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A Poem on the Archbishop's Hearse: Puritanism, Libel, and Sedition after the Hampton Court Conference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Alastair Bellany
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Extract

Late in March 1604, as his biographer John Strype records, Archbishop John Whitgift's “Corps was carried to Croydon … and there honourably interred in the Parish-Church … with a decent Solemnity.” Sir George Paule concurred, noting that the “Funerall was very honourably (as befitted his place) solemnized.” The funeral's honor, decency, and solemnity were somewhat marred, however, for among those laudatory elegies and epitaphs traditionally placed upon hearses, some audacious soul had contrived to pin a far from complimentary piece of doggerel. Entitled “The Lamentation of Dickie for the Death of his Brother Jockie”—Jockie being Whitgift and Dickie his successor as archbishop, Richard Bancroft—the poem was a vicious tirade against the late archbishop and his policies. The fullest extant copy survives in a collection of political papers once owned by the Kentishman Sir Peter Manwood:

      The prelats pope, the canonists hope,
      The Cortyers oracle, virginities spectacle,
      Reformers hinderer, trew pastors slanderer,
      The papists broker, the Atheists Cloker
      The ceremonyes procter, the latyn docter
      The dumb doggs patron, non resid[e]ns champion
      A well a daye is dead & gone,
      and Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.
      Prelats relent, Cortyers lament
      Papiste bee sadd, Athiests runn madd
      Grone formalists, mone pluralists
      frowne ye docters, mourne yee Procters
      Begge Registers, starve parators
      scowle ye summoners, howle yee songsters
      Your great Patron is dead & gone,
      & Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.
      Popishe Ambition[,] vaine superstition,
      coulured conformity[,] canckared envye,
      Cunninge hipocrisie[,] faigned simplicity,
      masked ympiety, servile flatterye,
      Goe all daunce about his hearse,
      & for his dirge chant this verse
      Our great patron is dead and gone,
      & Jhockey hath left dumb dickey alone.
      Yf store of mourners yet there lacke
      lett Croyden coull[i]ers bee more blacke
      And for a Cophin take a sacke
      bearing the corpes upon their backe
      dickye more blacke then any one
      as chief mourner may marche alone
      Singinge this requiem Jhocky is gone,
      & dickye hopes to play Jhocky alone
      holla dickye bee not so bould,
      to woulve yt in Cheif Jhesis fould
      as yf to hell thy Soule weare sould,
      lest as Jhocky was oft foretould
      If thou a persecutor stand,
      God likewise strike thee wth his hand:
      A-rankinge thee in the bloudy band
      of ravening cleargie woolves in the land.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , April 1995 , pp. 137 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1995

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References

1 Strype, John, The Life and Acts of The Most Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift (London, 1718), p. 579Google Scholar; SirPaule, George, The Life of the Most Reverend and Religious Prelate John Whitgift, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1612), p. 93Google Scholar. Paule was comptroller of Whitgift's household.

2 Les Reportes Del Cases in Camera Stellata (1593–1609) From the Original MS. of John Hawarde, ed. Baildon, William Paley (London, 1894), p. 223Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Hawarde, Les Reportes). I am grateful to Steve Jablonski for drawing my attention to the custom of placing epitaphs on hearses.

3 British Library (BL), Additional MS 38139, fol. 58r; summoners and “parators” (apparitors) were officials of the ecclesiastical courts. I have amended the text of the poem in a couple of places to make sense of what seem to be Manwood's transcription errors.

4 Ibid.; Hawarde, (Les Reportes, p. 223)Google Scholar recorded a variant of the first verse:

The prelate spoke. The Cananites hope.
Masked impietie, Cunninge hipocrisie,
Prelates' pope, Jesuites hope,
Papistes' broker Atheistes Cloker,
Latin Doctor, Devill's Proctor,
Dum dog's patron, Non residentes' Champion
Oure reformers' sclaunderer, True pastors' punisher,
Colored Conformitie, Vaine superstition,
Olde virgin's spectacle
Jockie is dead & gone,
And Dum Dickie is lefte alone.

