Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c.1560-1643 (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

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STUDIES IN MODERN BRITISH RELIGIOUS HISTORY

Volume 10

Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England Religion in Norwich, c.1560–1643

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STUDIES IN MODERN BRITISH RELIGIOUS HISTORY ISSN: 1464–6625 General editors Stephen Taylor Arthur Burns Kenneth Fincham This series aims to differentiate ‘religious history’ from the narrow confines of church history, investigating not only the social and cultural history of religion, but also theological, political and institutional themes, while remaining sensitive to the wider historical context; it thus advances an understanding of the importance of religion for the history of modern Britain, covering all periods of British history since the Reformation. I Friends of Religious Equality Non-Conformist Politics in mid-Victorian England Timothy Larsen II Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 Edited by Peter Lake and Michael Questier III Bishops and Reform in the English Church, 1520–1559 Kenneth Carleton IV Christabel Pankhurst Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition Timothy Larsen V The National Church in Local Perspective The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800 Edited by Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain VI Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War Julie Spraggon VII The Cult of King Charles the Martyr Andrew Lacey VIII Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England S. Mutchow Towers IX The Church of England in Industrialising Society The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century M. F. Snape

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Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England Religion in Norwich, c.1560–1643 MATTHEW REYNOLDS

THE BOYDELL PRESS

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© Matthew Reynolds 2005 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right ot Matthew Reynolds to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs an Patents Act 1988 First published 2005 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 1 84383 149 X

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website:www.boydellandbrewer.com A CiP catalogue record of this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Reynolds, Matthew, 1973Godly reformers and their opponents in early modern England : religion in Norwich, c.156–643 / Matthew Reynolds. p. cm. – (Studies in modern British religious history, ISSN 1464–6625 ; v. 10) Summary: “Close examination of the divided religious life of Norwich in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with wider implications for the country as a whole”–Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–84383–149-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Norwich (England)–Church history–16th century. 2. Norwich (England)–Church history–17th century. 3. Reformation–England–Norwich. I. Title. II. Series. BX4631.N6R49 2005 274.26⬘1506–dc22 2005001770

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements Abbreviations INTRODUCTION 1. The Godly, their Opponents and Stuart England’s ‘Wars of Religion’ 2. Norwich’s Reformation History Revisited PART I: THE MAKING OF A PROTESTANT CITY, c.1560–1619 3. Immigration, Catholic Conspiracy and the Rise of a Godly Moral Order 4. Urban Magistracy and Ministry, 1570–1619 5. An Undercurrent of Dissent, 1580–c.1620 PART II: RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND GODLY REACTION IN THE 1620s 6. New Directions in Episcopal Government: the Samuel Harsnett Years 7. The 1624 Parliament, its Repercussions and the Case of St Gregory’s Parish PART III: CONFESSIONAL DISCORD AND THE IMPACT OF LAUDIANISM IN THE 1630s 8. Godly Reaction: The Norfolk Trustees and the Tombland Lectureship 9. ‘Some Joyfully Conformed, others Frowardly Opposed’: Matthew Wren and the Stirs of 1636

vii ix xiii 1 3 20 37 39 63 86 109 111 131 157 159 186 215

PART IV: TRACING THE PURITAN REVOLUTION IN NORWICH 10. Puritan Diaspora, 1636–40 11. Puritan Revolution, 1640–43

217 236

CONCLUSION 12. Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Norwich and Beyond

251 253

Select Bibliography Index

269 293

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Publication of this volume was aided by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research, London.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES 4.1 7.2 8.1

John More from Henry Holland, Hervologia Anglica Altar cloth from St Gregory’s, Norwich, as illustrated in Blomefield’s Topographical History Reverend William Bridge

65 143 166

MAPS 1.0 2.1 2.2

East Anglia showing principal places mentioned in the text Distribution of parishioners in Norwich, 1603 and 1676 Partons of Norwich city churches, 1629

xvi 27 29

GENEALOGICAL TABELS 3.1 7.1 9.1

Aldrich, Sotherton and Steward Pettus and Debney Anguish or Anguishe

46 140 201

Plates 4.1, 7.2 and 8.1 are reproduced by kind permission of Norfolk County Council Library and Information Service.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Since it is an obvious convention to begin a preface with ‘This book’ – well, this book began life as an attempt to address two closely related themes: the nature of ‘popular’ response to the English Reformation, and the relevance of that response for the formation of political allegiance prior to the English Civil War. I leave defining the ideological rifts among Christians in early Stuart England to the Introduction. Suffice it to say that the following embellishes what Stephen Sykes has noted with dismay as the ‘tendency to present church history as a chronic succession of disputes’.1 But I hope this will not be a cause for regret. Likewise, any predisposed to view the established church of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I as being characterised by a high degree of workaday consensus will no doubt come away from this study disappointed. Such caveats aside, I have enjoyed being immersed in the everyday town – parish life of early modern England. On a personal level, the ‘politics of the parish pump’ under the Tudors and Stuarts has a familiar quality: disagreements arising from matters of worship being a perennial feature of the disputatious – yet never dull – small-town parish of my upbringing. Not that I have sought to view Reformation England through the lens of churchgoing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even so, the experience has – consciously or not – allowed for an appreciation of the intensity of feelings provoked by Reformation change in an age when obligatory participation in parochial worship was as much a compulsive act for a proportionally higher number of people, given the pervasiveness of religion in early modern society. Passions ran high in early modern England’s second city, Norwich, where the presence of so many churches hindered the forging of uniformity within the gates. Here, once again, an advance apology is needed to any who feel that by imposing my own preoccupation with religious factionalism upon Norwich’s past, I have done the city’s rich ecclesiastical heritage a grave disservice. My choice of subject owes much to the foresight of Kenneth Fincham. While supervising my inchoate efforts to uncover putative lay patronage ties to ‘Laudian’ clerics in the 1630s, he suggested that I might look for names within Matthew Wren’s voluminous correspondence (Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 68) covering Wren’s time as bishop of Norwich, 1635–8. One list of names (folio 153r) was especially intriguing. Here we find a certificate signed by twelve Norwich officials, 1. S. Skyes in The Church Times (22 Feb. 2002), p. 15.

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distancing themselves as Wren’s ‘ever devoted’, from a puritan petition against the bishop’s policies framed in 1636 by their foes within the corporation. Who were these officers and what of their confessional beliefs? Were they devotees of Wren’s style of churchmanship, and if so, what was their place within the political and religious micro-environment in Norwich by the 1630s? My work turned to find answers to these basic questions. In the process – besides having to develop patter to explain at parties who Matthew Wren was (yes, uncle of Christopher, the architect) – it became apparent that to set the events of Charles’s reign in context would mean picking up the narrative threads of Norwich’s evolving religious identity back in Elizabeth’s reign. How did Norwich become Protestant and with what consequences for local and national affairs before 1640? Again, my thanks are due to Kenneth Fincham for his patience and tireless enthusiasm throughout the serendipitous ‘data-collection’ phase of my research: while along the way, I have been privileged to draw upon the insights of many scholars working in the field of ‘Reformation studies’. A debt of gratitude goes to Nicholas Tyacke for examining my University of Kent thesis and recommending it for publication. In the same vein, I would like to thank David Ormrod, while Andrew Foster, Michael Questier, Ian Atherton, Elizabeth Edwards and Peter Lake have all given generously of their advice. I am grateful to all of them. Brett Usher, Tom Freeman, Susan Hardman-Moore, Trevor Cooper, Margaret Aston, Andrew Thomson, Andrew Cambers, David Como and David Crankshaw, among other familiar faces at the Religious History of Britain Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, have helped to keep the English Reformation such a lively topic. David Crankshaw kindly read and commented on draft chapters covering the book’s Elizabethan section. So too did Michael Moody, and I remain indebted to Michael for allowing me to cite his exciting work on Elizabethan separatism, in particular an unpublished essay on the Norfolk separatist Thomas Wolsey, a figure who, in common with Wren, spent much of his career in prison. Although not one of Norwich’s sons, I have always been made welcome on my research trips to the city. I wish to thank the staff of the Norfolk Record Office for extending every professional courtesy amid an awkward transitional phase after the 1995 fire. Special mention must go, as always, to Clive WilkinsJones of the Norfolk Local Studies Library, for his enthusiastic interest in my work. My thanks go to Andy Hopper – formerly of the Virtual Norfolk Project – for pointing out some references I would have missed, and to Nick Groves for kindly sharing his knowledge of the colourful history of St George Tombland. I would also like to thank John and Sue Adams for their hospitality. Earlier compressed versions of the overall thesis were tested on audiences at the Religious History of Britain Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, the Cambridge Postgraduate Seminar, the 2002 Ecclesiastical History Seminar at the University of Birmingham and the Friday seminar at the Centre for East Anglian Studies, Norwich. I am grateful for the warm response I received on each occasion. x

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All that remains is to convey several ‘shouts’ to various colleagues, friends and relations – too many to name in person – who have offered help and encouragement on the protracted learning curve of historical research. I wish to thank fellow UKC students Geoff Browell and Sue Petrie for many thought-provoking discussions. Another big ‘thank you’ must go to Stephanie Langton, for promptly looking up a crucial last-minute reference at the Norfolk Record Office, and to Claudia White for taking on some spot-check proof reading. To others who are not specifically acknowledged here, all I can say is that you know who you are. By far my greatest debt is owed to my mother and father, both for their constant support, and for putting up with occasional esoteric ramblings about Norwich’s past as well as an aspiring historian’s present. Out of the deepest gratitude and affection, I dedicate this book to them. Matthew Reynolds November 2005

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ABBREVIATIONS

AB ANW APC BIHR BL BLTT Blomefield Bod L Browne, Memorials CA CH Chapter Minutes

CJ COERS CUL DAB DCN DNB EANQ EHR ERO Greaves and Zaller

Hawes, Officers HJ HMC HP 1509–58

Norwich Assembly Book Archdeaconry of Norwich Acts of the Privy Council Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research British Library British Library Thomason Tracts Francis Blomefield, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of Norfolk (11 vols, London, 1805) Bodleian Library J. Browne, History of Congregationalism and Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk (London, 1877) Norwich chamberlains’ accounts Church History J. F. Williams and B. Cozens-Hardy (eds), Extracts from the Two Earliest Minute Books of the Dean and Chapter of Norwich Cathedral, 1566–1649, NRS, 24 (1953) Journal of the House of Commons Church of England Record Society Cambridge University Library Dictionary of American Biography Dean and Chapter of Norwich Dictionary of National Biography East Anglian Notes and Queries English Historical Review Essex Record Office R. L. Greaves and R. Zaller (eds), Biographical Register of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century (3 vols, Brighton, 1982–4) T. Hawes (comp.), An Index to Norwich City Officers, 1453–1635, NRS, 52 (1986) Historical Journal Historical Manuscripts Commission S. T. Bindoff (ed.), History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1509–58 (3 vols, London, 1982) xiii

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ABBREVIATIONS

HP 1558–1603 HR I&M JBS JEH JHI Laud, Works Le Neve, Fasti VII

LJ LPL Mayors of Norwich MCB MH Millican, Freemen NA NAM NCC NRO NRS ODNB Parentalia Parkhurst, Letter Book P&P PRO Puritan Movement Quiet Reformation

Reg Vagum Rye, Rate Book Seconde Parte

P. W. Hasler (ed.), History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1558–1603 (3 vols, London, 1981) Historical Research Immigrants and Minorities Journal of British Studies Journal of Ecclesiastical History Journal of the History of Ideas The Works of William Laud, eds W. Scott and J. Bliss (7 vols, Oxford, 1847–60) J. Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–1857, VII, Norwich, Westminster and Worcester Dioceses, comp. J. M. Horn (London, 1992) Journal of the House of Lords Lambeth Palace Library B. Cozens-Hardy and E. A. Kent, The Mayors of Norwich 1403 to 1835 (Norwich, 1938) Norwich Mayor’s Court Book Midland History P. Millican (ed.), The Register of the Freemen of Norwich, 1548–1713 (Norwich, 1934) Norfolk Archaeology Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany Norwich Consistory Court Norfolk Record Office Norfolk Record Society Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Christopher Wren, Parentalia or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (London, 1751) R. A. Houlbrooke (ed.), The Letter Book of John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich, NRS, 43 (1974–5) Past and Present Public Record Office (The National Archives) P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967) M. C. McClendon, The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich (Stanford, 1999) T. F. Barton (ed.), The Registrum Vagum of Anthony Harrison, 2 vols, NRS, 32–3 (1963–4) W. Rye (ed.), The Norwich Rate Book from Easter 1633 to Easter 1634 (Norwich, 1903) A. Peel (ed.), The Seconde Parte of a Register (2 vols, Cambridge, 1915)

xiv

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ABBREVIATIONS

Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’

StaffsRO SROB SROI STC

Stiffkey Papers, I Stiffkey Papers, II Stiffkey Papers, III

Stiffkey Papers, IV TBGAS TRHS Venn Wing

K. W. Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage of East Anglian Puritan Clerics in Pre-Revolutionary England’, Yale University Ph.D., 1971 Staffordshire Record Office Suffolk Record Office, Bury St Edmunds branch Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich branch Short Title Catalogue of Books . . . 1475–1640, eds W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave and K. F. Pantzer (3 vols, 1976–91) A. Hassell Smith et al. (eds), The Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. I, NRS, 46 (1978) A. Hassell Smith et al. (eds), The Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. II, NRS, 49 (1983) A. Hassell Smith and G. M. Baker (eds), The Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. III, NRS, 53 (1987–8) V. Morgan et al. (eds), The Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. IV, NRS, 64 (2000) Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society Transactions of the Royal Historical Society J. and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses Part 1 (4 vols, Cambridge, 1922–7) Short Title Catalogue of Books . . . 1641–1700, ed. D. Wing (3 vols, 1945–51)

Dates are given in old style throughout, although the year is taken to begin on 1 January.

NOTE: THE DEDICATION OF NORWICH CATHEDRAL Confusion exists over the interchangeable dedications of Norwich Cathedral. We have to thank the reforming energies of Protector Somerset, who in May 1547 called in Norwich chapter’s Henrician charter, reconstituting the cathedral as ‘Christ’s Church in Norwich of the foundation of King Edward VI’. But Holy Trinity, the dedication of the church attached to the former Benedictine priory, remained in use. Contemporaries employed both Holy Trinity and Christ Church, although for the forwardly Protestant of Norwich’s denizens, Christ Church was the preferred appellation – the same impulse lay behind the corporation’s decision in 1567 to swap the representation of the Trinity on the city seal for ‘Immanuel’. I have adopted both Holy Trinity and Christ Church. However, Holy Trinity is used to refer to the cathedral church itself, while Christ Church is taken to signify the precincts of which the cathedral building was a part. xv

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Map 1.0 East Anglia showing principal places mentioned in the text

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INTRODUCTION

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Chapter One THE GODLY, THEIR OPPONENTS AND STUART ENGLAND’S ‘WARS OF RELIGION’

Religion has always been seen as a critical element in the political meltdown of 1640 – 42, which led to the English Civil War. Exactly how and why has generated a great deal of debate, with recent discussion stemming from John Morrill’s now-famous suggestion that ‘the English Civil War was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion’. But what within the context of seventeenth-century England are we to understand by a religious war?1 To rephrase the question: What was singularly ‘religious’ about the motivation of the combatants on either side, and to what extent did the formation of allegiance mirror existing confessional tensions present within Stuart society? This book attempts to explore these issues. Granted that the Reformation ushered in an era of Christian militancy in England, arguably the more ‘militant’ aspect of English Protestantism– puritanism – has traditionally been ascribed an important role in fomenting rebellion against the crown. Perspectives have changed since Samuel Rawlinson Gardiner’s monumental account of the ‘puritan revolution’ written in the 1880s. For Gardiner, celebrating puritanism in robust terms as ‘the strength of England itself’, Protestant triumph at the Reformation helped nurture an independent spirit among the English people, propelling the nation to resist the absolutist tendencies of successive Stuart monarchs amid an heroic historical quest for political and religious liberty.2 However, this teleological view of early modern religious developments has proved influential. The Gardinerian model of puritanism as a revolutionary creed was readily adapted within a broad Marxist framework in the mid-twentieth 1

J. Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, TRHS, 5th Series, 34 (1984), p. 178; idem, ‘Sir William Brereton and England’s Wars of Religion’, JBS, 24 (1985), pp. 311–22. For critiques of Morrill’s thesis, see P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1988), ch. 5; I. M. Green, ‘ “England’s Wars of Religion”? Religious Conflict and the English Civil Wars’, in J. Van Den Berg and P. J. Hoftijzer (eds), Church, Change and Revolution (Leiden, 1991), pp. 100–21. 2 S. R. Gardiner, History of England 1603–42 (10 vols, London, 1883–4); idem, History of the Great Civil War 1642–49 (4 vols, London, 1893), I, p. 9.

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century, with evangelical Protestantism standing for the ideology of an emerging capitalist bourgeoisie: an idea associated with the work of R. H. Tawney and Christopher Hill.3 Approaching our own time, from the 1960s, the notion of a Civil War spurred on by a progressive and revolutionary puritanism has been subject to a number of revisionist challenges. To begin with, it was asked, what do we mean by a ‘puritan’? Wrestling with this problem in 1961, the American scholars C. H. George and K. George considered that it was impossible to distinguish a puritan ethos from the wider ‘Protestant mind of the Reformation’.4 The ‘puritan revolution’ was suddenly left wanting for puritans. Working on the other side of the Atlantic, Patrick Collinson lent further substance to the Georges’ argument by demonstrating how the earlier Elizabethan puritan movement for greater reform of the Church became the Calvinist establishment under James I. Puritans found common cause with the magisterial Reformation. At the heart of the matter lay a unifying Protestant imperial outlook, neatly summarised by Collinson as that yearning for ‘military glory, macho monarchy and Protestant zeal’ amid the cosmic battle against the Antichrist personified by Rome, which Protestants of many shades aspired to and looked to achieve in the figure of James’s eldest son Prince Henry. England’s puritan tradition was shifted from a radical left to a reactionary right. The same reinterpretation informed William Lamont’s assessment of Willliam Prynne – the ‘puritan’ agitator par excellence in the 1630s – as a conservative ‘more royalist than the king’.5 Collinson’s – and Lamont’s – work chimed in with Nicholas Tyacke’s research into intellectual developments within the early Stuart church. According to Tyacke’s thesis – compressed into a seminal essay of 1973 – religion became a burning issue in Charles I’s reign less on account of a radical challenge from puritanism and more as an outcome of the king’s partisan backing of an innovating Arminian party under William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury 1633–45. The hostility provoked by Laud’s archiepiscopate prompted a puritan backlash, which caused the Civil War. Coined after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, the pejorative term ‘Arminianism’ amounted to a rejection of the Calvinist theology of grace founded upon a belief in double predestination – the idea that God had pre-ordained the elect to salvation and the reprobate to damnation – which comprised the core doctrinal tenet of the Elizabethan church. Instead, Arminians emphasised the 3

R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926); C. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958); idem, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965), ch. 6. 4 C. H. George and K. George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570–1640 (Princeton, 1961). 5 P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), chs 3–4; idem, The Birthpangs of Protestant England, p. 130; W. Lamont, Puritanism and Historical Controversy (London, 1996), p. 58.

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universal nature of God’s grace and the free will of all to gain salvation. In early Stuart England, Arminius’s teachings became fused with a native antiCalvinist tradition, which had been present in intellectual circles at the universities from at least the 1590s.6 The elevation of anti-Calvinists like Laud to positions of authority proved divisive in a country steeped in evangelical Calvinism. But comprising more than a critique of predestinarian soteriology, Arminianism in England inspired a rival vision of Christian worship – one that elevated the sacramental life of the Church over preaching – with heightened emphasis being placed on the correct ritual performance of the sacraments, especially the eucharist. Such priorities informed moves to convert communion tables into railed altars in parish churches, with the insistence that communicants receive at the rail. However, the resulting ‘altar policy’ of the 1630s formed one aspect of a programme to refashion the setting of parish worship according to notions of the ‘beauty of holiness’, a concept that conveyed a polemically charged religious aesthetic, since labelled by Peter Lake as the ‘Laudian style’.7 In certain respects, the Laudian package reflected the virtuosi tastes of the Caroline court, which were linked to the intellectual avant garde. However, to hostile critics like William Prynne, Arminianism stood for libertine excess, while the policy of Laudianism served to alienate a swathe of Protestant opinion suspicious of the archbishop’s intentions.8 Ceremonial innovation was contested on the grounds of its dubious legality. But more than this, to its detractors, the direction of Caroline church policy seemed to portend a return to Romish practice, Laudianism being a thinly disguised Popery, which sought to overturn orthodox Protestant beliefs.9 For this reason, an Arminian religious policy had an explosive impact upon Scottish affairs. Thus Charles’s decision – being advised by Arminians among the Scottish 6

Tyacke’s essay ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter Revolution’, has been republished in N. Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), ch. 5. See also his AntiCalvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1990). The idea of an ‘Arminian revolution’ is endorsed in D. MacCulloch, ‘The Myth of the English Reformation’, JBS, 30 (1991), pp. 1–19 and A. Foster, ‘Church Policies in the 1630s’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (Harlow, 1989), pp. 193–223. 7 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, ch. 8; P. Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in K. Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 161–85; K. Fincham, ‘The Restoration of Altars in the 1630s’, HJ, 44 (2001), pp. 919–49; idem, ‘ “According to Ancient Custom”: the Return of Altars in the Restoration Church of England’, TRHS, 6th Series, 13 (2003), pp. 29–54, develop these themes further. 8 Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, ch. 9. 9 J. P. Somerville, Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (Harlow, 1989), pp. 217–24, argues that opposition to Laudianism was based upon legal–constitutional grounds alone. Yet this downplays the overriding suspicion of Arminianism as the vanguard of Popery: see P. Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Cust and Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England, pp. 72–106. For Laudian rehabilitation of aspects of Catholic ecclesiology, lending substance to these fears, see A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Church in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995).

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bishops – to introduce a revised Prayer Book into the Kirk triggered the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 – 41, which led to the summoning of the Long Parliament and all that followed thereafter.10 Civil War began as a reactionary Protestant crusade against a perceived Popish plot to destroy the Reformation. Tyacke’s thesis has been met with a barrage of criticism: to begin with, it has been asked – albeit counterfactually – that if advancing Arminianism carried an element of risk, why did Charles make the disastrous error of patronising the anti-Calvinist party in the first place? One way around this problem has been to take issue with Tyacke’s claim that Laud and his colleagues were controversial theologians, much less Arminians. Rather, Laud’s archiepiscopate stood for the essentially traditionalist aims of enforcing order and uniformity – albeit with greater strictness than before – as the Caroline church attempted to breathe new life into wellestablished patterns of Anglican worship, or so it has been argued by Peter White, George Bernard and Kevin Sharpe.11 As each maintain, since the majority of the populace were conforming Anglicans, Charles’s ‘Anglican’ appointments to the episcopate made perfect sense. In so far as religion mattered in the constitutional crisis of 1640, it had more to do with the sudden pressure brought to bear on English politics by the Scottish Covenanters, who found common cause with a small number – in Sharpe’s words, a ‘tiny sect’ – of English puritans.12 Yet surely this is to downplay the depth of ill-feeling towards both church and state generated by the policies of the Personal Rule. In order to recapture the sense of outrage that surfaced in the Long Parliament, a discernible pendulum swing back towards an acknowledgement of the Stuart regime’s critics has been in progress since the 1980s. Much of this has been in reaction to ‘revisionist’ interpretations of Parliamentary history spearheaded by Conrad Russell. Reacting to Russell’s assertions that ‘the ideological gulf between “government” and “opposition” is impossible to find in Parliament before 1640’ while ‘it is remarkable how hard it is to discover a “puritan opposition” in the 1620s’, work has been undertaken to reassess the emergence of adversarial politics in early Stuart England.13 Indeed, we cannot account 10 C. Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509–1660 (Oxford, 1971), pp. 324–6; idem, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), p. 114; Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, p. 218. 11 P. White, ‘The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered’, P & P, 115 (1987), pp. 201–29; idem, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus within the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992); G. Bernard, ‘The Church of England c. 1529-c. 1642’, History, 72 (1990), pp. 183–206; K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), chs 6 and 12. 12 Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 292, 729–30. For Tyacke’s response to the White–Bernard–Sharpe thesis, see his Aspects of English Protestantism, ch. 7. 13 C. Russell, ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective’, History, 61 (1976), p. 18; idem, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–29 (Oxford, 1979), p. 26. For the rise of a Parliamentary opposition restated,

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for royal patronage of an Arminian interest without consideration of James and Charles’s latent fears of popular ‘puritan’ spirits. As Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake have pointed out, the crunch came with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, and James’s efforts to broker an end to the crisis by securing a Spanish Match for Prince Charles. The public outcry provoked by these marriage negotiations pushed James towards the anti-Calvinist camp. Seeking to distance himself from mainstream Calvinism with its antiCatholic edge, the king found the Arminian definition of Calvinism as doctrinal puritanism congenial; at least the turn of events played upon James’s anxieties over a puritan challenge to royal diplomacy. Suspicions of ‘popular’ puritan subversion also informed Charles’s outlook, particularly as a consequence of the new king’s fraught dealings with parliament in 1629.14 But this was not just a reflection of royal paranoia: after all, thanks to John Cliffe, Nicholas Tyacke, Jacqueline Eales and Tom Webster – among others – the roots of godly agitation are now held to have run deep, being focused upon an organised puritan movement, which persisted into the 1630s.15 Lay – clerical patronage networks were vital to sustaining the godly cause, which erupted with a vengeance amid calls for ‘root and branch’ abolition of episcopacy in 1640. The survival of ‘a radical puritan continuum’ – to employ Tyacke’s phrase – adds an important dimension to our understanding of why Charles turned to the anti-Calvinist party as the group most readily predisposed to discipline the godly.16 Certainly, the Laudian programme was engineered to test the political loyalty of the king’s subjects. Yet by responding angrily to the ecclesiastical reforms of the Personal Rule, the godly reinforced the link made by Charles – and Laud – between puritanism and sedition. Such work has generated renewed interest in the subversive potential of puritanism. But here we encounter a paradox: for while James and Charles see for example, T. K. Rabb, ‘Revisionism Revised: the Role of the Commons’, P & P, 92 (1981), p. 66; R. Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987); A. Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his Circle in the 1630s – a “Parliamentary–Puritan” Connection?’, HJ, 29 (1986), pp. 771–93; J. Fielding, ‘Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: the Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637–1641’, HJ, 38 (1988), pp. 778–88. 14 K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I’, JBS, 24 (1985), pp. 169–207; idem, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I’, in Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, pp. 33–40; A. Thrush, ‘The Personal Rule of James I, 1611–1620’, in T. Cogswell et al. (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 84–102; and, in the same volume, R. Cust, ‘Charles I and Popularity’, pp. 235–58. 15 J. T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry: the Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England (London, 1984); Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, ch. 4; idem, ‘Puritan Politicians and King James VI and I, 1587–1604’, in Cogswell et al. (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, pp. 21–44; J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: the Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990); idem, ‘A Road to Revolution: the Continuity of Puritanism, 1559–1642’, in C. Durston and J. Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 184–209; T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997). 16 Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, p. 126.

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were given to associating puritans with popularity, in broad cultural term, puritanism has also been viewed as lacking in ‘popular’ appeal.17 It remains a commonplace to view early Stuart society as being divided between the godly elect and the rest. Not all Protestants were puritans, but what of the confessional make-up of English Christians not identifying with the godly, who may have formed a ready constituency for royalism in the 1640s? What was the religion of ‘the rest’? Here, efforts to explain the Civil War as ‘a war of religion’ have found synergy with an historical interpretation of the conflict as a cultural clash between ‘two Englands’: the emerging Protestant England of the Reformation and the remnants of an old festive world, a ‘Merry England’. Attempts to define the social, cultural and geographical boundaries between these two worlds has caused much spilt ink.18 However, the subsequent historiography can be said to have taken its cue from an insightful comment made by Richard Baxter, the famous Presbyterian divine, that ‘the warre was begun in our streets before the King and Parliament had any armies’.19 Baxter had in mind the experience of his former ministry in Kidderminster in the 1640s. He went on to furnish a lengthy description of the two ‘sorts’ who rallied to fight on either side, recalling how Parliament drew its support from the ‘generality of the people’ then called: puritans, precisians, religious persons that talk of God and heaven, and scripture, and holiness, and to follow sermons, and read books of devotion, and pray in their families, and spend the Lord’s day in religious exercises, and plead for mortification, and serious devotion, and strict obedience to God, and speak against swearing, cursing, drunkeness, prophaneness etc.

Championing the royalist cause stood those ranged against the godly. This group included: the gentry that were not so precise and strict against an oath, or gaming, or plays, or drinking, nor troubled themselves so much about the matters of God and the world to come, and the ministers and people that were for the King’s Book [the Book of Sports], for dancing and recreations on the Lord’s day, and those that made not so great a matter of every sin, but went to church and heard common

17 As stated strongly in C. Durston, ‘Puritan Rule and the Failure of Cultural Revolution, 1645–1660’, in Durston and Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, pp. 210–33; B. Reay, Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (Harlow, 1998), pp. 80–5. 18 This work entails a bias towards local history, much of it reaction to the ‘county community’ school of English Civil War studies, which underestimated the ideological divisions in provincial society leading to conflict. See A. Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (Leicester, 1966); J. Morrill, Cheshire, 1630–1660: County Government and Society During the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974); A. Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600–1660 (London, 1975). A discussion of this ‘school’ is given in C. Holmes, ‘The County Community in Stuart Historiography’, JBS, 19 (1983), pp. 54–73. 19 Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth (1659), pp. 456–7.

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prayer, and were glad to hear a sermon which lasht the puritans, and which ordinarily spoke against this strictness and preciseness in religion, and this strict observance of the Lord’s day, and following sermons and praying ex tempore, and talking so much of scripture and matters of salvation, and those that hated and derided them that take these courses.

Baxter’s depiction of popular royalism entailed an inverted image of the godly. However, his distinction between the two social and cultural spheres – the godly and reprobates not obsessed with every sin– was adopted as one of the central planks of Stuart studies in the twentieth century. Baxter identified the ‘preciser sort’ with the ‘middling sort’, who were more conspicuous in towns.20 This reflection was given a Marxist gloss by Christopher Hill, for whom the conflict between ‘two Englands’ was one of class, as the forces of bourgeois capitalist venture – inspired by Protestantism – pitted themselves against the feudal communal values favoured by the aristocracy and their tenants among the rural proletariat, the murky underclass of The World Turned Upside Down. Capitalism met feudalism around a maypole – perhaps the same maypole near the young Richard Baxter’s home, which his father, the preacher, ‘could not break’. More precisely, popular ‘traditional attitudes’ such as ‘dislike of labour, sexual promiscuity, swearing’ and ‘an emphasis on works rather than faith’ – ideals derived from the leisured ruling class – ’linked the upper and lower classes in opposition to the intermediate proponents of a Protestant ethic’.21 Hill expanded his thesis to show how ‘middling sorts’ everywhere, through a ‘Reformation of manners’, hoped to suppress old feudal ways. The same social and cultural struggle spilled over into the Civil War, as Protestant England met Merry England on the battlefields of Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby. The Hillian model has inspired a vast literature on puritanism and social control.22 Class tension between the godly middling sort and the profane lower orders – according to a famous study by Keith Wrightson and David Levine – was a marked feature of life in the Essex village of Terling under the Stuarts.23 Yet, in terms of lending itself to theories as to why the English 20

Matthew Sylvester (ed.), Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), pp. 30–1. C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London, 1972), p. 340; Sylvester (ed.), Reliquae Baxterianae, p. 2, for Baxter senior’s troubles over May games. 22 For example, see C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1964), chs 4 and 7; idem, ‘William Perkins and the Poor’, in Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, pp. 25–38; K. Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982), ch. 7. 23 K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1995). For critiques of the thesis linking godly Protestantism with social control, see M. Spufford, ‘Puritanism and Social Control’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 44–7; E. Duffy, ‘The Godly and the Multitude in Stuart England’, The Seventeenth Century, 1 (1986), pp. 31–55; Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, pp. 16–17, 90–110. 21

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people fought the Civil War, Hill’s thesis has assumed new forms. It lingers on, for example, in David Underdown’s celebrated study of patterns of Civil War allegiance across the three counties of Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset, Rebel, Riot and Rebellion, published in 1985. Underdown attempted to delineate the ‘two Englands’ according to regional topography. Within this west country Pays, he concluded that backing for Parliament was strongest in upland wood-pasture and cloth manufacturing areas – home to a mixed economy – where more fragmented social ties provided fertile grounds for puritanism. Here we traverse Hill, Wrightson and Levine territory, where the emergence of a middling sort and the concomitant Reformation of manners were more evident. Conversely, royalist support tended to be concentrated within lowland, arable-farming regions, populated by socially cohesive nucleated settlements – ‘tightly packed around the Church and manor house’ – where attachment to established parish life was stronger and where traditional communal festivities, church ales and Sunday games remained vital outlets for cementing social harmony and good-neighbourliness.24 Underdown’s slant on the ‘two Englands’ has since been criticised for being overly schematic. While we can say that puritanism took hold in some areas that subsequently became Parliamentarian enclaves in the 1640s, how central was ecology to this process? Moreover, would an absence of ‘puritanism’ in other places determine royalist proclivity?25 Here too, problems arise over Underdown’s definition of the religious and cultural antecedents of popular royalism, which he subsumes under the heading ‘conservative Anglicanism’ on the basis that the world of Carnival was joined to the liturgical round of the established church. However, this is to evoke the caricature of the hale and hearty Cavalier Anglican, a figure loyal to the crown and episcopal government, who was equally at home at the ale-bench. Indeed, this caricature lives on, most recently in Mark Stoyle’s efforts to develop the Underdownesque model within the context of Stuart Devon, where the same geographical determinants of popular allegiance are said to have applied. Thus ‘wartime Parliamentarianism’ was more pronounced in the county’s ports and south-eastern clothing districts, urbanised and proto-industrialised areas long associated with dissent. Royalism, on the other hand, was entrenched within the remoter mining and moorland zones of west and central Devon – a Pays notorious in godly eyes for being backward in religion – where a vibrant festive culture of church ales, allied to a ‘conservative Anglicanism’, held sway. Hard-drinking yet pious Anglicans later emerged to confront ‘puritan innovation’. The two cultural forces

24

D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Culture and Politics in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 4–5, 18, 40, 278–9. 25 Assault on the Underdown thesis can be found in J. Morrill, ‘The Ecology of Allegiance in the English Revolution’, JBS, 26 (1987), pp. 456–67; M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 101–3; Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England, pp. 153–4.

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seemingly collided on 11 December 1642, when certain parishioners from Dunsford turned out to protect their church from the Parliamentarian iconoclast Captain Nicholas Vaughan, who was shot dead in the village. From such episodes Stoyle concluded that religion was ‘the prime determinant of wartime allegiance’ in Stuart Devon.26 But what did it mean to be a ‘puritan innovator’ or a ‘conservative Anglican’ in the context of seventeenth-century England; or to put it another way, what innovations were puritans attempting to impose and what traditions were Anglicans trying to preserve? Again problems emerge over efforts to graft the values of ‘Merry England’ on to an Anglican spirit. To begin with, given the evangelical Calvinist dispensation of the Church at the Reformation, ‘Anglicanism’ in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period is difficult to identify and define. What interest did the established church have in propping up customary revels? Moreover, it is unclear whether popular attachment to a festive culture was as much an age-old concern by the 1640s as a ‘new’ phenomenon, given that tussles over the ritual year became an issue in English politics upon the crown’s efforts to revive recreations in decline by promoting the Book of Sports in 1618 and again in 1633. So Ronald Hutton has argued.27 Along similar lines, would the matter of church ales have proved such a divisive political matter in the 1630s, in Underdown’s west country at least, were it not for Archbishop Laud’s controversial overawing of the Somerset bench to sustain this means of raising parochial funds?28 How then does the notion of ‘two Englands’ help to explain a ‘war of religion’? Contemplating this problem, Christopher Haigh pulled together the themes explored by Underdown – and subsequently by Stoyle – in a famous essay on the Elizabethan church and ‘the people’, published in 1984. Haigh approached his subject from a ‘revisionist’ angle on the English Reformation. Where revisionists of the English Civil War have emphasised the extent of religious consensus prior to the 1630s, ‘revisionism’ when applied to the Reformation paints a picture of unresolved religious tension, all of which stemmed from the failure of Protestant evangelism to make headway among the populace. Protestantism, a religion of the Bible and sermon, won few converts from among a largely illiterate or semi-literate

26

M. Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon During the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994), pp. 200–1, 208–14, 253. 27 R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), ch. 5, especially p. 198. For the political circumstances surrounding the two royal declarations on sports, see L. Racault, ‘The Book of Sports and Sabbatarian Legislation in Lancashire, 1579–1616’, Northern History, 33 (1997), pp. 73–87; T. G. Barnes, ‘County Politics and a Puritan Cause Célèbre: Somerset Churchales, 1633’, TRHS, 5th Series, 9 (1959), pp. 103–22. 28 Here, confusion is sown by Underdown and Stoyle’s efforts to link church ales, a means of parochial fundraising, with the incidence of a residual ‘pagan’ festive culture, not entirely allied to parish worship.

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population. Instead, the vast majority remained stubbornly attached to traditional Catholic ways well into the seventeenth century, albeit in the form of a dislocated ‘parish Anglicanism’, as conservative sentiments adapted to a lasting Protestant settlement after 1559. As a substitute for lost Catholic practice, such conformists embraced the rituals prescribed by the Prayer Book. However, they also hankered after a greater degree of ceremony in worship, which they received following Laud’s elevation to archbishop in 1633, the policy of Laudianism finding a ready constituency among ‘parish Anglicans’.29 Haigh has expanded upon his idea of a reserve of widespread lay support for the Caroline church. Indeed, as he has gone on to argue, popular pressure may have forced ‘Arminianising theologians’ to eschew predestination for a more inclusive pastoral strategy underscored by the message that Christ died for all mankind. In short, the English people tamed the Reformation. The outcome of this process was that those alienated by evangelical Protestantism were predisposed to find affinity with the Laudian church, siding with King Charles against the ‘puritans’ in 1642 as a result. Yet in all this we find the ‘two Englands’ idea revisited. Haigh’s pessimistic view of the Reformation as a failure shares much with the Hill, Wrightson and Levine interpretation of Protestantism as a minority creed, more accessible to the educated – if not necessarily ‘middling’ sorts – against the masses who could not read. Equally, following Haigh’s description of ‘parish Anglicans’ as the champions of ‘the village unit at play and at worship’, we are back in world of Underdown’s west country revels.30 However, stressing the extent of Catholic survivalism within the established church, and tying proponents of ‘Merry England’ to a confessional strand hostile to Protestant orthodoxy, Haigh has located England’s ‘wars of religion’ within the wider struggle between Catholic and Reformed that engulfed early modern Europe as a whole. The same idea has since been entertained by Alexandra Walsham. Developing Haigh’s thesis that religious conformity was a residual Catholicism, Walsham has redefined ‘parish Anglicanism’ in terms of church papistry, suggesting that many worshippers were really crypto-Catholics, 29

C. Haigh, ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the People’, in C. Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 1984), pp. 214–19. See also Haigh’s English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society Under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993) and his ‘Success and Failure in the English Reformation’, P & P, 173 (2001), pp. 28–49. Revisionist notions of a slow Reformation from above have since been challenged. See, for example, Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, ch. 1; D. MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999); the introduction ‘Protestantisms and their Beginnings’, in P. Marshall and A. Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 4–5, 12–13; E. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003). 30 C. Haigh, ‘The Taming of Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, History, 85 (2000), pp. 572–88; idem, ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the People’, p. 218.

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whose conformity was a deliberate deception, a ruse to avoid being accused and fined for recusancy. It stretches the imagination to concede that all non-godly members of the Church of England were Catholics at heart. Nevertheless, given that such figures on the shadowy margins of conformity did exist, Walsham has argued that church papists found common ground with the Laudians in the 1630s. It was a case of like attracting like. Arminian divines, who found much to commend in the Church’s medieval Catholic heritage, courted the approval of would-be Catholic recusants, equally at odds with evangelical Protestantism. To this end, Walsham has recast the Caroline episcopate as a missionary body. By promoting a ceremonious style of worship supposedly more attuned to Catholic tastes, Laud and his colleagues were actively engaged in reconciling crypto-papists to the national church.31 Why church papists would find Laudian ritual appealing is another matter, and here the line on conformity as Catholic dissemblance is open to criticism.32 Taking a different tack, and offering a more positive interpretation of participation in the rites of the established church, Judith Maltby has located the convictions of the man and woman in the pew within a reformed continuum of ‘Prayer Book Protestantism’. Built around a shared attachment to Cranmer’s liturgy, Prayer Book conformity existed as an ameliorating force between the two poles of puritanism and popery. Moreover, because such conformists were heirs to a reformed tradition, they had no truck with Laudianism, which was widely regarded as an unwelcome intrusion upon established patterns of parochial worship. In evidence she cites the various petitions sent to the Long Parliament in favour of episcopacy and the liturgy. Reacting against radical calls for root and branch abolition, it was significant that those rallying to defend the established church harked back to the good old days of Elizabeth and James, while denouncing recent Caroline innovation.33 Where does this leave the religious causes of the Civil War? Following Maltby, we return full circle, with the crisis of 1640 being interpreted as a backlash against the Arminian revolution, which alienated a body of Protestant opinion from the episcopal hierarchy, prompting a puritan counter-revolution, which became revolutionary. But here Maltby’s portrayal of a middling Anglicanism, albeit of a Reformed hue raises

31 A. Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemics in Early Modern England (London, 1993); idem, ‘The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, AntiCalvinists and “Parish Anglicans” in Early Stuart England’, JEH, 49 (1998), pp. 620–51, especially p. 639. 32 Although for the patronage of William Sterne, a Laudian divine, by Thomas Brudenell, a suspected church papist, see A. Cambers, ‘Pastoral Laudianism? Religious Politics in the 1630s: a Leicestershire Rector’s Annotations’, MH, 27 (2002), pp. 38–51. 33 J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 16, 23–4, 84–6, 99–113, which develops the argument forwarded in J. Morrill, ‘The Church in England, 1642–9’, in J. Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649 (Basingstoke, 1984), pp. 89–114.

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nagging doubts. To begin with, how far did commitment to the Prayer Book mark a distinct third way, given that Protestants of varying opinions could all attest to the legitimate use of the prescribed liturgy? Did Prayer Book Protestants really exist? Maltby claims to have found one proponent in the figure of Sir Thomas Aston, who emerged as an energetic campaigner on behalf of the established church, both within his native Cheshire and nationally, in the 1640s.34 However, as Peter Lake has shown, Aston had clearly been an enthusiastic Laudian in the 1630s. Rather, his lobbying to defend the liturgy and government by bishops should be seen as one of many ‘elaborate coalition building exercises’, designed to rally strands of conformist anti-puritan sentiment to the king’s cause, by shifting attention to the immediate threat from Presbyterian extremism. Was Aston the voice of moderate provincial opinion or the inventor of a polemically aggressive ‘Prayer Book Anglicanism’?35 Another key criticism of the Maltby thesis – as with the Haigh – Walsham argument – is that it presents religious conformity as static and immovable. What constituted the ‘conformable’ was subject to redefinition throughout the Church of England’s history from 1559 to 1640.36 Reinterpretations of orthodox belief and practice were in a sense more dramatic in the wake of the anti-Calvinist ‘revolution’ of the 1630s. Surely, some lay worshippers willingly assented to the test of religious loyalty being imposed upon them during the Personal Rule. Some may indeed have been enthusiastic ‘Laudian’ ritualists, even though, to date, our knowledge of committed lay anti-Calvinists extends to a handful of individuals – inevitably members of the aristocratic or gentry intelligentsia – whose patronage of emerging Caroline churchmanship is well documented.37 An evident challenge lies in identifying putative ‘lay Laudians’ further down the social scale. Here, I wish to pick up the reins of the Haigh – Walsham thesis to trace lay parishioners who found an affinity with the Laudian programme – or who at least did not regard ceremonial change in a negative way – but whose actions helped excite local religious tensions preparing the way for a ‘war of religion’ by 1640. In doing so, I hope to progress from the

34

Maltby, Prayer Book and People, ch. 4. P. Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641’, in Cogswell et al. (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, pp. 259–89, especially p. 288. Thomas Aston’s piety calls for further study. An account of his co-religionists and their enemies in Cheshire is given here below, pp. 265–7: although the clearest indication of Aston’s Laudianism relates to his equipping Aston Chapel with an ‘altar-wise’ communion table in 1635. See BL, Add MS 36919, fo. 243. 36 See the introduction to P. Lake and M. Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. xiii–xiv. 37 P. Croft, ‘The Religion of Robert Cecil’, HJ, 34 (1990), pp. 773–96; I. Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: the Career of John, First Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, 1999), ch. 3; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 140–2, 192–4 for the Arminians William, Lord Maynard and Sir Richard Dyott. 35

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idea that ‘proto-Laudians’ were necessarily psuedo-Catholic proponents of fun-loving ‘Merry England’. Instead, the more likely scenario is of the Laudian establishment drawing a constituency from devoted members of the Church of England, whose compliance with and even attachment to the demands of a rival ‘anti-Calvinist’ vision of worship owed more to antipathy towards their godly neighbours’ efforts to sully the Caroline church.38 This reflexive process between the godly and their opponents, which accelerated in 1630s, had a pre-history of confrontation stretching back to James I’s reign. After all, it is often forgotten that many of the key progenitors of, and later apologists for, the confessional position we think of as Laudiansim – figures such as Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Neile, Peter Heylyn, and even William Laud – had all been evangelical Calvinists at points in their formative careers.39 Not wishing to psychoanalyse any of these divines, their turning from Calvinist orthodoxy was pronounced because of their unhappy experience of an evangelical faith. What held true for senior members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy was doubtless repeated in the lives of lay parishioners, whose fraught relationship with the godly was more stormy, given the constraint of worshipping together at close quarters in the same parish. Such reflexivity, at a grassroots level, was arguably more pronounced in an urban environment. Without dwelling on the question of how extensively ‘urbanised’ England became under the early Stuarts – and what is meant by ‘urbanisation’ in the early modern period – the playing out of religious factionalism in a parochial context can be observed at its most acute in seventeenth-century towns. This had everything to do with the charged political atmosphere within boroughs. Greater population density, as well as the immediacy of everyday political contact and a lively traffic in news and ideas, ensured that – to borrow Andy Wood’s phrase – ‘in towns and cities, popular politics seemed at its most heterogeneous, vibrant and disputatious’.40 This assumption underwrote my decision to focus upon early modern England’s second city – Norwich. Yet for the same reasons, the role of provincial towns as lightning-conductors for religious change and

38 For such tensions within the early Stuart church, see J. Fielding, ‘Arminainism in the Localities: Peterborough Diocese, 1603–1642’, in Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, pp. 93–113; P. Lake, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and a Shropshire Axe-Murder’, MH, 15 (1990), pp. 37–64; idem, ‘ “A Charitable Christian Hatred”: the Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s’, in Durston and Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, pp. 145–83. Friction among English Protestants was exacerbated by the rise of antinomian beliefs in some puritan circles. See D. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, 2004). 39 A. Milton, ‘The Creation of Laudianism: a New Approach’, in Cogswell et al. (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, pp. 162–84, which charts Peter Heylyn’s colourful career from Calvinist apologist to Laudian hack; N. Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism’, in Lake and Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, pp. 7–12; idem, Aspects of English Protestantism, p. 209, for Laud’s Calvinist phase. 40 A. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 116.

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conflict has attracted renewed interest in English Reformation studies, thanks largely to the work of Patrick Collinson and John Craig. As Collinson asked: what did the Reformation do for towns, and what did towns do for the Reformation?41 It is widely recognised that towns were vital to the advancement and dissemination of Protestantism under the Tudors: both as centres where official religious policies were showcased, and as obvious platforms for the spread of evangelical ideas through both print and preaching. Market day lectures and combination exercises – those key events in weekly lives of Elizabethan and Jacobean Protestants – came to be focused in towns under the patronage of borough elites.42 In short, towns and cities helped shape the religious contours of Protestant England, although saying this is not to suggest that the process of Reformation change was always easily assimilated by borough communities, which were notoriously rife with faction-fighting: the outcome of competition for economic resources and trading rights, or the struggle for lucrative office holding.43 Such contests acquired a religious dimension as the Reformation hit home. Political divisions in corporate government tended to follow confessional fault lines, as clashes of interest sucked in wider sections of the borough’s populace. Religious discord was intensely distilled within towns. For this reason, investigation of municipal politics under the Tudors and Stuarts has much to offer historians concerned with tracing the long-term resonance of the Reformation in moulding confessional differences among the English ‘people’. Where the relevant documentation survives, urban studies enable us to probe for popular opinion at a parochial level. After all, in the multi-layered and overlapping 41 See Collinson’s landmark essay, ‘The Protestant Town’, in his Birthpangs of Protestant England, pp. 28–59, especially, p. 36. Many of the remarks made there are reiterated in the introduction to P. Collinson and J. Craig (eds), The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 1–19. Another useful survey is given in W. J. Sheils, ‘Religion in Provincial Towns: Innovation and Tradition’, in F. Heal and R. O’Day (eds), Church and Society in England: Henry VIII-James I (Basingstoke, 1977), pp 157–76. 42 A perceptible shift has taken place in the historiography of the Tudor town. Earlier studies of urban change tended to devote a single chapter to religious developments. See, for example, W. T. MacCaffrey, Exeter, 1540–1640 (London, 1973); A. Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (Leicester, 1973); D. M. Palliser, Tudor York (1979), ch. 9; G. Mayhew, Tudor Rye (Falmer, 1987), ch. 2; D. Marcombe, English Small Town Life: Retford, 1520–1642 (Nottingham, 1993), ch. 9. Now the Reformation takes centre stage in the story of the Tudor town. See P. Clark, ‘Reformation and Radicalism in Kentish Towns, c. 1500–1553’, in W. J. Mommsen (ed.), The Urban Classes, the Nobility and the Reformation (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 115–22; C. Cross, Urban Magistrates and Ministers: Religion in Hull and Leeds from the Reformation to the Civil War, Borthwick Papers, 67 (1985); S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989); M. Skeeters, Community and Clergy: Bristol and the Reformation, c. 1530-c. 1570 (Oxford, 1993); B. Coulton, ‘The Establishment of Protestantism in a Provincial Town: a Study of Shrewsbury in the Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27 (1996), pp. 307–35; J. Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics: the Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 (Aldershot, 2001); J. Goring, Burn Holy Fire: Religion in Lewes Since the Reformation (Cambridge, 2003); and, of course, the essays edited in Collinson and Craig, The Reformation in English Towns. 43 P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 1979), ch. 9.

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political nation of early modern England, we encounter the same burgesses – at religious loggerheads in town affairs – serving as parish officials or members of select vestries. It is at the points where polemic collided with parochial interests in the arena of borough politics that we gain a window upon the local impact of the Reformation. As John Craig’s comparative studies of three East Anglian market towns – Bury St Edmunds, Thetford and Hadleigh – reveal, religious polemic could stir up bitter divisions on its own terms, or simply add colour to existing material rivalries.44 Either way, protagonists’ sympathies for or against the Reformation tended to bubble to the surface. Rarely, however, is the story of such internecine strife explored into the Stuart period, an omission that owes something to the rule of thumb that the narrative of religious upheaval generated by the Tudor Reformation loses momentum by the middle years of Elizabeth’s reign.45 Less is heard of religious and political strife in the early Stuart town until the beating of drums for Civil War divided civic leadership once again. Even then, upon entering the 1640s, the main historical focus is upon the practical matter of preparing for defence, as burgesses everywhere braced themselves for conflict; invariably they adopted a studied neutralism so as not to antagonise either side and risk potential damage to urban property.46 Meanwhile, the impact of developments within the early Stuart church upon the confessional environment of many towns is glossed over. Instead, putting aside Richard Baxter’s comment that the Civil War began in the streets, our overall perception of the seventeenth-century urban religious scene remains coloured by the outlook of another near-contemporary Shropshire lad, Peter Studley, for whom towns were ‘the seminaries and 44

As noted in the introduction to Collinson and Craig (eds), The Reformation in English Towns, pp. 4–5; Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics, chs 4–6. 45 Exceptions include: V. Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (London, 1961), pp. 160–76; R. Howell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1967), pp. 77–119; P. Clark, ‘Thomas Scott and the Growth of Opposition to the Early Stuart Regime’, HJ, 21 (1978), pp. 1–26; idem, ‘ “The Ramoth-Gilead of the Good”: Urban Change and Political Radicalism in Gloucester, 1540–1640’, in P. Clark et al. (eds), The English Commonwealth, 1547–1640 (Leicester, 1979), pp. 167–86; Lake, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and a Shropshire Axe-Murder’; D. Underdown, Fire From Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992); R. Cust, ‘Anti-Puritanism and Urban Politics: Charles I and Great Yarmouth’, HJ, 35 (1992), pp. 1–26; D. Harris Sacks, ‘Bristol’s “Wars of Religion”’, in R. C. Richardson (ed.), Town and Countryside in the English Revolution (Manchester, 1992), pp. 100–29; A. Hughes, ‘Religion and Society in Stratford Upon Avon, 1619–1638’, MH, 19 (1994), pp. 58–63; M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction: Rebellion and Civil War in an English City (Exeter, 1996), ch. 2; F. Grace, ‘ “Schismaticall and Factious Humours”: Opposition in Ipswich to Laudian Church Government in the 1630s’, in D. Chadd (ed.), Religious Dissent in East Anglia III (Norwich, 1996), pp. 97–119. 46 R. Howell, ‘Neutralism, Conservatism and Political Alignment in the English Revolution: the Case of the Towns, 1642–9’, in Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War, pp. 67–87; K. Lindley, ‘London’s Citizenry in the English Revolution’, in Richardson (ed.), Town and Countryside in the English Revolution, pp. 19–45, and in the same volume, D. Scott, ‘Politics and Religion in York, 1640–1662’, pp. 46–68; S. Porter, Destruction in the English Civil Wars (London, 1994); W. Coster, ‘Fear and Friction in Urban Communities During the English Civil War’, in W. G. Naphy and P. Roberts (eds), Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester, 1997), pp. 100–17.

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principal places where schism is bred and nourished’. Clarendon agreed, writing of the ‘natural malignancy’ among corporations in the 1640s.47 Such remarks have led to the simple equation that boroughs, being epicentres of puritanism, were therefore politically radical and overwhelmingly Parliamentarian during the Civil War. Yet this is a superficial reading of the role of towns in the destabilisation of early Stuart polity. Indeed, while recognising the entrenched nature of the godly cause in some cities and towns, it is also the case that major provincial boroughs – cathedral cities in particular – were regarded as vital platforms by the Church’s emerging ceremonialist wing. It is well known that Laudians embellished cathedrals as conduits for the ideals of ‘the beauty of holiness’.48 What remains to be seen, is the extent to which these evolving trends in cathedral worship spilled over into surrounding parishes, and with what consequences for the course of politics in their respective civic communities.49 Certainly, the rise of a new ceremonial orthodoxy fanned the flames of town–gown disputes in cathedral cities. So Andrew Foster and Catherine Patterson have argued, drawing attention to Charles’s partisan backing of cathedral chapters in their jurisdictional quarrels with their burgher neighbours; which made Laudianism a bitter pill to swallow for some civic worthies who were themselves patrons of ‘alternative’ forms of godly piety, under attack in the 1630s.50 However, to depict affairs in early Stuart cathedral cities as heading towards unbridgeable feuds between the higher clergy and the laity is to simplify matters. At least this is the contention of the ensuing account of Norwich, a cathedral city in which, from the 1620s, some members of the civic elite – being guided by successive disciplinarian bishops of Norwich, especially Samuel Harsnett and Matthew Wren – came to endorse a new ritualism associated with cathedral worship.

47 Peter Studley, The Looking Glass of Schism (1635), STC 23404, p. 175; Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. G. Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), II, p. 226. 48 Successive Tudor regimes had valued cathedrals to showcase liturgical change. See D. MacCulloch, ‘Worcester: a cathedral City in the Reformation’, in Collinson and Craig (eds), The Reformation in English Towns, pp. 111–12; D. J. Crankshaw, ‘Community, City and Nation, 1540–1714’, in D. Keene et al. (eds), St Paul’s: the Cathedral Church of London 604–2004 (New Haven, 2004), pp. 46–54. 49 Recent work on church building projects in Stuart London is beginning to address this issue. See J. Newman, ‘Laudian Literature and the Interpretation of Caroline Churches in London’, in D. Howarth (ed.), Art and Patronage at the Caroline Courts (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 168–88; J. Merritt, ‘Puritans, Laudians and the Phenomenon of Church Building in Jacobean London’, HJ, 41 (1998), pp. 935–60; idem, ‘The Cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey, 1558–1630’, JEH, 52 (2001), pp. 623–46; P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001), ch. 11. 50 Foster, ‘Church Policies in the 1630s’, p. 208; C. F. Patterson, ‘Corporations, Cathedrals and the Crown: Local Dispute and Royal Interest in Early Stuart England’, History, 85 (2000), pp. 546–71. For a study of Charles’s disciplining of Salisbury corporation, see P. Slack, ‘Religious Protest and Urban Authority: the Case of Henry Sherfield, Iconoclast, 1633’, in D. Baker (ed.), Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 295–302.

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What follows is structured around four parts. Adopting a broad narrative sweep, part I plots the processes by which Norwich became a precocious Protestant town – and a hotbed of puritanism and radical dissent – from the 1560s to the end of James I’s reign. Taking a shorter time span, part II explores the turning points in the city’s godly tradition during the ten years of Samuel Harsnett’s episcopate, 1619 – 29. Part III then picks up the narrative thread to examine the increasingly polarised relations between the godly and their conformist critics in the 1630s, which surfaced amid Matthew Wren’s infamous visitation of 1636. Finally, in part IV the fate of the city’s puritan movement from diaspora to Civil War will be traced in detail. In short, this book charts the fortunes of ‘puritanism’ within Norwich, alongside the rise of groups opposed to the godly, whose anti-puritanism was channelled into something approaching civic Laudianism by the mid-1630s. My findings do not endorse the Haigh – Walsham thesis that the Caroline church drew support from an unbroken Catholic continuum. Yet in so saying, I do not wish to downgrade Laudianism’s potential appeal in terms of focusing strands of anti-puritan feeling, to emerge as a potent political force in Norwich and other corporate towns on the eve of the Civil War. In order to track down competing religious voices among early modern Norvicians, it has been necessary to work with a varied cast of characters. Only by applying the tool of prosopography has it been possible to reconstruct the complex web of diffuse religious affiliations among the two to three generations of city dwellers from the reigns of Elizabeth to Charles I. Here, I apologise in advance for bombarding the reader with a disarming roll-call of names. Equally, I am conscious that while the following is a study of a town, it is not primarily an exercise in urban history – with much of the socio-economic and political background to Norwich city life having been discarded, which may give the urban historian cause for regret.51 However, I hope my work makes a contribution to the literature on Norwich’s spiritual past. It is towards a broader consideration of the secondary writing on the city’s eventful ecclesiastical history that we now turn.

51 On the other hand, the following fits current trends in urban studies towards a history of towns with politics put back in: see L. Hollen Lees, ‘The Challenge of Political Change: Urban History in the 1990s’, Urban History, 21 (1994), pp. 7–19.

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Chapter Two NORWICH’S REFORMATION HISTORY REVISITED

We know, or at least think we know, how the Reformation fared in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Norwich. Generally the transition from a Catholic to a Protestant city is seen as having carried on apace under the Tudors, with Norwich swiftly emerging as a noted centre of radical puritanism thereafter. Moreover, the grassroots of religious dissent were somehow deeply enmeshed in the fabric of urban life. Turning to the secondary literature, we find a classic statement of this idea within John Browne’s History of Congregationalism and Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk, published in 1877. Browne was, from 1849, the Congregationalist minister at Wrentham, Suffolk, and later secretary of the Suffolk Congregational Union. His published work was intended as a hagiography of the puritan movement in East Anglia: his heroes were the select band of saints who followed his namesake Robert Browne along the path of separation from the episcopalian church. The ‘little Brownist rivulet’ became ‘the broader and stronger stream of Congregationalism, and flows on to the present day’. However, Brownism belonged very much to the East Anglian environment, Norfolk and Suffolk having ‘long been distinguished by the zeal for Protestantism cherished and manifested in their towns and villages’. After all ‘one of the first victims of the writ de heretico comburendo was a Norfolk man’.1 A regional religious mythology was born, and came to be embellished twenty years later by Alfred Kingston’s account of East Anglia during the Civil War. In a romantic vein, Kingston wrote of the region’s ‘sturdy puritan folk’. It was ‘the immense impetus which the religious zeal of puritan East Anglia gave to the Parliamentary army’ that ensured its resounding victory over King Charles.2 Crossing into the twentieth century, the same received images have proved remarkably tenacious. East Anglia belonged to the south-eastern lowland zone – an area comprising ‘a great crescent running from Norwich down to Hove’ – which A. G. Dickens described as ‘the heartland 1 2

Browne, Memorials, p. 1; ODNB, ‘John Browne (1823–1886)’. A. Kingston, East Anglia and the Great Civil War (London, 1897), pp. 4, 313.

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of the English Reformation’. It remains a convenient shorthand to write of Norwich’s place in ‘Puritan East Anglia’; but is this a rather superficial characterisation?3 Known to students of the early modern period as England’s second city, Norwich’s relative success depended upon its role as a distributive centre for the surrounding county of Norfolk and elsewhere in East Anglia. But Norwich also prospered as a textile town. In particular – as described below (pages 48–9) – the city proved a versatile producer of lightweight woollen fabrics, the celebrated ‘Norwich stuffs’, which supplied a burgeoning domestic textile market as well as the export trade, through London, to Europe and beyond.4 While experiencing nothing like Tudor London’s population boom, Norwich’s early modern expansion was nonetheless steady. From an estimated 8,500 inhabitants in 1525, the populace settled to around 12,000 by 1600, almost doubling in size to between 20,000 to 22,000 by 1620, to reach a confirmed 30,000 by 1700.5 The spurt during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I was sustained in spite of devastating visitations by the plague. One acute epidemic in 1579 is reckoned to have carried away some 5,000 inhabitants – on Paul Slack’s estimation around a third of the overall population – while other crisis mortality years such as 1604 and 1625–6 struck down 3,000 on both occasions. In part, a stream of immigration, some from the Low Countries, offset such catastrophes.6 Fortunately for the aspiring historian of Norwich, the city’s high ranking in the league table of early modern English towns is reflected in the wealth of archival sources bequeathed by her corporation to posterity. Norwich boasted a prestigious tradition of corporate government. The form of administration in place over the Tudor and Stuart city – a body of twentyfour alderman, from among whom a mayor was elected annually on May Day – had been established by a royal charter of Henry IV in 1404. In 1415 the city legislature was broadened to include sixty common councillors. This body lacked Independent authority, only being convened during Assembly meetings to vote on measures forwarded by the aldermen. However, a seat on the council was a prerequisite for any seeking election to the shrievalty, a necessary step towards aldermanic service. Thus two sheriffs were chosen annually from among the body of councillors on 8 September; one candidate was forwarded by the entire freeman electorate, the other picked by the 3 A. G. Dickens, ‘The Early Expansion of Protestantism in England, 1520–1558’, reprinted in P. Marshall (ed.), The Impact of the English Reformation, 1500–1640 (London, 1997), p. 102; D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985), pp. 46, 71. 4 J. F. Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, 1988), pp. 51–3, 56–8, 61–2; N. J. Williams, The Maritime Trade of the East Anglian Ports 1550–1590 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 61–8; L. Martin, ‘The Rise of the New Draperies in Norwich, 1550–1622’, in N. B. Harte (ed.), The New Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300–1800 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 262–6. 5 W. G. Hoskins, Local History in England, 2nd edn (London, 1972), p. 239; Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, p. 28. 6 P. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), pp. 126–43.

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magistrates.7 The minutes of each Assembly meeting have survived in an unbroken run for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When read alongside an almost complete set of city chamberlains’ accounts covering the same time-span, scholars are afforded a detailed insight into how the city’s medieval administration confronted the challenges of early modern urban change. Day-to-day matters of government can also be followed in the proceedings of the mayors’ court, the local petty sessions court that met twice a week. In addition, the borough records contain an extensive collection of apprenticeship indentures and lists of those entering the freedom of the city, which when correlated, shed light upon Norwich’s changing occupational and trade structure over time. These sources have formed the basis for some excellent studies of the city’s economic and social life. John Pound’s exhaustive research into the impact of demographic and social change upon the priorities of municipal government has been given added colour by Victor Morgan’s consideration of an emerging civic mentalité, the shared political culture of Norwich’s elite and the material signs by which the elite conveyed its dignity and status.8 However, while the focus of such work has been on the practical concerns of Norwich’s elders, the story of the Reformation has often been left out of the picture.9 Rather the intellectual developments tied to what we think of as the rise of Protestantism have been viewed as secondary to the processes by which the city’s early modern fathers endeavoured to structure their immediate urban world. It is readily assumed that the administrators of a ‘puritan’ town inevitably subscribed to an evangelical faith.10 What this meant for the civic officials’ shared identity has been reconstructed by Patrick Collinson,

7

NRO, NCR Case 17b, Liber Albus, p. 145; W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey (eds), The Records of the City of Norwich (2 vols, Norwich, 1906–10), I, pp. lvii–lxix, 31–6. 8 J. F. Pound, ‘The Elizabethan Corporation of Norwich, 1558–1603’, University of Birmingham M.A., 1962; idem, ‘Government and Society in Tudor and Stuart Norwich, 1525–1675’, University of Leicester Ph.D., 1974; idem, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London, 1986), pp. 60–8; idem, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, chs 6, 8–9; V. Morgan, ‘The Norwich Guildhall Portraits: Images in Context’, in A. Moore (ed.), Family and Friends: a Regional Study of British Portraiture (London, 1992), pp. 21–9; idem, ‘The Elizabethan Shirehouse in Norwich’, in C. Rawcliffe et al. (eds), Counties and Communities: Essays in East Anglian History (Norwich, 1996), pp. 149–60; idem, ‘The Construction of Civic Memory in Early Modern Norwich’, in M. Kwint et al. (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation (Oxford, 1999), pp. 183–97. For a continuation of the themes of government and society into the later seventeenth century, see P. J. Corfield, ‘The Social and Economic History of Norwich, 1650–1850: a Study in Urban Growth’, University of London Ph.D., 1975. 9 Although, for an introduction to the early Reformation in the city, see R. A. Houlbrooke, ‘Persecution of Heresy and Protestantism in the Diocese of Norwich Under Henry VIII’, NA, 35 (1972), pp. 308–26; E. M. Sheppard, ‘The Reformation and the Citizens of Norwich’, NA, 38 (1981), pp. 44–56. Later religious developments, as traced by John Evans, Muriel McClendon and Kenneth Shipps, are discussed below. 10 However, for a more cautionary reading of the triumph of Protestantism in the city, see R. Houlbrooke and M. C. McClendon, ‘The Reformation’, in C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds), Medieval Norwich (London, 2004), pp. 266–8, 273–6.

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who has sensitively evoked post-Reformation Norwich’s governors’ efforts to fashion their city as a model godly Commonwealth, overseen by an alliance of magistracy and ministry. Throughout an emphasis was placed upon godly learning to promote order and obedience, two cherished values underpinning corporate authority in Elizabethan and early Stuart England.11 Religious beliefs were therefore central to the world-view of Norwich’s magistrates; although how the city’s governors assimilated their role as the dispensers of stern justice inspired by the word of God and the operation of divine providence has yet to be explored fully. We need to know how Norwich’s elders exercised religious patronage in bringing a godly ministry to town. Neglect in assessing the impact of individual magistrates in determining the course of the Reformation locally stems from a failure to get to grips with how – at a basic structural level – the established church functioned in early modern Norwich.12 This is in spite of a wealth of relatively untapped diocesan material covering the city.13 For the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, historians can call upon a range of extant diocesan and archidiaconal visitation returns, while the Norwich consistory court archives are of similar bulk. Other sources include a series of bishops’ registers, through which we can chart the flow of clerical personnel into Norwich’s parishes. Approaching the 1630s, the surviving diocesan records can be read alongside a detailed body of correspondence on Norwich affairs within Bishop Matthew Wren’s papers, now deposited among the Tanner manuscripts in the Bodleian Library.14 Indeed, this valuable collection provides the focus for the final two sections of this book. Overall, the historiography of early modern Norwich has shown a reluctance to examine how the existing parish structure – and more fundamentally parochial religion itself – remained an integral part of urban life during the period.15 This is in stark contrast to work on the medieval borough Norman 11 P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 141–5. Recent studies of the ‘reformation of manners’ in Norwich are strangely averse to discussing the impact of Protestantism upon the city’s governors. See P. Griffiths, ‘Masterless Young People in Norwich, 1560–1645’, in P. Griffiths et al. (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 146–86. 12 Such neglect does not extend to the cathedral, the subject of two excellent institutional histories: R. A. Houlbrook, ‘Refoundation and Reformation, 1538–1628’ and I. Atherton and V. Morgan, ‘Revolution and Retrenchment: the Cathedral, 1630–1720’, in I. Atherton et al. (eds), Norwich Cathedral: Church City and Diocese, 1096–1996 (London, 1996), chs 26 and 27. 13 Presenting a recent collection of essays on Norwich’s past, Carole Rawcliffe has omitted any reference to the available diocesan sources among other archives relating to the city. See the introduction to Rawcliffe and Wilson (eds), Medieval Norwich, p. xxx. Brief surveys of Norwich diocesan administration are given in R. A. Marchant, The Church Under the Law (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 15–29; R. A. Houlbrooke, Church Courts and People During the English Reformation, 1520–1570 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 4–6, 278–81. 14 Bod L, Tanner MS 68 and the working papers for Wren’s defence before the Long Parliament in 1641, mainly in volumes 220 and 314, which can be supplemented with Wren’s letter book, Bod L, Rawlinson MS C 368. 15 An issue not satisfactorily addressed in Houlbrooke and McClendon, ‘The Reformation’, pp. 166–8.

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Tanner has shown how Norwich with its cathedral priory, four friaries, nunnery, hospitals, myriad parishes and chantry chapels – alongside a proliferation of anchorages, hermitages and benguinages – formed the epicentre of a regional religion of ‘considerable richness and variety, a kind of High Church, almost Baroque Christianity’, which flourished throughout Norfolk until the Reformation.16 Recently, Tanner has described Norwich as late medieval Europe’s most religious city. Admittedly, this remains a highly subjective view, since medieval Norvicians’ urbane and contemplative piety was tempered somewhat by their city’s vicious fifteenth-century politics, not to mention two violent assaults by the citizens on the priory in 1272 and 1443.17 Nevertheless, faint echoes of a vibrant Catholic past are visible today. For example, Eamon Duffy’s catalogue of the outpourings of Catholic piety prior to the Tudor ‘stripping of the altars’ contains numerous Norfolk illustrations of extant medieval church furnishings and painted rood screens, which testify to the county’s medieval artistic heritage.18 Such material remains are a yardstick to assess the fortunes of medieval parish life, since devotion through sacred art was a valued aspect of Catholic religiosity. However, when we approach the subject of Norwich’s early modern religious environment, the part played by parochial affairs, indeed the role of the established ‘Church of England’ itself, is often passed over as being irrelevant to the city’s puritan progress. Of course, Norwich as a gem of a medieval city exerts an obvious attraction for Catholic historians like Tanner and Duffy. After the Reformation divide, historical considerations of the city’s religious life tend to be coloured by partisan later denominational accounts in the spirit of John Browne’s work. Indeed, emphasis continues to be placed upon the modes of religious expression favoured by dissenters, who were forced to worship outside the parish. This at least was the line adopted by Penelope Corfield, who in a lecture delivered at Norwich in 1980 spoke of Norwich’s enduring historical legacy of trade, religion and radical politics. For Corfield, the inculcation of evangelical Protestantism was a consequence of urban existence. Religious dissent reflected the sturdy ‘independence and self-reliance’ found in all open and non-deferential manufacturing communities, but especially in Norwich where a ‘strong tradition of puritanism . . . sprang from and dwelt in its artisan culture, as well as in the city’s intellectual circles’. Although ‘disputatious and argumentative’, puritanism mirrored a native preference 16 N. P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984), passim, especially p. 167. For the religious foundations, see C. Harper-Bill and C. Rawcliffe, ‘The Religious Houses’, in Rawcliffe and Wilson (eds.), Medieval Norwich, pp. 73–119. 17 N. Tanner, ‘Religious Practice’, in Rawcliffe and Wilson (eds), Medieval Norwich, p. 137; idem, ‘The Cathedral and the City’, in Atherton et al. (eds), Norwich Cathedral, pp. 259–69; R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London, 1966), pp. 217–25. 18 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992), illustrations passim.

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for ‘non institutionalised’ religion. Clearly, this development was the direct obverse of an ‘organisationally weak’ parish church structure within the borough’s confines, which had failed to cater for the spiritual needs of the city’s inhabitants. Elsewhere, Corfield has written of ‘the poverty and dejection of the Church of England’ in Stuart Norwich. Unable to appeal to vast segments of the local populace, the future lay with the dissenting congregations and the rigorous ‘commercial morality’ that they helped instil into the world of business.19 It is one thing to indicate a connection between Protestant nonconformity and burgeoning enterprise. It is quite another thing to explain why such a relationship occurred, and here Corfield’s pessimistic appraisal of the fortunes of the established church seems misplaced, especially in light of current scholarly interest in the early modern parish as a religious and social institution.20 Arguably too, her interpretation is a product of its time, the 1970s, a testing time for the Church of England’s resources in Norwich. Thus it is striking that Corfield’s ready dismissal of early modern parochial life also happened to coincide with the work of the Norwich Diocesan Commission, then engaged in the unhappy task of downsizing the number of places of worship available in the city. Post-war migration to the suburbs and the transformation of Norwich’s parishes into commercial districts had left many of the city’s historic churches ‘redundant’. However, while the Commissioners’ report deemed the city’s substantial medieval ecclesiastical heritage – which amounted to a church on nearly every street corner – a burdensome ‘luxury’, this was far from the outlook of Norwich’s early modern citizens, for whom the parish was a very relevant part of urban life.21 Of course, in strict quantitative terms, it is difficult to judge how important parochial religion was to the city’s inhabitants at the time. To begin with, we lack anything approaching an accurate statistical count of church attendance in the period; although we are fortunate to possess two diocesan surveys conducted at the opening and the close of the seventeenth century. 19

P. J. Corfield, Towns, Trade, Religion and Radicalism: the Norwich Perspective on English History (Norwich, 1980), pp. 27–9; idem, ‘A Provincial Capital in the Late Seventeenth Century: the Case of Norwich’, in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700 (London, 1972), pp. 294–5. 20 D. M. Palliser, ‘Introduction: the Parish in Perspective’, in S. J. Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750 (London, 1988), pp. 5–27 and in the same collection N. Aldridge, ‘Loyalty and Identity in Chester Parishes 1540–1640’, pp. 85–118; J. Barry, ‘The Parish in Civic Life: Bristol and its Churches, 1640–1750’, pp. 152–79; B. Kumin, The Shaping of a Community: the Rise and Reformation of the English Parish 1400–1560 (Aldershot, 1996); A. Foster, ‘Churchwardens’ Accounts of Early Modern England and Wales: Some Problems to Note, but Much to be Gained’, in K. L. French et al. (eds), The Parish in English Life, 1400–1600 (Manchester, 1997), pp. 74–93; E. Carlson, ‘The Origins, Function and Status of the Office of Churchwarden, with Particular Reference to the Diocese of Ely’, in M. Spufford (ed.), The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 164–207; J. Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics (Aldershot, 2001), ch. 3. 21 Norwich City Commission Report (Norwich, 1970), pp. 15–17.

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The first of these consists of a list of communicants in twenty-one city parishes taken in 1603. The other comprises the returns for the city for the Compton Census of 1676, covering thirty-four urban parishes, with the figures from both surveys being plotted opposite (see Map 2.1). In the 1603 returns, a city-wide total of 3,226 communicants was given, against a handful of twelve recusants. While this is an inadequate guide to the depth of religious sympathies of Norwich’s citizens, the earlier survey remains useful for plotting the distribution of parishioners within the city. The largest complements came from St Peter Mancroft, with 724 and St Andrew’s with 240. Occupying the space around the castle, these parishes straddled Norwich’s commercial heart, being encompassed by Middle Wymer and Mancroft wards, the two districts that yielded the greatest per capita taxable wealth – around a quarter of the city’s overall return – in the lay subsidy of 1525.22 Both parishes retained a pre-eminent ranking with the taking of the Compton Census in 1676. Of the 10,796 conformists against 62 ‘papists’ and 546 dissenters given for Norwich, Mancroft and the adjoining parish of St Stephen’s, accommodated the largest single congregations with 800 communicants apiece, comprising 15 percent of the city’s ‘conformists’. St Andrew’s retained a robust congregation of 500. However, it was now on an equal footing with adjacent parishes on either side of the River Wensum, such as St Martin at Palace – with 460 – and the three parishes of Coslany Ward, with a combined total of 1,358, around 12 percent of the communicants listed in Norwich.23 Attempts to measure the relevance of the established church from counting the number of worshippers is largely academic. Throughout the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth centuries, Norwich’s citizens were legally required to attend their local church, while even denizens uncomfortable with the Church’s prescribed practices could not escape the sheer everyday presence of Norwich’s maze of parishes. Thanks to Tanner’s research, we known that in 1520 Norwich boasted forty-six parish churches and affiliated chapels-of-ease. This was a proportionately high total of places of worship for a late medieval European city of lesser rank, which compared favourably with the distribution of churches in major urban centres such as Venice – with seventy parishes – and Bruges with twelve; although it should be noted that Bruges’s churches were built on a far grander scale and could accommodate larger numbers.24 Certainly, the early sixteenth century witnessed the thinning out of Norwich’s parishes. The Henrician dissolution closed the city’s four friaries – whose churches had perhaps served as rivals 22

BL, Harl MS 595, fos 160v–2v; U. Priestly, The Great Market: a Survey of Nine Hundred Years of Norwich Provision Market (Norwich, 1987); Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, pp. 34–5; Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, pp. 133–7. 23 A. Whiteman (ed.), The Compton Census of 1676: a Critical Edition, Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, 10 (1986), pp. 216–17. 24 Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, pp. 2–3.

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Map 2.1 Distribution of parishioners in Norwich, 1603 and 1676

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to the existing parochial structure – while further demolition between 1530 and 1564 cropped the number of parishes to thirty-four by Elizabeth’s reign. Nevertheless, this remained an impressive array of churches per head of population. Because so many religious buildings survived, it becomes difficult to speak of an ‘organisationally weak’ parish system; even more so in light of the management of ecclesiastical patronage in the city by the local church hierarchy. As revealed by a 1629 diocesan valuation covering all thirty-four city parishes (Map 2.2), the most prominent patron was the dean and chapter of Norwich. Retaining the right of presentment to fourteen cures, these benefices had been founded as livings appropriated to the medieval priory, who as corporate rector drew upon the tithe income while appointing the incumbents – described as chaplains – in each.25 With the Benedictine monastery’s reconstitution as a secular chapter in 1538, the livings were employed to provide stipends for minor canons attached to the new foundation.26 In a post-Reformation setting, that these resources were being siphoned off to fund the extra-parochial activities of ministers burdened with duties in Christ Church became a cause of much godly complaint. But such grievances tended to surround candidates deemed unworthy to serve the cathedral’s livings. Petty canons who were also energetic evangelical pastors were perfectly acceptable to the godly, and, as outlined below, the Reformation was brought to Elizabethan Norwich by a formidable team of preachers, all of whom had been encouraged to settle in the city as lesser cathedral office-holders.27 Besides the sizeable control exercised by the dean and chapter, the bishop of Norwich presented to a further three livings. In terms of its share of clerical patronage alone, the ecclesiastical hierarchy maintained a substantial influence over the worship conducted in the city.28 The point is that parish religion was far from institutionally disorganised and in a state of decay. To turn the argument on its head, given the poorly endowed nature of many city benefices, Norwich’s famed ministry was dependent, as a going concern, upon the public-spirited generosity of the devout in enhancing clerical

25

Details are based on NRO, DN VAL/2. Lists of patrons to Norwich benefices compiled at the Restoration, such as NRO, MS 4914 and BL, Harl MS 4626, fo, 324r, are incomplete. The same fourteen livings remained with the dean and chapter into the eighteenth century, NRO, DCN 115/9. 26 The number of minor or petty canons diminished over time. In 1538 a fund was set up to provide for sixteen canons, although during Edward VI’s reign the number of petty canons was halved to eight. By 1613, this body had been further reduced to six. See R. A. Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation, 1538–1628’, pp. 507–10. 27 Seconde Parte, II, p. 155; Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fos 131–5; see below, pp. 73–4, 76. 28 By comparison, Norwich city owned the advowsons to just two livings within its jurisdiction, St Etheldreda and St Helen’s connected to the Great Hospital of St Giles, where the city also appointed the master. See C. Rawcliffe, Medicine for the Soul: the Life, Death and Resurrection of an English Medieval Hospital (Stroud, 1999), ch. 7. However, some city fathers exercised clerical patronage as trustees to the two donative cures of St Andrew and St Peter Mancroft, see below, pp. 66–8, 103–4.

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Map 2.2 Patrons of Norwich city Churches, 1629

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stipends through the parish rates. Similarly, as discussed below, there is ample evidence of Elizabethan and Stuart Norvicians investing in the material fabric of worship. Visiting in 1682, Thomas Baskerville was suitably impressed by the city’s ‘large and well built’ parish churches, perhaps having been shown notable Elizabethan and Stuart additions, such as St Stephen’s tower. This edifice had been completed in 1601.29 Indeed, while the focus of Corfield’s work – the long eighteenth century – has placed store on the city’s lively nonconformist tradition, Norwich’s parishes remained objects of local pride beyond 1660, as reflected in Benjamin Mackerell’s lavish description of the city’s ‘handsome’ ancient churches, compiled in 1722.30 We need to understand how Tudor and Stuart Norwich’s citizens related to their surrounding parishes. That so little has been done in this direction is striking given the survival of detailed sets of churchwardens’ accounts for nine city churches – six of which run from Elizabeth’s reign onwards – which enable us to view how the key players in municipal politics performed their respective duties as parochial officers; this is a major concern of the following work.31 There is a slight exaggeration to this catalogue of historiographical neglect. After all, the impact of Reformation change upon Norwich borough politics prior to the English Civil War has been tackled in two monographs, both of which require further comment for being products of the same historical stable. The first, John Evans’s Seventeenth Century Norwich, published in 1979, offers a narrative of the city’s fortunes under the Stuarts. The book of a 1971 Stanford thesis, which purported to furnish a full prosopographical analysis of Norwich’s governing elite, Evans touched on issues such as the rise of puritanism and the corporation’s wrangling with successive episcopal governors – namely Samuel Harsnett and Matthew Wren – of relevance to this study.32 But town – gown relations were peripheral to Evans’s main concern with constitutional forms. Upon his reading, Norwich’s unusually ‘open’ political system, with its careful checks and balances and codes of conduct

29

See below, pp. 134–5, 146–9, 150–2; HMC, Portland MSS, II, pp. 269–70; Houlbrooke and McClendon, ‘The Reformation’, p. 405, n. 65. 30 BL, Add MS 12525, passim. 31 The survival rate of Norwich’s early modern churchwardens’ accounts is uneven. The earliest date covered by any extant accounts from the city is 1552 for St Margaret’s, which ends in 1600. Complete sets exist, in chronological order, for St John Maddermarket (from 1556), St Gregory (from 1574), St Peter Mancroft (from 1580), St Mary Coslany (from 1586), St Lawrence (1590–6 and then from 1603) and St Stephen (from 1598). Extracts from an earlier account book for St Stephen’s going back to 1567, now lost, are given in EANQ, 2nd Series, 8 (1899–1900), pp. 34–8, 70–2, 109–10. Later sets beginning in the early seventeenth century include St Benedict (from 1608) and St John Sepulchre (from 1625). A list of receipts for St Saviour’s begins in 1623. All are deposited at the Norfolk Record Office and the class marks are provided in the bibliography below. My research augments the list of Norwich churchwardens’ accounts in R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1996), pp. 280–1. 32 J. T. Evans, ‘The Political Elite of Norwich, 1620–1690: Patterns of Recruitment and the Impact of National Affairs’, Stanford University Ph.D., 1971; idem, Seventeenth Century Norwich: Politics, Religion and Government, 1620–1690 (Oxford, 1979), especially pp. 84–104.

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drawn up during the turbulent fifteenth century, proved a remarkable bulwark against the gathering storm of political strife from the Civil War to the Glorious Revolution. Against unfolding national crises, the basic framework of government acted to diffuse tensions within the urban community.33 Throughout the emphasis is on the ways in which borough politics continued to function amid wider upheavals affecting the nation state, although, by doing so, Evans missed the point about why the course of national events mattered to Norwich’s seventeenth-century inhabitants. He has sown confusion in the process. On the one hand, Evans presents Stuart Norwich as something akin to the blueprint for a modern democracy, a microcosmic republic in the making, in which a large freeman franchise ensured something like a mass participation in local politics. Norwich was not subject to power struggles along vertical ‘class’ lines. However, Evans’s case for an emerging democracy is based on his understanding of the obverse, the decline of oligarchy, and here his claim that Stuart Norwich’s aldermanic elite was becoming less exclusive socially is doubtful.34 Equally, why would the city’s potential for ‘popular’ participation in borough elections make for a stable political environment? Evans’s work should be seen as a product of its time and of the localism fashionable within Civil War studies in the 1970s, which sought to downplay the force of ideology in shaping public opinion during the crisis of 1640. Rather contemporaries were only concerned with the national affairs in so far as they impinged upon local matters. Yet the outcome of this view is to present an insular picture of provincial life, and certainly Evans bought into the ‘localist’ line by arguing that prior to the conflicts of Charles I’s reign ‘Norwich was a world in itself’, a city free of unrest and ‘capable of handling its own affairs’ without the need to call upon outside agents to settle disputes.35 My own work aims to modify this proposition. Early modern Norwich was never an enclosed world, since its citizens maintained various social and business contacts beyond the city walls, which makes it difficult to examine city politics in isolation from national events. A select few were themselves participants in a national political culture upon being elected as city burgesses to successive parliaments. We need to know more about the wider intellectual horizons of Norwich’s petite noblesse – cultivated through their associations with the universities, the clergy and the gentry – to gain a sharper appreciation 33

Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, ch. 2, especially pp. 60–2. Summarised in J. T. Evans, ‘The Decline of Oligarchy in Seventeenth Century Norwich’, JBS, 14 (1974), pp. 46–76, especially p. 51. The opposite is argued in R. O’Day, ‘The Triumph of Civic Oligarchy in the Seventeenth Century’, in R. O’Day (ed.), The Traditional Community Under Stress (Milton Keynes, 1978), pp. 103–36. 35 See above, p. 8n; Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, pp. 63–4. Evans’s insular view of city politics was also remarked upon in J. Morrill, ‘The Diversity of Local History’, HJ, 24 (1981), pp. 718–24, especially p. 717. 34

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of the principles at stake in civic politics, including disputes over religion.36 All of these external factors fed into municipal affairs creating friction. Admittedly, magistrates’ personal ambitious and agendas – in short, their ‘authentic’ voices – rarely permeate into the corporation archives, which in turn furnished the bulk of Evans’s source material. But this is not to say that deeper ideological concerns were absent from civic government. As Ian Archer has warned, it is easy for scholars to become seduced by the formulaic contents of early modern borough records into readily accepting ‘the myth of civic harmony they were designed to perpetuate’.37 Yet Evans has bitten off a slice of the same ‘myth’ in his rendering of Norwich’s corporate life. Twenty years on, and the same uncritical approach to the city archive informs Muriel McClendon’s The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich, a work worthy of some consideration as the most recent monograph on the borough’s early modern religious past. Its reception has been mixed. Peter Clark, for example, has endorsed McClendon’s work as ‘one of the best studies of religious Reform in a Tudor city currently available’.38 But her argument does not hold up well to scrutiny. Like Evans’s offering, the product of a Stanford doctoral thesis, McClendon belongs to the same ‘school’ of historical writing on Norwich, and has adopted the same nagging conceptual flaws to those underlying her predecessor’s work.39 Evans sketched out Norwich as an ‘open’, even democratic city. McClendon has gone further to present the borough as a template for a modern liberal pluralistic society four centuries ahead of its time. Again we are treated to a narrow take on city politics. Here the focus is on the sixteenth century and the earlier phase of the Tudor Reformation until the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Like Evans, she has pinpointed the ways in which the civic elite strove to contain division. As her argument runs, this was achieved through the pursuit of a deliberate policy of de facto religious toleration, which was intended to galvanise corporate unity against the threat of encroachment upon civic authority by a centralising Tudor state. While toleration was never theorised or codified in law, it operated as a pragmatic response to deep confessional attrition.40

36

V. Morgan, ‘Cambridge University and “the Country”, 1560–1640’, in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society (2 vols, Princeton, 1974), I, p. 241. I. M. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge 1991), p. 40. 38 Quiet Reformation, as reviewed by P. Clark in EHR, 115 (2000), pp. 414–15. 39 M. C. McClendon, ‘The Quiet Reformation: Norwich Magistrates and the Coming of Protestantism, 1520–1575’, Stanford University Ph.D., 1990, compressed into idem, ‘Religious Toleration and the Reformation: Norwich Magistrates in the Sixteenth Century’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 87–115. Another product of the ‘Stanford school’ of historical writing on Norwich is G. J. A. Goth, ‘Croakers, Tackers and Other Citizens: Norwich voters in the Eighteenth Century’, Stanford University Ph.D., 1985. 40 Quiet Reformation, pp. 33–4, 254–6. 37

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McClendon has presented an intriguing idea, although upon reflection her case, which awkwardly relies upon an argument from silence, is all too easy to pull apart for several reasons. The first of these relates to her methodology. To begin with, she draws more or less exclusively upon cases involving religious discord that were heard before the mayor’s court. But owing to a lack of follow-up in many instances, she has concluded that the presiding magistrates were willing to let matters lie. Because penalties were not recorded, sentences were not carried out, which in turn meant that Norwich governors were reluctant to exact punishments for matters of private conscience and belief. Yet to posit from incomplete documentation that a lack of recorded prosecution points towards religious forbearance is a non sequitur. At most, it is quite an assumption to make that the mayor’s court necessarily functioned to enforce religious uniformity, or that Tudor Norwich’s magistrates routinely noted every case of confessional wrangling brought to their attention, or wished to exercise complete control over doctrinal matters. The second weakness stems from her definition of tolerance. A vast body of literature has grown around the question of whether the roots of religious toleration should be sought within the context of England’s experience of confessional turmoil after the Reformation. Much focus has been on the development of ideas concerned with religious comprehension. Recently, Nicholas Tyacke and John Coffey have turned to examine the other side of the coin, the ways in which the legal processes of religious persecution were modified over time, in anticipation of the 1689 Toleration Act.41 Oddly, McClendon fails to engage with such wider themes. This omission is startling, since it is apparent that in so far as early modern Englishmen were prepared to extend latitude to other faiths, there was little consensus over what should be tolerated. Religious ‘toleration’ can be taken to encompass a range of attitudes. It can stand for a negative grudging acceptance of different beliefs, for indifference, for something approaching a rounded celebration of confessional plurality, based upon a shared mutual respect for other faiths. Where on the spectrum between indulgence and liberal pride Norwich’s magistrates drew the line is unclear. On the one hand, McClendon implies that the city’s governors simply pursued a pragmatic course; while on the other she asserts that they also strove for ‘a measure of spiritual diversity among themselves and the residents of the city’. This she ascribes to a ‘practical secularisation’ born of the magistrates’ efforts to ‘compartmentalise’ their prejudices aside from their public actions.42 However, the power to detach private beliefs 41

N. Tyacke, ‘The “Rise of Puritanism” and the Legalising of Dissent, 1571–1719’, reprinted in his Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 61–89; J. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), pp. 1–20. 42 Quiet Reformation, pp. 14, 17, 28.

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from the outward exercise of authority appears to be alien to what Patrick Collinson has neatly described as the ‘piebald mentality’ of sixteenthcentury Englishmen and women, who were given to comprehending the world in terms of binary opposites. Did Norwich’s magistrates really break the mould by countenancing an enlightened pluralistic conception of society? At any length to infer apropos MacClendon that Norwich’s residents were not overwhelmingly tolerant folk, then to judge this trait as ‘irrelevant to the analysis of toleration as a social and political practice’ makes little sense.43 Perhaps the quest for tolerance has some application in identifying those magistrates inclined to be more emollient than their colleagues. However, in reviewing McClendon’s book with reference to the Marian executions in Norwich, Tom Freeman has noted that ‘in no other city or major town in England during Mary’s reign did the civic authorities display such zeal in persecuting heresy’, unless they had been pressed into doing so by royal commissioners.44 During this critical phase of the English Reformation, moderate irenic figures appear thin on the ground. What emerged as a persecuting Catholic regime under Mary gave way to an ardent godly rule under Elizabeth, as a coercive variety of magistracy assumed the mantle of imposing a triumphant Protestant dispensation within its jurisdiction. Thus to posit that Norwich’s governors extended religious latitude while forging a godly Commonwealth is not very convincing.45 More to the point, to argue that religious dogma was of little consequence for the practice of secular government during the sixteenth century, a self-conscious age of faith, is misleadingly anachronistic. Unwillingness to execute Tudor religious policy was a futile tactic if, as McClendon suggests, Norwich corporation hoped to prevent intrusion into its affairs by central government and the crown. The entire McClendon edifice comes crashing down, and there are a number of unguarded aphorisms that are also worth highlighting as, for example, her supposition that Norwich’s aldermen failed to ‘split into factions along religious lines’. Similarly, she holds that there is no evidence for magistrates’ involvement in internecine struggles. Moreover, ‘it does not seem that they actively pursued religious dissidents through inquiries, commissions or investigations’, while the civic elite failed to intervene in the city’s religious life through the ‘exercise of great concern in the appointment of clergy’.46 In the following such propositions will be shown up as fallacious. But for our immediate purpose, it is worth pointing out that McClendon’s work has shown a reluctance to grasp how the institutional structure of the Church in Norwich

43

P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 147–8; Quiet Reformation, p. 33. 44 Review in JEH, 51 (2000), pp. 419–21. 45 Quiet Reformation, pp. 246–7. 46 Ibid, pp. 10, 13, 35, 73.

