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Marsilius of Padua and the Case for the Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy (The Alexander Prize Essay)
Abstract
Taking William Marshall at his word, a comparison of his Defence of Peace of 1535 with the Latin editio princeps of the Defensor Pacis , printed in Basle in 1522, reveals that there is much need for ‘correction’ or rather, it reveals that Marshall had himself corrected and amended the original to suit his own purposes. What those purposes were, the nature of the amendments and their consequences for our understanding of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy will be the subject of this essay.
All authority derived ultimately from God. As Thomas Cranmer’s Homily on Obedience, once of those pieces authorised to be read in churches in the absence of a sermon, put it in 1547:
Almighty God hath created and appointed all things in heaven, earth and waters in most excellent and perfect order. In heaven he hath appointed distinct orders and states of archangels and angels. In the earth he has assigned kings, princes, with other governors under them, all in good and necessary order.1
Consequently obedience to established authority was a religious duty, but the order envisaged by the homilist was less perfect than he imagined. God worked perforce through human agents, and these were not necessarily arranged in neat hierarchies. There had for centuries been disputes between spiritual and temporal lords over priorities, and the demarkation between their respective jurisdictions. Although the Church had never publicly admitted it, by the end of the fifteenth century this long-drawn-out struggle had ended in compromise. Kings accepted the papal primacy in theory, but largely ignored it in practice. Popes acquiesced in this situation in order to retain the support and cooperation of the secular authorities in the preservation of ecclesiastical discipline.
The most important force for change in early Tudor government is the most complex to analyse: the dynamic by which developments in different areas of governmental activity reinforced and amplified one another. Royal political control and the ability to provide effective justice interacted so closely that much of the time they blended into each other. Financial strength, whether derived from an enlarged crown estate or from intensified direct taxation, was made possible by tighter supervision of local elites, but in turn it facilitated expenditure — on magnificence, war, patronage and the suppression of rebellion — to make such supervision more palatable or less resistible. The growth of the state in the minds of its subjects, albeit fragmentary, encouraged the loyalty that submitted to political control, cooperated in the king’s judicial enterprise, and paid taxes.
‘This realm of England is an empire …’ asserted the act in restraint of appeals in 1533, ‘governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same’. It was a claim to the highest form of jurisdictional autonomy conceivable: as the Canterbury convocation put it in 1536, rulers exercising ‘Imperium merum … have the whole entire supreme government and authority over all their subjects without knowledge or recognising of any other supreme power or authority’. Indeed it stretched the bounds of the authority of the secular state beyond what many of Henry VIII’s subjects would previously have found conceivable, substituting royal for papal jurisdiction over the English church. Yet it purported to be doing nothing new. The act’s preamble argued that ‘divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles’ showed that England ‘so hath been accepted in the world’. And it left the exact relationship between church and state and the nature of royal power unclear for generations to come. As such it may stand as a symbol of the expanding ambitions of those who governed Tudor England, of the sources of those ambitions and of the arguments used to justify them, and of the extent to which those ambitions were, or were not, realised in the extension of royal power into new areas of national life.1
Viewed from the perspective of one influential characterization of Renaissance humanism, Aristotle’s Politics occupies an odd position within the humanist canon of ancient texts. Difficult, technical and obscure, more about structures and systems of classification than people, it contains little to inspire the admiration of the humanist advocates of Ciceronian eloquence and individual virtue. One might expect that its history of reception and commentary at the hands of the late medieval scholastics would have rendered it hopelessly old-fashioned in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And yet in 1438 one of the most creative and influential humanists of the Florentine Quattrocento, Leonardo Bruni, placed it at the centre of the classical revival by translating it into Latin. He dedicated his version to, among others, Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of the English king. In England and elsewhere, Bruni’s translation became the most popular way to read the Politics and was reprinted many times. Indeed so influential did the Politics become that by 1651 Thomas Hobbes would go so far as to claim that Aristotle’s anti-monarchical message had been responsible for the ‘effusion of so much blood’ during the English civil war.2
