Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535c.1585 (Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700)

Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–c.1585 In loving memory of Alan Overell Italian Reform and English ...

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Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–c.1585

In loving memory of Alan Overell

Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–c.1585 ANNE OVERELL The Open University, UK

© Anne Overell 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Anne Overell has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Overell, M. Anne Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–c.1585. – (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) 1. Reformation – England 2. Reformation – Italy 3. England – Relations – Italy 4. Italy – Relations – England I. Title 274.2’06 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Overell, M. Anne. Italian Reform and English Reformations, c.1535–c.1585 / by M. Anne Overell. p. cm. — (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5579-4 (alk. paper) 1. Reformation—England. 2. Reformation—Italy—Influence. 3. England— Relations—Italy. 4. Italy—Relations—England. I. Title. BR375.O94 2008 274.2’06—dc22 2007050604 ISBN 978-0-7546-5579-4

Contents Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations used in Text and Bibliography Note on Citation, Spelling and Translation Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Englishmen and spirituali Bernardino Ochino in London Edward Courtenay and Il Beneficio di Cristo The Italian Connection at Edward VI’s Court Peter Martyr Vermigli and his English Friends Venetian Exile and English Propaganda Pier Paolo Vergerio and Cardinal Pole Elizabethan Aftermath, 1558–1572 A Literary Epilogue

Bibliography Index

vii ix xi xiii 1 17 41 61 81 103 125 145 167 189 213 243

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Series Editor’s Preface The still-usual emphasis on medieval (or Catholic) and reformation (or Protestant) religious history has meant neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. As a result, continuities between the middle ages and early modern Europe have been overlooked in favor of emphasis on radical discontinuities. Further, especially in the later period, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various kinds of Protestantism means that the vitality and creativity of the established church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, has been left out of account. In the last few years, an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or catholic) religion makes these inadequacies in received scholarship even more glaring and in need of systematic correction. The series will attempt this by covering all varieties of religious behavior, broadly interpreted, not just (or even especially) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history. It will to the maximum degree possible be interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional. The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly. The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’s return and the beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic. Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy, for its part,

viii

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment. Thomas F. Mayer, Augustana College

Acknowledgements As a latecomer to the community of sixteenth-century historians, I have found friendship and generosity beyond all expectation. Behind the list of names that follows are the well-timed moments of encouragement, informative emails and tactful criticisms that made this book possible. So, I record my inadequate thanks: to John McDiarmid, whose scholarly comments on several chapters were invaluable; to Susan Doran and Tom Freeman, who have most generously read and reacted to whole chapters; also to Margaret Aston, Kenneth Austin, Susan Brigden, Ruth Chavasse, Elizabeth Evenden, Dermot Fenlon, Bruce Gordon, Peter Marshall, Charlotte Methuen, Letizia Panizza, Patrick Preston, Alex Ryrie, Bill and Sarah Sheils, David and Pamela Selwyn, Tracey Sowerby, Mark Taplin, Alexandra Walsham and Michael Williams for their painstaking and imaginative aid. The text that follows did not grow directly out of a thesis, but Diarmaid MacCulloch, Ole Grell and Jonathan Woolfson, examiners for my doctorate by published work, gave so much practical and generous help that a book began to seem achievable. I thank all my colleagues for helping more than they know: of course, mistakes will remain and they are mine alone. At various stages on my career path Rosemary O’Day, Penry Williams and Anthony Wright were wise and witty teachers and supervisors. Tom Mayer is a most affirmative series editor: I cannot count the number of times I have drawn on his immense knowledge. I have also benefited much from the editorial wisdom and friendly guidance of Tom Gray and Ann Allen of Ashgate. My thanks are due to many librarians in Britain and Italy, but especially to the staff of the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, the Open University Library and the Archivio di Stato in Mantua. Research travel to Italy has been supported for several years by the Open University and I record my gratitude. Annamaria Basile, Antonella Cavazza, Chiara La Sala, Lara Mocellin and Federica Sulas helped with language, translation, transcription and warm hospitality; Timothy Jarrold offered careful reading and many insights. I am also very grateful indeed to all my friends for tolerating me and my strange subject; Jane Hunt’s constant support and Ailsa Swarbrick’s encouragement and eagle eye were truly indispensable. Last, I record my loving thanks to my family: its four very young members are a perfect diversion, whilst the adults, Stephen and Olive, James and Helen, and Jan, all found time in their busy lives to read, question, comment and care about the progress of this book. I dedicate it to the memory of my husband, Alan Overell: he once said that history was for the enhancement of life and I think he was right. Michaelmas 2007


Abbreviations used in Text and Bibliography (First references are given in full and the abbreviated form is used thereafter) ARG AS CPEC

Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte Archivio di Stato Thomas F. Mayer, Cardinal Pole in European Context: a via media in the Reformation Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. J.E. Cox Cranmer, Writings and Disputations Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer relative to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, ed. J.E. Cox CRP The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, ed. Thomas F. Mayer Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, ed. W.H. Turnbull, CSP Foreign et al. CSP Spanish Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, ed. P. de Gayangos et al. CSP Venetian Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, ed. Rawdon Brown CSPDE Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553, revised, ed. C.S. Knighton CSPDM Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Reign of Mary I, 1553–1558, revised, ed. C.S. Knighton DBI Dizionario biografico degli italiani, ed. A.M. Ghisalberti EHR English Historical Review Foxe, AM (1563) John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (1563) Foxe, AM (1570) John Foxe, The ecclesiastical history contayning the actes and monumentes (1570) Gleanings Gleanings of a Few Scattered Ears during the Period of the Reformation in England, ed. G. Gorham HJ Historical Journal Emidio Campi and Frank James (eds), Peter Martyr HRR Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation JBS Journal of British Studies

xii JEH LLS

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN TEXT AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Journal of Ecclesiastical History Peter Martyr Vermigli, Life, Letters and Sermons, trans. and ed. John Patrick Donnelly LP Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47, ed. J.S. Brewer et al. NS New Series ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison OL Original Letters relative to the English Reformation, ed. H. Robinson Processi Carnesecchi I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi, ed. Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto Processo Morone Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone, ed. Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto PS Parker Society SCH Studies in Church History SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal STC Short Title Catalogue …1475–1640, first compiled by A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, 2nd edn rev. and enlarged, ed. W.A. Jackson, F.S. Ferguson and Katharine F. Pantzer STC Wing Short Title Catalogue …1641–1700, compiled by Donald Wing ZL The Zurich Letters, ed. Hastings Robinson

Note on Citation, Spelling and Translation Conventions for citation of contemporary correspondence vary from one collection to another. Therefore, for all letters I have given senders’ and recipients’ names and the date in full, but not place unless it is particularly significant. Letters in Calendars of State Papers appear with letter numbers (where possible) and page numbers. Collections of reformers’ letters (e.g. Gleanings, Original Letters and Zurich Letters) appear with page numbers. For The Correspondence of Reginald Pole letter numbers are used. Original spelling is retained in quotations from English language sources. For quotations from languages other than English, the translation appears in the text and the original is given in the footnotes.


Introduction There was infinite variety in the experiments we call ‘reform’. They could be bold or secretive, individual or communal, progressive or reactionary, ‘catholic’ or ‘protestant’.1 All over Europe there were faltering expressions, uncertain identities. Here we shall be connecting two of them: the Italian version was enigmatic, evasive and incomplete; the English, political, pragmatic, energetic and liable to pick up other people’s ideas and run with them. During the two short reigns of Edward VI and Mary Tudor, several reformers came from Italy to England. In 1547, in the months after the accession of the young King, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, a great internationalist, invited foreign gurus to come to foster a bolder reformation. Two Italians, ‘Peter Martyr’ Vermigli and Bernardino Ochino, were the first to arrive.2 The generosity with which they were received caused comment all over Europe: generous travel expenses, prestigious jobs, hospitality at Lambeth Palace, congregations which included the great and the good of Edwardian England. It was an entry con brio. Seven years later, the catholic Mary Tudor welcomed Cardinal Reginald Pole, English by birth, but intimately involved with reform in Italy, to lead his native country back to papal allegiance. Pole brought with him a group of like-minded men, most of them influenced by Italian reform during their own salad days and together they attempted reform of the English Church. On the accession of Elizabeth I, as the tables turned again, there was further clamour to ‘bring back Italians’. This strange sequence was part of an Anglo-Italian connection that spanned three reigns and echoed through the literature of the centuries that followed. The movement in Italy has been characterised as ‘a micro-history of defeat’, persecuted, and crushed by the 1580s.3 By then, however, contemporaries in England had become familiar with it. During the 1520s and 1530s English travellers went to Italy, primarily to study, but some also witnessed the first stirrings of reform. Then, the persecutions of mid1

Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, ‘Introduction: Protestantisms and their Beginnings’, in ibid. (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 1–13. 2 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven and London, 1996), pp. 380–83, 394–5, 501; ibid., ‘Archbishop Cranmer: Concord and Tolerance in a Changing Church’, in Ole Grell and Bob Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 199–215. 3

Silvana Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’ in Bob Scribner, Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 181–200 (pp. 181–2).

ITALIAN REFORM AND ENGLISH REFORMATIONS, C.1535–C.1585

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sixteenth century Europe brought about a series of migrations between the two countries. All these journeys, whether undertaken in hope or fear, created friendships and contacts. Gradually even stay-at-homes became more aware, as scores of translations were made available and a whole cast of Italians entered England’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, written by that committed European, John Foxe.4 This connection started in the early sixteenth century when the division and categorisation of Christians was unfamiliar, for many unthinkable. Early contact with the ideas of Luther (from about 1520) did not make Italian reformers into ‘protestants’. Later generations have used this confessional shorthand but it would have been meaningless to most contemporaries. In the 1540s some of those attracted to reform decided to stay in Italy, preferring loyalty to the Church, while others fled to lands where reform had taken a stronger hold – including England. Some Italian exiles fitted in well, others remained radicals and misfits in their places of refuge. We shall be concerned with them all: those who stayed and those who fled, confused and convinced, mainstream and radical. From about 1540, the word ‘spirituali’ (the spiritual, unworldly ones) came into regular use as a description for Italy’s reformers, but it is anachronistic for earlier decades.5 Despite making different choices later in life, these Italians started out with a wish to reform – both the Church and their own personal faith. They began as reformers and that is what they will be called here – though ‘spirituali’ will also be used for the years after 1540. Where it is necessary to distinguish reformers-who-became-protestants from reformers-who-remained-catholics, I shall specify. But I shall try to avoid using the words ‘catholic’ and ‘protestant’ for the period before 1550, on the grounds that these divisions had not come into existence. After the middle of the century, I shall allow those terms to creep in, because around then they came gradually into use, along with all the subdivisions: Evangelical, Reformed and so forth.6 Reluctantly and wistfully, after about 1560, English and Italian contemporaries accepted that, despite many 4

John Foxe, The ecclesiastical history contayning the actes and monumentes (London: John Day, 1570), STC 11223 (hereafter cited as AM (1570)), book 7, pp. 1068–73; ibid. book 9, pp. 1552–5. 5

On the use of this term, see Adriano Prosperi, Tra evangelismo e controriforma, G.M. Giberti (1495–1543) (Rome, 1969), pp. 285–6, 314–15; Stephen Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy (Leiden, 2002), pp. 144–5, 219–20. 6 ‘Evangelical’ is a good word for many European non-catholic reformers in the first half of the century but, because ‘Evangelism’ has caused much controversy among Italian scholars, I have avoided using both terms. For ‘Evangelicals’ in the rest of Europe, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London and New York, 2003), pp. xx; 353.

INTRODUCTION

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attempts at reconciliation, the divisions of Western Christendom could not be wiped away. ‘Reform’ and ‘reformation’ also present problems. Reform in Italy was theologically untidy, crammed with paradox. Most adherents thought they were saved by God and by their faith in God, though many shied away from hard-edged doctrines of salvation. They rediscovered the Scriptures with joy, either through reading or listening, and they wanted to see the end of obvious abuses in the Church. They talked about ‘reformatio’ by which they usually meant the process of purification, of church and individuals. Yet they lacked the support from secular rulers that proved so vital elsewhere and instead survived in groups with no recognisable organisation and no formal statements of doctrine.7 Therefore, to suggest that there was ever an ‘Italian Reformation’ goes a step too far. I shall stick to ‘Italian reform’, which seems to suit this un-organised, un-institutional phenomenon. By contrast, reformers in England gained spasmodic royal support, agreed on some hazy (and changeable) doctrines and made some rules.8 By the middle of the century these imperfect arrangements were good enough to qualify as a proper ‘English Reformation’. Yet very little of it was original. The English were exceptionally good at copying other European reforms and ‘headhunting’ their leaders. That is how the connection began. It is easy to think that European influence on England came in orderly, separate waves, first Lutheran and later Swiss, then Calvinist, with Mary Tudor’s Spanish and Italian advisers washed up in 1554 to provide a brief papalist interlude. But Tudor Englishmen could not foresee which groups would emerge as ‘influential’ and so they found doctrines and role models on a random basis, picking up ideas and contacts in the ordinary course of their travels and their reading. Especially in the first half of the century, influences were extraordinarily eclectic and pan-European.9 Their variety imparted vibrant eccentricity, together with a capacity to experiment, absorb, discriminate and reconsider. Thus, all the various sources of English ‘borrowing’ are important, especially those which historians tend to overlook through hindsight. If Italy seems an unlikely source of reform influence, that is because it became associated with reaction – but that was later, another story. Before 1550, English contemporaries found this brand 7 For introductions, see Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy; Cardinal Pole and the counter reformation (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 1–23; Euan Cameron, ‘Italy’, in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Early Reformation in Europe (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 188–214; Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’, pp. 181–200. On Italy’s ‘Reformation of doubt’, ibid., Erasmo in Italia: 1520–1580 (Turin, 1987), p. 269. 8

Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII (Cambridge, 2003).

9

For the breathtaking range, see MacCulloch’s Reformation.


4

of reform all the more interesting because it had developed in the Pope’s back garden and involved his most senior staff. Reforms in Italy and England were both derivative, which may help explain their mutual attraction. There are some threads in the weave of Italian reform which look indigenous, authentically ‘Italian’, but the border with Germany and Switzerland was near and the book trade was very brisk, especially around Venice. From 1525, books written by reformers were banned and consequently printers were up to all the tricks of the trade, altering authors’ names and titles or binding suspect material together with other impeccably ‘spiritual’ books. They invented soothing titles, often including confidence-building adjectives like ‘pio’ and ‘Christiano’.10 That wildly controversial book, Il Beneficio di Cristo, packed with extracts from the works of Northern Reformers, was described as ‘utilissimo’.11 Thus, Italians saw reform through a glass darkly and many did not make careful distinctions between Erasmus and Luther or, later, between Luther and Calvin.12 There was a disposition to hope that disagreements would be resolved and, above all, a wish to keep the peace in close-knit civic society.13 It is worth remembering that in England doctrines were often equally hazy, oscillating in accordance with the whims of King Henry VIII. Many kept their counsel and hoped that the King or the Pope would see the light.14 In both countries doctrinal mists cleared very slowly – in most cases long after rulers, reformers and then the Council of Trent issued their various brittle statements of doctrine.15 Some looked back wistfully on the first three decades of the century as a time of happy doctrinal free-for-all.16 Most of the Italian and English reformers who appear in our early chapters were students at that time; 10 Ugo Rozzo and Silvana Seidel Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, in J.-F. Gilmont (ed.), The Reformation and the Book, trans. by Karin Maag (Aldershot and Brookfield, 1998), pp. 319–67 (p. 332). 11 Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Cristo (Venice, 1543). This and other sixteenthcentury publications of the Beneficio in all European languages have been printed together in Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio di Cristo, ed. S. Caponetto (Florence, 1972) (hereafter cited as Caponetto, Beneficio). 12

Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 76. Paul Murphy, ‘Between spirituali and intransigenti; Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth Century Italy’, Catholic Historical Review, 88 (2002), 446–69. 13

14 Andrew Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, in ibid., Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 86–117; Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 3, 39–44. 15 A.D. Wright, ‘The Significance of the Council of Trent’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (hereafter cited as JEH), 26 (1975), 353–62. 16

Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone (6 vols, Rome, 1981–96) (hereafter cited as Processo Morone), vol. 2, p. 465.

INTRODUCTION

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they were formed in and deeply affected by all this doctrinal uncertainty. That may explain the noticeable English tolerance of the variety of Italian doctrine and behaviour. Italian books found English publishers with ease and only one editor dared criticise – and even he was very tentative.17 A revival of Italian literature in the middle of Elizabeth I’s reign included some material which would have been considered unorthodox by both ‘catholics’ and ‘protestants’.18 Similar long-suffering acceptance was evident in relations with the ‘church’ set up in 1547 for Italian strangers in London. The love-hate relationship between the English reformers and the ‘Stranger Churches’ in general was more pronounced in the case of the Italians, partly because of several sexual scandals and bitter internal quarrels.19

Humanism Italians and Englishmen shared the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of the generation that lived through the start of confessional strife. In both cultures, humanism has to be counted among the ‘highs’, the heady excitements of the age. (Religious persecution was among the worst of its miseries: we shall deal with that in the next section.) Nicholas Mann defined the slippery word humanism as a ‘concern with the legacy of antiquity’, an antiquity partly located in Italy and certainly rediscovered there. The main interest of humanists was classical texts and the Latin language, but ‘encoded in the fibre of the language’ they found a powerful morality. 20 This had its own dynamic, firing debate in other important areas of life: government, law, education and – above all, in all – religion. In both Italy and England, humanism supplied context, vehicle and motive for religious reform. 17 Editor’s marginals, Sermon 3, Bernardino Ochino, Fouretene Sermons … concernyng the predestinacion and eleccion of god tr. out of Italian into oure natyve tounge ([London]: John Day and William Seres [1551?]), STC 18767, sigs B vi–vii. 18 M.A. Overell, ‘Bernardino Ochino’s Books and English Religious Opinion: 1547– 1580’, in Robert Swanson (ed.), The Church and the Book, Studies in Church History, 38 (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 201–11 (p. 210). 19 L. Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica italiana a Londra nel XVI secolo ed suoi rapporti con Ginevra’, in D. Cantimori, L. Firpo et al. (eds), Ginevra e l’Italia (Florence, 1959), pp. 309–411; O. Boersma and A.J. Jelsma (eds), Unity in Multiformity: the Minutes of the Coetus of London, 1575 and the Consistory Minutes of the Italian Church of London, 1570–1591, Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland (London and Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 21–51; Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth Century London (Oxford, 1986). 20

Nicholas Mann, ‘The Origins of Humanism’, in Jill Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–19 (p. 2); Ronald Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: the Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden, 2000), p. 506.


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Taking such a line is apt to land historians in trouble, charged with perpetuating fuzzy definitions that stretch the humanists’ narrowly classical pursuits into areas where they do not belong.21 In particular, suggestions that religious reform was one outcome of the humanist programme provoke the reasonable objection that some of the reformers’ teachings constituted ‘anti-humanism’, especially their dark view of sinful human nature.22 Italian reformers certainly shared that pessimistic view, yet their mind-set and their style were unmistakably humanist. English observers commented on their profound learning, because they knew of, cited confidently and sometimes even owned, ancient texts not known in England.23 Also, they wrote books and sermons which presented religious ideas in humanist forms, especially dialogue. They communicated in Latin, sometimes in Italian, hardly ever in English or other European languages. With justice they have been viewed as ‘missionaries’ of humanism as well as reform throughout Europe, and certainly in England.24 Travel between the two countries was constant, but there were times when there was a lot of movement, significant migrations. The first of these took place in Henry VIII’s reign, when many English travellers – nobles, clerics, students and royal agents – went to study in Italy, the cradle of humanism. Of all the travel recorded here, this was the kindest. Usually these Englishmen had chosen to cross the Alps, they were not forced to do so by persecution. Often they went to Padua, Europe’s greatest (and most expensive) University.25 They studied classical texts, but also the Bible, because ‘studi sacri’ had become part of the accepted reading list. English students expected to find both sacred and secular wisdom – ‘pure’ humanist learning and insights that could be applied to practical concerns, like the government of England or King Henry VIII’s divorce.

21 Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York, 1979), pp. 22–23; Alistair Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’ and ‘English Humanism and the Body Politic’, in Alistair Fox and John Guy (eds), Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 9–33, 33–51 (p. 31). 22

Jean Delumeau, Naissance et affirmation de la Réforme (Paris, 1973), p. 74.

23

MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 381–83.

24

John Tedeschi, ‘The Cultural Contributions of Italian Protestant Reformers in the Late Renaissance’, Schifanoia: Bolletino dell’Istituto di studi rinascimentali (Ferrara), 1 (1986), 127–51. 25 Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 66, 97, 125; T.F. Mayer, ‘Marco Mantova and the Paduan Religious Crisis of the Early Sixteenth Century’, Cristianesimo nella storia, 7 (1986), 41–62, reprinted in ibid., Cardinal Pole in European Context: a via media in the Reformation, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot, 2000) (hereafter cited as CPEC), IX.

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Gordon Zeeveld argued that contacts with Italian thought gave English students big ideas – even Machiavellian ideas – and laid the ‘Foundations of Tudor Policy’.26 That was too sweeping a claim, but it suggests something of the impressionable excitement of Englishmen abroad in Italy. Some encountered not just bracing questions about princely ‘virtù’, but challenging demands for reform in all areas of life, the soul, the self, the state and the church. A few anticipated a cleansing operation thorough enough to reduce the power of the Renaissance papacy. From the moment when Henry VIII began his momentous quarrel with the papacy, English interest in Italian reform was riddled with anti-papal politics. Italians were not ‘ordinary’ reformers, shut up in a German or Swiss city, their base was the North of Italy, near the Pope’s own territories. Understandably they came to be regarded as potential fifth columnists and were watched carefully by English diplomats and ambassadors.27 Several influential Englishmen went to Italy in the early sixteenth century.28 Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s minister, was there. The poet Thomas Wyatt went on a mission to Rome, accompanying Sir John Russell, linguist father of the equally italianizzato Francis Russell, who will appear often in later chapters.29 Thomas Cranmer travelled in 1529 to Bologna and Rome on a diplomatic mission associated with the King’s divorce.30 Richard Morison, later to be King Henry VIII’s best propagandist, was a student in Padua and Venice, where he became fluent and mixed with Italian reformers.31 Yet one English nobleman became an ‘Italian’ reformer in all but nationality.32 Reginald Pole’s contacts with Italy lasted for well over twenty-five years – for most of that time he was involved with influential 26

G.W. Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, MA, 1948), pp. 178–89; for qualification, on grounds that ‘readers are not necessarily disciples’, see Sidney Anglo, Machiavelli: the First Century (Oxford, 2005), pp. 99–109 (p. 99). 27

Aldo Stella, ‘Guido da Fano, eretico del secolo XVI al servizio dei re d’Inghilterra’, Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, 13 (1959), 196–238; ibid., ‘Utopie e velleità insurrezionali dei filoprotestanti italiani (1545–47)’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance, 27 (1965), 133–82. 28 Kenneth Bartlett, The English in Italy: 1525–1558. A Study in Culture and Politics (Geneva, 1991). 29

On Wyatt’s adventures, see Susan Brigden and Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Thomas Wyatt in Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 58 (2005), 464–511. 30 R.B. Merriman, The Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (2 vols, Oxford, 1902), vol. 1, pp. 85–6; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 48–53. 31

M.A. Overell, ‘An English Friendship and Italian Reform: Richard Morison and Michael Throckmorton, 1532–1538’, JEH, 57 (2006), 478–93. 32 T.F. Mayer, Reginald Pole, Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000); T.F. Mayer, ‘Pole, Reginald (1500–1558)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) (hereafter cited as ODNB).


8

spirituali, with cardinals, bishops, aristocrats, preachers, and poets, all of them touched by ideas of reform. He arrived in Italy in 1521, studied in Padua and lived part of the time in Venice. In 1526 he returned to England to serve the King, but moved very slowly into open disagreement with the royal divorce. By 1532 he was back in Italy, a return to exile and an eloquent protest. He was based there for a further eighteen years, until his return to England as Cardinal Legate for England on the accession of the Catholic Mary Tudor. Like several senior Italian churchmen he had forwarded the cause of reform: shielded hotheads, distributed books and defended a theology which had similarities to that of Martin Luther. Yet, when forced to choose, finally and in agonised dilemma, he chose obedience to the Church. Thereafter, many Catholic zealots regarded him as still a heretic, while most reformers hated him as a traitor, a ‘Nicodemite’, who had hidden his beliefs and caved in.33 None of them doubted that Pole had once been an ‘Italian’ reformer. The history of the Anglo-Italian network is littered with humanist careers almost as complicated as Pole’s. On the English side were Thomas Starkey and Richard Morison.34 Among Italians, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Bernardino Ochino are obvious candidates, attaining high office in religious orders, teaching and packing the piazzas at sermon time, until bishops competed for their services as preachers of reform. In 1542 they scandalised church and society by fleeing into exile. Five years later, victories of imperial and catholic armies had put them in further danger and they answered Cranmer’s summons to England. Then, on Mary Tudor’s accession, they returned to mainland Europe and never crossed the Channel again. A decade later, Vermigli was revered as a famous protestant theologian, while Ochino was condemned as a heretic by his fellow reformers in Zurich. He had fallen out with both sides of the religious divide, like several others among his radical compatriots.35 Thus, the subject is full of ‘great lives’ lived partly in Italy and partly in England and historians’ perspective has usually been biographical. Here, however, the focus will be shifted from individuals to groups and patronage networks and to the texts and translations they produced. Any book concerned with interlocking groups can torture its readers with barrages of strange names, so I have been selective, especially in this Introduction. 33 Mayer, Reginald Pole, pp. 330–43; M.A. Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti-Nicodemite Propaganda and England: 1547–1558’, JEH, 51 (2000), 296–318. 34

T.F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989). For brief biographies, see the ‘Biographical Register’, in Woolfson, Padua, pp. 205–90. 35

Mark Taplin, The Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, c. 1540–1620 (Aldershot, 2003).

INTRODUCTION

9

Behind those with leading roles, lurk large numbers of Englishmen in Italy and Italians in England who will take the stage as necessary in later chapters. The communal focus is especially vital in relation to Italian exiles when they first arrived in England in the late 1540s. We have become too used to narrative of ‘lives of the great exiles’. It is time to consider the grim impotence of exiles in strange lands, if they were left unaided: the language problems, the unrealistic expectations, to say nothing of local hostility. Without powerful patrons, competent translators and enterprising printers to help spread their word, Italians in England would have made little impact. Humanism, aided by print, was the backdrop for their success.36 In many respects, their relationship with their English hosts conformed to an established pattern, whereby patrons hired and helped humanists, who then wrote on subjects that would please the patron. Like humanists all over Europe, Vermigli and Ochino had to be research workers and writers, producing texts of relevance to real life needs: reforming the Eucharist, condemning rebellion, overthrowing the Pope. Vermigli, in particular, contributed to the drafting of important English reformation documents, including the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552. But Italian reformers were dependent, in a strange country and most of them never learned to speak or write in English. This language problem cut them off from preaching to the ordinary people, as Vermigli recognised.37 Effectively they were trapped in the learned circles where they could find willing and competent linguists and collaborators. Their first and best patron, Archbishop Cranmer, was himself a humanist and could read the Italian language at least a little – it was not difficult for good Latinists. He was aided by eminent scholars, most of them members of the group known to historians as the ‘Cambridge Connection’: John Cheke, Anthony Cooke, Richard Morison, John Ponet, all of them steeped in the classics as well as the Bible.38 Edward VI’s humanist court supplied linguists who translated Italian reformers’ texts, like Anne Cooke and the Princess Elizabeth, while the young nobleman Edward Courtenay copied his peers, translating Il 36 John N. King, ‘The Book Trade under Edward VI and Mary I’, in L. Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (vols 3 and 4 at present, Cambridge, 1999–), vol. 3 (1400–1557), pp. 164–78 (pp. 167–70); Patrick Collinson, Arnold Hunt and Alexandra Walsham, ‘Religious Publishing in England’, in ibid., vol. 4 (1557–1695), pp. 29–66; see Chapter 9 below. 37 Martyr (Pietro Martire Vermigli) to Martin Bucer, 10 January 1551, Gleanings of a Few Scattered Ears during the Period of the Reformation in England, ed. G. Gorham (London, 1857) (hereafter cited as Gleanings), pp. 229–30. 38 Maria Dowling, ‘Cranmer as Humanist Reformer’, in Paul Ayris and David Selwyn (eds), Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 89–114; W.S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC, 1980).


10

Benefico di Cristo even while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Italian reform texts formed a part of the young King Edward VI’s humanist education.39 When he died in 1553, several of these volumes were already in print. By the end of the century, most of the texts written by Italian reformers were being read in English.40 Throwaway references in English sermons prove widespread familiarity with the idea that there had been reform in Italy and that it had come under attack.41 This easy currency came not just from individual exiles, however colourful their careers, but from a whole network of humanists.

Persecution Thus humanism provided a bond between Italian reformers and Englishmen, but then came the mutual misery of mid-century persecution. Some historians have seen the early 1540s as a time of crisis and reaction, when the Catholic Church changed the rules, drew up an Index of banned books, reorganised the Roman Inquisition and clamped down on Italy’s disorganised reform.42 Like most historical ‘watersheds’ this exaggerates and dramatises a much slower and more uncertain process.43 It is certain, however, that in 1542 Vermigli and Ochino knew that their teaching was under scrutiny. In August 1542, both men fled, followed by small groups of friends and leaving behind them a scandalised hierarchy.44 First, they went to Swiss and German cities where reformers were temporarily safe – Basel, Geneva, Augsburg, Strassburg. Their respite proved short. Five years later, victories of Imperial armies and renewed persecution in the Empire put them in further danger, from which they were rescued by

39

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), pp. 26–30; M.A. Overell, ‘Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo’, in Jonathan Woolfson (ed.), Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 151–74. 40

For instance, STC 18764–7, 18770–1; 24665–6; 24673; see Chapter 9 below.

41

H. Latimer, Sermons …, and Sermons and Remains …, G. E. Corrie (ed.) (2 vols, Cambridge, 1844, 1845), Sermons (1844), p. 425. 42

Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento: Ricerche storiche (Florence, 1939); Massimo Firpo, Inquisizione romana e Controriforma: studi sul cardinal Giovanni Morone e il suo processo d’eresia (Bologna, 1992), p. 91. 43

For emphasis on gradual change, see T.F. Mayer, ‘The War of the Two Saints: The Conclave of Julius III and Cardinal Pole’, CPEC IV. 44 Gigliola Fragnito, ‘Gli “spirituali” e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino’, Rivista storica italiana, 84 (1972), 777–811; Philip McNair, Peter Martyr in Italy; an Anatomy of Apostasy (Oxford, 1967), pp. 239–71.

INTRODUCTION

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Thomas Cranmer’s invitations. By that stage, England was one of the few remaining ‘safe-houses’ in Europe. English reactions to their arrival were a sign of these desperate times. Edward VI’s reign, when most reformers had little to fear, was a time of meditation on the persecution raging elsewhere, on the need to witness and the terrible sin of ‘Nicodemites’, who had failed to do so. English reverence for the Italians who had suddenly arrived in their midst was grounded in the fact that they were exiles. They had left Italy ‘for the faithful testimony of Jesus Christe’. Their lives were seen as ‘a sufficient proteccion’ for their writings, a guarantee of their personal wisdom and goodness.45 They, and the many exiled ‘strangers’ who arrived from the Continent in these years, had made a noble decision which several English reformers were conscious that they themselves had ducked; the religious changes of Henry VIII’s reign had been so capricious that to have survived was to be compromised.46 The reign of King Edward VI brought winds of change.47 In his great biography of Cranmer, Diarmaid MacCulloch emphasises the Archbishop’s ‘fervent belief in the potential of a General Council’ which gave ‘urgent purpose to his hospitality to foreign refugee evangelicals’ early in the new reign.48 Many shared his wish to use England, not just as a place of refuge, but as a base from which the whole European reformation could be rescued and reorganised. Among the Edwardian refugees, Italians had a special importance: they had chosen exile in 1542, relatively early in the long cycle of European repression, and they originated from the Pope’s own country. Persecution and exile (viewed as a minor martyrdom) became a leitmotiv of Anglo-Italian contacts for the rest of the century. English sensitivity to the problems of persecution in Italy was sharpened by contact with the exiles, but also through the widespread knowledge of one famous Italian story. Accounts of the ‘Tragedy’ of Francesco Spiera were written in 1549, by a group of exiled humanist reformers, led by the prolific propagandist Pier Paolo Vergerio.49 None of these authors ever came 45

‘Preface to the Christian Reader’, Ochino, Fouretene Sermons, sig. A ii; Sermons [six] of the right famous and excellente clerke Master B Ochine [tr.] (R. Argentyne) (Ipswich, 1548), STC 18765, sig. A iii. 46

Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 39–44.

47

Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 26–36. 48 49

MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 394–5.

Pier Paolo Vergerio, La historia di M. F. Spiera, il quale per havere in varii modi negata la conosciuta verita dell’Evangelio casco in una misera desperatione (ed. P.P. Vergerio, [Basel], 1551); Anne Jacobson Schutte, Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (Geneva, 1977), now in an unrevised Italian translation, with a new preface and revised bibliography, Pier Paolo Vergerio e la riforma a Venezia, 1498–1549 (Rome, 1988).


12

to England, but their story was a huge success there, published in English by one of the King’s printers, less than a year after its first appearance on the Continent.50 Part fact, part fiction, the story concerned a small-town Italian lawyer who was called before the Inquisition, recanted his beliefs, and died in despair, convinced he was damned. In this age of persecution, the moral was obvious. The story became widely known in Edwardian England, even before disaster struck. After the accession of Mary Tudor, recounting the story of Francesco Spiera’s cowardly dissimulation became Englishmen’s way of dealing with their own temptation and terror.51 The Marian persecution brought about more moves, more ‘migration’: some left for exile in Italy. These journeys were not the kindly humanist ‘educational’ travel – but enforced journeys, undertaken in shock. Vermigli and Ochino were given safe conducts out of England and this – their third – flight was depicted as a kind of martyrdom.52 Their English supporters scattered: to imprisonment, recantation and death by burning (Cranmer), to safe country houses (the Princess Elizabeth) or to exile.53 Several of Vermigli’s English friends joined him in exile in Strassburg or visited him there (Richard Morison and John Ponet).54 Another group of about fifty highly educated Englishmen went to Italy, most of them to the Veneto. Sometimes this has been regarded as a ‘a group of essentially political rather than religious refugees’, yet most of these men were deeply serious about religious reform and some had already forged strong links with Italian reformers at Edward VI’s court (John Cheke, Anthony Cooke, and Francis Russell are examples).55 So, we shall be regarding the Venetian exile as an important continuation of established links between England and Italy. While Marian exiles were in the Veneto, another ‘Italian’ spirituale travelled to England to end the schism and to re-form (yet again) the 50

Matteo Gribaldi, A Notable and Marvailous Epistle, tr. E.A. [Edward Aglionby] (Worcester, 1550), STC 12365. 51 H. Latimer, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 425; M.A. Overell, ‘The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera’, Sixteenth Century Journal (hereafter cited as SCJ) 26 (1995), 619–37 (pp. 632–37); ibid., ‘Vergerio’s Anti-Nicodemite Propaganda’, pp. 302–4. 52 Jonathan Wright, ‘The Marian Exiles and the Legitimacy of Flight from Persecution’, JEH, 52 (2001), 220–43. 53

MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 558–603; Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, pp. 103–5. 54 W.S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?–1556): Advocate of Limited Monarchy (Chicago, 1942); E.J. Baskerville, ‘John Ponet in Exile: a Ponet Letter to John Bale’, JEH, 37 (1986), 442–7. 55 Kenneth Bartlett ‘The Role of the Marian Exiles’, in P.W. Hasler (ed.), The House of Commons, 1558–1603 (3 vols, London, 1981), vol. 1, Appendix XI, pp. 102–10 (p. 104); ibid., English in Italy, pp. 131–63.

INTRODUCTION

13

English Church. Reginald Pole, Queen Mary Tudor’s cousin, was made Cardinal for England and later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Pole had not then renounced the theology of salvation he had learned with the spirituali in the early 1540s. He and several of his staff in England, like Thomas Goldwell, Richard Pate and Alvise Priuli, seem to have retained a typically Italian vision of the reformation and purification of the church and consequently of the individuals within it. They did not have long to apply it in England, but their industry brought fruits only recently recognised in historical scholarship.56 In mirror image, they did what Edwardian Italian reformers had done, striving to influence a strife torn country, in universities, pulpits and episcopal palaces. Italian reform had infiltrated and influenced two very different English reformations by that fateful day late in 1558, when Pole and Queen Mary both died.