Another variant of the first verse was recorded by the second earl of Clare in his commonplace book as “A libell of Bancroft Bishop of Canterbury” (BL, Harley MS 6383, fol. 71). Strype (pp. 579–80), and Edward Coke's report on the case, describes the poem as an attack on both Whitgift and Bancroft. Although Bancroft was obviously attacked in the verse, it is important to note that the surviving evidence suggests that the prosecution of the poem's alleged author concentrated nearly exclusively on the libel of Whitgift. I am grateful to Thomas Cogswell for the reference to the earl of Clare's copy.

5 For reasons I hope will become obvious, I will avoid using the term “libel” to describe this particular poem.

6 See Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967Google Scholar; reprint, Oxford, 1990), passim. The phrase is taken from the title of pt. 1, chap. 2.

7 This is not to deny the existence of any such antagonism, or to dismiss the possibility that many of the godly would have found the combination of Puritan reformism and popular mocking song inherently unnerving—Cartwright, after all, heartily disapproved of the earthy Marprelate—but rather to suggest that more nuance is required. We still need to explain, for instance, the resurgence of Marprelate-like Puritan polemic in 1640. One of the most eloquent formulations of the antagonism thesis can be found in Collinson, Patrick, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading, 1986)Google Scholar. Some modifications are made by Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar.

8 Hawarde, , Les Reportes, p. 223Google Scholar. Hawarde describes Bywater as “sometimes a minister but now deposed.” See too “The Anatomye of Thomas Bywater and how he becam puritan,” a report compiled by Edward Coke from Bywater's interrogation, Hatfield House MSS, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, Cecil Papers 103, fol. 142r. The “anatomy” attributes Bywater's drift into radical Puritanism as the result of career frustration. For the links to Sheffield and Hundson, see Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), Salisbury MSS, 17:83, 108–9Google Scholar. Hawarde dates the delivery of the tract to March 11, but James Montagu reported the presentation of the work in a letter to Archbishop Bancroft on February 23, while the earl of Worcester mentioned it in his letter of February 25 to the Privy Council (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:65, 70Google Scholar).

9 For this Puritan pressure campaign, and for an important, different take on the religious climate at this time, see Quintrell, B. W., “The Royal Hunt and the Puritans, 1604–1605,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31, no. 1 (1980): 41–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For the book, see the deposition of Richard Boyle, March 4, 1605, HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:82Google Scholar.

11 HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:65Google Scholar; Hawarde, , Les Reportes, p. 224Google Scholar, summarizes some of the arguments of the book; Coke's notes on what is probably the tract in question can be found in Public Record Office, State Papers Domestic, 14/11/46.

12 Hawarde, , Les Reportes (n. 2 above), p. 223Google Scholar; HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:83Google Scholar.

13 Alumni Cantabrigiensis, comp. Venn, John and Venn, J. A. (Cambridge, 1924), 3, pt. 1:359Google Scholar.

14 Sheils, W. J., The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, 1558–1610, Northamptonshire Record Society, vol. 30 (Northampton, 1979), pp. 111, n. 29, 115, 117Google Scholar.

15 Hatfleld House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 18 (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:620Google Scholar).

16 Ibid.

17 Collinson, Patrick, Elizabethan Puritan Movement (n. 6 above), pp. 450–52Google Scholar, and “The Jacobean Religious Settlement: The Hampton Court Conference,” in Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government, ed. Tomlinson, Howard (New York, 1983), p. 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Usher, Roland G., The Reconstruction of the English Church (New York and London, 1910), 1:294Google Scholar.

18 “A Copie of a Letter from a faithfull brother 8 of December 1603,” in BL, Sloane MS 271 (Letters and Petitions collected by Robert Smart, Minister at Preston Capes, Northants.), fol. 23r; Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 101, fol. 160r–v (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 15:262Google Scholar). I am grateful to Richard Cust for referring me to the Smart collection.