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affected the dynamic of religious change within the city. In part this neglect stems from her failure to consult any ecclesiastical records. Since her thesis ostensibly charts the rise of Protestantism, it is strange that she says little about the processes by which members of Norwich’s elite became Protestant. An obvious in-road would be to examine the flow of religious ideas transmitted from the city’s pulpits. However, again she distorts the picture by implying that evidence of the variety of sermons delivered in Tudor and Stuart Norwich does not survive either in printed or manuscript form.47 As we shall see, this is simply not true. It is a cause of some regret that the most substantial treatment of Norwich’s experience of Reformation politics to date, Kenneth Shipps’s 1973 Yale thesis tracing the emergence of puritan patronage networks across pre-Civil War East Anglia, has yet to be published. This devotes a chapter to the city’s religious stirs under Charles I.48 It has yielded a rich mine of historical detail drawn from pioneering work on the Norwich consistory court archive, a body of documentation that deserves to be better known. However, Shipps’s analysis was necessarily slanted towards puritans. Consequently, his thesis is marked by a overarching Whig teleology, as the ‘good seed planted by Norfolk laymen’ gathered to overcome ‘their arch-rivals, Bishop Wren and those of his ilk’, who as the villains of the piece receive less sympathetic coverage.49 While Shipps told only half the story, his research has provided a valuable point of departure for my own. What follows is an attempt to revisit the same historical terrain already traversed by Evans, McClendon and Shipps, while stopping to view a number of new sights and making the acquaintance of a host of hitherto unfamiliar Norwich inhabitants along the way. By extending the evidence to include corporation records, parochial and diocesan material, as well as printed sermons and other polemical writings, I hope to take a clearer snapshot of the confessional lie of the land. Giving equal weight to both the godly and their opponents, I also intend to stress the contested nature of the English Reformation in Norwich, which left a deeper imprint upon civic politics than Evans and McClendon were able to deduce. Norwich in one sense emerged as a puritan citadel. But it was never exclusively so, since the city contained elements prepared to challenge the cause of forward Protestantism at various times – most conspicuously from the 1620s – as successive anti-Calvinist bishops strove to overthrow the city’s reformed tradition. Before examining this wider struggle for the Church, it is necessary to chart how Norwich became Protestant in a process that was far from quiet.

47 Ibid, pp. 34–5. Regrettably, McClendon’s off-beat assertions have been recycled without modification recently in Houlbrooke and McClendon, ‘The Reformation’, pp. 259–66. 48 Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, pp. 267–99, summarised in his ‘The “Political Puritans” ’, CH, 45 (1976), pp. 196–205. 49 Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 299.

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Part I THE MAKING OF A PROTESTANT CITY, c.1560–1619

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Chapter Three IMMIGRATION, CATHOLIC CONSPIRACY AND THE RISE OF A GODLY MORAL ORDER

Denizens of early modern Norwich were keenly aware of the two props upholding an ordered urban society: good governance and religion. The close association between the two was recognised by Joseph Nobbs, a late seventeenth-century clerk and schoolmaster at St Gregory’s parish, as well as a chronicler of his adoptive city, who heaped fulsome praise on the orderliness and industriousness of his fellow citizens. Such traits he attributed to the clear guardianship of Norwich’s famed magistracy. The city’s elite did not shrink from the task of firm government ‘not suffering any debauched or idle persons to be found in the streets, chastising the unruly, quickening the sluggish and encouraging the willing, holding no want either for wages for such as can or will work’. But this model commonwealth was strengthened by Protestant teaching. In Norwich the Reformation ran deep, the city having been ‘stored with learned preachers for many years by reason whereof the inhabitants are reasonably instructed in the principles of religion’.1 Three hundred years on, and Nobbs’s account of the pious civility permeating early modern England’s second city skill holds sway. Patrick Collinson, for instance, has depicted Norwich as a borough ‘saturated with Calvinist preaching’, a ‘self-contained East Anglian Geneva’, a shining example of the close union between magistracy and ministry, which municipal authorities everywhere aspired to foster in Elizabethan England.2 But how, and to what extent did Tudor Norwich come to model itself after Geneva? To provide answers to this question, we will investigate how the magisterial Reformation was driven home in city life by Protestants among the civic elite – in partnership with evangelicals among the city’s clergy – in the face of conservative Catholic opposition, during the opening years of Elizabeth’s reign.

1

The chronicle, which deserves to be better known, is deposited among a loose bundle of antiquarian notes relating to eighteenth-century Norwich in NRO, MS 453. Joseph Nobbs’s clerkship at St Gregory’s is confirmed by NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 145v. 2 Puritan Movement, p. 202; P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), p. 144.

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THE MAKING OF A PROTESTANT CITY, c.1560–1619

Much of the story focuses upon the events leading to a botched attempt by disaffected Catholic gentlemen to raise the city in 1570. The significance of this abortive uprising lies in the way in which its protagonists attempted to exacerbate social, political and religious tensions that had spilled over into corporate affairs from the formative stage of the Reformation. Thus 1570 saw the playing out of division contingent upon the uncertainties of Elizabeth’s first decade as monarch. Local unrest was also generated by the settlement of Dutch and Walloon craftsmen in copious numbers from 1565, which created a measure of native hostility – readily exploited by Catholic plotters – towards some of Norwich’s elite. Conspiracy ended in failure. However, the potential threat to order convinced a majority of the magistrates to embark on a thorough overhaul of the city’s social welfare provisions to reduce poverty and quell unrest. Tied to the scheme for dispensing poor relief lay a concern to foster godly learning. The 1570s were a watershed in Norwich corporation’s transformation into a godly magistracy: a body increasingly alert to the need to counter disobedience to earthly civil authority and, through sin, to God. The Reformation arrived in Norwich long before Elizabeth’s accession. Much has been written about the early preaching activities of Thomas Bilney within the city, which led to his trial, conviction and then burning as a lapsed heretic in 1531.3 Following Henry VIII’s split from Rome, an evangelical message came to be propagated by proselytisers slotted into the local church establishment. For citizens receptive to the new learning, a key influence came in the charismatic figure of Dr John Barret – a former Carmelite and contemporary of John Bale – who became divinity lecturer at the cathedral at Thomas Cromwell’s behest in 1536, two years ahead of the cathedral priory’s refoundation as a secular dean and chapter. Barret’s appointment was intended to shake up traditionalist religious sentiment in Norwich as championed by Bishop Richard Nix and his successor William Rugge.4 From 1539 he was joined by another redoubtable Protestant, Robert Watson – a member of Archbishop Cranmer’s household – who similarly enjoyed Thomas Cromwell’s patronage, but whose educational background remains murky. In February 1539 Watson engaged in a sensational disputation with Bishop Rugge over free will, which drew a large crowd in Norwich. Cromwell then recommended Watson for the post of town clerk, apparently with the approval of some aldermen, although his name was not entered in the city Assembly books as having accepted this position. 3 J. F. Davis, ‘The Trials of Thomas Bylney and the English Reformation’, HJ, 24 (1981), pp. 775–90; Quiet Reformation, pp. 64–8. 4 R. Rex, ‘The Friars in the English Reformation’, in P. Marshall and A. Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), p. 45; R. A. Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation, 1538–1628’, in I. Atherton et al. (eds), Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996 (London, 1996), pp. 510, 521, 535. Until undergoing an evangelical conversion and marrying, John Bale had been a Carmelite in Norwich.

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IMMIGRATION, CATHOLIC CONSPIRACY & A GODLY MORAL ORDER

Presented to a prebendal stall in 1549, despite not having been ordained, Watson joined Barret among the cathedral staff. During the dramatic events surrounding Kett’s rebellion in 1549, both men attached themselves as preachers to the rebels’ camp, along with one of Norwich’s famous sons, Matthew Parker, the future archbishop.5 In the 1550s, with Barret, Watson turned to repudiate the real presence in the eucharist. On his own account, it was this action that led to his being hounded under Mary, when in February 1554 he was imprisoned by the mayor’s court for refusing to attend mass. He remained incarcerated for sixteen months. While in gaol, Watson entered into debate over transubstantiation again, this time with John Christopherson – dean of Norwich, 1554–7 – finally securing his release upon signing a statement of his belief in the real presence, before slipping away to Emden, returning to England prior to his death in 1559.6 Barret, on the other hand, reverted to Catholicism only to conform to the Elizabethan settlement. In 1563 he left a fascinating will, shot through with traditional statements, in which he called for all Christians ‘both in heaven and in erthe’ to pray for his soul, confessing that ‘I beleve as the holie Catholike Church doth beleve and teach and have ever beleeved and taught’. But in a more evangelical vein, he provided for ten sermons to be given in Norwich and the neighbouring dean and chapter peculiars ‘by some learned and discrete preacher’.7 Barret and Watson had distinguished themselves as spokesmen for the official Reformation in Norwich: and their passing marked the closing of one chapter and the opening of another in the history of the city’s early modern religious development. For our story, it makes sense to pick up the narrative thread after 1559. Though ultimately ushering in a lasting Protestant settlement, in another sense the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign did little to dispel the unease generated in corporate life stemming from the shifts in ecclesiastical policy from Edward to Mary’s reign. Yet the depth of religious feeling in the 1560s has since escaped Muriel McClendon’s notice. Instead she has depicted Elizabeth’s succession and its immediate aftermath as passing the city by without much incident, an easy transition that she has attributed to one natural disaster, namely the influenza epidemic of 1558–9. At a stroke, the ‘flu did Norwich politics a favour by wiping out potential Catholic troublemakers, on her count seven of the ten aldermen being struck down. The sudden death of so many

5 G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: the Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 138–9; D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a Life (New Haven, 1996), pp. 433–4; B. L. Beer (ed.), ‘ “The Commoyson in Norfolk, 1549”: a Narrative of Popular Rebellion in Sixteenth Century England’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 6 (1976), pp. 82, 92–3. 6 Robert Watson, Aetiologia Roberti Watsoni ([Emden], 1556), STC 25111, fo. 30r; Quiet Reformation, pp. 160–1; Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 48. Significantly, Watson penned his will in February 1554 as ‘late of Norwich’, perhaps anticipating martyrdom. See PRO, PROB 11/42b, fo. 247r, proved in 1559. 7 NRO, NCC 119 Knightes.

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burgesses committed to the old faith, and their replacement by a younger generation sympathetic to the new learning, brought about ‘the rapid confessional unification of the magistracy’. Staunch Catholics comprised a dwindling minority. By 1560, the composition of Norwich’s governing body of twenty-four aldermen had undergone a dramatic change, becoming ‘heavily Protestant, with but two identifiable Catholics and at least twenty probable Protestants’. Since the ranks were not refilled by conservatives ‘Norwich was quiet during the first years of Elizabeth’s reign’.8 In all this, it is the extent of the newcomers’ ‘probable Protestantism’ that is the crucial issue, but here McClendon has presented a non sequitur, for although infection may have wiped out some prominent traditionalists, it does not necessarily follow that Reformation change was easily accommodated by the city’s governors after 1559. Indeed, to suppose that Norwich was devoid of religious friction in the 1560s ignores the divisions among the city’s clergy, especially the higher clergy attached to the cathedral. The later 1560s witnessed a protracted tussle between forward reformers and their foes among the staff at Christ Church, which, being conducted before wider audiences across Norwich city and diocese, attracted the scrutiny of central government.9 On the one side stood a clutch of conservatives and crypto-Catholics about the dean, John Salisbury. An ex-monk of Bury St Edmunds who had held the deanery since 1539, before suffering deprivation for marriage under Mary in 1554 only to be restored in 1559, Salisbury’s commitment to religious Reform has been dismissed as having progressed little beyond Henrician Catholicism. Yet this is not to cast aspersions on his loyalty to the Elizabethan settlement. As he maintained after 1559, he had been quick to castigate any who ‘most disobedientlie refused to coom to church and to receyve the holie Communion’ as ‘evil or woursse than papistes’. On the same occasion, preaching before the mayor and corporation, he chided his audience for their tardiness in spreading the Gospel. Appealing to civil pride, he professed that ‘I would wishe you worshipull of this Citie as well to have a preacher of your owne to be called the preacher of Norwich, as well as Ypswich hathe one such and in like Linn with other good Cities and townes.’10 A more pronounced opponent of Reform was the prebendary Miles Spencer. The former diocesan chancellor in Mary’s reign, Spencer was connected with recusant circles across East Anglia, through his association with the irrepressible Suffolk Catholic gentleman Sir Thomas Cornwallis.11 8

Quiet Reformation, pp. 194–9. Faction-fighting at the cathedral is traced in Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation’, pp. 511–13 and D. MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors (Oxford, 1986), pp. 185–7. 10 DNB, ‘John Salisbury’; Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 48; MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors, p. 186; LPL, MS 113, fos 72r, 80r. 11 For Spencer’s links with Salisbury and East Anglian recusant circles, see Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation’, pp. 511, 527; MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors, pp. 185–7; PRO, PROB 11/57, fo. 49v. 9

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On the other side stood the forces of evangelical Protestantism under Elizabeth’s first – if initially reluctant – bishop of Norwich, John Parkhurst. Parkhurst is generally regarded as an incompetent and repeatedly hamstrung administrator, ill-suited to the challenges posed by such an unwieldy and fractious diocese, or alternatively – on Muriel McClendon’s account – as an exemplar of religious tolerance and forbearance.12 But to stress Parkhurst’s ineffectiveness misses the point about his commitment to Reform after the model of Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger’s Zurich, his place of exile under Mary. As such, Parkhurst acted as a prominent patron of energetic Protestant ministers in and around the city of Norwich, many of whom were to emerge as ardent nonconformists in the later 1570s.13 An early and extremely ambitious ally of the bishop was George Gardiner, whom Parkhurst proudly hailed as ‘one of my preachers’.14 Already officiating within the city as chaplain at St Andrew’s from 1563, Gardiner’s stormy career – which witnessed his elevation to archdeacon and eventually dean of Norwich upon John Salisbury’s death in November 1573 – was launched with his rise to a prebendal stall, secured through Parkhurst’s commendation to the Lord Keeper in 1565. Admittedly the two divines fell out following Gardiner’s pursuit of the archdeaconry against his diocesan’s wishes.15 However, upon entering the chapter, Gardiner was posted as the watchdog for the reformed interest in the close, a role he fulfilled over the next five years by sustaining a bitter controversy with his conservative colleagues, culminating in a public display of iconoclasm in the cathedral, carried out by Gardiner and three fellow prebendaries – John Walker, Edmund Chapman and Thomas Fowle – in 1570.16 Emboldened by the addition of three zealous reformers to the chapter, Gardiner oversaw the removal of offending objects, including the organ in the choir.17 To justify their actions – much to Salisbury’s obvious distress – the four canons then employed ‘one Slaughter’, down from Cambridge, to preach in the cathedral green yard to commend the perpetrators as ‘the very saints of God’. 12 See The Zurich Letters, Parker Society (2 vols, 1842–4), I, p. 61 for Parkhurst’s reluctance. The fullest biography remains Parkhurst, Letter Book, pp. 17–57. See Quiet Reformation, p. 208. 13 Confiding in Bullinger in 1560, Parkhurst expressed his frustration at the halt to a more perfect Reformation of the English church, administered by ‘many too cold and a few lukewarm, whom the Lord will spew out of his mouth’, Zurich Letters, I, pp. 91, 108. For Parkhurst’s patronage of future nonconformists, see below, pp. 66, 73n. 14 Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 74. 15 DNB, ‘George Gardiner’; NRO, ANW 1/5, liber cleri 1566; Le Neve, Fasti VII, pp. 48, 57; BL, Lansd MS 443, fo. 144. Parkhurst, Letter Book. pp. 37–40, 193, 217–18, 247, 250 and BL, Lansd MS 18, fo. 30 contain details of the contested archdeaconry. 16 Following Archbishop Parker’s 1567 metropolitical visitation, Gardiner kept a running commentary on the superstitious practices maintained at Christ Church, see J. Strype, The Life and Actes of Matthew Parker (3 vols, Oxford, 1821), III, pp. 156–61; NRO, DCN 29/1, fos 35r–8v. 17 Le Neve, Fasti VII, pp. 51, 54, 57, 59. Like Gardiner, John Walker also ministered in the city as chaplain at St Peter Mancroft, NRO, ANW 1/5. Chapman became a leading light in the puritan conference movement about the Stour Valley in the 1580s, see P. Collinson et al. (eds), Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 1582–1590, COERS, 10 (2003), pp. 192–6.

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On this occasion, Queen Elizabeth was not amused.18 But Gardiner subdued his earlier radicalism in the interests of gaining promotion, although his contact with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester – subsequently Norwich cathedral’s high steward, 1574 – 88 – helped him to secure a royal chaplaincy in 1573 and the post of dean the same year.19 Earlier in 1568, Gardiner’s complaints had been instrumental in moving for a royal commission to investigate popish abuses remaining at Christ Church.20 This body, which made its returns in January 1569, was headed by Parkhurst, acting with four civic worthies: Norwich’s recorder Francis Wyndham, the mayor Thomas Parker – Archbishop Parker’s brother who remembered Gardiner in his will – as well as two of Gardiner’s former patrons at St Andrew’s, Aldermen Augustine Steward and Thomas Sotherton, Steward’s son-in-law, of whom more in a moment.21 Contrary to McClendon’s account, we see city magistrates acting as commissioners to enforce religious uniformity in Norwich.22 That the burgesses heading the inquiry into cathedral practices were committed to advancing Reform is witnessed by their recommendation of a draft set of revised statutes for Christ Church, which significantly placed considerable emphasis on the chapter’s preaching duties, for ‘Gods word is a Lantern unto our Feete and a Lighte unto our pathe’. As Ralph Houlbrooke has pointed out, there is no evidence that the proposals were formally ratified by the crown.23 Nevertheless, Parkhurst’s – and Gardiner’s – aspirations to elevate the cathedral’s stature as a centre of evangelism was a vision shared by some members of Norwich’s civic elite, who were also engaged in the task of fostering godly learning within their own jurisdiction. Paralleling developments among the higher clergy, the Reformation under Elizabeth awaited its resolution among Norwich’s aldermanry. Here it makes sense to identify those among McClendon’s twenty ‘probable Protestant’ magistrates who placed themselves at the vanguard of further Reform in the years leading to 1570. One conspicuous candidate was John Aldrich. Son of Thomas, mayor in 1507 and rated as the second highest contributor for the 1523 lay subsidy return from Norwich, like his father Aldrich junior enjoyed a prestigious career in civic office, serving as alderman from 1545 until his death in 1582, becoming mayor in 1558 and 1570, and finally representing his city in the parliaments of 1555 and 1572.24 18

HMC, Pepys MSS, pp. 174–6; PRO, SP 12/73/68. H. Le Strange (comp.), Norfolk Official Lists (Norwich, 1890), p. 84; Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 247. 20 NRO, DCN 29/1, fos 35r–8v; PRO, SP 12/49/43 and NRO, DCN 115/9 supply the commissioners’ names. 21 Hawes, Officers, p. xxxvii for Wyndham; PRO, PROB 11/52, fo. 88v, will of Thomas Parker, proved in 1570; Mayors of Norwich, p. 58 for Steward and Sotherton. 22 Quiet Reformation, p. 35. 23 A copy of the draft statutes exists in BL, Stowe MS 128, especially fos 17v, 19r–20v; Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation’, p. 531. 24 PRO, PROB 11/23, fo. 9r, will of Thomas Aldrich, proved in 1529; J. Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, 1988), p. 32; Mayors of Norwich, p. 56; HP 1509–58, I, p. 304; HP 1558–1603, I, p. 333. 19

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Something of a dour figure, as suggested by his request to be buried without undue pomp and vain ‘Janglyn of Bells’, Aldrich provides a convenient touchstone for a wider godly network among Norwich’s elite. His origins were in St Clement’s parish, where Thomas Aldrich senior had acquired the former Norwich residence of the priors of Ixworth, Suffolk – a fine flint stone building, which still stands along the west side of the churchyard – taking advantage of the Henrician dissolution to improve the property with materials salvaged from Walsingham priory, including what became the main door.25 John Aldrich celebrated his second mayoralty by having his initials and the date 1570 embossed on the door frame. The Aldriches were not alone in benefiting from the availability of religious property during the 1530s, when Alderman Augustine Steward – father-in-law of Aldrich’s brother-in-law Thomas Sotherton (Fig. 3.1) – did the city a great service by snapping up, out of his own pocket, the former Blackfriars’ church for the corporation’s use as the ‘New Hall’ in 1540.26 Here we find a conspicuously early example of the ‘municipalisation’ of ex-religious institutions, which Robert Tittler has identified as having occurred in most Tudor towns, a decade after the dissolution.27 Steward has already been encountered in pushing for preaching initiatives at the cathedral, although he is probably more familiar to students of Tudor England as the alderman who surrendered the city sword to the Marquis of Northampton during Kett’s rebellion.28 But there is no reason to doubt Steward’s commitment to the evangelical cause. We know that he enjoyed a friendship with the early reformer John Barret, who later appointed Steward as executor to his will. Perhaps it was owing to Barret’s influence that he had one of his daughters baptised with the markedly evangelical name ‘Faith’. Alderman John Aldrich’s eldest son John later married Faith Steward, sealing a family union, which as we shall see, was allied to the cause of nurturing forward Protestantism.29 Returning to St Clement’s, the parish emerges as an early well-spring of reformed teaching. Another more illustrious former denizen of St Clement’s was Matthew Parker, Elizabeth’s first archbishop of Canterbury, who as the archetypal local boy made good, remembered his childhood home in later life. He left a fund for the parochial poor. He also made provisions through his college – Corpus Christi, Cambridge – for the maintenance of the Parker family monument, which still adorns, somewhat forlornly now, the south-west 25 PRO, PROB 11/64, fo. 207v, will of John Aldrich, proved in 1582; Mayors of Norwich, p. 56. Part of the ‘Aldrich House’ is now occupied by the Stationery Office. 26 Quiet Reformation, p. 72; Mayors of Norwich, p. 56 and PRO, PROB 11/53, fo. 311v, will of Augustine Steward, proved in 1571, for his family ties. 27 R. Tittler, ‘Reformation, Resources and Authority in English Towns: an Overview’, in P. Collinson and J. Craig (eds), The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640 (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 194, which also suggests that ‘neither towns nor individual townsmen tended to be the first purchaser of dissolved lands from the crown’. Steward’s transactions furnish an exception. 28 Beer (ed.), ‘ “The Commoyson in Norfolk, 1549” ’, p. 89. 29 NRO, NCC 119 Knightes; PRO, PROB 11/53, fo. 311v; Mayors of Norwich, p. 56.

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Fig. 3.1 Aldrich, Sotherton and Steward

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corner of St Clement’s churchyard. But the archbishop retained ties with the Aldriches. This was done most obviously through the person of his brother Thomas Parker, whom we have already met, who in turn nominated ‘my olde acquainted and worshipfull friend Mr John Aldrich’ as supervisor to his will in 1570.30 It was no coincidence then that Aldrich’s sons, Thomas and Henry, were destined for fellowships at Corpus Christi.31 However, this was not the end of the Aldrich – Parker – Corpus Christi connection, since the link was of seminal importance when, following Parker’s 1567 metropolitical visitation, the archbishop established a series of lectures within his native Norfolk, funded by an annuity left to his old college. Under the terms, the master of Corpus was to appoint college fellows to preach sermons at Thetford, Wymondham and Norwich. Norwich was to host two annual sermons, one being delivered in the green yard adjacent to St Andrew’s church, the other to be preached – not surprisingly – in the archbishop’s home parish of St Clement’s. In time, both venues would become settings for weekday corporation lectureships.32 It was through the educational ties with Corpus that another fellow of the college, Thomas Robartes or Robardes, came to minister in Norwich as the rector of St Clement’s in December 1574. A commanding presence in East Anglian godly circles, Robartes was surely commended by Alderman Aldrich and his sons.33 Connected to the emerging Elizabethan church hierarchy, John Aldrich was a clerical patronage broker in his own right, having purchased a grant of next presentation to the archdeaconry of Sudbury – alienated to certain Norwich alderman by a debt-saddled Bishop William Rugge before the latter’s removal from Norwich in 1550 – which Aldrich used to elevate his son Thomas to the archdeaconry in 1570.34 What can be said about Aldrich’s influence upon borough politics? Admitted to the freedom of the city as a grocer, his business interests extended to the export trade through participation in the Norwich Merchant Adventurers’ Company. Regrettably, the Norwich Adventurers’ archive no longer exists.35 However, we know that in this enterprise Aldrich was associated with his brother-in-law, Thomas Sotherton, whom we have already met as one of George Gardiner’s allies in seeking to reform practice 30

BL, Add Ch 26723; PRO, PROB 11/52, fo. 88v. Venn, I, p. 14. Henry Aldrich returned to Norwich in the 1580s to teach in the city grammar school. However, his ties with his former college remained strong, with Aldrich leaving £40 in 1592 for ‘two fyers of Charcoles’ to warm Corpus during the winter: NRO, NCC 54 Clarke. 32 BL, Add Ch 26723. By James I’s reign, the green yard by St Andrew’s had become the setting for the corporation’s annual Rogationtide sermon. In 1615, St Clement’s was made the venue for a municipal sponsored lectureship every Wednesday: see NRO, CA, 1603–25, fos 29v, 241v. 33 Venn, III, p. 466; NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 209v. Robartes was presented by Alderman Robert Wood, who as Augustine Steward’s son-in-law belonged to Aldrich’s extended family network. Robartes’s later career is traced below, p. 64, 73–5, 76, 91. 34 Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 49; S. M. Lyons, ‘The Resignation of William Rugg: a Reconsideration’, Catholic Historical Review, 73 (1987), pp. 23–40. 35 Millican, Freemen, p. 71; PRO, E 122/196/7, a petition from fifteen members of the Norwich Company in 1580, which includes John Aldrich’s signature. 31

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at the cathedral. Sotherton was the head of one of Tudor Norwich’s more prolific mercantile dynasties.36 He pursued a flourishing political career, being elected a city burgess to parliament in 1558, before rising to the mayoralty in 1565. Indeed, such was his local reputation that he was still being referred to as ‘greate Sutterton’, twenty years after his death in 1583.37 Moreover his lasting fame has extended into the annals of English Reformation history following a walk-on appearance in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. The martyrologist, who came to Norwich briefly at Bishop Parkhurst’s behest in 1562, probably met the alderman. At least a certain familiarity would account for Foxe’s insider version of Sotherton’s reluctant involvement in the burning of Elizabeth Cooper as a heretic in July 1557. Sotherton was then officiating as sheriff. According to his later testimony, it was while fulfilling this role that he was pressed into incarcerating Cooper by Alderman Thomas Marsham – mayor in 1554 – and ‘one Bacon’. He acted against his own conscience. Sotherton and Cooper had once served together in the same household, while out of ‘the friendship he bore unto her and the more for the gospels sake, he was very loth to do it’, regretting his part in the martyrdom ever since.38 If an accurate insight into Sotherton’s tortured mind, this accounts for his sympathy towards sufferers for the reformed faith during his mayoralty in 1565. For that year saw the introduction of émigré Protestant Dutch and Walloon craftsmen to Norwich, against fierce opposition from some native inhabitants. The settlement of the city’s ‘stranger’ community is a story that has often been told. Invariably, the main focus has been long-term economic benefits accrued through the introduction of foreign cloth manufacturing techniques – the rise of the ‘new draperies’ – for which Elizabethan and Stuart Norwich came to be renowned. Ostensibly, foreign expertise was sought to help rejuvenate the city’s flagging staple worsted industry.39 However, the move to inject outside innovation in Norwich textiles should also be seen against the background of English relations with the Low Countries, and the stymieing of

36 See above, p. 44; Mayors of Norwich, pp. 52, 56, 58. Thomas Sotherton was the son of Nicholas Sotherton, mayor in 1540. The Merchant Ventures arms still adorn the Sotherton family home, now known more famously as ‘Strangers’ Hall’. See R. M. R. Young, Guide to Strangers’ Hall: Museum of Life (Norwich, 1967). 37 Mayors of Norwich, p. 58; HP 1558–1603, III, p. 419, which states that ‘under Elizabeth, Sotherton played no outstanding part in civic affairs’. I judge differently. The posthumous testimony to Sotherton’s greatness is found in PRO, E 133/80/20, deposition of Stephen Franklin. 38 Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 43; Mayors of Norwich, p. 58; John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), STC 11222, p. 1603. Marsham is only given in the 1563 edition of Foxe’s work. His name was removed from subsequent editions, possibly owing to the influence of his family or friends. The reformer Thomas Watson also wrote acerbically of Alderman Marsham as being an enemy of Christ, see Watson, Aetiologia, sig. G6. 39 K. J. Allison, ‘The Norfolk Worsted Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Pt. 1’, Yorkshire Bulletin of Social and Economic Research, 12 (1960), pp. 73, 78–80; N. J. Williams, The Maritime Trade of the East Anglian Ports, 1550–1590 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 64–5; B. A. Holderness, ‘The Reception and Distribution of the New Draperies in England’, in N. B. Harte (ed.), The New Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300–1800 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 219–20.

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overseas cloth trade through the Antwerp mart, which affected the interests of Aldrich, Sotherton and their fellow Merchant Adventurers. Following an embargo imposed by the Duchess of Parma from 1563 – 4, the Adventurers looked to new markets at Emden and then Hamburg.40 In the meantime, another solution to the cutting of the supply of Dutch and Flemish fabrics exchanged for English wares at Antwerp was to settle foreign crafts closer to home. This scheme was certainly favoured by the Norwich branch of the Company. According to the original Letters Patent admitting alien weaves to Norwich in 1565, strangers were to produce ‘bays, arras, saies, tapestry, mockadoes, stamens, carsey and other outlandish commodities as hath not used to be made in this our realm of England’. In short, they were to manufacture fabrics that had become difficult to buy across the North Sea.41 In economic terms, Aldrich, Sotherton and their confrères within the Merchant Adventures’ Company hoped to transfer foreign skills in order to supplement lost imports. Debate exists over the degree of innovation that the strangers infused into Norwich textiles. Nevertheless, it is agreed that the establishment of new drapery production gave new stimulus to the city’s cloth industry from the mid-1560s, at least in terms of extending the range of fabrics distributed from Norwich.42 Immigrant craftsmen brought two distinct techniques, roughly divided between the Dutch and Walloon congregations. On the one hand, the Dutch specialised in the making of bays, varieties of heavy woollens, which required fulling, while on the other hand the Walloons produced a range of ‘caungeantry’, cloths akin to traditional worsteds being made of yarn that had been combed and dyed before weaving.43 The latter lent itself to being mixed with other fibres such as linen, cotton or silk, to produce a lightweight textile that could be woven into a rich variety of patterns. Both types were suited to clothing as well as a burgeoning demand for fabrics to be used in furnishings and upholstery, although it was the lighter ‘caungeantry’ that took off to form the basis for the famous ‘Norwich stuffs’, which came to predominate with everincreasing inventiveness into the seventeenth century.44 40

As told in John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce (Middleburg, 1601), STC 25330, pp. 28, 51–6. For the wider historical significance of the diversification of English North Sea trade, see G. D. Ramsay, The City of London in International Politics at the Accession of Elizabeth Tudor (Manchester, 1975), ch. 6; idem, The Queen’s Merchants and the Revolt of the Netherlands (Manchester, 1986), passim. 41 BL, Lansd MS 7, fo. 196. 42 E. Kerridge, Textile Manufacturers in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1985), pp.vii–ix, argues for continuity in native and imported alien cloth-making techniques. K. J. Allison, ‘The Norfolk Worsted Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Pt. II’, Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research, 13 (1961), pp. 63–4 and L. Martin, ‘The Rise of the New Draperies in Norwich, 1550–1622’, in Harte (ed.), The New Draperies, pp. 247–50, 266–7, highlight the significant innovation introduced by the strangers. 43 Holderness, ‘The Reception and Distribution of the New Draperies in England’, pp. 222–5; Martin, ‘The Rise of the New Draperies in Norwich’, pp. 247–50. 44 Martin, ‘The Rise of the New Draperies in Norwich’, pp. 250–3, 262–3; U. Priestly, ‘Norwich Stuffs, 1600–1700’, in Harte (ed.), The Rise of the New Draperies, pp. 277–8.

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But this is not to say that the settlement of strangers was a smooth affair. The prospect of inviting foreign artisans was at once contested by native freemen who feared competition from the Dutch and Walloons. Upon their arrival in 1565, the immigrants were made subject to restrictions on the marketing of their wares. Strangers were ordered to deal solely in their own goods, and then only by wholesale, while they were not permitted to maintain factors in London.45 The same regulations existed in other towns settled by workers from the Low Countries, namely Sandwich and Canterbury. But in Norwich, as in Kent, such rules were flouted by émigrés selling direct to London, while English citizens complained of difficulties in obtaining materials, as in 1568 for example, when the glovers complained that the strangers had snapped up all the sheepskins in the city.46 Such wrangling stored up resentment for the ‘crisis’ year of 1570. But the outcome of such disputes led, in 1570, to more stringent orders being issued by the Assembly, prohibiting the sale of alien commodities except to the freemen of the city. The strangers disputed this regulation with the Privy Council. In return, the corporation closed the Cloth Hall, which the city rented to the Dutch and the Walloons, while negotiations were made for a revised ‘Book of Orders for the Strangers’, finally approved by the Privy Council in April 1571. This overturned the 1570 ban on distribution to non-freemen. Nevertheless, co-operation between native weavers and the aliens – in terms of imparting the mystery of their craft – was not forthcoming, while it was not until 1598 that foreign settlers were permitted to become freemen, enabling them to enjoy the same privileges as English inhabitants.47 If such antagonism persisted beyond the 1570s, imagine the stormy response that greeted Mayor Sotherton’s reading of the Letters Patent to the Assembly on 5 November 1565. In protest, the common council refused to allow strangers into the city under the common seal, which forced Sotherton to admit thirty immigrant families – twenty-four Dutch and six Walloon – under the mayor’s seal.48 Here then are the bare bones of the politics of cloth in Elizabethan Norwich. However, as was the case with the struggle for resources and markets in other Elizabethan towns, there was also a religious angle to the 45

NRO, NCR Case 17d, Book of Orders for Strangers, 1564–1643, fos 18v–19r, 21r. M. F. Backhouse, ‘The Strangers at Work in Sandwich: Native Industries of an Industrious Minority’, I & M, 10 (1991), pp. 76–7, 90; J. Andrewes, ‘Industries in Kent, c. 1500–1640’, in M. Zell (ed.), Early Modern Kent, 1540–1640 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 120–1; W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey, The Records of the City of Norwich (2 vols, London, 1910), II, p. 183. 47 C. M. Vane, ‘The Walloon Community in Norwich, the First Hundred Years’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 24 (1984), pp. 130–2; For the compiling of this book. see D. L. Rickwood, ‘The Origin and Decline of the Stranger Community in Norwich (with Special Reference to the Dutch Congregation), 1565–1700’, University of East Anglia M.A., 1967; idem, ‘The Norwich Strangers, 1565–1643: a Problem of Control’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 24 (1984), pp. 126–7; Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, p. 60. 48 Blomefield, III, p. 282. A smaller contingent of Dutch immigrants had already settled in Norwich by 1560, although their arrival had not been greeted with the same clamorous response, see W. Rye, ‘The Dutch Refugees in Norwich’, NAM, Old Series, 3 (1885), pp. 185–7. 46

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squabbling provoked by Sotherton’s settlement project. Trouble flared up in the summer of 1567. By that time, it was becoming clear that the alien population had exceeded the original controlled figure of thirty households, a factor linked to a large exodus of Protestant refugees from the Low Countries following the Duke of Alva’s 1567 expedition. Persecution by the Council of Troubles ensured a steady traffic of migrants into East Anglia. In November 1569, the mayor informed the Privy Council that some 2,866 immigrants were domiciled within Norwich, a figure that had risen to 4,600 to 1582 – Dutch and Walloon settlers then comprising a third of the city’s total population.49 The influx of strangers into Norwich was a matter of concern for the mayor in 1567, Thomas Whalle. No friend of the refugees, Whalle – who in the words of the eighteenth-century antiquary Francis Blomefield, would have ‘turned them out’ – came to focus entrenched hostility to the Dutch and Walloons as well as their patron Thomas Sotherton. Unaffiliated to the Merchant Adventurers, Whalle did not share Sotherton’s stake in fostering ‘new drapery’ while offering refuge to Protestant émigrés. According to a local tradition recounted by Blomefield, Whalle wished to eject the strangers entirely; although in the event he was unable to move the majority of his fellow aldermen to back his scheme. Nevertheless, he issued orders restricting the movement of refugees within the city. Aliens were forbidden to lodge with any inhabitants except their countrymen, unless certified by the mayor, while they were to adhere to an 8 p.m. curfew.50 Following Blomefield’s account, Whalle then ‘acquainted the Privy Council of differences between the English and the strangers’. Regrettably, any such correspondence on Whalle’s part has since been lost, although we know that the Privy Council became concerned about the numbers crossing over from the Low Countries, insisting that a census be taken, the result of which was returned on 16 November 1569. The mayor in 1569, Robert Wood – Augustine Steward’s son-in-law and John Aldrich’s fellow parishioner at St Clement’s – was favourable to the Dutch and Walloons. Disagreeing with Whalle by pointing out that the strangers ‘live in good quiet and order’ and ‘travyle diligently to earne their lyvinge’, Wood even requested that more immigrants already resident in Sandwich be allowed to settle in Norwich. The Privy Council rejected this proposal. By way of compromise between the opinions of Whalle and those of his opponents, the current number was to remain, while the Privy Council instructed Mayor Wood not to admit further strangers, writing to Norfolk’s two deputy lieutenants, Clement Paston and Edward Clere, to enforce the order.51 49 R. Esser, ‘News Across the Channel – Contact and Communication Between the Dutch and Walloon Refugees in Norwich and their Families in Flanders, 1565–1640’, I & M, 14 (1995), pp. 140–2; BL, Lansd MS 7, fo. 203; Rye, ‘The Dutch Refugees in Norwich’, p. 189. 50 Blomefield, III, p. 284; NRO, NCR Case 17d, Book of Orders for Strangers, fo. 19r; BL, Lansd MS 7, fo. 203. 51 Blomefield, III, p. 284; Mayors of Norwich, pp. 59–60; BL, Lansd MS 7, fos 203, 205.

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What then of the religious dimension to Whalle’s agitation against the refugees? In part, his opinions of the migrants may well have converged with the unease expressed by Queen Elizabeth, who instructed Archbishop Parker on 13 May 1568 to make search of refugees holding heretical opinions. Parker conveyed the queen’s concerns to other ordinaries, including Parkhurst, on 16 May 1568. Parkhurst was to determine whether any strangers were ‘infected with dangerous opinions contrarie to the faithe of christes churche, as anabaptistes and such other sectaries and suche also as be doubted of to be giltie of somme horrible crime of rebellion, murder, robberies or such like comitted by them in the partes from whence they came’.52 Perhaps Alderman Whalle shared these suspicions. However, another key aspect of Whalle’s antipathy towards the newcomers, not realised until now, was his crypto-Catholicism. Whalle’s confessional sympathies seem out of step with the Protestantism of the Aldrich – Sotherton faction. Indeed, one deponent giving evidence in 1578 against Walter Hall – a former master of the common school in Norwich, ejected for his Catholic leanings by Bishop Parkhurst – referred to Whalle, Hall’s patron, as a ‘notorious papist’.53 Be that as it may, Whalle conformed outwardly to the Elizabethan settlement. On the other hand, elements within his home parish of St Simon and St Jude were stubbornly attached to decorous forms of worship, frowned upon by more precise Protestants. We know this from a letter sent from Parkhurst to his chancellor in 1572. Parkhurst was affronted by the ‘great abuse and disorder’ committed by ‘persons that had vowed themselves contrarye to God and good ordynances, so fareth it with the most parte of that paryshe’. One evening prayer, ‘three or four lewde boyes’ prevented the minister from reading the Magnificat, when they ‘brast out singing of the same sodenlye’. Moreover, it seems that this group of choristers had been brought in from the nearby cathedral, since we learn that ‘cheife of this unruly company was a sonne of Inglottes’. This was Edmund Inglott, organist at Holy Trinity from 1555, who owned property in St Simon and St Jude. But beside the saboteurs co-opted from the cathedral song school, their ‘setter on’ was Thomas Lynne of the parish, who stood accused of ‘contemptuous and disobedient dealings, especially in matters of religion’. At Simon and St Jude ‘the belles must jangle when the preacher is in the pulpitte’. It was also said of some parishioners that ‘they must be piping when they ought to be at preaching’; although here Parkhurst was assured that the Church also contained members of ‘the godlye sorte’ who had promised to seek Reform at the High Commission.54 52

Matthew Parker, The Correspondence of Matthew Parker D. D., Parker Society (Cambridge, 1853), pp. 321–2. A copy of Parker’s letter of 16 May, with eight appended articles of inquiry, exists in NRO, DN SUN/3, fo. 136r and is printed in Rye, ‘The Dutch Refugees in Norwich’, pp. 198–9. 53 PRO, SP 15/25/119, fo. 219r. 54 Parkhurst, Letter Book, pp. 161–2. For Inglott, see NRO, DCN 47/1, fo. 36r and P. Aston and T. Roast, ‘Music in the Cathedral’, in Atherton et al (eds), Norwich Cathedral, pp. 690–1. His

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Alderman Thomas Whalle, on the other hand, was not one of the godly. This is revealed by his will written in 1573 and proved in 1576, in which the alderman counted as relatives several future recusants, notably his sons Henry and William. Henry Whalle, a gentleman of St Simon and St Jude, was fined for one month’s recusancy in 1587. In the meantime, his brother William moved out of Norwich, remaining the head of a Catholic household at Aldeby, Norfolk, well into James I’s reign.55 Moreover, the ‘contemptuous and disobedient’ Thomas Lynne was Whalle’s son-in-law. The Lynnes feature prominently among Norwich citizens certified as papist recusants by the consistory court down to the 1600s, Thomas Lynne forming part of a network that harboured a seminary priest in the city in 1595. He was still an absentee from his parish church – then St Michael at Thorn – in 1615. Hauled before the mayor’s court that year with his wife Elizabeth, he refused the oath of allegiance and was imprisoned.56 Another of Thomas Whalle’s sonsin-law was Richard Lussher. A scrivener also hailing from St Simon and St Jude, Lussher was an ardent Catholic, who was brought before the Norfolk Assizes in 1585 before being committed to the Clink by Archbishop Whitgift in 1586 in lieu of a hefty £240 recusancy fine. At the same time, he was also caught hearing mass. By 1591 he was back in Norwich, where he was incarcerated again – this time by the civic authorities – for failing to attend divine service, only securing his release by appealing to the Privy Council, offering ‘some hope of his conformity’ in May 1591.57 Significantly, the Whalle, Lynn and Lussher families sent sons to Douai College.58 Like Alderman Whalle their father-in-law, Thomas Lynne and Richard Lussher initially enjoyed active roles in city office, both having sufficient local support to be elected as common councillors in 1578, until resigning their posts in 1583. With these family ties, Thomas Whalle’s commitment to the Reformation is cast into doubt. Rather, the alderman emerges at the head of an anti-reformed circle within St Simon and St Jude parish, whose ‘conservative’ religious views hardened into a Catholic recusancy during the 1580s. But how far did Whalle’s religious conservatism inform his hostility to the strangers? In part, his attacks on the Dutch and Walloons can be seen as an attempt to confound the godly faction of Aldrich and Sotherton, whose business interests and religious outlook found common cause in encouraging property in St Simon and St Jude is recorded in PRO, PROB 11/91, fo. 115r, will of Alderman Thomas Pettus. 55 PRO, PROB 11/57, fo. 451v; T. McCann (ed.), Recusants in the Exchequer Pipe Rolls, 1581–1592, Catholic Record Society, 71 (1986), p. 188; T. B. Trappes-Lomax, ‘Roman Catholicism in Norfolk, 1559–1780’, NA, 32 (1958), p. 32. 56 PRO, PROB 11/57, fo. 451v; NRO, DN DIS/9/1a, unfoliated entries for 1595, 1605, 1607, 1611, 1612; DN ACT/46c; MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 29r, 21 Aug 1615, fo. 39v, 16 Aug 1615. 57 PRO, PROB 11/57, fo. 451v; Stiffkey Papers, III, p. 11; McCann (ed.), Recusants in the Exchequer Piper Rolls, p. 115; APC, 1591, p. 144, where Lussher is transcribed as Lasher. 58 G. Anstruther, The Seminary Priests, Vol. I: Elizabethan, 1558–1603 (Durham, 1968), p. 216; idem, The Seminary Priests, Vol. II: Early Stuarts, 1603–1659 (Great Wakering, 1975), pp. 206, 345–6.

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Protestant refugees to come to Norwich. Either way, Whalle made his opinions on the settlers plain. As he informed Clement Paston, he believed that the strangers ‘had done more hurte than ever they would do good’, for ‘they did but sucke the lyvenges away from the Inglishe’.59 But Whalle’s comments soon echoed in Norfolk. Shortly afterwards, in May 1570, the county resounded to the rallying cry to ‘raise the commons and levy a power and beat the strangers out of the City of Norwich’.60 Thanks to Neville Williams, the events surrounding Appleyard’s conspiracy – named after its ringleader Sir John Appleyard – are well known. Within East Anglia, the timing of an uprising to coincide with the revolt of the northern earls in late 1569 was also spurred on by the declaration of a Papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth, a copy of which was nailed to the door of the Bishop of London’s palace by another Norfolk gentleman, John Felton. This act was a signal for a rebellion, between May and June 1570, which aimed to topple the queen in favour of the Duke of Norfolk.61 To seal their loyalty to the duke, the traitors hoped to raise Norwich – a traditional Howard family seat – by stirring up localised discontent against immigrant refugees of the kind already expressed by Alderman Thomas Whalle.62 Neither Whalle nor any members of his family were implicated in the conspiracy. However, several county gentlemen with known city connections were imprisoned and subsequently tried for their hand in creating disturbances in Norwich. These figures warrant further comment. Our knowledge of the participants in the 1570 uprising is derived from a list of thirty-two insurgents examined at the Assizes held between 17 July and 21 August 1570, of whom three were executed for treason.63 As stated, the nominal commander was Sir John Appleyard, sheriff of Norfolk in 1558. Half-brother to the earl of Leicester’s late wife Amy Robsart, Appleyard’s penchant for intrigue, combined with his family ties to the earl, seemingly helped save his neck. Appleyard was also a client of the Duke of Norfolk, although his role in organising the revolt remains shadowy.64 Two other active campaigners – both of whom eventually went to the gallows – were 59

Hawes, Officers, pp. 99–100. Whalle’s letter is quoted without citation in J. Pound, ‘The Elizabethan Corporation of Norwich, 1558–1603’, University of Birmingham M.A., 1962, p. 303. 60 Given among a list of indictments against four of Appleyard’s co-conspirators in PRO, KB 9/627/109. 61 N. Williams, ‘The Risings in Norfolk, 1569 and 1570’, NA, 32 (1961), pp. 73–81; idem, Thomas Howard Fourth Duke of Norfolk (London, 1964), pp. 179–88. See also Quiet Reformation, pp. 224–5. 62 This rising followed from an equally botched attempt to muster forces at Kenningshall, another Howard Norfolk seat, under John Welles, a sawyer, in December 1569. See Neville, Thomas Howard, pp. 177–9. 63 PRO, SP 12/71/61. For the three executions, see Blomefield, III, p. 284; PRO, KB 9/27/109; BL, Harl MS 368, fo. 183r. 64 HMC, Salisbury MSS, I, p. 350. As a client of Leicester, Appleyard had been implicated in the Dudley Plot against Queen Mary in 1555, see S. Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays in Elizabethan Politics (Manchester, 2002), pp. 152, 161; A. Hassell-Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974), p. 32 for his ties to Norfolk.

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John Throgmorton and George Redman. Claiming to be the chief conspirator, Throgmorton was a known Catholic resident in the city.65 Redman, a ‘gentleman’ from Cringleford – two miles to the south-west of Norwich – was also a freeman grocer of the city, having also served as a common councillor from 1557 until stepping down in 1562, presumably to reside at his country holding. He remained attuned to city affairs, picking up on native anxiety over foreign competition. Indeed, as a laconic note accompanying his Assize indictment reveals, Redman was especially forward in ‘spoiling or making havoc of the strangers’ during the May disturbances.66 Like Thomas Whalle, Redman had little sympathy for the cause of international Protestantism. While his religious leanings were not stated explicitly during his trial, we can infer much through his association with Edmund Harcocke, an ex-friar who was collated to St Michael Coslany by a fellow former Dominican, Bishop John Hopton, during Mary’s reign in 1555. Harcocke accepted the Elizabethan settlement and served his cure until his death in 1561, when he named Redman as a close friend in his will.67 However, in his previous life, Harcocke had served as the last prior of the Norwich Blackfriars, in which role he had courted notoriety by preaching against the royal supremacy, proclaiming before the corporation in 1535 that ‘an earthly man, namely a temporal man may not be head of the Church’.68 Had the ex-mendicant modified this view by 1559? Of course, we can only speculate as to his influence over George Redman’s opinions, although Harcocke’s survival into Elizabeth’s reign provides a bridge between the pre-Reformation church and the rebel leadership in 1570. Redman’s contacts with other potential adversaries of the Elizabethan church did not end there. During proceedings at the Assizes in July and August, another Norwich citizen, ‘one Marsham’, was examined for spreading the scandalous and seditious rumour that ‘the earl of Leicester had two children by the Queen’. This was probably Robert Marsham, nephew of the late Alderman Thomas Marsham, who had played a key part in the martyrdom of Elizabeth Cooper.69 However, condemned to lose both his ears or pay a heavy £100 fine, Robert Marsham – who was linked to Redman and Edmund Harcocke as Redman’s apprentice – survived to end his days on his property at Little Melton, where he died in 1615. But his ties to the 1570 plot 65 BL, Harl MS 368, fo. 183r; Blomefield, III, p. 284. The third conspirator hanged for treason was Thomas Brooke of Rollesby. John Throgmorton’s brother-in-law, Christopher Plater, another staunch Catholic resident in Norwich, had allegedly visited Rome prior to the uprising with one Woller, a Suffolk man in the service of the Duke of Alva’s army: PRO, SP 12/73/10. 66 Millican, Freemen, p. 71; Hawes, Officers, p. 128; PRO, SP 12/71/61. 67 NRO, DN REG/12/18, unfoliated entry, 28 Mar 1555; DN REG/13/19, fo. 63. For Harcocke’s ties to Bishop Hopton, see Rex, ‘The Friars in the English Reformation’, p. 53. His will survives as PRO, PROB 11/46, fo. 98r. 68 PRO, E 36/153, fos 23–5; Elton, Policy and Police, pp. 16–18. 69 E. Lodge (ed.), Illustrations of British History (3 vols, London, 1838), I, pp. 512–14; NRO, NCC 150 Hastings, will of Thomas Marsham, proved in 1557.

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destroyed any ambition he may have held for a career in city politics. Instead, the name of Marsham appears to have been sullied when, one year after Appleyard’s uprising, Robert’s father Ralph was barred from the higher positions of sheriff and alderman, ‘forever and not at any time hereafter’ by act of Assembly. The Marsham family was removed from civic office.70 Given the presence of Catholic or crypto-Catholic troublemakers in their midst, it was likely that the forward Protestants among the municipal elite would intervene to prevent religious malcontent from developing into open violence. Here McClendon’s insistence that the magistrates were indifferent to the conspiracy makes little sense. To begin with, the possibility of imminent insurrection was perceived as highly threatening by the city’s authorities, some of whom were able to recall the rioting and destruction that accompanied Kett’s infamous rebellion over two decades previously. Moreover, the raising of the rebels’ standard on 16 May 1570 followed John Aldrich’s election to his second mayoral term. Not a figure to waver in the face of popish conspiracy, over the next six months, Mayor Aldrich implemented a series of Assembly acts aimed at countering further insurgency, which laid the foundations for a more vigorous godly moral order later on. His first priority was to procure outside assistance in defending the town. Help was readily forthcoming from the two deputy lieutenants of Norfolk, Edward Clere and Drew Drury, who were ordered by the Privy Council to assemble the trained bands about Norwich for the ‘maintenance and comfort of the citizens’ against any possible trouble from the ‘mean and base sort’.71 By early June, Drury felt able to inform the council of his success in reducing the city to ‘better order and government’.72 If so, his confidence was tested when, between 6 and 10 June, the rebels gathered supporters within the city as a prelude to a larger muster at Trowse, by Norwich, on 16 June.73 However, these sinister events prompted Aldrich and his brethren to make their own response. It was no mere coincidence that following an emergency Assembly meeting convened on Friday 16 June – the same day as the muster – it was agreed to prohibit congregations of the ‘mean and base sort’ on the one day of the week when they would have had time on their hands to make trouble – the following Sunday. From Saturday evening until Monday morning, the city gates were to be kept shut and barred, while all traffic, especially in ‘berrecartes’, was to cease. In addition, any ‘shoppes either for buying, selling or retayling’ were forbidden to open during Sunday on pain of a 3s fine for each offence, with the same forfeiture being applied to any unlicensed brewing. The tone of these injunctions reflected John 70

Millican, Freeman, p. 73; NRO, NCC 85 Angell, will of Robert Marsham, proved in 1615; AB/3, 1553–83, fo. 194v, 21 Apr 1571. 71 Quiet Reformation, p. 225; PRO, SP 12/71, fo. 155. 72 PRO, SP 12/71/62. Neville Williams dated this order to July. However, in light of Drury’s return to the Privy Council, it is more likely that the letter was sent in May, see APC, 1558–70, p. 382, 5 June 1570. 73 PRO, KB 9/627/109; HMC, Salisbury MSS, I, p. 557.

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Aldrich’s fervent Protestantism. What functioned as a draconian act to lock out conspirators from Norwich also doubled up as Sabbatarian legislation, to the end that ‘Gods express Commandment may be better kept in observing the Sabbath days accordinglye within this worshipfull citie’, for the better edification of its citizens.74 Significantly, the same preamble was repeated in future acts halting Sunday trade passed intermittently down to the 1640s. Norwich’s reputation as a godly town, inspired by a rigid observance of the fourth commandment, owed not a little to the corporation’s reaction to the insurgence of the spring and summer of 1570.75 However, the Aldrich administration’s reforming zeal did not rest there. With the rounding up of the rebels at the end of June – an action in which Aldrich played a prominent part as one of the commissioners appointed to try the traitors in July – the mayor began a programme to quell the menace from the ‘great multitude of mean and base sort’, who had been deemed susceptible to the wiles of Catholic plotters.76 Aldrich sought to remedy the potential threat by enquiring into the extent of poverty in the city. Recalling how a compulsory poor rate had been introduced in 1549 to defuse tensions following Kett’s rebellion, Aldrich hoped to improve the city’s existing social welfare scheme. His first step was to organise the now-famous Norwich survey of the poor, which has been made known thanks to John Pound.77 Not surprisingly, Aldrich entrusted the census to a team of commissioners who shared his commercial concerns and religious aspirations. One was a fellow Merchant Venturer and brother-in-law, John Sotherton. Another was Simon Bowde, a future mayor and representative of the city at the 1585 parliament, who had a vested interest in encouraging immigrant textile production, having acquired a monopoly over the city’s wool supplies in partnership with Aldrich.78 A conspicuous evangelical was Alderman Thomas Beaumond, a friend of the reformer Robert Watson, whom Watson named as his executor.79 By drawing attention to the harmful effects they saw in indiscriminate alms-giving, Aldrich’s commission used the census in part as an opportunity to criticise their Catholic or crypto-Catholic opponents. The survey identified some 2,300 men, women and children, allegedly ‘counterfeattnge a kinde of work’ while begging for sustenance. As Pound 74

NRO, AB/3, 1553–83, fo. 174v, 16 June 1570. For future acts prohibiting Sunday trading and reinforcing Sabbath observance, see NRO, AB/4, 1583–7, fo. 24v, 4 Sept 1585; fo. 26v, 30 Mar 1586; AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 41r, 13 Dec 1615; fo. 45r, 26 Feb 1616; fo. 185r, 19 Dec 1623; fo. 253r, 12 May 1629; fos 276v–8r, 20 Jan 1632; fo. 364r, 29 Sept 1640. 76 PRO, SP 12/71/60. 77 J. Pound (ed.), The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570, NRS, 40 (1971), summarised in idem, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London, 1986), pp. 60–3. 78 NRO, NCR Case 20c, Mayor’s Book of the Poor, 1571–9, unfoliated, gives the commissioners’ names. For Sotherton, see PRO E 122/196/7 and for Bowde, Mayors of Norwich, p. 62; PRO SP 12/114/14. 79 PRO, PROB 11/42b, fo. 247r; Quiet Reformation, p. 160. 75

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has pointed out, the inquiry was at pains to distinguish between the native poor – eighty percent of whom had some occupation at the time of the census – and a more dangerous underclass of feckless vagrant, lured to the city by the misplaced generosity of its wealthy inhabitants. Such transients, it was claimed, were ‘soffred and nourished at everie mans dore without inquiringe from whence they came’. Indiscriminate alms-giving was therefore cast in a sinister light, since it had encouraged beggars to flock to town and squander their ill-gotten gains in the city’s victualling houses – ’stuffed with players and drunkerdes’ – who ‘in their pottes . . . swearing prating and lyenge’ offended God and hastened ‘the destruction of themselves and the commonwealthe’.80 Begging was blamed on the unrestrained benevolence of Norwich’s citizens. Concerns that sturdy vagrants found Norwich a soft touch merely increased the panic over civil order that had arisen during the scares of June 1570. Aldrich’s solution was to revise the municipal scheme for poor relief to mitigate the need for alms-giving, with its connotations of Catholic ‘good works’. Under the orders introduced at the end of 1570, begging was banned within the city, while relief was to be provided by a compulsory poor rate levied on all inhabitants able to contribute a minimum weekly assessment of a halfpenny. Rates were to be collected at parochial level and distributed evenly among the city’s less wealthy parishes. In itself, there was nothing novel about the move to institute a poor rate; as we have seen, compulsory payments for social welfare had been instituted in Norwich in 1549, and in London two years beforehand in 1547. However, the 1570 legislation was more comprehensive than earlier initiatives. As Pound has remarked, by extending the poor rate to all wage-earning citizens, a broad enough financial base for the new scheme was established to ensure its long-term success. But the scheme also depended upon its effective administration. Regulating the system was to be a permanent salaried staff of deacons and select women, responsible for keeping registers of paupers, finding employment for the able-bodied poor, instructing pauper children in reading and writing, while making searches for vagrants and other unruly persons. At the heart of the new organisation lay the city Bridewell or House of Correction, of which the mayor himself was master. A quasi penal institution, where a dozen inmates could be housed for up to three weeks and pressed into a regime of work interspersed with respites for eating and prayer, Bridewell was intended to Reform the character of the indolent pauper.81 Pound has described Aldrich’s measures as ‘drastic’. In many respects the 1570 project was rooted in a rationalising tendency identified by Margo 80 Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy, pp. 61–2. The report and orders following on from the census are printed in R. H. Tawney and E. Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents (3 vols, London, 1924), II, pp. 315–17. 81 Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy, pp. 59, 63–8. For a pessimistic assessment of the working of Norwich’s House of Correction, along with similar institutions elsewhere, see A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: the Vagrancy Problem in England (London, 1985), pp. 164–9.

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Todd as belonging to Christian Humanism, with its concern that the traditional obligations of the rich towards the poor should be channelled in a more systematic way as regulated by civil authority. Yet there was an evangelical edge to Aldrich’s campaign. Thus he hoped to deliver those most susceptible to a raft of vices ‘from idleness to drunkeness to whoredom to shamefull incest and abominable life’ through a body of deacons modelled after Geneva.82 Consequently, civic officials would not shrink from using the whip to punish vagrants and the unruly for their disobedience to God and the magistrate. This is not to dust off a tired argument linking puritanism with social control, rather it is to recognise how Aldrich and his supporters – inspired in part by religious zeal – attempted through an enlightened system of welfare to provide for the needy while containing the contagious influence of the morally corrupting vagabond. Indeed, it would be to misinterpret their intentions to conclude that Norwich’s magistrates were hostile to the poor per se. Thomas Tusser, the poetaster and writer on husbandry – who resided in Norwich at some point in the late 1560s or early 1570s – may have grumbled about the frosty reception encountered by those down on their luck in the Elizabethan city: At Norwich fyne, for me and myne, a Citie trim. Where strangers well may seeme to dwell, That pytch and pay, or keepe their day, But who that want shall find it scant so good for him.83

However, as the city’s governors were also aware, they were morally bound as Christians to dispense charity. This point was clearly reiterated by Timothy Plummer – usher of Norwich Grammar School, 1620–9 – when preaching before the corporation in 1621 on the text of Psalm 37: 25: ‘I have been young and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous foresaken, nor his seed begging bread.’ Plummer distinguished between the deserving and the undeserving poor. The latter were the ‘walking disorderly’ who ‘bringeth and keepeth multitudes in the base estate of beggary, when religion doth so schoole the righteous that he worketh in some lawful vocation’. Such idlers were the ‘caterpillars and devouring drones of our Commonwealth’. They were poor because they ‘dealeth with a slacke hand’, compared with ‘the hand of the diligent that maketh rich’ by pursuing ‘lawfull and honest labour’. Yet were the incorrigible beyond the pale of Christian love? Idleness was sinful, but 82

Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, p. 143; M. Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 118–47; NRO, NCR Case 20c, Mayor’s Book of the Poor, unfoliated proclamation, 4 June 1571. 83 ODNB, ‘Thomas Tusser (c. 1524–1580)’; Thomas Tusser, Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (1573), ii, pp. 29–30. Tusser was settled on an undisclosed Norwich living, probably as a singing man, by Dean Salisbury.

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so was pride ‘by which many rich men judge of their spiritual estate before God [and] think themselves highly in Gods favour’ on account of their wealth. After all, the poor could number among the inheritors of the riches of heaven. Because ‘God is kind even to the wicked which are strangers to his Covenant’, human charity was to be extended to the undeserving, since ‘povertie, ragges [and] nakednesse cannot separate us from Gods love in Christ’.84 For early modern Norvicians, care for the poor, even the morally reprobate, remained a vital aspect of the Christian life. However, where Aldrich’s welfare Reform departed from previous methods of furnishing relief was in its undercutting of specific motives for charitable giving, which were rooted in the old Catholic faith. As Ian Archer reminds us, there was no discrepancy between Protestantism and an impulse towards voluntary charity.85 But the novel feature of Aldrich’s Reform was its onus on curbing the catholicity of donations, whereby the act of charity itself could be considered meritorious to salvation, echoing a traditionalist belief in good works that retained a hold over some citizens. At the hour of death, the bid for self-sanctification through charitable giving was to be discouraged.86 Instead, Aldrich and his supporters devised a wholly reformed rationale for social welfare, which sought to undermine the notions that public-spirited generosity, and the quest for lasting fame in this life, could be employed to advance the soul’s prospects in the next. Perhaps they had the likes of Alderman Thomas Whalle in mind? Certainly, when drawing up his will, Whalle subscribed to a subtly different set of values in offering relief to fellow Christians, values at once ‘oldfashioned’ and out of step with Aldrich’s reforming zeal. Leaving £20 for a poor stock in St Simon and St Jude parish, the money was to be kept in ‘one chest called Thomas Whalls chest’ according to ‘the order of Cambridge chest’ in St Andrew’s. The latter was so named after its benefactor John Cambridge, a former mayor who had left a loan stock at his death in 1442, which was to be freely disposed to any in need on condition that the recipients prayed for the souls of the donor and his family.87 By modelling his bequest on Cambridge’s gift Whalle was making an obvious ‘traditionalist’ statement. Although shorn of any outward allusion to Purgatory, Whalle no doubt

84 Timothy Plummer, The Favourite, or a plaine Demonstration from Holy Scripture of Gods especiall love to the righteous, in a sermon preached at St Andrews in Norwich, the 18 November 1621 (1622), STC 20050, pp. 26–8; H. W. Saunders, A History of the Norwich Grammar School (Norwich, 1932), p. 274. Plummer, who held a Master’s degree, had been licensed to teach at the school earlier in March 1615. See NRO, DN REG/16/22, consignation book, 1627. He preached a coronation day sermon before the corporation in 1637, CA, 1625–48, fo. 44v. 85 I. Archer, ‘The Charity of Early Modern Londoners’, TRHS, 6th Series, 12 (2002), pp. 223–44. 86 B. Pullan, ‘Catholics and the Poor in Early Modern Europe’, TRHS, 5th Series, 26 (1976), pp. 15–34, notes the continuing drive for self-sanctification among apologists for charitable giving in Counter-Reformation Europe. 87 PRO, PROB 11/57, fo. 451r; Blomefield, IV, p. 317 and Mayors of Norwich, p. 22 for John Cambridge.

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hoped that any benefiting from the stock would feel compelled to remember their benefactor, easing his soul’s burden in the afterlife. A similar gesture was made by another of Whalle’s neighbours and brothers-in-law, Thomas Pettus, who became mayor in 1590. An eminent merchant whose property extended beyond the extant family home in St Simon and St Jude to include holdings in Suffolk and London, Pettus was a man whose religion was, from the stance of the godly, a little suspect. After all, through his family ties with the Whalles, Pettus could count a number of Catholic recusants among his relatives. Here, Richard Lussher’s release from the Guildhall prison at the end of Pettus’s term in office in 1591 may have owed something to the mayor’s intervention, on Lussher’s behalf, with the Privy Council. One of Pettus’s sons had participated in the ‘unruly companye’ that disturbed the minister at St Simon and St Jude in 1572.88 Possibly Thomas senior was also lukewarm to the cause of forward Protestantism, a point that is suggested by his presentation of Thomas Thwaites to his parish’s rectory in February 1583.89 Thwaites held St Simon and St Jude with Remersham and Thorpe-by-Norwich. But as a non-graduate petty canon of the nearby cathedral church, Thwaites was singled out by puritan critics as a ‘dumb dog’, ill-suited to the ministry.90 Alderman Pettus’s funeral in 1598 was a grand affair. In a gesture conspicuously absent from the wills of convinced reformers, namely John Aldrich and Thomas Sotherton, Pettus made over £12 to be distributed in alms at his burial.91 Aldrich, on the other hand, left £20 to be given to the poor before his funeral. The idea was to prevent a large crowd of hangers-on from attending his burial, a ploy that Aldrich seemingly borrowed from Augustine Steward, whose will Aldrich witnessed in 1570. Also bequeathing £20 to the poor, Steward had insisted that paupers ‘should not resorte to the parishe churche and trouble themselves and my executors’.92 Besides laying on funeral doles, Thomas Pettus was anxious to stamp his name on other charitable bequests, setting up a stock for alms ‘in shirtes and smockes or in woollen garments’ to be distributed in St Simon and St Jude parish for ten years after his decease. Pettus then furnished a stock of two ‘loades of charcole’ for St Saviour’s parish. Since this benefaction was to be distributed ‘about one month before Chrysmas and so contynuenge tenn weekes’ for five years, was it Pettus’s intention to evoke the grateful prayers of those receiving sustenance during the chilly winter months?93 88 Mayors of Norwich, pp. 64–5; PRO, PROB 11/91, fo. 115v, will of Thomas Pettus, proved in 1598; APC, 1591, p. 144; Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 161. 89 Pettus purchased the right of next presentation from Bishop Freke, NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 86r. 90 Stiffkey Papers, III, pp. 239–40; Seconde Parte, II, pp. 148, 155. 91 PRO, PROB 11/91, fo. 114r. 92 PRO, PROB 11/64, fo. 207v, will of John Aldrich, proved in 1582; PROB 11/53, fo. 311r, will of Augustine Steward, proved in 1571. 93 PRO, PROB 11/91, fo. 114v.

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Here were the subtle distinctions in charitable giving between the progenitors of the 1570 welfare scheme and those retaining a belief in the value of good works. Ultimately, it was Aldrich’s project that pointed the way towards future developments in the English poor law, when, upon being elected as a city burgess to parliament in 1572, he ensured that his orders for Norwich became a blueprint for national policy. This was thanks to his ties with Matthew Parker. Through the archbishop’s intervention, Aldrich was duly placed on the Commons’ committee responsible for drafting the twin Acts For the Punishment of Vagabonds and for the Relief of the Poor and Impotent and For Setting of the Poor on Work and for Avoiding of Idleness. After the Norwich model, ‘all inhabitants’ were liable to contribute towards relief. Moreover by ordering, for the first time, Houses of Correction to be established in every county, the statutes incorporated another key aspect of Aldrich’s programme and applied it at a national level.94 Aldrich’s poor law proved its worth as an enlightened system of social welfare. But given its intention to provide an alternative to residual impulses towards a catholicity in charitable giving, the 1570 Norwich scheme was hardly introduced amid a spirit of open-minded confessional tolerance, as argued by McClendon. Religious forbearance was lacking in city politics in the first two decades of Elizabeth’s reign. Measures to regulate begging went hand in glove with efforts on the part of Norwich’s governors to counteract what they took to be a threat to public order inspired by popish conspirators. But there was much discontent for Catholic plotters to exploit. Much of this had been fuelled by the perceived threat to native livelihoods contingent upon the planting of immigrant Protestant craftsmen in the town, largely at the behest of the Merchant Adventurers’ Company. Religious prejudice became enmeshed with disagreements over the city’s economic well-being. Yet the 1570s witnessed the triumph of the Aldrich – Sotherton faction’s vision of an ordered urban society, modelled as a godly commonwealth, presided over by the magistrates working with their spiritual guides among the clergy. It is to the ministerial arm of the godly order that we now turn.

94

P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), pp. 124–5.

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Chapter Four URBAN MAGISTRACY AND MINISTRY, 1570–1619

Norwich’s transformation into a Protestant town was further accomplished by a veritable team of committed pastors, who were settled in the city to articulate the moral values enforced in 1570. The fortunes of Elizabethan and Jacobean Norwich’s famed teaching ministry are examined here. Our impression of the city’s religious life in the last decades of the sixteenth century owes much to the panegyric offered by William Burton, a preacher who was forced to leave the city in 1589 after delivering a sermon, for which he was ‘accounted an enemy to Caesar’.1 Dedicating a translation of Erasmus’s Seven Dialogues to the corporation, he recalled his time in Norwich with a tinge of nostalgia. For Burton, the city could be compared favourably with the Biblical paradigms of Bethel and Jericho, which ‘maintained the Schooles of Prophets among them’; magistrates and ministers ‘embracing and seconding one as another and the common people affording due reverence and obedience to them both’. No motion put to the city Assembly was done without first consulting ‘your grave and godly preachers’. It was a great joy to witness ‘the continuall resorte that was every day . . . for many years together unto the holy exercise of religion’, of so many devout magistrates and so ‘great a meeting of learned and faithfull Pastors’, resorting to one another’s houses ‘whither some went, all went, none were excluded’ to ‘receive incouragement alike in the word of the lord’.2 Relations between pastors and people may not have been as cordial as Burton cared to remember, his own flight in 1589 to evade censure being a case in point. Nevertheless, Burton’s idealised depiction of religious life in Norwich provides an insight into the aspirations of some members of the civic elite to act as enthusiastic sponsors of godly learning. As seen above (pages 40–1, 43–4, 47), Norwich had long boasted a lively preaching tradition. Under the Protestant dispensation of the 1560s, the city became a 1

William Burton, A sermon preached in the cathedral church in Norwich, the xxi day of December 1589 ([1590]), STC 4178, ‘To the Reader’. See below, pp. 79–80 for Burton’s sufferings. Desiderius Erasmus, Seven dialogues both pithie and profitable, trans. William Burton (1606), STC 10457, sigs A2r–v. 2

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noted centre for ‘prophesyings’, those voluntary meetings of the clergy for the exposition of Scripture that eventually proved so irksome to Queen Elizabeth. Such gatherings were held in the city from at least 1564.3 Symbolically, they took as their venue the mother church of the diocese, initially with keen episcopal sanction, although following Bishop Parkhurst’s death in 1575 the ‘brethren’ had recourse to regulate proceedings on their own, compiling a detailed set of articles to govern the exercises. These were to take place weekly in the cathedral, with the focus being on a sermon followed by a discussion of the text at which laymen could attend. However, the orders looked towards a more perfectly reformed model of clerical discipline, one that was to be determined on the basis of ministerial parity to reinforce a sense of shared vocational mission. Any speaker found wanting in ‘soundness of doctrine’ was to accept admonition by the rest, or be excluded from the exercise.4 The 1575 orders aimed to enhance a feeling of collegiality among the clerical brethren, although over time two divines, Thomas Robartes and John More, whom William Burton hailed as the two ‘presidents or leaders of an army’, assumed pre-eminence.5 Robartes, a Welshman and the less welldocumented of the pair, has already been encountered through the Aldrich – Corpus Christi College connection.6 Cambridge contacts also came into play when encouraging John More, a fellow of Christ’s College, to settle in the city, where with Robartes, he enjoyed Alderman John Aldrich’s patronage as one of the ‘faithfull workmen of the Lords business’. Originally from Betham, Westmorland, More has become familiar as ‘the Apostle of Norwich’. Such was his commanding presence within Norfolk for twenty years until his death in 1592 that he was eulogised in Henry Holland’s ‘who’s who’ of illustrious English reformers, Hervologia Anglica, which printed his portrait (Fig 4.1) and inflated his academic qualifications to doctor of divinity, More having only progressed to bachelor of arts.7 Building the hagiography, Holland informed his readers that More grew the longest beard of his day in the guise of the Old Testament prophets. Celebrated by Norwich’s preaching fraternity and its patrons among the civic elite, More’s pastoral work left a powerful evangelical legacy for the city’s religious life under the Stuarts. 3

PRO, SP 15/12/27, Edward Gascoigne to Leicester, 25 Oct 1564, describing the Norwich prophesyings. For the background to these exercises, see Puritan Movement, pp. 168–78. 4 ‘The orders for the prophesie at Norwich in anno 1575, begun sede vacante’, transcribed in Browne, Memorials, pp. 18–20. 5 Erasmus, Seven dialogues both pithie and profitable, trans. William Burton, sig. A2v. 6 For Robartes, see above, p. 47. Patrick Collinson has confused this minister with Thomas Roberts, John Parkhurst’s steward, who was outmanoeuvred by George Gardiner for the post of archdeacon of Norwich. In the event, neither Robartes or Roberts officiated as archdeacon, see Collinson’s Godly People (London, 1983), p. 183 and Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 234 n. 566. 7 PRO, PROB 11/64, fo. 208r; DNB, ‘John More’; Henry Holland, Hervologia Anglica (Arnhem, 1620), STC 13582, pp. 209–11; Venn, III, p. 205.

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URBAN MAGISTRACY & MINISTRY, 1570–1619

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 4.1 John more ‘the Apostle of Norwich’ from an engraving in Henry Holland’s 1620 Hagiograpy Herωologia Anglica (Norfolk Heritage Centre).

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The precise circumstances leading to More’s arrival in Norwich are hazy. It is likely that he came to the city under the auspices of a divine with an equally impressive pastoral beard, Bishop John Parkhurst, who first collated More to the south Norfolk living of Alburgh in June 1572. More made his mark with receptive members of Norfolk’s elite at this time by preaching before a petty sessions at Acle. Among his auditors would have been Parkhurst himself, in attendance as a county JP, Acle also being hard by the bishop’s palace at Ludham.8 From there More progressed to the chaplaincy of St Andrew’s, Norwich.9 A donative cure held by a body of trustees, which is known to have comprised twenty-two members in 1615, one of the figures involved in More’s appointment may have been Alderman Thomas Sotherton, who was a substantial property owner within the parish and presumably a trustee as well.10 So began More’s association with a civic church that came to acquire a reputation as a bastion of evangelical Protestantism. What Clement Corbet, Bishop Matthew Wren’s anti-Calvinist chancellor, uncharitably dubbed ‘the sanctified parish of St Andrew’s’ in 1636 was never exclusively a haven of the godly. Throughout the Elizabethan period, the parish had its share of shirkers from worship as well as more exotic transgressors. These included one Robert Hempinstall, a glover and ‘a most badd and ignorant fellow’, who dabbled in fortune telling, healing and – more alarmingly –conjuring, while another regular name to feature among visitation returns was John Fisher, an alleged papist who would on occasion turn up to services drunk and revile the minister.11 Such ungodly figures aside, the dominant atmosphere within St Andrew’s was overwhelmingly favourable to the cause of forward Reformation. At some point prior to Francis Blomefield’s antiquarian enquiries in the eighteenth century, the parish vestry had seen fit to celebrate St Andrew’s Protestant heritage in verse form on two painted boards overlooking the nave. Over the

8

NRO, DN REG/13/19, fo. 178v; John More, Three godly and fruitfull sermons (Cambridge, 1594), STC 18074.5, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, which recalled More’s preaching at Acle ‘for the Quarter Sessions’. However, Quarter Sessions were not held at Acle. See A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 104–5. 9 Blomefield, IV, p. 301 places More’s presentment to St Andrew’s to 1571. While the later date of 1573 found in Venn, II, p. 205 is more accurate, the loss of the libri cleri for the 1570s as well as St Andrew’s churchwardens’ accounts means that we lack the relevant documentation to confirm this. More’s brother Miles was appointed usher of Norwich Grammar School by the corporation in 1574, and held the post until 1619. See NRO, NCC 371 Andrewes; H. W. Saunders, A History of the Norwich Grammar School (Norwich, 1932), p. 274. 10 APC, 1615–16, pp. 147–8, 10 May 1615, gives the number of feoffees; Mayors of Norwich, p. 57. St Andrew’s benefice, along with that of neighbouring St Peter Mancroft, formerly belonged to the college of St Mary in the Fields. Both livings were sold by the crown to feoffees after the college’s dissolution. 11 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 9r; J. F. Williams (ed.), Bishop Redman’s Visitation 1597, NRS, 18 (1946), p. 29; NRO, ANW, 3/10, comperta and presentments, 1602–3; DN DIS/9/1a, entry for 1601; DN VIS/4/2/1.

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south aisle, someone had affixed a jaunty bit of doggerel lauding the reforms of Edward’s VI’s reign: This church was builded of timber stone and bricks In the year of our Lord God XV hundred and six And lately translated from extreme idolatry A thousand five hundred and seven and fortie And in the first year of our noble King Edward The Gospel in Parliament was mightily set forward Thanks be to God, Anno Dom, 1547 December

Protestant progress under Elizabeth received similar praise above the north aisle: As the Good King Josiah being tender of Age Purged the Realm from all Idolatry, Even so our noble Queen and Counsell sage Set up the Gospel and banisht Popery, At twenty fower years began she her Reigne, And about forty fowre did it mayntain. Glory be given to God.12

Commitment to the Gospel continued apace at John More’s St Andrew’s, which became a recognised focal point for Norfolk’s teaching fraternity. In 1608, the parish’s prestige was enhanced with the founding of Norwich’s first municipal library, for the better edification of the clergy, located to the north of the Church over the porch to ‘New Hall’, the former church of the Norwich Blackfriars, which had been purchased by Alderman Augustine Steward on the corporation’s behalf at its dissolution.13 This repository attracted much civic pride as the ‘Old City Library’. But the room was also intended to furnish lodgings for visiting preachers invited to perform the annual cycle of corporation funded sermons. The keys were left with the parish clerk of St Andrew’s.14 Given such amenities, at the end of 1615, Norwich corporation enhanced the parish’s evangelical status further by funding three weekday lectureships at St Andrew’s on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays to supplement an existing Thursday lecture.15 Buttressing the emphasis on godly learning, St Andrew’s also boasted that other symbol of 12

Blomefield, IV, p. 312. D. J. Coby, ‘St Andrew’s Norwich (1550–1730): Parochial Prestige in an Urban Context’, University of East Anglia M.A., 1992; Quiet Reformation, p. 72 and above p. 45 for Steward. 14 A. S. Geo, Three Centuries of a City Library (Norwich, 1917), p. 4; H. Sutermeister, The Norwich Blackfriars (Norwich, 1977), pp. 15–16; NRO, MS 79, fo. 217. A catalogue of early donations to the library, drawn up in the 1650s, exists as NRO, MS 4228. St Andrew’s was not the only city parish to boast a library, another being founded at St Peter Mancroft in the 1610s, W. Rye, ‘St Peter Mancroft, Norwich: its Parish History in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, NAM, Old Series, 2 (1883), pp. 359–63. The founders of both repositories may have wished consciously to make up for the loss of the friars’ libraries, dissolved and dispersed under Henry VIII. 15 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 40r, 1 Dec 1615. 13

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a godly commonwealth, the city Bridewell. Relocated to Thomas Sotherton’s former residence in the parish– abutting the church on the north side – by prior arrangement at the alderman’s death in 1583, this institution for the moral and spiritual regeneration of the profane was established within earshot of Norwich’s most famous pulpit.16 Yet even before St Andrew’s began to attract this wealth of civic patronage, the Church was put on the map by John More’s turbulent ministry. Patrick Collinson has asserted that ‘the stigma of “factious person” sits uneasily on Mr More’, although to press this too far downplays the potential divisiveness of the preacher’s uncompromising beliefs underwritten by a rigid Calvinism not comforting to everyone.17 Indeed, in September 1573, More led a public disputation with the enigmatic master of Peterhouse, Andrew Perne. Perne had preached an offending sermon at the cathedral, which More then sought to refute from the pulpit, creating ‘some jare here amongest men’, as George Gardiner wrote to inform Parkhurst. We lack details as to the precise nature of this spat. However, given Perne’s suspected Catholic sympathies and apparent measured criticism of Calvinist orthodoxy, it is possible that the disagreement may have been in part soteriological.18 Certainly, More was hostile to any position that derogated from the message of free justification by faith in Christ. With no less than his dying breath, he denounced ‘all heresy and doctrine of poperie, especially that of meritte, purgatory [and] flying to saintes’ when composing his will in 1591.19 But what More was really about was the business of dispelling sin. Such was the principal message of his only venture into print during his lifetime, A briefe and necessarie catechism, which he co-authored in 1572 with another fellow of Christ’s College, Edward Dering. This hugely successful work, abridged as A Shorte Catechisme for Householders in 1580, ran to eighteen editions by 1631.20 Although subsequently attributed to Dering alone, in Elizabethan Norfolk it retained local prestige as ‘Mr More’s catechism’; for example, in 1592 the parson of Overington was admonished by the Court of High Commission for teaching not with ‘the Catachisme articulate but with Mr Mores’.21 Throughout the emphasis was on ‘how we can be

16

W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey (eds), The Records of the City of Norwich (2 vols, Norwich, 1906–10), II, p. 389. 17 P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), p. 142. More’s mental world can be captured from the entry for 1564 in his A table from the beginning of the world to this day (1593), STC 18074, p. 223, ‘CALVIN dyed Maii, THAMES frozen, OWSE bridge down’. The road between Cambridge and Norwich crossed the Little Ouse. Another event of key importance to More since the Creation was the foundation of the distinctly evangelical institution, Emmanuel College, in 1584. 18 Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 208; P. Collinson, ‘Andrew Perne and his Times’, in P. Collinson et al. (eds), Andrew Perne Quatercentenary Studies (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 1–34, especially, pp. 13–15. 19 NRO, NCC 371 Andrewes. 20 Collinson, Godly People, pp. 296–8. 21 R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the Church of England (New York, 1910), I, p. 265. In the preface to A brief and necessarie catechisme or instruction, very needful to be knowne of all householders

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saved at the day of judgement before Gods judgement seat’ given man’s corrupt nature. As it was put starkly in the text: is there nothing which a man can doe in this worlde to serve as sufficient recompense to God for our sin? No, although I should give all my goods to the poore . . . or suffer anye other punishment . . . it is not suffycient for one of my least sinnes. Yea but God is mercifull, will he punish sin so sharplie thinkest thou? Our God indeed is mercifull, but he is also just and true, and therefore must needes of iustice and truth punish mans sinne with that punishment which he hath appointed . . . None is able to suffer and overcome this great punishment of sin being onely man.

The sole way to assuage God’s retribution was to take ‘a holde upon Christe his merits with a true faith’. Having framed their hearts anew, Christians were therefore free ‘to detest, hate, loathe and abhore sinne in all men, but especially in ourselves’.22 Faith then was the only remedy for sin. But the only means towards sustaining a lively faith was through hearing the Gospel preached, for ‘without the preaching of the word, wee can never have fayth’. For More and Dering the solution was obvious. Able preachers had to be on hand to help expurgate all manner of profanity, which, according to the preacher’s checklist of ‘unchaste behaviour’, included such imperfections as ‘filthy lewd talk and songs, unwanted apparel, lewd and idle pastimes’ to ‘gluttony and drunkeness’ carried out in ‘houses of open whoredome’.23 Preaching before the petty sessions at Acle, More assured magistrates of their role.24 Since the day of judgement would find many wanting, justices were to dispel the ‘filthy adulteries, fornication and all uncleanesse’, found ‘especially here in Norfolk’. To assist in combating transgressions, they were to supply a ministry. Stressing the urgency of the times, More added: whosoever doth not beleeve is damned, and none can beleeve without a preacher. If then we will have the people of the Lord to be saved, let them have preachers . . . bestow your labour, cost and travell to

(1572), STC 6679, initialled by Dering, the work’s purpose was made plain. The catechism was offered as more wholesome reading than ‘Legendawry . . . Saintes lyves’, ‘tales of Robin Goodfellow’ and ‘of many other Spirites, which Satan had made [and] Hell had printed’ during the time of Popery. John More had a hand in writing this preface, although his name appears in the 1573 edition only, STC 6679.3. 22 Edward Dering, A Shorte Catechisme for Householders (1580), STC 6710.5, sig. Vi, Biii. 23 Ibid, sig. Bi, Aii. 24 John More, Three godly and fruitfull sermons (Cambridge, 1594), STC 18074.5, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’. These sermons were posthumously published by More’s literary executor, the ardent Sabbatarian, Nicholas Bownd: see P. Collinson et al. (eds), Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 1582–1590, COERS, 10 (2003), pp. 188–9. Bownd came to Norwich to assume the Thursday lecture at St Andrew’s in 1611, receiving a £10 per annum pension from the corporation: see NRO, NCR Case 16c/5, Assembly Minute Book, 1585–113, fo. 432v, 7 Apr 1613. He had married John More’s widow, who continued to claim Bownd’s pension after his death in 1613: NRO, CA, 1603–25, fos 241v, 261r, 281v.

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get them. Ride for them, runne for them, stretch your purses to maintain them. We shall begin to be riche in the Lord Jesus.25

The essence of More’s evangelical message, to hang upon God’s word taught to nourish faith against sin, was spiritual balm to some. On the other hand, the onus upon constant introspective reflection to recognise and guard against the roots of malign thoughts and actions could be disheartening to others. The state of melancholy it could induce was embroidered by one of Norwich’s literary sons, the dramatist Robert Greene. Most widely known for his pamphlets exposing swindlers and cony catchers, it was assumed by the compilers of the old Dictionary of National Biography that Greene – who over John More could claim the distinctions of being ‘Maister of Arts’ – was influenced by the ‘Apostle of Norwich’ during his youth. Possibly, he alluded to More’s preaching when he caricatured the puritan conversion narrative in his autobiography. Greene recalled how ‘the said learned man’ did ‘beate down sinne in such pithie and persuasive manner, that I began to call unto mind the danger of my soule’, sighing ‘Lord have mercy upon me and send me grace to amend and become a new man’. But whatever the extent of such ‘good notions’ they did not last long. Falling into ‘a solemn humour’, and being ridiculed by his profligate friends ‘calling me puritan and Precisian, and whether I might have a Pulpit, with such other scoffing terms’, he soon forgot ‘the good and wholesome lesson’ and lapsed back ‘into wicked life’.26 Greene finally succumbed to worldly distractions. Others within the city, especially those among the borough elite charged with policing immorality, were more willing to take to heart More’s emphasis upon countering sinful disobedience to God. Yet for all that his teachings strove to promote godly order within the commonwealth, More became a focus for disobedience in the wider spheres of church and state. Putting aside his endorsement of Thomas Cartwright’s controversial 1570 Cambridge lectures in favour of Presbyterian government, over contested religious practice in the 1560s and 1570s – notably the lively issues of clerical dress and full conformity to the Book of Common Prayer – John More could be construed as a troublemaker.27 In 1574, he was admonished by the diocesan chancellor for refusing to wear the surplice. His reluctance then warranted stern words from his patron, Bishop Parkhurst, that although the vestment ‘should be offensive to some, it were better to offend a fewe private persons than to offend God

25

More, Three godly and fruitfull sermons, pp. 5–6, 68–9. DNB, ‘Robert Greene’ repeated in ODNB, ‘John More (c. 1542–1592)’; The Repentance of Robert Greene, Maister of Artes (1592), STC 12306, p. 7. John More is not specifically named in the text, although the sermon that moved Greene to repent was of a type that More would have preached. 27 More was among twenty-one Cambridge alumni, who also included Alderman John Aldrich’s son Thomas, to sign a petition to Cecil in defence of Cartwright’s lectures. See PRO, SP 12/73/12 and Puritan Movement, pp. 112–13. 26

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and disobey the Prince’.28 However, within a year Parkhurst was dead. In November 1575 he was succeeded by Edmund Freke, an episcopal governor of a different hue, who was translated to Norwich from Rochester with a royal brief to put down prophesyings and enforce strict compliance to the rites and ceremonies enjoined by the Book of Common Prayer. Freke was to prove a determined foe to Norwich’s preaching fraternity. Throughout East Anglia, his episcopate led to a hardening of attitudes among divines and their lay patrons with qualms about the unresolved state of the English Reformation as it existed after 1559.29 We would like to know more about Edmund Freke. Patrick Collinson has described him as ‘a sometime moderate puritan who had turned his coat’, an appraisal echoed by Brett Usher, who sees in Freke’s authoritarian stance ‘the most calculated volte-face in the history of the Elizabethan church’. Both have indicated Freke’s earlier dislike of canonical vestments and his patronage of prophesyings in Rochester. Indeed, prior to his arrival in East Anglia, the bishop seemed every bit a friend to Reform, his subsequent reaction against the godly owing much, it was claimed, to the domineering influence of Mrs Freke.30 But was Freke ever a puritan? After all, when conducting his first visitation of Rochester diocese in 1572, he made a point of searching out any ‘that favour or maintain any errors or heresies as Puritans [and] Anabaptists’, being the first Elizabethan prelate to use the pejorative term ‘puritan’ in a set of articles.31 Freke had formed a hostile understanding of ‘puritanism’ without his wife’s input. Certainly, his former career as an Augustinian canon of Leigh Priory, where he conducted alchemy experiments before transferring to Waltham Abbey on the eve of its dissolution, does not commend him for precocious godly status. Finally surrendering his habit and then marrying, he was ordained priest by Bishop Bonner’s suffragan in 1545. During Mary’s reign, he disappeared into obscurity, evidently being employed in the household of another astute political turncoat, John de Vere, the sixteenth Earl of Oxford, at Castle Hedingham, Essex.32 Given the ties between William Cecil and the de Veres – the earl’s son Edward marrying Cecil’s daughter Anne – Freke came recommended to the future Lord Burghley. During the 1560s, Freke rose through the ranks, progressing to the deaneries of Salisbury and Rochester and then to the bishopric of Rochester, all the while serving as chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, 28

Parkhurst, Letter Book, pp. 216, 219; The Zurich Letters, Parker Society (2 vols, Cambridge, 1842–43), I, p. 108. 29 Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 38; Puritan Movement, pp. 202–4. 30 Puritan Movement, pp. 202–3; B. Usher, William Cecil and Episcopacy, 1559–1577 (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 121–2, 133. 31 W. H. Frere (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, Vol. III, 1559–1572 (London, 1910), p. 342. 32 D. MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors (Oxford, 1986), pp. 193–4; Usher, William Cecil and Episcopacy, pp. 120–1; D. Loades, Mary Tudor: a Life (Oxford, 1989), pp. 181, 184, 190, for de Vere’s crucial support for Mary in July 1553.

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being installed as Lord Almoner in 1573. Enjoying contacts at court, he proved an able spokesman for the Protestant settlement, preaching down Purgatory at Paul’s cross in 1565.33 But it was as an editor of St Augustine – the subject of his former studies and arguably the progenitor of Reformed soteriology – that Freke hoped to make his mark by publishing an English translation of Augustine’s An Introduction to the Love of God prefaced with a fulsome dedication to the queen in 1574. In this venture, he stated his commitment to Protestant orthodoxy. As he informed his readers, he had been careful to revise the original text ‘where it tendeth any way to the derogation of Gods glory by attributing too much to man, his merites and deservinges . . . advertising thee to esteeme no man his workes’.34 Freke sought to establish his evangelical credentials. His subsequent moves against Norwich’s preaching fraternity can be understood in terms of his ambition to act as the queen’s loyal servant in disciplining a diocese that had continued to vex Elizabeth. As Usher notes, as royal almoner in 1575, Freke was exposed to the queen’s concerns, being at her ‘beck and call on a daily basis’.35 But apart from his desire to fulfil royal commands, his subsequent falling out with the Norwich godly may have stemmed from more fundamental theological differences. Advertising himself as an Augustinian, he seemingly departed from his mentor’s pessimistic view of human nature. We can infer this from an account given by Richard Gawton, a Norfolk minister who fell foul of the bishop only to resurface as a participant in John Field’s Presbyterian conference in London during the 1580s. Gawton recalled a stormy audience at the bishop’s palace in Norwich, where he was grilled for refusing to wear the surplice. However, during the meeting, Gawton seized the opportunity to revisit an earlier doctrinal debate that he had held with one of Freke’s chaplains, who had preached, presumably during the bishop’s 1576 visitation. He took exception to this sermon. In particular, he disliked the chaplain’s belief in mankind’s innate ‘natural motions’ to be drawn to God through a knowledge of Christ, ‘albeit none come to Christ but those whom his father draws, yet all come not whom God doth draw’. Rather, it was ‘in man whether he be drawne or no’. Since man’s calling in faith was imparted through his capacity to hear and comprehend the Gospel, a ‘natural gift’, it followed that ‘we have faith by nature and consequently are saved by nature’.36

33

DNB, ‘Edmund Freke’; Usher, William Cecil and Episcopacy, pp. 121, 136 and the dedication to Freke as Lord Almoner in Andreas Hyperius, The regiment of the povertie, trans. Henry Tripp (1572), STC 11259; Bod L, Tanner MS 50, fo. 13v. 34 St Augustine, An Introduction to the Love of God, trans. Edmund Freke (1574), STC 935, ‘To the Reader’; D. MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London, 2003), pp. 106–15, which argues the case for the European Reformation as an ‘Augustinian revolution’. 35 Usher, William Cecil and Episcopacy, p. 136. 36 A parte of a register ([Edinburgh or Middleburg], 1593), STC 10400, pp. 393–400, especially p. 394. Gawton’s later career can be followed in Puritan Movement, pp. 204, 440.

