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THOMAS DIGGES, ROBERT PARSONS, SIR FRANCIS HASTINGS, AND THE POLITICS OF REGIME CHANGE IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2016
Abstract
By reconstructing the multiple contexts that prompted the production, in 1601, of a single tract, this article evokes and analyses the febrile political atmosphere of the Elizabethan fin de siècle, produced by the spectre of regime change consequent upon the death of the queen, and by the visible connections between central elements in the regime and certain Catholic loyalists involved in the notorious Archpriest Controversy. Certain men, most notably Sir Francis Hastings, who were used to regarding themselves as insiders and believed that they were some of the Protestant state's most trusted agents in the struggle against popery, now found themselves typed as ‘puritans’ and thus, at least potentially, on the outs with a regime engaged in a (to them) extraordinarily dangerous flirtation with allegedly ‘loyal’ papists. Adopting the politique hermeneutic mode of the Jesuit Robert Parsons, Hastings all but outed the guilty men and did so via a thoroughly self-conscious exercise in public politics. Throughout, the full range of contemporary media was in play, with printed polemic framing parliamentary debate, that debate in turn feeding into the pamphlet press, which prompted yet more rumours, in London and on the continent, before provoking the state's recourse to those ultimate forms of official publicity, a royal proclamation, treason trials, and the gruesome performativity of the scaffold.
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Footnotes
The original version of this article was published online on 25 October 2016 under an incorrect title. A notice detailing this has been published (DOI: 10.1017S0018246X18000018) and the error rectified in the print and online PDF and HTML copies.
References
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22 Ibid., pp. 422, 426–7. For William Parry's outspoken opposition to the 1585 bill against Jesuits and seminary clergy, see Hicks, L., An Elizabethan problem (London, 1964)Google Scholar, pp. 61ff, esp. pp. 69–70.
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24 Hartley, p. 474.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., p. 458.
27 Ibid., p. 427.
28 Ibid., p. 476.
29 Ibid., pp. 486–7; Cross, C., ed., The letters of Sir Francis Hastings, 1574–1609 (Somerset Record Society, 69, Yeovil, 1969)Google Scholar, pp. xvii–xviii.
30 Cf. the otherwise excellent discussion of this episode by Dean in his Law-making, pp. 120–8, which tends to avoid discussing the religious and political undercurrents running through these exchanges.
31 See the articles on Hall, Parry, and Alford in Oxford dictionary of national biography (ODNB), and Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, pp. 55–60, 62–4, 180–1.
32 Humble motives for association to maintain religion established (1601), p. 23.
33 Ibid., pp. 35–6.
34 Ibid., pp. 6–7.
35 Ibid., p. 16.
36 Ibid., pp. 11–12.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 14.
39 Collinson, P., ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 69 (1987), pp. 394–424 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, ‘The Elizabethan exclusion crisis and the Elizabethan polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994), pp. 51–92 Google Scholar. Digges's petition can be dated, on internal evidence, to the period before the Babington conspiracy and the death of Mary Stuart. It suggests that even after the failure of the interregnum proposal of 1584/5, the likes of Digges and Burghley continued to pursue the broad aims of what Collinson termed the ‘monarchical republic of Elizabeth I’, on which see Younger, N., ‘Securing the monarchical republic: the re-making of the lord lieutenancies in 1585’, Historical Research, 84 (2010), pp. 249–65Google Scholar; Graves, M., Thomas Norton (Oxford, 1994), ch. 7Google Scholar; Lake, P., ‘The “political thought” of the “monarchical republic of Elizabeth I”, discovered and anatomised’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (2015), pp. 257–87Google Scholar.
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41 For the claim that the archpriest dispute was an elaborate deception, see also Bell, Thomas, The anatomie of popish tyrannie, wherein is conteyned a plain declaration…of the libels, letters, edictes, pamphlets, and bookes lately published by the secular priests, and English Hispanized Iesuites (London, 1603)Google Scholar, pp. 104, 119. For a manuscript propaganda piece entitled ‘A politic consultation held by Dr Bagshaw, Father Holt, Father Stokes, Father Atkinson, Father John Hall, and others’, presumably sent by Sir Thomas Parry to Sir Robert Cecil in Nov. 1602, see Lemon, R. and Green, M. A. E., eds., Calendar of state papers, domestic series (12 vols. [for 1547–1625], 1856–72)Google Scholar (CSPD), 1601–1603, pp. 280–1; TNA, SP 12/286/57, 58); TNA, SP 78/47, fo. 218r. Making a virtually identical case to the Humble motives, it related how the leading appellant Christopher Bagshaw ‘advised that, if Father Parsons approved, he would write against the Jesuits as being factious among Catholics, as the puritans are among Protestants, calling both sectaries: this would highly please the bishops’. Bagshaw's suggestion was dispatched to Rome, so the manuscript claimed, and, eventually, Parsons agreed that it was ‘an excellent plot, and would gain liberty to the Catholics, by which they would know their strength and increase it; that the favour of bishops and priests would win many over, and that they might write against’ the Jesuits, publish it and even ‘procure our hurt when any of us went to England’; cf. Humble motives, pp. 33, 34.