The literature of early modern England was shaped by the manifold developments that made London, with a population of perhaps 50,000 in 1500 and 250,000 in 1600, the second largest metropolis in Europe by the later seventeenth century. With this growth came an increasing variety of communities and cultures. A well-established citizenry of craftsmen, retailers and wholesale traders enjoyed the traditional freedoms of London by virtue of membership in the guilds or ‘livery’ companies that organised the City’s trades. The expansion of international markets and the establishment of trading outposts around the globe transformed large portions of this citizenry into a wealthy, mobile and literate merchant class. At the same time, the permanent residence of the royal court in Westminster brought increasingly large numbers of the nobility to London, while the legal proceedings of Parliament, the chief courts of the realm and the Inns of Court drew officials, petitioners and litigants from throughout the counties. As the main conduit for the exchange of landed wealth, London became home to the aristocratic marriage market; its social season and developing luxury and leisure industries were attractive to urbanising gentry disposed to conspicuous consumption. The City harboured a large ‘youth culture’ of apprentices and domestic servants, male and female, recruited from the often distant countryside. Substantial portions of the greater London population were ‘strangers’ - continental traders, immigrants and communities of Flemish and French religious refugees - and ‘foreigners’ or non-free English migrants: the artisans, casual labourers, criminals, homeless and unemployed who frequented the rapidly growing suburbs outside the City walls.
‘Religious literature’ is a category which cannot be measured with statistical precision. What we in a more secular age call ‘religion’, a discrete phenomenon, permeated many areas of early modern life and much of its book production. Broadsheet ballads and pamphlets, precursors of both newspapers and novels, may have entertained, even titillated, but they professed to teach moral lessons. Preachers and journalistic hacks, writers of murder pamphlets and the like, invaded each others’ generic spaces. Popular songs were instantly ‘moralised’, with improving lyrics set to the same tunes. Historians and poets disputed which of their disciplines was in the better position to encourage ‘virtue’. Sir Philip Sidney thought poetry more ‘doctrinable’. ‘Truth’ was at a premium. The Bible was the ultimate in truth, but chronicles, too, were said to ‘carry credit’. But religious books, by a more exclusive and conventional criterion, will be found to have been the single most important staple of the publishing industry, making up roughly half of its output. This suggests considerable public interest in the subject, although two factors other than piety must be taken into account in explaining the volume of religious publication. On the one hand there were the commercial motives of printers and booksellers (presumably responsive to demand); on the other, the interest of state and church and of organised bodies of religious opinion, often critical, even dissident. These were factors of ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’. Even supposedly ‘popular’ literary forms may have been popular only in the sense that they were products intended by their social and intellectual betters for the improvement of the semi-literate, a process of downward cultural mediation.
At one level national identity is little more than xenophobia: that gut reaction which provokes verbal and physical violence against strangers and outsiders. It had appeared in fifteenth-century riots against Flemings and Italians; and it appeared in the ‘Evil May Day’ riot of 1517 against foreigners. An anonymous Italian observer, writing of the English about 1500, declared ‘They have an antipathy to foreigners, and imagine that they never come into their island but to make themselves masters of it, and to usurp their goods.’ There was a positive side to such feelings, but it was equally unattractive. The same observer continued: ‘The English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England. And whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that “he looks like an Englishman”.’ Such sentiments do not appear in English writings of the period, which were seldom aimed at a popular readership, but they were widespread at all social levels. English nobles attending Henry VIII in the highly competitive atmosphere of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) declared that if any French blood ran in their veins, they would cut it out with a knife.