19 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 190, fol. 2r (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 16:258Google Scholar).

20 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 18 (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:621)Google Scholar; BL, Sloane MS 271, fol. 23r–v. The description of the clash is rather allusive: Cecil appears to have accused Pickering of criticizing the king while trying to keep the impropriation scheme on track. Collinson, (Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 451Google Scholar, and “Jacobean Religious Settlement,” p. 33), following in part the testimony of Whitgift, attributes the impropriations scheme to Galloway.

21 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 18 (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:621Google Scholar); HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:114Google Scholar.

22 Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, “The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I,” Journal of British Studies 24 (April 1985): 169–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 171. The argument of this article is reproduced and chronologically extended in Fincham, and Lake, , “The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Fincham, Kenneth (London, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Ibid., pp. 183–86.

24 Ibid., p. 175; Fincham, Kenneth, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), p. 214Google Scholar.

25 Fincham, and Lake, , “Ecclesiastical Policy,” p. 171Google Scholar and passim, on the mutability of the terms of the debate. On the avant-garde, see Lake, Peter, “Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Peck, Linda Levy (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 113–33Google Scholar.

26 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 188, fol. 99r (transcribed and modernized in HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:114Google Scholar, from which I quote). Coke's belief that only a “scholar” could have written the libel is a puzzling one.

27 HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:123Google Scholar.

28 For Cecil's rather ambiguous response to the 1604–5 disputes, see Croft, Pauline, “The Religion of Robert Cecil,” Historical Journal 34, no. 4 (1991): 773–96, esp. 774–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 This combination of generalized assertion and technical, legalistic quibbling was common Puritan practice during the often heated debates within the Elizabethan church. I am grateful to Peter Lake for this point.

30 The Letters of Sir Francis Hastings, 1574–1609, ed. Cross, Claire, Somerset Record Society, vol. 69 (Frome, 1969), pp. 89, 90–92Google Scholar.

31 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 114, fol. 108v (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17: 125–26Google Scholar).

32 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Paper 192, fol. 11r (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:271Google Scholar). I take this phrase to refer to the Puritans, but it is not totally clear in the manuscript to whom it refers.

33 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 114, fol. 110r (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:619Google Scholar); Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 18 (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:621Google Scholar).

34 See, e.g., Hunt, William, “The Spectral Origins of the English Revolution,” in Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill, ed. Hunt, William and Eley, Geoff (London, 1988)Google Scholar. Thomas Scott's 1624 pamphlet Vox Dei is a good example of a Puritan loyalist work rife with the potential for opposition.

35 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 14r (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:623Google Scholar). If the Puritans became martyrs and a Protestant king their persecutor, it was possible that the Foxean tradition which had done so much to unite English Protestants might become a site of contest—and a cause of conflict—between them.

36 Hawarde, , Les Reportes (n. 2 above), pp. 224–25Google Scholar.

37 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 18 (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:621Google Scholar).

38 See Fincham, and Lake, , “Ecclesiastical Policy” (n. 22 above), p. 183Google Scholar; Lake, Peter, “The Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31, no. 2 (1980): 161–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, among other works.

39 Hawarde, , Les Reportes, p. 188Google Scholar.

40 Ibid., p. 225.

41 Chancellor Ellesmere claimed that Coke's report on the case was the definitive statement of the law of seditious libel (BL, Stowe MS 422, fol. 118v). See too Hudson, William, “A Treatise of Star Chamber” (written ca. 1621 and circulated in manuscript), in Collectanea Juridica, ed. Hargrave, F. (London, 1792), 2:103Google Scholar. The report was invoked during the libel trial of the seven bishops in 1688 (Speck, W. A., Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 [Oxford, 1988], pp. 151–52)Google Scholar. The report has been much studied, but not, as far as I know, in the context of the ecclesiastical politics of the Pickering case.

