The flavours of English protestantism

(Today's entry covers pages 16-21 of Gardiner's History. The picture to the left is of a young John Calvin.)

We're taking a tour here. It's not a bad thing to consider Big Ideas when our attention is not distracted elsewhere, but we shouldn't get stuck on them, should we?

Unfortunately, there are some huge (and vague) Big Ideas strewn like boulders in our way through the 17th century, and some of the biggest have to do with the beliefs--and the ceremonies that reflect them--of varieties of English Protestants.

Why should I emphasize Protestant Big Ideas rather than Catholic ones? Well, for one thing, I can hardly discuss protestant ideas without discussing catholic ones: they can best be understood in contrast to what was believed before. And by the time of Charles I, more than 90% of Englishmen paid at least lip service to some variety of Protestant belief. The big rocks are all protestant.

The central idea of protestantism is salvation by faith. Protestants aren't opposed to good works; they just don't think you can save your soul by them. Martin Luther was the first teacher to give this idea wide currency in the modern age. The idea is important in terms of ceremony, more so in terms of doctrine, but very important in terms of church government. Gardiner tries to summarize the importance in these areas in a very few paragraphs. He doesn't try very hard, and comes far short of succeeding. I can recommend a few books on the subject, such as Protestant Thought Before Kant, but I don't recommend you bring any of them along on the tour.

Because salvation by faith is least important in terms of ceremony, the forms of worship in early protestant churches were not wildly different than in catholic ones. More of the service was in the worshippers' tongue; some prayers were omitted; some homilies diverged. This allowed the English church to become protestant almost underhandedly, with the same ministers using largely the same liturgy as they had before.
Gardiner does do a good job of explaining this, and why a growing trend in protestantism, Calvinism, which adds several Big Ideas of its own, had to be resisted during the reign of Elizabeth.

As we know, Elizabethan resistance had little long-term effect on the spread of Calvinism, due, as Gardiner points out, "to its logical completeness, and to the direct antagonism in which it stood to the doctrines of the Roman Church."

A form of Calvinism was allowed to take hold in Scotland, however. We'll talk about Presbyterianism when we pick up on page 22.

The Spanish Armada, again

Gardiner's treatment of the Armada is too brief to be called dry, but it doesn't give an idea of the effect the victory had on Englishmen. For that, I can't think of a better source that the reminiscences of Captain John Smith (yes, the same that will colonize Virginia in 20 years' time.) The following is from The Adventures and Discourses of Captain John Smith, sometime President of Virginia and Admiral of New England, Newly Ordered by John Ashton:

I was born in the year 1579; that year when Jack Spaniard invaded Ireland, bringing with him a holy banner blessed by the Pope. Much blood and time it took before the rebellion was put down, and the Dons were all either killed, or put in ward. But the work was done thoroughly, and with a good heart, so that none, methinks, ever went back home to tell the tale. Ha! but we paid them out well, and made them dance a Coranto to a pretty tune when they tried the same sport, on a larger scale, with their Invincible Armada. Invincible, quatha! my Lord Howard and his old sea-dogs found joints enow in their harness, I trow; and Ireland proved even more unkind to them than before, for seventeen of their ships were taken or destroyed, and much over 5,000 men were killed or taken prisoners on that coast which, I warrant me, they love not now.

I mind the time well, though I was but a youngster of nine years old, for the whole land was drunk with joy, and of course my native village must be a piece with the rest of the world. My Lord Willoughby did give two great oxen to be roasted, and also good strong October; both of which were given without stint to all comers. Ay and he provided also a bull to be baited, which was the first I had ever seen of that rare sport. I remember it so well, more by token that our dog Tyke must needs be very valiant and join in the fray, but he limped on three legs ever after, and it had nigh cost him his life but for the great care and good nursing he received.

There was dancing round the May-pole, too, and it would have been kept up till night, but old Jack the crowder [fiddler] got overcome early in the afternoon with too much October, which he kept pouring down to make his arm lissome, for he said it ached with constant work; so many of us betook ourselves to Alford, to see the two Frenchmen with their bear and monkey.