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Regrettably, the offending cleric was not named. Similarly, we have no way of telling whether his sermon went on to tackle an awkward theological and ontological point: where did such critical faculties come from if not from the Almighty intervening in the lives of the elect? Nevertheless, the logic of his argument was to assert a positive value to human action over grace freely given as the way to salvation. It was a most un-Augustinian position on the question of nature and grace; at least Gawton believed that the chaplain had departed from orthodox Protestant belief, while his own protest caused some embarrassment for Freke, who curtly reminded Gawton that it was ‘not the matter’ for which he had been summoned. Should Freke have been more cautious in his appointment of a chaplain with maverick soteriological views? On the other hand, it is conceivable that this public refutation of predestinarian thought, derived in part from the bishop himself, who perhaps found the doctrinaire Calvinism expounded by Norwich’s godly preachers increasingly unpalatable. Either way, in light of this controversy over the workings of God’s grace, it is interesting that Freke allowed himself to be fêted by the leading Catholics of his see, like Sir Thomas Cornwallis. Two of the bishop’s servants were even reported to have attended mass, one of the men allegedly proclaiming in a loud voice that ‘he had as lieffe hear a dogge barke as Mr More preach’, a comment that may have reflected a deeper dislike of the ‘Apostle of Norwich’s’ rigid predestinarian teaching within the Freke household.37 Freke’s first moves to subdue the Norfolk ministry came in the wake of his primary diocesan visitation held during the summer of 1576.38 Having failed to adhere to ceremonies prescribed by the Prayer Book, nine preachers with Norwich connections – including John More and Thomas Robartes, along with two petty canons with benefices in the city, Richard Crick and Richard Dowe – were suspended.39 Also singled out was George Leedes, rector of Holt.40 In addition, Richard Gawton, Vincent Goodwyn and John Mapes are known to have held country livings at Stratton St Mary, Maltby with Wissingset and Bramstone with Cawston respectively, while William Harte 37 A parte of a register, p. 394; Hassell Smith, Country and Court, pp. 213–16, for Freke’s associations with Catholic gentry; PRO, SP 15/25/119, fo. 282v. 38 Puritan Movement, pp. 203–4. 39 The ministers’ names are derived from two extant copies of their original petition. The first, among the Yelverton manuscripts, is signed by John More, Richard Crick, Thomas Robartes, George Leedes, Richard Gawton and William Harte, BL, Add MS 48101, fo. 134r. The second copy, attached to a later puritan survey of the ministry, repeats these signatures, with the exception of Richard Gawton, who is replaced by Richard Dowe, Seconde Parte, I, p. 146. To these seven can be added Vincent Goodwyn and John Mapes, who both signed a submission to the bishop in 1578: BL. Add MS 48073, fo. 373r, Seconde Parte, I, p. 146. Crick had served as Parkhurst’s chaplain, but was suspended by the bishop in 1573. For Crick and Dowe’s careers, see Collinson et al. (eds), Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, pp. 196–8, 203–4. 40 Leedes had served as chaplain at St Stephen’s, Norwich, during the 1560s, having preached before the corporation in 1561, see NRO, ANW 1/4, liber cleri, 1563; ANW 1/5, liber cleri, 1566–7; CA, 1551–67, fo. 228r; C. Linnel, Some East Anglian Clergy (London, 1961), p. 45.

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(or Harvie’s), cure within Norwich diocese has proved more difficult to trace.41 Problems in identifying Harte (or Harvie’s) living stem from an erroneous transcription of his forename in the two manuscript copies of the ministers’ original petition. For William Harte we should read Robert Harvie – given as a ‘preacher’ at Great Yarmouth at the time of Freke’s visitation – but who as R. H. wrote a suitably angst-ridden letter to the bishop in 1576 charging him with manslaughter for having ‘plucked out these Preachers’, whereby ‘upon you may come the blood of all them which died for want of food of the word’ in the city of Norwich.42 The Norfolk ministers did not tamely submit. Contesting their suspensions, seven of the nine – More, Robartes, Crick, Dowe, Leedes, Gawton and Harvie – petitioned the Privy Council to lament the putting down of, on their count, nineteen or twenty exercises across the county, calling for their reinstatement. However, touching Prayer Book ceremonies, the petitioners remained adamant. Although stating their willingness to yield to the sovereign, they exclaimed that to offer up full conformity ‘must needes be to prefer the ordinance of man before the worde of God’, imploring the queen to Reform all offending rites ‘considering the synne in the severe urging of them’.43 Even if she saw the petition, such remonstration was unlikely to sway Elizabeth. Nevertheless, the lobbying campaign continued, as Patrick Collinson has pointed out, through the likely agency of Sir William Heydon of Baconsthorpe and Holt – who was rumoured by his enemies to be an Anabaptist – and Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, the Lord Keeper’s son by his first marriage, who maintained John More in his household after the preacher’s suspension.44 But it took two years for any action to be taken on the ministers’ behalf. After some timely intervention by Burghley on the occasion of a royal progress through East Anglia in August 1578, a carefully drafted submission signed by More, Crick, Robartes, Goodwyn, Dowe, Leedes and Mapes, acknowledging the ceremonies in that ‘they are so farre tolerable’, was presented to Freke.45 Burghley’s influence is evident from his amendments to the working paper, extant among his files. Collinson has interpreted this document as representing something of a fudge, in offering the preachers a limited subscription to the Prayer Book, at which the bishop reportedly 41 NRO, DN REG/13/19, fo. 182v, 166v; BL, Lansd MS 443, fo. 172v. Gawton, Goodwyn and Mapes had already proved contumacious over the surplice, Parkhurst, Letter Book, pp. 219–21. 42 Browne, Memorials, p. 21 for the identification of Harvie; A parte of a register, p. 368. 43 BL Add MS 48101, fo. 133v. 44 Puritan Movement, p. 203; Stiffkey Papers, I, p. 176, Stiffkey Papers, II, p. 8. Heydon also presented George Leedes to Holt rectory in August 1583, NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 93r. For Bacon’s importance as a patron of godly learning, see A. Hassell Smith, ‘ “ Puritanism” and “Neighbourhood”: a Case Study in Late 16th and Early 17th Century Norfolk’, in E. Royle (ed.), Regional Studies in the History of Religion in Britain Since the Later Middle Ages (Hull, 1984), pp. 81–93. 45 Three copies of the submission survive in BL, Add MS 48073, fo. 373r; PRO, SP 12/126/45; Seconde Parte, I, p. 146.

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‘stormeth’. Burghley hoped to bury the issue. Under his guiding hand, the ministers’ sterner objections were toned down to avoid offending the bishop: for example, against the contention that some ceremonies ‘have been brought into the Church since the time of the Apostles and might by public authority be altered’, was added ‘yet none ought’. Further references to ‘corruptions and imperfections’ in the liturgy were crossed through.46 At any length, Freke was pressed into restoring and then granting a preaching licence to each of the seven ministers, on the understanding that they were not to question the ceremonies publicly in their sermons. Even so, this did not prevent More and his colleagues from compiling five points of controversy touching the Prayer Book. They raised the matter with Archbishop Grindal – whom they hoped would be a sympathetic party – but who in turn ruled obedience to the ‘meaninge delivered’ in the Prayer Book, advising the preachers not to stick to their ‘owne imaginations and fancies’. Freke threatened to suspend the refractory clerics a second time. This dispute was brought before the Privy Council in the spring of 1580, which in turn held the bishop to his agreement not to restrain the Norfolk ministers, letting More and his colleagues off the hook.47 In the event, More avoided testing his scruples over the liturgy. While reinstated as the preacher at St Andrew’s, responsibility for conducting common prayer was assigned to the chaplain, Robert Lyneacre.48 But use of the surplice continued to be flouted. Enquiries made during the archdeacon of Norwich’s visitation in 1587 revealed that St Andrew’s did not even possess the vestment.49 Thomas Robartes adopted a similar evasive tactic to More. Unable to regain his living at St Clement’s, he continued to reside in the parish as a preacher until his death in 1584, probably under the sponsorship of Alderman John Aldrich, who remembered Robartes in his will, and whose son Henry witnessed Robartes’s testament. Robartes’s ministry was shared with the rector, John Morgan. A moderate critic of the prescribed liturgy, Morgan remained on friendly terms with Robartes, being on hand to witness his will.50 Another of the seven suspended clerics, Vincent Goodwyn, found 46

Puritan Movement, p. 204; Seconde Parte, I, p. 146; HMC, Salisbury MSS, II, p. 229. Seconde Parte, I, pp. 146–7; PRO, SP 12/126/45; APC, 1578–81, p. 437, 4 Apr 1580. 48 Blomefield, IV, p. 301; NRO, ANW 1/8, liber cleri 1581. More’s immediate replacement at St Andrew’s in 1576, Mr Holland, was not well received in the parish, being accused of teaching false doctrine, which ‘betrayed the word’, Stiffkey Papers I, pp. 256–7. Was Holland the chaplain who clashed with Richard Gawton? In 1591, the corporation voted to augment More’s stipend with profits from a lease at Heatheld, for ‘his tyme in taking paynes and travell to study to preache and teache gods word diligently and paynefully in this city’, NRO, NCR Case 16c/5, Assembly Minute Book, 1585–1613, fo. 94r, 22 Nov 1591. 49 NRO, ANW 3/1, comperta, 1587. Robert Lyneacre too contested the surplice: Seconde Parte, I, p. 244. 50 After his suspension Robartes was succeeded at St Clement’s by John Sate in 1577 and then by John Morgan, who resigned in 1588, NRO, DN REG/14/20, fos 12v, 144r. For Robartes’s role as preacher, see PRO, PROB 11/64, fo. 208, will of John Aldrich, proved in 1582 and NRO, NCC 326 Bate, will of Thomas Robartes, proved in 1584. For John Morgan’s nonconformity, see Seconde Parte, I, p. 244. 47

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employment as a stipendiary preacher in Great Yarmouth. However, throughout the remainder of Freke’s episcopate, he had difficulty in procuring a benefice, the bishop going out of his way in 1583 to refuse Goodwyn institution to the vicarage of Cley-next-the-Sea, in Sir William Heydon’s gift. Goodwyn had to wait for a change in episcopal administration in 1585 before being admitted to this cure.51 Other Norfolk pastors at variance with Freke – namely Richard Gawton and Richard Dowe – went further afield; Gawton eventually re-emerged in the capital, while Dowe followed his calling to Stratford St Mary on the Suffolk side of the Stour Valley, where he resumed his contact with Richard Crick. Crick had been installed as lecturer less than two miles away at East Bergholt in 1580. Two years later, both men became participants in the now-famous clerical conference, convened across the River Stour at Dedham under the auspices of another émigré from Norwich, Edmund Chapman.52 Nevertheless, despite the depletion in its ranks, Norfolk’s teaching circle did not lose its potency when contesting aspects of ecclesiastical authority. In October 1583, John More and his brethren rose to meet another challenge to their vocation from Archbishop Whitgift’s three articles, which were pressed upon Norwich diocese with the added clout of a metropolitical visitation of the see held a month later in November. These enjoined full subscription to the Royal Supremacy, the Prayer Book, the ordinal and the Articles of Religion. But what unsettled both Presbyterians and moderate nonconformists was the second article, which required assent to episcopal government and the liturgy as containing nothing contrary to the word of God.53 The demand for full endorsement of the Prayer Book was designed to strike at tender consciences. In Norfolk, a response was soon forthcoming, John More heading a list of sixty-three like-minded clergy – including Thomas Robartes, George Leedes and Vincent Goodwyn – who were resolved not to subscribe. Under pressure from the Privy Council, Whitgift was forced to accept subscription to a modified form of the second article.54 In any event – from the perspective of Norfolk’s preaching fraternity – a calming influence was shortly to arrive in the person of Edmund Scambler, who in January 1585 was translated from Peterborough to Norwich following Bishop Freke’s departure for the see of Worcester. Scambler’s historical reputation stands in contrast to his predecessor’s. Although not a former exile, he is thought of as having godly cachet for 51 NRO, DN REG/14/20, fos 92v, 123r. Goodwyn died in 1606 as ‘minister of the worde of God in Cley’, NRO, NCC 193 Bowrne. 52 Collinson et al. (eds), Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, pp. 192–6, 196–8, 203–4. 53 NRO, DN ACT/18/21; K. Fincham, ‘Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 130–1, discusses the impact of these articles from a wider diocesan perspective. 54 Seconde Parte, I, p. 244; Puritan Movement, pp. 243–72.

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having served – on John Foxe’s account – as the first pastor to an ‘underground’ Protestant congregation in Marian London, a claim that Brett Usher has shown to be dubious.55 As bishop of Peterborough in the 1570s, Scambler had been an enthusiastic supporter of prophesyings. However, as Bill Sheils has pointed out, his final years in Peterborough saw Scambler at increasing loggerheads with many godly ministers over enforcing Whitgift’s Three Articles. The modified subscription brokered by the Privy Council removed a source of friction with the teaching circles of his new see. Moreover, unlike Freke, Scambler was to prove far less indulgent to the Catholic recusants of Norfolk and Suffolk, a point that was to find favour with a range of Protestant opinion in Norwich diocese. Puritan clergy had much to hope for from their new bishop.56 In dedicating John More’s posthumous A table from the beginning of the world to Scambler in 1593, More’s literary executor, the Sabbatarian controversialist Nicholas Bownd, looked to his new diocesan to swell the ministry with ‘many more such Mores’ to advance the Gospel.57 Indeed, Scambler had found an outlet for the ‘Apostle of Norwich’s’ talents. In line with a wider national initiative to improve the vocational training of the parish ministry, Scambler set up a diocesan commission into clerical standards in 1589. Occupying places on the commission we find both More and his fellow nonconformist George Leedes. Inquiries were to be conducted according to ten articles, each of which was designed to test for overall literacy and knowledge of the Scriptures by insisting that incumbents make notes on selected passages for inspection. Clerics found deficient in Latin were to purchase copies of Calvin’s Institutes and Peter Martyr’s Common Places in English. Negligence in study was to be proceeded against by ecclesiastical censure, while the commissioners, ironically for More and Leedes, were to ensure that incumbents observed the set forms stipulated by the Prayer Book.58 The choice of commissioners was shrewd. By using professed nonconformists to police nonconformity, the bishop hoped to channel the energies of forward Protestantism behind his episcopate, smoothing over potentially divisive issues relating to ceremonies, in the pursuit of the common aim of securing a potent, religiously sound preaching ministry. By virtue of his new role, John More was encouraged to shelve his objections to the liturgy.59 55

Le Neve, Fasti VII, pp. 37, 106; B. Usher, ‘“ In a Time of Persecution”: New Light on the Secret Protestant Congregation of Marian London’, in D. Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 240–3. 56 W. J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, 1558–1619, Northamptonshire Record Society, 30 (1979), pp. 7, 24–5, 49. 57 John More, A table from the beginning of the world to this day, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’. 58 NRO, DN SUN/3, fo. 186. The articles, without the names of Scambler’s commissioners, are printed in W. P. M. Kennedy (ed.), Elizabethan Episcopal Administration (3 vols, London, 1924), III, pp. 255–6. For the Norwich inquiry within the context of similar vocational schemes in other dioceses, see K. Fincham, ‘Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, pp. 134–5. 59 Under Scambler, More regained the chaplaincy at St Andrew’s: NRO, ANW 1/10, liber cleri, 1590.

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Certainly, we know that the minister fulfilled his teaching responsibilities with zeal during the summer of 1589, causing a degree of friction in Norwich’s clerical circles in the process. One incumbent, Thomas Yowle (or Yould), a petty canon and chaplain at St Martin at Oak, disliked his integrity being questioned by the puritan investigators. Railing that ‘the preachers be dolts’ and that ‘Mr More and others are not worthy to carry their books after them’, Yowle’s ‘unseemly and revyling words’ against his fellow ministers landed him in gaol by order of the mayor, Christopher Layer.60 However, Scambler’s aim to tie godly ministers to ecclesiastical administration backfired when two commissioners were deprived for balking at the surplice and the sign of the cross in baptism. John Burgess, rector of St Peter Hungate, and John Harrison, chaplain of St Martin at Palace, along with a third Norwich parson, Rowland Nutt, rector of St Michael at Plea, fell foul of the High Commission’s round-up of nonconformists amid the hunt for Martin Marprelate conducted during the autumn and winter of 1589.61 Why were these three singled out for censure? Indeed, why did the High Commissioners fix their inquisitive gaze upon Norwich’s ministry in the first place? A likely explanation has to do with the mocking tone of Martin Marprelate. Goading Whitgift into locating the source of the libelling, Martin dared the archbishop’s pursuivants to ‘go into Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk’, dropping John More’s name among other ‘very seditious men’ worthy of examination for their part in the Marprelate press.62 More’s implication gave a pretext for a harrowing of Norwich’s clergy. Failing to appear before the Ecclesiastical Commission and being declared contumacious, Burgess, Harrison and Nutt initially looked to the good office of their diocesan ‘to sett us to our work again in the Lords harvest’. However, Scambler was unable to secure the ministers’ reinstatement.63 John Burgess eventually left Norwich and was instituted to Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire, upon accepting a modified form of subscription from William Chaderton, bishop of Lincoln. He became an agitator at the time of the Hampton Court Conference, before seeking refuge in Leyden.64 John 60

Yowle was a newcomer to the city’s ministry, having been installed as a petty canon in 1589, Chapter Minutes, p. 21; NRO, MCB/12, 1587–95, p. 308, 6 Aug 1589. For Christopher Layer’s religious outlook, see below, pp. 82–3. 61 NRO, DN SUN/3, fo. 186. The suspensions are referred to in a petition from the three ministers to Scambler, dated 1590, BL, Add MS 48064, fos 70r–1r. For Burgess’s appointment to Hungate, see NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 193v, and for Harrison’s incumbency of St Martin’s, see NRO, ANW 1/10, liber cleri, 1590. Rowland Nutt had held St Michael at Plea since 1586, NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 134v. 62 W. Pierce (ed.), The Marprelate Tracts 1588, 1589 (1911), p. 357; Puritan Movement, pp. 394–6, 403–16, for the background to the Marprelate libels. 63 BL, Add MS 48064, fo. 70r. 64 DNB, ‘John Burgess’; William Covell, A brief answer unto certaine reasons by way of an apologie delivered to . . . the L Bishop of Lincoln, by Mr John Burgess (1606), STC 5880, p. 40. A recent study of Burgess’s career is given in P. Lake, ‘Moving the Goal Posts? Modified Subscription and the Construction of Conformity in the Early Stuart Church’, in Lake and Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, pp. 179–205.

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Harrison conformed, but suffered a second suspension after Hampton Court, having gained promotion to the north Norfolk living of Braiseworth, while Rowland Nutt failed to regain St Michael at Plea, although he remained in Norwich as a preacher at St Andrew’s, dying in the parish in 1596.65 Nutt had been presented to St Michael’s by two eminent citizens, and residents of the parish: Thomas Peck and Richard Ferrour. Peck served as mayor twice in 1573 and 1586, while his patronage of Nutt in March 1586 was not without purpose given his determination to make Norwich a more sober and godly place.66 During his 1586 mayoralty, he turned his attention to the city’s alehouses. Such ‘tippling houses’ were regarded as hotbeds of misrule stuffed full with ‘all kynde of evill disposed persons’, some congregating ‘into streete corners’, eating, drinking, playing at ‘unlawful games and pastimes’, to the ‘highe displeasure of Almighty God and the evill example of others’. Peck’s solution was to restrict future alehouse licences to freemen. Only those deemed responsible citizens were permitted to open hostelries, thereby ensuring that the only drinking in town was to be done in respectable inns. But Peck went further in a bid to curb drunkenness by prohibiting the sale of ‘double beer and strong ale’. This ban was to be reinforced by ‘one honest and meeke person’ assigned as official beer taster in each petty ward – an impractical scheme given the relative strengths of ‘strong’ beer, which was promptly repealed by the next mayor.67 However, Mayor Peck continued to monitor the goings-on in Norwich’s inns. In February 1587, in the wake of the Babington Plot, he initiated a thorough search of outsiders lodging in the city’s taverns, which uncovered three nefarious ‘aliens’, papists and traitors, whose examinations before the mayor were promptly dispatched to Sir Francis Walsingham.68 Presumably, Alderman Peck’s crackdown on debilitating drink – and papist traitors – received Reverend Nutt’s vocal commendation. At any length, the 1589 suspensions of Nutt, Burgess and Harrison would not have been appreciated by the godly among the municipal elite.69 But these were not the only local ministers to be troubled. A fourth figure displaced at the time was William Burton, the vicar of Aylsham since November 1581, whose ebullient applause for the work of Norwich’s magistracy in setting forth the Gospel has already been noted.70 He played to a disgruntled civic audience by 65

K. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), p. 325. In the meantime, Harrison was hired to preach the corporation’s annual Rogationtide sermon in 1596, NRO, CA, 1589–1602, fo. 211v. For Nutt’s later career, see NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 194r and Blomefield, IV, p. 301. Preaching in 1633, John Stalham referred to Nutt’s former ministry at St Andrew’s, NRO DN DEP/41/46, fo. 568. 66 NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 134; Mayors of Norwich, pp. 61, 66. 67 NRO, AB/4, 1583–7, fo. 38v, 4 Nov 1586, fo. 40r, 8 Jan 1587, fo. 45r, 21 Aug 1587. 68 PRO, SP 12/198/4. 69 When drawing up his will in 1592, Alderman Peck remembered his ‘daughter’ Ursula Burgess. Was she related to the Reverend John Burgess? PRO, PROB 11/79, fo. 144v. 70 Uncertainty persists over Burton’s living. DNB, ‘William Burton’ states that he was employed as a master in the free school, Norwich, a position held jointly with the vicarage of Aylsham, where a

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expressing solidarity with his deprived brethren. Preaching at Christ Church in December 1589 – a sermon subsequently printed by Robert Waldegrave, publicist for the Elizabethan Presbyterian movement – Burton fulminated against ‘citations, admonitions, excommunications and other censures whatsoever [that] doe not proceed from a hatred of sinne’, but only from the Pharisees’ ‘stomack to revenge their own quarrels’. He then questioned whether refusal to wear the surplice, read every Collect or ‘make a leg at the name of Jesus’ was sufficient cause ‘to deny the minister his maintenance’. This was a sensitive issue to raise publicly in Norwich during the latter part of 1589, although Burton’s complaint reached a final crescendo, when citing Jeremiah 22: 2, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, O king of Judah’, he added that every minister of God ‘hath authoritie of the word to reprove the Prince’.71 The High Commission would have taken a dim view of such opinions, although whether or not this sermon alone sealed Burton’s fate is unknown. Indeed, according to his own account, he was hounded out of Norwich, the victim of a smear campaign by his enemies, who cited from documents allegedly implicating the minister in a Presbyterian network. In any event, Burton found refuge in the household of the Suffolk peer Henry, third Lord Wentworth.72 From there, he managed to resume his calling, as evidenced by his obtaining of a licence to preach throughout Bristol diocese from Bishop Richard Fletcher, to whom he dedicated a catechism published in 1591 Despite his reconciliation with episcopacy, Burton was not deterred from criticising ceremonies. In the same catechism that praised Fletcher for ‘building up of the Church of God’ in the city of Bristol, he counselled against bowing at the name of Jesus, insisting that ‘due reverence may be yeelded to our Saviour without any such outward ceremonie of kneeling or capping’. By the time these words appeared in print, Burton had assumed the vicarage of St Giles, Reading.73 The 1589 clamp-down on nonconformity in Norwich, followed by the death of John More in 1592, marked the end of an era for the city’s preaching ministry, with the godly among the borough elite striving to find a worthy replacement for their erstwhile Apostle. As described in the next chapter, during the 1590s, the ecclesiastical and civic authorities had to confront challenges from radical separatism in the city. In the meantime, William Burton was collated by Bishop Freke to Aylsham on 10 November 1581, NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 71r. This date tallies with the findings of ODNB, which states that Burton resigned several Berkshire cures in 1581. His name appears among the signatories against Whitgift’s articles in 1584, Seconde Parte, I, p. 244. 71 William Burton, A sermon preached in the cathedral church in Norwich, the xxi day of December 1589, ‘To the Reader’, sigs Av, Dr, B2v. For Robert Waldegrave, see Puritan Movement, pp. 391–2; W. J. Couper, Robert Waldegrave, King’s Printer for Scotland (Glasgow, 1916). 72 William Burton, Davids evidence of the assurance of Gods love (1592), STC 4170, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’. 73 DNB, ‘William Burton’; William Burton, Certain questions and answers concerning the knowledge of God (1591), STC 4167, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, pp. 11–12.

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successive bishops and godly magistrates alike looked to establish energetic preachers in Norwich capable of making appeals to Protestant unity. In 1599, the St Andrew’s trustees achieved this end by presenting Robert Hill. Remaining chaplain and public preacher at St Andrew’s until 1603, Hill was a graduate of John More’s college, Christ’s, Cambridge, who in 1589 migrated to St John’s during the mastership of the noted puritan William Whitaker. Hill’s later ministry at St Martin-in-the-Fields and St Bartholomew Exchange, London, has been studied extensively by Julia Merritt.74 In particular, Merritt has highlighted Hill’s road to respectability as a populariser of the works of the great doyen of English Calvinism, William Perkins, whose treatise A Golden Chaine Hill translated in 1590 at the author’s behest, revising the text as a catechism in 1612.75 However, Hill’s future role as an emollient, pastorally sensitive figure in the context of Jacobean Westminster and London should not mask his earlier radicalism. While at Cambridge in 1589, he had been active in the campaign organised by Henry Alvey, a fellow of St John’s, and Hill’s future father-in-law, on behalf of the imprisoned separatist Francis Johnson. Six years later, in 1595, Hill became embroiled in another controversy surrounding the anti-predestinarian teachings of William Barret.76 As befitting of a disciple of Perkins, Hill put his hand to a petition condemning Barret, which was again drafted by Alvey at St John’s. Also around 1595 – 6, he led an attack on the anti-Calvinist John Overall. At the time, Overall – who became bishop of Norwich from September 1618 until his death in May 1619 – held the vicarage of Epping. Hill took exception to a sermon preached by Overall to his troubled Epping flock. Apparently members of the congregation were convinced that they did not number among the elect and were damned; although offering words of comfort, Overall stressed that Christ had died for all mankind, not only the elect, reprobation being a punishment for sin. Hill, then present, found this last 74 J. Merritt, ‘The Pastoral Tightrope: a Puritan Pedagogue in Jacobean London’, in T. Cogswell et al. (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 143–61. Confusion exists over the precise dates of Hill’s incumbency at St Andrew’s. Blomefield, IV, p. 301, gives Hill as John More’s immediate successor in 1591, a date also implied in Henry Holland’s Hervologia Anglicia, p. 210. However, his name first appears in the Norwich deanery libri cleri for 1599, NRO, ANW 1/15, where Hill is described as both preacher and chaplain of St Andrew’s. He was present for the archdeacon of Norwich’s visitation on 25 Mar 1602/3, but disappears from the libri cleri thereafter, indicating his move to St Martin-in-the-Fields later in 1603: ANW 3/10. Between 1599 and 1602, he preached the corporation’s Rogationtide sermon, NRO, CA, 1589–1602, fos 265v, 274r, 291v. 75 Merritt, ‘The Pastoral Tightrope’, pp. 146–7, 154–6. When editing William Perkins’s Satans sophistrie answered by our saviour Christ (1596), STC 19747.5, Hill recalled his twenty-year acquaintance with Perkins, noting ‘I at his request made the first fruits of his labour to speak English’. For these fruits, see William Perkins, A Golden Chaine, or a description of theologie containing the order of the causes of salvation and damnation, trans. Robert Hill (1590), STC 19657 and the revised 1612 edition, STC 19664. 76 Merritt, ‘The Pastoral Tightrope’, pp. 144–5; PRO, PROB 11/142, fo. 182v, will of Robert Hill, proved in 1623, in which Hill bequeathed £10 to his father-in-law, Henry Alvey.

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point anathema and promptly denounced Overall’s errors to the bishop of London, Richard Fletcher.77 His confrontation with Overall still fresh in his mind, Hill’s thoughts on the question of assurance reached print in 1596 in his first extant published work – The Contents of Scripture – which was essentially an abridgement of the Bible supplied with a pointed Calvinist gloss in the form of aphorisms selected from Calvin’s Institutes.78 For those unsure of the path to salvation, Hill’s next published work furnished an equally uncompromising exposition of predestinarian views. Adapting De Natura Dei by the Heidelberg theologian, Hieronymous Zanchius, for an English readership as Life Everlasting, or the True Knowledge of one Jehovah, three Elohim and Jesus Immanuel in 1601, Hill provided an exposition of what has come to be termed ‘Covenant’ or ‘federal’ theology. Belief in God’s predestination to election and reprobation remained the basic touchstone. However, to help confront uncertainties of faith, an emphasis was placed upon prayer and the performances of good works as a means of reaffirming God’s Covenant of grace. Such works could not sway God’s predestination. Rather, they lent substance to it, ‘notwithstanding we are holpen by them both to the obtaining of the ende and other effects of predestination’, for ‘we are bidden to pray one for another’ because ‘God promiseth that he will heare such praiers for the godly brethren’.79 Such emphasis upon Christian duty to fulfil God’s Covenant readily appealed to the godly of St Andrew’s, who were assured of their the elect status. Here, two members of the congregation in particular – Thomas Layer and Francis Rugge – probably made the initial contact with Hill, who in turn dedicated a collection of sermons written by his successor, Thomas Newhouse, to the two city fathers in 1612.80 Both Layer and Rugge belonged to the family network around John Aldrich and Thomas Sotherton (Fig. 3.1). Elder brother of Christopher Layer – and brother-in-law to John Aldrich and Thomas Sotherton – Thomas enjoyed a distinguished career in civic politics, serving as mayor in 1576, 1585 and 1595 and burgess for the city in 1586, dying at the grand old age of eighty-six in 1614 when he charged his wife to execute his will ‘for soe I am persuaded she will doe, for that I know she have the feare of God before her eyes, for thanks be to God the giver thereof’.81 Christopher and Thomas Layer were members of the

77

CUL, Gg. 1.29, fos 119r–22v and dated in Merritt, ‘The Pastoral Tightrope’, pp. 152–3. Robert Hill, The contents of scripture: containing the sum of every chapter of the old and new Testament (1596), STC 13478. 79 J. S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England (Oxford, 1970), ch. 5; Robert Hill, Life everlasting, or the true knowledge of one Jehovah, three Elohim and Jesus Immanuel (Cambridge, 1601), pp. 594–5. 80 Thomas Newhouse, A learned and fruitfull sermon preached at Christ Church in Norwich (1611), STC 18494, ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ by Robert Hill. Layer and Rugge were rated as the highest tax payers on moveable goods in St Andrew’s parish for the 1598 lay subsidy, PRO, E 179/152/497. 81 Mayors of Norwich, pp. 61–3; HP 1558–1603, II, pp. 443–4; PRO, PROB 11/124, fo. 194v. 78

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Norwich Merchant Adventurers’ Company. With company interests abroad came business contacts – and common religious aspirations – with émigré Protestants from the Low Countries, Thomas Layer leaving the modest donation of 40s apiece to Norwich’s Dutch and Walloon congregations.82 Like his patron, Robert Hill also saw himself as belonging to a wider international Reformed movement. He cultivated friendships with some illustrious settlers from across the North Sea, including Francis Bertie, a founder member of the stranger church in London, as well as the absolutist theorist Adrian Saravia, whose widow Hill married.83 Alderman Francis Rugge also counted among the godly. mayor in 1587, 1598 and 1603, and member for the city during the 1589 parliament, Rugge was also close to Norwich’s Protestant founding fathers, having married Alderman John Aldrich’s daughter Anne.84 Although a well-respected Calvinist pedagogue with connections among the Norwich elite, Hill it seems had his foes in St Andrew’s. Hostility to his ministry may have derived from Hill’s avowed ‘puritanism’ in the sense that he looked to advance the Reformation, calling upon Sir Peter Fretchville – the knight of the shire for his native Derbyshire in 1601 – to ‘speake for such good things, as may further Religion’ in the coming parliament. Indeed, Hill had scruples over complying with the unreformed aspects of the liturgy. At least, in March 1603, he was examined by the archdeacon of Norwich upon the presentment that he had refused to conduct the entire service according to the Book of Common Prayer, omitting parts ‘by reason he doth expound the scriptures’. Hill did ‘not usually weare the surplisse’ and failed to follow the Prayer Book catechism. Partly, the threat of ecclesiastical censure may have forced Hill to make the timely move to St Martin-in-the-Fields, a parish within the political hub of the vill of Westminster in 1603. On the other hand, his impressive publishing record perhaps ensured that he was head-hunted to fill St Martin’s prestigious pulpit.85 Either way, Hill did not sever his Norwich links entirely, remembering his time in the city and being on hand to supply details of John More’s career to Henry Holland – Hill’s literary associate – for Holland’s hagiography of the minister. A promoter of Perkins’s works, Hill also helped commit the Apostle of Norwich’s name to posterity.86 Moreover, Hill used his reputation to endorse published works by confrères from his former city, as for example, his

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PRO, E 122/196/7; PROB 11/124, fo. 192v. PRO, PROB 11/118, fo. 60r, will of Francis Bertie; A. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth Century London (Oxford, 1986), p. 122; DNB, ‘Robert Hill’; J. P. Somerville, Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (Harlow, 1986), pp. 11–12 for Saravia. 84 Mayors of Norwich, p. 64; HP 1558–1603, III, p. 307. 85 Hill, Life everlasting, p. 690; NRO, ANW 3/10, comperta, 1602–3. 86 Holland, Hervologia Anglicia, p. 210; Merritt, ‘The Pastoral Tightrope’, p. 151. 83

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successor at St Andrew’s, Thomas Newhouse, who like Hill was an alumnus of Christ’s, Cambridge.87 Another Norwich minister to benefit from Hill’s backing was Foulke Robartes, rector of St Clement’s since 1602. Affixing fulsome dedicatory verse to Robartes’s The Revenue of the Gospel is Tithes in 1613, Hill advanced Robartes’s status among Norwich’s godly, to the extent that he was appointed to hold a prestigious weekday corporation lecture at St Clement’s on Wednesdays in 1615. We shall encounter Robartes again.88 Whatever Hill’s reasons for leaving Norwich, his ministry there marked the beginning of the high tide of Calvinist teaching in the city – sealed by Thomas Newhouse – under whose charge St Andrew’s pulpit became a platform for such topics as ‘the manner of Gods decree concerning Election and Reprobation’ and ‘how the child of God is neither subject to the dominion of sinne, nor total defection from grace’. These sermons were edited by Newhouse’s protégé Robert Gallard in 1614, who noted ‘how lawfull and meet a thing it is to preach and publish the doctrine of predestination’.89 By the middle years of James I’s reign, the evangelical ministry settled in the previous century, which had endured a turbulent relations with the ecclesiastical authorities from the mid-1570s until the 1590s, came of age under the pastoral charge of John Jegon, bishop of Norwich from February 1603 until his death in March 1618. Throughout his lengthy tenure of the see, Jegon remained committed to a broad evangelical agenda. Nicholas Bownd, who in 1611 took over from the late Thomas Newhouse as public preacher at St Andrew’s, had earlier praised Jegon’s ‘godly proceedings’ in enhancing the ministry by ‘stopping up the passage unto al idle shepherds and hirelings, who seek the fleece and not the flock’. More recently, Patrick Collinson has seconded Bownd’s good opinion, dubbing Jegon ‘as representative a Jacobean bishop as one could hope to meet’.90 While Jegon stood for firm episcopal government, it was by his guiding hand that the close alliance between magistrates and ministers in ordering city affairs reached its apotheosis with the promotion of John Yates to St Andrew’s in 1616. Yates was manoeuvred into the cure by Jegon as an able apologist for episcopacy (below, pages 104–7). But Yates was keen to justify the moral rectitude of civic magistracy as well, dedicating his catechism to 87 Newhouse, A learned and fruitfull sermon preached at Christ Church in Norwich, ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’. Newhouse tutored the future master of Sydney Sussex College, Samuel Ward, who considered his mentor overly precise, see M. Knappen, Two Elizabethan Diaries (Gloucester, Mass., 1966), pp. 103, 107, 113. Newhouse officiated as preacher at St Andrew’s, the chaplaincy being held by Thomas Mellis. See NRO, ANW 3/12, 3/17a; CA, 1603–25, fos 29v, 49v, 69v, 106v, 127r; NCC 135 Stywarde, will of Thomas Newhouse, proved in 1611. 88 Foulke Robartes, The revenue of the gospel is tithes (1613), STC 21069; NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 2; CA, 1603–25, fo. 241v. Robartes’s career can be followed below, pp. 232–4, 242. 89 Thomas Newhouse, Certaine sermons preached by T. Newhouse set forth by R. Gallard (1614), pp. 1, 46, sig. A3v. For Gallard, see below, pp. 103–4, 118–20, 132, 171. 90 Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 38; Nicholas Bownd, The holy exercise of fasting (Cambridge, 1604), STC 3438, sigs ¶3r–4iiiir; Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, p. 78.

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George Birch, mayor in 1621 and one of Yates’s St Andrew’s flock, so as to exalt the ‘peace powdered with piety’ found in his adoptive city. Yates called upon Birch to exert a tight reign on city government. As such Birch was admonished to ‘cleanse . . . the Augean stables of our drunken Taverns and Tippling Houses, with all the vaults of professed filthiness’, by executing laws with ‘strictness and resolution’, so that ‘God shall bless the same with happy success, if otherwise God will suffer wickedness to punish itself’.91 Significantly, Alderman Birch had been a zealous closer of unlicensed hostelries during his mayoralty in 1621. For example, when one John Cooper was brought before the mayor’s court in July 1621 for running an illicit alehouse, upon urging the magistrates that ‘if he might not be permitted to tipple’ he would be forced to convey his wife and children ‘to Mr Mayor to be kept’, Birch promptly sent Cooper to the city Bridewell.92 John Yates was a conformist ‘establishment’ cleric. However, with his arrival in Jacobean Norwich, godly magistrates, ministers and the ecclesiastical hierarchy had found common cause to elevate the devout tone of city life in line with an evangelical Protestant faith. The Calvinist tradition planted from the 1560s proved a redoubtable force against novel forms of divinity and worship introduced during the 1620s and 1630s. While the first two decades of James I’s reign were years of calm in relations between ecclesiastical and civic government in Norwich, it would be misleading to depict this phase of the city’s religious history as devoid of underlying confessional tension. Magistrates, ministers and bishops all took fright from a tenacious Brownist movement about the city from the 1580s. The survival of radical separatism also heightened royal suspicions of loyalties to the magisterial Reformation in East Anglia, which in turn prompted James to back the antiCalvinist reaction unleashed in Norwich diocese by the anti-Calvinist Bishop Harsnett in the 1620s. The shape of this undercurrent of dissent now warrants our attention.

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John Yates, A model of divinitie catechistically composed (1623), STC 26086, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’; Mayors of Norwich, p. 75. For the 1624 lay subsidy, Birch was rated the highest tax payer on goods in St Andrew’s, PRO, E 179/153/583. 92 NRO, MCB/15, 1615–24, fos 351r–v, 25 June 1621, fo. 378r, 15 Dec 1621.

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Chapter Five AN UNDERCURRENT OF DISSENT, 1580 – c.1620

While the Norwich ministers’ reluctance to comply with contested rites and ceremonies during the 1580s had vexed Edmund Freke, both the bishop and his successors were soon to be alerted to more radical challenges to episcopal authority. At their most extreme, such dissent amounted to instances of heresy. Indeed, between 1579 and 1589, Norwich became the backdrop for proceedings against four individuals who held a variety of heterodox beliefs, with each case ending in a burning. The first concerned Matthew Hamont, a ploughwright of possible Dutch descent from Hethersett. Examined before Bishop Freke for espousing Arian ideas, which denied the divinity of Christ and rejected the New Testament as a fable, he had courted attention for speaking slanderous words against the queen. Refusing to recant, he was committed in April 1579 to the mayor, Sir Robert Wood. Having been honoured with a knighthood during the royal progress of the previous year, Wood was compelled by Hamont’s outburst against Elizabeth to sentence him to lose his ears before committing him to be dispatched in the castle ditch on 20 May. Proceedings against Hamont sit uneasily with Muriel McClendon’s argument for the forbearance of Tudor Norwich’s magistrates.1 An eye-witness account of the burning was later provided in 1592 by the nonconformist minister William Burton, who was then anxious to demonstrate his own loyalty to the established church by denouncing heretics in print.2 Burton furnished details of two further heresy trials in the city. For maintaining similar Arian ideas, John Lewes and Peter Cole suffered the same fate as Hamont in the castle ditch in 1583 and 1587 respectively.3 Another

1

DNB, ‘Matthew Hamont’; BL, Lansd MS 981, fo. 161r; NRO, MCB/10, 1576–81, p. 386, 13 May 1579; Mayors of Norwich, pp. 59–60; Quiet Reformation, pp. 248–9, criticised in J. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), pp. 100–2. 2 William Burton, Davids evidence, or the assurance of gods love (1592) STC 4170, p. 137, and see above, pp. 79–80. Hamont’s trial was also recorded in John More, A table from the beginning of the world to this day (1593), STC 18074, p. 225. 3 Burton, Davids evidence, p. 137; DNB, ‘Matthew Hamont’, which gives Cole as a tanner of Ipswich. According to John More, Lewis was a ‘blasphemer’, while Cole was an ‘Arian Anabaptist’, A table from the beginning of the world, p. 225.

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AN UNDERCURRENT OF DISSENT, 1580–c.1620

Norfolk inhabitant to go to the stake, this time in January 1589, was Francis Kett. A former fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a nephew of the famous – or infamous – rebel leader Robert Kett of Wymondham, Kett’s heterodoxy was classed by Burton with the Arianism of Hamont, Lewes and Cole. However, Burton singled out Kett’s opinions as ‘more monstrous than his predecessors’. Doubtless such condemnation owed not a little to Kett’s pre-eminence at Cambridge, where he had graduated MD in 1581, although Burton was keenly aware of the doctor’s fall from the true Protestant path as reflected in his earlier writings.4 At least, publishing two works in 1585, Kett had depicted himself as a pillar of the established church. The first, prefaced with an elaborate dedication to Elizabeth, offered an entirely orthodox – if somewhat ecstatic – exposition on the theology of grace, seeing how man shall be ‘rewarded according to his deedes eyther with eternall reproufe or els everlasting glorification’. As a loyal member of a reformed church, he followed this essay with proof of why the Pope was to be accounted the beast of Revelations, this time dedicated to Bishop John Ailmer.5 But by 1589 his theology had become shockingly eccentric; in particular, as Burton reported, Kett had maintained that Christ was ‘not God but a good man’ who had ‘suffered once for his owne sinnes’ to ‘suffer again for the sinnes of the world’ at his second resurrection. Needless to say, this idea departed from his previous belief that ‘Christ was ordained before the world [and] was made to our glorie’. Kett also fused such essentially Arian views with an apocalyptic millenarianism; thus any seeking salvation ‘must before he die go to Jerusalem’, where ‘Christ with his Apostles are now personally in Judea gathering of his church, that the faithfull should miraculously be preserved at Jerusalem with a wall of fire and be fed with Angels food from heaven’.6 Bishop Scambler shared Burton’s alarm at such utterances. Writing to Burghley, Scambler condemned Kett’s beliefs as unchristian, since they implied that God’s ‘new Covenant promised is not yet established’. John More was equally scandalised. For rejecting Christ’s Covenant, More attacked Kett as a ‘Jewish Arian’, duly noting the heretic’s death in his A table from the beginning of the world, published in 15937 Richard Bancroft echoed More’s appraisal. Preaching at Paul’s cross, he seized upon Kett’s execution to inveigh against all false prophets who would welcome the spiritual kingdom of Christ only with the ‘material Restoration of the earthly

4

NRO, MCB/12, 1587–95, p. 229, 15 Jan 1589; ODNB, ‘Francis Kett (c. 1547–1589)’; Burton, Davids evidence, p. 138. 5 Francis Kett, The glorious and beautifull garland of mans glorification (1585), STC 14945, ‘Epistle dedicatory’ and ch. 2; idem, An epistle sent to divers papists in England proving the pope to bee the beast in the 13 of the Revelations (1585), STC 14944.5, ‘Epistle dedicatory’, which refers to a third written work entitled ‘The Golden Closet and Key’ no longer extant. 6 Burton, Davids evidence, pp. 138–9; Kett, The glorious and beautifull garland, ch. 1. 7 PRO, SP 12/217/11, Scambler to Burghley, 7 Oct 1588, charging Kett according to fifteen articles, summarised in BL, Lansd MS 982, fo. 102r; More, A table from the beginning of the world, p. 225.

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Jerusalem’.8 Clearly Bancroft also had in mind other false prophets among his Presbyterian opponents. While Kett’s heterodox ideas sent shudders through the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the ranks of the godly alike, millenarian beliefs that true religion was to be sought beyond the confines of the established church represented a marked form of open dissent within East Anglia under Elizabeth. Continuing his diatribe, Burton turned to castigate ‘our English Donatists, our schismaticall Brownists, followers of Barrow and his crue’. Conceivably, Burton was writing from first-hand experience of encountering such separatists, who ‘once accounted highly of Gods ministers, now they call them murtherers and false prophets’, during his ministry in Norfolk in the 1580s.9 Any history of the Elizabethan church in Norwich that fails to acknowledge the impact of Brownism misses a key element in the city’s religious development. Yet the lingering presence of separatist groups about Norwich has been passed over by Muriel McClendon, who insists that the city’s magistrates were somehow unaware of the radical religious movement in their midst.10 As will be argued here, this was far from the case. Instead, the breakaway congregation first gathered under Robert Browne and Robert Harrison, laid the foundations for a tenacious separatist tradition, which stood to challenge episcopal authority in Norwich into James I’s reign. Robert Browne’s career is well-known. His evolving position on the nature of church government has been subjected to extensive study, although the activities of his putative followers in East Anglia have received comparatively less coverage.11 Exceptions include Joy Rowe’s examination of Suffolk separatists as well as John Craig’s account of Brownism amid the ‘stirs’ at Bury St Edmunds in the 1580s.12 However, much less has been done since the pioneering work of Champlin Burrage and Albert Peel in the 1910s and 1920s, to assess the rise, tribulations and long-term survival of the Brownist movement closer to its often supposed Norwich birthplace.13 A graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Robert Browne sealed his notoriety with his A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for any. Printed at

8

BL, Lansd MS 982, fo. 102v. Burton, Davids evidence, p. 139; idem, A sermon preached in the cathedral church in Norwich, the xxi day of December 1589 (1590), STC 4178, sig. Gr. Burton may have encountered separatists first hand if – as suggested above, p. 79, n70– he held the vicarage of Aylsham, a town associated with the early activities of the separatist Robert Harrison, from 1581. 10 Quiet Reformation, p. 249. 11 B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradition from the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford, 1971), ch. 3. 12 J. Rowe, ‘Some Suffolk Separatists and the Norwich Conventicle, 1588–1610’, in C. Rawcliffe et al. (eds), Counties and Communities: Essays in East Anglian History (Norwich, 1996), pp. 179–87; J. Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics: the Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 103–10. 13 C. Burrage, The Early English Dissenters (2 vols, Cambridge, 1912), I, pp. 187–9; A. Peel, The Brownists in Norfolk and Norwich Around 1580 (Cambridge, 1920), passim. 9

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Middleburg in 1582, Browne’s tract established the guiding principles for a gathered congregation – Independent of episcopal and magisterial authority – which was based upon his own experience of the Church organisation co-founded in 1580 with another Corpus Christi graduate, Robert Harrison. On his own testimony, Browne had developed strong feelings against episcopacy while moving in Richard Greenham’s godly circle at Dry Drayton.14 Already, at some point prior to 1580, he had advanced a ‘Congregationalist’ position that no one under Christ had sole authority over the Church, rather the meeting of ‘everie whole church, and of the elders therein, is above the Apostle, above the Prophet, the Evangelist, the Pastor, the Teacher and every particular Elder’.15 However, it was upon arriving in Norwich diocese in 1579, at the time of Bishop Freke’s drive for full clerical conformity, that Browne put his ecclesiology into practice. There Browne renewed his acquaintance with Robert Harrison, a former master of Aylsham grammar school upon the presentation of Mayor Thomas Peck and Alderman John Aldrich – two civic worthies at the heart of the St Clement’s parish – Corpus Christi connection – in September 1573.16 Harrison was also recommended to Bishop Parkhurst by two local pedagogues, Henry Bird and Stephan Lymbert.17 Headmaster of Norwich Grammar School, 1569–98, Lymbert had succeeded Bird to this post, while Bird – a returned Marian exile – became ‘reader of the divinity lecture’ at the cathedral church.18 Henry Bird was remembered among other ‘faithfull workmen in the Lords busynes’ in John Aldrich’s will. Bird’s joint assessment of Harrison as ‘very diligent’ by comparison with other candidates for the duties at Aylsham was in all likelihood shared by Alderman Aldrich and Mayor Peck. All of which renders as complete nonsense Muriel McClendon’s statement that Harrison was unknown to Norwich’s magistracy.19 At any length, Robert Harrison soon got into trouble for his nonconformity, when in December 1573, while acting as godfather to the son of John Allen of Aylsham, Harrison moved the town’s vicar not to use the sign of the cross during the baptism. Moreover, Harrison insisted upon making changes to the set rubric, answering in the first person plural instead of the prescribed first person singular. So in response to ‘Wilt thou be baptised’, he 14 A. Peel and L. H. Carlson (eds), The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, Elizabethan Nonconformists Texts, II (London, 1953), pp. 150–70. 15 See Browne’s, ‘A true and short declaration’, in ibid, p. 399. 16 Parkhurst, Letter Book, pp. 209–11; HP 1558–1603, I, p. 333. See above, pp. 47–7, 79, for Aldrich and Peck. 17 Parkhurst, Letter Book, pp. 210–11. 18 H. W. Saunders, A History of the Norwich Grammar School (Norwich, 1932), p. 274. Bird’s exile is noted in the 1563 edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, STC 11222, p. 1678, although he returned to Norwich prior to subscribing to the Act of Supremacy in 1559, LPL, CM XIII/57; NRO, DCN 29/1, fo. 28v; DCN 47/1, fo. 396r, for Bird’s later career. 19 PRO, PROB 11/64, fo. 208r, will of John Aldrich, proved in 1582; Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 210; Quiet Reformation, p. 249.

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returned on behalf of all witnesses gathered ‘We do bring this child to be baptised into the faith of Christ’, by which change of pronoun Harrison presumably wished to signify the boy’s reception into an exclusive saving remnant.20 But Harrison fell out with other Aylsham inhabitants. Among them was the town bailiff, John Orwell, who brought the matter of the altered baptismal rites to Parkhurst’s attention. Parkhurst discharged Harrison from his teaching post in January 1574. Nevertheless, the future separatist was able to find further employment under the aegis of Norwich corporation as the master of St Giles’s Hospital in the city, where he accommodated Robert Browne in 1579.21 The true extent of Browne and Harrison’s following in Norfolk on their path to full separation and flight to Middleburg in 1582 is impossible to fathom. However, a potential constituency of support for the two men is indicated by one intriguing document, a supplication for further Reform signed by 175 Norwich inhabitants to be presented to the queen at some stage in the early 1590s. The only extant copy exists among papers collected for the puritans’ unpublished Seconde Parte of a Register. The precise organisation at work behind the petition remains shadowy, while the date of 1583 on the transcription is too late, given the inclusion of Robert Browne and Robert Harrison among the signatories, both having long since left Norfolk for the Netherlands. The supplication emerged from a transitional stage of Browne and Harrison’s journey. So Albert Peel argued, drawing attention to the subscribers’ Presbyterian demands, in advocating the removal of ‘the government of Antichrist also with all his archprelates and all his court keepers’ in favour of ecclesiastical discipline by ‘that holie Eldership, the verie sinew of Christs Church, which is so plainly described and so waightilie authorised in Gods word’.22 Turning to the signatories, we note the hand of John Allen, presumably the same figure whose son was baptised at Aylsham. Two other names – Robert Barker, a Cambridge contemporary of Browne, and John Chambers– feature in Browne’s later writings as worshippers within the Middleburg congregation.23 More prominent in terms of their standing in Norwich affairs were various members of the Weld family. Although yet to be elected as a common councillor when signing the petition, the most upwardly mobile figure was Roger Weld, who rose to become sheriff in 1585 and mayor in 1599. The

20 Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 218. Robert Browne later married Alice Allen. Whether she was related to the Allens of Aylsham seems unlikely in that she is described as ‘of Yorkshire’, see The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, pp. 6, 425. 21 Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 223. Parkhurst replaced Harrison with Mr Sutton, who had been Archbishop Parker’s choice for the mastership; DNB, ‘Robert Harrison’. 22 Seconde Parte, I, pp. 157–60; Peel, The Brownists in Norwich and Norfolk, pp. 6–8 for the dating of this petition. 23 Seconde Parte, I, p. 159; Robert Browne, ‘A true and short declaration’, in The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, pp. 397, 422, 425.

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Welds were cousins of the Aldriches.24 In turn, Roger Weld and his brother John – who also subscribed to the supplication with their father, John senior – became members of the Norwich Merchant Adventurers’ Company, Roger Weld’s will being witnessed by another company man – and ardent Protestant – Alderman Thomas Layer.25 We have no evidence to suggest that the Welds were nascent separatists. However, in the early 1580s they clearly identified themselves with a core of outspoken religious opinion in the city. This also negates McClendon’s statement that Norwich’s elite was oblivious to radical religious movements in their midst. Browne’s formal split from the Church came in the spring of 1581, with the drawing up of a Covenant by which he and his followers agreed to join themselves in fellowship in the Lord. This move was condemned by John More and Thomas Robartes, who counselled against schism. Indicative of his turbulent character, Browne then rounded on the Norwich preachers as the fount by which ‘wickedness went forth into all the land’.26 Another Norfolk pastor to react against the separatists was Edward Fenton, rector of Booton, a parish five miles from Robert Harrison’s Aylsham. A nonconformist, who on Harrison’s account had once considered breaking from the episcopal church, Fenton changed his mind and proved an active agent in persuading others from joining Browne’s congregation.27 Fenton’s proselytising against the Brownists won a stern rebuke from Harrison. By maintaining that the minister had blasphemed the Gospel and disobeyed God’s commands, Harrison posited that Fenton and his confrères were to ‘stand excommunicate till you be reformed’.28 Such heated exchanges highlight a deeper struggle for Christian sympathies in the Pays around Norwich and Aylsham. In Norfolk we hear nothing of the gatherings of ‘the vulgar sort of people’ to the ‘number of an hundred at a time in privat howses and conventicles’, reported by Bishop Freke as accompanying Robert Browne’s 1581 preaching tour of west Suffolk. But inhabitants of Norwich and its environs doubtless held strong views on Browne’s aim to further the Reformation without tarrying for the magistrate.29

24

Seconde Parte, I, p. 159; Hawes, Officers, p. 163; Mayors of Norwich, p. 66; PRO, PROB 11/64, fo. 207v, will of John Aldrich. 25 PRO, E 122/196/7; PROB 11/107, fo. 213v, will of Roger Weld, proved in 1606 and see above, pp. 82–3, for Thomas Layer. 26 White, The English Separatist Tradition, pp. 48–9; Robert Browne, ‘A true and short declaration’, p. 412. 27 Robert Harrison, ‘A treatise of the Church and the kingdome of Christ’, in The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, pp. 43, 45, 52–3, 55, 69. Fenton was instituted to Booton in April 1567 upon the presentation of Sir Christopher Heydon of Baconsthorpe, NRO, DN REG/13/19, fo. 137r. See Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 220 for Fenton’s nonconformity. 28 Harrison, ‘A treatise of the Church and the kingdome of Christ’, pp. 45–9, 58. 29 BL, Lansd MS 33, fo. 26, Freke to Burghley, 19 Apr 1581; Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics, pp. 104–5.

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The separatist congregation’s removal to the Netherlands did not mark the end of Norfolk Brownism, since a significant link with the movement remained in the county in the figure of Thomas Wolsey, a minister who had been associated with Browne and Harrison between 1580 and 1582. Thanks to Michael Moody’s research, Wolsey can be identified as the T. W. who joined Harrison in attacking Edward Fenton.30 Wolsey’s familiarity with Fenton suggests that he also once ministered in the vicinity of Aylsham, although in March 1584 he was arraigned with four other Brownists – including Emine Okes, a widow of Aylsham – before the Assizes at Thetford. Wolsey was confined to Thetford gaol but was transferred to Norwich Castle in 1585.31 He was listed as a prisoner in the castle ten years later and was still incarcerated there in 1602, when he was visited by Stephen Offwood – one of his critics – who commented sometime after the event that Wolsey had remained an inmate of Norwich Castle for thirty years. If correct, this dates Wolsey’s death to between 1610 and 1615.32 If by reprieving and confining the former minister to gaol the Assize judges hoped to curb separatism in Norfolk, they did not prevent Wolsey from continuing to proselytise from his Norwich cell for the rest of his life. Indeed, according to Offwood, Wolsey had some freedom of movement about the city. Apparently, he was permitted ‘a keye for to lete in unto him whome he would and to goe out as he pleased at a back gate’, probably to enable Wolsey to seek charitable relief during his extended spell inside. He remained in communication with his co-religionists. Moreover, as Offwood tells us, while in gaol Wolsey made a number of converts, successfully managing to turn ‘many zealous professors, of which I knowe twentie’ on to the separatist path. These included another famous name in the history of Elizabethan dissent, Henry Barrow. Of Norfolk gentry stock and at one time a ‘flourishing Courtier’ – until discovering the works of Thomas Cartwright and Robert Browne – Barrow sought out Wolsey’s guidance on the route to full-blown separatism, a journey that ended with his execution on 6 April 1593.33 However, the two eventually clashed. A particular bone of contention 30 Harrison, ‘A treatise of the Church and the kingdome of Christ’, pp. 42–3, 45, 68, which states that T. W. was imprisoned with members of Browne’s congregation. Identification of this figure with Thomas Wolsey is made by Michael Moody in ODNB, ‘Thomas Wolsey (d. c. 1610)’, and in an unpublished paper ‘Thomas Wolsey: a Forgotten Founding Father of English Separatism and a “Judaiser” ’. I am indebted to Dr Moody for allowing me to cite his research. 31 Ex inf. Michael Moody. For Emine Okes, see Stiff key Papers, III, p. 10. A conventicle was said to have met in Thetford in 1584, which may account for Wolsey’s presence in the town with his co-religionists. See LPL, CM XII/19, fo. 2r. 32 NRO, DN DIS/9/1a, list of ‘sectaries’ in Norwich Castle, 1595, unfoliated. Stephen Offwood’s account is given in his now extremely rare, An Advertisement to Jhon Delecluse and Henry May the Elder ([Amsterdam?, 1632]), STC 18789, p. 40, ex inf. Michael Moody. For Offwood, see M. Moody, ‘Trials and Travels of a Nonconformist Layman: the Spiritual Odyssey of Stephen Offwood, 1564–c. 1635’, CH, 51 (1982), pp. 157–71. 33 Offwood, An Advertisement, p. 40, which also notes Wolsey’s role in Barrow’s conversion. For Barrow, see White, The English Separatist Tradition, pp. 70–90.

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centred on Wolsey’s extreme views on the dietary code enjoined by Mosaic law. Drawing upon Acts 15: 29, he maintained – against Barrow – that it was unlawful for Christians to eat blood, things strangled and meats offered to idols.34 Following Barrow’s death, Wolsey continued to press his ideas. At least, he wrote to clear his name as a ‘Judaiser’ with the English separatist church, then under the charge of Francis Johnson and Henry Ainsworth in Amsterdam in 1602. However, Johnson and Ainsworth penned a hostile reply. Threatening to denounce Wolsey as a propagator of superstitious errors, they asserted that ‘it is our Christian liberty to eat any thing, even meat sacrificed to Idols’.35 Stephen Offwood delivered this answer to Wolsey in Norwich.36 Despite dissenting from other dissenters over Christian diet, and quarrelling with all of his followers at one time or another, Wolsey nevertheless kept the spirit of the Brownist movement alive in Norfolk.37 However, he was not the only ‘sectary recusant’ to be incarcerated in Norwich during the 1590s. While Wolsey languished in and out of prison, opposite the castle mound to the east, the cells beneath Norwich Guildhall began to fill with members of a second Brownist congregation uncovered within the city’s jurisdiction. We know of this group’s trials from George Johnson, brother of Francis. George finally quarrelled with his brother’s supporters within the Amsterdam church – especially one of its elders, Daniel Studley – a disagreement that stemmed famously from George’s disapproval of Francis’s wife’s penchant for fashionable dress, which he deemed unbecoming. Once at Amsterdam in 1598, George raised objections over how the Church was to be managed. He was left smarting at what he took to be an insidious move by his brother and Daniel Studley to consolidate their leadership by appointing deacons over the congregation’s wishes. Against such bickering George was excommunicated by the Amsterdam church in late 1598 or early 1599.38 Not surprisingly perhaps, in his subsequent account of his troubles, George Johnson singled out Daniel Studley for stern rebuke, and here Johnson was quick to include harsh comments on Studley passed on by Mr Hunt, the pastor of a church in Norwich, in a letter dated 6 March 1601. Hunt too was eager to denounce Studley for his earlier meddling in the running of the Norwich congregation. Visiting Norwich, seemingly as a representative

34

[Francis Johnson and Henry Ainsworth], A seasonable treatise for this age (1657), Wing S2245, pp. 2–3. 35 Ibid, pp. 16–17. 36 Offwood, An Advertisement, p. 40; [Johnson and Ainsworth], A seasonable treatise, p. 18, which dates the Church’s letter to Wolsey, 7 Dec 1602. 37 Offwood, An Advertisement, p. 40. 38 White, The English Separatist Tradition, pp. 96–103. On George Johnson’s testimony alone, it is difficult to attribute a single cause behind his subsequent excommunication. See M. E. Moody, ‘A Critical Edition of George Johnson’s A Discourse of Some Troubles and Excommunications in the Banished English Church at Amsterdam, 1603’, Claremont Graduate School, Ph.D., 1979, p. lxvi.

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of Henry Barrow’s London congregation around 1590–1 – Hunt being incarcerated in Norwich Guildhall prison at the time – Studley sought to usurp Thomas Ensner, an elder in Hunt’s congregation, by replacing him with ‘one Bradshaw, a man so openly and manifestly known of evil behaviour that he was of the whole Church utterly refused to be received as a member into that Church’. In turn Studley sullied the Norwich’s church’s reputation. If George Johnson is to be believed, he had inveighed against Hunt’s group as ‘a simple people’ both ignorant and weak, with the alleged aim of drawing away membership to Barrow’s group in London, wishing ‘all to come to them, to fill up their number, to increase their contributions etc’. Studley persuaded some to leave Norwich. By such actions, what George Johnson regarded proudly as ‘our elder sister in the Lord’ in Norwich had since been reduced to a ‘poor remnant’.39 Even so, despite Studley’s interference as well as periodic harassment by the authorities, Hunt’s fellowship continued throughout the 1590s. Hunt is readily identifiable as William Hunt, a non-graduate ordained by Bishop Scambler, who had been presented to the rectory of Chattisham – near Ipswich – in the gift of Eton College in November 1587. However, he did not remain incumbent for long. Within two years he had been replaced upon his deprivation for being a Brownist, his successor dutifully noting the fact in the parish register, complaining that no baptisms, marriages or deaths had been recorded at Chattisham during his predecessor’s ministry.40 We know from George Johnson that Hunt was imprisoned in Norwich in 1590. Why he followed his calling to the city is unclear, although Joy Rowe implies that he came to help minister to conventicles about Norwich, one of which was uncovered at Mr Serlesbye’s house in nearby Trowse in 1588. Thomas Serlesbye, the vicar of Trowse, was a nonconformist from his time as chaplain of St Nicholas, King’s Lynn in the 1560s.41 Indeed, several of those presented for resorting to Serlesbye’s meeting later reappear as likely members of William Hunt’s gathered church in the 1590s. Possibly, Hunt assumed the mantle of tending to semi-separatists from Serlesbye. In the event, we know that he was accompanied by members of his former Chattisham flock – notably Thomas Ensner – and that his teachings made an immediate impact in the city.42 The last point can be inferred

39

George Johnson, A discourse of the troubles of the banished church at Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1603), STC 14664, pp. 88–9, 205–6. The date of Hunt’s letter is given on p. 205. In a marginal note, Johnson recalled that the dispute in Norwich ‘fell out about twelve years since, if not more’. Writing in 1603, this dates Hunt’s imprisonment to 1590–1. 40 NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 157r and fo. 181r, which records John Arnold’s institution on 17 Oct 1589; SROI, FB 63, Chattisham parish register, unfoliated entry 5 Nov 1589. 41 Rowe, ‘Some Separatists and the Norwich Conventicle, 1588–1610’, pp. 181–2; Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 220. 42 Ex inf. Michael Moody; SROI, FB 63, which records the burial of Thomas Ensner’s wife at Chattisham in 1589. Another former Chattisham resident, John Hayward, became a peripatetic

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from a case heard against Miles Willan, cordwainer, before the mayor’s court in April 1591. Willan had spoken disparaging words against John More and another corporation preacher, George Flood, the chaplain at St Peter Mancroft, while conversing with a blacksmith, Richard Stutter. Willan asked Stutter why he resorted to hear the preachers. Exclaiming that ‘they do not teach the truth but teach mens traditions and fancies’, Stutter objected, saying he liked the ministers ‘very well’, which caused Willan to turn his back on him and shun him.43 Willan was ordered to attend divine worship at his parish. However, his outburst echoes the separatist view of the episcopal church, propounded by Robert Browne, as being a church corrupted with ‘the dongue that commeth of man, even with their traditions, tolerations and falsifiinges’.44 Was Willan also influenced by William Hunt? At least, during the 1590s, Hunt amassed a larger following, with other co-religionists being entered alongside the minister in a scratchy list of ‘sectaries’ imprisoned in Norwich, drawn up by the consistory court in 1595. Besides Hunt, fourteen names are given, ten being incarcerated in the Guildhall, four in Norwich Castle in the company of Thomas Wolsey.45 When collated with further indictments by the Church courts for being a ‘recusant sectary’ given down to 1617, it is possible to extend this number to thirty-five reported separatists, some if not all of whom may have joined in fellowship with Hunt. Several families dominate the lists from 1595 onwards, perhaps accounting for the core membership of the Norwich church. The most outstanding were the Lachelowes of St Peter Mancroft, with Elizabeth – relict of John Lachelowe, a scrivener of Norwich – having already been cited for resorting to Thomas Serlesbye’s conventicle at Trowse. She was interned in the Guildhall in 1595 with her daughter Anne. But she figures in the lists down to 1603, when she was joined by two fellow Mancroft denizens, Henry Ives and his wife, along with Thomas Mayes and his wife of St Peter Parmentergate.46 Another prisoner, Alice Browne or Burne, spinster, was probably the daughter of Alice and Robert, listed in 1608. They hailed from St Stephen’s parish, where two other ‘recusant schismatics’, Thomas Wootton and George Gooch, were returned in 1602 and 1607 respectively, Wootton’s name recurring as a ‘schismatick’ in presentments from the parish made to the archdeacon of preacher, who was presented for ‘seducing the people’ of St Margaret’s Ipswich in 1605, NRO DN DIS/9/1a. 43 NRO, MCB/12, 1587–95, p. 540, 24 Apr 1591. George Flood was both chaplain and preacher at Mancroft from around 1588 until 1597, see NRO, ANW 1/12, liber cleri, 1596 and CA, 1589–1602, fos 16r, 60r, 101v, 131r, 159r, 186r, 211v. 44 The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, p. 402. 45 NRO, DN DIS/9/1a, unfoliated. Extracts from this document are given in ‘Popish and Sectary Recusants in Norfolk and Suffolk, 1595’, EANQ, 1st Series, 2 (1865), pp. 177–8. 46 NRO, DN DIS/9/1a; Millican, Freemen, p. 117 for John Lachelowe; Rowe, ‘Some Separatists and the Norwich Conventicle, 1588–1610’, p. 182. Henry Ives had been admitted as a freeman painter in 1577, Millican, Freemen, p. 107.

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Norwich down to 1617.47 Also joining Hunt was Mary Wyllet, a single woman. Conceivably she was related to Thomas Wyllet, who was confined in the castle in 1595, where in 1607 he was interned again with his wife Alice and daughter Sarah, it being recorded that all three ‘keepeth victualling’ in the castle. Thomas Wyllet was a butcher by trade. Later he came to reside in St Michael at Thorn, where in 1615 he was presented by the churchwardens as a ‘recusant Brownist’ along with Alice his wife and their son John.48 Of the other ‘sectaries’ taken in 1595 whose professions are known, Gregory Pollard was a weaver. He pursued his occupation within the city proper, being detained by the civic authorities in the Guildhall, while two other worsted weavers, Adam Brayser and Thomas Fowler – an apprentice living in Pockthorpe – resided outside the city’s jurisdiction and were placed in the castle gaol. The same applied to John Turner, a yeoman.49 Comprising individuals from various occupational backgrounds, it would be interesting to know whether Hunt served to unite this group of reputed separatists, given that Hunt – like Thomas Wolsey – seems to have spent the remainder of his time in Norwich in gaol. In 1598 he was joined in prison by ‘Elizabeth his wooman’, a cutting phrase perhaps implying that their marriage had not been licensed. But even in Hunt’s absence, his flock, long since ‘persuaded’ and ‘seduced’ by the minister not to resort to their parish churches, were caught expounding Scripture in a private conventicle close to Norwich on 20 June 1602. Discussion focused on the nature of the true church. It was agreed that ‘there is no Lawfull ministry of the Word of God within the Church of England’, while the established church ‘was a synagogue of prophane persons and a Cage of Fowle and uncleane birdes’ in which the ‘sacraments be not rightly administered’.50 The only ‘trewe Church of Christ’ was that held by the separatists themselves. Since Hunt was recorded as being in prison at this time, he did not preside over this meeting in person, and he probably passed away shortly after in 1602 or 1603. In 1604 his widow Elizabeth Hunt remarried another separatist, Thomas Scase of Thrandeston, Suffolk.51 All of which activity points to a lively and dynamic separatist or semi-separatist tradition in and around Norwich running throughout the 1590s, which doubtless took its inspiration from the earlier movement led by Robert Browne and Robert Harrison in 47

NRO, DN DIS/9/1a; DN ACT/46c, a list of recusants and ‘sectaries’ dated October 1615, which refers to Wootton, as does ANW 3/20, comperta, 1614–17. 48 NRO, DN DIS/9/1a; DN ACT/46c; ANW 3/20. 49 NRO, DN DIS/9/1a. Thomas Fowler was the son of Thomas, who is given in the freemen’s lists as ‘of Leicester’. Thomas junior was apprenticed to Wiliam Poynter of Pockthorpe in 1595 and purchased his citizenship in October 1620: see Millican, Freemen, pp. 160, 223. 50 NRO, DN DIS/9/1a. The allusion to a ‘Cage of Fowle and uncleane birdes’ in the entry for 1602 was an amalgamation of the texts, Jeremiah 5: 27 and Revelations 16: 2. According to Rowe, ‘Some Separatists and the Norwich Conventicle’, p. 181, this was a familiar motif in Brownist invective against the established church. 51 Rowe, ‘Some Separatists and the Norwich Conventicle’, p. 183.

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the 1580s. Of course, in assessing the strength of Norwich separatism, we may not be dealing with the tip of an iceberg, so much as the iceberg itself. Nevertheless, the significance of William Hunt’s gathered church lies in the radical continuum it represented, marking an undercurrent of dissent in Norwich, which survived to trouble both the ecclesiastical and civic authorities at the close of the sixteenth century. But the tradition rubbed off on another figure: John Robinson. Famous for being the erstwhile pastor to the Pilgrim Fathers, John Robinson has since acquired a monumental stature in the history of New England colonisation, despite his never having set foot in the New World.52 He is often seen as being synonymous with Norwich and its puritan past.53 Again, this impression persists in spite of a relative paucity of biographical information with which to illuminate his early career prior to his migration first to Amsterdam in 1608 and then Leyden in 1609. What do we know about Robinson’s time in Norfolk? Thanks to the exhaustive genealogical research carried out by Walter Burgess – the product of a major historical industry in Robinson studies conducted in the 1910s and 1920s – Robinson’s origins in Sturton-le-Steeple, Nottinghamshire are well assured. With this established, the future pastor to the Pilgrim Fathers can be identified as John Robinson MA, a fellow of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, 1598–1604. From there, he followed in the footsteps of another distinguished radical from Corpus, Robert Harrison, to become master of St Giles’s Hospital, Norwich, in which capacity he received payments out of the hospital accounts in 1601 and 1602.54 Denouncing the separatists, the future bishop of Exeter, Joseph Hall, viewed Robinson’s decision to depart from the Church to his failure ‘sued for with repulse’ to regain the mastership.55 Be that as it may, from an anonymous manuscript treatise – attributed to John Robinson by Champlin Burrage – Robinson recalled his former links with St Andrew’s parish ‘wherof indeed I was sometymes a minister (as you saie), but never anie member’, since he resided in another city parish, where his children were baptised. If Robinson ministered at St Andrew’s, it is unlikely that he held the cure itself. Regrettably, the loss of St Andrew’s churchwardens’ accounts for

52 There is a substantial body of secondary literature on Robinson. However, for comprehensive guides to his writings, see T. George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, Georgia, 1982) and S. Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 193–202, 262–7. 53 As in B. Brooke, The Lives of the Puritans (3 vols, London, 1813), II, p. 334 and more recently P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (1982), p. 141. 54 W. H. Burgess, John Robinson Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers: a Study of his Life and Times (London, 1920), pp. 10–16, remains the most authoritative biography; George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Ttradition, p. 78. 55 Joseph Hall, A common apologie of the Church of England against the unjust challenge of the Over Just sect called the Brownists (1610), STC 12649, pp. 114–15, 125, 145. For Hall as a defender of the Jacobean church, see K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall Explains Himself’, EHR, 111 (1996), pp. 856–77.

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sixteenth and seventeenth centuries means that we have no way of telling whether Robinson was employed by the vestry to preach in the parish. His name certainly does not feature among the extant libri cleri for the period as the parish’s chaplain or preacher. Indeed, his later memories of St Andrew’s were now coloured by his commitment to separatism, since he went on to condemn the parish for sustaining an unholy congregation not ‘gathered out of the world, nor separated and sanctified from the world according to the dispensation of the Gospell’.56 Robinson hinted that he had tended, in a shadowy way, to a flock that was separate from the world. Much has subsequently been made – by Stephen Brachlow in particular – of a curious entry in a register compiled for Bishop John Jegon of a sermon preached by a Dr – or Mr – Robinson at St Andrew’s, as a thanksgiving for the Gowrie Conspiracy on 5 August 1603. Brachlow saw a spark of rebelliousness in this sermon. As reported, Mr Robinson used the occasion to speak out against corruption in the ecclesiastical courts, especially over the abuse whereby any not appearing were excommunicated by commissaries seeking additional fees for enjoining penance.57 Why would Jegon find this outburst alarming? After all, during August 1603 and under pressure from Archbishop Whitgift – who was anxious to counter puritan complaints about the exercise of ecclesiastical justice – Jegon instigated a thorough overhaul of the consistory and archdeaconry courts in Norwich diocese, suspending a ‘multitude and iniquity of apparitors’ in the process.58 Moreover, efforts to identify this Mr Robinson with the separatist come unstuck in that the preacher is clearly given as ‘of Emmanuel College’.59 The ‘radical’ John Robinson was of course a Corpus Christi man, who was known to both Bishop Jegon – the master of Corpus 1590–1603 – and the bishop’s brother, Thomas Jegon, who became archdeacon of Norwich in 1604, and who was in all likelihood John Robinson’s tutor at Cambridge.60 Indeed, John Robinson was on good enough terms with Bishop Jegon to commend the other Mr Robinson’s ‘sufficiency for the holy Ministry’ to his diocesan in November 1603. Since it would have been inappropriate for John Robinson to have recommended himself, the preacher of the Gowrie sermon in August must have been the Emmanuel College Mr Robinson, and not the future separatist as Brachlow maintained.61 56 Bod L, Jones MS 30, fos 5r–v, 17v, transcribed in part and dated in C. Burrage, New Facts Concerning John Robinson Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford, 1910), pp. 5–17. 57 Reg Vagum, I, pp. 34–6; S. Brachlow, ‘John Robinson and the Lure of Separatism in PreRevolutionary England’, CH, 50 (1981), pp. 288–301; idem, entry for Robinson in Greaves and Zaller, III, p. 103. This version of events has been recycled uncritically in Robinson’s entry in ODNB. 58 Puritan Movement, pp. 450–1; Reg Vagum, I, pp. 24–34, 40–50. 59 Reg Vagum, I, p. 34. 60 DNB, ‘John Jegon’; Burgess, John Robinson Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, p. 60 gives Thomas Jegon as Robinson’s tutor; Le Neve, Fasti VII, pp. 45, 53. 61 Reg Vagum, I, pp. 158–9. Venn, III, p. 470 records another contemporaneous John Robinson, who graduated from Emmanuel to become curate of Great Yarmouth in 1609.

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From the above letter, John Robinson can be placed in Norwich at the end of 1603. Another insight into his activities in the city at around this time comes from a passing comment from Henry Ainsworth, who publishing in 1608 recalled that ‘certayn citizens’ had been excommunicated for resorting to prayers conducted by the pastor.62 Ainsworth failed to specify when and where this meeting occurred. While we would desperately like to know who the excommunicated citizens were, it is not inconceivable that Robinson’s fellowship may have included former members of William Hunt’s congregation. The next we hear of Robinson is in May 1605. By then he had left Norwich and returned to his native Sturton-le-Steeple, whereupon seventeen parishioners from the neighbourhood around Sturton were presented to the archdeacon of Nottingham for ‘gadding’ to hear Robinson preach in his home town.63 Seeking ‘satisfaction for a troubled heart’, he spent the next two years between Sturton and Cambridge.64 While in transit he was drawn into the puritan dispersal across the Midlands that followed in the wake of the subscription campaign implemented after Hampton Court.65 Robinson recounted his attendance at a famous godly conference of 1608. Meeting at the Coventry home of Sir William and Lady Elizabeth Bowes, other participants included such noted puritan divines as Richard Bernard, John Dod, Arthur Hildersham and John Smyth, the future separatist and Anabaptist.66 It was probably Smyth who drew Robinson to the gathered congregation at Scrooby, Nottinghamshire. After being ‘hunted and persecuted on every side’, the Scrooby church took flight to Amsterdam, where Robinson and his flock joined the English separatists under Francis Johnson and Henry Ainsworth in 1608, before falling out with Johnson and Ainsworth and moving to Leyden a year later.67 There is no evidence to support Brachlow’s assertion that Robinson held the great civic pulpit of St Andrew’s, Norwich, and was a commanding preacher in the city. Instead, the significance of the future pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers’ impact upon religious developments within Norfolk and 62

Henry Ainsworth, Counterpoyson: considerations touching the poynts in difference between the godly ministers . . . and the seduced brethren of the Separation (1608), STC 234, pp. 246–7. R. A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York 1560–1642 (London, 1960), p. 152. 64 John Robinson, A manumission for a manuduction (Amsterdam, 1615), STC 21111, p. 20. 65 K. Fincham, ‘Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 138–9; N. Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 20, 112–16. 66 John Robinson, A justification of separation from the Church of England (Amsterdam, 1610), STC 21109, p. 10; C. M. Newman, ‘“An Honourable and Elect Lady”: the Faith of Isabel, Lady Bowes’, in D. Wood (ed.), Life and Thought in the Northern Church c. 1100–c.1700 (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 414; B. R. White, ‘The English Separation and John Smyth Revisited’, Baptist Quarterly, 30 (1984), pp. 344–7. 67 Smyth tended to a flock across the county – and diocesan – boundary at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. See William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620–1647, ed. S. E. Morison (New York, 1963), p. 10. 63

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Norwich rests with the encouragement that he continued to give to fellow separatists resident within the city and the county during James I’s reign – Albeit his rallying of the separatist cause was conducted at a distance from Holland. However, the émigré Scrooby congregation’s split from the Amsterdam church provided an alternative focus for the remnants of Hunt’s group, who may have felt aversion towards Francis Johnson, stemming from their earlier quarrel with his supporter Daniel Studley in the 1590s. It is interesting that of fifteen Norwich denizens identified by Henry Dexter as joining Robinson in Leyden, a large number, eight, belonged to the Wyllet family. Associated with William Hunt in the 1590s, Thomas Wyllet senior finally crossed over to Leyden in 1615 accompanied by his wife Alice, his daughters Sarah, Rebecca and Hester and his son Thomas, who subsequently became a founder of Plymouth colony. Sarah Wyllet had already wed William Minter of Norwich, who joined his in-laws at Leyden.68 That the Wyllets had delayed quitting England for so long may have owed something to a lingering antipathy towards Francis Johnson and his assistant Daniel Studley, which dated from Studley’s earlier interference in Hunt’s church. Robinson’s departure coincided with a resurgence of illicit conventicles in Norwich. The presence of ‘schismaticks’ in St Stephen’s parish down to 1617 is noted above, although another run of ‘pryvate meetings and assemblies’ was also uncovered by the archdeacon of Norwich in St Andrew’s in 1606. These were held in the house of Thomas Parker, who appears regularly in the archdeaconry act books thereafter. Again in 1609, the St Andrew’s churchwardens complained of Parker’s absence from divine service except to hear sermons, labelling him a Brownist ‘in contempt’ of the law in 1610, repeating the charge in 1614 upon his refusal to attend parish worship.69 Thomas Parker is readily identifiable as a joiner, who purchased his freedom in 1610. Yet the itinerant nature of his craft also took him to Great Yarmouth, where he was doubtless employed in ship-building.70 All the while, he remained a separatist. We know this because Parker is recorded – along with his wife – among sixtythree Brownists taken at Yarmouth in 1628, Mrs Parker being listed among thirty members of the same coventicle in 1630.71 This group, under the leadership of Thomas Caine of Yarmouth, had been rounded up by the town bailiffs in 1624, Caine standing accused of being an Anabaptist. However, as 68

NRO, DN DIS/9/1a; DN ACT/46c; H. Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (London, 1906), pp. 601–41, especially pp. 625, 639. NRO, ANW 3/12, comperta, 1606; ANW 2/44, presentments, 1603–11; ANW 3/20, comperta, 1614–17. 70 Millican, Freemen, p. 91; PRO, SP 16/171/19, which lists Parker as ‘a poore joyner’. He became a freeman without having served an apprenticeship in Norwich, which suggests that he was not a native of the city or at least did not learn his trade there. His name does not feature among the 1598 lay subsidy returns for St Andrew’s: PRO, E 179/152/497. A Thomas Parker signed the 1581 Norwich supplication, Seconde Parte, I, p. 159, although whether this was the same figure as the later Brownist Parker remains unclear. 71 PRO, SP 16/124/81; SP 16/171/19. 69

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we shall see (below, pages 105–7), Caine’s followers – some of whom were cited as ‘Brownists’ down to 1634 – were in contact with John Robinson’s church in Leyden throughout the 1610s: the three recorded mariners or sailors among the Yarmouth separatists no doubt helping to establish lines of communication between dissenters on both sides of the North Sea.72 Was Thomas Parker also in touch with his co-religionists in Leyden? If so, his reappearance at the Yarmouth conventicle points towards a wider religious network linking Caine’s group with earlier semi-separatist activity in St Andrew’s Norwich, where Robinson claimed to have ministered. Certainly both Robinson and Parker were active in St Andrew’s. However, even without the lingering spectre of separatism or semi-separatism within the parish, St Andrew’s remained – from a pastoral perspective–a problematic church for the Jegon brothers. Brownists apart, St Andrew’s was saturated with puritanism enough to test the integrity of episcopal government. A focus for such ongoing challenges to the Church establishment was Thomas Mellis, who succeeded Robert Hill as chaplain at St Andrew’s in 1603 and retained the office until 1614, during which time he led a charmed life as an habitual nonconformist.73 Mellis had not taken a degree. Nevertheless, he had pursued a ministry in Norwich since at least 1583, when he registered his protest against Archbishop Whitgift’s Three Articles. Officiating at St George Tombland in 1602, he failed to observe the Prayer Book in divine service. Four years later, and enjoying his new chaplaincy, he was presented for performing the duty of preacher at St Andrew’s – a post held by Thomas Newhouse – even though Mellis had not been licensed to preach.74 In 1607, he was in trouble over the surplice, while in 1613 he neglected to use the sign of the cross in baptism.75 Yet John Jegon seemingly forgave Mellis’s nonconformity, overlooking his various infractions in the interest of fostering religious unity in the parish rather than enforce uniformity too stringently and risk providing a pretext for more open forms of dissent. At the same time, Jegon was concerned to bolster St Andrew’s as a centre for evangelical preaching. This agenda can be seen in a famous case relating to seating arrangements in St Andrew’s, which emerged to irritate the diocesan chancellor, Robert Redmayne, in the summer of 1607.76 Prior to 3 July 1607, Redmayne had admonished the churchwardens to remove ‘divers convenient seats’ from the chancel. Apparently, these pews – set out so that ‘the ministers 72 H. Swinden, The History and Antiquities of the Ancient Burgh of Great Yarmouth (Norwich, 1772), pp. 829–32; PRO, SP 16/171/19. Other members of Caine’s group were involved in maritime trade or navigation. For example, Edmund Cameron – who headed the list of known separatists in 1634 – was a compass maker. See NRO, ANW 2/72, presentments, 1634–7. 73 BL, Harl MS, 595, fo. 161r; NRO, ANW 3/17a, comperta, 1613; ANW 3/20, comperta, 1614–17. Mellis’s lengthy tenure of St Andrew’s chaplaincy was missed by Blomefield, IV, p. 301. 74 Stiff key Papers, III, p. 240; Seconde Parte, I, p. 244; NRO, ANW 3/10, comperta, 1602–3; DN VIS/4/2/1. 75 NRO, ANW 3/12, comperta, 1606; ANW 3/17a, comperta, 1613. 76 Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, pp. 141–2; Quiet Reformation, p. 247.

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of the city were placed in one roumthe and in another next them, the aldermen’ – had been permitted by Thomas Jegon on the solidly evangelical grounds that it would free up space in the nave, to accommodate a larger audience on lecture days. Redmayne also ordered the churchwardens to purchase a decent surplice. However, they refused to fulfil both requirements until conferring with Bishop Jegon, whom the churchwardens believed would be more lenient over the seating. Redmayne excommunicated the churchwardens. Losing his temper, the chancellor allegedly rebuked the entire congregation in open court for being ‘schismaticks, schismaticall and factious persons [and] contemners of authoritie’.77 We can appreciate Redmayne’s frustration in seeking to order a parish where his own diocesan had seemingly winked at prior nonconformity. Seeking to overturn the chancellor’s ruling, the churchwardens, backed by other parochial worthies – most notably the two former mayors Thomas Layer and Francis Rugge – then petitioned Bishop Jegon, expressing their duty to the established government and rites of the Church. The petitioners attested to their chaplain’s conformity in ‘wearing and using the ornaments and dewe observation of all other ceremonies appointed’.78 Given Thomas Mellis’s continued flouting of the Book of Common Prayer, this statement was not entirely sincere, a point echoed by the reputed nonconformity of two of the signatories – or rather the wives of the two signatories – Edward Ainsworth and Richard Playford. Earlier in 1603 Mrs Ainsworth had refused to be churched. In the same year, while her husband officiated as churchwarden, Mrs Playford had been presented for receiving the Lord’s Supper seated, along with Edward Peckover. While he did not sign the petition, Peckover was a friend of Thomas Layer, whose will he witnessed in 1613.79 The significance here lies in the store that the same parishioners – whose attachment to the ceremonies was perhaps shaky – set by their diocesan on the understanding that to discipline the parish too stringently would only foster schism. Their appeal to the bishop was successful. Jegon settled matters allowing the seating to remain, as it did until 1636 when Bishop Wren’s visitors altered the 1607 arrangement on the grounds that some pews faced away from the east and the site of the Laudian altar.80 However, for Jegon the problem of occasional nonconformity at St Andrew’s remained. In the event the bishop was forced to monitor disputes at the parish closely, over time being pressed into adopting a firmer pastoral strategy for this most troublesome of city churches. At least, the bishop came to take a closer interest in vetting candidates forwarded to St Andrew’s living by the

77

Reg Vagum, II, pp. 279–80. Ibid, pp. 279–80, which incorrectly gives Francis Rugge’s surname as Brigge. For Layer and Rugge, see above, pp. 82–3. 79 NRO, ANW 310, comperta, 1602–3; ANW 2/44, presentments, 1603–11; PRO, PROB 11/124, fo. 194v. 80 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 139. 78

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Church’s foeffees. What was needed – from a diocesan standpoint – was to secure an ‘establishment’ pastor, who also held sufficient cachet in godly circles to ensure respect for the Church’s rites in the face of puritan and separatist complaint. Mellis’s successor to the chaplaincy in 1613, Robert Gallard, did not impress as a rigid supporter of episcopal government. Within a year of his promotion, Gallard came to be examined by Thomas Jegon for praying ‘not for archbishops and bishops according to the prescript form of the canon’, but only ‘for the ministrie and clergie’. Was Gallard advancing ministerial parity in his prayers?81 If so, he eventually managed to reconcile himself with the Jegon brothers, to the extent that John Jegon supported Gallard’s ambitions to become public preacher at St Andrew’s, the position having been made vacant by Nicholas Bownd’s death in December 1613.82 Gallard represented the lesser of two evils for the bishop. At any rate Jegon’s decision dismayed a majority of the twenty-two foeffees, for whom Gallard was not the preferred choice for preacher since he already held the chaplaincy, adding to his responsibilities by becoming rector of Sprowston and Beeston in February 1615.83 Instead, they hoped to install ‘one Rogers’ as lecturer. However, because Rogers was apparently unwilling to subscribe to the Articles of Religion and form of church government, he was unacceptable to Jegon. The contested appointment was brought before the Privy Council in May 1615, which backed Gallard.84 But this was not the end of the matter, since the grieved among the foeffees, who were now reluctant to maintain Gallard’s stipend, forced the rest to approach the corporation for assistance in funding the St Andrew’s lectureship. Finally, in December 1615, to prevent further bickering, the Assembly brokered an advantageous deal for the trustees. Gallard’s Thursday lecture would be borne by the city, while in exchange, the trustees agreed to allocate funds to an additional stipendiary weekday lecture on either Monday or Friday; although in 1618 the corporation assumed the charge for lectureships on all three weekdays.85 St Andrew’s pulpit gained the added cachet in becoming the municipal pulpit. Such developments also worked to Bishop Jegon’s advantage in that from the end of 1615, provision for St Andrew’s preachers was taken away from the Church’s foeffees, who were placed under greater constraint to promote conformable ministers likely to gain episcopal sanction, as a condition for being presented to the city’s employ. Would the trustees have entered into this series of negotiations had Jegon countenanced Rogers? That the corporation now had a hand in hiring 81

NRO, ANW 3/20, comperta, 1614–17. For Gallard’s career, see above p. 84 and below pp. 116, 118–20, 132, 171. Blomefield, IV, p. 301. 83 NRO, DN REG/16/22, consignation book, 1627. 84 APC, 1615–16, pp. 147–8, 195–6, 10 May and 9 June 1615. No clues are given as to Rogers’s identity, although he was probably a member of the clerical dynasty that had spawned John Rogers of Dedham. 85 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 40r, 1 Dec 1615; CA, 1603–25, fos. 301r, 319v. 82

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St Andrew’s lecturers inadvertently provided a safeguard for the bishop over appointments to this key civic pulpit, even though the problem of supervising nominations to the chaplaincy remained. However, facing increasing pressure from within the parish, Gallard resigned his city cure within a year of the contested lectureship reaching the Privy Council. While Gallard retained his Thursday lecture until September 1622, the way was left clear – from Jegon’s perspective – to promote a more convinced supporter of episcopacy to the living at St Andrew’s.86 Episcopal interference in parochial affairs bore fruit upon John Yates’s presentation to the chaplaincy on 4 July 1616. A graduate and fellow of Emmanuel College, Yates fitted the profile, having excellent godly credentials, as well as a proven publishing record of work in defence of Calvinist orthodoxy and the established church as regulated by bishops.87 A successful catechitical writer, Yates’s debt to the French grammarian Peter Ramus has been noted by Keith Sprunger.88 Indeed Ramus’s guiding principles were instilled into Yates upon his attending a private seminary for Cambridge graduates aspiring to the ministry, convened by Alexander Richardson – an esteemed Ramist – at Barking, Essex.89 Richardson’s failure to enter the ministry, it has been suggested, was tied to his unwillingness to subscribe to the Prayer Book. Certainly, Yates came to share an intellectual inheritance with other of Richardson’s pupils, whose names included such luminaries in the history of English puritanism as William Ames, Thomas Hooker and Charles Chauncey, the future president of Harvard College.90 The precise dates of Yates’s time at Barking are uncertain. However, he probably sought conference with Richardson between graduating in 1608 and progressing to MA in 1611, when Yates was also considered for a two-month trial as master of Dedham Grammar School, which if fulfilled, would have placed him within the sphere of another doyen of the East Anglian teaching fraternity: John Rogers.91 John Yates came to Norfolk with all the ‘right’ godly connections through Cambridge and London. However, he had made his mark with his first foray 86

NRO, CA, 1603–25, fos 319v, 377r and see below, pp. 117–20, for the fate of these lectureships under Bishop Harsnett. 87 NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, consignation book 1633, p. 99 which fixes Yates’s presentation to St Andrew’s to 1616, when he was granted a licence to preach; Venn, IV, p. 488. 88 K. L. Sprunger, ‘John Yates of Norfolk: the Radical Puritan Preacher as Ramist Philosopher’, JHI, 37 (1976), pp. 697–706. 89 J. Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 286; Alexander Richardson, The Logicians Schoolmaster: or a Comment upon Ramist Logicke (1629), STC 21012, ‘To the Christian Reader’; John Yates, A modell of divinitie catechistically composed (1623), STC 26086, ‘An advertisement to the reader’, in which Yates acknowledges Richardson’s tutelage. 90 Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, pp. 352–3; L. W. Gibbs, ‘William Ames’s Technometry’, JHI, 33 (1972), pp. 615–24; BLTT, E 135 (17), George Walker, A True Relation of the Chiefe Passages between Mr Anthony Wootton and Mr George Walker in the year . . . 1611, and in the Yeares next following to 1615 (1642), p. 6; C. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1704), iii, pp. 42, 60. 91 C. A. Jones, History of Dedham (Colchester, 1907), p. 124.

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into publishing: Gods arraignment of hypocrites, which was printed at Cambridge in 1615, as a contribution towards the burgeoning industry in recycling William Perkins’s writings. Nicholas Tyacke has since identified this treatise as a timely response to Jacobus Arminius’s Examen of Perkins, circulating from 1612.92 Yates championed Perkins’s works on the theology of grace, handing out a stinging rebuke to ‘all the crew of Arminius defenders that . . . do greatly derogate from the Maiestie of God and abuse their own wits to overturn Gods wisdom’. At the same time, he was careful to confirm his attachment to established church government. Yates acknowledged his unfailing duty towards his episcopal governors, ‘the true defenders of the Orthodoxicall truth and resolute enemies of all that oppose it’, at whose command he was ‘to stay or goe forward’ and ‘yield presently’.93 This statement of loyalty to episcopal authority curried favour with John Jegon. To the bishop, Yates was the ideal pastor to unite the factious congregation at St Andrew’s, and in recognition of this Jegon granted Yates a licence to preach throughout Norwich diocese upon assuming the chaplaincy in July 1616. Indeed, Yates’s reputation flourished in the city. In 1617, he was employed as the Friday lecturer at St Andrew’s, receiving an annual salary of £13 6s 8d from the corporation.94 Yates soon rose to his allotted task of persuading separatists to return to the national church. Upon arriving in Norwich, he engaged in a polemical debate with none other than John Robinson, who had remained in touch with Norfolk affairs, through the agency of W. E. This anonymous figure can be identified as William Euring. A mariner, who on his own account was brought up not ‘among the Muses, but Mariners’, Euring later participated in Thomas Caine’s Yarmouth conventicle, which suggests that his origins were in the port town.95 Imprisoned in 1628 with his wife – and given as William Uryn – a John Uryn had also been associated with Caine in 1624. John Yates would have been able to visit Euring in Norwich Castle prison in 1630, at which time he was moved to Great Yarmouth gaol, being recorded as very poor and living ‘on the baskett’.96 However, Yates had encountered Euring earlier in 1618. It seems that during the 1610s, Euring acted as a go-between in conveying Robinson’s A Justification for Separation from the Church of England for comment by divines within East Anglia. Having 92 N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinist: the Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1990), p. 39. 93 John Yates, Gods arraignment of hypocrites . . . a defence of Mr Calvine against Bellarmine, and of Mr Perkins against Arminius (Cambridge, 1615), STC 26081, pp. 91, 157–8. 94 NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 99; CA, 1603–25, fo. 281v. 95 John Robinson, The people’s plea for the exercise of prophesie against Master John Yates his monopolie (Leyden, 1618), STC 21115a, ‘To my Christian friends in Norwich’. This tract was republished with pagination in 1641, and it is the later copy in BLTT, E 1093 (1) that is cited here. For Euring, see Burrage, Early English Dissenters, I, p. 191; William Euring, An answer to the ten counter demands propounded by T. Drakes ([Leyden? 1619]), STC 10567, ‘To the Reader’. 96 Swinden, History and Antiquities of . . . Great Yarmouth, p. 831; PRO, SP 16 124/81; SP 16/171/9.

