Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (25 page)

In 1554, the year made ominous for Protestants by the marriage of Mary with Philip, Richard Hooker was born at Heavitree, Exeter. His parents were poor, sober citizens whose Reformed faith had been put to trial and strengthened by the old beliefs, as much conservative as Catholic, of the West. In the western rising of 1549 against Edward’s Act of Uniformity and his new prayer book, the Catholic rebels of north Devon had besieged Exeter for five weeks. And the start of Mary’s reign promised more afflictions for western Protestants. So the household of the Hookers was
full of earnest devotion. The Bible was ever at hand, either in Tyndale’s translation or in the impressive large folio of the Great Bible, first issued in 1539 to satisfy the need for the Scriptures in English and soon the favourite reading of the people. Its sonorous language was not only incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer for use in every church, but also found its way into the ordinary speech and greatly enriched the prose of the age. Young Richard flourished in this devout air; for though he was a country lad in looks, his gentle biographer Izaak Walton described him as ‘sanguine, with a mixture of choler’; he was a natural student and wise beyond his years: ‘his motion was slow even in his youth, and so was his speech, never expressing an earnestness in either of them, but an humble gravity suitable to the aged.’

To his masters he was ‘a little wonder’ and lapped up knowledge like a hungry kitten at a bowl of milk. His parents had no means to continue his education and had intended him to become an apprentice. But when it was seen how well the child did, a prosperous uncle, John Hooker, came to his aid, paid for the continuation of his schooling and then, in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, brought the boy to the attention of John Jewel, the bishop of Salisbury. Jewel was a strong Protestant who had fled from England during Mary’s reign. He was impressed by the gravity and the learning of the lad and perhaps saw him as a hopeful recruit to the Anglican ministry. In 1567, through the influence of the bishop, Hooker entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Jewel died in 1571, and with the loss of his patron Hooker feared for the future. But his quality had been noted; the head of his college assured him that his place was secure, and Sandys, the bishop of London, having heard of his excellence from Jewel, appointed young Hooker as tutor to his son Edwin. The peaceful rotation of the academic year at Oxford absorbed Hooker. Younger students gathered round him, in particular Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, the influential friends of his life. At nineteen be became a scholar of Corpus Christi, and at twenty-three a fellow. Oxford and Cambridge had always been the great breeding ground for churchmen, and Hooker, doubtless as his patrons intended, moved easily from the study of the classics and languages to the study of religion, applying a rational, lucid and temperate mind to the problems of faith: ‘the Scripture’, he said, ‘was not writ to beget disputations and pride, and opposition to
government; but charity and humility, moderation, obedience to authority, and peace to mankind.’ In 1580 he took orders and became a modest, obedient member of the Anglican priesthood.

Hooker was not a contentious or a proud man. At the age of twenty-six he had done well enough; the obscure rewards of university life, surrounded by books and pupils, would have suited his small ambition. The first sign that he was to be drawn out of the university quietness came in 1581 when he was appointed to preach at St Paul’s Gross in London. To preach this sermon, in the open air before a large, critical audience, was a considerable honour for a young man. The Elizabethan public came to the sermon to be entertained as well as instructed and expected both keen argument and a lively performance. Such preachers as ‘silver-tongued Smith’ at St Clement Danes and Clappam of Foster Lane with his ‘sour look, but a good spirit, bold, and sometimes bluntly witty’, or Egerton at Blackfriars with his great congregation ‘specially of women’, were popular London figures. Resounding sermons had made reputations. Jewel, Hooker’s first patron, had a famous success at St Paul’s Cross in 1560. The appointment of Hooker indicated that the eye of the church hierarchy was upon him. When he came down from Oxford for the sermon he lodged at the house of John Churchman in Watling Street and there met the family which was to become so important in his life, providing him with his future wife and the home in which to begin his great labour.