The Spanish Armada

It is curious that Gardiner disposes of the proposed Spanish invasion of England—the dispatch of the Armada—in a slender paragraph.

True, the Spanish attack was poorly planned, weakly co-ordinated, long anticipated, and extremely unlucky. But it is still a grand story. Gardiner admits that the prospects of an invasion were terrifying to the English. A ballad of the time began

From merciless invaders, from wicked men's device,
O God, arise and help us to quell our enemies!

Gardiner emphasizes the polarization that Spanish hostility cemented in England. The majority Protestants found in their religion a political ground more powerful than the philosophical and doctrinal differences they recognized with the Roman church. The polarization was strong and long lasting. It was possible 300 years later for an English clergyman to slaver at the mouth over the threatened religious invasion.

There is one result of the English victory that is perhaps so obvious that it has gradually been forgotten: the effect it had on English nationalism. Englishmen could feel that they were not only just the match, but the superior of men from anywhere in Christendom. Forget the Spanish grandee: the English gentleman drank his beer while the Spaniard drowned in the North Sea. As Gardiner says, the disintegration of the Armada instilled in the English the illusion of discipline, an illusion that both fed and fed on the discipline inherent in Calvinist theology. At the bottom of page 17, Gardiner sums it up with this observation:

Anchored on the Rock of Ages, they could safely bid defiance to all the menaces of the Pope and to all the armies of the mightiest potentates of Europe.

We'll pick it up next time on page 18.

Mary Stuart

Picking up on page 14...

Gardiner gives short shrift to Mary Queen of Scots. He mentions a few important facts—that she came into England looking for a way back to her throne; that her story generated Catholic buzz; and that the inevitable result of the decision to imprison her in England was that England must kill her.

Of the popular histories of Mary, I prefer the one by Antonia Fraser, which you can find on Amazon or in almost any used-book shop. Frasier is sympathetic but realistic and cuts neither Mary nor Elizabeth any slack. A far more romanticized story, but a very popular one, is the History of Mary Queen of Scots by Jacob Abbot, which you can read online.

I think the circumstance that strikes most modern readers is that Mary was the mother of James VI, the reigning king of Scotland at the time of her death, and who will be king of England, as James I, when we get to the start of our tour. As we will learn in Chapter 2, James did not lightly pass over the murder of his mother, but he didn't let it become a political issue, either. What does that say about James and about Mary and about their relationship?

If you want more about Mary Stuart, refer to the colorful EnglishHistory.net site, which has plenty of links and pictures.

What we should learn from the brief discission on pages 14 and 15 is that—to the English government—Mary Stuart's life was less important than her religion, and her religion important only for its political implications. She had to go, and that was just the way things worked in late Tudor England.

"Miss Porter" in the DNB

This afternoon I transcribed the article on Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester, in the Dictionary of National Biography. He was born a year or so before the period we are slowly building up to. My problem is not with Manchester, though: it is with the author of the article, which is signed "B. P.".

The contributor list for volume 38 shows "B. P." to be a "Miss Porter". So who is Miss Porter? I find her Christian name was Bertha. A little more research finds this article, which says she live 1852-1941, was an
employee of the DNB, was a "professional bibliographer" and edited the Topographical Bibliography of
ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings. More looking about indicates that she became an expert on the antiquities of Egyptian Thebes. I must look for her obituary, which was published in The Times, January 22, 1941.

(Update: the obit is available in the Times archives, but their rates are a bit steep -- $130 per year. If you already have a subscription, and you happen to go to the Times Archive search page and search for Bertha Porter on January 22, 1941, I'd appreciate a report.)

It is strange where Saturday-night recreational reading can take you.

Picking up again on page 12

Picking up again with the brief overview of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, at page 12 of Gardiner's History of England…

(By the way, if you want to direct your browser to a particular page in Volume 1 of Gardiner's History, copy this into your browser's address window:

http://bob.fooguru.org/content/gardiner/hist10/HistV1.html#pagexx

and change xx to the page number you want. The string for page 12 will be http://bob.fooguru.org/content/gardiner/hist10/HistV1.html#page12.)

