Still, Whitgift and his favorite lieutenant, Richard Bancroft, had the queen’s ear, and she was pleased to hear the mantra of conformists satisfied with the shape of their church’s liturgy, the rubrics of its Prayer Book, and “superiority” in its ministry (episcopacy): pastors were “not called to rule this churche of England,” Whitgift explained, “but to obey.”130 He was persuaded that if the reformists’ views prevailed, England’s bishops would be no more than backup; parish consistories would select preachers, who needed only to repair to their bishops, as they might drop by registrars, to put their incumbencies in the public record. “Not called to rule . . . but to obey,” Whitgift said, yet reformists looked to “rule” the hearts and minds of their parishioners and, Bancroft accused, to tug those “harts from the present governement of the church.” And from the government of the realm! One catches Bancroft wondering, in 1595, whether reformist agitators were experimenting with a discipline—a polity and “practice”—that could bring their realm to the brink of civil war: “I doo but aske the question.”131
KING JAMES I: RELIGION “WELL SETLED”
When we left him earlier in this chapter, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was steering from the Azores back to England, still entertaining what historian Paul Hammer describes as “lofty ambitions” for international fame and influence.132 Essex expressed them along with his antipathy toward Spain with a self-assurance that increasingly put off his queen. She reprimanded him, after which he sulked and refused to attend Court. Essex argued that attendance was not part of “the indissoluble dutie which I owe to her Majestie.”133 Elizabeth would have been angrier still had word reached her that he blamed her indignation on others, specifically on his rival, Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son and later Lord Salisbury, who questioned Essex’s loyalty. To answer the charge, he volunteered to lead reinforcements to Ireland, and, monumentally miscalculating, he boasted that he would hastily humble Hugh O’Neill, the rebellious Earl of Tyrone and his queen’s nemesis there.
The Council provided everything he imagined he would need: money, infantry, and transport. But, landing in Ireland, Essex realized his preparations had been inadequate. He had too few troops to hold Armagh while invading Ulster. To Elizabeth’s dismay, he promptly came to terms with Tyrone and returned to England to ward off criticism, which tallied his time in Ireland, the low yield from his Azores expedition, and even his tactics at Cadiz as failures. And complaints about his unruly soldiers who, while waiting for passage to England, “pestered both Dublyn and diverse marytime partes” probably beat him back to Court. Essex’s critics feasted on his humiliations.134
They were “bad instruments,” he said, vowing to “remove [them] from about her Majestie’s person.”135 To that end, he summoned friends to London and schemed to “surprise the Court with power.” He trusted that reformists in the city would rally to his cause, yet they appear to have been mystified by the ostensibly uncoordinated “rising” he staged in early February 1601, which failed abysmally. Essex was charged with having colluded all the while with Tyrone and was beheaded by the end of the month.136
The importance of all this for a politically and confessionally nonaligned playwright living in London at the time is hard to gauge. Literary historian James Shapiro persuasively argues that Shakespeare tremendously admired the Earl of Essex and smuggled him into his Henry V.137 Perhaps the playwright trusted Essex’s claim that he had acted against Cecil to defend himself and secure the succession for King James VI of Scotland. The latter did not make the mistake of endorsing Essex’s initiative. Instead, he continued to cultivate his friendship with Cecil, Elizabeth’s—and soon James’s—chief counsel, who reassured the king that “when that day (soe grievous to us) shall happen which is the tribute of all mortall creatures, your shippe shalbe steered into the right harbour.”138
That “grievous” day did come two years later, in late March 1603. In early April, the king of Scotland started south. He reached Berwick on the sixth of that month and York on the sixteenth. Thomas Cecil, Robert’s older brother, choreographed the welcomes en route. By the middle of May, England’s new sovereign was at Whitehall. The Catholic community in his new realm did not know what to expect from James, who doubtlessly was well informed about the infra-confessional conflicts that had divided it for nearly ten years. Bishop Bancroft was credited with the “greatest blow that the papists received in all Queen Elizabeth’s tyme,” because he often stoked animosities that resulted in an uninterrupted war of words among church papists, resident priests, Jesuits, and “appellant” Catholic clergy.139 Jesuits were determined to out priests who, they said, disgraced their calling. Resident priests rallied around the accused and berated their accusers for arrogance and corruption. Reconciliation seemed unlikely after Jesuit William Weston refused to associate with priests imprisoned with him at Wisbech in 1595 and appealed to Rome to appoint an archpriest for England to investigate clerical misconduct. George Blackwell, who had ties to the Jesuits, was sent and instructed to refashion English Catholicism in the order’s image.140
That was Thomas Bluet’s take on Rome’s and Blackwell’s purpose. Bluet, who had denounced Weston at Wisbech, lamented that the papacy entertained the illusion that English Catholics would be better off lined up behind “puritane Jesuits,” who were “right Donatists in resemblance” and who camouflaged their lust for control with their pleas for reform.141 John Colleton, another critic of the Jesuits, remembered that resident priests “welcomed [expatriate Jesuits] first entering into our labors . . . with all honor” and “acquainted them with our friends and places,” only to have the missionaries (“wolves”) impeach the “tender affections” of their clerical benefactors and turn the laity against them.142 But the bitterness of Colleton, Bluet, and other “discontented brethren” did not weigh heavily on Robert Persons, the leader of the Jesuits’ mission in the early 1580s, who, back in Rome, endorsed Weston’s request for the appointment of an archpriest and touted the nominee’s integrity. Persons protested that the order’s Catholic critics were “few in number” and “grene in credit.” Their accusations left only “little scratches,” hardly worth pondering. What disturbed Persons was that those “few,” “grene,” “discontented” critics had associated themselves with Richard Bancroft, who expected to reap rewards for the religiously reformed from demoralizing divisions within the English Catholic community.143
At issue were the Catholics’ chances of winning concessions from the new king. Rome first tried extortion, directing “all Catholikes in England” to withhold obedience from him until he resolved to bring his new realm back to the universal church.144 Appellants were least likely to oblige the pope. For a generation or more, they had made a point of “not exasperating [their Calvinist] adversaries.”145 We would be correct to think of appellants as accommodationists; they agreed with recusants that their realm’s reformed religion was badly deformed, and they trusted that time would tell against it, but appellants inferred from the history of the Christian traditions that Catholics could count on God to reconcile hostile governments to their faith’s survival and spread. Appellant accommodationists, searching history for examples of patience, thought that they found in Bishop Hilary of Poitiers an exceptional model and a theologian who, as far as they knew, persistently yet politely explained Nicene Christology to Emperor Constantius in the fourth century. Had there been Jesuits then, appellants intimated, Hilary would have been condemned for his failure to “exasperate” the authorities.146
For their part, the Jesuits looked for different ways to appease authorities in England. They, too, appealed to history, arguing that—unlike the phantom,