42 Ibid., pp. 24–5.
43 Ibid., pp. 37, 38, 39.
44 Ibid., p. 41.
45 Ibid., p. 26.
46 Ibid., pp. 27, 37; for Matthew's sermon, see Copley, Anthony, An answere to a letter of a Iesuited gentleman, by his cosin, maister A. C. concerning the appeale, state, Iesuits (London, 1601), p. 71Google Scholar; Bell, The anatomie, p. 99. Watson wrote that sermons had been delivered by ‘some at Paul's Cross and other places against us equally as against the Jesuits’ and those ‘who are most noted to have done so are known to be puritans by common report’, Watson, William, A decacordon of ten quodlibeticall questions concerning religion and state (London, 1602), p. 351Google Scholar. On Vaughan, see B. Usher, ‘Vaughan, Richard (c. 1553–1607)’, ODNB. In autumn 1600, Bishop Vaughan had been the target of Catholic accusations that he was at the centre of a local puritan conspiracy in Lancashire, focused on the ambition of the earl of Essex to seize the crown, and spearheaded by those who actively persecuted Catholics, J. H. Pollen, ed., Unpublished documents relating to the English martyrs, 1584–1603 (Catholic Record Society 5, London, 1908), pp. 383–4 (TNA, SP 12/275/115. ii); Giuseppi, M. S. et al. , eds., Calendar of the manuscripts of the most honourable the marquess of Salisbury (24 vols., Historical Manuscripts Commission, London, 1888–1976)Google Scholar (HMCS), x, pp. 335–6; CSPD, Addenda 1580–1625, pp. 399–400 (TNA, SP 15/34/20) (misdated to Nov. 1599).
47 Humble motives, p. 33. For the secular priest and enemy of the Jesuits, Christopher Bagshaw's alleged involvement in the Squire plot, see Anstruther, G., The seminary priests (4 vols., Ware and Great Wakering, 1968–77)Google Scholar, i, p. 15; Aray, M., The discoverie and confutation of a tragical fiction, devysed and played by Edward Squyer (Antwerp, 1599)Google Scholar; Ely, Humphrey, Certaine briefe notes… (Paris, 1602)Google Scholar, section entitled ‘An answear of M. Doctor Bagshaw…’, pp. 6–7; see also Charnock, Robert, A reply to a notorious libel… (London, 1603)Google Scholar, pp. 17, 19, 285.
48 Humble motives, p. 33. For the truth of this claim in relation at least to the Jesuit Robert Parsons, see n. 60 below.
49 Ibid., p. 39.
50 Ibid., p. 34.
51 Ibid., pp. 30–1.
52 Ibid., pp. 36, 31.
53 Ibid., pp. 28–9.
54 Ibid., pp. 28–9. For Robert Cecil's speech in Star Chamber on 13 Feb. 1601, see CSPD, 1598–1601, pp. 554–5, 556–7.
55 Humble motives, p. 25.
56 Ibid., p. 38. On Bancroft's involvement with the appellants, see Usher, R. G., The reconstruction of the English church (2 vols., New York, NY, 1910)Google Scholar, i, ch. 8, and now Collinson, P., Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan anti-puritanism (Cambridge, 2013)Google Scholar, ch. 10.
