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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2009
When Jean Lemaire de Belges composed his Traité de la différence des schismes et des conciles de l'eglise in 1511, the purpose of the text was to support Louis XII in his struggle with Pope Julius II, to promote the conciliar ideology which the French king was exploiting, and in general to set Christian kings and emperors in favourable contrast with the popes of Rome. Read beside vernacular texts by other authors – Jean Bouchet, Pierre Gringore, Jean Marot, Jean d'Auton – who were writing during France's war with Julius II, it appears more effective propaganda and in some ways bolder and more far-reaching. However, the contrast is not sufficient to mark its author out as heterodox in comparison with the rest, two of whom, Bouchet and Gringore, were later to attack Lutheranism with some vigour. Lemaire's text established itself as an acceptable Gallican–monarchical view of history. It sold well and was printed twice in both 1511 and 1512. It continued to be printed after the crisis which produced it had abated. Increasingly it was included in the collections of Lemaire's works which remained popular long after the author himself dropped out of public view in about 1515. As the Lutheran Reformation developed readers brought new perceptions to the text, and we may deduce a sharpened sense of its relevance from a new edition which appeared in Lyons in 1532. Romain Morin published the text in a new small format, and with a new title, Le Promptuaire des conciles de l'eglise catholique, avec les scismes et la difference d'iceulx. The text itself was very little modified. Morin himself reissued the Promptuaire in 1533 and ten years later Paris printers took it up, showing that the text continued popular in France into the 1550s, when it was finally placed on the Sorbonne's list of forbidden books.
1 For a study of the Traité see Jodogne, Pierre, Jean Lemaire de Beiges écrivain francobourguignon, Brussels 1972, 357–86Google Scholar; Britnell, Jennifer, ‘The anti-papalism of Jean Lemaire de Belges's” Traité de la difference des schismes et des conciles”, Sixteenth Century Journal xxiv (1994), 783–800Google Scholar.
2 Two printings by Estienne Baland at Lyons in 1511, and at least two by Geoffroy de Marnef at Paris in Jan. 1512: Abélard, J., Les illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye de Jean Lemaire de Beiges: étude des éditions – genèse de l'oeuvre, Geneva 1976, 40Google Scholar. For a letter in which Lemaire speaks of 6,000 volumes of the Traité and other works, see Oeuvres, iv. 421.
3 On the collections of Lemaire's works see Abélard, Illustrations. The Traité was printed in 1517, 1519, 1521, 1523, 1524, 1528, 1529, 1533, 1540, 1548, 1549. On the problem of the date of Lemaire's death, see ibid. 94, and Jodogne, , Lemaire, 139–41Google Scholar.
4 The Traité continued to be accompanied in this edition by the Histoire du Prince Syach Ysmail and the Saufconduit donné par le souldan, two texts about middle-eastern affairs which had reinforced the crusading ethos of the original text and compared Julius II unfavourably with contemporary Islamic princes; only the short poem Le blason des Venitiens was dropped.
5 Editions in [1543], 1545, 1546, 1547, and several undated. For the condemnation in 1551 (repeated in later Roman Indexes) see Higman, F., Censorship and the Sorbonne, Geneva 1979, 155Google Scholar.
6 Traité, p. 233. ‘That it is no new thing, nor one at which one should be over-surprised, if there is dissension between sovereign princes and Christian prelates, and even more between the sovereign prelates amongst themselves; and how the discord on both sides has been caused and carried on, and subsequently settled, up to now, by general and local councils…. But the schisms on the whole have always come from the popes' side and the councils from that of the princes. And for this reason the popes fear and reject councils'.
7 Ibid. p. 245. ‘Ambition, mother of Avarice; the failure to hold general councils, and the prohibition of lawful matrimony to the priests of the Latin Church.”
8 Now in Durham Cathedral Library; the binding, with the badge of the Percy family and a panel depicting St Barbara, is by Thomas Richardson of York: Oldham, J. Basil, Blind panels of English binders, Cambridge 1958, 37Google Scholar. Richardson used the same panel on a Manuale printed at York, c. 1530. He also used it for a York Missal printed in Paris in 1533, now in Liverpool Cathedral (I am most grateful to Dr A. I. Doyle for this information).