It's an important aspect of the international political landscape of the early 17th century that Spain was greatly over-estimated in its wealth and military strength. The English government, and probably most governments in Europe, thought Spain to be invincible and in possession of almost unlimited resources. In fact, Spain was already over-extended. Even the wealth of the Indies—which itself did not come without great expense—could not sustain perpetual standing armies in the Low Lands and Italy, and military adventures elsewhere. Still, knowing the outcome, I think we underestimate Spain at this time, and Gardiner makes the point very well.

Gardiner mentions Lepanto, the 1571 sea battle in which a combined Imperial, Spanish and Venician fleet defeated a Turkish flotilla in the Adriatic. It is one of the reasons that we will be talking much more about Christian-versus-Christian conflict in the 17th century than about Christian-versus-Musselman. It is the subject of what some consider the best poem of the 20th century, and I bring it up because (saving the unflattering reference to The cold queen of England in the first stanza), it might almost be an Elizabethan poem, in sentiment if not language. The English of that time, and we today, liked their enemies well-caricatured and their heroes too. Don John's subsequent history in the Netherlands would, of course, have dampened any English enthusiasm that might have existed for him after Lepanto. (See this blog for more information about the Battle of Lepanto, including a photo of a reproduction of Don John's flagship.)

The important take-away from this part of the first chapter is that protestantism and its attendant anti-catholicism were political as well as religious issues to the English ruling classes. Elizabeth and her council put a lid on the emotional aspects of doctrinal difference by making outward conformance to a compromise doctrine a requirement of the law. That a large part of the Catholics were practically excluded from the compromise was considered an acceptable political trade-off. In the short and the long term, this approach was sufficient; but in the middle—the period we are concerned with—the lid would not stay on.

We'll pick up next time on 14, with mention of Mary, Queen of Scots, and of the Armada.

Aside on Bacon's view of Queen Elizabeth

I mentioned Bacon's In Felicem Memoriam Elizabethæ, a short memorial/apology/analysis of the Queen's life by one of the most intelligent men of the age, written in 1609, six years after her death. On first reading, I did not realize how remarkable a document it is.

Part of the problem is that most of us are reduced to reading James Spedding's English translation (the linked document). Spedding does not quite capture the force of Bacon's Latin.

In Felicem is a tour-de-force, an extended conceit that casts Elizabeth's life and successes as felicitous—that is to say, both happy and lucky.

Bacon is not skimping in his praise of the queen's wisdom and temperance. Even for her persecution of papists he finds politic reasons. But at root, he says that Elizabeth was fortunate.

One has to think that this is a rationalization. A woman, even an exceptional woman, can not be expected to rule well, but Elizabeth (for the most part) did. How can this be explained? It must have been good fortune. That it was the good fortune of England as well as of the Queen, Bacon does not doubt; but the aberration, he implies, is merely happy chance.

Putting the boat in the water.

Just as you can't start a journey at its destination, you can't start reading history at the period that interests you. All the great histories of the 17th century provide examples of this. Rushworth, who wanted to write about the Civil War, found that he had to go back to 1618—and spend most of two volumes—to provide the necessary background.

But where to start? The problem is like floating a river: you want to put in far enough upstream that you explore it all, but at some point you must choose an arbitrary, convenient access point, put the boat in the water, and try to pick up the flow.

The first 49 pages—Chapter 1—of Gardiner's History of England give a very brief view of the headwaters of the stream of history we will tour. His choice of incidents is arbitrary, and one might say quirky, but it scarcely matters because he consciously decided to leave so much of it out.

I recommend that you read the entire chapter, but if you don't have time for that much, start around page 29, where we see some of the structural changes in English religion that will have great importance later on.

Think of this part of the tour as a bullet train ride to the country we will tour. I remember riding the fast train from Frankfurt airport to Köln in Germany. At Bonn, where the train slowed, I saw an elegant building which I told myself must have been the Poppelsdorf, the palace of the Prince-Elector. In fact, all I know is that such a building does exist in Bonn (it is the main building of the University), but not whether it is the building I saw. That is the level of understanding you should expect to get from Chapter 1.

