINGE COMMETH WITH GREAT
JOYE (Fig.3). The left panel shows the king, queen, and other dignitaries

46Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 57.

47Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 58.
48Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 59.
49Farley, Complaint of Pauls, 68. Note that the paginating is not sequential. The text
jumps from 59 to 68 to 62.
50All were seen to have an equal stake in the work. Hart, Inigo Jones, 109. Hart is one of
the few scholars who has given careful attention to Farleys text.
51Each panel measures four feet two inches by three feet four inches. Tudor-Craig, Old
St Pauls, 1. The inscription around the procession panel says, Amore, veritate, et reverential.
So invented and at my cost made for me. H. Farley. 1616. Wrought by John Gipkyn. Fiat vol-
untate Dei. For a discussion of John Gipkyn, see Tudor-Craig, 1825.
374 roze hentschell

Fig. 2.Procession to St Pauls from St Mary Overie, Society of Antiquaries Diptych,

by Thomas Gipkyn for Henry Farley, 1616.

attending a sermon at Pauls Cross as it would have appeared in 1616,

replete with an auditory by turns attentive and distracted, and a church
exterior much in need of repair (Fig. 4). The building speaks to the mon-
arch: view oh Kinge how my wall creepers / have made me worke for
chimney sweepers. The right panel shows an imaginary drawing of a
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls375

Fig. 3.Beholde the King commeth with great joye, detail of James I entering
St Pauls, Society of Antiquaries Diptych.
376 roze hentschell

Fig. 4.Bishop King preaching at Pauls Cross, Society of Antiquaries Diptych.

rebuilt spirewhich correlates mostly to the dream narrative in The

Complaint, a restored faade, and angels blessing the church (Fig. 5).
While the three panels are certainly interesting in and of themselves,
taken together, they offer an important narrative and a visual argument
that bolsters Farleys textual one. Farleys fantasy of legitimate royal inter-
est in the cathedral, which here is depicted as a state visit to hear a ser-
mon, has important and material consequences: a beautifully renovated
church that is the glory of the nation. The diptych is important as it is a
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls377

Fig. 5.Pauls spire rebuilt, Henry Farleys imagined restoration of St Pauls with
celebratory angels blowing trumpets, Society of Antiquaries Diptych.

rare 17th-century painting commissioned by a commoner. But more than

that, it serves as a guide for a king who would turn his attention to the
churchs rebuilding.
While Gordon Higgot asserts that Farleys petition and tract appears
to have goaded the king into action, and Tudor-Craig similarly suggests
that the king was perhaps worn down by Farleys appeals, Farley was
not acknowledged as the impetus for any official state action. Nor is there
378 roze hentschell

any firm evidence that the King was even aware of the eccentric scriv-
ener.52 Nevertheless, Jamess renewed interest in the churchs renovations
coincided with the publication of Pauls Complaint and Farleys argu
mentof a rebuilt church based on a multilateral effort was precisely the
same tack taken by the king in the ensuing years. As such, critics and his-
torians of Pauls must take it seriously as a text integral to the larger story
of Pauls.

King James, Bishop King, and the 1620 Commission

Also in 1616, James addressed the Star Chamber on matters of civic impor-
tance. While the subject of the speech was primarily the administration of
law in England, he also discussed Londons rapid growth, which he
regarded as a national concern. In this speech, James promotes an interest
and a care for London that had not been hitherto displayed. In particular,
James is troubled by how little the citizens of London regard the building
and upkeep of the city. He is alarmed at how scant men are in contribut-
ing towards the amendment of High-wayes and Bridges: Therefore take a
care of this, for that is done today with a penie, that will not be done here-
after for an hundred pounds, and that will be mended now in a day, which
hereafter will not be mended in a yeere; and that in a yeere, which will not
be done in our time, as we may see by Pauls Steeple.53 He singles out
Pauls as an extreme example of civic neglect, indicating not only that he
is aware of the cathedrals plight, but, more importantly, that he sees Pauls
as part of a larger civic and national narrative. I would suggest that this
speech represents a shift away from how Pauls was regarded by Elizabeth
(who described it as a temple) and sets the stage for what would become
Jamess deepening interest in the fate of the fabric of the church. It would
also lay the groundwork for imagining Pauls as an integral part of London
and, by extension, imagining London as a Stuart Royal city, much as Farley
had done. As James Robertson suggests, as the Stuarts continuing involve-
ment with St Pauls demonstrated, royal revivals of campaigns to rebuild
Londons cathedral offered an un-military national cause that both James
and Charles chose to direct their subjects energies towards: domestic

52Higgot, The Fabric, 174; Tudor-Craig, Old St Pauls, 12 The cause-effect assumptions
may come from Dugdale who suggests that Farleys frequent solicitations are what moved
the kings heart to the plight of the church. Dugdale, The History, 134. Of course, Dugdale
may have had access to records on the matter that no longer survive.
53James I, Speech in Star Chamber, 1616, in Charles Howard McIlwain (ed.), The
Political Works of James I (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 326345.
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls379

piety would displace protestant politics.54 Jamess regard for the timeliness
of civic repairs here indicates an interest in seeing urban progress happen
in short order.
Renovation efforts, however, never happened quickly when it came to
Pauls. Four years later, on 26 March 1620, in what many have seen as the
materialization of Farleys fantastical vision, the King was set to attend a
sermon preached by Bishop King at Pauls Cross. It was unclear to many
why the King was to be in attendance or what the subject of the sermon
would be. Speculation focused on the marriage negotiations between
Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta and on the conflict in Bohemia. In a
20 March letter to his friend, Sir Dudley Carleton, John Chamberlain men-
tions these other possibilities, but surmises that yf yt so fall out that he
come I rather beleve yt is about the rapairing of Paules which indeed growes
very ruinous.55 Preparations for the kings arrival were frantic. Less than a
week before his visit, the Privy Council sent a letter informing the bishop,
dean, and chapter that the King would enter through the west gate of the
churchyard and they must pull downe to the ground a tippling house and
a tobacco house in that area.56 Ridding the procession route of unsightly
structures was an important part of making way for the king and the entou-
rage; later plans for renovating Pauls would center on similar demolitions.
On the day of the sermon, James walked from Whitehall along with
Prince Charles and, according to Stows Annales,
many of the chiefe nobility, and seaven or eight Bishops, and at Temple
Barre, the Lord Maior, Aldermen, and Recorder, received him, and presented
him with a purse of gold, and from thence attended him to Paules, the streets
being rayled on both sides, and the Severall Companies of London in their
severall places, in their Liveries and Banners, gave their attendance all the
way to Paules.57
The reception of the royal party at Temple Barthe traditional entrance
into London through which other sovereigns had passedby the citys

54James Robertson, Stuart London and the Idea of a Royal Capital City, Renaissance
Studies 15 (2001), 3758. For a discussion of the importance of London to court culture in
Jamess reign, see Malcolm R. Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in
Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), esp. ch. 3.
55John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure,
Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1939), 297.
56A Letter to the Lord Bishop of London and the Deane and Chapter of the Cathedrall
Church of St Paule, 23 March 1620, in J.V. Lyle (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England,
vol. 37, 16191621 (London: His Majestys Stationary Office, 1930), 165.
57John Stow, Annales, or, A Generall Chronicle of England. Begun by John Stow: Continued
and Augmented with matters Forraigne and Domestique, Ancient and Moderne, unto the end
of the present yeere, 1631 by Edmund Howes, Gent (London: Richard Meighen, 1631).
380 roze hentschell

dignitaries and their subsequent participation in the rest of the proces-

sion marks a symbolic and material move through to civic space.58 The
emphasis on the presence of Lord Mayor Cockayne and members of the
London livery companies, their gift of gold, and the pomp with which they
accompanied the king to the church suggests the intermingling of civic
and royal, city and nation.59 They all entered the now spruced-up west
entrance of the churchyard at Ludgate Street, symbolically combining
England, London, and Pauls. But the processionand the sermon that
followedalso highlighted the complicated question of who was respon-
sible for the cathedral.
While the message that James was to hear was decidedly royal in origins,
he understood that the public location mattered. As Peter McCullough
points out, Pauls Cross, erected as early as 1241, had always been used by
monarchs as a state mouthpiece.60 The sermon had to be preached in
front of guild members, who had a stake in the fate of Pauls. Mary Morrissey
reminds us that Pauls Cross surpassed the court pulpits in its capacity to
reach a wide non-elite audience.61 For instance, members of the Stationers
Company attended on their stand (a large bench), and on forms obtained
from the cathedral.62 The Stationers in particular would have been
expected to come on this occasion since their guildhall was located in the
precinct and they would have a financial interest in seeing the renovation
efforts come to fruition. The presence of the king also had to be witnessed
by those Londoners who stood behind the rails and watched the proces-
sion pass. This spectacleperhaps prophetically envisioned by Henry
Farley four years priorwas a display of unity between church, city and
nation. However performative it was in nature, it sent a powerful message
that whatever would be spoken that day had major implications.63

58Temple Bar would later be rebuiltpossibly by Christopher Wrenas a grand gate

(recently relocated to Paternaster Row).
59James and Cockayne had a close and reciprocal relationship, as the King supported
then-Alderman Cockaynes misguided scheme to revive the English cloth trade by export-
ing dyed and dressed fabric. See Roze Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern
England: Textual Constructions of a National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), Ch. six.
60Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and
Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
61Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
62Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 22.
63Prior to the sermon, James entered at the Great West dore of Paules where he
kneeled, and having ended his Orisons, he was received by the Dean and the Chapter of
that Church, being all in rich capes and with solemne singing brought the King into the
Quire. (Stow).
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls381

Once Bishop King began his sermon, he made it clear that James, not
himself, was the key player in determining both the subject and the text.
The king, King begins, is part of your auditorie and a principall part of
my simple oratorie He laid my foundation for me, and set me my
patterne to worke by.64 Using metaphors of both textile and architec-
ture, the emphasis on materiality is underscored. The text of the sermon
comes from Psalm 102, a Prayer of the Afflicted, one of the penitential
psalms:65
Thou shalt arise, and have mercy upon Sion, for the time to favour her,
yea, the set time is come.
For thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof.
The text was, according to King, given me by a voice from earth, that is
next to heaven and the Bishop claims to be girt and tied to a scripture by
him.66 By expressing Jamess centrality in choosing the sermons text and
topic, King authorizes the goals of the sermonto raise awareness of and
money for the repair of Pauls fabric. As King reminds us in his concluding
remarks, he is merely the conduit of the message, even as the bishop of
London had always played a role in discussions surrounding the church
fabric. James was in attendance to listen to an argument preached at his
insistence and of his own design. He was there, in short, to make a request
to his subjects.67
Kings exegesis focuses on two elements: Gods mercy towards Zion and
the urgency of granting this mercy: the set time has come. King indicates
that the persuasion of his argument is quia tempus: I say it is a strong per-
swasion that floweth from time: and is as strongly enforced in my text,
nayle after nayle, driven home to the head.68 The presentation of mercy,
then, is one that is an opportunity: good is not good, mercy is not mercy,
that commeth not in time, he asserts. Time yeeldeth a strong perswasion;
when the time is past our hope is gone.69 King makes two important

64John King, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, on behalf of Paules Church (London:
Edward Griffin, 1620).
65See Hannibal Hamlin for a discussion of the role of psalms in the early modern
period. Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
66King, A Sermon, 32, 33.
67King, A Sermon, 58. While the kings role in choosing the topic and text was no doubt
a crucial one, the title of the sermon, which was published in short order, was A Sermon
Preached at Paules Crosse, On Behalf of Paules Church. The emphasis here is deflected again,
from the King to the personified beneficiary of financial support, the church itself.
68King, A Sermon, 201.
69King, A Sermon, 22.
382 roze hentschell

moves in the exegesis. First, he admits his sermon has the aim to persuade.
To use Torrance Kirbys helpful definition, he desires to speak to the con-
science, to appeal to the perceptions, judgment, discernment, prudence,
discrimination, etc. of a discerning religious public.70 In doing so, he lays
bare what the auditory is to glean from the sermon, in this case the neces-
sity of giving financially to the renovation of Pauls. King also emphasizes
the necessity of the now, which is woven into his argument on the urgency
to repair Pauls church. That King sees timeliness as a key factor in his
persuasiondespite the fact that renovation efforts had lain dormant for
nearly 40 yearsdemonstrates an almost modern understanding of the
psychology of giving. If there is a perceived crisis, it will be met with an
immediate financial imperative.
One important way that King is able to argue for immediate help for
Pauls is that the sermon is preached in situ. He emphasizes the decrepit
state of the church, likening it to a diseased body that has many aches in
hir joints, together with a lingering consumption, that hath long lien in her
bowels.71 Recalling the source of the illness, he claims that since the burn-
ing of the spire, the church hath remained veletudinary & infirme.72 By
endowing the church with the most human of characteristicsthe capac-
ity to fall illKing creates an ontological connection between audience
and subject. But rather than describing the dilapidated state of the church,
he privileges the visual capacity of his auditory to see for themselves:
there can bee no stronger eloquence, to affect the minde, then what
floweth into the eye, from the fissures and maimnes, which every corner of
the Church yeeldeth.73 James arrived at the pulpit after a service in the
choir of the church, which meant that he walked through the west
entrance and through the nave, thereby viewing firsthand the dilapidated
interior. The emphasis on the material reality all around the king and
other auditors drives much of what is effective about this sermon: I would
to God you would look with your owne eyes, they are the truest witnesses.
The eye that beholdeth these ruines, and adjureth not the heart, to yield
some help, what metall is it made of?74 King privileges sight as that which
appeals to pity and then to action. In much the same way that Farley
understood that the visual of the diptych would bolster his rhetorical

70Torrance Kirby, The Public Sermon: Pauls Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in
England, 15341570, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme 31.1 (2008),
329.
71King, A Sermon, 35.
72King, A Sermon, 36.
73King, A Sermon, 39.
74King, A Sermon, 378.
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls383

argument, King uses the ears and eyes of the audience. In his seminal
work on human geography, Yi Fu Tuan says that human spaces reflect the
quality of the human senses and mentality. The mind frequently extrapo-
lates beyond sensory evidence.75
Once King appeals to the sensory, then he is able to move to the corner-
stone of the application: making the case that Pauls is part of London as a
whole and, as importantly, the magnificence of London as the paragon of
civilizations: A decaying cathedral reflects poorly on the city, andin
Kings formulationthe world:
If England bee the ring of Europe, your City is the gemme. If England the
bodie, your City the eye; if England the eye, your City the apple of it. Here
is the Synopsis, and Summe of the whole Kingdome. Here the distillation
and spirits of all the goodnesse it hath. Here the Chamber of our Brittish
Empire say I, give mee London in England, which is a Load-star to lead all
the rest There is yet one thing wanting unto you, if you will be perfit, perfit
this Church: not by parting from all, but somewhat, not to the poore, but to
God himself. This church is your Sion indeed.76
By emphasizing to the Citys great men what is righteous and powerful
about London, King inspires them, a departure from the Jeremiad mode so
often preached at Pauls, which focused on shaming the auditory. His
assertion that those who give money to the cause of Pauls need not part
with all they have, or even give to the poor, would appeal to the parsimoni-
ous among them. King understands that St Pauls cannot be rebuilt with-
out the material assistance of those who have become wealthy in Londons
secular realms and thus Pauls is situated among a larger understanding of
London:
when I behold that forrest of masts upon your river for trafficke, and that
more than miraculous bridge, which is the communis terminus, to joyne the
two bankes of that river; your Royall Exchange for Merchants, your Halls for
Companies, your gates for defence, your markets for victual, your aquae-
ducts for water, your granaries for provision, your Hospitals for the poore,
your Bridewells for the idle, your Chamber for Orphans, and your Churches
for holy Assemblies; I cannot denie them to be magnificent workes, and your
Citty to deserve the name of an Augustious and majesticall Citty.77
Like Farley, King contextualizes the project of Pauls renovation in a larger
web of civic projects and achievements. In so doing, he secularizes the

75Yi Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1977), 16.
76King, A Sermon, 434.
77King, A Sermon, 456.
384 roze hentschell

church to a certain extent. But by imagining Pauls as an integral part of

London, he also modernizes it. Skillfully, he leaves behind an argument of
nostalgia in favour of an argument of advancement. This argument also
points to the temporality of space. What is seemingly fixed and stable is
rendered changeable, dynamic, and able to be cured. As Andreas Huyssen
puts it, an urban imaginary in its temporal reach may well put different
things in one place: memories of what was there before, imagined alterna-
tives to what there is.78 Further, Kings repetition of you and your ren-
ders the auditors as owners of these achievements, which creates a shared
responsibility among them. They are at once keepers of the pasts memory
and visionary architects of the future.
This understanding of collective ownership of Pauls was necessary to
proceed with the renovation. And it was important that the king and sub-
jects participate in the project as it emulated the ideal structure of the
commonwealth. That is why his presence at the sermon was so crucial.
The auditory needed to see that he was there, that he was seeing and hear-
ing what they were seeing and hearing, and that he too was troubled by
and invested in Pauls Cathedral: Such a people in view of their King, and
such a King in view of his people, banding their eyes to and fro, the one
from the other, would be as the flowing and falling of waters, a reciprocall
and enterchangeable motion of love betwixt them.79 From this exchange
of love, rendered as natural as rivers flow, King and the king hope will fol-
low an outpouring of financial assistance. But cast in terms of national
fealty and civic charity toward a sacred space, giving money becomes a
higher calling.80
The sermon, with its emphasis on timeliness, had immediate results. In
the published sermon, King claims that James said he would be contented
to doe a penance, and to fast with bread and water, so this Church might
be built.81 James set up a new royal commission with Inigo Jones, the royal
surveyor, as the key commissioner. The group of about 70 men was com-
prised of nobility, church officials, and prominent citizens. Initially, select
members of the commission were charged with specific tasks: they needed
to make particular discovery of the said decays; and likewise what Houses,

78Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 7.
79King, A Sermon, 49.
80The sermon was published in short order ensuring an even wider audience. See Lori
Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the Kings Preachers and the Rhetorics of
Conformity, 16031625 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
81King, A Sermon, 54.
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls385

Cellars, & c. had been built neer it, to the annoyance and blemishing,
either of it or the Church-yard.82 The church, in other words, needed to be
taken in context of the larger precinct. Further, the commission was
required to assess the source and extent of funding for previous repairs
that had not been used and to determine the most fit and proper means
to raise money for to carry on the said repair as well as appoint surveyors
and other officers to proceed with the work.83 Importantly, the commis-
sion determined just who was financially responsible for which parts of
Pauls: the Bishop of London had peculiar care of the whole body of the
Church, and the Dean and Chapter, of the Quire84 But since these reli-
gious entities did not have revenue enough to support the massive cost of
repairs, the commission determined that it would be necessary to share
the burden for this civic and national treasure: as anciently it had been, so
now, a generall Benevolence throughout the whole Kingdom, should be
attempted, and that, for the better encouragement therof, the Nobility and
Gentry, who stood best affected to so good a work, might be moved, to
signifie, by Subscriptions, what they would contribute thereto.85 As in
Farleys dream vision, the repairs and renovations could only be paid for
by those across the economic spectrum, who would see that important
symbolic role of renovating Pauls. Thus, Pauls was deemed a national
responsibility whose repairs became a royal concern. To give example
unto others, James promised 2,000 for the efforts.86 Prince Charles
pledged 500 and Bishop King 100 a year from his revenue. Portland stone
was purchased and stored, while new glazing and the demolition of shops
in the precinct had begun.87
What appeared to be a new dawn for the renovation of Pauls fabric
turned into Pauls work yet again. The raising of funds went so slowly
forward that the prosecution of the work became wholly neglected.88
The king, whose interest in the project was so crucial in allowing it to
gain traction, had larger problems to contend with. As Higgot explains,
The Kings authority over Parliament and the country fell to a new ebb
during 1621; his health was failing, and his finances were in ruins. With
out visible royal support, interest in the restoration campaign quickly

82King, A Sermon, 54.

83King, A Sermon, 54.
84King, A Sermon, 54.
85King, A Sermon, 137.
86King, A Sermon, 137.
87Hart, Inigo Jones, 417.
88Dugdale, The History, 137.
386 roze hentschell

waned.89 The project was abandoned and the Portland stone that had
been collected was famously borrowed by George Villiers, Duke of
Buckingham, to build the water gate at York House, which exists today at
Embankment Gardens, a survivor of the fire of 1666 and a living monu-
ment to Pauls work.90
One of the commissioners, the prolific letter writer John Chamberlain,
offers us some special insight into the debacle that would occur and the
roadblocks in the way of renovation efforts. Despite their historical value,
Chamberlains letters have not been examined closely by scholars of Pauls.
But the private nature of the letters, and the honesty with which they were
written, enables us to see just how massive yet poorly organized the survey
was. Chamberlain was skeptical of the royal interest in Pauls, even sug-
gesting prior to the 1620 sermon that the need for money for the project
would conflict with other, perhaps more pressing needs, such as those of
Bohemia: The motion for Powles comes not very oportunly, for yt cannot
be but these contributions comming together must needes crosse one
another.91 Despite his private skepticism, Chamberlain was appointed as
part of the commission for Pauls. In a letter of 29 April, he expresses con-
fusion over his appointment as well as doubts about the success of such
efforts, despite the royal interest in the matter: I am very unfit for any such
employment, and I know not how I came in unles yt be for my love to the
place The King is very earnest to set yt forward, and they begin hotly, but
I doubt when all is don yt will prove (as they say) Powles work.92 That one
of the members of the commission had such misgivings about the proba-
bility of success indicates the difficulty of the task ahead.
While most historians agree that the plans for renovation were thwarted
because of a lack of resources or perhaps waning interest on the part of
the king, Chamberlains letters suggest a more modest, but no less trouble-
some reason: the problem of the displaced inhabitants and shopkeepers
in Pauls precinct. In a letter dated 27 July 1620, Chamberlain states,
Our commission for Paules begins very roughlie, having teken order that all
the houses at the east and west ends shalbe puld down and demolished,
and those on the south and north sides before Whitsontide next, which is
somewhat a hard case, for more than 2000 soules one and another (as they
pretend) to be turned out of house and home upon so short a warning, and
with so little hope or appearance of recompence, whereupon they made

89Higgott, The Fabric, 174.

90Dugdale, The History, 137.
91Chamberlain, Letters, 300.
92Chamberlain, Letters, 301.
 pauls work: repair and renovation of st pauls387

petition to the King at his being here, but he referred them back to the com-
missioners saying that stat sentential they must downe, but wold have some
meanes found to geve them satisfaction, which is a matter not so easily don
as saide, for to begin with all the commissioners are faine to rate themselves
at 20 li a man to defray the charge of pulling down the houses and filling
up the sellars and holes. But for mine own part I must confesse I am so ten-
der harted, that yf I must needs pay this monie I had rather yt go ad aedifica-
tion than ad ruinam: but by the manner of proceedings I doubt we shall see
hard courses taken, which will rather cause a crie and clamor then give
contentment.93
Notwithstanding Chamberlains pity for the residents of the precinct who
are to be turned outhe was a frequent visitor to Pauls and likely person-
ally knew some of its inhabitantshe emphasizes the lack of a solid plan
for dealing with them. His skepticism that some means will be found for
restitution of the 2,000 people involved is only matched by his doubt that
the demolition will occur at all. He further laments that his own money
will be put towards the pulling down of the buildings rather than for the
renovation itself. Just over a week later, on 4 August, Chamberlain wrote
another letter suggesting that the residents of the threatened structures
were unwilling to cooperate with the work of the commission, even seeing
it as somewhat of a joke: The demolishment of the houses about Paules is
threatened every day but the people either do not or will not seeme to
believe yt, nor do not remove nor avoide, but some make jests as yf yt were
not meant in earnest, and one knaverie wrote upon his doore stet quaeso
candide lector [Let it stand, gentle reader].94 What had begun in earnest
as an auspicious multilateral effort on the part of city, church, and nation
to renovate the Cathedral had devolved into a debacle unforeseen by the
commissioners who could not proceed with the grander work until the
tenacious tenants were dealt with.
While we do not hear more official word about the work of the survey
(Dugdale tells us that it wasnt until Laud became bishop that the cause
got taken up again), it would be a mistake to think that the project halted
entirely. In a letter of 22 June 1621, Chamberlain refers to a visit the lord
mayor, Peter Probie, took to Greenwich Palace to meet with the Recorder
of London who offered
some few memorandums to the Lord Mayor and his brethren about
Middletons water, the swarming of beggars, the cleansing and removing the
shelves of sand out of the Thames, the building of Paules and the like, wherin

93Chamberlain, Letters, 31314.

94Chamberlain, Letters, 315.
388 roze hentschell

the bishop of London had great commendations for his care and forward-
ness in that works: and for an example to lead them the way the King told
them he had allotted 1000 li per annum for certain years, the Prince his sonne
500 li and most of the Lords their severall summes to the perfection of
that work.95
While the official storyor at least the story we can piece together from
surviving records, as all of the charters for renovations were destroyed in
the great fireends in 1620, the following summer money was still being
raised and Pauls was still regarded as part of a larger civic landscape of
renovation. In 1625, Chamberlain further refers to a wealthy draper by the
name of John Kenricke who had died and left 1000 to the reparation of
Paules.96 In the year of Jamess death, his legacy for the continued efforts
of the renovation of Pauls was alive.
Inigo Joness plans for the cathedral were not, as many believe, solely a
Caroline project. Not only was he actively involved in plans for restoration
throughout the first quarter of the 17th century, but the vision of a cathe-
dral for Stuart London materialized as a result of the sustained and very
public efforts of James I; and King Jamess vision for Pauls was a much
more broad and cohesive one than his predecessors. Importantly, it laid
the ground work for the much more successful plans for renovation by
Archbishop Laud and Charles I. As the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
puts it, Architectural grandeur may reflect, simply, the fantasy of the pri-
vate self. On the other hand, if this self is also the monarch with claims to
embodying the dignity of the state, private indulgence is inextricably
entwined with a more impersonal ideal.97 The impersonal ideal here is
imagining a church worthy of the religious adulation that would occur
within its walls, but also one that would stand as an impressive emblem
for all London had become, and all to which it aspired.

95Chamberlain, Letters, 441.

96Chamberlain, Letters, 596.
97Yi-Fu Tuan, Oral Ambiguity in Architecture, Landscape 27.3 (1983), 14.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE LOVE-SICK SPOUSE:

JOHN STOUGHTONS 1624 PAULS CROSS SERMON IN CONTEXT

Jeanne Shami

The Love-sick Spouse, a Pauls Cross sermon by John Stoughton first

printedposthumouslyin 1640, has received very little scholarly atten-
tion. In part, this neglect is due to Millar MacLures dating of the sermon
as ante 1640 (when it was first printed), thus rendering invisible its more
precise religious and political features as a sermon preached in 1624.1
However, the sermon bears more detailed examination in light of the two
manuscript forms in which it exists. The manuscript witnesses allow us to
date the sermon and also enable a more exact understanding of how at
least one preacher, in this case an alleged nonconformist, negotiated the
rhetorical challenges of preaching high-profile, public sermons in that
year. Moreover, the temper and effect of The Love-sick Spouse, preached
early in 1623/4, are intimately entwined with a sermon, The Happinesse of
Peace, preached by Stoughton ten months later in Cambridge, and com-
parison of the two yields evidence of the pressures exerted on preachers
by their public sermon performances. The extant manuscript evidence,
then, allows this sermon to be understood within three contexts: the ser-
mons delivery at Pauls Cross, likely in March 1623/4; a sermon delivered
by Stoughton ten months later in Cambridge; and the sermons publica-
tion in 1640.
Stoughtons early biographer described him as a Puritan preacher of
exceptional eloquence, adding that it is difficult to believe that greater
pulpit orator ever jewelled a sentence to more curious beauty than Stough
ton.2 Despite these gifts, however, Stoughton is remembered primarily as

1Millar MacLure, The Pauls Cross Sermons, 15341642 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1958), 256. This essay develops arguments anticipated in brief in Jeanne Shami, John
Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003),
21517.
2J.C. Whitebrook, Dr John Stoughton the Elder, Congregational History Society
Transactions 6 (191315), 83, 91. Additional biographical information on Stoughton can be
gleaned from the following sources: Benjamin Brook, The Lives of the Puritans (London:
J. Black, 1813), vol. 3; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry: The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart
390 jeanne shami

a graduate and then fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (that great

crucible of Puritans and nonconformists) and incumbent of St. Mary
Aldermanbury, London (have for some of the most famous nonconformist
preachers of his day) who shared in the persecutions authorized by
Archbishop Laud on suspicion of being a collector of funds for New
England ministers.3 Brook notes that, although he was a laborious and
orthodox preacher, he was investigated at the instigation of Laud because
he touched upon the Popish and Arminian controversies.4 At various
times, incriminating letters were intercepted, his study raided, and he was
investigated by the High Commission, although he enjoyed the patronage
and protection of such Puritan leaders as Sir Robert Harley and the Earl of
Holland. He was one of five lecturers [the others were John Viner, John
Goodwin, Andrew Molen, Sydrach Simpson] examined by William Juxon,
Bishop of London, for inconformity.5 All five preachers, according to
Laud, promised amendment for the future, and submission to the Church
in all things, [and] my lord [Juxon] very moderately forbore further pro-
ceeding against them. Stoughton, accompanied by Harley, was the only
one of the five to be brought before the High Commission.6 Although
suspected of channelling funds to nonconforming ministers in the new
world, however, Stoughton was eventually acquitted and died in 1639.
There is reason to believe, then, that he was sympathetic to the views of
nonconforming ministers, but that he managed to cover his activities suf-
ficiently within the bounds of conformity to satisfy both his patrons and
the authorities.
Stoughtons alleged nonconformist activities of the 1630s are antici-
pated, to some extent, in the sixteen-twenties.7 He preached at least twice
in 1624: first at Pauls Cross (The Love-sick Spouse) and then before James at

England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Round
heads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the Civil War (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990); P.S. Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of
Religious Dissent 15601662 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970); J. Venn, Alumni
Cantabrigenienses, part 1, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922); P.S. Seaver,
John Stoughton (bap. 1593 d. 1639), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
University Press, 2004accessed 28 April 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com.libproxy
.uregina.ca:2048/.
3Stoughton was preceded at St. Mary Aldermanbury by Robert Harris (a future mem-
ber of the Westminster Assembly) and Thomas Taylor, and succeeded in 1639 by Edmund
Calamy who wrote the history of nonconformists after the Restoration.
4Brook, Lives, 3: 527.
5Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 63.
6Seaver, Puritan Lectureships, 25658.
7Whitebrook, John Stoughton, 93.
 the love-sick spouse391

Trinity College, Cambridge (The Happinesse of Peace), sermons that expose

political and religious views at least partially at odds with those of estab-
lished authorities, and perhaps even his patrons. In 1913 Whitebrook
believed that Stoughtons opinions on affairs of his day were of little inter-
est to his own, but contemporary readers disagree, and it is in this spirit
that I have attempted to direct as much detailed attention as possible on
Stoughtons 1623/4 sermon at Pauls Cross.
The textual history of The Love-sick Spouse is both informative and puz-
zling. Although it exists in two manuscript versions, neither seems to be
the source for the sermon as it was printed posthumously in 1640 in a
volume dedicated to Henry Rich, Earl of Holland.8 Both manuscripts
appear to be copied from an identical source (perhaps from Stoughtons
papers, from which the printed sermons were apparently derived) with
Rawlinson E. 148 providing a complete text of the sermon, and Emmanuel
MS 96 a small fragment from the first half of the sermon. The manuscripts,
while they appear to be copied from the same source, differ substantively
from the printed source in terms of verbal variants, added or deleted pas-
sages, and the disposition of Greek and Latin quotations.
Two important kinds of historical and contextual information are pro-
vided only by the manuscripts. The first is the sermons date (1623/4) and
the second is the theological and political context in which the scribal
copies circulated (indicated obliquely by the composition of both manu-
script miscellanies, both of which contain Puritan, anti-Laudian materials
emerging from Cambridge in the 1630s and focused on puritan Emmanuel
College). Although MacLure had provided only the general date ante 1640
on the evidence of the 1640 printing, a manuscript of the full sermon
in the Bodleian Library dates it in 1623 (i.e. between 25 March 1623 and
24 March 1623/4) and internal evidence suggests that it was delivered
at Pauls Cross after the Christmas season of 1623, and probably in February
or March of 1623/4 while parliament was in session.9 The evidence for
this precise dating is based on two passages in the sermon. Stoughton
approaches the end of his sermon with references to the stability of the
church founded upon the rock of Christ. In the printed version, Stoughton

8The primary manuscript source for this sermon is Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS.
E. 148, fols. 53r-90v. A fragment of the first section of the sermon is found in Cambridge
University, Emmanuel College MS. 96. All further references to the manuscript will be
taken from the Bodleian copy, and indicated in parentheses in the text. References to the
printed version of the sermon are taken from XV. Choice Sermons (London: R. B[adger] for
Iohn Bellamie et al, 1640) and indicated parenthetically in the text of this essay.
9Emmanuel MS. 96 also dates the sermon 1623.
392 jeanne shami

gives two examples of the outward signs by which this confidence can be
manifested: Maximilian the Emperors decision to write Pauls phrase
Si nobiscum Deus (if God be with us) on the walls of the palace rooms, and
the advice of an ancient wise man to the Christians of Antioch to write
Christus nobiscum, state on their walls to protect against an earthquake
that was devastating their houses, which being done accordingly, they fell
not: so the Church being built upon the Rock, the gates of hell shall not
prevail against it (154). The 1623/4 Bodleian manuscript contains an addi-
tional example: the instruction to write Immanuel ouer or gates in golden
letters; god wth us, & Jesus in or hearts by love, as they say Ignatius had, &
therefore feare not to be shakd (fol. 90r), an example that would have
been appropriate and conventional to a sermon preached during the
extended Christmas season and equally apposite for a sermon invoking
the godly of Emmanuel College to stand firm. This addition helps to
explain a second passage in which Stoughton employs a topical analogy to
rouse his congregation from their security, and to remind them of the suf-
ferings of their co-religionists on the continent. He asks whether it were
not wisdom for us, that are but of the lower house [i.e. the Commons and/
or the Church militant], to grant a Subsidie of sighs; for us that are but of
the Common Councell, to take order for a presse of prayers; for us that are
but private Subjects of the Kingdome of Grace, to contribute a benevo-
lence of tears, toward the quenching of those flames, with which all the
Churches of God round about us are on fire?(143). The allusion would
have been especially pointed after parliament convened when the subject
of subsidies and benevolences to support a war with Spain was debated.
A letter from John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, dated 3 January
1623/4, corroborates that Most of the time [between Christmas eve and
the present] hath ben spent in daylie consultations, which resolved in the
end on a parlement to begin the 10th of Februarie.10
The contents of the miscellanies in which these manuscripts circulated
are also relevant to this discussion. Stoughtons sermon has survived as
part of Bodleian MS Rawl. E. 148, an anthology of Cambridge materials
from the 1620s and 1630s epitomizing how conformist Calvinists traced
their woes in the 1630s to their betrayal by James to pro-Spanish ceremoni-
alists circa 161824. The sermons date and its circulation in an anthology
of non-conforming, anti-Laudian materials highlight several topical and
thematic aspects. The first four items, at least, are connected specifically

10John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman. E. McLure (Philadel
phia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 2: 536.
 the love-sick spouse393

to Emmanuel College and to its Puritan, non-conformist connections.11

The sermon on Canticles 5:8 is the fourth of eight documents. The first two
are sermons by a Dr Garnons, likely John Garnons of Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, whose commencement sermon on Psalms 84:1, the first in the
manuscript, marked his proceeding DD in 1631.12 The second sermon in
the collection, also by Garnons, is a Latin sermon ad clerum. The third
sermon in the collection is by Richard Spinke on Romans 1:14, delivered in
St Johns College Chapel 17 May 1632. This is likely Richard Spinke, who
matriculated at Johns, Easter 1620, took his BA 16234, MA 1627, and died
9 October 1634, aged 29.13 Anthony Milton notes that increasingly, those
who discussed Church ceremonies [in the 1630s] found their motives
questioned and their works censored. He further notes that Spinke was
summoned and forced to recant this sermon because, among other things,
it emphasized the spiritual beauty of holiness to the detriment of the
physical.14 The sermon on Romans 1:14 (I am a debtor both to the Greekes
& Barbarians, both to the wise & unwise) recants various positions taken
regarding the authority and vocation of preachers and ministers of the
Gospel, the beauty of holiness, the role of the sacraments, the authority of
bishops, and in particular the preachers indiscreet and unadvised man-
ner of expressing himself (fol. 50r). Item 4 is Stoughtons sermon, dated at
Pauls Cross 1623. This is followed by an unidentified fragment of a Latin/
Greek discourse, a copy of a letter from John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln,
regarding the placement of a communion table, and a speech delivered at
Norwich by Dr Corbet, Bishop of Norwich on 28 April 1634 to the clergy of
the synod. The speech is a specific call for funds (a benevolence) for the
reparation of St. Pauls. The final item is part of a sermon by Dr Love, likely
the anti-Laudian head at Cambridge, vice-chancellor of Corpus Christi
College, later dean of Ely, in St. Marys on Christmas day, 1633, on 2 Cor. 8:9
(Ye knowe the grace of or Lord Jesus Xt that though he was rich, yet for yor
sakes he became poore, that ye through his poverty might be rich).15
Although not a coherent collection, the contents of the entire manuscript
reflect the doctrinal and disciplinary debates of the 1630s in Cambridge,
with an emphasis on nonconformist, anti-Laudian materials.
The Emmanuel College fragment circulated in a similar manuscriptmis
cellany. It appears as the last item in a collection of manuscripts including

11Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry, 923.

12Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, part 1, 2: 196.
13Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, part 1, 4: 136.
14Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in
English Protestant Thought 16001640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71.
15Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 73, 75.
394 jeanne shami

the following materials, all thought to have derived from Archbishop

Sancroft: an anti-Arminian Latin letter from John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury
to a Dr Ward [unidentified]; observations by John Hales of Eton on the
Trinity (labelled polemically by religious opponents as Socinian despite
his explicitly anti-Socianian views on the Trinity);16 academic resolutions
to disputed questions (e.g. Samuuel Wards determination that baptized
infants are saved; an anonymous determination on John 11:45, 46; and a
determination on the Sabbath, attributed in the margin to Dr Garuons
[perhaps Dr Garnons]) and dated 30 June 1632; a copy of Samuel Brookes
dissertation De Auxilio divin grati (allowing him to proceed DD in June
1616) dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke, Gresham, 1619 in which he
attacked Calvin and, while claiming not to be his disciple, supported the
Dutch theologian Arminius in his rebuttal of the doctrine of predestina-
tion;17 several documents discussing the legal notion of affinity (the
relationship that a person has to the blood relatives of a spouse by virtue
of the marriage), including one by Bishop William Barlow; notes and
extracts from Isaac Casaubons diary;18 Hugo Grotius to Bishop John
Overall; Hammonds answer to Whitefoot; John Haywell on the keeping of
Christmas; and, at the end of the miscellany, a fragment of John Stoughtons
Pauls Cross sermon on Canticles 5:8, dated 1623 [old style].19 While vari-
ous, the contents of this miscellany nonetheless point to Emmanuel
College as a locus of controverted religion as well as theological and legal
debate. And while the fragment of Stoughtons sermon that survives in
this collection appears an afterthought (it is inserted at the end of the mis-
cellany, separated by blank leaves, and copied upside down from the other
contents), it nonetheless must be seen as emerging from the milieu docu-
mented by the miscellanys other contents.
These connections are manifested in the 1640 posthumous printing
of fifteen of Stoughtons sermons, including the sermon on Canticles
preached at Pauls Cross. These are dedicated to the Earl of Holland, whose
patronage Stoughton had enjoyed for some time, including the period of
his examination before the High Commission. The Earl of Holland, earlier

16Basil Greenslade, John Hales (15841656), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,

Oxford University Press, 2004accessed 28 April 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com
.libproxy.uregina.ca:2048/.
17C.S. Knighton, Samuel Brooke, (c.15711631), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, 2004accessed 28 April 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com
.libproxy.uregina.ca:2048/.
18Published as Ephemerides, ed. John Russell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850).
19M.R. James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Emmanuel College (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1904), 85.
 the love-sick spouse395

Lord Kensington, had also intervened at about the time this sermon was
delivered in the imprisonments of Dr Everard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields
for indiscreet pulpit words regarding the Spanish Match. Comments by
Anthony Burgess, also one of the St. Johns / Emmanuel Puritan axis and
the editor of the 1640 edition in his epistle to the reader, tell us something
of how Stoughtons sermons were transmitted to us. Specifically, we are
informed that He left severall Sermons under his own hand, preached at
speciall times, and in Auditories of greatest worth and estimation, and that
the sermons in the 1640 volume encompass the chiefe of these. In addi-
tion, we are told, others of his Sermons were only taken from his mouth,but
care has been taken to publish them by, and compare them with the exactest
copies that can be gotten. The Epistle asserts that in these sermons we have
the Authors mind, as nearly as can be expressed in his own words, without
additions or deletions (To the Reader).
The promise to reproduce the Authors mind in the 1640 Sermons, and
the identification of that mind with his own words, is challenged by the
existence of two, textually-different versions of this sermon, and creates
some interesting complexities of interpretation. One of the very first dif-
ferences between manuscript and print witnesses is in the version of
Canticles 5:8, the sermons text, that they provide. Both manuscripts cite
Canticles 5:8 as follows: I charge ye o ye daughters of Ierusalem if you find
my welbeloved, that you tell him I am sicke of love. The print version
reads: I charge you, o yee daughters of Jerusalem, if yee find my Well-
beloved, what shalle yee tell him? that I am sicke of love. Both manu-
scripts, then, cite the common reading of both the Geneva and King James
versions, while the printed text uses a more literal translation, one that
introduces the interrogative sense and rhetorical intensity of the Hebrew,
but which is not found in any contemporary Bibles. Despite this intriguing
Biblical crux in the sermons text, however, and despite its opening
paragraphan extended Scriptural quotation from 1 Corinthians 13, this
sermon is one of the least Biblical early modern sermons I have encoun-
tered. Although it quotes extensively from philosophers, poets, historians,
the Greek Epigrams, and multiple Church Fathers, I counted fewer than
ten direct biblical quotations over 110 printed pages. For the most part, the
sermon develops its themes without recourse to Reformed practices
of Biblical cross-referencing, the customary practice of analyzing dark or
obscure places in light of clearer passages.20 While it is not the object of

20Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 53.
396 jeanne shami

this study to establish an authoritative text for Stoughtons sermon, how-

ever, it is important to observe how the manuscript and printed versions
of this sermon relate to one another. Together, the two versions tell us
much about the effects of oral transmission on printed sermons, and rein-
force our sense of the rhetorical differences between early modern manu-
scripts and printed sermons. The manuscripts are replete with passages of
un-translated Greek, and employ parentheses and commas as marks of
punctuation directly related to rhetorical pacing and emphasis. Several
passages in the printed sermon, in fact, suggest that the manuscript ser-
mon was copied orally rather than from a written source. The manuscript
refers, for example, to the thunder of Canaan, the language of war (fol.
56r), where the printed version correctly supplies the thunder of the
Cannon (56) for the first part of the phrase. Similarly, the manuscript has
may reigne calamityes (fol. 81r) in place of the obviously intended may
rain calamities (127), and, more interestingly, golden time of danger (fol.
68v), (a nonsensical phrase in the context) instead of gold in time of dan-
ger (90) which was clearly intended.
There are also numerous examples in which the manuscripts could be
used to correct 1640 readings. At page 102, for example, the printed sermon
introduces at least two corrupt readings, which are clarified by this manu-
script source. Unlike the aural errors noted above, these errors appear to
derive from scribal copying errors. For example, 1640 says that a godly
man feels a medall of grace and nature in him, an expression which is puz-
zling, if not meaningless. The manuscript, on the other hand, says that a
godly man findes a medley of grace & nature in him (fol. 72v) and is clearly
correct. Similarly, the 1640 sermon reads some might wonder, as Syllas
son did at his sister, that had two Paramours at once (102), in place of the
manuscripts as Sylla soe did at his sister (fol. 72v). However, the 1640 ser-
mon also provides an example of an aural error, corrected this time by the
manuscript (oyntment chased [118] in 1640 should be oyntment chast
[fol. 78v] as in the manuscript). Similarly, the manuscript correctly sup-
plies the phrase we can sucke fast, & cry (fol. 81v) which has been garbled
in 1640 to produce we can, such as fast and crie (134). And the odd phrase
her speedy whispers (140) of 1640 makes sense as her speech whispers
(fol. 85r) in the manuscript.
There are, however, many more examples of 1640 correcting manuscript
readings, attributable to the careful editorial efforts of Anthony Burgess,
who clearly tried to make sense of certain nonsensical or incorrect read-
ings as he prepared Stoughtons sermons for publication. Some of the
 the love-sick spouse397

most significant are changes from bough of myrrhe (fol. 61r) to bough of
Myrtle (71); Bug-beggers (fol. 76v) to Bul-beggers (112); fair living on out-
ward things (fol. 78r) to fair liverie of outward things (117); Rev. 21.18 (fol.
79v) to Rev. 21.8 (122); or p[ro]fession will remayne some blot (fol. 80v) to
lest our profession receive some blot (125); & therefore is troubled (fol.
84r) to and their soul is troubled (136); Callidore (fol. 84v) to Cassiodore
(137); flowing on (fol. 85r) to floting in (138); pearle of peace (fol. 88r) to
pearl of price (148). The differences between manuscript and print, while
not my primary focus, nonetheless attest to the vagaries of sermon trans-
mission, and the powerful impact of their moment of delivery on their
subsequent iterations.
While the manuscripts have enabled a date, and exposed a history of
the sermons transmission suggestive of its political and theological reso-
nance as well as its oral impact, the remainder of this essay will put more
pressure on the sermon by situating the sermon thus dated and framed
within three specific frameworks that will deepen the historical and rhe-
torical analysis. The first is the interpretative history of the Song of Songs,
and of this text in particular, in Reformed English sermons, treatises, com-
mentaries, and versifications. The second is the fact of this sermons deliv-
ery at Pauls Cross following Jamess Directions to Preachers (1622) preached
in the context of the Spanish Match and the international Protestant
cause. The third framework involves comparison of this sermon with a
court sermonThe Happinesse of Peacepreached by Stoughton to cel-
ebrate the French Match before the King at Trinity College, Cambridge,
and dated by Peter McCullough 13 December 1624, just 10 months after this
occasion.21
Stoughtons text comes from the narrative heart of the Song of Songs,
with its dramatic account of the Brides separation from the beloved,
absent because of the spouses failure of desire, and her persecution by the
watchmen of the community from whom she expected protection. It is
not a theologically innocent text, but is freighted with a lengthy interpre-
tative history, most of it invested in spiritual interpretation of a text that,
taken literally, was carnal and erotic, a dialogue between two lovers with
no explicit historical basis, and no textual reference to God, but which no
interpretative communityJewish, Catholic, or Reformedwas willing
to reject as canonical. It was a text that most commentators insisted was

21Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean
Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Calendar, 295.
398 jeanne shami

impossible to interpret, and one deeply problematical for a faith that

maligned the allegorical excesses of Catholic exegetes.22
Perhaps because of its instability, the Song of Songs, since its inception,
generated a flurry of commentaries, sermons, treatises, paraphrases, and
versifications designed to guide readers, within strict parameters, to alter-
native readings, usually focused on the text as an allegory of the relation-
ship between Christ and the true Church, and/or Christ and the individual
soul.23 Some commentators, such as James Durham, embarrassed by this

22I am grateful to Victoria Brownlee for sharing unpublished work from her disserta-
tion: Reforming Figures: Biblical Interpretation and Literature in Early Modern England
(PhD diss., Queens University Belfast, 2012). Her chapter on the Song of Songs is particu-
larly strong on the literal/allegorical implications of the book. My account of the interpre-
tative history of the Song of Songs also relies on the two most important publications
dealing specifically with its interpretation in the early modern period: Noam Flinker, The
Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of Their Mouths (Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer, 2000); Elizabeth Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-
Century England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Clarke claims that
In many ways, the struggle over the identity of the Church of England in the seventeenth
century is a conflict over the meaning of the Song of Songs (3). See also E.A. Matter, The
Song of Songs in Western Mediaeval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1990).
23Among the extended commentaries, versifications, sermons, and paraphrases of the
Song of Songs available in 1623/4, the following contribute significantly to the interpreta-
tive tradition, but the list is by no means comprehensive: Bartimaeus Andrewes, Certaine
verie worthie, godly and profitable sermons, vpon the fifth chapiter of the Songs of Solomon
(London: Robert Waldegrave, 1583); Robert Aylett, The Song of Songs, which was Salomons
metaphrased in English heroiks by way of dialogue. With certayne of the brides ornaments
(London: William Stansby, 1621); William Baldwin, The canticles or balades of Salomon,
phraselyke declared in Englysh metres (London: [Edward Whitchurche], 1549); Thodore de
Bze, Master Bezaes sermons vpon the three chapters of the canticle of canticles (Oxford:
printed by Joseph Barnes, and are to be sould [in London by T. Cooke] in Pauls Church-yard
at the Tygers Head, 1587); Henoch Clapham, Three partes of Salomon his Song of Songs
(London: Valentine Sims for Edmund Mutton dwelling in Pater-noster-Row at the signe of
the Huntes-man, 1603); John Dove, The conuersion of Salomon A direction to holinesse of life;
handled by way of commentarie vpon the whole booke of Canticles (London: W. Stansby for
John Smethwick, 1613); Thomas Drant, Two sermons preached the one at S. Maries Spittle on
Tuesday in Easter weeke 1570 and the other at the court at Windsor the Sonday after twelfth
day, being the viij of Ianuary, before in the yeare 1569 (London: John Day, 1570); Michael
Drayton, The harmonie of the church Containing, the spirituall songes and holy hymnes, of
godly men, patriarkes and prophetes [] to be read or sung, for the solace and comfort of the
godly (London: [T. Orwin for] Richard Ihones, 1591); Dudley Fenner, The Song of Songs, that
is, the most excellent song which was Solomons (Middelburgh: Richard Schilders, 1594);
George Gifford, Fifteene sermons upon the Song of Salmon (London: Barnard Alsop, 1620);
William Gouge in Henry Finch, An exposition of the Song of Solomon: called Canticles
Together with profitable obseruations, collected out of the same (London: John Beale, 1615);
Joseph Hall, Salomons diuine arts [] Drawne into method, out of his Prouerbs & Ecclesiastes.
With an open and plaine paraphrase, vpon the Song of songs (London: H[umphrey]
L[ownes], 1609); William Loe, Songs of Sion Set for the ioy of gods deere ones (Hamburg: s.n.,
1620); Jude Smith, A misticall deuise of the spirituall and godly loue betwene Christ the spouse,
 the love-sick spouse399

allegorical imperative, argued that in this book, the allegorical meaning is

the literal meaning: I grant it hath a literal meaning, but I say, the literal
meaning is not immediat, but that which is spiritually and especially
meant by these Allegorick and Figurative speeches, is the Literal meaning
of this Song.24 Durham further distinguished between allegoric exposi-
tion of Scripture (which he rejected) and an exposition of an allegoric
Scripture, which this book required: The first is that, which many Fathers,
and School-men fail in, that is, when they Allegorize plain Scriptures and
Histories, seeking to draw out some secret meaning, other than appeareth
in the words; and so will fasten many senses upon one Scripture. An
Exposition of an Allegorick Scripture, is, the opening and expounding of
some dark Scripture [] making it plain and edifying.25 In England in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were over 500 commentaries
on this book alone, an exegetical tradition surpassed only by commentary
on the Psalms.26
Nor was the Song of Songs politically innocent. At least as early as
Luther, who preached a series of sermons on the book, it had been made
to comment on Church governance, and Elizabeth Clarke has demon-
strated the extent to which, during the Stuart reign, it expressed theologi-
cal and cultural opposition to the Crown, particularly among Puritans,
and was aligned with anti-Catholic nationalism. Early in the Jacobean
period, it was associated with members of the court of Prince Henry, and
after that with the cause of international Protestantism epitomized by the
religious and political struggles of the Palatinate in the 1620s. By the 1630s

and the church or congregation Firste made by the wise Prince Salomon [] (London: Henry
Kirckham, and are to be solde at his shoppe, at the little northe doore of Paules, at the signe
of the black Boie, 1575); George Wither, The hymnes and songs of the Church diuided into two
parts (London: John Bill, 1623).
24James Durham, Clavis cantici, or, An exposition of the Song of Solomon (Edinburgh:
George Swintoun and James Glen, 1668), 6. This view was not exclusively applied to the
Song of Songs, but to Scripture as a whole. See John Donnes comments on the literal
sense: The literall sense is always to be preserved, Donne says, but the literall sense is not
always to be discerned, for the literall sense is not always that, which the very Letter and
Grammer of the place presents, as where it is literally said, That Christ is a Vine, and liter-
ally, That his flesh if bread, concluding that the literal sense is the principall intention of
the Holy Ghost, but an intention that might be to express things by allegories, by figures;
so that in many places of Scripture, a figurative sense is the literall sense (The Sermons of
John Donne, eds. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, [Berkeley: University of
California Press, 195362], 6: 62).
25Durham, Clavis cantici, 223.
26Brownlee cites this figure provided by George L. Scheper, Reformation Attitudes
toward Allegory and the Song of Songs, Publications of the Modern Language Association
89.3 (1974), 556. For evidence that this was not just an English phenomenon, see Clarke,
Politics, Religion, 12.
400 jeanne shami

it had assumed an anti-Laudian, anti-Arminian agenda, finding the enemy

to the bride of Christ within rather than outside the Church and the
Nation. Clarkes findings, and the texts she discusses, point to the Song of
Songs as a coded narrative invoking the afflictions of the faithful as well as
their passionate desire for mystical marriage with Christ, increasingly
threatened from within the nation and the Church. By all accounts, it was
a wildly popular, tantalizingly oppositional text, one that could avoid cen-
sorship by virtue of its acknowledged obscurity, and an irresolvable ten-
sion between its literal and allegorical meanings. By the end of the century
it was a favourite of Presbyterians, Independents, and separatists, includ-
ing those new-world puritans who had abandoned the Church of England
to forge a separate identity as the true Church in America.27
When we place Stoughtons public Pauls Cross sermon on the afflic-
tions of the spouse separated from the bridegroom in the context of its
immediate occasion, and compare it with a sermon he delivered at the
end of that year on the occasion of the signing of the marriage articles for
a much more worldly couple, Charles and Henrietta Maria, the Catholic
princess of France, the results are surprising. The sermon touches many
of the themes dominating pulpit discourse during Lent (i.e. February
or March 1624) while Parliament was in session, when it was likely deliv-
ered, including anti-papism, marriage (and lovesickness), and a quasi-
apocalyptic fear of the consequences of peace and security.
The sermon focuses on the spouses love for Christ, and her painful sep-
aration from him, and is divided into two main parts: the substance of the
text, treating the affectionloveand the spouses lovesickness; and the
circumstances of the context, divided roughly into the absence of her
beloved, and the spouses affliction (see Appendix A). The absence of the
beloved, Stoughton says, punishes former negligence and provokes future
diligence, eventually leading the spouse to Christ. The second major cir-
cumstance of the contextthe afflictions of the spouseexpresses
Stoughtons more pointed views on the unpopular negotiations for a bride
for Charles.
In this Pauls Cross sermon, an interpretative tension is constructed
around the idea of lovesickness.28 On the one hand, as the text and its

27See Clarke, Politics, Religion, esp. chapters 1 and 2.

28In Politics, Religion, Clarke notes that Commentaries on the Song of Songs are full of
the adjective love-sick, represented as a desirable frame of mind for the Christian (18). She
provides a reference to a sermon by William Gearing entitled The love-sick Spouse, or, The
substance of four sermons preached on Canticles 2.5 (London: Nevill Simmons, 1665), but
makes no reference to Stoughtons sermon.
 the love-sick spouse401

tradition of commentary suggests, lovesickness is the appropriate attitude

for the lover (either the individual soul or the national Church) who seeks
Christ, but it can also gesture towards lovesickness as idolatry, most pow-
erfully evoked by Charless trip to Spain to court the Infanta in person,
and, following his escape from that Match, the opening of negotiations
for the only slightly more tolerable French Match. Stoughton, whose
patron Rich was enthusiastic about the French Match, seems to be express-
ing the caution of those wary, if not absolutely opposed to, a marriage with
one of the daughters of Antichrist, although the French Match held a stra-
tegic advantage in a war to recover the Palatinate and support the cause of
international Protestantism.
Stoughtons sermon invites strong topical application when he criti-
cizes sermons that sing sweetly in the meditation, but fail in the applica-
tion. In this case, the language of war, peace, and the dangers of security
expresses the pressure to wage war with Spain, and to make parliamentary
subsidies dependent on some say in foreign policy. In this context,
Stoughtons assertion that the language of war is the best Rhetoricke to
commend peace (56) registers dissatisfaction with Jamess handling of
both domestic and foreign policy, reinforced with statements indicating
that England has been lulled into security and has not benefited from
peace. The example of the French Protestant Church is a cautionary tale to
England, as Stoughton concludes that mourning France may tell merry
England , sorrowful France may tell secure England thus much: Gods chil-
dren must not look for any Paradise upon earth, that Vine must not think
it grows in Paradise (85). In fact, the dangers of peace and security are a
premise of the sermon. Stoughton comments, for example, that The beau-
tie of the world foils a Christian more than the strength, the Peace
more than the war, the flattering Sunshine more then the blustring storm
(945). In another section, Stoughton elaborates on the concept by saying
that the lap of prosperity upon the knees of peace have made us tender
and delicate, and both make faith effeminate (97). For Stoughton, one
further use of the sermon is a caution about how to use peace and pros-
perity: wee sit rent-free upon the Gospell, it costs us nothing, and yet we
grow verie beggars (131). In fact, in an association common in sermons of
the period, Stoughton expresses his fears that peace will lead inevitably to
a toleration of religion. This fear that a toleration of religion, and particu-
larly of Catholicism, was ensuing as a natural consequence of negotiations
for Charless match is expressed throughout the sermon in a large number
of anti-Papist, and specifically Anti-Jesuit comparisons. Stoughton com-
pares the spouses wounded conscience to the chamber of meditation
402 jeanne shami

(as the Jesuites call that where they tutor their Scholars to kill Princes)
(62). Another passage contrasts the numberless tears of the Saints with
the Papists numbering their beads, and counting out their prayers (75).
Stoughton also contrasts the faulty Papist economy of the relationship
between grace and merit with the right valuation of the work of grace.
I pray God, he says, that Peace doe not play the Sophister in the world
now adayes and partaking of the nature of cold, freeze Heterogeneals
together, Papists and Protestants in the neerest bonds (138), upsetting the
proper economy of grace. As he urges, The acclamation at the founding of
the Temple in Zachary, was Grace, Grace, not Merit, as the rough Pelagian;
nor Merit and Grace, nor Grace and Merit, nor Merit at all, nor Free-will
neither, but all Grace, Grace (80). And in an attack on the luxury and
corruption of the Roman Church, Stoughton warns that though the Whore
of Rome can clothe her family in scarlet, prosperity does not make a
Christian (115). Moreover, peace that means ignoring the sufferings of
Palatinate Christians is unnaturall, and those who are not moved by these
afflictions, but sorry Christians. Finally, in specific application to the
joint political future of England and the Palatinate, joined as they are by
the families of Charles and his sister Elizabeth, Stoughton urges his hear-
ers to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, that our sons may be as plants
grown up in their youth, that our daughters may be as corner-stones, pol-
ished after the similitude of a Palace, that they may be Royall and Palatine
stones (141).
Three additional points can be made. The first is that the acknowledged
(in fact, desirable) darkness and obscurity of Canticles is exacerbated in
this sermon by its almost complete lack of Biblical cross-referencing or
collation. Mary Morrissey has shown how preachers supported the doc-
trines they derived from their texts by comparing cryptic or troublesome
passages with more perspicuous ones, so that a theologically sound under-
standing would be established,29 but it seems likely that preachers such as
Stoughton chose texts from this book precisely because its instability
allowed them to exploit it for their own purposes without being tied to a
strict interpretation of the Biblical words or the obligation to support and
clarify his interpretation from other Biblical places.
The second point is that in this period of heightened sensitivity to the
religious and political implications of dynastic marriages, reference to
marriages, even those between Christ and the Church, were charged with

29Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 53.

 the love-sick spouse403

political resonance. A year earlier, on 19 March 1623, royal chaplain James

Rawlinson made a direct connection between Prince Charless Amorous
travels to gain a bride and the Amatorious text of the Song of Songs in a
sermon entitled The Bridegroome and his Bride.30 While ostensibly focus-
ing on the mystical marriage appropriate for the Lenten season, Rawlinson
derives politically apposite lessons from it. The anti-Catholic tenor of the
sermon, and the instruction that the Bride should abstain from fornica-
tion with idols is only one such reference. The sermon also makes much of
the fathers role in choosing the Bride, stressing divine election, one that
sets in motion a complex hermeneutic critical of the father, James, for his
choice of a non-elect bride for his son. As Elizabeth Clarke concludes: the
Song of Songs is being interpreted in the traditional framework of the
mystical marriage, but lessons from it are being drawn in the opposite
direction, from the spiritual phenomenon back to the projected marriage
of Prince Charles.31 Stoughtons sermon a year later, after Charles had
returned from Spain without a Spanish bride, also by implication makes
James responsible for separation of the two lovers, Christ and his Church,
by having sent his son away from England/ the Church of England, into the
lascivious arms of Spain.
The third point is that the sermon, preached in a particular context,
would have appeared perhaps even more oppositional when it was printed
in 1640, when the full impact of Laudian policies, royal marriages, and the
failures of England to support international Protestantism had become
more apparent, and when the labels of puritan and schismatic had been
used so effectively to marginalize the godly. This impact is epitomized by
the printed sermons naming of Edward Dering as the anonymous exem-
plary Xtian of the manuscript. In 1624 Stoughtons tongueunlike the
exemplar to whom he alludesis sufficiently bridled that he refers only
obliquely to that persons martyrdom in the anti-prelatical cause, a man
who on his deathbed preferred the golden beams of Gods countenance
won through adversity to the golden bags of worldly prosperity. Patrick
Collinson makes clear that after his death, this outspoken and honest
preacher became a living legend, a mirror of exemplary godliness and
evangelical ardour.32 Stoughtons reluctance to name Dering, perhaps

30James Rawlinson, The Bridegrome and his Bride, in Quadriga Salutis (London: John
Lichfield and William Turner, 1625), sig. 2v.
31Clarke, Politics, Religion, 40.
32Patrick Collinson, Edward Dering (c.15401576), Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004accessed 28 April 2013, http://www.oxforddnb
.com.libproxy.uregina.ca:2048/.
404 jeanne shami

because of his reputation as a royal gadfly, reflects the complex political

negotiations being conducted in his sermon, as well as Stoughtons model
for evangelical preaching at the Cross, a model which could not be fully
invoked, apparently, until he was safely dead.
Having established the potentially oppositional elements of Stoughtons
1624 Pauls Cross sermon, it is instructive to compare this performance
with Stoughtons sermon preached on December 13, 1624, at Trinity
College, Cambridge, and calendared by Peter McCullough as a Court ser-
mon celebrating with fulsome praise the signing of articles for the French
Match just the day before. Stoughton was likely appointed to preach this
sermon at the urging of his patron, Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, chief
negotiator for the match. In this sermon, McCullough identifies an impor-
tant variation on the rex pacifici theme praising James for securing peace
without compromising religion, and insisting that war for religions sake
was a justifiable compromise for peacein short, a thanksgiving for the
end of the Spanish Match, and an endorsement of war on behalf of the
Palatinate.33
This summary accurately characterizes the sermons overall message,
although Stoughton digresses frequently from his celebratory tone to offer
anti-Catholic diatribes and warnings disguised as praise. Whitebrook
observes that while the sermon lacks no courtliness of phrase, it is plainly
directed against the Spanish alliance, the French alliance, or any other alli-
ance that would, in Stoughtons opinion, tend to place again upon the
nation the yoke of Rome.34 An obvious question raised by comparison of
these sermons, then, is whether, in fact, the pressure of the Court occasion
made Stoughton even less Dering than his heroic evangelical exemplar,
thus casting doubt on the sincerity or efficacy of his words at Pauls Cross.
Stoughtons sermon is acutely conscious of its occasion and courtly audi-
ence, where such a benigne aspect of Majesty, such a Constellation of
Nobility resides.35 He says: it is enough for me that I speake in such an
assembly, to wise men, whose reason shall be my rhetoricke; to Christians,
whose conscience will be my eloquence; to Courtiers, whose rare humani-
tie cannot but looke like it selfe (if not rather like the Cherubims, as we see
them painted) and shew a lovely countenance, even to my raw Divinitie
(12). Stoughton offers his sermon as a Privie Counsellour to Majestie

33McCullough, Sermons at Court, 306.