9 BL, Add. MS 4729, fo. 27/13. On the royal library, see Birrell, T. A., English monarchs and their books: from Henry VII to Charles II, London 1986Google Scholar. Henry marked many of his books, but there are no such marks on the Promptuaire.
10 See for example Scarisbrick, J. J., Henry VIII, London 1968, 265–6Google Scholar; Nicholson, Graham, ‘The Act of Appeals and the English reformation”, in Cross, C., Loades, D. and Scarisbrick, J. J. (eds), Law and government under the Tudors, Cambridge 1988, 19–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fox, A. and Guy, John, Reassessing the Henrician age: humanism, politics and reform 1500–1550, Oxford 1986, ch. vii, 151–78Google Scholar; Lockwood, Shelley, ‘Marsilius of Padua and the case for the royal ecclesiastical supremacy”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. i (1991), 89–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 See for example Sawada, P. A., ‘Two anonymous Tudor treatises on the general council”, this Journal xii (1961), 197–214Google Scholar.
12 PRO, SP 1/178 fo. 111–14; Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, 1509–1547, ed. Brewer, J. S., Gairdner, J. and Brodie, R. H., London 1862–1932Google Scholar (hereinafter cited as LP), xviii/1, 611 (11). These four leaves are the beginning of a translation which starts from Lemaire's paragraph ‘Et pour ceste matiere entendre mieulx” (p. 241). The fragment breaks off in the middle of the paragraph commencing ‘Et encoires de ce non content” (p. 250). The four leaves are badly damaged, particularly the second one (fo. 112), but comparison of lengths in the legible parts suggests that this passage has been translated in its entirety without omissions. The translation is accurate and literal, and thus independent of and very different from that of Gough, on which see below.
13 PRO, SP 1/178 is listed as dating from May 11 to June 9 1543, but the entry in LP xviii/1, 611 notes that ‘the following papers are probably of various dates but are placed here for convenience”. There is no indication of date on the document itself.
14 See Lockwood, , ‘Marsilius”, 105Google Scholar, on William Marshall's omission of most of Marsilius' material on the general council; and Sawada, , ‘Two anonymous Tudor treatises”, in particular on A treatise concernynge generall councilles, printed by the king's printer Berthelet in 1538, which questions the authority of recent general councils (pp. 205–6)Google Scholar. Henry VIII was at pains to question the authority of Paul III's proposed General Council of Mantua: Scarisbrick, , Henry VIII, 390–1Google Scholar.
15 See for example Elton, G. R., Policy and police: the enforcement of the Reformation in the age of Thomas Cromwell, Cambridge 1972, 171–216Google Scholar. As well as the official government propaganda campaign represented in texts composed by government employees or printed by the king's printer, Cromwell encouraged evangelical scholars likely to further the evangelical cause in their writings and lent support to suitable writings produced independently: see for example Pragman, J. H., ‘The Augsburg Confession in the English Reformation: Richard Taverner's contribution”, Sixteenth Century Journal xi (1980), 75–85 at pp. 77–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wiedermann, G., ‘Alexander Alesius” lectures on the Psalms at Cambridge, 1536”, this Journal xxxvii (1986), 15–41 at pp. 16–17Google Scholar; Lockwood, , ‘Marsilius”, 90Google Scholar.
16 A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. Pollard, A. W. and Redgrave, G. R., 3 vols, second edn rev. Jackson, W. A., Ferguson, F. S. and Pantzer, K. F., London 1976–1991Google Scholar (hereinafter cited as STC), no 15453. (8°, sig. A8–1; colophon: ‘Imprynted by me John gowgh dwellynge in Lumbard strete, agaynst the stockes market at the synge of the mermayd Anno domini M.CCCCC.XXXIX.”; printing attributed to Robert Wyer.) It is impossible to tell from the translation whether Gough was using an edition of the Promptuaire or one of the reprints under the original title; the fact that he entitles it The abbrevyacyon of all generall councellys tends to suggest the former, but if he was using the 1519 edition of the Traité des schismes published in Paris by E. and J. de Marnef, it might explain the strange dating of the text to 1519, repeated by implication in the prologue when Lemaire is said to have composed the work at the request of Louis XII ‘xix yere past” (sig. A2r). Given that Louis XII died in 1515, and that his wife Mary, Henry's sister, who is mentioned in the prologue in the same sentence, was married to Charles Brandon and back in England within a few months of Louis's death, this dating does not look as if it were the product of much thought.