With the mark of favour upon him Hooker returned to Oxford while his friends, chief among whom were the Sandys, father and son, looked for his preferment. Church affairs move at a leisurely pace; in December 1584 Hooker was given the benefice of Drayton Beauchamp, near Aylesbury, but this was only a temporary appointment before he took up the Mastership of the Temple in February 1585. It is likely that Hooker was an absentee vicar of Drayton Beauchamp. The practice was a common abuse of the time. ‘What do you patrons?’ Latimer had complained as early as 1550. ‘Sell your benefices, or give them to your servants for their service, for keeping of hounds or hawks, for making of your gardens.’ Hooker’s friend and pupil Edwin Sandys was absentee prebend of Wetwang in Yorkshire for twenty years while he was a lawyer at the Middle Temple and then M.P. for Plympton in
Devon. Hooker himself defended the practice on the grounds that servants of the Church who were scholars or writers could not continue their work without an income, which they would not have without a benefice. And this was exactly the kind of church service which the authorities had marked out for Richard Hooker. He was to become a controversialist for the Anglican Church.

When Elizabeth came to the throne her first concern was to restore the absolute authority of the Tudor State which Mary’s Catholicism had lessened to some degree. She herself was naturally a Protestant; to be otherwise would have been an admission of illegitimacy. But though she made a certain show of religion, suiting her action to the company, most observers thought her either sceptical or indifferent. At the end of her reign one of her countrymen boldly declared that she was ‘an atheist and a maintainer of atheism’. The most unfanatical and cautious of women, she was not intolerant, and the religious changes she made were done steadily and slowly. Her instinct was to take the middle course. ‘There are three notable differences of religion in the land, the two extremes whereof are the Papist, and the Puritan, and the religious Protestant obtaining the mean.’

But theological questions were of little importance to Elizabeth. Her chief aim was to follow the path found out by her father and make the English Church solely responsible for its own faith, ritual and organization. A national Church was but a part of the commonwealth, and the only legislator for the commonwealth was the Crown acting through Parliament. Parliament became the only true interpreter of the Scriptures and the religious duty of the subject was to obey or be convicted of treason. The faith which Queen and Parliament ordained for the people in 1559 was rather more Protestant than the settlement of Henry VIII. The Mass was called a ‘blasphemous fable and dangerous deceit’; transubstantiation, which Henry’s Parliament of 1539 had defended even unto the death penalty, was ‘repugnant to the plain words of Scripture’; and purgatory and the cult of the saints were now ‘fond things, vainly invented’. Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy asserted the jurisdiction of the Crown in spiritual matters and put the Bishop of Rome firmly in his place as ‘bishop of that one see and diocese and never yet well able to govern the same’. The same Act reminded the clergy that they ought, ‘specially and before others’, to be
obedient to their sovereign. The English hierarchy learnt the lesson well. ‘For this is our doctrine’, declared Bishop Jewel, ‘that every soul of what calling soever he be—be he monk, be he preacher, be he prophet, be he apostle—ought to be subject to Kings and magistrates.’ And Aylmer, Bishop of London, wrote to Sir Christopher Hatton that ‘I trust not of God but of my sovereign which is God’s lieutenant and so another God unto me’. With this submission, Elizabeth was content.

Queen and Parliament were satisfied, but fervent men were not. Elizabeth’s settlement was so obviously a part of social policy, to secure the power of the monarchy and to prevent unrest, that no man possessed by true religious enthusiasm could be satisfied with it. At Mary’s death the Catholic opposition diminished. Many Catholics went abroad and those who remained at home were caught between their loyalty to the Queen, which as patriotic Englishmen they felt most strongly, and their loyalty to the Pope who in 1570 excommunicated Elizabeth and released her subjects from their allegiance. The hapless Edmund Campion, a Jesuit missioner executed for treason in 1581, cried from the scaffold that ‘your queen is my queen’. It gradually appeared to Englishmen that Catholicism was not so much a religion as a treasonable activity intent on deposing the Queen and setting up in her stead a sinister continental tyranny.