This chapter aims to describe the complexities which characterise the relationship between the literary arts, especially those of an officially sanctioned kind, and political circumstances in the metropolis during the period 1603-40. At one level, this is a narrative of continuities. The principal forms in which the city of London constructed and celebrated its own image remained the same as in the Elizabethan period. Royal processions once more expressed the aspirations and the loyalism of the City towards the monarchy. Although there are significant silences, such as the cancelled celebration of the coronation of Charles I and the curtailed rites for the funeral of the Duke of Buckingham, the return of Charles I in 1641 from the Scottish crisis was commemorated as emphatically as the coronation entry of James I. The procession to commemorate the installation each year of a new Lord Mayor, a ritual established in its fullest form towards the end of the Elizabethan period, continued, arguably with increasing pomp, throughout our period. Paul’s Cross remained the most public and the most influential preaching platform in the City, and its careful control ensured a continuing loyalism in the majority of sermons preached there, many of which were subsequently printed. Likewise, outside the arenas of state control, the self-representation of the metropolis appeared remarkably stable. City comedy, apparently holding up a mirror to the lives of London’s citizens, continued to be an extremely popular dramatic form, and its assumptions and values changed only a little between the late Elizabethan paradigms, such as The Shoemakers Holiday (1599), and early Stuart examples within that tradition.
To describe Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh national discourses in the latter half of the sixteenth century as discrete intellectual traditions would credit unduly the propaganda of nationhood itself, and grant the claim of national autonomy to a moment when national identities were even more interdependent than they would become. Such interdependence is perhaps especially true for members of the British archipelago (both then and now). It is not that the concept of an independent Scotland or England does not exist in this period. (Ireland and Wales are largely beyond the pale of national self-representations at this time-at least in the English language - though they did indeed have identities within an imperial British state thrust upon them.) But the identities of these British nations are developed in relation to each other, both discursively and politically. Their representations are further interwoven both by virtue of their authors’ membership in a common cultural milieu, and especially by virtue of the fact that the two countries define themselves first and foremost as an effect of Protestantism, and in relation to its enemies. When Henry VIII declared in 1533 that ‘this realm of England is an empire…without restraint or provocation to any foreign princes or potentates of the world’, he struck a rhetorical alliance of Protestantism and resistance to alien domination which would circulate throughout the Tudor century, sometimes in ways uncongenial to monarchy.
The middle decades of the seventeenth century in England were momentous in political, religious and material terms - with the country in the throes of political crises, religious sectarianism, and civil as well as foreign warfare - but they also represent a significant turning point in the history of English literary activity. The structures of patronage which had sustained and framed the literary output of previous generations (as discussed by Graham Parry in Chapter 4) were by now severely weakened and in some cases totally demolished. The court, the focal point of national culture (for good or ill) in the days of Elizabeth I and James I, had become the polarising, unfixed and shadowy entourage of Charles I at war, and after 1649 it moved into exile abroad. The English Church, instigator and inspiration of so much literary production since the Reformation, was divided, fragmented and ultimately disestablished until 1660. The public theatres, the material and financial context for a substantial amount of early modern writing, were closed between 1642 and 1660. Although some of the kinds of writing previously fostered by these three major institutions (for example, the lyric) continued to be produced, and although some of the issues that they had formerly expressed - love, religious devotion, power - continued to drive the texts of the mid-century, these new writings began to reveal the environment from which they predominantly came: the household.
In 1603, the Scottish King James VI inherited the throne of England. The following year, he issued a proclamation, changing his title from ‘King of England and Scotland’ to ‘King of Great Britain’. James wanted to unite more than just the crowns of the two kingdoms. His ultimate goal was to create ‘a united British nation’. He introduced a new gold coin, called the ‘unite’ (unit), which featured an inscription declaring ‘I will make them one nation.’ The English and Scots, he argued, were currently ‘two nations’, but both inhabited ‘one Ile of Britaine’, and they were ‘alreadie ioyned in vnitie of Religion and language’. In time, he hoped, the two nations would become one. The ultimate political allegiance of all his subjects - English, Scots, Welsh and Irish - was to himself. It made sense for countries that were already united by their political and religious loyalties, and by geography and language, to enter into still closer union. Writing in favour of the Union, the Scotsman Robert Pont found it remarkable that his country men and the English had so long been mortal enemies. In times past, he argued, God had ‘armed these nations with mallice and hatred one against another’ in punishment of their popish idolatry. Since the Reformation, however, God had changed his attitude towards the two peoples, and if they refrained from angering him by sinning too seriously, it was now possible for them to live together as ‘one commonwealth … in a lovelie and perpetuall peace’.