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conferred with Thomas Drakes, the minister of Harwich, Essex, Euring also approached Yates.97 On both occasions, the mariner raised questions over whether it was the mark of a true church for laymen to prophesy and expound the Scriptures, publicly, before an assembled congregation. This issue was especially relevant for the Yarmouth conventicle, which met without the guidance of an ordained pastor. However, Yates disagreed on the grounds that the ability to prophesy also entailed the power to ‘remit and retain sins’, which he believed fell to an ordained ministry alone. Setting out his objections, Euring passed Yates’s answer to Robinson in Leyden. Robinson, in turn replied to his ‘Christian friends in Norwich’ with The people’s plea for the exercise of prophesie against Master John Yates his monopolie in 1618, a work that was distributed apparently with Yates’s consent given ‘before the magistrate’. If so, Yates allowed himself to be singled out for scorn. Although accounted ‘a man of good gifts and note among you’, Robinson believed Yates stood to plead ‘the cause of the Church of Rome as Christs wife and of Antichrists clergie as of Christs ministry’, which was a provocative challenge to lay down.98 The main contention centred on Yates’s premise that any ‘out of office’, without a calling to the priesthood, had no capacity ‘to meddle with the power of the keys’. While there were scriptural examples of prophesying by men and women outside of an ordained ministry, Yates drew the distinction between prophecy according to an ordinary rule as opposed to an extraordinary example. The Holy Spirit had worked through lay individuals. But these cases being by God’s ‘extraordinary permission’, established no lasting principles, the only true pattern for a ministry being Christ’s perpetual ‘binding and losing to all such as are sent or ordained, either by himself immediately, or by such as he shall appoint thereunto’, making it absurd to claim that ‘ordinary prophesie ought to be out of office’.99 For Robinson this dichotomy was irrelevant. Instead, he believed it to be ‘a violation of natural honesty’ to exclude any with ‘a warrant sufficient from his zeale in Gods glory and mans salvation’ from using their gifts in ‘due time, place and order’. Such had been the calling of the prophets. Of course, this argument struck at Yates’s understanding of ministerial vocation, whereupon even the prophets were bound by an ordinary rule, since their calling came from God, who had predetermined their role as teachers. But, as Robinson pointed out, how was the Church to know ‘such as have bent their thoughts towards the ministry’ unless they reveal their gifts beforehand? Believing that it was ‘intolerable bondage’ for Christians ‘to have pastors ordained for them of whose ability in teaching they had not 97 Burgess, John Robinson Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, pp. 207–8; Euring, An answer to the ten counter demands, ‘To the Reader’. 98 Robinson, The people’s plea, ‘To my Christian friends in Norwich’. 99 Ibid, pp. 1–2, 4.

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taken former experience’, Robinson advanced the radical conclusion that churches ‘attaining perfection’ should admit as prophets ‘not only the Ministers but also the Teachers, and of the Elders and Deacons, and even of the Common people . . . if there were any which could confer their gifts’ to proclaim God’s word.100 Hardening Euring’s resolve, such remarks troubled Yates, who returned to the theme of ministerial authority in the 1623 edition of his catechism. Indeed, Yates devoted an entire section of this work towards strengthening the notion of the true church as being ‘one individual and singular body . . . not to be divided into many bodies’ against the ‘error of Separation to say a Congregation is a Church properly taken’.101 Surely this was intended as a swipe at Robinson and his co-religionists in Norfolk? Yates went on to lambast separatists who ‘set the left legge before the right’ in their efforts to usurp the Church ‘referred of God to the Pastor and the Prince’ and administered by those ‘whom God with an ordinary calling extraordinarily gifted’ – a reference to episcopally ordained clerics like himself – the New Testament having recorded ‘nothing of examination or election’ of priests.102 John Yates was struck by his exchanges with Robinson. As we shall see (below, pages 122–6), the question of ministry by ‘popular’ congregational election – as advanced in the late 1630s by future Independents – returned to vex Yates again, goading him to publish entrenched views on episcopacy jure divino at the height of Charles I’s Personal Rule. Returning to James I’s reign, in July 1624 the Norfolk Assize judges proceeded against Thomas Caine’s conventicle. Yet this was not the final word on Brownist activity in the county, since four years later, in 1628, Bishop Harsnett wrote alarmingly that ‘the sect of the separatists doth daylie increase, not onlye in Yarmouth, but in the villages round about’. One of those caught, Robert Earll, spoke boldly of the bishop as ‘the devells messenger’.103 This attack on episcopal authority belonged to a well-established tradition of radical dissent in Norfolk founded by the earlier Brownist movement in the 1580s. With the cause sustained by émigrés, like John Robinson, from across the North Sea, separatism proved irrepressible. On the other hand, Norwich, the cradle of the Brownist movement in the 1580s, and a focal point for the local dissenting network into the 1610s, settled into an evangelical equilibrium under Bishop Jegon’s administration. But this balance was placed under increasing stress in the next two decades.

100 Ibid, pp. 31–2, 71. However, Robinson continued to maintain the need for an ordained ministry: see Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints, pp. 195–6. 101 John Yates, A modell of divinitie, STC 26086, p. 256. 102 Ibid, pp. 256–7, 263, 267. 103 Swinden, History and Antiquities of . . . Great Yarmouth, pp. 828–31; PRO, SP 16/124/8; R. Cust, ‘Anti-Puritanism and Urban Politics: Charles I and Great Yarmouth’, HJ, 35 (1990), pp. 1–26.

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Part II RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND GODLY REACTION IN THE 1620s

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Chapter Six NEW DIRECTIONS IN EPISCOPAL GOVERNMENT: THE SAMUEL HARSNETT YEARS

During the 1620s, John Yates’s integrity came to be tested by the same episcopal authority he had striven so assiduously to defend. Bishop Samuel Harsnett’s elevation to the see of Norwich in September 1619, a promotion that reflected the diocese’s puritan reputation in the eyes of the crown, held deeper implications for the fortunes of the city’s godly community. Harsnett, a noted anti-Calvinist, arrived in his new see determined to exert greater control over Norwich’s pulpits. Under his government – which lasted for a decade until 1629 – the Jegon administration’s measured evangelical programme was overturned in favour of a disciplinarian agenda, which strove to impose a tighter definition of religious conformity across Norfolk and Suffolk. Within Norwich city alone, a campaign against preaching was conducted in tandem with moves to elevate the cathedral’s status at the heart of civic religious spectacle. To some citizens, episcopal moves to scale down the level of religious instruction offered within the town stood to undermine the alliance of magistrates and ministers, which had hitherto ordered the moral fabric of urban life. As a further affront to godly sensibilities, Norwich’s parishes became the setting for a more decorous style of worship, seen as a direct obverse to promoting the Gospel.1 As traced in the next chapter, such development’s rebounded in a litany of complaint against Harsnett in the 1624 parliament; although for now let us turn to examine the immediate circumstances surrounding the prelate’s coming to East Anglia. Consideration of the city’s religious affairs in the 1620s must take into account the course of national events. In particular, Harsnett’s local manoeuvres took place against the background of James I’s efforts to secure a Spanish marriage for his son Prince Charles, and the widespread 1 I. Atherton and V. Morgan, ‘Revolution and Retrenchment: the Cathedral, 1630–1720’, in I. Atherton et al. (eds), Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996 (London, 1996), p. 547. Atherton and Morgan are silent on Harsnett’s impact upon religious practice in the city parish churches, discussed at length below, pp. 133–5, 138–9, 146–54.

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popular reaction such diplomacy provoked. James’s alarm over public criticism of his hispanophile policy enabled Harsnett to seize the initiative. Manipulating royal fears that a popular puritan conspiracy was afoot, the bishop was permitted to depart from the evangelical irenicism characteristic of former Jacobean churchmanship in East Anglia to raise the temperature of confessional discord with the city and diocese of Norwich.2 Harsnett’s image within the historiography of the Stuart church is of an angular figure – in Andrew Foster’s words ‘something of a bully’ – who was famed for his enmity towards puritans. As an outspoken anti-predestinarian and chaplain to Bishop Bancroft in the 1590s, Harsnett had proved a formidable hatchet-man against the puritan movement, especially by exposing the fraudulent practices of John Darrell, a self-styled exorcist, with a popular following among the godly of York province.3 Harsnett’s promotion to York in 1629 occasioned a solemn fast by the preaching ministers of the archdiocese. Fearing the prelate’s ‘Designs of Mischief against the Reforming Pastors and Christians’ of the north, a prayer meeting held in March 1630 to ‘implore the Help of Heaven’ against the new archbishop had the desired effect; for within a year Harsnett was dead.4 However, in the summer of 1619 King James deemed such an unflinching disciplinarian a suitable administrator for the puritan-infested Norwich diocese. In keeping with the divideand-rule spirit of James’s ecclesiastical policy, Harsnett was translated from Chichester to succeed John Overall – a divine of similar theological outlook – who had held Norwich for only eight months until his untimely demise in May 1619.5 As well as finding royal favour, Harsnett’s posting to Norfolk owed much to the intervention of his friend and patron Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. Often assumed to have been a crypto-Catholic, Arundel’s confidence in Harsnett was surely connected to the bishop’s soteriological outlook, which the virtuoso earl found congenial, to the extent of entrusting his son William’s education to Harsnett’s care.6 As bishop of Chichester, Harsnett had been a 2

T. Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 26–33; K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I’, JBS, 24 (1985), pp. 198–202; K. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), pp. 243–6. 3 A. Foster, ‘The Dean and Chapter, 1570–1660’, in M. Hobbs (ed.), Chichester Cathedral: an Historical Survey (Chichester, 1994), p. 91. For further biographical details, see N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1990), pp. 164–5 and T. Freeman, ‘Demons, Deviance and Defiance: John Darrell and the Politics of Exorcism in Late Elizabethan England’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 34–63. 4 T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1997), p. 88. 5 Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 38 and above, pp. 81–2; K. Fincham (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, Vol. 1, COERS, 1 (1994), p. 57. 6 N. Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), p. 238; M. F. S. Hervey, The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel (Cambridge, 1921), p. 119.

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NEW DIRECTIONS: THE SAMUEL HARSNETT YEARS

useful agent in maintaining the Howard presence in Sussex. The prelate’s elevation to Norwich was also linked to Arundel’s resurgence; although once established in Norfolk, Harsnett’s fortunes became entwined with those of the Howard interest, both at court and in the immediate vicinity of the family’s traditional county seat. A dark period came with Charles I’s ascent to the throne. Following Arundel’s temporary fall in 1626, as a consequence of his opposition to Charles and Buckingham’s war policy against Spain, Harsnett was called upon to raise the earl’s composition fine, squeezing rents from his patron’s Kenninghall estate, to rekindle – as he put it – that ‘spark of the vigor of their ancestors spirits’ among Howard’s tenants.7 But the earl’s servant also suffered a loss of face in the wake of the Buckingham party’s rise. We can discern this from a curious dispatch among William Laud’s papers – Laud of course moving in Buckingham’s circle as the duke’s chaplain – which is dated October 1627, around the time of Laud’s ascent to a seat on the Privy Council.8 The letter does not bear a signature. However, Laud’s unknown correspondent expressed dismay at a sermon preached by Harsnett – on visitation in King’s Lynn in May 1627 – on the theme ‘who is a faithful servant, whom when the master comes shall find so doing’. This choice of text was to commend Nicholas Price and Thomas Hare, the town’s public lecturers.9 Such praise would have startled Harsnett’s audience, since the bishop had earlier gone out of his way in October 1620 to suspend Nicholas Price for some indiscretion, the preacher only recovering his lectureship in September 1624.10 As Laud was informed, the sermon had encouraged the puritans to ‘a far greater confidence and insolency than before’. Moreover, Harsnett allegedly went on to countenance the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but ‘not the seaven sacraments which now adayes are obtruded upon you’, before chiding churchwardens for presenting painful preachers and ministers who refused to wear the surplice. Price was given confidence to single out his enemies in King’s Lynn for condemnation in his lectures.11 However, given that one of the named witnesses was Edmund Mapletoft, a fellow of Harsnett’s old college of Pembroke, Cambridge, this report savours of an earlier disagreement between the bishop and his former collegiate foes.12 For this reason, we have 7 K. Sharpe, ‘The Earl of Arundel, his Circle and Opposition to the Duke of Buckingham, 1618–1628’, in K. Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford, 1978), pp. 231–2; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, pp. 278–9; BL, Add MS 39948, fo. 187v. 8 Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, pp. 214–15. 9 LPL, MS 943, p. 125. 10 BL, Add MS 24346, entries for 27 Oct 1620, 11 Sept 1624. The entry for 11 Mar 1625 records Thomas Hare’s appointment as lecturer. 11 LPL, MS 943, p. 125. 12 Ibid, p. 127; Venn, III, p.138. As rector of Holbrook, Suffolk, Mapletoft served as a standing official to another Pembroke alumnus, Bishop Wren, see Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 220r, Tanner MS 314r, fos 180r–v; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (1948), p. 84. For Harsnett’s troubles at Pembroke,

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cause to doubt its veracity. On the other hand, with Arundel in disgrace and with Buckingham recasting himself as a Protestant champion in his ill-fated bid to secure La Rochelle in June 1627, perhaps Harsnett too hoped to jump on the Protestant patriot bandwagon, reinventing himself as a reformed pastor to secure new lines of patronage?13 If so, his pulpit utterances in 1627 were entirely out of character with his former governmental style. Returning to Norwich, Harsnett’s defence of the Howard regional patrimony had given the bishop plenty of scope to meddle in civic affairs, as in 1621, when he was commissioned by Arundel – as Steward of the Duchy of Norfolk – to head an inquiry into the standards of worsted finishing in the city. Such interference in the running of Norwich’s staple industry was not entirely welcomed by the corporation.14 Nor too was the bishop’s careful cultivation of a friendship with Sir Thomas Cornwallis of Beeston, a deputy lieutenant of Norfolk and an adversary to the magistrates when it came to apportioning the city’s contribution to county musters.15 Moreover, the bishop was well known for his confrontational approach to incorporated boroughs. Drawn into a jurisdictional feud between the city and the dean and chapter of Chichester over rights in the cathedral close and the city’s charters – a dispute settled in 1617 – Harsnett had confided his contempt for the burghers to Arundel, writing that ‘if your lordship had but the least taste of the unsavoury government of Chichester, you would do like Almighty God, spew both it and them out of your mouth’.16 Yet upon his translation to Norwich, it was not immediately clear whether relations between the prelate and his new cathedral city would turn equally sour. Indeed, following his arrival, Harsnett can be seen fulfilling his duty of furnishing hospitality for Norwich’s governing elite. Arguably, there were ulterior motives behind these initial overtures. In particular, the new bishop was keen to gain the municipality’s backing over the matter of finding alternative accommodation for the city’s French Walloon congregation. Since Bishop Parkhurst’s time, the Walloons had been permitted use of the bishop’s chapel for their services. Like his predecessor John Jegon, Harnsett hoped to evict the French by suggesting that they relocate to that prime see, ODNB, ‘Samuel Harsnett (1561–1631)’ and J. Twigg, The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution, 1625–1688 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 18. 13 T. Cogswell, ‘The People’s Love: the Duke of Buckingham and Popularity’, in T. Cogswell et al. (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), p. 223. As Nicholas Cranfield implies in ODNB, Harsnett made other ‘popular’ overtones at this time, apparently backing the Petition of Right in the 1628 Parliament. 14 Reg Vagum, II, p. 245; NRO, MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 380v, 10 Jan 1623, fo. 382r, 17 Jan 1623. 15 Cornwallis, who had married Bishop Jegon’s widow, proved a useful ally during Harsnett’s troubles over a dilapidation suit, which can be followed in Bod L, Tanner MS 228, fos 89r–91v; PRO, DEL 4/9, fos 22r, 35v, 127v; SP 16/270/167–8. For the city’s wrangling with Cornwallis, see G. L. Owens, ‘Norfolk 1620–1641: Local Government and Central Authority in an East Anglian County’, University of Wisconsin Ph.D., 1970, pp. 203–7. 16 BL, Add MS 39948, fo. 185r; A. Foster, ‘Chichester Diocese in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 123 (1985), pp. 191–2.

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piece of civic property, the New Hall, which had been home to the Dutch church since the 1560s. Having viewed the existing Dutch chapel, Harsnett raised his idea with the mayor’s court. Remarking on the benefits to be accrued from renting part of the building to the Walloons, the bishop’s proposal was one that ‘this howse did well like of’. The French did not. Dismayed by the prospect of competing for space with the Dutch, they petitioned against the move, while Harsnett was forced to relent and confirm their licence to the chapel in 1622, albeit not without first ordering the Walloons to remove their seating with the least possible grace. Members of the congregation were made to bring chairs to divine worship.17 In pursuing this business, Harsnett established firm contacts among the civic elite, notably with Alderman William Browne – mayor in 1630 – who, following his diocesan’s mediation with the city over the Walloon church, purchased a piece of plate for the bishop for having entertained his brethren.18 The tie was sufficiently strong for Harsnett to remember Browne in his will. Perhaps their acquaintance also represented a convergence of religious preferences, since from what is known about his role in parochial affairs at St George Tombland, Browne’s apparent lack of commitment to the reformed rite attracted adverse comment. At least he was at odds with others of his parish, who hinted at his church papistry to the ecclesiastical authorities. As reported during the Metropolitical visitation of 1613, Browne had refused communion for the past seven years ‘albeit he hath bene friendlie, charitablie and christianlie intreated and admonished thereunto to the great offence of well disposed inhabitants and citizens of Norwich and the evil example of others’.19 Admittedly, this did not prevent Browne from serving as churchwarden in 1609, 1616 and 1619, when he appeared at the archdeacon’s visitation but declined to take his oath.20 Browne’s outlook may have been attuned to Harsnett’s style of divinity and abrasive antipuritanism; at least Browne had earlier sought to distinguish himself as a patron of Norwich cathedral, an institution that was to assume a front-line position in Harsnett’s designs to restrict the amount of preaching sponsored in the city. For example, in 1608 Browne contributed a modest 40s towards a new organ for the cathedral choir.21 More impressively, in collusion with his 17

NRO, MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 267v, 17 Nov 1619; W. J. C. Moems, The Walloons and their Church at Norwich 1565–1832 (London, 1888), pp. 21–2. Mayors of Norwich, p. 78; NRO, MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 269v, 4 Dec 1619. Browne was a merchantdraper who traded through Great Yarmouth, PRO, REQ 2/414/19. 19 PRO, PROB 11/160, fo. 174r; NRO, ANW 3/17a, comperta and presentments, 1613. 20 NRO, ANW 3/16, comperta, 1609; ANW 3/20, comperta, 1614–17; ANW 3/21, comperta, 1617–19. 21 NRO, DCN 107/1, receipts for organ repairs, 1607–9. The new organ was intended to replace an instrument damaged in 1601 after the spire was struck by lightning. See P. Aston and T. Roast, ‘Music in the Cathedral’, in Atherton et al. (eds), Norwich Cathedral, p. 690. For another list of benefactors towards a new organ at Worcester, this time with a conspicuous Catholic complement, see M. Hodgetts, ‘Recusant Contributors to the Worcester Cathedral Organ, 1613’, Midland Catholic History, 1 (1991), pp. 28–33. 18

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Tombland neighbour Edmund Anguish in 1615, Browne erected a gallery around the cathedral’s open air ‘green yard’ for ‘the better and more convenient setting and hearing for themselves and their friends’ of the sermons preached there.22 In the same year, his fellow aldermen were busily channelling funds to set up three lectureships at the rival preaching place, St Andrew’s. As we shall see, Harsnett promptly closed two of these down, conspicuously showing more favour to the cathedral sermons, where Browne already had a ring-side seat. Whatever the nature of his beliefs, Browne was not one of the godly, which made him a ready ally of Harsnett.23 Despite initial conviviality, relations between diocesan government and the forwardly Protestant among Norwich corporation cooled in the wake of Harsnett’s primary visitation of 1620. Certain articles were bound to create a stir in godly circles. Most testing of all related to the conduct of lecturers which, as Kenneth Fincham has remarked, was the first of any Jacobean episcopal injunctions to single out this wing of the ministry for special attention. churchwardens were to enquire whether lecturers attached to their respective parishes held a licence. They were also to present ministers who failed to read public prayers before preaching – clad in a surplice according to the Book of Common Prayer – ‘without omission of any part thereof’ and without maintaining ‘any doctrine directly contrary or repugnant to the articles of Christian faith and religion’. Were ministers ‘schismatically and phantastically affected to novelties and innovations’? Such questions probed far beyond the moderate level of subscription required by Harsnett’s predecessor John Jegon, and at St Andrew’s Robert Gallard was censured for seldom reading prayers before his Thursday morning lectures.24 Equally contentious was the insistence that all women being churched should wear ‘a decent veil upon their heads’. At St Andrew’s, the churchwardens balked at returning names of those not complying with the order, while on the other side of the Wensum at St Saviour’s, the veil proved to be something of a local cause célèbre for the godly.25 Events were set in motion, when in January 1621, Elizabeth Shipdham refused to give thanks for the birth of her son suitably veiled. Shipdham née Thurston held strong religious views as the daughter of Alderman Edmund Thurston, a veteran critic of episcopacy and signatory of the Norwich supplication of 1581, who had extended patronage to the nonconformist minister John Burgess in the 1590s.26 Elizabeth was the wife of Thomas Shipdham. Originally from 22 A deed cited in H. W. Saunders, A History of Norwich Grammar School (Norwich, 1952), p. 122; Chapter Minutes, p. 50. 23 See below, pp. 118–20, 126–7. 24 Fincham (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, p. 216; NRO, DN VIS/5/1. Gallard’s earlier career is traced above, pp. 84, 103–4. 25 For the role of churching, see D. Cressy, ‘Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England’, P & P, 141 (1993), pp. 106–46; NRO, DN VIS/5/1. 26 PRO, PROB 11/177, fo. 32r, will of Edmund Thurston, proved in 1598; Seconde Parte, I, p. 159. For Burgess, see above, pp. 78–9.

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Halesworth, Suffolk, Thomas Shipdham had ambitions to rise in city politics, and also happened to be serving out his turn as sheriff in 1621.27 Through the agency of her husband, Elizabeth took her objections to the criminal court. So when Chancellor Redmayne excommunicated Mrs Shipdham for her obstinacy, she contested the sentence in King’s Bench during Trinity term 1622, arguing that the requirement to wear the veil was both an ecclesiastical innovation and an alien novelty, a praemunire, not sanctioned by any custom or law in England. For Harsnett, the case threatened to overturn his visitation articles. Moreover, if found guilty and with the sentence being taken to its extreme, Redmayne and presumably the bishop as well could have faced distraint and imprisonment, with Sheriff Shipdham no doubt waiting to throw away the key. In the event, the case was referred to Archbishop Abbot. Convening a panel of six bishops then present in London – one of whom was Harsnett himself – the matter was resolved in Redmayne’s favour.28 The Shipdhams lost their plea. But Thomas did not shrink from disdaining ecclesiastical censure, later emerging as an active campaigner against Bishop Wren in 1636, when it was alleged that Shipdham dismissed excommunication as ‘but a Scare Crow’ in the face of the Church courts.29 Having averted trouble over the veil, Harsnett was presented with an opportunity to instigate an overhaul of Norwich’s religious life with regard to preaching. Here the prelate was able to cultivate King James’s unease over outbursts against his pro-Spanish diplomacy emanating from both press and pulpit, to begin a campaign against lectureships in his own diocese. Significantly, royal anxiety became fixed on Norwich. The city attracted notoriety again for having played host to the minister Thomas Scott, a vociferous critic of Jacobean foreign policy, who was exposed as the author of Vox Populi, a pamphlet of 1620, which alleged to have discovered the machinations of the Spanish Council of State and its agent Count Gondomar to subvert the Protestant succession. Scott was forced to continue sniping from the safety of the Netherlands.30 Since the publishing venture had no bearing on episcopal authority, Harsnett was initially reluctant to involve himself in proceedings against Scott, although he was approached by the minister’s brother to intercede on Scott’s behalf with Archbishop Abbot.31 27 NRO, DN DEP/31/34, fo. 11r. Shipdham had been apprenticed to his future wife’s uncle, Alexander Thurston, who became mayor in 1600. See Millican, Freeman, p. 104; Mayors of Norwich, p. 67; PRO, PROB 11/177, fo. 32r. 28 The case can be followed in Geoffrey Palmer, Les Reportes de Sir Geoffrey Palmer (1688), p. 296. Harsnett’s presence in London is confirmed by PRO, DEL 4/9, fo. 35r. 29 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 162r. 30 S. L. Adams, ‘Captain Thomas Gainsford, the Vox Spiritus and the Vox Populi’, BIHR, 49 (1976), pp. 141–4; P. Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, HJ, 25 (1982), pp. 805–25. DNB, ‘Thomas Scott’, states that Scott was a minister at St Saviour’s, although his name does not appear among the extant Norwich libri cleri for the 1610s. 31 PRO, SP 14/134/20, 134/75.

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However, Harsnett was soon drawn into the fray to counter protest against the Spanish Match. Following Vox Populi, another perceived timely complaint against James’s marriage negotiations – linked to Norwich diocese – emerged in the form of The Double Deliverance: Spain and Rome Defeated, a satirical print endorsed by Samuel Ward, the famous town lecturer of Ipswich, in February 1621.32 The illustration affirmed God’s providential intervention on England’s side against her Catholic foes. Depicting the Pope, cardinals and the king of Spain seated in league with the devil, flanked by the flight of the Armada ‘ventorum ludibrium’ on one side and Guy Fawkes approaching Parliament with a lantern under God’s eye on the other, Ward claimed that the cartoon had been produced five years earlier.33 But its publication in Amsterdam, to coincide with Gondomar’s embassy, was regarded as inflammatory by James. Ward was placed under house arrest for a fortnight and then barred from preaching, although upon his release he disregarded the injunction and returned to the pulpit. At this point Harsnett became involved to discipline the minister in the consistory court. In return, Ward made a direct appeal to the crown through Lord Keeper Williams, who was unable to secure Ward’s request for reinstatement after James gave instructions that the Ipswich lectureship was to be performed by six beneficed ministers in rotation.34 Conceivably Harsnett – who was present in London at the time of this order’s promulgation on 26 July 1622 – may have been involved in drafting the edict. Yet whatever his part in orchestrating policy at the centre, the bishop certainly took the king’s directions as a mandate to convert borough lectureships into combination exercises elsewhere in his see.35 Harsnett’s attention was fixed upon the city of Norwich and the parish of St Andrew’s in particular. Three ministers on the corporation’s payroll met with episcopal disapproval, when at some point in the summer of 1622, Harsnett reduced the number of civic lectures held in the Church from three a week back to its pre-1615 level of one.36 The first to be prohibited was Robert Gallard, who had held the Thursday lecture since 1615.37 The second was his 32 For Ward, see Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, pp. 248–59; P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 153–4, 174–7. 33 Reproduced in M. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature, Vol. I (London, 1959), p. 15. 34 T. Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of James I (2 vols, London, 1848), II, pp. 226, 228, 232; R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War (London, 1969), p. 53; PRO, SP 15/42/76; John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata: a Memorial Offered to the Great Deservings of John Williams D. D. (2 vols, 1692), I, p. 95; PRO, SP 14/130/127, 132/59; Bod L, Tanner MS 265, fo. 28r. 35 PRO, DEL 4/9, fo. 35r; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, p. 244. 36 The creation of weekday lectures at St Andrew’s is traced above, pp. 103–4. Confusion exists over the date of Harsnett’s cutting of the series. Bishop Wren, in preparing his defence in 1641, was informed that proceedings were initiated immediately upon Harsnett’s translation to Norwich in 1619, Bod L, Tanner MS 314, fo. 155v, followed in Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 271. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, p. 246, suggests a later date after 1622. My reading is taken from the annual payments for preachers in the city chamberlains’ accounts, which were made out on Lady Day – 25 March – every year. 37 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 40r, 1 Dec 1615.

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colleague John Ward, a graduate of Emmanuel College and Monday lecturer since November 1617, whose employment by the corporation had followed his presentation to St Michael at Plea by Richard, Lord Dacre in September 1617.38 This John Ward should not be confused with John, a brother of the Ipswich lecturer Samuel Ward.39 Moreover, to complicate matters further, John Ward who officiated at St Michael’s, must not be mistaken for another contemporaneous cleric of the same name who also officiated in Norwich, having been collated to Simon and St Jude by Bishop Jegon in 1604 and St Swithan in 1608, before serving St Benedict’s in 1628.40 This John Ward was of a completely different character from his ex-Emmanuel namesake. No graduate, he remained in the city until the 1640s, when reports about his inept preaching and scandalous life in ‘frequenting taverns and alehouses’ were sent to the Long Parliament. This Ward held his city livings with Little Ellingham, which he neglected shamelessly. Such was the opinion voiced by the exasperated Ellingham churchwardens, who complained bitterly to the archdeacon of Norwich in 1629 about their rector’s continued absence, entrusting the cure to Henry Baldwin, who ‘doeth not live in the town’ and ‘cannot read to the misunderstanding of his parishioners’, it being ‘unknown whether he be in holie orders or not’.41 However, John Ward of St Michael’s was respected within godly circles. A patron of religious learning, the minister retained contacts with his old college and its master William Sancroft, by acting as a local talent scout for scholars for Emmanuel, that ‘Nursery of Preachers’, that ‘famous seminary’ whose ‘renown whereof make every man that looketh heaven-ward desirous to crowd his children into’.42 Admittedly, Ward was not held in high esteem by all Norvicians. In July 1621 for example, one Frances Whitacres, a parishioner at St Michael’s, threatened that ‘if she should meete with him [Mr Ward], she would spit in his face and dischardge her ordynance at him’,

38

Venn, IV, pp. 331–2; NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 80r, 24 Nov 1617; DN VSC/2/3b, fo. 3v. The mistake occurs in Venn, IV, pp. 331–2. John Ward of St Michael at Plea was born in Stradbrooke, Suffolk, in 1582, NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 505r. This John Ward should not be confused with his namesake, the brother of Samuel and Nathaniel Ward, who became rector of Dinnington, Suffolk, where in 1638 he was charged with simony by the High Commission, PRO, SP 16/392/33, 392/72, 393/16; Bod L, Tanner MS 219, fo. 1. By then the Norwich John Ward had already joined the English church at Rotterdam, see below, pp. 191–2, 227–8. 40 This Ward was collated to St Simon and St Jude while a deacon in 1604, NRO, DN REG/15/21, fo. 11. He was ordained priest by Jegon and collated to St Swithan’s in 1608, resigning St Simon and St Jude in 1616, DN VSC/2/3b, fo. 4v, DN REG/16/22, fo. 55v. His time at St Benedict’s is recorded in NRO, PD 191/23. 41 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 134; NRO, DN REG/16/22, fo. 21r; MC 16/15, fos 1–2. During the 1634 visitation, Ward was presented at St Swithan’s for neglecting to read prayers on holy days, DN VIS/6/4. 42 BL, Harl MS 3783, fo. 38r, a letter of 1634 from Ward imploring Sancroft to oversee his son’s education, so that the boy ‘shall in due time come forth to beare the name of the Lord Jesus, and lift him up amongst his people’. Ward also hoped to advance the learning of a son of Gilbert Cushion, a schoolmaster and ‘a godly poor man of our city’. 39

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adding that ‘she had as willingly receive the Sacrament of a dogge as of him’: for which railing words and other lewd behaviour that acknowledged crusader against profanity – the aptly named Mayor George Birch – had Whitacres whipped and committed to Bridewell.43 Bishop Harsnett was equally unimpressed with Ward’s standing among the civic elite, allegedly dismissing Ward’s preaching as ‘needlesse’.44 So saying, Harsnett converted Ward’s Monday lecture into a combination exercise of ministers from ‘out of the country’, a ruling that also applied to John Yates’s Friday morning lectureship, leaving the corporation to fill the roster on both weekdays.45 The Thursday exercise at St Andrew’s was allowed to continue, with the Wednesday lecture at St Clement’s.46 So at a stroke, the number of civicsponsored public sermons was halved from four a week to two, Robert Gallard and John Ward disappearing from the annual payments to preachers in the chamberlains’ accounts after September 1622.47 The third pastor forced to adjust to the bishop’s changes was John Yates. He retained the chaplaincy at St Andrew’s and assumed the remaining Thursday lecture vacated by Robert Gallard until the summer of 1623; after which time he devoted his energies to his other living at Stiffkey, where he had been presented by an ageing Sir Nathaniel Bacon in September 1622.48 Possibly altered circumstances influenced the decision to quit St Andrew’s, or so Kenneth Shipps and Keith Sprunger have argued. As they suggest, Yates’s move was a ploy to evade Harsnett’s censure and continue his ministry unhindered, even if upon arriving in Stiffkey Yates was disappointed to find the existing pulpit ‘too low’ for his preaching stature.49 So began, as they imply, a trajectory by which Yates broke from the episcopal church to become a Congregationalist in the 1640s and 1650s: but is this a superficial reading of his career?50 To begin with, the minister’s potential road to radical Independency rests on a glaring factual error in the old Dictionary of National Biography, which placed the Norfolk John Yates among the signatories of A Renunciation and Declaration of the Ministers of Congregational

43

NRO, MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 358r, 28 July 1621. George Birch’s career is outlined above, pp. 84–5. BL, Add MS 18597, fo. 168v. 45 Bod L, Tanner MS 314, fo. 155v; NRO, CA, 1603–25, fo. 396v. Settling funds on the combinations led to squabbling as in MCB/16, fo. 18r, 23 Oct 1624; AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 217v, 14 Oct 1625. 46 NRO, CA 1603–25, fo. 396v. 47 Ibid, fo. 377r, accounts for the year ending 25 Mar 1623. Gallard and Ward were to receive £6 13s 4d – half of the former salary of £13 6s 8d – indicating that their lectures ended around September 1622. 48 Ibid, fo. 396v, accounts for 1623–4, where Yates was paid for the Thursday lecture ‘for the quarter ended at midsummer’ only; NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 99. He was succeeded as chaplain and preacher at St Andrew’s by Laurence Howlett, another Emmanuel alumnus. For Nathaniel Bacon, see above, pp. 74. Bacon died in February 1623, five months after appointing Yates, PRO, PROB 11/141, fo. 117v. 49 Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 276; K. L. Sprunger, ‘John Yates of Norfolk: the Radical Puritan Preacher as Ramist Philosopher’, JHI, 37 (1976), pp. 697–8; NRO, DN VIS/6/1, 1629 visitation, for complaints about the height of Stiffkey pulpit. 50 Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England, p. 315 offers the same interpretation. 44

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Churches . . . in the City of London, printed in response to Thomas Venner’s Fifth Monarchy Plot of 1661.51 This may have been so were it not for the awkward fact of Yates’s recorded burial at Stiffkey on 12 September 1657.52 Obviously, another John Yates must have declared against Venner, which at once throws into doubt such efforts at reading history backwards to locate Yates of Stiffkey’s impending ‘puritanism’ in the 1620s, largely in light of future events. Indeed, Yates was uncomfortable with the term ‘puritan’ and anticipating revisionist scholars publicly called for its abolition.53 Upon which note, it is worth embarking on a short yet necessary detour of the minister’s subsequent writings in the 1630s and 1640s, in order to set his former words and actions during the Harsnett years in their proper context. Certainly, the Norfolk Yates was no stranger to religious controversy. Summoned to parliament in 1624 to give evidence against Harsnett, he was shortly to become a prominent spokesman for the opposition led by Archbishop Abbot’s chaplains Thomas Goad and Daniel Featley against a tract entitled A New Gagg for an old Goose, penned by one of the royal chaplains, Richard Montagu.54 The events surrounding this publication are well known. Written to counter a Catholic proselytiser who had attempted to make converts from among his parishioners at Stanford Rivers, Essex, Montagu sought to beat the missionary priest at his own game by blurring the distinctions between the Churches of England and Rome. Underlying Montagu’s treatise was a sensational redefinition of Calvinism as doctrinal puritanism. As such, A New Gagg was promoted by the Arminian party around Richard Neile to discredit their Calvinist foes in the eyes of King James, who was then seeking to distance himself from mainstream Calvinism with its concomitant antiPapal edge.55 Neile’s chaplains, Augustine Lindsell and John Cosin – Montagu’s

51 DNB, ‘John Yates’, citing B. Hambury, Historical Memorials Relating to the Independents or Congregationalists (3 vols, London, 1839–44), III, p. 595. This reading of Yates’s later career is recycled in Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 279 n. 41; Sprunger, ‘John Yates of Norfolk’, p. 698; Greaves and Zaller, III, p. 348. 52 NRO, PD 492/1, although Yates of Stiffkey’s will was not proved until 1662, NCC O. W. 1662. Part of the case for Yates’s putative Independency rests on the appearance of the name as a co-editor of the works of two Norfolk Congregationalists, Jeremiah Burroughs and William Bridge. See the dedications BLTT, E 424 (1) and E 471 (1) respectively. However, a more likely candidate was John Yates, rector of Cheshunt Hertfordshire from 1656, who was ejected as a Congregationalist minister at the Restoration. See A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 551. 53 John Yates, Ibis ad Caesarem, or a submissive appearance before Caesar in answer to Mr Montagues Appeale (1626), STC 26083, pt III, p. 40. 54 BL, Add MS 25278, fos 138v–9r; K. Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Politics: Archbishop Abbott’s Defence of Protestant Orthodoxy’, HR, 61 (1988), p. 57. Thomas Goad had earlier edited Yates’s catechism, A modell of divinitie catechistically composed (1623), STC 26086, ‘An advertisement to the reader’. Yates, confiding in his new patron Sir Roger Townsend – Nathaniel Bacon’s son-in-law and heir – recalled how Goad had saved the work from some awkward slips Particularly embarrassing was the error that Christ’s second death saw his ‘banishment from blessednesse and the favour of God’. See NRO, MF/RO 27/3 no. 422. 55 DNB, ‘Richard Montagu’; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 125–6; Richard Montagu, A Gagg for the New Gospel? No: A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624), STC 18029, pp. 110, 157–72.

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friend and correspondent – were instrumental in guiding A New Gagg through the censor. Its timely release to coincide with the 1624 parliament was intended to maximise its appeal to James’s ecumenical sensibilities in line with his current foreign diplomacy. The tract had the desired effect. At least the king found Montagu’s argument congenial, publicly defending the author with a disarming ‘if thou be a papist, I am a papist’.56 Yates was brought on board to uphold Calvinist orthodoxy. With Nathaniel Ward – brother of the Ipswich lecturer Samuel – he was co-opted into signing a declaration condemning Montagu’s book, which was submitted to the Commons on 13 May 1624 for further deliberation by Archbishop Abbot, the protest’s main architect.57 But this was far from the end of Yates’s involvement. When Montagu was called upon to justify his original work in the follow-up Appello Caesarem, a Just Appeal from Two Unjust Informers of 1625, which identified the ‘unjust informers’ as those ‘Classicall Puritans’, the ‘two Grandees of the faction, so great and turbulent as most be in the diocese of Norwich’, Yates was forced to reply with Ibis ad Caesarem.58 The reference to the eponymous ‘Ibis’ would not have been lost on Yates’s readership. Any familiar with his catechism and its warning to Norwich’s ‘worthy senators’ not to repeat the folly of Alexandria, which having ‘nourished the great bird Ibis to devour the garbage and offal of it . . . left of his owne filth and beastliness more noysome behind him’, would have got the in-joke. Montagu’s divinity was so much ‘filth and beastliness’. To prove the point, Yates printed his original protest to parliament along with its accompanying set of twenty-one articles outlining Montagu’s doctrinal errors as an appendix.59 Yet Yates’s spat should not seal his reputation as a rebellious puritan grandee, as Montagu and later Peter Heylyn commented.60 Indeed, in 1637 and in the wake of Matthew Wren’s notorious visitation of the previous year, Yates was so incensed by ‘puritan’ criticism of the ‘altar policy’ that he published an elaborate apology for receiving the eucharist at an east-end communion table.61 He hoped to win over those who viewed Laudian altar

56

G. Ornsby (ed.), The Correspondence of John Cosin D. D, Vol. 1, Surtees Society, 52 (1869), p. 22; M. Janson and W. B. Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625 (New Haven, 1987), p. 325. 57 PRO, SP 14/166, fo. 199, parliamentary diary of Sir Edward Nichols, which corrects Peter Heylyn’s account that the two subscribers were Yates and Ward ‘preachers at Ipswich’, see Cyprianus Anglicus (1668), pp. 125–6, 135. The error that Samuel Ward, rather than his brother Nathaniel, signed the declaration recurs in Greaves and Zaller, III, p. 348 and J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: the Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 59–60. Nathaniel Ward was imprisoned for his protest: APC, 1623–5, p. 237, 13 June 1624. 58 Richard Montagu, Appello Caesrarem: a just appeal from two unjust informers (1625), STC 18030, sig. A2, p. 3; Yates, Ibis ad Caesarem, sig. A2. 59 Yates, A modell of dvinitie, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’; idem, Ibis ad Caesarem, pt iii, pp. 45–6. 60 Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, pp. 125–6, 135. 61 John Yates, A treatise of the honor of Gods house: or the true pattern of the Church, with a discovery of the true causes and cure of our present contentions (1637), STC 26089, pp. 5, 8, 52–60, 63. Some

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Reform as idolatry. Echoing his earlier exchanges with John Robinson, he lashed out at dissenters from public worship as ‘contentious spirits’ and ‘bad humours’ who would ‘set all in combustion’, adding that ‘separations are not to be trusted that seek safety where Satan shall not find them: America is no more the place than Rome, Satan is to be feared, hath found and will find their societies’.62 Continuing the polemic, Yates went on to reinforce the jure divino status of episcopacy. Much spleen was vented on those who sought to have Timothy and Titus ‘unbishopped’ – an obvious foil to William Prynne’s attack on the episcopal office of 1636 – which had questioned the ‘supposed divine Monopoly of conferring orders’ granted to Timothy and Titus by St Paul. Instead, for Yates, bishops were ‘absolute in their dioceses’. Having ‘none above them in the extraordinary calling’ and as a ‘number of Apostles above the rest’, the Church held no ‘power to confer their ministry which is given them of God and not of man’.63 However, this was far from Yates’s last word on church government. Two years later, in November 1639, he reiterated the same elevated views on episcopacy in a second piece, Imago mundi, et regnum Christi, whose publication was delayed by several months, suggesting that the work was deliberately put on hold in anticipation of the calling of parliament amid a worsening Scottish crisis by the spring of 1640.64 Indeed, Imago mundi was a timely piece of propaganda aimed at dissuading English sympathies for the Scots. Dedicated to King Charles, and courteously reminding its readership that to excommunicate and take up arms against the monarch would lead to the dissolution of both church and state, Yates also devoted a passage to the bishops, ‘Princes of Priests by divine right’. Again he clearly had Prynne, a ‘nameless author’, a lawyer, a layman and one of the ‘mocking Michaels of our dayes’, in its sights.65 In particular, Yates took issue with Prynne’s treatment of 1 Timothy 1: 3 – where the Apostle Timothy was dispatched to govern the Church of Ephesus by St Paul – which Prynne had cited to undermine claims for episcopacy jure divino. As the argument ran, while Timothy may have been conferred absolute

doubt persists over whether the Stiffkey Yates or a contemporary namesake wrote this ‘Laudian’ work. See ODNB, ‘John Yates (d. 1657)’. On the basis of the evidence cited here, he clearly was the author. 62 Ibid, dedication ‘To Clere Talbot Dr of Law and Commissary to the lord Bishop of Norwich’. For Talbot’s career, see B. P. Levack, The Civil Lawyers in England 1603–1641: a Political Study (Oxford, 1971), pp. 274–5. 63 Yates, A treatise of the honor of Gods house, pp. 34, 39, 43–6, 49, engaging with William Prynne, The Unbishopping of Timothy and Titus and of the Angel of the Church of Ephesus (Amsterdam, 1636), STC 20476, p. 24. Prynne’s treatise was reprinted in 1660, and a copy survives in BLTT, E 190 (1). 64 E. Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of the Stationers of London 1554–1640 (London, 1877), iv, p. 465; John Yates, Imago mundi et regnum Christi: the foure monarchies and Christs twofold kingdom, the gentiles converted (1640), STC 26084, frontispiece. 65 Yates, Imago mundi et regnum Christi, sigs A3v, C2r–v.

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autonomy over this congregation, Ephesus was only one city and was not a pattern for the whole Church. However, Yates disagreed and responded by alluding to a favoured passage in Revelations 1: 20 – a vision of seven angels set above seven churches – which he rendered in an anagogical sense, by interpreting the angels to signify the apostle within each church in Asia. Ephesus was not unique, since it was God’s design to order the entire Asian Church according to Apostolic succession. Thus every city had ‘but one Bishop to rule over it as the Levites were given to Aaron, so all Priests and Deacons to the Bishop’; the statement had obvious overtones for one contemporary city, Geneva, as well as any who looked to imitate Geneva, like English puritans and Scottish Covenanters. Casting aside episcopacy, Geneva ‘by no Constitution can be a Church, or agree with the Apostolicall plantation’.66 Yates’s redoubtable defence of the Caroline church hierarchy was apparently inspired by his personal rapprochement with his former literary opponent, Richard Montagu, who succeeded Matthew Wren as Yates’s ordinary in 1638. Yates had found Montagu ‘not Lordly, but loving’ and willing to put aside past differences. At the same time, he was acutely conscious of having to justify his position against the ‘conceit’ that ‘his Lordship would remember an old contention, and that I should be urged to renounce my writing, and indeed, some say I have not only done this, but am wholly changed from what I was and become an Apostate, a heavy judgement and worse than the plague’.67 Indeed, Yates was to account Montagu ‘my greatest friend’.68 Yet whatever the extent of his smoothing over theological contention, Yates’s apology for altar reform, as well as his hardline statements on episcopacy jure divino, proved difficult to explain away in the changed political circumstances of the Civil War, especially in light of his having sworn the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643. Yates left himself open to accusations of being a turncoat. But, as he was quick to point out, he had always remained constant in his doctrinal views, adding that many have conceived that he [Montagu] converted me to be an Arminian, and I shall have been one in point if I had not prevented it in a miserable mangled copy and two books [which] came out before this Parliament, that I hear are put up unto it for popery, and so Sir Edward Dering hath printed, but I could pay him for more wit and discretion.69

66 Prynne, The Unbishopping of Timothy and Titus, p. 33; Yates, Imago mundi et regnum Christi, sigs A3v, C*, e. 67 Yates, Imago mundi et regnum Christi, sigs C3-d. Montagu also published a stout defence of episcopacy jure divino in his THEANTHROPIKON (1640), STC 18035, II, p. 464. There may have been some collaboration between the two divines as Yates later implied, BL Add MS 25278, fo. 124v. 68 BL, Add MS 25278, fo. 124v. 69 Ibid, fo. 139v.

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The point was that Dering, county member for Kent, had targeted Yates among other authors of ‘audacious and libelling pamphlets against true religion’ licensed during the 1630s.70 Yates’s angry response to Dering is found in a manuscript treatise on ecclesiastical government entitled ‘Eldership the Greatest Lordship’, which was penned by the minister around 1643 for Sir Oliver St John, the Solicitor General, who was then engaged in devising a religious settlement against widening fissures between Presbyterians and Independents in the Westminster Assembly. Backing the toleration order of September 1644, St John emerged as a moderate Independent on Erastian grounds of retaining state control over the Church. Prior to this about-turn, the Solicitor General was courted by the Scot Robert Baillie as the Presbyterians’ ablest supporter in parliament, and it seems that Yates held out similar hopes that St John would ally the English church closer to the Scottish model.71 But for Yates there was one important proviso. Whereas the Solemn League was a call to extirpate government by bishops root and branch, Yates argued the case for a reduced form of episcopacy, stating simply that ‘Episcopacy without Presbytery is tyranny’ while ‘Presbytery without Episcopacy is faction’. He envisaged a greater role for a national synod in determining discipline. However, ordinaries had a vital role to play as ‘president or moderator’ among other divines, while worthy ‘bishops who can defend our Covenant [and] cannot be against the episcopacy of the apostles or their successors in the planting of churches’ were to be maintained.72 This was far from the radical ecclesiologies favoured by some Independents, who invested congregations with powers to decide their own affairs. To Yates, Independent arguments for a fragmented form of church government were redolent of those advanced by John Robinson during the 1610s and 1620s.73 To the end, Yates remained a firm Calvinist and staunch supporter of episcopacy. While the priorities and outlook of the Church hierarchy had shifted between the reigns of James I and Charles I, Yates’s belief in government by bishops as the only bulwark against schism did not falter. His last recorded statement to this effect came in the wake of the

70

BLTT, E 197 (1), A Collection of Speeches made by Sir Edward Dering . . . in matters of religion (1642), p. 13. Yates’s name does not appear in an earlier edition, BLTT, E 196 (18), Foure Speeches made by Sir Edward Dering in the High Court of Parliament concerning the Archbishop and divers other grievances (1641), p. 6, possibly because the former version was not authorised by Dering. 71 BL, Add MS 25278, fos 119r, 120r; DNB, ‘Oliver St John’; W. A. Shaw, A History of the English Church During the Civil War and Under the Commonwealth (2 vols, London, 1900), II, pp. 41–3. However, as William Palmer’s excellent entry on St John in ODNB points out, the Solicitor General’s religious position was far from clear cut. Indeed, he seems to have heeded Yates’s advice, as in extending patronage to Bishop James Ussher by installing the latter as preacher at Lincoln’s Inn in 1647. 72 BL, Add MS 25278, fos 143r, 165v. 73 See above, pp. 105–7. Similar arguments to Yates’s advancing a reduced episcopacy in the 1640s are examined in Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England, pp. 314–16.

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second Civil War of 1648. Thus in June 1648, he signed an address of Norfolk Presbyterian ministers vindicating the Solemn Covenant: an action which sits uncomfortably with the depiction of Yates as a radical Congregationalist.74 Such controversies lay in the future. However, anticipating Yates’s uncompromising defence of episcopal government in the 1630s, we may infer that his former relations with Bishop Harsnett in the 1620s were more complex than the air of mutual hostility between ordinary and minister posited by Kenneth Shipps. That said, Yates was perturbed by Harsnett’s efforts to modify Norwich’s religious life, in the wake of James’s Declaration to Preachers of 4 August 1622. Again there is a possibility that Harsnett exerted an influence over the drawing up of these articles; at least the spirit of the declaration mirrored the earlier royal injunction determining the Ipswich borough lecture instigated in July.75 However, the August directions went a stage further than the orders of the previous month. Intended to curb the excesses of ‘divers yonge students’, who ‘by reading of late writers and ungrounded divines’ had broached ‘unprofitable, unsound, seditious and dangerous doctrines’ leading to disquiet in both church and state, preachers were admonished to conduct sermons ‘in a regular form’. Sermons were to adhere to set patterns laid down in the Articles of Religion and the Homilies. Moreover, expositions of the starker points of predestination, election and reprobation were deemed contentious and were to be avoided, while preaching on the prerogative powers of sovereign princes was similarly prohibited. Instead, ministers were to reinforce obedience to the monarch and uniformity in the Church. They were to do so without falling into ‘bitter invectives and indecent rayling speeches against the persons of either papists or puritans’, especially ‘when the auditory is suspected to be tainted with the one or the other infection’.76 By the last clause, James hoped to seal his commitment to sustaining harmony within the Church. However, one crucial provision – which was aimed at promoting unity – rested on the encouragement of all clergymen to catechise upon the tenets of Christian faith rather than offer sermons on Sunday afternoons. It was this point, article two of the royal declaration, that Harsnett adapted to regulate preaching in a draconian way. In September 1622, the bishop forbade the continuation of all Sunday morning services in Norwich beyond 9.30 a.m. to enable the city’s inhabitants – all 20,000 – the opportunity to attend the sermon at the cathedral, which lesson was to be followed in every parish church by afternoon catechism classes instead of

74

BLTT, E 447 (6), The Attestation of the Ministers of the County of Norfolk and the City of Norwich, in vindication . . . of the Solemn Covenant against the spreading Errors and prodigious Blasphemies that are scattered abroad in these licentious Dayes (1648). 75 Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, p. 245; idem (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, p. 216. 76 LPL, Register Abbot, ii, fos 199r–200r.

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preaching.77 Here Harsnett did not seek to silence the city’s pulpits by granting, as Ian Atherton and Victor Morgan have put it, a ‘monopoly’ to the cathedral sermon.78 Rather, the bishop wished to curtail the time allocated to expounding on the Gospel in the city parishes, a move that was subsequently taken as a grave affront by Norwich’s sermon-going citizens, who had hitherto enjoyed a rich diet of painful preaching available across the city on the Lord’s Day. There was also the practical matter of seating. Norwich’s respectable wellto-do, in need of further edifying lessons on the Sabbath, were now forced to cram themselves into the cathedral nave or – if weather permitted – outside in the adjoining ‘green yard’, where there was not enough room to accommodate all 20,000 inhabitants. This deficiency was highlighted twenty years later by one city minister, William Alanson. Writing to his patron Bishop Matthew Wren in 1641, Alanson recalled how lack of space deterred many, especially youths bound as servants or apprentices – individuals traditionally deemed to have been most in need of pious instruction – from following their masters beyond the cathedral gates. Left to their own devices, the young fell into bad company, absconding to taverns for all manner of riotous activities. Feasting, gaming or ‘worse matters for the maintenance whereof’, servants and ‘cash keepers’ were prone ‘sundry times’ to ‘fall short of their accounts’, squandering their employers’ earnings in idle profligate pastimes. Harsnett had undermined the moral fabric of civic society.79 The problem with reading this overly pessimistic assessment is that it was penned by Alanson, while engaged in furnishing evidence for Matthew Wren, as the bishop awaited impeachment by the Long Parliament. Wren had overturned the 1622 injunction on Sunday services in 1636. By casting the longterm outcome of Harsnett’s reforms in a negative vein, Alanson was applying obvious spin in a bid to recast Wren as pastor committed to promoting the Gospel. Alanson therefore had his own reasons for defining the Harsnett years as a dark time for preaching. The reactions of Norwich’s clergy and citizens to the 1622 ruling were most likely more mixed than Alanson later chose to portray, while some Norvicians – both clerical and lay – welcomed the added prestige that Harsnett’s orders conferred on the cathedral’s teaching role. One obvious enthusiast was Edmund Suckling, dean of Norwich, 1614–28. Here the 1622 injunction augmented his own tireless efforts to secure the cathedral’s status by pressing for an authoritative set of statutes, which were finally granted through Harsnett’s intervention in September 1620.80 Upon 77 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 316r, 336r; LJ, III, p. 388; BL, Harl MS 159, fo. 118v; NRO, ANW 21/1, fo. 8v. 78 Atherton and Morgan, ‘Revolution and Retrenchment: the Cathedral, 1630–1720’, p. 547. 79 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 336r. Alanson’s career can be followed below, pp. 195–7, 211–12, 221–2, 237, 242, 245, 250. 80 NRO, DCN 24/2, fo. 30v; DCN 115/9, iii, entry for 1620. The background to the 1620 statutes is given in R. A. Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation, 1538–1628’, in I. Atherton et al. (eds), Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese 1096–1996 (London, 1996), pp. 514, 530–3.

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his elevation to dean, Suckling had been the chapter’s longest-serving member. Holder of the third prebendal stall since 1587, Suckling had acted as the chapter’s de facto head during George Montgomery’s time as dean from 1603, Montgomery being a largely absentee Scot who took little interest in Norwich affairs. Suckling assumed an assiduous lead in defending the chapter’s property rights against the corporation, making local enemies in the process.81 Indeed, some of his foes were close to home, like the first Mrs Suckling, who in a strange turn of events sought out a certain Mary Woods of Norwich to have foreknowledge of her husband’s death, even offering Woods ‘a trunke of plate’ should she dispatch the dean by poison. Fortunately for Dr Suckling, Woods refused and the plot was uncovered by one of the city justices, Sir Thomas Hyrne.82 Hyrne was on good terms with the chapter, and in 1607 donated the worthy sum of £10 towards the cathedral’s new organ, making him the largest single contributor to the fund beside Bishop Jegon.83 Because of his financial support for Holy Trinity, Hyrne presumably enjoyed Suckling’s confidence. But he was not the only member of the Norwich’s governing elite with connections to the future dean; after all Suckling, as the son of Robert – mayor on two occasions in 1572 and 1582, as well as city burgess twice in 1571 and 1586 – belonged to one of Elizabethan Norwich’s more successful and politically prominent mercantile families.84 With his roots established in Norwich, Edmund Suckling had sufficient local contacts to attract patronage to the cathedral. We have already noted how certain worthies, like Alderman William Browne, had invested in the physical surrounds of the ‘green yard’. Yet the provision of convenient seating chimed in with moves to finance Sunday sermons at Christ Church by other civic patrons.85 A conspicuous lead was given by Sir John Pettus – the eldest son of the discreetly non-godly Thomas Pettus, and heir to the sizeable Pettus estate across Norfolk, Suffolk and London – who made the cathedral, rather than any parochially orientated sermon, the object of benefaction in his will of 1614.86 Out of the ‘love, zeal and religious mind’ he had ‘unto the preaching of the word of God’, Pettus left funds for cathedral sermons during the

81 Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 54; Houlbroke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation’, pp. 514, 524–6; Bod L, Tanner MS 228, fo. 140v. 82 PRO, SP 14/69/66, examination of Mary Woods, 6 June 1612. Woods’s skills in poisoning husbands allegedly attracted a noble clientele, which included the Countess of Essex. See SP 14/72/49–55. Mrs Suckling’s abortive attempt on the dean’s life did not deter him from paying for her monument in Norwich cathedral, PRO, PROB 11/154, fo. 86v, will of Edmund Suckling, proved in 1628. 83 Mayors of Norwich, p. 68 for Hyrne, who was knighted at Greenwich in 1609; NRO, DCN 107/1. 84 Mayors of Norwich, pp. 60–1; HP 1558–1603, III, p. 464. 85 See above, pp. 115–16. 86 For Thomas Pettus’s religious identity, see above, p. 61. John Pettus served as mayor in 1608 and MP for Norwich in 1601 and 1604. He was knighted during James’s progress from Scotland in 1603, Mayors of Norwich, p. 83; HP 1558–1603, III, p. 212.

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summer season. Bequeathing 10s for every sermon delivered in the green yard between Trinity Sunday and Sunday before the bishop’s synod at Michaelmas, or ‘Steane day’ – when the preaching rota for the next summer season was drawn up – 10s a time was not a vast sum.87 But by offering this token, Pettus hoped to nurture new preaching talent at the cathedral. In addition, his donation was made with the deliberate aim of funding an alternative venue for instruction to those sponsored by the city godly, notably at St Andrew’s. At any length, Pettus set a precedent for others to follow. Certainly Dean Suckling was quick to applaud the benefaction, since it helped reinstate the cathedral’s standing as a recognised local centre of religious learning. So too was the dean’s brother, Sir John Suckling. Comptroller of the royal household from 1622, John Suckling supplemented Pettus’s original endowment, bringing added cachet to the cathedral sermon.88 In turn, Sunday preaching at Christ Church came to attract distinguished visitors from out of town. In 1631, Edmund Suckling’s successor, Dean John Hassell, was compelled to tout the weekly event to his patron Dudley Carleton, Viscount Dorchester, as the East Anglian equivalent of the St Paul’s cross sermon, in being frequented by ‘the best qualitie that the Countie can afford, as knights, gentlemen, councillors at law etc’.89 If so, the corporation was equally keen to court such ‘qualitie’ and the opportunities for networking it presented. Some aldermen took advantage of Bishop Harsnett’s 1622 ruling to turn the cathedral exercise into an occasion for grand civic spectacle, even hiring a steward ‘for keeping the door at Christ Church sermons’ to accommodate honoured guests. The mayor’s court encouraged auditors to contribute to the city’s poor stock, arranging for alms collections at the cathedral door on Sundays.90 Such developments sealed the Christ Church sermon as a regular institution within the civic week, and as such it would be wrong to swallow William Alanson’s loaded assessment into assuming that Harsnett’s Reform was deeply resented by all of Norwich’s pious inhabitants. On the other hand, not everyone appreciated the new teaching arrangement. We gain an insight into one strand of popular opinion from certain words uttered by Robert Walman, a freeman carpenter, who was brought before the consistory court in 1632 for exclaiming that ‘there were ten false prophets in the City of Norwich to one true one’ since ‘divers ministers or preachers in Norwich had preached lies’.91 Walman had neglected to repair to his parish on Sunday mornings. His reluctance was prompted by his low opinions of

87

PRO, PROB 11/123, fo. 412r; Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation’, p. 536. NRO, DCN 29/2, p. 32, which lists donations for sermons from two other citizens, Henry Fawcett and Edward Nutting. For John Suckling, see the DNB entry for his son Sir John, the poet. 89 PRO, SP 16/188/3. 90 NRO, CA, 1625–48, fo. 12r; MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 427v, 15 Oct 1622. 91 Millican, Freemen, p. 92; NRO, DN DEP/40/45, fos 97r–v, 98r. 88

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Richard Gamon, rector of St Lawrence and St Giles, whom Walman decried as a pharisee and an unworthy preacher, which moved Gamon to sue for defamation.92 In his defence Walman argued that the service overran ensuring that he missed the beginning of the cathedral sermon. He disliked being forced to attend the green yard, being adverse to the setting, for the cathedral was ‘built by papists . . . [and] was not Christ’s Church but . . . a Romish church, and he went thither sometimes because some good men did come thither’.93 Walman was not alone in his sentiments. It would be interesting to know his position on a petitioning campaign brought to the mayor’s court in December 1623, ‘for restoring the morning exercises upon the Sabbath dayes’. Regrettably the original petition, which claimed some three hundred signatures, has not survived.94 However, the petition’s timely appearance during the mayoralty of Robert Craske presumably owed much to the canvassing of public opinion by the mayor himself. As we shall see, Craske emerged as a forceful patron of puritan ministers in the city in the 1630s. But his credentials as a zealous Protestant were established when, serving as an apprentice grocer in 1584, he presented Mr Olyet, a minister, to the magistrates for speaking ‘unseemly and contemptuous words tendynge to the discredit and defaymynge of the preachers of gods word’.95 If anyone was to champion godly complants against Harsnett, it would be Alderman Craske. Indeed, with the summoning of a parliament the following spring, the mayor and his supporters were presented with an opportunity to take their grievances to the heart of national government. The wider ramifications of their political lobbying against the bishop will now be discussed.

92

NRO, DN DEP/40/45, fo. 97v. For Gamon’s livings, see DN VSC/2/3b, fos 1v, 2v. Gamon became an active agent in the crackdown on nonconformity under Wren in 1636, see Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 220r, 240r. 93 NRO, DN DEP/40/45, fos 98r–v. 94 NRO, MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 508v, 31 Dec 1623. 95 Millican, Freemen, p. 74. Craske was sheriff in 1607, Mayors of Norwich, p. 75; NRO, MCB/11, 1582–7, p. 362, 18 Nov 1584.

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Chapter Seven THE 1624 PARLIAMENT, ITS REPERCUSSIONS AND THE CASE OF ST GREGORY’S PARISH

The events surrounding Bishop Harsnett’s pursuit through Parliament in May 1624 marked another turning point in the city of Norwich’s relations with local episcopal administration. Failure on the part of the godly to gain restitution ensured that the bishop’s injunctions on lectureships and Sunday services remained. In the meantime during the 1620s – much to the consternation of the godly – novel programmes of church decoration and beautification were implemented in some city parishes, most conspicuously at St Peter Mancroft and St Gregory’s. But before assessing the significance of these developments in detail, let us turn to the 1624 Parliament itself. We are fortunate in that the unprecedented nature of proceedings against a bishop by the Commons attracted much contemporary interest and a number of entries within the historical record. Besides the outline in the journals of the two houses, Harsnett’s replies to the original articles survive among the Tanner manuscripts.1 The case also proved more than a distraction for one MP, Sir Walter Erle, who made hurried notes in his diary of the damning evidence aired before the Parliamentary committee set up to investigate the Norwich petition. Another insider account is furnished by John Yates’s recollection penned in the early 1640s.2 Combined, this material affords a glimpse of the pressure group at work to challenge diocesan authority, a point that Harsnett used to his advantage in nurturing James’s suspicions over the subversive potential of puritanism. Let us begin with the petition. Here it is important to note that although presented at Westminster under Mayor Robert Craske’s sponsorship after being certified by the mayor’s court, the petition had not been put to the vote by the common council meeting in a city Assembly. This may explain why the city burgesses, Sir William Denny and Sir Thomas Hyrne, distanced

1

CJ, I, pp. 699–701,705, 714–15; LJ, III, p. 386; Bod L, Tanner MS 114, fos 205–20. The fullest secondary treatment remains Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, pp. 272–9. 2 BL, Add MS 18597, fos 167r–75v; Add MS 25278, fos 124v, 137r–9v.

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themselves from the godly appeal.3 Instead, Craske acted through the agency of one of the knights of the shire, Sir John Corbet, who moved the Norwich complaints to the Commons. From Craske’s perspective, Corbet had the added prestige of a county seat. However, having acted without the prior consultation of the city members, Harsnett was able to lambast his detractors’ charges as the underhand work of a ‘companie of factious puritans’, or so Francis Nethersole put it when describing proceedings to Sir Dudley Carleton.4 In certain respects Nethersole was close to the mark. John Corbet, along with his brother Miles – recorder of Great Yarmouth, 1625–44 – and a future regicide – occupied a conspicuous place at the heart of a godly network criss-crossing Norfolk, which was to resurface during the religious contests of the 1630s.5 The Corbet family retained a keen interest in recent religious developments in Norwich. From February 1615, the family seat at Sprowston had become home to Robert Gallard, the Thursday lecturer at St Andrew’s until Harsnett’s pruning back on preaching in September 1622, who in turn dedicated sermons to the ‘trulie religious gentleman’ Thomas Corbet – the patron of Sprowston rectory – and his wife Anne, the parents of Miles and John. Gallard presumably held strong opinions on his ordinary’s shake-up of Norwich’s lectureship series.6 Ironically too, the Corbets were also distant relatives to Samuel Harsnett, which made the course of Parliamentary proceeding in 1624 something of a family affair, which was surely not lost on the bishop.7 The plot thickens too when we learn that, besides the Corbets, Robert Craske was also associated with another protagonist, Sir Edward Coke. A former recorder of Norwich – soon to emerge as the champion of the city’s complaints against Harsnett – Coke was no friend of the bishop, having previously gone out of his way while attorney general in 1600 to present Harsnett on treason charges for licensing John Hayward ‘s The First Part of the Life and Reign of Henry IV, a work that contained a eulogy to the Earl

3

PRO, SP 14/165/2; BL, Harl MS 159, fo. 6. To judge from his defence of Bishop Wren as city recorder in 1636, William Denny may have been hostile to the puritan petition. Thomas Hyrne’s position is not known. However, given his earlier role as a patron of cathedral worship – donating £10 towards a new organ in 1607 – he was probably unsympathetic towards Mayor Craske, NRO, DCN 107/1. 4 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 130; PRO, SP 14/165/21. 5 DNB, ‘Miles Corbet’; H. Le Strange (comp.), Norfolk Official Lists (Norwich, 1890), p. 170; NRO, MC 46/4, Miles Corbet’s apology for signing Charles I’s death warrant. 6 For Gallard, see above, pp. 84, 103–4, 116, 118–20. Gallard held Sprowston rectory jointly with neighbouring Beeston, both of which fell within the peculiar jurisdiction of the dean and chapter of Norwich, NRO, DN REG/16/22, consignation book, 1627; Thomas Newhouse, Certaine sermons preached by T. Newhouse set forth by R. Gallard (1614), STC 18493, p. 89. Thomas Corbet died in 1618, bequeathing copyhold land in Repps (Flegg hundred) and £5 to Gallard, PRO, PROB 11/131, fos 110v–11r. Regrettably, ODNB, ‘Miles Corbet (1594/5–1662)’, has made a terrible hash of the Corbet genealogy. That Miles, the regicide, was the second son of Thomas and Anne is confirmed by Thomas Corbet’s 1618 will. 7 W. G. Bentham, ‘Pedigree of Archbishop Samuel Harsnett’, Essex Review, 40 (1931), pp. 108–9.

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THE 1624 PARLIAMENT: REPERCUSSIONS & ST GREGORY’S PARISH

of Essex, then implicated in a Popish plot to seize the crown.8 Coke chased the same quarry with equal tenacity in 1624. Moreover, as a prominent Norfolk landowner in his own right, Coke could count among his tenants – as lords of the manor of Welborne – Robert Craske and his fellow Norwich alderman Thomas Atkin, who also happened to be a kinsman of the Corbet brothers.9 With the assistance of such influential backers at Westminster, statements against the bishop were taken on 3 May.10 Initially, Harsnett was investigated according to four main clauses referred to a joint committee of both Lords and Commons on 13 May, which included Sir John Corbet among its membership. The charges were then enlarged to six points, which were read on 18 May and presented to the peers the day after. The first article touched on the bishop’s curtailing of Sunday morning sermons and weekday corporation lectureships, whereupon John Yates was summoned to testify – as he recalled twenty years later – against Harsnett’s ‘putting down preaching and taking too much for orders and institutions’. While doing so he was pressed into signing a declaration condemning Richard Montagu’s A New Gagg (above, pages 121–2). But returning to the matter in hand, Yates’s evidence was heard alongside that of John Ward, who had been left smarting at Harsnett’s alleged dismissal of his ‘needlesse’ preaching.11 Harsnett then came under fire both for excommunicating parishioners who did not pray to the east, and for encouraging images to be erected in city churches.12 Having silenced the pulpits – as godly critics saw it – the bishop had undermined the Reformation still further by allowing superstitious gestures and objects to creep back into public worship. However, Harsnett’s involvement in restoring images was far from clear cut. Evidence supporting this allegation derived ostensibly from one parish, St Peter Mancroft, where two representatives – the chaplain, Dr Samuel Gardiner, and John Thacker, a vestryman – were forward in supplying details to the Commons’ committee. It is interesting to learn that Samuel Gardiner was sometime chaplain to Archbishop Abbot.13 Running parallel to the opposition directed against Richard Montagu by Abbot’s other chaplains, Thomas Goad and Daniel Featley, the Abbotian camp had a hand in questioning Samuel Harsnett’s integrity as well.14 About John Thacker we know a great deal. Although only 8

Hawes, Officers, p. xxxvii; DNB, ‘Samuel Harsnett’; PRO, SP 12/274/61–2, 275/31. PRO, E 134/8 Chas1/Mich3. Thomas Atkin’s second daughter Anne married Humphrey Brewster – son of Francis – who was a patron of the puritan émigré John Philips, later of New England. Miles Corbet married Humphrey Brewster’s sister, see D. Brunton and D. H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (London, 1954), p. 110. 10 BL, Add MS 18597, fo. 167r. 11 CJ, I, p. 705; BL, Add MS 25278, fo. 138v; Add MS 18597, fo. 168v. 12 PRO, SP 14/165/2; Bod L, Tanner MS 114, fo. 205. 13 BL, Add MS 18597, fo. 168r; DNB, ‘Samuel Gardiner’. 14 See above, p. 121 and BL, Add MS 25278, fos 138v–9r; K. Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Politics: Archbishop Abbot’s Defence of Protestant Orthodoxy’, HR, 61 (1988), p. 57. 9

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a common councillor in 1624, he eventually rose to the mayoralty during the troubled year of 1643, helping to secure Norwich for Parliament in the opening months of the Civil War.15 Thacker was an erstwhile ally of Robert Craske. But during Easter 1624, prior to his summons to Westminster, he had been at loggerheads with some fellow parishioners over a contested nomination to the office of churchwarden, a post that the vestry had allotted to the more upstanding Alderman Alexander Anguish for a second term. Thacker wanted to be churchwarden, presumably to block adornment at Mancroft. His challenge to Anguish’s election ended up before the consistory court, where Anguish attacked his opponent as ‘factiouslie given’.16 By travelling to the capital Thacker had a point to prove. He was on a mission to vindicate his role as a representative of parochial interests, especially in the face of unwelcome episcopal interference into the running of his church’s affairs. With such bickering in mind, let us examine in detail Thacker’s testimony against Harsnett’s commendation of a beautification programme at Mancroft. Allegedly, this was a lavish scheme, which involved the defacing of a monument to accommodate a high altar, the decking of the Church with images and crucifixes and the setting up of a decorous font complete with a silver dove descending and ‘stirring the water with its wings’.17 On Thacker’s account, the bishop played an indirect part in the beautification. According to information imparted to him by his friend Mayor Craske – who was present when the bishop visited Mancroft – Harsnett had merely voiced his approval of the project, adding ‘the blessing of God be upon those that did it’. Instead, the real culprits were Thacker’s foes in the vestry. In spite of his objections, they had redirected some £200 designated for the repair of the Church roof towards the plan, even though, as Samuel Gardiner confirmed, most of the parish had contested the reallocation of parish funds.18 Unfortunately, the identities of these controversial vestrymen are not given in the Parliamentary records. A thorough trawling of the extant Mancroft churchwardens’ accounts for the early 1620s has failed to turn up specific references to payments for images and adornments for the ‘high altar’. However, this is not to discount Thacker and Gardiner’s testimonies as deliberately embroidered. Indeed, the richness of Mancroft’s furnishings

15

John Thacker had served as a common councillor since 1618, and became an alderman in 1638, see Hawes, Officers, p. 150. For his mayoralty, see below, pp. 246, 248–50. 16 NRO, PD 26/71, pp. 45, 47; DN CON/12, unfoliated. Alexander Anguish was the highest tax payer on moveable goods in Mancroft as well as the collector of the 1624 subsidy, PRO, E 179/153/583. 17 BL, Add MS 18597, fo. 168v. The reference to crucifixes is vague. It is more likely that images of crucifixes, either in paintings or stained glass, were being alluded to, rather than free-standing crosses set up on the communion table. 18 BL, Add MS 18597, fos 168v, 175v; Bod L, Tanner MS 114, fo. 219. My reading of these events f leshes out the account given in M. Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660’, in C. Durston and J. Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 106.

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gave cause for concern twenty years on, when the church was referred to among a catalogue of complaints from the city to the Long Parliament in 1642, a petition that Thacker – then anticipating elevation to the mayoralty – would have endorsed. Much was said about St Peter’s. As it was claimed: there are 26 images painted and their severall names set downe, then 7 images without names, alsoe the picture of the devill tempting Christ carved and painted with many Crucifixes continued in the windowes. All these abound at the Altar. At the font there are alsoe divirse Images upon the topp, an angell gloriously apparrelled standing upon a gilt globe and holding a sceptre in his hand, then upon 4 pillars stand the 4 Evangelists. There is also hanging over the water a gilded dove susteyned by a wire with about forty Images besides.19

This description reiterates the statements made in 1624. That his parish had been transformed into an ‘idolatrous temple’ during the time of Harsnett’s episcopate certainly left John Thacker seething. By sitting out services under his hat he hoped to avoid gazing on superstitious images. Other parishioners opted for more pro-active measures, after one John Hoyle was presented to the mayor’s court in July 1624 for committing sacrilege in removing the silver dove from St Peter’s.20 This was doubtless the same wooden dove noted in the articles against Harsnett. Seemingly, the placing of sacred imagery in Mancroft had split the parish, although as Thacker related – and as Harsnett was quick to reply – any dissension at St Peter’s had more to do with the parochial politics than the bishop’s personal interference. Yet the point remained that Harsnett had neglected his pastoral duty by not ordering the removal of superstitious objects. That he could claim to have merely acted in response to a localised dispute was a ploy that the bishop used in his defence of the fourth article presented against him in 1624. Here we encounter another link in the chain of the Norfolk godly network. On this count, Harsnett was attacked for censuring one minister, Robert Peck, rector of the market town of Hingham, for catechising and singing psalms with his family at home on Sunday afternoons.21 Peck had enjoyed favour under Harsnett’s predecessor John Jegon. Incumbent in his living since 1606, he became the principal lecturer at a combination exercise established at Hingham in 1610, largely with Bishop Jegon’s blessing. But his renown as a preacher extended beyond Norfolk. Thus his son Thomas married a daughter of the famous John Rogers of Dedham, which union symbolised the Peck family’s status within a wider East Anglian

19

Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 131. NRO, DN VIS/6/4; MCB/16, 1624–34, fo. 6v, 17 July 1624. 21 CJ, I, p. 705; Bod L, Tanner MS 114, fo. 205. 20

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teaching fraternity.22 But from an episcopal perspective Peck was an habitual troublemaker. At least this is what Harsnett maintained in his defence, noting that he had been forced to proceed against Peck upon reports from several Norfolk Justices who were alarmed by unlawful late-night assemblies at the minister’s house. The bishop, who also sat on the county bench, brought proceedings against Peck in the consistory court. There it was alleged that Peck had ‘infected the parish with strange opinions as not to kneel when they come to church, that the name of Jesus is no more than a common name and that it is superstitious to bow at the name of Jesus’. Bound over at Quarter Sessions in 1622 for holding conventicles, other examples of Peck’s ‘inconformity’ were cited by Harsnett from documents now lost.23 However, Peck was not the only East Anglian minister at odds with episcopal government, after another incumbent – Thomas Stokes, rector of Carleton Rode, to the south of Hingham – charged his diocesan on two counts of exacting exorbitant fees for institutions. Again Harsnett ensured that such accusations did not wash. According to the bishop, Stokes had moved corruption charges out of a fit of pique upon being denied the archdeaconry of Norfolk, an office devolved to him in November 1619 by his father Richard Stokes, the previous archdeacon. Stokes junior was understandably bitter at losing the position to Harsnett’s candidate. Moreover, he had allegedly threatened to ‘smoake the Bishopp with more Complaints’ should his suit not be granted.24 These were menacing words. Yet Harsnett was able to exploit such animosity to his advantage, since it enabled him to present himself, and not Stokes, as the wronged party. Fortunately for Harsnett, the king saw things the same way. James went to great lengths to protect the prelate from investigation by the Lords, requesting the Upper House, through the Lord Keeper, to refer the entire matter to the High Commission on the grounds that, since the articles dealt with church affairs, they should be decided by an ecclesiastical tribunal. Like Harsnett, James was anxious to settle the case outside of the Lords, to prevent a precedent whereby any diocesan might become subject to a Parliamentary inquest. So when that avowed champion of Reformation, William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, motioned that Harsnett be examined by the Upper House alone, the king intervened in person, sending a stern rebuke to the peers reminding them that this action represented a grave affront to the royal prerogative.

22

NRO, DN REG/15/21, fo. 24r; Reg Vagum, I, p. 102; Bod L, Tanner MS 180, fo. 24v. Bod L, Tanner MS 114, fos 220–1. For Peck’s later career, see below, pp. 165, 171, 173, 226–7. 24 Bod L, Tanner MS 114, fo. 222; PRO, SP 14/165/2. For Stokes’s inheritance of the archdeaconry, see BL, Add MS 39534, fos 38v, 39r. Rector of Carleton Rode since February 1620, he emerged as an active participant in Bishop Wren’s administration in 1636, and was sequestered from his living in 1644: see Venn, IV, p. 167; NRO, DN REG/16/22, consignation book, 1627; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), p. 273; Bod L, J. Walker MS c 6, fo. 46r. 23

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James stepped in to save Harsnett at the final hour. Saye was forced to shelve further proceedings against the bishop, while parliament’s dismissal on 29 May effectively brought an end to the matter.25 In the following weeks, the Privy Council embarked on a mopping-up exercise against Harsnett’s foes. Thomas Stokes was imprisoned and bound over to make submission to his ordinary, while John Yates was brought before the king to give answer for presenting evidence against Harsnett and for petitioning against Richard Montagu’s A New Gagg.26 This is how Yates described the audience in the 1640s. James assailed the minister with terrible and often-quoted words that such ‘puritans dissolved parliaments, perturbed his affairs and [he said] he would make his kingdom too hot for us’. In the end though, Yates got off lightly with an admonition ‘to make all clear’ and seek his ‘quietus est’ with Harsnett. Wishing to smooth things over, the king then informed the beleaguered minister: ‘God forbide . . . I should blame you to testifie what you payed for institutions, I iustifie it.’27 By showing Yates an even hand, James stuck to his familiar irenic tactics for dampening religious friction. The same royal attempts to assuage godly anger over Harsnett’s government pervaded James’s speech at the end of parliament: which, in summing up, endorsed the bishop’s actions in curbing the ‘popular party of Puritans’ by suppressing ‘popular lectures within his own diocese’. It also backed Harsnett’s sanctioning of religious images in churches. To quote the king’s words at length: I would not have you scared with a speculation they [the puritans] have given in against the Bishop of Norwich, whoe yf he be guiltie, must be punnished. But I am verye fare grieved at this gentle Bishops, that you call the ornaments of the Church Idolatrye being nothing but the Pictures of the Apostles and such like as I have in myne owne Chappell. I praise my Lord of Norwich for thus ordering his Churches, and I commend it in spite of all the Puritanes, and I command you my Lords Bishops to doe the like in your severall dioceses.28

Here James can be seen reinforcing his own decision to equip certain showcase churches with imagery to impress influential Spanish guests. Earlier in December 1621, it was reported in a Catholic newsletter that the king had countenanced the Chapel Royal to be decorated ‘after the old manner’ with a ‘crucifix of gold set in it’. At the same time, similar developments were recorded as having taken place at the chapel at Whitehall. As Sir Thomas

25

S. R. Gardiner, Notes on Debates in the House of Lords, 1624 and 1626, Camden Society, 2nd Series, 24 (1879), p. 96. Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 274, implies that the first motion to refer Harsnett to the High Commission came from the Lords. However, the prime-mover was clearly King James. 26 APC, 1623–5, pp. 235–7, 12–13 June 1624. 27 BL, Add MS 25278, fos 136r, 139r. 28 BL, Harl MS 159, fos 136r–v.

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Knyvett observed, the chapel was ‘curiously painted and all the images new made, and a silver crucifix amaking to hang therein, against the Spanish lady’s coming’. If so, James had no qualms in defending Harsnett, whose commendation of elaborate church decour echoed the king’s diplomatic employment of religious art.29 On the other hand, despite backing Harsnett’s disciplinarian style of episcopal government, as ever anxious to foster unity, James made the stern caveat to his bishops not to harass ‘Ministers that are Conformitants’.30 Perhaps the king had John Yates in mind? Having won a measure of royal approval for his reforms, Harsnett emerged from the political manoeuvres of May 1624 as the clear victor. The Norfolk godly connection had been thwarted. At any length, in Norwich the upshot of Mayor Craske and his confrères’ hamstrung political complaint was that the bishop’s injunction on Sunday morning services remained for the next twelve years, until being overturned by Matthew Wren in 1636. Ironically, it was the anti-Calvinist Wren – who remembered Harsnett from his Pembroke College days as ‘so potent, crafty and violent an adversary’ – who reversed the order. Admittedly, his reasons owed nothing to a spirit of evangelism, Wren being more concerned over whether truncated forenoon worship allowed for the full celebration of Common Prayer, complete with the litany, the omission of which was ‘to the offence of almighty God and the great scandal of Christian Religion’. Consequently, he changed tack and allowed sermons to run over the time allotted for the cathedral exercise.31 However, members of the corporation were still expected to present themselves en masse for the entire cathedral service every Sunday, and Wren secured a written order from King Charles to ensure that they did.32 Returning to the late 1620s: what of the wider repercussions of James’s protection of Harsnett for religious developments in Norwich? To begin with, James’s speech furnished a harsher critique of puritanism for any who disliked the godly: in other words, the king endorsed a definition of ‘puritan’ that mirrored Harsnett’s own, by broadening the term’s usage to apply to English Protestants uncomfortable with ‘the ornaments of the Church’, of which sacred pictures were now deemed to be a valid part. At least, Christians with a taste for religious art had a stronger case to make for the ‘puritanism’ of those ill-disposed towards images. Yet such redefining of puritanism was readily anticipated in Norwich, as seen by the circulation of a scurrilous libel within the city, which was brought before the mayor’s court on the same day as James’s peroration at the end of parliament, on 29 May 1624. 29

Cited in N. Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 31–2. 30 BL, Harl MS 159, fo. 136v. 31 BL Harl MS 7048, p. 153; Bod L, Tanner MS 137, fos 7r–8v. By restoring forenoon sermons, Wren wished to prevent afternoon catechism classes from being turned into occasions for preaching, Laud, Works, V, p. 538. 32 NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fos 97v–8r, 23 Mar 1636; Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 156.

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Regrettably, the text is unknown. But bearing the suitably provocative title of ‘howe nowe proud scismatique’, the libellers clearly had as their target either Mayor Craske, John Thacker, or both. The verse went around St Peter Mancroft, passing through the hands of Dr Gardiner’s servant. However, its source was eventually traced back to the household of Alderman William Browne, whom we have met as Bishop Harsnett’s staunch ally within Norwich corporation (above, pages 115–6). Browne’s servant appeared before the magistrates for publishing the verse.33 But in light of his association with Harsnett, it is unlikely that Browne had done much to discourage the libelling and may even have been behind its composition. If so, was Alderman Browne alone among the civic elite in criticising the godly? Another potential supporter of the bishop was Robert Craske’s successor as mayor in 1624, Robert Debney, a figure who can be identified as favouring a more decorous style of worship through his part in the Restoration of his parish church, St Gregory’s, in the 1620s. It is worth dwelling in some detail on Debney’s background and his association with his home parish.34 A scrivener by trade, becoming sheriff in 1600 and alderman in 1609, Debney led a distinguished career in corporate government until his death in 1638, even gaining election as a city burgess to the 1628 parliament.35 What can be said about his religious outlook? Much can be teased out from his other administrative role as vestryman at St Gregory’s, which fortunately for our purposes is a remarkably well-documented parish, possessing an excellent set of churchwardens’ accounts, which run continuously from 1574 onwards.36 Before delving into this source, it is necessary to give a profile of the Church and its history. Situated to the north of the market place, St Gregory’s stood within the inner ring of more densely populated and, in terms of their overall tax yield, wealthier of Norwich’s city centre parishes. With the taking of the Compton Census, St Gregory’s boasted a robust congregation of 350, above the average of 308 for Norwich’s thirty-four churches. However St Gregory’s – unlike St Peter Mancroft, St Andrew’s and St Clement’s – did not rank as one of Norwich’s more prestigious municipal parishes, and home to a corporation funded lectureship. Instead, St Gregory’s fortunes were tied to the cathedral, the living being appropriated to the dean and chapter, who appointed the chaplain.37 The Debney family (Fig. 7.1) also sustained firm contacts with the dean and chapter, Robert’s father John having served jointly as cathedral 33

NRO, MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 512r, 29 May 1624. Mayors of Norwich, p. 76; PRO, E 179/153/583, 1624 lay subsidy returns, which list Debney as the largest tax payer on moveable goods in St Gregory’s parish. 35 PRO, PROB 11/177, fo. 252v, will of Robert Debney, proved in 1638. I am grateful to Andrew Thrush for permission to cite the History of Parliament Trust’s forthcoming biography of Debney. 36 NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 1, loose vestry minutes, 1620. 37 A. Whiteman (ed.), The Compton Census of 1676: a Critical Edition, Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, 10 (1986), pp. 216–18; NRO, DN VAL/2. 34

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Fig. 7.1 Pettus and Debney

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coroner, chapter clerk and under steward at various times from at least 1564 until his death in 1595.38 That the lines of patronage led to Christ Church also ensured that the Reformation was a tardy affair at St Gregory’s. During the first decades of Elizabeth’s reign, the Church attracted notoriety for being a haven of religious conservatism, a reputation that owed much to John Debney’s influence upon parochial affairs. Certainly, Debney senior was at odds with forces of progressive Protestantism. During the royal visitation of the cathedral in 1568–9, Debney – along with the prebendary Miles Spencer – had to stave off accusations of embezzling cathedral property through a series of false leases not bearing the chapter’s seal.39 Bishop Parkhurst found Debney especially tiresome. Trouble flared up over Parkhurst’s orders to remove the existing rood loft, which allegedly stood ‘in a manor whole’ so ‘as little is wanting of that it was in the tyme of popery’, from St Gregory’s in 1573. Gathering many ‘adversaries’ John Debney led an open show of defiance in his Church. Hindering Parkhurst’s visitors by standing ‘on a ranke upon the soller [cellar]’ and declaring that ‘they of the parish must nedes in the mayntayning thereof’, the protest was all Debney’s doing, who ‘many waies forgetteth himself, as in calling the Geneva psalmes Gehenna psalmes’, the bishop grumbled. Such put-down of reformed musical tastes echoed charges against the cathedral choir, who had refused to sing ‘the geneva psalmes allowed by the Queene Majesties Injunctions’.40 While perhaps not constituting the only or indeed the most powerful voice in parochial affairs, Debney and his supporters were reluctant to see their church completely severed from its Catholic roots as a result of Bishop Parkhurst’s reforming zeal. Indeed, visible traces of the past survived in St Gregory’s to provoke Protestant disapproval. For example, the Church retained its ring of five pre-Reformation bells – each inscribed with appropriately medieval Catholic slogans like ‘Gabriel ave, hac in conclave, nunc pange suave’ and ‘Nos societ Sanctis semper Nicolaus in altis’ – which the parish clerk enthusiastically continued to toll ‘contrary to the Queenes Iniunctions’ during the 1560s. Intriguingly, the same bells remained in situ until 1818.41 Of course, the original peal’s continuance beyond the sixteenth century may have owed more to the practical matter of paying for their replacement than to any lasting nostalgia for sounding the holy company of heaven; but their survival points towards a sharpened historical sensitivity within the parish.

38

NRO, DCN 29/1, fo. 28v, a list of cathedral staff, 1564, which records Debney’s offices; NCC 238 Hinde, will of John Debney, proved in 1595. 39 R. A. Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation, 1538–1628’, in I. Atherton et al. (eds), Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996 (London, 1996), p. 527; NRO, DCN 29/1, fos 41v–42r. 40 Parkhurst, Letter Book, p. 212; NRO, DCN 29/1, fo. 39r. 41 Blomefield, IV, p. 274; NRO, ANW 1/4, presentments, 1563; The Norwich Mercury (29 Aug 1818).

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Bell inscriptions were obscured from everyday view. However, St Gregory’s retained other relics of a bygone medieval age among its furnishings, some of which occupied more visually commanding positions. Of particular note was a reconstituted fifteenth-century black worsted funerary pall, preserved down to the nineteenth century (Fig. 7.2). Urging mourners to ‘pray for the soules of John Reed and Agnes his wyf’ through a series of motifs depicting angels raising aloft naked praying figures atop shrouds from the mouths of rather stylised beasts, the original intention was to evoke intercessions for souls in torment. In a Protestant setting, the design was appropriated to signify the souls of the righteous being conducted to heaven. At least this was the message conveyed to the eighteenth-century antiquarian Francis Blomefeld, who duly recorded the hanging’s usage as an altar cloth.42 But what could be interpreted as a reference to medieval penitential beliefs seemingly adorned the communion table before the 1700s. This is suggested by an oblique comment from Bishop Wren’s officials, who, inspecting St Gregory’s in 1636, were affronted by ‘naked images in the chancel, not decent’. Were they referring to the embroidered figures gracing the communion table?43 Be that as it may, that the old funerary pall had not been disposed of in Elizabeth’s reign can be attributed to the traditionalism of John Debney, his fellow parishioners and their successors, who kept what reminders they could of their church’s Catholic heritage. But Debney’s coolness towards Reform also came into play when brokering his son Robert’s marriage. Arguably there was some confessional purpose in John Debney’s successful pursuit of a union between his family and the conservative kinship network around Alderman Thomas Pettus, whose daughter Agnes became Robert Debney’s first wife. Pettus called upon Robert Debney to supervise his will. With this tie to the Pettuses came a clutch of Catholic in-laws, which included the fellow scrivener and recusant Richard Lussher, who had served his apprenticeship under John Debney (Fig. 7.1).44 Robert Debney became the heir of an anti-Reform continuum among Norwich’s well-to-do; but did this connection have any bearing on developments at St Gregory’s? The obvious problem encountered when searching for confessional continuity within St Gregory’s between the 1570s and 1620s is that in spite of the concerted protests of John Debney and the ‘adversaries’ the Reformation arrived in the Church by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, as confirmed by the extant churchwardens’ accounts. Whatever the entrenched resistance to

42 Blomefield, IV, p. 284. The pall is illustrated in BL, Add MS 23039, fos 94–7 and in the grangerised Neville Rolfe edition of Blomefield’s essay deposited in the Norfolk Studies Library, vol. IV, pt III, pp. 22–5. NRO, DN TER/111/21, glebe terrier and inventory, 1706, confirms the pall’s use as an altar cloth. 43 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 213r. 44 Mayors of Norwich, p. 76; PRO, PROB 11/91, fo. 116v; Millican, Freemen, p. 117 and see above, pp. 52–3, 61.

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Fig. 7.2 Altar cloth from St Gregory’s church, Norwich. Detail from a nineteenth-century water colour in the grangerised edition of Blomefield’s Topographical History (Norfolk Heritage Centre)

Parkhurst’s visitors, parish funds were directed towards adapting St Gregory’s to a Protestant climate. In 1577, for example, a glazier was hired ‘for taking out the images out of the windowes and amending the same’, the royal arms being painted in their place.45 Of course, extirpating superstitious imagery was one thing, converting reluctant parishioners to the new faith was something else. Yet in time, St Gregory’s came to be exposed to increasing doses of evangelical preaching, due in large part to a succession of pastors planted in the Church by its capitular patron, certainly from the 1580s onwards. A key figure was John Barnard – chaplain 1581–88 – and a petty canon at the cathedral. No graduate, but an esteemed ‘preacher in his own cure’ nonetheless, Barnard was a nonconformist to the extent that he signed against Archbishop Whitgift’s 1583 articles, which by enjoining subscription to the

45

NRO, PD 59.54, fos 6v, 9r.