34Whitebrook, John Stoughton, 91.
35John Stoughton, The Happinesse of Peace in XV. Choice Sermons (London: Richard
Hodgkinson, Thomas Cotes, and Richard Badger, 1640). All references to this sermon are
taken from this edition and cited parenthetically in the text of the essay.
 the love-sick spouse405

(4) to inform it of how the unity of peace and religion makes a people
happy. Where the Pauls Cross sermon had warned of the dangers of peace
and security, this sermon sets out to show how peace is a great blessing to
a nation. James is explicitly praised as a blessed peace-maker, while in the
next breath he must hear that war is Malum, but may be Necessarium, and
it is good some times to hunt the wolfe, though it be better to fodder the
sheep (1112). While peace is extolled, however, the superiority of religion
to peace occupies the heart of the sermon, and is expressed in terms that
would have caught the attention of those gathered ostensibly to celebrate
the French Match: So that the fairest Kingdome without religion, which
provides for the soule against death, is but a Paradise without a Tree of life,
like a beautifull harlot (according to the French proverb) a Paradise for the
eye, and a Purgatorie for the soule (17). The union of Charles and Henrietta
Maria results in the joining of peace and religion, that perfect felicitie: as
when some skilfull hand hath made an happie marriage between perfect
Red (suppose the Prince of the House of Roses) and purest White
(suppose the Lady of the nation of the Lillies) they beget the sweetest
colour (26). Nonetheless, this perfect felicity, the two-part song of the
England Church in prosperity, is immediately undercut by an unseemly
diatribe against the Whore of Babylon (27).
More striking, however, is the verbatim repetition in each of Stoughtons
sermons of two passages that had struck a warning note at Pauls Cross,
and that constitute the thematic core and political thrust of both sermons.
Stoughton observes, citing Jewish commentators, that if you take the
letters of the name Jehovah, out of the names of man and woman, Ish,
Ishah, there remains nothing but Esh, Esh, fire, fire; to note that when
marriage is not in the feare of the Lord, in the knot of true Religion, there
is nothing in it but the fire of contention (Happinesse 33, emphasis
mine).36 The second passage takes up once more the cause of interna-
tional Protestantism, and specifically the fate of Jamess daughter Elizabeth
and the Palatinate. In both sermons the passages are identical: pray for
the peace of Jerusalem, that our sons may be as plants growne up in their
youth, that our daughters may be as corner-stones, polished after the
similitude of a Palace, that they may be Royall and Palatine stones

36The equivalent passage in The Love-sick Spouse is as follows: and as the Cabbalists
note of marriage, out of the words, man and woman, that if thout take out Jod and He,
the letters of the name of God, there remaines nothing but , fire, fire; that when marriage
is not in the feare of the Lord, in the knot of true Religion, there is nothing in it but the
fire of contention, so it is betweene us and God without Christ (Love-sick Spouse, 589).
406 jeanne shami

(Happinesse, 31; Love-sick Spouse, 141). At Pauls Cross, this passage pre-
cedes Stoughtons passionate exhortation to grant a subsidie of Sighs, a
presse of prayers, and a benevolence of tears, toward a quenching of
those flames, with which all the Churches of God round about us are on
fire (Love-sick Spouse, 143). In the court sermon, this passage precedes
more specifically anti-Catholic attacks on those whose Religion is rebel-
lion, whose faith is faction: that rends a Common-wealth often, as the
sword cuts the scabberd. Peters Successour loves to fish in troubled waters,
ever since he drew his Crowne out of them (Happinesse, 32). The point is
punctuated in the court sermon, though Stoughton disclaims any infer-
ence (34), when he contrasts former times when Religion comprised sons
of the Coale whose nature and delight it was to kindle the flames of
Martyrdome with present times when the sons of light walk by the light
of the gospel. Then, he says, England was hell, but now it is heaven (34).
The court sermon concludes with a wish that England may transmit these
blessings as an inheritance to its children, no doubt alluding to the vexed
issue of succession and to the education, both religious and political, of
the royal offspring. Nobles, politicians, and especially the King are urged to
maintain their zeal for religion and defence of the faith, the exhortations
tasting of critique as much as praise, but the sermon ends with fulsome
praise for James who, as sovereign defender of the faith, blesses the nation:
Seeing that by thee we enjoy great quietnesse, and that verie worthy deeds
are done unto this Nation (this gowned Nation) by thy providence, wee
accept it alway, and will celebrate it in all places (most noble Felix, most
happy Soveraigne) with all thankfulnesse (41). The notion that the French
Match was the providential joining of peace and religion puts the best
possible construction on the treaties, Stoughtons dutiful benevolences
(40) of a golden tongue to the King who is Christ to Stoughtons Zaccheus,
and to whom he owes this tribute, but the unabashed anti-Catholicism of
the sermon undercuts this posture.
The audience at Pauls Cross, no doubt larger and more diverse than the
academic and courtly audience in Cambridge, was treated to a more
overtly or consistently oppositional experience, in an exhortatory register.
But despite the starstruck attitude exhibited by Stoughton in front of such
an exalted court auditory, he managed to preach his core messagethe
importance of true religion in any union, and the compassionate duty to
pray and even to intervene militarily on behalf of beleaguered continental
Protestants. And despite the excesses of his praise of the pair to be mar-
ried, and the Defender of the Faith, King James, he managed to convey
his continuing anxiety about the state of true religion. The anti-Catholic
 the love-sick spouse407

elements of the court sermon are, if anything, more biting than those spo-
ken at Pauls Cross, but Stoughton must have been relying at Court on the
gilded frame of flattery of his sermon to soften the impact of the message
at its core, an unhappy alliance of hope and warning that exposed the
national anxieties underpinning this political marriage. James must have
been relieved to hear the sermon end as it did because it offered him a
face-saving way to celebrate the Match and to demonstrate the conformity
of even his oppositional clergy even as it expressed national solidarity on
issues of religion and conscience.37 But the tensions at its core belie its
unctuous conclusion, and echo, literally, the anxieties that sermons had to
negotiate in 1624 as the political and religious axes shifted around them.

37Although there is little evidence of pre-sermon censorship, after the fact, court ser-
mons could be censored by penal measures taken against preachers who had overstepped
unwritten bounds. McCullough argues that these bounds were clearly defined early in the
reign by Jamess response to a sermon preached by John Burgess at Greenwich, 19 June
1604. From this example and the correspondence surrounding it, McCullough concludes
that there was a de facto Golden Rule of the court pulpit: that is, even if only in the last
moments of ones sermon, compliment the prince (Sermons at Court, 44). Any criticisms
could also be defended by a disclaimer against application to the present audience.
As McCullough suggests, So fundamental was the preachers right to control meaning,
that disavowals of a clearly intended meaning seem to have been deemed sufficient to
exempt the preacher from the punishment that he would otherwise receive (Sermons at
Court, 146).
408 jeanne shami

APPENDIX A: Structure of The Love-sick Spouse

A. Proemium (4550): Encomium of spiritual love

B. Substance of Text:
a. The affection Love
b. The intention Sickness
C. Circumstances of the Text:
a. Absence of the beloved (5085)
i.Three effects
1. No outward wooing of his word
2. No inward working of his spirit
3. No comfort of his presence
ii.Grounds of paradoxical effect
1. Nature of love
2. Nature of man
3. Nature of this absence
iii.How absence leads the spouse to Christ
1. Discipline of law drives her to him
iv.Reasons for his absence
1. For consolation
2. For exhortation
a. If you enjoy him, wear him in your bosom
b. If you perceive him going, exhort him to stay
c. Be not impatient for another
3. For instruction
a. To illustrate the cold entertainment of the Gospel occa-
sioned by plenty
b. The spouses afflictions (affliction is an incentive of divine
affection)
i.It abases the enticing loveliness of the world outside
ii.It abates the lustiness of the flesh within that might incite us to
folly
iii.It abets the Spirit in his quarrel with the two former (the world
and the flesh)
1. It does this by persuasion (lays us flat on our backs so we can
see heaven)
2. It does this by necessity (affliction drives us to God)
iv.Affliction interpreted as divine affection has three uses
 the love-sick spouse409

1. For instruction: prosperity does not make a Christian

2. For encouragement: many people delight in deriding Chris
tians for the afflictions they endure
3. For caution: affliction can cause coldness or untowardness
a. Dont forget the afflictions of others
b. Dont fall in love with Gods blessings and grow key-cold
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SERMON, SALVATION, SPACE: JOHN DONNES PERFORMATIVE

MODE AND THE POLITICS OF ACCOMMODATION

Kathleen OLeary

Being called to this high place, in this great assembly, where is accustomed
to be a concourse, not onley from all parts of the City, but almost of every
nation under heaven.1

The clergyman Robert Sibthorpes description of Pauls Cross in 1617 sug-

gests both the sheer number and variety of types that gathered there. It is
a site of multiplicity but can also be seen as a liminal place, untidy, dan-
gerous. Its audience is non-elite, a heady mixture that lends to the place
uncertainty and excitement and it is here that John Donne preached inter-
mittently from 1616/7 to 1629. This chapter will examine how Donne uses
his significant skills as a preacher to reach out to this large and unsettled
congregation and how he uses language to coerce and awe his hearers. It
will examine the visceral effects that the use of carefully selected diction,
phrase, and rhythmic pattern can have on the listeners and how these
effects can transform not only the congregations sense of their individual
salvation but the preachers too. Donnes particularly vibrant style of
preaching is, of course, not confined to his Pauls Cross sermonshis
audiences and locations are many and variedbut his Pauls Cross con-
gregation form possibly the most interesting group as their collectivity
and sheer size provide that sense of ambiguity, uncertainty and, maybe,
disquiet.
The performative mode of Donne will also be central to this chapter,
not merely as an instance of acknowledging the connection between the
preacher and the actor, for most in the congregation, one might assume,
would also be theatre-goers, but more interestingly by examining the per-
formance as spiritual device. By this I mean that Donnes dramatic mode
is not only a means of transfixing an audience but also of dislocating them

1Robert Sibthorpe, A Counter-Plea to an Apostates Pardon, A sermon preached at Paules

Crosse vpon Shroue-Sunday, February 15. 1617 (London: B.Alsop, for R.Fleming, 1618).
412 kathleen oleary

from the temporal, concrete world into something rich and strange, or as
Bryan Crockett would have it [Donnes] dizzying verbal pyrotechnics ...
frustrate the categories of rational thought.2 Donne himself notes in a ser-
mon at Whitehall:
The Son of God is [] The Word; God made us with his word, and with our
word we make God.3
The Augustinian preacher and reforming theologian Egidio da Viterbo
argues that the divine cannot reach us unless it is covered in poetic veils.4
Oral performance from the pulpit often engages the listener in sequential
narrative, irony, cumulative tension and resolution, which needs to be
coupled with modulation of pitch, timbre and body language, to which
even the least sophisticated member of the congregation can be sensitive.
The aural tradition excites the imaginative faculties of the audience, a sub-
stantial number of whom would be conversant with the semiotics of the
stage and, one supposes, with oral devices in narrative communication.
The dramatic spectacle that was Donnes preaching, which can tease us
out of thought, is not simply a route to a hazy divine space; it can in fact
work against religious and political polemic. Not merely a get-out into
some abstract realm, Donnes style wishes to connect his congregation
with the business of the sacred, working on an audience that would have
been receptive to the art of theatrical rhetoric but also of the practices of
old Catholicism. Louis Montrose, for instance, has suggested that the sup-
pression of Catholic ritual provides an opportunity for the theatrical flour-
ish as a legitimate means of expression.5 By tapping into the vestiges of
the old, religious tradition, Donne carefully works on a multi-faceted audi-
ence whose memories of an earlier aesthetic of rosaries, incense and
devotional prayer could have been provocatively stirred. This creates a
palimpsest of sacred devotional practice, of imagined visual iconography,
and verbal exultation; for, although the power of the logos is at the heart of
Donnes role as preacher, his imagistic evocations arguably provide his lis-
teners with a kind of invisible idolatry in another form.

2Bryan Crockett, Holy Cozenage and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear Sixteenth
Century Journal 24.1 (1993), 47.
3John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. by George R. Potter and Evelyn M.
Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), 3:259260.
All references to Donnes sermons are taken from this edition.
4Egidio da Viterbo in Bryan Crockett, Holy Cozenage and the Renaissance Cult of the
Ear, 54.
5Louis A. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespeare Anthro
pology, Helios 7 (1980), 63.
 sermon, salvation, space: donnes performative mode413

Donnes approach to his role as preacher and the suggestive diction

found in the sermons, calls to mind, in language highly vivid and incanta-
tory, the pictorial and rhythmic entreaty of Catholic devotion. I would
argue that this overlaying of one religious doctrine with another can re-
define reverential practice and assuage doubts and fears that cannot
always be theologically justified through the processes that accompany a
new religions dogma. In short, a congregation may be more likely to
receive that dogma when delivered with an attentive glance at its recent
past. The evocative Word in the Sermons, sustained by a veiled Catholic
aesthetic, can reconnect worshippers to an elegiac world of emblems
and significations, which were arguably critical to a post-Reformation
Protestant society that had undergone considerable change and was aware
of a sense of cultural loss. Eamon Duffy remarks that for most of the first
Elizabethan adult generation, Reformation was a stripping away of famil-
iar and beloved observances, the destruction of a vast and resonant world
of symbols.6 And even by Donnes time, one might suggest that echoes of
this fading tradition still resounded. Placing the memory of old obser-
vances at the heart of the sermon keeps the scripture vibrant and alive in
the immediacy of the spoken performance and also central to communal
spirituality that engages with the art of preaching. Remembrance can
answer our need for salvation: as Donne indicates: But the memory is so
familiar, and so present, and so ready a faculty, as will always answer.7
And, more significantly, The art of salvation, is but the art of memory.8
Moreover, the bustle of the everyday, of quotidian habit and custom,
lends to the idea of an individual experiencing a sense of otherness, a
feeling of being removed from the commonplace when placed in these
spiritual settings. That these sermons are heard on Sunday also comple-
ments the idea of shifting away from ordinary time, allowing the imagina-
tion to modify itself away from its workday pattern into a contemplation
of eternity. Removed from the rigours imposed by a strong Protestant
work-ethic, Sunday can offer the congregation a spiritual space that can
accommodate a Catholic past that is still within its cultural memory
and the two religions, past and present, can work on the individual and
collective mind to create a sense of a divine world. The importance of
this accommodation can implicitly legitimise a Catholicism that would

6Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 14001580
(New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992), 591.
7Donne, Sermons 2:73.
8Donne, Sermons 2:73.
414 kathleen oleary

otherwise remain within secret, private masses, whilst at the same time
transforming both past and present religions to produce a fresh and
acceptable synthesised faith.
Donnes Pauls Cross sermon delivered on the 6 May 1627 asks his listen-
ers to remember the past, to acknowledge both Judaic and Catholic tradi-
tion, though he, with some vigour, notes their errors and calls such a
follower a person mis-led.9 He argues, citing Catholicism, that even a
Religion mixt with some idolatry, and superstition, is better than none,
that a Papist is better than an Atheist.10 This subtle manoeuvre that
encourages his audience to remember, yet also to critique, foregrounds
the important difference between then and now, of past and present
but at the same time to be mindful of temporall blessings and that all
creatures are Gods children.11 It also allows the congregation to consider
the immediate experience of the sermon, happening on that day, post-
Reformation, with Donnes words at the centre of this tradition, hearing
the message of God rather than worshipping images. But there is also the
suggestion of linearity and filiation to this sermon, from the Judaic to the
Catholic to the newly formed Protestant church, and in this is the idea of
progression shown in the recurring images of darkness to lightso past
religions will see the truth, The Sunne of Righteouness will arise in me.12
Bryan Crockett has suggested that in Protestant aesthetics the ear was
more to be trusted than the eye, which had a sense of Catholic idolatry
attached to it: he notes that 16th-century reformers repeatedly insist that
ordinary worshippers are led astray by the visually theatrical aspects of
the traditional liturgy as well as by the visual allure of carved or painted
images.13 Indeed, we can trace this delight in an aural aesthetic in the
development of Church music following on from the Reformation. Added
to this, Crockett indicates how this interest led to an enhanced receptivity
to the nuances of oral performance.14 Yet in that receptivity there is
produced another kind of theatricality, which draws not just on practiced
verbal dexterity but on the same techniques that an actor would employ to
gain his audiences attention. Along with the power of the spoken Word,
the preachers body can effect a sense of wonder in a congregation. The
rhetorical and often theatrical turn of phrase, delivered with brio and

9Donne, Sermons, 7:17.

10Donne, Sermons, 7:17.
11Donne, Sermons, 7:17.
12Donne, Sermons, 7:18.
13Bryan Crockett, Holy Cozenage and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear, 50.
14Crockett, Holy Cozenage, 51.
 sermon, salvation, space: donnes performative mode415

enhanced by a vivid image or paradoxical concept, can draw in the listener

who is captured by a mixture of the linguistic, imagistic and the devo-
tional, a supra-rational rhetorical force, all of which work upon him or her
to create a sense of transcendence.15
And Donne is readily aware of this heady mixture, adroitly re-configur-
ing unacceptable visual idolatry into a sort of spiritual linguistics, where
the imagistic tradition is enfolded and made permissible. The image of
the Church as an Ark on a stormy sea pervades the 1627 sermon as does the
flagrant, if implied, use of St Sebastian shot through with arrows.16 In
the same sermon, Donne cites Calvins tolerance of those inculcated into
this representative style, arguing that there needs to be an easy transition
from eye to ear:
There are many that could not bee without those Bookes (as hee calls those
Pictures) because then they had no other way of Instruction; but, that that
might be supplied, if those things which were delivered in picture, to their
eyes, were delivered in Sermons to their eares. And this is true, that where
there is frequent preaching, there is no necessity of pictures. Remembrance
was one office of the Holy Ghost himself, that he should bring to their
remembrance those things; which had been formerly taught them.17
Thus, the ear replaces the eye directly through the power of the sermon
though, implied in Calvins words, is the sense of transition as a moderate
shift through the act of remembrance. William R. Mueller notes that
Donnes frequent use of bodily imagery to expound spiritual matters is
effective because of its concreteness and familiarity to a congregation.18
In an undated Whitsunday sermon (c. 161821), for example, Donne fore-
grounds the importance of the ears as the route to salvation:
The Eares are the Aqueducts of the water of life; and if we cut off those, that
is, intermit our ordinary course of hearing, this is a castration of the soul, the
soul becomes an Eunuch, and we grow to a rust, to a moss, to a barrenness,
without fruit, without propagation.19
Here is the importance both of preaching and listening as a means to sal-
vation through direct entry to the soul through the body, for if we do not
use our ears to hear Gods word our souls will become withered. The soul

15Crockett, Holy Cozenage, 58.

16Donne, Sermons, 7:23.
17Donne, Sermons, 7:19.
18William R. Mueller, John Donne: Preacher (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1962), 123.
19Donne, Sermons, 5: 55.
416 kathleen oleary

needs food in the form of language in order to sustain it or it will become

diminished. The negative references to castration and eunuch are juxta-
posed with the propagating and masculine powers of the word to insemi-
nate. Here language can not only fertilise but also feminise the castrated
soul, making it capable of growth. The voice of God, the logos, then,
becomes a powerful, sexual symbol of impregnation, like the Incarnation,
without which the soul will fade. Rosalie Osmond has described the prop-
erties of Donnes language as being alive, the incarnational of the sermon
itself, which lends itself to this idea of the living text.20 But arguably it is
more than symbol for Donne because the words can travel down through
the ears and actually into the soul itself, as though it were part of the phys-
ical geography of the body, for it too hath Bones as well as body.21 In an
age where not everyone was literate, the importance of the ear becomes
central to absorbing the power of the Word; hence Donnes use of it as a
conduit for nourishment. It is as though the Word has extended beyond
the conceit of metaphor where the act of delivery itself renders the Word
alive, capable of having a visceral effect on the listener. It is an act of
metamorphosis, of invisible Word into palpable substance, like the body
and blood of Christ himself, a linguistic re-formation as though the words
replace the host and wine as the living presence of the body and blood of
Christ, where language becomes the flesh and drink that the congregation
consumes in order to ensure the souls well-being.
We have here, then, in the vibrancy of a Pauls Cross gathering, a congre-
gation that seems perfectly attuned to receive a sermon that is intricately
bound up with the dramatic art. Crockett notes that Pauls Cross had the
air of the theatre about it:
ordinary Londoners milled about in the churchyard of St Pauls, while the
gallery seats in the main structure of the Cathedral itself were reserved for
members of the Court. Well-to-do citizens got seats on or near the wooden
stage where the preacher stood when he descended from the pulpit for the
ritualistic drama of public penance. In these services the preacher shared
the stage with a public penitent who wore a white sheet and carried a taper
and faggots representing the death by fire the sinners deserved.22
John Stubbs indicates that the size of the crowds at Pauls Cross, the sta-
dium conditions, could be overwhelming and that there was a high level

20Rosalie Osmond, Mutual Accusation: Seventeenth-Century Body and Soul Dialogues in

Their Literary and Theological Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 143.
21Donne, Sermons, 2:84.
22Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 39.
 sermon, salvation, space: donnes performative mode417

of discrimination in the audiences Donne faced, a fact that reminds us of

the actors hope to please the audience.23
The use of theatrical devices as a means to keeping the congregations
attention at Pauls Cross can be extended to other venues. Inside the run-
down St Pauls cathedral, Stubbs describes a huge congregation made up
of aristocrats, lawyers, gentlemen, merchants and shopkeepers as well as
those from the theatres and the taverns.24 Many would be found either
worshipping in the choir and side chapels, whilst a noisy throng would be
standing or walking along the passage of the nave, Pauls Walk.25 Stubbs
notes how Donne could use a venue to enhance his sermon. For example,
the light through the Rose window shining on the congregation in St Pauls
was employed as a dramatic device to gather the crowd, bringing together,
physically and metaphorically, diverse humanity before him.26
The power of Donnes language to subdue, though, must be paramount,
given the noise and general disarray in Stubbss descriptions of the groups
of people at Pauls Cross, or in the cathedral itself. It also raises the issue of
how the preacher might deliver his sermon in order to bring about such a
seemingly dramatic change in the congregation, for the preacher must
shake and shiver, and throw down the refractory and rebellious soul.27
Bryan Crocket has noted the connection with the performative qualities
of the sermon and argues that such a conflation between church and
theatre can evoke in the congregation a sense of being possessed by the
divine:
the metaphysical sermon, like the drama, depends on an audience. Sermons
and stage plays are very much public, communal occasions for the reception
of the spoken word, Both modes achieve their effect in part by evoking a
sense of wonder [] Since at the very heart of the Christian story is the mys-
tery of divine immolation, the paradox invites on the hearers part a similar
relinquishment of possessive power.28
The possessive power here suggests a surrendering of the worldly to the
ethereal world that the performance of the sermon evokes; and it is an act
that is a remembrance of Christs surrender of his body on the cross. Such
power of the sermon to evoke ecstasy is triggered by Donnes own noted
exhibitionism, conflated with the act of confession as he reveals himself

23John Stubbs, Donne: The Reformed Soul (London: Viking, 2006), 325.
24Stubbs, Donne, 378.
25Stubbs, Donne, 373374.
26Stubbs, Donne, 379380.
27Donne, Sermons, 2:164.
28Crockett, Play of Paradox, 5859.
418 kathleen oleary

before God. It is also an act of penance as Donne mercilessly exposes his

faults to a public who have become part of this dramatic exegesis. As a
means of re-connecting with a remembrance of the past, this engagement
and obsession with the confessional is strongly linked with management
of transgression and atonement.29
The space at Pauls Cross is also significant as the actual pulpit cross was
octagonal in shape. The 360 degree circle that this affords creates a sense
of eternity, an idea posited by the sixteenth-century Reformation theolo-
gian Martin Bucer. He suggested that a church built in the round would be
the perfect, democratic space for the preacher and his congregation. He
indicated that the circle, in both classical and Neo-Platonist thought, was
a symbol of perfection, suggesting eternity, and within this is a perfect
space, devoid of lines, angles, levels:
From Plato to Plotinus to Ficino to the architects of the quattrocento, the
commonly held view was that the circleor, better yet, the sphereis the
geometric form that most closely associates with divine perfection.30
If this circle were to become an actual, physical space, then, for a human
to stand in the centre of it would be to command the attention of every-
thing within that space and the most obvious means of continuing that
attention is through language. In a church built on this design, all eyes
and, more importantly, ears, would attend upon the preacher. There would
be no ornaments, no rituals, but the preacher with his words. To use
alchemical symbolism, the preachers space becomes an alembic, the cir-
cular receptacle in which are placed the ingredients to make gold, or to
reach the divine. Bucer notes
that whatsoever picture or images hath ben wont to be worshypped in holye
places / shulde both they and their aulters be clene taken away / and avoided
out of sight.31
Bucer argued that it is the meanings generated through language that
connect us to God, whereto shulde we make many wordes.32 It is not
the visual display of transcendence, nor the ascendancy of one individual

29Mark Cousins and Athar Hussain, Michel Foucault (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press,
1984), 211.
30See Bryan Crockett, Play of Paradox, 4.
31Martin Bucer, A treatise declaryng [and] shewing dyuers causes take[n]out of the holy
scriptur[es], of the sente[n]ces of holy faders, [and] of the decrees of deuout emperours, that
pyctures [and] other ymages which were wont to be worshypped, ar i[n] no wise to be suffred
in the temples or churches of Christen men (London: Thomas Godfray, 1535?), A2r-A3v.
32A treatise declaring and showing that images are not to be suffered in churches, D2r.
 sermon, salvation, space: donnes performative mode419

over another, or intercession of one individual on behalf of another, which

a cruciform style of church design encourages.33 Visual iconography is an
olde rooted custome / and the devyll agayne exercyseth and putteth forthe
his craftes and disceyptes so busely.34
To conclude, Pauls Cross provides Donne with the physical space to
join together a diverse selection of London life. His sermon of 1627 gathers
them together to celebrate the importance of memory as a means to salva-
tion. Though visual idolatry is gone, there is, nonetheless, in Donnes ser-
mons a re-connection, or translation of memorial agency into the Word,
which offers a more complex view of Donnes religious path. In his Satire
III, he famously advised his readers to Seeke true religion and the pursuit
of what went before brings together past and present, creating a sense of
kairoseternal timewhere not only do Catholic and Protestant aes-
thetics combine, but where divine eternity and secular time may also
come together in the moment of the sermon.

33Crockett, Play of Paradox, 5.

34Martin Bucer, A treatise declaring and showing that images are not to be suffered in
churches, C4r.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE PAULS CROSS JEREMIAD AND OTHER

SERMONS OF EXHORTATION

Mary Morrissey

Some discussion of the Jeremiads might be expected in a volume on the

Pauls Cross sermons, as they are the sermons most associated with that
pulpit today. Here, I want to return to subject I first tried to disentangle ten
years ago: the generic classification of the Pauls Cross Jeremiads, and why
it is significant.1 I will argue that the Jeremiads are sermons of exhortation,
designed to rouse a complacent church into a more zealous response to
the preachers message. As such, the Jeremiad is a sermon-genre particu-
larly suited to very public pulpits like Pauls Cross, because it concerns the
Christians duty to fellow-members of a visible church: the duty to edify
the church by the means appropriate to ones station. (The magistrate
should punish wrong-doers; the minister should proclaim the threat of
punishment over those who neglect Gods mercy; and every Christian was
bound to admonish and support each other.) But the notion that the
Jeremiad is a type of sermon that asserts the corporate basis of Englands
religious culture runs counter to the scholarship on these texts to date,
which finds in them an impulse among Calvinist preachers to separate the
godly sheep from the reprobate goats. I argue that when studying the
Jeremiads, we should not seek out expressions of the centrifugal force that
is the doctrine of predestination, but rather see the numerous demonstra-
tions of the centripetal force of the significance attributed to the visible
church in English Protestantism.
Perry Millers eloquent and persuasive writing on covenant theology
and New England Puritanism has been the starting point for any discus-
sion of the Jeremiad. Miller noted that the idea of a covenant with God,
where God bound himself by particular terms into an agreement withman,
provided a framework within which the deity could become knowable
and predictable. The terms of our obligation to God (believe and be saved)

1Mary Morrissey, Elect Nations and Prophetic Preaching: Types and Examples in
the Pauls Cross Jeremiad, The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History
1 6001750, ed. Peter McCullough and Lori Anne Ferrell (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 2000).
422 mary morrissey

are revealed to us; by endeavouring to observe the moral law (as sum-
marised in the Ten Commandments) and being alert for signs of grace, the
Christian shows a disposition that indicates she already has the faith that
constitutes her end of the bargain. So powerful was this notion of a bilat-
eral compact that the covenant idea was extended to explain the nature
of the compact between members of the community and the rulers of
the Massachusetts polity.2 The long-term significance of this doctrine,
explored by writers since Miller, lies in the ways in which it made bilateral
agreements a foundational element in political theory.3 But in a chapter of
The New England Mind called Gods Controversy with New England (the
title of a Jeremiad by Michael Wigglesworth from 1662), Miller pushed this
analysis of a covenant-based conception of social relations even further.
He suggested that Gods covenant with mankind extended to temporal
benefits and argued that New England Puritans believed themselves party
to a covenant with God where their upholding of the moral law was
rewarded with peace and prosperity. He used the terms communal cove-
nant and national covenant in this context, and so distinguished this
bond between God and New England with the covenant of grace, but he
did not explain the relationship between the two. Failure to uphold this
covenant between God and nation was denounced in Jeremiads, which
simultaneously asserted Gods special relationship with New England
while castigating its inhabitants for failing to live lives worthy of that bond.
Unlike Protestants elsewhere, Miller writes, New Englanders could be
exhorted to cleave to God for life and prosperity, for they alone were in a
legal compact with Him, and by their cleaving to Him they would infallibly
gain prosperity, while should they fail Him, they would as infallibly pro-
cure losses by land and sea, defeat at the hands of their enemies, and mas-
sacre by the Indians.4
This image of Puritan New England as a unique redemptive hub from
which the world would be saved has not been without its critics.5 Most

2Perry Miller, The Marrow of Puritan Divinity, in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 1956; repr. 1984), 5098; The New England
Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 373462.
3James B. Torrance, The Covenant Concept in Scottish Theology and Politics and its
Legacy, Scottish Journal of Theology 34 (1951); Daniel J. Elazar, From Biblical Covenant to
Modern Federalism: The Federal Theology Bridge, in The Covenant Connection: from
Federal Theology to Modern Federalism, ed. Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid (New York:
Lexington Books, 2000), 113.
4Miller, The New England Mind, 463491, 4778.
5Francis Bremers To Live Exemplary Lives: Puritans and Puritan Communities as
Lofty Lights, The Seventeenth Century 7 (1992), 28. Bremer offers an elegant summary of the
debates arising from Millers thesis as a preface to his own argument here.
 the pauls cross jeremiad423

important for our purposes are the problems that emerged when attempt-
ing to explain how God might bind himself to a people for earthly benefits
while simultaneously covenanting with his elect for salvation. The two-
covenant pattern that Miller proposed was distinctive; previous, continen-
tal European accounts of federal theology had not considered the
possibility of a covenant made with a secular entity (the nation) for tem-
poral goods. For Bullinger and Ursinus (the continental theologians most
significant in the early stages of the development of covenant theology)
the covenant of works was made with Adam in Paradise, and it promised
eternal life on condition of continued obedience. After the Fall, the cove-
nant of works continued in the form of the moral law contained in the
Decalogue; but because man could not now fulfil the Law, the covenant of
works serves only to demonstrate the Christians dependence on Christ.6
This covenant of works was superseded by the covenant of grace, in which
faith that Christ fulfilled the conditions of the covenant is rewarded with
salvation. This understanding of federal theology did not consider tempo-
ral rewards and knew nothing of nations; only individual sinners and their
collective approach to God in the church.
So scholars went to Old England to find the origins of this peculiar phe-
nomenon: the communal or national covenant for temporal prosperity
that does not seem to appear in the work of continental theologians. In
three important articles on the subject, Michael McGiffert suggested that
the idea of the nation being in a covenant with God could be found in
Elizabethan texts, but he also admits that it is not full articulated. In an
article for Harvard Theological Review in 1982, McGiffert writes:
We have here a problem in the history of ideas. The originators of covenant
theory knew only the single post-lapsarian covenant of grace, which they
found differently administered before and after the Incarnation, yet being
one and the same in substance, having reference at all times to Christ alone.
By the 1590s, however, theologians were beginning to speak of covenant in
quite another form: the covenant of nature or works, embodying the moral
law. These revisers retained the covenant of grace for the elect; they brought
in the covenant of works to justify Gods way with the mass of humanity who
were slated for spiritual execution for violations of the law, and who, in the
calculations of ministers, had little if any chance of gaining sanctuary within
the pale of grace. The covenant of works, unlike the covenant of grace,

6J. Wayne Baker, Heinrich Bullinger, the Covenant, and the Reformed Tradition in
Retrospect, Sixteenth Century Journal 29. 2 (1998), 35976, and Bakers Heinrich Bullinger
and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980);
David A. Weir, The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 135.
424 mary morrissey

became distinctive as a contract with the conditions of a legal quid pro quo
relationship. It evidenced the tug of contractual principles upon the theo-
logical mind of the era.
The mutation has not been definitely traced through the continental lit-
erature, but the English record, spotty though it is, proves informative.7
In an article primarily concerned with Jeremiads, McGiffert writes that
preachers compare England to Israel by what he calls the Israelite para-
digm, a simple simile by which England was like Israel in being Gods
most favored nation, in superiority of spiritual and temporal goods, and
accordingly in magnitude of debt. The debt incurred was an obligation to
observe the moral law, and shortcomings would be penalized by afflic-
tions proportioned to the default and dealt to the nation generally. The
ultimate sanction was the doom of Lo-Ammi - not my people.8 This com-
parison between England and Israel is the basis for McGifferts argument
that the Jeremiads are reaching towards a notion of national covenant
based on a covenant of works between God and the English nation. The
national covenant provided preachers with the means to promise and
threaten mixed congregations (of godly and ungodly, reprobate and
elect), because it allowed them to exhort the two parts of their congrega-
tion differently. The covenant of grace was only available to the elect, and
so excluded many of the preachers hearers. But the sermons were also
concerned with temporal calamities (war, plague, famine), and those
could be considered Gods punishment for failing to uphold the national
covenant. To those not included in the covenant of grace, preachers could
at least hold out the hope of temporal benefits that God had promised in
the covenant of works. If God delays judgement he does so only for the
sake of his elect within the English community.
I have written that I think it is an error to treat the comparison with
Israel as a simple simile, because Israel represents many things in the
Bible: a nation that sins and is punished; a visible church, containing true
Israelites and hypocrites; typologically, it represented Gods invisible
church, his elect. The comparison between Israel and England does not
necessarily mean that England is in a national covenant with God,
because the Israelites covenant with God was usually treated as an aspect

7Michael McGiffert, Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in
Elizabethan Puritanism, Harvard Theological Review 75.4 (1982), 464; See also McGiffert,
Covenant, Crown, and Commons in Elizabethan Puritanism, Journal of British Studies 20
(1980), 3552.
8Michael McGiffert Gods Controversy with Jacobean England, The American Historical
Review 88.5 (1983), 1153.
 the pauls cross jeremiad425

of Israels function as a type of the church. There may be references to

England being in the covenant, or to God having a covenant with England,
but it is not Millers temporal national covenant, and it is not, indeed, a
covenant between God and the nation. Elizabethan puritans do not talk
about Millers national covenant, and without explicit mention of such a
thing, any mention of the covenant of works might be read as referring to
the moral law (the Decalogue as a schoolmaster, teaching dependence on
Christ), not as a separate arrangement for temporal prosperity that God
makes with those he means to damn. What causes confusion is early mod-
ern English preachers habits of treating the English people as synony-
mous with the English Church, and our habit of reading the English people
as a term synonymous with the English nation. The subject of clergymens
covenant doctrine is, I would contend, not the English nation (as
McGiffert argues) but the English Church. England can claim to be within
the covenant of grace insofar as England is a church.9
Viewing the Jeremiads appeal to the community from the perspective
of the church, not the elect minority, restores the inclusive force of the
preachers exhortations to repentance. Patrick Collinson has suggested
that we might see intimations of the break-up of the national church in
the spread of covenant theology, and he wondered about the role of puri-
tans in precipitating this break-up. There is, he explains, a tension in puri-
tan thinking (and one that is transferred to separating and non-separating
congregationalists) about the cohabitation of the faithful and the unfaith-
ful. Their self-identification as godly and the perceived need to remain
aloof from the ungodly majority might incline puritans to dissociate them-
selves from their less godly neighbours and fellow-parishioners. Collinson
was astute enough to see what awkward neighbours the puritans could be:
the very habits of life which Puritans condemned as a pernicious waste
of time were the ordinary and daily cement of local communities.10

9Commenting on my 1999 article, Edward Vallence notes that some ministers clearly
saw the connection between the two nations as being that both were in covenant with
God. He is right to point out these comparisons, but the preachers do not say that the
nation qua nation is in the covenant of grace. Also, as I will discuss below, being in the
covenant could mean having access to the means of salvation. This is why, as Vallence
rightly says the idea of a national covenant presented by these ministers is more complex
than simply the covenant of grace which bound only the elect: Edward Vallence,
Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the
Political Nation, 15531682 (Cambridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 346.
10Patrick Collinson, The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful, in From
Persecution to Toleration, ed. Oleg Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991), 67.
426 mary morrissey

The reasons for the puritans determination to distinguish themselves

as the pious underdogs may be partly historical, a legacy of a hard-won
reformation, but the ultimate source of this was the doctrine of
predestination:
The doctrine of saving grace, limited by election, was evidently a mental
structure of binary discrimination, especially when held robustly as a full
and balanced doctrine of double predestination. It elevated to a cosmic and
divine principle that gross over-simplification which reduces the teeming
variety of human conditions and types to just two: elect and reprobate. But
since it was possible to hold the doctrine of election in an inclusive and non-
pejorative form, to combine Calvinism with a churchly and conventional
view of the nation or the city as Christian, it is far from clear that these doc-
trines, taught in sermons and confirmed by a conditional reading of the
Bible, caused the state of mind which we are investigating.11
This last point, that it was possible to combine Calvinism with a churchly
and conventional view of the nation or the city as Christian, has been
neglected by scholars. We have not examined the importance of the
national, visible church to puritan writers, perhaps because these men
were awkward, sometimes semi-detached members of it. Collinson him-
self has argued that this tendency of puritans to see themselves as semi-
detached from their fellow-parishioners was reinforced by the emphasis
placed on predestination in puritan practical divinity and fostered by the
preaching of Jeremiads. Preachers seem to have known (for it was built
into their biblical-prophetical sources) that not all of their hearers would
respond, and that Gods covenant would be honoured not by the whole
nation but only by a remnant, a remnant which might for a time redeem
and preserve the nation, but which would also survive the temporal ruin
of the nation. Such preaching was, he concludes, of necessity divisive.12
But Collinson also sees the significance of the church, rather than the tem-
poral nation, to the preachers address:
Just as country could be made to mean a number of things in early Stuart
public rhetoric, so these preachers moved imperceptibly between their
address to the individual, to the Church, to the nation, and to covenanted
groups and remnants within both Church and nation. In principle, the entire
baptized nation (and other Christian nations) stood covenanted in the same
way, by the same gracious bond, as the individual is bound.13

11Collinson, The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful, 54.