Memory and Myth Elizabeth I’s accession brought another ‘protestant’ reformation and many expected to pick up where they had left off in 1553, resuming AngloItalian networking on English soil. The new queen had other ideas. In an unforeseen turn of events, the humanist Princess Elizabeth became a queen who was suspicious of most foreign reformers. She prevaricated for over two years about the return of Italians and finally allowed only a fairly low-key exploration of Vermigli’s preparedness to return. He refused on grounds of his age and the likelihood of difficult working conditions in England. On the latter point he was right. His countrymen were not allowed the religious limelight as once they had been. The Italian church in London re-opened, its cause not helped by diminishing numbers and more scandals.57 Italian exiles were kept in safe, secular occupations. Their predecessors had been consultants and advisers for a national reformation, but those halcyon days were over. Memory was a different matter. Without doubt, Italian reform influence continued: it was acceptable, even welcomed, so long as it could be located in the Edwardian past, preserved in print and finally made part of the Elect Nation’s myth. John Foxe worked that magic when he reminded his readers of Vermigli’s courage in England, of English martyrs who read the 56 John Edwards and Ronald Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2005); Eamon Duffy and David Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2006). These two collections contain several valuable studies, cited separately below, but see especially, T.F. Mayer, ‘The Success of Cardinal Pole’s Final Legation’, in Duffy and Loades, Church of Mary Tudor, pp. 149–75. 57

Boersma and Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, pp. 23–42.


14

story of Francesco Spiera and the daring Italians executed for proselytising in their own country.58 An Elizabethan boom in the publication of Italian reformers’ books helped imprint these memories. After his death in Zurich in 1563, Vermigli became required reading for English students of divinity – usually in the form of his Common Places, which were manageable excerpts from his scriptural commentaries.59 Reverence for his teaching contributed to the variety of Elizabethan Protestantism. English loyalty to Ochino was surprisingly resilient. His works were still being published in England some twenty years after Zurich’s ministers had condemned him for heresy in 1563.60 That Italian classic Il Beneficio di Cristo appeared in a new translation and had a lively run of re-editions.61 Of all the texts, Francesco Spiera’s story was the most widely known. It appeared in plays, ballads and poems and, after a further seventeenth century revival, was quoted by John Bunyan, Samuel Richardson and in countless sermons and popular stories over three centuries. Whenever Spiera’s name was mentioned, Italian reform was solemnly remembered and the great debate about persecution, witness and the danger of damnation was reopened.62 Italians had made their anti-hero very famous indeed. Italian reform, crushed in Italy, left strong impressions on English culture. From Cranmer’s generation until well into the seventeenth century this ‘Italian Connection’ depended on a tightly intertwined mixture of motives: religious, ‘humanist’, and political. When Englishmen remembered Italians they recalled devoutly the persecutions which had brought these two groups together. Anti-papal and political instincts also came into play, making Englishmen alert to every hint of continued reform in Italy. Some optimists continued to cherish the delusion that Venice might still become a protestant outpost in catholic Italy.63 The connection, started by humanists in Padua in the 1520s, and then sealed by persecution, had remarkable 58 Foxe, AM (1570), book 9, pp. 1552–5; book 10, p. 1583; book 11, p. 1816; ‘Admonition to the Reader’, book 12, p. 2312; book 7, pp. 1068–73. 59

The common places of ... Peter Martyr translated and partlie gathered by A. Marten (London: H. Denham and H. Middleton, 1583), STC 24669. 60 Overell, ‘Bernardino Ochino’s Books, p. 210. 61 Benedetto da Mantova, The Benefit that Christians receive by Jesus Christ Crucified ... A.G. (London: [Thomas East] for Lucas Harrison and George Bishop, [1573]), STC 19114–8. 62 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 86–7, 326–7; see below, Chapter 9. 63

Sir Henry Wotton to the Earl of Salisbury, 13 September 1607, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. L.P. Smith (2 vols, Oxford, 1907), vol. 1, p. 399; Paolo Sarpi, Historia del Concilio tridentino (Londra: appresso Giovan. Billio. regio stampatore [1619]) [ed. M.A. De Dominis], STC 21760; see also STC 21761, 21764.

INTRODUCTION

15

staying power. Ochino, Pole, Vergerio, Vermigli et al. had contributed to a lively awareness that there had been a brief flowering of reform, close to the epicentre of Catholicism, enigmatic but rich in insights and worthy of judicious borrowing. From the moment reform ran into trouble in Italy, the long process of transfer to England began. How and why it affected English culture are questions addressed in this book.


CHAPTER ONE

Englishmen and spirituali The Bishop’s [the Bishop of Rome’s] authority in religion seemeth to diminish more and more, as well in this city [Venice] as in all the rest of Italy, for the Scripture beginneth to reign universally. (Edmund Harvel to Anthony Denny, Venice, 20 May 1543.)1

The magnetism of the land of the ‘Renaissance’ was strong for Englishmen, as for many Europeans. The journey was demanding and costs were high, but generations of students seized the opportunity to visit the place where ancient texts had been rediscovered and reinterpreted. They went to study under the guidance of Italy’s great humanists, reading all the subjects revitalised by that powerful renovatio: natural philosophy, medicine, mathematics, law, theology, as well as ‘the humanities’.2 Motives were mixed: intellectual, professional, personal, only rarely explicitly religious. Yet these English hopefuls encountered (and usually possessed) Christian religious assumptions and aspirations imbedded within the process of intellectual enquiry. Italian humanism and Christianity were in counterpoint, sometimes in harmony, very rarely in complete discord.3 This first chapter will show how English humanist travellers became involved with the beginnings of reform in Italy.4 The humanists’ return ad fontes, to the original sources, in every field of learning, included searching for the authentic, accurate text of Scripture. Burgeoning textual scholarship, commentary and translation made

1 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47, J.S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R.H. Brodie (eds) (21 vols and 2 vols addenda, London, HMSO, 1862–1932) (hereafter cited as LP), vol. 18, part I, 576, p. 334. 2

On English travel, Jonathan Woolfson’s Padua and the Tudors is indispensable.

3

Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: the Origins of Humanism, p. 503; Timothy Verdon, ‘Environments of Imagination’, in Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (eds), Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and the Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento (Syracuse NY, 1990), pp. 1–33 (pp. 27–31); Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: the Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot, 1997). 4 The literature on Italian reform is extensive, see The Italian Reformation of the Sixteenth Century and the Diffusion of Renaissance Culture: A Bibliography of the Secondary Literature, ed. John Tedeschi in association with James M. Lattis (Modena, 2000); Salvatore Caponetto, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth Century Italy, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Kirksville MO, 2001) is a useful reference book.


18

the Bible more immediate – and for many, more worrying.5 The chasm between the holiness of God and the sins of humanity, always present in Judeo-Christian religion, seemed to deepen. Some Italians were asking the question often associated with Martin Luther’s spiritual crisis: how could I, the chief of sinners, be saved? The experience of the Venetian nobleman and humanist Gasparo Contarini sounds like that of a ‘Lutheran before Luther’. In 1511, Contarini went to make his Easter confession in a state of anxiety. He was uncertain of his future and lonely because several of his friends had decided to work out their own hard way of salvation in the hermitage of Camaldoli.6 The advice of an unknown confessor released in Contarini a different, more confident approach to the age-old problem of salvation. Soon afterwards, he wrote: ‘Only we must strive to unite ourselves with Christ our head, in faith, hope, and the little love of which we are capable. As for the satisfaction for past sins and those into which human frailty continually falls, His passion has been enough and more than enough’. Thereafter, he could ‘sleep securely in the midst of the city ... since I have such a payer of my debt’. Despite the similarities to Luther’s experience, Contarini’s story also shows the differences. His phrase ‘the little love of which we are capable’ seems to qualify the idea of salvation by faith alone. Human beings still had to do something (albeit only to love) whereas Luther thought they were so sunk in sin as to be incapable of contributing anything at all. Contarini was not alone with his anguish and the conclusion of his crisis left him inside the Church.7 That is where he and many Italian reformers remained. In the early sixteenth century world, still not divided into confessional groups, many people felt no need to make stark choices. They hoped to have it all ways: to pursue their humanist studies of the classics, the 5 Danilo Zardin ‘Bibbia e letteratura in volgare nell’Italia del cinque-seicento’, Annali di storia moderna e contemporanea, 4 (1998), 593–616 (p. 594). 6

Stephen Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy (Leiden, 2002); Constance Furey, ‘The Communication of Friendship: Gasparo Contarini’s Letters to the Hermits at Camaldoli’, Church History, 72 (2003), 71–101. 7

‘Solum fatigar se dovemo in unirse con questo nostro capo con fede, con speranza et con con quel poccho di amor che potemo. Ché quanto a la satisfaction di i peccati fati et in i quali la fragilità humana casca, la passion sua è stà sufficiente et più che bastante … Non dormirò adonque io securo, benché sia in mezzo la cità … havendo io tal pagatore del mio debito?’, Contarini to Giustiniani, 24 April 1511, in Hubert Jedin, Contarini und Camaldoli (Rome, 1953), pp. 12–15, quoted in Elisabeth G. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome and Reform (Berkeley, 1993), p. 14; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 8. For the development of Contarini’s thought, see P. Matheson, Cardinal Contarini at Regensburg (Oxford, 1972); Constance Furey, Erasmus, Contarini and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 89–98.

ENGLISHMEN AND SPIRITUALI

19

Bible and the Fathers, to remain in a purified church and receive its sacraments, whilst believing that their salvation came through grace and faith alone. The origins of the ideas of Italian reformers were once a subject of fierce controversy. Were their beliefs unforeseen by-products of Italian humanism?8 Are we witnessing genuinely Italian reform or just an appropriation of ideas which came from the Reformation further north?9 According to older interpretations, the early stage of the process (once called ‘Italian Evangelism’) was indigenous, authentic and Italian.10 Research in recent decades, however, shows how widely and how well the works of Luther and Melanchthon were known in Italy.11 Although Italians like Contarini were asking independent questions about salvation, it is certain that, by 1520 at the latest, powerful answers were coming from across the Alps. Those who stress influence from the German and Swiss Reformations have proved their point.12 But to suggest that this issue must be settled on an ‘either/or’ basis is unhelpful polarisation. Italian Reform grew from imported and home grown seeds. English travellers were exposed to both sorts of influence by the very fact that almost all of them were based in the North of Italy, the melting pot of reform. They were not living in a homogenous, closed society; new ideas spread rapidly, partly because itinerant preachers drew huge crowds, in the best Italian tradition.13 In the northern cities reform came in all shapes and sizes, some of it intensely personal, like the significant number of departures to hermitages, or local, based on confraternities and individual preachers. In Ferrara, it centred on the ducal court, in Padua on the university; in Venice, reformers gathered around printers’ shops.14 The 8 Bowd, Reform before the Reformation, pp. 165–70; Euan Cameron, ‘The Late Renaissance and the Unfolding Reformation in Europe’, in J. Kirk (ed.), Humanism and Reform; the Church in Europe, England and Scotland 1400–1640. Essays in Honour of James Cameron, SCH, Subsidia 8 (1991), pp. 15–36 (p. 17); Lewis Spitz, ‘Humanism and the Protestant Reformation’, in A. Rabil (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy (3 vols, Philadelphia, 1988), vol. 3, pp. 380–404 (pp. 383–5, 403). 9

On the historical and theological background, see Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 1–23. 10 Eva Maria Jung, ‘On the Nature of Evangelism in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 14 (1953), 511–27; for criticism, see Elisabeth Gleason ‘On the Nature of Sixteenth Century Evangelism: Scholarship 1953–78’, SCJ, 9 (1978), 4–25. 11 Rozzo and Seidel Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, pp. 346–55; Silvano Cavazza, ‘Libri in volgare e propaganda eterodossa: Venezia, 1543–47’, in Rolando Bussi (ed.), Libri, idee e sentimenti religiosi nel Cinquecento Italia (Modena, 1987) pp. 9–28 (pp. 19–23). 12 For instance, T. Bozza, Il Beneficio di Cristo e La Istituzione della religione cristiana di Calvino (Rome, 1963). 13

Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’, pp. 187–9. Papal suspicions about reformation ideas at the Estense court in Ferrara began as early as 1521, Charmarie Jenkins Blaisdell, ‘Politics and Heresy in Ferrara’, 1534–1559, 14


20

northern border was near and German merchants facilitated the flow of books and ideas. The international student community of the University of Padua was organised into ‘nations’, with a large German contingent and a vocal group of French students, some of whom were religious refugees.15 The early sixteenth century was a golden age for the University of Padua and for English attendance there. The great attractions were medicine and the law faculty but the University was also famous for its Aristotelianism and a galaxy of great teachers expounded all ‘humane’ studies.16 Jonathan Woolfson’s Padua and the Tudors shows the university as the hub of the contemporary intellectual universe and a determining factor for the development of the English professions and for many individual lives. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Padua’s English students included Thomas Linacre, William Latimer and Cuthbert Tunstall. Then, Reginald Pole came in 1522, accompanied by Thomas Starkey, followed the next year by Thomas Lupset, who became Pole’s close companion.17 Edmund Harvel, merchant and humanist, had arrived by 1524, when he was acting as agent for the Paduan philosopher Niccolò Leonico Tomeo. By then he was in touch with Pole as well.18 Modern historians are rightly suspicious of the ‘myths’ about Pole, but there can be little doubt that he was a gifted ‘networker’, the centre of a circle of Italian scholars and visiting English students.19 During two periods of residence, he spent in all some twenty-six years in Italy. His correspondence proves the importance of his friendships and the difficulty of understanding this most Italianate of Englishmen. In the eyes of Italian contemporaries, Henry VIII’s cousin was no ordinary visiting student; Pole was of royal blood; the philosopher Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, became his friend and tutor; Padua’s star humanist, the poet Pietro Bembo, was Pole’s ‘great admirer’ and would later provide an important connection with the

SCJ, 6 (1975), 67–93 (p. 71); John Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley, CA, 1993), pp. 25–48; Achille Olivieri, Riforma ed eresia a Vicenza nel Cinquecento (Rome, 1992), pp. 121–49, 177–94. 15 P.J. Van Kessel, ‘The Denominational Pluriformity of the German Nation at Padua and the Problem of Intolerance in the Sixteenth Century’, ARG, 75 (1984), 156–76; G. Toso Rodinis, Scolari francesi a Padova: agli albori della Controriforma/ Presentazione di Enrico Opocher (Padua, 1970). 16

Woolfson, Padua, p. 4; Mayer, ‘Marco Mantova and the Paduan Religious Crisis’, pp. 56–62. 17 For English Paduans, see Woolfson, Padua, ‘Biographical Register’, pp. 205–89; Leonico to Pole, Padua, 18 June 1524, CRP 18. 18

Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Harvel, Edmund (d. in or before 1550)’, ODNB. Woolfson, Padua, p. 110; Robert Barrington, ‘Two Houses both alike in dignity: Reginald Pole and Edmund Harvel’, HJ, 39 (1996), 895–913 (pp. 897–9). 19


21

world of Italian reform.20 Possibly Pole was also in touch in these early years with Pietro Martire Vermigli and Pier Paolo Vergerio, key figures in the chapters that follow.21 They were all in Padua at the same time, and perhaps, as was later claimed, Vermigli and Pole were ‘special friends’.22 By the mid-1520s, Pole was displaying a steady interest in religious and patristic studies.23 Because of the uncanny, magnetic power of his ‘spiritual patronage’, his interests were infectious. When he moved on from these early religious studies into the world of Italian religious reform, so would the several Englishmen associated with him.24 First, however, he had to pay the price of his expensive Paduan education. In August or September 1526, Pole left Italy and returned to England to serve the King.25 In 1529, he was sent to obtain an opinion from the University of Paris favourable to the royal divorce. It was the season when Englishmen were abroad about the King’s business. Whilst Pole was away from Italy, others were sent there with briefs related to the divorce. John Stokesley, Richard Croke, Thomas Boleyn and – significantly for this history – Thomas Cranmer all travelled on missions to Italy. It was Cranmer’s first visit and probably kindled his interest in learning the language. Cranmer was then, as ever, the King’s good and willing servant.26 But Tom Mayer argues that, during his mission to Paris, Pole, too, was still reasonably willing.27 After that, however, he left King Henry to his own dangerous devices and he was back in Italy by 26 October 1532.28 Ludovico Beccadelli, Pole’s first biographer, presented this as Pole’s Damascus moment. As in all the best conversion narratives, there is a

20 Woolfson, Padua, p. 105; P. Simoncelli, ‘Pietro Bembo e l’evangelismo italiano’, Critica Storica, 15 (1978), 1–73 (p. 2). 21

McNair, Peter Martyr in Italy, pp. xx, 98–100; Schutte, Vergerio, pp. 36–8. Josiah Simler, Oratio de vita et obitu viri optimi, praestantissimi theologi D. Petri Martyris Vermiglii (1563), in Peter Martyr Vermigli, Life, Letters and Sermons, trans. and ed. John Patrick Donnelly SJ (Kirksville MO, 1999) (hereafter cited as LLS), p. 26. 22

23

Jonathan Woolfson, ‘John Claymond, Pliny the Elder and the Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford’, EHR, 112 (1997), 882–903 (pp. 897 and 901); ibid., ‘Reginald Pole and his Greek Manuscripts in Oxford’, Bodleian Library Record, 17 (2000), 79–95 (pp. 83–5); Mayer, Pole, p. 4. 24 T.F. Mayer ‘When Mycaenas was broke: Cardinal Pole’s “Spiritual” Patronage’, SCJ, 27 (1996), 417–35 (pp. 425–6), CPEC XIV. 25

Leonico to Pole, Padua, 10 May 1527, CRP 46; Woolfson, Padua, p. 95.

26

Woolfson, Padua, pp. 228, 274; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 48–9.

27

T.F. Mayer, ‘A Fate Worse than Death, Reginald Pole and the Paris Theologians’, EHR, 103 (1988), 870–91, reprinted in CPEC XI. 28

Bembo to Pole, Padua, 26 October 1532, CRP 63.


22

sudden change, he returned to Italy completely devoted to sacred studies.29 Yet Pole told his mother to remember that she had educated him ‘entirely for God’ from childhood. For much of his first stay in Italy he had been studying the church fathers and Pole himself claimed that he had been concentrating on theology since 1528.30 So Pole’s supposed ‘conversion’ in the early 1530s was more a case of an already religious man taking stock of a very difficult situation. Other Englishmen in Italy, like Thomas Starkey, Richard Morison, Michael Throckmorton, Henry Cole and George Lily were doing the same.31 They were reading the classics and studying theology, but also they were acutely aware of the political turmoil in England. From the date of Pole’s return to Italy, their lives changed in tandem with King Henry VIII’s ‘Great Matter’ of the divorce, Pole’s responses to it, and the steady infiltration into Italy of German and Swiss theologies.32 In England, great cracks in the Church Universal appeared as a result of the King’s divorce and the Reformation legislation; in Italy, smaller, sinister fault lines were apparent in debates and discussions about salvation, scripture, the sacraments and purgatory. Yet, at this early stage, there was no neat alliance between ‘political’ reform in England and ‘religious reform’ in Italy. Quite the reverse: English expatriates bore the brunt of Italian outrage at the executions of ‘the Monks’ [the Carthusians] in England, ‘infaming … our nation in the vehementist words they could use’.33 To be English in the North of Italy in the mid-1530s was a testing experience. Moreover, being associated with Pole did not always involve agreeing with him about the King’s divorce, as his protégés proved. Yet most of them shared his growing attraction to reform. Thomas Starkey has been called an ‘English spirituale’, ‘as Italian in religion as in most other respects’,34 while George Lily thought of joining the Theatines, 29

Ludovico Beccadelli, ‘Vita del Cardinale Reginaldo Polo’, in G. Morandi (ed.), Monumenti da varia letteratura (2 vols, Bologna, 1797–1804), vol. I ii, p. 287, cited by Woolfson, Padua, p. 112. 30

Pole to Countess of Salisbury, ‘Venge’ [?Venice] 1536, CRP 103; Woolfson, Padua, p. 109; Pole to Sadoleto, Venice, 28/29 October 1532 / 1 November 1532 (prob.), CRP 64. 31 Other English Paduans included Thomas Bill and John Friar, see Woolfson, Padua, ‘Biographical Register’ for individual entries. 32

Rozzo and Seidel Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, pp. 346–7; Gigliola Fragnito (ed.), Church Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 15–16; Cavazza, ‘Libri in volgare’, p. 9. 33

Edmund Harvel to Thomas Starkey, Venice, 15 June 1535, Original Letters Illustrative of English History, 2nd series, H. Ellis (ed.) (4 vols, London, 1827), vol. 2, pp. 73–4. 34

Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal, pp. vii, 170 and title of Chapter 6, pp. 169–99.


23

an order which was then closely associated with reform.35 Starkey’s influence on the developing connection between Englishmen and Italian reform was cut short in December 1534, when he returned to England to serve Henry VIII. Thus he missed the most dramatic years of reform in Italy, and he died in England in 1538.36 However, for some of the English ‘flock’, especially Morison, Harvel and Throckmorton, the pull of Italy and its strange brand of reform remained strong throughout their careers and they lived into the 1540s and 1550s, long enough to have a strong influence on the emerging connections between England and Italian reform. Their names will appear often in this book. Therefore, it is worth investigating how much contact they had with reform in Italy in these crisis years for the Henrician Reformation in England. We shall then move on to that still more Italianate Englishman, Reginald Pole himself. Richard Morison arrived in 1532, stayed in Padua and Venice, and then returned to England in 1536. He befriended Italians in England in Edward VI’s reign, and during the Marian exile he studied with Vermigli in Strassburg: he died there in March 1556. Therefore, he had an apprenticeship in Italy when reform was gathering steam, and he was ‘on stage’ for Anglo-Italian contacts in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary. In the long line of Englishmen who helped Italian reformers, he came not far behind Pole and Cranmer.37 Morison arrived in Italy as a hard-up young humanist, trying to impress potential patrons and already attracted to reform: ‘Religion expects her restoration only from you and Latimer’, he intoned in a letter to Cranmer in January 1533.38 With such inclinations, he was likely to be on the lookout for fellow reformers in Padua and Venice – and his fluency in Italian helped him to find them.39 One incident in Padua, discovered by 35 Lily to Starkey, 6 September 1535, LP, vol. 9, no. 292. p. 98; G.B. Parks, ‘The Reformation and the Hospice (1514–1559)’, in The English Hospice in Rome: The Venerabile: Sexcentenary Issue, 21 (Rome, 1962), pp. 193–217; T.F. Mayer, ‘Lily, George (d. 1559)’, ODNB; George Lily to Thomas Starkey, 29 December 1535, LP, vol. 9, 1034, p 355. 36

Mayer, Starkey, pp. 198–9.

37

There is an excellent modern study by Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘“A brave knight and learned gentleman”; the careers of Richard Morison, 1513–1556’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2006); G.W. Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge MA, 1948); D.S. Berkowitz, Humanist Scholarship and Public Order (Washington, DC, 1984). C.R. Bonini, ‘Lutheran Influences in the Early English Reformation; Richard Morison Reexamined’, ARG, 64 (1973), 206–24, does not focus on Morison’s years in Italy and is inaccurate in places. Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Morison, Sir Richard (c.1510–1556)’, ODNB. 38

Morison said that he had already met Cranmer and that the Cambridge humanist, William Gonell, had set up their meeting, LP, vol. 6, 1582, p. 643; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 31–2. 39

Morison to Starkey, ?1535, LP, vol. 9, 102, p. 29. On Morison’s reputation for recommending ‘insight into tongues’, British Library, MS Sloane 1523, fol. 29b.


24

Jonathan Woolfson, suggests that Morison was mixing with reformers. He was registered as a student of law, and on 1 August 1534 he was elected ‘consiliarius’ of the small English ‘nation’ at the University. Less than a fortnight later he was accused of being involved in a ‘conventicula scisma’, which met in the church of San Firmo. It was said that its members aimed to stop the appointment of a French rector. Paduan university politics was bedevilled with accusations of heresy but ‘scisma’ seems to indicate that Morison was involved in a heterodox group. ‘Conventicula’ was used regularly to describe groups of reformers.40 Morison, usually an ambitious man, was prepared to lose his promotion to consiliarius rather than simply swear that he had not been part of the San Firmo group.41 There was a defiant streak in him and possibly he just decided to dig in his heels but he may have been protecting reformer friends. He was certainly reading around his subject. He had registered as a student of law but he hoped to read ‘the whole of Aristotle’ and he was studying theology and philosophy. He was perpetually poor and often pleading for a post in England. In August 1535, a full two-and-ahalf years after the begging letters had begun, he described a life deeply dependent on Pole, stressing how much he would have suffered from the North Italian winter ‘if the kindness of Signour Pole had not rescued me’. Later, Pole said that Morison had been treated like ‘like a full brother’. As a ‘brother’ Morison was in receipt of second-hand clothes, ‘wearing Mr. Michael Throckmorton’s breeches and doublet’.42 Throckmorton and also Henry Cole lent him money.43 George Lily, who was almost as poor as he was, joined him in the reading of Euripides and Aristophanes.44 While he was in Italy, Morison was mixing with serious and religious humanists but, according to his own later reminiscence, he also knew some eminent Italian churchmen who were already identified with reform. His recollections date from 1539, three years after he had returned to England to serve Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII and to wield ‘the best propagandist pen in Henrician England’.45 By the closing years of the 1530s, 40

Woolfson, Padua, pp. 33–5; Toso Rodinis, Scolari francesi a Padova, pp. 23–5.

41

‘et tandem qui idem D Ricardus noluit iurare non interfuisse dicte conventicule’, Padua, Archivio Antico dell’Università di Padova, IV, fol. 311, cited by Woolfson, Padua, p. 35, note 138. 42

Morison to Starkey 16 August 1535, LP, vol. 9, 101–3, pp. 29–30; Morison to Starkey, ? February 1536, LP, vol. 10, 320, pp. 122–3; Pole to Morison (draft), March or April?, 1539, CRP 243. 43

Morison to Starkey, Venice, ? February 1536, LP, vol. 10, 320, pp. 122–3; same to same, 12 April 1536, LP, vol. 10, 661, pp. 262–3; Morison to Friar, 4 March 1536, LP, vol. 10, 418, p. 169; Morison to Starkey, ? August, 1535, LP, vol. 9, 102, p. 29. 44

Lily to Starkey, 29 December 1535, LP, vol. 9, 1034, p. 355. G.R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge 1972), pp. 191–207 (p. 199); Richard Morison, Apomaxis calumniarum (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1537), STC 18109; ibid., A 45


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the King’s reformation was not popular in England, so Morison needed some scoops: he came up with a tale of homosexual rape at high levels in the Church. Toward the end of his Exhortation to styrre all Englyshe men to the defence of theyr countreye (1539), Morison told of the rape and murder of the young Bishop Cosimo Gheri, who had died unexpectedly on 24 September 1537 about eighteen months after Morison’s departure for England.46 Rumour had it that Gheri was raped, with dreadful violence, by Pier Luigi Farnese, Captain General of the Church and Pope Paul III’s natural son – and also that Gheri died a few months later because of the shock.47 Morison’s account, the second version ever published in Europe, casts light on the young Englishman’s reform contacts. I knew the bishop [Gheri] wonderful well: he was undoubted as well lerned a yonge man as few were in Italy. His style so pure, he in writynge so elegante and eloquent, that I dare saye, there were not x [ten] in all Italye, not two of his age that coulde matche hym.48

Morison probably exaggerated his acquaintance but they may well have met. Gheri had studied at Padua from 1530 until 1536, at the same time as Morison, and was influenced by the teaching of Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, as were Pole, Starkey and several English students. Gheri had moved in circles of highly placed reformers: Reginald Pole; Pole’s friend Alvise Priuli and his biographer Ludovico Beccadelli; the humanist-poet Pietro Bembo; Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga.49 Last, there was a mysterious Englishman in Gheri’s household in 1537, one ‘Giorgio Inglese’, who preached regularly lamentation in which is shewed what ruyne and destruction cometh of seditious rebellyon (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1536), STC 18113.3; ibid., A remedy for sedition (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1536), STC 18113.7; C.R. Baskervill, ‘Sir Richard Morison as the Author of Two Anonymous Tracts on Sedition’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, The Library, 17 (1936–37), 83–7; W. Gordon Zeeveld, ‘Richard Morison, Official Apologist for Henry VIII’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 55, 1 (1940), 406–25. 46 Richard Morison, An exhortation to styrre all Englyshe men to the defence of theyr countreye (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1539), STC 18110, sigs C vi – D. For detailed consideration of Morison’s text and possible sources, see G.B. Parks ‘The Pier Luigi Farnese Scandal: an English Report’, Renaissance News, 15 (1962), 193–200. 47

M.A. Overell, ‘An English friendship and Italian reform: Richard Morison and Michael Throckmorton, 1532–1538’, JEH, 57 (2006), 478–93; Gigliola Fragnito, ‘Gli “spirituali” e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino’, Rivista Storica Italiana (hereafter cited as RSI), 84 (1972), 777–811 (especially p. 788, note 39). 48 49

Exhortation, sig. C vi.

Dizionario biografico degli italiani, ed. A.M. Ghisalberti (Rome, 1960– ) ( hereafter cited as DBI), ‘Cosimo Gheri’. Stephen Dowd rightly questions the use of the terms ‘group or party’ for these reformers in the 1530s, Reform before the Reformation, pp. 210–14.


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on St Paul’s writings, especially the reformers’ favourite book of Scripture, the Epistle to the Romans. ‘Giorgio Inglese’, alias ‘George Bucker’, perhaps best known as Adam Damplip, was a roving radical who travelled northwards after leaving Gheri and turned up in Calais a few months later.50 If Morison knew Gheri even half as ‘wonderful well’ as he claimed, then he knew Gheri’s reformer-friends. Italian reform had touched the career of Richard Morison. Towards the end of his time in Italy, Morison moved into a different reform ambience – Edmund Harvel’s house in Venice.51 By 1536, Harvel had been in Italy for some twelve years and was a man of several parts, merchant, messenger, agent and humanist. As agent for the philosopher Leonico Tomeo, Harvel had met Pole and his circle. By the 1530s he had developed close contacts with German merchants at the Fondaco Tedeschi in Venice, and in January 1537 he became engaged to Apollonia Uttinger, whose father was a merchant from Augsburg.52 Four years later Harvel had some hothead Italian radicals on his staff, notably his secretary, the Venetian Baldissare Altieri. These contacts have led to a suggestion that he was running a radical hostel in Venice to rival Pole’s more orthodox household.53 But it is unwise to organise these English expatriates and their Italian friends into hostile ‘houses’ at this early date. They were in Italy, Henry VIII’s reformation was miles away, so was Rome; furthermore, ‘Catholic’ doctrine had not been defined. English ex-patriots were trying to keep their heads down. Harvel refused Thomas Cromwell’s bidding to return to England, saying he wanted ‘a private and quiet life’ (probably with Apollonia).54 Until 1537, he was still serving the English government and acting as an agent for Pole (he is the ‘Sigismondo’ of Pole’s letters) but

50

Beccadelli, Monumenti di varia letteratura, vol. 1 i, p. 294; Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, p. 265; Bucker was executed in Calais, on the orders of the English government in 1543, T.F. Mayer, ‘Bucker, George (d. 1543)’, ODNB. 51

Morison to Friar, 4 March 1536, LP, vol. 10, 418, p. 169; see also Jonathan Woolfson ‘Edmund Harvel’, ODNB; Barrington, ‘“Two houses”’, p. 901. 52 AS Venice, Proprio Vadimoni R. 33, fol. 51v, printed in H.F. Brown, ‘The Marriage Contract, Inventory and Funeral Expenses of Edmund Harvel’, EHR 20 (1905), 70–77. Brown’s dating of Harvel’s arrival (as 1535) was a mistake. 53 54

Barrington, ‘“Two houses”’, passim.

Harvel to Cromwell, 11 March 1535, LP, vol. 8, 373, p. 149; Harvel was useful because at this time there was neither a Venetian ambassador to England, nor an English ambassador to Venice until 1539, when Harvel was made English ambassador, but his appointment was never ratified, Barrington, ‘“Two houses”’, p. 904; Mayer, Starkey, p. 205.


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there can be little doubt that privately he was moving towards his later firm commitment to reform.55 Michael Throckmorton faced similar ambiguities.56 Very little is known of him until 1533, when he was a witness to Thomas Bill’s MD degree in Padua. Like his friend Morison, he was ‘a scholar of law’ at Padua.57 Like Morison, Throckmorton read outside his subject. The book inventory drawn up on his death in 1558, revealed a ‘Renaissance Man’ who owned many medical texts and even more religious ones – and was sympathetic to reform.58 That sympathy may have begun in Padua, where, with friends like Morison and Harvel, he had plenty of opportunities to absorb new ideas. At his death, Throckmorton owned editions of books of the Bible, and of the Fathers and St. Bernard, also the standard ‘crib’ for doctrinal controversy, Hermann Bodius Unio dissidentium.59 There are texts by well-known Italian reformers, like Vittoria Colonna and Marcantonio Flaminio.60 He appears to have given shelf-room to at least two suspect vernacular books, containing the writings of Luther and the Northern Reformers and published anonymously in Venice in the 1520s and 1530s.61 We do not know if Throckmorton bought his risky reformation books in Padua: it is possible that he inherited them later and there is no evidence 55

CRP 77 (note 197), 79, 93. On Harvel’s ‘murky’ role, see Mayer, Pole, p. 36 and Woolfson, ‘Edmund Harvel’ in ODNB. 56 Overell, ‘An English Friendship’, pp. 488–93; T.F. Mayer, ‘Throckmorton , Michael (d. 1558)’, ODNB. 57

Michael Throckmorton is remembered on his son Francis’s wall memorial in the chapel at Ullenhall in Warwickshire for his ‘bountifull hospitalitie’ to English travellers in Italy, William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated, revised by William Thomas (2 vols, London, 1730), vol. 2, pp. 818–19. Francis was presented as a recusant in 1592, Warwick CRO 2662 fol. 2v. I am indebted to John Tobias for this information; Archivio della Curia Vescovile di Padova, Diversorum 54, fol. 97, cf. Acta graduum academicorum Gymnasii Patavini ab anno 1501 ad annum 1550, ed. E. Martellozzo Forin (Padua, 1969– 72), no. 1943, cited by Woolfson, Padua, pp. 213, 276. 58 I found Throckmorton’s inventory in Mantua, AS Mantua: Registrazioni notarili, 1558, fos 94v–97v. A full edition is in preparation. 59

Hermann Bodius, Unio Hermani Bodii in unum corpus redacta et diligenter recognita doctorum (Venice, 1532). 60 Vittoria Colonna, Le rime spirituali della illustrissima signora Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara (Venice ?, 1538). On Flaminio’s prose and verse translations of the Psalms (1538 and 1546 respectively), see Carol Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio: Poet, Humanist and Reformer (London, 1965), pp. 93–5, 159–61 and Monica Bottai,‘“La Paraphrasis in triginta Psalmos versibus scripta” di Marcantonio Flaminio: Un esempio di poesia religiosa del XVI secolo’, Rinascimento, 40 (2001), 157–265 (pp. 158–60). 61

Throckmorton owned a ‘Sumarium Scripture volgare’, almost certainly the controversial Summario dela sancta Scriptura et l’ordinario deli cristiani, which appeared in 1534, the year after he arrived in Italy. The text is generally agreed to be a closely woven amalgam of Erasmus and Luther, see Overell, ‘English Friendship’, pp. 489–90.


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that he read all he owned. More important is the picture of the man and his mental landscape that emerges from his library. Clearly, Throckmorton shared with Morison, Harvel and Pole a love of study, reverence for the scriptures and some sympathy for reform. Theirs was an untidy humanist world.62 But then, in the late 1530s, all four men were forced to make hard choices. Morison removed himself to England to serve Henry VIII. Meanwhile, Pole’s own decision implicated other Englishmen in Italy, including Harvel and Throckmorton. Pole’s choice involved holding in tension three positions: he decided against Henry VIII’s reformation, for the Pope, but also for reform in Italy. By spring 1536, Pole had finished writing his famous Pro Ecclesiae Unitatis Defensione, usually called ‘De Unitate’.63 In it he delivered his withering opinion on the King’s divorce and the disunity that had followed from it. The dispatch of the book to England, apparently in the care of Michael Throckmorton, has been viewed as a ‘fateful’ moment, when Pole burned his boats with the English government.64 Contemporaries were not so sure. Throckmorton delayed committing himself, while Morison, employed as secretary to the committee responsible for reading and assessing De Unitate, tried to plaster the cracks by deleting the passages of Pole’s ‘bloody book’ most likely to be offensive to the King.65 Pole was more clear-sighted, saying that he expected ‘to be proscribed’.66 Italy would be his bolt-hole from Henry VIII’s wrath and he remained there until 1553. Having attacked the English king, he became the Pope’s servant. He was made Cardinal in December 1536 and then legate responsible for rallying European support for the dangerous rebellion against Henry VIII, known as ‘the Pilgrimage of Grace’. In 1541 he became Legate to Viterbo, a province of the Papal States. That string of appointments suggests that Pole had well and truly ‘gone over’. Yet Cardinal Pole, the Pope’s man, remained profoundly interested in reforming the church and individual souls within it. He was not alone: 62

On the humanists’ dilemma, see MacCulloch, Reformation, pp. 680–81.

