Others in England liked sacraments better than sermons: expatriate priests and Jesuits who, from the late 1570s, secretly returned to England; resident recusants who welcomed and hid them from authorities; and an assortment of conformists as well. Most reformists, particularly the puritans, took fondness for sacraments to be characteristic of unreformed religion. Baptisms and Eucharists without preaching, “the principall part of [reformists’] ministry,” were “polluted”; “as the seale without the writing, so itt is nothing for the sacrament without the sermon within it.”24 So the reformists argued, and one of their petitions went so far as to identify sermons as “the only meanes whereby [God’s] kingdome is established.”25 But the conformists answered that frequency was the enemy of quality and that the insistence on more preaching encouraged the realm’s preachers to “handle matters verie rawlie” in the pulpit.26
Several years (and pamphlets) into his controversy with reformist Thomas Cartwright, John Whitgift, later bishop of Worcester—the diocesan with jurisdiction over reformed church discipline in Shakespeare’s Stratford—noted that “none” of his conformist colleagues “denyeth that hearing the Worde of God is the usual and ordinarie meanes . . . God useth to worke faythe in us and that therefore preachers be necessarie.” Still, he all but endorsed the remark that “the whole of London” could be well served by just four industrious preachers: “If any hath sayd that some of those which use to preach often by their loose negligente, verball, and unlearned sermons have brought the word of God into contempte, or that foure godlie learned, pithy, diligent, and discreet preachers might do more good in London than forty contentious, unlearned, verball, and rashe preachers, they have said truely and their saying myghte well be justifyed.”27 Later and throughout his career—in Worcester and, from 1583, as archbishop of Canterbury—Whitgift contended that it was unreasonable to expect a sermon with every sacrament. Such frequency would leave preachers no time for other pastoral work. Whitgift also held that each bishop ought to be trusted to make determinations about the quality and quantity of the pulpit oratory in his diocese and that episcopal discretion was by far the most important element in the formulation and implementation of policies for the administration and reform of the church. But many reformists wanted local congregations to have the final say, assuming that reformed, right-minded parishioners, whose “eies [were] opened from darknes to light” by “simple preaching,” could provide for their own edification. They would comprehend, for example, that ceremonies dazzled rather than informed. They would also “discerne by” that “light,” puritans predicted, that “the true church” ought not to concentrate power in the hands of bishops.28
Implacable reformists insisted that bishops cared more for their estates, revenues, and respectability than for parishioners’ regeneration. Bishops promoted pluralism, turning a blind eye, according to their critics, to the exceptionally poor service that parishes received when an incumbent in one had other parishes to serve. But to excuse pluralism, conformist bishops and their apologists explained that “petit and meane salarie[s]” on offer in the smaller parishes were insufficient to stock pastors’ studies—not to mention their cupboards. Poverty kept the best and brightest from the ministry.29 Conformists conceded that pluralism, if left unmonitored, would become “the very cut-throate of the preaching of the gospel,” although they were confident that the bishops and their deputies would recognize and remedy abuses promptly and that the church could afford some pluralists too busy to preach as often as reformists required. Conformists said that sermons in strategic locations would suffice. There was nothing in the Bible about putting pulpits in every parish. Besides, for centuries, England had a number of parishes thirty or forty miles across, much larger than any two or three parishes served by Jacobethan preachers.30
But reformists were unimpressed by conformists’ history lessons. Dudley Fenner, probably the most highly regarded theologian among the dissidents in the 1580s, held that no Christian in a reformed church ought to “goe above five myle to hear a sermon.”31 For it would be a shame to deprive a religion of the Word of the Word—namely, of the gospels’ “glad tidings” intimately as well as learnedly, eloquently, and, above all, frequently preached. When “want of maintenance” became a sticking point in small parishes, parishioners, “eies opened,” reformists claimed, would find solutions that fit local circumstances without sacrificing sermons.32
To conformists, such confidence in local improvisation was silly and sometimes sinister. They suspected reformists’ lay patrons of plotting parish coups. If parishes were kept small and “maintenance” modest, few competent and commanding figures would stay in the ministry. The exodus of the best would enable lay elites to capture control, and the underpaid, overworked pastors who remained would prove to be no match for parishes’ lay leadership intending to experiment with unorthodox administrative arrangements that empowered sheep to hire or fire their shepherds. So, all the reformists’ talk of sermons and size seemed subversive to conformists.33
From the 1580s, highly placed conformists continued to question their critics’ motives and methods. Reformists were reputed to love to argue, to be “in great choller,” and to “wear[y] themselves in factious discourse.”34 John Aylmer, Whitgift’s principal coadjutor, had been one of those allegedly choleric critics in the 1560s but confided that his opposition to episcopacy at the time had been a symptom of sickness; he spoke intemperately about episcopacy in a fit and while “braynsick.”35 He recovered and joined other conformists—“Judases,” according to many reformists, diocesan officials who “maime and deforme the Body of Christ.”36 Peter Lake now senses “resentment” and “desperation” in those accusations, for the 1580s were not going at all well for the bishops’ critics. Their petitions in Parliament were regularly rejected, their patrons at Court were dying, and Whitgift was named to the queen’s Council. Reformists were losing what little leverage they had while conformists positioned themselves to influence significantly—and to their critics’ disadvantage—what “apperteineth to the emperiall office.”37
Resentment and desperation prompted barbed editorials on the established church and its leadership that issued from dissidents’ secret presses in late 1588 and 1589. A fictive, irreverent, and witty vigilante, Martin Marprelate, hurled insults at the more prominent conformists, a few of whom commissioned pamphleteers to respond in kind. Whitgift and his conformist colleagues also set out to persuade the government to consider martinists as dangerous as “massing priests,” who were still pouring into England and supposedly planning to escort the realm back to Rome and to give it over to Spain.38 Richard Bancroft can be said to have captained the anti-martinist enterprise. He had a reputation for effectively suppressing subversives. Whitgift reported how diligently Bancroft had been in Bury, silencing reformist preachers and magistrates.39 Felicity Heal now calls him the regime’s Rottweiler, referring to his ferocious defense of the realm’s established church’s interests. He was especially good at disarranging the affairs of forward Calvinists and lay-low Catholics.40 He supported the appellants among the latter, a faction of Catholic accommodationists, who labored to discredit the English Jesuits. Bancroft also wrote against the reformists, equating their religious disaffection with political disloyalty. In sum, he assiduously