17 According to Susan Brigden he was ‘an evangelical even more reckless than he [John Tyndale]; perhaps even an anabaptist”: ‘Thomas Cromwell and the “brethren””, in Cross, Loades, and Scarisbrick, , Law and government under the Tudors, 31–49 at p. 37Google Scholar. See also Brigden, , London and the Reformation, 2nd edn, Oxford 1991, particularly pp. 82, 111, 160, 270, 290, 346, 407–8 (for Gough's will)Google Scholar. She regards him as one of the ‘evangelical brethren”, the few prime movers in the evangelical cause. On Gough and Anabaptists, see below n. 47.
18 STC iii, 70. Different sources offer different dates for the beginning of his career as a bookseller; Duff, E. Gordon, A century of the English book trade, London 1905, 58–9Google Scholar, gives 1526, as Gough is said to have claimed in 1528 that he had only been in business for two years and before that was a servant to another (LP iv/2, 1803), but the editors of STC note that he was listed as a bookseller in St Bride's parish in the lay subsidy of 1523.
19 Reed, A. W., Early Tudor drama, London 1926, 166–8Google Scholar; Harvey, E. Ruth, ‘Appendix A: The image of love”, in The Yale edition of the complete works of St Thomas More, vi/2, ed. Lawler, T. M. C. and others, Newhaven–London 1981, 729ffGoogle Scholar.
20 LP iv/2, 1778, 1803.
21 Proceedings and ordinances of the privy council of England, ed. Nicholas, H., 7 vols, London 1834–1837, vii. 109Google Scholar.
22 Acts and monuments of J. Foxe, ed. Pratt, J., 8 vols, London 1877, v. 448Google Scholar; Brigden, , London, 401Google Scholar.
23 Reed, , Early Tudor drama, 168Google Scholar.
24 See Aston, Margaret, Lollards and reformers: images and literacy in late medieval religion, London 1984, 229–30Google Scholar.
25 It is worth noting that two of the first titles he was associated with, both printed by Wynken de Worde, were in the nature of official publications: accounts of the king's meeting with Francis I at Calais in 1532 (STC 4350, 4351) and of the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533 (STC 656).
26 See Mozley, J. F., Coverdale and his Bibles, London 1953, 324–26Google Scholar, and, on The original and sprynge, McConica, J. K., English humanists and Reformation politics, Oxford 1965, 173–5Google Scholar.
27 Ibid. 180–1.
28 Tudor royal proclamations, ed. Hughes, P. L. and Larkin, J. F., 3 vols, Newhaven–London 1964–1969, i. 271–2Google Scholar. Williams, Franklin B., Index of dedications and commendatory verses in English books before 1641, London 1962, 239Google Scholar, gives only ten references to editions actually carrying the text of a privilege from Henry VIII, two of which are the licences to Gough discussed here.
29 Printed at the end of the book, 17v.
30 STC 25587.5; licence on verso of title page.
31 Reed, , Early Tudor drama, 184Google Scholar.
32 Aston, , Lollardy, 230–1, 251–3Google Scholar.
33 Ibid. 234. Gough's preface apologises for, and therefore draws attention to, any offence that might be caused by chs x and xiii of the Dore (attacking respectively corrupt clerics and the study of the pagans in the universities); these were not necessarily the most controversial chapters.
34 Ibid; Hudson, Anne, The premature Reformation: Wycliffite texts and Lollard history, Oxford 1988, 492–3Google Scholar.
35 DNB s.v. Taylor, John; he became DD and Master of St John's in 1538; he was one of those selected by Cranmer to help in preparing a revised version of the Bible and he was briefly imprisoned in 1546 for opinions on the sacrament expressed in a sermon. In 1538 his preaching was challenged by the sacramentarian Lambert: Brigden, , London, 296–7Google Scholar. On Seton, see Foxe, , Acts and Monuments, v. 449–51, 855Google Scholar. Cromwell had disassociated himself from him in April 1540: Brigden, Susan, ‘Popular disturbance and the fall of Thomas Cromwell and the reformers, 1539–1540”, Historical Journal xxiv (1981), 257–78 at p. 266Google Scholar.