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Prayer Book as containing nothing contrary to the word of God, were intended as the acid test of clerical conformity.46 Gaps in the episcopal and archidiaconal presentments for the 1580s prevent us from knowing more about Barnard’s impact upon St Gregory’s. Yet annual payments for washing that most contested of clerical garb – the surplice – are conspicuously absent from the churchwardens’ account for Barnard’s time, perhaps indicating that the vestment was not worn during his ministry. Maybe his misgivings over unreformed rites and ceremonies was shared by members of his flock? Gregory Kirby – chaplain 1588–92 – was a graduate with a Master’s degree from Clare College, Cambridge; although upon his leaving the cure to take up a living in London, there was some difficulty in securing a long-term replacement.47 In the 1592 accounts, Mr Deckman was paid ‘for his paynes in the Church’ and Mr Gurney ‘for his paines in preaching by the consent of the parish’. Whether such teaching efforts had gained the entire parish’s approval, these entries hint at a warming to a sermon-centred form of piety, which was made more revealing in that both payments were laid out by Robert Debney, then fulfilling his duty to furnish an able ministry while serving as churchwarden.48 Had the younger Debney acquired a liking for ‘precise’ preaching? Whatever the extent of John Debney’s coolness towards Reform, this certainly did not deter Mrs Cecily Debney from providing – in a devout Protestant fashion – for a funeral sermon when writing her will in 1602; although in the event, by lingering on until 1613, she was afforded plenty of time to ponder its contents.49 Here an influence in the lives of Cecily Debney and her son – as much as Jacobean St Gregory’s as a whole – was Matthew Stoneham MA. Down from Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, Stoneham commenced his ministry within his native Norwich in 1594; unlike his immediate predecessors, he stayed on as St Gregory’s chaplain for over forty years until his death in 1636, also cutting a familiar figure as a local schoolmaster, all the while supplementing his income by trading imported wine.50 In 1602 Stoneham was collated vicar of St Stephen’s, also in the chapter’s gift. As Ralph Houlbrooke has remarked, Elizabethan St Stephen’s too had an air of conservatism about it, probably stemming from the presence of Dr Miles Spencer, who lived in the parish until his death in 1570. Indeed, Stoneham’s second charge was endowed with a new bell tower in 1601, while in 1603 an

46

Chapter Minutes, p. 21; NRO, ANW, 1/8, liber cleri, 1581; PD 59/54, fos 14v, 21v; Stiffkey Papers, III, p. 230; Seconde Parte, I, p. 244. Barnard died as parson of Welborne in 1622, NRO, NCC 53 Bradstitt. 47 NRO, PD 59/54, fos 24r, 27r, 28r; ANW 1/10, liber cleri, 1590; Venn, III, p. 24, which missed Kirby’s incumbency at St Gregory’s. He ended up as curate of St Botolph, Bishopgate. 48 NRO, PD 59/54, fos 27v–28r. 49 NRO, NCC 178 Coomney. 50 NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 31v; Venn, IV, p. 169; NRO, NCC 351 Spendlowe, will of Matthew Stoneham, proved in 1637, which bequeathed ‘a licence for the drawing of wine’.

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organ made of seventy pipes was installed in the Church.51 Both at St Stephen’s and St Gregory’s, Stoneham came to express overwhelming concern for the material surrounds of worship, as he informed the Assize judges in 1608; ‘the Church is to be sustained, the arches and pillars whereof are with all care and diligence to be . . . supported’. Significantly, under Bishop Wren, he emerged as a Laudian apologist, justifying Wren’s innovations as being ‘expressly according’ to the Prayer Book and Canons.52 However, his actions in the 1630s should not conceal Stoneham’s former guise as an evangelical Calvinist determined to beat down sin in his home town – publishing some 232 quarto pages on the subject in 1610 – which extolled the godly not to take pleasure in sinning ‘for they well know themselves to be the chosen of God, his elect ones’ who ‘though they live in the darkness of this world’ are ‘righteous still much more performing that by the light of grace’. By publishing, Stoneham enhanced his status as a pillar of the local church establishment under Bishop John Jegon, who made Stoneham his chaplain.53 The point is that under Stoneham’s guidance, St Gregory’s appeared as a reformed church, its leading parishioners – the Debneys among them – having come to embrace the word-centred piety of English Protestantism, Robert Debney leaving the worthy sum of £3 to Mr Stoneham ‘preacher’ for a funeral sermon to testify to his reformed faith. In keeping with the change, the Sabbath was observed with greater strictness at St Gregory’s. When in 1605, for example, Samuel Lynsey of the parish failed to attend Sunday worship since ‘he comonlie tradeth abroad’ on the Lord’s Day, he was said to have acted ‘verie scandalously’ to the offence of his neighbours and Almighty God.54 Such evidence indicates St Gregory’s absorption into the Jacobean Protestant mainstream. However, scratch below the surface and all was not as it appeared, at least in the eyes of hostile critics who feared that the Church was following a dangerous path towards idolatry and superstitious practice. We have noted the assemblage of medieval Catholic fittings on show in St Gregory’s. Another link between the worlds of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries existed in the person of Robert Debney, who for all that he served as a patron to preaching, was conscious of his responsibility to his church’s Catholic heritage. If this overstates the case, Debney certainly exhibited a concern for the maintenance of St Gregory’s fabric.

51

NRO, DN REG/14/20, fo. 198v; R. Houlbrooke and M. C. McClendon, ‘The Reformation’, in C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds), Medieval Norwich (Norwich, 2004), p. 275; ‘Account Books of St Stephen’s Church and Parish, Norwich’, EANQ, 2nd Series, 8 (Norwich, 1899–1900), p. 109 for the organ. 52 Matthew Stoneham, Two sermons of directions for judges and magistrates (1608), STC 23290, p. 21; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 164r. 53 Matthew Stoneham, A treatise of the first psalm (1610), STC 23289, sig. A2, pp. 17, 33. Stoneham proudly proclaimed his role as a ‘preacher of God’s word’ in 1595, see BL, Harl MS 595, fo. 162v. 54 PRO, PROB 11/177, fo. 254r; NRO, ANW 2/44, presentments, 1603–11.

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Having assumed his father’s post as cathedral coroner in 1596, Robert Debney made for a choice go-between in his parish’s dealings with its capitular patron, until he resigned refusing ‘absolutely to supply and execute’ the office of coroner in 1612. Was there a falling out with his employer? If so a mounting source of complaint for St Gregory’s parishioners rested with the chapter’s apparent neglect as rector, to ensure the upkeep of the Church’s chancel.55 Debney for one was worried enough to take matters into his own hands. In April 1614, the alderman, with three brothers-in-law – a fellow scrivener William Edgely, John Crome and John Warde – purchased a twentyone-year lease on the rectory of St Gregory’s.56 By agreement, the chapter retained its patronage to the living. For their part, the four St Gregory’s men were to sustain the chancel ‘in good and sufficient reparation’; it was an obligation they were anxious to fulfil, since two years later the churchwardens – one of whom was the trustee John Warde – made dire warnings to the archdeacon. The remnants of the old rood loft across the chancel – so hotly contested in the 1570s – vexed the parish once again. This time it posed a pressing structural problem in that the ‘stayer case which sometime went upp’ to the loft now stood in danger of imminent collapse, threatening to take a section of the north wall along with it. Warde and his co-warden John Freeman requested the stair tower be demolished and replaced with buttressing. However, a faculty to begin the work was not granted until 1620, a delay that was doubtless caused by internal disagreement within the vestry over whether the rectory’s leaseholders could dip into parish funds to help cover the repairs. Eventually a compromise was reached. In the meantime, it seems that the stair tower had become too unstable an eyesore for the parish and the ecclesiastical authorities to procrastinate any longer. The vestry split the costs two ways. Roughly half was taken out of the parish rates, with the other part being raised by voluntary contributions – the total expenditure running to the tune of £107 12s – the work finally being completed under the supervision of John Freeman, acting as churchwarden again in 1623.57 So began the campaign to restore the Church. Fortunately, John Freeman and the other churchwarden for 1623, John Weever, listed all eighty-five donors to the project in their accounts. Parochial pride had been recovered at St Gregory’s. The churchwardens signed-off with a triumphant note, calling upon all ‘Christian Successors’ to repeat 55 Chapter Minutes, p. 38; NRO, DCN 24/1, fo. 174r. Negligence on the chapter’s part can be attributed to what Ralph Houlbrooke has described as ‘the parlous state of the cathedral’s finances’ in the 1610s. See ‘Refoundation and Reformation’, p. 529. 56 NRO, DCN 24/1, fos 192v–3r and the original indenture, which survives as PD 59/52. NCC 156 Angell, will of William Edgely, proved in 1615; ANW register 42/49, will of John Crome, proved in 1622; NCC 96 Purgell, will of Mary Warde, widow, proved in 1631, establish the ties between the trustees. 57 NRO, ANW 3/20, comperta, 1614–17; PD 59/54, fos 59r, 63r.

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so pious a work as the Beautifying of Gods House or habitation, the place where his Honour Dwelleth, as the Prophet Daniel Professeth in the 26 Psalm, the 8 verse, not doubting but that as our Fore Fathers have formerly shown their Zeale and good works in building of this Temple, so you seeing our Continewed Mayntayning and upholding of the same, may take better Occasion to be stirred up, to go forward, in the same good course.58

The repairs were packaged to evoke a sense of the parish’s history. By commending the work of former medieval church builders, Freeman and Weever held up an example for their fellow parishioners to follow. Yet especially keen to follow in his forebears’ footsteps was Robert Debney. Heading the list of donors, he made the single largest contribution of £2 8s, being joined by his fellow trustee, John Warde, who gave £2 2s, as well as Matthew Stoneham, the minister, who gave £1. But other local worthies patronised the Restoration. The most distinguished included the future royalist judge of King’s Bench, Francis Bacon – whose substantial family monument dominates the south aisle – and his brother-in-law Edmund Reeve, the town steward and also under steward to the dean and chapter, who presided over the Court of Common Pleas during the 1640s.59 Of more interest than the survival of this list of benefactors was the manner in which the donations were spent. As well as looking back to rival past church restorers, what for convenience might be labelled the St Gregory’s scheme also anticipated certain ecclesiological developments that were to become more commonplace in the 1630s. Dovetailing with the controversial refit at St Peter Mancroft, the refurbishing of St Gregory’s in 1623 likewise turned a few heads. Having completed the more urgent task of reinforcing the exterior wall at a cost of £51 15s, the churchwardens then applied the remaining £56 towards beautifying St Gregory’s from within, laying out for some flamboyant fixtures. Most remarkable was the expenditure on decorating the font. Returning to the 1623 accounts, we note that £20 was paid to Jeames Avys ‘for making up the font bargayned at the whole estate, that stands with all the figures without paynting’. The same ‘figures’ were gilded and painted by Thomas Isbourne.60 As a craftsman, Isbourne was well known in Stuart Norwich as a member of an established émigré family of goldsmiths. But he was equally familiar to the city magistrates for his drinking exploits on the Sabbath.61 Consequently, Avys and Isbourne’s handiwork

58

NRO, PD 59/54, fos 63v–5r. DNB, ‘Francis Bacon’; Blomefield, IV, pp. 274–6; NRO, NCC 1662 O. W. 78, will of Mary Reeve, for the family ties; DNB, ‘Edmund Reeve’; Hawes, Officers, p. xxxvii; NRO, DCN 47/4, fo. 40r. Reeve emerged as a moderate Presbyterian, taking the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643. 60 NRO, PD 59/54, fos 60r–v, 62r, 66r. 61 V. Tillyard, ‘Painters in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Norwich’, NA, 37 (1980), pp. 318–19; NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 300v, 2 Dec 1640. 59

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proved shocking to some, while their patrons – the two churchwardens John Freeman and John Weever– were cited in the consistory court for having erected and exalted ‘divers piles or at least one pile of Images, pictures or portraytures, which had an Image mounted above all the rest . . . to be called and known to be the Image of our Saviour Christ and the others to be the Image of the Saynts or Apostles’.62 Freeman and Weever were accused of having contravened article twentythree of the 1559 Injunctions for abolishing ‘things superstitious’.63 Regrettably, the loss of the relevant act book for 1624 means that the outcome of these proceedings is unknown, although to judge from the St Gregory’s accounts, John Freeman was suitably unrepentant and was left at liberty to continue adorning his Church two years later, laying out for 9 Ibs of gold ‘for the high Altar’, while ‘True the Paynter’ was employed for some undisclosed work.64 Indeed, following puritan complaints about St Gregory’s in 1642, it seems that images above the font, and within the chancel, were allowed to remain in the Church. As noted by the godly, Bishop Harsnett had ‘promised Reformation’; but in light of King James’s recent endorsement of sacred imagery episcopal censure was not forthcoming; for while the churchwardens were charged to remove imagery ‘by the names of the great seal putt out’, the bishop’s seal was left off the order, invalidating the injunction.65 Harsnett was not inclined to censure Church decor and tried to bury the issue. Images remained to affront to the godly, who subsequently maintained that failure to discipline the St Gregory’s churchwardens had encouraged other religious impulses in the parish that they found equally disturbing. It was shocking enough that ‘one James’ – surely the same Jeames Avys hired in the 1623 accounts – was ‘a known papist, having that platform [i.e. the base for the font] from Rome’. In turn, the font-cover continued to be graced with ‘a great Image of Christ [and] on the topp 2 Angells on each side one, then the holie twelve Apostles [and] the 8 persons sacred in the Ark’; while at the Church’s ‘upper end’ was preserved ‘a most Idolatrous Crucifix, the 4 evangelists in full stature and a blasphemous picture of the Trinity’. St Gregory’s was ‘more like and Idolatrous Temple than a reformed church’. More alarmingly, by the standards applied by the godly, such far from edifying decor was revered in an idolatrous manner, as when ‘one poore old woman [was] observed to make curtesy to the font’, while ‘where Moses and Aaron are sett upp . . . they paint Moses face with strawes after the forme of the Idolatrous Churches beyond the seas, representing thereby

62

NRO, DN CON/11, consistory court allegations and libels, 1623–4, loose gathering. Ibid; W. H. Frere (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, III (London, 1910), p. 16. 64 NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 67v. 65 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 130. 63

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the glory of Moses face [as] he came from the mount’.66 To the godly, St Gregory’s had overstepped the bounds of acceptable Protestant piety. Whatever the extent of Alderman Debney and his fellow vestrymen’s prior commitment to the Gospel, they had diverted their parish from the course of Reformation; St Gregory’s was the first church in Norwich to erect images ‘to the great offence of the people’.67 Intriguingly, a penchant for religious art extended into the homes of some denizens of the parish. One interesting reference relates to widow Susan Downing – relict of a former mayor George Downing – who contributed towards the restoration scheme in 1623, and who also happened to be Robert Debney’s mother-in-law through his second marriage to Downing’s daughter Margaret.68 Susan Downing in turn called upon Robert Debney to supervise her will penned and proved in 1625.69 Here we find listed among widow Downing’s choice possessions – all carefully inventoried at her death – a ‘picture of our Lady’ along with another ‘Picture of Christ, Mary, Martha and the curtayne to it’, which she proudly bequeathed to her son George.70 What significance did the ownership of such images hold for the Downing household? As Tessa Watt has pointed out, Biblical narratives were not uncommon subjects for domestic pictures, decorations and wall paintings in Elizabethan and early Stuart England; although from the evidence she collated, Watt detected a trend away from New Testament towards old Testament scenes during Elizabeth’s reign. Depiction of holy figures from the Gospels were phased out in favour of stories from the Apocrypha and parables. Where display of illustrations showing Christ, the Apostles and Evangelists emerge from the historical record, it was inevitably in relation to cases of suspected Catholic recusancy. A picture of ‘our Lady’ may be construed as an odd subject for a Jacobean Protestant to have around the house. On the other hand, possession of this image alone offers rather slim grounds upon which to classify Susan Downing – still less other members of her extended family including Robert Debney – as a closet papist;

66

Ibid, fos 130–1. Ibid, fo. 135. How offensive was the imagery, even to the godly? Describing the font – ‘a large pile’– in its eighteenth-century form, Francis Blomefield noted the design of its cover around an octagonal shape. On four sides were carved the four evangelists, while allegories of the four continents graced the opposite faces. The affair was topped off with an angel holding a mitre in one hand and the Gospels in the other, by which emblem it was taken that ‘by the Gospels of these Evangelists, all the world shall be converted to the faith of Christ’. The artistry on the cover may have been censured since 1642. However, there is little doubting the evangelical message that this design was meant to convey. See Blomefield, IV, p. 284. 68 Mayors of Norwich, p. 69; NRO, NCC 43 Trotter, will of George Downing, proved in 1617; W. Rye (ed.), The Visitation of Norfolk, 1563, 1598 and 1613, Harleian Society, 32 (1891), p. 221; PRO, PROB 11/177, fo. 254, will of Robert Debney. 69 NRO, NCC 66 Belward, will of Susan Downing, proved in 1625. 70 NRO, NCC INV 32/86; NCC 66 Belward. 67

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while her legacy of ‘my Bibles’ to a maid would certainly have been in keeping with reformed evangelical preferences.71 On the whole widow Downing’s art collection, like the St Gregory’s scheme itself, in view of our understanding of reformed suspicion of sacred imagery strikes as being eccentric. Alternatively, given the political value placed upon religious art in the wake of the Spanish Match – as sealed by James’s closing speech to parliament – Robert Debney and his sympathisers could claim royal sanction for wishing to channel parochial pride into sacred imagery. But the font was not the only holy vessel to be adorned in 1623. Returning to the churchwardens’ accounts, work was also carried out on the chancel alongside what was termed – unconventionally for the 1620s perhaps – ‘the altar’, which was paved with ‘wotten tyle’ and given a reredos displaying the Decalogue, Lord’s Prayer and Creed. An additional 16s 6d was paid ‘for vi great posts and 42 pillars tuning for the altar’, £3 10s 7d being spent upon ‘tymber and worksmanshipe to the Rayle’.72 By this provision, are we to assume that the St Gregory’s vestry sought to cordon off and protect the sanctity of their communion table, anticipating one of the central strands of Laudian altar policy pursued in the next decade? Perhaps, but here there is an obvious problem in visualising the chancel’s layout from the accounts alone. On the other hand, we know that the parish responded to directives over the siting of communion tables given out by Bishop Harsnett’s commissioners attached to the archdeacon of Norwich’s court on 27 September 1619, five days after Harsnett had assumed the temporalities of his new see. Inspecting Norwich city churches, they ordered that communion tables were ‘to be placed at the east end of the chancel’, in eight parishes, St Gregory’s not included. Here Harsnett’s commissaries can be seen reinforcing the Elizabethan Injunctions, which stipulated that the Holy Table was to be moved into the body of the Church at the time of communion, but was to be returned to where the altar once stood when not in use for the service.73 However, following up the order in Norwich archdeaconry, it is possible that the bishop’s officers had a permanent east-end position in mind. Particular evidence relates to Mileham, where in November 1621 the churchwardens were instructed that their table was ‘to be alwaies placed att the east end of the chancell, as it is now placed by order of the commissioners in this visitation’, although in this case the wardens were not expressly prohibited from moving the table to administer the eucharist.74 Similarly, at St Gregory’s it is not easy to judge whether the table was to remain fixed within its enclosed position after 1623, prefiguring Laudian

71 T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 197–210; NRO, NCC 66 Belward. 72 NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 62v. 73 Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 38; ANW 3/21, comperta, 1617–19; Frere (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, p. 28. 74 NRO, ANW 3/24, comperta, 1620–1; MS 2686, stray comperta, 1621–2, entry for Mileham.

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eucharistic practice. On the other hand, from the churchwardens’ accounts, we know that a new communion table was procured for 23s in 1626, which may have been intended to replace a larger piece of furniture hitherto aligned ‘table-wise’ in the chancel.75 Sadly, for our purposes, the 1626 fixture was taken away amid High Church fervour during a refit in 1861. However, a brief description of ‘the old communion table’ was later provided by John Jessopp, curate at St Gregory’s in the 1880s, and the author of the church’s first guide book. Jessopp noted that the table was unremarkable save for an inscription on one of the longer sides. This recalled the 30s donation to church beautification by Francis Watson, a pedlar, who helped to marble and paint the pillars about the altar and adorn the chancel ‘out of his own free will, zeal and devotion to the house of God’. We lack corroborating evidence to show whether Watson took a brush to his church. However, Watson’s name does figure among the list of benefactors for 1623, and if – as Jessopp indicated – the table bore lettering on one face only, we may infer that the 1626 table was designed to be orientated permanently ‘altarwise’, with Watson’s ‘zeal’ shining forth as an example to be read by any approaching the chancel from the west.76 Then there is the use of term ‘altar’ in the churchwardens’ accounts. However, this expression may have been employed to refer to the area where the communion table was to be placed, rather than to signify the table’s treatment as an altar in a later Laudian vein. Much hinged on the internal plan of St Gregory’s, where the chancel is raised four feet above the nave over a crypt below. The ready height and visual prominence that such elevation afforded the sanctuary could have attracted the familiar expression ‘altar’ in the 1620s, even though a physical stone altar had long since been removed during the Reformation. Of course, we have no firm way of telling where the table stood for the eucharist. In line with the Elizabethan Injunctions, it could have been placed further down into the Church and realigned east–west, a point that eluded entry in the parish accounts, since the churchwardens could have carried the table with no cost to themselves. But at St Gregory’s the business of moving the communion board was made rather awkward. Why did the vestry go to lengths to erect so many obstacles between the sanctuary and the rest of the Church if ease of transportation was the aim? We have observed the provision of rails. But, in 1626, the churchwardens saw fit to reinforce this wooden enclosure with iron ‘pikes for the altar’, also feeling it prudent to keep the railing locked when buying a ‘lock, key and staple to the High Altar dore’, and a ‘new joynt for the high Altar gate’ in 1630.77 The most likely scenario is that in 1623 the vestry sought to fashion a separate communion room. 75

NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 67v. J. Jessopp, The History and Antiquities of St Gregory’s Church Norwich (Norwich, 1886), p. 13; NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 65r. 77 NRO, PD 59/54, fos 67v, 73r. 76

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During the eucharist, parishioners were to enter an enclosed sanctuary and assemble before a table possibly set altarwise in the chancel to receive the Sacrament, which makes sense of the provision for 20s 4d worth of ‘matts for the Chansell and for the Alter’ in the 1623 accounts.78 Clearly, though, Matthew Stoneham’s flock did not seek to receive at a rail. If William Alanson, Bishop Wren’s later agent in city affairs, is to be believed, it was established practice in some of Norwich’s churches for communicants to take the Sacrament at rails ‘without the least scruple at all’ long before Wren instructed them to do so more forcefully in 1636.79 Alanson’s information must be treated with caution. His purpose was to aid his master’s defence following Wren’s impeachment by Parliament in 1641 for causing, among many innovations, the taking of the eucharist before a rail, although here Alanson would have achieved little by lying. Yet of the parishes mentioned by Alanson, St Gregory’s was strangely absent. This implies that it was not customary at St Gregory’s for the celebrant to remain secluded behind railing, a point that is confirmed by Wren’s visitors, who reported that in the church the rail was set ‘so far from the table that communicants go within [the rail]’. The 1623 scheme did not employ Laudian railing.80 As such, it would stretch the evidence too far to speak of Jacobean St Gregory’s as a ‘proto-Laudian’ church, even if Robert Debney and his fellow parishioners can be seen making arrangements for the Lord’s Supper to be distributed with a more rigid sense of propriety, not entirely out of step with Laudian priorities in the 1630s.81 Significantly, despite insisting on liturgical changes in the parish, Bishop Wren found a core of support from St Gregory’s. In part, there seems some synergy between later political backing for Laudianism and an earlier impulse towards decorous styles of worship evident in the church from Bishop Harsnett’s episcopate.82 Certainly, the St Gregory’s scheme signified ecclesiological developments at variance from Norwich’s well-established evangelical tradition. Taking sides over the controversial adornments of city parishes like St Peter Mancroft and St Gregory’s played an important part in formation of confessional opinions, which became more pronounced in the 1630s. Yet the church restoration work examined here has a wider historiographical significance. Thanks to George Yule and more recently Julia Merritt’s work on the polemics of church building in early Stuart London, it is now incorrect to depict the Jacobean period as one of widespread neglect in the maintenance and repair of

78

Ibid, fo. 63r. Bod L, Tanner MS 314, fo. 110. Alanson’s career is outlined below, pp. 191, 195–7, 211–12, 221–2, 237 242, 245, 250. 80 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 213r. Such distinctions did not prevent Wren from citing the precedence of communion rails at St Gregory’s in his defence before Parliament in 1642, Parentalia, p. 77. 81 Efforts to prevent the profanation of sacred space at St Gregory’s in the 1620s even extended to placing a ‘pissing stone’ for the churchyard in 1626: NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 67v. 82 In 1628 St Gregory’s received a gilt silver chalice, courtesy of Mary Warde, inscribed ‘Deo et Ecclesiae dicavit’, which was to replace an existing communion cup: see Blomefield, IV, p. 284. 79

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church fabrics. In the capital, there was no leaky church roof brigade. Instead, our impression of indifference to the material surrounds of worship prior to Charles I’s reign owes much to the view propagated by Laudian apologists, anxious to highlight their mission to restore a church despoiled, on their account, by accumulative acts of sacrilege since the Reformation.83 In Jacobean Norwich, the condition of parish churches was as much a concern for the ecclesiastical authorities as it was in London. Indeed, in 1603 – a year after his arrival and under pressure from Archbishop Whitgift to survey church fabrics – Bishop John Jegon saw fit to remind clergy and churchwardens of their duty ‘to repayre redelye and rebuyld all ruynes and decayes’ in every church and chapel and to provide the requisite ornaments for worship. To prevent shoddy workmanship, Jegon even appointed one Richard Kimocle as official diocesan ‘lymmer’. Given a monopoly to edify churches across Norwich diocese, the privileges granted to Kimocle so rattled the puritan agitator Sir Richard Lewkenor that he copied Jegon’s order, presumably to use as ammunition against prelacy at the time of the Hampton Court Conference.84 But from the Jacobean comperta from Norwich archdeaconry, efforts were made to ensure city parishes were fully equipped with the furnishings of Common Prayer.85 However, evidence from St Peter Mancroft and St Gregory’s departs from Julia Merritt’s thesis in its chronology. Taken to its conclusion, Merritt’s argument for a Jacobean boom in church restoration tends to smooth over contemporary disagreement over what constituted acceptable and permissible church beautification and edification. To put it another way, church building appears not to have been an issue with London’s parishioners until the Laudians made it one. Imposing their own agenda for the correct ritual adornment of sacred space and cranking up the rhetoric, Laudian polemicists served to place church design at the forefront of their efforts to redefine the nature of Christian worship. That in Norwich acrimony over church repairs, alongside the settingup of imagery, embellished fonts and ‘altars’, emerged in the 1620s, predates such developments by a decade. In Norwich, questions of church decoration and style became entwined with polemical religious faction-fighting long before Laud’s rise to Canterbury; and it was all linked to Samuel Harsnett’s clamp-down on Norwich’s evangelical tradition in 1622. However, certain citizens were at home in the new environment, beautifying their churches in ways that other Protestants found unorthodox. It seems Was this donation indicative of a heightened sacramentalism within the church? For Wren’s supporters from St Gregory’s, see below, pp. 197–9, 209–13. 83 G. Yule, ‘James VI and I: Furnishing the Churches in his Two Kingdoms’, in A. Fletcher and P. Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 182–208; J. Merritt, ‘Puritans, Laudians and the Phenomenon of Church Building in Jacobean London’, HJ, 41 (1998), pp. 935–6. See also D. MacCulloch, ‘The Myth of the English Reformation’, JBS, 30 (1991), pp. 13–14. 84 LPL. Register Whitgift, iii, fo. 140v; BL, Add MS 38492, fos 95r–v; P. Collinson, ‘Magistracy and Ministry: a Suffolk Miniature’, in his Godly People (London, 1983), pp. 445–66, for Lewkenor. 85 See, for example, NRO, ANW 3/10, comperta, 1602.

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local emotions over the question of idolatry were dramatically rekindled around October 1628, when John Haydon – a visiting preacher from out of town – spoke out against raising images in churches and bowing at the name of Jesus in a sermon delivered in Norwich. According to William Prynne’s version of events, printed later in 1637, Harsnett was incensed and allegedly sought to ‘lay high treason’ against Haydon for his outburst. Nonetheless, others among the magistracy must have shared the bishop’s alarm, since the indiscreet cleric was arrested and committed to the ‘common gaol in Norwich’ for thirteen weeks without bail, while his lodgings were also searched and various incriminating sermon notes were communicated to William Laud and then the Privy Council.86 Haydon’s tale is a curious one. Hailing from Devon, he arrived in Norwich with a certificate of recommendation from Ignatius Jordan, the irrepressible puritan oligarch of Exeter, which was endorsed by a host of celebrated London godly divines.87 Presumably, Haydon hoped for some employ either by the corporation or another patron in Norfolk. A ‘Mr Higgon’ – perhaps a mispronunciation of Haydon – was paid by the chamberlains to preach, in August 1627, the city’s annual sermon commemorating the defeat of Kett’s rebellion.88 If performed by Haydon – who may not have been licensed to preach in Norwich – possibly this was the occasion in which he berated idolaters? After crossing Harsnett, he next appears on the historical record upon being proceeded against by the Court of High Commission in April 1634 for preaching about London despite having been ‘deposed and degraded’ from the ministry. Haydon had apparently been imprisoned several times, but had escaped on each occasion to preach another day.89 However, the High Commission finally caught up with him, and after a spell in the Gatehouse and the London Bridewell, Haydon was eventually released in January 1636 after writing two grovelling petitions to Archbishop Laud – and the High Commission – professing his conformity and protesting his sufferings at the hands of ‘disciplinarians’. He also begged leave either to minister in Ireland or ‘teach letters in England’.90 Rather than have such

86 [William Prynne], A Breviate of the Prelates Intolerable Usurpations (1637), STC 20454, p. 161, and recounted more briefly in [William Prynne?], Divine and politike observations newly translated out of the Dutch language . . . on . . . the speech of the Archbishop of Canterbury pronounced in the Starre Chamber upon 14 June 1637 (1638), STC 15309, pp. 59–60. I owe these references to the kindness of Kenneth Fincham. PRO, SP 16/119/22, a list of sermon notes found at Haydon’s lodgings, endorsed by Laud, 23 Oct 1628. This document fixes the date of Haydon’s incarceration at Norwich. 87 At time of writing, I have yet to ascertain Haydon’s precise origins; although Prynne, A breviate, p. 161, describes him as ‘a poore Devonshire minister’, which is seemingly confirmed by the testimonial from Ignatius Jordan. See PRO, SP 16/119/22 and M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction: Rebellion and Civil War in an English City (Exeter, 1996), ch. 2 for Jordan. 88 NRO, CA, 1625–46, fo. 69r. 89 PRO, SP 16/261, High Commission act book, 1634–6, fo. 12r. 90 Ibid, fos 33v, 104r, 175r, 244r. Haydon offered to go to Virginia, but was refused, His petitions survive as PRO, SP 16/308/31, 339/32.

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a loose cannon remain in the capital, Laud cautiously assented to the Irish option, granting Haydon passage to ‘foreign parts’, not to return unless lawfully licensed. Under more favourable circumstances in the 1640s, Haydon came back from exile. He continued to attract controversy, conceivably being the same ‘Mr Heydon’ who was petitioned against by the Westminster Assembly in August 1643 for professing antinomian views.91 John Haydon was a turbulent spirit. Evidently, he could not have broached a hotter topic than that of superstitious image worship in Norwich in the late 1620s. But was he put up to the task by members of the civic elite? This episode aside, the remainder of Harsnett’s time at Norwich – until his translation to the archbishopric of York in January 1629 – was to prove both frustrating and disappointing for the godly. Learning of the bishop’s apparent volte-face in commending the ‘brethren’ of King’s Lynne in 1627, some felt it opportune to raise the issue of preaching.92 Certainly, the mayor for that year, Francis Cocke, a figure with links to the puritan ‘core’, around Alderman Robert Craske and Alderman Thomas Atkin– his fellow parishioners at St John Maddermarket – believed circumstances were ripe to move the Assembly to fund two Sunday sermons in the city. This proposal was opposed, although a petition ‘for liberty of preaching’ was sent to the bishop.93 However, nothing came of the corporation’s plea: for Harsnett – now involved in a complex legal wrangle over the dean and chapter’s right to present to the lectureship at Great Yarmouth – was not readily disposed towards backing further preaching initiative.94 Besides, as he maintained in 1624, he had already permitted three sermons in Norwich on Sundays. From Harsnett’s perspective, this number, later confirmed by Bishop Wren in 1636, was sufficient not to warrant additional preaching on the Sabbath.95 Instead, the bishop’s parting gift took the form of petitioning on the chapter’s behalf over rating property near the close. Complaining of the city’s alleged encroachment upon the cathedral’s rights through ‘Surrepticious charters to strengthen them in their unlawful Claims’, Harsnett failed to dampen the tensions between town and gown, which he done much to exacerbate.96 But more ominous storm clouds were gathering overhead.

91

PRO, SP 16/261, fo. 309v; D. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, 2004), p. 434 n. 8. 92 Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 38; LPL, MS 943, fo. 125r and see above, pp. 113–14. 93 Mayors of Norwich, pp. 76–7; PRO, E 179/153/583; NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 236r, 26 Nov 1627. 94 R. Cust, ‘Anti-Puritanism and Urban Politics: Charles I and Great Yarmouth’, HJ, 35 (1992), pp. 4–5; Bod L, Tanner MS, 134, fo. 189. 95 Bod L, Tanner MS 114, fo. 218; Laud, Works, V, p. 339. 96 Undated petition from Harsnett to King Charles in NRO, NCR Case 9m, which also contains the working papers for the city’s property disputes with the dean and chapter. See also the entries in NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 253r, 12 May 1629, fos 274v–5r, 1 Mar 1631, fos 283v–4r, 27 July 1632, fo. 285r, 17 Aug 1632, fo. 288r, 21 Jan 1633, fo. 288v, 25 Oct 1633.

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Part III CONFESSIONAL DISCORD AND THE IMPACT OF LAUDIANISM IN THE 1630s

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Chapter Eight GODLY REACTION: THE NORFOLK TRUSTEES AND THE TOMBLAND LECTURESHIP

Samuel Harsnett’s elevation to York in January 1629, prompted renewed agitation by the godly of Norwich’s elite, ever anxious to restore Sunday morning sermons as well as the corporate lectureships axed in 1622. A key campaigner for Reform was the outgoing mayor Thomas Cory. Allied to the activists Thomas Atkin and Robert Craske – Craske would call upon Cory to supervise his will in 1638 – during the final month of his mayoralty in May 1629, Cory moved the Assembly to petition the new bishop, Francis White, for further preaching. The mayor’s request was doubly urgent. Thus in the same session, an ordinance was passed to prohibit trading and public gatherings ‘under pretence of cudgell play’ on the Sabbath, which had become occasions for much ‘idleness, drinking and disorder’.1 Would the new diocesan back such efforts to sanctify the Lord’s Day, by allowing worship to continue beyond 9.30 a.m.? The godly had much to hope for in Francis White, a figure who immediately strikes the student of the early Stuart church as an unlikely champion of civic-sponsored preaching, largely on the grounds of his association with Richard Neile and the Arminian Durham House Group in the 1620s. Neile had consecrated White bishop of Carlisle in a controversial ceremony in 1626.2 Certainly, White came from a similar anti-Calvinist stable to that of Bishop Harsnett, although – from the perspective of Norwich corporation – he was potentially a less combative personality than his predecessor. To begin with, White was not attached to the Howard interest in Norfolk. Moreover, as royal almoner, he had sufficient duties within the king’s household to keep him from becoming enmeshed in the affairs of his see; it was a position that acquired a new significance following Charles’s instructions of December 1629, which ordered all bishops to reside in their dioceses, except 1 Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 38; Mayors of Norwich, p. 77; PRO, PROB 11/181, fo. 419v, will of Robert Craske, proved in 1638; NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fos 253r–v, 12 May 1629. 2 DNB, ‘Francis White’; T. Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of Charles I (2 vols, London, 1848), I, pp. 179–80. See also Andrew Foster’s entry on the Durham House Group in ODNB.

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CONFESSIONAL DISCORD & LAUDIANISM IN THE 1630s

those ‘in necessary attendance at court’, like the royal almoner. In any case, White was prepared to remove himself to Norfolk. Confiding in William Laud, that being advanced in years and finding Norwich diocese to be ‘in as good order as most places are’, he was prepared to end his days at Ludham manor, should the king see fit to release him from courtly office.3 In 1629, White was a proponent of the quiet life. Perhaps owing to his peaceable and retiring state of mind, White seemed willing to extend every courtesy to Norwich corporation and grant the concession of one extended Sunday morning sermon to take place in the city.4 Yet Mayor Cory and his confréres may have come away disappointed. The matter of weekday lectureships was left unresolved, although here, whatever the bishop’s opinions on the need for additional preaching, he was soon to be hamstrung in December 1629 with the issue of Charles’s instructions to his bishops. Framed under the auspices of William Laud, the main force behind the articles was the more senior anti-Calvinist, Harsnett of York. Significantly, given Harsnett’s influence, the instructions included a section on public lectures that repeated the archbishop of York’s former ruling for Norwich in 1622, by insisting that all new corporate-sponsored sermons were to be read ‘by a company of grave and orthodox divines near adjoining’. Since the Monday and Friday stipendiary lectures at St Andrew’s had been run as ‘combinations’ from 1622, these exercises were to continue by royal decree. In addition, any existing lecturer was to be barred from preaching, unless he first ‘profess his willingness to take upon him a living with cure of souls within that corporation’ and then assume the pastoral charge once it had been procured.5 It is was in response to this demand that we note the formation of the ‘trustees for the Religion in Norwich and Norfolk’ in 1631. Modelled on the famous London Foeffees for Impropriations, the trustees’ agenda was simple: by raising funds to purchase advowsons and tithes to impropriated livings, they sought to augment the number of preachers in the county, with a view to supplying benefices for stipendiary lecturers.6 Of course, the idea was to promote divines of a suitable evangelical calibre. However, what on one level may appear to be a perfectly benign enterprise to foster religious instruction had, given its timing, a more focused political purpose. The trustees operated in the face of official efforts to stem teaching of the central Reformed doctrine, predestination. After all, the December 1629 instructions

3

Laud, Works, V, p. 307; PRO, SP 16/176/26. Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 336r. N. Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), p. 216; Laud, Works, V, p. 308. For Harsnett’s ending of the stipendiary lectureships, see above, pp. 118–20. 6 PRO, SP 16/531/134. For the London feoffees, see I. M. Calder (ed.), The Activities of the Puritan Faction of the Church of England, 1625–33 (London, 1957) and Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, pp. 121–2, 217. 4 5

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formed the tail end of a series of royal directives to control topics for public exposition, much within the spirit of King James’s earlier 1622 prohibition on soteriological speculation as being ‘fitter for the schooles and universities than for simple auditories’. Further silence on the vexing matter of preaching – for or against – predestination was enjoined by a royal declaration of 1628. To be affixed to future editions of the Prayer Book and the formularies, this admonished ministers to avoid ‘curious points in which the present differences lie’ and to adhere to the ‘literall and gramaticall sense’ of the Thirty-Nine Articles. In January 1629, amid criticism of Richard Montagu’s Appello Caesarem, another injunction was issued. While calling in copies of Montagu’s controversial work, any ensuing discussions from the pulpit or the press ‘either pro or contra’ Montagu’s writing were strictly forbidden.7 With these proclamations Charles sought to stifle theological discord and foster unity. Yet, if the intention was to extinguish debate over reprobation and election, it remained an awkward point that to observe the literal sense of the Thirty-Nine Articles also entailed adhering to the clear statement of unconditional predestination given in Articles Ten and Seventeen. What was to be silenced? The political fallout from Charles’s vain attempt to impose an all-out ban on contentious preaching has attracted much scholarly attention, most recently from David Como, who has highlighted William Laud’s less than impartial enforcement of the royal edict while bishop of London, 1629–33. Laud selectively harassed Calvinists who impugned Charles’s injunction. But by failing to make similar examples of outspoken anti-Calvinists, he implemented the prohibition in an unbalanced way to frame predestinarians as dangerous subversives, while shrewdly depicting himself as a even-handed figure: the king’s good servant.8 As Anthony Milton has shown, Laud employed much the same tactic while acting as censor in the 1630s. Through a combination of muzzling and massaging works of moderate Calvinist divines entered for publication, Laud again aimed to undercut Calvinism from the middle-ground of religious orthodoxy.9 But how were official efforts to contain debate over predestination managed outside Laud’s London? Did church authorities outside London diocese employ similar tactics to those of the archbishop to discredit Calvinists while redefining anti-predestinarians as orthodox and moderate? How did entrenched godly groups seek to manoeuvre around Charles’s stifling of soteriological preaching? That the royal ban on predestination patently failed to bring

7

See above, p. 126; K. Fincham (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart church, Vol. II, COERS, 5 (1998), pp. 33–4; J. F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, II: Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–1646 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 90–3, 220–2. 8 D. Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, HJ, 46 (2003), pp. 263–94. 9 A. Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, HJ, 41 (1998), pp. 625–51, especially pp. 644–9.

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peace to the Church is revealed by events in Norwich following the efforts by William Bridge – the Norfolk trustees’ candidate – to overawe a fellow city minister – and anti-Calvinist – John Chappell. Before examining this theological spat in detail, let us return to the background behind the creation of the Norfolk trustees. We know of the group’s existence from two pages detached from a lengthier report among the State Papers, which when calendared in the nineteenth century was dated to 1630, although on the basis of internal evidence, a date after December 1631 – the time of William Bridge’s promotion to a Norwich living – is more accurate.10 This places the dispatch in the context of William Laud’s moves to close down the London Foeffees for Impropriations in the Court of Exchequer during 1632 and 1633. Indeed, the unknown informant rendered his account of the Norfolk trustees in alarmist terms, which were attuned to Laud’s suspicion that the London feoffess and similar bodies, like the Norfolk group, served as – in the bishop’s words – ’the main instrument for the puritan faction to undo the Church’.11 The Norfolk trustees’ expressed intention was to promote conformable graduates. But as the anonymous correspondent went on to explain – citing an alleged remark made by the group’s agent – ’it is true conformity is put in, but it is onely for a pretence’. It was also claimed that the Norfolk men had raised £200 to be sent to ‘our proto-trustees in London’.12 This suggestion of a prior financial arrangement with co-religionists in the capital was designed to play upon Laud’s fears that a co-ordinated puritan plot was afoot, if indeed Laud was the intended recipient of this document. However, we have no evidence that proceedings were instigated against the East Anglian group. While Kenneth Shipps has maintained that as ‘a branch of the London foeffees’ the Norfolk body continued to operate into the later 1630s, it is likely that following the Exchequer ruling over the London body in 1633, the Norfolk trustees also went into abeyance.13 Fortunately, the names of the twelve trustees, comprising four Norwich aldermen, four lawyers and four clerics, are recorded in the 1631 report. Significantly, among the aldermen we note Robert Craske and Thomas Atkin – the two principal agitators against Bishop Harsnett in 1624 – who were joined by Craske’s brother-in-law John Tooley and Augustine Scottow, a figure linked to the other three as a member of the Norwich

10

PRO, SP 16/531/134 and see NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 7 for Bridge’s appointment to St Peter Hungate on 22 Dec 1631. 11 Calder (ed.), The Activities of the Puritan Faction of the Church of England, passim; Laud, Works, III, pp. 216–17. 12 PRO, SP 16/531/134. 13 Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, pp. 283–4. Whether the Norfolk group was being co-ordinated from London is unclear. The Norwich trustees should be seen in the light of similar initiatives taken elsewhere outside the capital, as at Reading and Leicester. See J. M. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records (2 vols, London, 1895), II, p. 266; PRO, SP 16/88/13.

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Grocers’ Company.14 As merchant-grocers, all four gained their livelihood by plying one of the city’s more affluent distributive trades. The grocers were dependent upon their success in supplying the local market in luxury foodstuffs, dried fruits, sugar, spices and tobacco, as well as other miscellaneous household items like candles, linen and metalware, quantities of which were imported from the Low Countries via Great Yarmouth.15 For example, Augustine Scottow had known trading contacts across the North Sea through the émigré De Hem family. Residents of St Michael at Plea – where the clerical trustee John Ward administered – the denizen founder Jacques de Hem had integrated himself into Norwich high society by purchasing his freedom in 1602. The elder De Hem also participated in Norwich’s parochial life. When writing his will in 1624, he remembered John Ward along with another evangelical pastor, John Payne, who had been deprived from St John Sepulchre for nonconformity by Bishop Harsnett.16 De Hem made his fortune from importing a range of Dutch and Flemish goods, from feathers to warming pans. His business was so successful that he was able to acquire several estates in Norfolk, while during the dearth year of 1596 he came to his adoptive city’s aid by shipping over 300 quarters of rye, bought on the corporation’s behalf in Amsterdam. Throughout, De Hem remained an elder in Norwich’s Walloon church, being its representative at a ‘stranger’ colloquy in London in 1615. While settling in East Anglia, he did not sever ties with his native Flanders, and duly enrolled his son Tobias in the arts faculty at Leyden University. Tobias returned to Norfolk. Taking charge of family interests in England, he called upon his ‘loving friend’ Augustine Scottow to supervise his will in 1629.17 With such traffic overseas came a shared commitment to a pan-European Calvinist cause. The same determined sense of purpose to save the Reformation also lay behind John Tooley’s advancement to alderman while serving as sheriff in 1631; it was a questionable advancement given recent amendments to the city’s constitution made in 1628, which stipulated that only officials who had completed their full turn as sheriff were eligible for the magistracy.18 Tooley’s promotion can be seen as an attempt by the godly

14

PRO, SP 16/531/134; Mayors of Norwich, pp. 75, 80; Millican, Freemen, p. 76. J. Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, 1988), pp. 56–7, 72, 77; U. Priestly and A. Fenner, Shops and Shopkeepers in Norwich, 1660–1720 (Norwich, 1985), pp. 6–7; D. Rickwood (ed.), The Norwich Account for the Customs on Strangers’ Goods and Merchandise, 1582–1610, NRS, 39 (1970), passim. 16 Biographical details on the De Hems are given in R. Esser, ‘News Across the Channel – Contact and Communication Between the Dutch and Walloon Refugees in Norwich and their Families in Flanders, 1565–1640’, I & M, 14 (1995), p. 149; PRO, PROB 11/143, fo. 481r; SP 14/165/2, for John Payne’s deprivation. De Hem also left bequests to Payne’s successor, Ralph Furness, another serial nonconformist. See below, pp. 192–3. 17 PRO, PROB 11/156, fo. 125v. 18 Mayors of Norwich, p. 74; J. T. Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich (Oxford, 1979), pp. 76–7. 15

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to fill the aldermanic bench with their own, and his election caused a stir. One William Gargrave, for example, complained of corrupt practice when he exclaimed that ‘he himself might have as well been Sheriff and Alderman of the City as Mr Toly, if he would have paid as dearly for it as Mr Toly paid’. Tooley promptly had Gargrave bound over at the next Quarter Sessions.19 Here, we can detect the same radical continuum behind the challenges to episcopal authority in the 1620s, rising to the challenge of furthering the Gospel once again. Were the four lawyers of the same stamp? The main protagonist, Great Yarmouth’s recorder, Miles Corbet – another veteran campaigner against Bishop Harsnett and a future regicide – certainly held uncompromising religious views.20 Sir Thomas Huggin’s religion is harder to fathom. Resident at Castle Acre, where he defaulted on the forced loan in 1626, Huggin was a Virginia Company speculator: but apparently dying intestate, he remains an obscure figure.21 John Fountain seemingly held advanced Protestant opinions in tune with Miles Corbet. A former steward of the royal manors of Cawston and Ronham, by Norwich, under James I, Fountain later emerged as a staunch Parliamentarian by becoming captain to the Norwich volunteer company in 1642.22 Moreover, in 1637 Fountain emerged as a formidable opponent against Bishop Wren. Acting on behalf of William Rivet – patron of Bildeston, Suffolk, and later deputy lieutenant for his county in the Civil War – Fountain brought a suit in Chancery against the bishop for refusing to institute Rivet’s choice of incumbent, John Ashley, to the living. Ashley had begun his career as a lecturer at Walpole, Suffolk, where he clashed with Edmund Stubbes. Parson of Huntingfield and Cookely – two parishes adjoining Walpole – as one of Wren’s standing commissioners, Stubbes did not hesitate to inform the bishop of Ashley’s ‘inconformity and sundry other misdemeanours’. Wren blocked Ashley’s promotion. Instead, he forwarded another candidate, who was hastily served with a writ of ne admitus by Rivett and Fountain, forcing Wren to back down and admit Ashley.23 Fountain served to champion godly clergy. However, the fourth lawyer, Richard Catelyn of Kirby Cane, is not so easy to categorise in terms of confessional outlook; his involvement perhaps owed more to the opportunities for future employment by Norwich’s well-to-do that the position offered. To this end, he was successful gaining election to the Long Parliament as a city burgess in 1640.

19

NRO, NCR Case 20a, Quarter Sessions’ minute book, 1630–8, fo. 9r, 21 May 1631. William Gargrave was well known for speaking his mind, having already appeared before the consistory court for ‘rayling and furious words’ spoken against several fellow parishioners at St Peter Mancroft, NRO DN DEP/39/44, fos 54v–8r. 20 PRO, SP 16/531/134 and above, pp. 132–3. 21 Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 280; PRO, SP 16/70/73. 22 HMC, 10th Report, Appendix 4, p. 213; Blomefield, III, p. 384; BL, Add MS 22619, fo. 33r. 23 Related in Parentalia, p. 108; LPL, Register Laud, fo. 136v and Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 99v for Ashley’s lectureship.

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But Catelyn was not a zealous or active member of the House, being discharged and sequestered in 1643 for his continued absence from Westminster once Civil War had begun.24 A range of motives and varying religious positions is encountered among the four clerical trustees. Robert Peck of Hingham was a notorious nonconformist and an unflinching proponent of forward Reformation from James I’s reign, while John Ward, rector of St Michael at Plea, would eventually assume the role of pastor to the English congregation at Rotterdam, following Wren’s visitation (below, pages 227–8).25 John Benton, rector of Wramplingham, near Hingham, and like Ward an Emmanuael College man, sits uncomfortably with Kenneth Shipps’s label of ‘inveterate puritan’.26 Arguably a far more incongruous figure, especially in light of his future endorsement of the ‘altar policy’ and justification for episcopacy iure divino in the later 1630s, was John Yates of Stiffkey. However, in 1631 Yates was a staunch defender of Calvinist orthodoxy with overwhelming cachet among godly circles in Norfolk. Learning of Laud’s moves to discredit Calvinist preachers ensuing from the ban on discussing predestination, Yates hoped to make a stand on behalf of the evangelical cause. Indeed, the trustees’ only recorded clerical appointment mirrored their resolve. Communicating with contacts in London through a young lawyer, ‘one King’, who was undoubtedly Henry King, a son of Norwich’s town clerk Thomas King – who emerged as a combatant against Wren in 1636 – the Norfolk group extended patronage to a former fellow of Emmanuel College, William Bridge (Fig. 8.1).27 Bridge was a predestinarian. According to one hostile witness, who accounted the preacher ‘an absurd turbulent fellow’, Bridge was fond of ‘preaching by expressions’: for example: ‘You know grace is irresistible. Very Good . . . hear an expression for it. God is like a mother, who when her child cryes puts on the cloathes thereof, whether the child will or noe.’ Others may have balked at the infelicity of God the matron; but Bridge’s talents were rated highly enough by his fellow Emmanuel graduates John Ward, John Benton and John Yates.28 Doubtless too, the three ministers were aware of Bridge’s earlier brushes with ecclesiastical authority while officiating at Saffron Walden, Essex, where in January 1630 he reportedly preached both forenoons and afternoons on alternate Sundays, funded by ‘divers of the parish’. In November

24 M. F. Keeler, The Long Parliament, 1640–1641: a Biographical Study of its Members (Philadelphia, 1954), p. 128; PRO, SP 23/72/606. For Catelyn’s election, see below, pp. 237–8. 25 PRO, SP 16/531/134. For Peck, see above, pp. 135–6 and below, pp. 171, 173, 226–7. For Ward, see above, pp. 118–20, 133 and below, pp. 171, 191–2. 26 Venn, I, p. 137; NRO, DN REG/16/22, fo. 38v; Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 281. 27 PRO, SP 16/531/134; A. Campling and A. W. H. Clark (eds), The Visitation of Norfolk, 1664, Vol. 1, NRS, 4 (1934), p. 115; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 185r, and below, pp. 171, 196–8, 229–30, for the King family. 28 DNB, ‘William Bridge’. Bridge graduated MA in 1626; PRO, SP 16/5331/134.

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Fig. 8.1 The Reverend William Bridge, after the frontispiece to his collected works, 1649 (Norfolk Heritage Centre).

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he was presented to the archdeacon of Colchester for refusing to wear the surplice and hood. When interrogated over whether he had a licence to preach, Bridge told the commissary that ‘he hath not done it as yet, but if he can obtain a licence from the Lord Bishop, he will be carefull to observe the kings instructions for the tyme to come’. Apparently Bridge had foes in Walden, who were keen that he should contribute towards repairing the church bells.29 In the event, it took Bridge three months to gain a licence to preach in London diocese, which was duly granted by William Laud in February 1631. But Laud was far from enamoured with Bridge’s preaching. Learning of an outspoken sermon delivered by the minister at Colchester in 1631, Laud was left smarting: ‘He was angry, and said, When you want one, you must first go to Dr Gouge and then to Dr Sibes, and then you come to me: I scorn to be so used: I’ll never have him lecture in my diocese that will spew in the pulpit.’ William Gouge and Richard Sibbes were, of course, members of the London Foeffees for Impropriations. If the account of Laud’s speech is accurate, the bishop seemingly took offence at Bridge’s expounding upon Revelations 3: 15: ‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot, I would thou were cold or hot.’30 Bridge had Laud’s design to silence Calvinists pegged. If Bridge was deliberately attempting to goad the bishop of London, he managed to evade episcopal censure by following the call to Norwich, where his ministry got off to an auspicious start thanks to Robert Craske and his fellow alderman Thomas Cory, who presented him to the rectory of St Peter Hungate on 22 December 1631. Next came the important step of obtaining a preaching licence. Here Bridge and his patrons were able to take advantage of the vacancy at Norwich created by Francis White’s translation to Ely, in December 1631.31 Until the following May, all diocesan business was temporarily transferred to Lambeth. So for six months, Norwich was administered by Laud’s opponent Archbishop George Abbot, who although long since eclipsed at court, remained committed to pursuing an evangelical agenda in line with the aspirations of the Norfolk trustees. On the same day as being instituted to Hungate, Bridge was licensed to preach across Norwich, Lincoln and Ely dioceses.32 Moreover, in the coming year, in April 1632, the minister gained further sanction from Abbot, who permitted Bridge to hold Hungate in plurality with chaplaincy of St George Tombland, where

29

ERO, D/AC/A47, fo. 70v, 20 Jan 1630, fo. 161v, 9 Nov 1630. John Yates’s wife, Mary Fening, hailed from Walden, which may also account for the rector of Stiffkey’s familiarity with Bridge. See ODNB, ‘John Yates (d. 1657)’. 30 London Metropolitan Archives, DL/C/343, fo. 102r, 5 Feb 1631; The Winthrop Papers, III, Massachusetts Historical Society (1943), p. 58. 31 NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 7; Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 38. 32 LPL, Register Abbot, iii, fos 153r–9v; Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 38; NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 7; K. Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Politics: Archbishop Abbot’s Defence of Protestant Orthodoxy’, HR, 61 (1988), pp. 36–64.

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the trustee John Tooley resided and officiated as churchwarden.33 Bridge had met the requirement of Charles’s 1629 instructions that corporate lecturers were to hold benefices. In October 1632 – no doubt owing to pressure from Tooley – the Assembly was moved to include Bridge on the city’s payroll for a Friday lecture at Tombland at £20 per annum, twice the amount given to the established Thursday lecturer at St Andrew’s. Provision was also made for an additional Monday exercise at Hungate to be taken by Daniel Claydon. At last the godly had realised their aim of restoring the number of corporation lectures to their pre-1622 level of four per week.34 However, this end could not have been achieved without the timely intervention of both Archbishop Abbot and Francis White’s successor at Norwich, Richard Corbett, who, as stated in the Assembly book, ‘allowed’ Bridge to perform weekday sermons. Following Hugh Trevor-Roper’s appraisal of his career, Corbett is regarded as a better satirist than an administrator. Identified as an anti-Calvinist, largely on the basis of his witty poem The Distracted Puritan – reared in ‘the howse of pure Emmanuel’ – which mocked William Perkins’s predestinarian scheme as ‘the black lines of damnation’, Corbett’s dealings with the godly were less confrontational in practice.35 He was not averse to fostering preaching initiatives. While incumbent upon his former see of Oxford, he had licensed several lectureships, including a combination exercise at Woodstock, where Corbett himself took regular turns in the pulpit. His successor, John Bancroft, disliked this meeting and closed it down.36 Nevertheless, presented with an opportunity to sponsor preaching initiatives in Norwich, Corbett commended Bridge’s appointment, on the condition that in line with the 1629 instructions to bishops, his weekly exercises were to be filled in rotation by ‘a company of grave and orthodox divines near adjoining’.37 What Corbett saw as an extension of good will backfired. By permitting the Friday lecture at Tombland, Corbett ultimately gave Bridge and his confrères a platform to excite religious controversy across the city. 33

NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 2; Rye, Rate Book, p. 58 for Tooley’s office holding. John Tooley was not, as stated in Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 285, the patron of St George’s, the living being appropriated by the bishop of Ely, NRO, DN VAL/2. 34 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 286r, 2 Oct 1632. In 1633, Claydon’s Monday lecture was moved to St George Colegate. The exercises at Tombland and Hungate supplemented the St Andrew’s Thursday lecture as well as Foulke Robartes’s Wednesday lecture at St Clement’s. Robartes resigned the post in 1633. John Carter was then employed to preach on Tuesdays at St Peter Mancroft, see NRO, CA, 1625–48, fos 164v–5r. 35 J. A. W. Bennet and H. R. Trevor-Roper (eds), The Poems of Richard Corbett (Oxford, 1955): xi–xli, pp. 56–7. However, Corbett’s indolence has been overplayed. While in Norwich, he sought to evict the Walloon congregation from his chapel using harsh terms, ordering them ‘to depart and hire some other place’ for their ‘irregular meetings’, BL, Harl MS 464, fo. 15. The bishop was also an energetic enforcer of regimental seating in parish churches, see PRO, SP 16/266/58. 36 K. Fincham, ‘Episcopal Government, 1603–1640’, in K. Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), p. 85. 37 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 286r, 1 Oct 1632; Laud, Works, V, p. 308.

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Indeed, while Bridge’s spell as Tombland lecturer was not, as his anonymous detractor put it, ‘absurd’, it certainly proved turbulent. To begin with, the minister soon came under scrutiny during Bishop Corbett’s visitation of Tombland in October 1633, where it was revealed that Bridge – and his assistant John Stalham – neglected St George’s, failing to read prayers on weekdays and holy days. He was popular with sermon gadders, who resorted to St Peter Hungate ‘when Mr Bridge preacheth there’.38 Moreover, given the pastor’s absence from Tombland, the parish was viewed with alarm for becoming a haven for conventiclers, when one parishioner – Nathaniel Porter – was presented for holding illicit prayer meetings, a point of some concern since Porter had previously been excommunicated for expounding ‘to his own invention’, in the house of one Bursham in St Andrew’s, in 1632.39 With Bridge at the helm, St George Tombland emerged as a ‘puritan parish’. Equally troubling for Bishop Corbett was the minister’s choice of ‘company’ to fill the Friday preaching roster, many of whom were reputed vocal critics of current developments within the Church. Besides Bridge, thirteen clerics are known to have shared the pulpit at St George’s.40 Among them we can count two divines of a future radical pedigree: William Bridge’s Emmanuel College contemporary, Jeremiah Burroughs, and a graduate of Gonville and Caius, William Greenhill, both of whom – with Bridge himself – later formed the mainstay of the Independents in the Westminster Assembly of divines as the celebrated ‘Morning Star’ and ‘Evening Star’ of Stepney respectively. As Cambridge scholars, Bridge and Burroughs had been influenced by John Wilson, town preacher at Sudbury, 1618–30, who had been suspended for nonconformity several times by Bishop Harsnett.41 Under Wren, Burroughs was suspended from his Norfolk living of Tivetshall and excommunicated for failing to use ‘visible reverence’ at the name of Jesus, while also refusing to read the king’s declaration on Sunday sports.42 Despite efforts by his patron Henry Rich, the earl of Holland, to intercede for his restoration, Burroughs left Norfolk. After initial reports to Wren in November 1637 that the minister had returned from Amsterdam, Burroughs found shelter at Little Leighs, Essex, home of the earl of Holland’s brother Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick.43 In 1638 he was in trouble again, this time for justifying the Scots’ right to resist King Charles. At least, this was the reported topic of a conference held at Little Leighs between Burroughs and

38

NRO, DN VIS/6/4. John Stalham is described vaguely as ‘clericus’. Ibid; NRO, MC 16/15, fo. 4. 40 The names are given in NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 580v, 591r–v. 41 DNB, ‘Jeremiah Burroughs’; Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, pp. 173–84; T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 22, 87–8; DAB, ‘John Wilson’. 42 Bod L, Tanner MS 68. fos 6v, 204r; Tanner MS 89, fo. 175. 43 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 10r, 121r, 248r; B. Donagan, ‘The Clerical Patronage of Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, 1619–1642’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 120 (1976), p. 408. 39

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John Michaelson, vicar of Chelmsford, whose information prompted proceedings against Burroughs in the High Commission and then in King’s Bench, and hastened the minister’s departure to Rotterdam.44 Legitimising the taking-up of arms against the monarch occupied Burrough’s preaching talents in the 1640s. He soon proved a powerful propagandist for Parliament, exhorting one London congregation in 1643 to rally in defence of ‘our lawfull liberties [and] our estates which we inherit as truly as the king inherits any thing he hath’, but especially ‘our Religion which is our chiefe inheritance’.45 Burroughs was surely perturbed by Charles’s injunction on predestination, as well as the tightening of discipline enjoined by the 1629 instructions. His colleague, William Greenhill – Burroughs’s fellow lecturer from an earlier combination exercise at Mendlesham – certainly viewed the current direction of ecclesiastical policy with a good deal of pessimism.46 Both clerics had enjoyed the patronage of Lady Jane Bacon of Brome Hall, Suffolk. Lady Jane had presented Burroughs to Tivetshall in 1631, while Greenhill served as tutor and chaplain to the dowager, later occupying the living at Oakley, within the neighbourhood of Brome.47 Greenhill’s correspondence to his patroness survives and is now deposited in the Essex Record Office. In one portentous letter of January 1630, Greenhill confided his anxieties over the royal instructions issued the previous month: Since I wrote to your Ladyship, the Bishops have received instructions from the King, for they make him the author of all. And they are touching Bishops retiring to their own Sees, Catechising in the afternoon, Gentlemen restrained from keeping of Chaplaines or Schollers in their houses, Lecturers reading of prayers in their habits and Surplusses Constantly on Week days or others. They have thought to have chopt them all downe at a blow but that was too violent: they will now take a milder course, weary all men out with imposition of holy burdens that they will hardly touch with one of their fingers. It makes my heart bleed to thinke of the miseries that by such men and their projects are coming upon the Church, which I beseech the Lord of his infinite mercy to uphold and preserve in despight of all the oppressors thereof.48

44

LPL, MS 3391, fos 42r–v, copy in ERO, T/B211/1/39; BLTT, E 345 (14), Jeremiah Burroughs, A Vindication of Mr Burroughes against Mr Edwards his foule aspersions in his spreading Gangraena and his angry Antiapolgia (1646), pp. 20–3. 45 Jeremiah Burroughs, The Glorious Name of God, the Lord of Hosts (1643), Wing B6074, pp. 27–8. 46 DNB, ‘William Greenhill’, which conflates Greenhill with a cleric of the same name – a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford – who became vicar of New Shoreham, Sussex, in 1615; A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 233. For the Mendlesham exercise, see N. Evans (ed.), The Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury 1630–1635, Suffolk Record Society, 29 (1987), p. 264. 47 Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 286. 48 ERO, D/DBy/C24, fo. 19r; F. Heal and C. Holmes, ‘ “ Prudentia Ultra Sexam”: Lady Jane Bacon and the Management of her Families’, in M. McClendon et al. (eds), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society and Self-fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford, 1999), pp. 111–12.

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Given his fears that a conspiracy to subvert the true Protestant religion was afoot, Greenhill’s subsequent clash with Wren in 1636 seems almost inevitable. Suspended for refusing to comply with the bishop’s articles, he followed Bridge and Burroughs to the Low Countries – only to return in the 1640s – in later life acting as co-editor of both Bridge and Burroughs’s works, being named as Bridge’s literary executor in 1671.49 The ties between this trio of ministers were already well assured by the settling of the Tombland lecture in October 1632. Other participants in this exercise with grave concerns over the bishops’ intentions included three of the clerical trustees: John Benton of Wramplingham, John Ward of St Michael at Plea and Robert Peck of Hingham. Robert Gallard, parson of Sprowston, was associated with Miles Corbet, another trustee.50 So too was Thomas King – son of Thomas King, Norwich’s town clerk – and rector of Salle since 1628, who had been on hand to witness the will of Miles Corbet’s father Thomas. King junior was later censured by Wren for his over-length scriptural expositions during catechism classes.51 Another pastor clearly linked to the Sprowston Corbets was Thomas Case, rector of Erpingham from 1629, who also crossed Wren’s administration in 1636, this time for holding a public fast – where the Sacrament was administered – ahead of the required royal proclamation, offering the excuse that ‘he heard it was at London and supposed it had been here likewise’.52 Case had formerly served as curate at North Repps under Richard Heyrick, who happened to be Miles Corbet’s brother-in-law. A future Presbyterian, Heyrick succeeded, in 1635, in gaining the wardenship of Manchester collegiate church, leaving Norfolk for Lancashire, where Case also hoped to reside upon marrying – two years later – Ann Mosley, a lady of some substance and standing within godly circles in the north-west.53 Shipps writes of Case that ‘Wren sent him packing’, which assessment is not entirely accurate. In any event, Case did not resign from Erpingham until December 1640, even though in the meantime he proved a slippery customer for the Laudian authorities by his frequent absences from Norfolk to attend – as he maintained – to his estate in Lancashire.54 By March 1639, rumours had reached Laud of Case’s preaching at Manchester ‘very boldly against the Discipline of the Church of England’. 49

Bod L, Tanner MS 89, fo. 175; Tanner MS 314, fo. 122r; BLTT, E 471 (1), The Works of William Bridge (1649), ‘To the Reader’; PRO, PROB 11/335, fo. 354r, will of William Bridge, proved in 1671. 50 For Gallard’s career, see above, pp. 84, 103–4, 116, 118–20, 132. 51 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 591v, for the familial tie between the two Thomas Kings; Venn, III, p. 21; PRO, PROB 11/131, fo. 111r; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 212r. 52 Chancellor Corbet did not buy this excuse, replying that ‘he might as well make me beleeve there was no heate in the summer’. See Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 5r–v. 53 See Michael Mullett’s entries on Heyrick and Case in ODNB. Heyrick married Miles Corbet’s sister Helen, PRO, PROB 11/131, fo. 110v, will of Thomas Corbet, proved in 1618. 54 Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 290; DN REG/18/24, fo. 19v; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 10v; Parentalia, p. 98. Case presented himself at Erpingham for the archdeacon of Norwich’s visitation in 1638,

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Laud, who asked John Bridgeman – bishop of Chester – to investigate further, suspected that the sermon, which reportedly ended with prayers ‘for the good success of the Scotch Rebels’, had been delivered under Richard Heyrick’s patronage. Bridgeman confirmed the archbishop’s fears, and Laud promised to free Chester of the minister. Subsequently sitting on the Westminster Assembly and serving as a Parliamentary army chaplain, Case was another radical to emerge from the Tombland exercise.55 Robert Kent was a veteran city preacher, having held the chaplaincy at St Martin at Oak since 1595. In 1601, Kent had faced office proceedings in the consistory court for a sensational sermon preached in the cathedral green yard, in which he complained that ‘there is much corruption in the world’ and that ‘bribery and corruption were of prelates and church government’, at which point he reportedly made an ill-conceived gesture towards the bishop’s palace. Kent was alive and well during Wren’s 1636 visitation, when he refused to read the second service at the communion table according to the bishop’s injunctions.56 Richard Johnson, from 1611 the vicar of Ketteringham, Norfolk, upon the presentation of Sir John Heveringham – one of the defaulters on the forced loan tried during the famous Five Knights Case of 1627 – avoided similar provocation with the episcopal authorities after 1636.57 Besides these beneficed clerics, the Tombland exercise also played host to three stipendiary preachers drawn from the teaching circle around King’s Lynn. The first, Matthew Swallow – curate at St Margaret’s Lynn since January 1629 – had already been taken to task for his nonconformity, being suspended by Bishop White seven months later in July 1629. He balked at conforming to Wren’s injunctions, relinquishing his cure ‘not without some contempt’, as the bishop noted.58 We have already encountered John Stalham, who came to Norwich after serving as a successor for the late Nicholas Price at St Nicholas’s church in the port town during 1629. Possibly Stalham had hoped for a permanent position at St Nicholas. But he soon fell out with members of the vestry, causing a stir with a thundering fast day sermon delivered in March 1629, which condemned the present state of the Church and Commonwealth.59 He gave thanks for prosperity under Elizabeth and James. Then he lamented: now there is pollution in the Court, pollution in the Church and commonwealth, and how O Lord . . . canst thou behold us with the

NRO, ANW 3/34, at which time Bishop Montagu gave him leave to attend to business in the north-west. 55 StaffsRO, D1287/P/399/183, 185. Laud was informed that Case aspired to a fellowship at Manchester. See ODNB, ‘Thomas Case (1598–1682)’ for the minister’s later career. 56 NRO, DN REG/16/22, consignation book, 1627; DN DEP/31/34, fos 301r–v; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 37v. Kent died shortly after Wren’s visitation, Parentalia, p. 94. 57 NRO, DN REG/16/22, fo. 34r; Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 287. 58 NRO, DN REG/16/22, consignation book, 1627; BL, Add MS 24346, entries for 8 Dec 1628 and 24 July 1629; Bod L, Rawlinson MS C 368, fo. 5r, 7 Dec 1636. 59 See above, pp. 113, 169. BL, Add MS 24346, entry for 11 Oct 1629; NRO, DN DEP/38/43, fo. 389r.

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eyes of mercie, seeing poperie and superstition is secretly set up in the chiefest places of this kingdom . . . for the sinnes of this kingdom great miseries and calamities would fall, and our wifes and children shall sow them, and God would judge this kingdom for the sinnes of it within a twelve month.

Such inflammatory remarks failed to move all of the town’s inhabitants. For example, recalling – in the more convivial surrounds of a local tavern – Stalham’s profession to stand ‘not as a prophet to judge but as a watchman to forewarn’, one wit allegedly quipped ‘noe you stand like a foole’.60 The wit was Thomas Rivett, the town clerk, 1614–33, which may explain Stalham’s failure to secure future employment in Lynn.61 Instead in May 1632, he gained promotion to the living of Terling, Essex, in the gift of Sir Robert Mildmay, whose daughter had married a brother of the Norfolk trustee, Robert Peck of Hingham. Peck himself had familial ties with the Lynn’s mercantile elite.62 Such contacts account for Mildmay’s patronage, although here it may come as some surprise to note Stalham’s continued presence in Norwich in the autumn of 1633, while enjoying the fruits of his Essex cure.63 But Norwich, unlike Terling, was beyond Laud’s reach. Enjoying fellowship with Bridge in the more congenial atmosphere of Norfolk, Stalham was able to foster the kind of evangelical preaching that was being muzzled in London diocese. The same attraction held sway over the third preacher from King’s Lynn, Thomas Walker. William Bridge’s near contemporary at Emmanuel College, Walker went to Cambridge on a scholarship funded by Lynn corporation, taking turns in the town’s pulpits in 1631 before progressing to Tombland and finally Assington, Suffolk, left vacant following Nathaniel Rogers’s departure for New England in 1635.64 Backed by confrères of Stalham and Walker’s stamp, the stage was set for Bridge’s showdown with John Chappell. The ensuing religious dispute, which was in direct contravention of Charles’s edicts, exacerbated confessional tensions among Norwich’s clergy and lay citizens and led to Bridge’s temporary suspension throughout the spring and summer of 1634. Our knowledge of the clash comes from a set of testimonies given during office proceedings against Bridge in the Norwich consistory court in February 1634. The original articles exhibited against the minister have not survived,

60

NRO, DN DEP/38/43, fos 389r–90r. H. Le Strange (comp.), Norfolk Official Lists (Norwich, 1890), p. 203. 62 R. Newcourt, Repertorium . . . or an Ecclesiastical Parochial History of the Diocese of London (2 vols, 1710), II, p. 578; K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1995), pp. 160–4, which is silent on Stalham’s formative career in Norfolk. For the Peck family’s marital ties, see Bod L, Tanner MS 180, fos 24v, 242r. 63 NRO, DN VIS/6/4; DN DEP/41/46, fo. 568r. 64 BL, Add MS 24346, entries for 1 July 1631 and 2 Dec 1631; NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 3; PRO, SP 16/293/218. Walker also emigrated to New England rather than conform under Wren: Bod L, Tanner MS 314, fos 120r, 122v. 61

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although from the extant witness depositions taken prior to the hearing, it is possible to reconstruct the background behind the case of Grandorge and Salter con Bridge, which was spotted by Kenneth Shipps in 1971.65 Shipps offered a partial reading of the material. However, given current interest in the fate of predestinarian preaching in the 1630s, the significance of this case lies in its careful manipulation by the local church establishment to vilify Bridge and his coterie of ministers. Managing proceedings for Bishop Corbet was the diocesan chancellor Clement Corbet, whose signature endorsed each deposition. No relation to the present bishop, Clement Corbet was a cousin of Samuel Harsnett, who had secured the chancellorship for his kinsman in 1625. Clement Corbett shared Harsnett’s antipathy towards puritans. As traced below, he made for a zealous hatchet-man under Bishop Wren; his religious views were in sharp contrast to those of his nephew, the Norfolk trustee and future regicide Miles Corbet, who had inherited the family seat at Sprowston.66 Complaint was brought by the churchwardens of St Andrew’s, Isaac Grandorge and John Salter, against Bridge for having contradicted their chaplain John Chappell. Incumbent and Thursday lecturer at St Andrew’s since 1626, Chappell had been singled out in a run of Tombland sermons for handling doctrines that William Bridge and his followers deemed heterodox.67 Bridge’s actions were in breach of Canon Fifty-Three. Under the terms of the Canon – reiterated in Richard Corbett’s visitation articles for Norwich – churchwardens were to present ministers heard to ‘impugn or confute any doctrine delivered by any other preacher’ without the ordinary’s prior consent. In addition, the churchwardens hoped to clear their lecturer’s name. After all, as it was alleged during the proceedings that upon besmirching Chappell’s reputation, Bridge had drawn away a number of auditors from the St Andrew’s exercise to his own sermons at Tombland.68 Parochial pride was at stake; although Grandorge and Salter may have been motivated to ‘shop’ Bridge on more pointed confessional grounds. If so, Grandorge’s animosity towards the minister probably owed little to any profound religious disagreement; at least from what we can discern about the churchwarden’s beliefs, he emerges as an evangelical Protestant more attuned to Bridge’s unflinching Calvinism. Grandorge was entered in the freemen’s lists as a comfit maker, a kind of early confectioner. But he was a devout comfit maker, who when writing his will in 1634 – he died a year 65

Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, pp. 286–8. The case is deposited in NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 567r–604r. W. G. Bentham, ‘Pedigree of Archbishop Samuel Harsnett’, Essex Review, 40 (1931), pp. 108–9; B. Levack, The Civil Lawyers in England 1603–1641: a Political Study (Oxford, 1971), p. 220. See below, pp. 132 n.6. 67 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 568r, 582v, 584v; MC 992/1, fo. 12v, for Grandorge and Salter as churchwardens. Chappell’s appointment is given in AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 282v, 3 May 1626. 68 G. Bray (ed.), The Anglican Canons, 1529–1947, COERS, 6 (1998), p. 341; K. Fincham (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart church, Vol. 1, COERS, 1 (1994), p. 163. 66

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later – provided for ‘a godly preacher’ to deliver his funeral sermon, while entrusting his wife ‘to bring up my small children in the feare of God’.69 Moreover, he was also the son of a godly minister, Richard Grandorge, a participant in the clerical conference centred on Bury St Edmunds in the 1580s.70 Confectionery may seem an odd calling for a preacher’s son; although it is worth speculating that having been reared upon theological discourse, he was alert to the potential divisiveness of soteriological wrangling. John Salter, on the other hand, who lived on to emerge as a royalist sympathiser during the Civil War, may have been a pronounced foe of the godly. Compounding out of the aldermanry in late 1642, he was one of twenty Norwich citizens imprisoned by the Commons for refusing to pay subscription money; although such defiance of Parliament did not prevent him from becoming mayor under the Commonwealth in 1655.71 Besides the churchwardens, two fellow parishioners from St Andrew’s were especially forward in presenting evidence against William Bridge. The first, Francis Norris, a successful maltster, born in 1600 and bred in St Andrew’s parish, led a similarly chequered political career to that of John Salter in the 1640s and 1650s. Resigning his seat on the common council in 1642, Norris was reluctant to serve the English Republic. He compounded out of the shrievalty to the tune of £50 in 1653, yet was forward in giving £65 towards the city’s voluntary contribution to Charles II in 1660, becoming an alderman in 1662 until his death in 1667. Norris’s political allegiance lay with the Stuart monarchy, but what was his earlier perspective on the Caroline church?72 Fortunately, he left a will to posterity, which although penned in the altered circumstances of the 1660s is of interest for including a pious exhortation to his family, expressing hope that his kin ‘may be filled according to your measures with the fullness of God’ and that God’s grace may be constant ‘whilst we remayne in the tabernacles of flesh and wilderness of danger’. God’s grace, as he saw it, could be lost. Significantly, Norris’s advice echoes John Chappell’s teaching – as witnessed in the 1634 proceedings – that before grace ‘brings a man to iustification, he may by some initiall act of grace and the spiritt please God in some measure but not to salvation’.73 We can infer that Norris was not a rigid predestinarian and

69

Millican, Freemen, p. 38. Specifically, a comfit is a sweet comprised of a nut coated in sugar. Though gaining his freedom in 1603, Grandorge only held office as a common councillor from 1627 until his death in February 1635. See Hawes, Officers, p. 71 and PRO, PROB 11/168, fo. 350r for his will. 70 NRO, NCC 55 Hudd, will of Richard Grandorge, proved in 1621; P. Collinson et al. (eds), Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan church, 1582–1590, COERS, 10 (2003), pp. 214–15. Isaac Grandorge’s son Benjamin followed the family business, gaining his freedom as a sugarbaker in 1633, Millican, Freemen, p. 123. 71 CJ, II, p. 896; Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, pp. 189, 203; Mayors of Norwich, p. 88. 72 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 567r; Hawes, Officers, p. 113; Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, p. 227. 73 PRO, PROB 11/323, fo. 122r; NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 604r.

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may have been receptive to ‘Laudian’ altar-centred Sacramentalism as well. At least his son Anthony – who took over his father’s business – was evidently disposed towards ceremonies; thus, when serving as churchwarden at St Andrew’s in 1675, he paid out of his own pocket to restore the communion rails to their pre-Civil War position before the table at the east end of the chancel, ‘to prevent doges pissing against it and other prophanations and abuses’. When the vestry refused to cover his costs, Norris junior raised the matter in the archdeacon’s court.74 Such troubles for the Norris family lay in the future, although in light of Francis Norris’s religious statements in later life, he may already have been predisposed to bring complaints against William Bridge’s evangelical preaching in 1634. The second parishioner, Thomas Ingram, was antipathetic to the godly. A hosier by trade, originally from Dunwich in Suffolk, Ingram was a newcomer to St Andrew’s, having only settled in the parish four years earlier. But he was already known to the godly among Norwich’s magistrates. In May 1624, he helped to publish the mocking verse, ‘howe nowe proud scismatique’, which was seemingly directed against the then mayor and future Norfolk trustee, Robert Craske.75 Ingram continued to confront the godly of his adoptive church. Significantly, his bitterest enemy among his neighbours was John Greenwood, sheriff in 1642, and later an Independent of extreme religious views.76 In January 1636, Ingram brought a defamation suit against Greenwood for spreading rumours of adultery with his second wife while his first wife was alive.77 Nevertheless, against the background of such grubby parochial squabbling, it is interesting to note Ingram’s unflinching support for John Chappell against Greenwood’s subsequent fellowship with Bridge as a founder member of the minister’s Congregational church at Great Yarmouth in 1643.78 Indeed, Greenwood’s rumours of sexual incontinency seemed to have been aired from the pulpit by William Bridge. Preaching, perhaps with Ingram in his sights, prior to Bishop Wren’s visitation in May 1636, Bridge broke the injunction on predestinarian teaching again, to dispel the need for human acts in attaining salvation, by urging that ‘God loveth a man never the better for his Sanctification’. He then employed a jarring simile. Concluding that ‘if God should love for vertue and hate for vice, or love for goodnes and hate for sin’, Bridge likened the Almighty to ‘such men as chose their wives for their beauty onely, which when that failes, their love failes also’. 74 NRO, MC 992/1; ANW 4/38, comperta, 1675–6. Concern over canine intrusion was often used to justify Laudian ‘altar policy’ in the 1630s. See below, p. 189. 75 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 568v; MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 532r, 29 May 1624. 76 For Greenwood, see Hawes, Officers, p. 72 and Joseph Hall, ‘Hard Measure’, in The Works of Joseph Hall, Vol. I, ed. P. Hall (Oxford, 1837): lv, which recalled Greenwood’s part in desecrating Norwich Cathedral in 1643. 77 NRO, DN DEP/43/47, fos 500r–5v, Ingram con Greenwood; Bod L, Tanner 68, fo. 271r. 78 NRO, FC 31/1, fo. 1.

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Such words held a particular resonance for an alleged adulterer like Thomas Ingram. In response, Ingram had no compunction in presenting Bridge to Wren’s visitors, blankly commenting on the minister’s ‘endeavouring to maintane diverse opinions, which in my understanding are contrary to the faith of Christ and holy Scripture . . . the Articles of Religion and the king’s declaration’. Chancellor Corbet, on the other hand, had nothing but praise for Ingram’s courage, during the instances proceedings against Greenwood. Writing on his behalf to Bishop Wren, Corbet commended the hosier as ‘an honest citizen’, who although sometime ‘of that faction of assurance and undoubted salvation’, had endured numerous insults from ‘schismaticks’ who accounted him an ‘apostate’ for opposing Bridge.79 As an apostate, Ingram failed to gain civic office. While he sat on the common council for two years from 1656 until his death in 1658, it is noteworthy that he did not seek a career in municipal government sooner, a failing that cannot be attributed to lack of financial means, Ingram leaving £500 in income from rents in his will.80 According to Ingram’s testimony, tensions flared up on 23 May 1633, on the occasion of one of Chappell’s Thursday lectures at St Andrew’s. Preaching on the working of divine grace, Chappell maintained that ‘God doth truly intend and will the salvation of all men and that Christ died for all men according to the holy scriptures conditionally that they repent, believe and obey the terms of the Gospel’. Bridge, who was present, found the stress on the universal nature of God’s grace objectionable. Having conference afterwards in the chancel – as was customary at St Andrew’s on lecture days – Bridge asked Chappell to forbear propagating such doctrines ‘for that they were new things’ and ‘that it was Arminianism, and he would preach the contrarie’, ominously sending word that he would dispute with Chappell in his own lectures.81 Indeed, according to an indignant Francis Norris, the first salvo was fired the next day. Standing in for Bridge at St George’s, and preaching on 1 Corinthians 3: 11 – ‘For other foundations can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ’ – John Stalham implored his auditors to follow the doctrines founded by John More, Thomas Newhouse, Roland Nutt and Nicholas Bownd. Norris understood this to be a direct attack on Chappell for having betrayed the evangelical legacy planted at St Andrew’s.82 However, true to his word, William Bridge turned to refute Chappell’s ‘divers deceits’ in a run of sermons, which culminated in

79

Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 79r, 271r. Hawes, Officers, p. 87; PRO, PROB 11/285, fo. 105r. 81 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 569r–v. 82 Ibid, fos 568r, 583v. Stalham remained sensitive to Arminianism, attacking Samuel Oates in 1647 for having infected Terling with ‘strange conceits’ touching universal grace. See BLTT, E 384 (10), John Stalham, Vindiciae Redemptionis in the Fanning and Sifting of Samuel Oates his Exposition upon Matt 13: 44 (1647), ‘To my beloved brethren and neighbours in Terling’. 80

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a forceful exposition delivered at Tombland in January 1634. Bridge left no room for doubt as to his own theological position. As he assured his congregation, ‘he did not believe [that] Christ died for every particular man for that all men should be saved . . . because he intended not for all’ since ‘it was not likely that Christ should lay down his life on earth for him he appears not for in heaven’, adding that while Christ’s death was sufficient for all ‘his righteousness [is] not imputed to every man’.83 Such exchanges, which were permitted to continue for over six months, made for a fervent atmosphere. We gain a hint too, if Thomas Ingram’s account is to be believed, of the godly closing ranks against Chappell, with Bridge writing to several prominent citizens and the wife of his patron Miles Corbet, calling upon them to boycott Thursday lectures at St Andrew’s. Apparently, Ingram encountered difficulties in securing Chappell’s half-yearly stipend from the corporation.84 Another witness, John Evered of St Martin at Palace – significantly, like Francis Norris, a maltster by trade – also testified to the declining numbers at St Andrew’s, having ‘heard it credibly reported’ that some said ‘they durst not come to hear Mr Chappell because he preached Arminianisme’.85 Such backbiting had affected Chappell’s health, leaving him ‘somewhat sickly and grieved’ and unable to preach.86 The point here, of course, is that Bridge and Stalham sought to define themselves as champions of the orthodox Protestant religion, against Chappell’s emphasis on universal grace. In a way their actions were justifiable according to Charles’s 1629 instructions. These enjoined bishops to ‘countenance and encourage the grave and orthodox divines of their clergy’ that ‘they may have knowledge, how both lecturers and preachers behave themselves in their sermons’.87 Yet it is unlikely that Bridge’s self-appointed task of clerical watchdog had received episcopal sanction. However, by exposing Chappell’s putative errors, Bridge hoped to press his duty upon Richard Corbet in keeping the bishop abreast of infringements against the royal ban on contentious preaching. At least, this was the subsequent line taken by the pro-Bridge camp during the suit. Three deponents in particular, the trustee John Ward, Alderman Timothy Scottow of St Andrew’s – brother of another trustee, Augustine Scottow – and the town clerk, Thomas King,

83

NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 567r–v, 577r, deposition of John Ward. Ibid, fo. 585v, deposition of William Mapes, worsted weaver of St John Sepulchre, who received the information from Thomas Ingram. Miles Corbet boycotted the Thursday lecture at Yarmouth, given by the Laudian chaplain of the town, Matthew Brooke. Allegedly, Corbet ‘did speake openly and audibly’ against the doctrines preached by both Brooke and his assistant curate, Thomas Cheshire. See R. Cust, ‘Anti-Puritanism and Urban Politics: Charles I and Great Yarmouth’, HJ, 35 (1992), p. 18. 85 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 592v, 593v. 86 Ibid, fo. 592r, deposition of Edmund Porter, prebendary of Norwich. 87 Laud, Works, V, p. 308. 84

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were at pains to highlight Bridge’s orthodoxy, while casting aspersions on Chappell. Scottow and King shrewdly deferred comment on Chappell’s orthodoxy to the bishop’s judgement.88 But John Ward, who seems to have harboured long-standing grievances against the St Andrew’s minister, was more forthcoming over his alleged Arminianism, remarking candidly that as ‘common fame’ would have it: since the publication of King James his declaration . . . Mr Chappell hath publiquely in the pulpit commended Arminius by name, as well for his doctrine as his conversation and that he cited the authority of Bertius for it, which [he] . . . knoweth was and is offensive to many, for [he] . . . hath heard divers persons express so much.89

But was Chappell an Arminian as his detractors claimed? While we would like to know more about Chappell’s developing beliefs, on the strength of the testimonies presented in 1634, he clearly emerges as a convinced antipredestinarian. This may seem surprising given his educational background at Cambridge. Graduating from Christ’s College – a bastion of Calvinism throughout Elizabeth’s reign – he migrated to another robustly evangelical institution, Emmanuel College, in 1610; it was a move that happened to coincide with a crackdown on nonconformity at Christ’s upon the election of Valentine Cary as master of the college the previous year.90 Perhaps John Chappell found the new atmosphere at Christ’s less than congenial. At any length, Emmanuel – where he became a fellow, 1613–18 and progressed to BD in 1617 – prepared him for his first ministerial post as erstwhile ‘praedicator’ and sometime perpetual curate at All Saints’, Derby, from 1617 until switching to Norwich in 1626.91 Chappell came to St Andrew’s with the ‘right’ vocational background to fulfil a corporate lectureship. Indeed, he was still styling himself ‘verbi divini praedicator’ in 1634, which ascribed title had obviously been sanctioned by Bishop Harsnett, who had licensed Chappell’s lectureship in the first place.92 Possibly Chappell was diverted from the evangelical path under Harsnett’s guidance. However, another key influence upon the minister’s theological development was his elder brother William – also an alumnus of

88

NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 578v, 589v–90r, 600r. For Timothy Scottow, see Rye, Rate Book, p. 58. NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 581r. 90 Venn, I, p. 324; S. Bondos-Greene, ‘The End of an Era: Cambridge Puritanism and the Christ’s College Election of 1609’, HJ, 25 (1982), pp. 197–208. 91 Venn, I, p. 324; Lichfield Record Office, B/V/1/32 and 37, libri cleri, 1616 and 1620; J. C. Cox and W. H. S. St John-Hope, The Chronicles of the Collegiate church or Free Chapel of All Saints’ Derby (London, 1891), p. 25. At time of writing the precise dates of Chappell’s Derby period are unclear. He appears to have shared responsibility for the cure of All Saints’ with one Thomas Dukesbury, also a local schoolmaster; but his ministry did not provoke adverse comment in the extant Lichfield diocesan archives. 92 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 282v, 3 May 1626; DN DEP/41/46, fo. 586r. Giving evidence in 1634, Edmund Porter commended Chappell’s earlier lecturing in Derby, NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 582r. 89

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Christ’s – who emerges as a controversial theologian, especially in light of his characterisation by William Prynne as ‘the most notorious seducing Arminian in the whole University of Cambridge’.93 Certainly, reports of the elder Chappell’s anti-predestinarian beliefs were in circulation in 1619, which seemingly commended him to Laud. Consequently, in his later career as provost of Trinity College, Dublin, from 1634, Chappell proved an effective, if initially reluctant, agent on Laud’s behalf in Ireland, working tirelessly to transform Trinity College into a model Laudian institution according to a new set of statues authorised by royal charter in 1637. Amid the battle over the Trinity statute, Chappell confronted stinging criticism, most vociferously from Bishop James Ussher, who attacked the provost for advocating justification by good works and Arminianism.94 For his pains, Archbishop Laud ensured that William Chappell was rewarded with the twin sees of Cork and Ross in 1638, while the same lines of patronage also helped John Chappell to gain preferment in Ireland following his resignation from St Andrew’s, Norwich, in February 1635. Indeed, having joined his brother in Dublin by November 1637, Laud was happy to promote John Chappell as ‘a deserving man’ to Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford, the Irish lord deputy. By the end of 1638, the archbishop was especially keen to see John Chappell installed as his brother’s successor as provost of Trinity, an ambition that was not realised, although a year later the younger Chappell gained a string of Irish livings, including the deanery of Ross and the chancellorship of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.95 But John Chappell had other anti-Calvinist connections. Indeed, the brothers Chappell were also associated with the brothers Sterne, William and Richard; all four were Nottinghamshire natives and part of an old boys’ network that extended from Mansfield Grammar School via Cambridge to Archbishoip Laud’s inner circle. Richard Sterne – Laud’s loyal chaplain from 1633 – famously stood by his master’s side at his execution and helped publish Laud’s address from the scaffold in 1667. Moreover, in a later guise as archbishop of York at the Restoration, another of Sterne’s commemorative acts was to erect a monument to both Chappell brothers in Bilsthorpe church, Nottinghamshire.96 However, in life John Chappell had done the elder Sterne, William, a favour by keeping warm the Leicestershire rectory 93

William Prynne, Canterburies Doome (1646), p. 178. However, it was also alleged during Archbishop Laud’s trial that William Chappell was ‘at first fierce’ against Arminians: Laud, Works, IV, pp. 298–9. 94 My reading follows Alan Ford’s excellent account of William Chappell’s career in ODNB. 95 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 312r, 24 Feb 1635. For the archbishop’s emphatic letters commending John Chappell, see Laud, Works, VI, pp. 514, 518, VII, pp. 398, 418, 439, 464, 471, 522, 543; Venn, I, p. 324. 96 DNB, ‘William Chappell’; PRO, PROB 11/265, fo. 31r, will of William Sterne, proved in 1657; ODNB, ‘Richard Sterne (1596–1683)’, establish these ties. For the inscription at Bilsthorpe, eulogising John Chappell as having been ‘born for the pulpit’, see R. Thoroton, The Antiquities of Nottinghamshire (3 vols, Nottingham, 1790–6), III, p. 194.