We will pick up at page 42—the death of Elizabeth—next time.

At the bottom of page 2, Gardiner comments that it would be more appropriate to have a statue of Edward I in front of Parliament than that of Richard Lion-Heart. I had not known that this statue was move to Palace Yard only in 1860 (it was in Hyde Park before), and therefore would have been fresh in Gardiner's mind.

On page 7, Gardiner mentions two statutes that greatly affected the relations of the English state with Rome. The Statute of Provisors, in the reign of Edward I, dealt with nominations to church positions by the Pope; it said, in essence, that if someone other than the Pope has the right of a nomination, the pontiff may not usurp it. The Statute of Præmunire, in the reign of Richard II, forbade the appeal of judicial decisions outside the realm of England—and specifically appeals to Rome. (Gardiner assumes you knew this; pardon me if you did.)

At the top of page 8 is the first of 633 footnote references, and the note itself is a good example of what to expect from Gardiner's asides. Many are citations, of course; some give critical background on sources; and some, like this one, are just remarks: "Chaucer not being a medieval poet at all, except in point of time, but standing in the same relation to Shakspere as that in which Wycliffe stands to Luther." The poet he is discussing in the text is of course Dante.

The Colet mentioned in conjunction with Sir Thomas More on page 9 is an interesting figure, John Colet, the founder of St. Paul's School.

I'm going to break off at page 12 because there Gardiner mentions Francis Bacon's defense of Elizabeth, and I believe there is no easily accessible English translation of it on the web. I'll take a few hours to put one together [Done.] and then add some more random observations on the first chapter.

A little historiography

Before we set out on a walk with Samuel R. Gardiner, I want to spend a few minutes discussing his views on how we should understand the landscape.

Take a look at Gardiner's Preface to Volume 1 of his revised history. It is an unusual preface, short and succinct. In it, he makes some important points about the writing of history. First, he acknowledges that his own interests drove the attention he paid to various subjects, and that, on the basis of experience and reflection, he found many things to correct and re-proportion. Would that we all had the chance to do so.

Second, he discusses the practical usefulness of studying a period that was, even in the 19th century, antique. In fact, he concludes, there is very little direct light that past events can cast on current problems. The value of studying the problems of the past lies not in the nature of the problems but in the way men and societies and governments and religions tried to solve them. Writing history from that perspective does have value. As Gardiner sums it up,

He ... who studies the society of the past will be of the greater service to the society of the present in proportion as he leaves it out of account. If the exceptional statesman can get on without much help from the historian, the historian can contribute much to the arousing of a statesmanlike temper in the happily increasing mass of educated persons without whose support the statesman is powerless. He can teach them to regard society as ever evolving new wants and new diseases, and therefore requiring new remedies. He can teach them that true tolerance of mistakes and follies which is perfectly consistent with an ardent love of truth and wisdom. He can teach them to be hopeful of the future, because the evil of the present evolves a demand for a remedy which sooner or later is discovered by the intelligence of mankind, though it may sometimes happen that the whole existing organisation of society is overthrown in the process. He can teach them also not to be too sanguine of the future, because each remedy brings with it fresh evils which have in their turn to be faced. These, it may be said, are old and commonplace lessons enough. It may be so, but the world has not yet become so wise as to be able to dispense with them.

I can't fully support Gardiner's disapproval of Thomas Babbington Macaulay, the author of the most popular history of 17th century Britain, and of John Forster, the biographer of John Eliot. It is certainly true, as Gardiner points out, that they saw history, at least in some ways, as a justification of the politics of their own time; and that view colored the story they told. But that view also added life and relevance to those stories. The high sales of Macaulay's multiple volumes were due at least as much to the topical relevance of the author's asides as to his lively and lucid writing. And in the long run, what impressions a student (or a tourist) retains of Buckingham's impeachment or Hambden's trial, has less to do with the author's politics than the student's.

But that's it from me on the subject of historiography. We have too many exciting things to see to spend time on meta-discussion.