42 “The Epistle,” in The Marprelate Tracts, 1588,1589, ed. Pierce, William (London, 1911), p. 81Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Marprelate Tracts); The Works of John Whitgift, ed. Ayre, John, Society, Parker (Cambridge, 1853), 3:518 ffGoogle Scholar. Hudson, (“A Treatise,” p. 102Google Scholar) asserted that it was a “gross error” to believe “That it is no libel if the party put his hand unto it.”

43 Marprelate Tracts, p. 81.

44 SirHoldsworth, William, A History of English Law, 2d ed. (London, 1937), 5:207Google Scholar. The falsity of the statement was also central in the scandalum magnatum statutes.

45 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 14r (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:623Google Scholar).

46 Hawarde, , Les Reportes (n. 2 above), p. 223Google Scholar.

47 Holdsworth, 5:207.

48 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 114, fol. 109r (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:126Google Scholar). Pickering, it seems, did not take the phrase “old virgin's spectacle” to be an insult of Elizabeth, only of Whitgift. His judges would read the phrase differently.

49 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 114, fol. 111r (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:620Google Scholar).

50 Hawarde, , Les Reportes, p. 223Google Scholar.

51 Hatfleld House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 18 (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:620Google Scholar).

52 For more on the circulation of these verses, see my “‘Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse’: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Sharpe, Kevin and Lake, Peter (London, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; earl of Clare's copy in BL, Harley MS 6383, fol. 71.

53 Hawarde, , Les Reportes, p. 229Google Scholar; “Reports of Sir Edward Coke,” in The English Reports (Edinburgh and London, 1907), 77:251Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Coke, Reports).

54 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 103, fol. 142v (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:35)Google Scholar; HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:115Google Scholar.

55 Manning, Roger B., “The Origins of the Doctrine of Sedition,” Albion 12, no. 2 (1980): 99–121, esp. at 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He is attacking the interpretation advanced by Holdsworth.

56 Coke, , Reports, p. 251Google Scholar.

57 Ibid.

58 Quoted in Siebert, F. S., Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana, Ill., 1952), p. 118Google Scholar.

59 Coke, , Reports, p. 251Google Scholar.

60 Ibid.; Hawarde, , Les Reportes, p. 226Google Scholar.

61 Hawarde, , Les Reportes (n. 2 above), p. 229Google Scholar. For a different interpretation of Coke's report, see Hamburger, Philip, “The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press,” Stanford Law Review 37, no. 3 (1985): 691–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hamburger is mainly concerned with the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and wants to draw a distinction between this case—which, he argues, is technically about the “libel of magistrates”—and the law of “seditious libel,” which, he believes, only emerged as a distinct doctrine in the later period. Hamburger, I think, overestimates the differences between the libel of a person in government and an attack on the government in abstract in the earlier period. In any case, even if we are not really dealing with the law of “seditious libel” in a technically distinct sense here, we can still argue that the law on the “libel of magistrates” assumed the “seditious” nature of such libels.

62 It would be interesting to know what Lewis Pickering made of these arguments. As Mervyn James has argued, secular concepts of honor were destabilized by certain aspects of Protestantism. From the evidence of his letters, it appears that Pickering was aware of the power of different formulations of “honor.” He compared “trewe & everlasting honor” won in the service of God with the merely “earthly honor” Cecil had achieved. He referred in another letter to the liberty of the gospel as “the only honor of this nation” (Hatfleld House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 17r [HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:619]Google Scholar; 114, fol. 108v [HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:125–26])Google Scholar. Pickering did, however, subscribe to a version of blood-based ties of honor. He insisted that he could not have intended to defame Elizabeth as he was actually distantly related to her (Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 114, fol. 109r).