63

For an analysis, see Mayer, Pole, pp. 14–33. Pole’s Instructions [for Throckmorton] with De Unitate, ca. 27 May 1536, CRP 97 and see note 53; Throckmorton to Cromwell, no day, 1536, LP, vol. 11, 4, p. 2; Mayer, Starkey, pp. 230–31. Zeeveld called the decision ‘fateful’, Foundations, p. 226; Merriman, Life and Letters of Cromwell, vol. 1, pp. 203–7; but see T.F. Mayer, ‘A Diet for Henry VIII: the Failure of Reginald Pole’s Legation’, JBS, 26 (1987) 305–31 (pp. 305–6), CPEC VII. 64

65 On Throckmorton’s role, Pole to Cromwell, Rome, 16 February, 1537, CRP 154; T.F. Mayer, ‘A Diet for Henry VIII’, pp. 310–314; Overell, ‘English Friendship’, pp. 491– 3; T.F. Dunn, ‘The development of the text of Pole’s De Unitate Ecclesiae’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 70 (1976), 455–68; Morison to Pole, no date, but [1536], CRP 116; Mayer, Starkey, pp. 232–4. 66

Pole to Contarini, 8 June 1536, CRP 98.


29

Cardinals Gasparo Contarini, Ercole Gonzaga, Giovanni Morone and Bishop Gianmatteo Giberti were thinking on similar lines. Some read reformation literature.67 Even those later to be categorised as ‘intransigenti’, like Gian Pietro Carafa, were at this stage willing collaborators in discussions aimed at reform in Church Universal. In 1537 all these men worked together on the commission which produced the document Consilium de emendanda ecclesia. It recommended: the reduction of exaggerated claims to papal power, the end of financial abuses, bishops’ residence in their dioceses and the pastoral care of priests for their people. The themes were old; the explicitness about a spreading sickness within the church was newer. At the time, the Consilium did not achieve much in the way of real change, but it was widely publicised.68 The years 1536 to 1540 were the time when reform began to spread more rapidly through the cities of Italy: Venice, Modena, Verona, Lucca, Siena, Naples and many others. The process was aided by travelling preachers whose themes seemed ‘traditional’: prayer, penance, devotion to the Virgin Mary, the imitation of Christ. 69 But the last topic, in particular, often spilled over into reliance on the passion of Christ and thence to salvation by faith. An important group gathered in Naples, around the exiled Spanish humanist and mystic, Juan de Valdés. This learned circle included Italy’s two top preachers, who later became England’s most famous Italian exiles: the Augustinian, Pietro Martire Vermigli, and Bernardino Ochino, first a Franciscan Observant and then, from 1538, a leading Capuchin. Also present were the two main authors of the text Il Beneficio di Cristo, the Benedictine monk Benedetto da Mantova and the humanist poet Marcantonio Flaminio, who appear to have been working on early drafts of the book while they were in Naples.70 They were joined by Guido Giannetti da Fano, who later became a book merchant, a zealous 67 Paul Murphy, ‘Between spirituali and intransigenti; Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth Century Italy’, Catholic Historical Review, 88 (2002), 446–69. Between 1537 and 1538, Cardinal Gonzaga bought twelve scriptural works by German and Swiss reformers, Paul Murphy, ‘Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Catholic reform in sixteenth century Italy (1505–63)’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1990), pp. 43–5. 68

Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 143–9; Mayer, Pole, pp. 103–5. Philip McNair, ‘New Light on Ochino’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Travaux et Documents, 35 (1973), 290–300. 69

70 M. Firpo, Tra alumbrados e spirituali: Studi su Juan de Valdés e il Valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del’500 (Florence, 1990), esp. pp. 127–38; M. Firpo, trans. J. Tedeschi, ‘The Italian Reformation and Juan de Valdés’, SCJ, 27 (1996), 353–64; Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio; Philip McNair, ‘Benedetto da Mantova, Marcantonio Flaminio and the Beneficio di Cristo: a Developing Twentieth Century Debate Reviewed’, Modern Language Review, 82 (1987), 614–24. On Benedictine influences, see Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation; the Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford, 1985).


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distributor of the Beneficio and an agent for the English government.71 The group was large and, between 1536 and 1541, many influential people came and went. Valdés himself had read deeply in Reformation literature and his Italian disciples appear to have encouraged him.72 The group in Naples functioned as a powerful seminar, which left its members more confident about their views and more willing to make them public. By 1540 two changes were apparent. First, a collective name was beginning to be given to all those who believed in reform – whether of their own lives, or of the church, or of both. The term was applied not just to Valdés circle, but more widely, to include reforming cardinals, bishops, preachers, and their many followers. They were called ‘gli spirituali’ – the unworldly, spiritual people.73 The term signified belief in personal and ecclesiastical regeneration, often (but not always) involving the doctrine that people could be saved only by God’s grace, not by their own striving. The echoes of Contarini’s spiritual experience, discussed earlier, and of Lutheran ‘salvation by faith alone’ are clear but they need treating with caution; the spirituali were never an organised group and the term conveyed no commitment to doctrinal formulae. The second change was partly due to coincidence. It was a time of departures from Naples, as people left for important work in other places; the effect was to disseminate their ideas. In April 1540, Vermigli was chosen for the reform of his Order and rapidly he was transferred to the important Augustinian house at Lucca, a merchant republic, where reformation books and ideas were already in wide circulation. In Vermigli’s time as abbot, Lucca became still more ‘an infected city’, Italy’s closest approximation to a communal reformation.74 His team of reformers included Emmanuele Tremellio, who came to England in 1549, and Caelio Secondo Curione,

71 Aldo Stella, ‘Guido da Fano, eretico del secolo XVI al servizio dei re d’Inghilterra’, Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, 13 (1959), 196–238. 72

Carlos Gilly, ‘Juan de Valdés: Übersetzer und Bearbeiter von Luthers Schriften in seinem “Diálogo de Doctrina”’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (hereafter ARG) 74 (1983), 257–305 (pp. 257–8). Valdés also paraphrased Calvin, see Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars, pp. 165–7; McNair, Peter Martyr in Italy, pp. 174–5; Firpo, Tra Alumbrados, p. 55; Frank James III, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Predestination; the Augustinian Inheritance of an Italian Reformer (Oxford and New York, 1998), pp. 160–63. 73 The terms used as opposites to ‘spirituali’ were ‘carnali’ and ‘mondani’, the worldly ones, Prosperi, Tra evangelismo e controriforma; G.M. Giberti, pp. 285–6, 314–15; Bowd, Reform before the Reformation, p. 219. 74 S. Adorni-Braccesi, ‘Una città infetta’: la repubblica di Lucca (Florence, 1994); Peter Blickle, Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Atlantic Highlands, NJ and London, 1992).


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who finally settled in Basel, but kept in close touch with English humanists and reformers for most of his life.75 In the spring of 1541, there were more departures from Naples. The humanist poet Marcantonio Flaminio travelled north, accompanied at times by his close friend Pietro Carnesecchi. Both men already knew Pole and, in October 1541, they arrived in his household at Viterbo, north of Rome, the base for his new role as Legate to the Papal States.76 During the months they spent at Viterbo, Flaminio was revising the Beneficio di Cristo, a controversial statement of the doctrine of salvation by faith alone. His host, the English Cardinal, already believed in that doctrine yet, by his own testimony, he was deeply impressed by his guests’ ‘useful company’; he said they were feeding him with ‘that food that does not die’.77 Many years later, in 1566–67, Carnesecchi was brought to trial before the Inquisition. In an apparently frank statement, he described the process of ‘correction’ of the Beneficio: The first author of this book was a black monk of the order of S. Benedict called Don Benedetto, who said he had written it while he was in a monastery of his order in Sicily, near Mount Etna. This Don Benedetto, being a friend of Marcantonio Flaminio, passed the said book on to him, asking him to polish it and illustrate it with his beautiful style, so that it would be more readable and pleasing. And so Flaminio, keeping the subject unaltered, corrected it as seemed right to him.78 75 Kenneth R.G. Austin, ‘From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius (1510–1580)’, (unpublished PhD dissertation, St Andrews University 2002); McNair, Peter Martyr in Italy, pp. 223–4; Hans R. Guggisberg, Sebastien Castellio: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age, trans. and ed. Bruce Gordon (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 59–60. 76 For the controversy on their strategy, and the extent of their influence on Pole, see Firpo, Tra Alumbrados, pp. 158–9, 177–81; Mayer, Pole, pp. 113–18; Gigliola Fragnito, ‘Intervento sulla Relazione di Massimo Firpo, Valdesianesimo ed Evangelismo alle origini dell’ Ecclesia Viterbiensis, 1541’, in Prosperi and Biondi (eds), Libri, idee e sentimenti religiosi, pp. 73–5. 77 ‘De illo cibo qui non perit’, Pole to Contarini, 9 December 1541, CRP 341; Mayer, Pole, pp. 105, 115–17. 78

‘Il primo auttore di questo libro fu un Monaco negro di san Benedetto chiamato don Benedetto di Mantua il quale disse haverlo composto mentre stette a un monasterio della sua religione in Sicilia presso il monte Etna. Il quale don Benedetto essendo amico di messer Marco Antonio Flaminio, li comunicò il detto libro pregandolo che lo volesse polire et illustrare col suo bello stile, acciò fusse tanto più legibile et dilettevole. Et cossì il Flaminio, servando integro il subietto, lo riformò secondo che parse a lui’, Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi, 1557–1567, Edizione Critica (2 vols in 4, Città del Vaticano, 2000), vol. 2, pt. 1 (June 1566–October 1566), pp. 170–71; for other references to Benedetto da Mantova, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 4, 8, 59; Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 460; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 63.


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Modern scholarship, however, reveals that the Beneficio was more highly crafted than Carnesecchi suggested because the manuscript circulated widely and was altered in the process.79 Pole’s biographer, Tom Mayer, regards the text’s revision at Viterbo as a ‘collective effort’: Benedetto’s book was revised by Flamino, in collaboration with Pole, who passed on at least on one patristic reference suggested by Contarini.80 If that is so, the book later to be translated, then published several times in England was partly written by an English nobleman. But the book’s direct and dancing style was that of the wordsmith and poet, Flaminio, as Carnesecchi had testified. Pole’s much less appealing prose is not in evidence. Carnesecchi’s testimony reflects one of the more tantalising aspects of Italian reform. ‘Beautiful style’ and humanist-sounding qualities like being ‘readable and pleasing’ were seen as important and tended to blur the doctrinal issues, both in Italy and, later, in England. Readers could be drugged by the style: moreover, the Beneficio’s central theme, salvation by faith, was not ‘heresy’ at the time it was written and all those most closely involved with the preparation of the book remained in the Catholic Church.81 All the same, there were over sixty quotations from Melanchthon, Luther and Calvin, not attributed but either verbatim or so similar that the source is certain.82 Flaminio, like many of Valdés group, had been reading the European reformation’s set-texts. Il Beneficio di Cristo was not ‘Valdesian’ or ‘Benedictine’ or ‘Lutheran’ or ‘Calvinist’ but reflected influences from all these traditions.83 From Naples, then Viterbo,

79 The early circulation in manuscript form is emphasised by C. Ginzburg and A. Prosperi, ‘Le due redazioni del Beneficio di Cristo’, in Eresia e riforma nell’ Italia del Cinquecento, Biblioteca del Corpus Reformatorom Italicorum, Miscellanea 1 (Florence, 1974), contributi di Albano Biondi et al., pp. 135–205; Marcantonio Flaminio, Apologia del “Beneficio di Cristo” e altri scritti inediti, ed. Dario Marcatto (Florence, 1996), pp. 7, 25. 80 Mayer, Pole, pp. 119–23, (p. 120); ‘he [Pole] should almost be assigned credit for the work’, T.F. Mayer, ‘A Reluctant Author: Cardinal Pole and his Manuscripts’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 89 (1999), 4; Paolo Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole: eresia e santità nelle polemiche religiose del cinquecento (Rome, 1997), p. 29. 81

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 63, 131–6, 200–204; Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio, pp. 140–41. On the style and language of this group, ‘an unstable mix of poetry and piety’, see Mayer, Pole, p. 123. 82

‘The Beneficio di Cristo’, ed. Ruth Prelowski, in J. Tedeschi (ed.), Italian Reformation Studies in Honour of Laelius Socinus (Florence, 1965), pp. 21–102. Prelowski’s notes record all apparent borrowings from the writings of other reformers. Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 13–85. 83 McNair, ‘Benedetto da Mantova, Marcantonio Flaminio and the “Beneficio di Cristo”, pp. 614–24; Overell, ‘Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 152–4.


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came a controversial classic which would be known in London before the end of the decade.84 When Flaminio left Viterbo in August 1542, the Beneficio had still not been published. That summer, in an extraordinary sequence of related events, the ties that bound Pole, Flaminio, Vermigli, Ochino, and all the spirituali snapped. On the evidence so far, Italian reform was ‘softcentred’; some cardinals were sympathetic, groups had gathered, many risky reformation books were circulating. A few had taken their protest to the point of leaving Italy: as early as 1525 Francesco Negri left Bassano del Grappa because of his beliefs and later his books would be read by English reformers.85 Yet Negri and other early exiles were not then well known: Vermigli’s and Ochino’s decision to break ranks in August 1542 was of a completely different order. When these leaders of reform fled, they exposed their friends who remained behind to suspicion and worse. Later, Vermigli explained his flight on grounds that developments in the Catholic Church in Italy were ‘not most grievous calamities yet they were messengers and tokens of them’.86 His biographer, Josiah Simler, said that Vermigli had left Lucca on 12 August and that on 24 August Vermigli wrote to Pole telling of his decision to leave his post, but the letter does not survive. Vermigli, a very cautious man, seems to have requested that delivery should be delayed until he was safely out of Italy.87 In so doing, he saved his own skin and avoided implicating others. Not so his fellow exile. Too often this history is written through the lens of later developments and Ochino plays the ‘also-ran’ to the wiser, steadier Vermigli. In July 1542, however, the spotlight fell on Ochino, when he received a summons to Rome. This was probably part of the tightening of the net that preceded the reorganisation of the Roman Inquisition in the same month.88 Ochino seems to have decided to do as he was told, but then he dithered. Gigliola Fragnito’s research shows that Cardinals Contarini, Gonzaga and Pole, as well as Bishop Giberti and Pole’s devoted friend Vittoria Colonna, were all to some extent ‘in on’ Ochino’s act. When the summons came, Ochino was in Verona with Giberti, who tried to help him by asking

84

For analysis of the text, see below, Chapter 3.

85

Biblioteca Comunale, Bassano del Grappa, Epistolaria Remondini, XVI, 18, fols 4377–82. 86 Peter Martyr to the Faithful of the Church at Lucca, Strassburg, Christmas Day, 1542, Gorham, Gleanings, pp. 24–5. 87 88

1542.

Simler, Life, LLS, p. 26; McNair, Peter Martyr, pp. 270–72, 279–84. The bull Licet ab Initio, reorganising the Inquisition, was promulgated on 21 July


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for extra time.89 On 19 August, Ochino talked to Contarini, who was mortally ill but had rallied temporarily. Ochino claimed that Contarini ‘did not say that I should not go, but he gave me a sign [that I should not]’.90 Gonzaga said that he had seen Ochino, a Capuchin, on the road near Mantua, dressed as a soldier, but that he had not realised there was anything brewing – not one of the Cardinal’s brighter moments. On 22 August, Ochino wrote to Pole and his friend Vittoria Colonna, warning them that he was leaving Italy. Contarini died on August 24. By the end of that dramatic month, Giberti knew that Ochino was on his way but delayed a few days before informing the authorities in Rome.91 Ochino’s flight exposed them all to the suspicion that leading reformers – cardinals, a bishop and a prominent noblewoman – were his friends, who knew what he was contemplating and did nothing. He made them appear either heterodox or stupid. During the autumn of 1542, they tried extricate themselves. Pole cautioned against ‘curiosità’ at Viterbo and advised Vittoria Colonna that all further communications from Ochino must be sent to Rome.92 This has been seen as the time when Italian reform fell apart.93 Undeniably, the year 1542 saw the emergence of institutions that would provide clear opposition to reform: the Jesuits, the reorganised Roman Inquisition and the Roman Index of Prohibited Books. In the hands of the traditionalists, later known as ‘intransigenti’, these organisations ‘changed the rules of the game’.94 At least, they did in the end. In recent years, several historians have revealed the length and the confusion of that process.95 89

Fragnito, ‘Gli “spirituali” e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino’, pp. 780–83. It is arguable that Fragnito relies too much on the self-fashioning of Ochino’s letters; on Colonna, Ochino and Pole, see Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008). 90 ‘Mons Rmo Contarini non mi disse che non andassi, ma mi ne di’ cenno’, Ochino to Giberti, 31 August 1542, printed in Karl Benrath, Bernardino Ochino von Siena. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Reformation, second edn (Brunswick, 1892), p. 283, cited by Fragnito, ‘Gli “spirituali” e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino’, pp. 791, 805–7; Mayer, Pole, p. 131. 91 92

Fragnito, ‘Gli “spirituali” e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino’, pp. 782–3. Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 73.

93

Anne Jacobsen Schutte ‘Periodization of Sixteenth Century Italian Religious History: the Post-Cantimori Paradigm Shift’, Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989), 269–84, (pp. 271–2); M. Firpo, ‘Historiographical Introduction’, The Italian Reformation of the Sixteenth Century… A Bibliography, pp. IX–XLIX, especially, pp. XLV–XLVIII. 94 M. Firpo, Inquisizione Romana e Controriforma: Studi sul cardinal Giovanni Morone e il suo processo d’eresia (Bologna, 1992), p. 91. 95

Mayer stresses the unity of ‘the reform tendency’ until 1550, ‘War of the Two Saints: the Conclave of Julius III and Cardinal Pole’, CPEC, IV; Mayer, Pole, pp. 175–6 and passim. For the contrary view, see M. Firpo, ‘Note su una biografia di Reginald Pole’, RSI, 114 (2002), 857–74 (p. 861).


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In fact, the trap did not close on Italy’s reformers in 1542. Finally, the Beneficio was published in 1543, despite criticism preceding publication.96 During 1544–45, Cardinals Pole and Morone did not act like cowed spirituali, suddenly going underground: instead they continued to cooperate to promote reform, especially in the dioceses of the North.97 In the Italian cities, grass-roots reform went on well into the 1580s. This was not just an affair of cardinals and salons but of ordinary folk, reading their bibles, making their own doctrinal selections, unimpressed by the high society dramas of 1542.98 Also, several highly placed people ‘changed sides’ at different times. For instance, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Bishop of Capodistria, moved very slowly on this tortuous road. His ‘conversion’ probably occurred in 1545 but he did not make his decision to leave Italy until 1549.99 Only then was his devastating polemic turned against Pole and his angling for an invitation to England started in earnest.100 From the perspective of Anglo-Italian relations, the year 1542 is not ‘the Great Divide’. Just two important pieces of the jigsaw had slipped into place by that date. First, the Beneficio di Cristo was in manuscript and, second, Vermigli and Ochino had chosen exile. Others were left behind in Italy to cope with uncertainty. The pervasive ambiguity of the times matters much more than dividing reformers into groups of strong-minded exiles and Nicodemite stay-at-homes. There is abundant evidence that many people lived through the 1540s hoping things would turn out the way they wanted. These hopes kept up the momentum for all the meetings, debates and discussions aimed at resolution and reconciliation in that decade. For many people a final split was still either unforeseen or unbearable.101 A leading member of this (no doubt huge) band of hopefuls was Reginald Pole: it almost certainly included his friends left in Italy, like 96 Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Cristo (Venice, 1543), printed in Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 13–83. The first edition appeared in the early months of 1543 and the second in the autumn of that year, see Flaminio, Apologia del Beneficio di Cristo, especially pp. 7, 21, 25. Scipione Bianchini to Ludovico Beccadelli, 26 October 1543, cited by Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 74. 97 98

Mayer, Pole, pp. 133–42. For this ‘spontaneous diffusion’, see Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’, pp. 189–92.

99 Anne Jacobsen Schutte, Pier Paolo Vergerio e la Riforma a Venezia, 1498–1549, trans. V. Capelletti (Rome, 1988). In her preface to this Italian edition, Schutte revises her earlier view that Vergerio’s ‘conversion’ was delayed until 1549; Robert A. Pierce, ‘A New Look at the Conversion of Pier Paolo Vergerio’, in Ugo Rozzo (ed.), Pier Paolo il Giovane, un polemista attraverso L’Europa del Cinquecento (Udine, 2000), pp. 83–97 (pp. 87–8). 100 101

Overell, ‘Vergerio’s anti-Nicodemite Propaganda’, pp. 307–11; see below, Chapter 7.

Delio Cantimori, ‘Submission and Conformity: Nicodemism and the Expectations of a Conciliar Solution’, in Eric Cochrane (ed.), The Late Italian Renaissance (London, 1970), pp. 226–44; MacCulloch, Reformation, pp. 226–37.


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Throckmorton and George Lily. Many cherished hopes that discussions at the Council summoned to meet at Trent would go their way.102 Yet the Council of Trent’s first meeting (1542) was abortive; when it reconvened, Pole absented himself from the discussion of the doctrine of salvation in 1546. The reason given for this famous departure was his health. It is likely that Pole read the straws in the wind, could not face what was coming and so left in a state close to breakdown.103 Belief in salvation by faith alone (or almost alone) had marked most of the leading Italian reformers: Contarini, Flaminio, Vermigli, Ochino, Vergerio and Pole himself. ‘Faith alone’ was one doctrine shared by German, Swiss and English reformers – who were deeply divided on many other issues. By contrast, the Council of Trent’s Decree of Justification, issued in November 1547, said that both faith and works contributed to salvation, through the operation of God’s grace in human beings. The process was made effective by people’s use of their God-given free will. This formula was not easy to grasp and the consensus it was supposed to achieve was more apparent than real.104 Thus, on the crucial doctrine of salvation, some room for reservation remained, at least for those with power. For ordinary folk, like the notary Francesco Spiera, who faced Inquisition proceedings in 1548, there was less leeway. It depended on who you were and where you were, and Pole’s high office protected him, at least in the short term. He did not sign the Council’s decree, he did not give up hope and he did not give in; but he certainly became more cautious. He continued to work for reform of the Church and was within one vote of becoming Pope at the election in 1549–1550, which finally produced Pope Julius III.105 That fact alone makes nonsense of the idea that the spirituali had been utterly defeated in the early 1540s. Other Englishmen in Italy had to make decisions almost as difficult as Pole’s. With apparent reluctance Throckmorton decided to abandon his native country and his friend Morison; instead he chose allegiance to Pole.106 Harvel remained in Venice as the King of England’s man, packing his large household with radical reformers like Baldassare Altieri, 102

John W. O’Malley summarises controversies about the Council, Trent and All That (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 103

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 131–6; Mayer, Pole, pp. 151–4. A.D. Wright, The Counter Reformation: Catholic Europe and the non-Christian World (London, 1982) and ibid. revised edition (Aldershot, 2005), references are to the revised edition, pp. 18–20; idem, ‘The significance of the Council of Trent’, JEH 26 (1975), 353–62 (p. 355). 104

105

Mayer, ‘War of the Two Saints: Conclave of Julius III’, CPEC IV. Pole to Cromwell, 16 February 1537, CRP 154; Overell, ‘English Friendship’, pp. 492–3. 106


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and Antonio Brucioli.107 In 1543, his unduly sanguine assessment of the progress of reform, quoted at the very beginning of this chapter, must have been music to English ears: ‘The Bishop’s [the Bishop of Rome’s] authority in religion seemeth to diminish more and more … for the scripture beginnith to reign universally’.108 Harvel continued to try to turn the confused situation to the benefit of Henry VIII and his haphazardly reformed church, in which doctrinal ambiguity reigned at least as much as it did in Venice.109 Harvel’s secretary, Baldassare Altieri, was in league with Guido Giannetti da Fano and Ludovico de Armis who were trying to raise troops in northern Italy to fight against the Emperor, on behalf of Henry VIII and the German Princes in the League of Smalchalden. In this anti-imperial conspiracy there was a combustible mixture of motives, including Venetian separatism and religious reform. Giannetti da Fano distributed the Beneficio and carried books of reformation theology from England to Italy, as well as messages about mercenary armies and plans for insurrections. The King of England and Edmund Harvel, his agent in Venice, were supporters and paymasters of these desperadoes.110 They seem to have thought that reform in Italy in the late 1540s was alive and well – and useful for their own political purposes. That disposition to make the most of every spark of religious resistance in Italy would remain a powerful factor in Anglo-Italian contacts for well over a century, as we shall see in the chapters that follow. A few radical English reformers still thought it worthwhile to go to Italy. John Philpot, who was among those executed in Mary’s reign, arrived in Italy by 1541 (possibly as early as 1539), travelled to Venice, Padua and Rome and became involved in a religious dispute with a Franciscan friar. William Turner, deeply discontented with the slow progress of Henry VIII’s reformation and in flight because of an illegal marriage, arrived in 1541. He passed through Padua and Bologna and probably gained his MD at Ferrara, returning to England by 1547 to become Physician to the Duke of Somerset.111 In 1544, the irrepressible William Thomas left England, partly because he was in trouble with the law and partly because of his radical religious opinions. He spent the next five years abroad. He claimed that, on a road near Bologna in 1547, he too was involved in a fracas 107 108 109 110

Barrington, ‘Two houses’, pp. 905–8. Harvel to Anthony Denny, 20 May 1543, LP, vol. 18, part i, 576, p. 334. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 70–71. Aldo Stella, ‘Utopie e velleità’, pp. 137–8; ibid., ‘Guido da Fano’, pp. 201, 207–8

and 209. 111 For brief biographies see, Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, Appendix 1, pp. 266– 70; Eric Josef Carlson, ‘The Marriage of William Turner’, Historical Research, 65 (1992), 336– 9; W.R.D. Jones, William Turner: Tudor Naturalist, Physician and Divine (London, 1988).


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about Henry VIII’s religious changes. Shortly afterwards he was back at the English court in an unofficial role as King Edward VI’s mentor.112 But why should these men of such obviously anti-Catholic persuasions choose Italy as a place of exile in the 1540s? Their decision to go on travelling (and brawling about religion) suggests that some contemporaries may not have not quite given up hope that reform would survive in Italy. The magnetism of the peninsula and its universities as places of study remained strong in the later 1540s and 1550s, as it had been in the preceding decades. Italian humanist culture was a Pandora’s box of alternative values – for Reginald Pole and Michael Throckmorton, then for William Thomas, John Cheke, Edward Courtenay and many other troubled and disaffected Englishmen throughout the sixteenth century, both ‘protestants’ and ‘catholics’.113 This chapter began with groups of Englishmen arriving in Italy and becoming influenced by reform: principally Pole and the English Paduan ‘flock’.114 It ends with groups of Italians leaving in search of a more complete reform. After Vermigli and Ochino made their dramatic decisions in 1542, they were followed by Vermigli’s colleagues Emmanuele Tremellio and Celio Secundo Curione. A steady stream of individuals and small groups decided that staying in their sunlit homeland involved dissimulation, compromise, hiding ‘Christ under a mask’.115 Those who left during the mid-1540s had no thought of England. Exile to cities like Zurich, Geneva and Strassburg was painful but logical, especially for reformers from the North of Italy. Secret messengers still crossed the mountain paths; the sympathetic communities of the Waldenses in Piedmont and reformers in Chiavenna and the Valtellina gave shelter.116 Exiles could, with difficulty, remain in touch. But flight to England was a different matter. Except for a few daredevil agents-cum-spies, like Giannetti da Fano, most Italian reformers did not consider the English option until international crisis in 1547 forced it upon them. In that year, Imperial victory against German 112

E.R. Adair, ‘William Thomas; a forgotten Clerk to the Privy Council’, in R.W. Seton-Watson (ed.), Tudor Studies, presented to A.F. Pollard (London, 1924), pp. 133–62. 113 This is an extension of Jonathan Woolfson’s comment that for Pole ‘Italy was to become the focus of an alternative set of beliefs, values and ways of living’, Padua, p. 119. 114

The word was George Lily’s, Lily to Thomas Starkey, 29 December, 1535, LP, vol. 9, 1034, p. 355. 115 ‘predicar sospetto e predicar Christo mascerato in gergo’, Ochino to Vittoria Colonna, Florence, 22 August 1542 (from copy in Biblioteca Comunale, Sienna), printed in Karl Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena, trans. H. Zimmern (London, 1876), p. 107, unnumbered note; Mark Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, pp. 26–37, 59; S. Adorni-Braccesi, ‘Religious Refugees from Lucca in the Sixteenth Century; Political Strategies and Religious Proselytism’, ARG, 88 (1997), 338–79. 116

Euan Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics; the Waldenses of the Alps, 1480– 1580 (Oxford, 1984).


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princes at the battle of Mühlberg gave the Emperor Charles V the power to turn unwanted exiles out of his dominions. Patrick Collinson once described the English reformation as ‘Act II of a Continental drama played out earlier and on a different stage’.117 This chapter has looked at some little-known scenes of Act I set on the Italian stage, as reform gathered pace. In the late 1540s, the action which had begun in Italy was transferred to England with several of the same players. In the four chapters that follow Ochino, Tremellio, Vermigli, Giannetti da Fano, Richard Morison, and William Thomas all reappear in London, where Thomas Cranmer was Archbishop of Canterbury in King Edward VI’s reforming regime.

117

Patrick Collinson, Preface, in Peter Newman Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay in Historical Development (second edition, London, 1992), p. xxii.


CHAPTER TWO

Bernardino Ochino in London I have taken in hand to dedicate to your Ladyship this smale number of Sermons … proceding from the happy spirit of the santified Bardardyne. Anne Cooke’s Dedication to her mother of her translation of Ochino’s Fouretene Sermons concernyng the predestinacion and eleccion of God [1551].1

Bernardino Ochino and Pietro Martire Vermigli arrived in England on 20 December 1547. A few months later a sour Imperial ambassador commented that they were the ‘pet children’ of the Archbishop of Canterbury.2 In some ways he was right. Cranmer’s provision for them was so generous that it attracted widespread comment and certainly encouraged other Italians to seek similar invitations.3 During the next five years several Italian exiles came to England, while English translators and publishers set to work on Italian reform texts. All this made for a strong current of Italian influence on the Edwardian Church. Connections between England and Italian reformers had gone on for two decades and would continue for the rest of the century but this is the most important point of intersection. It was in King Edward VI’s reign that the Italian connection became strong. This chapter and the following three will show the range and suddenness of the flow of Italian reform ideas into England. The action will begin in London, in the environs of the court; it will then move outwards and westwards, to Oxford and ‘Peter Martyr’ Vermigli’s troubled life there.

1

Fouretene Sermons , sig. A iv.

2

Van der Delft to the Emperor, 16 May 1548, Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, ed. P. de Gayangos, G. Mattingly, M.A.S. Hume and R. Tyler (15 vols in 20, HMSO, 1862–1954) (hereafter cited as CSP Spanish) (1547–49), p. 266. 3

Vermigli to Bullinger, 26 October 1551, Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. H. Robinson, Parker Society (2 vols, Cambridge 1846–47) (hereafter cited as OL), vol. 2, pp. 499–500; Pier Paolo Vergerio, Copia di una lettera scritta a iiii di gennaio 1550 nella quale sono alcune nuove di Germania e d’Inghilterra (n.p., n.d.); Al serenissimo Re d’Inghilterra Eduardo Sesto, della creatione del nuovo Papa Jiulio terzo et ciò che di lui sperare si possa (n.p., [1550]); Vergerio to Rudolf Gualter, Vicosoprano, 8 March 1551 (Zurich ZB MS f 40, 568r–569r), printed in Petro D.R. De Porta, Historia Reformationis ecclesiarum Raeticarum, Curiae Raeticorum (Lindaviae, 1772), vol. 1, book 2, p. 150, cited by Robert Archer Pierce, ‘Pier Paolo Vergerio, the Propagandist’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1996), p. 110, note 65.


42

John Abel, a trusted English merchant, escorted Ochino and Vermigli to England and his expense accounts for the journey survive in the Bodleian Library. Before he set out Ochino was given a new outfit and a dagger, and forty-and-a-half gilders were spent on books for him. The English government also paid for the carriage of boxes of books for the two men. They came as humanists, equipped with their academic tools, to serve new patrons. The total cost of the transfer came to £126.4 Such lavish business expenses reflected high expectations – and a disposition to admire these expensive visitors. Very shortly after their arrival the Princess Elizabeth described Ochino as ‘holy and learned’.5 It is noticeable that Ochino’s name often precedes others in contemporary reports as if he was seen as a particularly important exile: the Emperor Charles V grumbled about ‘apostates and heretics such as Bucer, Brother Bernardine of Sien, Brother Peter Martyr and others’. The Italian exile Pietro Bizzarri said ‘Masters [Martin] Bucer, Bernardine and Peter Martyr are most actively labouring at their ministry’.6 Twenty years later, Ochino had been relegated and that valuation persists to this day in most history books. The reversal came about because Ochino’s whole life came to be viewed through the distorting lens of his condemnation for heresy in 1563. While Vermigli and Tremellio lived to become revered theologians, Ochino turned into a painful memory: once a heretic, always a heretic. English contemporaries thought otherwise. Without a crystal ball in which to behold Ochino’s awful future, they were enthusiastic and he became something of a star. In terms of general popularity he outshone Vermigli, which may have been because he was sent to London, closer to the hub of things and without Oxford’s local tensions.7 Ochino had been used to the limelight and he basked in it.8 So did his wife: the rarely charitable John Hooper commented that ‘Bernardine’s wife exhibits herself in England both in dress and appearance as a French lady of rank’.9 Maybe she raised his stock. Born in Siena about 4 MS Bodl. Ashm. 826, 3, printed in N. Nichols, ‘The Bill of Expenses attending the Journey of Peter Martyr and Bernardino Ochinus’, Archeologia, 21 (1827), pp. 469–73, item 28. A detailed list of the Italian exiles’ books was enclosed but has been lost. 5 Elizabeth ‘Regina’, ‘Bernardini. Ochini. Senesis. de Christo. Sermo. Ex Italico. In Latinum. Conversus’, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 6, printed in V. Gabrieli, ‘Bernardino Ochino: “Sermo de Christo”. Un inedito di Elisabetta Tudor’, La Cultura, 21 (1983), 151–74 (pp. 165– 6); F. Madan, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (7 vols, Oxford, 1905) vol. 5, no. 27877. 6 The Emperor to Jehan Scheyfve, 3 September 1551, CSP Spanish (1550–52), pp. 349– 52; Peter of Perugia (Pietro Bizzarri) to Bullinger, 10 February 1550, OL, vol. 1, p. 338. 7

Overell, ‘Bernardino Ochino’s Books’, pp. 203, 207–8. Karl Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena, trans. H. Zimmern (London, 1876); Roland H. Bainton, Bernardino Ochino: Esule e riformatore Senese (Florence, 1940). For introductions, Mark Taplin, ‘Ochino, Bernardino (c.1487–1564/5)’, ODNB; Bernardino Ochino, Seven Dialogues, trans. Rita Belladonna (Toronto, 1988), pp. vii–xli. 8

9

John Hooper to Henry Bullinger, 8 April 1549, OL, vol. 1, p. 55.