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of Glooston for his fellow Mansfield scholar. Seemingly, John Chappell had sought to depart from Norwich, immediately following William Bridge’s elevation to a municipal lectureship, in December 1632, by gaining institution to Glooston, a living that he held for a few months until June 1633. Perhaps Chappell never left Norwich to attend to his new cure. On the other hand, the timing of Bridge’s initial protest in St Andrew’s, on 23 May 1633, was surely more than coincidental; in other words, perhaps Bridge hoped to challenge Chappell upon his return from Leicestershire, derogatory things having been said about the minister in his absence. Whatever the extent of John Chappell’s movements in early 1633, it is intriguing to note that he promptly vacated Glooston in favour of William Sterne. Thanks to Andrew Cambers’s research on the collection that Richard Sterne conveyed to York upon his elevation to the archbishopric – now deposited in Halifax Parish Library – we know that William Sterne owned and avidly annotated several of Arminius’s works, including his controversial Examen of William Perkins. This tract, deplored by English Calvinists, was posthumously published by Arminius’s disciple Peter Bertius in 1612.97 However, it is telling – upon John Ward’s testimony – that John Chappell was criticised for citing Bertius, which he may have borrowed from Sterne. Whether he belonged to an Arminian book club, in light of his literary contacts and their common reading interests, Chappell emerges as an Arminian in the strict sense of someone who had internalised the Dutch theologian’s teachings on the theology of grace, and who was prepared to run the gauntlet of propagating the new divinity in Norwich.98 Of course, when presenting his own side to the consistory court, Chappell was anxious to distance himself from the ‘factious term’ Arminianism. As he was quick to chide William Bridge, his position that ‘in the sending of Christ, God did conditionally intend the eternall good of all mankind’, could be accounted ‘scripturisme’. Since ‘the Lutheran churches held these things before Arminius . . . [there was] no reason they should have their denunciation from him’. Accordingly, Chappell understood the Dutch theologian’s writings to be within a reformed tradition, and as such he advised his auditors not to judge ‘Arminianisme odious before they knew what Arminius his tenets were’.99 Was this remark intended to commend Arminianism? In one sense it was; although here Chappell hoped to downplay his commitment either way by professing to keep an open mind, stating that ‘he was neither, Arminian, nor

97 PRO, E 331/Lincoln/8; A. Cambers, ‘Pastoral Laudianism? Religious Politics in the 1630s: a Leicestershire Rector’s Annotations’, MH, 27 (2002), pp. 39–40, 42, furnishes details of William Sterne’s library and career at Glooston. For Bertius, see Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700, p. 223. 98 Ibid, fos. 588r, 599v. 99 NRO, DNDEP/41/46, fos 586v–7r; 599v.

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Lutheran, nor Calvinist, nor Zwynglyan, but a Christian’.100 This was not how Bridge interpreted Chappell’s preaching. As a principled Calvinist, Bridge was sensitive to any public exposition of the Dutch theologian’s teachings, knowing that his work had been condemned as heterodox by King James after the Synod of Dort. Admittedly, Chappell knew this as well. As he deposed, he was aware that James had declared Arminius as an ‘enemy of God’, and had dubbed ‘the rest of his Scholle Hereticks’. However, this portion of his confession is tellingly crossed through in the record.101 The point is that Chappell, or rather Chancellor Corbet, who countersigned Chappell’s testimony, was anxious that the earlier unfavourable censure of Arminius’s works would not be aired again in the Church court. By such means Chappell’s statement was carefully angled. Far from being an insidious apologist for a dangerous heresy – which is how the godly perceived him – the minister was portrayed as a benign figure, whose doctrine was entirely orthodox. Much the same loading of the evidence continued. This is most clearly seen in the hand-picking of witnesses on Chappell’s behalf from among the ranks of the city clergy known for their hostility towards the godly. Three ministers in particular warrant attention. The first, George Cocke, one of Harsnett’s ordinands, who succeeded Chappell to St Andrew’s in 1635, later served as one of Bishop Wren’s trusted standing commissioners after the 1636 visitation. Cocke acknowledged Chappell’s orthodoxy, but had far more to say about Bridge’s sermons.102 So too did Edmund Porter, who likewise played a prominent part in Wren’s administration as another standing commissioner in Norwich archdeaconry.103 Richard Gamon, rector of St Lawrence since 1604, put the case against Bridge and his followers more strongly. Gamon, who also assisted Wren in 1636, has already been encountered as the object of puritan attack for being a pharisee and an unworthy preacher (above, pages 129–30).104 Not surprisingly, he rallied to Chappell against Bridge and John Stalham, also venting his spleen against the goings-on at Tombland. As Gamon suspected, Bridge had admitted ‘divers strangers not inhabiting within the Cittie of Norwich’ to preach at St George’s, knowing that some ‘have heretofore byn suspended for their inconformitie and some doctrines or opinions by them preached’.105 With such statements to hand, Chancellor Corbet made his case against Bridge. He upheld Chappell’s reputation by characterising him as a peaceable

100

Ibid, fo. 599v. Ibid, fo. 587v. 102 Ibid, fos 572r–v, 574r. For Cock’s career, see NRO, DN VSC/2/4, fo. 1v; CA, 1625–48, fo. 202v; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 220r, 240r. 103 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 591v–2r; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 220r. In the 1640s, Porter was duly sequestered from his prebend and Norfolk livings by Parliament, who also had him imprisoned in Ely House, 1642–5, see A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), p. 271. 104 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 581v; DN REG/16/22, fo. 3r; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 220r. 105 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 583v. 101

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divine, who had fallen victim to godly intimidation prompted by Bridge’s moves to gather a ‘popular’ following for the lectures at Tombland. That Chappell breached the royal ban on discussing Arminius was conveniently downplayed. Instead, it was Bridge, who by hammering out the message of absolute predestination from the pulpit, who was cast as subversive and divisive. The most damaging rebuke came from Francis Norris. In a marginal note affixed to his deposition – added conspicuously in Clement Corbet’s recognisably scratchy hand – Norris lamented that ‘since the coming of Mr Chappell and by his good life . . . unity and love hath bin nourished, until the coming of the said Mr Bridge hath declared to a general dissension . . . in religion’.106 Bishop Corbett was moved to suspend Bridge several weeks later on 8 March 1634. The minister was barred from the ministry for seven months, and was only restored after some timely pleading by a deputation sent from the mayor’s court in September 1634, which happened to comprise Bridge’s former patrons, Thomas Cory, Augustine Scottow and John Tooley.107 The airing of Grandorge and Salter con Bridge offers a fascinating window upon the acrimonious religious scene of the Personal Rule. To begin with, the rush to take sides either for or against John Chappell contradicts Kevin Sharpe’s argument that debates over predestination were of little consequence for the 1630s, and that ‘doctrinal differences were not often a real issue in the parishes’.108 Evidence from Norwich clearly shows that they were. Soteriological disagreements had the potential to create rifts not only among the city’s clergy, but also among their lay auditors at a parochial level. This was in spite of Charles’s blanket call for silence on the issue. Instead, the king’s efforts to define the parameters of theological debate according to the ‘literall and Grammaticall sense’ of the Thirty-Nine Articles, created uncertainties that both sides – Calvinist and antiCalvinist – attempted to exploit in highlighting threats to the Church’s integrity. Predestinarians, like Bridge, felt compelled to denounce Arminian apologists in respect of the royal directive. Yet under the same ban, antiCalvinists like John Chappell and Clement Corbet were given a freehand to redefine and discredit Calvinist soteriology as inimical to the pursuit of order and uniformity. Following Laud’s tactic of vilifying vocal Calvinists in the High Commission, Clement Corbert also sought to marginalise Bridge’s views as extreme.109 Unable to gain – on their terms – a neutral hearing and excluded from the bounds of established ecclesiastical justice, Bridge and his confrères responded by closing ranks against the ‘ungodly’, a move that in turn lent justification to their opponents’ imputed charge that evangelicals sought to sow schism. 106

Ibid, fo. 568r. NRO, DN ACT/63/15, fo. 30r; MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 21r, 13 Sept 1634; Laud, Works, V, p. 328. K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), pp. 298–9. 109 Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, pp. 289–94. 107 108

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In Norwich, smear campaigns continued on both sides. Following Bridge’s suspension, Chappell was made to feel unwelcome in the city by his opponent’s influential backers. He resigned from St Andrew’s in February 1635, unable to salvage his loss of face with Norwich’s sermon-going citizens.110 However, with Bridge restored to his city benefices by February 1636, Chancellor Corbet was given a second opportunity to expose the negative impact of predestinarian teaching. Corbet’s quarry this time was another of Bridge’s Tombland assistants, Edward Wale. Employed as a curate upon Thomas Walker’s presentation to Assington in September 1635, like others of Bridge’s protégés, Wale drew attention to himself for nonconformity. He refused to wear the surplice or use the sign of the cross in baptism. He did not bow at the name of Jesus and altered parts of the liturgy, preaching beyond 10 a.m. on Sunday mornings in contempt of Harnsett’s 1622 orders.111 On top of these infractions, Wale allegedly caused distress with some uncharitable death-bed utterances. Summoned to pray at the bedside of Thomas Sergenson, a parishioner praised for ‘his honest and religious life and conversation’, suddenly struck by ‘a dangerous sickness’, Wale was heard to ‘terrifie and affright’ the dying citizen with ‘strange, difficult questions concerning his salvation’. Unable to gain satisfactory answers from Sergenson as to his assurance of faith, Wale stormed out. To the minister the old man was ‘in a damnable estate, for his sinnes were more heavie than anything in the world and worse than damnation’, words that reportedly caused ‘great terror and astonishment’ among Sergenson and his family.112 Wale was no wit. But his ready dismissal of a parishioner as a reprobate was swiftly seized upon by Chancellor Corbet to hold up the uncompromising predestinarian teaching propounded by Bridge’s circle to further public scrutiny. This time, Corbet raised the temperature up a notch. Calvinism of the stamp of Bridge and Wale did not only equate to disorder and schism; it was also to be regarded in a more sinister light as pastorally debilitating and conducive to despair. Corbet hoped to shock opinion in Norwich, successfully swaying some citizens to his version of the moderate path.113 Moreover, upon learning of Bridge’s suspension in 1634, William Laud, now archbishop, was equally concerned to sensationalise the subversive potential of Calvinist preaching in Norwich in his annual report to Charles. Labelling Bridge ‘factious’, Laud impressed upon the king the need for even tighter control in East Anglia. With Richard Corbett’s timely death

110 NRO, DN AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 312r, 24 Feb 1635. Chappell felt suitably slighted not to return to Norwich in 1636 when Wren hoped he would serve the cure at St Peter Mancroft. He was perturbed by the city’s ‘godly and factious people’, see BL, Egerton MS 2716, fo. 436. 111 NRO, DN CON/16, articles exhibited against Edward Wale clerk, loose file. 112 Ibid. Depositions relating to this case are bound in NRO, DN DEP/42/47a, fos 534r–7v. 113 Wale was not present at St George’s for Wren’s visitation, indicating that he had been suspended prior to the spring of 1636, see NRO, DN VSC/2/4, fo. 3r; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 155r.

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in July 1635, the way was clear to promote a more forceful disciplinarian, unlikely to suffer theological wrangling by evangelicals like Bridge. Charles picked Matthew Wren, whose appointment had the desired effect. Within a few months of Wren’s visitation, the Tombland lecturer had quit Norwich for Rotterdam, which in one respect assuaged royal anxieties. Noting Bridge’s departure, Charles remarked ‘Let him go, we are well rid of him.’114

114

Laud, Works, V, pp. 328, 340.

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Chapter Nine ‘SOME JOYFULLY CONFORMED, OTHERS FROWARDLY OPPOSED’: MATTHEW WREN AND THE STIRS OF 1636

Matthew Wren’s brief incumbency of Norwich, which lasted almost two and a half years from December 1635 until April 1638, proved to be bitterly divisive to contemporaries, and continues to invite controversy.1 On the one hand, Wren remains the viperous figure of ‘Little Pope Regulus’ drawn by William Prynne.2 On the other hand, a sympathetic account of the bishop’s work was provided some time after the Restoration by his great-nephew, Christopher – son of his famous namesake, Sir Christopher Wren – who understandably lauded his family’s accomplishments. Christopher junior attested to his great-uncle’s skills as a Hebraist. More than that, Matthew Wren was a zealously loyal son of the Church of England, who was to be remembered for ‘his Courage and Resolution in putting into Practice impartially the legal Ecclesiastical Discipline, in a most dissolute, hypocritical age’. For his pains, Bishop Wren became the victim of a malicious backlash from ‘troublesome’ puritans.3 This partisan reading of Matthew Wren’s career has been endorsed by his fullest biographer to date, Peter King, who, drawing upon Wren’s extant papers in the Bodleian Library for a 1969 doctoral thesis, took the bishop at his own word. After all, Wren’s correspondence is rich in details about mundane matters of diocesan government. Reflecting what is to be found in the sources, King concluded that Wren was no more than an overly efficient administrator, whose energetic pursuit of the moderate aims of order and uniformity hardly warranted his eighteen-year imprisonment by Parliament

1

Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 38. The chapter title quotation is taken from Foulke Robartes, Gods holy house and service (1639), STC 21068, sig. *2v. 2 [William Prynne], Newes from Ipswich ([Edinburgh], 1636), STC 20469, p. 4. Later attacks on the bishop in the mould of Prynne’s pamphlet include BLTT, E 165 (14), The Wrens nest defiled (1641) and E 166 (7), Wrens Anatomy (1641). 3 Parentalia, p. 10.

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MATTHEW WREN & THE STIRS OF 1636

from 1642 until the return of monarchy in 1660.4 Kevin Sharpe agrees. Sharpe has insisted, somewhat perversely, that the opposition aroused by Wren’s reforms should be taken as ‘a measure of his success in pressuring men to conformity’.5 None of this explains the vehemence of the attack on the bishop in the Long Parliament. What follows is not so much an essay in reassessing Wren’s historical reputation as an attempt to investigate his impact upon an already fractious local religious scene in Caroline Norwich. Wren’s reforms forced the godly into open dissent. Yet, at the same time, within the city of Norwich at least, the bishop gained support from clerics and laymen not adverse to shifts in ecclesiastical polity, some of whose individual stories are pieced together below. At stake was Wren’s uncompromising enforcement of the ‘altar policy’ during his visitation of 1636. In Norwich, this aspect of the ‘Laudian’ religious package fanned the flames of religious controversy, previously ignited by William Bridge and John Chappell’s public debate over predestination in 1634. Why then did Wren’s moves to refashion the interior of parochial worship spark such acrimony? In one respect, much had to do with the bishop’s abrasive governmental style; although so saying it is difficult to substantiate Julian Davies’s off-beat casting of Wren as one of the villains of the piece in his recent efforts to depict King Charles, rather than William Laud, as the real architect of ceremonial Reform in the 1630s. As the king’s choice for Norwich, Wren assumed the mantle of royal hatchet-man. Giving Wren free rein to inflict his ‘hawkish solutions’ on the altar policy across ‘puritan’ East Anglia, Charles backed a figure who was more ‘Laudian’ than the cautious and emollient Archbishop Laud; Wren’s brand of ‘Carolinism’ is said to have brought the episcopal office into disrepute by 1640.6 Certainly, Wren was Charles’s candidate for the vacant bishopric in 1635. We know this from a letter among Laud’s papers sent by the archbishop to the king’s sister Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, touching her own suit on behalf of John Hassell, dean of Norwich, 1628–54, who aspired to the episcopate. Hassell, who owed his deanery to Laud’s intervention, hoped for further patronage. But as Laud explained, the dean was not a contender – Charles believing that Norwich diocese required ‘a man whom he might trust’ – whereas Hassell, a former army preacher in the Netherlands, was evidently not to be trusted. Instead, Charles promoted Wren – his former chaplain and future dean of the Chapel Royal – who was then bishop of Hereford. 4 P. King, ‘Matthew Wren, Bishop of Hereford, Norwich and Ely, 1585–1667’, University of Bristol D.Phil., 1969, especially chs 6 and 7; idem, ‘Bishop Wren and the Suppression of the Norwich Lectures’, HJ, 11 (1968), pp. 237–54. King’s thesis is recycled in H. A. Lloyd-Jukes, ‘Bishop Wren and the Non-conforming Ministers of the Diocese of Norwich’, History Studies, 1 (1968), pp. 15–20. 5 K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), pp. 368–74, especially p. 371. 6 J. Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1992), pp. 246–7.

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Consequently, Laud was happy to endorse this selection, holding ‘it no good manners to prevent my master till he was graciously pleased to discover himself, which he hath since done’.7 The point is that Wren was a figure whom Laud ‘might trust’ as well. The William Bridge affair aside, the need for a forceful manager at the helm in East Anglia was brought home to the archbishop during his metropolitical visitation of Norwich, conducted in April 1635. To the vicar-general Sir Nathaniel Brent, the whole diocese was ‘much out of order’.8 This was the case in the city of Norwich, where many ministers refused to wear ‘priests’ cloaks’, while other suspected nonconformists ‘carried themselves so warily that nothing could be proved against them’. On a personal note, Brent had felt deliberately snubbed by the Mayor, Christopher Barret – a godly parishioner at St Andrew’s, previously presented for not standing at the Gloria or Gospel – who failed to turn out to greet his honoured guest. This was in contrast to the cannon salute laid on by the burgesses of King’s Lynn. Afterwards, Barret and his brethren were compelled to make amends by producing the customary gift of plate, protesting ‘that they will be always ready to desire your Grace’s good opinion of them’.9 Laud was aware of the need for tighter diocesan control in Norwich. Indeed, upon his promotion, Wren’s antidote for the ills of his new charge – worthy of mention since it underwrote everything he performed in his see – took the form of a disarming set of visitation articles, comprising nine chapters and 132 sections with six questions in each. Wren aimed at clarity, ‘thereby the better to provide for the Serenity of Men’s Consciences and the Securing of Men’s Minds’, as he put it later.10 To the godly these injunctions became a source of extreme discomfort, especially given their joint issue with a separate list of ‘Particular Orders, Directions and Remembrances’, distributed in manuscript during the primary visitation of 1636.11 In puritan circles, this circular acquired the disparaging title of Wren’s ‘pocket injunctions’.12 Most controversial of all was the provision for

7 Laud, Works, VII, pp. 167–8. See PRO, SP 14/174/35, for Hassell’s ties with the Queen of Bohemia and Blomefield, III, p. 622, for his time in the Netherlands. Laud may have been aware of the dean’s earlier associations, while minister of Burton upon Trent, with the puritans William Bradshaw and Arthur Hildersham, a point I owe to Ian Atherton’s entry on Hassell in ODNB. Embroiled in a dispute over his statutory rights vis-à-vis the Norwich chapter, Hassell became an active Laudian under Wren: NRO, DCN 86/29; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 86. 8 Laud, Works, V, p. 334. 9 PRO, SP 16/292/128; NRO, DN VIS/5/1, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 51r, 15 Apr 1635. 10 K. Fincham (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, Vol. II, COERS, 5 (1998), pp. 129–55; Parentalia, p. 110. 11 For adverse commentary on the articles, see Symonds D’Ewes, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Symonds D’Ewes, ed. J. O. Halliwell (2 vols, London, 1845), II, p. 142; T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 208. 12 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 33r–6v; Tanner MS 220, fo. 54, petition of Samuel Peck of Hingham.

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the administration of the eucharist from a communion table, fixed permanently altarwise at the east end of the chancel, and divided from the main body of the Church by a rail ‘reaching across the north wall to the south wall, near one yard in height [and] so thick with pillars that dogs may not get in’. The idea was to stop communicants from entering the sanctuary as well. Instead, members of the congregation were expected to ‘come up reverently and kneel before the rails to receive the holy communion’, in an orderly procession, which in ‘great parishes’ was to be limited to four hundred in any one service. If the parishioners exceeded this total, they were admonished ‘to have communion the ofterner’, in smaller groups.13 Julian Davies has interpreted the thorough-going nature of these instructions as marking an extreme hard-line position on the ‘altar policy’, in contrast to William Laud’s moderate stance over the contentious issue of receiving at the rail. If so, Wren was surely following Lambeth’s lead. To begin with, his 1636 articles clearly justified setting up rails in Norwich ‘according to the archbishops late injunctions’ given by Nathaniel Brent during the metropolitical visitation, which were duly copied into the consignation book for April 1635. Specifically, Brent ordered churchwardens to rail in communion tables at the east end ‘in comely sort’ to protect the sanctuary from potential canine intrusion.14 Admittedly, the 1635 instructions are silent concerning where the Sacrament was to be administered; although from a later account of a conversation between Laud and Brent – dated to November 1641 and transcribed for use in the archbishop’s trial – Laud pressed Brent to encourage reception at the rails during the metropolitical visitation, ‘by persuasions’ and in ‘a faire way’, in the hope that ‘the people will best be won by the decency of the thing itself’.15 Doubtless Brent acted upon this brief in Norwich, as in other dioceses in the southern province, preparing the way for Wren’s assertive stance. While Laud may have preferred fair persuasion, the archbishop heartily approved of the 1636 measures for Norwich, as seen two years later in 1638 when Wren’s successor Richard Montagu queried procession to the rail as ‘a noveltie’. Laud promptly settled Montagu’s qualms by recommending to Charles that ‘the present bishop continue it and look carefully to it’.16 There is little evidence here to strengthen Davies’s suggestion that the archbishop’s designs for eucharistic practice differed fundamentally from those of his enthusiastic ‘Caroline’ subordinates, or that Laud was at loggerheads with

13

Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 33r–6v. Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 33r; NRO DN VSC/2/3b, fo. 1r, which was first given in relation to St Nicholas, Great Yarmouth. A copy of this order also survives among Wren’s papers, again suggesting that Wren took his cue from Lambeth: see Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 15r. 15 PRO, SP 16/485/118; Laud, Works, V, pp. 342–3; Fincham, ‘The Restoration of Altars in the 1630s’, HJ, 44 (2001), p. 936. 16 LPL, MS 943, p. 626; Laud, Works, V, p. 340. 14

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Wren over the altar policy. Indeed, when devising his will, Laud named his ‘worthy friend’ Wren as overseer. Previously, Wren had honoured Laud by asking him to be godfather to his fourth son, who was appropriately baptised William after his metropolitan, surely in celebration of the common goal for the Church that existed between the two divines.17 Not that any supposed disagreements over the enforcement of altar Reform at the centre were of great consequence to worshippers in Norwich diocese, who were made to square up to ‘new ceremonies’. Apart from the matter of reception at the rail, Wren’s orders caused distress for other reasons. From a ministerial perspective, the bishop’s insistence that the entire second service, including the Epistle and Gospel, was to be read from the communion table within the chancel, was especially confounding to godly clergymen.18 For practical reasons, the placing of the minister at some distance from his congregation could render the lesson and service inaudible.19 Wren was prepared, albeit begrudgingly, to grant dispensations for certain great churches – as he put it, ‘scarce one such of forty throughout the Diocese’ – to place the communion table lower down in the chancel for all services except the eucharist; the decision inverted the Elizabethan Injunction governing the positioning of tables. This allowance was made at St Mary’s Bury St Edmunds, Lavenham and Great Yarmouth.20 But as the parishioners at Bury were informed, such leniency was to be the exception rather than the rule – ‘because however, one church in five hundred can pretend such an impossibility of hearing, yet every one should expect and contend the same indulgence’.21 Episcopal intransigence dismayed evangelical ministers keen to officiate with as little formality and ceremony as possible. By enhancing the physical space separating pastors from their congregations, the directive was also taken as an attempt to subvert the very nature of the pastoral ministry itself.22 When Wren demonstrated the new priestly mode in person in the precociously Protestant town of Ipswich, his actions triggered a riot.23

17

Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church, pp. 215–16; Laud, Works, IV, pp. 448, 450. Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 33r. 19 Parentalia, p. 80. 20 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 29v. The concession was given upon a petition from Edmund Calamy and Henry White, lecturers at Bury St Edmunds: SROB, MS 909/8, fo. 50r, 16 May 1636. However, Wren’s leniency did not prevent Calamy from preaching against innovations, Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 317. Similar dispensations were granted at Lavenham and Great Yarmouth: see Parentalia, p. 80. 21 SROB, MS 909/8, fo. 50r. 22 The Winthrop Papers, III, Massachusetts Historical Society (1943), p. 356. 23 F. Grace, ‘ “Schismaticall and Factious Humours”: Opposition in Ipswich to Laudian Church Government in the 1630s’, in D. Chadd (ed.), Religious Dissent in East Anglia III (Norwich, 1996), pp. 97–119, especially p. 99. A report of a second altercation following Wren’s translation to Ely in 1638 – calendared in HMC, Rutland MSS, p. 522 – whereupon ‘some red coats peeping in at the 18

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While the city of Norwich did not erupt into open violence against the injunctions, the impact of ecclesiastical Reform succeeded in stirring up political faction-fighting among the civic elite. Events were precipitated by the primary visitation completed in June 1636. Balking at compliance with the episcopal orders, several city ministers refused to present themselves and were excommunicated by the diocesan chancellor, Clement Corbet, who welcomed the opportunity to censure godly preachers. Corbet was a formidable agent on Wren’s behalf.24 If the bishop’s articles were designed to test the loyalty of the rank and file of the clergy, they singled out the disloyal, when eleven ministers incumbent upon city livings – and one schoolmaster – chose not to comply and were suspended. These included four rectors: John Ward, William Bridge, Thomas Allen of St Edmunds and William Stynnet of St John Maddermarket. To this list can be added seven stipendiary chaplains: Ralph Furness of St John Sepulchre, Robert Kent of St Martin at Oak, John Burnham of St James and St Paul, John Carter of St Peter Mancroft and his curate Edmund Brome, as well as William Bridge’s assistants at St George Tombland, Richard Ireland and Thomas Carver.25 Also troubled was John Ward’s protégé Gilbert Cushion. According to Wren’s visitors, Cushion – a schoolmaster – stood in for Ward at St Michael at Plea, where he expounded upon the catechism in ‘such a vayne of nonsense’ that one parishioner called the clerk to end the class by striking up with a psalm. Corbet made Cushion officiate the second service at the cathedral wearing a cope, in accordance with Canon Twenty-Four, which he did in ‘so scornful a behaviour’ that he was not restored.26 Despite John Evans’s rather lame assertion that ‘the number of ministers actually forced out by Wren was and is debatable’, in Norwich at least, five of the original deprived dozen are known not to have sought reconciliation with the new ecclesiastical order.27 Here the lead was taken by John Ward and William Bridge. If William Alanson, Bishop Wren’s Norwich informant, is to be believed, the two had contemplated leaving East Anglia prior to being excommunicated during the 1636 visitation. Allegedly Ward had

window’ interrupted a committee for sewers at Wisbridge with shouts of ‘give us Wren that damned bishop Ely, we will have him or else fire the town and cut the throats of all the commissioner’, is surely a later fake. 24 According to William Prynne, Clement Corbet had threatened to pistol one recalcitrant clergyman for refusing to read the Book of Sports, Bod L, Tanner MS 299, fo. 160r. Apparently this utterance was made to William Greenhill, Tanner MS 68, fos 6r–v. 25 Taken from Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 37r–v, 155r. 26 Ibid, fos 37r, 82r, 336v. For Cushion’s links with Ward, see BL, Harl MS 3783, fo. 39r. The Cushion referred to disparagingly as ‘a young man’ by Wren’s commissary was probably Gilbert junior. In addition, William Alanson noted another former curate at St George Tombland, Edward Wale. However, since Wale had been suspended prior to the 1636 visitation, I have not included his name here: see Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 155r and NRO, DN VSC/2/4, fo. 3r. 27 J. T. Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich (Oxford, 1979), p. 94. My reading is based on a comparison of the lists in Bod L, Tanner 68, fos 37r–v, 155r.

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planned to sail for New England ‘any time above this Twelve Month’. However, in the event, no doubt utilising connections with the émigré Dutch of his own parish of St Michael at Plea, Ward crossed over into Holland.28 Whether Bridge initially hoped to join his colleague is less certain. Nevertheless, it became apparent that life in Norwich was about to become extremely awkward for the pastor, especially in light of his foe Thomas Ingram’s timely presentment of Bridge for expounding doctrine ‘contrary to the faith of Christ and Holy Scripture’.29 While he certified his conformity and was absolved, Bridge had followed Ward to Rotterdam by November 1636.30 Doubtless the minister was also able to draw upon contacts from the Low Countries resident in St Peter Hungate, where a Dutch congregation later worshipped in the 1640s under Theophilus Elison, son of John, the first pastor of Norwich’s Dutch church.31 Ward and Bridge became pastors to the English church at Rotterdam, as explored below (pages 227–8). Thomas Allen, rector of St Edmund’s, also departed Norwich – first to Holland and then to New England – encouraging several members of his flock to emigrate with him (below, pages 220, 222, 224–5).32 The fourth city minister suspended in 1636 was Ralph Furness. At the grand old age of eighty-three, Furness was a veteran nonconformist from Elizabeth’s reign, having commenced his career as John More’s successor as public preacher at St Andrew’s upon More’s death in 1591. From there, he was talent-scouted by Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, who presented Furness to Morston in 1596. Deprived from this north Norfolk living during the clamp-down on nonconformity after the Hampton Court Conference, he returned to Norwich as chaplain of St John Sepulchre in 1614, presumably having subscribed; although he continued to officiate without wearing the surplice.33 He refused to comply with Wren’s instruction to read the second service from the communion table, and was suspended a second time.34 In his place, the dean and chapter, as the appropriate rector of St John Sepulchre, granted the cure to one of Wren’s commissioners, the aptly named Thomas Discepline or Displine, who faced stiff resistance from members of the Furness family resident in the parish. Headed by the former incumbent, they led a protest against

28

Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 3v, 155r. For Ward’s links with the stranger community in his parish, see PRO, PROB 11/143, fo. 481r and above, p. 163. 29 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 79r. 30 Followed in Bod L, Tanner MS 89, fo. 175; Tanner MS 314, fo. 122v; BL, Egerton MS 2716, fo. 232; Bod L, Rawlinson MS C 368, fo. 3r, 25 Apr 1637. 31 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 3v. The Dutch congregation at Hungate is mentioned in M. Exwood and H. L. Lehmann (eds), The Journal of William Schellinks’s Travels in England 1661–1663, Camden Society, 5th Series, 1 (1993), p. 158. 32 NRO, DN REG/16/23, fo. 87r. 33 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 155r. 34 NRO, ANW 1/12, liber cleri, 1596; CA, 1589–1602, fos 101v, 131r, 159r, 186r; DN REG/14/20, fo. 247r; Stiffkey Papers, IV, pp. 16–17; K. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), p. 325; NRO, PD 90/69; DN VSC/2/3b, fo. 3r; DN VIS/6/4; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 37v.

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receiving at the rail. While the matter ended up in the consistory court, Discepline allegedly kept the chancel door locked, saying that ‘none but the priest himself might pass that way’; it was an obvious foil to Furness, who seemingly continued to administer the Sacrament to some of his former flock.35 Furness’s nonconformity had been an occupational hazard throughout his career. However, the issue of reading the second service from the chancel also vexed ostensibly more moderate men such as John Carter and Edward Brome of St Peter Mancroft, William Stynnet of St John Maddermarket, Robert Kent of St Martin at Oak and John Burnham of St Paul and St James. Brome, Stynnet, Kent and Burnham conformed.36 But John Carter continued to challenge the new ceremony in a series of impassioned exchanges with Chancellor Corbet. Carter had a strong case. As Mancroft – a corruption of ‘Magna Croft’ – implies, St Peter’s is a large building, which to Carter warranted the Church’s inclusion in Wren’s list of ‘scarce one such of forty throughout the diocese’, where the communion table might be lowered from the east end of the chancel. Carter stated his point in a sermon. His argument hinged around the provision stated in Canon Fourteen, whereby the ordinary could order the reading of prayers in any part of the Church ‘so as the people may be most edified’.37 Making intercessions at the uppermost recess of the chancel was not edifying. In this assessment, he enjoyed the support of several parishioners, including the distinguished troublemaker and former critic of Samuel Harsnett, John Thacker, now firmly established on the roster of officiating churchwardens. During Bishop Montagu’s primary visitation in January 1639, Thacker noted ironically that nothing was amiss save that divers could ‘not hear the minister read when he readeth second service at the communion table’.38 Unfortunately for both Carter and Thacker, Chancellor Corbet – who regarded Mancroft as a principal showcase church for the rest of the city and diocese – was unwilling to indulge the minister’s scruples. Writing to Wren, he warned his master not to ‘let any slipp’.39 For Corbet, Carter was ‘a Traducer . . . very schismatically brede’ whose namesake father – a celebrated Suffolk divine – had ‘died in that shifted vaine’ in St Swithin’s in 1615.40 He had no intention of allowing Carter – who failed to regain his 35

Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 155r; Chapter Minutes, p. 73; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 220r; NRO, DN SUN/4a, fo. 1r; Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 131. Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 37r–v. William Stynnet – a Presbyterian during the Civil War – was accused by his Independent opponents of siding too closely with episcopacy in the 1630s, BLTT, E 385 (4), Vox Norwici: or the City of Norwich Vindicating their Ministers (1646), pp. 9, 11. Robert Kent died shortly after being restored: Parentalia, p. 94. 37 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 54; G. Bray (ed.), The Anglican Canons, 1529–1947, COERS, 6 (1998), p. 285. 38 NRO, PD 26/71, fo. 135v. For Thacker, see above, pp. 133–5, 139 and below, pp. 246, 248–50. 39 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 2v. 40 Ibid, fos 189v–90r. Corbet’s assessment of the elder Carter is borne out in BLTT, E 903 (4), John Collings, Elisha’s Lamentation for Elijah (1656), p. 23, which recalls that the minister ‘was a 36

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cure – to set a precedent over siting communion tables in Norwich. While Carter hoped to remain in Norwich as a schoolmaster, Corbet was having none of it, subsequently informing Wren that the minister would ‘do more mischiefe in that course than he hath done in his shuffling practices in the Church’.41 Carter sought a temporary haven at Newport, Essex. However, unlike John Ward and William Bridge, who took the dramatic step of quitting England, Carter – who emerged as a critic of Bridge’s brand of Congregationalism in the 1640s – preferred to reach accommodation with Wren’s successor Richard Montagu in September 1638.42 Carter did not follow a path to open dissent, although his departure created a vacancy at Mancroft. According to local gossip, John Chappell was approached by Wren to accept the cure, although Chappell, having already been slighted by ‘those godly and factious people’ of Norwich, was understandably not keen.43 Instead, one of the bishop’s commissioners, Simon Sumpter, brother of Alderman Robert, stepped in to officiate. But finding this position difficult to maintain with his living of Badingham in Suffolk, Sumpter readily resigned upon learning of Carter’s rapprochement with Montagu.44 Carter’s suspension in the summer of 1636 provoked a strong reaction from his backers in the corporation. Their frustration was apparent given that, since January 1633, Carter had been in the city’s employ for a Tuesday lecture at Mancroft, which, compounded with the loss of William Bridge’s exercise on Fridays, ensured that the civic teaching rota was reduced back to one exercise per week at St Andrew’s, where the pulpit was held by Wren’s supporter George Cocke.45 The godly among the civic elite hoped to present their grievances against Wren to King Charles and Archbishop Laud. However, for their plea to carry weight, it would have to be delivered in the name of the entire citizenry, a move that caused friction among the magistrates, arousing opposition from a group of aldermen outwardly sympathetic to Wren. The bishop’s enemies were fortunate in that the mayor for 1636, Thomas Baker, identified with their cause. Baker, who was associated Non-Conformist in those furious times of Prelacy’; NRO, NCC 80 Angell, for the elder John Carter’s will. 41 NRO, DN VIS/6/4; BL, Egerton MS 2716, fo. 436, Anthony Mingay to Framlingham Gawdy, 20 Dec 1636, noting that ‘Mr Carter hath laid down his living’; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 1r, 2v, 3r. 42 John Collings, Elisha’s Lamentation for Elijah, p. 24; BLTT, E 447 (6), The Attestation of the Ministers of the County of Norfolk and City of Norwich in Vindication of the . . . Solemn Covenant against the spreading Errors and prodigious Blasphemies that are scattered abroad in these Licentious Dayes (1648); NRO, PD 26/71, fo. 135v, which records Carter’s subscription in the Mancroft vestry minutes for 11 Sept 1638. 43 BL, Egerton MS 2716, fo. 436; Bod L, Rawlinson MS C 368, fo. 5v, 20 Jan 1637; Tanner MS 68, fo. 4v. 44 Bod L, Tanner MS 89, fo. 151; Tanner MS 68, fo. 220r; Venn, IV, p. 185; PRO, E 331/Norwich/11, 8 July 1630, for Sumpter’s institution to Badingham. 45 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 287v, 21 Jan 1632. Significantly, Carter had been licensed by Archbishop Abbot during the interregnum following Francis White’s move to Ely, NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 7; CA, 1625–48, fo. 240r; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 220r.

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with the puritan activist, Alderman Robert Craske – Craske having served his apprenticeship under Baker’s grandfather Nicholas – steered an initial petition, to be presented to Wren, through the city Assembly in July, asking for the eleven city clerics suspended the previous month to be restored.46 As seen, those clerics willing to conform were reinstated. But since their number did not include the three preaching heavyweights, John Ward, William Bridge and John Carter, Baker and his associates decided to press further complaints against their diocesan. Besides the laconic entries in the corporation records, our knowledge of what happened next is derived from a series of letters among Wren’s files.47 Explaining their own position against the godly activists, we are fortunate to possess correspondence from a group of disgruntled magistrates under the nominal leadership of Alderman Henry Lane. However, the most informative eye-witness accounts stem from the minister William Alanson. Chaplain at St Mary Coslany since 1625, as well as a petty canon of Norwich, Alanson had been ordained deacon by Richard Neile – as Bishop of Durham – in 1619 and priest by Samuel Harsnett in Norwich 1622, who granted him licence to preach on the same day as his ordination.48 The cleric’s mentors were recognised for their antipathy towards puritanism. Alanson was no friend of the godly either, going out of his way in 1636 to depict Mayor Baker and his colleagues as dangerous subversives: ‘for our Norwich Puritans, though they bee more Civil, yet they are as Malitious and more Crafty than those of Ipswich: here three or four Puritans rule the whole city’.49 Certainly, the minister was well placed to keep Wren abreast of city affairs, having formerly served positions in the corporation’s employ. Master of St Giles’s Hospital, he had also been instituted to the living of South Walsham in the magistrates’ gift, although from there Alanson failed to gain promotion to one of the corporation’s stipendiary lectureships, his ambitions possibly being thwarted by William Bridge’s arrival.50 This may explain his antipathy towards ‘our former needless multitude of Lecturers’. As for Bridge’s confrère John Ward, he was simply unable to ‘Turne Ten lines of Englishe into Tolerable Latin, nor Construe twenty lines of Latine

46 Millican, Freemen, p. 74. Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 284 states that Baker had been Craske’s apprentice: but this is not supported by the freemen’s lists; NRO, AB5, 1613–42, fo. 326r, 24 July 1636. 47 The relevant letters are bound out of chronological sequence in Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 159r, 147r, 150r–v, 152r–v, 162r. 48 NRO, DN VIS/6/2; DN VSC/2/4, fo. 4; Chapter Minutes, pp. 72–3; Venn, I, p. 21, gives Alanson as a graduate of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, but does not state his place of origin. However, Robert Alanson, born in Cumberland and recorded as chaplain at St George Colegate in 1617, may have been a relative, NRO, DN DEP/35/40, fo. 29v. If so, this sheds light on Alanson’s oblique reference to ‘my Northern Kindred’ in a later dispatch of 1641, Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 336v. 49 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 159r. 50 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 135; NRO, MCB/16, 1624–34, fo. 196r, 4 Aug 1630; ANW 3/30. Alanson preached before the corporation in 1634, NRO CA, 1625–48, fo. 183r.

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in any Indifferent Author’.51 Instead, Alanson turned to his new diocesan for patronage. Wren rewarded the minister for his pains by making him his chaplain, appointing him to serve as a standing commissioner, in which capacity Alanson allegedly preached that any who died excommunicate without seeking absolution ‘went ipso facto to hell’.52 However, Alanson continued to maintain contacts among the magistracy. Such links account for his extensive insider knowledge of the closed proceedings in the mayor’s court that informed his various dispatches to Wren. His correspondence also gives an insight into the personalities involved in the ensuing political wrangle. According to Alanson’s report – confirmed by entries in the corporation records – trouble began on 15 August 1636, when at a specially convened meeting of the mayor’s court, a second petition against Wren, to be presented to the king, was forwarded for ratification at the next Assembly on 21 September.53 The prime-mover was the town clerk, Thomas King, whom we have met as one of William Bridge’s patrons (pages 165, 178–9). Having drafted the document, King was especially grieved by the loss of both Bridge and John Ward of St Michael at Plea, where the town clerk worshipped, and where in 1627 he had been presented for not standing at the Gospel.54 However, a majority of the aldermen resolved to drop the petition, preferring instead to send a delegation to entreat with the bishop. Regrettably, the original petition bearing signatures has not survived, allowing us to check Alanson’s stinging comment that the complaints were endorsed solely by ‘notorious Puritans, the Town-Clarks Creatures’. From a transcription made by Wren, it emerges that King’s supporters sought redress according to nine articles. The first seven points criticised the novelty and illegality of the bishop’s ceremonial reforms, while article eight was more urgent in calling for the Restoration of weekday lectures, whereby ‘many gentlemen and others of good quality’ might have recourse to bring their custom back to Norwich. Wren’s visitation had been detrimental to local trade. As a consequence, so it was claimed, many inhabitants had been forced to depart the city, taking their livelihoods with them. Alanson was sceptical. As he scoffed, ‘for the pretended poverty that is growing so fast upon us, I am sure the citizens wear as rich cloathes and make as greate feasts as ever they did’.55 Several aldermen agreed.56 Confiding in Alanson, one of their number, most probably Henry Lane – acknowledged as being

51

Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 159r, 155r. Ibid, fo. 162r, signed ‘Your Lordships Humble and Faithful Chaplain’; Tanner MS 68, fo. 220r; Tanner MS 220, fo. 135. 53 Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, pp. 90–5; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 159r; NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 120v, 15 Aug 1636. 54 NRO, DN VIS/5/3/2. Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, p. 91 confuses Thomas King with his son Henry. 55 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 159r, 160–1. 56 Ibid, fo. 152r, certain aldermen to Bishop Wren, 17 Oct 1636. 52

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the first to ‘oppose these practices’ – recounted accidentally stumbling across a closed meeting headed by Mayor Baker and Town Clerk King on 12 September. Observing ‘divers papers lying upon a Table before them’, Lane was prevented from seeing the documents, which ‘with all speed they covered’.57 The alderman suspected that Baker and King were planning to undo the magistrates’ consensus not to present the petition to the next Assembly to be held on 21 September 1636. Lane’s concerns were realised. While debating business to be forwarded to the common council that day, the protest against Bishop Wren was raised in the mayor’s court. Again Lane’s supporters stayed the motion. Imagine their surprise when – as they informed the bishop several weeks later – upon entering the council chamber they were greeted by ‘the most frequent and fullest assembly that any of us in our remembrance did ever see’. Managed by the town clerk, fifty-three out of a total of sixty councilmen were present and ‘not without carefull solicitation (we verelie believe)’. Suddenly, Mayor Baker drew the same petition – earlier blocked by the aldermen – out of his pocket and handed it to King to read, which provoked a storm of protest from Lane’s party, incensed by the business’s ‘fawse cariage’. Lane and his associates requested to see the names of those subscribing to the articles. However, Baker refused on the grounds that the petition, allegedly signed by ‘six or seven score persons’, had been entrusted solely to him.58 A hot debate ensued. While Alderman Lane’s objections were deemed reasonable enough to satisfy ‘moderate men’, by swaying the common council Baker and King carried the day. It was agreed to move the complaints to both Charles and Laud on behalf of all the citizens of Norwich.59 Of course, we only have the anti-petition group’s word for it that they constituted, out of twenty-four magistrates ‘most of the Aldermen present’, although Wren, informing Laud about the ‘dissenting and dissuading’ of the petition’s passage, stated that only six aldermen had set their hands to it.60 However, we can detect the usual suspects behind the protestation. As Alanson put it, ‘the Mayor, the Town Clark and three or fower puritan Aldermen have their private meetings at one alderman Crask’s, where their plots are hatched and expedited, and their Court oft times not acquainted with them at all’. The reference to the known puritan agitator Robert Craske is significant. Alanson went on to drop the names of Thomas Atkin, John Tooley and Thomas Cory – three figures who had been associated with Craske through the Trustees for the Religion in Norwich and Norfolk (pages 162, 167). Another radical figure reported to Wren was ‘that absurd,

57

Ibid, fos 147r, 159r. Ibid, fos 152r–v, certain aldermen to Bishop Wren, 17 Oct 1636. 59 Ibid, fos 150r–v, Henry Lane to Bishop Wren, 14 Oct 1636; NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 327v, 21 Sept 1636. 60 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 152r; Tanner MS 70, fo. 103v, Wren to Laud, 20 Oct 1636. 58

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clamorous Alderman’ Thomas Shipdham. From Alanson’s perspective, Shipdham’s involvement was all the more sinister, in that he was reported to have been in touch with the burgesses of Ipswich, who had also petitioned the king protesting Wren’s articles several months earlier in July. The Norwich petition was part of a co-ordinated lobbying campaign against the 1636 visitation that spanned the entire diocese.61 Lining up behind Henry Lane, stood two key officials: the city steward – and Lane’s fellow parishioner at St Gregory’s – Edmund Reeve (page 147), and the recorder, Sir William Denny, who as a member of the King’s Council was an assured opponent of the godly.62 Crucially, Lane could also count on Thomas Barber. As one of the sheriffs at the time of the Assembly of 21 September, Barber’s consent was required for the petition to pass as an act of the corporation, a point that was not lost on Wren. However, he was unwilling to countenance the articles ‘for which the TownClarke fell very fierce upon him’, as was reported to Alanson.63 Barber’s successor, John Freeman, who had been manoeuvred into shrievalty by Lane’s faction on 21 September, was equally unco-operative. Nevertheless, despite resistance from the sheriffs, Baker and King proposed to send the complaints to London. Learning of the move by Tooley, Shipdham and other ‘zealous Commenders and dispatchers’ of the petition to travel to the capital on 13 October, Henry Lane threatened to undermine the document by certifying against it.64 Penning an apology to Wren the next day, he drew up a certificate that was signed by nine other aldermen as well as Sheriff Freeman. 65 In the event, Lane successfully discredited Mayor Baker’s cause before Archbishop Laud and King Charles, much to the chagrin of the godly among Norwich’s citizenry.66 But what caused him to oppose the anti-Wren petition? On the one hand, the flow of letters from Alanson, Lane and his backers offers insight into the back-room strategies that doubtless accompanied much business in the Norwich Assembly, not revealed by the resolutions entered into the minutes alone. On the other hand, the correspondence sheds little light on the motivation of Lane and his colleagues. Of course, they were quick to draw themselves as moderate men, who were left smarting

61

Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 147r, 162r; Grace, ‘ “Schismaticall and Factious Humours” ’, pp. 111–12. Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 150v. Originally from Beccles, Denny was made recorder in 1618 and knighted in 1627: BL, Add MS 18126, fo. 292, Hawes, Officers, p. xxxvii and PRO, SP 16/212, fo. 47, Liber Pacis 1632, for his place on the King’s Council. By his will, proved in 1641, he bequeathed ‘a book’ to Matthew Brook, the beleaguered Laudian curate of Great Yarmouth, and made provisions to be buried in the cathedral, where he owned property, NRO, NCC 54 Brampton, PRO, E 179/153/583. Both actions suggest sympathy with the local Caroline church establishment. 63 Bod L, Tanner MS 70, fo. 103v; Tanner MS 68, fo. 162r. 64 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 147r, 162r, 150v. 65 Ibid, fos 150v, 153r. 66 Bod L, Tanner MS 70, fo. 103v. 62

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at the underhand – and therefore by default extreme and sinister – tactics employed by Mayor Baker to undermine their right to veto. In this sense, their appeal to moderation carried a polemical edge: but was this more than mere rhetoric? After all, by committing themselves to disarming a puritan petition against Wren’s reforms, Lane’s followers surely demonstrated their deep-seated dislike of the godly activists in their midst. Moreover, as moderate conformists, the ‘pro-Wrenians’ may also have been expressing a positive approval of the changes in worship in 1636. The key to unlocking the confessional leanings of the ‘pro-Wrenians’ lies in reconstructing the individual histories of the twelve ‘ever devoted’ who certified against Mayor Baker’s petition. Heading the list were the most senior officials and former mayors, John Anguish, his brother Alexander, Robert Debney and William Browne. Beneath them we note the names of one of the current sheriffs, John Freeman, the former sheriff Thomas Barber, beside Henry Lane and his fellow magistrates, Robert Sumpter, William Gostlyn, John Loveland, Thomas Carver and Richard Warde.67 Some figures are better documented than others. For example, when searching for their wills, potentially useful sources to illuminate piety in early modern England, the coverage proved uneven.68 Of the twelve signatories, five died intestate. Of the remaining seven – Debney, Browne, Carver, Loveland, Barber, Freeman and Warde – only two, Debney and Browne had wills proved in the late 1630s, when the Laudian church was at its height.69 In neither case does the religious preamble indicate marked anti-Calvinist beliefs. Debney’s wish, ‘to be saved and to rise again att the latter day to have remission of my sinnes and to enjoy life everlasting’, is formulaic, as is Browne’s appeal ‘beseeching God Almightie to Receive my Soule into his heavenly kingdome’.70 Of the others, only Carver offered a more concrete statement of faith. Here the citizen’s hope in 1642 ‘to have fruition of eternall life through the residue of his elect’ puts him in the Calvinist camp.71 Sadly, no extant wills survive for the Anguish brothers John and Alexander. This is a pity given John Anguish’s reputation as one of King Charles’s good servants, examined by the House of Commons in 1640 for

67

Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 153r. For wills as invaluable guides to religious beliefs, see N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1990), pp. 140–2, 192–4. For the pitfalls in interpreting will evidence, see J. D. Alsop, ‘Religious Preambles in Early Modern English Wills as Formulae’, JEH, 40 (1989), pp. 19–27; J. Craig and C. Litzenberger, ‘Wills as Religious Propaganda: the Testament of William Tracy’, JEH, 44 (1993), pp. 415–16, 431. 69 In alphabetical order the seven are: Thomas Barber, NRO, NCC 34 Aliston (1643); William Browne, NCC 18 Greene (1639); Thomas Carver, NCC 33 Brampton (1641); Robert Debney, PRO, PROB 11/177, fo. 251r (written in 1634 but proved in 1638); John Freeman, PROB 11/219, fo. 83v (1652); John Loveland, NRO, NCC 70 Houchin (1649); Richard Warde, PRO, PROB 11/189, fo. 189r (1642). 70 PRO, PROB 11/177, fo. 251r; NRO NCC 18 Greene. 71 NRO, NCC 33 Brampton. 68

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his assiduous collection of ship money while serving as mayor in 1635.72 In gathering the tax, Anguish made a number of enemies.73 But he had also aroused the antipathy of the godly by arresting Edward Penton, a ‘Sanctified brother [who] hath bin already at New England’, for distributing prohibited literature such as Henry Burton’s Divine Tragedy and William Prynne’s scurrilous attack on Wren, Newes from Ipswich, in Norwich in 1637. Raiding Penton’s house, Anguish caused a scuffle involving ‘many women [who] assembled and were near by to make resistance, if they could have found how to do it’.74 Examined before the magistrate, Penton’s network of London suppliers – which extended to Burton and Prynne – was brought before the Court of Arches and then prosecuted in Star Chamber in April 1637.75 This chain of events had been caused by one justice’s vigilance. John Anguish’s action against puritan pamphleteers is all the more remarkable given what is known about his family background among the godly of late Elizabethan and Jacobean Norwich. Alderman John’s father, Thomas, the youngest of three brothers, hailed from Foulsham, Norfolk (Fig 9.1). The Anguishes had been established in the county since the early sixteenth century and were armigerous, although Thomas senior became a freeman mercer of Norwich, having served an apprenticeship under Edmund Thurston, marrying Thurston’s sister Elizabeth.76 Edmund Thurston was a figure of marked religious views. A signatory – with Robert Browne and Robert Harrison – of the 1583 Norwich supplication against episcopacy, Thurston was a son-in-law of Alderman John Aldrich, one of the founding fathers of civic Protestantism in Elizabeth’s reign (above, pages 44–7, 51, 56–7), whose granddaughter Mary Aldrich married Thomas Anguish’s eldest son John – the ‘pro-Wrenian’.77 Thomas Anguish also sent another son Richard to that bastion of future evangelical ministers in Norwich, Corpus Christi, Cambridge.78 Mayor in 1611, Thomas Anguish senior was the Jacobean godly magistrate personified, sealing his reputation by establishing

72

CJ, II, pp. 47, 71; R. Schofield (ed.), The Knyvett Letters, 1620–1644, NRS, 20 (1949), p. 96. Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, pp. 81–3, discusses the collection of ship money. A tantalising bit of gossip in one of Anthony Mingay’s letters refers to John Anguish’s absence from the city on account of ‘Lord Castleton and the bowling ground’. This ties the mayor with another keen executor of Caroline fiscal policy, the Lincolnshire peer Nicholas Saunderson, Viscount Castleton: HMC, Gawdy MSS, p. 156; C. Holmes, Seventeenth Century Lincolnshire (London, 1980), p. 102. 74 PRO, SP 16/346/58. 75 PRO, SP 16/349/52. The link man here was Edward Chillings or Chillingham – presumably Edmund Chillenden, the future Fifth Monarchist – who was also presented during the famous trial of Burton, Bastwick and Prynne: SP 16/354/181, fo. 1v. 76 W. Rye (ed.), The Visitation of Norfolk, 1563, 1599 and 1613, Harleian Society (1891), p. 6; Mayors of Norwich, p. 70, which erroneously states that Anguish married Thurston’s daughter Elizabeth; Millican, Freemen, p. 73; PRO, PROB 11/77, fo. 32r, will of Edmund Thurston, proved 1590. 77 Seconde Parte, I, p. 159; Mayors of Norwich, p. 79; G. Branwhite Jay (ed.), The First Parish Register of St George of Tombland Norwich, 1538–1707 (Norwich, 1891), p. 36. 78 Venn, I, p. 33; PRO, PROB 11/128, fo. 315r, will of Richard Anguish BD, proved in 1616. 73

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a children’s hospital, a philanthropic act celebrated in devout Protestant fashion with an annual sermon on founder’s day.79 This charitable benefaction was also intended to assuage God’s anger. Thomas Anguish’s mayoral inauguration in 1611 went down in the annals of the city as a tragic occasion, after a cord suspended with fireworks in the market place – part of the display during the celebration – collapsed, killing thirty or so bystanders. Anguish was apt to view the accident providentially. So too did a local Catholic commentator, who saw divine retrinution in the ‘lamentable mischance’ as ‘a scourge to that wicked citie and puritane mayor, whose name . . . being Anguish did portend anguish and sorrow to the people’. Fireworks were banned from Guildhall feasts thereafter.80 Nevertheless, such unfortunate events played on Mayor Anguish’s mind, prompting his bequest for a foundling hospital, by way of atonement, dying in 1617 in the assurance that Christ: hath of his own free will and greate mean fully paide and satisfied the wrath of God the father due unto me for my synne. And that through his blessed merit, death and passion [I] shall have and enjoy the fruition and benefit of everlasting life to ioyn with him in eternall ioy and happiness among the elect children of God forever.81

Such predestinarian beliefs were imparted to the young John Anguish and his brothers. Anguish senior was certainly a Calvinist, if not a ‘puritane’ as his Catholic detractors claimed, although it would be inaccurate to ascribe an overbearing dourness to his Protestantism. After all, Anguish held all the cultural pretensions befitting his status as a city father. These were symbolised by his monument, an early work by Nicholas Stone – later master mason of the King’s Works – erected to overlook the family pew in St George Tombland.82 Besides being a benefactor to poor children, Thomas Anguish was also a patron of the cathedral church. Owning a dwelling and shop adjacent to Christ Church in St George Tombland, the alderman, with his second son Edmund, lavished expense upon a new organ for the choir, having a standing order for repairs from 1607 to 1609. Edmund Anguish has already been encountered in providing seating in the cathedral green yard.83 Significantly, in light of his anti-puritanism in backing Wren, Edmund’s elder brother John emerged as a patron of the dramatic arts,

79 NRO, ANW 205 Weavers, will of Thomas Anguish, proved in 1617; NRO, NCR Case 25e, Anguish Boys’ Hospital accounts, 1620–68; Blomefield, IV, pp. 407–12. 80 Westminster Cathedral Archives, AAW A. X., no. 131, p. 377, William Rayner to Thomas More, 11 Oct 1611, ex inf. Michael Questier. I am grateful to Dr Questier for providing a transcript of this letter. A brief narrative of the accident is given in NRO, COL 5/19, fo. 46. 81 NRO, ANW 205 Weavers. 82 BL, Add MS 12525, fo. 47r; M. Q. Smith, ‘The Monument of Thomas Anguish in Saint George of Tombland, Norwich’, NA, 32 (1962), pp. 96–8. 83 NRO, DCN 107/1 and above, p. 116.

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being charged in 1616 for frequenting unlicensed itinerant stage plays by the mayor’s court.84 In the absence of any vestry minutes for St George Tombland for the seventeenth century, we cannot tell what impact John Anguish had upon his parish in the 1630s. Indeed, we would like to know more about John Anguish’s perspective on William Bridge’s circle within his church, as supported by Anguish’s opposite number on the aldermanic bench, John Tooley. However, in the case of John’s younger brother Edmund, documentation is more forthcoming. Although owning property with a third brother Alexander – another ‘pro Wrenian’ – in St Peter Mancroft, Edmund did not enter civic office since his main interests lay in the surrounding county of Norfolk, where he served as clerk of the peace, 1618–41, with his seat being to the south of Norwich at Great Melton.85 The opening of the 1630s saw the Norfolk Anguishes, under Edmund, seeking to uphold their status in county society. Difficulties arose in 1628 following the death of Edmund’s cousin Richard, of Moulton, who made Edmund the guardian of Richard’s heir Thomas, along with a daughter Katherine, both of whom were minors.86 However, in his new role as head of the family Edmund had the misfortune to cross Sir Robert Gawdy. Without dwelling too long on the legal complexities surrounding the dispute, Gawdy contested Edmund Anguish’s claim to the wardship of the young Thomas on the grounds that because several of the Anguishes’ Moulton tenements encroached upon his manor at Claxton, Gawdy – who was convinced that the land was held by knight service – believed that the property, then occupied by a minor, fell to his control. Initially, Gawdy took his case to the Earl Marshal’s Court, presided over by the Earl of Arundel. However, deciding against Gawdy’s argument that the contested lands were leased from the crown, the earl allocated full custody rights to Anguish, who in turn consolidated his family’s title by marrying Thomas to one of his daughters. Incensed by a prospective union between two ‘neere kinsfolkes’, Gawdy attempted to prevent the wedding by abducting Thomas. In any event, the marriage went ahead, which forced Gawdy to serve a writ for ravishment of ward on Edmund Anguish through the Court of Common Pleas, with the suit to be decided at the Norfolk Assizes. After claims and counter-claims of jury rigging, Arundel again intervened on Anguish’s side. Defeated at the Assizes, Gawdy then pursued the case in Chancery in 1630 in order to recover his losses. But to keep

84

NRO, MCB/15, 1615–24, fo. 96v, 11 Sept 1616; L. G. Bolingbroke, ‘Players in Norwich from the Accession of Queen Elizabeth until their Suppression in 1642’, NA, 13 (1898), pp. 14–15. 85 PRO, E 179/153/583; Rye, Rate Book, p. 29; NRO, MS 5320; PRO, C 2/CHASI/D46/22. 86 NRO, NCC O. W. 1627 431, will of Richard Anguish of Moulton gent. This bears an uncompromising Calvinist preamble, trusting his soul to be a partaker of ‘the heavenly inheritance prepared by almighty God for his Elect’. Edmund Anguish was also entrusted with young Katherine’s education ‘in the fear of God’.

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everything in the family, Anguish married his second ward Katherine to his son Richard.87 Edmund Anguish retained his family’s inheritance, although his success owed much the assistance of both the Earl of Arundel and Sir William Denny, who served as legal counsel to the defendant throughout. Against this background of troubles with Gawdy, we can trace Anguish’s efforts to elevate his seigneurial profile by restoring All Saints’ Great Melton. It is worth shining the historical spotlight upon Great Melton, of interest for being a settlement containing two parish churches: St Mary’s, which was annexed to the neighbouring vicarage of Marlingford, and All Saints’, adjacent to the now ruinous Melton Hall, Edmund Anguish’s seat since 1624. The present All Saints’ was rebuilt in the nineteenth century.88 However, from the time of Anguish’s occupancy of Melton Hall, and throughout the 1630s, the church was re-edified by the squire’s family and tenants, a process that was recorded retrospectively in the parish register, most probably by William Yonger – sometime librarian at Gonville and Caius College – and rector of All Saints’ upon Edmund Anguish’s presentation in 1631.89 Looking back with nostalgia in the 1640s, Yonger noted that in December 1624 the existing communion cup shared by both parishes was sent to Norwich and recast into two vessels. The cost was met by the new landlord and twelve of his Melton tenants, while nine years later – between January and October 1633 – the parishioners laid out money for more extensive repairs to the Church’s fabric. The internal fittings of the chancel were remodelled to include a frame for the Decalogue, Lord’s Prayer and Creed set at the east end. Rails were then erected around what the memorial describes as ‘the high altar’, while the chancel floor was freshly paved, the whole affair being topped off with a painted ceiling ‘formerly taken from the rood loft’ and placed over the communion table. Further gifts of new Prayer Books were made by members of the Anguish family.90 Benefactors included Edmund’s eldest son John, Alderman John’s son – also called Edmund – and the squire’s son-in-law George Bayfield, under sheriff of Norfolk in 1638.91 Another was Edmund senior’s third son Richard. Rector of Starston, upon the presentation of George Bayfield in 1637, the following May Richard Anguish gave a cushion for the communion table at Melton.92 87

PRO, C 2/CHASI/G23/16; A. W. Hughes Clarke and A. Campling (eds), The Visitation of Norfolk, 1664, NRS, 4 (1934), p. 4. NRO, DN REG/16/22, consignation book 1627; PRO, C 2/CHASI/D46/22; Blomefield, V, p. 21; N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Norfolk 2 (London, 1962), p. 368; NRO, MS 4579, fo. 360. 89 NRO, PD 479/1, account of church refurbishment, 1623–57, unfoliated. For William Yonger, see Venn, IV, p. 485; NRO, DN REG/16/23, fo. 149r. 90 NRO, PD 479/1. 91 Branwhite Jay (ed.), The First Parish Register of St George of Tombland, p. 41. For Bayfield’s ties with the Anguishes, see BL, Egerton MS 2716, fo. 429r. His office holding is given in HMC, 12th Report, Buxton MSS, p. 252. 92 Hughes Clarke and Campling (eds), The Visitation of Norfolk, 1664, p. 4; NRO, DN REG/16/23, fo. 172r. As well as promoting his kinsman to Starston, Bayfield also acted as a patron, with 88

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Here we see the Anguishes beautifying their chancel in a manner convergent with the emerging ideals of the Caroline Church. Having asserted his family’s honour, Edmund Anguish was anxious to fulfil his role as a religious patron, consistent with his new standing within the county.93 Yet, fashioning Great Melton chancel to include a railed ‘altar’, the Anguishes made their preferences for the ‘Laudian style’ clear. Similarly, the opaque ‘painted ceiling’ reconstituted from the original rood loft was perhaps intended to signify historical continuity with the parish’s medieval Catholic past, a piece of Restoration work that ‘Laudian’ apologists – at pains to stress the visible succession of the Church of England from Rome – would have approved.94 Was this a panel bedecked with religious imagery? If so, that such a piece had survived intact into the 1630s could be attributed to the religious sentiments of Melton Hall’s previous occupier Robert Downes, a notorious recusant who was duly imprisoned for being ‘a great harborer, cherisher and mayntayner of Iesuit priests’. Downes featured among returns of Catholics from the 1570s.95 He was also implicated in the 1578 investigation against Bishop Freke, for allegedly stating that ‘I am sure we have the Bishop on our side’, which, in relation to the clerical provision for All Saints’ Great Melton, was not misplaced. In 1589 the cure passed to one of Freke’s ordinands, Thomas Browne, presented by one Thomas Browne of Brisley, yeoman; surely a relation. Lacking both a degree and a preaching licence, this longstanding rector – incumbent until his death in 1631 – was not perceived as a force for forward Reformation in Great Melton, a village populated by various other Brownes, who were probably the priest’s kinsmen.96 Such was the conservative and openly recusant atmosphere in the parish when Robert Downes conveyed his holdings to Edmund Anguish in 1624. This sale was to the obvious distress of Robert Downe’s sole surviving son Edward, a Catholic recusant resident at Northwold, who in 1627 tried to reclaim the property through Chancery.97 Edmund Anguish moved to a parish seemingly antipathetic to aspects of Reformed piety. By installing sections of the former rood loft into the 1633 chancel design, the new landlord resurrected an object of entrenched local pride, which recalled a pre-Reformation devotional world itself undergoing a positive reappraisal by the Church in the 1630s. Yet even before acquiring Edmund Anguish, in providing sureties for Simon Davy to the rectory of Sterning in 1629, PRO E 334/17, fo. 189r. 93 Edmund Anguish compounded for a knighthood fine in 1632, PRO, E 407/135, fo. 130v. 94 NRO PD 479/1; A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Church in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 77–85. 95 PRO, C 2/CHASI/D54/58. For Robert Downes, see PRO, SP 12/99/55, 154/88, 185/3, 188/9, Reg Vagum I, p. 179; T. B. Trappes-Lomax, ‘Roman Catholicism in Norfolk, 1559–1780’, NA, 32 (1958), pp. 35, 43. 96 See above, p. 73. PRO, SP 15/25/119, fo. 279r; NRO, DN REG/16/22, consignation book 1627; PRO, E 179/153/533. 97 NRO, DN VIS/6/4, entry for Northwold; PRO, C 2/CHASI/A38/24, D46/22, D54/58.

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Melton Hall, Edmund Anguish had shown a penchant for more elaborate forms of worship. We have already noted his contributions towards a new organ for the cathedral in 1608; of no less significance was his joint role, with his brother Alexander, as churchwarden of St Peter Mancroft, 1622–3, the year in which controversial adornments – a ‘high altar’ and images – were apparently introduced into the parish. As churchwardens, the two brothers would have overseen the refurbishment. While the parish accounts for Mancroft contain no references to an altar, payments were made in 1623 for a reredos to support the Decalogue, perhaps as part of a wider beautification programme supervised by the Anguishes. Had Edmund Anguish developed a taste for sacred imagery and ritual prior to the 1630s?98 Regrettably, like his brothers John and Alexander, Edmund Anguish died intestate, without leaving further clues as to whether his religious beliefs had departed from the rigid Calvinism maintained by his father, Alderman Thomas Anguish. However, from his restoration of Great Melton, Edmund Anguish emerged as a supporter of the Caroline church. It is striking that he matched his ‘Laudian’ piety with an unflinching commitment to the royalist cause after 1642, being promptly sequestered in 1643 – along with his eldest son John – for joining the king’s forces: John Anguish junior gaining the rank of captain in the royalist field army.99 As a reward, John was created port comptroller of King’s Lynn at the Restoration. Dying in 1692, he declared his ‘faithful discharge of his duty to king Charles of blessed memory in the wars during the wicked rebellion’, on his monumental inscription in Melton All Saints. Father and son were at large when the Major Generals accounted for suspected royalists in 1655.100 Another family member to fight for the king was Alderman John’s eldest son Edmund, who went by the unfortunate title of Major Anguish when taken in arms at Gloucester.101 Equally active on the royalist side was squire Edmund’s third son Richard MA, the rector of Starston. A graduate of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and ordained priest by Wren in 1637, Richard Anguish not surprisingly exhibited a zealous attachment to the new ceremonial orthodoxy enforced by Wren’s administration. He angered some in his parish in the process.102 For 98 NRO, DCN 107/1 and above, pp. 134–5, for events in the 1624 Parliament; NRO, PD 26/71, pp. 33, 35–6. 99 BL, Add MS 5508, fo. 39v; PRO, SP 28/213, fos 10r–v. 100 PRO, SP 29/7/129; NRO, MS 4499, for John Anguish’s monumental inscription; BL, Add MS 34013, fo. 2r. 101 R. H. Mason, The History of Norfolk (London, 1884), p. 282. Major Anguish died intestate and was interred at Great Melton in 1694: see E. Farrer, Church Heraldry in Norfolk, vol. 2 (Norwich, 1885), p. 175. 102 Venn, I, p. 53; NRO, DN REG/16/23, fo. 172r. Richard Anguish claimed a sense of collegiality with one of Wren’s clerical commissioners, Stephen Hurry, rector of nearby Alburgh, who remembered Anguish in his will, Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 220r; Bod L, J. Walker MS c 6, fo. 47; PRO, PROB 11/200, fo. 331v.

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example, James Seaman spoke of his incumbent as ‘a devill and no man’, adding that Mr Anguish ‘did look after the fleece but for his flock they might go starve’; it was a sentiment that suggests that Anguish did not meet his congregation’s expectations of pastoral care. Seaman then threatened to make the rector ‘into barley bread’.103 In 1644, in the wake of the Earl of Manchester’s investigation into scandalous ministers, he got the chance to oust his parson, testifying to the commission that Anguish had never declared ‘the necessity of a national Reformation’, instead being ‘a great practicer and presser of Bishop Wren’s Injunctions’, preaching that ‘the demolishing of Monuments in Churches was a sin as ill as sacrilege’ and that ‘it were better some few factious and schismatical persons suffered than the whole kingdom should perish’. For this and other speeches against Parliament, Richard Anguish was sequestered from his livings. However, the Reverend Anguish had already joined his relatives in the king’s army serving under Prince Maurice, finally enduring exile on Montserrat during the Commonwealth, only to return to Starston, vindicated, at the Restoration.104 On the basis of the available evidence, members of the Anguish family conformed wholeheartedly to the new ceremonialism introduced by the Caroline church. Another likely forward conformist was the Anguishes’ neighbour at St George Tombland, Bishop Harsnett’s former ally, Alderman William Browne.105 Besides certifying against the anti-Wren petition, more direct evidence of Browne’s religious views in the 1630s has not survived. However, as the historian and antiquary Walter Rye argued convincingly, Alderman Browne was the uncle of the illustrious physician Sir Thomas Browne, who settled in Norwich between 1635 and 1637.106 Possibly, the doctor stayed with his uncle after following his tutor Thomas Lushington to the city. Dr Lushington, a celebrated wit, troubled for advancing Socinianism in the 1640s, had moved to East Anglia as Bishop Richard Corbett’s chaplain, remaining in Norwich to participate in Wren’s administration as one of the bishop’s standing commissioners in 1636.107 Through Thomas Browne we can discern a link between Alderman William Browne and Lushington. Moreover, while officiating during a communion service at St Simon and St Jude – a few yards away from the Browne residence in 103

NRO. DN DEP/45/48b, fos 58v–9r, Anguish con Seaman, 21 July 1640. Bod L, J. Walker MS c 6, fos 45v–6r; PRO, SP 29/22/116; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), p. 263. 105 PRO, E 179/152/497; W. Rye, ‘The Precincts of Norwich Cathedral’, NAM, 2nd Series, 1 (1906), pp. 49–51 and see above, pp. 115–16, 138–9, for Browne’s links with Harsnett. 106 W. Rye, ‘What Brought Sir Thomas Browne to Norwich?’, NAM, 2nd Series, 1 (1906), pp. 83–5; idem, ‘Sir Thomas Browne, his Descent and Arms and his Possible Family Connections with the Family of Dr Dee the Mystic’, Norfolk Historical Essays IV, no date or place of publication, pp. 449–54, both give a date of 1635. However, ODNB, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ suggests that Browne migrated to Norwich later in 1637 upon his incorporation as DM at Oxford University. 107 John Aubrey, Brief Lives (Oxford, 1898), p. 186; DNB, ‘Thomas Lushington’; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 220r. 104

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Tombland – Lushington caused an uproar by preaching free will, elevating the sacraments above his head in a manner that some present deemed popish. Some were so incensed that they left the church. One of their number apparently declared his intention there and then to depart for New England.108 Perhaps Lushington stayed with his friends in Tombland on this occasion. Possibly too, we can trace echoes of this local controversy in a much-quoted passage from Thomas Browne’s most famous work, Religio Medici, which was published in 1642 but composed significantly earlier in 1636. At least Browne shared his mentor’s taste for outward gesture in worship. As he admitted: I am, I confess, naturally inclined to that which misguided zeale terms superstition, my common conversation I do acknowledge austere, my behaviour full of rigour, sometimes not without morosity; yet at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, my hands, with all those outward and sensible motions which may express or promote my invisible devotions. I should cut off my arms rather than violate a church window, than deface or demolish the memory of a Saint or Martyr . . . At a solemn Procession I have wept abundantly, while my consorts, blinde with opposition and prejudice have fallen into excess of scorn and laughter.109

If penned in Norwich in 1636, such words held a special resonance for events taking place in the city at the time of Wren’s visitation. It is worth speculating whether Browne’s attachment to outward signs of devotion were shared by his uncle, who, in light of his former refusal to communicate with the established church, seemed to be at odds with the evangelical dispensation under James I.110 Admittedly, this is opaque evidence upon which to base William and Thomas Browne’s ‘Laudianism’. But certainly, the tumult aroused by Lushington’s preaching and novel celebration of the eucharist – as well as Wren’s ensuing impact upon Norwich’s religious life – provides a context for Thomas Browne’s treatise. Another figure who seems to have perused Religio Medici was the Laudian apologist and rector of St Clement’s, Foulke Robartes. Defending the use of external physical gestures in public worship in comparable terms in 1639, Robartes declared after Browne that ‘by the outward gestures of our bodies we declare that worship which is in the heart’, adding ‘Whenever I see any man using outward reverence in the act of God’s worship, I shall judge him to be more devout within.’111 Besides Alderman Browne another potential backer of Wren’s reforms was Robert Debney. We have already met Debney as a patron of St Gregory’s 108

Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 136, which does not date this episode. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in Works, 1, ed. G. Keynes (London, 1928), pp. 9, 12–13. NRO, ANW 3/17a, comperta, 1613 and see above, p. 115. 111 Foulke Robartes, Gods holy house and service (1639), pp. 61, 64. 109 110

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church (pages 145–7), a reputed haven of ritualism since 1623, and a parish that significantly brings together four names on the pro-Wren certificate. These were Debney’s son-in-law Richard Warde, John Loveland, Loveland’s son-in-law John Freeman and Henry Lane.112 More detailed evidence of Warde and Loveland’s religious outlooks is regrettably lacking, although Loveland emerged at the head of the royalist faction in city politics in the opening stages of the Civil War. His son Joseph also supported the king, being ejected from his fellowship at Gonville and Caius College in 1644 for refusing the Solemn League and Covenant. Loveland junior was also sequestered from his Cambridgeshire living for, among other indiscretions, volunteering his horse for the royalist forces with instructions that if the animal should fall into Parliamentarian hands it was to be ridden to death. Joseph returned to Norwich as a prebendary of the cathedral at the Restoration.113 Serving as sheriff, John Freeman, a vintner by trade, has also been encountered as the churchwarden responsible for adorning St Gregory’s with ‘superstitious’ imagery in 1623. In the meantime, he acquired property in St John Maddermarket. While he retained links with St Gregory’s, requesting to be interred there at his death, Freeman held parochial office at St John’s where he served as churchwarden in 1633 and 1634.114 Maddermarket was duly given the Freeman touch. As revealed by the extant parish accounts for 1633, the churchwardens paid for a reredos and a frame for the Creed and Ten Commandments, which may have been decorated with imagery, since the work was carried out by Thomas Isbourne, who had beautified St Gregory’s in 1623. In 1636, Freeman headed a rate to provide communion rails ‘as Commanded by Authority’. Clearly, he was anxious to set an example to other prominent parishioners, namely Aldermen Thomas Atkin and Robert Craske, who may have been less enthusiastic contributors towards the refurbishment. Freeman was active on Wren’s behalf in other ways, assisting Chancellor Corbet to persecute the Reverend Thomas Allen. This episode will be discussed fully below (pages 220–3), suffice to say here that while serving sheriff in 1636, John Freeman executed his office as a staunch proponent of the new ecclesiastical order.115 But what of his backer among the magistrates, Henry Lane? Given Lane’s self-appointed role as the principal anti-puritan protagonist in the 1636 stirs, we would like to know more about his personal religious convictions. To judge from his family background, Lane’s upbringing was imbued with a 112 PRO, E 179/153/581; PROB 11/177, fo. 252r, will of Robert Debney and NRO, NCC 70 Houchin, will of John Loveland, for these family ties. All four contributed to the beautification scheme in 1623, see NRO, PD 59/54, fos 63v–4r. 113 See below, p. 240; J. Venn, Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College 1349–1897 (Cambridge, 1897), I, p. 243. 114 NRO, DN CON/11, loose file, discussed above, pp. 146–8; Rye, Rate Book, p. 36; PRO, PROB 11/219, fo. 83v; NRO, PD 461/48, unfoliated. 115 NRO, PD 461/48, entries for 1634 and 1637.

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strong Calvinism. Son of Thomas, mayor in 1603, the Lane family had resided successively in the parishes of St Andrew’s and St Peter Hungate; here Thomas Lane extended patronage to one of the doyens of Calvinist preaching in Jacobean Norwich, Thomas Newhouse, who received a legacy of 40s in the alderman’s will. However, as well as this bequest, Lane senior created a precedent of donating impedimenta to parish churches for his son to follow. Prior to his death in 1607, Thomas Lane gave a richly embossed silver communion cup, inscribed with his name alongside that of his wife Mary, to St Peter Hungate.116 This act may have inspired Henry to continue the family tradition of pious benefaction in St Gregory’s. The family also had strong links with St John’s College, Cambridge, where Henry Lane’s brother Robert took a doctorate and became a fellow until his death in 1636.117 From Dr Lane, we gain an insight into Henry Lane’s confessional perspective, albeit in a roundabout way. Casting back to October 1627 – and the dispatch sent to William Laud recounting Bishop Harsnett’s visitation sermon at King’s Lynn – details of Harsnett’s sensational preaching were supplied by Dr Lane of St John’s College, who had received information from his brother, a man ‘well accounted of in Norwich’, who had been present at the sermon. It seems likely that this was Henry Lane, visiting Lynn on city business while officiating as sheriff of Norwich in 1627. At any length, Dr Lane’s brother was apparently shocked by Harsnett’s inveighing against ‘University preachers that sometimes came thither with theire uncircumcised hayre and theire Babylonish garments’, by which phrase the bishop was understood to have criticised novice clerics keen to wear the surplice.118 If Harsnett had really said this, did Henry Lane take offence because he was a stickler over canonical vestments? If so, Lane’s dismay at Harsnett’s startling commendation of the godly preachers of Lynn sheds light on the future alderman’s anti-puritanism, which, compounded with his hand in the controversial beautification of St Gregory’s, made him a ready constituent of Wren’s reforms. Certainly, Dr Robert Lane’s role as an informer in 1627 indicates a family connection with Harsnett’s Cambridge foes, which included Wren. Indeed, while officiating as vice chancellor at Cambridge, Wren had done Henry Lane a great service by helping to secure a contested fellowship at St John’s College for his son.119 Surely, by challenging Wren’s adversaries in 1636, Lane hoped to

116 Mayors of Norwich, p. 67; PRO, PROB 11/109, fo. 174r, will of Thomas Lane, proved in 1607. For Thomas Newhouse, see above, pp. 82, 84. Thomas Lane also left a bequest to Mr Robinson, ‘preacher’. But this was not the separatist John Robinson. 117 PRO, PROB 11/166, fo. 49, will of Dr Robert Lane, proved in 1634. 118 LPL, MS 943, p. 126 and see above, pp. 113–114; Hawes, Officers, p. xxiv. As sheriff in 1627, Lane probably visited Lynn on city business to organise the quartering of Irish troops in Norfolk en route from France: see NRO, COL 5/19, fo. 47. 119 J. Twigg, The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution, 1625–1688 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 18; CUL, MS Mm 1. 38, p. 99.

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return the favour? Yet before we draw firm conclusions about the alderman as an unflinching ‘Wrenian’, other possible motives behind his counterattack on Mayor Baker need to be considered. To begin with, he was concerned to maintain Norwich corporation’s integrity in the eyes of the crown. After all, Lane had his fingers burnt – ironically given future events – in partnership with the puritan trustee Thomas Atkin, when in 1635 he challenged the Earl of Arundel, the Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk, over whether individual aldermen were liable to attend county musters without the mayor’s prior order. Arundel raised the matter with the Privy Council, which backed the earl. Charles ominously threatened to recall Norwich’s charter by writ of quo warranto should the Lord Lieutenant meet with any further resistance over musters from within the city. Atkin was imprisoned for his protest.120 While Lane was not confined to goal, his subsequent defence of Wren can be seen as an opportune move to salvage both his own and his city’s reputation, in order to counter lingering royal suspicion over Norwich’s propensity towards rebelliousness. Moreover, for all that he professed to be Wren’s ‘ever devoted’, when it came to implementing the bishop’s reforms, Lane’s enthusiasm was more muted. As pointed out (page 152), Wren’s visitors found the existing communion rails in St Gregory’s out of keeping with new liturgical arrangements, being so far from the table that communicants were able to enter the sanctuary. ‘It can be no other sayth alderman Lane.’ However, he was hamstrung by parochial foot-dragging, when the churchwardens for 1637 – one of whom ironically being Wren’s professed ally in civic affairs, Richard Warde – were excommunicated for failing to refit St Gregory’s chancel. Whether reluctance was derived from hostility to the altar policy, as much as from the practical concern over cost, is difficult to tell. Nevertheless, upon assuming the mantle of churchwarden himself in 1638, Lane ensured that the chancel was made to comply to Wren’s design by hiring a painter to add colour to a newly aligned rail.121 Significantly, Lane was anxious to forge cordial relations with Richard Montagu, who succeeded Wren to Norwich in May 1638. Upon arriving in the city on visitation, Montagu was greeted with a peal of bells from St Gregory’s, along with a gift of 6d worth of tobacco purchased by the parish from Alderman Lane, then officiating as churchwarden.122 If Lane and his fellow parishioners had qualms over Wren’s injunctions, they soon made show of their loyalty to the Church. Doubtless their affections were honed by the new appointment to the cure at St Gregory’s, which had been made 120

G. L. Owens, ‘Norfolk 1620–1641: Local Government and Central Authority in an East Anglian County’, University of Wisconsin Ph.D., 1970, pp. 526–7; PRO, PC 2/45, pp. 69–70, 10; Bod L, Bankes MS 18/30. Lane and Atkins’s stand over musters stemmed from their joint service as city sheriffs in 1627: see Hawes, Officers, p. xxiv. 121 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 213r, 216r; NRO, PD 59/54, fos 88r–v, 89v. 122 NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 89r.

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vacant by Matthew Stoneham’s death in late 1636. It was no coincidence that Wren’s informant, William Alanson, came to officiate at a ‘pro-Wrenian’ parish. As Alanson’s opponents remarked in 1642, the minister was given to ceremonial innovation, reading the litany ‘in the body of the Church after the manner of Rome’, while allegedly imparting many superstitious doctrines proven ‘especially by popish authors’.123 Specific authors were not named. However, given St Gregory’s reputation as an ‘idolatrous Temple’, Alanson’s new congregation may well have been sympathetic to his teaching. Besides offering patronage to Alanson, Lane retained his family link with Wren. Evidence of the alderman’s constant loyalty to his former diocesan is revealed by a single extant letter sent by Lane to Wren in August 1641, which, by expressing the continuing ‘respect I bear your Lordship’, struck an obsequious note at a time when the bishop’s former allies may have felt it prudent to distance themselves from him. But Lane saw it as his duty to inform Wren about accusations made by Tulling, a ‘bold and impudent fellow’. Tulling reported words allegedly spoken by Wren to the churchwardens of Walsingham, who had produced a charter supposedly exempting their Church from being visited by the diocesan by royal sanction. Wren’s response was that ‘in such cases the authoritye of the Bishopp was above that of the Kinges’. Doubting this story’s veracity, Lane hoped to ‘doe your Lordshipp any good office in this or in other occasion’, which was a courteous pledge to make while the prelate was being investigated by the Long Parliament in 1641. Moreover, Lane offered confirmation of Tulling’s remarks from Mr Dobson.124 This was Isaac Dobson, William Bridge’s carefully picked successor at St George Tombland and a staunch apologist for Wren’s reforms, who argued dogmatically that ‘wee ought to beleeve as the Church beleeves, and if the Church said the crow is white, wee must beleeve it’.125 Such was the clerical company kept by Henry Lane in the later 1630s. Reporting on the state of his new diocese to Archbishop Laud, Montagu – as we shall see (pages 232–4) – was critical of his predecessor’s instructions for processing to the rail to receive communion. Even so, Montagu was impressed with Norwich’s city churches. As he observed, each was ‘extraordinarily fayre . . . all with the Altar standing close to the East wall, all rayled about the Altar; I never saw so many beautifull Fonts as be in many of them’.126 While a godly citadel, Norwich’s inhabitants had invested pride in beautifying their churches, as seen at St Gregory’s. However, if Alderman Lane and his fellow parishioners had reservations over Wren’s version of the ‘altar policy’, there is a sense that after 1636 and under William Alanson’s guidance St Gregory’s congregation emerged as ‘joyfully conformed’ to the new ceremonies. 123

Chapter Minutes, pp. 72–3, 10 Jan 1637; NRO, PD 59/54, fos 86v, 87v, 89r, 91r; Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 135. 124 Bod L, Tanner MS 290, fo. 116r. 125 NRO, DN SUB/1, p. 59; Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 135. 126 LPL, MS 943, p. 627.

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Wren’s reforms gained a mixed reception from Norwich’s inhabitants. Not all were antagonistic towards Caroline ecclesiastical policy as it developed apace after 1633, with some citizens – like the Anguishes – developing a taste for a decorous altar-centred style of worship prior to Wren’s arrival. That this was so in a borough typically noted for its native reformed tradition warns against making assumptions about the city’s overarching ‘puritanism’. Indeed, Wren was able to tap into a core of native sentiment out of alignment with the general direction of evangelical Protestantism, which, in the case of figures like Robert Debney and William Browne, may have been marked for some time. Wren’s episcopate should not be viewed solely through the prism of puritan complaint. The 1636 visitation excited confessional tensions within city life: but religious friction was already present, the new ecclesiastical order enabling critics of the godly to articulate their opinions in a more focused way. This was of no consolation to the godly, who found themselves at odds with ecclesiastical government. The resulting crisis of conscience, which inspired the puritan diaspora to Holland and the New World as a precursor to England’s ‘wars of religion’, will now be traced.

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Part IV TRACING THE PURITAN REVOLUTION IN NORWICH

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Chapter Ten PURITAN DIASPORA, 1636–40

The years between Wren’s visitation in 1636 and the summoning of the Long Parliament in 1640 are seen as a dark time for East Anglian puritanism.1 From the perspective of later dissent, Wren’s harrowing of Norwich’s celebrated preaching fraternity has been viewed as defining moment in the history of nonconformity, so much so that it proved fertile grounds for a mediocre Victorian pot-boiler – Andrew Reed’s Alice Bridge of Norwich: a Tale of the Time of Charles the First – published in 1879. Reed came from a Congregationalist background. Son of his famous namesake Andrew senior – a hymnodist and energetic philanthropist, as well as founder of several orphanages including Reedham Asylum near Croydon – the younger Reed followed his father’s vocation to become the Congregationalist minister at St Leonards-on-Sea.2 But he also spent time in Norfolk. There he acquired an ‘interest in the romance of Puritan times’ and duly proceeded to write about them with gushing sentimentality – and with his target audience of children in mind – through the eyes of Alice, an entirely fictitious daughter of the Reverend William Bridge, forced to flee Norwich where civic liberty was a shadow. Every place swarmed with spies and heavy fines suppressed all curious talk . . . a hasty word against any Church officials brought speedy penalties. Presence at a conventicle or opposition to Popish ceremonies was punished most severely.3

Of course, Reed’s essay on the historical novel was a work of fiction. As such his Norwich is peopled with near-historically accurate figures, like sheriff Jacob Freeman, who assailed Bridge – then pilloried on ‘Tombland Green’ for his refusal to read the Book of Sports – with ‘Hurrah for the Bishop! Down with Puritans’. With her father, Alice fled to Yarmouth, the

1

Browne, Memorials, p. 85; Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, pp. 288–9. ODNB, ‘Andrew Reed (1787–1862)’. Andrew Reed junior was also the elder brother of the educationalist MP Sir Charles Reed. 3 Andrew Reed, Alice Bridge of Norwich: a Tale of the Time of Charles the First (London, 1879), preface and p. 199. 2

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TRACING THE PURITAN REVOLUTION IN NORWICH

bishop’s Cavalier son, Stephen Wren, in pursuit.4 However, even without the added tropes of Victorian melodrama, the course of events surrounding the puritan exodus from Norwich after 1636 were no less dramatic in their own right. To begin with, the aggrieved godly continued to protest Wren’s innovations. Remaining within the city, the bishop’s detractors sought to challenge episcopal directives with recourse to legal process, or through open displays of defiance in refusing to pay parish rates to provide for controversial church adornments. Ultimately, others, like William Bridge, rejected episcopacy outright in favour of alternative ecclesiologies. Before discussing Bridge’s turning away from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, it is appropriate to begin with another local puritan cause célèbre, the case of Thomas Allen, rector of St Edmund’s, who was deprived for failing to present himself at the 1636 visitation. Son of a Norwich dyer, Allen comprised one of the younger generation of Emmanuel College graduates in the 1630s. He owed his promotion to St Edmund’s – his first living – in February 1634, to Lady Elizabeth Clere of Ormesby, Norfolk and Colton, Suffolk, the widowed sister of Sir Thomas Wroth, a figure whom Nicholas Tyacke has dubbed ‘an extreme puritan’, for his part in organising the London root and branch petition in 1641.5 Lady Clere also devoted herself to the anti-episcopalian cause, lending money to Parliament and the Scots in the 1640s. She counted as friends and kinsmen such eminent figures within East Anglian godly circles as members of the Corbet family and the staunch Parliamentarian Sir Symonds D’Ewes. When drafting her will, her estate was to be part-supervised by the former Norwich trustee, Alderman Thomas Atkin.6 Given the overarching godliness of these family connections, the evangelical purpose behind Thomas Allen’s planting in Norwich is not difficult to detect; while the minister’s appointment soon gave Chancellor Clement Corbet cause for concern. At least Allen marked himself out for censure. Within a year of his arrival the new minister successfully set about the task of transforming St Edmund’s, quite literally, into a shining beacon of advanced Protestantism, by holding afternoon exercises past the prescribed canonical hour on Sabbath days. In doing so, he split the parish. As with the consistory court hearing against William Bridge in February 1634, Allen’s transgressions were brought to Corbet’s attention by two churchwardens, Richard Wythe – a worsted weaver and former common councillor – and his apprentice Thomas Dixon, who were both serving their turn at St Edmund’s, 1635–6. But handling their complaints was the chancellor,

4

Ibid, pp. 211, 220. An illustration of William Bridge in the stocks adorns the frontispiece. DNB, ‘Thomas Allen’; NRO, DN REG/16/23, fo. 87r; B. Cornford, ‘The Cleres of Ormesby’, Yarmouth Archaeology, 1 (1982), n. p.; N. Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 124–5. 6 PRO, PROB 11/194, fos 53v, 54v–5v, will of Lady Elizabeth Clere, proved 1645; SP 16/531/134. 5

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PURITAN DIASPORA, 1636–40

who instigated office proceedings against Allen in February 1636.7 According to Thomas Dixon, the new rector had caused friction by expounding from three in the afternoon ‘until it was dark’, forcing the churchwardens to light candles at additional cost to themselves. The sermons drew people from elsewhere in the city. Crowding into the nave, the churchwardens suffered the indignity of having to relinquish their seats for numerous strangers who were ‘accompted to be schismatically affected’.8 Allen also attracted attention for his nonconformity. As Wythe and Dixon deposed, their pastor often omitted the litany, Decalogue and Nicene Creed during Sunday morning worship. He neglected to bow at the name of Jesus.9 More alarmingly, he admitted unlicensed men to preach in St Edmund’s, who allegedly had encouraged members of his flock to contend the rites and ceremonies of the Church.10 One figure, Jonathon Porter, a weaver, was especially contumacious in the eyes of the churchwardens. With several fellow parishioners, Porter had previously been excommunicated during Bishop Richard Corbett’s visitation of 1633, for failing to pay towards the repair of St Edmund’s chancel. He had been absolved. However, this did not prevent him from continuing to disrupt worship by loitering in the churchyard until the time of the sermon. Admonished to attend divine service, Porter refused to kneel at the required places. Standing to pray wearing his hat, he then proceeded to mock set forms by looking towards Mary Oliver with ‘a laughing countenance’ about his face.11 Mary Oliver was the wife of Thomas Oliver. A persistent nonconformist, Thomas Oliver had been presented in 1629 for his ‘irreverent behaviour’ in not standing for the Creed or Gospel in St Edmund’s. In 1633, he was caught gadding with his wife to sermons at St Michael at Plea.12 Such was the puritan contingent among his parishioners, which the Reverend Allen proceeded to cultivate by attracting godly strangers to reinforce the spiritual exclusivity of his exercises at St Edmund’s. He strove to administer to a saving remnant, an elect. However, in losing their pews, the two churchwardens were not considered among this group, which rankled with Wythe and Dixon and marked a worrying trend for Chancellor Corbet. In his defence, Allen called upon one of his flock, 7 NRO, DN DEP/42/47a, fos 528r–33r. Richard Wythe, recorded as being seventy-six at the time of the trial, was probably used to the less electrifying ways of Allen’s immediate predecessor John Fernly, rector since 1602, DN REG/16/22, consignation book 1627. Wythe died shortly after these proceedings, NCC 259 Blosse. For his career and links with Dixon, see Hawes, Officers, p. 171 and Millican, Freemen, p. 90. 8 NRO, DN DEP/42/47a, fos 528v–9r, 531r. 9 Ibid, fos 528v, 529r, 531r. 10 Ibid, fos 528r, 533r, which refer to a Mr Arthur and a Mr Gray respectively. 11 Ibid, fo. 530v; NRO, DN VIS/6/4. Was Jonathon related to Nathaniel Porter, who was presented for attending conventicles in St Andrew’s in 1632 and St George Tombland in October 1633? See NRO, MC 16/15, fo. 4; DN VIS/6/4. 12 NRO, DN VIS/6/1; VIS/6/4.

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another weaver Michael Metcalfe, as a character witness. Metcalfe, who like Jonathon Porter had also failed to contribute to the maintenance of his church’s fabric in 1633, believed the Reverend Allen to be ‘a very conformable man to the orders and discipline of the church of England’, arguing that Thomas Wythe’s complaint had been ‘made in malice’.13 We shall encounter Metcalfe, Porter and the Olivers again. Censured in 1635, Thomas Allen showed dismay at Wren’s injunctions and failed to appear at the June 1636 visitation, for which he was declared contumacious and excommunicated. He then departed Norwich. At least, Chancellor Corbet was informed that Allen had taken ship to Holland, where he joined his fellow Norwich ministers John Ward and William Bridge at Rotterdam.14 In the meantime, Allen lodged a protest with the consistory court. By this he contested his deprivation as an infringement of his common law rights, on the grounds that the visitation of St Edmund’s had been carried out illegally, since it had not been conducted by royal letters patent. In turn, Allen’s excommunication was an alien novelty, a Praemunire.15 It seems that the minister had read a copy of William Prynne’s Brief Instructions for churchwardens and others to observe in all Episcopall and Archidiaconall Visitations and Spiritual Courts, published at Amsterdam in 1636 to coincide with Wren’s arrival in East Anglia. Prynne provided handy legal advice for any seeking to evade censure by the bishop’s officers. Arguing around six points, churchwardens – by ‘virtue of the Oath of Royal Supremacy’ – were to demand royal patents before making presentments. They were to enquire whether the articles had been passed by convocation and ratified by Parliament. If not, the authors of such injunctions were to be considered ipso facto excommunicated, an extraordinary reworking of Canon Twelve, which applied the same sanction to any holding ‘anabaptistical’ conventicles to frame ecclesiastical constitutions without the king’s authority.16 Wren’s reforms were not only illicit. By devising his measures without recourse to convocation as prescribed, the bishop had by default excluded himself from the church. The implications for Allen were apparent. Since the bishop was liable to be excommunicated for breaking his oath of canonical obedience, the minister was free to continue in office without restraint as before.