More on Fairholt's book

The introduction of Fairholt's collection of poems on Buckingham and his execution (23 years in the future, in terms of this blog), is interesting for more than including the schedule of Buckingham's gifts from the crown. It also explains most of what is known about "Doctor" John Lambe, the quack and astrologer whom Buckingham seems to have occasionally consulted.

I'm working on a web edition of Fairholt's book. It should be ready this week.

One couplet in an epitaph on Buckingham struck me this evening. It is

Live ever, Felton, thou hast turn'd to dust
Treason, ambition, murther, pride and lust.

(Felton, of course, was the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham.)

However unfair that may be to the memory of George Villiers (as Gardiner will show us six volumes from
now), it is as comprehensive a condemnation as can be.

I beg pardon for these consecutive interruptions of a tour that has yet to begin. I still intend a short historiographical comment, and then to commence the walks that Samuel Gardiner has laid out.

Another asynchronous question

We have yet to commence 1603, but I have a question concerning the Duke of Buckingham's impeachment 25 years later. The 12th article of the impeachment refers to an attached schedule that details the monies accumulated by Buckingham since his introduction to the Court--amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds. In his defence, Buckingham refers to another schedule that gives a "truer" accounting.

Where are these schedules to be found?

Update: I found the schedule from the charge in, of all places, Fairholt's "Poems and Songs Relating to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham", pp. x-xiii. No luck yet on the counter-schedule, though.

A TOC

The chief guide book we'll be using to start is Samuel Gardiner's 10-volume History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War. The edition is that of 1900, as digitized by Microsoft, rendered as text by The Internet Archive, and formatted in html (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) by me. The Gardiner text, and much of the other material that will be linked from this blog, are stored at fooguru.org .

I will be proofing the History and other texts as we go along, so you may see some typos if you get too far ahead. Feel free to report them as you find them.

I don't intend to follow Gardiner down all the paths he knows, but many of the choices are tempting. Take a look at this Table of Contents for the first two volumes. If there are any tours that are particularly appealing to you, let me know. Otherwise, I'll be following the paths that most appeal to me.

Next post: A very little bit of historiography.

Meet the tour guide

There is one essential quality of a tour guide: he must know the territory.

No man knew or knows more about the 17th century—at least the first half of it—than Samuel Rawson Gardiner. The period was his life's work. He was both meticulous and precise. Gardiner's pace of documentation was this: one year of history, one year of writing. There is no doubt Gardiner knows the territory.

But what about other characteristics that make a good guide, things like amiability, curiosity, physical endurance and an open mind? I claim that Gardiner has these, too.

For details about Gardiner's life and work, see the biographical material I have collected. As one of his friends pointed out, Samuel Gardiner is not the kind of man whose biography is written. These few anecdotes, though, give some idea of the man:

• He was a teacher. At the same time he was teasing out the causitive events of an era, he was lecturing to first-year students at King's College, London on the most basic facts of the period. Nor was he a dry teacher. When asked to provide an examination question for upper-level students on the soporific author Johann Bluntschli, his contribution was "Give your reasons for thinking Mr. Bluntschli to have been an ass."
• He was energetic. He went by bicycle to many of the sites about which he wrote.
• He liked to stroll with friends. The Minnesota historian James K. Hosmer recorded this visit with Gardiner:

  He invited me to his home at Bromley in Kent, where he allowed me to read the proofs of the volume in his own great series which was just then in press. It related to matters that were vital to my purpose and I had the rare pleasure of reading a masterly work and seeing how the workman built, inserting into his draft countless marginal emendations, the application of sober second thought to the original conception. I spent the best part of the night in review and it was for me a training well worth the sacrifice of sleep. In the pleasant July afternoon we sat down to tea in the little shaded garden where I met the son and daughter of my host and also Mrs. Gardiner, an accomplished writer and his associate in his labours. The interval between tea and dinner we filled up with a long walk over the fields of Kent during which appeared the social side of the man. He told me with modesty that he was descended from Cromwell through Ireton, and the vigour of his stride, with which I found it sometimes hard to keep up, made it plain that he was of stalwart stock and might have marched with the Ironsides.