BERNARDINO OCHINO IN LONDON

43

1487, Ochino was around sixty when he arrived in England, already an old man by contemporary standards, and a very good-looking one too. In Italy he had preached to emotional crowds, packing the piazzas in the major cities. He had held high office as a Franciscan Observant and then as General of the more austere Capuchins. His contacts with the circle of Valdés in Naples were recorded in chapter 1. By 1542 the Roman Inquisition was more interested in him than in Vermigli. His dramatic departure from Italy was a massive embarrassment to reforming cardinals. First he went to Geneva, where he married. He was licensed to preach to the Italian community and from that city’s presses issued a steady run of editions and translations of his sermons, usually known as the ‘Geneva Prediche’.10 In August 1545 he left Geneva and travelled to Basel and Strassburg. In December 1545 he was offered a preaching post in Augsburg but by 1547 the Emperor was keen to have him out of imperial territory because knew his skills in the pulpit and hated his new doctrine. In that year the Emperor Charles V’s armies began a determined campaign; they besieged Augsburg in January and, on 23 April, won a decisive victory at the battle of Mühlberg.11 For Europe’s beleaguered reformers this reversal required a psychological adjustment. It appeared that God was not on their side. In these months of despair, Edward VI’s accession to the throne of England was the single glimmer of hope. The hitherto insignificant island might yet become a refuge and rallying point for the defeated movement. Ochino was in immediate danger because his name appeared on the Emperor’s list of those who were to be handed over to the Imperial army. He was smuggled out of Augsburg, and went back to Basel. Meanwhile Vermigli had been living in Strassburg since 1542. Martin Bucer, Strassburg’s leading reformer, took a keen interest in the affairs of England and was friend and regular correspondent of Archbishop Cranmer. In October 1547, Abel’s mission arrived in Strassburg with invitations for both Vermigli and Ochino to come to England and Bucer provided warm recommendations. We do not know exactly what made Cranmer choose these Italians to be the first in the line of exiles he invited in Edward VI’s reign. It is likely that the suggestion came from Bucer but, as humanist, diplomat and then Archbishop, Cranmer had developed a good enough network of European contacts to make him fully aware of the history and present plight of Italian reformers.12 As we saw in the Introduction, Cranmer had been to Italy (in 1530) and by 1536 he had worked up some knowledge of the Italian language. In that year, he sent the King his version of a report, adding, with a note of pride: ‘Here I have written the very words of the letter as I did translate them out of 10 For a complete list of Ochino’s works, see Benrath, Ochino, trans. Zimmern, Appendix, pp. 299–304. 11

Taplin, ‘Bernardino Ochino’, ODNB. Paris, Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève MS 1458, fols 173v–175r (28 November 1547), cited by MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 381. 12


44

Italian into English as near as I could, word for word’.13 He was translating a document about Reginald Pole – by then a marked man, on whom English diplomats, spies and assassins kept careful watch.14 While Pole remained in Italy, Cranmer needed to keep himself briefed. In addition to his progress in teaching himself Italian, there were fluent Italianists on hand in London and at Lambeth. Richard Morison returned to England in 1536 and began a steady rise to power and influence and, as we saw in the last chapter, he kept up with Italian news.15 In addition, there were native Italians already in England before Ochino and Vermigli arrived. Giannetti da Fano, reformer, book merchant and agent for the English government, encountered in the last chapter, had arrived for his second visit to England in 1546. His friend and benefactor, Pietro Vanni, who had been employed in Henry VIII’s divorce diplomacy, was made King Edward VI’s Latin secretary.16 John Ponet, another good Italianist, became Archbishop’s chaplain in 1545.17 Thus, when Cranmer’s invitations were sent to Ochino and Vermigli, Italian reform was in the air, both at Lambeth and at court, where an evangelical establishment ruled the country and guided the young king. At its head, Edward Seymour, made Lord Protector and Duke of Somerset, was in sympathy with reform and from him humanists and religious writers expected the establishment of a New (and reformed) Jerusalem.18 In the last fifty years, there has been much interest in the role of the exiles in the establishment of the English Reformation. Modern historians emphasise the internationalism and daring radicalism of Edward VI’s government, under the control of Somerset and of his successor, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and later Duke of Northumberland.19 The Italians were early arrivals among a band of foreigners that would include Jan Łaski (1548), Pierre Alexandre (1548), Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius (1549). All were committed participants, ‘not passive refugees’, as A.G. Dickens pointed out.20 They helped to get the show on the road.

13 Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. J.E. Cox, PS (Cambridge, 1846), pp. 330–32. 14

G.B. Parks, ‘The Parma Letters and the Dangers to Cardinal Pole’, Catholic Historical Review, 46 (1960), 299–317 (pp. 309–15). 15 See above, Chapter 1, and Overell, ‘English Friendship’, pp. 484–8; Woolfson, Padua, pp. 35, 66–70, 125–6. 16 17

Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, pp. 216–17; L.E. Hunt, ‘Vannes, Peter (c.1488–1563)’, ODNB. D.G. Newcombe, ‘Ponet, John (c.1514–1556)’, ODNB.

18

John N. King, ‘Protector Somerset, Patron of the English Renaissance’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 70 (1976), 307–31 (p. 331). 19 20

See especially, MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 173–4.

A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1964), p. 319; Basil Hall, ‘Martin Bucer in England’, in D.F. Wright (ed.), Martin Bucer: Reforming Church and Community (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 144–60; Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The Importance of Jan Łaski in the English Reformation’,


45

Vermigli and Ochino were plunged into English life at breakneck speed. There was no period of acclimatisation or ‘induction’, despite the personal disruption they were suffering. They came without their wives, who followed early in 1548, in the company of Giulio Santerenziano, Vermigli’s secretary and friend. So Ochino and Vermigli faced the early months alone and, as neither of them spoke English, Latin had to serve. Cranmer’s precison in matching his men to their new jobs showed that he knew their reputations and made the most of their transferable skills. Less than six weeks after they had set foot on English soil they were in post and expected to deliver. Vermigli, the theologian, was sent to Oxford as Regius Professor and he seems to have been in residence by January 1548.21 Ochino, the preacher, was granted a pension of a hundred marks out of the King’s privy purse and a non-resident prebend at Canterbury, but catapulted into ministry to a congregation of ‘strangers’ in London, mostly Italians.22 Preaching for the best part of a long life has profound effects. Attractive, passionate and charismatic, Ochino was used to being listened to. But sixteenth century preachers did not need to be – and often were not – absolutely consistent. Their emphases could change and in these troubled times the ability to shift key slightly to suit the needs of the magistrate or congregation was a positive asset, a way of continuing to preach the Gospel on shifting sands. Cranmer had in his employ not a consistent, systematic theologian but one of Europe’s famous communicators, a magnetic exCapuchin, who could ‘make the very stones weep’ with his oratory.23 Placing these strangers in prominent positions was part of a grand strategy to take England out of the doctrinal wilderness where Henry VIII had left it and establish ‘an entire system of true doctrine’.24 The priority was to leaven the London lump. Groups of ‘strangers’, worshipping in their own way in the capital, might serve as models ‘of a Church fully reformed for an English church which was struggling to reform itself’.25 Cranmer seems to have used Ochino’s little congregation as a political football in his struggle in C. Strohm (ed.), Johannes à Lasco; Polischer Baron, Humanist und europäischer Reformator (Tübingen, 2000), pp. 315–45. 21

Christ Church Oxford Archives, Battels Book, MS x (1) c.1, cited by J.A. Löwe, Richard Smyth and the Language of Orthodoxy: Re-imagining Tudor Catholic Polemicism (Leiden, 2003), p. 40. 22

Benrath, Ochino, p. 188; Cranmer to Bonner, 27 January, 1547[8], Bonner’s Register, London Guildhall Library, MS 9531/12 pt 1, f. 117r, found by Paul Ayris and cited by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 79–80; Ochino’s annual salary of 100 marks came from the King’s privy purse, Benrath, Ochino, p. 188. 23

G. Rosso, Historia delle cose di Napoli sotto l’imperio di Carlo Quinto (Naples, 1760),

p. 70. 24

à Lasco to Cranmer, 4 July 1548 and Cranmer to Hardenburg, 28 July 1548, Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, pp. 420–23. 25

Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), p. 460.


46

with Edmund Bonner, the traditionalist Bishop of London. The Archbishop made a great (and probably calculated) fuss about the comfort of the Italians: they must have seats in the church: ‘it is not their habit long to stand’. Then he insisted that the conservative Bishop Bonner should go to hear Ochino preach and afterwards entertain him to dinner.26 This was hardly fair on Bonner – or Ochino. We know that the great and the good went to hear him preach in Italian. His regular listeners seem to have included the devoutly protestant Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, William Parr, the Marquess of Northampton and the Imperial Ambassador, who thought, predictably enough, that Ochino had lost his touch; ‘he has lost all the grace he formerly possessed’.27 Yet language was a barrier preventing his preaching to uneducated people, so Ochino began to write. In December 1549, Francis Dryander recorded, ‘Bernardine employs his whole time writing and this too with a force and rapidity, as tells me, beyond what he ever did before’.28 Ochino was lucky – the right man in the right place at the right time. He arrived in a country in the grip of cultural change, liberated from the theological confusion of Henry’s VIII’s last years, and he came to a court where there was a fashion for translation from the works of Continental reformers.29 His arrival coincided with a boom year in publishing, when censorship was relaxed and stationers in London, Ipswich and Worcester were putting out reformation books in plenty. He was ‘taken up’ by a dedicated group of godly printers.30 All this was good fortune but it was combined with some careful management on the part of his English patrons. Six volumes of Ochino’s work appeared in England in Edward VI’s reign. English translators set to work on sermons already in print and they were astonishingly fast off the mark. Two volumes of translations of sermons were published before the end of 1548, the year of his appointment to the Italian Church.31 Also, probably late in 1547, the Princess Elizabeth translated one

26

Cranmer to Bonner, 27 January, 1547[8], Bonner’s Register, London Guildhall Library, MS 9531/12 pt 1, f. 117r, found by Paul Ayris and cited by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 79–80. 27

Van der Delft to the Emperor, 23 February 1548 and 16 May 1548, CSP Spanish (1547–9), pp. 253 and 266. 28 Dryander (Francisco de Enzinas) to Bullinger, 3 December 1549, OL, vol.1, p. 353. 29 Maria Dowling, ‘Humanism at the Court of Henry VIII’, in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (eds), Protestantism and the National Church (London, 1987), pp. 36–78; Overell, ‘Edwardian Court Humanism’, pp. 155–61. 30 On the Protestant stationers Walter Lynne, Anthony Scoloker and John Oswen, who all worked on Italian reformers’ books, see King, ‘Book Trade under Edward VI and Mary 1’, pp. 167–70. 31 STC 18764–18767, 18770 and 18771. All the sermons translated in England came from the ‘Geneva Prediche’, see Benrath, Ochino, pp. 152–69 and Appendix 2, pp. 314–23, numbers 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 12 and parts of 32. The titles in Cooke’s 1548 collection seem to contradict


47

other sermon from Italian into Latin, but never published it.32 Translators’ and editors’ prefaces and dedications stressed three things: Ochino was famous, learned and holy. The first in the race to get published, Richard Argentyne, seemed to know something of the Italians’ history before the exile because he mentioned Ochino’s reputation: ‘the most notable preacher of all Italy’, he called him.33 Argentyne also noted his ‘profound lerning’, while the stationers who devised this first title page went overboard and claimed Ochino had been ‘borne (sic) within the University of Siena’.34 Also, he had been ‘persecuted of Paul III’ and was ‘now also an exile for the faithful testimony of Jesus Christ’.35 The Princess Elizabeth dedicated her sermon translation to her brother, the King, and she, too, stressed that Ochino was ‘patria expulsus’, ‘in strange lands and among people he did not know’.36 These sympathetic reactions showed that the idea of exile had immense power, probably because some English reformers were uncomfortably aware that they had ducked such brave decisions during the previous reign. They might have responded to Henry VIII’s bouts of tyrannical traditionalism as Ochino had responded to the Pope’s dictates – but most of them had not done so. Thus, Ochino’s exile was his guarantee, taken as a proof of wisdom as well as courage. English translators paid no attention to the fact that the sermons they were working on had been printed (and, by implication, approved) while he had been in Geneva. Years later that city had become ‘Head Office’ in the eyes of many godly Englishmen, but not yet. Ochino fever seems to have gripped English literati. Dates suggest that translators either worked at breakneck speed or had begun work before Ochino set foot on English soil. Princess Elizabeth’s double translation of Ochino’s sermon Quid sit Christus, was a New Year present to her brother, with the date as ‘Enfeldiae 30 Die Decembris’. The Bodleian Library Catalogue gives the date as ‘perhaps as early as 1547/8’.37 Elizabeth’s movements early in her brother’s reign suggest that December 1547 is the Benrath’s assumption that only volumes 1 and 2 of the Geneva Prediche had appeared by this date, ibid., p. 208. 32

Gabrieli, ‘Bernardino Ochino: “Sermo de Christo”’, pp. 165–6.

33

Sermons [six], (Richard Argentyne), STC 18765, sig aiii. 34 Fouretene Sermons, STC18767, sigs A iii–v; Sermons [six], STC 18765, sig A iii; Sermons of Barnardine Ochyne; (to the number of .25), STC 18768, sigs A ii–v. 35

Sermons [six], STC 18765, title page and prefaces, sig. A iii.

36

‘patria expulsus, cogitur in locis peregrinis et inter ignotos homines vitam traducere’, Elizabeth’s dedication to King Edward, MS Bodl. 6, printed in Gabrieli, ‘Bernardino Ochino: “Sermo de Christo”’, p. 165. 37 Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian library, vol. 5, number 27877; Gabrieli, ‘Bernardino Ochino: “Sermo de Christo”’, pp. 165–6. For Elizabeth’s movements at this time, see Elizabeth I, Collected Works, Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (eds) (Chicago and London, 2000) numbers 5–8, pp. 13–18; David Loades, Elizabeth I (Hambledon, 2003), pp. 57–60. Catherine Parr and Thomas Seymour spent Christmas 1547


48

correct date and, if so, she had completed her work less than two weeks after Ochino arrived. Richard Argentyne’s translation of six of Ochino’s sermons was printed in Ipswich by 28 January 1548.38 Anne Cooke, one of the four clever daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, was slightly slower off the mark. Her first volume of Ochino’s sermons appeared in July 1548, the same year as Edward Courtenay’s manuscript translation of the Beneficio di Cristo.39 Italian works were suddenly in vogue at this humanist court where translation from the works of other reformers was already a popular activity.40 Richard Argentyne, the first to the printing press, was an eccentric, an Ipswich schoolmaster, a doctor and a self-appointed theologian.41 He worked with the printer Anthony Scoloker, who brought out seven translations from Continental theological works between July 1547 and June 1548, three of them translated by Argentyne. Both men were allied to an enterprising group of East Anglian stationers, which published many European reformation works: Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon and Oeclampadius. In this mixed bag of foreign reformers, Ochino fitted nicely. Scoloker added his own preface to Argentyne’s version of Ochino – ‘a man of great years and wonderful reputation’, he said. ‘If these shall be thankfully received’, he intended to print more of Ochino’s work, though he never did.42 Argentyne chose sermons in which Ochino was tackling hard-core theology – never his best subject: ‘What God is’; ‘How we may know God by his creatures’. The sermon entitled ‘if philosophy serves theology’ comes up with a (predictably) negative answer and the old saw from St Jerome, ‘the philosophers are the patriarchs of the heretics’.43 In the last sermon Ochino said he had ‘compassion of them that rest blinded’ with book learning because he was once himself ‘in that error’. That anti-intellectual refrain

at Enfield and Elizabeth was then still in Catherine’s household, Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 320–23. 38 Sermons[six] of the right famous and excellente clerke Master B Ochine, [trans.] (R. Argentyne) (Ipswich, 1548), STC 18765. 39 Sermons [five]of Bernardine Ochine of Sena [trans. Lady A. Bacon] (London: R. C[ar] for W. Redell 1548), STC 18764. 40 J.K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965); Maria Dowling ‘Humanism at the Court of Henry VIII’, pp. 36–78; Overell, ‘Edwardian Court Humanism’, pp. 155–61. 41 Argentyne conformed in both Mary’s reign and Elizabeth I’s, J.M. Blatchly, ‘Argentine, Richard (1510/11–1568)’, ODNB. 42

‘Anthony Scoloker unto the Reader’, STC 18765, sig. Av. On Scoloker, see Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archeology, vol. 24, pp. 187–91 and on John Oswen, ibid., pp. 191–3. I am indebted to Diarmaid MacCulloch for information on this East Anglian group of printers and translators, and for these references. 43

STC 18765, Sermon III, sig. B vi.


49

marked much of Ochino’s work and he was still taking the same line in 1563, at the time of his condemnation for heresy. 44 Like Argentyne, the Princess Elizabeth was coping with cerebral material. Her sermon was ‘Che cosa è Cristo’; ‘What [not who] is Christ?’45 In addition, in accordance with the educational precepts of the age, she was ‘double translating’ from Italian into Latin and apparently not aiming for publication. Anne Cooke had more dramatic topics: death and the devil, themes dear to mission preachers’ hearts, were the leitmotiv of her ‘Sermons five’: ‘How a Christian should make his last will and testament’, ‘How we should answer the devil when he tempteth us and namely in the end of our life’. From these medieval themes, Ochino moved rapidly to salvation by faith alone but he added his own individual twists to well-worn reformation metaphors of personality exchange between the sinner and Christ. The extravagance of Ochino’s language surpasses that of Luther and of the authors of the Beneficio di Cristo (his probable sources): ‘In case that any must be damned for the sins I have done, it is Christ that must be damned and not I, good lord’.46 However, amidst the avalanche of religious books, pamphlets and tracts which appeared in 1548 and early 1549, no one noticed. 47 It was a busy, uncritical and optimistic phase. Ochino lived in Richard Morison’s house in Whitefriars for most of his time in London and the two men became close friends.48 On 22 March 1549, Hugh Latimer picked out the Italians for special praise: ‘There is yet among us two great and learned men, Petrus Martyr and Barnard Ochin, which have 100 marks apiece. I would the King would bestow 1000 pounds on that sort.’49 Even their hundred marks, however, had to be earned by doing and writing what their patrons wanted. During 1548 Ochino began work on a set of short plays, called the Tragoedie or dialoge of the uniuste usurped primacie of the bishop of Rome.50 Writing plays was a natural development for a humanist who delighted in the verbal tennis match of dialogue. The Tragoedie recorded the overthrow of the usurped power of the Pope by that godly troop, Henry VIII, Thomas Cranmer and Edward VI. It was a perfect theme for an exile seeking 44 Ibid. Sermon VI, sig. Di; D. Bertrand Barraud, Les idées philosophiques de Bernardin Ochin (Paris, 1924). 45 46

Gabrieli, ‘Bernardino Ochino; “Sermo de Christo”’, p. 159. STC 18764, Sermon 3, sig. D iiii.

47

King, ‘The Book Trade under Edward VI and Mary 1’, pp. 164–78.

48

PRO PROB 11/39, fol. 214v, cited by Sowerby, ‘The careers of Richard Morison’, p. 209. Latimer, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 141.

49 50

Bernardino Ochino, A tragoedie or dialoge of the vniuste vsurped primacie of the Bishop of Rome, and of all the iust abolishyng of the same, made by master Barnardine Ochine an Italian, [and] translated out of Latine into Englishe by Master Iohn Ponet Doctor of Diuinitie, neuer printed before in any language (London: Gwalter Lynne, 1549), STC 18770, and another issue of same but with mention of Somerset removed, STC 18771. For analysis, see Stephen Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 105–16.


50

acceptance. Its appropriateness suggests a tip-off and that Ochino was being ‘managed’ by powerful figures at Edward VI’s court, which welcomed but also controlled these strangers. Ochino’s drama was part of a group of ‘historical’ works published in England between 1548 and 1550 that envisaged the extinction of the papacy by the Christian Kingship of Edward VI.51 Diarmaid MacCulloch has suggested that the young King also knew the Tragoedie months before it was published, and used it as a crib for his own homework, a composition in French on the papal supremacy, written between mid-December 1548 and the end of August 1549. 52 Young Edward VI may well have been drawn to Ochino’s drama because he was one of its stars, made into a hero-king who would rescue the whole world from the pope’s usurpation, without any need for violence.53 Violence, however, was seen as essential when dangerous insurrections began in the spring and summer of 1549, followed by a coup d’état that led to the fall of Lord Protector Somerset. Suddenly Ochino’s confident drama became embroiled in anxious politics. Walter Lynne, the harassed printer, had to bring out two versions of the Tragoedie in the same year.54 The first, issued before the fall of Protector Somerset, contained flattering references to him. In the second version, the offending references have been cut and ‘the Counseill’ substituted. Ochino’s dedication noted that the young King had driven out Anti-Christ ‘being yet but almost a babe’.55 Ochino was saying and doing what was expected, using phrases about ‘babes’ (aged eleven), which were part of contemporary English discourse. Like other exiles, he was required to contribute to the ‘political and performative aspects of religion’.56 These Italians were government men, not freelancers.

51

Alford, Kingship and Politics, pp. 100–105. Ochino’s work had similarities to Thomas Kirkmeyer’s Tragoedia nova Pammachius, already translated by John Bale, who appears to have been Ochino’s friend, Roland H. Bainton, Bernardino Ochino: Esule e Riformatore Senese (Florence, 1940), p. 96; Philip McNair, ‘Bernardino Ochino in Inghilterra’, Rivista storica italiana 103 (1991), 231–42 (pp. 239–40). On knowledge of Pammachius in England, see Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 179–82. 52

MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 26–30.

53

Ochino, Tragoedie, Ninth Dialogue, sig. Cciii.

54

Lynne himself wrote an anti-papal work, The beginning and endyng of all popery and popish kyngedome (London: John Herford for Gualter Lynne, 1548), STC 17115; Alford, Kingship and Politics, pp. 102–3. On the use of Lynne’s ‘Day of the Lord’ woodcut for Ochino’s Tragoedie, see John King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton NJ, 1989), pp. 164–7. 55 STC 18770; STC 18771; Tragoedie, Bernardino Ochino’s Dedication to Edward VI, sig. [A.i] in both versions. 56

Ethan Shagan, ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions’, English Historical Review (hereafter cited as EHR), 114 (1999), 34–53 (p. 50).


51

By the summer of 1549, rebellion had spread from the South-West to the Thames Valley, the Home Counties, the Midlands, and East Anglia.57 The shock was profound. The causes of the troubles were different in different areas, predominantly religious in the South-West, less so elsewhere. Vermigli and Ochino joined Cranmer and Cheke in a team of polemicists employed to condemn rebellion.58 For Italians, struggling to grasp the nuances, this was disaster; their safe haven was manifestly not safe, but they had to go on defending it because there was nowhere else to go. Their role became still more complicated when their two important patrons, the Archbishop and Lord Protector Somerset, reacted differently to the rebels. Cranmer’s ‘Sermon Concerning the Time of Rebellion’ used material prepared by Vermigli. He steered clear of using Ochino’s Dialogue between the king and his people. Instead, the Dialogue was left to gather dust for centuries until it was discovered by Philip McNair in 1959. McNair argued that it was ‘forgotten’ because Ochino had ‘presented with uncomfortable cogency the opinion he was commissioned to controvert’. Valdo Vinay, too, suggests Ochino used the King’s speeches in the Dialogue as a means of expressing his own sympathy for the rebels. Descended from the people, he sided with the people, at least partially. 59 However, Ethan Shagan’s research suggests a more political explanation for Ochino’s stance. When rebellion broke out, Ochino seems to have followed where Lord Protector Somerset led – but that path was far from straight. Shagan argues that Protector Somerset’s public rhetoric during the troubled summer of 1549 ‘came dangerously close to envisaging a political partnership between government and commons’, although he never actually made an alliance.60 The Lord Protector was playing to different audiences, doubling as strong ruler and friend of the people.61 He was treading a fine line; an Italian, trying to please, might well not be completely ‘on message’. In the Dialogue, Ochino, like Somerset, aired both points of view. The King was made to acknowledge the commons’ necessary role ‘in our and your country’, and 57

Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 5th edn (Harlowe, 2004), pp. 52–89. 58 V. Vinay, ‘Riformatori e lotte contadine. Scritti e polemiche relative alla ribellione nella Cornovaglia e nel Devonshire sotto Edoardo VI’, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa (hereafter cited as RSLR), 3 (1967), 203–51. 59 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Parker MS 340, fols 97–108, Ochino’s ‘Dialogus Regis et Populi’; McNair, ‘Ochino on Sedition’, Italian Studies, 14 and 15 (1959–60), 36–49 (p. 37); Vinay, ‘Riformatori e lotte contadine’, pp. 241–3. 60 ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions’, EHR, 114 (1999), 34–53. Shagan views Somerset’s patronage of Vermigli as part of his ‘campaign of self-representation’ (p. 48) and the same is almost certainly true of Ochino. Ibid., ‘“Popularity” and the 1549 rebellions revisited’, EHR, 115 (2000), 121–33 (p. 122). 61

Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 276–80.


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stressed that he wanted all ‘usurpations’ (presumably those of the gentry against the commons) to come to an end. Thus far, Ochino’s King mouthed the ‘commonwealth’ rhetoric of Somerset and the commons were seen as deserving sympathy. Ochino made no attempt to conceal their sufferings. King:

But everyone has to bear his own cross, remembering that God has given it to him for his benefit. People: If in that case he does not have enough to live on, what then? King: Then you must do as God commanded … without going outside the law in order to find food. People: And what if that is not enough. Have we got to allow ourselves to die of hunger?

Then came the sting in the tail. ‘Definitely you must do so when you have no other alternative’, replied the King, suddenly deciding that his subjects’ starvation and death was better than their rebellion.62 Shagan’s revision of Somerset’s tactics puts the alarming swings of Ochino’s dialogue in a new light. Ochino was not viewing English popular unrest through the distorting lens of Savanorolan Florence, nor was he showing any special sense of social justice. He was echoing one version of the government’s ‘rhetoric of commonwealth’ – the Protector’s and not Cranmer’s.63 Ponet’s imprisonment in November may have been partly due to his translation of the pro-Somerset version of Ochino’s Tragoedie.64 There was an inaccurate rumour that ‘Bernardine and Bucer had been apprehended together with the Lord Protector’, which suggests that Ochino was generally identified as ‘a Somerset man’.65 Yet he survived having backed the wrong horse. He was helped by the fact that the Earl of Warwick, who led the coup, favoured exiles and presented himself as friend to reform. In June 1550, Warwick’s government gave a 62 ‘Rex: ma debba portar ognun la sua croce, con pensar che Dio gli l’habbi data per benefitio suo. Populus: Et se in tal caso non havessemo da vivere, che doveremo fare? Rex: Dovereste con raccomandarvi a Dio … senza passar li limiti della giustitia per haver del pane. Populus: Et se non ci bastasse, haviamo a lassarci morir di fame? Rex: Senza dubio, quando non haveste alchun altro giusto remedio, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 340, pp. 97–108, printed in McNair, ‘Ochino on Sedition’, pp. 46–9 (p. 47). 63

McNair, ‘Ochino on sedition’, p. 37, note 4 and Vinay, ‘Riformatori e lotte contadine’, pp. 207–8, 249; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 435–7. It appears that Vermigli took Cranmer’s side, see below Chapter 5, p. 111. 64

[N. Pococke], ‘Preparations for the First Prayer Book’, Church Quarterly Review, 35 (1892–93) 33–68 and ‘Preparations for the Second Prayer Book’, ibid., 37 (1893–94), 137–66 (pp. 141–4). Ponet’s treatise on clerical marriage was probably a more important cause of his imprisonment, Newcombe, ‘John Ponet’, ODNB. 65

Dryander to Bullinger, 3 December 1549, OL, vol. 1, p. 353.


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fine building, the Church of the Austin Friars, for the use of Dutch and French exiles, as well as generous grants for its restoration as the ‘Stranger Church’.66 This may have signalled a general reorganisation of London’s Stranger congregations, which affected Ochino. In November 1550 he handed over his ministry to Italians in the City of London to a reformer who had just arrived in England, Michelangelo Florio. Florio operated from within the congregation of French strangers and was given a pension, with the promise that the congregation would assist with his lodging and subsistence expenses. Why move Ochino, the famous preacher, and employ an unknown one? We do not know, but Florio’s appointment seems to have been secured through the patronage of Cranmer and the up-and-coming William Cecil was also involved.67 Making way for Florio seems to have been part of a larger change of direction in Ochino’s career. After 1550, his political interventions ceased abruptly. Thereafter, he wrote nothing as political as the Tragoedie and the ‘Dialogue between the King and his People’. Significant gaps begin to appear in his career: he was not asked to participate in the revision of the Book of Common Prayer, as Vermigli and Martin Bucer were. His name does not appear on the commission set up in 1551 to reform the Ecclesiastical Laws, as Vermigli’s did.68 By the time the Earl of Warwick had promoted himself to become Duke of Northumberland in October 1551, Ochino was less obviously a government man, but he was certainly not out of favour. A splendidly bound copy of the second (pro-Northumberland) version of his Tragoedie appeared in the royal library. Another copy of the work (again almost certainly in the second edition) appears in the inventory of Northumberland’s own library.69 Ochino may have offended but he was not rejected. As Northumberland moved into closer collaboration with the Scottish reformer John Knox and the Polish humanist Jan Łaski, the tide seemed to be turning in favour of radicals. The Duke was also backing the printer John Day, who, at this stage in his remarkable career, printed the works of radicals like John Hooper, John Bale and Henry Hart.70 Day added to his list two further editions of translations of Ochino’s sermons. Longer and more expensive 66

Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, pp. 30–34; Jennifer Loach, Edward VI, ed. George Bernard and Penry Williams (London and New Haven, 1999), pp. 127–9. 67 Florio took over in November 1550, Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica di Londra’, pp. 317–21; Boersma and Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, p. 22. For Florio’s later career, see Chapter 4. William Cecil was imprisoned after the 1549 coup, but by September 1550 he was a privy councillor and third secretary, Wallace T. MacCaffrey, ‘William Cecil, First Baron Burghley (1520/21–1598)’, ODNB. 68

See below, Chapter 5, p. 117 Literary Remains of Edward VI, J.G. Nichols (ed.) (Roxburghe Club, 2 vols, London, 1857), vol. I, pp. cccxxv–cccxxxiii; Bodl., Add. MS C. 94, fol. 13r., cited by MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 53, 230. 69

70

MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 524; J.N. King, ‘John Day: Master Printer of the English Reformation’, in Marshall and Ryrie, The Beginnings of English Protestantism, pp. 180–208.


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than the sermon collections of 1548, their success suggests that Cranmer’s guest had been taken up, perhaps taken over, by influential people pressing for further doctrinal change. Anne Cooke’s translation of Ochino’s Fouretene sermons … concernyng the predestinacion and eleccion of god was printed in 1551.71 This was followed in the same year by a composite volume containing all the translations of Ochino’s sermons which had appeared during Edward VI’s reign: Cooke’s five, Argentyne’s Sermons Six and Cooke’s Fouretene Sermons.72 Cooke’s choice of subject matter, along with the appearance of Day’s name as printer suggested that Ochino’s sermons were part of the brave, new, radical world of Northumberland’s regime. Predestination was an ancient doctrine, found in St Paul and St Augustine, as well as in Archbishop Cranmer’s private papers (although his public statements about it were more ambiguous).73 By 1550 it had become a marker of godliness: that year in Oxford, Vermigli began to give lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, which included a long comment on predestination.74 Anne Cooke was allying herself, her famous family and Ochino to those who were prepared for complete reformation. The doctrine of ‘salvation by faith alone’ led to questions about predestination, because, when ‘faith’ was granted, it appeared that some did better than others. Predestinarians looked back to the cause of people’s faith, God’s ‘decree’, which picked out (‘elected’) those to whom faith would be given. Anne Cooke said she had been reared in such thinking, literally from her mother’s knee. She dedicated her translation to her mother, who had insisted that: ‘We acknowledge that he [God] doth foresee and determine from without beginning all things and cannot alter or reward after our deserved works but remain steadfast according to his immutable will.’ Her father, Sir Anthony Cooke was a devout humanist, who provided a powerhouse of classical learning and reformation teaching for his four clever daughters. He also seems to have been a stand-in royal tutor. The whole Ochino-Cooke-Day project was part of the fervent humanist activity encouraged at the court of the ‘Young Josiah’. Anne Cooke’s dedication and preface exudes admiration for the ‘sanctified Bernardine’; she praised his ‘high style of … theologie’.75 Her editor, who 71

Fourtene Sermons, STC 18767. The date 1550 is sometimes given. John Day co-printed the volume with William Seres, factor to William Cecil, who was brother-in-law to Anne Cooke, Alford, Kingship and Politics, p. 122. 72

Certayne sermons of the ryght famous and excellent clerk master Barnardine Ochine [London: John Day, 1551?], STC 18766. 73

Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance (Oxford, 2000), pp. 195–204,

222. 74 75

See below, Chapter 5, p. 116

Anne Cooke’s Dedication, Fouretene Sermons, STC 18767, sigs Aiii–Av; see also the composite version, STC 18766, where Anne Cooke’s Fouretene Sermons on predestination appear as Sermons 12–25; M.K. McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke: Tudor Humanist, Educator and Religious Reformer’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 119 (1975), 233–50.


55

gave only his initials, ‘G.B.’, also wrote a preface emphasising that exile itself was Ochino’s guarantee: ‘a man whose life without words were a sufficient proteccion to his worke.’76 That ‘proteccion’ was a vital aspect of Ochino’s whole sojourn in England. The medium was the message. The initials ‘G.B.’ may have stood for ‘Gulielmus Baldwinus’ – William Baldwin, author of the satire A maruelous hystory intitulede beware the cat who was proof-reader for the godly stationer Edward Whitchurch and was well acquainted with Ochino’s printer, John Day. Baldwin, Whitchurch and Day were part of a publishing network dedicated to evangelical religion in print. Baldwin seems to have been keen on Italian material: two years later he translated a salacious anti-papal diatribe thought to be by Pier Paolo Vergerio.77 He knew the religious book market better than most. Perhaps that was why G.B. dared utter the only whisper of criticism of Ochino in the whole of Edward’s reign. The editor’s worries were about a doctrine known for short as ‘assurance’, later to be a favourite theme of ‘hotter’ Elizabethan Protestants. According to this teaching, those predestined, ‘the elect’, might sin sometimes but could never fall out with God for good: they were saved and they would know it, hence their ‘assurance’. In the margin of Ochino’s Sermon 3 entitled, ‘If we may know in this present life whether we be in the grace of God or not’, ‘G.B.’ inserted a general warning: ‘this must be warily read’. Then Ochino made an extravagant comment about the fate of the elect: ‘he [Christ] will conduct them to salvation although they, as much as lieth in them, were continually prompted to all evil’. Set beside it is the marginal entry, ‘This is not spoke to declare that it is possible for God’s elect to be wholly given to sin, but if it were possible yet should they recover that pestilence.’ These are brief marginal additions: it would be wrong to read too much into them, but ‘G.B.’ seems to have thought Ochino was suggesting that God’s elect might fall utterly from grace and on this point he would not let the Italian author have his head.78 76

‘Preface to the Christian Reader’, Fouretene Sermons, STC 18767, sigs Ai-Aii; Retha Warnicke, ‘Women and Humanism in England’, in A. Rabil (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundation, Forms and Legacy, vol. 2, pp. 39–55 (p. 46); Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes towards Learned Women in the Renaissance’, in Margaret Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word (Kent, OH, 1985), pp. 107–25 (p. 125). 77

Epistola de morte Pauli Tertii pont. Max.deque iis quae post mortem eius acciderunt a firma di Aesquillus [Pasquillus, Pasquino] anno MDXLIX, translated into English as Wonderful news of the death of Paul III ([London] Thomas Gaultier [1552]), STC 10532; Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti-Nicodemite Propaganda’, pp. 305–6; King, ‘John Day: Master Printer of the English Reformation’, p. 195. There has been doubt about the identity of the author of Epistola de morte, see STC 10532, where the work is misattributed to Matthias Flacius Illyricus and Benrath, ‘Lettera di Fra Bernardino (sic) Papa Paolo III’, Rivista Cristiana (Florence, 1874), cited by Benrath, Ochino, p. 207. 78

Sermon 3, Fouretene Sermons, sigs B vi–vii.


