Cecil and King James disappointed and often distressed the “forward” (or “frivolous”) reformists, several of whom pinned their hopes on Prince Henry. They speculated that, if only the king called off his bishops’ campaigns against conscientious nonconformists, the centenary of the reformation in the 1630s—during the reign of his son—would see the completion of work that the Tudors had started. The eighth Henry “pull’d down abbeys and cells”; the ninth would see to it that England knew no more of “bishops and bells.”160 The ninth’s father, James, hardly would have approved the rhymester’s abbreviation of his tenure, but he listened less and less to reformists’ appeals, favored conformist preachers—notably, Lancelot Andrewes—and kept his distance from what historian Kenneth Fincham describes as “the excessive evangelicalism” around the realm.161
As for some English Catholics’ fin de siècle hopes for relief from a new regime, they were dashed in 1604, when James made his debut in Parliament and pronounced himself well-pleased with England’s well-settled, reformed religion. A few devotees of the old faith were so disconcerted that they conspired to blow up Parliament with king and prince in its chambers. Robert Catesby, the ringleader, expected to gallop to Wales with a posse of accomplices after the fateful explosion, anticipating that armed coreligionists would join them to await in Wales the arrival of the reinforcements Guy Fawkes had been recruiting during his travels abroad. The conspirators, with their new English army and their foreign friends formed, in Catesby’s imagination, a juggernaut. They would kidnap and crown James’s daughter; England would return to Rome.162
Wilder coups have been known to succeed, but, in this instance, there was a leak, and Fawkes was discovered with incriminating kegs of powder before Parliament convened in early November 1605. Other conspirators were apprehended in the Midlands; Catesby was cornered and killed. Historians have tried ever since to chase down facts over the many furlongs of fiction that hyperactive imaginations have associated with the “powder plot.” Were Catesby and Fawkes deranged? Did expatriate missionaries and resident priests endorse the plan? Could Robert Cecil have masterminded the conspiracy or merely let it run to discredit Catholicism and rally support for the new regime? Were other authorities correct to think that a few ruthless fanatics under the sway of sinister Jesuits had taken England to the very brink of disaster?163
The government might have blamed Spain—yet again—had English envoys, months before, not come to provisional terms that promised a period of peace between the two old enemies. Something approaching Spain-fatigue apparently had set in, and seasoned veteran Richard Leveson—who fought against the armada in 1588, during the Cadiz expedition, in the Azores, and against the Spanish troops in Ireland—was dissuaded from undertaking yet another expedition.164 With the new king reconsidering England’s old animosities, it was a terrible time to recycle anti-Hapsburg rhetoric, so the Jesuits were left to take the blame. Conspirators refused to implicate them, although Henry Garnet, the Jesuit superior in England, acknowledged that one of the would-be assassins mentioned the plot during confession. Garnet’s defense did not impress interrogators, who were unpersuaded that confidences of the confessional were inviolable. It was wrong (and papist), they claimed, to rank the secrets of the confessional above the safety of one’s religiously reformed country.165 Garnet insisted that he had disapproved of the plot and had begged overeager conspirators to leave the reconversion of the realm to Providence. He failed; then they failed. Finally, he failed again, in another forum, to persuade English magistrates that he and fellow Jesuits had nothing to do with the homicidal intent of Catesby, Fawkes, and their friends. Garnet was executed, and English Catholics waited anxiously for the measures they were certain that reformed officials would devise to “roote out all memory of Catholike religion by sudden banishment, massacre, imprisonment, or some unsupportable vexations and pressures.”166
The old faith’s leading spokesmen were far from idle. Archpriest George Blackwell was quick to condemn, publicly and stridently, those egregiously irresponsible fringe figures whom he blamed for having concocted “a detestable and damnable practice,” “odious,” he added, “in the sight of God.”167 Blackwell and other accommodationists may have been consoled to hear it denounced by Justice Coke as “the Jesuits’ treason,” yet no Catholic would have drawn comfort from the comments of another magistrate who belligerently referred to the plot as “an anatomye of poperie.”168
Cecil let out that the new king was not contemplating “new severities.” He admitted, however, that “this fiery treason” “inflamed” the realm’s religiously reformed and confessionally indifferent subjects alike against “the generalitie of the papists”—so much so, he speculated, that “the greatest violences . . . under colour of publicke safetie” would be construed as “effects of care and providence.” But Cecil was certain that James would safeguard “publicke safetie” gently, reserving the rod for “the particulars”—convicted conspirators—and showing mercy to Catholic subjects who deplored and denounced the crime of those “particulars.” The Roman church could make that benevolence easier for all to accept, not just during the crisis at hand but as permanent policy, Cecil said, if popes stopped encouraging assassins and endorsing “grosse usurpation[s]”: officials everywhere, who “doe not approve papal jurisdiction yet would faine . . . a charitable opinion of their [Catholic] subjects,” would not risk the dangerous disapproval of others if the papacy restrained Jesuits. The officials to whom Cecil referred undoubtedly included his king.169
The powder plot proved to the religiously reformed that their religion was celestially sanctioned as well as “well setled.” God had delivered the church in 1534 in Parliament, where the realm’s first reformers “shooke off the bonds and fetters of the Romane corruption.” If the conspirators had brought the edifice down on the heads of the dignitaries within, one could infer God’s displeasure. But, with Westminster spared, England’s reformed religion well settled, and the king’s regime and family prospering, Cecil said, one should presume exactly the opposite.170
On the next few anniversaries of the powder plot’s discovery, sermons reinforced what Cecil would have had them presume—and, if the archdeacon of Canterbury was right, they also “rowse[d] up the drowsie spirits of the people,” “premonish[ing]” them to oppose extremists.171 Did Shakespeare hear the “rows[ing]” pulpit oratory? Did he take notice of the printed sermons? Maybe not, but knowing something about the religion around the realm, we are now in a better place to inquire about the religion around Shakespeare.
EARLY
Identifying some of the religions around the realm—the last chapter’s task—was not at all as challenging as deciding which features of each likely surfaced in the conversations of ordinary yet alert subjects. Retrieving the religion around Shakespeare—this chapter’s assignment—would be easier if it were not so difficult to locate him, particularly in the years after he finished formal schooling and, later, as he moved about London and Southwark. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire in 1564, educated there in the 1570s, and married nearby. Of that we can be sure. He was in London or outside the city walls in Shoreditch by the late 1580s, occasionally returning to Stratford to visit his family and then to retire a few years before his death in 1616. But, in London, he gets lost—lost to us, that is. We cannot tell where he first lodged. Plausibly, Shoreditch, because the theaters were there, and many players lived where they worked. But glovers, his father’s London colleagues, congregated in Bishopsgate Ward, so he might have joined them upon coming to the city—or later. We know only that he changed residences from