• He was Deacon of the Apostolic Church, an apocalyptic Protestant sect so rigorous that it was ejected from the Presbyterian denomination. Yet his judgments on the puritans, the catholics and the Church of England are just and even-handed.

Samuel Gardiner is our tour guide because

1. He knows the country.
2. He is amiable (if dry and occasionally pedantic).
3. He is enthusiastic.
4. He tries to see the country for what it is, not for what he wishes it had been.

First query

I said yesterday that I have a lot of questions. Here's an immediate one: Where can I find the text of King James's "Book of Bounty", which I understand to have put bounds on causes for suits at law, and of which I think I have never heard until this evening.

Update: Ok, it's reprinted in Gordon's Monopolies by Patents. Maybe that's available at archive.org (which isn't responding tonight). It's not a Google book.

The plan of this blog

As I mentioned yesterday, I am not qualified to guide a tour through the Britain of the 1600s. We will need a professional guide. I plan to proceed sequentially, starting about 1603, and to follow the narrative set out by Samuel R. Gardiner in his series of books on the period, which include

• History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War, (10 volumes), originally published 1863-1881, then revised and republished 1883-1884.
• History of the Great Civil War, (3 volumes), originally published 1886-1891, then republished in 4 volumes, 1893.
• History of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, (2 volumes, interrupted by Gardiner's death), completed by Charles H. Firth.

If you want to read ahead, I have collected links to page images of Gardiner's works.

I haven't yet given much thought to how to proceed through the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution (should we ever get so far), but that is a decision that can be safely deferred.

Gardiner considered the subject broadly and meticulously. Nevertheless, he was mainly concerned with constitutional and political history and the history of ideas. There are paths, I am sure, that we will want to follow where other guides will add local color. Fortunately there are many volunteers. I plan to supplement Gardiner with material from various letters and diaries, from the State Trials, from the Dictionary of National Biography, and later from John Rushworth's Historical Collections and Clarendon's History of the Rebellion

I believe the entries in this blog will usually fall into one or more of these catagories:

1. Introduction, like most of the entries this week. These entries will be meta-discussion about the blog itself, and I'll try to keep them to a minimum.
2. Strolls through particular narratives. There are any number of stories that I find interesting and that I want to explore. These walks will undoubtedly involve following branches off the main trail.
3. Admiration of vistas. Once we have a clear view of an area in front of us, I suspect we will want to ask questions about it: why is it appealing or appalling? How did it get that way? How does the same prospect look 400 years later?
4. Queries. I have a lot of questions. I'll be asking them here, trying to answer them from the sources I have available, and hoping that others will be interested enough also to contribute answers.

The emphasis will be on history rather than historiography (although I do have an historiographical post in mind for next week); and on political, constitutional, social, economic and military aspects of history, with an occasional diversion into literature and geography.

Next entry: Meet the tour guide, Samuel R. Gardiner.

Introduction

I've had in mind some time a blog for which the central subject would be the history of Britain in the 17th century. The topic seems odd enough to require an apology, which I will provide in a subsequent blog entry; for now I offer an entirely sufficient excuse for any blog: the subject interests me and I have something to say about it.

As a field of study, this period of history is mostly a closed book in the sense that most of the artificts likely to be found, have been. And they have been examined and considered by men and women of sound judgment and extensive knowledge. But because the field is bounded, does not mean it isn't vast. On almost any question, it is possible to wander satisfyingly far down a winding path in search of an answer. This blog will be a tour along some of those paths.

I am not qualified to guide such walks. I will be one of the sojourners. By trade I am an experienced software engineer—a software architect—employed (while employed I may be) by a computer processor design company. I have no academic background to speak of except in engineering and the hard sciences. I was in England and Scotland once, for a few weeks, 35 years ago; I've seen Ireland only from the air. These limitations will greatly effect the plan and the progress of this blog.

The title of this blog is influenced by the fine essay of Henry David Thoreau, Walking. I have the idea that frequent, short essays on this wide but familiar subject will be like Thoreau's jaunts around Concord, where he found

my vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.

Next entry: The plan of this blog.