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Yet, having done his bit with the editorial red pen, ‘G.B.’ let other eccentricities pass. Ochino asserts the inevitability of suffering for God’s chosen, and then suddenly retracts this orthodoxy in favour of a eulogy of the elect’s happy state both on earth and in heaven. ‘They have the honour of every enterprise they take in hand they cannot be letted or resisted no more than God.’79 This was odd: sixteenth century religious thought, ‘protestant’ or ‘catholic’, did not generally promise earthly bliss to anyone. These sermons also suggest reticence on ‘reprobation’ – the idea that, just as God elects some for salvation, he ‘reprobates’ others to be condemned. Having stated that ‘None is in hell but by his own wickedness’, Ochino then decided to call a halt: ‘Of the reprobate I intend not to dispute wherefore God hath cast them off’.80 By 1551 there had been three years of frantic rush to publish European reformation texts in England. English readers were becoming more aware of widening doctrinal disagreements. We do not know if they noticed Ochino’s theological swerves and emergency stops: the evidence suggests that, mostly, they did not. The Princess Elizabeth, however, was especially interested, according to Ochino’s own (possibly rose-tinted) memory of their discussions, which he recorded about ten years later. After he had left England and Elizabeth had become Queen, Ochino dedicated to her his Labyrinths concerning free will (1561). Ochino wrote, ‘I well remember that when I was in England, your Majesty read some of my treatises on predestination and when you consulted me about them you gave me many proofs of the comprehensiveness and acuteness of your intellect’.81 By then the compliments came too late, but his reminiscences may have been completely true: the clever, polyglot Princess, who had already translated one of his sermons, might well have wanted to know more. From the viewpoint of Catholic states, Ochino was the best known of the exiles.82 He had not been hidden away most of his life in some safe ‘reformation’ area. Less than a decade before he had been a famous Capuchin and his flight – even more than Vermigli’s – had caused a stir, as we saw in chapter 1. Therefore he was a marked man, under surveillance by disgruntled Imperial diplomats. In 1550, Renard reported that Ochino’s presence in England was one of the causes of English fears that the Emperor 79

STC 18767, Sermon XIV, sig. H viii.

80

Ibid., Sermon IX, sig. F ii.

81

‘Io ricordandomi che già in Inghilterra v. Maesta avendo letti certi miei sermoni della predestinazione; e circa ciò domandandomi di alcuni dubbi non solo mi scoperse il suo bello raro, e sottile ingegno ma ancora un ardente desiderio di sapere gli altri e reconditi segreti di Dio’, Ochino’s Dedication to Elizabeth I, Prediche di M.Bernardino Ochino, nomate Laberinti del libero o servo Arbitrio (Basle, 1561), cited and translated in Benrath, Ochino, p. 251, see also Appendix, number 42. 82

For instance, Litolfi’s ‘Description of England’, 1557, AS Mantua, Archivio Gonzaga, busta 578, fols 192–204 (fol. 204).


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would make war.83 That was an exaggeration but relations were tense. They deteriorated further when Ochino’s friend, Richard Morison, was posted as ambassador to the peripatetic Imperial court in 1550, taking the Princess Elizabeth’s erstwhile tutor, Roger Ascham, as his secretary. Morison’s zealous pressure for freedom of worship in his embassy caused trouble. This was compounded by a spy’s reports that Morison allowed ‘preaching’ to go on in his household. Animosity flared to a point where Nicholas Wotton had to be sent out to smooth things over, and then was treated to the Emperor’s very negative opinions about the exiles from his dominions who had been given refuge in England.84 Wotton replied that the Emperor could say whatever he wanted about ‘Bernardine and Bucer’ (note the order) but ‘in England they were taken for great, wise and learned men’.85 Wotton departed, but then on 13 July 1552, in a letter to Cecil, Morison recounted a spy’s report that: ‘I did read them [his household] Bernardine Ochine “Prediche” for the tongue and sometimes Machiavel’.86 In these diplomatic scuffles Ochino’s name had kept on cropping up, but while the Emperor complained, Ochino’s personal contacts were being put to good use. We must now turn to his useful role in the breathless internationalism that characterised Edwardian foreign policy. Even Cardinal Pole was treated with cold courtesy by the Duke of Somerset’s regime, as we shall see in the next chapter. Other reformers on the Continent attracted warmer interest. MacCulloch emphasises Cranmer’s European and ecumenical vision.87 In the Archbishop’s ‘open door’ policy, Ochino’s circle of friends was useful and he acted as a go-between. In July 1548 he claimed to have set up an invitation to England for his friend Wolfgang Musculus, then in Augsburg: ‘I made mention of your virtue and learning to the Archbishop of Canterbury’, said Ochino, who also produced a wildly exaggerated estimate that there were 5000 Germans in London needing poor Musculus to minister to them.88 Musculus never came, but Ochino’s international networking continued: six months later he suggested ‘a certain godly and excellent youth’, clearly a foreigner, for Princess Elizabeth’s service and, though his candidate was found unsuitable, Ochino remained part of the consultation.89 His residence was in use as a meeting place for reformers: early in 1550 John Bradford went 83

Renard to the Emperor, 1 September 1550, CSP Spanish (1550–52), p. 170.

84

The Emperor to Jehan Scheyfve, 3 September 1551, CSP Spanish (1550–52), pp. 349–52. 85 Wotton to the Council, 1 September 1551, Calendar of State Papers, Foreign (23 vols, HMSO, 1863–1950) (hereafter cited as CSP Foreign), (1547–53), 436, p. 166. 86 Morison to Cecil, 13 July 1552, ibid., 550, p. 216; on misconstruction of this letter, see Anglo, Machiavelli: the First Century, p. 102, n. 32. 87

MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 174–5, 394–5.

88

Ochino to Musculus, 17 July 1548 OL, vol. 1, p. 334, and 23 December 1548, ibid.,

p. 336. 89

Martin Bucer to Edmund Allen, 27 August 1549, OL, vol. 2, pp. 541–2.


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there to meet another Italian exile, Pietro Bizzarri, who subsequently went to be tutor in the Italianate household of John Russell, Duke of Bedford.90 The stream of invitations to foreigners to come to England continued. Jan Łaski arrived for a brief stay in 1548 and returned for a longer one in May 1550.91 Martin Bucer arrived in April 1549. In that year, negotiations were under way for a riposte to the Council of Trent in the form of a General Council of reformed nations and cities.92 The English government did not seem particularly interested in Calvin, which was as well because the Genevan leader made snide remarks about Italians in general and Ochino in particular; he even said that Ochino’s sermons were best left un-translated.93 In contacts with reformers in Basel Ochino was particularly useful because he had stayed there twice during his exile, in 1545 and then for several months in 1547, just before he travelled to England. Basel’s resident reformers, Curio Secondo Curione and the Franco-Italian Sebastien Castellio, had both served as Ochino’s translators and knew him well. Profoundly interested in English reform, they were using their friendship as part of a deliberate pitch to get themselves noticed in London.94 Ochino had arrived in 1547 bearing a letter of introduction from Curione: the message was ‘welcome him and don’t forget me’. The package contained compliments to John Cheke, the King’s tutor, and an enclosure of books by Curione and his son, sent for the English court’s perusal.95 Then, in 1551, Sebastien Castellio dedicated his Latin translation of the Bible to the King, adding glowing praise for Cheke 90

John Bradford to Martin Bucer, ?early 1550, Writings of John Bradford, A. Townsend (ed.) (2 vols, PS, Cambridge, 1848, 1853) vol. 2, pp. 353–4; Peter of Perugia [Pietro Bizzarri] to Bullinger, 10 February 1550, OL, vol. 1, p. 338. 91

MacCulloch, ‘The Importance of Jan Łaski in the English Reformation’, pp. 325–46.

92

MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 448. Calvin to M. de Falais, March 1546, Corpus Reformatorum, Opera Calvini, ed. William Baum, Edward Cunitz, and Edward Reus (58 vols in 25, Brunswick, 1863–1900), vol. 12, no. 784, pp. 319–23, cited by Daniel Bertrand-Barraud, Les idées philosophiques de Bernardin Ochin (Paris, 1924) p. 19; MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 173–4. 93

94 Benrath, Ochino, Appendix, pp. 299–300, numbers, 15,17 and 18 and 32; F. Buisson, Sébastien Castellion; Sa vie et son oeuvre: Etude sur les origins du Protestantisme libéral francais (2 vols, Paris, 1892), vol.1, pp. 226–7, cited by Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 131; Hans Guggisberg, ‘Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth Century Basle’, in O.P. Grell and R.W. Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 149–63. On Curione’s concealment of his radical views, see Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002), p. 218. 95 ‘Reliqua quae quae brevitas litterarum non fert a sapientissimo sene Bernardino Ocillo cognoscas’, Caelio Secundo Curione, Selectarum Epistolarum, Libri ii (2 vols, Basle: Oporinus, 1553), vol. 1, p. 287; Caelio Horatio Curione, De Amplitudine Misericordiae Dei (Basle: Oporinus, 1550); Nichols, Literary Remains, 1, cccxxx; Ruth Chavasse, ‘Humanism in exile: Caelio Secondo Curione’s learned women friends and exempla for Elizabeth I’, in S.M. Jack and B.A. Masters (eds), Protestants, Property, Puritans: Godly People Revisited, Parergon, NS, 14 (1996), pp. 165–86, especially p. 77, n. 35.


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and for Edward’s kingdom, ‘open to all those seeking refuge on account of persecution for their studies and defence of Scripture’.96 Clearly he was writing in full knowledge of English generosity to his former colleague, and he almost managed to follow in Ochino’s footsteps. In 1551, when the post of Regius Professor at Cambridge was left vacant by the death of Martin Bucer, the radical Castellio was recommended as a possible successor.97 The steady stream of recommendations and applications for work in England shows that both Somerset’s and Northumberland’s regimes were marked by a disposition to look beyond English shores. In March 1552 Cranmer invited the reformers Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich, John Calvin of Geneva and Philip Melanchthon of Wittenberg to come to England for a council – to trump the Council of Trent.98 Even as the young King’s health began to fail and terrible crisis loomed, the government issued another invitation to Philip Melanchthon to come and take up the post at Cambridge, left vacant by Bucer and, in the end, not given to Castellio.99 To go on catching foreigners at such a moment was some measure of the ruling group’s unquenchable faith in the policy of bringing in exiles. As an early arrival, Ochino had facilitated that policy. Historians used to ‘read’ his English exile in the light of his later condemnation. Heterodoxy in the 1560s was transmuted into contemptible failure in England between 1547 and 1553 when he ‘produced nothing of any value’.100 Edwardian internationalists thought differently: the Italian had proved a useful link in the chain of introductions and invitations intended to make England the powerhouse of European Protestant revival. Ochino had served both Somerset’s and Northumberland’s regimes by his writing and his networking. Some of his ‘contracts’ were suggested to him, perhaps demanded of him. In the case of the Tragoedie and the Dialogue his themes and some material appear to have been supplied by his political masters. Ochino complied and delivered: so, his English exile was, on balance, a considerable success. There is not a shred of evidence that anyone thought that he was a dangerous heresiarch in the making. His age, combined with his effervescent style and status as an exile-martyr, had given him prestige. The first two years of the reign were the best time and 96

Praefatio, fol. 2r, cited by Hans R. Guggisberg, Sebastien Castellio: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age, ed. and trans. Bruce Gordon (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 56–61,172–3 (p. 57). 97

The recommendation came from Jan Łaski, MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant,

p. 174. 98

MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 501–2.

99

MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 524–39; J.D. Alsop, ‘Philip Melanchthon and England in 1553’, Notes and Queries, NS, 37 (1990), 164–5. 100

p. 117.

C.H. Smyth, Cranmer and the Reformation under Edward VI (Cambridge 1926),


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Dryander noticed his happiness.101 With the King reading his Tragoedie and members of the court translating his sermons, his cup ran over. Then, from autumn 1549 onwards, there were difficulties: he had not written exactly what was wanted about the rebellions and he became identified with the wrong side in the tortuous political crisis that followed. When the Duke of Northumberland took over, Bucer, Fagius, Łaski and Vermigli were invited more often than he was to join in the planning of the reformation. Yet Ochino was not exactly out of favour. Favoured printers brought out two volumes of his sermons; his ‘high style’ impressed his translator, his editor, even the Princess Elizabeth. One editor’s cautions about one sermon seem to have been ignored. Meanwhile, on the international front, English diplomats made the most of their famous catch, while his friends on the Continent watched with envy and considered following him to England. Ochino even managed a neat justification for asking them: in his Tragoedie, ‘King Edward VI’ says ‘And if we cannot find enough such men [preachers] within our own dominions, they must be sought for wherever they may be found’.102

101

Dryander to Bullinger, 3 December 1549, OL, vol. 1, p. 353.

102

Tragoedie, Ninth Dialogue, sig. Cciii.

CHAPTER THREE

Edward Courtenay and Il Beneficio di Cristo I have thought good to present … this breve and godly treatise following written bj a famous clerk in the Italionne, the understanding whereof as I have bi my noune studie acheved. Edward Courtenay’s dedication to the Duchess of Somerset of his translation of Il Beneficio di Cristo.1

By the time Ochino had established himself in London, the Beneficio di Cristo had been translated into English and was circulating at court. The translator was a young nobleman, Edward Courtenay, cousin to Cardinal Pole. Just as the composition of the Beneficio in Italy had been a complex process, so this small book’s reception in England is shrouded in mystery. It has never been clear how Courtenay came by the original: if it was given to him by his cousin Pole, by Ochino or Vermigli, or indeed any of the Italians who had read and publicised the work in Italy. Courtenay’s version was never published, but much later the text was printed and presented as a plea for unity among Christians, in strife-torn Elizabethan England.2 Thus, the Beneficio had significance for Italian reform and for both the Edwardian and Elizabethan reformations, but it was read in different ways and its message was adapted according to English needs. During the reign of Henry VIII, young Edward Courtenay had become a symbol of the dire possibility of aristocratic and catholic resistance to the Tudors. Since 1538 he had been a prisoner in the Tower of London on account of his dangerously valid claim to the throne. He had finished translating the Beneficio by 1548 but we do not know exactly when he set to work. He presented his final copy in one of the most exquisite manuscripts of the mid-Tudor period, dedicating it to Anne Seymour (Stanhope), Duchess of Somerset, wife of the Lord Protector. By choosing her, Courtenay made a political and religious point.3 He was declaring himself on the ‘right’ side, the reformation side, and seeking the court’s 1 Cambridge University Library, MS Nn. 4.43, ‘A treatice most profitable of the benefite that christianes receive by the dethe of Jesus Christe’, 1548. 2

Benedetto da Mantova, The Benefit that Christians receive by Jesus Christ Crucified . . . A. G. (London: [Thomas East] for Lucas Harrison and George Bishop, [1573]), STC 19114; Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 275. 3

J.N. King, ‘Protector Somerset, Patron of the English Renaissance’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 70 (1976), 307–31 (pp. 327–31).


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notice, for himself and for his text. He wanted the Duchess’s powerful husband, the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector to the young King, to let him out of prison, where he had been since he was twelve. He had endured this deprived life because he was so close to the throne on the Yorkist side. His father, the Marquis of Exeter, had been executed in 1538, as a potential focus of Catholic rebellion. Almost all Courtenay’s family connections were ‘catholic’. From the perspective of English reformers, his cousin Pole was seen as the most catholic of them all – though conservatives in the papal court were beginning to think differently. Henry VIII kept the child Edward Courtenay in prison because it was feared that he, too, might be identified with unrest.4 In the Tower, he was ‘poorly and strictly kept’, but in 1541 his mother Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, was allowed to employ tutors for him.5 Thereafter he seems to have had a Tudor humanist education, but not as complete as that given to his royal cousins, the young Prince Edward and the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. In 1546 he tried to escape from the Tower.6 When Henry VIII died in 1547 there were hopes that the young prisoner might be pardoned and received at court. But, as the heir to Courtenay estates in the West Country and a possible catholic figurehead, he was one of four prisoners regarded as too dangerous to be included in the general pardon granted at Edward VI’s accession. So, close to the time when he translated the Beneficio, Courtenay was swallowing bitter disappointment. His work on the book may have been a last throw, a final appeal for attention and release. Hence the beauty of the manuscript, hence the calculated dedication, which played on the court’s two soft spots: humanism and religion. Courtenay claimed he needed freedom in order to become properly educated. He bemoaned his own lack of opportunity in the Tower. He said he had been shut up ‘from suche of whome and bi whose godlie conversation I should or mought have conceived or lernid annj either godlines or civilite’. He sought a place in the household of the Duke of Somerset in order to gain that ‘godlines or civilite’.7 He was parroting two words dear to humanist hearts: clearly the Tudor educators had influenced him, even in the Tower. Yet his claims were true, he had been shut up and his studies had been patchy and relatively short, just seven years of formal education. His dedication of the Beneficio reveals halting words and distinctly odd spelling and syntax, even allowing for the creative variety of mid-Tudor practice. Nonetheless, he wanted to do what his peers were 4

Horatia Durant, Sorrowful Captives: The Tudor Earls of Devon (Pontypool, 1960), pp. 64–9. 5

LP, vol. 16, 1011, p. 483.

6

Durant, Sorrowful Captives, p. 68.

7

Courtenay’s Dedication to the Duchess of Somerset, CUL MS Nn. 4. 43, fols 1v– 4v (fol. 2r).

EDWARD COURTENAY AND IL BENEFICIO DI CRISTO

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doing, read, write, translate and become a proper Renaissance man. No doubt he was aware of the significant precedents in the humanist enthusiasm of this court.8 We have seen that, in the same year as Courtenay presented his work, his cousin Elizabeth translated one of Ochino’s sermons and the learned Anne Cooke had tackled no less than five of them.9 Edward Courtenay went one better, translating a whole book, though he chose a short one. Later in his life, when he was released from prison, he would show himself to be a dedicated follower of fashion.10 It is significant that he did not try his hand at a secular work, nor at the texts of recently arrived Italian reformers, like Ochino or Vermigli, making their impression at court at the time of his translation. Instead, he went for an anonymous author but a title famous in much of Europe. How well known was it in England? We do not know if Courtenay was aware of the secretive preparations, condemnations and ‘uproar’ that had marked the history of his original. In his dedication, he gave no sign that he knew much about the author, who is described casually as ‘a famous clerk in the Italionne’, nor anything at all about the doctrine.11 However, in the young man’s vagueness, there is useful unwitting testimony. First, just as in Italy the appeal of the Beneficio was general and widespread, so some ten years after its composition this English translator still presented the text as innocuous, bypassing all mention of theological parties and doctrinal colours. He just noted that ‘this litle boke most playnely declarethe and settithe out’ Christ’s glory.12 There was no arguing with him – even in a country currently seething with religious debate. He was doing what the Benficio’s Italian authors had done, making the most of a title and theme that might sound attractive and neutral to untutored ears. Second, Courtenay was willing to bet – or someone had told him – that the anonymous author was famous, ‘a famous clerk’. Last, it is significant that he assumed that translating an Italian text would do him some good and that readers at court would be interested. That gamble turned out to be absolutely right. Two sentences in King Edward VI’s handwriting appear on Courtenay’s manuscript translation. 8

John King ‘Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr’, in Margaret Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word (Kent, OH, 1985), pp. 43–60; Overell, ‘Edwardian Court Humanism’, pp. 159–65. 9

See above, Chapter 2, pp. 48–9.

10

On Courtenay’s life, see Anne Overell, ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy: Edward Courtenay, 1548–1556’, in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe at Home and Abroad (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 117–35. 11

Bianchini to Beccadelli, 26 October 1543, cited by Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 74; Courtenay’s Dedication, CUL Nn 4.43, fol. 2v. 12

Ibid., fol. 3r.


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They were inserted at the beginning and end of the text. The first quotes St James’s epistle: Faith is dede if it be without workes, your loving neveu, Edward.

The second has no obvious doctrinal thrust: Live to die and die to live again. Youer neveu, Edward.13

It was a royal approval, granted by a child-King, a ‘godly imp’, but too young to have plumbed the controversial depths of the Beneficio di Cristo.14 Edward VI’s superficial aphorisms, ‘live to die’, and so forth suggest that he (or his minders) had decided that Courtenay’s book was a good thing, containing doctrines that were similar enough to doctrines then being introduced in England to receive royal approval. Was he right? To answer that, we must examine the match between Beneficio and English views in the late 1540s English contemporaries trying to place the text within contemporary controversy faced an uphill task. Intensive Italian research over the last fifty years has shown a huge range of influences and a miscellany of conflicting sources. First, as we saw in chapter 1, Carnesecchi told the Inquisition that there were two authors, the Benedictine monk Benedetto da Mantova and the humanist poet Marcantonio Flaminio.15 Also, we know that others, like Pole and Contarini, were consulted. In addition, modern textual scholarship has detected multiple extracts from German and Swiss reformers.16 The book reproduced large sections of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.17 These long quotations come especially in the last three chapters, put there in all probability by Flaminio, the second of the two authors, who had been reading the works of the Northern reformers for several years and had loaned Calvin’s Institutes to Carnesecchi in

13

Ibid., fols 4v and 92r. James 2:17. For the controversy about John Foxe’s view of Edward as the ‘godly imp’, see Loach, Edward VI, pp. 158, 180–89; MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 23–38. 14

15 Processi Carnesecchi, vol. 2, pt. I, pp. 170–71. For a summary of research, see McNair, ‘Benedetto da Mantova, Marcantonio Flaminio and the Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 614–24. 16 17

Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 13–85; Prelowski, ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 47–102.

Tommaso Bozza, Il Beneficio di Cristo e la Istituzione della religione cristiana di Calvino (Rome: privately printed, 1961), and ibid., Il Beneficio di Cristo e la Istituzione della religione cristiana di Calvino (Rome, 1963).


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1541.18 When they read this book, so well ‘polished’ by Flaminio, English readers were imbibing Calvin. In addition, Massimo Firpo has shown how much of the Beneficio’s teaching was taken from Valdés.19 Barry Collett’s research revealed echoes of the piety of the influential Cassinese Benedictine community.20 Achille Olivieri has highlighted the pervasive inspiration of the Imitation of Christ.21 Multiple revisions muddied the waters still further. Flaminio had been tinkering for years with a manuscript that originated in Naples, was ‘polished’ in Viterbo, then revised in response to attacks from traditionalists, especially those of Ambrogio Catarino; only after all that was it published in Venice.22 Courtenay, Edward VI and other English readers were dealing with a patchwork of sources – Calvin, Luther, Melanchthon and Valdés – all left unacknowledged. Despite a veritable industry of Italian Beneficio scholarship, its reception in England has never been studied. Here we shall focus on the aspects of this eccentric text likely to have struck chords at Edward VI’s court. Most English readers would have spotted the authors’ primary intention: to help troubled souls, misled by ‘Pelagian’ emphasis on works and merit. To anyone still tempted to seek God by being good and doing good, the Beneficio preached that salvation came by faith in Christ’s goodness and in that alone. In different guises, again and again, the authors return to this theme of hope through faith. Among the cognoscenti, in England as in Italy, the doctrine was not new. It had been circulating since before Luther’s crisis.23 When the Beneficio was translated, the ‘official’ English reformation was already some fifteen years old. Italian observers had been taught to think of England as a ‘reformation’ country, governed by ‘Questo Re heretico’, in cahoots with the Lutherans.24 But appearances were deceptive. King Henry VIII’s beliefs were far from Lutheran and were not ‘heretical’ enough to please his own Archbishop. Doctrine lagged way 18

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 79 and 91.

19

Firpo, ‘The Italian Reformation and Juan de Valdés’, pp. 353–64. Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars, pp. 26–7, 168–78.

20 21

Achille Olivieri, ‘Ricerche su Il Beneficio di Cristo’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 142 (1984), 437–55 (pp. 438–9). 22 Ambrogio Catarino Politi, Compendio d’errori e inganni luterani contenuti in un libretto intitolato … trattato utilissimo del beneficio di Cristo crucifisso (Rome, 1544); Ginzburg and Prosperi, ‘Le due redazioni del Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 137–204; Rita Belladonna and Andrea del Col, ‘Per una sistemazione dell’ evangelismo Italiano e di una opera recente’, Critica storica, 17 (1980), 264–77; Flaminio, Apologia, pp. 15–20. 23 For instance, Thomas Bilney’s experience in 1516, see H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge 1958), pp. 39–40. 24

ASVen, Capi del Consiglio dei Dieci, Lettere di ambasciatori, Roma, b. 23, Despatch of 8 May 1545.


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behind external changes and the Supreme Head never accepted the idea of justification by faith. Archbishop Cranmer’s barely concealed exasperation as he tried to rub the new theology into the royal brain indicates the difficulties, not just for the monarch but for the majority.25 Neither the King nor many (but not all) in his country were willing to let go of the old idea that they could do their bit towards their own salvation, by their efforts, by their ‘works’. Cranmer, on the other hand, had made the reformers’ doctrine into his own. The third section of his manuscript collection of ‘Great Commonplaces’ (1543 onwards) makes it abundantly clear that, by then, he believed in justification by faith, in the permanent helplessness of man and in predestination.26 These teachings failed to take root in the country before the old King’s death, largely because the King himself did not want them.27 Yet when he died, Henry VIII left reformers in charge of his heir and of the government. By then, he seems to have accepted that completing his reformation would be the ‘least worst’ option. Therefore, the accession of Edward VI in January 1547 marked the beginning of a doctrinal revolution in England, in which foreign reformers and their texts played an important part. The year of Edward VI’s accession was important for the history of doctrine. Archbishop Cranmer was free to teach and preach the doctrines he had kept for his private papers. His ‘Homily of Salvation’ was printed in July 1547. A few months later, in November, the Council of Trent’s decree defining Catholic teaching on salvation appeared. 28 Canterbury and Rome had spoken within the same year, the subject was in the air, but in neither camp was the debate settled. At this psychological moment, Cranmer’s guest reformers arrived in England and the Beneficio was translated. Whether Courtenay knew it or not, he was part of a great European controversy. To educated ears, his title alone would have probably have suggested reformation doctrine. ‘Beneficium’, a favourite humanist word, appeared in many contexts, but reformers used it to refer to God’s gifts, and specifically to Christ’s saving work for mankind. Cranmer had written of the ‘merit and benefit of Christ’.29 In addition, the title 25 MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 209–11; Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 131–2, 157–8. 26

BL Royal MSS 7B 11 and 7B 12, ‘Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces’; Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 157–212 and 262–9. 27

MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 346–7, 360–61.

28

Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570), ed. R.B. Bond (Toronto, 1987); Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 174–95. 29

Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer …relative to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, ed. J.E. Cox (PS, Cambridge, 1844), p. 114, cited by Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine


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of Edward Courtenay’s version has been subtly altered. In all the Italian versions printed before 1548, the work is called Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Giesu Christo crocifisso verso i christiani. Courtenay’s English title reads ‘A Treatice most profittable of the benefitt that true christianes receyve by the dethe of Jesus Christe’. The echo of medieval devotion to ‘Christo crocifisso’, the Crucified, is expunged, while the benefit of Christ’s death becomes available only to ‘true Christians’, apparently not to all Christians.30 It looks deliberate, as if Courtenay and his mentors were trying to make the title sound more distinctly a product of the reformation and thus to fulfil the new, more radical English expectations. In other respects as well, the Beneficio slotted neatly into English propaganda needs. By the standards of its time and type, it was readable and full of parables and forceful images. The first chapter was beguilingly short. Although later chapters became longer and heavier-going, at first glance it appeared an easy read. It started with a subject that has always tantalised human beings – themselves, warts and all. On the perversity of fallen human nature, the Beneficio agreed with the very gloomy assessment of Valdés (and indeed of Cranmer himself). Left to their own devices, human beings were on a downward spiral and God’s law was a mirror in which they might see their depravity.31 Only then, when they were humbled and at rock bottom, could the fruits of Christ’s justification become available to them. So far so good: Cranmer and his friends would probably have approved.32 However, English reformers were dealing with a (mostly uneducated) nation, not a coterie of sensitive humanist souls. They needed teaching that told it straight and the Beneficio did not meet that need because it was a spiritual rather than a theological book. Chapter 3 introduces the reformation doctrine of salvation by faith, but draws upon a miscellany of ideas drawn from the Imitation of Christ, from Benedictine spirituality and, most of all, from the enigmatic spiritual director, Juan de Valdés. It is possible that the first three chapters were written in the late 1530s or very early 1540s, well before the long process of defining orthodoxies was under way. The passage of time between the book’s composition and publication, then between publication and reception in England, created a problem. of Repentance, p. 122. 30 The French translation (1545) also has ‘Christians’ rather than ‘true Christians’. For titles of all sixteenth century editions and translations, see Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 504–11. 31

Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 159–62; MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 345. The metaphor of the law as mirror is found in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (2 vols, Philadelphia, 1960) (Library of Christian Classics vols XX and XXI), vol. 1, p. 355. 32

Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, p. 131.


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The Italian authors spoke in and to a world unsure of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ doctrine. For instance, Christ ‘the kind physician’ is presented as ‘healing all our sicknesses, reforming our free will and restoring us to our first innocency and bringing us again to the likeness of God’.33 English readers of Luther’s ‘simul iustus et peccator’ might well have been puzzled, struggling to reconcile the German reformer’s emphasis on intrinsic sinfulness with the Beneficio’s ‘innocency’ and ‘restoration’ to God’s likeness. By Edward VI’s reign, most English reformers followed Luther: human innocence was never restored. Cranmer headed one of the sections of his ‘Great Commonplaces’, ‘to justify means to pronounce, declare or exhibit as just’. In his view, man could never be fully pleasing to God: he was not made good, even ‘by Christ the kind physician’, he was only ‘pronounced’ (or reputed or declared or exhibited) as such.34 The reformation was a cascade of ideas, filtered by time, place and situation. Italy was not England and the ten years that stretched between the Beneficio’s composition and its English reception made a big difference. There was a disjunction between sanguine Italian belief that man would be ‘made better’ and Cranmer’s sober certainty that inner sinfulness was there for ever. Later, in chapter 3, the Beneficio’s burst of optimism seems to veer close to a theology of Universal Salvation. The fruit of Christ’s work is ‘a general pardon to all mankind’. This ‘general pardon’ crops up several times in the text. To benefit from it, all people had to do was to believe the Gospel. The image almost certainly derives from the teaching of Valdés, who had had such a decisive influence on the Beneficio’s authors in Naples.35 Cranmer and an influential group (which included the Cooke family whom we visited in the last chapter) were convinced predestinarians. At least potentially the Beneficio’s ‘general pardon’ came into conflict with that impenetrable divine decree, by which only some people were elected to salvation.36 The text’s most quirky, mystical flights came in chapter 4, which was given the title, ‘Of the effects of living faith and of the union of the soul 33

Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 163, lines 31–2. Christ as the Physician was a Benedictine topos, Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars, pp. 26–7. 34 MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 345. Cranmer followed both Luther and Melanchthon, but there were dissenting voices among the reformers, which maintained that some essential righteousness was restored in man, notably that of Andreas Osiander, Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 105 and 122. 35

‘un perdon generale a tutta l’umana generazione’, Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 22 and 165; Benjamin B. Wiffen, Life and Writings of Juan de Valdés ... with a Translation from the Italian of his ‘One Hundred and Ten Considerations’, by John T. Betts (London, 1865), Consideration CIII; Firpo, ‘Italian Reformation and Juan de Valdés’, p. 356; Firpo, Tra alumbrados, pp. 132–8. 36

MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 211–12; Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 200–204.


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with Christ’. Like Luther, the author subtly alters the Pauline analogy of the marriage of Christ and the Church to a marriage of Christ with the Christian soul. But, in the Beneficio, that relationship turns into identification. Courtenay’s lumbering prose did not conceal the doctrinal precipice: ‘Truely it may be saide that the christen man was fastenyd to the crosse, buried, raised agayne, ascended to heaven and was made partaker of the nature of God’.37 Later in the same chapter: ‘We become one thing with Christ, who being onely one thing with God, we also by Christ be one onely thing with God’. This was not Edward Courtenay’s fault – his translation was accurate if clumsy. The statement was in the text: ‘una cosa sola con Dio’, a neo-platonist idea, at odds with English reformers’ teaching.38 Since man remained sinful, he could not partake of God’s nature: he might love and imitate Christ, but he could not ‘be’ Christ, or God. There is no direct evidence that English contemporaries noticed this mystical minefield. All the same, unlike other Edwardian translations from Italian reformation works, Courtenay’s beautiful manuscript was never published. The Beneficio’s last three chapters show a distinct change of style. They are longer and more heavyweight, with a pronounced emphasis on ‘authorities’ cited to support the argument. Regular readers of reformation polemic would have found themselves at home. Most of the longer passages borrowed from the Northern Reformers are found in this part of the book, where long extracts from Calvin are quoted verbatim or used in a free translation.39 In addition, the tone changes, it becomes more élitist, more distinctly ‘them’ and ‘us’. ‘We’ are the saved, divided from others ‘with Hebrew minds’, who do not accept salvation by faith. Chapter 5’s punchy comments suggest that, in the race for salvation, not everyone is a winner, or even a team-mate. As Flaminio expanded on St Paul’s image of ‘being clothed with Christ’, divisions become obvious. The ‘clothing’ of the saved makes them different, distinguishing them from ‘the man of the worlde’ and ‘false Christians’.40 Such separatism was part of the book’s history. It had been produced in small Nicodemite groups, communicating with like-minded believers in code, hoping that their beliefs would become

37 Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 27 and 169–70; compare Ephesians 5: 21–32 and Colossians 2: 11–15. 38 39 40

Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 28, note 1 and p. 182. See for instance, Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 38, note 23.

Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 187–8; Ephesians 4: 22–4. Both Luther and Calvin use this Pauline image of ‘clothing’, see Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 52, n. 1 and Prelowski, ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 73–7. On élitist group consciousness, see Matheson, Cardinal Contarini at Regensburg, p. 79.


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accepted doctrine.41 As suspicions grew and investigations began, they had become cut off, defensively making their case against traditionalists, ‘false Christians’. Such divisiveness was precisely what the builders of the English national reformation hoped to avoid. In all its public statements, the Edwardian government was careful to present the Gospel as synonymous with national unity and ‘commonwealth’.42 The Beneficio’s final chapter opens with message of religion as relief. Taking a theme from Luther, the author lists ‘four remedies’ to comfort those plagued by doubts: prayer, recall of our baptism, communion and ‘a very good remedy … the rememberauce of our predestinacyon and election to eternall lief’.43 The last two of the Italians’ ‘remedies’ matched exactly the two hottest topics of early Edwardian religious controversy. Not long after he arrived in England, Pietro Martire Vermigli noticed that the Eucharist was discussed on every street corner.44 Predestination, too, was definitely on the national agenda. The authors of the Beneficio, however, were addressing a different constituency, not a nation undergoing doctrinal revolution but a group of sensitive souls tortured by doubt. They offered their ‘remedies’ not as doctrines, but a means of comfort, simply bypassing core Eucharistic questions like ‘what is being received?’, ‘by whom’?, ‘what part is played by the faith of the recipient?’ When the Beneficio was written Eucharistic debates were still not common in Italy.45 By contrast, Courtenay set to work after a decade of furious Eucharistic controversy in much of Europe. Simple comfort was a thing of the past. Englishmen probed and argued about this subject and, with the introduction of the 1549 Prayer Book, they experienced audible and visible changes in their communion services, a ‘radical discontinuity’.46 In the Beneficio, communion remained a ‘remedy’, whilst in Edwardian England it had become the problem. At the very end of his last chapter, Flaminio addressed a topic still unfamiliar to many in Italy and just becoming current in Edwardian England: predestination to eternal life. 47 Who were the elect? According 41 Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’, p. 188; Rozzo and Seidel Menchi, ‘The Book and the Reformation in Italy’, pp. 358–9. 42

Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation, pp. 274–7.

43

Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 196 (for original, see p. 69). Luther’s remedies against temptation seem to be the chief source, supplemented by Valdés, see Prelowski, ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 78 and 84. 44

Martyr to Bucer, 26 December 1548, OL, vol. 2, p. 468.

45

The Beneficio’s authors were drawing on Calvin’s writings about the Eucharist, but the passages they used in this chapter were not especially contentious, for instance see Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 66–7, n. 17, Prelowski, ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 83–4. 46

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400– 1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 464–5. 47

Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 196–205.


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to the Beneficio, those who believed were also the predestined: ‘We (who have received the grace of the Gospell) are even now the sonnes of God chosen to eternall lief’.48 Cranmer took a similar line, believing that ‘the elect and the justified were coterminous’.49 At first Flaminio preaches predestination as comfort, which ‘keapeth the true Christian in a contynuall myrth and ioyfulness of spirite’.50 In the life of the faithful, thoughts about reprobation are treated as no more than temptations. So far the Archbishop of Canterbury would have agreed with him. However, there was something very un-Cranmerian about Flaminio’s concluding comment on reprobation: I saie that … certaintie of predestination cannot hurte true christians … and I cannot see that it can hurte the reprobate and false christians; for howe moche so ever those men which be reprobate do forse them selves to beleve that they be in the nomber of them that are predestinate, yet they can never persuade their conscience thereunto.51

His subjectivity and his directness might well have worried Cranmer, who certainly believed in predestination, yet his ‘pastoral instinct muffled his presentation’: he did not share Flaminio’s certainty that this doctrine ‘cannot hurte’.52 The authorial voice, ‘I saie …’, ‘I cannot see …’, always present in the Beneficio, becomes passionate in the closing pages of the text, insisting that those who are saved will be conscientious about doing good works. Here Flaminio was drawing partly on Calvin, but he was also rephrasing Pole’s famous advice to Vittoria Colonna: to believe as if she were saved by faith, but on the other hand to live as if her salvation depended on works.53 In 1548–49 the phrase was also applicable to the English condition. English reformers, too, kept on hammering home the importance of continued good works because they were haunted by the spectre of ‘antinomianism’, a national free-for-all, in which the collapse of obedience was their special 48

Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 196.