Religion has always been central to explanations of the political and ideological causes and course of the English civil war. Where historians once privileged aspects of the conflict that associated it with a broader narrative about the historic development of religious toleration and parliamentary democracy, the 1980s witnessed a shift whereby it was more firmly contained within local and European contexts. More recently, there has been an effort to place the civil war within another broad context, yet one that traces its roots in the Reformation rather than its legacies in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, a question remains as to what the English Reformation meant for the relationship of civil and ecclesiastical power: in many ways this was the key issue that shaped the politics of religion in the English civil war. This essay suggests that we understand the politics of religion more effectively by situating the conflict within the wider contexts opened up by Atlantic and imperial history.
This article offers a re-examination of the concept of Erastianism as an explanatory tool in discussions of church and state. It focuses in particular on three texts – by Pierre du Moulin, Thomas Cobbet and John Milton – that took up the question of the nature of civil power in the sphere of religion. Based on this, the article argues that the term ‘Erastianism’ obscures the complexity and nuance of arguments about religious politics in the civil war period. It concludes by suggesting that we should instead consider these debates as contributions to discourse on civil religion.
This paper begins to consider the meanings of a word that was ubiquitous in early modern culture, but which has been surprisingly neglected by historians. Focusing on printed sources and taking advantage of recent advances in digital technology, it outlines the changing uses of ‘peace’ between 1500 and 1700 and its predominant meanings at particular moments in time. The paper suggests that while these meanings were clearly derived from Christian and civic republican sources, the political conflicts of the seventeenth century saw the term politicised, appropriated and popularised in new and unexpected ways. It also argues that the semantic confusion which often attended ‘peace’ – most evident, perhaps, in its capacity to legitimise and sanction violence after 1640 – stemmed from its simultaneous role as a descriptor of society and self, and of spiritual and civil life. As a result, who should define, police and enforce peace became deeply contested issues of the course of the period. In tracing the semantics of the term in this way, the article serves as a contribution to the burgeoning historical literature on the paradigmatic vocabularies of the early modern era. It also illuminates the complicated relationship between words and concepts and the importance of both in motivating and legitimising social and political action.
:Reception of Dante in England in the early sixteenth century and during the reign of Henry VIII has received relatively little attention so far, although important work has recently been done on the 'cultural revolution' of the time and the ways in which its medieval past was being mapped and read (ROSS 1991; GORDON 1996; SIMPSON 2002; WALKER 2005; MCMULLAN and MATTHEWS 2007). What follows will therefore focus on three main areas of enquiry: the circulation of relevant texts in the period; the perception of Dante's status, especially in relation to England as 'empire'; and his potential for recruitment as a 'proto-Protestant' writer. Within the wider context of early Tudor culture, I shall also be concerned with two of the 'related sets of allegorizing myths' that Trevor Ross has identified in the argument about literary tradition at this time: "myths of empire and myths about the continuity of Protestant thought" (ROSS 1991: 61).
Lorsque Jean Lemaire de Belges redige son Traite de la difference des schismes et des conciles de l'Eglise en 1511, il entend appuyer le combat de Louis XII contre le pape Jules II et promouvoir l'ideologie conciliaire. Le texte de Lemaire anticipe largement les methodes des futurs propagandistes protestants. Dans les annees 1530, les premiers lecteurs anglais sont attestes. John Gough traduit et publie l'oeuvre en 1539 mais le tronque largement. Gough detourne le sens original pour refuser l'autorite de Rome, pour en faire une histoire pro-monarchique et anti-papiste. La question des conciles tres importante pour Lemaire est alors releguee au second plan
The new political theology of obedience to the prince which was enthusiastically adopted by the Church of England in the 1530s was essentially founded upon Luther's new interpretation of the fourth commandment. It was mediated to an English audience by Tyndale, but his ideas were not officially adopted as early as some recent research has suggested. The founding of royal authority on the Decalogue, and thus on the ‘word of God’, was a particularly attractive feature of this doctrine, which became almost the defining feature of Henrician religion. Rival tendencies within the Church of England sought to exploit it in the pursuit of their particular agendas. Reformers strove to preserve its connections with the broader framework of Lutheran theology, with the emphasis on faith alone and the ‘word of God’, while conservatives strove to relocate it within an essentially monastic tradition of obedience, with an emphasis on good works, ceremonies, and charity. The most significant achievement was that of the Reformers, who established and played upon an equivocation between the royal supremacy and the ‘word of God’ in order to persuade the king to sanction the publication of the Bible in English as a formidable prop for his new-found dignity.
