But James was suspicious of the Catholics’ ambitions to “reedify” the realm and of their warbling about “truth as cleare as the sunne.” Without conceding that they had gotten a raw deal from his predecessor, he nonetheless intimated that there might be relief in store, though he also confided to Cecil his worries that his early overtures to the recusants could have prompted their “bragging that none shall enter to be king thaire but by thaire permission.”148 Cecil answered by explaining the “dyfference[s]” in English Catholics’ “spirits”: few were bold; most were various shades of conciliatory; all were hopeful. The new king’s criticism of the old regime was readily accepted—notably, the observation that Cecil’s father, Lord Burghley, the queen, and her Council had been long on laws yet short on what James called “exemplaire execution” or enforcement. But Cecil recommended “charitable relief,” which, he clarified, did not mean that Catholics—“enemies to the gospel”—would be encouraged to revive the old faith’s hold on the realm, but that sufficient measures should be put in place to make them “friends to [King James’s] good fortune.”149
Cecil was anxious that “charitable relief” not be misconstrued by England’s Calvinists. Hence, he probably saw to the circulation of the new king’s categorical declaration that, if forty thousand armed Catholics gave him a choice between pikes and peace, he “would rather dye in the field than condiscend to be false to God.”150 James, however, was less melodramatic when, in 1604, he addressed his first English Parliament and acknowledged that there were a number of “quiet, well-minded men” among Catholic “layickes.” Yet he estimated that many of their coreligionists, who were “nursed or brought up . . . upon such venim in place of wholesome nutriment,” became “factious stirrers of sedition and perturbers of the commonwealth.” The king regretted punishing “well-minded men” for confessional attachments, he said, but he believed he was forced to do so in self-defense. Catholic Masses and “murthers” of religiously reformed princes on the Continent seemed to him to be closely connected; “stirrers” and “perturbers” in France and Holland used the sacraments to consolidate fellow Catholics’ support for the “dethroning” of their sovereigns. James agreed to meet Catholic petitioners in his new realm partway, “so that all novelties might be renounced on either side”—that is, by Calvinists and Catholics—but he left unspecified what he would weigh as novel and expendable. He did specify and stress how he deplored irrepressibly regicidal Catholics on the Continent. In England, their coreligionists must not, he said, take his gentle disposition as a sign that he was weak, for he welcomed opportunities to “tread downe their errors.”151
One could characterize James’s and Cecil’s as mixed messages. There was not much in them to console the Catholic accommodationists. True, their new king’s queen had been received into their church, and Cecil was still counseling “charitable relief.” Might there have been a vein of live-and-let-live beneath King James’s gruff talk of “tread[ing] downe errors”? Maybe so, but what surely would have complicated any translation of the new regime’s irenic inclinations into policy was the response anticipated and occasionally heard from the religiously reformed. Tobie Matthew, bishop of Durham, warned that Cecil’s and James’s efforts to appease or “quiet” the Catholic accommodationists had caused “great jollity” among Catholics of all stripes, because the relaxation of restrictions on the practice of the traditional faith was almost certain to lead to the growth of the unreformed community “in number, courage, and influence.” The growth and “jollity,” Matthew continued, were doubly difficult to overlook at a time when the king and his Council were silencing the realm’s more forward reformists. Confiding that he “mislike[d] their zeal,” Matthew also acknowledged that he was dismayed to see their hopes for a more effective preaching ministry—hopes he shared—shattered while English Catholics’ hopes for tolerance or more seemed to be encouraged. Had the realm’s authorities forgotten that Catholicism had been (and still was) “opposite and contrary” to the religion established in King James’s old and new territories?152
Matthew either misperceived or—more likely—exaggerated the new government’s kindness to Catholics. His remarks about their resurgence and rejoicing were almost certainly intended to nudge his new king to stay Elizabeth’s course. Moreover, Matthew overstated the king’s determination to disadvantage reformists. England’s first Stuart sovereign was never as opposed as its second—his son and heir, Charles—to reformist critics of the Prayer Book and of its conformist partisans. But James seems to have sensed that a few reformists, unable to “avoyd all singularity” and bitter toward bishops, would set off one schism after another. Hence, the new king supported the interrogations and deprivations Whitgift originated and the old queen allowed twenty years earlier.153 Petitions asking that the Council halt the proceedings and reinstate those reformist ministers Elizabeth’s commissioners had deprived were not answered favorably. Prominent London preacher Stephen Egerton proposed new procedures, suggesting that bishops and their deputies be excluded from the commissions sifting the accusations against nonconformists and that panels of laymen determine whether pastors exceeded their authority and “used new forms” instead of simply, selectively, and inoffensively omitting what they considered Catholic and objectionable.154
Too much in the new king’s new realm seemed unresolved when he summoned several conformists and reformists to a conference at Hampton Court in autumn 1604. From all reports, what could have become an occasion for polemical pyrotechnics was rather subdued. Reformists gained no ground. James was unsympathetic when they aired requests for relief from what they called episcopal tyranny. The king was wary of proposed alternatives to diocesan administration. He feared that congregational consistories and assertive local leadership would end with the kind of decentralization that could destabilize England’s secular—as well as religious—regimes. “They pleade for [appeal to] my supremacie,” he said, referring to reformists’ deference, but, he added, “I know what would become of my supremacie” once bishops “were out” and reformist agitators “in place.”155
We have no idea what Shakespeare knew about, or whether he cared about, the Hampton Court conference, yet he and James’s new theater company, the King’s Men, had been at the site before the delegates were invited. And the company returned more often than did the reformists. The results of the king’s meeting, of course, were no secret. Reports circulated in manuscript as well as in print. James was known to have confirmed royal support for highly placed prelates, whom reformists derisively called “ruling bishops,” and to have rejected reformists’ argument that the Bible, “the all sufficient word of God,” made no provision for executives “ruling” churches.156 Yet he conceded that the bearing and behavior of many English bishops were as off-putting and papist as their critics had claimed. His sensible Scots subjects, he said, would turn thuggish at the sight of English executives’ sumptuous stoles and pretentious processions. “If I were not with you,” strolling through Edinburgh, he told his new realm’s prelates, “you should be stoned to death.”157
With their king’s imprimatur, however, they continued to hound nonconformists. In Royston, parishioners complained about the dismissals of the “faithfull pastors, through whose ministry we have bin . . . brought from darkenes into light.”158 Yet James trusted that the religiously reformed community, as a whole, enjoyed greater security and tranquility as a result of bishops’ vigilance. Praestat ut pereat unus quam unitas—better to send one intractable preacher packing than to jeopardize church unity. Church unity depended on conformity. Nonconformity could disturb the peace of parishes,