49

Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, p. 128. Null shows how the soteriology of Cranmer’s private papers was adapted but not often changed in public statements (pp. 222–3). 50 51

Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 196. Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 205.

52 MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 211, 375. Cranmer regarded the justified as also the elect, believed in praedestinatio ante praevisa merita, and that some were ‘non-elect’. Repentance, however, was ‘a sure sign of salvation’, Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 203–4, 222. 53 Caponetto argues that the authors of the Beneficio used Pole’s idea but that they leaned further than he did towards a doctrine of salvation by faith alone, Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 82, n. 52.


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nightmare. 54 The Beneficio was written for individual souls, perhaps small groups, certainly not nations. Yet this dangerously mystical book ended on the utterly practical note of good works, a mantra for reformers all over Europe: God predestined the elect, their faith alone justified, but ‘good works cannot be separate from faith’.55 Any Edwardian reformer who read the Beneficio through to the very end might well have been relieved that, after taking some strange byways, the book ended up in the right place. There is an air of unreality in the idea of the young, not very clever, Edward Courtenay ploughing through all this divinity in the Tower. He was twenty-two, not experienced. He turned out to be a dilettante, and a worldly man, keen on fashionable clothes and silver forks, yet he must have worked hard on this complex text.56 Was there a humanist, possibly an Italianist, in the background, helping him? The historian James McConica suspected that this was so: ‘Someone in the English court felt that, of the many possible approaches to the King, this one, through the most celebrated contemporary Erasmian treatise of personal devotion, would be the most likely to bring Edward Courtenay his freedom’.57 The rest of this chapter will be devoted to trying to track down McConica’s ‘someone’. The quest will include some of the most important figures linking Italian reform with the English reformation. First, how much help did Courtenay need? Can we assume that both the translation and the manuscript were his own work? In his dedication, he claimed that he had translated the tract ‘from the Italionne, the understanding whereof I have by my noune studie acheved’.58 In later life, he read and wrote some Italian: in 1555, he wrote a short letter in Italian and the oration at his funeral in 1556 mentions his knowledge of the Spanish, French and Italian languages. Therefore, it is likely that he had enough Italian to translate the Beneficio, either alone or with some help.

54

‘The necessity of obedience to authority was the doctrinal touchstone of the Henrician reformation’, Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (London, 1993), pp. 25–6, cited by Null, Doctrine of Repentance, p. 158. 55


56

Overell, ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy’, pp. 117–35.

57

James K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965), pp. 257–8. McConica’s use of the word ‘Erasmian’ would now be questioned by many scholars. See especially, Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’ and ‘English Humanism and the Body Politic’, in Fox and Guy (eds), Reassessing the Henrician Age, pp. 9–51. The Beneficio contains no direct references to works of Erasmus. On Italy’s late reception of Erasmus, see Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia. 58 CUL MS Nn. 4.43, fol. 3r.


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The beautiful manuscript is a different matter: almost certainly it was the work of a professional calligrapher.59 Who gave him the book? The obvious suspects must be those closest to him: his mother, his fellow prisoners or his tutor. His mother Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, had ensured that Courtenay finally received a good humanist education, even in prison, but her correspondence suggests she was an administrator of estates and woman of the world rather than a woman likely to read and loan the Beneficio.60 There was also an adopted parent in Courtenay’s miserable life. In the summer of 1548, Bishop Stephen Gardiner, finally fell out with Edward VI’s radical government and arrived as his fellow prisoner in the Tower, where Courtenay referred to him as his ‘father’.61 Gardiner was a humanist but also a traditionalist, unlikely to poison Courtenay’s young mind by passing on the Beneficio.62 At first sight, Courtenay’s tutor, the humanist Nicholas Udall, looks a much more likely inspiration; later Udall translated Vermigli’s great work, the Tractatio de Sacramento Eucharistiae.63 But the chronological evidence does not quite fit: the first payment for Udall’s services as Courtenay’s tutor is recorded in June 1549, several months after the Beneficio translation appears to have been finished.64 Therefore, we must cast the net more widely and look outside the Tower for his suppliers. The severity of imprisonment for Tudor nobles varied a lot and Courtenay’s conditions eased after 1546, when he became ill.65 There was a long tradition of ‘distance education’; many noble prisoners found

59

Earl of Devon to the King [Philip of Spain], 21 May 1555, Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Reign of Mary I, 1553–1558, revised, ed. C.S. Knighton (London: PRO, 1998) (hereafter cited as CSPDM), 174, p. 94; Thomas Wilson’s funeral oration, 1556, in John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials Relating Chiefly to Religion (3 vols in 6, Oxford, 1822), vol. 3, part ii, Catalogue of Originals, pp. 420–27 (especially pp. 422 and 425); CUL MS Nn. 4.43. 60

For instance, Lady Exeter to Devon, 16 May 1555, CSPDM, 169, pp. 93–4.

61

Overell,‘A Nicodemite in England’, pp. 123–4.

62

For controversial views on Gardiner and the English reception of Machiavelli, see Peter S. Donaldson, A Machiavellian Treatise (Cambridge, 1975); for criticism, see Anglo, Machiavelli: the First Century, pp. 109–14. 63 A discourse or traictise of Petur Martyr Vermilla Florentine, the publyque reader of diuinitee in the vniversitee of Oxford … concernynge the sacrament of the Lordes Supper, trans. Nicolas Udall ([London: Robert Stoughton, [i.e. E. Whitchurch ] … for Nicolas Udall [1550]), STC 24665. 64

Nicholas Udall, Roister Doister, ed. G. Scheurweghs (Vadus: Kraus Reprints, 1963) (originally published, Louvain, 1939), p. xxxviii; Exchequer Accounts, Accounts Various, E. 101/426/6, fos. 60r and 76v cited in Udall, Roister Doister, ed. Scheurweghs, p. xxxix; Matthew Steggle, ‘Udall, Nicholas (1540–1556)’, ODNB. 65 LP, vol. 21, part 2, 775, p. 449, fol. 96.


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solace in humanist books.66 Yet their solitary studies depended on contact with the outside world, on the comings and goings of tutors and doctors, shopkeepers and book parcels. In his dedication, Courtenay claimed to be ‘shut up in prison within the wallis from the companie allmoste of all men’ – ‘allmoste’, but not quite, because he had obtained his Italian text and probably a calligrapher too.67 Who would have known the Beneficio and have had access to Courtenay? In the mid-nineteenth century, Churchill Babington suggested that Cranmer was an early English reader of the Beneficio di Cristo and that he made use of it when he was preparing his ‘Homily of Salvation’, which appeared in July 1547.68 Babington gave no evidence, but his ‘hunch’ is important and possible: Cranmer’s biographer notes that he ‘was alarmingly eclectic in his use of sources to reach his goal’. If he could use Italian and Spanish sources, like the work of Cardinals Cajetan and Quinones, why not use the Beneficio? 69 Moreover, the fact that he had in his library a book by that bête noir of Italian reformers, the Catholic controversialist Ambrogio Catarino, suggests that he was keeping up with contemporary Italian debates.70 On the other hand, Cranmer did not need the Beneficio as a source for his own ‘Homily of Salvation’. He had been thinking about justification over a long period and his ‘Notes on Justification’ and his ‘Great Commonplaces’ already provided him with an impressive collection of scholarly sources.71 All the same, there are interesting similarities between his ‘Homily’ and the Italian text. To support the proposition that faith alone justifies, the authors of the Beneficio cite three sources which are identical to those in Cranmer’s ‘Homily’: St Basil On Humility, St Hilary’s Commentary on St Matthew and St Ambrose’s Commentary on the Epistles of St Paul. In the ‘Homily’ these are the only three patristic quotations, all appearing at the beginning of the second part.72 They are juxtaposed in Cranmer’s 66

Maria Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (London, 1986), pp. 191–200,

205. 67


68

The Benefit of Christ’s Death, ed. by Churchill Babington (London and Cambridge, 1855), Introduction, p. lv. 69

MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 374.

70

See David Selwyn, The Library of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1996), lxxxvi–xcii and number 260; E. Burbidge, ‘Account of the Remains of Archbishop Cranmer’s Library’, in B. Quaritch (ed.) Contributions towards a Dictionary of English Book Collectors (London, 1892–1921), p. 6. 71 72

Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 175–6, 214–17.

There are other patristic references but no other quotations, The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to be read in Churches, ed. John Griffiths (Oxford, 1859), p. 28; Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 174–5; Prelowski, ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, p. 62.


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sermon, as they are in the Beneficio, but Cranmer has them in a different order. An identical mistake occurs in the citation from St Hilary but this may come from that widely used compendium of proof texts, the Unio Dissidentium, which makes the same error in the reference to St Hilary – yet the Unio does not include the other two citations.73 The quotations from Basil and Ambrose are in Cranmer’s ‘Notes on Justification’, but not the quotation from Hilary.74 If he had been using the Beneficio, Cranmer would have found the same three quotations strung together, with the same mistaken reference as well. Such striking similarities in two texts on the same subject, known in England around the same time, may well tempt historians to conclude that Cranmer was borrowing. But coincidence could be at work here, because the three quotations used in both were all standard proof texts in the contemporary debate. The Italian authors and Cranmer could have been using common sources in the vast European literature. The textual similarities are arresting, but they do not prove that the Archbishop borrowed from the Beneficio. However, circumstantial evidence makes it likely that the archbishop had seen the Italian text. By 1547, there had been three editions published in Venice and one in Tübingen, a French translation had been printed in Lyons in 1545 and another edition appeared in Paris in 1548.75 This book was in vogue and Cranmer kept his finger on the pulse of European scholarship. He had learned some Italian and three books in Italian are found in his library.76 John Ponet was his chaplain and the Italianate Richard Morison was a like-minded acquaintance. Italian enthusiasm was increasing, at Lambeth and at court. In addition, in the summer after Edward VI’s accession, Cranmer was a man in a hurry. Textual errors in the printing of the ‘Homily of Salvation’ suggest that the manuscript had reached printers in an unchecked state.77 It is possible that the harassed 73 Hermann Bodius, Unio Hermani Bodii in unum corpus redacta et diligenter recognita doctorum (Venice, 1532). 74

The quotation from St Basil in the ‘Homily’ and in the Beneficio appears to be from the Latin version used in the ‘Commonplaces’ rather than that of the ‘Notes’, BL Royal Mss 7B xii. 91r, cited by Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, p. 217–18; ‘Notes on Justification’, in Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 203–11 (especially, p. 205). 75

Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 89–152, 504–7.

76

Babington, Benefit of Christ’s Death, Introduction, p. lv, note 1; Maria Dowling, ‘Cranmer as Humanist Reformer’, in P. Ayris and D. Selwyn (eds), Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1993), pp. 89–114 (pp. 101–2); David Selwyn, ‘Cranmer’s Library: its potential for Reformation Studies’, in ibid., pp. 39–72 Although Cranmer’s library contained three works in Italian, none of them has direct relevance to the Italian reformation, see Selwyn, Library of Thomas Cranmer, nos 359, 382 and 599. I am very grateful to Dr David Selwyn for his generous and painstaking help. 77

Griffiths, Two Books of Homilies, pp. viii–ix, l–li.


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Archbishop, sermonising under pressure about salvation, had used this popular Italian text on the same subject and then had passed the book to Courtenay. But another famous Englishman had ineradicable links to the Beneficio: Reginald Pole was Courtenay’s cousin and, though he remained in exile in Italy in 1548, he was taking a lot of interest in England, trying to build bridges and negotiate a rapprochement with Edward VI’s government. In chapter 1 we saw Pole’s very prominent part in the ‘collective effort’ that went into the polishing of the Beneficio at Viterbo and his close friendship with Flaminio, the book’s main author.78 Later the traditionalists, the ‘intransigenti’, associated Pole’s name with the book, partly as a way of discrediting him.79 So, is it possible that Pole sent the text to Courtenay? Some of the circumstances make it unlikely. In the early 1540s, Pole still believed in the possibility of combining admiration for the Beneficio with obedience to the Church. In those hopeful years, he might have found a way to send the Italian original to his young cousin in the Tower. But, at that time, Courtenay was under strict guard, had no tutor until 1541 and was probably too inexperienced to understand and make use of the text.80 By 1548, however, the young man had gained some education and relations between the new English government and cousin Pole seemed to be thawing – slightly. The first sign of thaw was a letter dated October 1548 from the English government’s representative, John Yonge, to Pole’s agent, Michael Throckmorton. Yonge said that Throckmorton had already persuaded him of Pole’s ‘affection’ for his native country and his honourable intentions. He said that Protector Somerset was willing to receive Throckmorton himself, Richard Hilliard or another Englishman, bringing letters from Pole, but only as a private citizen.81 Nervous and puzzling contacts continued. In April 1549 Pole wrote to the Earl of Warwick (probably he received no reply), then he wrote to Somerset saying he was sending representatives and they probably arrived in the summer of 1549.82 Somerset replied with a letter beginning ‘we had conceived the hope and a certain consolation 78

Mayer, Pole, pp. 120–21; idem., ‘A Reluctant Author: Cardinal Pole and his Manuscripts’, p. 4; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 63, 89–95. 79 80

Deposition of Gabriel Martinet, Processo Morone, vol. 6, p. 291. LP, vol. 16, 1011, p. 483.

81 John Yonge to Michael Throckmorton, 26 October 1548, Calendar of State Papers, Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553, revised, ed. C.S. Knighton (HMSO, 1992) (hereafter cited as CSPDE), 160, p. 66; Mayer, Pole, pp. 163–5, 169–71 and 206–7; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 148. 82

Pole to Earl of Warwick, 6 April 1549, CRP 538; Pole to Protector and Council, 6 May 1549, CRP 544.


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about you’. Why would the English government in 1548–49 entertain consoling thoughts about the author of De Unitate? It may have been a rhetorical flourish. Somerset then accused of Pole behaving like ‘a foreign prince’ and he insisted that the King’s minority presented no dangers.83 Pole replied with one of his extraordinarily long letters: towards the end he noted that he had heard of the outbreak of rebellions whilst he was still writing and he sounded distinctly cheered up by the news, offering to come to England and referee.84 By the time the letter arrived, Somerset had fallen from power. The time and attention given to these exchanges by both sides is noteworthy (even Somerset replied with reasonable speed). Why did the government allow contacts with a traitor-exile to proceed at all? We simply do not know. However, these exchanges may provide a context for Courtenay’s translation; his cousin Pole and his agents were actively involved in diplomatic contacts with the English court near the relevant time. The letters started in October 1548, at which date Yonge said there had been some prior contact (now lost) between himself and Throckmorton. Yet it is most unlikely that this included sending the Beneficio to Pole’s cousin in the Tower, however close Pole’s (and possibly Throckmorton’s) earlier involvement with the text had been.85 All the Italian evidence suggests that the Cardinal had become cautious in the face of the mounting chorus of questions about the Beneficio’s orthodoxy. By the late 1540s, it had appeared on two indices of heretical books and was beginning to be used by the Inquisition as a litmus test of guilt by association; if you had seen the book, you were suspect.86 Pole was unpredictable, but by the late 1540s it is unlikely that he was using these high-level exchanges to pass on a text which had become too hot to hold. There are also doubts about the other ‘obvious’ Italian importers, Ochino and Vermigli. In Italy, both had moved in the right circles and they certainly brought boxes of books into England with them. 87 We do not know if the Beneficio was in their luggage, but it is perfectly possible.88 Yet, there was 83 84

Somerset to Pole, 4 June 1549, CSPDE, 265, p. 108; CRP 549 (4/6 June). Pole to Somerset and the Council, Civitella and Rome, 12 October 1549, CRP 555

(p. 67). 85 The Beneficio is not on Throckmorton’s library list, AS Mantua, Registrazioni notarili, 1558, Throckmorton’s Inventory, fos 94 v–97r. By the date of his death in 1558, it would have been risky to own the text. 86

Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 343–422, 440–41, 443–56; Processo Morone, vol. 6, pp.

301–6. 87

Nichols, ‘The Bill of Expenses’, pp. 469–73. Vermigli brought a manuscript copy of John Chrysostom’s Ad Caesarium Monachum, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 382–3. 88


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a relatively narrow time span between Vermigli’s and Ochino’s arrival late in November 1547 and the appearance of Courtenay’s translation in 1548. If they brought the book, then Courtenay (and/or his assistants) made fast work of a demanding text and produced an exquisite manuscript. It is important to bear in mind that the young nobleman was not good with words. Seven years later he wrote ‘I am neither good secretary nor good orator’, and the halting prose of his dedication of the Beneficio bears this out.89 The Princess Elizabeth and Anne Cooke might make fast work of their Ochino texts but, intellectually, they were in a different league. If Courtenay had a lot of help or worked with uncharacteristic diligence, then Vermigli and Ochino could have been his suppliers. Almost certainly Pole and Throckmorton were not. The least exciting solution to our problem is the most likely. Anyone of a group of much less well-known Italian reformers, all hovering around the English court, could have provided the text: Guido Giannetti da Fano, Pietro Vanni, Pietro Bizzarri, Giovanni Battista Castiglione, Petruccio Ubaldini. With the possible exception of Ubaldini, they all had links to Italian reform. Their careers will be examined in the next chapter because they reveal an environment in which humanists moved freely between London and Italy (usually Venice), bearing books and acting as spies, translators and teachers. That environment is an essential backdrop for the whole Anglo-Italian connection, and for Courtenay and his text. One of this Italian group stands out as Courtenay’s most likely middleman because he was a book pedlar and a known promoter and supplier of the Beneficio di Cristo. In chapter 1, we met the spy Guido Giannetti da Fano, who was involved in an anti-Imperial plot in Venice in 1545, supported by King Henry VIII. There we came in at the middle of his extraordinary career, which stretched from the early 1530s to the 1560s.90 Like most good spies, he moved around a great deal: to London, to Rome, to Naples, to Venice and back to London again. In 1533, he was granted the prebend of Hyworth in the diocese of Salisbury.91 He had a friend and protector in Pietro Vanni, Latin secretary to King Henry VIII. After the 89 Devon to Paget, 25 August 1555, CSPDM, 216, p. 106; ‘You know how ill a secretary I am’, Devon to James Bassett, 26 August 1555, CSPDM, 218, p. 106. Courtenay’s letters were often very short. I am very grateful to Dr C.S. Knighton for his generous advice about this correspondence. 90

Aldo Stella, ‘Guido da Fano, eretico del secolo XVI al servizio dei re d’Inghilterra’, Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, 13 (1959), 196–238; Processo Morone, vol. 1, pp. 282– 3 and vol. 6, pp. 223, 236, 304 and 425–7. Marcantonio Flaminio, Apologia del ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, p. 7; Firpo, Inquisizione Romana, pp. 170–71. 91 Salisbury cathedral chapter was something of an Anglo-Italian club: Pietro Vanni and Guido Giannetti da Fano were both canons, Aldo Stella, ‘Guido da Fano, pp. 200 and 216. In 1540 Pietro Vanni became Dean. In 1537, Morison received the prebend of Yetminster


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King’s divorce, Giannetti came to live in England, acting as an informant about Italian affairs. Then, in 1538, he left again, taking with him back to Italy many books by reformers.92 By February 1539, he was living in Rome, where he had close links with a reform group led by Pietrantonio da Capua, Bishop of Otranto. Giannetti boasted that he had the best stock of reformation books available in the Eternal City at the time.93 During the next two years, the spy-cum-reformer-cum-bookman came to know and admire the Beneficio di Cristo. He visited Flaminio, Carnesecchi and other members of Valdés’ group in Naples and, in the late spring of 1541, Carnesecchi met him again in Rome and gave him a manuscript copy of the Beneficio.94 From then on, Giannetti became one of the book’s most able publicists.95 Between 1543 and 1545, he was reported to the Inquisition for lending out the Beneficio. A witness described his black market activities like this: In Rome I saw a book entitled Il Beneficio di Cristo, dating from 1543. And, if I remember rightly, Guido da Fano lent it to me and I kept it for one day, and I showed it to Spada, our General and then I returned it. I couldn’t examine it, neither do I think I read it because Guido made a fuss about returning it. And I had the feeling that he was upset because I showed it to the Superior.96

No wonder Giannetti was ‘upset’ – in Rome both he and the Beneficio were in deep trouble. He fled to Naples and then on to Venice, the natural home of reformers in hot water, where he became involved in the wild plots already discussed in chapter 1. His passion for books and his interest in England were leitmotivs of his daredevil career. He arrived in London for a second visit in 1546 and he gained entry to Edward VI’s court, helped by his friend Pietro Vanni.97 Therefore, Giannetti da Fano, experienced book smuggler, a friend of Flaminio and a known Beneficio enthusiast, given Secunda at Salisbury, once held by Reginald Pole. I am grateful to Jonathan Woolfson for some of this information. 92

Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, p. 201, n. 17.

93

Dario Marcatto, “Questo passo dell’heresia”: Pietrantonio di Capua tra valdesiani, “spirituali” e Inquisizione (Naples, 2003); Aldo Stella, Dall’anabattismo al socinianesimo nel Cinquecento veneto (Padua, 1967), p. 31, n. 80. 94 Stella, Guido da Fano, p. 201; Marcantonio Flaminio, Apologia del ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, p. 7; ‘Giannetti (Zanetti), Guido (Guido da Fano)’, DBI. 95

Stella, Guido da Fano, p. 209. Second deposition of Bartolomeo della Pergola, Processo Morone, vol. 6, p. 304; Stella, Dall’anabattismo, p. 31, note 80; Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, p. 209. 96

97 Marcatto, ‘“Questo passo dell’ heresia”’, pp. 29–31; Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, pp. 216–17; R. Biddle, A Memoir of Sebastian Cabot (London, 1831) and L. Sanuto, Geografia distinta in XII libri (Venice, 1588), cited by Nichols, Literary Remains, i, p. clxxxix.


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to lending others this book, was networking at Edward VI’s court about two years before Courtenay presented his translation. Giannetti may well have been the supplier, passing the text to humanist friends or directly to Courtenay himself. The timing would have been perfect. Thus, on the definitive identification of McConica’s ‘someone’, the jury is still out. There were several people likely to have known both the Beneficio and Courtenay: Cranmer; Vermigli and Ochino and other Italian exiles; also Pole and Michael Throckmorton. On available evidence, Guido Giannetti da Fano looks like the strongest possibility because he was in and around the court from 1546, allowing plenty of time for the young man (and his tutors and calligraphers) to get to work. We can be more certain that McConica’s general assumption was correct: the intermediary was ‘someone in the English court’, or with ready access to it. Courtenay’s translation, his intermediaries and his book suppliers were part of the godly humanist culture of Edward VI’s court, like Ochino’s Tragoedie and the translations of his sermons. Edwardian humanists were ready to experiment, even when this involved absorbing a miscellany of doctrines, as it did in the case of the Beneficio. Whoever suggested the translation of ‘a litle boke’ written ‘in the Italionne’ thought that thus Courtenay would strike the right note.98 The King’s childish autograph, ‘your loving neveu Edward’, proves that the project achieved part of its purpose. Courtenay’s manuscript was received at court but, sadly, the translator was not. Until the accession of Mary Tudor in 1553, he remained locked up in the Tower, still learning Italian, in imitation of the Edwardian humanist court from which he was excluded.

98

CUL Nn. 4.43, fol. 2v.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Italian Connection at Edward VI’s Court …our merchants do now traffic abroad and by travel have attained such knowledge of civility that I warrant you those strangers who now repair into England are as well received and seen, and as much made of as any other kingdom of all Europe, especially in the Prince’s Court and among the nobles. William Thomas, The Pilgrim, 1547, ed. J.A. Froude (London, 1861)1

Whilst Courtenay completed his education in the Tower, the young King, too, was following an intensely humanist syllabus, crammed with ‘godlines’ and ‘civilite’.2 The humanist scholars, John Cheke and Richard Cox, were his tutors; both were committed to helping reformers in England and aiding exiles from the European mainland.3 Their royal pupil would be educated to lead his country towards perfection, both civil and religious, and then to take the stage as saviour of the whole European Reformation.4 The King’s godfather, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, with his halting Italian and unstoppable ecumenism, was the most outward-looking humanist of them all. Cranmer’s European and ecumenical vision led to his passionate belief in a general council, to checkmate the Council of Trent.5 English interest in Italian reformers was part of an impressionable turning to the mainland and a general wish to be on good terms with the rest of the European cast. Archbishop Cranmer could not have ‘gone it alone’; influences ran to him as well as from him. He was able to tap into a rich vein of Italianism, 1 William Thomas, The Pilgrim: a Dialogue on the Life and Actions of King Henry the Eighth, 1547, ed. J.A. Froude (London, 1861), p. 6. 2

I am very grateful to John McDiarmid for his profound comments on a draft of this chapter. CUL MS Nn. 4. 43, fol. 2r. On Edward VI’s accession and the power of the ‘evangelical establishment’, see MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 6–8 and ibid., Cranmer, pp. 357–65. 3 J.F. McDiarmid, ‘John Cheke’s Preface to De Superstitione’, JEH, 48 (1997), 100– 120; Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 197–8. The precise status of the royal tutors is uncertain, Felicity Heal, ‘Cox, Richard (c.1500–1581)’, ODNB; Alan Bryson, ‘Cheke, Sir John (1514–1557)’, ODNB. 4

MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 174–5, 394–5, 554; Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘England’, in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Early Reformation (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 166–87 (pp. 169– 74); Peter Brooks, Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist, see especially Patrick Collinson’s preface, p. xxii. 5



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especially at court, where he found many energetic collaborators.6 Without their patronage and commitment Italian reform would have stood no chance in England. It was not a matter of individual foreigners, like Ochino or Vermigli, coming and ‘influencing’. They were sustained, employed, sometimes controlled, but always part of a wider context which included some less well-known Italians and many Englishmen who were fascinated by Italian culture. This wider group provided the knowledge, commitment and linguistic fluency that kept the Anglo-Italian show on the road. The aim of this chapter is to identify them and explore the connections between them. Humanism had arrived relatively late on English shores and therefore Italian reformers crossed the Channel nicely in time to benefit from interest in things classical and Italian.7 This was especially evident at the royal court, the source of all power and patronage in Tudor England. Storms of historical controversy have gathered around the group called ‘Humanists’, as we saw in the Introduction, and the same is true of the sub-divisions ‘Tudor Humanists’ and ‘Protestant Humanists’. According to Alistair Fox, ‘Without a specific commitment to the idea that classical learning is valuable and efficacious, no Tudor figure should be considered a humanist’.8 Most of the members of Edward’s court who feature in this chapter would have passed Fox’s test with flying colours. They did think studying the classics was a basic ingredient of good learning and good life but they also stressed the vital importance of religion. Tudor humanism is sometimes seen as especially ‘applied’, adapted, concerned with politics and the vita activa but it is worth remembering that stress on civic duty and ‘real life’ flowed continuously through the Italian form as well.9 By Edward VI’s reign, humanist studies had gathered impetus and humanists were active everywhere, doing everything, although their activities were not necessarily products of ‘humanism’. Humanism was a means to many things, vehicle and inspiration for many things – and religious reform, both catholic and protestant, was certainly among them.10 In English historiography, ‘protestant humanism’ has been a long6

Dowling, ‘Cranmer as Humanist Reformer’, pp. 89–114. J.B. Trapp, ‘The Humanist Book’, in L. Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1400–1557 (vols 3 and 4 at present, Cambridge, 1999), vol. 3, pp. 285–315 (pp. 285–7). 7

8

See above, Introduction, p. 6; Alistair Fox, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’, p. 31. 9 Woolfson, Padua, pp. 39–40; Jonathan Woolfson, ‘John Claymond, Pliny the Elder and the Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford’, EHR, 112 (1997), 882–903 (pp. 883–4 and 901). 10

Woolfson, ‘Introduction’, in ibid., Reassessing Tudor Humanism, pp. 7–10.

THE ITALIAN CONNECTION AT EDWARD VI’S COURT

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running theme. 11 But it has not won the day; English catholics, too, drew heavily on humanist writings; often ‘sheer contingency’ intervened and so humanists ‘played their parts on both sides’.12 Maria Dowling depicts a strong tradition of humanist learning growing steadily, alongside and within the reformation, at the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI. ‘In Edward … is seen the humanist education of a gentleman at its fullest extent.’13 Within his humanist court we shall locate a nexus of Italianate Englishmen, all of them friends of Italian reform The royal minority was the humanists’ best opportunity and they made sure that the ‘godly imp’ had a superb education.14 His classical schooling is revealed in his notebooks, with their grammatical exercises on extracts from Cicero and Aristotle, but he seems to have found his scripture homework more boring.15 Especially in the early years of the reign, he was influenced by his learned stepmother Catherine Parr and her circle of humanist women friends, all keen on translation from religious books. We have already seen that the Princess Elizabeth caught their enthusiasm; Catherine Parr’s brother William, Marquess of Northampton, too, shared their scholarly interests. 16 The passion for translation was more than a charming noble diversion. Its effect was to turn attention outwards, to make this perhaps the most European of all Tudor courts. As foreign reformers looked hopefully to Edward VI, so his mentors looked to them and to their texts for a deeper understanding of the religion he was destined to lead. The child-king was surrounded by chances to know about Italian reform, through his teachers and through books in his library. We know the royal collection included Marcantonio Flaminio’s translation of Thirty 11

Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987); Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society, 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London, 1982), pp. 89–90. 12

Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000), p. 17; Richard Rex, ‘The Role of Humanists in the Reformation up to 1559’, in N.S. Amos, A. Pettegree and H. van Nierop (eds), The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 19–40 (pp. 22–3, 29 and 39). 13

Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII, p. 214; Dowling, ‘Humanism at the Court of Henry VIII’, pp. 36–77. 14 Loach, Edward VI, pp. 158, 180–89; MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 23– 38; Overell, ‘Edwardian Court Humanism and Il Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 157–61. 15 16

Literary Remains of Edward VI, vol. 1, pp. cccxx–cccxxv.

J.K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965); John N. King, ‘Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr’, pp. 43–-60 (p. 52). Susan E. James, ‘Parr, William, marquess of Northampton (1513–1571)’, ODNB; King, ‘Somerset, Patron of the English Renaissance’, pp. 307–31.


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Psalms. In addition, there was the manuscript of Courtenay’s translation of the Beneficio and the second (expurgated) edition of Ochino’s Tragoedie.17 Edward VI almost certainly warmed to Ochino’s cosmic ‘star wars’, especially in view of the leading role given to him; he probably cribbed the text for his own homework.18 On the other hand, the King’s autographs on the Beneficio manuscript suggest that he was too young for that text’s doctrinal subtleties.19 Childlike, he seems to have preferred stories and we know that one Italian tale was current at his court. This was an account of the miserable death of an Italian lawyer, Francesco Spiera, who abandoned his adherence to reformed religion in face of persecution, but had his come-uppance, dying in terrible despair. The originator and chief publicist was Pier Paolo Vergerio but there were several versions; the one imported to Edward VI’s court was by the Paduan jurist-reformer, Matteo Gribaldi (1549).20 The text reached England at high speed, in less than a year. Translated by Edward Aglionby, one of Catherine Parr’s relatives, its English publication in 1550 had all the hallmarks of a royal project. It was issued in Worcester by John Oswen, who had been part of the East Anglian group which had taken on publication of Ochino’s sermons. By 1550 Oswen had moved to Worcester and became the royal printer for Wales and the Marches, licensed to print and sell books ‘set forth by the King’ and other volumes ‘conteyning any storye or exposycion of Goddes Holie Scripture’.21 This was tantamount to a royal imprimatur: within two years, Bishop Hugh Latimer was cheerfully assuming that everyone at court would know who Francesco Spiera was. Later, when Edward VI became ill, then died, and English reformers faced catholic persecution, this was to become a key text, the most frequently re-published of all Italian reform books in England.22 17

Nichols, Literary Remains of Edward VI, pp. cccxxv–cccxxxiii.

18

STC 18771; MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 25–30; see above, Chapter 2,

p. 50. 19

See above, Chapter 3, p. 64.

20

Matteo Gribaldi, Historia de quodam [F. Spira] quem hostes Evangelii in Italia coegerunt abiicere cognitam veritatem (Padua, 1549) (place of publication is false); Caelio Secundo Curione, Francisci Spierae qui quod susceptam semel Evangelicae veritatis professionem abnegasset (Basel, 1550); this includes pieces by Gribaldi, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Sigismund Gelous ‘from Transylvania’ and Henry Scrymgeour, a Scottish Protestant from St. Andrews, and prefaces by John Calvin and Martin Borrhaus; Pier Paolo Vergerio, La historia di M. F. Spiera, il quale per havere in varii modi negata la conosciuta verita dell’Evangelio casco in una misera desperatione, ed. P. P. Vergerio (n. p., n. pub. (?Basel), 1551). 21 A Notable and Marvailous Epistle, trans. E. A. [Edward Aglionby] (Worcester: J. Oswen, 1550), STC 12365; Alford, Kingship, p. 117; ‘John Oswen’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, vol. 24, pp. 191–3. 22

H. Latimer, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 425: see below, p. 203.


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Edward VI also had tutors who could tell him about Italian reform. Cheke and Cox were aided by the humanists Anthony Cooke and Roger Ascham and all four of them developed Italian contacts in the course of the reign.23 It is possible, but not certain, that Giovanni Battista Castiglione, an Italian with strong reform views, taught the King Italian, as he was certainly teaching the Princess Elizabeth. By 1551 the young king could speak some of the language.24 Also, the royal schoolroom was infiltrated by a rogue mentor, that ebullient Italianist William Thomas. Through his teachers and his books, King Edward VI grew up knowing that Italy’s encounters with reform had implications for reformation in his own country. John Cheke, royal tutor, great teacher, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge until 1551, spoke little Italian himself, but his rich collection of contacts made up for it. W.S. Hudson argued that pupils and friends of Cheke formed the ‘Cambridge Connection’, a group which became a vital force in Edwardian and Elizabethan politics. Contemporaries called them ‘the Athenian tribe’ because of their classical, especially Greek, learning: members included Anthony Cooke, Richard Morison, Roger Ascham, John Ponet, William Cecil and Thomas Wilson. Clearly there was more to their networking than a shared passion for Greek and memories of their salad days: intricate family ties, shared religious sympathies and promotion of mutual economic and personal interest all played a part.25 Contained within the network were friendships with foreigners taken under the wing of individuals, then ‘shared’ within the group. Morison knew Vermigli well and Ochino still better; Cecil knew Tremellio, Florio and Bizzarri;26 Cheke received letters from Curione; he also knew Bizzarri and struck up

23 Rosemary O’Day, ‘Ascham, Roger (1514/15–1568)’, ODNB; Donn L. Calkins, ‘Cooke, Sir Anthony (1505/6–1576)’, ODNB. 24

‘Mémoires de la vie de Francois de Scepeaux, sire de Vieilleville’, in Collection complète de mémoires relatif à l’histoire de France, ed. C.-B. Petitot (52 vols, Paris, 1819– 1826), vol. XXVI (1822), pp. 339–41. 25

J. Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke (Oxford, 1821), pp. 9–10, 20; W.S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC, 1980), especially p. 54; Alford, Kingship, pp. 153–6. John F. McDiarmid, ‘Common Consent, Latinitas and the “Monarchical Republic” in mid-Tudor Humanism’, in ibid. (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot, 2007) pp. 55–74 (pp. 60–63). 26 BL Lansdowne MS 2, f.201r (5 Sptember 1552), cited by Alford, Kingship, p. 141; Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica italiana a Londra’, p. 320. Bizzarri’s later correspondence in Italian with Cecil was occasionally signed ‘affettionatissimo servitore’, Massimo Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri: esule italiano del Cinquecento (Turin, 1971), Appendix, letter numbers 3, 5 (especially nos 6 and 7).