57 For references to Doleman, R. (pseud.), A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland… (Antwerp, 1594)Google Scholar (a work of mixed authorship, almost certainly incorporating a major contribution from Robert Parsons; see Allison, A. F. and Rogers, D. M., The contemporary printed literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640 (2 vols., Aldershot, 1989–94)Google Scholar (ARCR), ii, no. 167), see Humble motives, pp. 24, 28, 35; for Newes from Spayne and Holland, see Humble motives, pp. 41–2, and for the Philopater tract, i.e. Philopater, Andreas (Parsons, Robert), Elizabethae, Angliae reginae haeresim Calvinianam propugnantis, saevissimum in Catholicos sui regni edictum (Antwerp, 1592)Google Scholar, see Humble motives, p. 25, where Parsons's text is cited as the source for the crypto-Catholic proclivities of Sir Christopher Hatton.
58 Newes, fos. 29r–v (sig. D8r–v), 32r–v.
59 A conference, pt 2, pp. 240–4.
60 Newes, fo. 27v.
61 A conference, pt 2, pp. 244–7.
62 Parsons, Robert, A brief discours contayning certayne reasons why catholiques refuse to go to church (Douai (imprint false; printed at East Ham), 1580)Google Scholar; see also Peck, D. C., ed., Leicester's commonwealth: the copy of a letter written by a master of art of Cambridge (1584) and related documents (Athens, OH, 1985)Google Scholar, esp. pp. 66–8, 72–3, which echo the position laid out by Parsons in A brief discours. (While most scholars agree that Parsons was in some way involved in the production of Leicester's commonwealth, the authorship of the tract remains controversial and is, on the evidence currently available, probably unresolvable. In noting the parallels between Parsons's work and Leicester's commonwealth, which are a matter of fact, we are in no way assuming that Parsons wrote the latter tract.) Parsons subsequently changed his position on the status of the Elizabethan regime and the propriety of resistance; faced by the death of Mary Stuart and the candidacy of the Calvinist James VI, he also shifted fronts on the succession. He thus confronted the appellants as an active supporter of the infanta, a client of the Spanish crown and a proponent of the linked causes of legitimate resistance and elective monarchy; see also Lake and Questier, ‘Taking it to the street?’.
63 On Bancroft's style of anti-puritanism, see his Dangerous positions and proceedings and A survay of the pretended holy discipline, both of 1593. Also see Lake, P. with Questier, M., The Antichrist's lewd hat (London, 2002)Google Scholar, ch. 13; Lake, P., Anglicans and puritans? Presbyterianism and English conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1987)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Conformist clericalism? Richard Bancroft's analysis of the socio-economic roots of presbyterianism’, in Sheils, W. and Wood, D., eds., The church and wealth (Studies in Church History, 24, Oxford, 1987), pp. 219–29Google Scholar; Lake, P., ‘Puritanism, (monarchical) republicanism, and monarchy; or John Whitgift, antipuritanism, and the “invention” of popularity’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40 (2010), pp. 463–95Google Scholar.
64 Humble motives, p. 40.
65 Archivum Britannicum Societatis Jesu (ABSJ), Collectanea P/ii, p. 542.
66 ABSJ, Stonyhurst MS Anglia iii, no. 27; Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2006, fo. 173r. This was a gloss on the passage cited above which unfavourably compared the fates of Udall and Watson.
67 Copley, Anthony, Another letter to Mr A. C. his dis-iesuited kinseman… (London, 1602)Google Scholar; A briefe censure upon the puritane pamphlet entituled, (Humble motyves for association to maintayne religion established) (n.p. (printed secretly in England), 1603). The Humble motives (pp. 26, 38) attacked Copley's An answere to a letter of a Iesuited gentleman, a piece which was dated 30 Nov. 1601, very shortly before the Humble motives was published.
68 Copley, Another letter, pp. 17–18.
69 The author of the Briefe censure may have been the Catholic priest, Richard Broughton, who in 1601 had produced An apologicall epistle directed to the…privie councell (Antwerp (imprint false; printed secretly in England), 1601; ARCR, ii, no. 73), a Catholic toleration tract, written at the time of the 1601 parliament. That tract is stylistically very similar to A briefe censure, which itself boasts (p. 81) that the author ‘love[s] to answer you [the author of the Humble motives] with your own arguments’, a technique which Broughton claimed to have pioneered. The secret press in question, no. 12 in the list compiled by ARCR, ii, was the one used to reprint Robert Parsons's Brief discours in 1599 and 1601 and also, crucially, to publish Robert Southwell's Humble supplication. As we understand ARCR, this means that the press was the one owned/used by James Duckett and that the author of the 1601 Apologicall epistle (i.e. Broughton) was almost certainly on the fringes of the appellant agitation. Also, both editions of another of Broughton's works, The first part of the resolution of religion (n.p. (printed secretly in England), 1603), were printed on secret press no. 13 in the list in ARCR, ii (nos. 82, 83); significantly this was the same secret press on which the Briefe censure was published, ARCR, ii, no. 909. (This may have been in part because Duckett's press had now been silenced.) Broughton's relationship with other Catholic clerical interest groups was complex.