13

NRO, DN DEP/42/47a, fo. 532r; DN VIS/6/4. It would be interesting to know the extent of the repairs carried out in 1633. However, the work did not prevent St Edmund’s steeple from blowing down in a storm in 1639, when a brief was made to raise funds to restore the tower. See ‘Fire at St Edmund’s Church, Norwich, 1640’, EANQ, 1st Series, 2 (1865), p. 174. 14 Bod, L Tanner MS 68, fos 3v, 7r, which states that Allen visited Cambridge to converse with John Carter, chaplain of St Peter Mancroft in April 1637. 15 Ibid, fos 116r–18v. 16 William Prynne, Briefe Instructions for churchwardens and others to observe in all Episcopall or Archidiaconall Visitations and Spirituall Courts (Amsterdam, 1636), STC 20454.3, n. p.; G. Bray (ed.), The Anglican Canons, 1529–1947, COERS, 6 (1998), pp. 279–81.

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This challenge held subversive overtones for episcopal authority. However, in a related legal move, Thomas Allen’s brother Robert, who also resided in Norwich, sought to protect his family’s property interests in the face of ecclesiastical censure. Acknowledging his brother’s sentence to be void, Robert upheld Thomas’s right to collect his tithes. Subsequently, Robert Allen brought a suit in the Court of Common Pleas against several members of the St Edmund’s congregation for denying their minister his maintenance. Reflecting existing parochial divisions, the figure most reluctant to fund the sequestered pastor was Thomas Dixon.17 But acting through the agency of his ‘loving friend’ Thomas Lechford – a Clement’s Inn lawyer who, in his own words, ‘suffered imprisonment and a kind of banishment’ in Boston because of his association with Prynne in the late 1630s – Robert Allen served writs against Dixon and others for trespass in breaking the ground in St Edmund’s chancel to raise altar steps and rails. Dixon’s allies included the current churchwardens Nicholas Copping and Richard Wadeton, who were arrested in October 1636 pending trial at the Assizes in August.18 Attempting to discredit Thomas Allen in the 1640s by citing information supplied by William Payne MA – a ‘man almost fowerscore yeares age’ who had resided in St Edmund’s in the 1580s – William Alanson recalled that communion rails were present in the church’s chancel from the middle of Elizabeth’s reign. The original railing did not follow Wren’s pattern. Instead, it encompassed the table ‘turning upon either side unto the east window’: although on Alanson’s account it was also customary for former incumbents at St Edmund’s, including ‘Mr Allen at his first coming hither’, to administer the Sacrament from the rails. If true, the existence of rails in a ‘pre-Wrenian’ arrangement at St Edmund’s added an exacerbating factor in the Allens’ dispute.19 Wren and Corbet were anxious to prevent such a potentially embarrassing case from being given a prominent local platform before a grand jury: while in response Corbet advised his master to issue a writ de excommunicato capiendo against Thomas Allen to secure his arrest. Both looked to Laud’s support ‘to shelter us . . . from that storme’. However, to imprison the Reverend Allen, the bishop first had to track him down, which he hoped to achieve by setting spies on the minister.20 In Norwich, Corbet enlisted the willing help of William Alanson. But providing the necessary

17 PRO, SP 16/334/23, Robert Allen to Thomas Lechford, 20 Oct 1636; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 115r. 18 PRO, SP 16/335/68, Robert Allen to Thomas Lechford, 17 Nov 1636; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 7r, 115r; DAB, ‘Thomas Lechford’; BLTT, E 136 (22), Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing: or, News from New England. A short view of New Englands present Government, both Ecclesiastical and Civil, compared with the anciently received and established Government of England (1642), sig. A2r. Sadly, details on who arrested the churchwardens are not given in the correspondence. 19 Bod L, Tanner MS 314, fo. 110; Parentalia, p. 84. 20 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 5r, 7v, 115r; Rawlinson MS C 368, fo. 8r, 9 May 1637.

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muscle was Sheriff John Freeman, who acting on a tip-off that Thomas Allen was lodging with his brother, raided and proceeded to ‘beset and breake upp’ the Allen household in the middle of the night of 11 June 1637, with the chancellor and Alanson in tow. The Reverend Allen was nowhere to be found.21 In the event, proceedings against the churchwardens of St Edmund’s were not brought to trial, although the threat of a legal precedent to undermine episcopal directives loomed large for Wren, who thought it prudent to confer with the judges appointed for the next Assize circuit.22 Wren halted litigation in the civil courts by bringing charges against the Allens in High Commission, forcing them to drop their suit. As a result, an inquiry was begun into defaults of payments to the sequestrators of St Edmund’s, which in turn blocked any residual financial assistance to Thomas Allen from his loyal parishioners.23 With local backing from Chancellor Corbet and Sheriff Freeman, Wren staved off the potential threat from the Allens. But the family’s legal challenge had been a close call, for, as Clement Corbet observed, ‘if we be open to Writts and Prohibitions, these Refractories which be either suspended or excommunicated will never be reduced to order so long as they may shelter their contempt with quirkes and trickes of the law’.24 Had the suit for trespass received a sympathetic hearing at the Assizes, the outcome would have been disastrous for the bishop. Nevertheless, the bitter ideological wrangling, based around fundamental legal principles, rubbed further salt into the already wounded relations between the Norwich godly and the established church, which rebounded against Wren in the 1640s. Thomas Allen evaded censure by crossing to Massachusetts, where he embraced the New England ‘way’. Defined as a form of Congregationalism where church membership was determined by outward signs of sanctity, this ‘way’ converged with Allen’s previous ministerial efforts to convert St Edmund’s into a shining beacon for the visible elect. A devotee and editor of John Cotton, Allen settled as a teacher to the gathered church at Charlestown.25 It was this brand of New England puritanism that the minister brought back upon becoming pastor to an Independent congregation in his native Norwich in 1651.26 In a highly symbolic gesture, this 21

This episode can be followed in Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 120; Tanner MS 220, fo. 2. Bod L, Rawlinson MS C 368, fo. 8v, 16 May 1637. Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 2; Rawlinson MS C 368, fo. 8v, 23 May 1637. 24 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 8r. 25 K. L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Urbana, 1972), pp. 200–6; D. D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: a History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1972), pp. 46–7, 81–2; BLTT, E 843 (5), John Cotton, An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (1655), ‘Epistle to the Reader’ by Thomas Allen. 26 For Allen’s return to Norwich, see A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 7; BLTT, E 957 (1), Thomas Allen, A Chain of Scripture Chronology from the Beginning of the World to the Death of Jesus Christ (1659), ‘To the Reader’ by William Greenhill. 22 23

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congregation met in William Bridge’s former church of St George Tombland. The idea was to signify continuity with the earlier preaching mission founded in the parish before Wren’s visitation, while to celebrate his return – and to accommodate the auditors expected – in 1652 Allen’s new flock erected a gallery in the chancel, which was said to be a ‘great hindrance’ to divine worship by conformist critics in the 1670s.27 At the Restoration, the minister continued to defy episcopal authority, when he was bound over for maintaining conventicles with his equally obstreperous brother Robert, who had been duly removed from civic office under the provisions of the 1661 Act of Indemnity.28 There has been a trend within the recent historiography of the New England experience to downplay the religious origins of the ‘Great Migration’ in the 1630s. For example, David Grayson Allen and David Cressy have highlighted a range of material incentives for New World settlement under Charles I, with religious motivations being far from paramount; as Cressy has argued, ‘the primacy of puritan concerns in the bulk of the movement’ remains to be determined.29 Yet to gloss over Wren’s administration as insignificant to the causes of emigration from East Anglia in the 1630s misses the point.30 Here, the timing of the ‘bulk of the movement’ in 1637 – a year after the bishop’s primary visitation – was more than coincidental, as neatly confirmed by Norman Tyack’s survey of migration from Norfolk and Suffolk in early Stuart England. Tyack’s list of emigrants provides a sample figure. Based upon his calculations for Norfolk alone, the number of identifiable settlers shot up from a handful of nine in 1636 to 180 by the end of 1637, with a steady flow of 141 proceeding in the following year.31 Of course, this sudden rise may simply reflect a bias in the available evidence. Details of licences to travel abroad from Great Yarmouth – Tyack’s main source – survive within the central government archive for 1637–9 and not 1635–6; this uneven coverage by itself may suggest that the Caroline regime felt it prudent to police migration more stringently after 1636,

27

For the battle over the Tombland gallery, see NRO, ANW 4/14, comperta, 1670–1; DN FCB/1, fo. 87. BL, Add MS 41656, fo. 75r; J. Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, 1988), p. 97. 29 T. H. Breen and S. Foster, ‘Moving to the New World: the Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 30 (1973), pp. 159–222; D. G. Allen, ‘The Matrix of Motivation’, New England Quarterly, 59 (1986), pp. 408–18. See also D. Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 74–106. 30 For restatements of the centrality of religion in the great diaspora, see V. Dejohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: the Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 12–46; S. Hardman Moore, ‘Popery, Purity and Providence: Deciphering the New England Experiment’, in A. Fletcher and P. Roberts, Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 257–89. 31 N. C. P. Tyack, ‘Migration from East Anglia to New England Before 1660’, University of London Ph.D., 1951, p. civ. Tyack did not cite references to Norwich emigrants among Wren’s papers. He also failed to take into account settlement in the Low Countries at this time. 28

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reflecting a growing concern that religious malcontents were in fact absconding overseas in increasing numbers at this time.32 The case of Thomas Allen demonstrates the strength of religious feelings manifested in the trek to New England from Norwich after 1636. But Allen’s continued stance against his suspension was by no means conducted alone, since a number of his parishioners were compelled to ‘cross over’ with their pastor after facing similar ecclesiastical censure. At least five denizens of St Edmund’s are known to have departed for Boston in 1637. Of these, we have already met the acknowledged troublemaker Jonathon Porter, who took flight with another weaver from St Edmund’s, John Piers or Pierce.33 A more vociferous adherent of Thomas Allen was Michael Metcalfe. Described by William Alanson as ‘a violent Puritane’, Metcalfe had allegedly courted attention prior to Wren’s coming by condemning the reissue of the Book of Sports, uttering ‘dangerous words against the king’.34 In 1637, he attempted to leave for New England, first via Plymouth, then finally from Great Yarmouth. Initially he planned to venture forth alone, sending a lengthy epistle justifying his actions to his wife, children and all other ‘true professors of Christs Gospel in the city of Norwich’. Trusting in God’s providence to deliver his people from ‘the furnace of affliction’, he lamented the state of religion in his native city. For Metcalfe the coming years would be a trial on a cosmic scale, with the Lord coming to judge the ‘persecutors and opposers of God’s people’, since ‘their injustice may be a means the sooner to provoke the Lord to take pity on you and to punish them that so despitefully use you: for though God suffer them for a time, in their pride, yet shall they not always escape his avenging hand’. The loss of Norwich’s famed preachers was retribution for the sins of a city, now ‘relapsed and fallen from her first love and purity of life and doctrine’. But to assuage God’s coming wrath, he warned others to ‘try the doctrines of your preachers’ and be wary of Arminian teaching; admonishing his confrer’s not to ‘nibble too long at the bait until you are catched with the hook, rather banish from your ears and hearts those stinking fogs and infectious vapours into the Netherlands from whence they were spawned as a bastard brood of Popery’. Such was the anger felt by the beleaguered godly, for whom Wren’s harrowing of the ministry was viewed in apocalyptic terms. Indeed, observing that ‘the hour of temptation is at hand, which shall come upon the world to try them that dwell upon the earth’, Metcalfe convinced himself that the only sanctuary from a profane and ungodly land lay across the Atlantic.35 Joining his family, the Metcalfe household left 32

PRO, E 157/21–22, passim, printed in C. B. Jewson (ed.), Transcript of Three Registers of Passengers from Great Yarmouth to Holland and New England, 1637–1639, NRS, 25 (1954), passim. 33 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 158r, 338r. For Piers, see NRO, DN VIS/6/4; PRO, E 157/21, fo. 3r. 34 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 338r. 35 Michael Metcalfe, ‘To all the true professors of Christs Gospel within the city of Norwich, 13 Jan 1637’, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 16 (1862), pp. 279–84.

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Yarmouth for Boston in April 1637. But leaving England on the same ship were his fellow parishioners Thomas Oliver and his wife, both of whom were known to the church authorities for their earlier nonconformity in the 1630s. Metcalfe persuaded others from St Edmund’s Norwich to follow him and the Reverend Allen to America. Although the weaver had been a force behind migration from his parish, he found life across the Atlantic too turbulent, since – on the basis of William Alanson’s testimony – by sticking to the Book of Common Prayer ‘hee cannot yet be admitted to be a member of their church’.36 If true, Metcalfe became disillusioned with the direction of the New England ‘way’. While a number of Thomas Allen’s flock became fellow travellers on his journey overseas, of no less significance to the godly reaction to Wren’s reforms were the minister’s supporters who chose to stay behind. Robert Allen’s litigation on his brother’s behalf has been noted. Another key figure very much in on the act was Thomas Toft or Toftes, a parishioner with Robert Allen at St Clement’s, which parish adjoined St Edmund’s, where he served as churchwarden and vestryman during the 1630s.37 A grocer by trade, Toft played a pivotal role in Norwich’s puritan movement after 1637. He is most familiar as the iconoclastic city sheriff behind ‘that furious sacrilege’ that was visited upon Norwich cathedral in May 1643, and vividly depicted by Wren’s successor bar one, Bishop Joseph Hall. Describing his rough treatment by the puritans in his Hard Measure, Hall recalled being intimidated by Sheriff Toft. Entering the bishop’s palace with a company of ‘many zealous fellows’, the sheriff’s party: came into my chapel to look for superstitious pictures and relics of idolatry and sent for me to know they found these windows full of images, which were very offensive and must be demolished. I told them they were the pictures of some ancient and worthy bishops – St Ambrose, Austin etc. It was answered me that they were so many popes and one young man among the rest . . . would take upon him to defend that every bishop was a pope.

Toft later emerged as an Independent of extreme views.38 But his violent repudiation of episcopacy had been shaped by his experience of parish life in the 1630s: a sequence of events that has not been explored fully. Toft had showed his disapproval of Wren’s visitation by contributing towards the cost of Robert Allen’s writ against the St Edmund’s churchwardens 36

PRO, E 157/21, fos 3r, 3v; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 338r. PRO, SP 16/334/23, 345/23; Rye, Rate Book, p. 74. Toft had purchased property in St Clement’s, much of which still stands on the corner of Fye Bridge Street and Fishergate – now the King of Hearts gallery – from the former mayor Sir Robert Wood, Mayors of Norwich, p. 88. 38 Joseph Hall, Hard Measure, in The Works of Joseph Hall, ed. P. Hall (12 vols, Oxford, 1837), I, p. lv; Mayors of Norwich, p. 88. 37

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for trespass. This in itself was an audacious move since Toft, through accepting the office of churchwarden in 1636, had already taken an oath to oversee the bishop’s articles, including the section on communion practice. Here, it may seem that Toft, like Michael Metcalfe, had become a radical in response to Wren’s directives. However, from earlier evidence brought before the archdeacon in 1616 and 1617, it appears that as a young man, Toft had been counted a nonconformist for refusing to stand at the Creed in St Clement’s, while he was also presented for sermon gadding with several neighbours.39 His brother John resided at Hingham, Norfolk, from where in 1635 thirty inhabitants – John Toft included – emigrated to found the inspirationally titled Hingham, Massachusetts.40 This overseas township became a vital refuge for the former Norfolk foeffee Robert Peck – who was duly dubbed ‘the oulde Fox’ by Clement Corbet – and a part of his congregation, while evading Wren’s censure in 1637. Noting the prevention of tithes to Thomas Allen, Peck safeguarded his property by conveying it to his son Joseph to hold in trust. By these means, several of Peck’s parishioners reserved tithes for their former minister, which was much to the irritation of Chancellor Corbet and the replacement incumbent at Hingham, Edward Agas.41 In addition, members of Peck’s flock boycotted Agas’s services and were excommunicated. However, procuring their absolution through the Court of Arches, Agas – who moved in the circle of one of King Charles’s grooms of the bedchamber, the future royalist Thomas Jermyn the younger of Rushbrooke, Suffolk – took the matter to the top by petitioning Archbishop Laud to stay the court’s actions.42 Providing for Robert Peck’s security undoubtedly eased his return in the 1640s. As one of the older generation of godly clergy, he was not enamoured with the New England ‘way’, later emerging as a staunch critic of the Independents in Norfolk alongside John Yates of Stiffkey, who perhaps had Peck in mind when he fulminated that ‘America is no more the place than Rome, Satan is to be feared, hath found and will find their societies’ in

39 PRO, SP 16/345/23; Rye, Rate Book, p. 74 records Toft’s parochial office holding; NRO, ANW 3/20, comperta, 1614–17. 40 S. Lincoln, History of the Town of Hingham Plymouth Colony Massachusetts (Hingham, Mass. 1827), pp. 22, 49–50; D. G. Allen, In English Ways: the Movement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1981), p. 258 for John Toft of Hingham. NRO, ANW will register 1672–3 34, will of Thomas Toft senior, proved 1672, which establishes the family relationship. 41 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 11r, 171r for Robert Peck’s departure; PRO, CP 25/2/464/14 CHAS I EASTER; Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fos 54, 145; NRO, DN SUN/4a, fo. 6v, contain details of these financial transactions. 42 PRO, SP 16/382/14; SROB, HD 1113/1, fos 27, 39; ODNB, ‘Sir Thomas Jermyn (1573–1645)’; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), p. 325 for Edward Agas. According to a nineteenthcentury tradition, Robert Peck’s parishioners removed the communion rails from Hingham church in 1641 as fencing for the town’s horse pond, commonly called ‘Parson’s Pond’. See A. Kingston, East Anglia in the Great Civil War (London, 1897), p. 28.

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1637.43 Thomas Toft of Norwich sustained contacts with the ‘Hinghams’ on both sides of the Atlantic throughout. To begin with, one of Toft’s fellow parishioners at St Clement’s, William Ludkin, a locksmith, left for new Hingham, where his brother George Ludkin had already settled with John Toft. Secondly, Thomas Toft’s son, Thomas junior, served as curate at old Hingham in 1639. It was while nourishing Robert Peck’s Norfolk flock that Toft came to be examined by the consistory court for preaching ‘that the lights of the church of England were gone into New England and that only the socketts were left’.44 A stock phrase among puritans crossing the Atlantic – Michael Metcalfe had said the same – Toft found a receptive audience. Significantly, the younger Thomas had begun his clerical career in 1636 as a deacon under the Reverend Thomas Allen at St Edmund’s, where he was presented for expounding without a licence.45 The Toft family network spanned two noted epicentres of puritan migration from Norfolk: St Edmund’s, Norwich and Hingham. Moreover, Thomas Toft senior provides the missing piece in the jigsaw linking the remnant of the godly community that stayed in Norwich with another part of the puritan diaspora from the city, that which settled in fellowship with John Ward and William Bridge in Rotterdam. An English church had been present in Rotterdam since at least 1622, when the congregation was gathered according to a covenant. During the later 1620s, it had come to be administered by leading lights in the puritan movement, notably Hugh Peter and – for a few months until his death in 1633 – William Ames, who was succeeded by a former member of the foeffees for Impropriations, John Davenport. Nicholas Tyacke has described the Rotterdam church as a ‘prototype for New England ecclesiastical developments’.46 But because it enjoyed de facto autonomy outside of episcopal control, Laud hoped to secure the church’s closure; at least when negotiations were brokered in 1633 to move the Merchant Adventurers’ staple to Rotterdam, the city magistrates agreed not to tolerate any other English church except that maintained for the Company. However, Peter and Davenport’s congregation continued to be recognised and protected by the burgomaster. Following their suspension by Wren, Rotterdam offered a haven for John Ward and William Bridge,

43

BLTT, E 447 (6), The Attestation of the Ministers of the County of Norfolk and the City of Norwich (1648), which corrects the reading of Peck’s career in Browne, Memorials, pp. 103–5. Peck was not a Congregationalist. John Yates, A treatise of the honor of Gods house (1637), STC 26089, ‘To Clere Talbot’, and see above, pp. 122–3, 125–6. 44 Allen, In English Ways, p. 179; NRO, ANW will register 1672–3 34; DN SUN/4a, fo. 16r. 45 Michael Metcalfe, ‘To all the true professors of Christs Gospel within the city of Norwich’, p. 283; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 37v. 46 C. B. Jewson, ‘The English Church at Rotterdam and its Norfolk Connections’, NA, 30 (1952), pp. 324–33; K. L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: a History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leyden, 1982), pp. 164–5; Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, p. 123.

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who by encouraging certain affluent Norwich citizens to join them, helped to ingratiate the church with the Rotterdam authorities. Peter, who was involved in the Massachusetts Company, followed the call to Boston in October 1635. John Davenport, who also held a stake in the company, chose to follow Peter to New England in 1637, while the care of the Rotterdam Church passed to Ward and Bridge upon the congregation’s election.47 Ward and Bridge’s pastoral work in Holland is made known to us exclusively through the writings of their critics. A less than favourable account was published in 1644 by the Presbyterian apologist Thomas Edwards with the obvious aim of vilifying Bridge, as one of the ‘dissenting brethren’, who comprised the core of an emerging Independent Congregationalist party in the Westminster Assembly of Divines. Consequently, he made much of Ward and Bridge’s alleged renunciation of their former episopal ordinations. As Edwards saw it, Ward’s dramatic reordination by Bridge and Bridge’s reordination by Ward were actions tantamount to declaring their separation from the established church. The implication was that Bridge, in particular, was a dangerous schismatic, who was not to be countenanced in the 1640s. Of course, neither Bridge nor Ward regarded themselves as separatists in the extreme sense of arguing against resorting to the ministry of the Church of England on the grounds that it was a false church. But Bridge’s detractors cited damning evidence, which made imputed charges of fomenting schism stick.48 One ‘fierce letter’ – readily seized upon and published by Edwards – saw the émigré Bridge admonishing several Norwich citizens to turn from episcopacy and ‘look out after the platforme of Government left by Christ and his Apostles, by Elders, Pastors, Teachers, Deacons and Widdowes, and to consider that every Church hath the power within itself and is not subject to an Officer, or to another Congregation but to the whole body’. In a deliberate move to drum up membership for his new church, Bridge struck out against episcopacy as ‘Papall and Romish’. To submit was to follow the Antichrist: what becomes of them that do worship the beast and what of him that do receive his marks . . . it is a receiving a marke to practice any Canon, constitution or order that is framed or injoyned by that government. What? You have no Elders, Pastors etc. What? You sit, 47 Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, p. 123; Jewson, ‘The English Church at Rotterdam and its Norfolk Connection’, pp. 332–5. Following BLTT, E 1 (1), Thomas Edwards, Antapologia (1644), pp. 17–18, Ward was appointed pastor, while Bridge served as a teacher. Ward fell out with members of his flock and resigned in January 1639. He was replaced by Jeremiah Burroughs, another colleague from the Tombland lecture, who was invited to Rotterdam by Bridge, communicating through a Norwich citizen. See BLTT, E 345 (14), Jeremiah Burroughs, A Vindication of Mr Burroughs against Mr Edwards his foule aspersions in spreading Gangraena and his angry Antapolgia (1646), p. 21. 48 Thomas Edwards, Antapologia, pp. 17–18; Browne, Memorials, pp. 106–7. Bridge was anxious to maintain his ministerial authority, intervening to prevent his flock from prophesying ‘after the Brownists way’, see BLTT, E 317 (5) Robert Bailie, A dissuasive from the errours of our time, wherein the tenets of the principall sects, especially of the Independents are drawn together (1645), pp. 75–7.

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stand, kneele at the command of that government . . . Paying a Pepper corn may acknowledge a Land lord, and the standing up at the Creed may acknowledge the government.

Unfortunately, the original letter has been lost, while Edwards neglected to reproduce its date. However, we know that Bridge’s radical call to follow the Congregationalist way was addressed to five Norwich citizens, Henry King, Mr Toft, Mr Smith, Mr Rayner and Mr Mapp.49 At time of writing, Mr Smith’s identity has proved difficult to trace. Mr Rayner was most likely Thomas Rayner, a founder member of the first Congregational church at Great Yarmouth in 1643, while a possible candidate for Mr Mapps is William Mapes, a worsted weaver of St John Sepulchre parish, who provided evidence on Bridge’s behalf during office proceedings against the minister in 1634.50 Mapes’s ties with emerging radical groups in the city is assured in the light of his naming John Toft – son of Thomas Toft – to supervise his will.51 Probate was granted for Mapes’s testament in January 1637, which if indeed Mapes was William Bridge’s intended correspondent, suggests a date for Bridge’s letter around the autumn and winter of 1636, within the first few months of the minister’s arrival in Rotterdam. With Henry King we are on firmer ground. Son of the Norwich town clerk, Thomas King, Henry has already been encountered as the attorney acting as a London-based agent for the Norfolk trustees in 1631 (above, page 165).52 Bridge’s entreaty appealed to Henry King, who visited his sisters in Holland in the summer of 1637, no doubt conferring with Bridge on his journey.53 Mr Toft could have been either the ubiquitous Thomas Toft senior of St Clement’s – who ultimately preferred to remain in Norwich – or Thomas’s son John, a parishioner at St George Tombland, where he was presented in 1633 for refusing to stand at the Gospel, while gadding with his wife to hear Bridge preach at St Peter Hungate.54 At any length, John Toft’s brother Daniel was licensed to journey to Leyden in the spring of 1637. It is possible that Daniel made an excursion to Rotterdam to communicate with John Ward, William Bridge and other émigré Norwich citizens.55 Significantly, the Toft family remained in touch with their godly confrères in Holland. At some point in the winter of 1637, Thomas Toft’s son John – of 49

Thomas Edwards, Antapologia, p. 45. NRO, FC 31/1, fo. 1; DN DEP/41/46, fos 584r–6r. PRO, PROB 11/173, fo. 38v. 52 Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 297, n. 98, incorrectly states that the Henry King referred to was the rector of Heddenham. Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 185r; A. Campling and A. W. H. Clarke (eds), The Visitation of Norfolk, 1664, Vol. 1, NRS, 4 (1934), p. 115 ; PRO, SP 16/531/134. 53 PRO, E 157/21, fo. 15r. 54 Rye, Rate Book, p. 57; NRO, DN VIS/6/4. Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 296, n. 97 causes yet more confusion by suggesting that Thomas Toft senior of Fyebridge and John Toft junior of Tombland were brothers. However, Thomas’s brother John had left for Hingham, Massachusetts in 1635. 55 PRO, E 157/21, fo. 5v; Jewson (ed.), Transcript of Three Registers of Passengers from Great Yarmouth to Holland and New England, p. 27. 50 51

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Tombland – was caught with a consignment of what Clement Corbet later described as ‘scandalous and seditious books’, which were promptly seized and burnt by the hangman in December 1637 by order of Mayor Robert Sumpter, a ‘pro-Wrenian’, who had signed the 1636 certificate. Corbet failed to give titles: although works by Henry Burton and William Prynne probably counted for a large part of the package. However, from Corbet’s account we know that the literature was ‘sent from some of their holy friends from Delph’, with Thomas Thurston being singled out as an active agent.56 A weaver by trade, Thurston, had moved to Rotterdam ‘to remain’ in April 1637. However, as a convinced follower of Bridge – later signing up as a founder of the minister’s Congregational church in Great Yarmouth in 1643 – Thurston’s religious motivations for relocating to the Netherlands are well founded.57 Neither Thomas Toft nor his sons chose to domicile in Holland. On the other hand, Bridge, and John Ward, successfully persuaded another prominent Norwich resident, the town clerk Thomas King, to cross the North Sea, whereupon he joined the Rotterdam church with his wife Rebecca in 1639. One of King’s daughters married John Armiger of St Andrew’s. Examined by Clement Corbet in 1637 for criticising the Book of Common Prayer and for his continual absence from church, Armiger likewise departed with his family to the Low Countries. Thomas and Rebecca King returned to Norfolk as co-founders of Great Yarmouth Congregational church in 1642.58 Of more importance to unravelling a puritan network, prior to their exodus from East Anglia, the Kings were caught with upwards of fifty citizens, including several of Thomas Toft’s sons, at a conventicle in the house of William Clerke in St Peter Mancroft in 1636. Clerke was said to have separated himself from the established church.59 However, the presence of Thomas and Rebecca King among Clerke’s fellowship reveals the extent to which a committed godly circle continued to meet in adversity under the patronage of influential members of the civic elite. Both the King and Toft families kept in touch with developments in Rotterdam. Besides his connections with the town clerk, Thomas Toft enjoyed contacts with other city officers, including Wren’s opponent Mayor Thomas Baker, under whom he had served his apprenticeship. Such backing proved influential during Toft’s legal action with Robert Allen against Chancellor Corbet. Here, another important link in the godly chain is furnished by the will of Robert Craske – written in May 1638 and proved a year later – which reveals that the godly cause in Norwich was anything but

56

Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 279r, 285r. PRO E 157/21, fo. 4v; NRO FC 31/1, fo. 1. 58 Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 8v, 10r, 338v; NRO, DN CON/15, bills and answers 1637 for Armiger’s sentence; NRO FC, 31/1, fo. 1. 59 NRO, DN CON/16, articles against William Clerke, 7 Aug 1636, loose file. Shipps, ‘Lay Patronage’, p. 297, incorrectly dates the conventicle to 1639. 57

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dormant after Wren’s visitation. In a remarkable set of bequests, Craske provided for annual sermons at St Julian and St Peter Hungate. On each occasion the preacher was to expound on the sobering subject of how the auditors ‘shalbe discharged at the day of Judgement when they shall appeare before Gods Judgement seate’, a theme redolent of an earlier printed sermon by John More, the ‘Apostle of Norwich’.60 Craske attempted to revive the heyday of godly patronage in Elizabethan Norfolk. To execute this bequest, he called upon his kinsman, Hammond Craske, a figure who would later emerge as a staunch Parliamentarian, while serving as lieutenant in the Norwich volunteer company. As such, Hammond Craske had no compunction in using the cathedral as a stable in the Civil War, mocking the altar ‘in a deriding manner’.61 More significantly, overseeing the will stood Robert Allen, the recipient of a piece of pewter plate inscribed with the initials ‘R. A.’, who was requested to convey legacies to a select band of clergy, Ralph Furness, John Carter, John Ward, William Bridge and Thomas Allen, all of whom had been deprived in 1636. As supervisors, Craske appointed his brother-in-law Alderman John Tooley alongside Alderman Thomas Cory. When devising his own will in 1639, Cory also remembered the same displaced city preachers, naming ‘my loving and faithful friend John Tooley’ as supervisor.62 Unlike his associate Thomas King, Robert Craske remained in Norwich, where he continued to trouble Wren’s administration. Along with his fellow parishioner at St John Maddermarket and former partner in the Norfolk trustees, Thomas Atkin, whom Chancellor Corbet deemed ‘an absolute schismatike’, Craske was cited in the consistory court in 1637 for having balked at receiving at the rail. Both had been pressed into contributing towards equipping the chancel at St John’s according to Wren’s design.63 Perhaps the prospect of imminent court proceedings proved the final straw for Thomas Atkin, who quit Norwich, and the offer of the mayoralty, in favour of becoming sheriff of London in 1637. His move to the capital was strongly contested by Norwich corporation, who approached the Privy Council to prevent Atkin’s departure. Amid all the excitement, one of the reasons allegedly given by the alderman for relinquishing his office was that there was no more good preaching to be had in Norwich.64 More active

60

Millican, Freemen, p. 78; PRO, PROB 11/181, fos 417r–v; John More, Three godly and fruitfull sermons (Cambridge, 1594), STC 18074.5, p. 1. 61 PRO, PROB, 11/181, fo. 418v. For Hammond Craske’s career, see BLTT, 669 f 6 (54), To the Lords: the Petition of Many Thousands of the Inhabitants of Norwich (16 July 1642); E 114 (27), Newes from the Citie of Norwich (1642); E 385 (4), Vox Norwici (1646), p. 15; CJ, II, pp. 701, 704; LJ, V, pp. 266–7, 468, 574–5; BL, Add MS 22619, fo. 33; NRO, DCN 107/3. 62 PRO, PROB 11/181, fos 419r–20r; PROB 11/180, fos 45r, 46r. 63 NRO, DN SUN/4a, fo. 1r; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 8r; NRO, PD 461/48, St John Maddermarket churchwardens’ accounts, unfoliated payments for 1637. 64 NRO, DN SUN/4a, fo. 1r; PRO, PC 2/48, pp. 75–6, 25 June 1637; SP 16/361/92.

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resistance over receiving at the rail was also pursued by Thomas Toft at St Clement’s. In 1637, Toft organised a rate strike to stymie Laudian refurbishment in the church, finally being pressed into making payments by the consistory court a year later, although even then he was reluctant to conform to Wren’s injunctions by venturing only as far as the chancel entrance to receive.65 Surely Toft was forward in voicing his grievances over the new eucharistic practice to Wren’s successor Richard Montagu. As remarked upon in chapter six (above, page 124), Montagu, who was elevated to Norwich upon Wren’s translation to Ely in May 1638, went to lengths to appear as a conciliatory figure within his new see. We have seen this in his rapprochement with his old literary foe John Yates. As it was Yates received a warm greeting from the bishop: ‘you are welcome to me if I am welcome to you, not a word of our controversy, I am weary with chiding’.66 But it seems that Montagu hoped to defuse tensions created by his predecessor’s orders for receiving at the rail, which he deemed a ‘noveltie’. Whereas Wren envisaged communicants approaching the rail in a long procession, Montagu understood this to be ‘a mere unnecessary, inconvenient, cumbersome, or irregular course’, redolent of ‘the practice of the Roman church in Italy’. Writing to Laud, Montagu had his own ideas over ceremonial arrangements. So as not to disturb the sanctity of the eucharist, Montagu believed – after Chrysostom – that all communicants were to remain kneeling ‘in their distinct ranks’ within the chancel while the Sacrament was administered, presumably by the incumbent walking among the people. However, Laud insisted that reception at the rail was to remain, and duly advised Charles ‘to command that the present bishop continue it’.67 In turn, giving directions at a synod at Ipswich in October 1638, Montagu retained Wren’s scheme for processing, albeit with the key proviso that communicants entering the chancel were to line up in neat orderly rows – with ‘the best in the parishe’ taking up pole-position closest to the rail, either standing sitting or kneeling – but allowing ‘a sufficient space for the priest to goe betweene’ each file descending from the altar.68 But was Thomas Toft willing to assent to this compromise? If so, Montagu’s modification of Wren’s earlier order may well have been to the irritation of Toft’s minister, Foulke Robartes, who was very much Wren’s man. The new ruling gave a pretext for Toft to be difficult. For while under Montagu’s direction Toft was to communicate in the chancel, arguably he did not have to approach the rail itself; although as a vestryman and one of ‘the best in the parishe’ Toft was surely expected to lead any procession to the sanctuary. Indeed, St Clement’s in the later 1630s witnessed a battle of wills. Within the

65

NRO, DN SUN/4a, fo. 9v; Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fos 134–5. BL, Add MS 25278, fo. 137r. 67 NRO, FCB/1, fo. 36r; LPL, MS 943, p. 626; Laud, Works, V, p. 360. 68 NRO, FCB/1, fo. 37r; K. Fincham (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, Vol. II, COERS, 5 (1998), p. 219. 66

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parish one of Wren’s most entrenched detractors, Thomas Toft, clashed with one of the bishop’s most ardent apologists, the Norwich prebendary Foulke Robartes, who had been sad to see his former diocesan go. Writing to Wren with a tear in his eye, Robartes recalled his thirty-six-year ministry in Norwich. During that time – as he put it – no other ordinary had attempted to ‘bring things so full home to the primitive Christian devotion’ or to resurrect ‘the pristine splendor of religion’. Yet such sentiments were extraordinary given Robartes’s career profile. Incumbent at St Clement’s since 1602, he was most likely a relative, possibly a nephew, of Thomas Robartes, doyen of the preaching fraternity in Elizabethan Norwich, who had been suspended from the same cure for nonconformity by Bishop Freke.69 Like his forebear, Foulke moved in godly circles as Wednesday corporation lecturer at St Clement’s from 1615 until 1633.70 Something of a poetaster, he dedicated verse to an edition of sermons by the champion of Calvinist orthodoxy in Jacobean Norwich, Thomas Newhouse, affirming his trust that: Gods sure Election as foundation stands. Gods Feare as strongest pillar bears up all.

Consistent with his role as an evangelical pastor, Robartes was not always compliant over wearing the surplice.71 However, by the time of Wren’s visitation, having already been inducted into the ceremonial environment of Christ Church Norwich as a prebendary from 1616 Robartes, changed tack abandoning his former predestinarian beliefs. Writing in 1639, he expressed the view that God’s grace was available to all. As he remarked, is not the excellent goodnesse of God such as drawes all mens eyes upon him and feeds them all with expectation? Is not his bounty such as filleth every living thing with plenty of his goodnesse? Shall not the eye then looke up towards God in admiration and hope? Shall not the hand be lifted up showing the heart ready to receive the blessing and to reach our thankes?72

In all likelihood, Robartes’s anti-Calvinist conversion was occasioned by his unhappy experience of administering to vocal critics of ecclesiastical policy in the 1630s, namely, Thomas Toft. In return, Toft’s hostility to religious 69

Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 309r; NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, p. 2. For Thomas Robartes, see above, pp. 47, 64, 73–5. ODNB, ‘Foulke Robartes’ sheds no new light on the minister’s origins, which remain obscure. However, the name ‘Foulke’ could suggest Welsh ancestry, as might his ordination at the hands of William Hughes, Bishop of St Asaph. He may have been related to Thomas Roberts, a Welshman, although Foulke was evidently not his son, see NRO, NCC 326 Bate. 70 NRO, CA, 1603–25, fos 241v, 261r, 281v, 301r, 319r, 338v, 357r, 414v; CA, 1625–48, fos 11v, 131v, 140v, 164r. For further evidence of Robartes’s inclusion in godly circles, see NRO, NCC 89 Coomney, will of Anne Rugge, proved in 1613. 71 Thomas Newhouse, Certaine sermons preached by T. Newhouse set forth by R. Gallard (1614), STC 18493, p. 143 and see above, pp. 82, 84, for Newhouse; NRO, ANW 3/20, comperta, 1614–17, entry for St Saviour’s. 72 Le Neve, Fasti VII, p. 57; Foulke Robartes, Gods holy house and service (1639), STC 21068, sig. *3v.

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change was intensified by his minister’s departure from his evangelical roots, as one part of a stressful relationship. Committing his exalted views on the ‘beauty of holiness’ to print in 1639, it is possible to sense Robartes’s obvious frustration. Here too, the timely appearance of his Gods holy house and service in 1639, with its fulsome dedication to Laud and Wren for having followed the archbishop ‘as another Elishaeus in the spirit of Elias’, was perhaps intended as a retort to Richard Montagu for questioning Wren’s injunctions. Yet the minister also had his parishioners in mind. Striking out against the ‘much irreverence’ in the performance of Holy Communion, he complained bitterly that ‘I have often conceived thereupon that either Papist, Turke or Pagan observing our fashion, would think that either our churches were not the houses of the holy God, or that the people in them were not about Gods worship.’ For both Bishop Montagu and Thomas Toft’s benefit, he had much to say about receiving at the rail. Asking ‘what superstition is it to kneele at the rayle more than at the stoole?’, he pointed out that ‘the nearer a man approacheth to that table whereupon he setteth with his eyes the sacred body and blood of his Saviour Jesus Christ’, the ‘more he should find himselfe ravished with devotion and not scared with all imagination and superstition’.73 Unfortunately for Robartes, a number of his parishioners and fellow citizens refused to share his enthusiastic ‘Wrenian’ stance on eucharistic practice. As the minister’s anxieties demonstrate, hostility towards the ‘Laudian’ altar policy continued to rankle with many worshippers in Norwich, whatever the good intentions on the part of Bishop Montagu to clarify and amend his predecessor’s more contentious orders for reception at the rail. Individuals like Thomas Toft, linked to a puritan network with contacts across the North Sea and the Atlantic, continued to trouble Wren’s supporters. Indeed, despite having forced a sizeable exodus of committed godly clergy and laymen from Norwich and East Anglia, the fallout from Wren’s visitation failed to dampen dissenting opinion. It merely sharpened godly resolve to bring about a more perfect Reformation, either overseas or – with the collapse of the Personal Rule – at home. As Michael Metcalfe reminded his fellow citizens, the diaspora would prove a trial forged in the ‘furnace of affliction’ in which God would divide the wheat from the chaff.74 Eventually, political events in England would confirm Metcalfe’s understanding of the working of divine providence. With the summoning of the Short Parliament, amid a mounting Scottish crisis, godly activists in Norwich were able to muster sufficient political clout to return two of their number to Westminster. The first was Alderman John Tooley. The second was his former co-trustee Thomas Atkin, whose election was especially controversial given his previous discharge from the aldermanry 73 74

Robartes, Gods holy house and service, sigs *2r–v, p. 44. Michael, Metcalfe, ‘To all the true professors of Christs gospel within the city of Norwich’, p. 281.

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to become sheriff of London. Inevitably, the two MPs attended with a petition reiterating the complaints made in 1636. Noting that Wren’s visitation had been to the detriment of the city’s economic well-being, the signatories called for the immediate repeal of the bishop’s innovations and the Restoration of preaching exercises, also adding a request for parliament to be convened annually.75 Parliament’s abrupt dismissal prevented any proceedings from taking place. However, the calling of a second parliament in November 1640, in the wake of a Scottish victory, enabled disgruntled Norwich citizens to mount a more sustained and successful campaign against Wren and his former adherents in municipal government and among the city’s clergy. The ensuing struggle, amid the decline into Civil War, will be followed as an epilogue to Norwich’s confessional politics under the first two Stuarts.

75 CJ, II, p. 6; J. Maltby (ed.), The Short Parliament (1640) Diary of Sir Thomas Aston, Camden Society, 4th Series, 35 (1988), p. 12. The Norwich petition, presented on 18 April 1640, is calendared in HMC, 4th Report, p. 24.

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Chapter Eleven PURITAN REVOLUTION, 1640–43

To what extent did the confessional rifts of the 1630s determine patterns of Civil War allegiance in Norwich during the ensuing decade? The dramatic events leading to the collapse of Charles I’s Personal Rule provided the godly with an opportunity to present their grievances and begin the task of furthering the Reformation once again. But what of the discernible core of support for Bishop Wren? Admittedly death robbed this faction of its more senior leaders, like Robert Debney, prior to 1640, although the summoning of the Long Parliament saw remnants of the ‘pro-Wren’ contingent under Henry Lane conduct various rearguard actions against the godly. A royalist constituency did exist among Norwich’s governors. But ultimately, the king’s loyal adherents, left increasingly isolated in local affairs by Charles’s consolidation of a power base away from East Anglia, did not prove forceful enough to prevent the city’s alignment with Parliament in 1643. Our aim is not to outline in detail the collapse into Civil War and its ramifications for Norwich’s citizens.1 Instead, this chapter will attempt to tie up some loose ends from the previous section, to explore the ways in which religious alignment in the 1630s was played out in the political jockeying for sides during the early 1640s. While the struggle was not exclusively about religion, views on the Caroline Church shaped factions among the city’s elite. Indeed, Henry Lane’s elevation to the mayoralty in May 1640 ensured that the godly activists’ rise to prominence was by no means well assured on the eve of the calling of the Long Parliament. Lane procured a sympathetic officer for the shrievalty in September. His candidate, John Osborne, approved by the majority of the magistrates, was instrumental in settling the quarrelsome elections for Westminster the following month. With Lane, Osborne was declared a ‘delinquent’ and discharged from the aldermanry in 1642.2 For their part, the godly minority within the mayor’s court, led by the two 1

J. T. Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich (Oxford, 1979), ch. 4. For a more succinct account of events in the 1640s and 1650s, see A. Hopper, ‘The Civil Wars’, in C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds), Norwich Since 1550 (London, 2004), pp. 89–116. 2 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 364v, 3 Oct 1640. Osborne became mayor at the Restoration in 1662, Mayors of Norwich, p. 92.

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PURITAN REVOLUTION, 1640–43

former foeffees, the Short Parliament MP John Tooley and Augustine Scottow, exerted their influence over the common council to appoint John Dethick as the second sheriff. Dethick’s candidature was unsettling to Lane. To begin with he was a close associate of another Norfolk foeffee, Thomas Atkin, having previously served as his apprentice. Moreover, like his erstwhile master, he had also opted to reside in London, requesting exemption from civic office in August.3 His appointment and timely return to the city, to coincide with Charles’s convening of a second parliament, was part of an orchestrated move by the godly aldermen to nominate one of their number. With the Parliamentary elections in October, Dethick’s role became apparent. The first of the two borough seats was secured comfortably by Alderman Richard Harman, Henry Lane’s immediate predecessor as mayor in 1639. Clive Holmes has suggested that Harman was a moderate respected by Wren. While William Alanson regarded him as ‘an ingenuous man’, surely Wren was able to recall how Harman – serving as churchwarden at St Andrew’s in 1636 and 1637 – had questioned the bishop’s right to visit the Church.4 No Laudian, Harman remained an active Parliamentarian until his death in 1646.5 However, having successfully returned one proven critic of the former bishop, problems then arose over the citizens’ selection of a second burgess. This seat was fought over by John Tooley and Richard Catelyn. Already encountered as one of the four lawyers among the Norfolk Trustees for Religion in 1631, Catelyn strikes as being an unlikely advocate of Caroline ecclesiastical policy. In the 1640 election he was the clear winner, polling 906 votes to Tooley’s 265.6 However, in the initial indenture returned to Westminster by John Dethick, Tooley was named as victor, which provoked protest from the other sheriff, John Osborne, who made out another indenture advancing Catelyn. Dethick had conspired to throw the election for Tooley knowing that Catelyn, who was not a freeman of Norwich, was ineligible to stand. Of course, the prospect of either Tooley or Catelyn as a representative cannot have been relished by Henry Lane’s supporters, although in the event, Catelyn, who emerged as a lacklustre supporter of Parliament, sequestered for deserting the House in 1644, appeared as the lesser of two evils.7 Lane was keen to close the loophole, granting Catelyn his freedom 3 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 364v, 3 Oct 1640. For Dethick, see Milican, Freemen, p. 105; V. Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (London, 1964), p. 253; NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 293r, 20 Aug 1640. 4 Mayors of Norwich, p. 80; C. Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974), p. 245; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 336r; NRO, MC 992/1, fo. 14v for Harman as churchwarden and Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 8v for parochial resistance at St Andrew’s. 5 M. F. Keeler, The Long Parliament, 1640–1641: a Biographical Study of its Members (Philadelphia, 1954), pp. 203–4. Harman sat on the Commons’ committee to investigate complaints against Wren, Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 334. Further evidence of his commitment to Parliament’s cause is given in NRO, HMN 7/122/3. 6 PRO, SP 16/531/134 and above, pp. 164–5, for Catelyn; PRO, C 219/43/2/62. 7 PRO, C 219/43/2/63; CJ, II, p. 22, 7 Nov 1640; Keeler, The Long Parliament, p. 57; PRO SP 23/72/606; SP 28/213, fo. 10r for Catelyn’s political career in the 1640s.

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before promoting an ordinance banning the election of outsiders in future. But by approving Catelyn, in order to counter Sheriff Dethick’s manoeuvre on Tooley’s behalf, the ‘pro-Wren’ group hoped to stymie a more radical agenda from being pursued on the city’s behalf at Westminster.8 If this was Lane’s intention, it backfired following the bishop’s impeachment on 19 December. Immediately, the stage was set for a more concerted attack against the reforms imposed in 1636 when, as the ever-vigilant William Alanson observed on 11 January 1641, ‘our citizens are very busy at an Assembly, where every parish is giving in what charges and expenses my Lord’s visitation put them to’.9 Heading the investigation was a reputed nonconformist, Alderman Christopher Barret. He was particularly anxious to resolve the lingering matter of rails within St Edmund’s, haranguing the churchwardens for complying with the former bishop’s orders, adding ‘I perceive you would well nigh have Poperie come in again’.10 His findings informed the first of three petitions dispatched by the corporation against Wren. Referred to the Commons’ committee on Wren on 27 January, this initial document repeated the complaints expressed in 1636, that the prelate had enforced superstitious innovations and driven out preaching in favour of a ‘debaucht, ignorant and lazy ministry zealously observant of his will and pleasure’, thereby depopulating the city with a knock-on effect on trade. However, as an indication of changed circumstances, the petition was not stalled by the magistracy as in 1636. Consequently, Mayor Lane did not try to impede the Assembly on 11 January, although dissenting voices were raised by two ‘Wrenians’, William Gostlyn and John Freeman, whose protests were duly recorded in the Assembly minutes.11 This first list of accusations was compiled amid a flurry of excitement, as Sir Thomas Knyvett observed to his wife. Returning home to Norfolk in January, he noted ‘Conventicles every night in Norwich, as publicly known as sermons in the daytime, and they say much more frequented. There is but two preaching ministers that goes for current among them in the whole city, viz Mr Carter and Mr Hall, the rest all prators.’12 John Carter of St Peter Mancroft had been suspended under Wren but restored to his living and Tuesday corporation lectureship by Richard Montagu in 1639. He was summoned to Westminster to testify concerning his treatment by Chancellor Corbet, where he was joined by Henry Hall, the chaplain and Thursday

8 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 354r, 20 Oct 1640, fo. 367v, 3 Apr 1641. This conclusion was also reached in Holmes, The Eastern Association, p. 24. 9 Parentalia, p. 51; CJ, II, p. 55; Bod L Tanner MS 68, fo. 336v. 10 NRO, DN VIS/5/1, entry under St Andrew’s for Barret’s nonconformity; Bod L, Tanner MS 290, fo. 108r. This letter was quoted in Wren’s defence, see Parentalia, p. 99, where Alderman Barret is amusingly mistranscribed as ‘Parrot’. 11 Symonds D’Ewes, The Journal of Sir Symonds D’Ewes, ed. W. Notestein (New Haven, 1923), p. 284; Bod L Tanner MS 220, fos 44–6; NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 356r, 11 Jan 1641. 12 B. Schofield (ed.), The Knyvett Letters, 1620–1644, NRS, 20 (1949), pp. 98–9.

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lecturer at St Andrew’s, who later became a Presbyterian member of the Assembly of Divines.13 With Carter giving evidence against Wren, another strike at the bishop was made by Norwich’s magistracy. Although not referring to the prelate by name, the ensuing petition, which called for the magistrates’ release from compulsory attendance at the cathedral every Sunday, could have been taken as a direct attack on Wren for enforcing the measure in 1636. This much-quoted petition is a curious document loaded with hyperbolic indignation. The two named protagonists behind its inception were the radicals Christopher Barret and Thomas Shipdham, who complained bitterly about having to sit through lengthy, elaborate services in the cathedral, ‘not less than three hours and a halfe ordinarily’ in low draughty pews, which left the aldermen ‘much distempered with colde whereby their health is much impaired’. Mr Barret also suffered much humiliation after being bombarded with objects during worship, including a great Bible, which broke his spectacles. On another occasion someone allegedly urinated over Mrs Barret’s seat, while: at the time of the present Mayor that now is upon the Sunday the day before the knights of the shire were chosen in October last, alderman Shipdham Iustice of the Peace and sitting next to the Mayor, somebody most beastly did conspurcate and shitt upon his gowne from the galleries above. And the Sunday immediately after some one from the galleries did let fall a shooe which narrowly missed the Mayor’s head. And at another time one from the said Gallery did spitt upon alderman Barrets head.

We lack evidence to confirm whether such ribald antics really happened. However, the inclusion of Mayor Lane, Sheriff Osborne and three other ‘Wrenians’, William Gostlyn. Thomas Carver and John Freeman among the signatories, strikes as being particularly jarring.14 Was Lane’s group buckling under pressure from Barret and Shipdham to press grievances against Wren and the local Church hierarchy? If so, this was more than Lane – who wanted to remain loyal to his former diocesan – could stomach, the mayor finally taking a stand by resigning from office in February 1641, some four months before his term was due to end.15 Lane’s request for early discharge set in motion a chain of political manoeuvres whereby the puritans wrestled for control of city government. By abstaining from office, Lane inadvertently created an opportunity for his

13 For Carter, see above, pp. 191, 193–4, 195; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 336r–v; NRO, CA, 1625–46, fos 321r, 345r; Blomefield, IV, p. 301. 14 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fos 147, 149–50. 15 See for example Bod L, Tanner MS 290, fo. 110r, Lane to Wren, 19 Sept 1641; NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 305r, 20 Feb 1641.

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ideological opponent John Tooley to serve as deputy mayor until the next elections. Following established procedure the mayoralty was to fall to the most senior alderman under the chair, William Gostlyn. In turn Gostlyn was to be succeeded by another known Wren supporter and Lane’s fellow parishioner at St Gregory’s, John Loveland, who would also prove unsympathetic to the godly.16 Neither candidate was a welcome prospect to those with aspirations for further Reformation. With the ensuing mayoral elections in May, the freemen voted for Thomas Carver and Adrian Parmenter, the third and fourth in seniority, from whom the magistrates nominated Carver as the new mayor-elect. Carver’s appointment was a compromise. Parmenter, a former apprentice to Alderman Robert Craske, who later rose to notoriety as a member of the sequestration committee for Norfolk, held uncompromising religious views unlikely to heal rifts in the governing elite.17 For the godly, it was apparent that Carver, who was not a well man, might have to defer to a deputy of their choosing. In the event of his death, which occurred on 29 May, just weeks after being voted in on 1 May, the puritans seized the initiative by forwarding their preferred candidate, Parmenter, as the next mayorelect. The mayoral vacancy was greeted with calls for a second election by the common council.18 However, in light of Carver’s timely demise, the council moved during the Assembly on 11 June that voting should be carried out regardless of seniority, to enable all aldermen to stand for the position. The puritans’ ploy worked and Parmenter gained promotion to the mayoralty.19 In the autumn, the new administration was presented with the opportunity to oversee the dismantling of the controversial Laudian furnishings introduced in 1636, according to the Commons’ resolution of 1 September, which ordered the removal of altar rails and the levelling of chancel steps in all parish Churches. This ruling was promptly executed across the city. From a sample of the eight extant churchwardens’ accounts for Norwich parishes covering the period, admittedly only four record specific payments for taking down communion rails. St Benedict’s, St Stephen’s and St Mary Coslany each complied by the time of drawing up their accounts in Easter 1642.20 However, at St Lawrence there seems to have been some initial reluctance, something that could be attributed to the influence of Charles Davill – rector since 1637 and Foulke Robartes’s former curate at St Clement’s – who had been a keen ritualist and who subsequently continued to conduct Prayer Book services

16

NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 356r, 11 Jan 1641. Ibid, fo. 371r, 26 May 1641; Mayors of Norwich, p. 81; Milican, Freemen, p. 76; BL, Add MS 15903, fo. 26. 18 NRO, AB/5, 1613–42, fo. 371r, 4 June 1641. 19 Ibid, fo. 371r, 11 and 16 June 1641. 20 CJ, II, p. 279, 1 Sept 1641; ‘Altar Rails’, EANQ, 1st Series, 3 (1868), p. 252. Extant accounts for St Peter Mancroft, St John Maddermarket and St Gregory do not record payments for the removal of rails. St Saviour’s accounts, NRO, MC 1939/1, list receipts only. However, see NRO, PD 191/23, fo. 50r (St Benedict); PD 484/118, fo. 315v (St Stephen), COL 3/4, fo. 70r (St Mary Coslany). 17

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to a diminished congregation in his Church during the 1640s. Now the shoe was on the other foot. According to Davill, Parliament was comprised of ‘ungodly and Tiranicall persons, which seeke our bodyes, our goods, our lives, our lands, and if it were possible to take away our God too’. Moreover, preaching a fast-day sermon in Norwich in January 1644, Davill reiterated his contempt for directives emanating from Westminster. Speaking out against sacrilege, he branded the executors of Parliamentary ordinances to destroy religious images in Churches as ‘base domineering fellows which scandalised the ministers of God and abused the temples of the Lord’.21 Significantly, the churchwardens at St Lawrence’s were slow to dismantle their rails. Facing resistance from their rector, they delayed levelling the chancel until 1643 upon administering the Solemn League and Covenant to the parish – allegedly enjoining subscription themselves in Davill’s absence – before dutifully ridding their Church of any remaining superstitious ‘inscriptions and crucifixes’ in the same year.22 Inertia over the rails was probably to be found at the reputed ‘idolatrous Temple’ of St Gregory. In the receipts for 1641 and 1642, no mention is made of communion rails by the churchwardens, who instead laid out money for colouring the font. Perhaps the parish held out against the Commons’ resolution? Possibly, existing rails were taken away by more forcible means in 1643 when the accounts record a large payment of £10 for glazing and other objects ‘that must be repaired’, perhaps indicating that the Church had been subjected to a spate of iconoclasm. At the least, we know that railing was removed at some point in the 1640s, since in 1670, the churchwardens petitioned the archdeacon to have ‘handsome rails’ restored to St Gregory’s chancel..23 By the same backtracking from archdeaconry comperta taken after the Restoration, when communion rails came to divide Norwich parishioners once again, we note that besides St Gregory’s and the four parishes noted above, railing was ordered to be fitted before tables in ten city Churches by April 1687.24 Laudian fixtures had been dutifully taken down across the city during the 1640s. Anxious to hasten the process of purging recent ecclesiastical novelties, as well as other remnants of Popery, the new mayor Adrian Parmenter was quick to inform Parliament of residual local attachment to Laudianism. A pretext was provided by Charles’s abortive attempt to arrest the Five Members in January 1642. Reacting against the king’s actions in London,

21

NRO, DN SUB/1, p. 62; Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 134 and BL, Add MS 15903, fo. 75, for complaints against Davill. 22 BL, Add MS 15903, fo. 75; Blomefield, IV, p. 264; NRO PD 58/38, fo. 66r. 23 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 131r; NRO, PD 59/54, fos 94v, 95v; ANW 4/14, comperta, 1670. 24 NRO, ANW, 4/38, comperta, 1676 (St Andrew’s); ANW 4/58, comperta, 1682–3 (St Swithin’s, St Edmund’s, St Mary Coslany, St Michael Coslany); ANW 4/69, comperta, 1686–7 (St John Timberhill, St Peter Southgate, St Ethelred’s, St John Maddermarket, St Augustine’s, St Martin at Oak).

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the mayor’s court endorsed a petition calling for the speedy defence of the country and the relief of Ireland. This was delivered to the House by representatives from the corporation on 22 February. However, attached to the remonstrance was a separate catalogue of complaints, noted by Framlingham Gawdy in his diary, as running ‘something like the rest against Bishop Wren that their abilities are not now in respect of the decay of trade as it was in Queen Elizabeth’s days’. With Wren incarcerated in the Tower, a third attack on the bishop seemed overkill. At least this is how Sir Symonds D’Ewes viewed proceedings, when he remarked that the House had already ‘transmitted a charge long since against Bishop Wren which rested with the Lords’.25 But the document, a transcription of which survives among the Tanner manuscripts, also amounted to an assault on the bishop’s adherents. Parmenter’s supporters took the opportunity to single out those ‘least affected’ to Parliament and the cause of forward Reformation, namely eighteen ‘scandalous’ members of the city’s clergy, noted for being zealous observers of Wren’s orders.26 Of these, Thomas Displine, Foulke Robartes, William Alanson and Isaac Dobson have been encountered as apologists for the Laudian Church. While specific charges were made against each minister, the complaints also highlighted a number of superstitious practices continuing in Norwich Churches, most conspicuously St Gregory’s, where several of Mayor Parmenter’s adversaries, notably Henry Lane, worshipped.27 The intention was to point out the hesitant support for Parliament from some quarters of the city’s magistracy and ministry. Mayor Parmenter’s petition signified the widening political and religious fissures in corporate life already present by the end of 1641, but which became more apparent in the coming mayoral year under the leadership of William Gostlyn, who was the next alderman under the chair. Gostlyn’s elevation revealed that the seniority principle held despite the wrangling over Parmenter’s election. A ‘pro-Wren’ alderman in 1636 and a future royalist, Gostlyn’s rise to the mayoralty in May 1642 conceivably marked a setback for the godly within the corporation, although the course of national events would soon confound opposition to the puritans in Norwich.28 Whatever

25

NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 339r, 12 Feb 1642; W. H. Coates, A. S. Young and V. F. Snow (eds), The Private Journals of the Long Parliament 3 January to 5 March 1642 (New Haven, 1982), pp. 439–40, 445. 26 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fos 131–5. The eighteen were William Alanson of St Gregory, Mr Alfe of St Martin at Palace, Mr Christopher of All Saints’, Charles Davill of St Lawrence, St Mary Coslany and St Simon and St Jude, Thomas Displine of St John Sepulchre, Isaac Dobson of St George Tombland, Robert Harris of St John Timberhill, Robert and William King of St Michael Coslany, Joseph Reading of St Augustine, Foulke Robartes of St Clement, Edward Smith of St George Colegate, Thomas Smith of St Peter Southgate, John Sowter of St Peter Parmentergate, John Spendlowe of St Martin at Oak, Robert Tyte of St Michael at Thorn, Laurence Townley of St Julian and John Ward of St Swithin. 27 Bod L Tanner MS 220, fos 130–1, 135. 28 Mayors of Norwich, p. 81; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fo. 153r.

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Gostlyn’s sympathies in 1642, his first months in office were preoccupied with the practical matter of securing the city’s defence amid the decline into Civil War. Here a lead was taken by local Parliamentarian activists, who on 16 July, formed a volunteer company with the expressed intent of uniting against the dayly growing evils and almost desperate diseases which have overspread the whole body of this kingdom, both in Church and State . . . the multitude of frivolous, ridiculous and unwanted ceremonies, pressed with the vehemence of suspension, excommunication and deprivation of many godly ministers.

They also condemned monopolies, illegal taxation and tyranny ‘as if government had been set free from restraint of laws’ during the Personal Rule.29 Significantly, the company’s declaration was published following rumours of popish plots to burn down the city, which also found their way into print, generating panic among Norwich’s elite.30 Yet with the volunteer company, the city also witnessed a groundswell of popular sympathy for the king’s cause. Much of this was spread by angry menacing talk of the kind indicted during the July Quarter Sessions where, for example, Robert Riches – given as a gentleman – openly called the Parliamentarian Earls of Warwick and Holland ‘bastards’ since ‘their mother was a whore’. He hoped to see them hanged as traitors with John Pym. More prophetically, one John Baldwyn exclaimed that Parliament was against the king, adding that if Charles ‘should go to the Parliament, they would take away his prerogative and commit him to prison and take off his head’. For Robert Norris, Parliament was a nest of ‘Anabaptists, Brownists and Roundheads who care not for Bishopps’.31 Perhaps Norris had spent time in the company of Robert Tyte, chaplain at St Martin at Oak and St Michael at Thorn – a keen ceremonialist in saying of the altar that ‘God is there more especially present’ – who loudly drank Bishop Wren’s health, stating that those unwilling to share his pledge were rebels. Tyte had already been bound over for sinister words that ‘he cared not if the whole city were of fire’. Such inflammatory outbursts proved unsettling even for another of Wren’s former allies, Mayor Gostlyn, who felt it prudent to report proceedings of the July sessions to Speaker Lenthall.32 29

BLTT, 669 f 6 (54), To the Lords, the Petition of Many Thousands of the Inhabitants of Norwich, 16 July 1642, reprinted as BLTT, E 114 (27), A True and Exact Relation of the Present Estate of the City of Norwich (27 Aug 1642). 30 BLTT, E 179 (10), Bloody Newes from Norwich: or a true relation of a bloody attempt of the Papists in Norwich to consume the whole city by fire (27 Nov 1641), reprinted as E 147 (1), Foure Wonderfull, Bloody and Dangerous Plots discovered from Norwich where a Train of Papists had conspired the firing of the Citie (May 1642). However, supporting evidence of these ‘plots’ is lacking. 31 NRO, NCR Case 11a /46 and 47, Quarter Sessions, interrogations and recognisances, 1642–3. Francis Norris, who had been forward in deposing against William Bridge in 1634, had a brother and a son both of whom were called Robert. PRO, PROB 11/323, fos 121r–v and see above, pp. 175–6, 177, 183. 32 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fo. 134 for Tite; HMC, Portland MSS, I, pp. 46–7, 53.

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Gostlyn’s moves to stifle criticism of Parliament may appear as incongruous given his former backing of Wren. However, unnerved by the rapid decline into war in the summer of 1642, the mayor failed to make a more decisive stand for the king, when on 28 July, Captain Moses Treswell entered the city to execute the royalist commission of array on behalf of the Earl of Lindsey. After an emergency meeting of the mayor’s court, it was agreed that Treswell should not be allowed to recruit volunteers. So when the captain marched through the streets beating his drums, he was promptly arrested by the city sheriffs, imprisoned and then dispatched to Westminster.33 While Gostlyn felt it prudent to inform Charles, the magistracy as a whole made its allegiance clear. When a royal proclamation calling for aid in suppressing rebels was delivered to the mayor’s court, the aldermen refused to have it read out at the next Assembly.34 Instead, the city was placed on greater alert. Every able-bodied householder was to attend the watch in person, while on 5 August the magistrates acting on an order from the Lords, relinquished command of the trained bands to the newly formed deputy-lieutenants for Norwich, Livewell Sherwood and Hammond Craske, the mainstay of the volunteer company, who were given the vital task of guarding the city’s magazine.35 Military build-up precipitated the formation of the Eastern Association by Parliamentary ordinance on 20 December 1642. Establishing an alliance of the five counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, inhabitants were to swear ‘with our lives, powers and estates’ to defend the region from royalist incursion.36 The intention was to galvanise local loyalties to Parliament. In Norwich, where Mayor Gostlyn had been walking a political tightrope in the interests of preserving peace in civic government, royalists among the corporation could no longer procrastinate. On 31 January, the Lords implemented the ordinance in the city. The two captains in charge of the volunteer company, or either of the two sheriffs, were instructed to confiscate arms and horses from known recusants and other ‘delinquents’. At this stage, the mayor, backed by the new city recorder, Francis Cory, sought to hinder the order.37 Their actions were the direct cause of a timely visit to Norwich on 1 March 1643 by William, Lord Grey of Warke, the recently appointed Major General of the Eastern Association. Smelling a royalist plot, Lord Grey had the mayor arrested and imprisoned at Cambridge on 2 March.38 33 NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 355v, 29 July 1642; BL, Add MS 22619, fo. 34; CJ, II, pp. 698, 701, 1–3 Aug 1642; BLTT, E 112 (16), Joyfull Newes from Norwich wherein is declared how the Earl of Lindsey endeavoured to raise a party against the Parliament (17 Aug 1642). The Treswell incident also played a key role in the events leading to the formation of the Eastern Association, Holmes, The Eastern Association, pp. 56–7. 34 NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 359v, 27 Aug 1642. 35 Ibid, fo. 355v, 29 Aug 1642; LJ , V, pp. 265–7, 5 Aug 1642; CJ, II, pp. 868–9, 29 Nov 1642. 36 LJ, V, pp. 505–7; CJ, II, p. 942; Holmes, The Eastern Association, pp. 62–5. 37 LJ, V, p. 583, 31 Jan 1643; CJ, II, p. 967, 16 Feb 1643; PRO, SP 24/66, City of Norwich versus Cory, documents Francis Cory’s hostility towards Parliament. 38 BL, Add MS 22619, fo. 29; NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fos 377v–8r, 379r, 1–2 Mar 1643.

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There was substance to the Major General’s suspicions, since Gostlyn’s removal heralded a bungled coup by a group of disaffected citizens and gentry to capture the city for the king two days later. The eighteenth-century antiquary Francis Blomefield implied that a number of magistrates were involved.39 However, from a list of traitors convicted at the following Quarter Sessions and sent into Cromwell’s custody, seven ring-leaders, including Sir William Denny, the former Norwich recorder’s son and Sir Thomas Richardson, emerge. Beside them stood four Norwich citizens, Thomas Aldrich, John Payne, Ralph Sulyard and Augustine Collier. However, the central figure was Augustine Holl, whose family home at Heigham, close to the city walls, was besieged by the volunteer company.40 As a former sheriff of Norfolk, Holl was well placed in county society to act as the main protagonist. Something of a hothead, who in his youth had started a drunken brawl in a Norwich inn, Holl enjoyed a privileged position at court as one of King Charles’s gentleman ushers.41 Yet his ill-planned uprising on his master’s behalf did not attract the desired following. One figure closer to city government known to have been in league with Holl’s associates was Alderman John Anguish, who was caught holding Holl’s boat at his house by St Martin’s Gates. This was locked up by the marshals. Perhaps Anguish did not make a greater show of force on account of his declining health. He passed away at the end of April.42 The royalists had failed, and with Gostlyn languishing at Cambridge, the mayoralty was freed once again for the more dependable Parliamentarian Adrian Parmenter to serve as deputy. A wider purge of those disaffected to Parliament then followed. At a hastily convened Assembly meeting held the following week on 13 March, it was agreed that letters be sent to Aldermen Henry Lane, John Osborne and John Daniel requesting their return to Norwich upon pain of forfeiting their places.43 Lane, who had been absent for a year, had perhaps joined the king’s forces. However, Osborne and Daniel had been unable to attend for three months on account of their imprisonment in Norwich for non-payment of Parliament’s Proposition tax. They shared a cell under the Guildhall with two city clerics. The first was one of Wren’s former standing commissioners Thomas Displine, parson of St John Sepulchre. The second was John Whitefoot. William Alanson’s successor at St Gregory’s from the beginning of 1642, Whitefoot later gained the rectory of Heigham where Augustine Holl and afterwards Bishop Joseph Hall 39

Blomefield, III, p. 384. NRO, NCR Case 11a/47, which fixes the date of the ‘riotous assembly at Heigham’ to 4th March 1643; BL, Add MS 22619, fo. 33; R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War (London, 1969), pp. 176–8; PRO, PROB 11/155, fo. 26r, will of Thomas Holl, proved in 1629. 41 NRO, MS 12818; PRO, STAC 8/25/5; PRO, LC 5/134, p. 172. 42 NRO, AB/6, 1642–68, fo. 6r, 13 Mar 1643; G. Branwhite Jay (ed.), The First Parish Register of St George of Tombland Norwich 1538–1707 (Norwich, 1891), p. 36. 43 NRO, AB/6, 1642–68, fos 6r–v, 13 Mar 1643. 40

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resided upon his sequestration in 1644. Hall was buried at Heigham Church, Whitefoot delivering his funeral sermon.44 However, failing to reply to their summons, the missing aldermen were promptly discharged from the mayor’s court on 18 March, to be replaced by three Parliamentarians, Livewell Sherwood, Matthew Lindsey and Robert Baron.45 The events of March 1643 confirmed the hegemony of the Parliamentarians in municipal government. However, with the next mayoral elections looming at the end of April, there was a possibility that the city would be saddled with another mayor more inclined towards the king. As the next longest-standing alderman, Thomas Barber was in line to be the mayorelect. Although quiescent during the attempted coup, as an active supporter of Matthew Wren while serving as sheriff in 1636, Barber was viewed with suspicion by the ascendant godly party. So at the Assembly on 30 April the notion of seniority was dispensed with for the ensuing term.46 Instead, the common council elected two candidates, John Thacker, whom we have already met as a leading protagonist in the lobbying campaign against Bishop Harsnett in 1624, alongside Matthew Peckover. The aldermen chose Thacker. But faced with the rise of John Freeman, the longest-standing city officer to the mayoralty in 1644, the Assembly abandoned the seniority principle altogether on 1 May, the day of Thacker’s elevation.47 As one of Wren’s agents, Freeman had been shown a vote of no-confidence by the majority in his ward.48 Similar misfortunes awaited Alderman Gostlyn, when following his release prior to August 1643, he attempted to reclaim his fee for the part of his mayoralty spent incarcerated at Cambridge. Arguing that his expenses had been incurred performing the city’s business, he tried to claim them back. Suing the corporation for damages, his return to Norwich was not welcomed by his fellow aldermen, even though he continued to enjoy his role as a magistrate, sitting on local commissions of Oyer and Terminer into the mid-1640s.49 As the last of the surviving ‘Wrenians’ within the mayor’s court, Alexander Anguish,

44 CJ, II, p. 896, 19 Dec 1642; NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 94v; Browne, Memorials, p. 121; Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War, p. 231; John Whitefoot, Deaths Alarum, or a Presage of Approaching Death given in a Funeral Sermon preached at St Peters in Norwich . . . for the Right Reverend Joseph Hall DD (1656), dedication ‘To Robert Hall DD’. 45 NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fos 381r–v, 18–20 Mar 1643. 46 NRO, AB/6, 1642–68, fo. 6v, 30 Apr 1643; Bod L, Tanner MS 68, fos 153r, 162r. Barber may also have been considered too infirm to be mayor. Indeed, he wrote his will several months later, NRO, NCC 4 Burlye. 47 NRO, AB/6, 1642–68, fo. 9v, 1 May 1643. For Thacker, see Mayors of Norwich, p. 82; BL, Add MS 18597, fos 168v, 175v and above, pp. 133–5, 193. 48 NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 384r, 3 May 1643. 49 NRO, AB/6, 1642–68, fo. 11v, 25 Aug 1643, fo. 13r, 17 Nov 1643; PRO, C 181/5, pp. 481, 521. In the meantime, a ‘Mr Gostlyn’ provided refuge for Bishop Joseph Hall in the cathedral close, see Hall’s Hard Measure, in The Works of Joseph Hall, ed. P. Hall (12 vols, Oxford, 1837), I, pp. lv–lvi; Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War, pp. 225–31. This benefactor may have been Alderman William Gostlyn, who is known to have owned property in Christ Church in the 1640s, see NRO, NCR Case 7k/1, levy for Fairfax’s forces, unfoliated.

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failed to retain office. No doubt because of his family’s ardent royalism, he too fell foul of the change of administration, being expelled from the aldermanry on charges of fraud and corruption in April 1644.50 Assuming control of city government in the wake of Augustine Holl’s botched coup, the godly were able to resume the task of rebuilding Jerusalem within Norwich. One outstanding object in their sights ripe for further Reformation was the cathedral, a powerhouse behind the ceremonial reforms imposed across city parishes in the 1630s. According to the anonymous T. L., rumours abounded that apprentices planned to storm Christ Church on Shrove Tuesday 1642. If his account is to be trusted, the threat of violence forced the dean and chapter to remove the contested communion rails from the cathedral themselves, while a ‘great store of parsons and priests’ stood armed at the precinct gate ready to repel any assault.51 However, there is no corroborating evidence to support this story. Of equal concern for those preparing to make a stand against the king was the fact that Christ Church continued to offer a platform for pro-royalist preaching. One rousing sermon with the provocative title of Rex Meus est Deus found its way into print in two editions. The first, dated 23 March 1643, bore the anonymous hand of G. D., while in a second version produced several months later, the author was exposed as George Downham, rector of South Repps since 1638.52 The timing of the initial publication after the botched royalist coup was more than coincidental. Conceivably, Downham had delivered his text several weeks earlier with the express aim of drumming up local backing for Augustine Holl’s bid to raise the city. Downham’s sermon has escaped historical attention. The work, which as the title suggests expanded on the divine right of kings – Charles being alluded to as the ‘sparkling gemme in the ring of this round world’ – is more remarkable for containing an all-out attack on the Calvinist theology of grace.53 Downham laid into the ‘carnall gospellers of these times that are all for faith and nothing for works, that believe they shalbe saved as soon as the rest, but they have nothing to shew for it’. Rather, those who maintained that God’s grace was only operative on his elect, were ‘scandalizars of religion’ since ‘the means of salvation are held out to all, if thou or any thou in the world will do well thou shall be accepted’ according to God’s revealed will and ‘what is commanded thee in this world’.54 Significantly, Downham rallied his auditors by playing on hostility to predestinarian teaching. That he believed 50

NRO, AB/6, 1642–68, fos 16r–v, 4 Apr 1644 and see above, pp. 206–7, for the Anguishes’ royalism. BLTT, E 140 (17), T. L., True Newes from Norwich (1642), sig. A2, p. 7. The episode was dated 22 February 1642. 52 BLTT, E 93 (24), G. D., Rex Meus est Deus, or a sermon preached in the common place in Christ Church in the City of Norwich (23 Mar 1643), given as George Downham in Wing D2096A. For Downham, see Venn, II, p. 61. 53 Downham, Rex Deus est Meus, p. 30. 54 Ibid, pp. 3, 8–9. 51

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he could make an appeal by infusing his royalism with a distinct doctrinal edge testifies to the relative success of anti-Calvinist teaching in making inroads into Norwich’s citizenry prior to the 1640s. Whatever the constituency for Downham’s views, his sermon can only have convinced Mayor Thacker of the need to exert a tighter control over the cathedral pulpit. In November 1643, Parliament empowered the mayor to appoint preachers for the Sunday morning sermons at Christ Church; while the same ordinance resolved the issue of seating within the choir, by enabling the corporation to sit at the east end of the cathedral chancel ‘as in former times they were accustomed’.55 That Christ Church harboured royalist clerics also occasioned Sheriff Thomas Toft’s iconoclastic purge of the cathedral, so vividly described by Joseph Hall. Entering the building with Aldermen Matthew Lindsey and John Greenwood, Toft supervised the ‘furious sacrilege’ witnessed by the bishop: Lord what work was here! What shattering of glass! What beating down of walls! What tearing up of monuments! What pulling down of seats! What wrestling out of irons and brass from the windows and graves! What defacing of arms! What demolishing of curious stone-work, that had any representation in the world.

Offending superstitious objects were marched out in a ‘sacrilegious and profane procession’ to the market place and burnt amid much shouting and trumpeting on dismantled organ pipes.56 Some confusion persists over the precise date of these events. R. W. KettonCremer and John Evans implied that the iconoclasm occurred between September and November 1643, although an entry in the dean and chapter’s accounts ‘for taking down the organ’ on 25 May 1643 fixes the episode some months earlier.57 The timing was significant, since the desecration greeted John Thacker’s rise to the mayoralty. Heralding triumph by the godly over their opponents, by ransacking the cathedral in May, Thacker and Toft pre-empted the Parliamentary ordinance calling for the destruction of all monuments of superstition and idolatry, which was not issued until the following August. Acting on this directive, the Norwich men embarked on a second round of iconoclasm in January 1644. Forming a committee to take stock of ‘such scandalous pictures, crucifixes and images as are yet remaining’,

55

NRO, NCR Case 17b, City Revenues and Letters Book, fo. 43r. Joseph Hall, Hard Measure, p. lv. For Matthew Lindsey, see Mayors of Norwich, pp. 85–6. For John Greenwood, see Hawes, Officers, p. 72 and above, p. 176. Thomas Toft’s earlier career is traced above, pp. 225–6, 227, 229–30, 232–4. 57 Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War, pp. 252–5; Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, p. 129; NRO, DCN 10/2/1. 56

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several ‘popish pictures’ were removed from St Swithin’s and St Peter Mancroft and burnt in the market place.58 Toft’s actions coincided with the return of William Bridge to Norwich. Already present in East Anglia as town lecturer at Great Yarmouth since the end of 1641, Bridge had made a personal contribution of £42 8s 7d worth of plate towards Parliament’s war effort. Preaching before the Norwich and Yarmouth volunteer companies, he exhorted his listeners to have courage against the ‘malignant and Iesuiticall party’. Bridge saw the ensuing struggle against the king in apocalyptic terms, perceiving ‘what great matter it is to die for your God, a little before your time, who would live when Religion is dead’.59 In May 1643, Norwich corporation persuaded the minister to give a Friday lecture at St Andrew’s. At about the same time, Bridge helped establish an Independent Church in the city, which was joined to its sister congregation at Great Yarmouth on the basis of a covenant, and later placed in the pastoral charge of Timothy Armitage, who was hired by the corporation to preach at St Michael Coslany on Wednesdays and deliver a weekday lecture in the cathedral.60 By restoring Bridge, the Thacker administration hoped to bring Norwich’s ministry back full circle. However, one key aspect of the religious revolution as yet unresolved lay in rooting out vociferous clerical spokesmen for the Laudian Church, still holding pastoral charges in the city. This task was facilitated by the formation of the committee for scandalous ministers at the Earl of Manchester’s behest in 1644. Staffed by zealous godly officials such as Matthew Lindsey and John Greenwood – both active agents in desecrating the cathedral – as well as the radical Independent lawyer Henry King, such personnel did not shrink from the business of ejecting ‘malignant’ priests.61 Thanks to A. G. Matthews, we know that the Norfolk committee sequestered nine of the eighteen city clerics accused of observing superstitious practices in 1642.62 The list included the two Laudian prebendaries Foulke Robartes and John Spendlowe, who were forced to vacate their city livings, prior to losing their cathedral offices with the dean and chapter’s formal abolition on 29 May 1649.63 Others 58 C. H. Firth and R. S. Rate (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–1660 (3 vols, London, 1911), I, pp. 265–6; NRO, MCB/20, 1634–46, fo. 411r, 23 Jan 1644, fo. 415r, 9 Mar 1644. 59 Cited in Browne, Memorials, p. 108; BLTT, E 89 (7), William Bridge, A sermon preached unto the volunteers (1642), pp. 9, 12. 60 NRO, AB/6, 1642–68, fo. 10r, 3 May 1643; Blomefield, IV, p. 301; NRO, FC 31/1, fo. 3; ODNB, ‘Timothy Armitage (d. 1655)’; NRO, AB/6, 1642–68, fo. 13r, 17 Nov 1643. 61 Bod L, J. Walker MS c 6, fos 44r, 45r, records the names of the committee members. For Henry King, see above, pp. 165, 229. 62 Bod L, Tanner MS 220, fos 131–6. The nine listed in A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), pp. 263–75, in alphabetical order, are: Thomas Displine, Robert and William King, Joseph Reading, Foulke Robartes, Thomas Smith, John Spendlowe, Robert Tyte and John Ward. Thomas Lushington, who was also attacked for preaching free will in Norwich, was sequestered from his Norfolk livings. See above, pp. 207–8. 63 Firth and Rate (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, II, pp. 81–104, 200–5; Blomefield, III, pp. 622, 666–70.

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among the nineteen voted with their feet, leaving Norwich before the committee came into being. Joseph Reading, rector of St Augustine and a minor canon, was recorded as having been absent from his cure from the spring of 1643, while his fellow minor canon William Alanson is known to have relinquished St Gregory’s by the middle of 1642.64 We would like to know what became of Alanson. Along with his former patron at St Gregory’s, Alderman Henry Lane, he vanishes from the Norwich records after 1643. One explanation for their disappearance, albeit a speculative one, is that they left to join the royalist army. If so, then their decision to quit East Anglia is indicative of the problem facing denizens of Norwich wishing to make a more determined stand on behalf of the king. As B. G. Blackwood observed for Norfolk, the county was ‘abandoned to the Parliament by the organisation of the royalist war effort’.65 Even so, backing for Parliament was far from unanimous within Norwich, with some citizens being prepared to court fines and imprisonment for expressing their loyalty to Charles, in a city that had been readily exposed to the religious policies of the Personal Rule. Rather opinion in Norwich in the 1640s was as divided amid the collapse into Civil War as it had been in the 1630s. Given the ideologically charged atmosphere, it is difficult to endorse John Evans’s conclusion that the Parliamentarians’ triumph in capturing Norwich corporation had been ‘peaceful, legal and non-provocative’. 66 Having overthrown the proponents and the symbols of the Caroline Church, godly hopes to rebuild Norwich as a city on a hill could begin again. However, as the Civil War progressed it became apparent, to evoke the words of the Psalmist, that Jerusalem could not be at unity with itself. While the city from the 1620s had been marked by tensions between conformists and ‘puritans’, Norvicians in the 1640s split into Presbyterian and Independent camps. Once again, the issue of ecclesiastical government and discipline, a lively question in the city’s post-Reformation history since at least the 1580s, returned to ignite passions. In August 1646, a libel was circulated lambasting the local Presbyterian ministry under the leadership of John Carter. It was claimed that while Carter and his confrères preached uniformity, they expounded little upon ‘the Doctrine of Faith towards God, repentance from dead works, love amongest Brethren, communion with God, union with Christ, fellowship with the Spirit etc’. For Carter’s supporters, such libelling ‘troubled our Israel this day’.67 However, the new rifts among Protestants to emerge in the wake of the Civil War and the Interregnum form another episode in Norwich’s seventeenthcentury ‘wars of religion’, and must be explored elsewhere. 64

Chapter Minutes, p. 84; NRO, PD 59/54, fo. 94v. B. G. Blackwood, ‘The Cavalier and Roundhead Gentry of Norfolk’, The Local Historian, 26 (1996), p. 206. 66 Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, pp. 131–2. 67 Ibid, ch. 5; BLTT, E 385 (4), Vox Norwici, or the City of Norwich Vindicating their Ministers (1646), pp. 1, 7, 15. 65

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Chapter Twelve GODLY REFORMERS AND THEIR OPPONENTS IN NORWICH AND BEYOND

It is currently fashionable to take a long-term perspective on the English Reformation. No longer held as a neatly wrapped affair following the Elizabethan settlement of 1559, the narrative framework through which we plot the trajectories of response to the Tudor religious legacy now extends into the seventeenth century and beyond.1 Returning to Norwich, it is striking how contested the Reformation became within the city. At least, on the basis of this study, it is inadequate to gloss over early modern Norwich as a puritan citadel; for while the borough developed a precocious reputation for civic-sponsored godly learning – helping to nurture some of the famous figures in the history of dissent in England – this was one side to a rich, heterogeneous urban religious scene. Against this radical past, events in Norwich shed new light on the roots of a ceremonialist tradition within the Church of England. The city’s experience of the later Reformation rebounded in an unfolding reflexive process between the godly – or rather conflicting voices within the godly – and other clerical and lay denizens, who for a variety of reasons wished to halt the march of forward Protestantism in varying degrees at different times. The colourful story can be summarised as follows. In the first two decades of Elizabeth’s reign, the momentum of religious change within the city gathered pace, as a staunchly Protestant body of aldermen affiliated to John Aldrich and Thomas Sotherton’s family connection through the Merchant Adventurers’ Company – working in conjunction with Bishop John Parkhurst – assumed the mantle of evangelising urban society. Their common aim was to foster the word of God preached by inspirational ministers, most notably John More. In turn, the alliance between magistracy and ministry stood for order in the commonwealth, against a perceived threat to civic harmony from conservatives and Catholics within the town and 1 N. Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 26–7, 37–8; D. MacCulloch, Tudor church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), ch. 4; idem, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London, 2003), ch. 17.

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among the mercantile elite, centring on the kinship circle around Alderman Thomas Whalle. The new breed of Calvinist burgesses and their clerical confrères set about the task of reinforcing obedience both to God and the civil magistrate. Officiating as local agents to reinforce the magisterial Reformation, it is difficult to credit Norwich’s governors with being the enlightened forebears of religious toleration, as Muriel McClendon has argued.2 Yet paradoxically, aiming to strengthen magisterial authority, the godly regime had the potential to sow disobedience. At least this was how Elizabeth understood matters in dispatching Bishop Edmund Freke to discipline what she regarded as an epicentre of puritanism, her suspicions of the city’s radical potential being confirmed by the inflammatory actions of Robert Browne in the 1580s. Both the Church hierarchy and Norwich’s civic governors took fright against the emergence of Brownism within their midst. Yet the continuity of separatism within the city, from William Hunt’s gathered church in the late 1590s, through to John Robinson’s rallying of ‘sectary recusants’ in Norfolk during the 1600s and 1610s, sealed Norwich’s reputation as a hotbed of dissent in the eyes of Elizabeth and James I. From 1602 until 1618, a balance between the demands of an evangelical agenda, as fulfilled by episcopacy, was struck by Bishop John Jegon. However, lingering royal concerns over the extent of nonconformity within the city ensured that Norwich became a destination for disciplinarian troubleshooting prelates under the first two Stuarts. Matters came to a head during James’s negotiations for a Spanish Match. Here, we can discern the strategic elevation of the anti-Calvinist Samuel Harsnett to Norwich in 1619, as part of a coordinated move to counter ‘puritan’ criticism of current foreign diplomacy. Harsnett seized the moment to manipulate James’s fears to pursue his own programme to overturn Norwich’s evangelical tradition. In related moves, the bishop embarked on a campaign to curtail preaching in the city, cutting back lectureships and Sunday forenoon teaching in favour of the cathedral sermon, while sanctioning the greater beautification and ritual adornment of the city’s parish churches, as seen at St Peter Mancroft and St Gregory’s. Harsnett sought to stifle a perceived threat to the church’s integrity from the unchecked civic patronage of preaching. From his perspective, Norwich’s celebrated alliance of godly magistrates and ministers existed as an agency for faction and schism in the wider spheres of church and state. Interestingly, certain laymen shared this view. The 1620s witnessed a parting of the ways between the godly and those citizens and clergy willing to endorse a heightened emphasis upon impressing religious uniformity. Religious tensions were present prior to the polarising events of the 1630s. However, these divisions were exacerbated during the Personal Rule, especially in the wake of the

2

Quiet Reformation, pp. 14, 17, 254–6.

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long-running controversy over predestination, which was pursued in defiance of Charles’s edict on soteriological debate, by John Chappell and William Bridge. Norwich’s citizens were again forced to take sides in the ensuing polemical exchange. As the godly closed ranks around Bridge and his supporters, so their opponents sought to demonstrate their loyalty to the established church, especially in the wake of Matthew Wren’s appearance on the local scene in 1635 to instigate the ‘altar policy’ with full force. In short, the thesis is this. While recognising that the Laudian church created discord in early Stuart Norwich’s parochial life, we must also acknowledge that anti-Calvinist divines harnessed a measure of lay support within the city, helping to create a grassroots royalist contingent by 1642. Apologists for the Caroline reform gained local backing by playing upon existing friction between the godly and their foes. They achieved this by redefining the boundaries between conformity and nonconformity, religious orthodoxy and heterodoxy, driving a wedge between worshippers to test their loyalty to the church’s supreme governor. But, this is not to downplay the willingness of some citizens to comply with an evolving anti-Calvinist programme from the 1620s. Some, like Francis Norris and Thomas Ingram of St Andrew’s, as well as the younger generation of the Anguish family, were won over late in the day from the tradition of civic-sponsored godliness. Others such as William Browne were seemingly out of step with the dominant reformed dispensation in Norwich prior to Harsnett’s arrival. What too are we to make of the core of Wren’s support within St Gregory’s parish under the leadership of Alderman Robert Debney? In some respects Debney’s extended family circle – known for not being fully reconciled to the Reformation – seemingly substantiates Christopher Haigh and Alexandra Walsham’s efforts to locate a lay constituency for Laudianism within an unbroken chain of ‘parish Anglicanism’ or ‘church papistry’.3 However, this argument is tempered by Debney’s personal commitment to the Protestant dispensation established under James I, as reinforced by his minister Matthew Stoneham. Instead, the backing for Harsnett and Wren from within St Gregory’s demonstrates the shifting nature of lay conformity within the early Stuart church, as other parishioners – like John Freeman and Henry Lane – approving the new ceremonialist agenda, took the opportunity to beautify their church with religious images, deemed idolatrous by the godly, turning their backs on the march of forward Reformation as a consequence.4 3 C. Haigh, ‘The church of England, the Catholics and the People’, in C. Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 1984), pp. 214–19; idem, ‘The Taming of Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, History, 85 (2000), pp. 572–88; A. Walsham, ‘The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists and “Parish Anglicans” in Early Stuart England’, JEH, 49 (1998), pp. 620–51. 4 On religious conformity as a malleable phenomenon, see the introduction in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. xiv–xvi.

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But here we should not lose sight of a specific local cultural milieu. In many ways, the growing concern by some citizens in the material surrounds of worship neatly chimed in with Norwich’s development as a regional centre of artistic production.5 That craftsmen were on hand, on the doorstep, readily facilitated the setting up of religious imagery as at St Gregory’s and St Peter Mancroft. The impulse within Laudian church Reform to invest sacred space with the aura of the ‘beauty of holiness’ appealed to local artistic sensibilities, tinged with much parochial pride, which reflected the trappings of wealth within the city more generally. Absent from the story is any hint of a ‘middle way’ grouping of conservative Anglicans or, to follow Judith Maltby’s reconstruction of mainstream conformity, ‘Prayer Book Protestants’.6 Instead, as I hope this study has demonstrated, confessional identities in early modern Norwich were at once more fluid and their interaction more dynamic than Maltby’s model permits; the process was accelerated during the 1620s and 1630s as the wider struggle for the theological direction of the church of England was enacted locally. The accumulative impact of official moves to restrain Norwich’s civic-sponsored Reformation split the city’s inhabitants into polarising ideological camps. Religious change, as overseen by Harsnett and Wren, created an atmosphere in which adversarial politics became ever more poisoned as the godly withdrew from – on their understanding – an increasingly superstitious and corrupt church. In response opponents of the godly, following the strictures of new conformity, emerged as civic Laudians by the end of the Personal Rule. Such mounting factionalism left little breathing space for an ameliorating version of Anglicanism as defined by Maltby; and here Maltby’s efforts to revive notions of a ‘Prayer Book’ consensus within early Stuart England falter when considered against the Norwich evidence. But her interpretation of a cosy provincial religion relies upon the same insipid ‘localist’ approach of Evans and McClendon’s ‘Stanford school’ reading of Norwich’s past. Under this scheme, the seventeenth-century man and woman in the pew – Norvicians being no exception – were naturally inclined to eschew controversial and potentially divisive matters concerning faith and worship, in the interest of securing a more protean quality, communal harmony. As this study shows, Stuart Norvicians were prepared to participate in the internecine wrangles affecting the church of England as a whole between 1559 and 1642, but which came to a head in the 1630s.

5 V. Tillyard, ‘Painters in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Norwich’, NA, 37 (1980), pp. 315–19; V. Morgan, ‘The Norwich Guildhall Portraits: Images in Context’, in A. Moore (ed.), Family and Friends: a Regional Study of English Portraiture (London, 1992), pp. 21–9. 6 J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 16, 23–4, 84–6, 99–113, 228–32.