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warm friendships with Vermigli and Girolomo Cardano.27 Ascham, too, knew Bizzarri.28 The Cambridge group’s Latin scholarship made Italian an easy language to acquire: Morison and Ponet were both fluent; Cecil appears to have been competent.29 Cheke tried to learn later, when he went to Venice during the Marian exile. An Italian connection had developed, closely entwined with the Cambridge Connection, a branch of the vine. Edward VI’s accession ended John Cheke’s need to shelter behind the very guarded reform opinions which had been evident in the long preface to his Latin translation of Plutarch’s De Superstitione (1545 or 1546).30 After 1547 he began to show his reform colours, initiating contact with humanists in the print shops of the city of Basel.31 We have seen that, very early in the reign, the Basel humanist Caelio Secundo Curio had sent Cheke a letter and two volumes dedicated to the King, probably using Ochino as postman.32 This was followed by Curio’s dedication of his translation of the Philippics to Edward VI (1551), highlighting the young king’s knowledge of languages and appending fervent praise for his tutor Cheke, ‘vir iudicio et sapientia singulari’.33 That other radical, the Franco-Italian Sebastien Castellio, also paid Cheke special compliments. Dedicating his Latin translation of the Bible to King Edward VI, Castellio commented on the welcome the English court had given to exiles, ‘on account of their studies and defence of scripture’ and also congratulated the King’s ‘learned

27 Firpo, Bizzarri, pp. 28–9. On Cheke’s contacts with Cardano, see below, p.97 and with Vermigli, see below, Chapter 5, p. 114. 28

Roger Ascham to William Ireland, 8 July 1549, ‘literae tuae, quas Petrus Perusinus mihi attulit, pergratae fuerunt’, The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, ed. J.A. Giles (3 vols in 4, London, 1865), vol. 1, pp. lvii and 165. 29

Bizzarri often used Italian in letters to Cecil, Firpo, Bizzarri, Appendix, letters 7, 13, 17 and 22. 30 McDiarmid, ‘Cheke’s Preface to De Superstitione’, pp. 100–120. This article effectively disproves Alistair Fox’s view that Cheke and Ascham were examples of ‘the separation of humanist and religious preoccupations’, ibid., ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’, p. 30. 31

Cheke sent to Sigismund Gelenus his own translations of eight sermons of S. John Chrysostom, Hans R. Guggisberg, Sebastien Castellio: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age, ed. and trans. Bruce Gordon (Aldershot, 2003), p. 60. 32

Curione, Selectarum Epistolarum, Libri ii, vol. 1, p. 287; Caelio Horatio Curione, De Amplitudine Misericordiae Dei (Basel, 1550); Strype, Cheke, p. 23; see above, Chapter 2, p. 58. 33

C.S. Curione’s Dedication to ‘Eduardo VI Brittaniae’, M. Tullis Ciceronis Philippicae Orationes XIV in M. Antonium (Basileae: H. Froebenium et N. Episcopium, 1551), cited in Guggisberg, Sebastien Castellio, p. 59; David Pingres, ‘Apologia of Alphonus Lincurius’, in Tedeschi (ed.), Italian Reformation Studies, pp. 199–201.


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master’ (Cheke again).34 Basel’s Italian exiles were making friends at court. Later in this chapter we shall encounter Cheke’s other Italian contacts, the humanist Pietro Bizzarri and the physician, mathematician and astrologer, Girolomo Cardano, who lived temporarily in Cheke’s house and was taken into his confidence.35 Important lines of communication ran between the royal tutor and several Italians. Cheke’s colleague, the self-taught classicist Sir Anthony Cooke, was paid an annuity from March 1550 for training the King ‘in good letters and manners’. The grave Sir Anthony had nine children, taught together in an educational hothouse, where it was like ‘living among the Tusculans, except that the studies of women were flourishing in this Tuscany’.36 His daughter, Anne, Ochino’s translator, ‘had never gaddid farther than her father’s house to learn the language’.37 Cheke’s protégé, Roger Ascham, was Princess Elizabeth’s tutor from 1548, and also taught calligraphy to the King.38 He shared with the rest of the court a passion for the gentle art of translation and he may have influenced Elizabeth’s double translation of Ochino’s sermon in 1547–48, but there is no certain evidence.39 Ascham wrote to Kate Astley, Elizabeth’s governess: ‘I send my lady Elizabeth her pen, an Italian book and a book of prayers’.40 Later he was to become famous for his suspicions of Italianate Englishmen, but, in Edward VI’s reign, Ascham was poor and ambitious; he had to be as interested in Italy as everyone else. Also, in and around the court was John Ponet, Archbishop Cranmer’s polyglot chaplain, who befriended the boss’s foreign visitors, as archbishop’s chaplains should. We have seen that he was translator of Ochino’s Tragoedie and, according to John Bale, he also turned some of Ochino’s sermons into English.41 He was made Bishop of Rochester 34 Castellio, Praefatio, fol. 2r, quoted in Guggisberg, Castellio, pp. 56–9 (p. 57); MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, p. 245, note 24. 35

See below, p. 97.

36

PRO E.315/221/131, cited by McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke’, p. 241. According to Walter Haddon, Cooke was self taught, ‘G. Haddoni, Cantabrigensis sive exhortatio ad literas’, Lucubrationes epistolae, Poemata, ed. Thomas Hatcher (London: William Seres, 1567) STC 12596, pp. 131 and 138, cited by McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke’, p. 237 and 240. 37 Editor’s ‘Preface to the Christian Reader’, Fouretene Sermons… [1551?] STC 18767, sigs Ai–Aii; Lamb, ‘The Cooke Sisters’, pp. 107–25. 38

Rosemary O’Day, ‘Ascham, Roger (1514/15–1568)’, ODNB.

39

King, ‘Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr’, pp. 43–60; Lawrence Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford, CA, 1963), pp. 102–7. 40 41

BL Add. MS 33,271, fols 37v–38r, 39v, cited by Ryan, Ascham, p. 104.

Ochino, Tragoedie, STC 18770 and 18771; John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), pp. 201–3. N. Pococke, ‘Preparations for the Second Prayer Book’, Church Quarterly Review 37 (1893–


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in March 1550 and then moved rapidly to the more prestigious see of Winchester (1551), a royal presentation. An accusation of bigamy brought personal and public storms, but Ponet was resilient – and lucky. Despite all these ups and downs, he had a meteoric career, and by the end of the reign he was acting as royal chaplain. Italians seemed to be drawn to him; Vermigli corresponded with him; Michelangelo Florio, soon disgraced and sacked from his post as minister to London’s Italians, nonetheless came to court, acquired Ponet’s Cathecism (1553) and immediately translated it into Italian.42 There was one true wildcard: William Thomas, self-appointed, parttime mentor to the King, knew so much about Italy that he put all the other tutors in the shade. When the rascal Thomas last appeared in this book, he was on the run in Italy, having embezzled his English master. The English agent in Venice, Edmund Harvel, required to intercept him in 1545, gave an account of Thomas’s ‘incessable weepings for his trepasses’.43 Even when the stolen money had been returned, Thomas did not dare go home and there followed a period of exile in Italy that proved to be the making of him. Thomas claimed that in February 1547, just before Edward’s accession, he had had a confrontation (nearly a fight) with some Italians on the road to Bologna. He defended Henry VIII’s reformation against their catholic views and shortly afterwards he wrote up his account as a way of making the court of the new King Edward VI give him a second chance. An undated manuscript version in English, now in the British Library, is probably earlier than the published Italian version, entitled Il Pellegrino Inglese, dated 1552.44 It is safest to treat Thomas’s ‘dialogue’ as a construct, but, true or false, it still proves that King Edward VI’s ‘secret mentor’ was thoroughly au fait with Italian reform, an aspect of his career that has not been studied before. 94), 137–66; John Bale, Scriptorum illustrium Maioris Brytanniae catalogus (2 vols, Basel, 1557–59), vol. 1, p. 695, cited by Hudson, John Ponet, pp. 27–8; MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, p. 27. 42 Alford, Kingship, pp. 138–9; Vermigli to Utenhoven, 21 September 1548, Gleanings, p. 54; Firpo ‘La comunità evangelica italiana’, pp. 318–20. 43 44

Harvel to the Council, 10 April 1545, LP, vol. XX part i, 515, p. 246.

British Library, Cotton MSS, Vespasian D. XVIII, ‘Six Discourses’ and ‘Peregrine’; Thomas, The Pilgrim, ed. Froude; William Thomas, Il pellegrino inglese ne’l quale si difende l’innocente, & la sincera vita de’l pio, & religioso re d’Inghilterra Henrico ottavo, bugiardamente caloniato da Clemete vii. & da gl’altri adulatori de la Sedia Antichristiana ([?Zurich: Andreas and Hans Jakob Gesner], 1552); Adair, ‘William Thomas; a Forgotten Clerk to the Privy Council’, p. 138; P.J. Laven, ‘The Life and Writings of William Thomas’ (Unpublished MA Dissertation, University of London, 1954), pp. 75–90; Dakota L. Hamilton, ‘Thomas, William (d. 1554)’, ODNB.


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In his account, Thomas depicts himself as having offended his Italian opponents by attacking the papacy, in particular by his allusion to Francesco Negri da Bassano’s Tragedia ... intitolata libero arbitrio, a fervently antipapal text, published in Basel a year earlier and immediately ‘condemned’ in Italy.45 Thomas describes Pole as ‘virtuous and learned’ and then gives an assured account of Pole’s alliance with ‘the great Contarine’, Contarini’s agreement with German views on justification and ‘how Pole secretly professeth to be a Protestant and openly maintaineth the papacy’.46 There can have been few Englishmen, even at Edward’s humanist court, who had all this at their fingertips. Thomas had been following form.47 On his return to the English court in 1549 or 1550, Thomas tried to influence the young King but how far he succeeded is tantalisingly unclear. He pretended they were corresponding via a secret messenger and wrote over eighty questions and papers on matters of government, sprinkled with Machiavellian thought.48 But the young Edward VI was carefully guarded – so probably Edward’s tutors and guardians knew what was going on. Moreover, Thomas’s career had taken off: he was producing books on Italian language and history for the consumption of the Italophile court.49 He took up post as secretary to the Privy Council in 29 April 1550 and was seeking a further appointment in Venice.50 Between 1551 and 1553, he felt secure enough to give to the King a New Year present with a distinctly 45

Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 27; Biblioteca Comunale, Bassano, Epistolaria Remondini, XVI, 18, fos 4377–82; Francesco Negri, Tragedia ... intitolata libero arbitrio (n.p., 1546). On ‘messer Thomaso inglese’, who was distributing reform books in Venice and nearby Asolo, see AS Venice, S. Uffizio, Processi, busta 14, deposition of Vincentio Valgrisi, 21 May 1547. It is unlikely that this ‘Thomaso’ was William Thomas, because there was an English bookseller called Thomas Anglus, see Antonio Rotondò, ‘Anticristo e Chiesa Romana: Diffusione e metamorfosi d’un libello antiromano del Cinquecento’, in ibid., Forme e destinazione del del messagio religioso: Aspetti della propaganda religiosa nel cinquecento (Florence, 1991), pp 19–164 (p. 75). Taplin identifies him as Thomas Knight, see Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 21. 46 Thomas, The Pilgrim, pp. 61–6. 47 Thomas claimed to have been in Bologna in February 1547; he was in Rome in December of that year and the next January Sir Thomas Hoby recorded seeing Thomas in Strassburg, A booke of the travail and lief of me Thomas Hoby, with diverse things worth the noting in The Travels and Life of Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. Edgar Powell, in Camden Miscellany, vol. X, 3rd series, vol. 4 (London, 1902), p. 4. 48 Cathy Shrank, Writing the nation in Reformation England (1530–1580) (Oxford, 2004); Anglo, Machiavelli: the First Century, pp. 102–9, 467–8. 49

William Thomas, The History of Italy, ed. G.B. Parks (New York, 1963); ibid., Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar, with a dictionarie [A facsimile of the edition of 1550] (Scolar Press: Menston, 1968). 50

On Edmund Harvel’s death in 1550, Pietro Vanni had been made ambassador, but see William Thomas to Wiliam Cecil, 14 August 1552, CSPDE, 695, p. 251.


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Italian flavour, his own translation of the Venetian Josaphat Barbaro’s Narration of his voyages.51 Thomas was to be executed in Queen Mary’s reign, but in the early 1550s he appears upwardly mobile, well versed in Italian literature and history – and all the troubles of the spirituali. Sir Thomas Hoby, perhaps the greatest Tudor travel writer, arrived in Venice in 1548. Later, Thomas Hoby, William Thomas and Richard Morison formed a triumvirate of Italian-speaking Englishmen at Edward VI’s court, all of whom had direct experience of reform in Italy. Hoby is remembered for his Travail and lief of me Thomas Hoby and as English translator of Baldissare Castiglione’s Courtyer, a set of dialogues intended as a guide to courtly manners. The translation, begun in 1552, was not published until 1561.52 Both these works are well known, but Hoby had a humbler translation project, which is usually overlooked. In the midst of his travels, we catch him settling down to translate an Italian religious text. After spending time in Strassburg, where he studied with Bucer and Vermigli, Hoby travelled through Italy, going as far South as Sicily.53 Then, on the return journey to England, in August 1550, he spent three months in Augsburg: ‘During the time of my abode here [in Augsburg] I translated into Englishe the Tragedie of Free Will [by Francesco Negri] which afterward I dedicated to my Lord Marquess of Northampton [William Parr]’.54 It is significant that Hoby chose the very same anti-papal book that William Thomas had dragged into his argument in Bologna three years earlier. Given the fervent anti-papalism of Edward’s court, already fuelled by Ochino’s Tragoedie, translating Negri’s Free Will was not a bad way to get noticed, especially by William Parr, brother of the dowager Queen Catherine Parr and a committed reformer. Hoby’s strategy mirrored Edward Courtenay’s: both worked on Italian reform texts to win court approval. In Hoby’s case at least, it did the trick; at Christmas 1550 the italianissimo Hoby was received at court and at New Year 1551 he entered William Parr’s service. The last of our triumvirate, Richard Morison, was also the most important. He appeared in chapter 1, encountering Italian reform ‘on the

51

BL Royal MSS, 17 C. X, ‘Travels to Tana and Persia’.

52

Hoby, Travail; Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castiglio, trans. Thomas Hoby (London, William Seres, 1561), STC 4778; Mary Partridge, ‘Thomas Hoby’s English Translation of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier’, HJ, 50 (2007), 269–86. 53

Hoby arrived in Strassburg on 4 October 1547, shortly before Vermigli’s departure for England, Hoby, Travail, p. 4. 54 Hoby, Travail, p. 63; Edoardo Barbieri, ‘Opere di Francesco Negri in Gran Bretagna’ Aevum, 71 (1997), 691–709 (pp. 695–7). For Henry Cheke’s translation of Negri’s Free Will, see Chapter 9, p. 197.


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ground’, in Padua, where he was a student between 1534 and 1536.55 After his return to England in 1536, he made himself indispensable to the Henrician government, writing colourful and effective propaganda, but his old ties with Italian reformers kept on surfacing. In Edward VI’s reign, he was sent as a royal visitor to Oxford University in 1549, in time for Vermigli’s controversial disputation there.56 Then, in 1550, he was posted to the Imperial court, taking Roger Ascham as his secretary. As we have seen, there was a spy’s report that Morison was conducting semi-public readings of Ochino and Machiavelli (for language practice, or so it was said).57 Even as he climbed the career ladder, ‘merry Morison’ remembered Ochino, his friend, his house-guest and the Emperor’s bête noir. On Ochino’s side, too, there were proofs of the bond between them. When he fled from England in July 1553, after Mary Tudor’s accession, he left all his goods in Morison’s safe-keeping.58 A year later, he dedicated his Apologi (sets of scurrilous anti-Catholic anecdotes) to ‘Signor Riccardo Moricini’.59 By then Morison was himself in exile and unlikely to be damaged by his Italian friendships. The successes of Italian exiles were dependent on these Italianate Englishmen, not just the great and the good, like John Cheke and Anthony Cooke, but also the more unconventional, like William Thomas and Richard Morison. In the royal schoolroom and at court we have found an ‘Italian connection’, based on a widespread fluency and often on Cambridge Connection friendships as well. Many links in the chain started from Cheke and were continued in the powerful kinship networks originating from the marriages of Anthony Cooke’s daughters: in 1545, Mildred, the eldest, herself a linguist, married William Cecil, Cambridge man and reformer; in 1553, Anne, Italian translator, married the Lord Keeper, Nicholas Bacon; in 1558 Elizabeth was to marry Thomas Hoby, Italian translator and traveller. All this made for a capacious umbrella of patronage and protection for Italian reformers. From Cranmer and Cheke, down through the ranks of lesser mortals, this court became involved with

55

Woolfson, Padua, pp. 35, 66–70, 125–6; Sowerby, ‘Careers of Richard Morison’, pp. 34–45; Overell, ‘English Friendship’, pp. 478–88. 56

See Chapter 5 below, pp. 108–9. Emperor to Scheyve, 3 September 1551, CSP Spanish (1550–2), pp. 349–52; Morison to Cecil, 13 July 1552, CSP Foreign (1547–53), 550, p. 216; see above, Chapter 2. 57

58

Sowerby, ‘Careers of Richard Morison’, p. 209; Bernardino Ochino to Cecil, 25 August 1561, CSP Foreign (1561–62), 454, p. 277. 59 Bainton, Bernardino Ochino, p. 101; Bernardino Ochino, Apologi nelli quali si scuoprano li abusi sciocheze superstitioni, errori, idolatrie et impieta della sinagoga del papa (Geneva, 1554), cited by K. Benrath, Ochino, pp. 217–18 and Appendix no. 33.


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Italian reform because it was assumed to be part of that greater goodness for which, as Christians and humanists, they all longed. Morison was the most fully engaged. He had the knack of knowing the things that mattered for Anglo-Italian relations. In the spring of 1551 he filed his report from Augsburg: Yesterday heard that Bishop of Rome has imprisoned two bishops in the castle of S Angelo because they have become Protestants: one of these is the Bishop of Bergamo, a Venetian of good house: the other’s name he knows not. Vergerius has done a marvellous deal of good by leaving his Bishopric and forsaking his hope of growing great in the world; but he has done much more good by printing daily of new books which go in great numbers into Italy. Many of these are dedicated to the king’s majesty. 60

Morison was marking the fact that ‘Nicodemite’ spirituali who had tried to stay on in Italy were being deprived of their leaders, through Bishop Vittore Soranzo of Bergamo’s arrest and Bishop Pier Paolo Vergerio’s apostasy and flight into exile. So far in this chapter we have focused on Englishmen who sympathised with Italian reform. It is time to consider the input from native Italians: first, Morison’s headline figure, the tempestuous Vergerio, who tried to come to England but never made it. After that we shall turn to Italians who arrived at Edward VI’s court in person. According to Morison, Vergerio had ‘done marvellous good’ by abandoning his bishopric, that of Capo d’Istria on the northern Adriatic coast – not a plum posting. As we saw in chapter 1, Vergerio’s ‘conversion’ came gradually, though he claimed a Damascene moment at the end of 1548, when he witnessed the agony of conscience of Francesco Spiera.61 He fled from Italy in the following spring, arrived in the tolerant Rhaetian republic and turned into a gifted if vitriolic propagandist, determined to prod the consciences of Italian ‘Nicodemites’ still remaining at home, hence Morison’s reference to ‘his books which go daily into Italy’. Vergerio was also angling for an invitation to England, with his books ‘dedicated to the King’s Majesty’. By 1550, the English court was the safest protestant refuge in Europe and Vergerio badly needed patronage. He dedicated a series of minor works to Edward VI, notably Copia di 60

Morison to the Council, Augsburg, 14 April 1551, CSP Foreign (1547–1553), 318, p. 88; M. Firpo, Vittore Soranzo, Vescovo ed Eretico: Riforma della Chiesa e Inquisizione nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Rome, 2006). 61

‘I would not be here [in Basel] now had I not seen Spiera’, Vergerio to Martin Borrhaus, 1550, cited by Giuseppe de Leva, Degli Eretici di Cittadella (Venice, 1873), p. 43; Shutte, Vergerio, pp. 273–5; Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti-Nicodemite Propaganda and England’, pp. 300–306.


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una Lettera (?1550) and Al Serenissimo Re Eduardo Sesto (1550). He was convinced that Edward’s accession would stop reformers losing out to catholic armies: ‘For God has given it a King who although only fourteen is most admirable and amazing and in addition to his other virtues and blessings has this one . . . that he appreciates the gentleness and beauty of the Gospel and will not lend his ear to the bitterness and vulgarity of pharasaical teachings’.62 Wishing to participate in all these ‘blessings’, he asked Bullinger to pull strings for him. On 26 October 1551, Vermigli wrote to Bullinger: The affair of the bishop Vergerio cannot now be undertaken or promoted by me because I am a long way from court and from persons in power: for I am residing, as you know, at Oxford where I have no intercourse with any but students. In the next place some great commotions have been raised in the state ... but when an occasion shall be afforded I will not be unmindful of this duty.

Presumably the ‘great commotions’ were the dirty politics which resulted in the Duke of Somerset’s arrest on 14 October.63 However, even when relative calm was restored, Vergerio never got his ‘raccomandazione’ and never arrived. In the works dedicated to Edward VI, Vergerio made connections between several current events; the accession of the young King in England, the death of Pope Paul III, the calling of the Council of Trent and the dilemma of the silent ‘spirituali’ still left in Italy. He hoped ‘some Cardinals and bishops and generals [religious superiors] would now want to make up for it and admit their mistake’. This was almost certainly coded language for Cardinal Pole, whom Vergerio hated with dangerous passion, as we shall see later. 64

62 ‘Perché Dio le ha dato un Re, il quale in una età di quattordeci anni e meraviglioso et stupendo, et oltra le sue altre belle virtù e felicità, ha questa, che egli gusta la dolcezza et bellezza dell’ Evangelio, et non può sentire la amaritudine e la bruttezza delle dottrine farisaiche’, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Copia di una lettera scritta a iiii di gennaio 1550 nella quale sono alcune nuove di Germania e d’Inghilterra (n.p., ?1550); Al serenissimo Re d’Inghilterra Eduardo Sesto, della creatione del nuovo Papa Jiulio terzo et ciò che di lui sperare si possa (1550), in several versions, including Latin, French and German translations, cited by Simonelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, pp. 78–9. 63 64

Vermigli to Bullinger, 26 October, 1551, OL, vol. 2, pp. 499–500.

‘Quei di Roma cominciano a risentirsi et a concedere che in alcuni articoli noi habbiamo ragione…Et voglio credere che alcuni Cardinali et Vescovi et generali et altri. . . hora voranno risarcire et emendare il fallo’, Copia di una lettera scritta a iiii di gennaio 1550 (n.p., 1550), cited by Simoncelli, Pole, pp. 79–80. On Vergerio and Pole, see Chapter 7.


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Morison was right about the significance of Vergerio’s books. In 1552 there was an English translation of an anonymous scurrilous work usually attributed to him, Wonderful News of the Death of Paul III. The translator was ‘W.B. Londoner’, William Baldwin, [Gulielmus Baldwinus]. This may have been the same ‘G.B.’ who edited Anne Cooke’s translation of Ochino’s sermons. In translating this ‘Wonderful News’, Baldwin was dealing with disreputable Italian pasquinade. According to ‘W.B.’s’ preface, Pope Paul III’s sins included ‘the giving of his sister to be abused of one that was pope before him, the poisoning of his mother and of his sister because she loved another better than him, the abusing of his own daughter and his persecuting of Christians’. It is not surprising that Baldwin hid behind his Italian author, tongue-in-cheek: ‘I know no man would have been so shameless so to make report except he were sure’. 65 It is significant that Baldwin was absolutely clear about the young King Edward VI’s role in this salacious Italian diatribe: this book, he said, was written ‘principally for princes’, that readers might thank God for delivery from ‘so stinking a Head’ and ‘better love and obey our sovereign Lord’. Anti-papalism, so useful to the House of Tudor, was part of the legacy of Italian reform, transmitted by Ochino, Vergerio and Negri and many others. They were good at it: they had all lived in the shadow of Rome. 66 There can be little doubt that a winning ticket at Edward’s court was to be both a humanist and an Italian refugee: Vergerio did not make it, but several others did.67 In preceding chapters we have already met Italians at court: Ochino, Vermigli, Tremellio, Castiglione and the book trafficker Guido Giannetti, who had a penchant for the Beneficio di Cristo. It is a mistake to treat less well-known Italians as just ‘minor exiles’ and ‘also rans’. Their skills created the ambience in which Italian reform became public knowledge: they were native speakers, with humanist pedigrees, often also engineers, good at making things and explaining the workings of 65

Epistola de morte Pauli Tertii Pont. Max. deque iis quae ei post mortem eius acciderunt a firma di Aesquillus [Pasquillus, Pasquino] 1549; translated into English as Wonderful news of the death of Paul III, STC 10532, Translator’s Preface, sig. Aii. William Baldwin wrote the satire, A maruelous hystory intitulede beware the cat [c. 1553] (London, Wylliam Griffyth: 1570), STC 1244. John N. King, ‘Baldwin, William (d. in or before 1563)’, ODNB; King, ‘John Day, Master Printer of the English Reformation’, p. 195. 66 A revised edition of Negri’s anti-papal work appeared, Della Tragedia di M. Francesco Negro Bassanese, intitolata libero arbitrio. Edizione seconda con accrescimento dell’’anno MDL (n.p. [Basle: J. Oporinus], 1550). On dating, see Edoardo Barbieri, ‘Note sulla fortuna europea della Tragedia del libero arbitrio di Franceseco Negri da Bassano’, Bolletino della Società di studi valdesi, 114 (1997), 107–40 (p.131). 67 Someone passed the liturgy in use in the Dutch Stranger Church in London to Vergerio to translate into Italian for the use of the church in the Graubünden, where he was minister, Boersma and Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, p. 21.


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gadgets – and the boy king loved gadgets.68 Exile had made these refugees into Europeans, while their religious beliefs made them natural opponents of Catholic governments – all in all, a perfect preparation for the Tudor intelligence service, where many of them ‘did time’. Pietro Vanni was an old hand at diplomacy, having been involved in King Henry VIII’s divorce negotiations. He was made Latin secretary to Henry VIII (after 1528) and became Dean of Salisbury in 1540.69 In a career that straddled church and state, Vanni was well placed to connect with Italian reformers, yet this aspect of his life has been overlooked.70 His long friendship with Guido Giannetti da Fano, gave him an early connection with the spirituali. On Edward VI’s accession, Vanni kept his job as Latin secretary, then from 1550 he became English ambassador to Venice. In the Venetian archive there is evidence that Ambassador Vanni took on the reform mantle of his predecessor, Edmund Harvel, with some gusto. Depositions to the Venetian Inquisition show that, at a time when the authorities were taking a much firmer line with ‘heretics’ on the run, ‘the house of Signor Pietro Vanni Lucchese’ became a sanctuary for Italian reformers. The heretic Girolamo Donzellino had been Edmund Harvel’s doctor and continued to attend Vanni’s ambassadorial household. In a deposition to the Inquisition he said that one day he had found Vanni reading a reform text which he said was very good indeed. When Donzellino asked the name of the author and the subject, Vanni replied that it was Johannes Rivius, De admirabili consilio Dei. 71 It is important not to let Vanni’s later conformity in Mary Tudor’s reign overshadow his allegiance to ‘protestant’ reform until 1553. In Venice, as the representative of Edward VI’s godly reformation government, he was required to spy on Cardinal Pole’s household and thus Vanni’s friendships with Venetian reformers served his intelligence gathering.72 Vanni, though mocked as

68

Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, pp. 216–17; R. Biddle, A Memoir of Sebastian Cabot (London, 1831) and L. Sanuto, Geografia distinta in XII libri (Venice, 1588), cited by Nichols, Literary Remains, vol. 1, p. clxxxix. 69

Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, pp. 200–202.

70

L.E. Hunt, ‘Vannes, Peter (c.1488–1563)’, ODNB.

71

AS Venice, S. Uffizio, busta 39, Processo di Girolamo Donzellino, 26 November, 1560, fol 47v;Walter Bullock, ‘The Lost Miscellaneae Quaestiones of Ortensio Lando’, Italian Studies, 2 (1938–39), 49–64. For Donzellino, see Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, p. 132; Joannes Rivius, De admirabili Dei consilio in celando mysterio redemptionis humanae (Basle: Oporinus, 1545). 72

Vannes to the Council, 5 April 1551, CSP Foreign (1547–53), 313, pp. 81–2; Vannes to Sir William Petre and Sir William Cecil, ibid., 12 May 1553, 678, p. 279.


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‘timorous’ and tearful, was an important link in the chain that ran from the spirituali left in Northern Italy to the English court in London.73 Giovanni Battista Castiglione, too, had arrived in England during Henry VIII’s reign and made a successful career. He became the Princess Elizabeth’s Italian teacher, probably he taught King Edward the language, possibly Edward Courtenay as well.74 On the young King’s death in 1553, Castiglione stuck to his beliefs, as we shall see.75 His friend was Pietro Bizzarri, a reformer who became something of a joke because of his highflown ‘Ciceronian’ style. Having converted in 1542–43, Bizzarri left Italy because of his religion.76 Cheke recognised his cleverness and in 1549, when Bizzarri was still only 24, the royal visitors to Cambridge made him a fellow of St. John’s College.77 The Cambridge group took him under its wing. He was an acquaintance of Roger Ascham and later John Bradford met him at Ochino’s house in London.78 Bizzarri was always on the move and by 1551 he had left Cambridge and become secretary and tutor in the family of the Earl of Bedford. The Russell family were keen Italianists and Francis Russell, heir to the title, was already strongly identified with evangelical reform. The Russells were Bizzarri’s passport to Edward VI’s court, enabling him to produce several eulogies of reforming nobles. Edward Courtenay, though still in the Tower, may have been among Bizzarri’s noble contacts in England. Much later Bizzarri would claim that he was present at Courtenay’s deathbed.79

73 Marc Antonio Damula to the Doge and Senate, 19 August 1554, CSP Venetian (1534–1554), 936, p. 565. 74

‘But especially [Elizabeth] had a refined and elegant way of speaking our language, for which Signor Giovanni Battista Castiglione was her principal tutor’: ‘Ma in particulare possede ella la nostra più tersa et più elegante favella, di cui suo principal precettore è stato il signor Giovanni Battista Castiglioni’, Pietro Bizzarri, Historia della guerra fatta in Ungheria (Lyons, n. pub., 1568), p. 206. 75

‘Castiglione, Giovanni Battista’, DBI; Jennifer Loach, ‘Pamphlets and Politics, 1553–58’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 48 (1975), 31–44. See below, Chapter 6, p. 141. 76

Bizzarri described himself as ‘An exile from Italy, his native country by reason of his confession of the doctrine of the gospel’, Peter of Perugia [Pietro Bizzarri] to Bullinger, 10 February 1550, OL, vol. 1, p. 338; later his career became more secular, Nicholas Barker, ‘The Perils of Publishing in the Sixteenth Century: Pietro Bizzarri and William Parry’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (eds), England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J.B.Trapp (Woodbridge, 1990), pp. 125–41. 77 Thomas Baker, History of the College of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge, ed. J.E.B. Mayor (2 parts, Cambridge, 1899), part 1, p. 285. 78

Ascham, Works, vol. 1, LVII, p. 165; Bradford, Writings, vol. 2, pp. 352–4. P. Bizzarri, Poematum, Libri II , 93v. 96r, 166r, 126r, 128v 149v cited by Firpo, Bizzarri, pp. 30–31; ibid., pp. 23–39; Pietro Bizzarri, Senatus populique Genuensis (Antwerp: 79


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The Hebrew scholar, Emmanuele Tremellio, once Vermigli’s colleague at Lucca, arrived in London by the early months of 1549 and stayed in the environs of the capital, as a guest at Lambeth Palace, until he was posted to Cambridge as King’s Reader in Hebrew in November 1549. Tremellio remembered Cranmer as ‘Host, Mycaenas and father in one, he knew how to welcome strangers and could speak their language’.80 It was a just tribute but, as we have seen, others in and around the court were almost as welcoming to strangers as Cranmer was. Some Italians stayed in favour at court despite their more enigmatic religious positions. The physician and mathematician Girolamo Cardano was Cheke’s protégé: ‘My friends among the high officials of the court were Sir John Cheke childhood tutor to King Edward VI ...’, he crowed. Yet his later comments in his ‘Book of My Life’ suggest his views were catholic: ‘I ever keep in mind the divine majesty of God but turn my meditation as well upon the Blessed Virgin Mary and holy S. Martin’. In the early 1550s he kept quiet about the Virgin and St Martin and concentrated on his medicine and on the passion for astrology which he shared with Cheke. 81 Like Cardano, Petruccio Ubaldini kept his counsel about religion. He had been in the service of the English crown since 1545 but returned to Venice, presumably as an agent. By 1549, he was back in England, in an Italian garrison defending the Borders, but subsequently sought royal employment as a clerk and calligrapher. In 1550 he produced a beautifully copied set of moral aphorisms for the use of the King Edward.82 His Relazione delle cose del Regno d’Inghilterra, written in 1551, reveals his acute observation of the court’s religion, daily routines and its eccentric formalities. He noted sadly the young King’s disastrous dress sense, proved by his fondness for purple hats.83 Christopher Plantin, 1579), quoted in Firpo, Bizzarri, p. 35; Overell, ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy’, pp. 132–3. 80

John Strype, Memorials of Archbishop Thomas Crammer (2 vols, Oxford, 1840), vol. 2, chapters xiii and xxii; Kenneth Austin, From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius (1510–1580) (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 61–4, 69. I am grateful to Kenneth Austin for several illuminating conversations about Tremellio. 81 Jerome Cardan, The Book of My Life (De vita propria liber), translated by Jean Stoner (London and Toronto, 1931; reprinted New York, 1962), pp. 16, 63, 79. Cardano, an astrologer, was given biographical information in order to predict the royal tutor’s future, including the date when Cheke almost fell from favour, J.G. Nichols ‘Some additions to the biographies of Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith’, Archeologia, 38 (1860), 98–127. 82 BL Royal MSS 17A. xxiv, cited by Cecil H. Clough, ‘Ubaldini, Petruccio (fl. 1545– 1599)’, ODNB. 83

Petruccio Ubaldini’s ‘Relazione d’Inghilterra’ BL, Add. MS 10169, fol 56v, reprinted in Giuliano Pellegrini, Petruccio Ubaldini. Un Fiorentino alla corte d’Inghilterra nel Cinquecento (Turin, 1967), pp. 57–152 (p. 99). See also F. Bugliani, ‘Petruccio Ubaldini’s account of England’, Renaissance Studies, 8, (1994), 175–97; A.M. Crino, ‘Come Petruccio


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That young fashionista was central to this whole Anglo-Italian network. But in the early spring of 1553, Edward VI began to sink slowly into serious illness. It was a calamity for the English reformation and the Italian connection embedded within it. Like reformers all over Europe, the Italians at court had hoped for much from this particular teenager; no one expected his early death and many feared the accession of his catholic elder sister Mary. Yet there had been a psychological preparation for this time of trial. Even in green reformation pastures, with the boy reformer-king on the throne, Englishmen had been forced to think of suffering for the truth and of damnation for the lily-livered. Their hour of temptation had not come, but it might. Sharp reminders came from all sides: the presence of foreign exiles at court; the Stranger Churches founded because of European persecution; the flood of European ‘anti-Nicodemite’ literature which had poured into England throughout Edward VI’s reign, pulling no punches in the psychological battle to make faint-hearts into martyrs. Among the campaigners were Calvin and Bullinger and even Bucer, after his earlier more Nicodemite phase. Less well known but still more vehement were several Italian reformers.84 Italians knew the Nicodemite dilemma intimately because large numbers of one-time sympathisers still remained in Italy, keeping their heads down. Edward VI’s illness and death brought the risk that the same would happen in England. With Catholic persecution threatening and the court network in danger of collapse, the Italians’ trademark tale about Francesco Spiera came into its own. As we have seen, Aglionby’s English translation of the Spiera story was already in circulation. In the summer of 1553 educated English readers began to take that story very seriously indeed. 85 Like most good stories, the Spiera saga was constantly reinterpreted and re-worked during its long shelf-life in England. Its original version went like this: Spiera, a hard-up lawyer from Cittadella just North of Venice, was struggling to bring up a large family. He had come to believe in reform and was questioned by the Venetian Inquisition in 1547–48. He recanted his beliefs and was made to pay a fine. Then he fell into deep despair and was moved to nearby Padua for medical treatment. Many Ubaldini vede lo scisma d’Inghilterra’, in B. Maracchi Biagiarelli and D. E. Rhodes (eds), Studi offerti a Roberto Ridolfi (Florence, 1973), pp. 223–36. 84

Carlos M.N. Eire, ‘Prelude to Sedition: Calvin’s attack on Nicodemism and Religious Compromise’, ARG 76 (1985), 120–45; for lists of Calvin’s and Viret’s most important antiNicodemite works, see ibid. pp. 120 and 142; Peter Matheson ‘Martyrdom or Mission; a Protestant Debate’, ARG, 80 (1989, 154–72; Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti-Nicodemite Propaganda and England’, pp. 296–99. 85

Notable and Marvailous Epistle, STC 12365; Susan James, Kateryn Parr (Aldershot, 1999), p. 148.