70 Briefe censure, sig. a.vir–v, br et seq.
71 Ibid., sig. aiiir.
72 Ibid., sig. biir.
73 Ibid., sig. bv v.
74 Ibid., sigs. bvir–v, divr; Humble motives, p. 34.
75 Briefe censure, sig. dviiir–v.
76 Ibid., sigs. ciiir, bviiv.
77 Hatfield House, Cecil papers, 85/39 (HMCS, xii, p. 56).
78 Hatfield House, Cecil papers, 183/104 (HMCS, xi, p. 573).
79 Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster (AAW), A, vii, no. 41, pp. 232–3; ABSJ, Stonyhurst MS Collectanea P/ii, p. 547a; Tierney, M. A. (ed.), Dodd's church history of England (5 vols., London, 1839–43)Google Scholar, iii, pp. clxxviii–ix (ABSJ, Stonyhurst MS Anglia iii, no. 22); AAW, A, vii, nos. 37, 39; Anstruther, Seminary priests, i, p. 372; Southwell, Robert, An humble supplication to her maiestie (n.p. (printed secretly in England), 1600)Google Scholar; ARCR, ii, no. 717. One of the other clergy hanged on the same day, Robert Watkinson, had been denounced by a renegade from the seminary college at Douai, much to Bancroft's fury, TNA, SP 12/283/86. ii (CSPD, 1601–1603, pp. 180–2); British Library, Harleian MS 360, no. 22, fo. 36r–v.
80 AAW, A, vii, no. 41, p. 234.
81 AAW, A, vii, no. 39. For Sterrell, see Martin, P. and Finnis, J., ‘The identity of Anthony Rivers’, Recusant History, 26 (2002), pp. 39–74 Google Scholar.
82 Hughes, P. L. and Larkin, J. F., eds., Tudor royal proclamations (3 vols., London 1964–9)Google Scholar, iii, no. 817.
83 McClure, N. E., ed., The letters of John Chamberlain (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1939)Google Scholar (LJC), i, p. 117.
84 Hughes and Larkin, eds., Tudor royal proclamations, iii, no. 817.
85 Lambeth Palace Library MS 2007, fo. 54r–v (Barnaby to Bagshaw, from the Clink prison, 15 Feb. 1603); cf. e.g. TNA, SP 78/48, fo. 10r (Sir Thomas Parry to Sir Robert Cecil, 24 Jan. 1603, concerning the appellants in Paris, including Bagshaw, and their desire to have ‘access’ back in England).
86 LJC, i, pp. 185, 186 (Howson's recent sermon in Oxford, reported by Chamberlain on 11 Feb. 1603); ABSJ, Stonyhurst MS Anglia, iii, no. 9. This corrects the inaccurate dating of this incident ( Foley, H., ed., Records of the English province of the Society of Jesus (7 vols. in 8, London, 1875–83), i, pp. 18–19 Google Scholar) followed in Questier, M., Catholicism and community: politics, aristocratic patronage and religion in early modern England (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 262–3Google Scholar. For Darrel's exorcisms, see T. Freeman, ‘Darrell, John [Darrel] (c. 1562–c. 1607)’, ODNB.
87 LJC, i, p. 186.
88 TNA, SP 12/287/50, 52.
89 On 27 June 1602, the countess of Warwick's chaplain, William Walker, had preached at Paul's Cross against the ‘devilish temporizing course’ of ‘some lukewarm Protestants or natural atheists which will hold the middle course between papists and Protestants’ and the resulting danger from a ‘Trojan-horse toleration’ by default. Those ‘crafty natural atheists’ argued that ‘papists differ not much from Protestants’ and that ‘both are Christians’, British Library, Harleian MS 5067, no. 1, fos. 41v et seq. (quotations at fos. 61v, 59r, 53r).
90 Briefe censure, sigs. dviiiv–er. This paralleled an earlier outbreak of violence by ‘puritan justices’ against Catholics ‘in the west countries’ when in Sept. 1599 Essex was coming ‘out of Ireland’, ibid., sig. diiir.