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Although as yet not acquiring rigid labels, we find amid Norwich’s fractious religious scene under Charles I the antecedents of the clearly defined ‘party rage’ spurred on by dissenting Whigs and episcopalian Tories – in local parlance ‘Croakers’ and ‘Tackers’ – which characterised city politics after the Restoration.7 Still it remains to be seen whether similar religious encounters were precipitated in other urban communities under the Stuarts. To put the question more succinctly, how successful was the rising antiCalvinist party in cultivating lay support, especially within towns and cathedral cities in the 1630s, and with what result for the destabilising of Stuart polity we think of as England’s ‘wars of religion’? More detailed comparative case studies to Norwich await follow-up in future work. However, it is possible – albeit tentatively – to pinpoint other potential avenues of enquiry towards further research on the extent of seventeenth-century England’s confessional ‘street wars’, which call for additional investigation. I will now offer some sketches by way of progressing to a fuller catalogue of anti-godly town dwellers who became lay Laudians. A potentially interesting early example centres on events in Gloucester, following in the wake of William Laud’s promotion to the deanery of the cathedral there in December 1616. Although not resident in the close for long, Laud created a stir by moving the cathedral’s communion table into an east-end altarwise position. His action provoked considerable local complaint in the form of a scurrilous libel, which was circulated in Gloucester in January 1617, attacking the recent ceremonial innovation for its ‘animating of the papists’. However, the perpetrators were summarily dealt with by Alderman John Jones. Officiating as a magistrate, he had those responsible bound over to appear at the next Assizes, insisting that they be examined by a special tribunal, ‘spedily procured from his Majesties High Commissioners’, of local clergy and justices of the peace unfavourable towards ‘that schismaticall faction of the puritans’.8 Jones wished to serve on the commission; but what were his motivations? Here, Alderman Jones’s involvement, ostensibly on Laud’s side, is significant in that as well as being a member of Gloucester’s civic elite he was also the diocesan registrar, a position he defended fiercely throughout his turbulent career, leaving a paper trail of litigation in Star Chamber in the process.

7 J. T. Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich (Oxford, 1979), chs 6 and 7; G. J. A. Goth, ‘Croakers, Tackers and Other Citizens: Norwich Voters in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Stanford University Ph.D., 1985; I. Atherton and V. Morgan, ‘Revolution and Retrenchment: the Cathedral, 1630–1720’, in I. Atherton et al. (eds), Norwich Cathedral: church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996 (London, 1996), pp. 563–75; P. D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 222–4, 304–7. M. Knights, ‘Politics, 1660–1835’, in C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds), Norwich Since 1550 (London, 2004), pp. 167–92. 8 Laud, Works, IV, p. 233, VI, pp. 239–41; B. Taylor, ‘William Laud Dean of Gloucester 1616–21’, TBGAS, 77 (1958), p. 89; PRO, SP 14/90/75.

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An early rival for his control of the registry in the mid-1590s came in the figure of John Marrow, Bishop John Bullingham’s proctor and brother-in-law. In a series of allegedly underhand moves Marrow had attempted to dispossess Jones of his office, which led Jones to champion the cause of Bullingham’s successor, Godfrey Goldsborough, to claim certain episcopal properties held in Gloucester by Bullingham and Marrow’s relatives. This resulted in a violent altercation, as Marrow’s nephew attempted to keep Jones from seizing one contested residence by force of arms.9 However, the embattled registrar also had enemies among the corporation, most notably a faction led by Alderman Thomas Machen and his son-in-law Thomas Ryche, who both clashed with Jones over his successful election campaign to gain a burgess seat in the 1604 parliament. Again Jones was forced to preserve his hold on the diocesan post. As Machen complained, his foe only stood for parliament upon being tipped off by Bishop Goldsborough that the registry, along with its ‘lease belonging to the see of Gloucester, the state whereof and of all other leases of that nature and quality’, were to be examined by the Commons. What grieved Machen, prompting his suit in Star Chamber, were the tactics employed by the registrar to defeat his candidacy. It was claimed that Jones with his family and certain officials from the consistory court – backed by Goldsborough – had intimidated the Machen camp by packing the city with ‘great numbers of strangers and others such as had no voice in the same election’, who were entertained at Jones’s expense ‘in several Inns, Taverns and Alehouses there drinking and carousing in very disorderly manner’, being rallied with shouts of ‘Jones for burgess’.10 With such clamours Jones carried the day. church bells were rung and more drink laid on for his supporters, who to rub victory in their opponents’ faces were told to approach the mayor and aldermen and ‘shout even to their very faces Jones, Jones for a burgess’. It was very personal. But this was far from the end of the story, since we learn of further ‘oppressions, riots, unlawful assemblyes, assaults, [and] affrayes’, committed by Jones and his sons against Thomas Ryche in 1604, the year of Ryche’s mayoralty. Contention arose over Ryche’s contribution to the city’s fee-farm rent, which Jones believed the mayor was reluctant to pay. Mustering the sheriffs once again, Jones seized ‘divers goods, wares and merchandise’ from Ryche’s shop by way of distraint, significantly on the same day as Ryche was about to relinquish the mayoralty. Jones’s partner on this occasion was Alderman John Payne. No friend of the mayor, Ryche and Payne had been engaged in a bitter feud for thirteen years over the latter’s right to keep ‘an auncient tennys court’ at his Gloucester inn. Ryche ordered the court’s closure. But facing continued resistance, he had 9 PRO, REQ 2/163/9; F. D. Price, ‘Bishop Bullingham and Chancellor Blackleech: a Diocese Divided’, TBGAS, 91 (1972), pp. 192–3. 10 PRO, STAC 8/4/9; 207/25; J. K. Gruenfelder, ‘Gloucester’s Parliamentary Elections, 1604–40’, TBGAS, 96 (1978), pp. 54–5.

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Payne bound over at Quarter Sessions before taking the matter to the Council of the Marches and finally to Star Chamber.11 Whether the anti-tennis court group of Ryche and Machen belonged, on Jones’s reckoning, to ‘that schismaticall faction of the puritans’ remains to be seen. 12 For Jones’s part, he came to view his role as a pillar of local diocesan administration with increasing intensity; in turn he celebrated his office holding on his monument – completed under his direction prior to his death in 1631 – which still adorns the west wall of Gloucester cathedral. Surrounding his effigy are depicted the tools of his profession, namely parchments and quills. Presumably, Laud would have found much to commend in a tough ecclesiastical bureaucrat after his own heart, while Jones’s decision to site his monument looking east towards the sanctuary of Gloucester cathedral may indicate affinity with the altar-centred vision of Laudian piety. Did Jones die a convinced anti-Calvinist? As an intriguing codicil, Jones’s son Henry, who became registrar at his death, came to be investigated by the High Commission in 1635 for his alleged recusancy, possibly as a result of having espoused anti-predestinarian views.13 Laud’s reforms at Gloucester stirred up tumult amid an already fractious local political scene. But what of the course of religious affairs in London, where the wealth of extant parish records and vestry minutes – unrivalled by any other English town for the early modern period – permits a unique insight into the impact of Laudianism at a parochial level within the capital? Not all Londoners perceived the demands of altar reform in the 1630s in a negative vein. As recent scholarship suggests, there were clear precedents in some London churches – alongside parishes within the neighbouring vill of Westminster – for later communion arrangements favoured by the Laudians.14 In the city, a nascent ceremonialism certainly radiated from the metropolitan cathedral. For example, as David Crankshaw has pointed out, showing reverence to a communion table set eastwards in the sanctuary was performed by the canons and vicars choral at St Paul’s from the 1560s. This practice was enforced aggressively within the entire church during the 1630s. But the ceremony was significant point given the conversion – trumpeted by Laud and Wren – of the communion table into a railed altar at St Giles Cripplegate, under Lancelot Andrewes’s direction in the 1590s. St Giles lay within the

11 PRO, STAC 8/4/8; 4/9. The Joneses and the Paynes were allies, Robert Payne witnessing John Jones’s will in 1629, PRO, PROB 11/159, fo. 293v. 12 Thomas Ryche was a staunch Calvinist, being assured of his place ‘amongest the number of the elect’, at his death in 1607, see PRO, PROB 11/110, fo. 215v. Belief in election did not make him a puritan. Thomas Machen did not repeat this bequest in his 1614 will, trusting ‘assuredlie’ to receive everlasting life through Christ’s passion, PROB 11/124, fo. 160v. 13 PRO, PROB 11/159, fo. 293v; SP 16/308/22, fo. 39. 14 MacCulloch, Tudor church Militant, pp. 210–12, has traced the first stirrings of ceremonialist churchmanship to a ‘Westminster Movement’ centred on the abbey and its neighbouring parish of St Margaret’s.

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peculiar jurisdiction of St Paul’s, while Andrewes held a prebendal stall at the cathedral from 1589.15 It seems possible that receiving communion at the rails before a table orientated ‘altar-wise’ was customary in some London parishes prior to the ceremony’s widespread implementation in the 1630s.16 This is not to downplay the divisive potential that the Laudian package held for worshippers in the city. A celebrated case relates to the impact of the altar policy within All Hallows Barking, the first London parish to present its minister Edward Layfield – the archdeacon of Essex and Laud’s nephew – for ceremonial innovations to the Long Parliament in 1640. Layfield had arrived in the parish in 1635. Yet the main bone of contention for the godly within the vestry centred on a beautification scheme, conducted between 1637 and 1639, which had seen the removal of the communion table to an altarwise position at the east end as well as the adornment of the chancel. Layfield was blamed for insisting on such novelties, which had followed on from earlier church restoration along non-Laudian lines.17 But reacting against godly complaint, the minister found a core of support from among the vestry, headed by Marmaduke Rawdon, a successful merchant with court connections, who was later knighted by the king for his defence of Basing House during the Civil War. Rawdon was especially active in beautifying All Hallows throughout the 1630s. Moreover, he also served as a patron to other churches, having previously in 1625 donated a stained-glass window – sadly no longer extant – to St Giles-in-the-Fields.18 Rawdon died intestate, leaving no further clues as to his religious outlook. However, it would be interesting to learn whether the Caroline church found other lay benefactors of Rawdon’s stamp from among the capital’s great and good, allowing us to speak of the emergence of civic Laudianism in London with more confidence. All Hallow’s Barking furnishes an example of a parish vestry split along confessional fault lines by 1640. Moving west to England’s third city, Bristol, it is likely that religious developments had helped to exacerbate ideological rifts evident in the port during the Civil War, as rival Royalist and Parliamentarian gangs paraded the streets wearing different coloured ribbons in

15 D. Crankshaw, ‘Community, City and Nation, 1540–1714’, in D. Keene et al. (eds), St Paul’s: the Cathedral church of London 604–2004 (New Haven, 2004), pp. 53–4; N. Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism’, in Lake and Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English church, pp. 20–1. 16 Wren was keen to cite the pre-existence of communion rails at ‘sundry’ churches in London. Besides St Margaret’s, Westminister and St Giles Cripplegate, already discussed, he also noted the cases of St Martin-in-the-Fields, St Michael Crooked Lane and St Saviour’s. See Parentalia, p. 77. 17 Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament: House of Commons Vol. I (New Haven, 2002), pp. 239–40, 260, 288–90. I am grateful to Kenneth Fincham for details of this fascinating parochial dispute. 18 PRO, SP 16/503/111; H. F. Killick, ‘Memoirs of Sir Marmaduke Rawden, Kt, 1582–1646’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 25 (1920), pp. 315–30.

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their hats to denote their allegiance.19 David Harris Sacks has written of the rise of a Laudian party in Bristol politics in the 1620s and 1630s. Yet Harris Sacks’s definition of ‘Laudianism’ is opaque, while he has offered a confusing thesis linking support for the Caroline church with the socially conservative values of the monopolistic Merchant Venturers’ Company. Puritanism, on the other hand, was embraced by Bristol’s ‘anti-monopolistic’ lesser shopkeepers and artisans.20 One of the officials on Harris Sacks’s list was Alderman Robert Aldworth, the founder of Bristol’s first sugar refinery and a kinsman of Laud, who favoured church beautification in his will. Certainly, Aldworth made a bequest towards the restoration of Wantage church in Berkshire, presumably the alderman’s native parish. Whether he intended this legacy to be spent on a Laudian design is unclear, while his hope of salvation ‘not by any meritts or deserts of myne owne’ does not single him out as an anti-Calvinist.21 However, Aldworth had acted as godfather to a son of Thomas Tucker BD. A graduate of Laud’s college of St John’s, Oxford, Tucker was an ally of Laud during the future archbishop’s incumbency of Bath and Wells diocese, Laud collating the minister to a prebendal stall at Wells cathedral in 1627. Tucker also served the rectories of Portishead and Long Ashton, hard by Bristol, from where he was ejected in 1646. In all likelihood, Tucker was a firm ceremonialist whose religious outlook found synergy with that of Alderman Aldsworth, Tucker finally gaining a post at the heart of civic affairs, becoming a prebendary of Bristol in 1632.22 Aldworth fought a contested election for the mayoralty in 1626 against Christopher Whitson, a would-be rival in the sugar refining business. But as well as being motivated to keep a potential contender for trade from power, Aldworth’s challenge may have owed something to his religious perspective, given that Whitson belonged to a group of puritan conventiclers in Bristol. Whitson’s brother-in-law, Matthew Warren, ran for mayor in 1633, but was successfully blocked by Aldworth.23 It would be interesting to learn whether religious developments permeated proceedings in 1626 and 1633, especially in light of what William Prynne later described as a ‘great contestation’ in the city in the late 1620s. If Prynne’s account is to be trusted, tensions arose from Bishop Robert Wright’s moves to erect images in Bristol cathedral and other city parishes. Although Wright – bishop of Bristol, 1623–32 – has been 19 Cited in R. Howell, ‘Neutralism, Conservatism and Political Alignment in the English Revolution: the Case of the Towns, 1642–9’, in J. Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649 (Basingstoke, 1982), p. 72. 20 D. Harris Sacks, ‘Bristol’s “Wars of Religion” ’, in R. C. Richardson (ed.), Town and Countryside in the English Revolution (Manchester, 1992), pp. 100–29, especially pp. 113–14, 116–17. 21 Ibid, p. 116 and idem, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 66–7, 76, 234, 412; PRO, PROB 11/167, fos 21r–2r, will of Robert Aldworth, proved in 1635, which names kinsfolk in Wantage. 22 PRO, PROB 11/167, fo. 22r; E 331/Bath&Wells/2 and 3; J. Foster, Alumni Oxoniensis, 1500–1714 (4 vols, Oxford, 1891–2), IV, p. 1515; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), p. 321. 23 Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate, pp. 214, 221–2, 234, 412.

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depicted as a model, if somewhat avaricious, Jacobean preaching pastor, as Prynne observed he soon turned his coat to become ‘a great Innovator and maintainer of Superstitious Ceremonies at Bristoll to humour Canterbury’.24 In doing so Wright clashed with the city steward, George Salterne, as well as the dean of Bristol, Edward Chetwynd, who was also the corporation’s divinity lecturer and a luminary within west country teaching circles.25 Even on his own testimony to Laud, Wright professed his pride in having ‘got all the churches in the citty so well repaired and beautified, that I dare say noe parish in London excells them’; he also recalled how he had procured ‘organs to be set up in seven of those parish churches there and the meanes to maintain the organist in three or four of those’.26 What was Robert Aldworth’s take on this diocesan’s initiative to transform the sights and sounds of worship within Bristol? For Bristolians, as for Norwich’s citizens, the appropriate setting of worship was a lively issue prior to the Personal Rule, when between 1637 and 1641 the diocese came to be administered by Bishop Robert Skinner, one of Laud’s protégés and a vocal champion of the ideals of the Caroline church.27 Did Skinner find a lay constituency similar to that raised by Wren in Norwich? At least one civic official, Alderman Henry Yate, was comfortable with the emerging decorous ceremonial atmosphere in Bristol, which had been forged in the Wright era. Drawing up his will in 1636, he echoed his former diocesan’s penchant for elaborate church music. Leaving money for ‘the maintenance of one experte and skillfull musician to laud and praise God upon the organs in Christchurch’, Bristol, Yate envisaged a Sunday service interspersed with musical interludes ‘to move and stirr up the peoples affections more cheerfully’, music having been employed ‘in the most flourishing and peaceable estate of the church, both before and since the Incarnation of our Saviour Jesus Christ’.28 Were the godly of Yate’s parish equally well-disposed towards organ voluntaries?

24

William Prynne, The Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacie (1641), II, p. 313. Regrettably, Harris Sacks sheds no light on this ‘great contestation’. For Wright’s reputation, see K. Fincham, ‘Episcopal Government, 1603–1640’, in K. Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), p. 87; ODNB, ‘Robert Wright (1560–1643)’; BLTT, E 200 (2), A Speech Spoken in the House of Commons by . . . Robert Lord Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Being brought to the Barre to Answer for Himself (1641). 25 Prynne, The Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacie, II, p. 313. For George Salterne’s godliness, see his praise ‘de speculo Pietatis’ of William Est ‘preacher of God’s word’ of Est’s, The right rule of a religious life (1616), STC 10536. ODNB, ‘Edward Chetwynd (1577–1639)’ and the dedication to Chetwynd among other ‘respected friends and brethren in the ministry’ in Richard Bernard, The faithfull shepherd . . . very much inlarged (1621), STC 1941. 26 PRO, SP 16/351/38, Wright to Laud, 29 Mar 1637. 27 Robert Skinner, The Speech of Dr Robert Skinner, Lord Bishop of Bristol, at the Visitation of Dorchester, September 18 1637 (1744); BL, Add MS 20065, fos 37r–44r; Prynne, The Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacie, II, p. 313; ODNB, ‘Robert Skinner (1591–1670)’. 28 PRO, PROB 11/173, fo. 213v. Yate’s son-in-law Alderman John Taylor became an ardent royalist, who joined the king at Oxford and was killed defending Bristol against Fairfax and Cromwell in 1645. See Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate, pp. 237–8.

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Moving to the Herefordshire borough of Leominster in the 1630s, we find another patron of florid church music – with an equally florid name – Wallop Brabazon, a justice of the peace within the town. Unfortunately for Brabazon, his reputation remains blackened. His conduct comes to us from an account penned by his enemies, namely an undated petition sent to Parliament by ‘the burgesses of the corporation of Leominister’, which is now deposited among Sir Robert Harley’s papers in the British Library. From the allegation made in this document, Brabazon, the brother of an Irish earl, seemingly fits to a tee the stereotype of the Laudian–royalist Cavalier. Although endorsed by only one signature, that of Edward Dalley – who was later dubbed a roundhead by his adversaries in Leominster – Brabazon had gone to great lengths to intimidate other townsmen during the Personal Rule from the time of Laud’s metropolitical visitation in 1636. Serving as churchwarden that year, he complied with Nathaniel Brent’s orders to reposition the communion table railed altarwise at the east end. However, Brabazon was an enthusiast for the new ceremonial arrangements, going further to procure an enactment from Brent for an organist’s salary to be paid out of the parish stock. An organist was duly entertained in Brabazon’s house to teach his children music. More disconcerting for the ‘honest religious’ of the parish was Brabazon’s licensing of a servant to keep an alehouse and bowling green near the town, ‘to the great hinderance and unthriftines of a greate many as well servants as poore househoulders, [by] causing the lords day to be profanely spent gaming and drinking all the time of divine service and sermon’. While his servant bowled on the Sabbath, Brabazon allegedly kept company with ‘excommunicated papists’ at ‘his house, table and ells where’.29 Animosity also stemmed from disputes over common rights, with Brabazon being accused of grazing cows and pigs, ‘which are not commonable creatures’, on land belonging to the town, while ‘impounding the cattle of the true owners thereof’. He then used family ties with Lord Keeper John Finch to halt the borough’s complaints. Similarly, he also employed his local standing with the high sheriff of Herefordshire to become ship money assessor for Leominster and ‘a forward man’ in urging payments. But there was more to this tale than cattle rustling and tax collecting. Another part of the equation in this ongoing feud was the vicar of Leominister, the not-yet baptist minister John Tombes, who had been presented to the cure – a crown living – in 1630.30 He provided the other half of a stressful relationship. Attached to Sir Robert Harley’s godly circle in north Herefordshire, Tombes

29 J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: the Harleys of Brampton Brian and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), p. 106 ; BL, Add MS 70086/74 for the Leominster petition, and Add MS 70106, fo. 165r for Edward Dalley. 30 BL, Add MS 70086/74; PRO, E 331/Hereford/9, 17 Nov 1630; A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), pp. 487–8 for Tombes’s career.

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did not shrink from his task of bringing the Gospel to Leominster, a borough that nestled in a region labelled, according to puritan polemic, ‘a dark corner’ of the land. Harley also found Leominster church in need of urgent Reform. Passing through the borough in October 1641, he left orders to the churchwardens to remove ‘one crucifix upon the great stone cross there, and another crucifix of stone over the church porch’, along with ‘other scandalous pictures’ in the surrounding stained-glass windows.31 Tombes’s decision to revert the communion table ‘table-wise’ and disuse the surplice and the sign of the cross in baptism, was said to have ‘nettled the ignorant and superstitious’. Obviously ‘nettled’ more than most was Wallop Brabazon, who declared himself to be ‘an adversary to preaching’, and threatened his vicar for ‘disturbing our election of churchwardens, as not brooking the choice of anyone that is zealous for religion’.32 Yet others within Leominster shared Brabazon’s fears. One enthusiastic group, led by a tanner of the town, even boasted that they had ‘brought four muskets to kill puritans’. They refused to perform the town watch, since it might offer puritans protection. When the crunch came on 31 July 1642, Brabazon had little trouble in mustering volunteers to force The King’s Answer to the Parliament’s Petition to be proclaimed by the minister in Leominster church. Brabazon intended to press Tombes into declaring Charles’s ultimatum. But Tombes was conspicuously absent, the service being taken by Matthew Clarke, rector of Bitterly, Shropshire, who narrowly escaped being cudgelled to the ground by Brabazon’s supporters for refusing to read the pamphlet.33 Events in Leominster reveal an extreme case of religious divisions between the godly and their opponents, which fed into the drawing of allegiance in 1642. However, confessional discord was made more acute by the caustic mix of an irrepressible nonconformist, Tombes, and a Laudian protagonist, in the shape of Wallop Brabazon.34 Both were prepared to ‘up the ante’ amid the struggle for the Reformation that characterised the 1630s. As the Laudian establishment heightened godly antipathy towards the episcopalian church, mutual antagonism was provoked by the Laudian church’s success in raising fears of puritan subterfuge to undermine authority within both church and state. Moving further north, we can detect the same splitting of public opinion in Chester on the eve of the Civil War. Incidentally, championing the ‘reformed’ cause was to be found a cousin of Sir Robert Harley, the purposefully named Calvin Bruen of Bruen Stapleford, a mercer 31 Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, pp. 106, 115–16; BL, Add MS 70003, fo. 162r for Harley’s orders touching Leominster church. 32 BL, Add MS 70003, fo. 92r, Tombes to Harley, 3 Jan 1642. 33 Ibid, fo. 106v; BL, Add MS 70106, fo. 165r; Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, pp. 156–8. 34 However, as Ian Atherton has pointed out, Brabazon changed tack in March 1642, calling for Hereford cathedral to be purged of copes, candlesticks and the high altar. See I. Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: the Career of John, First Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, 1999), p. 223.

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of Chester and sometime sheriff of the city. Bruen could claim an impressive godly pedigree as the son of the iconoclast John Bruen.35 Calvin was also the grandson of Alderman Henry Hardware – ’a godly and zealous man’ according to a later chronicler – who as mayor in 1599 had aroused much local opposition by prohibiting certain ‘oulde customs’ in causing ‘the giants which use to go at Midsummer to be broken’ and ‘the bull ringe at the high cross to be taken down’. The giants, part of Chester’s traditional midsummer pageant, were promptly restored by the next mayor.36 Bruen’s bitterness towards the bishops was sharpened upon being imprisoned and fined, after being proceeded against by Bishop John Bridgeman, the York High Commission, and finally the Privy Council, for having entertained William Prynne – en route to Caernarvon Castle – in the summer of 1637. Bruen’s sufferings are well-documented. For resorting to hold ‘extemporary prayers and repetitions with Mr Prynne, as also for procuring the picture of the said Mr Prynne to be drawn by a limer in Chester’, Bruen was enjoined to make public confession, alongside his confrères, in Chester Cathedral and before the corporation in the Common Hall, under Bridgeman’s gaze. The portraits were produced. However, to halt further local sympathy being shown towards Prynne, the pictures were promptly seized by the pursuivants – by order of the York High Commission – and consigned to a bonfire before Chester High cross amid shouts of ‘burn them, burn them’.37 Bruen took the Scots’ part after 1638. On his own account, he acquired a copy of Alexander Leighton’s anti-episcopal Sions plea against the prelacie as soon as it appeared in print. With the meeting of the Long Parliament, he got up a local petition calling for root and branch Reform of the church.38 In this endeavour, Bruen counted on the backing of the Protestant ‘patriot’ party among the county gentry led by Sir Richard Grosvenor and Sir Richard Wilbraham – a relative of the Hardwares and

35

P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), p. 167; BL, Harl MS 165, fos 21r–3r. For John Bruen’s notoriety in ridding Tarvin church of superstitious idols, see M. Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660’, in C. Durston and J. Eales, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 100–2. Aston draws heavily upon William Hinde, A Faithfull Remembrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen (1641), pp. 78–80, which places an obvious hagiographic gloss on Bruen’s image-breaking, suggesting that he acted on the authority of a special commission from the crown. On the other hand, his organised wrecking spree of Cheshire’s stone crosses earlier in 1615 lacked similar sanction, leading to his prosecution in Star Chamber: PRO, STAC 8/21/6. 36 Hinde, A Faithfull Remembrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen, pp. 24, 98, which states that the Hardware family often came ‘to be tabled’ at Bruen Stapleford; BL, Harl MS 2125, fo. 45r for Hardware’s mayoralty, discussed in P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 54–5. 37 Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660’, pp. 109–10; PRO, SP 16/367/18, 367/101; William Prynne, A New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny (1641), pp. 92–7, 101–8, 219–24; idem, The Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacie, II, pp. 290–1; BL, Harl MS 165, fos 21r–3r; StaffsRO, D1287/P/399/58. 38 S. Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground (Hamden, Conn., 1978), pp. 30–9; CJ, II, pp. 89, 123.

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Bruens – who ensured that the petition was passed to another future radical Parliamentarian, the member for Cheshire, Sir William Brereton, who read the petition to the House of Commons in February 1641.39 Bruen’s efforts provoked a reaction from Brereton’s rival Thomas Aston, who engaged in a spirited defence of episcopacy, by petitioning Parliament. But Aston’s effectiveness as a campaigner for the established church was reliant upon his sources on the ground in Cheshire.40 The most outspoken and incensed of Aston’s correspondents was a Chester lawyer, John Werden. Werden was attached to the local pro-ceremonialist and crypto-Catholic faction commanded by Viscount Cholmondeley and Earl Rivers, of which Aston himself was clearly a part.41 From his various letters to Aston, Werden also revealed himself as an ardent Laudian. Certainly, Werden detested Calvin Bruen’s backers among the ‘popular patriots’ of Cheshire’, deploring such perfidious displays of nonconformity as that acted by Mr Boden – curate of Wydenbury and a ‘notorious adulterer’ – who passed over the absolution, litany and ‘proper lessons or psalmes for the day, and the psalmes he did reade he would not reade them out of the service book but the bible’. When Boden came to the Creed, he doctored ‘I believe in the holy Ghost, the holy Catholic church’ to read ‘I beleeve there is a Catholique church’. Werden was equally scandalised by reports of the iconoclasm inflicted on Neston church by Sir William Brereton’s niece, who gave instructions ‘to take downe some painted auncyent Imagery which was in the Glasse wyndowes’. When the minister refused, the redoubtable lady sent her man round to finish the job. This was deeply wounding to Werden’s sensibilities, as one who ‘loves decency, order and good discipline’ in the church– surely an obvious Laudian ‘tag’.42 But how many like-minded worshippers were there in Werden’s circle? Were other Chester inhabitants similarly attached to the ideals of the Caroline church, whose ‘Laudianism’ developed from an intense dislike of Bruen’s godly coterie, and who subscribed to the pro-episcopacy petition gathered in Cheshire by Aston’s associates in January and February 1641?43 Surely members of the civic elite helped to shop Bruen in 1637? 39 R. Cust and P. Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Rhetoric of Magistracy’, BIHR, 54 (1981), pp. 40–51; P. Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641’, in T. Cogswell et al. (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 260–1. Hinde, A Faithfull Remembrance, p. 97 recalled how Grosvenor was ‘transplanted’ and brought up in John Bruen’s household. For ties between Wilbraham and the Hardwares, see PRO, PROB 11/121, fo. 269r, will of Henry Hardware, junior, proved in 1613. 40 Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions’, pp. 259–89. 41 Ibid, p. 260. Werden’s links with Cholmondeley and Rivers are also revealed in his will, written in July 1645 and proved a year later, which named Thomas Cholmondeley esq. as executor and records the gilt bowl and cover ‘given me by my now good Lord, the Earle Rivers’. See Cheshire and Chester Archives and Local Studies, WS 1645. This document was strangely overlooked by Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, p. 155. 42 PRO, SP 16/448/43 and 449/4, John Werden to Thomas Smyth, 20 and 27 Mar 1640; BL, Add MS 36914, fos 214v–15v, John Werden to Sir Thomas Aston, sent after Good Friday 1641. 43 Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions’, pp. 274–7.

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Moreover, given the large turnout for the burning of Prynne’s portrait, anti-puritan and potentially pro-ceremonialist sympathies may have run deep in Chester.44 Such emotions were likely to have been honed upon witnessing Bruen’s public admission of guilt; a purgative moment for the entire urban community. We await a more satisfactory prosopographical narrative of the religious scene in the parish of early Stuart Chester, as we do for the examples of Gloucester, London, Bristol and Leominster cited here. Such work will add depth to the tensions between the godly and their opponents, which was given a pernicious edge from the late 1620s. By applying the microscope to politics in early Stuart towns, we can discern a range of squabbles among lay parishioners over the fate of the Reformation in England, of no less interest than the local disputes that accompanied the first stirrings of Protestant evangelism under the Tudors. Conceivably, further study will unearth other potential lay supporters of the Caroline church, who shared equal responsibility with their puritan adversaries for inflaming religious passions by 1640. Indeed, it is likely that such figures lurked within other civic corporations, all too readily classified as exclusive cliques of godly Calvinist oligarchs, who were intent upon transforming their boroughs into cities set on their respective hills across the landscape of early Stuart England. There is much more work to do. But there is every indication that there are other similar urban-based internecine struggles in the 1620s and 1630s to find.

44 It is worth speculating on the religious tastes of Robert Sproston, mayor in 1638, a former chorister of Chester cathedral, whom Laud praised as ‘discreet’ for ending the ‘schism’ with the dean and chapter over seating arrangements in the cathedral choir. See PRO, SP 16/404/5; StaffsRO, D1287/P/399/176. Equally, what of the outlook of Alderman Randle Holme junior (1601–59) – chronicler of Chester – who became an energetic royalist in the 1640s? See ODNB, entry for his father Randle Holme, 1571–1655.

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WILLIAMS, Neville, J., The Maritime Trade of the East Anglian Ports 1550–1590 (Oxford, 1988) —— ‘The Risings in Norfolk, 1569 and 1570’, NA, 32 (1961), pp. 73–81 —— Thomas Howard Fourth Duke of Norfolk (1964) WOOD, Andy, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002) WRIGHT, S. J. (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1330–1750 (1988) WRIGHTSON, Keith and LEVINE, David, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1995) YULE, George, ‘James VI and I: Furnishing the Churches in his Two Kingdoms’, in A. Fletcher and P. Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 182–208 Unpublished Thesis

COBY, D. J., ‘St Andrew’s, Norwich 1550–1730: Parochial Prestige in an Urban Context’, University of East Anglia M.A., 1992 GOTH, G. J. A., ‘Croakers, Tackers and Other Citizens: Norwich Voters in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Stanford University Ph.D., 1985 KING, Peter, ‘Matthew Wren, Bishop of Hereford, Norwich and Ely, 1585–1667’, University of Bristol D.Phil., 1969 OWENS, Gary Lynn, ‘Norfolk 1620–1641: Local Government and Central Authority in an East Anglian County’, University of Wisconsin Ph.D., 1970 RICKWOOD, D. L., ‘The Origin and Decline of the Stranger Community of Norwich (with Special Reference to the Dutch Congregation) 1565–1700’, University of East Anglia M.A., 1967 SHIPPS, Kenneth W., ‘Lay Patronage of East Anglian Puritan Clerics in Pre-Revolutionary England’, Yale University Ph.D., 1971 TYACK, Norman C. P., ‘Migration from East Anglia to New England before 1660’, University of London Ph.D., 1951

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Abbot, George, Archbishop 117 and the 1624 Parliament 121, 122, 133 and Norwich sede vacante business 167–8 Acle, Norfolk 66, 69 Agas, Edward 226 Ailmer, John, Bishop 87 Ainsworth, Edward 102 Ainsworth, Henry 93, 99 Alanson, William 127, 129, 152, 191, 195–7, 198, 211–12, 221–2, 224, 225, 237, 238, 242, 245, 250 Alburgh, Norfolk 66 Aldeby, Norfolk 53 Aldrich, John, Alderman 44–7, 51, 53, 56–7, 62, 82–3, 200 Protestantism of 44–5, 56–7, 60–1, 64, 75, 89, 253 and social welfare reform 57–9 Aldrich family 44–6, 82–3, 91, 200 Aldrich, Henry 47 Aldrich, Thomas, Archdeacon 47 Aldrich, Thomas, royalist 245 Aldworth, Robert, of Bristol 261, 262 Allen, David Grayson 223 Allen, John, separatist 89, 90 Allen, Robert, Alderman 221–2, 225, 230, 231 Allen, Thomas, minister 191, 192, 209, 218–23, 224, 225, 227, 231 altars Bishop Harsnett accused of endorsing 134–5, 148, 206 railing of in Norwich 102, 122, 152, 188–190, 212, 221, 231–2, 240–1 opposition to altar policy 5, 123, 189–91, 220–1, 231–4, 260, 264 restoration of 5, 150–2, 153, 187, 189–90, 204, 212, 255, 257, 259–60 see also communion rails; communion tables; Norwich, St Edmund’s;

Norwich, St Gregory’s, Norwich, St Peter Mancroft Alva, Duke of 51 Alvey, Henry 81 Ames, William 104, 227 Amsterdam, city of 93, 97, 118, 163, 169, 220 separatist church in 93, 99, 100 Anabaptists/Baptists 52, 71, 74, 99, 100, 220, 243, 263 see also Caine, Thomas, Heydon, Sir William, Smyth, John; Tombes, John Andrewes, Lancelot, Bishop 15, 259–60 Anguish, Alexander, Alderman 134, 199, 203, 206, 246–7 Anguish, Edmund, clerk of the peace 116, 202–6 Anguish family 200–7 Laudianism of 200, 204–6, 213, 255 royalism of 206–7, 245, 247 see also, Great Melton Anguish, John, Alderman 199–200, 202, 206, 245 Anguish, Richard, clergyman 204, 206–7 Anguish, Thomas (senior), Alderman 200–2, 206 Antwerp, city of 49 Appleyard, Sir John 54 Archer, Ian 32, 60 Arches, court of 200, 226 Arians/Arianism 86–8 see also Cole, Peter, Hamont, Matthew, Kett, Francis, Lewes, John Armiger, John 230 Arminianism/anti-Calvinism 4–6, 81–2, 85, 105, 124, 159–60, 161, 168, 177–82, 183, 208, 224–5, 233, 247–8, 254–5, 257, 259 see also Chappell, John; Laudianism; predestination, doctrines of

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Arminius, Jacobus, 105, 179, 181–2, 183 Armitage, Timothy 249 Arundel and Surrey, Thomas Howard, Earl of 112–13, 114, 159, 203–4, 211 Ashley, John, minister 164 Assington, Suffolk 173, 184 Aston, Sir Thomas 14, 266 Atherton, Ian 127 Atkin, Thomas, Alderman 133, 155, 159, 162–3, 197, 209, 211, 218, 231, 234–5, 237 Augustine, Saint 71–3 Avys, Jeames 147–8 Aylsham, Norfolk 79, 89–90, 91, 93 Babington Plot 79 Bacon, Francis, of Norwich 147 Bacon, Lady Jane 170 Bacon, Sir Nathaniel 74, 120, 192 Baconsthorpe, Norfolk 74 Badingham, Suffolk 194 Baker, Nicholas 195 Baker, Thomas, Alderman 194–5, 197–9, 211, 230 Baldwin, Henry, clergyman 119 Baldwyn, John, royalist 243 Bale, John 40 Baillie, Robert 125 Bancroft, John, Bishop 168 Bancroft, Richard, Archbishop 87–8, 112 Barber, Thomas, Alderman 198, 199, 246 Barker, Robert 90 Barking, Essex 104 Barnard, John 143–4 Baron, Robert, Alderman 246 Barret, Christopher, Alderman 188, 238, 239 Barret, Dr John 40–1, 45 Barret, William 81 Barrow, Henry 88, 92–3, 94 Baskerville, Thomas 30 Baxter, Richard 8–9, 17 Bayfield, George 204 beards, pastoral 64–5 Beaumond, Thomas, Alderman 57 Beeston, Norfolk 103, 114 bell inscriptions 141 bell ringing 45, 52, 141, 211 Benton, John 165, 171 Bernard, George 6 Bernard, Richard 99 Bertie, Francis 83 Bertius, Peter 179, 181

Betham, Westmorland 64 Bildeston, Suffolk 164 Bilney, Thomas 40 Bilsthorpe, Nottinghamshire 180 Birch, George, Alderman 84–5, 120 Bird, Henry 89 Blackwood, B. G. 250 Blomefield, Francis 51, 66, 142, 149n, 245 Boden, Mr, minister 266 Bohemia, Elizabeth Queen of 187 Bonner, Edmund, Bishop 71 Book of Common Prayer 8–9, 12–14, 70, 75, 76, 77–8, 83, 116, 138, 144, 145, 153, 161, 204, 225, 241, 256 puritan objections to 70, 73–5, 77–8, 83, 89–90, 101, 102, 104, 184, 219, 266 see also ‘parish Anglicans’; ‘Prayer Book Protestants’ Book of Homilies 126 Book of Sports 8, 11, 169, 191n, 224 Booton, Norfolk 91 Boston, Massachusetts 221, 224, 225 Bowde, Simon, Alderman 57 Bowes, Lady Elizabeth 99 Bowes, Sir William 99 Bownd, Nicholas 77, 84, 103, 177 bowing at the name of Jesus 80, 133 puritan objections to 80, 136, 154, 169, 184, 219 Brabazon, Wallop, of Leominster 263–4 Brachlow, Stephen 98, 99 Bradshaw, Mr, separatist 94 Braiseworth, Norfolk 79 Bramstone, Norfolk 73 Brayser, Adam, separatist 96 Brent, Sir Nathaniel 188, 189, 263 Brereton, Sir William 266 Bridge, William 162, 165–8, 176–7, 180, 184–5, 187, 188, 191–2, 194, 195, 196, 202, 212, 231, 249 as pastor of the Rotterdam church 171, 192, 218, 220, 227–9, 230 and the Tombland lectureship 168–9, 173–4, 176–9, 182–3, 194, 223, 255 Bridgeman, John, Bishop 172, 265 Brisley, Norfolk 205 Bristol, bishops of, see Skinner, Robert; Wright, Robert Bristol, city of 80 religious controversy in 260–2

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see also Aldworth, Robert; Chetwynd, Edward; Prynne, William; Salterne, George Brome, Edmund, minister 191, 193 Brome Hall, Suffolk 170 Browne, John, church historian 20, 24 Browne, Robert, separatist 20, 88–9, 90–1, 92, 95, 200, 254 Browne, Sir Thomas 207–8 Browne, Thomas, rector of Great Melton 205 Browne, Thomas, yeoman 205 Browne, William, Alderman 115–16, 128, 139, 199, 207–8, 213, 255 Brownists, see separatists/separatism Bruen, Calvin, of Chester 264–7 Bruen, John, of Bruen Stapleford 265 Bruges, city of 26 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of 113, 114 Bullinger, Heinrich 43 Bullingham, John, Bishop 258 Burgess, John 78–9, 116 Burgess, Walter 97 Burghley, Lord, see Cecil, Sir William Burne or Browne, Alice 95 Burnham, John 191, 193 Burrage, Champlin 88, 97 Burroughs, Jeremiah 169–70, 171 Burton, Henry 200, 230 Burton, William 63–4, 79–80, 86–8 Works: Davids evidence (1592) 86–8; A sermon preached in the cathedral church in Norwich (1590) 80 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk 17, 42, 175, 190 religious ‘stirs’ in 88 Caine, Thomas, separatist 100–1, 105, 107 Calvin, John 77, 82 Calvinists/Calvinism 4–5, 15, 39, 68, 70, 73, 81–2, 84, 104, 105, 121–2, 125, 145, 161, 163, 165, 167, 174–5, 177–8, 179, 181, 182, 183, 199, 202, 206, 209–10, 233, 247, 254, 261 see also, predestination, doctrines of Cambers, Andrew 181 Cambridge, John 60 Cambridge, town of 244, 245, 246 Cambridge University 31, 43, 70, 81, 87, 90, 98, 99, 104–5, 113, 173, 180, 210–11

colleges in Christ’s 64, 68, 81, 84, 179, 180 Clare 144 Corpus Christi 45, 47, 64, 87, 88, 89, 97, 200, 206 Emmanuel 98, 104, 119, 165, 168, 169, 173, 179, 218 Gonville and Caius 144, 169, 204, 209 Pembroke 113–14, 138 Peterhouse 68 St John’s 81, 210 Canons, ecclesiastical 103, 145, 174, 191, 193, 220 Canterbury, Kent 50 Carleton Rode, Norfolk 136 Carter, John (junior) 191, 193–4, 195, 231, 238–9, 250 Carter, John (senior) 193 Cartwright, Thomas 70, 92 Carver, Thomas, Alderman 199, 239, 240 Carver, Thomas, minister 191 Cary, Valentine, Bishop 179 Case, Thomas 171–2 Castle Acre, Norfolk 164 Castle Hedingham, Essex 71 catechisms/catechising 68–9, 80, 83, 84–5, 107, 121n, 122, 126–7, 135, 138n, 191 Catelyn, Richard 164–5, 237–8 cathedral cities as centres of Laudianism 18, 257, 259–62, 265–7 Catholics/Catholicsim 11–12, 23–4, 39–40, 60–1, 73, 112, 121, 126, 130, 137–8, 141–2, 145, 148–9, 173, 202, 205, 212, 232, 241, 253–4, 257, 259, 263 see also church papists; Cornwallis, Sir Thomas (senior); Norfolk, county of, recusants in; Norwich city of, Catholic plots in; Norwich city of, charity in; Norwich city of, recusants in; Purgatory, doctrine of Cawston, Norfolk 73, 164 Cecil, Sir William 71, 74–5, 87 Chaderton, William, Bishop 78 Chambers, John 90 Chancery, court of 164, 203–4, 205 Chapel Royal, the 137, 187 Chapman, Edmund, prebendary 43, 76 Chappell, John 162, 173, 174, 176, 179, 183, 184, 187, 194 Arminianism of 175, 177–8, 179–82, 255

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Chappell, William 179–80 charity and philanthropy, see Norwich, charity in Charles I, King 20, 107, 111, 113, 123, 125, 138, 153, 169–70, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 206, 211, 223, 226, 236, 237, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 255, 256–7, 264 and the 1629 instructions to bishops 159–61, 167, 168, 170, 178 ecclesiastical policy of 4, 6–7, 161–2, 183, 184–5, 187–8, 223–4, 232 Charlestown, Massachusetts 222 Chattisham, Suffolk 94 Chauncey, Charles 104 Chelmsford, Essex 170 Cheshire, county of 265–6 Chester, bishops of, see Bridgeman, John Chester, city of religious tensions in 264–7 see also Bruen, Calvin, Prynne, William, Werdem, John Chester, diocese of 171–2, 265 Chetwynd, Edward, Dean of Bristol 262 Chichester, city of 114 Chichester, diocese of 112–13 Cholmondeley, Robert, Viscount 266 Christopherson, John, Dean 41 Chrysostom, Saint 232 church papists 12–13, 15, 112, 115, 149–50, 255, 266 churching of women 102, 116 see also Shipdham, Elizabeth née Thurston Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of 18 Clarke, Matthew 264 Claxton, Norfolk 203 Claydon, Daniel 168 Clement’s Inn, Middlesex 221 Clere, Edward 51, 56 Clere, Lady Elizabeth 218 Clerke, William, separatist 230 Cley-next-the-Sea, Norfolk 76 Cliffe, John 7 Cocke, George, minister 182, 194 Cocke, Francis, Alderman 155 Coffey, John 33 Coke, Sir Edward 132–3 Colchester, Essex 167 Cole, Peter, heretic 86–8 Collier, Augustine 245 Collinson, Patrick 4, 16, 22–3, 34, 39, 68, 71, 74, 84

Colton, Suffolk 218 Common Pleas, court of 147, 203, 221 communion plate 152n, 204, 210 communion rails 151–2, 176, 189, 204, 209, 221, 240–1, 247, 259–60 and processing to 189–90, 192–3, 212, 231–4 communion tables 5, 122, 150–2, 189, 190, 193, 259–60, 264 cushions and mats for 152, 204 profaned by dogs 176, 189 second service read from 172, 190–1, 192–4 see also altars; eucharist, the Como, David 161 Congregationalists/Congregationalism 20, 89, 93–4, 96, 98, 106–7, 120–1, 125–6, 194, 217, 222–3, 225, 228–9, 249 see also Independents, religious; separatists/separatism convocation 220 Cookely, Suffolk 164 Cooper, Elizabeth, martyr 48, 55 Cooper, John 85 copes 191 Copping, Nicholas 221–2 Corbet, Clement, diocesan chancellor 66, 184, 191, 193–4, 209, 218–19, 220–2, 226, 230, 231, 238 anti-Calvinism of 174, 177, 182–3 Corbet, John 131–2 Corbet, Miles 132–3, 164, 171, 174, 178, 218 Corbet, Sir Thomas 132 Corbett, Richard, Bishop 168–9, 174, 178, 183, 184–5, 207, 219 churchmanship of 168 Corfield, Penelope 24–5 Cork and Ross, bishops of, see Chappell, William Cork and Ross, diocese of 180 Cornwallis, Sir Thomas (senior) 42, 73 Cornwallis, Sir Thomas (junior) of Beeston, Norfolk 114 Cory, Thomas, Alderman 159, 160, 167, 183, 197, 231 Cosin, John 121–2 Cotton, John 222 Coventry, city of 99 Craig, John 16, 17, 88 Crankshaw, David, 259

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Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop 40 Craske, Hammond 231, 244 Craske, Robert, Alderman 130, 131–2, 133, 134, 138, 139, 155, 159, 162–3, 167, 176, 195, 197, 209, 230–1, 240 Cressy, David 223 Crick, Richard 73–4, 76 Cringleford, Norfolk 55 Crome, John 146 Cromwell. Oliver 245 Cromwell, Thomas 40 crucifixes 135, 137–8, 148, 241, 264 Cushion, Gilbert (junior) 191 Dacre, Richard, Lord 119 Dalley, Edward, of Leominster 263 Daniel, John, Alderman 245 Darrell, John 113 Davenport, John 227 Davill, Charles 240–1 Davis, Julian 187, 189 Debney family 139–41, 142, 144, 145, 255 Debney, John 139–41, 142, 146 Debney, Robert, Alderman 139, 142, 144, 145–7, 149, 150, 152, 199, 208–9, 213, 236, 255 Decalogue, Lord’s Prayer and Creed, paintings of 150, 204, 206, 209 Deckman, Mr 144 Dedham, Essex 76, 104, 135 De Hem, Jacques 163 De Hem, Tobias 163 Delft, town of 230 Denny, Sir William (junior) 245 Denny, Sir William (senior) 131–2, 198, 204, 245 Derby, Derbyshire 179 Dering, Edward, divine 68–70 Dering, Sir Edward 124–5 Dethick, John, sheriff 237 Devon, county of 10–11, 154 D’Ewes, Sir Symonds 218, 242 Dexter, Henry 100 Dickens, A. G. 20–1 Discepline or Displine, Thomas 192–3, 242, 245 Dixon, Thomas 218–19, 221 Dobson, Isaac 212, 242 Dod, John 99 Dorchester, Dudley Carleton, Viscount 129, 132 Dorset, county of 10 Dort, Synod of 182

Douai College 53 Dowe, Richard 73–4, 76 Downes family 205 Downes, Robert 205 Downham, George 247–8 Works: Rex Meus est Deus (1643) 247–8 Downing, George, Alderman 149 Downing, Susan, widow 149–50 Drakes, Thomas 106 Drury, Sir Drew 56 Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire 89 Dublin Cathedral 180 Dublin, Trinity College 180 Duffy, Eamon 24 Dunsford, Devon 11 Dunwich, Suffolk 176 Dutch congregation, see Norwich, city of, Dutch and Walloon congregation in Eales, Jacqueline 7 Earl Marshal’s Court 203 Earll, Robert, separatist 107 East Bergholt, Suffolk 76 Eastern Association 244 Edgely, William 146 Edward VI, King 67 Edwards, Thomas 228 Works: Antapologia (1644) 228–9 Elison, Theophilus 192 Elizabeth I, Queen 40, 42–3, 45, 52, 54–5, 64, 67, 71–2, 74, 86, 87, 142, 172, 221, 242, 253, 254 Elizabethan Injunctions 141, 148, 150, 151, 190 Ely, bishops of, see White, Francis, Wren, Matthew Ely, diocese of 167 Emden, town of 41, 49 Ensner, Thomas, separatist 94 episcopal government 89, 90, 103, 104, 125–6, 172, 212, 218, 225, 228, 266 jure divino claims for 105, 107, 122–4 Epping, Essex 81–2 Erle, Sir Walter 131 Erpingham, Norfolk 171 Essex, county of 71, 76, 244 Essex. Robert Devereux, Earl of 132–3 Eton College 94 eucharist, the 41, 42, 73, 113, 120, 150, 151–2, 171, 193, 208, 232, 234 and kneeling to receive 189, 192–3, 208, 219, 229, 232 see also altars, communion tables

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Euring, William, separatist 105–6, 107 Evans, John 30–1, 191, 248, 250, 255 Evered, John 178 Exchequer, court of 162 Exeter, Devon 154 fasts, religious 112, 171, 172 Featley, Daniel 121, 133 Felton, John 54 Feoffees for Impropriations 160, 162, 167, 227 Fenton, Edward 91, 92 Ferrour, Richard, Alderman 79 Field, John 72 Finch, John, Lord Keeper 263 Fincham, Kenneth 7, 116 Fisher, John 66 Five Knights Case 172 Five Members 241 Fletcher, Richard, Bishop 80, 82 Flood, George 95 fonts decoration of in Norwich churches 134–5, 147–9, 153, 212, 241 see also Norwich, St Gregory’s; Norwich, St Peter Mancroft forced loan 164, 172 Foster, Andrew 18, 112 Foulsham, Norfolk 200 Fountain, John 164 Fowle, Thomas, prebendary 43 Fowler, Thomas, separatist 96 Foxe, John, martyrologist 48 Freeman, John, Alderman 146–7, 148, 198, 199, 209, 221–2, 238, 239, 246, 255 Freeman, Tom 34 Freke, Edmund, Bishop 71–6, 86, 89, 91, 205, 233, 254 anti-puritanism of 71, 73–5 Fretchville, Sir Peter 83 Furness, Ralph 191, 192–3, 231 Gallard, Robert 84, 103–4, 116, 118–20, 132, 171 Gamon, Richard 129–30, 182 Gardiner, George, Dean 43–4, 47, 68 Gardiner, Dr Samuel 133, 134, 139 Gardiner, Samuel Rawlinson 3 Gargrave, William 164 Gawdy, Framlingham 242 Gawdy, Sir Robert 203–4 Gawton, Richard 72–3, 74, 76

Geneva, city of 39, 59, 124 George C. H. and K. 4 Glooston, Leicestershire 181 Gloucester, bishops of, see Bullingham, John; Goldsborough, Godfrey Gloucester, city of faction fighting in 257–9 see also Jones, John, Machen; Thomas, Ryche, Thomas Goad, Thomas 121, 133 Goldsborough, Godfrey, Bishop 258 Gondomar, Count 117–18 Gooch, George, separatist 95 Goodwyn, Vincent 73–4, 75–6 Gostlyn, William, Alderman 199, 238, 239, 240, 242–5, 246 Gouge, William 167 Gowrie Conspiracy 98 Grandorge, Isaac 174–5, 183 Grandorge, Richard, minister 175 Great Melton, Norfolk 203, 204–6 Great Yarmouth, Norfolk 100–1, 105–6, 132, 163, 164, 190, 223, 224 lectureship/preaching in 73, 76, 155, 249 Brownists in, see Caine, Thomas; Earll, Robert; Euring, William; Parker, Thomas; separatists/separatism Congregationalist church at 176, 229, 230, 249 Greene, Robert 70 Greenham, Richard 89 Greenhill, William 169, 170–1 Greenwood, John, Alderman 176, 248, 249 Grey of Warke, William, Lord 244 Grindal, Edmund, Archbishop 75 Grosvenor, Sir Richard 265 Gurney, Mr, minister 144 Hadleigh, Suffolk 17 Haigh, Christopher 11–12, 14, 19, 255 Halesworth, Suffolk 116–17 Hall, Henry, minister 238–9 Hall, Joseph, Bishop 97, 225, 245–6, 248 writings against separatists 97 Hall, Walter, schoolmaster 52 Hamburg, city of 49 Hamont, Matthew, heretic 86–8 Hampton Court Conference 78–9, 99, 153, 192 Harcocke, Edmund 55

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Hardware, Henry, of Chester 265 Hare, Thomas 113 Harley, Sir Robert 263, 264 Harman, Richard, Alderman 237 Harris Sacks, David 261 Harrison, John, minister 78–9 Harrison, Robert, separatist, 88–90, 91, 97, 200 Harsnett, Samuel, Archbishop 85, 107, 111–20, 126–7, 129–30, 131–3, 137–8, 139, 148, 150, 152, 154, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 169, 179, 182, 184, 193, 195, 207, 210, 255–6 anti-Calvinism of 112–13, 160, 174 articles against in the 1624 Parliament 111, 121, 130, 131–2, 133–6, 246 churchmanship of 18, 111, 112–14, 126–7, 153, 254 relations with Norwich corporation 19, 114–16, 118–20, 126–7, 129–30, 155 Harvie (or Harte), Robert (or William) 73–4 Harwich, Essex 106 Hassell, John, Dean 129, 187–8 Haydon, John 153–5 Hayward, John 132–3 Heigham, Norfolk 245, 246 Hempinstall, Robert 66 Henry IV, King 21 Henry VIII, King 40 Hereford, diocese of 187 Herefordshire, county of 263–4 Hertfordshire, county of 244 Hethersett, Norfolk 86 Heveringham, Sir John 172 Heydon, Sir William 74, 76 Heylyn, Peter 15, 122 Heyrick, Richard 171, 172 High Commission, court of 68, 78, 80, 136, 154–5, 170, 222, 257, 259 Hildersham, Arthur 99 Hill, Christopher 4, 9–10, 12 Hill, Robert 81–4, 101 Works: The Contents of Scripture (1596) 82; Life everlasting (1601) 82 Hingham, Massachusetts 226–7 Hingham, Norfolk 135, 136, 165, 171, 173, 226–7 Holl, Augustine 245, 247 Holland, Henry Rich, Earl of 169, 243 Holland, Henry 64, 83 Holmes, Clive 237

Holt, Norfolk 73, 74 Hooker, Thomas 104 Hopton, John, Bishop 55 Houlbrooke, Ralph 44, 144 Hoyle, John 135 Huggin, Sir Thomas 164 Hunt, Elizabeth, separatist 96 Hunt, William, separatist 94–7, 99, 100, 254 Huntingfield, Suffolk 164 Hutton, Ronald 11 Hyrne, Sir Thomas 128, 131–2 iconoclasm 11, 67, 143, 208, 225, 241, 264, 265, 266 see also Norwich cathedral, iconoclasm in, Norwich , city of, Reformation in images, religious 24, 137–8, 142, 149–50, 153, 241, 248–9, 262, 264 and stained glass 135, 143, 260, 264, 266 erected in Norfolk churches 204–5 erected in Norwich churches 133–5, 147–9, 150, 153, 206, 209, 249, 255 see also Norwich, city of, decorative art in; Norwich, St Gregory’s; Norwich, St Peter Mancroft; rood lofts Independents, religious 120–1, 125–6, 169–70, 223, 226, 228, 249, 250 see also, Armitage, Timothy; Bridge, William; Burroughs, Jeremiah; Greenhill, William; Toft, Thomas; Ward, John (1); Westminster Assembly of Divines Ingram, Thomas 176–7, 178, 192, 255 Inglott, Edmund 52 Ipswich, Suffolk 94, 118, 195, 198, 232 lectureship in 42, 118, 126 religious riots (1636) in 190–1 Ireland, Richard 191 Isbourne, Thomas 147–8, 209 Ives, Henry, separatist 95 Ixworth, Suffolk 45 James I, King 53, 84, 88, 100, 107, 125, 131, 136–8, 148, 150, 172, 208, 254, 255 and the 1622 ‘Directions to Preachers’ 126, 161, 179 ecclesiastical policy of 7, 111–12, 121–2, 126, 136–8, 182

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James I (cont.) Spanish diplomacy of 111–12, 117–18, 137–8, 150, 254 Jegon, John, Bishop 84–5, 98, 103–4, 105, 114–15, 119, 128, 135, 145 churchmanship of 84, 101–2, 107, 111, 112, 116, 153, 254 Jegon, Thomas, Archdeacon 98, 102, 103 Jermyn, Sir Thomas, royalist 226 Jessopp, John 151 Johnson, Francis, separatist 81, 93, 99, 100 Johnson, George, separatist 93, 94 Johnson, Richard, minister 172 Jones, Henry, of Gloucester 259 Jones, John, of Gloucester 257–9 Jordan, Ignatius, of Exeter 154 Kenninghall, Norfolk 113 Kent, Robert, minister 172, 191, 193 Kett, Francis, heretic 87–8 Kett, Robert 87 and Kett’s Rebellion 41, 45, 56–7, 154 Ketteringham, Norfolk 172 Ketton-Cremer, R. W. 248 Kimocle, Richard 153 King, Henry, lawyer 165, 229, 249 King, Peter 186–7 King, Rebecca 230 King, Thomas, minister 171 King, Thomas, town clerk 165, 171, 178–9, 196–8, 229–30, 231 King’s Bench, court of 117, 147, 170 King’s Lynn, Norfolk 42, 94, 113–14, 155, 172–3, 188, 206, 210 Kingston, Alfred 20 Kirby, Gregory 144 Kirby Cane, Norfolk 164 Knyvett, Sir Thomas 137–8, 238 Lachelowe, Elizabeth, separatist 95 Lachelowe family 95 Lake, Peter 5, 7, 14 Lamont, William 4 Lancashire, county of 171 Lane, Henry, Alderman 195, 196–9, 209–12, 236–7, 239–40, 242, 245, 250, 255 Lane, Dr Robert 210 Lane, Thomas, Alderman 210 Laud, William, Archbishop 4–6, 11, 13, 15, 113, 153, 154–5, 160, 161, 162, 165, 167, 171–2, 173, 180, 183, 184, 187–8,

189–90, 194, 197, 198, 210, 212, 221, 226, 227, 232, 234, 257, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263 Laudianism 5–7, 12–15, 150–1, 152, 153, 176, 187, 205, 206–8, 212–13, 232–4, 255–6, 259–64 see also Norwich, Laudianism in Lavenham, Suffolk 190 Layer, Christopher, Alderman 78, 82–3 Layer, Thomas, Alderman 82–3, 91, 102 Layfield, Edward 260 Lechford, Thomas 221 Leedes, George 73–4, 77–8 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 44, 54, 55 Leigh Priory, Essex 71 Leighton, Alexander 265 Lenthall, William, Speaker of the Long Parliament 243 Leominster, Herefordshire religious controversy in 263–4 see also Brabazon, Wallop; Tombes, John Levine, David 9–10, 12 Lewes, John, heretic 86–7 Lewkenor, Sir Richard 153 Leyden, city of 78, 97, 99, 163, 229 separatist church in 100–1, 105–7 Lincoln, bishops of, see Chaderton, William, Williams, John Lincoln, diocese of 78, 167 Lindsell, Augustine, Bishop 121–2 Lindsey, Matthew, Alderman 246, 248, 249 Lindsey, Montagu Bertie, second Earl of 244 Little Ellingham, Norfolk 119 Little Leighs, Essex 169–70 Little Melton, Norfolk 55 London, bishops of, see Ailmer, John; Bancroft, Richard; Fletcher, Richard; Laud, William London, city of 21, 50, 58, 61, 72, 81, 83, 94, 104, 117, 118, 128, 144, 154–5, 162, 163, 170, 171, 198, 200, 218, 231, 235, 237, 241, 259–60 church restoration in 152–3, 262 London parishes All Hallow, Barking, 260 St Giles Cripplegate, 259–60 London, St Paul’s Cathedral, 259–60 and Paul’s Cross sermon 72, 87, 129

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Long Parliament 5–6, 20, 119, 124–5, 127, 134, 135, 152, 164–5, 170, 172, 175, 186–7, 207, 209, 212, 218, 236–7, 241–2, 243–6, 248–50, 260, 263–4, 265–6 Loveland, John, Alderman 199, 209, 240 Loveland, Joseph, prebendary 209 Ludham, Norfolk 66, 160 Ludkin, George 227 Ludkin, William 227 Lushington, Thomas 207–8, 249n Lussher, Richard 53, 61, 142 Lymbert, Stephan 89 Lyneacre, Robert 75 Lynne family 53 Lynne, Thomas 52–3 Lynsey, Samuel 145 Machen, Thomas, of Gloucester 258–9 Mackerell, Benjamin 30 Maltby, Judith 13–14, 256 Maltby, Norfolk 73 Manchester Collegiate Church 171–2 Manchester, Edward Montagu, second Earl of 207, 249 Mansfield, Nottinghamshire 180 Mapes, John 73–4 Mapes, William 229 Mapletoft, Edmund 113 Marlingford, Norfolk 204 Marrow, John 258 Marsham family 55–6 Marsham, Robert 55 Marsham, Thomas, Alderman 48, 55 Martin Marprelate 78 Martyr, Peter 77 Mary I, Queen 34, 41–2, 55, 71, 89 Massachusetts Company 228 Matthews, A. G. 249 Maurice, Prince 207 Mayes, Thomas, separatist 95 McClendon, Muriel 32–5, 41–2, 43–4, 56, 62, 86, 88, 89, 91, 254, 256 Mellis, Thomas 101–2, 103 Mendlesham, Suffolk 170 Merchant Adventurers Company, see Norwich, Merchant Adventurers Company of Merritt, Julia 81, 152, 153 Metcalfe, Michael 220, 224–5, 226, 227, 234

Michaelson, John 169–70 Middleburg, town of 88–9, 90 Mildmay, Sir Robert 173 Mileham, Norfolk 150 millenarianism 87–8, 249 Milton, Anthony 161 Minter, William, separatist 100 Montagu, Richard, Bishop 121–2, 124–5, 133, 189, 193, 194, 211, 212, 232–3, 234, 238 Works: A Gagg for the New Gosepl? (1624) 121–2, 133, 137; Appello Caesarem (1625) 122, 161 Montgomery, George, Dean 128 Montserrat, island of 207 Moody, Michael 92 More, John 64–6, 68, 70, 73–5, 76, 77–8, 80, 83, 87, 91, 95, 177, 192, 231, 253 Works: A briefe and necessarie catechism (1572) 68–70; A table from the beginning of the world (1593) 77, 87; Three godly and fruitful sermons (1594) 66, 69–70 Morgan, John, minister 75 Morgan, Victor 22, 127 Morrill, John 3 Morston, Norfolk 192 Mosley, Ann 171 Moulton, Norfolk 203 Neile, Richard, Archbishop 121–2, 159, 195, 265 and the Durham House Group 159 Neston, Cheshire 266 Nethersole, Francis 132 New Draperies, see Norwich, city of, cloth manufacture in Newhouse, Thomas 82, 84, 101, 177, 210, 233 Newport, Essex 194 Nix, Richard, Bishop 40 Nobbs, Joseph 39 Norfolk, county of 111, 113, 126, 128, 163, 244 Assizes in 53, 54–6, 92, 107, 145, 203–4, 221, 222 combination lectures in 120, 135 deputy lieutenants of 51, 56, 114 Justices of the Peace in 69–70, 136 members of parliament for, see Corbet, John musters in 56, 114, 211

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Norfolk (cont.) Parliamentary committees in 240, 249–50 puritanism in 20–1, 73–6, 78, 89–91, 113–14, 120, 132, 135–6, 138, 165, 169, 192, 207, 213, 218 puritan migration from 223–4, 226–7 recusants in 53, 77, 205 see also Downes family, Lynne family, Whalle, William Reformation in 20–1 royalism in 206–7, 245, 247, 250 scandalous ministers in 61, 119, 207, 238, 242, 243, 249–50 trained bands in 56, 244 Trustees for the Religion in 160–1, 162–8, 171, 173, 176, 178–9, 183, 197, 218, 229, 237 Norfolk, Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of 54 Norris, Anthony 176 Norris, Francis, Alderman 175–6, 177, 178, 183, 255 Norris, Robert 243 Northampton, William Parr, Marquis of 45 North Repps, Norfolk, 171 Northwold, Norfolk 205 Norwich archdeaconry/archdeaconry court 23, 43, 75, 83, 98, 100, 101–2, 115, 119, 146, 150, 153, 176, 182, 241 see also Jegon, Thomas, Archdeacon Norwich, bishops of, see Corbett, Richard; Freke, Edmund; Hall, Joseph; Harsnett, Samuel; Hopton, John; Jegon, John; Montagu, Richard; Nix, Richard; Overall, John; Parkhurst, John; Rugge, William; Scambler, Edmund; White, Francis; Wren, Matthew Norwich, bishop’s chapel 114–15, 225 Norwich, bishop’s palace 72, 114, 172, 225 Norwich Castle prison 92, 95–6, 105 Norwich Cathedral and the Civil War 231, 247–8, 249–50 choristers of 52, 141 see also Inglott, Edmund clerical patronage in Norwich of 28, 139, 143, 144, 192 deans of, see Christopherson, John; Gardiner, George; Hassell, John;

Montgomery, George; Salisbury, John; Suckling, Edmund dean and chapter of 28, 40–1, 42–4, 127–8, 139–40, 143, 146, 155, 247, 249–50 grammar school in 59, 89 green yard in 43, 115–16, 127, 128, 130, 172, 202 iconoclasm in 11, 43, 225, 231, 248 objections to seating in 127, 130, 239, 248 organ/organ repairs in 43, 115, 128, 202, 206, 248 peculiar jurisdictions of 41, 132 petty canons of, see Alanson, William; Barnard, John; Chapman, Edmund; Crick, Richard; Dowe, Richard; Fowle, Thomas; Reading, John; Thwaite, Thomas; Walker, John; Yowle or Yould, Thomas preaching in 28, 41, 43–4, 68, 80, 82, 84, 89, 116, 128–9, 247–8 prebendaries of, see Gardiner, George; Loveland, Joseph; Porter, Edmund; Robartes, Foulke; Spencer, Miles; Spendlowe, John prophesying in 63–4 puritanism in 28, 43, 70–1, 72, 76, 78–80, 89, 172, 191, 217 Reformation in 40, 42–3, 91 relations with city of Norwich xv, 24, 89, 111, 127–30, 155, 238–9 statutes of xv, 44, 127–8 Sunday sermons in 126–7, 129–30, 131, 133, 138, 155, 159, 184, 248, 254 Norwich, city of administration of 21–2, 30–4, 39, 85, 211, 240, 246 apprentices in 22, 127, 247 Anguish Boys’ Hospital in 200–202 Assembly meetings in 21, 50, 56–7, 63, 103, 131, 155, 159, 168, 195, 196–7, 198, 238, 240, 244, 245, 246 brewing in 56–7, 79, 175, 178 Bridewell in 58, 85, 120 Brownists in, see separatists/separatism; Brayser, Adam; Browne, Robert; Burne or Browne, Alice; Ensner, Thomas; Fowler, Thomas; Gooch, George; Ives, Henry; Harrison, Robert; Hunt, Elizabeth; Hunt, William;

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Norwich (cont.) Lachelowe, Elizabeth; Mayes, Thomas; Minter, William; Parker, Thomas; Pollard, Gregory; Turner, John; Wolsey, Thomas; Wootton, Thomas; Wyllet, Thomas Catholic plots in 40, 54–7, 62, 243 see also Appleyard, Sir John; Redman, George; Throgmorton, John Civil War allegiances in 134, 164, 175–6, 209, 231, 235, 236, 240, 243–8, 250 charity in 58–62, 129, 202 Cloth Hall in 50 cloth manufacture in 21, 48–50, 96, 114, 218, 220, 229, 230 Congregationalist church in 249 conventicles in 94, 96, 99, 100, 169, 223, 230, 238 corporation of 21–3, 30–5, 129–30, 138, 154, 160, 163, 178, 188, 191, 197–9, 211, 231, 235, 236–40, 242, 244, 246–7, 250, 256–7 and religious change 39–40, 42, 44–5, 63, 78, 79, 82–3, 138, 247, 248–9, 253–4 dearth in 163 decorative art in 147–9, 255 dissolution of the monasteries in 26–7, 40, 67 distributive trades in 21, 47, 49, 56, 96, 128, 144, 162–3, 174, 196, 200, 202, 209, 225, 238 distribution of wealth in 26, 58, 139 drunkenness in 56–7, 79, 85, 147, 159, 243, 245 Dutch and Walloon settlers in 21, 40, 48–55, 62, 163 and ‘Book of Orders for the Strangers’ 50 and relations with English inhabitants 40, 48, 50–4 Dutch and Walloon congregations in 83, 114–15, 163, 192 see also De Hem, Jacques; Elison, Theophilus firework displays in 202 friars in 26–7, 40, 45, 55, 67 see also Barret, Dr John; Harcocke, Edmund funeral doles in 61 gaming in 79, 127, 159

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gaol in 41, 53, 61, 93, 94, 95–6, 154, 245 Guildhall in 61, 93, 94, 96, 245 heresy burning in 34, 48, 86–8 see also Cole, Peter; Cooper, Elizabeth; Hamont, Matthew; Kett, Francis; Lewes, John influenza epidemic, 1558–9, in 41–2 inns and taverns in 58, 79, 85, 245 Kett’s Rebellion in, see Kett, Robert Laudianism in 18–19, 145, 152, 176, 187, 193–4, 195–6, 199, 205–9, 212–13, 232–4, 240–1, 242, 243, 249–50, 254–6 lectureships/preaching in 41–2, 47, 63, 67, 74, 103–4, 105, 111, 116, 118–120, 126–7, 129–30, 131, 133, 138, 139, 143–4, 154, 155, 159, 160, 167–9, 174, 176–8, 179, 183, 184, 194, 195, 196, 208, 218–19, 222–3, 224, 227, 231, 233, 238–9, 253–4 magazine in 244 market place in 26, 248–9 mayor’s court in 22, 33, 41, 53, 85, 130, 131, 135, 138–9, 183, 196, 197–8, 203, 244, 246 members of parliament for, see Aldrich, John; Atkin, Thomas; Catelyn, Richard, Debney, Robert; Denny, Sir William (senior); Harman, Richard; Hyrne, Sir Thomas; Layer, Thomas; Rugge, Francis; Sotherton, Thomas; Suckling, Robert; Tooley, John Merchant Adventurers’ Company of 47–9, 57, 62, 83, 91, 253 metropolitical visitations of 76, 115, 188 musters in 114, 211, 244 New Hall in 45, 67, 114–15 Old City Library in 67 plagues in 21 plays in 202–3 population of 21, 50–1 poverty and vagrancy in 57–60, 196, 202 and Census of the Poor, 1570 in 57–8 puritanism in 19–21, 24–5, 35, 70–1, 72–6, 78–80, 83, 90–1, 97, 101–2, 116–17, 122, 129–30, 143–4, 163–4, 169, 182, 188, 191–4, 195–8, 200,

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Norwich (cont.) 202, 218–221, 223, 224–7, 229–32, 234–5, 239–40, 242–3, 246–50, 253–5 see also Norfolk, Trustees for the Religion in puritan migration from 90–1, 99, 165, 185, 191–2, 208, 213, 220, 222, 224–5, 226–30 Quarter Sessions in 164, 243, 244 recusants in 26, 52–3, 55, 77, 79, 244, 253–4 see also Lussher, Richard; Lynne family; Lynne, Thomas; Whalle, Henry; Whalle, Thomas Reformation in 19–24, 32–5, 39–48, 60–1, 63, 67, 82–3, 84–5, 141–4, 151, 253–6 see also Barret, Dr John, Bilney, Thomas, Watson, Robert relations with the dean and chapter xv, 24, 127–30, 155, 238–9, 247–8 religious libels in 129, 138–9, 176, 250 religious patronage in 23, 28–30, 34–5, 63, 68, 79, 82–5, 102–4, 167–8, 231, 248–9, 253 royalism in 175, 209, 236–7, 242, 243–6, 247–8, 250, 255 Sabbatarian legislation in 56–7, 159 see also Sabbatarianism St Giles’s Hospital in 90, 97, 195 seditious books seized in 200, 230 ship money collection in 200 social welfare in 39–40, 57–9, 61–2, 129 volunteer company in 164, 231, 243, 244, 245 watches in 244 Norwich consistory court 23, 95, 98, 101–2, 117, 129, 134, 148, 172, 173–4, 182–3, 184, 193, 220, 221 see also Corbet, Clement, Redmayne, Robert Norwich, diocese of 23, 71, 77–8, 111–12, 117, 122, 128–9, 160, 167, 184–5, 187–8, 189, 193, 198 synods in 129, 232 Norwich parishes and parish churches and medieval devotional life 23–4, 26–8 communicants in 24–7, 139 distribution of patronage in 28–30

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St Andrew’s 43–4, 47, 75, 82–4, 97–8, 100, 101, 103–4, 116, 120, 139, 169, 175, 176, 178, 180, 181, 188, 210, 230, 255 early reformed tradition in 66–8, 177 lectureships in 75, 79, 81, 84, 99, 101, 105, 116, 118–20, 129, 132, 160, 168, 174, 179, 184, 192, 194, 239, 249 religious controversy in 98, 101, 103, 174, 176–8, 237 seating in 101–2 St Augustine’s 250 St Benedict’s 119, 240 St Clement’s 45, 47, 51, 75, 84, 89, 139, 225, 226, 227, 229, 240 lectureship in 47, 75, 84, 120, 208, 233 religious controversy in 232–4 St Edmund’s 191, 192, 224, 225, 227 religious controversy in 218–23, 238 St Giles’s 130 St George Colegate 168n St George Tombland 101, 115–16, 167–8, 191, 202–3, 207–8, 229 gallery in 222–3 lectureship in, see Bridge, William, and the Tombland lectureship religious controversy in 115, 169, 184, 208, 212, 222–3, 229–30 St Gregory’s 39, 131, 139–53, 198, 211–12, 242, 245, 250, 255 altar cloth in 142–3 beautification of (1623) 139, 146–50, 151, 153, 208–9, 210, 241, 254, 255 communion rails in 150–2, 211, 241 St James’s 191, 193 St John Maddermarket 155, 191, 193, 209, 231 St John Sepulchre 163, 191, 192–3, 229, 245 St Julian’s 231 St Lawrence’s 130, 240–1 St Martin at Palace 78, 178, 245 St Martin Coslany (at Oak) 26, 78, 172, 191, 193, 243 St Mary Coslany 195, 240 St Michael at Plea 78, 79, 119, 163, 165, 171, 191, 196, 219

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Norwich parishes (cont.) St Michael at Thorn (Ber Street) 53, 96, 243 St Michael Coslany 55, 249 St Paul’s 191, 193 St Peter Hungate 78, 167–8, 169, 210, 229, 230 Dutch congregation at 192 see also Elison, Theophilus St Peter Mancroft 26, 95, 131, 139, 191, 193, 194, 203, 238 beautification of (1623–4) 134–5, 147, 153, 206, 249, 254, 255 religious controversy in 133–4, 193–4, 230 St Peter Parmentergate 95 St Saviour’s 61, 116 St Simon and St Jude 61, 119 Catholicism in 52–3, 60–1 religious controversy in 207–8 St Stephen’s 26, 30, 95, 100, 144–5, 240 St Swithin’s 119, 193, 249 Norwich Supplication 90–1, 116, 200 see also Presbyterians/Presbyterianism Nutt, Rowland, minister 78–9, 177 Oakley, Suffolk 170 Offwood, Stephen 92, 93 Okes, Emine, separatist 92 Oliver, Mary 219–220 Oliver, Thomas 219–220, 225 Olyet, Mr, minister 130 organs 144–5, 262–3 see also Norwich Cathedral, organ/organ repairs in Ormesby, Norfolk 218 Orwell, John 90 Osborne, John, Alderman 236–7, 239, 245 Overall, John, Bishop 81–2, 112 Overington, Norfolk 68 Oxford, bishops of, see Bancroft, John; Corbett, Richard Oxford, diocese of 168 Oxford, John de Vere, sixteenth Earl of 71 ‘parish Anglicans’ 11–12, 255–6 Parker, Matthew, Archbishop 41, 44, 45, 47, 52, 62 founds lectures in Norwich 47 Parker, Thomas, Alderman 44, 47

Parker, Thomas, separatist 100, 101 Parkhurst, John, Bishop 43–4, 48, 52–3, 64–5, 68, 70, 89–90, 114, 141, 143 as a Protestant reformer 43–4, 141, 253 parliament 6, 31, 62, 67, 130, 136–7, 220, 235, 258 and House of Commons 62, 122, 131–2, 133, 175, 199–200, 238, 240, 242 and House of Lords 131, 133, 136, 242, 244 see also Long Parliament; Norfolk, county of, members of parliament for; Norwich, city of, members of parliament for; Short Parliament Parma, Duchess of 49 Parmenter, Adrian, Alderman 240, 241–2 Paston, Clement 51, 54 Patterson, Catherine 18 Payne, John, minister 163 Payne, John, of Gloucester 258–9 Payne, John, royalist 245 Payne, William 221 Peck, Joseph 226 Peck, Robert, minister 135–6, 165, 171, 173, 226–7 Peck, Thomas, Alderman 79, 89 Peckover, Edward 102 Peckover, Matthew, Alderman 246 Peel, Albert 88, 90 Penton, Edward 200 Perkins, William 81, 83, 105, 168, 181 Perne, Andrew 68 Peter, Hugh 227–8 Peterborough, bishops of, see Scambler, Edmund Peterborough, diocese of 76 Pettus, Thomas, Alderman 61, 128, 142 Pettus, Sir John 128–9 Piers or Pierce, John 224 Pilgrim Fathers 97, 99, 100 Playford, Richard 102 Plummer, Timothy 59–60 Plymouth, Devon 224 Pockthorpe, Norfolk 96 Pollard, Gregory, separatist 96 poor relief, see Norwich, city of, social welfare in Porter, Edmund, prebendary 182 Porter, Jonathan, weaver 219–20, 224 Porter, Nathaniel, puritan 169

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Pound, John 22, 57–8 ‘Prayer Book Protestants’ 13–14, 256 predestination, doctrines of 4–5, 11–12, 82, 84, 87, 145, 165, 175, 176–7, 183, 184, 208, 247–8, 250, 255 debates on 40, 68, 72–3, 81–2, 105, 121–2, 161–2, 165, 174, 177–8, 181–3 see also Augustine, Saint; Freke, Edmund, Bishop; Bridge, William; Chappell, John; Gawton, Richard; Hill Robert; More, John; Montagu, Richard; Overall, John; Yates, John (1) royal injunctions against 126, 161–2, 170, 173–4, 177, 183, 255 Presbyterians/Presbyterianism 6–7, 14, 70, 72, 76, 78, 80, 90–1, 116, 123, 125–6, 171–2, 194, 228, 239, 250 see also Carter, John (junior); Cartwright, Thomas; Case, Thomas; Edwards, Thomas; Field, John; Gawton, Richard; Heyrick, Richard; Norwich Supplication; Scottish Covenanters; Solemn League and Covenant; Waldegrave, Robert; Westminster Assembly of Divines Price, Nicholas 113, 172 Privy Council 50–1, 53, 56, 61, 67, 74–5, 76, 77, 103, 104, 113, 137, 154, 211, 231, 265 prophesyings 63–4, 71, 77 see also Norwich cathedral, prophesyings in providence, doctrines of 69–70, 172–3, 202, 224–5, 234 Prynne, William 4, 5, 123, 154, 180, 186, 200, 220–1, 230, 261–2, 265, 267 Works: Brief Instructions for Churchwarden (1636) 220; Newes from Ipswich (1636) 186n, 200; The Unbishopping of Timothy and Titus (1636) 123 psalm singing 135, 141, 191 Purgatory, doctrine of 60–1, 68, 72, 142 puritanism 70–1, 76, 78, 80, 81, 89–91, 99, 104, 117–18, 124, 126, 132, 137, 174, 218, 227–9, 257, 259, 261 and ceremonies, see Book of Common Prayer, puritan objections to; bowing at the name of Jesus, puritan objections to; sign of the

cross in baptism; standing at the Creed/Gospel; surplices, use of, puritan objections to and clerical nonconformity 70–1, 76, 78–9, 83, 89–90, 94, 101, 116, 135–6, 144, 162, 164, 165–7, 184, 188, 218–19, 233, 264 and Civil War allegiance 8–11, 20, 239–40, 241–3, 244, 246–7, 248–9, 261, 264, 265–6 and predestination, see predestination, doctrine of; predestination, debates on and migration in the 1630s, see Norwich, puritan migration from and providence, see providence, doctrines of and social control, see Reformation of manners historical definitions of 3–4, 6–8, 121, 137–8, 162, 168, 183 see also Congregationalists/Congregationali sm; Independents, religious; Norfolk, county of, puritanism in; Norwich Cathedral, puritanism in; Norwich, city of, puritanism in; Presbyterians/Presbyterianism Pym, John 243 Ramism, see Richardson, Alexander, Yates, John (1) Ramus, Peter 104 Rawdon, Marmaduke, of London 260 Rayner, Thomas 229 Reading, Berkshire 80 Reading, Joseph, royalist minister 250 Redman, George 55 Redmayne, Robert, diocesan chancellor 101–2, 117 Reed, Andrew 217 Works: Alice Bridge of Norwich 217–18 Reeve, Edmund 147, 198 Reformation of manners 9–10, 58–9, 79, 85, 119–20 Remersham, Norfolk 61 Richardson, Alexander 104 Richardson, Sir Thomas, royalist 245 Riches, Robert 243 Rivers, John Savage, Earl 266 Rivet, William 164 Rivett, Thomas, town clerk 173

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Robartes, Foulke, prebendary 84, 208, 232–4, 240, 242, 249 Robartes, Thomas, minister 47, 64, 73–5, 76, 91, 233 Robinson, John, separatist 97–101, 105–7, 122–3, 125, 254 Works: A justification of separation (1610) 105–6; The peoples plea (1618) 106–7 Robinson, Mr, preacher 98 Robsart, Amy 54 Rochester, bishops of, see Freke, Edmund Rochester, diocese of 71 Rogers, John 104, 135 Rogers, Nathaniel 173 Ronham, Norfolk 164 rood lofts 141, 146, 204–5 Rotterdam, city of 170, 185, 192, 220, 229, 230 English church at 165, 227–9, 230 see also Independents, religious; Ames, William; Bridge, William; Davenport, John; Peter, Hugh; Ward, John (1) Rowe, Joy 88, 94 royalism 9–10, 260–1, 264, 266 and Anglicanism 10–12, 14 see also Norwich, city of, royalism in Rugge, Francis, Alderman 82–3, 102 Rugge, William, Bishop 40, 47 Rushbrooke, Suffolk 226 Russell, Conrad 6 Ryche, Thomas, of Gloucester 258–9 Rye, Walter 207 Sabbatarianism 77, 127, 130, 135, 145, 159, 218–19, 263 see also Bownd, Nicholas; Norwich, sabbatarain legislation in Saffron Walden, Essex 165–7 St John, Sir Oliver 125 Salisbury, John, Dean 42–3 Salle, Norfolk 171 Salter, John, Alderman 174, 175, 183 Salterne, George, of Bristol 262 Sancroft, William 119 Sandwich, Kent 50 Saravia, Adrian 83 Saye and Sele, William Fiennes, First Viscount Scambler, Edmund, Bishop 76–9, 87, 94 and 1589 clerical survey 77–8 Scase, Thomas, separatist 96

Scott, Thomas, puritan polemicist 117 Scottish Covenanters 5–6, 123–4, 169–70, 235, 265 see also Baillie, Robert; Solemn League and Covenant; Yates, John (1) Scottow, Augustine, Alderman 162–3, 183, 237 Scottow, Timothy 178–9 Scrooby, Nottinghamshire 99, 100 Seaman, James 207 separatists/separatism 20, 81, 85, 88–9, 91–8, 99–101, 105–7, 228, 230, 243, 254 see also Ainsworth, Henry; Amsterdam, city of; Barrow, Henry; Browne, Robert; Congregationalists/Congregationali sm; Ensner, Thomas; Euring, William; Harrison, Robert; Hunt, William; Johnson, Francis; Johnson, George; Leyden, city of; Offwood, Stephen; Robinson, John; Scase, Thomas; Studley, Daniel; Wolsey, Thomas Sergenson, Thomas 184 Serlesbye, Thomas 94 sermon gadding 169, 219, 226 Sharpe, Kevin 6, 183, 187 Sheils, Bill 77 Sherwood, Livewell, Alderman 244, 246 Shipdham, Elizabeth née Thurston 116–17 Shipdham, Thomas, Alderman 116–17, 198, 239 ship money 263 see also Norwich, collection of ship money in Shipps, Kenneth 35, 120, 126, 162, 165, 171, 174 Short Parliament 123, 234–5, 237 Sibbes, Richard 167 sign of the cross in baptism 89, 101, 184, 264 Skinner, Robert, Bishop 262 Slack, Paul 21 Slaughter, Mr, preacher 43 Smith, Mr, puritan 229 Smyth, John, separatist and Anabaptist 99 social welfare, see Norwich, city of, social welfare in Socinians/Socinianism 207 see also Lushington, Thomas

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Solemn League and Covenant 124–6, 209, 218, 241 Somerset, county of 10, 11 Sotherton family 44–6, 48 Sotherton, John 57 Sotherton, Thomas, Alderman 44–8, 50–1, 53, 61, 62, 66, 68, 82, 253 South Repps, Norfolk 247 South Walsham, Norfolk 195 Spencer, Miles, prebendary 42, 141, 144 Spendlowe, John, prebendary 249 Sprowston, Norfolk 103, 132, 171, 174 Sprunger, Keith 104, 120 Stalham, John 169, 172–3, 177, 178 standing at the Creed/Gospel 188, 196, 219, 226, 229 Stanford-Rivers, Essex 121 Star Chamber, court of 200, 257–9 Starston, Norfolk 206–7 Sterne, Richard, Archbishop 180–1 Sterne, William 180–1 Steward, Augustine, Alderman 44–6, 51, 61, 67 Steward, Faith 45 Steward family 45–6 Stiffkey, Norfolk 74, 120, 121, 165, 192, 226 Stokes, Richard 136 Stokes, Thomas 136, 137 Stone, Nicholas 202 Stoneham, Matthew 144–5, 147, 152, 212, 255 Stoyle, Mark 10–11 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of 180 ‘stranger’ community, see Norwich, city of, Dutch and Walloon settlers in Stratford St Mary, Suffolk 76 Stratton St Mary, Norfolk 73 Stubbes, Edmund 164 Studley, Daniel, separatist 93–4, 100 Studley, Peter 12–13 Sturton-le-Steeple, Nottinghamshire 97, 99 Stutter, Richard 95 Stynnet, William 191, 193 Suckling, Edmund, Dean 127–9 Suckling, Sir John 129 Suckling, Robert, Alderman 128 Sudbury archdeaconry 47 Sudbury, Suffolk 169 Suffolk, county of 61, 76, 80, 91, 164, 244

Sulyard, Ralph, royalist 245 Sumpter, Robert, Alderman 194, 199, 230 Sumpter, Simon, minister 194 surplices, use of 70–1, 75, 113, 116, 144, 170, 210 puritan objections to 70–2, 75, 83, 101, 165–7, 184, 188, 192, 233, 264 Swallow, Matthew 172 Tanner, Norman 23–4, 26 Tawney, R. H. 4 Terling, Essex 9, 173 Thacker, John, Alderman 133–5, 139, 193, 246, 248–50 Thetford, Norfolk 17, 91 Thirty-Nine Articles 76, 103, 126, 177, 183 Thorpe-by-Norwich, Norfolk 61 Thrandeston, Suffolk 96 Throgmorton, John 55 Thurston, Edmund, Alderman 116, 200 Thurston, Thomas 230 Thwaites, Thomas 61 Tittler, Robert 45 Tivetshall, Norfolk 169, 170 Toft family 226, 227, 229–30 Toft, Daniel 229 Toft, John (junior) 229–30 Toft, John (senior) 226 Toft, Thomas, minister 227 Toft, Thomas, Alderman 225–6, 227, 229, 230, 232–4, 248–9 Todd, Margo 58–9 toleration, religious 32–4, 62, 254 Tombes, John 263–4 Tooley, John, Alderman 162–4, 167–8, 183, 197, 198, 203, 231, 234–5, 237, 240 Tories 257 Townsend, Sir Roger 121n trespass, writs for 221–2, 225–6 Treswell, Moses, captain 244 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 168 Trowse, Norfolk 56, 94 Tucker, Thomas 261 Tulling, Mr, informant against Bishop Wren 212 Turner, John, separatist 96 Tusser, Thomas 59 Tyack, Norman 223 Tyacke, Nicholas 4–7, 33, 105, 218, 227 Tyte, Robert 243

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Underdown, David 10, 11, 12 Usher, Brett 71, 72, 77 Ussher, James, Bishop 180 Venice, city of 26 Venner, Thomas 120–1 vestments/vestiarian controversy, see surplices, puritan objections to Virginia Company 164 visitation articles 71, 116, 174, 188–9 Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire 78 Wadeton, Richard 221–2 Waldegrave, Robert 80 Wale, Edward 184 Walker, John, prebendary 43 Walker, Thomas 173, 184 Walloon congregation, see Norwich, city of, Dutch and Walloon congregation in Walman, Robert 126–30 Walpole, Suffolk 164 Walsham, Alexandra 12–13, 14, 19, 255 Walsingham, Norfolk 45, 212 Walsingham, Sir Francis 79 Waltham Abbey, Essex 71 Wantage, Berkshire 261 Ward, John (1), preacher of Norwich 118–20, 133, 163, 165, 171, 178–9, 181, 191–2, 194, 195, 196, 220, 227–8, 230, 231 Ward, John (2), scandalous minister 119 Ward, Nathaniel 122 Ward, Samuel, preacher of Ipswich 118, 122 Warde, John 146, 147 Warde, Richard, Alderman 199, 209, 211 Warren, Matthew, of Bristol 261 Warwick, Robert Rich, Earl of 169, 243 Watson, Francis 151 Watson, Robert 40–1, 57 Watt, Tessa 149 Weever, John 146–7, 148 Webster, Tom 7 Welborne, Norfolk 133 Weld family 90–1 Weld, Roger, Alderman 90–1 Wentworth, Henry, third Lord 80 Werden, John, of Chester 266 Westminster, Middlesex 81, 131, 133, 134, 165, 234, 236, 238, 241, 244, 259 St Giles-in-the-Fields 260 St Martin-in-the-Fields 81, 83

Westminster Assembly of Divines 125, 155, 169, 172, 228, 239 Whalle, Henry 53 Whalle, Thomas, Alderman 51–5, 60–1, 254 Whalle, William 53 Whigs 257 Whitaker, William 81 Whiteacres, Frances 119–20 White, Francis, Bishop 159–60, 167, 168 White, Peter 6 Whitgift, John, Archbishop 53, 76, 78, 98, 153 three articles of 76, 77, 101, 143–4 Whitefoot, John 245–6 Whitson, Christopher, of Bristol 261 Wilbraham, Sir Richard 265–6 will preambles 41, 199, 202, 261 Willan, Miles 95 Williams, John, Bishop 118, 136 Williams, Neville 54 Wilson, John 169 Wiltshire, county of 10 Wissingset, Norfolk 73 Wolsey, Thomas, separatist 92–3, 95 as a ‘Judaiser’ 92–3 Wood, Andy 15 Wood, Sir Robert, Alderman 51, 86 Woods, Mary 128 Woodstock, Oxfordshire 168 Wootton, Thomas, separatist 95 Wramplingham, Norfolk 165 Wren, Christopher ( junior) 186 Wren, Sir Christopher 186 Wren, Matthew, Bishop 23, 35, 66, 102, 117, 122, 124, 127, 138, 142, 152, 155, 164, 169, 171, 174, 176, 182, 202, 206, 207, 209, 210–11, 212–13, 223, 224, 232–3, 236, 243, 244, 245, 246, 255–6, 259, 262 churchmanship of 18, 185, 186–7 petitions against 194–5, 196–9, 207, 235, 238–9, 242 visitation/visitation articles of 19, 145, 152, 165, 171, 172, 185, 187, 188–91, 193–4, 207, 208, 213, 217, 218, 220–2, 225–6, 231–2, 234, 255 Wright, Robert, Bishop 261–2 Wrightson, Keith 9–10 12 Wroth, Sir Thomas 218 Wyllet family 96, 100

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Wyllet, Thomas, separatist 96, 100 Wymondham, Norfolk 47, 87 Wyndham. Francis, recorder 44 Wythe, Richard 218–20 Yate, Henry, of Bristol 262 Yates, John (1), minister of Stiffkey 84–5, 104–7, 111, 120–6, 131, 133, 137, 138, 165, 226–7, 232 Works: ‘Eldership the Greatest Lordship’ ([1643]) 124–5; Gods arraignment of hypocrites (1615) 104–5; Ibis ad Caesarem (1626) 122; Imago mundi et regnum Christi (1639) 123–4; A model of divinitie (1623) 84–5, 107, 122; A treatise of

the honour of Gods house (1637) 122–3 Yates, John (2), Congregationalist minister 121 Yonger, William 204–5 York, archbishops of, see Harsnett, Samuel, Neile, Richard, Sterne, Richard York, archdiocese of 112, 155, 159, 160, 180, 181, 265 Yowle (or Yould), Thomas 78 Yule, George 152 Zanchius, Hieronymous 82 Zürich, city of 43 Zwingli, Huldrych 43

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Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c.1560-1643 (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England

William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Early Modern Women in Conversation (Early Modern Literature in History)

Early Modern Women in Conversation (Early Modern Literature in History)

Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

Women and Property: In Early Modern England

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England

Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England

Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England

Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook

Radical Comedy in Early Modern England (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England

Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modern England

Religion and Society in Early Modern England; A Sourcebook

Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion

Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Early Modern Literature in History)

Shakespeare and Religious Change (Early Modern Literature in History)

Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c.1560-1643 (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England

William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Early Modern Women in Conversation (Early Modern Literature in History)

Early Modern Women in Conversation (Early Modern Literature in History)

Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

Women and Property: In Early Modern England

Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England

Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England

Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England

Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook

Radical Comedy in Early Modern England (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England

Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modern England

Religion and Society in Early Modern England; A Sourcebook

Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion

Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Early Modern Literature in History)

Shakespeare and Religious Change (Early Modern Literature in History)

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