The greatest challege to Elizabeth’s settlement came not from the discomforted Catholics, but from those on the left wing of the Reformation—Anabaptists, Calvinists and the like—generally known in England under the collective title of ‘Puritans’, a group angrily divided among themselves but united in thinking that Elizabeth’s faith was too secular and not radically different from Catholicism. John Knox had spurned the settlement of 1559, and had denounced Cecil’s ‘carnal wisdom and worldly policy’. The thoroughgoing doctrine of Knox was equally repugnant to Elizabeth’s accommodating bishops who supported the authority of the Crown. ‘God save us’, wrote Archbishop Parker, ‘from such a visitation as Knox has attempted in Scotland; the people to be the orderers of things!’ The Puritans retorted by rejecting the episcopacy itself as unlicensed by Scripture and as actually anti-Christian. From there they went on to attack most of the outward signs of worship, the ritual of the service, the dress of the clergy, the fast-days and holidays, the use of choirs and organs—all these
were marks of idolatry. They condemned as ‘things stained with superstition’, Hooker wrote, ‘our prayers, our sacraments, our times and places of public meeting together for the worship and service of God, our marriages, our burials, our functions, elections and ordinations ecclesiastical, almost whatever we do in the exercise of our religion according to laws for that purpose established’. Most worrying of all to Elizabeth and the supporters of her settlement, the Puritans, like the Catholics, denied the royal supremacy. Though they claimed to be loyal subjects, they could not understand how laws devised in Parliament should make them go against their clear reading of the Bible.

The English Church was a child of the Reformation and so there were many among the English clergy who held Puritan or non-conformist views. Archbishop Grindal was easy on nonconforming ministers so that his successor, Whitgift, complained to Lord Burghley that the bishops, instead of turning them out, ‘offend rather, the most of them, on the contrary part’. Puritans were also well entrenched in the universities, particularly at Cambridge where Cartwright and Travers stirred up the people to establish a blessed church republic such as Calvin had built in Geneva and Knox in Scotland. Two Puritan
Admonitions
in 1571 called the attention of Parliament to the faults of the church system which Parliament itself had devised in 1559. Soon Puritan opinions had infiltrated even into Parliament and the attack on the bishops was delivered from the floor of the House. The royal supremacy, the whole edifice of the English Church, was shaken. ‘To which end’, wrote pious Izaak Walton in his life of Hooker, ‘there were many that wandered up and down and were active in sowing discontents and seditions, by venomous and secret murmurings, and a dispersion of scurrilous pamphlets against the Church and State; but especially against the Bishops; by which means, together with venomous and indiscreet sermons, the common people become so fanatic, as to believe the Bishops to be Anti-Christ, and the only obstructers of God’s discipline!’

The task of repelling the Puritan’s persistent attacks rested largely on John Whitgift, at first Bishop of Worcester and after 1583 Archbishop of Canterbury. He was such a stout defender of the Elizabethan orthodoxy that the Queen called him ‘her little black husband’. His position was that the English Church contained ‘all points of religion necessary to salvation’, and that matters
beyond these essentials of faith, such as forms and ceremonies, were ‘things indifferent’ which a national Church had the right to determine. And this determination should be done by the governors of the State, for Church and State were one. ‘I perceived no such distinction’, he wrote in his
Defence of the Answer,
‘of the commonwealth and the Church that they should be counted as it were two several bodies governed with divers laws and divers magistrates.’ Since he thus assumed what the Puritans vehemently denied, his arguments were not convincing to them. Nor were the writings of other Anglican apologists such as Bancroft and Bilson any more persuasive. When Whitgift became archbishop in 1583 he took energetic practical measures against the nonconformists. Licenses to preach were withheld from those who would not conform; commissions in London and under Sandys, by now Archbishop of York, in the North examined the beliefs of the ministers; and, at the orders of the Privy Council, a censorship was put on Puritan propaganda, and illicit presses were suppressed. But censorship rarely works, then as now; the Puritan printers, driven underground, soon showered the bishops with the fierce, joyous vituperation of the Marprelate Tracts. The Puritans could only be beaten down by a cool, learned, authoritative defence of the English Church, and in search of this the bishops came to Richard Hooker.

The chance to recruit Hooker to the fray against the Puritans came in 1585 when Dr Alvey, the Master of the Temple, died and left the succession likely to fall upon Walter Travers, one of the most vehement Puritans who was already a lecturer at the Temple. Archbishop Sandys, always the good friend and patron, immediately proposed Hooker for the Mastership, a suggestion taken up by Archbishop Whitgift. And these two powerful ecclesiastics easily overrode the objections of Travers’s supporters, even though they had gained the ear of Burghley. The objections of Hooker himself had also to be overcome, the extent of whose gentle ambition it was to live and study in the country and ‘eat that bread which he might more properly call his own, in privacy and quietness’. Finally, he gave way and was installed in the Mastership in February 1585.