12Patrick Collinson Biblical Rhetoric, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed.
Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20.
13Patrick Collinson, Biblical Rhetoric, 20, 27.
 the pauls cross jeremiad427

These reflexive movements of thought between individual and corporate

spheres can make neat distinctions difficult for us, but the essential point,
Collinson claims, is the strong, organic connection between self and soci-
ety. However conditional their allegiance to the Church of England,
English puritans were mostly men who chose to remain in the national
church; they were not separatists, or semi-separatists, and they were not
Congregationalists. We should look for the ideological basis of prophetic
preaching in the kinds of communities that existed in English parishes,
where the presence of the true signs of the church (preaching and the
sacraments) testified to the churchs soundness, not whether its members
could claim to be elect. Jonathan Moore has written on hypothetical uni-
versalism and discusses William Perkins as an example of the particularist
position against which thinkers like John Davenant and John Preston
wrote. Moore explains that Perkins theology needs the visible church to
counterbalance his rather extreme version of limited atonement. For
Perkins, the covenant promises are made by God to the elect but within the
context of the church. The Gospel is preached to the church, and the prom-
ises it contains are effective in the elect. But all members of the
visible church have a duty to assume that these promises apply to them.
Moore writes:
We have already seen how Perkins asserts that the reprobate have no title to
the death of Christ whatsoever. However, it is necessary to appreciate an
important qualification Perkins makes to this by way of his judicial ecclesiol-
ogy and high sacramentology. The reprobate do not have any title to the
death of Christ qua reprobate, but as those whom God has made outward
members of church they do have such a title. Just as the ministers of God,
not knowing his secret counsel, in charitie think al to be elect, so all church
members are to work out their salvation in fear and trembling as Christians
and not in order that they might become Christians. They work out their sal-
vation from within the covenant, not in order to enter it, and do so on the
basis of their very real judicial standing and sacramental privileges. Thus,
within this Evangelicall covenant with the church Perkins can say that the
Evangelical promises are indefinite and doe exclude no man, unless perad-
venture any man do exclude himselfe.14
So, for example, in his extensive Exposition of the Creed, Perkins writes
that we are charitably to think, that all those, that live in the Church of
God, professing themselves to be members of Christ, are indeed elect to

14Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening
of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids MI: William B Eerdmans, 2007), 534. Moore here
quotes Perkins Exposition of the Creed and A Golden Chain.
428 mary morrissey

salvation, till God make manifest otherwise. And on this manner, and not
otherwise, doe the Apostles call whole Churches elect.15
God gives his elect access to the means of salvation (preaching and the
sacraments) through visible churches, and Perkins attribute such signifi-
cance to belonging to a church that he almost denies the possibility of
salvation to those who are not: forth of the militant Church there are no
means of salvation, no preaching of the word, no invocation of Gods
name, no Sacraments, and therefore no salvation.16 This doctrine of the
church coalesces around the sacraments: in A Reformed Catholike, Perkins
describes the covenant of grace as a vow made by all that are baptized
and one that ought to be renewed so often as we are partakers of the
Supper of the Lord.17 And Perkins was by no means idiosyncratic in the
importance that he attributed to the corporate life of the church within a
soteriology built on strict double-predestination. For Perkins and his con-
temporaries, preaching, the proper administration of the sacraments and
the exercise of ecclesiastical discipline on those who erred were the notes
by which the presence of a true church of God could be known in the
world.18 The emphasis on preaching in puritan culture in no way dero-
gated from the importance of the sacraments in their conception of the
role of the church: Arnold Hunt has reminded us that a simple contrast
between the doctrine of predestination, communicated through preach-
ing and the sacraments involving communal and ritualized forms of
worship is unsustainable when considered in the light of attitudes to
communion among Englands puritans.19 Indeed, Perkins account of the
church is not dissimilar to that of a scholar with whom he is rarely com-
pared: Richard Hooker.20
Perkins influence was enormous, but there is another reason to con-
sider him so closely, and that is because Perkins himself preached a very

15William Perkins, Exposition of the Creed, in Workes (London: John Haviland, 1631), I: 282.
16Perkins, Exposition of the Creed, 301.
17William Perkins, A Reformed Catholike, in Workes (1631), I: 5834.
18Kenneth A. Locke, The Church in Anglican Theology: A Historical, Theological and
Ecumenical Exploration (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 627.
19Arnold Hunt, The Lords Supper in Early Modern England, Past and Present 161
(1998), 39. See also, E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan
Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 15701720 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1974), 2774.
20See W. David Neelands, Richard Hooker on the Identity of the Visible and Invisible
Church, in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Torrance Kirby (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 2003). See also Bryan D. Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology:
Sacraments and Salvation in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker (Lanham,
MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1999).
 the pauls cross jeremiad429

influential Jeremiad, and one that scholars have used to claim that puri-
tans considered England to be in a national covenant with God.21 Perkins
A Faithful and Plaine Exposition upon the Two First Verses of the Second
Chapter of Zephaniah is described as containing a powerful exhortation to
repentance on its title page, and this is the running title to the piece: An
Exhortation to Repentance.22 The biblical text that Perkins chose to dis-
cuss is characteristic of the Jeremiad: Search your selves, even search you,
O Nation, not worthy to be beloved: before the Decree come forth, and you
bee as chaffe that passeth on a day, and the Israelite nation in his text is
frequently compared to England. But in doing so, Perkins inevitably slips
between describing the Israelite people and the English Church. In
describing the analogy with Israel, he explains:

God had blessed them above other Nations: He gave them his Covenant of
grace, and thereby made them his people, and committed to their trust his
holy Word and Oracles; but he dealt not so with other nations, neither had
the Heathen knowledge of his lawes. Besides all this, they had a better land
than others about them, it flowed with Milke and Honey (that is, with all
commodities, and delights).23

Then Perkins presses the analogy home: England is blessed in the same
way: it too is covenanted because it has access to the means of salvation:

First, therefore the same mercies and far greater, have beene powred and
heaped upon us; he hath called us out of the darkenesse: First of Heathenism,
and then of Popery: his covenant of grace and salvation he hath confirmed
with us, his treasures of his Word and Sacraments hee hath imparted unto
us, his holy Word never better preached, and the mysteries thereof never
more plainly opened since the time of the Apostles; and as we have Religion
so we have it under a religious Prince, whereby it comes to passe, that these
blessings of salvation we enjoy not in secret, or by stealth, but we have it
countenanced by authority: so that Religion is not barely allowed, but even
as it were thrust upon men. Besides all this, we have a land also that floweth
with milk and honey.24

21Michael McGiffert, Gods Controversy with Jacobean England, 1163.

22The sermon was delivered at Stourbridge fair, probably shortly after 1592. Perkins
editor for the sermon (William Crashaw) writes in the dedicatory epistle that Perkins had
discussed the doctrine of repentance in a treatise of 1592 and shortly after, being asked to
preach at Stourbridge Fair, he decided to discuss the same issue so that by this exhortation
his hearers would be stirred up to the practice of it: An Exhortation to Repentance, in
Workes (1631), III: sig. 3O6v.
23Perkins, An Exhortation to Repentance, in Workes (1631), III: 419.
24Perkins, An Exhortation to Repentance, 420.
430 mary morrissey

Perkins believed in predestination; all theologians of his time, be they

Dominicans or Calvinists, believed in predestination in some form. The
emphasis that Perkins placed on predestination did not make him inca-
pable of combining Calvinism with a churchly and conventional view of
the nation or the city as Christian, to quote Patrick Collinson again.
Indeed, Perkins theology requires the visible church to be a body that is
covenanted with God, even if not every member of that body is indeed
elected to salvation, because he can then explain biblical texts that make
the promise of salvation open to all. (He interpreted them as referring cor-
porately to the church, not to all of its individual members.) The church
was instituted by God to provide access to preaching and the sacraments,
because these were Gods chosen means to bring his elect to faith and
repentance, and as long as the hearers are members of the church, exhor-
tations to faith and repentance could be addressed to them in good faith.
For this reason, Perkins Exhortation to Repentance, like other Jeremiads
and sermons of exhortation, was designed to bring the whole of the English
Church to knowledge of Gods covenant through the preaching and sacra-
mental offices of visible churches.
Perkins sermon is a Jeremiad, and it is also designated as an exhorta-
tion. To understand the Jeremiad, we must examine what was understood
by the term exhortation in English Reformed preaching theory. The
exhortation was part of the sermons application, where the preacher
pulled out all the stops to convince his hearers to adopt what he had said
and to live it after they left the sermon; its defining characteristic was
vehemence, both rhetorical and argumentative. Richard Bernard advised
preachers to use their rhetorical skill, and all the engins of that Arte and
grace in speaking in exhortation. Contrary to modern assumptions about
plain style preaching, puritans were thought to place perhaps too much
emphasis on exhortation, with its heightened, emotional style: Griffith
Williams complained in his 1614 Pauls Cross sermon, that we have some
men in our daies, that are alwaies moving and perswading, but never teach-
ing; for notwithstanding all their great shew of doctrine, they have nothing
in their doctrines, but meere exhortations.25 This moving and perswad-
ing was a matter of argument as well as of style. Richard Bernard consid-
ered the use of rhetoric as complementary to the emphatic elaboration of

25Richard Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard (London: Arnold Hatfield for Iohn Bill,
1607), 66; Gryffith Williams, The Resolution of Pilate in The Best Religion (London: George
Miller, for Philemon Stephens and Christopher Meredith at the golden Lion in Pauls
Church-yard, 1636), 399.
 the pauls cross jeremiad431

persuasive arguments: the preacher should enforce and enlarge some of

the waightiest [reasons] and stir up to the meanes, showing the hearers
how they could act on the preachers teaching as well as their motives for
doing so. Examples of the means available to put teaching into practice
included Gods assistance, his promise to helpe, the excellency and good
even in using the meanes.26 The Jeremiads concentrated on providing
motives for greater piety and zeal: by castigated the hearers sinfulness
and warning of the threat of temporal punishments from God, they
reminded their hearers that disaster can be avoided through repentance;
God will turn away his wrath as he did at Nineveh. This point is made by
William Hampton in the ominously titled A Proclamation of War from the
Lord of Hosts (1626):

Now for a conclusion: All that hath beene spoken, may serve as a strong
motive, to stirre us up with speed to turne unto God, that hee may turne
unto us, and turne from us this fearefull calamitie; Let us repent heartily, and
cry unto him mightily, to spare us, to be mercifull unto us. The sinnes of
our Land like the sinns of Niniveh, are ascended up on high, and cry alowde
for revenge to the GOD of heaven: but our religious King hath proclaimd a
Fast; hee and his Nobles have led the way; if we, with him, and them, send up
repentance, and prayers, and teares, to cry alowd in Gods eares; they will dull
the cry of our sinnes, that he shall not heare it; and dull the edge of his sword
that it shall not wound us.27

Preachers threatened punishments, but in the context of exhortations

that also stressed the possibility of mercy and Gods patience with sinners.
In The Gallants Burden (1612) for example, Thomas Adams ends his exhor-
tation with a lyrical evocation of the promise of mercy and a reminder
that repentance is never too late:

There is a reservation to repentance, even to abhorred Edom: let the sonnes

of the profanest Esau repent, and they shall not be forsaken of mercy: Return
and come, and your night threatned shall be made a joyfull morning.28

That Gods justice will be executed when his mercy has been neglected is
a theme that runs through prophetic preaching as consistently as the use

26Richard Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard, 656.

27William Hampton, A Proclamation of Warre from the Lord of Hosts (London: Iohn
Norton for Mathew Lawe and are to be sold for the signe of the Fox in Saint Paules Church-
yard, neere Saint Austens Gate, 1627), 378.
28Thomas Adams, The Gallants Burden, in Works (London: W. W[hite] for Clement
Knight, and are to be sold at his shoppe in Pauls church-yard at the signe of the Holy
Lambe, 1630), 29.
432 mary morrissey

of Old Testament examples.29 An image commonly used at Pauls Cross to

express Gods patience is of a bent bow. God is ready to strike, but he
delays to allow men to repent. In a Pauls Cross sermon preached between
1605 and 1615, John Hoskins compares the weapons in the Armory of
heaven to a rainbow, without an arrow; with a full bent, but without a
string, the wrongside being alwaies upwards, as if we shot at him, not hee
at us.30
The rhetorical balance here is vital to our understanding of the Jeremi
ads: the threat of punishment and the promise of forgiveness are married
together into a rousing exhortation that insists the English Church can
and must do better. The threats that hang over England if it fails to repent
are many. Plague and famine they already know. War they have been lucky
enough to avoid, but examples of wars of religion were not hard to find.
In The Gallants Burden, Thomas Adams cites the suffering of the French
in the uncivill civill warres and the unquiet bread long eaten in the Low-
countries, to remind his audience that their time of persecution might
also come.31
Nonetheless, Michael McGiffert rightly pointed out that the ultimate
sanction presented in the Jeremiads was the doom of Lo-Amminot my
people, quoting the passage on God divorcing Israel in Hosea 4. The doom
of Lo-ammi is not one that befalls the nation; it befalls a church. God can
take England out of the covenant, by depriving her church of the sacra-
ments and preaching. Without these, the ordinary means of salvation, the
basis of that charitable hope that oneself and ones neighbours might
be among the elect would be almost impossible to sustain. Pauls Cross

29Nathaniel Cannon, The Cryer (London: Felix Kingston, 1613), 45; Lancelot Dawes,
Gods Mercies and Jerusalems Miseries (London: John Windet, 1609), sigs. A6r-v; John
Hoskins, A Sermon preached at Pauls Cross [on Zach. 5.4], in Sermons preached at Pauls
Crosse and Elsewhere (London: William Stansby for Nathaniel Butter, 1615), 28; Robert
Milles, Abrahams Suite for Sodome (London: William Hall for Mathew Lawe and are to be
sold at his shop in Pauls Church yard at the signe of the Foxe, 1612), sigs. B5v-B8r; George
Webbe, Gods Controversie with England (London: F. K[ingston] for William Leake, 1609),
1920; Francis White, Londons Warning by Jerusalem (London: George Purslowe, for
Richard Flemming: and are to be sold at his shop at the signe of the three Flower-de-Luces,
in Saint Pauls Alley, neere Saint Gregories Church, 1619), 289.
30John Hoskins, A Sermon preached at Pauls Crosse [on Isaiah 28.1], in Sermons preached
at Pauls Crosse and Elsewhere (1615), 34. The fullest use of this image is by Immanuel Bourne
in The Rainebow (London: Thomas Adams, 1615). See also Sampson Price, Ephesus Warning
before her Woe (London: G. Eld for Iohn Barnes, 1616), 47; John Jones, Londons Looking
backe to Jerusalem (London: William Jones, 1633), 2; Thomas Sutton, Englands Summons, in
Englands First and Second Summons (London: William Hall for Mathew Law, 1616), 29;
Webbe, Gods Controversie, 17; Robert Milles, Abrahams Suite for Sodom, sig. B3r-v.
31Adams, The Gallants Burden, 9.
 the pauls cross jeremiad433

preachers did not have to look far for examples of people that lost these
signs of the true church. After the Old Testament prophets, the most often
used biblical texts for the Jeremiad were taken from the second chapter of
Revelations and the angels addresses to the churches of Asia. The preach-
ers could remind their hearers that the seven churches were lost. In 1630,
John Jones informs his hearers that every place is so long (no longer) the
Temple and habitation of God, as there shall be found in it true faith and
holynesse of life. When that ceases God will remove his kingdome of
grace from such a place or people, and give it to a Nation that will bring
forth the fruites of it, and among the examples given are the Easterne and
African Churches, sometime glorious Sanctuaries of the most high, but
now given over to Turkes and Infidels. The same commonplaces (and
indeed many of the same phrases) are used by Thomas Sutton in Englands
Summons, preached in 1612.32 Sampson Price preached two prophetic ser-
mons (in 1613 and 1616) on the second chapter of Revelations making the
same comparison rather more extensively.33 A more recent and closer
example was offered in the Thirty Years War, which at times threatened to
return all of Germany to papal domination. Thomas Barnes makes this
comparison in his Wise-mans Forecast (1624):
Yet the poynt in hand, intimateth that plagues may hang over places where
Religion, and religious ones bee: Is it then a sufficient cause of derision to say,
judgements may be approching OUR Kingdome? Foure yeeres agoe the Lord
had a wise, and understanding people in the Palatinate, yet the evill which
hath since befallen it, was even at that time imminent over it.34
It is possible that this is where the political significance of the Jeremiads
lay, and why these sermons were so easily politicised when Charles Is
and Lauds innovations appeared to lessen access to preaching and re-
introduce idolatry. The covenant with God, to which England was party by
virtue of her status as a true church, was threatened.
Exhortation did not rely only on the use of such vivid examples (Sodom
destroyed and Nineveh saved) and on a heightened, emotional style. Style
and examples were meant to reinforce the preachers argument that
the means to repentance and the motives for doing so were to hand.
In Jeremiads, descriptions of the punishments visited on the Israelites

32Jones, Londons Looking backe to Jerusalem, 289; Sutton, Englands Summons, 5455.
33Price, Ephesus Warning (1616); Price, Londons Warning by Laodiceas Luke-warmnesse
(London: G. Eld for Iohn Barnes, 1613).
34Thomas Barnes, The Wise-mans Forecast against the Evill Time (London: I. D[awson]
for Nathaniell Newbery, 1624), 10.
434 mary morrissey

function as motives for the hearers to mend their ways. Other sermons of
exhortation concentrate on more positive motives to greater godliness.
Sermons preached at Pauls Cross on the Sunday nearest Bartholomew
Fair, for example, take as their theme the correct attitude that the Christian
should have to worldly goods and worldly gain, and the motives to godli-
ness and in favour of fair dealing in trade.
This could be harder than we might think, because the relationship
between the true Christian and the world was not an easy one. Daniel
Price preached on the pearl of great price (Matthew 13. 4546) on the
Sunday before Bartholomew Fair in 1607, and he told his hearers that the
merchant sold all to gain the pearl because he that will obtaine Christ,
must forsake al: There is no fellowship betweene righteousnes & unrigh-
teousnes, no communion of light with darknes, no agreement betweene
the Temple of God and Idols, not Concord between Christ & Belial.35 The
correct distance between the Christian and the world was not a physical
one, however; it was a matter of moral difference rather than physical sep-
aration. Pauls Cross hearers were exhorted to contribute to the good of
their community. In a sermon on The Joy of Jerusalem and the Woe of
Worldlings (preached in June 1609), for example, William Loe exhorted his
hearers to remember that here we have no abiding city (Hebrews 13:14),
but clarifies that I understand not thereby not anie Anabaptisticall or
Brownish separation. The separation demanded is from a worldly attitude;
if anything it implies a charitable involvement with ones community. This
divine Separation is known by A Catholike faith towards God. 2. Integritie
of life and conversation in themselves, 3. Evangelicall charitie towards
others.36 The emphasis in Loes definition towards actions in the real
world (integrity of life, evangelical charity) direct us to the points where
Pauls Cross preachers are most likely to discuss the links between
individual Christians and the church, and it is within the context of the
parish congregations and parochial communities to which the auditors
belonged. The preachers at Pauls Cross do not separate their hearers into
elect sheep divorced from the reprobate majority; the congregations they
describe are this-worldly phenomena, the local and visible units whose
members are, in the judgement of charity, in via to the heavenly city.

35Daniel Price, The Marchant: A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse on Sunday the 24. of
August, being the day before Bartholomew Faire, 1607 (London: Joseph Barnes, 1608), 29.
36William Loe, The Joy of Jerusalem and Woe of Worldlings (London: T. Haueland for
C. Knight and I. Harrison, and are to be sold [by C. Knight] in Pauls Church-yard at the
signe of the holy Lambe, 1609), sigs. Cv, C3r-v.
 the pauls cross jeremiad435

Churches, not just individual saints, are units with which God was
thought to deal through his covenant, and so parishes and national
churches are the units that the Pauls Cross preachers address, in Jeremiads
and other sermons of exhortation. The biblical examples used by the
preachers showed that God would punish whole communities for sin, and
for the toleration of sin. What Harro Hpfl has described as the wrath-
averting view of [ecclesiastical] discipline stressed that the authorities,
civil and religious, had a duty to regulate the community in order to pre-
vent divine punishment for the sins that were allowed to happen.37 If God
delayed punishment for the sake of his saints (Religion hath bred peace,
William Loe claims38), God would also punish those who did not look to
their neighbours. We see this in one of the most common motifs of the
Pauls Cross sermons: exhortations addressed, in turn, to ministers, magis-
trates, and householders to prevent sin and forestall judgement. Daniel
Prices sermon on The Merchant ends with an exhortation to the whole
city to take a care of its trade:
O London, thou that sittest like a Queene, al thy Citizens being as so manie
Merchants, thy Merchants as so many Princes, nay, as so many polished cor-
ners of the Temple. They are unworthy to enjoie the lest of these blessings,
unlesse they be like to the good Merchant here that seeketh good pearles,
Neither they, nor thou, shalt sinne with impunity, the mightines of thy state,
singularitie of thy government, climing of thy wals, aspiring of thy Towers,
multitude of thy people, cannot make they secure against the wrath of the
Lord.39
These exhortations can be seen to do more than advance a wrath-averting
view of social regulation: we could claim that they present a positive duty
belonging to minsters, magistrates and householders to promote godli-
ness in their neighbours and themselves, for the good of all. Not punishing
sins is a dereliction of duty by those with the responsibility to promoting
godliness in their inferiors. Indeed, that duty is one of the main themes of
Robert Milless Abrahams Suite for Sodome, preached on 25 August 1611.
Milles takes Abrahams bargaining with God over the fate of the city (God
will save it if there are just five just men in the city) as indicative of the
small number of the elect, and of the duty of the just to dissuade their
neighbours from sin. (The sins of Sodom that Milles describes are those

37Harro Hpfl, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), 1189, 130.
38Loe, The Joy of Jerusalem, sig. Hv.
39Price, The Marchant, 345.
436 mary morrissey

listed in Ezekiel 16:49: pride, idleness, fullness of bread, contempt of the

poor;40 this was the usual interpretation at Pauls Cross.) He points to bib-
lical examples of these faults being punished, and then makes a compari-
son with the lives of Londoners: they are exhorted to desist from these sins
and so avoid punishment, as they would be in any other sermon of exhor-
tation. But Abrahams suit to God on behalf of the city is the core of the
sermon, and Milles interprets it as showing the sympathie and feeling
compassion of the faithfull for their afflicted and sinfull brethren. He
asserts that this affection and tender heart hath alwayes been in Gods ser-
vants for Gods people, their sinnes, and punishment, and he cites mul-
tiple biblical examples before pressing his hearers to show the same. It is,
he says a manifest signe of the child of God, and a true marke of a good
man, to be sory for his brethren, and to grieve at their punishment for
sinne.41
Milles does not exhort his hearers to separate themselves from their
ungodly neighbours: it may be that preachers elsewhere did so, but they
did not preach that message from Pauls Cross. Instead, he argues that hav-
ing a care for the sinful members of ones church is a manifest sign of the
child of God. The relationship between faith and good works was one that
exercised preachers at Pauls Cross a great deal. They could not exhort
their hearers to charity by saying that good deeds would be rewarded with
heaven, and they repeatedly pointed out that their Catholic opponents
blamed solefidianism for the lack of charity in England. They exhort to
good deeds and charity routinely by pointing out that the evidence of a
saving faith was to be found in good works: St James said I will show thee
my faith by my works (James 2:18, AV), and this, the preachers at Pauls
Cross told their hearers, meant that no true, saving faith would be unac-
companied by good works. If someone wanted assurance that they had
the faith that saved, they should look to the things they do. Sanctification,
the process of becoming righteous, motivated the justified person to fulfil
moral law: so the more good works one performed, the better the argu-
ment for ones own spiritual health. And what were the signs of sanctifica-
tion, the works that showed one was in via to the New Jerusalem, in but
not of the world? At Pauls Cross, the hearers were told that a Christians
charitable disposition demonstrated that they were not covetous for
worldly things. Indeed, the theme of charity had a pragmatic function in

40The Geneva Bible says neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy:
Milles intensifies this to contempt of the poor.
41Milles, Abrahams Suite for Sodome, sigs. E6r-v, E8r.
 the pauls cross jeremiad437

the Pauls Cross sermons and a very definite objects, because collections
for charitable purposes were often made after the sermons.42 The Pauls
Cross sermons were themselves the object of charity, and it was traditional
to remember their benefactors during the sermons themselves.
A charitable attitude extended to all of a Christians dealings with their
fellows: there was an equal necessity to practise neither fraud nor oppres-
sion in economic transactions. Those who covetously hoarded their goods
or who were fraudulent in trade (a theme no doubt pertinent on the
Sunday before Bartholomew Fair) were guilty of placing worldly goods
above heavenly ones. Those who did not contribute to the church and
commonwealth were equally guilty of a lack of charity to their neighbours.
The true Christian laboured at his calling, and had a lawful calling (which
did not include the mimicall Comaedians, according to Milles; he was
particularly outraged that the idle and scurrile invention of an illiterate
bricklayer, presumably Ben Jonson, should be compared to preaching).43
In this way, preachers told their hearers that the evidence of being among
Gods chosen was to be found in diligent pursuit of a lawful calling for the
good of church and commonwealth (and preachers of sermons near
Bartholomew Fair refer to both when discussing charity and trading eth-
ics). Daniel Price tells his hearers that a truly wise merchant will not risk
heavenly treasures for the sake of gaining earthly goods; rather, he will
give away his earthly goods, knowing that heaven will not be reached
otherwise. And Price cites several examples of Londoners whose charity
was famous: Sir Thomas White, founder of St Johns College Oxford, and
Sir Thomas Gresham. Nay I doubt not says Price, but there be manie
amongst you who having sought with this Merchant good Pearles, the glo-
rie of God, and the blessing of his Church, and Commonwealth, have had
your hands in the building of hospitals, spittlehouses, bridges, Schooles,
and maintaining of poore Schollers at the University.44 The pearl that the
merchants seek is here no longer a figure of salvation, or of faith (as it was
earlier in the sermon); it here represents the good deeds that evidence
faith in Christ.
The sermons of exhortation preached near Bartholomew Fair stressed
that the Christian makes his election sure by working for the good of the
church and commonwealth in which they find themselves, and neither

42See my Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 78.
43Milles, Abrahams Suite, sigs. D5v-6v.
44Price, The Marchant, 20.
438 mary morrissey

church nor commonwealth are defined exclusively. The preachers at Pauls

Cross do not advocate the creation of a self-selecting community of the
godly; they exhort their hearers to edify and improve the place where they
live and work. In Jeremiads and other sermons of exhortation, Pauls Cross
preachers address the whole people, as a church, and not a saving rem-
nant, or the elect minority within it. All are assumed to have access to the
means of salvation because all are members of a visible church. But the
privileges of belonging to a visible church, of being in the covenant rest
on the actions of all its members. The whole community was being mobil-
ised to protect the religious benefits that the Reformation brought.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

LOST AT PAULS CROSS: UNRECORDED SERMONS1

Susan Wabuda

The sermon has always been closely related to the life of the soul. From the
very earliest times in the history of the Christian Church, building on
Jewish antecedents, preaching has channeled the power of the Word of
God as a moralizing force. For England in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, the sermon had an important role in the great effort of salvation. Its
purpose was to lead as many souls as possible heavenward and to increase
every believers understanding in the fundamentals of faith in the Ten
Commandments, the Sacraments, and the Creed. In London, Sunday by
Sunday, year by year, sermons were delivered in the cemetery next to
St Pauls Cathedral even before Bishop Thomas Kempe, towards the end of
the 15th century, rebuilt the imposing little building that sheltered its pul-
pit. Pauls Cross was the premier pulpit in the realm, not only for its prox-
imity next to the cathedral, but for its nearness to the royal court and
parliament, and for its symbiotic relationship with the developing medium
of the printing press and the booksellers stalls along Paternoster Row. The
sermons that were delivered at Pauls Cross were especially weighted,
beyond any others, for they held the potential of being political exercises
as well as religious addresses.
At least that was the case from 22 June 1483, when the Cambridge-
trained theologian Dr. Ralph Shaw, canon of St Pauls, stood in the pulpit
at Pauls Cross and impugned the legitimacy of the boy king Edward V as
an opening salvo in the successful effort to usurp the throne for Richard,
duke of Gloucester. It has been suggested that Shaw drew some of his
inspiration from the fast-approaching feast of the Nativity of St John
Baptist to help along his intimations that the late King Edward IV had
fallen prey to the same kind of sexual failings that beset King Herod.
Neither the king nor his younger brother had been lawfully begotten, Shaw

1The author wishes to express her thanks to the Cambridge University Library, the
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and to the participants of the Pauls Cross
conference for their helpful comments, especially Arnold Hunt.
440 susan wabuda

announced. Perhaps it was this unexpected conflation of the sacred with

the political that prevented the people in the audience from crying out for
king Richard, king Richard, as Gloucester pushed his way through the
crowd to take his place in the upper story of the pulpit cross to receive, as
he hoped, their acclaim. The most famous account of what happened then
is from the hostile history of Sir Thomas More, who recorded that the peo-
ple were shocked into silence. They stood as if thei had bene turned into
stones. Shaw was so overcome by the poor reception of his sermon and
the disdain that people felt towards him for his association in Richards
plot that he died the following year.2
We might wish that we had a better source for what Shaw was supposed
to have said that day than Mores biased summary. Since then, if not even
earlier, the political potential of the Pauls Cross sermon was high, and its
importance only increased through the next century under the influence
of Erasmus and other humanists. A new Latin word, concio, entered the
preachers vocabulary. Concio had been a rarity until Erasmus began to
employ it in the first decade of the 16th century as a means to interject
styles of classical rhetoric into the sermon. He combined the ideal of a
political address with the homily and the sermon.3 After a quarter century
of thoughtful development, Erasmus brought the concept to a new level of
perfection in his last great masterpiece, on the method and philosophy of
preaching, his Ecclesiastes of 1535.4 This was an important innovation that
helped to define the sermon as a political address as well as a religious
exhortation. The Ecclesiastes emerged at the same moment that Henry
VIII assumed supremacy over the English Church, and its influence in
England, and over English styles of preaching, was very great.