63 Hawarde, , Les Reportes, p. 225Google Scholar.

64 Ibid., pp. 226, 228.

65 Ibid., p. 227; cf. Paule's, comment of these speeches, The Life of … John Whitgift (n. 1 above), p. 92Google Scholar.

66 Hawarde, , Les Reportes, p. 227Google Scholar.

67 Ibid., p. 225; biblical quotations taken from the King James Version.

68 Ibid., p. 227.

69 Ibid., p. 225.

70 A point made by Kaplan, M. Lindsay, “Slander for Slander in Measure for Measure,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 21 (1990): 23–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. at 25. Compare Clarendon's comment on the “anger and indignation” of men of the professional classes at the pillorying and mutilation of the divine, physician, and lawyer Burton, , Bastwick, , and Prynne, , The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. Macray, W. Dunn (Oxford, 1888), 1:126Google Scholar.

71 Hawarde, , Les Reportes (n. 2 above), p. 230Google Scholar.

72 Ibid., p. 228.

73 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fols. lOr, 12r (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:270–71Google Scholar). Pickering's motives for denouncing Montagu are difficult to fathom. The following account must remain rather hypothetical.

74 Collinson, , “The Jacobean Religious Settlement” (n. 17 above), p. 39Google Scholar.

75 Fincham, , Prelate as Pastor (n. 24 above), pp. 229, 272Google Scholar.

76 HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:29Google Scholar.

77 Montagu's role in the Burgess affair has been reconstructed by Peter McCullough, to whom I am grateful for sharing his findings in advance of his important forthcoming study of sermons at the courts of Elizabeth and James. A Mr. Burgess of Buckinghamshire was among the ministers named by Pickering as witnesses to the dean's true religious leanings.

78 HMC, Salisbury MSS, pp. 85, 288Google Scholar.

79 HMC, Lord Montagu ofBeaulieu MSS, p. 46Google Scholar.

80 Ibid., p. 48.

81 For James's affection for Montagu, see Fincham, , Prelate as Pastor, p. 38Google Scholar.

82 Hatfield House MSS, Cecil Papers 192, fol. 7r (HMC, Salisbury MSS, 17:623Google Scholar). For Cecil's possible role in this, see Croft (n. 28 above), pp. 777–78.

83 HMC, Salisbury MSS, 18:431–32Google Scholar.

84 Hamburger, , “Seditious Libel” (n. 60 above), p. 693Google Scholar, following in part Hudson (n. 40 above), p. 100.

85 The detailed and, on the whole, convincing researches of Thomas G. Barnes, very occasionally take the case for rehabilitation too far: see “Cropping the Heath: The Fall of a Chief Justice, 1634,” Historical Research 64 (1991): 331–43, esp at 343Google Scholar. For another example of Star Chamber revisionism, see Sharpe, Kevin, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992), chap. 11, pp. 665 ffGoogle Scholar.

86 For “paranoia” and “incompetence,” see the trenchant critiques of Charles by Reeve, L. J., Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Russell, Conrad, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), esp. chap. 8Google Scholar; Cust, Richard, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar, treats these aspects of Charles's character in ideological terms as the fear of “popularity.” Sharpe (Personal Rule of Charles I) provides a far more sympathetic portrait of the king.

87 For the clash of the rival sets of fears, see Lake, Peter, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England, ed. Cust, Richard and Hughes, Ann (London, 1989)Google Scholar; the notorious trials were of Alexander Leighton, William Prynne (twice), Henry Burton, and John Bastwick.

88 Though the earl of Northampton's comments in Star Chamber reveal that some councillors were afraid that this was at least a possibility (Hawarde, , Les Reportes [n. 2 above], p. 228Google Scholar).

89 The making of Prynne's martyrdom—a highly self-conscious and politically devastating appropriation of the Foxean tradition by the enemies of the Laudian hierarchy—deserves intensive study. For now, see the analysis of the political costs of the Prynne case in Sharpe, chap. 12, pp. 758 ff.