In 1570, Thomas Wilson translated Demosthenes' Olynthiacs and Philippics during a period of considerable tension in Anglo-Spanish relations. What appears at first sight to be a work of classical
humanism was simultaneously a hard-hitting piece of anti-Spanish propaganda and a critique of Elizabethan foreign policy.
By controlling the typography of the translation and adding polemical marginalia and other peripheral material, Wilson masterfully
directed his readers’ interpretation of the text. He unequivocally advocated military intervention in the Netherlands as the
consequences of inaction would be dire: England would lose its current bulwark against Spain's military might, just as Athens
had lost Olynthus. Wilson deliberately appealed to the intellectual background of those Tudor statesmen who formed the ‘Cambridge
Connection’ in the Elizabethan government. Moreover, he articulated his message without compromising the integrity of Demosthenes'
text or his own humanist credentials. By subtly recofiguring the role of Demosthenes from orator to statesman, Wilson gave
his orations greater political authority. Wilson's Demosthenes also marked an important moment in English intellectual history:
it clearly politicises classical translation.
The reigns of the five Tudor monarchs were the context of vast changes in the nature of religion and government in England. This study explores the way in which these changes were reflected in sermons preached before the princes. Five preachers have been selected, one from each reign. All the sermons were delivered before the reigning monarch in English, and were printed and published shortly afterwards. The Introduction gives a general overview of the thesis. The subject matter of Chapter 1 is concerned with the funeral oration at the obsequies of Henry VII. Bishop John Fisher focuses his attention on the death of Henry, his contrition for his sins, and his reliance on God, through Holy Church, for the assurance of forgiveness. Chapter II examines a Good Friday sermon preached at Greenwich Palace before Henry VIII and Queen Anne Boleyn in 1536 by the King's confessor, John Longland. Longland promotes the beliefs and practises of Holy Church notwithstanding Henry's rejection of papal authority. In Chapter III, Hugh Latimer, the 'Prophet to the English,' preached a series of sermons before Edward VI in the Preaching Place at Whitehall during Lent 1549. Latimer's aim is to show Edward the path to true kingship and to promote justice in the realm. The sermons of Thomas Watson, Dean of Lincoln, before Queen Mary at Greenwich in Lent 1554 are the subject of Chapter IV. Watson supported the Queen in her efforts to return England to the true faith. Chapter V analyses the sermon John Whitgift, Dean of Lincoln, preached before Elizabeth I at Greenwich in Lent 1574. Whitgift refuted Catholic beliefs but reserved his greatest attacks for the radical Protestants.
There are two anonymous treatises concerning the General Council that are left to us from the reign of Henry VIII: the one is Hatfield MS. No. 46, which has never been put into print, the other is A Treatise concernynge generall councilles, the Byshoppes of Rome and the Clergy, published by Berthelet in 1538, which was a development of Hatfield MS. No. 47. Though their existence has been known for some time, they have failed to receive the attention they deserve; the first treatise has been summarised by historians of the English Reformation, the second hardly ever mentioned, although its MS. draft was cursorily used by F. van le Baumer. Neither treatise has, thus, ever been studied in its entirety. The purpose of this paper is to give a fuller account of what these treatises are, to elucidate the circumstance of their composition, and to place them in the context of the general history of contemporary Tudor literature on the General Council.
Historical Argument’ 217
- Nicholson
The defence of peace lately translated out of laten in to englysshe
- Marshall William