36 On Becon see Bailey, D. S., Thomas Becon, London–Edinburgh 1952Google Scholar. Gough sold some twenty editions of books by Becon, who wrote under the pseudonym Theodore Basilius: STC iii. 70. Bailey says of these works: ‘They are not designedly controversial, though running through most of them is a note of Protestant apologetic”: Thomas Becon, 23. But Becon's recantation in July 1543 related to eighteen propositions from them, and they were proscribed in 1546: ibid. 30–45, 52.
37 Foxe, , Acts and monuments, v. 445Google Scholar. Twenty-five imprints sold by Gough were printed by Mayler, all in or after 1540, the first being The dore of Holy Scripture. Eight, between 1535 and 1537, were printed by Nicholson, the printer of Coverdale's Bible. The printing of the Abbrevyacyon, however, is attributed to Robert Wyer.
38 Lockwood, ‘Marsilius”.
39 Surtz, E. and Murphy, V., The divorce tracts of Henry VIII, Angers 1988Google Scholar: see the notes, for example pp. 298, 300, 307.
40 Dunnan, D. S., ‘A note on John Gough's “The dore of Holy Scripture””, Moles and Queries, 09 1989, 309–10Google Scholar.
41 The angelic pope was an established figure in prophecies of the regeneration of the Church and the whole world; see Reeves, Marjorie, The influence of prophecy in the later Middle Ages, Oxford 1969Google Scholar. Such prophetic connotations could colour the earlier concept of the king's character angelicus: Ernst Kantorowicz, H., The king's two bodies, Princeton, NJ 1957, 8Google Scholar n. 4, 144n. 168.
42 See n. 14 above.
43 In a similar way he says later ‘Constantyne poysoned holy perfection with temporall possessyons” (sig. A5v), at a point where Lemaire does not mention Constantine. Gough does not share Lemaire's obvious concern with exonerating Constantine.
44 For example, the ‘fylthy treasours” and the ‘covetous mynde” of Pope Fabian; Diocletian insisted on having his feet kissed, Lemaire, ‘Comme font les Papes modernes, en ensuivant l'arrogance barbare des Roys de Perse” (p. 250)Google Scholar, Gough ‘as popis of late dates hath use princes and crysten rulers to do which was abhomynable afore God, and man” (sig. A6v–7r).
45 In this the translation differs from that of the MS fragment described in n. 12 above, which renders ‘pape” as ‘pope”.
46 For example, most of the information about Constans, Helen and Constantine; much of the material about the Pragmatic Sanction.
47 Foreign Anabaptists had been expelled or in some cases executed in 1535: Brigden, , London, 270–1Google Scholar. This reference seems designed to distance the translator from Anabaptists – either because Gough did not agree with them, or because he did not wish to seem to do so: ibid, 270, 290, for evidence of his involvement with Anabaptists.
48 Referring probably to the dissent caused both in France and Germany by the tithes raised by Callistus III (1455–8) for a crusade, and seeking to show a continuum of ever-growing rebellion against the authority of the popes.
49 Gough omits the prophecies cited by Lemaire, perhaps because, with their allusions to Merlin, sibyls, eagles and griffins, they sufficiently resembled prophecies current in England to be dangerous: Elton, , Policy and police, 57–62Google Scholar; Jansen, Sharon L., Political protest and prophecy under Henry VIII, Woodbridge 1991Google Scholar. On Lemaire's prophecies, which in fact represent a programme very hostile to the clergy, see Britnell, , ‘Jean Lemaire de Belges and prophecy”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes xlii (1979), 144–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Prophéties sur l'Église à la veille de la Réforme”, Renaissance européenne et phénomènes religieux 1450–1650, Montbrison 1991, 199–205Google Scholar.
50 The identification of the papacy with AntiChrist, made early in the continental Reformation, was current in England by this time and, although it does not normally appear in official documents and publications, could be heard from Cranmer or from Henry VIII himself: LP x, no. 283; xv, no. 848 (I am grateful to this Journal's reader for this information). Because of the prophetic context the theme has its full apocalyptic significance here, rather than the more attenuated expression of disapproval to which it is sometimes reduced: Firth, Katharine R., The Apocalyptic tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645, Oxford 1979, particularly pp. 7–8Google Scholar; Emmerson, Richard Kenneth, Antichrist in the Middle Ages, Manchester 1981, 206–21Google Scholar.