2The History of King Richard III in The Complete Words of St Thomas More, vol. 2, ed.
Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1963), 668, 1402, 2467. See also
the entry on Bishop Thomas Kempe by Rosemary C.E. Hayes in the ODNB.
3For examples of the early use of concio, see the translation of Bishop John Fishers first
sermon against Luther, which was made by Richard Pace: Contio qvam anglice hauit rever-
endvs pater Johannes Roffensis Episcopvs in celeberrimo Nobilium Conventu Londini eo die,
quo Martini Lutheri scripta public apparatus in ignem coniecta sunt (Cambridge: John
Siberch, 1521, RSTC 10898). See John W. OMalley, Erasmus and the History of Sacred
Rhetoric: the Ecclesiastes of 1535, in Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching,
Rhetoric, Spirituality and Reform (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), chapter VII; Susan Wabuda,
Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
6671, 8990.
4Erasmus, Ecclesiast sive de ratione concionandi libri quatuor (Basel: Froben, 1535),
and available also in a modern edition edited by Jacques Chomerat in Opera Omnia
Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, series V (vol. IV (New York, 1991), books 12; vol. V (New York,
1994), books 34.
 lost at pauls cross: unrecorded sermons441

Historians and scholars of English literature for the Tudor and Stuart
periods who have wished to explore the importance of the sermon in the
political context of the Reformation have long wrestled with the difficul-
ties that Mores story of Shaws sermon presents. The names of the preach-
ers who appeared at Pauls Cross have not always been recorded, much less
the words they spoke. The reactions of audiences to sermons have offered
their own problems.5 In relieving some portion of the difficulties, scholars
owe a debt of gratitude to the late Millar MacLure, Professor of English
Literature at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, for his pioneer-
ing efforts to identity the preachers who spoke at Pauls Cross. At the end
of his study The Pauls Cross Sermons, 15341642, which was published as
long ago as 1958, he produced a helpful finding aid in a Register of refer-
ences to all known sermons that were delivered at Pauls Cross, which he
compiled from a close reading of the first edition of The Short-Title
Catalogue. Originally the Register was simply an appendix, but MacLure
amplified it in later years. Working with Jackson Campbell Boswell and
Peter Pauls, it re-emerged as an independent publication in 1989, only a
year before his death.6 With J.W. Blenchs Preaching in England in the Late
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, and G.R. Owsts Preaching in Medieval
England,7 MacLures work proved to be indispensable to a previous genera-
tion of scholars, and it is still of enduring value in our present time.8
As a list, MacLures Register was reasonably comprehensive, but by ini-
tiating his inquiries as late as 1534, the year of the passage of the Henrician
Act of Royal Supremacy, MacLure could not take note of some of the most
important trends that marked earlier changes in the life of Pauls Cross.
Some deficiencies were unavoidable, especially regarding doctrinal or

5For a later period, see Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their
Audiences, 15901640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
6Millar MacLure, The Pauls Cross Sermons 15341642, University of Toronto Department
of English, Studies and Texts, no. 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1958); Millar MacLure,
Register of Sermons Preached at Pauls Cross 15341642, rev. and augmented by Jackson
Campbell Boswell and Peter Pauls, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies,
Occasional Publications, vol. 6 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989). My thanks go to
Jackson Campbell Boswell for his memories of Professor MacLure.
7J.W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1964); G.R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: an Introduction to Sermon
Manuscripts c. 13501450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926).
8Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 15581642 (Oxford: University
Press, 2011), ix, 1, 4, 99, and passim; The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, eds.
Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011); Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists:
The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 15901640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 24865.
442 susan wabuda

political disagreements, or long-term shifts in the patterns of English

devotional culture. MacLure missed important occasions when Erasmus
was attacked by name at Pauls Cross as attempts to confuse his scholar-
ship with Martin Luthers. MacLure was not able to notice the presence
of monks or the mendicant friars in the pulpit, perhaps because he was
too reliant on Owst, who thought that a vital, potent interest in preaching
by members of the regular orders, especially Benedictine monks, for the
15th century and afterwards appeared to be dead, and their failure was a
distant contributor towards the need of reformation in the Church.9 This
had the unfortunate effect of negating the power that the friars exercised
from the pulpit, and the hold that they had in popular opinion until the
moment their religious houses were closed in 1538. Before then, the men-
dicants and the bishops shared much of the responsibility for preaching at
Pauls Cross and elsewhere, and some of the essential balance that was
once part of the experience of the English Church was lost with the expul-
sion of the friars.
The purpose of this essay is to consider some of the sermons and events
that have been associated with Pauls Cross before the reign of Elizabeth
for which only limited evidence survives, especially in those cases when
the written text of the sermon, in notes, manuscript, or printed form is not
known. Perhaps we have a reasonable hope that more texts will be discov-
ered, or more references to the preachers who delivered sermons at Pauls
Cross will appear, as the power of digitisation, especially of manuscripts,
will reveal more information than was ever available before now.
There used to be an implicit assumption among twentieth-century
scholars that sermons were rather rare until the Reformation, a miscon-
ception that has been corrected by the great outpouring of recent scholar-
ship on the sermon and preaching. But it is the case that the generous
number of sermons that were printed in the second half of the 16th cen-
tury into the seventeenth may have contributed something towards mak-
ing that mistake. Mary Morrissey has referred to the fact that roughly 250
Pauls Cross sermons were printed, or survive in manuscript for the period
between 1558 and 1642, and as a print genre, sermons became really
important only in Elizabeths reign.10
Certainly it was the case that active preachers during the reigns of
Henry VIII or Edward VI or earlier did not often venture into print. Before

9Owst, Preaching, 49.

10Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, ix, 5. Also Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists,
248265; Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and
Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: University Press, 1998).
 lost at pauls cross: unrecorded sermons443

Edwards reign, the number of printed sermons by contemporary clergy-

men was small. Bishops were well represented, including John Alcock of
Ely;11 John Fisher of Rochester;12 Hugh Latimer of Worcester;13 and John
Longland of Lincoln.14 Sermons appeared in print also by John Colet;15
Erasmus; William Chedsey and Cuthbert Scott; Simon Matthew; William
Peryn; Robert Singleton; and Robert Whittington (the grammarian). They
were delivered in a variety of pulpits: at court, at convocation, and on visi-
tation. Peryn, the once and future Dominican friar, preached his series of
three sermons at the Hospital of St Anthonys in London in 1546.16 Few
among this meager harvest were delivered at Pauls Cross, but they
included two sermons preached in 1544 by Chedsey and Scott. Chedseys
included a rousing allusion to the dangerous journeys and the vnspeak-
able costs that Henry VIII had assumed in protecting his subjects from the
vsurped power of the byshop of Rome.17
Part of the reason for that lack rests on the obvious observation that
taking a stand in a sermon, in light of the shifting nature of the political
and doctrinal situation, was fraught with risks that were even more
dangerous for preachers than was nonconformity during the Vestiarian
Controversy of the 1560s.18 Simon Matthew preached his sermon in

11John Bale mentioned one book of Alcocks Homelias uulgares, which may include
Alcocks English Sermo (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, [1497], RSTC 284); his sermon for
Holy Innocents Day, In die Innocenci (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde [1499?], RSTC 282);
or his best known Exhortacyon made to Relygyouse systers (Westminster: Wynkyn de
Worde, [1497?], RSTC 286). John Bale, Scriptorvm illustri maioris Brytanni, quam nunc
Angliam & Scotiam uocant: Catalogus (Basel: Joannis Oporinum, 1557, 1559), 632.
12The sermon of John the bysshop of Rochester made agayne the pernicious doctryn of
Martin luther witin the octaues of the ascension (London: Wynkyn de Worde, [1521], RSTC
10894); Here after ensueth two fruytfull sermons, made & compiled by the ryghte Reuerende
father in god John Fyssher/ Doctoure of Dyuynte and Byshop of Rochester (London: William
Rastell, 1532, RSTC 10909).
13Hugh Latimer, The Sermon that the Reuerende father in Christ, Hugh Latimer,
byshop of worcester, made to the clergie, in the cuocati. (London: Thomas Berthelet,
23 November 1537, RSTC 15286).
14A Sermond spoken before the kynge his maiestie at Grenwiche, vppon good fryday: the
yere of our Lorde .MCCCCCxxxvi. (London: [s.n.], 1536, RSTC 16795); A Sermonde made
before the Kinge, hys maiestye at grenewiche, vpon good Frydaye (London: Thomas Petyt,
[1538], RSTC 16796.
15The sermon of doctor Colete/ made to Conuocacion at Paulis ([London?: Thomas
Berthelet, [1531], RSTC 5550.5).
16William Peryn, Thre godlye and notable Sermons, of the moost honorable and blessed
sacrament of the Aulter (London: John Herforde for Robert Toye, [1546], RSTC 19785.5.
17William Chedsey and Cuthbert Scott, Two Notable Sermons (London: John Herford
for Robert Toye, 1545 RSTC 5106.5), sig. E6v.
18In his final book, Patrick Collinson took up once more the matter of the opposition
to the surplice and the square cap as clerical garb required by the Elizabethan Church
444 susan wabuda

StPauls on 27 June 1535, between the executions of Fisher on 22 June, and

More on 6 July. His text was an exhortation to obedience, taken from
1 Peter 5:6: Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God.19 The elim-
ination of Fisher in particular was a warning that few preachers could
afford to ignore. Robert Singleton was chaplain to Anne Boleyn, and her
initial, with Henrys, appears on the title page of his sermon, which was
delivered in Lent 1535. When it was printed the following year, Singletons
sermon may be understood as another example of the desperate efforts
her chaplains took to protect her in the last chaotic weeks of her life.
Singleton too was executed in 1544 for reasons that are still obscure: what
Alec Ryrie calls murkier matters that involved heresy in Kent.20 The
deadly rivalry between Robert Barnes and Stephen Gardiner was displayed
for all to see at Pauls Cross in Lent 1540 as a telling part of the events that
destroyed Thomas Cromwell. Barnes played to the crowd with foolhardy
courage. He said he was a fighting cock, and he called Gardiner by name to
come out from the audience and answer him. When Gardiner refused,
Barnes insulted him by saying he had no spurs, and then he threw down
his glove as a challenge. We know the details because Gardiner wrote of
them with chilling precision five years later, when he wished to establish
in the face of the world that he had not persecuted Barnes. Barnes had
gone too far in his provocation, and Gardiner complained to the king.
Henry expected Barnes to recant, but at his next sermon at the pulpit cross
at the Hospital of St Marys, he bid Gardiner to hold up his hand to the
audience in a sign that he forgave him. Later Gardiner would argue that he
had forgiven Barnes before now, but he would not hold up his hand. Their
horrifying competition culminated with Barness fiery execution that
summer at Smithfield.21

in Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2013), 1520.
19Simon Matthewe, A Sermon Made in the Cathedrall Churche of saynt Paule at London,
the XXVII. daye of Iune, Anno .1535. (London: Thomas Berthelet, 30 July 1535, RSTC 17656).
Matthewe does not appear in the ODNB.
20Robert Singleton, A Sermon preached at Poules crosse the fourth sonday in lent the yere
of our lorde god .1535. (London: Thomas Godfraye [1536], RSTC 22575). Lincoln Cathedral
Library shelfmark Rr. 7. 11. For a transcription of the sermon see Torrance Kirby, Robert
Singletons sermon at Pauls Cross in 1535: the true church and the Royal Supremacy,
Reformation and Renaissance Review 10.3 (2008), 343368. Eric Ives, The Life and Death of
Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). For the quotation, see Alec Ryries
entry for him in the ODNB.
21Gardiners letter to the reader in A Declaration of such true articles as George Ioye hath
gone about to confute as false (London: John Herford, 1546, RSTC 11588) reprinted in The
Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. James Arthur Muller (Cambridge: Cambridge: University
Press, 1933), 164175.
 lost at pauls cross: unrecorded sermons445

Aside from the considerable dangers of speaking at cross-purposes to

the royal supremacy or dynastic stability,22 did it pay to print a sermon?
The costs of bringing a sermon to print could be prohibitive, and by
Elizabeths reign, the printed sermon became a dependable commodity in
a way that had not been possible before, or at least not in the same way.23
For from the end of the 15th century, there had been a thriving market for
printed works that helped priests to prepare their homilies or sermons.
Helpful collections of sermon material for Sundays and saints days were
in steady use in the 16th century. Their compilers included John Herolt and
John Myrk, among others, and they were the specialties of the printers
William Caxton, his successor Wynkyn de Worde and Julian Notary.24 They
represented only a small portion of a huge corpus of sermon and homiletic
material that had been compiled over many centuries, whose full range in
manuscript and print, is still not completely understood.25 Older sermons
were eagerly collected by churchmen who referred to them from the pul-
pit. Chedsey quoted from Bede. Archbishop Thomas Rotherham of York
had in his possession manuscript sermons by the thirteenth-century
bishop of Lincoln Robert Grosseteste and many others which he bestowed
on the library he built at his birthplace as a resource for the chantry priests
he hoped would refer to them in their sermons.26 The sermon notes of
Erasmuss friend, the Cambridge scholar Robert Ridley, the uncle of
Nicholas, consisted of selections from John Chrysostom, Laurentius Valla
as well as an early cycle from the Benedictine monk William of Merula.27
The customers for printed sermon cycles were largely clerical, but not
exclusively so, for the laity was also attracted to the stories of the saints,
and some of them may have appealed to the same readership who enjoyed
books of hours.28 Some of the same patrons, including the Lady Margaret

22These subjects are the themes of G.R. Eltons Policy and Police: Enforcement in the Age
of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
23Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 42.
24John Herolt, Sermones discipuli de tempore de sanctis (London: Julian Notory, 1509,
RSTC 13226); John Myrk, The festyuall (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1508, RSTC 17971); and
Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation, 33.
25See, most helpfully, H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Siegfried Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and
preaching in late-medieval England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
26R.B. Dobson, The educational patronage of Archbishop Thomas Rotherham of York,
Northern History, 31 (1995), 6585.
27Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. 5. 27. See also Damian Riehl Leader, A History
of the University of Cambridge, vol. 1, The University to 1546 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 18990, and Richard Rex on Ridley in the ODNB.
28Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 12401570 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
446 susan wabuda

Beaufort, who helped bring books of hours to the press, also helped the
printers who produced the great sermon collections of the late 15th
century.29
This was the sort of literature, however, that may have begun to seem
out of date for priests once Erasmus began to raise standards for preachers
in the Ecclesiastes, and it was castigated further by evangelicals like John
Bale.30 From the reign of Edward VI the various editions of the Book of
Homilies eventually replaced most older compilations,31 and the kind of
cleric who needed to rely on such generic works to assist him as he read
from a pulpit are out of our sightlines anyway, for the opportunity to
preach at Pauls Cross frequently represented a kind of pinnacle in a career.
The men who climbed into the pulpit in Pauls churchyard tended to be
trained, invited, even stellar.
Despite his fame and the astonishing erudition he displayed in the
Ecclesiastes, Erasmus seems to have avoided the pulpit for much of his life.
He also refused an opportunity to preach at Pauls Cross when he suppli-
cated the University of Cambridge in 1506 to take his much-desired doc-
toral degree in theology. His request led to some curious entries in the
record-books for Cambridges degrees about a unique set of agreements
that were offered to him on the part of the university. The usual require-
ments that a candidate for a doctorate in theology must engage in disputa-
tions and also preach at Pauls Cross were waived for him (probably at the
request of Fisher, who was Cambridges chancellor). Instead, the univer-
sity asked him to lecture and to deliver two sermons ad clerum at the uni-
versity church, Great St Marys. Finding all of this onerous, Erasmus
instead went to the University of Turin in summer 1506 to improve his
Greek, and he had his degree in theology a year earlier than he would have
done had he stayed at Cambridge.32
Erasmus placed new emphasis on a refreshed commitment to the apos-
tolic model of preaching, which meant that the preacher should exhibit a

29Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The Kings Mother: Lady Margaret
Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
30John Harryson, [pseud. for John Bale], Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe ([Antwerp],
1543 RSTC 1309), fols. 54v-57r.
31Among Cranmers numerous books, Bale recorded only the Homelias Christianas.
Bale, Catalogus, 691.
32See Grace Book B I, ed. Mary Bateson, Luard Memorial Series, vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1903), 222; Leader, Cambridge, 174, 292; OMalley, Erasmus and
the history of sacred rhetoric, VII, 21. Erasmus also wrote for use in Colets school at
St Pauls, The Concio de puero Jesu, which appears as Homily on the child Jesus, trans.
Emily Kearns, in Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 7, eds.
Elaine Fantham and Erika Rummel, vol. 29 (Toronto, 1989), 5170.
 lost at pauls cross: unrecorded sermons447

deep reliance on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, as well as possess an

excellent memory. The humanists and the evangelicals committed to
heart as much of the New Testament as possible, and especially the
Epistles. This meant, in practical terms, that many mid-century preachers
did not write their sermons in advance, or else they used abbreviated
notes as an aide memoire.33
Did Latimer always speak from a prepared text? For the amanuensis
who recorded the first sermon that Latimer preached before Edwards
court in 1549 lamented that he was not able to write worde for worde as he
dyd speake, for like a great river did eloquence and learnynge flow most
abundantly out of godly Latymers mouth.34 Without the energetic efforts
of his amanuenses, most notably his Swiss associate Augustine Bernher,
we would have few of Latimers sermons at all.35 We know that he preached
a series of at least four sermons at Pauls Cross the year before he appeared
at court, but without a good secretary; most of the details of what he said
have been lost. Only one has come down to us, and it has become one of
his most famous: his Sermon on the Plough, which was delivered in mid-
January 1548 in the Shrouds or undercroft of the chapter house of the
cathedral, delivered there probably because the weather was too cold and
foul to preach at the Cross.36 Some risks were ridden out because the
preacher did not commit his words to paper in advance. How many
preachers at Pauls Cross spoke as they felt that they were directed to by
the Holy Spirit, for which there was never any written text at all? We will
not be able to answer this question with any certitude.
A following for printed sermons by specific preachers was slow to
develop in England. This was different than the experience on the conti-
nent, where sermons by Luther or John Calvin among many others had a
ready market early on.37 In England, by contrast, the print industry lagged
behind that on the continent, and printers could not at first be certain of
sales. The shifts that occurred among customers and their buying habits

33Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation, 6672.

34The fyrste sermon of Mayster Hughe Latimer, whiche he preached before the Kinges
grace wythin his graces palayce at Westmynster. M.D.XLIX. the viii. of March (London: John
Day and William Seres, 1549, RSTC 15270.5), sig. A3r.
35See Frvitfvll Sermons Preached by the right reuerend Father, and Constant Martyr of
Iesus Christ M. Hvgh Latimer (London: John Daye, 1584 RSTC 15280).
36A notable Sermon of the Reuerende father maister Hughe Latemer, which he preached
in the Shrouds at Paules churche in London the .xviii. day of January (London: John Daye and
William Seres, 1548, RSTC 15291); Morrissey, Politics and the Pauls Cross Sermons, 11.
37Andrew Pettegree, The Reformation an the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
448 susan wabuda

would reward further study. The innovator in this direction was Latimers
printer: John Day, with his early partner William Seres, who in 1548 began
to produce his sermons to be sold at the new shop by the lytle Conduyte
in Chepesyde. They began by printing individual sermons piecemeal, but
almost immediately they were able to issue, as a collected group, the
sermons that Latimer delivered at court in 1549. This set ran to nearly
200 pages.38 The investor who met the costs of production was Katherine
Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk,39 and well into the reign of Elizabeth, Day
continued to find and print Latimers sermons in ever-expanding collec-
tions in the same way that he, working now with John Foxe, put together
larger and larger editions of the Actes and Monuments. Compilations of
Latimers sermons and Foxes Book of Martyrs were designed to comple-
ment each other. Until the very end of his life, Day printed Latimers
sermons. His final edition came out in 1584, just weeks before his death.
Day created an indelible sense of Latimer as a person, and he enhanced
his reputation as a preacher and a martyr. He also helped to create a
market for printed sermons; and this is another of the important innova-
tions to the sixteenth-century book trade with which John Day should be
credited.40
Days success with Latimers sermons in Edwards reign was noted
immediately. How else do we explain the sudden appearance in 1557 of
Roger Edgeworths massive collection Sermons very fruitfull, godly and
learned, which ran no fewer than 317 folios?41 Edgeworth was the chancel-
lor of Wells Cathedral, as well as a canon there and at Salisbury and Bristol.
His doctorate in theology was from the University of Oxford. His preach-
ing style represented the very best of the period: it was humanist, evangeli-
cal and vibrant. Among the reasons that his sermons were printed was to
defend Mary Tudors Church, and he wished to establish that her fathers
Church too represented no awkward incongruities with an older ortho-
doxy. His collection represented the fruit of a career spent preaching

38The seconde [to the seuenth] Sermon of Maister Hughe Latimer (London: John Day and
William Seres, 21 June, 1549, RSTC 5274.7). The quote is from the colophon.
39For one example among many, see The fyrste sermon of Mayster Hughe Latimer (RSTC
15270.5).
40Latimer, Frvitfvll Sermons (RSTC 15280). See Andrew Pettegrees entry for Day in the
ODNB; Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern
England: the Making of Foxes Book of Martyrs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011). I am grateful for Elizabeth Evendens suggestions about the selling power of Latimers
sermons.
41Roger Edgeworth, Sermons very fruitfull, godly and learned (London: Robert Clay, 1557,
RSTC 7482) which has been edited by Janet M. Wilson. See her entry on Edgeworth in the
ODNB.
 lost at pauls cross: unrecorded sermons449

against Luther and against Latimer. Edgeworths collection of sermons

was meant to remind his readers why Latimer was burnt in 1555.
Edgeworths sermons included six on the gifts of the Holy Ghost, a hom-
ily on the Creed, and a score on the first Epistle of Peter. Most of them
were delivered in Bristol, but we would be mistaken if we thought that
Edgeworth spent his entire career in the West Country, for he attended the
legatine court at Blackfriars to consider the kings Great Matter in 1529,
and he was one of the theologians who prepared the Kings Book of 1543.
He recounted that besides these that he had delivered in Bristol, he had
delivered manie sermons before verie solempe audiences: at Oxford, or
at Paules cross in London; or at courte afore my mooste honourable
Lorde and Maister kinge Henry the eighte. These are the sermons that we
would most like to have, but I purpose (God willing) to set [them] forth
hereafter, as I maye haue oportunitie. But a second volume did not appear.
The queen died, and he followed soon afterwards. Edgeworths Pauls Cross
sermons are lost.42
Intriguing examples of this sort could be multiplied. For Colet, more
sermons initially survived in manuscript than we now know, for John
Bales Catalogue of 1559 listed ordinary and extraordinary sermons as
among his works.43 Archbishop Matthew Parker kept among his papers
the letters he received from Cranmer and Cromwell that summoned him
to preach at court or Pauls Cross, as well as a roll that listed his Conciones.44
The Franciscan bishop Henry Standish of St Asaph kept his own manu-
script collection of Several Sermons preached to the people, which was
also noted by Bale as Sermones ad vulgum. It too is not now known to
exist. This is particularly unfortunate, for Bale wrote that Standish
preached sermons against both Colet and Erasmus. In 1519, Standish
preached a sensational sermon at Pauls Cross that denounced Erasmuss
translation of the New Testament, which Erasmus thought was a gratu-
itous ad hominem attack against him. Then Standish compounded his
remarks by repeating them at court. We know many of the details about
this episode because More (with John Stokesley, future bishop of London)

42Edgeworth, Sermons very fruitfull, godly and learned, contents page. Bale did not list
Edgeworth in his Catalogus.
43Bale, Catalogus, 649. Jonathan Arnold has asked for the rediscovery of a Colet manu-
script, known to survive into the nineteenth century that dealt with matters of cathedral
discipline: John Colet and a lost manuscript of 1506, History, vol. 89 (2004), 17492.
44Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 114A, fols. 391r, 393, 395r, and MS 583 (a parch-
ment role). Digital images of the manuscript in Parkers Library have been made available
at http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/parker. I wish to thank David Crankshaw for helpful
advice concerning Archbishop Parker.
450 susan wabuda

wrote to warn Erasmus about him, and Erasmus sent furious letters of pro-
test (which he also printed) in response. Erasmuss denunciations were so
effectual that decades later, Bale was still characterizing Standish as a silly
blabberer.45 Episodes such as these were the stuff that enabled Latimer to
claim Erasmus and Colet as proto-Protestants and martyrs manqus.46
In terms of the discovery of early modern sermons, sermon notes, and
references to sermons, especially in manuscript, much still remains to be
rediscovered and understood. Fresh revelations are still to come. Bale and
Day were active in bringing to wider attention every piece of writing that
they thought should be recorded and preserved, just as Erasmus had ran-
sacked the libraries of colleges to try to rediscover as many classical and
ancient texts as possible. The very last of Latimers sermons to come to
light was his 1536 invective against the rebellions of that year which may
have been uncovered by William Turner and given by him to Day to print
for the first time as late as 1578.47
1989, the year of the second edition of MacLures Register of Sermons,
already seems like a long time ago. Easy travel by jet aircraft, the Internet,
Early English Books On-line, the Universal Short Title Catalogue and other
forms of digitisation have increased our opportunities by erasing many of
the boundaries of distance as well as access to sources in both print and
manuscript. For MacLure, the great technological innovation of his day
was the advent of microfilm; even so he had to travel up to Lincoln on his
study leave in 1952 to see the only known surviving copy of Singletons
Sermon, which is preserved in the Lincoln Cathedral Library, and is still
not available on EEBO.48 Heroic stories could be told about the research
trips of our predecessors. Helen and P.S. Allen, the great Erasmus scholars,
went to Spain before and after the First World War to discover letters of
Erasmus to add to their trove. The Allens had an unhappy, coffee-less time
in Simancas in 1925, as they trailed through the dusty landscape from the
rail station to the archives, a perspective that was relieved slightly by the

45Bishop Standish in quotidiana concione plura contra Coletum & Erasmum blater-
auit. Bale, Catalogus, 706; Erasmus to Hermann Busch, written from Louvain, 31 July 1520:
Opvs Epistolarvm Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P.S. Allen, vol. 4 (1922), no. 1126, Englished in
CWE Correspondence, vol. 8, 717. See Andrew A. Chibis account of Standishs life in the
ODNB, and Erika Rummel, Erasmus and His Catholic Critics, vol. 1, 15151522 (Nieuwkoop:
De Graaf Publishers, 1989), 1227.
46Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation, 92.
47Hugh Latimer, Frvtfvll Sermons (London: John Day, 1578, RSTC 15279) fol. 1.
48Although a transcription of Singletons sermon was recently published. See Torrance
Kirby, Robert Singletons sermon at Pauls Cross in 1535: the true church and the Royal
Supremacy, Reformation and Renaissance Review 10.3 (2008), 343368.
 lost at pauls cross: unrecorded sermons451

sight of a purple rift of crocuses growing wild. They discover a single

previously-unknown letter to Erasmus from Charles V. In the midst of
their visit, Allen found himself wondering how the great J.A. Froude had
had the patience to spend so much time working there, and by his heavy
labors make his history real and living as he drew upon the inspiration of
the actual letters and dispatches that no English historian, until then, had
ever seen.49
It remains to be determined whether other scholars, our future col-
leagues, will have to undertake the kind of research trips that all of us used
to do. The electronic revolution has begun to bring the images of early
printed books and manuscripts to desks and screens in ways that were
almost unimaginable at the beginning of this present century, opening
vast realms of material that were previously inaccessible to all but the
most energetic.50 Perhaps the time has arrived to follow up the work of
our predecessors, and to begin to build fresh, consolidated electronic
search aids which would serve a new century in the engaging pursuit of
the medieval and early modern sermon.

49P.S. Allen, Erasmus: Lectures and Wayfaring Sketches (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934),
17992.
50But see the caveats of William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in
Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 17982.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuscripts

Bodleian Library, Oxford

Add. MS C. 303, fols. 67r-73r.
more accurate, but incomplete copy of same account of Campions trial as BL Add.
MS 6265.
Rawlinson MS D.1349, item 7.
This contains notes on Samuel Harsnets notorious anti-Calvinist sermon of 1584 (see
Register of Sermons, 63). The Bodleian copy misdates the sermon to 1594.
Tanner MS 50.
Short and summary nootes of some Sermons preached at Poulls crosse and ells whear
not vnprofitable to be remembred. The volume contains notes on (39) sermons
preached between June 1565 and September 1566, most of them preached at Pauls
Cross. There is much of interest here, particularly on the Jewel/Harding controversy. The
original manuscript cant be consulted because of its condition, but there is a microfilm
available, and the Bodleian will make copies of the manuscript from that.
Tanner MS 329.
incomplete translation of Paolo Bombino, Vita et Martyrium Edmundi Campiani.
Twyne MS 17, 157167.
Brian Twynes copy of Windsors Receavinge of the Quenes Majestie.

British Library
Add. MS 6265, fols 14r-22v.
Complete copy of unique account of Edmund Campions trial on 20 November 1581,
which formed basis of Howells edition of State Trials, 1816.
Add. MS 15891.
Letters to Sir Christopher Hatton, mostly printed by Sir Harris Nicolas; letter of Bishop
Aylmer to Hatton on subject of John Stubbe, 28 September 1579. Fols. 8r to 9r.
Harl. MS 353, fol. 141r-v and Harl. MS 643, fol. 1r-v.
Both manuscripts give accounts of the incident in 1553 when there was a riot following
Dr Gilbert Bournes sermon (see MacLure, Register of Sermons, 34).
Harl. MS 417, fol. 129r.
vol. 2 of John Foxes papers: letter of John Foxe to Bishop Grindal.
Harl. MS 422, fols. 136r172v.
vol. 7 of John Foxes papers: Copies of Edmund Campions last three disputations in the
Tower, seized and annotated in house of William Carter by Richard Topcliffe, two veri-
fied as in Stephen Vallengers hand, and coming from Whyting of Lancashire.
Harl. MS 425, fols. 131r133v.
Mr [John] Foxe at paules crosse on good frydaye the xxiiith of February Anno 1570. notes
gatherde by the parson of St agnes and corrected by master fox. This sermon was
printed: A sermon of Christ crucified (1570) (see Register of Sermons, 50). See Foxe in 2.3
below.
Harl. MS 1714, fol. 140r.
Certaine notes collectide out of the Parliament of Christ declaring the enactide
and recyvide truthe of the presence of his body and blode in the blessed sacrament
impugnide in a wickide sermon by master Juell collected and sett forthe by Thomas
Hoskins doctor of divinitie 1566..
454 bibliography

Lansdowne MS 33.
Lord Burghleys papers: Thomas Nortons notes on last disputation of Campion, no. 61;
Oliver Plucketts ward-mote for commending Campion, no. 63; drafts of Campions
indictment, nos. 64 and 65.
Sloane MS 2495.
Vita Henrici VIII.

Cambridge University Library

Add. MS 3117, fols. 160v168v.
Notes on Edwin Sandys Pauls Cross sermon on his becoming bishop of London, taken
from the printed edition of Edwin Sandys sermons (1585), and written out c. 1630.
MS Dd. 5.27.
Sermon notes of Robert Ridley.

The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

MS 106.175, fol. 487.
Letter from the duke of Somerset to Gardiner bishop of Winchester charging him not to
meddle with any matter of controversy in his sermon, Syon June 28, 1548..
MS 106, item 68.
Letter of appointment to Pauls Cross from Dr Haynes to an unknown recipient, undated.
MS 114, item 129, fol. 393.
Letter from Thomas Cromwell vice-gerent to Mr. Parker dean of Stoke, appointing him
to preach at St Pauls-cross.
MS 114, item 133, fol. 401.
Letter from Ridley bishop of London to Dr. Parker, appointing him to preach at St Pauls-
cross, dated 29 July.
MS 114A.
Matthew Parker, Correspondence.
MS 119, item 14.
A letter from Edmund Bonner exhorting members of Cambridge University to preach at
Pauls Cross.
MS 127.5, fol. 7.
Letter from the duke of Somerset to the bishop of Winchester, repeating his command
that he should not treat of the mass nor of other controversial points in his sermon:
dated Syon June 28, 1548..
MS 127.5, fols. 1530.
The sermon of the bishop of Winchester [Stephen Gardiner] before the kings maiestie
29 June 1548, on Matthew XVI.13..
MS 257.
Miles Windsor, An. Dni 1566. The Receavinge of the Quenes Majestie into Oxford. fols.
104r114r (fair copy, autograph); fols 115r123r (draft, autograph with revisions).
MS 583.
A parchment role relating to Matthew Parkers career.

The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

MS V.a.109. fols 1r21r.
John Bereblock, Commentarii sive Ephemerae actiones rerum illustrium Oxonii gestarum
in adventu Serenissimae Principis Elizabethae.
MS V.a.176.
Bishop Robinsons copy of Miles Windsors A Brief Rehearsall.
MS V.a. 251.
A sermon preached at St Paules crosse the firste of June 1606, by John Dove, Doctour of
Divinitye of the Kinges prrogative..
 bibliography455

MS V.a.459 to 461.
Diaries of Richard Stonley; first vol. contains Campions trial and drawing.

Huntington Library
Ellesmere MS 2079.
A single sheet of notes on Jewels Challenge sermon (see Register of Sermons, 42).

Inner Temple Library

Petyt MS 538, vol 47, Item 242, fols. 459r460v.
Answer to certain pieces of a sermon made at St Pauls Cross 27 June 1572 by Thomas
Cowper, Bishop of Lincoln. The sermon was not printed, but this gives a good idea of
what it contained.

Lambeth Palace Library

MS 374, fols. 115v149r.
Dr John Copcots Sermon at S. Pauls Cross, 1584 on Psalm xxxiv.1. wherein Answer is
made to the Counterpoison. This sermon was not printed: see Register of Sermons, 64.
MS 2001.
John Bale, unpublished holograph manuscript titled A retourne of James Cancellers ray-
linge boke upon hys owne heade, dated 1561. Responds to Cancellars Path of Obedience
(1556?).
MS 2872, fols. 5758.
Papers mainly concerning Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex.

St Pauls Cathedral Library

MS 38.F.22.
This manuscript contains most of the Easter sermons from 1588: the Passion sermon at
Pauls Cross and the three Spital sermons (but not the rehearsal sermon). Its mostly of
interest because it contains a version of Lancelot Andrewes 1588 Spital sermon (making
this the only sermon where we have a manuscript witness independent of the LXXVI
Sermons), a transcription of which can now be found in Peter McCullough, ed. Lancelot
Andrewes, Selected Sermons and Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bibliography of Sermons

MacLure, Millar. Register of Sermons preached at Pauls Cross, 15341642. Revised and aug-
mented Jackson Campbell Boswell and Peter Pauls. CRRS Occasional Publications, no. 6.
Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989.