91 Ibid., sig. cvv. The Humble motives (pp. 26, 32, 36) mentions Parsons's Wardword. Hastings's reply, his Apologie or defence of the watch-word (London, 1600)Google Scholar, had used exactly the same strategy as the Humble motives, denying Parsons's distinction between Protestants and puritans, HC, 1604–1629, iv, p. 575.
92 See C. Cross, ‘Hastings, Henry (c. 1536–1595)’, ODNB.
93 Gajda, A., ‘Debating war and peace in late Elizabethan England’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009), pp. 851–78Google Scholar. The extent of Hastings's connection to Essex is revealed by two letters of godly counsel and encouragement; the first, written within days of Leicester's death, called upon him to emulate his father and step-father as an ‘instrument for the good both of church and commonwealth’. The second offered spiritual solace as the earl languished in continuing disgrace in Nov. 1600. See Cross, The letters of Sir Francis Hastings, pp. 38–41, 75–6.
94 Parsons, Robert, A temperate ward-word to the turbulent and seditious wach-word of Sir Francis Hastinges (n.p. [Antwerp], 1599)Google Scholar.
95 Briefe censure, p. 67; HC, 1624–1629, p. 578.
96 AAW, A, vii, no. 36, p. 213.
97 This is the subject of important new research by Neil Younger.
98 See Lake, P., ‘Matthew Hutton: a puritan bishop?’, History, 64 (1979), pp. 182–204 Google Scholar. Like Hastings, Hutton was a great admirer both of the earl of Huntingdon and of the earl of Essex. He was also extremely alarmed by the attempt, at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and even more so, at the beginning of James's, to establish the equivalence of the puritan and popish threats as official doxa.
99 Wernham, R. B., The return of the armadas: the last years of the Elizabethan war against Spain, 1595–1603 (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar, ch. 20, esp. pp. 320, 322–4.
100 See Newton, D., ‘Sir Francis Hastings and the religious education of James VI and I’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 917–34Google Scholar; Quintrell, B., ‘The royal hunt and the puritans, 1604–1605’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 31 (1980), pp. 41–58 Google Scholar.
101 Questier, Catholicism, pp. 271–2.
102 Healy, S. and Questier, M., ‘“What's in a name?”: a papist's perception of puritanism and conformity in the early seventeenth century’, in Marotti, A. F., ed., Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in early modern English texts (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 137–53Google Scholar; HC, 1604–1629, iv, pp. 414–16, 576–8; Russell, King James VI and I and his English parliaments, pp. 38–40.
103 This is in no way to endorse the (contemporary) caricature of Parsons as a quintessentially Machiavellian political manoeuvrer, but merely to accept the evidence of his great skill as a political commentator and agent provocateur in pursuit of what he took to be the interests of English Catholics and Catholicism. It is important in dealing with a subject as complex as Parsons to refuse the false choice between machiavel and plaster saint with which some of the recent writing about him tends to confront us. Polemicist, theologian, political theorist, casuist, devotional writer, missionary priest, administrator, (would be and actual) counsellor of princes and popes, and freelancing political operator, Parsons was all of the above, and we do ourselves no favours as historians if we try to suppress that fact or impose on ourselves or others a simple choice between these multiple identities and forms of activity. It is how and why he managed to combine all of these roles that makes him such a fascinating and important figure. See esp. Houliston, V., Catholic resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons's Jesuit polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot, 2007)Google Scholar.
104 Lake, P., ‘The king (the queen) and the Jesuit: James Stuart's True law of free monarchies in context/s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 14 (2004), pp. 243–60Google Scholar; Stafford, James VI of Scotland, chs. 7, 8; Collinson, P., ‘Richard Bancroft and the succession’, in Doran and Kewes, eds., Doubtful and dangerous, pp. 92–111Google Scholar; A. Gajda, ‘Essex and the “popish” plot’, in ibid., pp. 115–33; T. McCoog, ‘A view from abroad: continental powers and the succession’, in ibid., pp. 257–75; Hicks, Leo, ‘Sir Robert Cecil, Father Persons and the succession, 1600–1601’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu, 24 (1955), pp. 95–139 Google Scholar; Loomie, A., ‘Philip III and the Stuart succession in England’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, 43 (1965), pp. 492–514 Google Scholar.
105 See Lake and Pincus, eds., The politics of the public sphere, esp. the introduction and chs. 3, 4, and 5.
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