Selected Primary Printed Sources

Alcock, John. Exhortacyon made to Relygyouse systers. Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde,

[1497?].
. In die Innocenci. Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde [1499?].
. Sermo. Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, [1497].
Allen, William. A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII. Reverend Priests,executed
within these twelvemonethes for confession and defence of the Catholike Faith. But under
the false pretence of Treason. [Rheims: Foigny], 1582.
456 bibliography

Anonymous. A reporte of maister doctor Redmans answeres, to questions propounded him

before his death concernynge certaine poyntes of religion, now beyng with many in con-
trouersye. Whervnto diuerse artycles be added, lately subscribed by Master Chedsey.
[London: Thomas Raynalde in Paules churche yeard for Wylliam Seres, dwellyng at the
west syde of Paules towarde Ludgate, at the signe of the hedge hog], 1551.
. An apologie of priuate masse sediciously spredde abroade in writyng without name
of the authour: as it semeth, against the offer and protestacion made in certain sermons by
the reuerende father Byshop of Salesburie. With an answere and confutacion of the same,
set forth for the defence and maintenance of the trueth. London: [Thomas Powell], 1562.
. LHistoire de la Mort que le R. P. Edmond Campion Prestre de la compagnie du nom
de Iesus, & autres ont souffert en Angleterre pour la foy Catholique & Romaine le premier
jour de Decembre, 1581. Paris: Chaudire, 4 January 1582.
. An Advertisement and defence for Trueth against her Backbiters, and specially
against the whispring Favourers, and Colourers of Campions, and the rest of his confeder-
ats treasons. London: C. Barker, 1581.
Anderson, Anthony. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the 23. of Aprill, being the Lords
day, called Sonday. 1581. Londo[n]: [H. Bynneman? for] Ralph Nevvbery, 1581.
Bale, John (pseud. John Harryson). Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe: A dysclosynge or ope-
nynge of the Manne of synne, co[n]tayned in the late declaratyon of the Popes olde faythe
made by Edmonde Boner bysshopp of London wherby Wyllyam Tolwyn was than newlye
professed at Paules Crosse. Zurik [Antwerp]: Olyuer Iacobson [A. Goinus], 1543.
. Scriptorvm illustri maioris Brytanniae, quam nunc Angliam & Scotiam uocant:
Catalogus Basel: Joannis Oporinum, 1557, 1559.
Babington, Gervase. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the second Sunday in Mychaelmas
tearme last. 1590. Not printed before this 23 day of August. 1591. London: Thomas Este,
dwelling in Aldersgate streete, 1599.
Bacon, Francis. A Declaration of the Practises & Treasons attempted and committed by
Robert late Earle of Essex and his complices. London, 1601.
. Sir Francis Bacon his Apologie, in certaine imputations concerning the late Earle of
Essex. London, 1604.
Bancroft, Richard. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 9. of Februarie being the first
Sunday in the Parleament, Anno. 1588 by Richard Bancroft D. of Divinitie, and Chaplaine to
the right Honorable Sir Christopher Hatton Knight L. Chancelor of England. London: E.
B[ollifant] for Gregorie Seton, 1588.
Barlow, William. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent:
Martij 1. 1600 with a short discourse of the late Earle of Essex his confession, and penitence,
before and at the time of his death. London: Mathew Law, dwelling in Paules Church-
yard, 1601.
. The sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of Nouember being the next
Sunday after the discouerie of this late horrible treason. London: John W[indet], 1606.
Barnes, Robert. A supplicatyon made vnto the most excellent and redoubted prince kinge
henrye the eyght. London: John Byddell, at the signe of our lady of Pitie, nexte to flete
bridge, 1531.
Barne, Thomas. A sermon preached at Pauls Crosse the thirteenth of Iune, the second Sunday
in trinitie tearme 1591. Oxford: Ioseph Barnes, 1591.
Bisse, James. Two sermons preached the one at Paules Crosse the eight of Ianuarie, 1580.
the other at Christes Churche in London, the same day in the after-noone: by Iames Bisse
maister of Arte, and fellowe of Magdalene Colledge in Oxenford. London: Robert walde-
graue, for Thomas Woodcoke, dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Beare,
1585.
Bombino, Paolo. Vita et Martyrium Edmundi Campiani. Mantua: Osannas, 1620.
Bonner, Edmund. Homelies sette forth by the righte reuerende father in God, Edmunde
Byshop of London, not onely promised before in his booke, intituled, A necessary doctrine,
but also now of late adioyned, and added thereunto, to be read within his diocesse of
 bibliography457

London, of all persons, vycars, and curates, vnto theyr parishioners, vpon sondayes, & holy-
dayes. London: in Poules churcheyarde, at the sygne of the holy Ghost by Ihon Cawodde,
Prynter to the Kyng and Queenes Maiesties, [1555].
. Iniunctions geuen in the visitatio[n] of the Reuerend father in god Edmunde, bishop
of London begunne and continued in his cathederal churche and dioces of London, from
the thyrd day of September the yere of oure Lorde god, a thousand fiue hundreth fifty and
foure, vntill the. viii. daye of October, the yeare of our Lord a thousand fiue hundreth fifty
and fiue then nexte ensuyng. London: In Paules churcheyard, at the signe of the holy
ghost, by Iohn Cawood, printer to the Kyng and Queenes highnesses, [1555].
Bradford, John. A sermon of repentaunce. Londo[n]: In Paules Churche yearde, at the signe
of the Rose, by [S. Mierdman for] Iohn Wight, [1553].
Bray, Gerald, ed. Tudor Church Reform: the Henrician canons of 1535 and the Reformatio
legum ecclesiasticarum. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press [for the] C of E Record Society,
2000.
Bridges, John. A sermon, preached at Paules Crosse on the Monday in Whitson weeke Anno
Domini. 1571 entreating on this sentence Sic deus dilexit mundum, vt daret vnigenitum fil-
ium suum, vt omnis qui credit in eu[m] non pereat, sed habeat vitam ternam. So God
loued the worlde, that he gaue his only begotten sonne, that al that beleue on him shoulde
not perysh, but haue eternall life. Iohn. 3. London: Henry Binneman for Humfrey Toy,
[1571].
Broke, Thomas. A slaunderous libell (cast abroad) vnto an epitaph set forth vpon the death of
D.E. Boner, with a reply to the same lying libell, by T. Brook. London: John Daye, [1569?].
Brooks, James. A sermon very notable, fruictefull, and godlie made at Paules crosse the. xii.
daie of Noue[m]bre, in the first yere of the gracious reigne of our Souereigne ladie Quene
Marie. London: Within the late dissolued house of the Graie friers, by Roberte Caly, 1553.
Bush, Edward. A sermon preached at Pauls crosse on Trinity sunday, 1571. London: Iohn
Awdely, 1576.
Camden, William. Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum. London: Stansby, 1615.
Campion, Edmund. Rationes Decem: quibus fretus, certamen adversarijs obtulit in causa
fidei, Edmundus Campianus. [Stonor Park: Brinkley, 1581].
Cecil, Robert, of Salisbury. An Answere to Certaine Scandalous Papers, scattered abroad
vnder colour of a Catholicke Admonition. London, 1606.
Certain sermons or homilies appointed to be read in churches. Book 1. Certain sermones, or
homelies, appoincted by the kynges Maiestie, to bee declared and read, by all persones, vic-
ars, or curates, euery Sondaie in their churches, where thei haue cure. London: Richard
Grafton, 1551.
Certayne sermons appoynted by the Quenes Maiestie to be declared and read, by all persones,
vycars, and curates, euery Sonday and holy daye, in theyr Churches: and by her graces
aduyse perused a[nd] ouersene, for the better vnderstandyng of the simple people. London:
Imprinted in Powles Churchyarde by Richarde Jugge and John Cawood printers to the
Quenes Maiestie, 1559.
Chronicle of the Grey friars of London, ed. John G. Nichols. London: Camden Society, 1852.
Cartwright, Thomas. A Replye to An Answere made of M. doctor Whitgifte Agaynste the
Admonition. [Hemel Hempstead?: J. Stroud?], 1573.
Chaderton, Laurence. An excellent and godly sermon most needefull for this time, wherein we
liue in all securitie and sinne, to the great dishonour of God, and contempt of his holy word.
Preached at Paules Crosse the xxvi. daye of October, an. 1578. London: Christopher Barker,
printer to the Queenes Maiestie, [1578?].
Chedsey, William and Cuthbert Scotte. Two notable sermones lately preached at Pauls
Crosse Anno 1544. London: John Herford for Robert Toye dwellynge in Paules church
yarde, 1545.
Christopherson, John. An exhortation to all menne to take hede and beware of rebellion
wherein are set forth the causes, that commonlye moue men to rebellion, and that no cause
is there, that ought to moue any man there vnto. With a discourse of the miserable effectes,
458 bibliography

that ensue thereof, and of the wretched ende, that all rebelles comme to, moste necessary to
be redde in this seditiouse [and] troublesome tyme, made by Iohn Christoferson. At the ende
whereof are ioyned two godlye prayers, one for the Quenes highnes, verye conuenient to be
sayd dayly of all her louing and faythfull subiectes, and an other for the good [and] quiete
estate of the whole realme. Read the whole, and then iudge. [London: In Paules churche-
yarde, at the signe of the holy Ghost, by Iohn Cawood, prynter to the Queenes highnes,
1554].
Clarke, Thomas. The recantation of Thomas Clarke (sometime a Seminarie Priest of the
English Colledge in Rhemes; and nowe by the great mercy of God conuerted vnto the
profession of the gospell of Iesus Christ) made at Paules Crosse, after the sermon made by
Master Buckeridge preacher, the first of Iuly, 1593. Whereunto is annexed a former recanta-
tion made also by him in a publique assembly on Easter day, being the 15 of April, 1593.
London: Deputies of Christopher Barker, printer to the Queenes most excellent Maiestie,
1594.
Colet, John. The sermon of doctor Colete/ made to Conuocacion at Paulis. [London?: Thomas
Berthelet, [1531].
Crakanthorpe, Richard. A sermon at the solemnizing of the happie inauguration of our most
gracious and religious soueraigne King Iames wherein is manifestly proued, that the souer-
aignty of kings is immediatly from God, and second to no authority on earth whatsoeuer:
preached at Paules Crosse, the 24 of March last 1608 London: VV. Iaggard for Thomas
Adams, dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Blew Bell, 1609.
Curteys, Richard. Tvvo sermons preached by the reuerend father in God the Bishop of
Chichester the first at Paules Crosse on Sunday beeing the fourth day of March. And the
second at VVestminster before [the] Queenes maiestie the iij. Sunday in Lent last past. 1576.
London: [J. Allde?], 1576.
. Two sermons preached by the reuerend father in God the Bishop of Chichester the first
at Paules Crosse. The second at Westminster before the Queenes Maiestie. London: T. Man,
and W. Brome, 1584.
Davidson, John. D. Bancrofts rashnes in rayling against the Church of Scotland noted in
an answere to a letter of a worthy person of England. Edinburgh: Robert VValde-graue,
1590.
Deios, Laurence. That the pope is that Antichrist: and An answer to the obiections of sectaries,
which condemne this Church of England: Two notably learned and profitable treatises or
sermons vpon the 19. verse of the 19. chapter of the Reuelation: the first whereof was
preached at Paules Crosse in Easter terme last, the other purposed also to haue bene there
preached. By Lawrence Deios Bachelor in Diuinitie, and minister of Gods holy word.
London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1590.
Donne, John, and Jeanne Shami, ed. John Donnes 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-
Text Edition. Pittsburgh, Pa: Duquesne University Press, 1996.
Dorman, Thomas. A proufe of certeyne articles in religion, denied by M. Iuell: sett furth in
defence of the Catholyke beleef therein. Antwerp: J. Latius, 1564.
. A request to M. Iewell, That he kepe his promise, made by solemne protestation in his
late sermon at Pauls Crosse. Louvaine: John Fowler, 1567; repr. [Menston]: Scolar Press,
1973.
Dove, John. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the sixt of February. 1596 in which are
discussed these three conclusions. 1 It is not the will of God that all men should be saued.
2 The absolute will of God, and his secret decree from all eternitie is the cause why some
are predestined to saluation, others to destruction, and not any foresight of faith, or
good workes in the one, or infidelitie, neglect, or contempt in the other. 3 Christ died not
effectually for all. By Iohn Doue, Doctor of Diuinitie. [London]: T. C[reede] for R. Dexter,
1597.
. A sermon preached at Pauls Crosse, the 3 of Nouember 1594 intreating of the second
comming of Christ, and the disclosing of Antichrist: With a confutation of diuerse coniec-
tures concerning the end of the world, conteyned in a booke intituled, The second comming
 bibliography459

of Christ. Preached by Iohn Dove. [S.l.]: Imprinted by V.S. for VVilliam Iaggard, and are to
be sold at his shop in Fleetstreet in Saint Dunstans Churchyard, [1594?].
Dyos, John. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 19. of Iuli 1579 setting forth the excellencye
of Gods heauenlye worde: The exceeding mercye of Christ our Sauior: the state of this world:
A profe of the true Church: A detection of the false Church: or rather malignant rable: A
confutation of sundry hresies: and other thinges necessary to the vnskilfull to be knowen.
London: Iohn Daye dwelling ouer Aldersgate, 1579.
Edgeworth, Roger. Sermons very fruitfull, godly, and learned, preached and sette foorth by
Maister Roger Edgeworth, doctoure of diuinitie, canon of the cathedrall churches of
Sarisburie, Welles and Bristow, residentiary in the cathedrall churche of Welles, and
chauncellour of the same churche: with a repertorie or table, directinge to many notable
matters expressed in the same sermons. London: Roberti Caly, 1557.
. Sermons very fruitfull, godly, and learned: preaching in the Reformation, c. 1535c.
1553; edited by Janet Wilson. Cambridge; Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1993.
Erasmus, Desiderius. Ecclesiastae sive de ratione concionandi libri quatuor. Basel: Froben,
1535, and available also in a modern edition edited by Jacques Chomerat in Opera Omnia
Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, series V, vol. IV, New York: 1991, books 12; vol. V, New York:
1994, books 34.
. Homily on the child Jesus, trans. Emily Kearns, in Collected Works of Erasmus:
Literary and Educational Writings 7, eds. Elaine Fantham and Erika Rummel, vol. 29,
5170. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989.
. Opvs Epistolarvm Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P.S. Allen, 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 19061958.
Feckenham, John de. Two homilies vpon the first, second, and third articles of the crede, made
by maister Iohn Feknam Deane of Paules. [London: Roberti Caly, ca. 1555].
. A notable sermon made within S. Paules church in Lo[n]don in the presence of certen
of the kinges and Quenes moost honorable priuie cou[n]sell at the celebration of the exe-
quies of the right excellent and famous princesse, lady Ione, Quene of Spayne, Sicilie [and]
Nauarre. [et]c. the xviij. of Iune, Anno. 1555. By maister Iohn Feckenam, deane of the sayd
churche of Paules. Set furth at the request of some in auctoritie whose request could not be
denayed. London: Robert Caly, 1555.
Field, John and Thomas Wilcox. An Admonition to the Parliament. [Hemel Hempstead:
J. Stroud], 1572.
Fisher, John. Contio qvam anglice habuit reverendvs pater Johannes Roffensis Episcopvs in
celeberrimo Nobilium Conventu Londini eo die, quo Martini Lutheri scripta public appara-
tus in ignem coniecta sunt, trans. Richard Pace. Cambridge: John Siberch, 1521.
. The sermon of Iohan the bysshop of Rochester made agayn the pernicious doctryn of
Martin luther within the octaues of the ascensyon. London: Wynkyn de Worde, [1521].
. A sermon had at Paulis concernynge certayne heretickes. London: T. Berthelet,
[1526].
. Here after ensueth two fruytfull sermons, made & compyled by the ryghte Reuerende
father in god Iohan Fyssher, Doctoure of Dyunyte and Byshop of Rochester. London:
William Rastell, 1532.
. A sermon very notable, fruicteful, and godlie made at Paules Crosse, in London, Anno
domini. 1521. within the octaues of the Ascension concerning the heresies of Martyne
Luther. London: Robert Caly, 1554, 1556.
Fisher, William. A sermon preached at Paules crosse the firste Sunday after Newyeeres day,
beeing the thirde day of Ianuary. 1580. London: [by Thomas Dawson] for Edwarde Aggas
[and] Thomas Chare [sic], 1580.
. A Godly Sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 31. Day of October 1591. London:
1592.
Fotherby, Martin. Foure sermons, lately preached, by Martin Fotherby Doctor in Diuinity, and
chaplain vnto the Kings Maiestie. The first at Cambridge, at the Masters Commencement.
Iuly 7. anno 1607. The second at Canterbury, at the Lord Archbishops visitation. Septemb. 14.
460 bibliography

anno 1607. The third at Paules Crosse, vpon the day of our deliuerance from the gun-powder
treason. Nouemb. 5. anno 1607. The fourth at the court, before the Kings Maiestie. Nouemb.
15. anno 1607. Whereunto is added, an answere vnto certaine obiections of one vnresolued,
as concerning the vse of the Crosse in baptisme: written by him in anno 1604. and now com-
manded to be published. London: Henry Ballard, for C. K[night] and W. C[otton], 1608.
Foxe, John. Actes and Monuments. London: John Day, 1563; new edn. Adam and Company,
1873.
. A sermon of Christ crucified, preached at Paules Crosse the Friday before Easter, com-
monly called Goodfryday. Written and dedicated to all such as labour, and be heauy laden
in conscience, to be read for their spirituall comfort. By Iohn Foxe. Seene and allowed. Newly
recognished by the author. London: John Daye, 1570. Repr. 1575, 1577, 1585, and 1609.
Republished with a preface by George Whitefield. London: 1759.
. De Christo crucifixo concio. London: John Day, 1571.
Frank, Mark. LI sermons preached by the Reverend Dr. Mark Frank : being a course of ser-
mons, beginning at Advent, and so continued through the festivals: to which is added a
sermon preached at St. Pauls Cross, in the year forty-one, and then commanded to be
printed by King Charles the First. London: Andrew Clark for John Martyn, Henry Brome,
and Richard Chiswell , 1672.
Gardiner, Stephen. A Declaration of such true articles as George Ioye hath gone about to con-
fute as false. London: John Herford, 1546.
. An explicatio[n] and assertion of the true Catholique fayth, touchyng the moost
blessed sacrament of the aulter [Rouen: R. Caly], 1551.
. De vera obediencia: an oration made in Latine by the ryghte reuerend father in God
Stephan B[ishop] of Winchestre, nowe lord Chau[n]cellour of England nowe translated
into english and printed by Michal Wood. Roane [Londonby authoritie. London: Henry
Ballard, for C. K[night] and W. C[otton], 1608.
. The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. James Arthur Muller. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1933.
Gifford, George. A sermon preached at Pauls Crosse the thirtie day of May. 1591 by M. George
Giffard, preacher of the worde of God at Maldon in Essex. London: I. Windet for Tobie
Cooke, at the Tigers head in Paules Churchyard, 1591.
Glasier, Hugh. A notable and very fruictefull Sermon made at Paules Crosse the XXV. day of
August, by maister Hughe Glasier, Chapleyn to the Quenes most excellent maiestie, Perused
by the reuerende father in god Edmond bishop of London, and by him approued, com-
mended, and greatly liked: and therefore nowe set furth in print, by his auctoritie and com-
maundement. Read, and iudge. Loke, and lyke. London: Robert Caly, within the precinct
of the late dissolued house of the graye Freers, nowe conuerted to an hospital, called
Christes hospitall. The XII. day of October, 1555. 8vo., London, 1555. [copy in St Pauls
Cathedral Library].
Godet, Giles. The city of London, as it was before the burning of St Pauls ste[eple]. [London?:
G. Godet?, 1565?].
Gosson, Stephen. The trumpet of vvarre: A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the seuenth of
Maie 1598. By M. Steph. Gosson parson of great Wigborow in Essex. London: V. S[immes]
for I. O[xenbridge] dwelling in Paules churchyard at the signe of the parot, [1598].
. Pleasant quippes for upstart newfangled gentle women. London: Rich. Johnes, 1596;
with Pickings & pleasantries from the trumpet of warre: a sermon preached at Paules
crosse. Totham: Charles Clarks private press, 1847.
Grindal, Edmund. A sermon, at the funeral solemnitie of the most high and mighty Prince
Ferdinandus, the late Emperour of most famous memorye holden in the Cathedrall
Churche of saint Paule in London, the third of October. 1564. London: Iohn Day, dwelling
ouer Aldersgate, beneath saint Martins. Cum gratia & priuilegio Regi Maiestatis,
[1564].
Hacket, Roger. A sermon needfull for theese [sic] times wherein is shewed, the insolencies of
Naash King of Ammon, against the men of Iabesh Gilead, and the succors of Saule, and his
 bibliography461

people sent for their reliefe. Preached at Paules Crosse the 14 of Feb. 1590 by R.H. fellow of the
New Colledge in Oxford. Oxford: Ioseph Barnes printer to the Vniuersitie, 1591.
Hake, Edward. Newes out of Powles Churchyarde otherwise entituled, syr Nummus. Written
in English satyrs. London: Iohn Charlewood and Richard Ihones, 1579.
Hall, Joseph. An holy panegyrick: a sermon preached at Paules Crosse vpon the anniuersarie
solemnitie of the happie inauguration of our dread soueraigne Lord King James, Mar. 24,
1613 by J[oseph] H[all] D.D. London: Iohn Pindley for Samuel Macham, 1613.
Hatt, Cecilia. English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (14691535): Sermons and
Other Writings, 15201535. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Harding, Thomas. An ansvvere to Maister Iuelles chalenge, by Doctor Harding. Louaine: John
Bogard, at the Golden Bible, 1564.
. A briefe answere of Thomas Harding Doctor of Diuinitie touching certaine vntruthes
with which Maister Iohn Iuell charged him in his late sermon at Paules Crosse the VIII of
Iuly, anno 1565. Antwerp: gidius Diest, [1565].
. A detection of sundrie foule errours, lies, sclaunders, corruptions, and other false
dealinges,touching doctrine, and other matters. Louvain, 1568.
. A Reioindre to M. Iewels replie. Antwerp, 1566.
Harpsfield, John. A notable and learned sermon or homilie, made vpon saint Andrewes daye
last past 1556 in the Cathedral churche of S. Paule in London, by Mayster Ihon Harpesfeild
doctour of diuinitie and canon residenciary of the sayd churche, set furthe by the bishop of
London. London: Robert Caly, within the precinct of the late dessolued house of the
graye freers, nowe conuerted to an hospitall, called Christes Hospitall, 1556.
Herolt, John. Sermones discipuli de tempore de sanctis. London: Julian Notory, 1509.
Hill, Adam. The crie of England. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse in September 1593
published at the request of the then Lord Maior of the citie of London, and others the alder-
men his brethren. London: Ed[ward] Allde, for B. Norton, 1595.
Hooker, Richard. The answere of Mr. Richard Hooker to a supplication preferred by Mr Walter
Travers to the HH. Lords of the Privie Counsell. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612. [MS, 1586].
. Of the lavves of ecclesiasticall politie: Eyght bookes. London: John Windet, dwelling
at the signe of the Crosse keyes neere Powles Wharffe, and are there to be soulde, [1593].
. Of the lavves of ecclesiasticall politie: The fift booke. London: John Windet dvvelling
at Povvles wharfe at the signe of the Crosse Keyes and are there to be soulde, 1597.
. Of the lavves of ecclesiasticall politie: the sixth and eighth books. A work long
expected, and now published according to the most authentique copies. London: Richard
Bishop, 1648.
. The works of Mr. Richard Hooker (that learned and judicious divine), in eight
books of ecclesiastical polity compleated out of his own manuscripts, never before pub-
lished: with an account of his life and death London: Thomas Newcomb for Andrew
Crook, 1666.
. A remedie against sorrow and feare, delivered in a funerall sermon, by Richard
Hooker, sometimes fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, and
are to be sold by John Barnes dwelling neere Holborne Conduit [London], 1612.
. A learned and comfortable sermon of the certaintie and perpetuitie of faith in the
elect especially of the prophet Habakkuks faith. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, and are to be sold
by John Barnes dwelling neere Holborne Conduit [London], 1612.
. A learned sermon of the nature of pride. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, and are to be sold
by John Barnes dwelling neere Holborne Conduit [London], 1612.
Howson, John. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the 4. of December. 1597 Wherein is dis-
coursed, that all buying and selling of spirituall promotion is vnlawfull. By Iohn Hovvson,
student of Christes-Church in Oxford. Imprinted at London: By Arn. Hatfield for Thomas
Adams, 1597.
. A second sermon, preached at Paules Crosse, the 21. of May, 1598. vpon the 21. of Math.
the 12. and 13. verses concluding a former sermon preached the 4. of December 1597. vpon
the same text. By Iohn Hovvson, student of Christes-Church in Oxford. London: Arn[old]
462 bibliography

Hatfield for Thomas Adams, dwelling in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the white
Lion, 1598.
. A sermon preached at St Maries in Oxford, the 17. day of November, 1602. in defence of
the festivities of the Church of England, and namely that of her Maiesties coronation. By
Iohn Hovvson Doctor of Divinitie, one of her Highnes chaplaines, and vicechancellour of the
Vniversitie of Oxforde. At Oxford: Joseph Barnes, and are to be sold in Fleete-streete at
the signe of the Turkes head by Iohn Barnes, 1602.
Hudson, John. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the ix. of Februarie. Anno Dom. 1583. By
I. Hudson, Maister of Arte, of Oxon. London: Thomas Purfoote, and are to solde at his
shop ouer against Sainte Sepulchres Church, 1584.
James VI and I, King of England and Scotland. His Maiesties speach in this last session of
Parliament Together with a discourse of the maner of the discouery of this late intended
Treason. London, 1605.
James, William. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the IX. of Nouember, 1589. By William
Iames D. of Diuinitie, and deane of Christes-church in Oxford. London: George Bishop and
Ralph Newberie, 1590.
Jewel, John. Apologia ecclesi anglican. London: [Reginald Wolfe], 1562.
. An Apologie or answere in defence of the Church of England, with a briefe and plaine
declaration of the true religion professed and vsed in the same. With a dedication by
M[atthew] C[antuariensis] to the translator Ladie A[nne] B[acon]. London: Reginald
Wolfe, 1564.
. A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande, an answeare to a certaine
booke by M. [Thomas] Hardinge. London: H. Wykes, 1567.
. Certaine sermons preached before the Queenes Maiestie, and at Paules crosse
whereunto is added a short Treatise of the sacraments. London: C. Barker, 1583.
. The true copies of the letters betwene the reuerend father in God Iohn Bisshop of
Sarum and D. Cole: vpon occasion of a sermon that the said Bishop preached before the
Quenes Maiestie, and hir most honorable Counsel. 1560. London: John Day, 1560.
Joye, George. The exposycion of Daniel the prophete, gathered out of Philip Melancthon,
Iohan Ecola[m]padius, Chonrade Pellicane, [and] out of Iohan Draconite A prophecye
diligentely to be noted of al emperoures [and] kinges, in these laste dayes. London: In
Paules Church yearde, at the signe of the Starre, by Thomas Raynalde, [1550].
. George Joye confuteth Winchesters false Articles. Wesill [Antwerp]: Widow of
C. Ruremond, 1543.
Knewstubs, John. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the Fryday before Easter, commonly
called good Friday, in the yeere of our Lorde. 1579. London: At the three Cranes in the
Vintree, by Thomas Dawson for Richard Sergier, 1579.
. A confutation of monstrous and horrible heresies, taught by H[endrik] N[iclaes] and
embraced of a number, who call themselues the Familie of Loue. Seene and allowed, accord-
ing to the Queenes Maiesties iniunctions. London: Thomas Dawson, for Richard Sergier,
1579.
Latimer, Hugh. Frvtfvll Sermons. London: John Day, 1578.
. Frvitfvll Sermons Preached by the right reuerend Father, and Constant Martyr of
Iesus Christ M. Hvgh Latimer. London: John Daye, 1584.
. Fruitfull Sermons: Preached by the right Reverend Father, and constant Martyr of
Iesus, Master Hugh Latimer, newly imprinted with others not heretofore set forth in print, to
the edifying of all which will dispose themselves to the reading of the same. London:
Thomas Cotes, 1635.
. The fyrste sermon of Mayster Hughe Latimer, whiche he preached before the Kinges
grace wythin his graces palayce at Westmynster. M.D.XLIX. the viii. of March. London: John
Day and William Seres, 1549.
. The seconde [to the seuenth] Sermon of Maister Hughe Latimer. London: John Day
and William Seres, 21 June, 1549.
 bibliography463

. The Sermon that the Reuerende father in Christ, Hugh Latimer, byshop of worcester,
made to the clergie, in the cuocati London: Thomas Berthelet, 23 November 1537.
. A notable sermo[n] of ye reuerende father Maister Hughe Latemer whiche he
preached in ye Shrouds at Paules churche in Londo[n], on the xviii daye of Ianuary 1548
[Sermon on the ploughers]. London: John Day and Wylliam Seres, 1548.
Lever, Christopher. Queene Elizabeths teares: or, Her resolute bearing the Christian crosse
inflicted on her by the persecuting hands of Steuen Gardner Bishop of Winchester, in the
bloodie time of Queene Marie. London: V[alentine] S[immes] for Mathew Lownes dwell-
ing in Paules Churchyard at the signe of the Bishops head, 1607.
Lever, Thomas. A sermon preached at Pauls Crosse the xiiii day of December. London: John
Day, 1550.
. A fruitfull sermon made in Poules churche at London in the Shroudes, the seconde
daye of Februari. [London: Ihon Daie, dwelling ouer Aldersgate, and Wylliam Seres
dwelling in Peter Colledge, 1550].
Longland, John. A sermonde made before the kynge his maiestye at grenewiche, vpon good
frydaye. The yere of our Lorde God. M.D.xxxviij. By Ioh[a]n Longlonde, busshop of Lincolne.
Ad gloriam Christi, & ad memoriam glorios passionis eius. Cum priuilegio ad imprimen-
dum solum. [London: In Paules Churche yearde at the sygne of the maydens heed by
Thomas Petyt, 1538].
Machyn, Henry. The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London,
from a.d. 1550 to a.d. 1563, ed. John Gough Nichols. London: Camden Society, J.B. Nichols,
1848.
Martiall, John. A Replie to M. Calfhills Blasphemous Answer Made Against the Treatise of the
Crosse. Louvain: Fowler, 1566.
Matthewe, Simon. A Sermon Made in the Cathedrall Churche of saynt Paule at London, the
XXVII. daye of Iune, Anno .1535. London: Thomas Berthelet, 30 July 1535.
Mayer, John. A Treasury of ecclesiasticall expositions, vpon the difficult and doubtfull places
of the Scriptures collected out of the best esteemed interpreters, both auncient and mod-
erne, together with the authors judgement, and various observations. London, 1622.
Milward, John. Iacobs great day of trouble, and deliuerance. A sermon preached at Pauls
Crosse, the fifth of August 1607. vpon his Maiesties deliuerance from the Earle Gowries trea-
son and conspiracie. London: [William Stansby] for Eleazar Edgar, and are to bee sold at
his shop in Pauls Church-yard, at the signe of the Wind-mill, 1610.
More, Thomas. The co[n]futacyon of Tyndales answere made by syr Thomas More knyght.
London, 1532.
. The History of King Richard III in The Complete Words of St Thomas More, vol. 2, ed.
Richard S. Sylvester. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
. The second parte of the co[n]futacion of Tyndals answere in whyche is also confuted
the chyrche that Tyndale deuyseth. London, 1533.
M[unday], A[nthony]. A Discouerie of Edmund Campion, and his Confederates, their most
horrible and traiterous practises, against her Maiesties most royall person, and the Realme.
London: Edwarde White, 1582.
Myrk, John The festyuall. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1508.
Nowell, Alexander. A confutation, as wel of M. Dormans last boke entituled a disproufe.
London, 1567.
. A reproufe, written by Alexander Nowell. London, 1565.
. The reproufe of M. Dorman his proufe of certaine articles in religion &c. continued by
Alexander Nowell. London, 1566.
Penry, John. A briefe discouery of the vntruthes and slanders (against the true gouernement
of the Church of Christ) contained in a sermon, preached the 8. [sic] of Februarie 1588. by
D. Bancroft. [Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1590]. [See Bancroft above.].
Persons, Robert. De Persecutione Anglicana Epistola. Qua explicantur afflictiones, aerumna, &
calamitates gravissimae, cruciatus etiam & tormenta, & acerbissima martyria, quae
464 bibliography

Catholici nunc Angli, ob fidem patiuntur. Quae omnia in hac postrema editione aeneis
typis ad vivum expressa sunt. Romae: George Ferrarius [English College], 1582.
Peryn, William Thre godlye and notable Sermons, of the moost honorable and blessed sacra-
ment of the Aulter. London: John Herforde for Robert Toye, [1546].
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Aaron97, 146
Abell, Thomas109
Abrahams Suite for Sodome
(Milles)435436
Abram/Abraham146147, 163, 435436
academic politics269
Accession Day sermons333n25
acclamations69
Ackworth, George269
Act against Appeals to Rome112
Actes and Monuments (Foxe)169, 220, 448
Act Extinguishing the Authority of the
Bishop of Rome171n36
Act in Restraint of Appeals to
Rome171n36
Act of Six Articles89, 126, 130, 138,
142, 150
Act of Succession115n33
Act of Supremacy115n33, 171, 258259,
441442. See also royal supremacy
Act of Uniformity253
Acts 1:20298n28
Acts 2:2713, 293, 299
Acts of English Votaries (Bale)187
Adam255, 423
Adams, Thomas431, 432
ad hominem attack449
adiaphora172173, 331332, 335, 337, 342.
See also things indifferent
Admonition controversy2, 321
Admonition to Parliament57
Advertisements (Parker)2
pinus, John136
thelred the Unready23, 366
Aethiopian History240, 243n61
Albertus Magnus98
Alcock, John443
Alexander220
allegiance322
allegories187188, 189, 193, 398399
Allen, Helen and P.S.450451
All Hallows, Bread Street46
alliteration151
almoners309, 311
almonry boys309310
altars, desecration of198
ambition351
INDEX
Ambrose97
Ambrose of Milan134
amor, orientation of164
amphitheatre playhouses224, 243244
Anabaptists318, 319, 331
Anabaptistical separation434
anaphora190191
Andrewes, Lancelot14, 322, 323, 325
Anglicans and Puritans? (Lake)338
Anglo-Saxon kings23, 28
Anjou marriage277278, 283
Annales (Stow)379
Anne of Denmark, Queen of
England367, 371
Answere to the Admonition (Whitgift)330
Answer to a Cavillation (Cranmer)209
Answer to certaine scandalous Papers
(Cecil)356357
Answer to Master Jewels Challenge
(Harding)234
anti-Catholicism289 ff
and Arminians300
Antichrist119, 355
anti-Laudian materials391, 392, 393,
399400
antimetabole190
Antioch392
anti-theatre sermons224
apocalypse354355, 359
Apocrypha154
Apologia Ecclesi Anglican (Jewel)232
Apologie, in certaine imputations concern-
ing the Late Earle of Essex (Bacon)352
Apostles Creed255, 289
apostles, equality of123, 124
apostolic succession145146
apsidal chapel25
Arber, Edward178
arch-stones (voussoirs)2527
Arden, Evan281
Are You Alone Wise? (Schreiner)331
Ark415
Arminians300
Arminius394
Armin, Robert310
Arnold, Jonathan449n43
art of hearing234, 242
476 index

Arthur, Thomas189 Gunpowder Plot sermon1516,

Ascham, Roger238, 305 352356, 357
Ashton, Abdias346 sermons as fodder345, 350, 359, 360
Askew, Anne150 Barnes, George267
Assertion and Defence of the Sacrament Barnes, Robert99100, 101
of the Alter (Smith)9 conflict with Gardiner8, 129139, 444
Assertio septem sacramentorum escape and return132
(Henry VIII)196 martyrdom138139
asyndeton190 Barnes, Thomas433
Athanasius297 barracks37
auditory London226 Barrow, Henry329, 330
Augustine69, 97, 103, 147, 164, 170, 189, Bartholomew Fair18, 311, 434, 437
317, 319 Bartholomew the Apostle, feasts eve274
City of God18 Barton, Elizabeth (Holy Maid of Kent)8,
De doctrina christiana10, 187, 193194 112113, 114
errors254 Basil319
glorification256 Basil of Caesarea188
ignorance and knowledge336 Beal, Robert, Clerk of the Privy
aural aesthetic414415 Council252
authoritarianism338 Beaufort, Margaret9596, 445446
authority323, 329 Becket, Thomas 114n28, 197, 284
autonomy, vice of335 Beckets chapel31
Aylmer, John Becon, Thomas230, 231
Campion254256, 261 Bedyll, Thomas116, 122n56
complaint to Privy Council268 beheading307
exile257 belfries32, 35
Hatton277 Bell, the281
Hooker246, 247, 249252, 258 Bellarmine, Robert254n31
special worship53 bells
Whitgift and48 belfry32, 35
Azevedo, Matt62n6, 85 passage of time82, 84, 8586
thanksgiving55, 59
Babington Plot48 Bel Savauge, public house theatre235
Bacon, Francis15, 345, 350352, 357, 360 Bench, John252
Bacon, Nicholas35 Benedictine monks442, 445
Bale, John10, 187, 199, 200, 443n11, 446, benefit of clergy108
449450 Bernard, Richard430
Bancroft, Richard Bernher, Augustine154, 181n34, 182, 447
anti-puritan295, 315, 319320 Beza, Theodore254, 255, 256, 285, 293, 299
conformist1415 Bible
Disciplinarian Puritanism2 adapting to plays239240
episcopal privilege321 Bishops Bible291, 293, 299
Hampton Court conference297 English232, 267, 294295, 305306
Penry332339 Geneva232, 233, 291, 293, 297, 299, 305,
royal prerogative340342 395, 436n40
translation298 Great Bible291
baptism255, 316 Hebrew395
baptism of children146, 394 King James13, 17, 290, 295, 297300, 395
Barker, Christopher305306 Rheims289291, 293, 294, 299, 316
Barker, Robert356 Bible reading142, 186, 335336
barley break273 moral vs. literal meaning10, 187189,
Barlow, William43n7, 46, 143, 265 190, 194195, 200
affinity394 vernacular211
Earl of Essexs death1516, 346349 biblical exegesis10, 187, 200
 index477

Bilney, Thomas176, 189 Bourne, Gilbert228, 266

Bilson, Thomas13, 289, 294295 Bowes, Martin275
on Christs descent to hell13, 295297, Brabantio (character)241
299 Brachlow, Stephen330331,
translation work297300 332, 340
Bird, John123, 124, 125 Bradford, John267
Bishop of Rome111, 116, 124, 180 Bradocke, Richard306
bishopric298n28 Bradshaw, William330
Bishop, Richard247 Brandon, Catherine (ne Willoughby,
bishops Duchess of Suffolk)154, 158, 176n5,
authority to make laws171 182, 448
complaints against100 Break with Rome8, 57, 119
fathers323324 Brevissima Institutio (Erasmus)274
luxury of251 Briant, Alexander278
Bishops Bible291, 293, 299 Bridegroome and his Bride
bishops palace, St Pauls Cathedral31, (Rawlinson)403
3839 Briefe Discovery (Penry)329
Black Rubric142 A brief Treatyse (Booke of Traditions;
blasphemy347 Smyth)170171
Blayney, Peter M.W.228, 229, 241 Brigden, Susan117n43
Blench, J.W.211, 441 Brook, Benjamin390
blindness102 Brooke, Samuel394
Blount (Blunt), Christopher350 Brooks, James10, 187200
Boccaccio, Giovanni197 Browne, George110, 117n43
bodily imagery415 Brownish separation434
Bodleian Library290, 391 Brownlee, Victoria398n22
Boghurst, William361 Bucer, Martin142, 185, 321, 417
Bohemia379, 386 Bullinger, Heinrich135, 256n37,
Boleyn, Anne110, 113 257261, 423
chaplain to120, 444 Bull, John307
fall of121 Burgess, Anthony395, 396
Bombino, Paolo275276, 279, 284 Burgess, John407n37
bonfires55, 59 Burghley, Lord Treasurer.
of books96, 107, 143 See Cecil, William
of images125 burials35
Bonner, Edmund47n25, 131, 132, 133, 266 Burnet, Gilbert134
Booke of Traditions (A brief Treatyse; burning of heretics273
Smyth)170171 Bury St Edmunds25
Book of Common Prayer54, 56, 233, 321 Butler, John135
Office of Morning Prayer7475 buttresses23, 29, 31
revisions142 Byrd, William312, 313
second (1552)142, 158
social disorder155, 156 cabala98
Virtual Pauls Cross7677, 88 Cadiz46, 53, 302, 348, 352
Book of Homilies54, 55, 141142, 148, 446 Caesar347348, 349
Book of Martyrs (Foxe)199, 230, 231, 448 Calamy, Edmund390n3
books calendars62n5, 120, 121
burning9, 96, 107, 143 Calfhill, James271
forbidden109 Call to Order74, 76
bookshops4, 3435, 183, 223, 225226, 228 Calvinists
acoustics and229230 betrayal by James392
books of hours445446 hyperbole256
Boswell, Jackson Campbell441 predestination18, 430
Bourbon, Antoine de51 purgatory292
478 index

Calvin, John love for England190

Bancroft337 metaphors199200
Beza293 Scripture and335336
grace258 Catholicism50
hell13, 255, 299 return to187200
hyperbole255, 256, 260 catholicity203, 215216, 218, 220221,
Institutes of the Christian 294295
Religion331n19 Catholic restoration, sermons under44
market for sermons447 Catholics and John Fawkes355
Penry339 Catholic, term used by Fisher102
texts185, 254, 285, 337 Catholic University in Douai169
try the spirits337, 339 causes, primary and secondary259
Camden, William245, 285 Cave (Plato)161, 170
Cambridge, theologians from108 Caxton, William95, 96, 445
Trinity College391, 397, 404 Cecil, Robert (Earl of Salisbury)302303,
Campbell, Gordon232 306
Campion, Edmund253256, 257, 261 Earl of Essexs death348, 350n22
Challenge to the Privy Gunpowder Plot sermon
Council253254 instructions352
contemporaries270 Inigo Joness patron368n33
death of278281 Cecil, William (Lord Burghley)45n18, 51,
disputations12, 275, 279, 281, 284 220, 254, 285, 315, 327n2, 364
Londoner284285 celibacy, clerical9, 142, 143, 194195
reluctance to speak263265, 268 cemeteries32, 439
schooling272273, 286 censorship282
speech and discourse285 Certaine Prayers set foorth by
trial for treason278279, 283 Authoritie302303, 306
upbringing12, 265266 certainty332
Campions Brag283, 291, 292 Chaderton, Laurence297, 330
Canterbury Cathedral37 challenge as rhetorical device208210
Canticles 5:8393, 394, 395 Challenge Sermon
Capon, John (Salcot)109, 112113, 114, 119 Bibles and231232
Cardinal College165 communion205206, 211, 214215
Carleton, Dudley379, 392 influence of216217, 289
Cartwright, Thomas overview1011, 203205
Confutation299 pulpit event270, 271
not seditious330, 331 Challenge to the Privy Council
protg315 (Campion)253254
Queens jurisdiction331 Chamberlain, John362, 379, 386388, 392
Rheims New Testament contro- Chambers, E.K.239
versy291, 293, 299 chantries142, 157
Scripture interpretation340n35 Chapel Royal83, 154, 307, 312
sermons on57 chapels31, 417
things indifferent332n21, 333n26 apsidal chapel25
translations298 Chapel Royal83, 154, 307, 312
Casaubon, Isaac394 glassmaker using365
Case, John264265 of Katherine Brandon182
Catalogue (Bale)449 Lady chapel37
cathedrals, damage during Civil War and St. Johns College Chapel393
Commonwealth35 Tower chapel275276, 286
Catherine of Aragon113, 131, 158, 196, 197 chapter house23, 31, 35
death of119 Convocation122n56
Catholic Church facsimile5
cross of Christ296 St Albans Abbey25
Jewell206, 207, 209, 210, 214, 216, 218, 219 Chapuys, Eustace110111, 113
 index479

charity157, 437 love for England190

Charles I metaphors199200
family of402 Scripture and335336
innovations433 Cicero, Marcus Tullius163164
marriage400, 405 City of God (Augustine)18
Spanish Match379, 401, 403 civil disobedience157
presence at sermon42n5 Civil War
restoration of St Pauls361, 362, 371, breaking out324
378, 385, 388 damage to cathedrals35
sermons under46 Clapham, Henoch292
statue of38 Clarke, Elizabeth398n22, 399400, 403
Charles II, birth of42n5 Clement VII2, 172
Charles V451 Clementine Epistles172
chastity121 clerical vestments217
Chaucer, Geoffrey151 clergy
Chavura, Stephen217 authority of298
Chedsey, William46, 443, 445 examination of251
Cheney, Richard264, 282 Pauls Complaint371
Chester, Allan175n4, 177, 178, 183 cloister23, 3031
Chester, William263 arcade25
Chevron design, St Pauls2527 facsimile cloister5, 31
childrens choir76, 309310, 311, Pardon Cloister31, 35
312, 313 Shrouds177n11, 447
choir cloth trade380n59
bookshops230 Cloyne, Cornelius107
crypt beneath177n11 Clyomon and Clamydes239
Gothic23, 28, 29 coats of arms30
New Work5, 28 Cochlaeus, Johannes198199
preaching place within37 Cockayne, William380
Romanesque5, 28 cohabitation of faithful and unfaithful425
tombs within35 Coldock, Francis240, 243n61
worship382, 417 Cole, Henry203, 209, 232, 233
Wrens choir34 Cole, Thomas45, 51
Choir of St Pauls76, 311 Colet, John162, 274, 443, 446n32, 449
chopping metaphor188189, 191 Collection of State Trials (Howell)357
Christ Church, Oxford165166 collective worship4142
Christian IV367 Collinson, Patrick327n3, 403, 425, 426,
Christian liberty331332, 335, 338, 430, 442n18
339, 342 Common Conditions239
Christian Prayers and Meditations in Common Prayer, Book of5455, 56, 7475,
English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, 76, 88, 142, 155, 156, 158, 321
and Latin303, 306 Commonwealth period, damage to
Christs Hospital265, 272, 310, 311 cathedrals35
Chudleigh, John87 communal covenant422, 423
church communal ownership157
ability to err339 communion
congregation vs.291, 299 Challenge Sermon205206, 211,
God in covenant with435 214215
Jeremiads438 Cloyne107
Church Militant, Suffering commemoration142, 206
and Triumphant105 conscience255
Church of Rome Hooker256
cross of Christ296 purity of214215
Jewell206, 207, 209, 210, 214, 216, real presence124, 142, 185, 191192
218, 219 Sacrifice of the Mass124, 169, 171
480 index

transubstantiation9, 142, 143, 147, 166, books published on behalf of144, 148
168, 169, 205, 206 chaplain of44, 59
under two kinds316 commissary143
universality206, 211, 256 Cromwell114, 119
Communion of Saints (Brachlow)330331 early sermons18
Complaint of Paules to All Christian Soules Edwardian Reformation169
(Farley)368378 Gardiner137, 209210
concio440, 449 heresy159, 169
A Conference abovt the next svccession to Hilsey117, 119
the crowne of Ingland, divided into two Jewel208
partes (Parsons)347 Latin rite142
confession4748, 51 Levitical law112
confessional subscription339 liturgy910
Confutation (Cartwright)299 Mallet119
Confutation (More)210 martyrdom208
Confutation (Nowell)270271, 272 Parker449
congregational responses to preaching69 persuasion59
congregation vs. church291, 299 plot against131, 132
Connerton, Paul356 propaganda2
Conrad, John281 Reformed standards167
conscience217, 255, 329, 331332, 335, sermons18, 43n8, 59, 112
339340, 342n40 Smith159, 167, 169
conspiracy in partibus transmarinis283 use of challenge210
Constantine, emperor200 Vermigli9, 169
constitutionalism251 Crockett, Bryan412, 414, 416, 417
conversio163164 Crome, Edward123, 124
Cooke, Laurence109n11 Cromwell, Thomas
Cooper, John42n3 arrest and execution131
Cooper, Thomas265 Convocation of 1536121122
Copcot, John14, 315318, 322 Cranmer114, 119
Corbet, Dr393 encyclical115n35
1 Corinthians158 Harcocke118
1 Corinthians 7:5195 Hilsey109, 117n43, 118119, 122, 125126
1 Corinthians 11:1734205206 injunctions122
1 Corinthians 15:52355 legislative position231
Coriolanus349 letters to109, 110, 116, 123
Corpus Christi College191, 247 William Marshall126
Council of Trent220 Simon Matthew123, 126
Counter-poison (Fenner)14, 315, 317, 318 monastic visitations121
Countrie Mans Comfort (Rhodes)301302, Parker449
307n16 plot against130, 132133, 137138, 444
courts power struggles over pulpit108109
books and34 propaganda2
folkmoot as31 Stokesley111, 117n43, 120
covenant theology421424 Cross Churchyard3435
in context of the church425427 cross of Christ296
Jeremiads422, 424, 432433, 435, 438 crossing tower28
Coverdale, Miles189, 196 crowd size66n13, 7881
Cox, Richard155 Crowley, Robert157
Cranach, Lucas, the Elder199 crypts25, 177n11
Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop Shrouds150, 177n11
Barnes132133 Wren construction23, 35
Bishop of Winchester130 Crystal, Ben63, 72, 73n27, 8081, 85, 8889
Book of Common Prayer142 Crystal, David64n7
 index481

cult of the saints120 Dekker, Thomas368n36

Cupid and Psyche240, 241
cura religionis331
curiosity336
Cyprian254
Cyril297
dagger thrown266, 267
Damascene98
damnation257
Dangerous Positions and Proceedings328
Daniell, David162n3, 232
Davenant, John427
David167, 255
Day, George108n7
Day, John
Book of Martyrs230
bookshops and the pulpit230231
Challenge Sermon220, 232
cheap print237238
Christian Prayers and Meditations303
commercial success237, 448
Latimer154, 158159, 448
printing complete works243
psalms233
royal patentee305
Sermon on the Ploughers154, 181182
dead, prayers for117118, 120, 136137, 157,
185n52
Dead Terme (Dekker)368n36
De Auxilio divin grati (Brooke)394
Decades (Bullinger)257, 259
Decalogue136, 422, 423, 425, 439
de casibus tragedy352
De casibus virorum illustrium
(Boccaccio)196
deception208209, 215
Declaration of the Treasons of the late Earle
of Essex, and his Complices (Bacon)350
De Controversiis (Bellarmine)254n31
Dedham Conference59
De doctrina christiana (Augustine)10, 187,
193194
Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of
Englande (Jewel)272
Defence of the Sacrifice of the Masse
(Smith)9
Defending Royal Supremacy and Discerning
Gods Will in Tudor England
(Eppley)332n21
Defense (Cranmer)210
Defense of the Sincere and True Translations
of the Holy Scriptures (Fulke)293
de heretico comburendo8
deliverance353, 355
Deliver me, O Lord my God, from all my
foes that be (Elizabeth I)301302
De matrimonio serenissimi Regis Angliae,
Henrici Octavio, Congratulatio
(Cochlaeus)198199
Demosthenes188
De praescriptionem haereticorum
(Tertullian)195
De Ratione Studii (Erasmus)273274
Dering, Edward220, 403404
Desdemona (character)241
De Vera Obedientia (Gardiner)131
de Vere, Edward (Earl of Oxford)309310,
312313
Devereux, Robert (Earl of Essex)46, 302
corruption of347
fall and redemption348, 352, 360
justification of execution345
penitence of348n7, 349, 351352
plotting350351
Devil, as bishop180181
devotion, levels of213
Dialogue concerning heresies (More)195
Diary (Machyn)310
Digby, Everard358
Dionysius98
diptych
details from63, 75, 76, 78, 79, 82,
374377
Farley368, 373378, 382
speaker230
theatre235
Directions for Preachers (James I)56,
299, 397
Disciplinarian Puritanism2, 315
discipline318
discourse, hierarchy of282, 287
Discourse of the maner of this late
intended treason1516, 356360
A Discoverie of the Manifold Corruptions
of the Holy Scriptures by the Heretikes
of our Daies (Martin)291, 293
disease5, 41, 51, 52n49 320
leprosy320
plague45, 46, 49, 50, 5152, 53,
243n61, 366
smallpox47, 304305
disembedded imaginary105106
disembowelment280
Diuell of the Vault354
divine providence47, 51
divorce8, 109110, 112113, 158, 196, 197
482 index

doctrines41 Edward VI
contradictory253254 accession8, 9, 141, 166, 170
Doleman, R. (Robert Parsons)347 chantries157
Donne, John characterization196
attention to time8384 Christs Hospital310, 311
Gunpowder Day sermon7, 63, 65, death of156, 158
7071, 7274 first year of reign141142, 149
congregational response to8891 French ambassador to148
liturgical grounding7477 Gardiner168169
interruptions69, 86, 235n35 general pardon175
literal sense399n24 inter-school competition under275
memory413 printed sermons during reign442443,
performance17, 86, 411412, 414419 446, 448
preaching schedule72 reformation129, 164165, 216
preparation of sermons6768, 7172 Regency Council for131132
sentence fragments7274 right religion212
sermons as texts6869 Royal Injunctions of9, 122, 141142,
Dorman, Thomas220, 270271 146, 150, 183, 265
The doubt of future foes exiles my present special worship during reign44
joy (Elizabeth I)307 Thomas Lever155
drama239 (see also theatre) tutors for130
Douai169, 284 Edwardian reformation2, 10, 126, 129,
drought50 141149, 169
Dublin Fragments (Hooker)256n36, Edwardine Prayerbook (Second, 1552)10
256n37 Egerton, Stephen348n7, 352
Dudley, John141, 156, 157158, 159 Egypt, delivery of Jews from215
Duffy, Eamon413 eldership315n2
Dugdale, William364, 387 election257, 259, 423, 424, 426, 437438
Durham, James398399 electronic revolution450451
dynastic marriages402403 Elizabeth I
French Match397, 400, 401, 404, 405, accession1, 159, 169, 234
406, 407 attacked as woman250251
Spanish MatchCharles17, 395, 397, Barlow352
401, 403, 404 Campion264, 280, 284, 287
Spanish MatchMary51, 57, 285 hymn performance307313
dynastic stability445 inscription in New Testament189
poems13, 301302, 307
eagles192193, 200 prayers13, 301307
ears86, 414416 printed sermons during reign442443
earthquakes5, 32, 41, 392 privacy302, 306307
Easter sermons18, 272273, 296 propaganda200
Edwards marriage to Anne Boleyn110 proposed marriage277278, 283
Harcocke118n46 recovery from smallpox47, 304
Hilsey122124 reformation217
Spital services296, 310, 398n23 restoration of St Pauls364
Ecclesiastes (Erasmus)440, 446 right religion212, 215
echoes224, 234235 thanksgiving service301, 366
into print241, 243 threat to from Essex349
Edelen, Georges247n10 Elizabeth I: Collected Works304n10
Edgeworth, Roger448449 Elizabeth II301
Edward I31, 44 Elizabethan Settlement51, 142, 294, 295,
Edward III278 315, 318319, 331
Edward IV439 Elizabeth, Princess402
Edward V439 Embankment Gardens386
 index483

Emmanuel College390, 391, 392, 393, 394 Evelyn, John38

emotional appeal207208 Everard, John395
Enchiridion militis Christiani evil255
(Erasmus)161163, 164, 165, 170, 172173 excommunication2, 117
England, Nicholas238 executions127, 130, 282, 287
England as empire171n36 Barnes444
English Bibles232, 267, 294295, 305306 Campion278280, 281, 285
episcopacy14 Cromwell131
jure divino327 Devereux15, 345, 346, 348n7
episcopal privilege321, 328 Fisher8, 444
episcopal reform178181, 183185 More8, 198, 444
episteme163 Seymour156
epistemological authority332333, spiritual423
340342 Thomas Becket197
epistemological conversion161163, 170 exegesis
epistrophe191 biblical187, 194, 200, 294, 381382
epizeuxis191 dramatic418
Eppley, Daniel332n21, 340 Exhortation on Unitie and Obedience
Erasmus, Desiderius170, 172173, 176 (Starkey)337
attacks on1819, 442, 449450 Exhortation to Repentance (Perkins)430
Brevissima Institutio274 exhortatory sermons3, 18, 4950, 55, 289
Charles V451 Adams431
concio440 Bancroft321, 335, 337
conversion161165 Erasmus440
early sermons18 Jeremiads422, 425, 429438
Ecclesiastes440, 446 Matthew443444
educational programme design273274 Perkins429430
Enchiridion161163, 164, 165, 170, 172173 Price435
Handbook162163 Stoughton406
humanism161, 170, 176, 440 Exposition of the Creed (Perkins)427428
letters450451 eyes382, 383, 405, 414415
Paraphrases of the New Testament142 Ezekiel103
printed sermons443 Ezekiel 16:49435436
refusal of sermon18
Standish449450 faith104, 120, 134
Erkenwald, shrine for5, 28 covenant theology423
Errorum Parisiis Condemnatorum254 good works18, 436, 437
Essex, Earl of. See Devereux, Robert measuring213, 214
Essexs Rebellion53 works and316
Esther200 Faithful and Plaine Exposition upon the
Ethelred the Unready23, 366 Two First Verses of the Second Chapter of
Eucharist Zephaniah (Perkins)429
Challenge Sermon205206, 211, 214215 Fall423
Cloyne107 fall and redemption348, 352, 360
commemoration142, 206 fallen angels351n23
conscience255 fallen nature120, 124
Hooker256 False Decretals172
purity of214215 false prophets319320, 331332, 333,
real presence124, 142, 185, 191192 334, 339
Sacrifice of the Mass124, 169, 171 famine46, 48, 51
transubstantiation9, 142, 143, 147, 166, Farley, Henry362, 368378, 380
168, 169, 205, 206 Farman, Thomas109n11
under two kinds316 Fasciculi Zizaniorum (Netter)102103
universality206, 211, 256 fasts4142, 46, 143, 146
484 index

Fathers204, 291, 292, 295, 297, 323, 395 on congregation270

Fawkes, Guy353357 on Erasmus translation162n3
Fawkner, Anthony50 Gardiner134, 168
fear296, 297 invited to preach270
federal theology423 knife throwing223
Felicity, feast of114n28 printing complete works243
Fenner, Dudley14, 315, 317, 318 Seymour168
Ferrell, Lori Anne353n32 Richard Smith167n25
Ficino418 Tyndale150, 162n3
fire France, peace treaty with44, 158
bonfires55, 59, 125 Francis I110
cathedral5, 361, 363, 366n30, 367n31 Francis II366
death by198, 416 Frank, Mark14, 219, 322325
Great Fire23, 35, 38, 39, 62, 386, 388 free-standing sermons47, 55
Gunpowder Plot354 free will259
fire of contention405 French Match397, 400, 401, 404, 405,
first and second causes259 406, 407
First Blast of the Trumpet against the friars442
Monstrous Regiment of Women Froude, J.A.451
(Knox)253 Fulke, William291, 299
1 Corinthians158 on harrowing of hell13, 291292,
1 Corinthians 7:5195 293294
1 Corinthians 15:52355 Rheims New Testament
1 Corinthians 1734205206 controversy293
1 John 4319, 332333 Vulgate297
1 Peter449 Fuller, Thomas43n7, 46, 49, 245
1 Peter 5:511115n36
1 Peter 5:6444 Gadarn, Darvell125
1 Timothy 5:17315 Gagger controversy300
Fisher, John Gairdner, James117n43
death of8, 111, 115n36, 444 Gallants Burden (Adams)431, 432
influence in St Johns College114 Gaping Gulf (Stubbe)277
opposition to royal will117 Gardiner, George252
Parable of the Sower178 Gardiner, Stephen45, 154155
printed sermons443 Bale on199
sermon against heretics (1526)7, conflict with Barnes8, 129139, 444
99100, 101, 104105 Cranmer and209210
sermon against Luther (1521)7, 9599, George Joye130
100, 104, 107, 178, 440n3 Henry VIII131132
Fisher, William268 orthodoxy266
Five Members of Parliament322 Smiths retractation149, 167168
Fleming, Abraham286 Garnet, Henry308
folkmoot3132 Garnons, John393, 394
Fool upon foole (Armin)310 Gataker, Thomas300
Forest, John109110, 125, 149150 Gauden, John245
Form of the Good161 Gearing, William400n28
Forty-two Articles142, 257 gender confusion241
foundations35, 36, 6162, 365 generations of reform216217
Foxe, John Genesis 14:1720146147
Actes and Monuments169, 220, 448 Geneva Bible232, 233, 291, 293, 297, 299,
Barnes136, 137 305, 395, 436n40
Book of Martyrs199, 230, 231, 448 Gerrard, Thomas131, 137
Campions Brag283 Gibson, Anthony4849, 50, 51
chronology115, 118n44, 119 Gipkyn, John32, 34, 61, 368
 index485

diptych63, 75, 76, 78, 82, 373377 Greenblatt, Stephen217

Glasier, Hugh143 Green Dragon bookshop240, 243n61
Glasse of the Truthe110 Greenwood, John329
glassmaker365 Gregory97
Globe Theater369 Gresham, Thomas437
glorification256 Grey, Lady Jane159, 250, 257
God: two wills248249 Grindal, Edmund45, 47n26, 47n27, 51, 175,
godliness, sermons on4849 269270, 364
godly prince331. See also royal supremacy Grocers Company12, 263, 264, 268, 282
Gods Gift of Martyrdom (Kolb)139 Grossteste, Robert98
Godwin, Thomas263, 269 Grotius, Hugo394
Gold, Henry114, 126 Gunnes, Gregory (alias Stone)281282
Golden Asse collection240, 241 gunshot268
Golden Rule of the court pulpit407n37 Gunpowder Day sermon (Donne)7, 63, 65
Golding, Arthur238, 239, 240 congregational response to8891, 92
good earth103 liturgical grounding7477
Good Friday123125, 231 text of7071, 7274, 8486
Good, Form of161 Gunpowder Plot1516, 345, 352360
Goodwin, John390 Gurney, John Henry301
good works98, 105, 148 Gurney, Richard322, 324
sign of grace18, 185n52, 436 Gurr, Andrew224, 236
unnecessary134, 138 gutters365
Goshawk in the Sun242n54
Gospels299 halberds267
Gosson, Stephen239, 240, 241242 Hales, John394
Gowrie conspiracy357n47 Hall, Joseph1718
grace104, 255, 256n26, 258260 Hammond, Dr286, 394
covenant theology422, 423, 424 Hampton, William43n7, 46, 47n27, 431
by faith120, 184 Hampton Court conference297
merit and402 Hanson, John308
grammar274275, 283 Happinesse of Peace (Stoughton)389,
Grand Remonstrance322 391, 397
Gratian254 Harcocke, Edmund118
graven images108. See also idolatry Harding, Thomas207, 211, 214, 218219,
Gray, Jordan61n3 220, 233234
Great Bible291 Jewel and272
Great Controversy271, 290. See also Nowell and270
Challenge Sermon Harington, John296, 306307
Great Matter449 Harley, Robert390
Great Fire of 166623, 35, 3839, 62, 388 Harpsfield, Nicholas45
Great St Marys446 Harris, Robert390n3
Greek harrowing of hell146, 289, 291, 293294
Aylmer250 Bilson on13, 295297
Bible text291, 297 translation and299
Campion276 Harsnett, Samuel247n9, 261
Elizabeth305 Hartley, William285
epigrams395 Hart, Vaughan362n4
Erasmus446 Harvard Theological Review423
metanoia163n8 Hatton, Christopher35, 277, 327, 365
prayers303, 304 Haywell, John394
quotations391 Hayward, John46n22
un-translated396 Heal, Felicity218
Wolfe144 hearing, art of234, 242
Greek Maid, A240 Hearne, Thomas280
486 index

Heath, Nicholas113 Hilary of Poitiers134

Hebrew Bible395 Hill, Adam50
Hebrews 7:7147 Hill, David61n3
Hebrews 13:14434 Hilsey, John108109, 117119
Helen (mother of Constantine)200 campaign against idolatry125
Heneage, Thomas35, 36 Easter week sermons122123, 124
Henrician Reformation2, 8, 116, evangelical preaching126
123124, 198 Hincmar, archbishop of Reims172n39
Henri II148, 197 historical analysis205206
Henrietta Maria400, 405 History of Caesar and Pompey242
Henry III2, 32 Holinsheds Chronicles286
Henry VII95, 129 Holland, Earl of. See Rich, Henry
Henry VIII Hollar, Wenceslaus, engravings of23, 26,
Brooks on195, 196 28n3, 29, 30, 35, 37, 38, 61, 64
campaign against Luther107, 155 Holy Blood of Hailes125
changes in religious politics7, 108 Holy Maid of Kent (Elizabeth Barton)8,
critics of195199 112113, 114
desire to control pulpit78, 110 Holy Scriptures163, 172
divorce8, 109113, 158, 196, 197 Holy Spirit
doctrinal orthodoxy165, 175 inspiration of446447
Gardiner131132, 444 in the world9799
inter-school competition under275 descent of146
monastic houses151, 157 gifts of449
Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus130n2 guidance178, 340n35
Persons on197 literal intention399n24
printed sermons during reign442443 Latimer178
reformation216 remembrance415
religious beliefs129130 Whitgift340n35
rule by proclamation251 homeless people386387
St Pauls belfry32 Hooker, Richard
Singleton444 biographies245246
supremacy231, 440 dating of sermon247248, 261
vnspeakable costs443 Elizabethan Settlement318319
Henry, Prince399 Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie249, 341
Herbert, William, Earl of Pembroke35, Puritan crisis of conscience342n40
394 significance12, 261
heresy subject of sermon248249, 256
death penalty89, 142 theological errors248249
destabilization of society101 visible and invisible church428
omission of prayers for dead117118 Hooper, John142, 258
as storm97, 9899 Hopkins, John76n29, 77, 233
heretics47n25 Horne, Robert269
Andreas Osiander338 Hosea 4424, 432
Elizabeth Barton as113 Howard, Lord Admiral Charles46,
execution as126127 280, 302
Hugh Latimer159, 169 Howards arrests132
Nicholas Ridley159, 169 Howard, Thomas (Duke of Norfolk)132
sincerity of98 Howell, Thomas Bayley357
Herod198, 439 Huguenots45, 366
Herodians347 human reason104
Herolt, John445 Humfrey, Laurence263, 265, 269, 272n49,
Hierome254 285
Higgot, Gordon377, 385 Hunt, Arnold219, 234, 428
High Commission390 Hutchinson, William53
 index487

Hus, Jan100 Jardine, David357

Huyssen, Andreas384 Jefferay, Richard50
Hyde, Margaret273 Jena, Germany255n34
hymns233, 301303, 308313 Jenkins, Thomas264
hyperboles255259, 261, 285 Jeremiads18, 4950, 152
covenants and422, 424, 432433,
Icarus352n30 435, 438
iconoclastic destruction8, 37 exhortation421, 425, 429435, 437438
iconography418419 inclusive425
idolatry50, 125, 143, 401, 414 Perkins428430
invisible412, 415, 419 predestination426
idols291 zeal431
ignorance291 Jeremiah 35:1819322
Image of Both Churches (Bale)199 Jeremiah 48:10152
indulgences125 Jerome97, 336
Infanta, Spanish17, 379, 401 Jerome, William131, 137
Ingworth, Richard118n46 Jesuits290
injunctions9, 122, 141142, 146, 150, 183, Campion253, 254, 278280, 290291
265 conspirators355n42
Inns of Court58 Garnet308
institutional conversions165166 Gunpowder Plot355n42
insults and invective317 meditation401402
inter-school competitions273274 mission253, 261, 276, 290291
Invicta Veritas (Abell)109 Persons196
Irenaeus319 Stoughton401402
Irish Rebellion322 Jesus Christ97
irreligion347 blood of136137
Isaac163 descent to hell289, 292, 293294,
Israel 295297, 299
England as215, 216, 221, 424, 429 in the Garden255
God divorcing424, 432 Jairuss daughter and190
and monarchy7374 presence of256n37
relationship to the Church398, 400
Jacob, Henry296 speech of164
Jairuss daughter10, 190, 200 supremacy of116
James 2:1818, 436 traps set for347
James VI and I46 Jewel, John
attendance at sermon379381, 382 anti-Arminian letter394
Bancroft sermon327, 328n4 audience for231233
Barlow352 Challenge Sermon1011, 203206, 211,
Donnes Gunpowder Day sermon7071 214217, 231232, 270, 271, 289
Directions for Preachers56, 299, 397 controversy270, 271
Discourse356357, 359 Defence of the Apologie272
finances385 eloquence of219, 220
Gipkyn diptych373377 Harding233234
Gunpowder Plot352355, 360 influence of216217, 289
peace404 messenger205206, 207, 211, 215
renovation of St Pauls16, 362, 367368, negative method210212
369, 371373, 378, 385, 388 rhetorical devices207210
royal commission384 sermon popularity1
sermon on7374 speaking to diversity213214, 216
statue of38 Jewish cabala98, 405
visit to St Pauls367 Jews, delivery from Europe215
James, Thomas290 John 1:29192n26
488 index

John 11:4546394 knife throwing223, 228

John 15:5192n26 Knollys, William281, 327
John 15:2697 Knowles, Francis280
1 John 4319, 332333 Knox, John175, 250, 253
John Chrysostom319, 445
John of Gaunt, chapel of31 Lady chapel37
John the Baptist164, 440 Lake, Peter224, 230, 236237, 338, 342
Johnson, Craig61n3 Lambeth Palace Library14, 316, 348n7,
Jolles, John368 350n17
Jonadab322, 323 Last Supper147
Jones, Inigo Latimer, Hugh119, 121, 122, 125, 155
Christian IV367n32 bishopric177
James16, 367368, 384385, 388 Colet450
new spire367368 colloquial219
plans for cathedral renovation16 Duchess of Suffolk154, 158, 176n5, 182
portico5, 31, 3536, 37, 38 early sermons18
redecoration30, 31, 38 episcopal reform178181, 183185
restoration under Charles I361, 362 Erasmus450
royal commission384385 heresy159
Jones, John433 nachleben177n10
Jones, Norman185 populism183184
Jonson, Ben437 printed sermons181183, 230, 443,
Josiah7374, 85, 120 447448, 450
Joseph, John43n7, 44, 51, 59 relicensing175
Joye, George130, 133 repetition181
Joy of Jerusalem and the Woe of Worldlings sanitation158
(Loe)434 Sermon on the Ploughers2, 9, 10,
Judas255, 298n28 150154, 156, 447
judges213214 sermons159
Judith200 Shrouds10
Julian the Apostate198, 199 Laud, William322, 387, 388, 390, 433
jure divino episcopacy327 law, moral423
justification104, 184, 256 laws of nature99
justification by faith133135, 136, 138, 142, laws of Old Testament112
148, 167 lay cemetery32
Juxon, William390 Learned Discourse on Justification
(Hooker)256
kairos419 learning, popularity of276
Kempe, Thomas32, 34, 439 Lee, Rowland114n28
Kenricke, John388 Leighton, Edward126
Kett, Robert155 Lenten Sermons
Ketts Rebellion44, 155156 1535444
Kidderminster, Richard107108 1540129139, 444
King James Bible13, 17, 290, 295, 1597295296
297300, 395 Leo X196
King, John8, 16, 50, 63, 219, 230, 362, leprosy320
379, 381384, 385 Letter to the Privy Council
Kings Book356, 357n47, 449 (Campions Brag)283, 291
Kings Printer144, 155 Lever, Thomas9, 155159, 181n30
Kirby, Luke278 Levitical law112
Kirby, Torrance217, 231, 331, 382 LHistoire de la Mort281
Kitching, Christopher364, 366 libel281, 282
Kolb, Robert139 Liber Retractationum libri duo
Knewstubs, John297 (Augustine)147, 170
 index489

liberties of the City2 market for sermons447

Life of Hooker (Walton)12 September Testament199
light, imagery of103, 104, 105 sermon against9599, 178n12
lightning35, 363 Song of Songs399
Limbus Patrum293, 294 Two Kingdoms131
Lincoln Cathedral Library450 writings of100, 155
lining out233 Lutheran7, 100, 102, 104, 105, 132, 134,
listening186 250, 337
literacy4, 1112, 226 Lyly, John310
literal meanings vs. figurative10, 152153, Lyst, Richard110
187195, 200, 395, 398n22, 399
liturgical formats5455 Maas, Korey132, 135
Livery Companies267268 Machyn, Henry1n2, 233, 310
living water163 MacLure, Millar108, 114, 154, 175n4,
Lo-Ammi424, 432 219, 227
Loe, William434, 435 dating of Stoughtons sermon389, 391
logos412, 416 Mark Frank sermon322n12
Londoners284285 on popular voice2
London House3839 preacher identification441
Longland, John99, 119, 443 Register of Sermons2, 4243, 441442,
Look and bow down thine ear, O Lord 450
(Elizabeth I)301302 theatricality235
Lord Mayors Day365 Madox, Richard281
Lords Prayer88 Magdalen College263, 269, 272, 281
Loseby, Thomas273 Mallet, Francis119
lost and found213, 215 Manningham, John352n30
Louvain197, 270, 271272 Marbury, Francis292
Love, Dr393 Marcourt, Antoine de185
Love, Harold306 marginalia109
love, orientation of164 Marian persecutions177, 208
lovesickness400401 burnings285
Love-sick Spouse389392, 395398, Markham, Ben62n6, 80, 85
400406, 408409 Marprelate, Martin251, 320, 333
Lwe, Andreas167 Marprelate tracts315, 318, 328, 333
Lucretius161 Penry329
Ludgate368 marriage255, 277278
Ludgate Hill39 marriage to a brothers widow110112
Luke 8102, 150 Marsh, Christopher233
Luke 9:62178 Marshall, William126
Luke 18:3543102 Martial, John271
Lombard, Peter254 Martin, Gregory13, 290291, 293, 294, 299
lust50 Martinism328329
Luther, Martin martyrs208, 230, 403, 406
allegories187188 Barnes138139
attack on135 Book of Martyrs199, 231, 448
on Barnes139 Bradford and Rogers267
Campion254 Campion280, 284
connections to132 Erasmus and Colet450
conscience331 Latimer448
Erasmus442 Mary I44, 45, 47n25, 51, 142
Fisher7, 9599, 100, 104, 107, 178, 440n3 accession10, 158, 169, 190
Henry VIII196 attacked as woman250251
hyperbole254, 255 Campion284, 287
justification by faith167 clergy of187, 197
490 index

Jewel208, 212 Moab152

London265267 Molen, Andrew390
marriage266 monarchomach doctrine330
Oxford268269 monarchy, sermon on7374
propaganda200 monastic houses, dissolution109110, 151,
reign of165 157, 166, 198, 310
Mary, Queen of Scots57, 58, 307, 366 monastic vows120, 121
Massiglia, James64n7 Montague, Richard300
masonry365 Montrose, Louis412
materiality381 Moore, Jonathan427
Matheson, Peter210 moral and mystery plays236
Matthew 9:18190 moral law112
Matthew 13:2430102 More, Thomas111, 115n36, 117, 195, 198, 200
Matthew 13:4546434 authority of church10
Matthew 16:18116 execution8, 444
Matthew 22:21346347 Londoner284
Matthew 24:28192 Shaw and Richard III440
Matthew, Simon111, 115116, 122, 123125, Standish and Erasmus449450
126, 443444 use of challenge210
Maximilian the Emperor392 Morrissey, Mary57, 183, 218, 223, 237, 268
Mayer, John346 Bancroft328, 334n27
Mayne, Jasper8687 Bilson296
McCaul, D.J.64n7 comparison of passages402
McCullough, Peter68, 70, 310, 380, 397, surviving manuscripts442
404, 407n37 wide audience of St Pauls380
McGiffert, Michael423424, 432 Morwen, John366n30
McGrath, Patrick204 Moses97, 215
McRae, Andrew183184 mouldings31
Melanchthon, Philip176, 258, 337, 338, 339 Mueller, William R.415
Melchiades172n39 Muller, James132
Melchizedek146147 Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus,
Memoranda (Stow)270 Henry VIII130n2
memory413 murder50
mendicants442 murder pamphlets224, 236
Merchant (Price)435 Myrk, John445
Meriall, Thomas118n44
merit402 national covenant422, 423424, 429
Metamorphoses (Ovid)238 National Maritime Museum302
metanoia161162, 163, 164 national pulpit, notion dispelled42
metaphors national warning, sermons of4950
Alexander220 nature, laws of99
battlefield215 naves23, 25, 26, 28
nursing mother192 dilapidation382
raising Jairuss daughter190 facsimile5
sheep213 Holy Communion and142
storm97, 99 Pauls Walk12, 237, 238, 417
trees9798 print marketplace within237
Midlands revolt358 secular activities367
Midsummer Nights Dream241 Winchester27
Miller, Perry421422 Wren5, 31
Milles, Robert50, 435437 Nazianzen, Gregory319, 336
Milton, Anthony393 Nebo152
Milton, John317 Nebuchadnezzar198
Mirandola, Pico della161, 163 negative method210212
 index491

Neo-Platonist thought418 orthodoxy258259

Nero347 Osiander, Andreas338
Netter, Thomas102103 Osmond, Rosalie416
Neville, Henry281 Othello (character)241
New College, Oxford269, 270, 271, 272, otherness413
282283, 290 Overall, John394
New England421422 Ovid238, 240
New England Mind (Miller)422 Owst, G.R.441
Newes from Rome (Campion)265 Oxenbridge, John306
New Learning170 Oxford
News from Spain (Persons)197 Bilson290
New Testament154, 189 Bodleian Library290, 391
English232 Brooks187, 191
glosses193 Campion253, 263, 264, 278, 284,
Rheims13, 289291, 292, 299 285, 287
New Work5, 2831 clerical vestments268269
Nicene Creed337 disputations12, 284
Nicholas of Cusa172 Edgeworth448, 449
Nicholls, Mark353n32, 357 Gunnes281282
Ninety-five Theses155 Hooker247n9, 247n10
Nineveh431, 433 Jewel204, 272
Ninevites156 Leighton126
Noahs flood354 Martin290
non-conformity318, 320, 331, 389391, New College269, 270, 271, 272,
392393, 443 282283, 290
Norden, John32, 306 preaching at9
Norfolk, Duke of (Thomas Howard)132 Rainoldes48
Northern Rebellion307 Ridley159
Norton, William264 Smith143144, 145n13, 146, 147, 158, 159,
Norwich cathedral, belfry32 164165, 169
Notary, Julian445 St Johns College263, 290, 393, 437
Nowell, Alexander204, 220, 270, 272 theologians from18, 108, 268, 282
disputation with Campion275276, translators299
285286 Vermigli204, 250
Oxford, Earl of (Edward de Vere)309310,
Oates, Rosamund206 312313
Oath of Supremacy169
Obedience of a Christian Man Pace, Richard95, 96
(Tyndale)187188 Page, William278
obedience9, 214, 319, 321, 323, 333, 348, Painter, William1112, 238239, 240, 241
349 Palace of Pleasure (Painter)1112, 238, 240
Office of Morning Prayer7475 Palatinate401, 402, 404
Of Schooles and Houses of Learning Palmer, John303
(Stow)274275 pamphlets
Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie Anne Boleyn121
(Hooker)249, 261, 319, 341 Bacon15, 350, 352
Old Testament156, 179 Counter-Reformation366
Omnis homo mendax144145, 149, 167, 173 early modern murder pamphlets225
ONeill, Hugh (Earl of Tyrone)350 Elizabeth I302303
optics98 Farley368377
Oration on the Dignity of Man Gunpowder Plot345, 356357
(Mirandola)161 Lake225, 236237
ordination264 papists, execution of126127
Origen98, 194195 Parable of the Sower150, 177178
492 index

Parable of the Wicked Mammon Percy, Henry (Earl of

(Tyndale)158 Northumberland)355n42
paradoxes255, 258 performative mode411412
Paraphrases of the New Testament Perkins, Williams427428
(Erasmus)142 Perpendicular style29
Pardon Cloister31, 35 Perpetua, feast of114n28
Parker, Matthew2, 108n7, 158, 175, 269, Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect
333n26, 449 (Hooker)256
Parker, Patricia359 perseverance255
Parker, William (Lord Monteagle)358 Persons, Robert196197, 285
Parsons, Robert347 persuasion, defining59
Passion of Christ124125, 142, 146 Peryn, William443
Paternoster Row34 Peter, St97
patristic authority218 1 Peter449
Paul 1 Peter 5:511115n36
call of255 1 Peter 5:6444
on communion205206 Peter College227
connected to English church221 petitionary worship47, 50, 52n49, 55
made a spectacle279280 Pettegree, Andrew216
purity of Eucharist214 Petyt, Thomas145n14, 265
Paul III198 Phaedrus (Plato)161
Pauls Boys76, 311 phainomena163
Pauls Cross phantasia161, 163, 170, 172173
acoustic modelling61, 6264, 65, Pharisees347
7781, 226n9, 228 Philip of Spain47n25, 158, 266
architecture45 Philistines163
booksellers228 philosophia Christi161
Church of St Faith177n11 pica roman286
connection to belfry and folkmoot32 Piers, John13, 309, 313
damage and repair32, 34 Piers Plowman (character)150, 151
octagonal shape34 pigeons of Pauls275
visual model6162 Pigg, Oliver59
Pauls Cross and accountability218 pigs, Anthony275
Pauls Cross sermons Pilgrimage of Grace121n54, 122
attendance at67 pilgrimages120, 141
organization of66 Pilkington, James363, 364, 366n30
requirement of252 plague45, 46, 49, 50, 5152, 53, 243n61, 366
Pauls Cross Sermons, 15341642 Plantin, Christopher284
(MacLure)441 Plato161162, 418
Pauls, Peter441 play-going condemned236, 241, 243
Pauls Walk12, 237, 238, 417 Plays Confuted in Five Actions
Pauls work: colloquial meaning361, (Gosson)239
385, 386 pleasure reading237239, 241, 243
peace Pliny the Younger163
blessing403404 Plotinus418
dangers of401 plowman10, 150, 151, 153154, 175176,
pearl of great price434, 437 178180
Pelagian controversy256n36 Pluckett, Oliver282
Pembroke Hall14 Plutarch349
penance41, 418 Pole, Geoffrey120
Pendleton, Henry268, 273 Pole, Reginald10, 197, 198
Penrose, Francis34 polemic1415, 196, 197, 200, 206207, 234
Penry, John1415, 327, 329, 332, Bibles290
338340, 340342 Bilson289
Pensive Mans Practise (Norden)306 necessity of answering209210
 index493

not mere rhetoric328n6 Psalm 18:50353

political obedience116117 Psalm 20346
political sermons Psalm 82346
defining5152, 58, 115117 Psalm 84 (85)316
Directions for Preachers56, 299, 397 Psalm 84:1393
pope Psalm 102381
as Antichrist119 Psalm 116:11 (Vulg. Ps. 115:2)144, 167
Bishop of Rome111, 116, 124, 180 Psalms, singing of1, 7677, 232233, 312
head of universal church203, 211 public sphere16
Matthews sermon against123, 124 Purfoot, Thomas305
supremacy of97, 272n50 purgatory136137, 142, 154, 206, 292294
portico5, 31, 3536, 37, 38 Puritanism159
Portland stone385, 386 anti-popery and289, 292
Portland Stone in Pauls Churchyard Bancroft328330
(Farley)368 crisis of conscience342n40
Prayer Book Rebellion142 descent into hell293294
prayers, Elizabeth301307 epistemological authority340342
prayers for the dead117118, 120, 136137, false prophets334
157, 185n52 false reform317
Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth revolutionary impulse330
and Sixteenth Centuries (Blench)441 royal supremacy329330; 340342
Preaching in Medieval England (Owst)441 Scripture336
Precationes priuat[] Regi E. R.304305 sedition328330, 331, 333, 335
Precatio Reginae ad Dominum Iesum Pynson, Richard155
(Elizabeth I)306 Pyramus and Thisbe240
Precatio Reginae pro Subditis
(Elizabeth I)306 Queen Elizabeths Prayer Book
predestination248249, 254, 256257, (Palmer)303
258261, 421, 426, 428 Queen of Ethiopia240
prelates150151 quietism338
Presbyterians328n4, 330 Quintilian163164
Preston, John427
Price, Daniel434, 435, 437 rack286
Price, Sampson50, 433 rain, heavy48, 50
pride349, 351 Rainoldes, John48, 247n11, 297
printed material, ready availability223, Ramsey, Henry273
226, 230232, 234235, 236, 237, 445 Ramsey, William31
priory of Holy Trinity, Aldgate110 Rastell, John214
Privy Council (Charles I)42n5 Rationes Decem (Campions Brag)283,
Privy Council (Edward VI)165 291, 292
Privy Council (Elizabeth I)53, 277278, Rattigan, Ian64n7
282, 283, 285 Rawlinson, James403
Privy Council (Mary I)267, 268 reading, pleasure237238
Probie, Peter387388 real presence124, 142, 185, 191192
Proclamation of War from the Lord of Hosts rebellions of 154959
(Hampton)431 recantation41, vs. retractation147
Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione Rechabites322, 323
(Pole)197 reconciliation to Rome10, 45, 190191, 200
profanity50 recording studios6364
progression414 redemption348, 352, 360
prophecy205 Red Lion theatre224, 235, 239
prophetic sermons4950, 5152, 57, 58. Reformations, multiple141, 166
See also Jeremiads loss of symbols413
prudence100 reform, continental schools of184185,
Psalm 16293, 299 216, 219
494 index

Reformed Catholike (Perkins)428 Romeo and Juliet224, 241

Register of Sermons Preached at Pauls Rood of Grace125
Cross 15341642 (MacLure)3, 4243, roof363, 365
441442 rose windows5, 28, 29, 30, 417
Regius Professorship of Divinity9, 143, Rotherham, Thomas445
158, 164, 169, 285 Royal Injunctions9, 122, 141142, 146,
Regnans in Excelsis (papal bull, 1570)253 150, 183, 265
relics141 royal prerogative328, 340
religious identity not a given3 royal supremacy
religious reform, Erasmus on161163 Act of Supremacy115n33, 171, 258259,
remnant426, 438 441442
renovation cross-purposes to445
Elizabethan period362 Forests denial149
Jacobean period362 Gardiners defense of131, 168
repentance4748, 51, 429n22, 431, 432 Harcocke118
call to179 Hooker251
means and motives433434 Jewel219
repetition234 Latimer149
Republic (Plato)161 Lever156
Restoration324 no reconciliation with Rome119120
Retourne of James Cancellers raylinge boke Penry329330
(Bale)187, 199 Pilgrimage of Grace122
retractation vs. recantation147 preaching of114116
Revelation 2433 Puritanism15, 328, 329330, 332,
Revelation 12:4355 340342
Revelation, book of199, 299 royal agenda121, 122
Revell, Jon365n21 Smiths support of146, 171172
Rheims Bible316 unequal versions331
Rheims New Testament289291, 293, Rudd, John113114
294, 299 Rudolf II284, 287
rhetorical devices190191, 207, 430 Russell, Henry264
Bancroft328n6 Russell, John155
challenge208210, 217 Ryrie, Alec444
misused242
Rhodes, John301, 307, 312, 313 Sabbath, play going236
rhyming prose151 Sacks, Chelsea61n3
Richard III107, 439440 sacramentarianism138
Richardson, John347 sacraments155, 205
Rich, Henry (Earl of Holland)390, 391, covenant of grace428
394395, 401, 404 deficiencies in316
Ridley, Nicholas143, 158, 159, 169, 321, 445 individual participation206
Ridley, Robert445 right use of212
rituals142143, 162, 170171, 172173, 412, Sacred Oracles163
418 Sacrifice of the Mass124, 171. See also
Robertson, James378 Eucharist; transubstantiation
Robinson, Robert306 St Albans Abbey25, 28
Rogers, John267 archdeaconry53
Romans 1:14393 St Andrews Holborne282
Romans 3:4167 St-Denis (Paris)29
Romans 13332n21, 333 St Dunstans Church311
Romans 14:5255n33 St-Etienne (Caen)25
Rome St Faith, Church of177n11
Break with8, 57, 119 St James (Compostella)28
reconciliation to10, 45, 190191, 200 St Johns College263, 290, 437
 index495

St Johns College Chapel393 Sermones ad vulgum (Standish)449

St Margarets Old Fish Street269 sermon-gadding56
St Margarets Pattens269 A Sermon of Christ Crucified (Foxe)231
St Martin-in-the-Fields395 Sermon on Behalf of Pauls Church
St Marys Hospital (Spital)17, 122, 273, 296 (King)16
St Pauls Cathedral, images Sermon on the Ploughers (Latimer)2, 9, 10,
booksellers228 150154, 156, 175176, 177, 447
exterior24, 31, 33, 37, 227 sermons
virtual229 congregational response to6870,
St Pauls Cathedral, nature of364, 367 8891, 101, 269270, 277
St Quentin45 congregational size66n13, 7880
saints, stories of445 control over56, 237
St-Sernin (Toulouse)28 Donnes preparation of6768, 7172
Salcot, John (Capon)109, 112113, 114, 119 Easter sermons272273, 296297
Salisbury cathedral, belfry32 funds for251252
Salisbury, Earl of. See Cecil, Robert integrated into special worship5455
Sampson, Charles265, 269 liturgical grounding7477
Sampson, Richard123, 137 market for445, 447448
Sancroft, William394 marriage to a brothers wife110
sanctification256 of national warning4950
Sander, Nicholas270271 parishes5254, 58
Sandys, Edwin57 print genre442443, 445
Saxon kings23, 28 purpose of4452
Schofield, John64, 177n11, 368n33 register of4243
scholarships263, 268, 282 similarity to theater6970
schooling309310 structures of9799, 102104, 105
Schoolmaster, The (Ascham)238 Temple Sermons247
Schreiner, Susan331, 333 timing of8186
Scory, John108n7 Sermons very fruitfull, godly and learned
Scotland328, 329 (Edgeworth)448449
Scott, Cuthbert443 Several Sermons preached to the people
Scottish Presbyterian Church328n4 (Standish)449
scribal publishers306307 Seymour, Edward (Protector Somerset)35,
scriptural integrity316 141, 149, 156, 158, 167168
scripture, infallibility170 Shakespeare, William70, 239, 240, 241,
moral vs. literal meaning10, 187189, 243, 351n23
190, 194195, 200 Shami, Jeanne7071, 87
reading186, 335336 shared memories invoked9596
vernacular211 Shaw, Henry264
Sebastian415 Shaw, Ralph107, 439440
Sebba23 Shaxton, Nicholas108n7, 119
second and first causes259 sheep213
2 Timothy 3:16178 Sherringtons library31
sedition, accusations of328330, 331, 333, Short-Title Catalogue303, 441
335. See also treason shrines120
seeds103, 150 Shrouds155, 177, 447
self-awareness217 Sibthorpe, Robert44
Selve, Odet de148149 Sidney, Phillip239, 242
Seneca347 sign (signum)9
sentence fragments7274 Simons, Dr or Mr See Matthew,
Sententi305 Simon
separatism329330 Simpson, Sydrach390
September Testament (Luther)199 sincerity insufficient98
Seres, William154, 181182, 238239 Singleton, Robert120121, 231, 444, 450
496 index

sins spire5, 363, 365, 367368, 373

blotting away255 spiritual death190
dissuasion of neighbors435436 Spital (St Marys Hospital)17, 122, 272273,
God as author of255, 258260 296, 310, 398n23
sermons on4849 square cap443n18
what constitutes sin50, 51 Stafford, George176
Sisson, C.J.247n7 Standish, Henry449450
site of persuasion, shift in5254, 56 Standysshe, John (Standish)138
use by crown5758 Stanley, Agnes273
Six Articles89, 126, 130, 138, 142, 150 Stanwood, Paul69
Skelton, John189 Stapleton, Nicholas214
smallpox47, 304305 Star Chamber378
smells65n10 Starkey, Thomas337
Smith, Bruce R.226n9 stationers34
Smithfield444 Stationers Company227, 232, 237, 380
Smith, Miles298 Stationers Register302, 305, 306
Smith, Richard (also Smyth)9, 143149, statuary29, 38
155, 158, 159 steeple363, 367368, 278
argument of retractation910, 169173 Stephens, Joshua61n3
history of allegiance164169 Stern, Tiffany82
patristic authority218 Sternhold, Thomas76n29, 77, 233
social imaginary105106 Stevenson, Kenneth W.322
Sodom433 Stock, Richard292
Sodomites156 Stokesley, John108109, 110111, 116,
sodomy50 117120, 125, 449
sola fides98 Convocation (1536)121122
sola scriptura98, 145, 146, 172, 188 Stone, Gregory (Gregory Gunnes)281282
solefidianism436 Stonley, Richard279
Solomon167 Story of Samson239240
Some, Thomas154 Stoughton, John
Somerset285 date of sermon391
Somerset, Protector. See Seymour, Edward Happinesse of Peace389, 391, 397,
Song of Songs397400, 403 404407
soundscapes226n9 Love-sick Spouse1617, 389, 390392,
Spain, war with392 395398, 400404, 405406, 408409
Spanish Armada, defeat of45, 59, 301, 366 nonconformity390
hymn13, 301302, 306308 text of sermon395397
petitionary prayers in response to56 Stourbridge Fair429n22
Spanish Infanta17, 379, 401 Stow, John175n4, 270, 272, 274275,
Spanish Match 309, 311
Charles17, 395, 397, 401, 403, 404 Annales379
Mary51, 57, 285 Strafford. See Wentworth, Thomas
Sparks, Thomas297 Strasbourg185, 204, 250
speaking, emphasis in school273274 Strype, John204, 250, 251, 327n2
special worship Stuarts362, 378, 388, 399
announcements of4647 Stubbe, John277278, 284
defined4142 Stubbs, John416417
free standing47 submission to authority318
instrument of control56 Submission of the Clergy171
key themes of48 succession347
parish church59 Summa Totius Theologi (Aquinas)284
prefaces for56 Supplication to Henry VIII (Barnes)100
sermons integrated into5455 surplice443n18
Spinke, Richard393 Sutton, Dana357n47
 index497

Sutton, Thomas433 chapel275276, 286

Swan, the273 disputations275, 279, 281, 285, 286
swearing50 executions279
syllogisms274, 282 imprisonment in109n11, 150, 355n42
symbolic signification193 Latimers release from175
Synod of Gerstungen172n39 Queens Council267
Townsend, Roger118n46
Taylor, Charles105106 Toye, Humphrey264, 265
Taylor, Thomas390n3 Toye, Robert265
Te Deum45, 59, 75 traditions162, 170171, 172, 299
Temple Bar379380 tragicomedy357358, 360
Temple controversy248 Traheron, Bartholomew257258
Temple Sermons247 transepts25, 30, 31, 34
temporality of space383384 acoustics80, 230
Ten Commandments136, 422, 423, fallen35
425, 439 fire363
Tertullian195, 254, 297, 319, 334, 336 rebuilt28, 365
thanksgivings4142, 4546, 47, 53 translations: rules for298299
actions55, 59 transubstantiation9, 142, 143, 147, 166
Elizabeths recovery from smallpox47 Gardiner on168, 169
end of plague54 Jewel205, 206
not ordered52n49 Travelling Fellowships264
Spanish Armada defeat45, 59, 366 Travers, Walter246, 248, 250, 256
spread to other parishes5254 treason347, 351. See also sedition,
Theatre224, 235, 239, 240, 242 accusations of
theatre, likened to sermons6970, Treason Act278, 283
411412, 417 Treatise of three conversions of England
trumpets244 (Persons)196197
thing signified (res)9 Treatise on the Penitential Psalm
things indifferent255n33, 330331, (Fisher)95
332n21, 333n26, 340n35. See also Treaty of Boulogne44, 158
adiaphora tree, analogy9798
Thirty Years War433 Trinity, Holy138, 146
Thomas Aquinas Trinity College, Cambridge391, 397, 404
biblical exegesis187 tropes194
errors of254 True Difference between Christian
feast of114n28 subjection and Unchristian Rebellion
Summa284 (Bilson)13, 294
Thomas of Canterbury114n28, 197, 284 trumpets244
Thompson, Cargill327n3, 333 try the spirits333, 334, 335, 336, 338
three-fold orders of ministry321 Tuan, Yi-Fu383, 388
Thyrtell, Thomas273 Tudor authority42n3
timber364, 365 Tudor-Craig, Pamela368n37, 373n51, 377
time, during sermons8186 Tunstall, Cuthbert3, 119, 120
timeliness382, 384 Turner, William199, 450
Timoclea of Thebes240 Two Kingdoms131
1 Timothy 5:17315 Tyburn278, 279, 281, 285, 286
2 Timothy 3:16178 Tyndale, William150, 152, 154, 158
Titus 3333 challenge by More210
Titus 3:1214, 318 in conversation with Brooks191
toleration of religion401 literal vs. figurative reading10, 187188,
tombs35 192, 194, 195, 200
Tottel, Richard238 Obedience of a Christian Man187188
Tower of London translation of Erasmus162
498 index

Tyndales New Testament100, 115n36 visible church213, 421, 424, 426427,

type286, 369 430, 438
Typographus305 Viterbo, Egidio da412
Tyrone, Earl of (Hugh ONeill)350 voussoir2527
Vulgate91, 192, 290, 297
Udall, Nicholas162
uniformity339 Wabuda, Susan117, 178, 182, 185n52
universal church203, 205, 206, Wall, John67, 228, 229, 312
215216, 220221, 317 Walsham, Alexandra217
University Church of St Mary the Walsingham, Francis305
Virgin, Oxford253 Walton, Izaak12, 7172, 86, 245246,
University of Louvain169 248, 249, 261
University of Oxford448 Walzer, Michael330
University of Turin446 Ward, Samuuel394
unwritten tradition145 war, sermons on46, 48, 51
urban renewal378379 Wars of the Roses129
water gate386
Valens188 Watson, Thomas267
Valla, Lorenzo172, 445 weather
Vallence, Edward425n9 historical62n5, 65
Variae Meditationes et sermons on48, 50
Preces piae305306 weeds102103, 105
Veale, Abraham241 Wells Cathedral448
verbosity317318 Wentworth, Thomas322
Vere, Edward de (Earl of Oxford)309310, Westcott, Sebastian311
312313 Western Rebellion44, 155156
verger74, 75 Westminster Abbey: 235, 362n4
Vermigli belfry32
Aylmer250, 257 Campion278, 283, 284, 285, 286
Bancroft321 Dead Terme (Dekker) 368n36
Cranmer43n8 discourse278, 286, 287
Hooker250, 257 fasts46
Jewel1, 204, 213, 231, 232 post-Reformation monuments5
Latimer185 Regius Professorship of Divinity143n7
prayer book criticism142 royal associations2, 28, 35, 366
Regius Professorship9, 158, 169 St Pauls preeminence362n4
Smith158, 169 tombs35
vernacular141, 275276, 285 Westminster Hall284, 285, 286
vernacular Bible203, 211, 290 Whitaker, William285
Vestiarian Controversy291, Whitbie, Oliver5152
333n26, 443 White, Edward307n16
vestments217, 269, 291 White, John263 (1568)
via media204, 219, 335 White, Thomas5152, 243n61, 268, 437
Villiers, George386 (1554)
Viner, John390 Whitebrook, J.C.391, 404
Viret, Pierre154, 185 Whitgift, John
virginity255 adiaphora331, 332n21, 333n26, 340n35
Virgin Mary153, 298 Answere to the Admonition330
Virtual Pauls Cross authoritative interpretation332n21
acoustic modelling67, 61, 6264, Barlow348n7
65, 7781, 228 Bible translation297
design of6165 Cartwright333n26, 340n35
preachers location312 Disciplinarian Puritanism2
visual model6162 Harsnett censored256257
 index499

Marprelate tracts315 Word, power of416

publication of Elizabeths Worde, Wynkyn de7, 9596, 445
prayer302303, 306 works98, 316
special worship48, 54 confusion over184185
submission14, 318319 covenant theology423, 424
Temple controversy249 good works18, 98, 105, 148, 436
thanksgiving sermon46 necessary vs. voluntary184
Titus14 unnecessary134, 138
tradition322 Woudhuysen, Henry303
Whit Monday269 Wren, Christopher
Whitsunday415 St Pauls Cathedral5, 35, 61
Whittington, Robert443 choir34
Whore of Babylon199200, 405 dome363
Wigglesworth, Michael422 measurements by61
Wiggs, William264 nave5, 31
William of Merula445 office of31
Williams, Griffith430 Temple Bar380
Williams, John393 Wriothesley, Charles115, 125,
William the Conqueror28 148, 171
Willis, Francis264 Wriothesley, Henry (Earl of
Willoughby, Lady307 Southampton)350
Windet, John306 Wycliffe, John107
Wise-mans Forecast (Barnes)433
Wittenberg185 York House386
Wolfe, Reginald143144 Young, John273
Wolsey, Thomas96, 99, 100, 107, 132,
165, 166 Zaccheus406
women Zedekiah7374, 85
profanation of Sacrament339 Zurich1, 185, 204, 250, 261
spiritual jurisdiction250251 Zwingli, Huldrych100, 261