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learned men gathered at his bedside, led by Pier Paolo Vergerio (at that point, still a bishop). They could not comfort Spiera, who died at the end of 1548, convinced that he was damned because he had not witnessed to his faith. The story was part-fact, part-fiction. The deathbed scenes were certainly embellished in accordance with the tropes of the medieval ars moriendi, which influenced all groups, ‘protestants’ just as much as ‘catholics’: despair, devils, noble stoicism, valedictory speeches full of uncannily correct quotations from Scripture. A ‘failed’ Italian reformer was made into Europe’s archetype Nicodemite and readers could indulge the Faustian frisson of identifying with the damned. There was no anti-Nicodemite literature quite like it. 86 The tale was given an Oxford première, by Vermigli, lecturing on the Epistle to the Romans in 1551. He used Spiera as an illustration of the hoary problem about whether God wills sin and damnation, always a conundrum.87 Then, in the year before the King’s death, Hugh Latimer preached to the court about the sin of turning away from the truth. He assumed the name Francesco Spiera would be known to listening courtiers, but the ‘moral’ of the tale was given Latimer’s inimitable spin I know now that Judas had sinned against the Holy Ghost, also Nero, Pharaoh and one Franciscus Spira; which man had forsaken popery and done very boldly in God’s quarrel; at the length he was complained of ... he contrary to that admonition of the Holy Ghost denied the word of God and so finally died in desperation; him I may pronounce to have sinned against the Holy Ghost. But I will show you a remedy for sin against the Holy Ghost. Ask remission of sin in the name of Christ and then I ascertain you that you sin not against the Holy Ghost.88

Latimer was pouring the cooling balm of Christian forgiveness on overheated Italian ‘retribution’ theology. He allowed that Spiera had sinned but thought there was no need for his extreme desperation: ‘I will show you a remedy … . Ask remission …’. During King Edward VI’s and Hugh Latimer’s reformation, God would remain merciful, even to Nicodemites. But the young King’s death changed all that. Musing on divine mercy gave 86

Overell, ‘The Reformation of Death in Italy and England: circa 1550’, Renaissance and Reformation, 23 (1999), 5–21; Overell, ‘Exploitation of Spiera’, pp. 632–7. 87 Pietro Martire Vermigli, In Epistolam S.Pauli ad Romanos commentarii doctissimi (Basle: P. Perna, 1558), trans. as Most learned and fruitfull commentaries …upon the epistle to the Romanes, trans. out of Latin by H. B. [Henry Billingsley] (London: John Day, 1568), STC 24672, pp. 288–312 (p. 301). See Chapter 5, p. 116. 88

p. 633.

Hugh Latimer, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 425; Overell, ‘Exploitation of Franceso Spiera’,

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way to the terrible fear of backsliding. The Spiera story was harsh and, left like that, it was more likely to stiffen resolve. English reformers and Italians were no longer privileged, courtly humanists but frightened men facing a major life decision: to witness to their understanding of the Gospel or to be a Nicodemite, like Spiera. For Ochino, Vermigli, Tremellio and the other Italian exiles, their second attempt to settle down in Protestant territory was suddenly sabotaged. This time Imperial armies were not in the vicinity but, if the half-Spanish, catholic Princess Mary became Queen, it was clear that Italian refugees from Habsburg dominions would not be welcome to stay in England. Their danger was increased by the actions of the most important of their English supporters at the court of the now dead boy-King. In June and July 1553, Cranmer, Cheke, Cox and Cooke were complicit, to varying degrees, in the attempt to make the protestant Lady Jane Grey Queen of England in Mary’s place.89 Michelangelo Florio, too, attached himself firmly to the Duke of Northumberland and Lady Jane Grey’s cause. 90 When the coup failed, Mary Tudor was crowned Queen on 20 July 1553. Then Archbishop Cranmer invited Vermigli to join in public disputation against the new catholic government’s religious position and the Italian agreed.91 Thus, soon after Mary’s accession, many of the English patrons of the Italian Connection had put themselves clearly on the ‘wrong’ side – and so had Vermigli, a leading Italian exile. When he arrived in England late in 1547, Vermigli was a widely respected scholar, but no more. It was his English exile that brought him centre stage. Between 1548 and 1550, he became prominent as Cranmer’s research assistant, consultant and friend. Though based in Oxford, he relied on friends in the London court group with which we have been concerned in this chapter. A detailed examination of Vermigli’s English exile has been left until last, partly because he usually comes first, to the point where the rest of this connection fades in the shadow of one famous career. But, as this chapter has shown, the Edwardian world in which Pietro Martire Vermigli worked for six years contained several of his countrymen 89


90

Michelangelo Florio dedicated his ‘Rules of the Italian Language’ to Lady Jane Grey, Michelangelo Florio e le sue “Regole de la lingua Toscana”, ed. Giuliano Pellegrini, Studi di filogia italiana, 12 (1954), pp. 77–204. In July 1553, the month of Mary’s accession, he dedicated his translation of Ponet’s Catechism to the Duke of Northumberland, Catechismo, cioe forma breve per amaestrare i fanciulli e perl’ autorita [sic] del serenissimo re d’Inghilterra ...Tradotta di latino in lingua Thoscana per M.Michelangelo Florio Fiorentino, no date but (London: [S. Mierdman, 1553]), STC 4813. His Historia della vita e de la morte de l’illustriss. Signora Giovanni Graia was written in Strassburg after he had left England (1554–55) and published in 1607, cited by Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica italiana a Londra’, pp. 322–3. 91

See below, Chapter 5, p. 121.


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and a host of enthusiastic English humanist patrons. They were Vermigli’s landscape and they made possible his significant contribution to the English reformation.


CHAPTER FIVE

Peter Martyr Vermigli and his English Friends I have taken refuge under the authority of your name under which I may be protected from those who seem that they will make no end of slandering, attacking and everywhere ridiculing my name with their impudent lies. Vermigli’s Dedication to Cranmer, Tractatio de sacramento Eucharistiae.1

The action shifts now from London to Oxford, where Pietro Martire Vermigli had to adapt rapidly to life in a hostile English university.2 His name appeared in the Battels book of Christ Church in January 1548, little more than a month after his arrival. For much of his stay he was based in Oxford, but he returned to Lambeth Palace often and sometimes to the court, there to enjoy the protection of the humanist court group, as other Italians had done. Yet there were important differences: he was closer to Archbishop Cranmer than Ochino and the rest, and he faced far more serious problems.3 Vermigli often needed to ‘take refuge’ in the Archbishop’s protection because his duties in Oxford turned into ‘a continual struggle with my adversaries, who are indeed most obstinate’.4 He had such a hard time partly because he was drawn rapidly into the councils of the mighty – and that never makes for an easy exile. While other foreigners could praise Englishmen as ‘very good natured and shrewd people and very fond of strangers’, Vermigli had an altogether tougher call.5 1

‘ad tui nominis authoritatem confugi, sub qua protegerer ab his, qui nullum videntur finem facturi, detrahendi lacerandi, et nomen meum ubique mendaciis impudentissimis traducendi’, Pietro Martire Vermigli, Tractatio de sacramento Eucharistiae … Ad Hec: Disputatio de eodem sacramento, in eadem universitate habita (London: [R. Wolfe] [1549]), STC 24673, sig. aiii., Diarmaid MacCulloch’s translation, in ibid., ‘Peter Martyr and Thomas Cranmer’, in Emidio Campi and Frank James III (eds), Peter Martyr Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation (Geneva, 2002) (hereafter cited as HRR), pp. 173–201 (p. 187). I am very grateful to Diarmaid MacCulloch for making proofs of his chapter available to me prior to publication; I have learned much from his insights. 2

Christ Church Oxford Archives, Battels Book, MS x (1) c.1, cited by J. Andreas Löwe, Richard Smyth and the Language of Orthodoxy: Re-imagining Tudor Catholic Polemicism (Leiden, 2003), p. 40. 3

For a lucid introduction, see Mark Taplin, ‘Vermigli, Pietro Martire [Peter Martyr] (1499– 1562)’, ODNB. Bucer recommended Tremellio to Cranmer, Paris Bibliothèque Ste-Genevieve MS 1458, fos 173v–175r (28 November 1547), cited by MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 381. 4

Martyr to Bullinger, 1 June 1550, OL, vol. 2, p. 481. John ab Ulmis to Rudolph Gualter, 5 November 1550, OL, vol. 2, p. 420. Ab Ulmis, who arrived in spring 1548, was not always reliable. 5

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Oxford had never been as sympathetic to the Reformation as Cambridge. On arrival, early in 1548, he was a suspect incomer, an ‘escaped’ Augustinian, awaiting the arrival of his wife (his ‘harlot’) in a proud, conservative city, where religious reforms were anticipated but detested in advance.6 Yet it was the government’s determination to promote him that led to most of his troubles. They set out to find him a plum job, something more decidedly intellectual than Ochino’s London posting, suited to his skills and commensurate with their high hopes. As prior of San Frediano in Lucca, then at the College of St Thomas in Strassburg, Vermigli had been a talented scholar and teacher. So, in March 1548, he was promoted to the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford, from which the incumbent Richard Smyth was ousted to make room for him. Therefore Smyth, backed by conservative dons and undergraduate cheerleaders, began to make trouble.7 It was not a good start. There is a long-standing tradition, backed by observers on both sides of the confessional divide, that Vermigli was ‘a plant’, sent to Oxford to teach what the government required. The reformer, Richard Cox, said that Vermigli ‘has met extremely well the expectation of the leading magistrates and of His Majesty the King’. Later the catholic controversialist Robert Persons made a similar point: Vermigli ‘was content to … teach that religion which should be appointed him’; he ‘had been sent to Oxford … with indifferency, to teach what should be ordained of him from higher powers in the parliament’.8 Like Ochino, he was expected to say and do what was expected, when it was expected. Yet conservative Oxford was less generously receptive than London and Vermigli’s correspondence leaves the reader in no doubt that he found this religious revolution hard going, bewildering, at times even shocking.9 Pietro Martire Vermigli and Reginald Pole are now the best known ‘names’ in the group of one-time spirituali who came to England. Vermigli’s reputation reached its peak after he had left England and returned to mainland Europe at Mary Tudor’s accession in 1553. He died in 1562. 6

Martyr to Bucer, 10 June 1550, Gleanings, pp. 151–2. Christ Church Oxford Archives, Battels Book MS x (1) c. 6, f. 9v, cited by Löwe, Richard Smyth, p. 40. 7

8

I owe this important point to Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Martyr and Cranmer’, HRR, pp. 181 and 186. Pietro Martire Vermigli, The Oxford Treatise and Disputation on the Eucharist 1549, trans. and ed. Joseph McLelland (Kirksville, MO, 2000), p. 289; Robert Persons, The third part of a treatise intituled of three conversions of England… [and] a review of ten Disputacions (St Omer: [François Bellet] 1604), STC 19416 (and 19414, for annexed text), p. 36, cited by MacCulloch, ‘Martyr and Cranmer’, p. 182. 9 On Vermigli’s reactions, see M.A. Overell, ‘Peter Martyr in England 1547–1553: An Alternative View’, SCJ, 15 (1984), 87–104. In the light of more recent work, cited throughout this chapter, I would now want to modify some of the conclusions of this article.

PETER MARTYR VERMIGLI AND HIS ENGLISH FRIENDS

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In Elizabethan England, John Foxe and the translator Anthony Marten made him a niche in the national myth. After the mid-seventeenth century, Vermigli’s work went out of fashion in England.10 Yet in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a widespread rediscovery, culminating in the important series of scholarly modern editions of his works called the ‘Peter Martyr Library’.11 In a review of Early Writings, the first volume of that collection, Euan Cameron commented on the importance of placing Peter Martyr more firmly in context.12 That is the aim of this chapter, which will focus especially on the political and social context provided by the Anglo-Italian network in England. Vermigli was an exceptionally erudite, if not particularly original, theologian; even his enemies thought it wise to take copious notes when he lectured.13 Yet this chapter is not primarily a history of his theology and its influence. Instead, like the rest of the book, it deals with the co-operation and interaction of a group. To counter-balance his immense difficulties, Vermigli had patrons and friends in high places and it is with those networks that we shall be principally concerned. During these years in England, his theologising was constantly interwoven with politics because real-life demands provided the spark which set him thinking and writing. According to his biographer Josiah Simler, Vermigli ‘enjoyed the friendship of the best men and most holy bishops’.14 Simler, who wrote just after Vermigli’s death, described the Italian’s ‘friends at Oxford’ thus: ‘there were the bishops, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, John Ponet and John Hooper’. That fits our earlier findings: we have noted Ponet’s co-operation with Ochino; Vermigli, too, made contact with the Archbishop’s chaplain in the early months of his exile.15 Latimer was certainly a firm supporter, saying that the Italians were worth all the money the government gave them.16 The three laymen whom Simler picks out for special mention are also an exact match to those at the heart of our ‘connection’ in previous chapters: ‘The gracious and esteemed gentlemen Anthony Cook, John 10 For the much cooler reception in Scotland, see Bruce Gordon, ‘Peter Martyr Vermigli; a Sixteenth Century Reformer in a Seventeenth Century Quarrel’, in HRR, pp. 274–93. 11

For a summary, see J.C. McLelland, ‘From Montreal to Zurich 1949–1999: Vermigli Studies today’, HRR, pp. 9–16. 12 Euan Cameron’s review in JEH, 48 (1997), p. 364, of Peter Martyr Vermigli, Early Writings: Creed, Scripture, Church, trans. and ed. Mariano di Gangi and Joseph McLelland, with introduction by Philip McNair (Kirksville, MO, 1994). 13 J. Andreas Löwe, ‘Vermigli and Richard Smyth’s De votis monasticis’, in HRR, pp. 143–72 (pp. 145–7). 14

Simler, Life, LLS, pp. 37–8.

15

Vermigli to Utenhoven, 21 September 1548, Gleanings, p. 54; ‘John Ponet’,

ODNB. 16

Latimer, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 141 (22 March 1549).

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Cheke and Richard Morison’. What is most striking is that Simler’s list of ‘friends at Oxford’ contained very few people actually resident in Oxford.17 That dearth of local friends was Vermigli’s greatest problem. In the early months, however, all went reasonably well, despite Smyth’s irritating interruptions of his lectures.18 In December 1548, Vermigli wrote to Bucer urging him to delay in Strassburg no longer: ‘There are no dangers in this country … except those of an ordinary character’.19 Vermigli was not in Oxford all the time. According to Simler, there was a lot of commuting: ‘Whenever Martyr had any vacation from his public labour of teaching, Cranmer sent for him and conferred with him about weighty matters’. The Archbishop, in particular, ‘embraced our Martyr with a singular love’. Cranmer’s recorded contacts with Ochino are sparse, but that may be due to the later tendency to edit Ochino out of the historical account – which is very evident in John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’.20 Vermigli’s case was different: the Archbishop remembered that ‘I had with him many conferences in that matter [the Eucharist]’.21 The core question is who influenced whom? The thoroughly biased Richard Smyth thought Vermigli took the lead: Cranmer was ‘folowing your great god, Peter Martyr’.22 On the other hand, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows that the Archbishop did not need to follow Vermigli: he had moved towards Swiss views on the Eucharist shortly before the Italian’s arrival. Nonetheless, the Italian helped Cranmer find scriptural and patristic support for a ‘spiritual presence’, non-realist position on the Eucharist.23 He appears to have brought with him a manuscript of John Chrysostom’s Ad Caesarium Monachum, relevant to the debate and then unknown in England.24

17

Except for Henry Siddal and James Curtop, canons of Christ Church, ‘who at that time were outstanding defenders of the truth, but afterwards in Mary’s time did not retain the same constancy’, Simler, Life, LLS, p. 36. 18

Löwe, ‘Vermigli and Smyth’s De votis monasticis’, HRR, pp. 146–7.

19

OL, vol. 2, p. 472. 20 Simler, Life, LLS, p. 38; Foxe remembered Vermigli with reverence but excluded Ochino, John Foxe, AM (1563), STC 11222, book 12, pp. 1550 and 1566. 21 Cranmer’s ‘Response to Richard Smith’ inserted at end of Thomas Cranmer, An Answer … unto a Crafty and sophistical cavilation, devised by Stephen Gardiner [London; 1551], sig. Zqiiiiv, cited by M. Anderson, ‘Rhetoric and Reality: Peter Martyr and the English Reformation’, SCJ, 29 (1988), 451–69 (p. 455). 22

Richard Smyth, A confutation of a certain booke, called a defence of the true and Catholic doctrine of the sacrament (Paris, 1550), STC 22819, sigs Giiv-Bi r, cited by Anderson, ‘Rhetoric and Reality’, p. 454. 23

Cranmer’s change probably came in 1546 or early 1547, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 173–4, 354–5, 380–83, 406; MacCulloch Tudor Church Militant, pp. 87–9. 24



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Cranmer included him in official business very quickly. Having begun his lectures on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the new Italian professor appears to have left Oxford to stay at Lambeth.25 A working paper, dated 1 December 1548, was prepared by Vermigli in Latin and turned into English by an anonymous translator in time for the debate about the Eucharist in the House of Lords during December.26 Almost certainly, it was intended as a layman’s guide for the use of Protector Somerset during those debates. The government was about to ‘go public’ with changes in Eucharistic doctrine and the first Prayer Book was soon to be approved. Religious change had become part of English life but this was not just ‘more of the same’. To change the mass involved a cultural revolution and behind the scenes was an Italian academic. Vermigli recorded the stresses and strains: ‘Our most reverend fights strenuously … I see that there is nothing more difficult in the world than to found a church’.27 It was a sombre recognition of the enormity of the task ahead. Vermigli’s involvement in these preparations had given the Protector and the court the opportunity to weigh him up. He seems to have passed the test and then he was allowed back to Oxford and his lectures on Corinthians.28 He conflicted with the conservatives on the subject of monastic vows but Simler suggests that serious trouble was delayed until the spring of 1549: ‘when on the occasion of the Apostle’s words, he began to deal with the Lord’s Supper, they [his enemies] thought they should no longer remain silent’.29 For just over a year, Vermigli had avoided being drawn publicly on the English Reformation’s most controversial issue, the Eucharist. Ochino, too, had touched on it very little, fixing instead on justification and the papacy; Courtenay had translated Il Beneficio di Cristo, which contained only superficial references to the Eucharist at the 25 Vermigli probably began his lectures on I Corinthians in March 1548, and may have continued through the next two years, Oxford Treatise and Disputation on the Eucharist 1549, trans. and ed. McLelland, Translator’s Introduction, pp. xix–xx. These lectures were published as In Selectissimam S.Pauli priorem ad Corinthios Epistolam …Commentarii (Zurich: C. Froschover, 1551). 26 David G. Selwyn, ‘A New Version of a Mid-Sixteenth Century Vernacular Tract on the Eucharist: a Document of the Early Edwardian Reformation’, JEH, 39 (1988), 217–29; ibid., ‘The Book of Doctrine, the Lords’ Debate and the First Prayer Book of Edward VI: an Abortive Attempt at Doctrinal Consensus’, Journal of Theological Studies, N.S., 40 (1989), 446–80 (pp. 458–61). 27

Martyr to Bucer, 15 January 1549, Gleanings, p. 74.

28

For the sequence of events and the relationship of these lectures to Vermigli’s Tractatio, see Oxford Treatise and Disputation, Introduction, p. xx. 29

Löwe, ‘Vermigli and Smyth’s de Votis Monasticis’, HRR, p. 146; Simler, Life, LLS, p. 33; see also John Ab Ulmis to Bullinger, 2 March 1549, OL, vol. 2, p. 388; J.C. McLelland, The Visible Words of God; an Exposition of the Sacramental Theology of Peter Martyr (Edinburgh, 1957), p. 18, especially note 39.

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end of the book. So far, the reception of Italian reform had kept pace with the official agenda: not too much too soon. When Vermigli’s lecture course arrived at St Paul’s interpretation of the communion (I Corinthians 10:16), the 1549 Prayer Book had parliamentary approval. Then Smyth began the Oxford protest.30 Notices were posted announcing a disputation, Vermigli refused to be drawn at first but then, at the end of his lecture, he was challenged again to a disputation. Amidst uproar, Richard Cox, Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor, invited all the participants to his house to plan further proceedings, taking Vermigli’s arm on the way. The ‘extreme caution’, which marked most of Vermigli’s reactions, was especially evident in planning this disputation.31 As Simler put it, ‘he did not want to get into such an important matter without consulting His Royal Majesty’. He insisted on government referees, with Cox as president. Propositions were drawn up and May 4 was the date planned for the disputation. But Richard Smyth, one of the proposed disputants, had been arrested and subsequently released on promise of good behaviour; then he fled.32 By 17 May 1549, the tables had turned dramatically in Vermigli’s favour: royal officials had arrived for a visitation and Richard Morison, that good friend of Italians, was among them.33 The show could go on. Smyth’s place was taken by the conservatives’ ‘B team’, William Tresham, canon of Christ Church, William Chedsey of Corpus and Morgan Phillips of St. Mary Hall. They defended the catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the belief that, at the words of consecration, the ‘substance’ of the bread and wine was changed into the body and blood of Christ. Vermigli, on the other hand, was proposing that Christ was spiritually, not actually, present in the elements.34 Contemporaries on both sides thought that after he had arrived in England, Vermigli changed his views and moved further away from both catholic and Lutheran teaching that there was a ‘real presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist.35 Smyth’s stinging charge was that Vermigli ‘came to court (my italics), saw what doctrine misliked them’ then, ‘turned his tippet and sang another song’.36 Bucer, a close friend of Vermigli, said 30 31

On Smyth and Vermigli, see Löwe, Richard Smyth, pp. 40–44. Philip McNair, ‘Biographical Introduction’, in Vermigli, Early Writings, p. 14.

32 Simler, Life, LLS, p. 35; C.E. Mallet, History of the University of Oxford (3 vols, London, 1924), vol. 2, pp. 90–92. 33


34

Later Vermigli told the Zurichers that he had been defending their doctrine Simler, Life, LLS, p. 324, cited by McLelland, Oxford Treatise and Disputation, trans. and ed. McLelland, p. xxv. 35

Ibid., pp. xxxi–xxxix; MacCulloch, ‘Martyr and Cranmer’, pp. 180–81. Smyth, A confutation of a certen booke, called a defence, fols 8v–9r, cited by MacCulloch, ‘Martyr and Cranmer’, p. 180. 36


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that the Italian had started to use a new vocabulary in reference to the Eucharist, ‘since the Zurich people have here many and great followers’.37 The political implications of these comments have been lost in centuries of theological controversy.38 Contemporaries, both friends and foes, were aware of the English court’s influence on Vermigli; they thought it likely that he was being swayed by his patrons, made part of an official political programme, of ‘Reformation carried out in the King’s name’.39 Simler’s praise for Vermigli’s ‘incredible constancy and courage’ in the disputation is an exaggeration.40 The Italian Regius Professor was the government’s guest, taking the Archbishop’s line on the Eucharist, debating before hand-picked Royal Visitors, with the reforming Chancellor, Richard Cox, as a judicious but sympathetic president. Cox called the disputation to a halt, presenting it as a deferral: ‘we are not inclined to give an opinion on these controversies just now … it will be determined when it seems good to his Majesty the King and the leaders of the Church of England’.41 The government gave and the government took away. Long deferral was inevitable because unrest and resentment, smouldering for months, flared into rebellion in the spring and summer of 1549, spilling over into areas close to Oxford. The seriousness of the scare may account for Vermigli’s gloom about the disputation. He wrote to Bucer: ‘my strength being small, and the matter perplexing, and the adversaries both obstinate and very audacious, in the compass of four days I was unable to effect more than you see’.42 He told Bullinger in Zurich that he had ‘not yet gained complete victory in the contest’.43 Bucer himself had come to England on 23 April 1549 and, officially, he took up the parallel job as Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge in January 1550. By June, Bucer, too, was involved in a disputation, but Vermigli soon warned

37

Bucer to Theobold Niger, 15 April 1550, Gleanings, pp. 142–3.

38

Oxford Treatise and Disputation, Translator’s Introduction, pp. xxxvi–xxxix.

39

Alford, Kingship, p. 101.

40

Simler, Life, LLS, p. 34. Many have seen the outcome as a victory for Vermigli: Foxe, AM (1570), book 9, pp. 1552–55; McLelland, Visible Words, pp. 17–23; ibid., Oxford Treatise and Disputation, Translator’s Introduction, xlii-xlv. On the other hand, Gordon Huelin considered it ‘by no means as complete as he himself hoped for, or as his supporters maintained it to be’, ‘Peter Martyr and the English Reformation’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1954), p. 55. See also Overell, ‘Peter Martyr in England 1547–1553: an Alternative View’, pp. 90–99. On this point, I note Professor McLelland’s correction regarding Cox’s support for Vermigli, Oxford Treatise and Disputation, Translator’s Introduction, p. xl; ibid. ‘Disputation’, p. 289. 41

42 43

Martyr to Bucer, 15 June 1549, Gleanings, p. 81. Martyr to Bullinger, 27 January 1550, OL, vol. 2, p. 478.

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him off: ‘I cannot see that much benefit can come from disputations of this kind’.44 Contemporaries were alarmed by the scale of the resistance, religious in inspiration in the South West but primarily social and economic elsewhere. Cranmer employed Vermigli, Ochino and Cheke as propaganda writers, to reprimand the rebels and discourage the rest. Cheke insisted that the rebels’ own precipitate haste had disrupted reforms already ongoing or ‘entended’ by ‘the kynges maiestie etc’: they had rushed in and possibly ruined things.45 We have already seen that Ochino’s ‘Dialogue between the King and his people’ occasionally sounded sympathetic to the economic grievances of the rebels. Vermigli, however, stressed that revolt risked ‘eternal damnation of innumerable soules’. And for this horrible possibility he blamed everyone, first and significantly, the ‘magistrates’, but also the gentry, and the rebels themselves.46 Cranmer’s ‘Sermon Concerning the Time of Rebellion’, preached on 21 July 1549 in St Paul’s, drew on sermon drafts prepared by Vermigli. In this national emergency he had become Cranmer’s ‘principal collaborator’.47 Yet a two-way process was at work, for Vermigli, like Ochino, was being briefed. For instance, it is deeply unlikely that, after about eighteen months in England, he could have produced the very English references in the sermon without help from his friends: analogies like ‘a Caunterbury Tale’ and ‘Jack Strawe, Jacke Cade the black smyth, and Capitaine Aske’ did

44

N. Scott Amos, ‘Bucer, Martin (1491–1551)’, ODNB; Martyr to Bucer, 6 September 1550, Gleanings, p. 177. 45 John Cheke, The hurt of sedicion howe greueous it is to a commune welth [London: Iohn Daye and Wylliam Seres 1549], STC 5109; Cheke’s phrase ‘the kynges majestie etc’ is significant for the debate about the ‘monarchical republic’ of Tudor England; Alford, Kingship, p. 62; McDiarmid, ‘Common Consent, Latinitas and the “Monarchical Republic”’, p. 70. 46 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Parker MSS 102, pp. 409–99, ‘A sermon concernynge the tyme of rebellion translated from the Latin of Peter Martyr’, with marginalia in Cranmer’s hand, quotation at fol. 413. I heard Torrance Kirby’s fine paper on the subject of this manuscript at the conference of the Society for Reformation Studies in April 2007. Professor Kirby’s The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Leiden and Boston, 2007) appeared when this book was almost due to be sent to the publisher. Torrance Kirby’s comparison of this manuscript with Vermigli’s Latin original (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Parker MS 340, fols 73–95) overturns many earlier assumptions (Zurich Connection, pp. 121– 80). I do not think he has proved that the sermon actually preached by Cranmer on 21 July 1549 was ‘the work of … Peter Martyr Vermigli’ (ibid., p. 124). But, in the light of this new scholarly work, their ‘close collaboration’ is now certain (p. 130). 47

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Parker MS 340, fols 73–95. Ochino’s ‘Dialogus Regis et Populi’ is ibid., fols 97–108. Vinay, ‘Riformatori e lotte contadine’, pp. 225–36; McNair, ‘Ochino on Sedition’, p. 37; Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings, ed. Cox, pp. 108– 222; MacCulloch, ‘Martyr and Cranmer’, p. 188.


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not trip naturally off Italian tongues.48 These homespun illustrations could have been suggested by Cranmer himself or someone else at Lambeth. The prominent criticism of the ‘magistrate’, for failure to punish rebellion, suggests that Vermigli (unlike Ochino) was being influenced against the Duke of Somerset, who had appeared at first to be wooing the rebels.49 Next there were the judgements on gentry and commons for their pursuit of wealth and on the hatred felt by the people for those in power. Towards the end, the preacher depicted himself as addressing those who had once embraced the gospel and then fallen into sin: ‘One thing … in myn opinion is the head and beginning of all their tribulations’, that is, the failure to live out the gospel, which is ‘in their lippes and not in their hartes’.50 Thus, Vermigli was following English contemporaries in distinguishing between non-religious and religious agendas.51 Like Ochino, he had picked up the English habit of using ‘the king’s majesty’s minority’ as a lever on the rebels’ emotions. How could they exploit a mere child?52 In the dark days of 1549, Vermigli was influenced as well as influencing, adopting English conventions, English tropes and possibly delivering the message of the anti-Somerset faction. Co-operation in this crisis sealed his bond with Cranmer and with the emergent, pro-Northumberland, group of reformers at court. This was apparent in the well-managed book-launch given to his Treatise on the Eucharist, which appeared in 1549, bound together with his own account of the Oxford disputation.53 Dedicated to Cranmer, the text was read by the eleven-year-old king, who annotated his own copy, trouncing Vermigli’s conservative opponents with more gusto than accuracy.54 The publicity management became still more evident when, exceptionally for that era, Vermigli’s text was translated into English. The translator was Nicholas Udall, who was also given publishing rights. Udall had translated Erasmus’s Paraphrases and had become tutor to Edward Courtenay, who

48 On English evangelical influence on Ochino, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 438; CCC Parker MS 102, fols 451 and 469. 49

See Chapter 2 above; Shagan, ‘Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions’, EHR, 114 (1999), 34–53 (p. 50). 50

CCC Parker MS 102, fols 462–3.

51

Vinay, ‘Riformatori e lotte contadine’, pp. 224–8. Vinay’s comments on Vermigli’s ‘Letter to the Duke of Somerset’ suggest a mistake concerning the chronology, ibid., pp. 224–5. 52 CCC Parker MS 102, fol. 433. On Nicholas Udall’s stress on Edward’s ‘tendre babehood’, Alford, Kingship, p. 123. On the royal minority, ibid., pp. 51, 61–4. 53

Pietro Martire Vermigli, Tractatio de Sacramento Eucharistiae … Disputatio de eodem sacramento, STC 24673. 54 BL C. 37.e.2, cited by MacCulloch, ‘Martyr and Cranmer’, HRR, p. 186.

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was still keeping up with his humanist syllabus in the Tower. 55 Now Udall was helping Vermigli to become the mouthpiece of a publicity-conscious government, despite the Italian’s ignorance of English.56 At Somerset’s fall from power and imprisonment in the bloodless coup of October 1549, Ochino ran into trouble but Vermigli seems to have stood back and waited to be sure which way the political wind was blowing. It was therefore a very awkward moment when it blew Somerset out of prison again for a (temporary) reprieve. Englishmen struggled to find appropriate words and stable footholds; it was harder for foreigners.57 Vermigli wrote an embarrassed letter, tantamount to an apology: ‘Peradventure it would not have displeased you if I or any such as I should have written unto you [in prison] … I dare say you yourself were of better cheer in the midst of the water than we that stood upon the shore and beheld your wreck. Wherefore I thought it meetest to spend that time in weeping and in prayers’.58 The fact that this letter, too, was translated rapidly, in March 1550, was further proof that Vermigli was being drawn into the court group and used to cover seamy English politics with a cloak of Italian divinity, by telling the fallen Lord Protector that his destruction and partial restoration were both part of God’s plan. The translator of this letter was Thomas Norton, William Cecil’s sonin-law, well disposed to Vermigli and a good Latinist, whom we shall encounter in a later chapter.59 Somerset’s re-emergence and Vermigli’s response threw into stark relief the Italian’s dependence on patronage and the dangers of becoming something of ‘a power in the land’ when that land itself was so politically unstable. However, Vermigli’s main protectors survived. Cranmer’s bitter conflict with Somerset’s successor, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was not kindled until later. John Ponet’s career was ‘one of the great ecclesiastical success stories of the Dudley years’. Cheke, too, was ‘one of the more obvious political survivors of the years 55

A discourse or traictise of Petur Martyr Vermilla Florentine, the publyque reader of diuinitee in the vniversitee of Oxford …. concernynge the sacrament of the Lordes Supper (translated by N. Udall) [London: Robert Stoughton, [i.e. E. Whitchurch ] … for Nicholas Udall [1550]], STC 24665. 56

Vermigli never learned English, or German, or French, Simler, Life, LLS, p. 45.

57

For instance, Willliam Gray’s ‘Sayings to the Duke of Somerset’, CUL Dd. 9.31,

fol. 24. 58 59

Martyr to the Duke of Somerset, c. March 1550, Gleanings, pp. 129–40 (p. 129).

Pietro Martire Vermigli An epistle to the right honorable and Christian prince, the Duke of Somerset written vnto him in Latin awhile after hys deliueraunce out of trouble, by the famous clearke Doctour Peter martyr, and translated into Englyshe by Thomas Norton [London: N. Hill for Gualter Lynne[1550]], STC 24666. The printer, Walter Lynne, had issued both the first and second versions of Ochino’s Tragoedie in the previous year. On Thomas Norton, see below, Chapter 8, p. 185.


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of transition’.60 Vermigli had weathered the political storm and he had not lost his friends. That was as well, because 1551 was a year spent in the limelight. John Hooper, once a protégé of Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, had returned from exile to England and had been offered the diocese of Gloucester, ‘to the exceeding joy of all good men’, according to Vermigli.61 Yet Hooper remained bishop-elect for months, while the ‘good men’ wrestled with his unquiet conscience about the proper vestments for his ordination as bishop. Martin Bucer joined Vermigli in support for the Archbishop’s attempts to quell Hooper’s resistance. Both argued that the vestments were inessentials, ‘adiaphoric’, certainly not enough to make a virtuous bishopelect disobey authority. Writing to Hooper, Vermigli was courteous, but clear: ‘I judge it to be something completely indifferent’. At the end of this letter, he summarised his position carefully: ‘Already, right from the beginning, when I applied my mind to the Gospel I judged that these distinctive vestments should not be used, but I thought that their use was not ungodly and pernicious in itself’.62 Others were not so sure. The Polish reformer, Jan Łaski, took Hooper’s side and, in a rare note of asperity, Vermigli called Łaski ‘the leader of the farce’.63 Bullinger and Gualter in Zurich also supported Hooper; so did Northumberland, at least for a time. Cranmer, Bucer and Cheke were on the other side. The cautious Vermigli, caught in a church quarrel of Trollopian intensity, commented ‘it is well that the bishops have seen my letter [to Hooper], which will clear me of all suspicion’. In privacy to Bucer, a man he trusted, Vermigli vented his disapproval: ‘his [Hooper’s] cause lies in such a state that it cannot be approved by good and pious men’.64 His tone was less critical when he informed Hooper’s one-time mentor, Heinrich Bullinger. In that letter Vermigli stressed that they were all united on the fundamental principle that ultimately these vestments should be abolished.65 He watched the political line-up with care, apparently telling Ab Ulmis that Hooper ‘has lost all his influence with almost all the

60

Alford, Kingship, pp. 138–9, 143.

61

Martyr to Bullinger, 1 June 1550, OL, vol. 2, p. 482.

62

The quotation of this important letter is from Donnelly’s modern translation, Vermigli to Hooper, 4 November 1550, LLS, 48, p. 103. (Also translated in Gleanings, pp. 187–96 (p. 196). Vermigli’s letter was quoted often in quarrels about vestments in Elizabeth’s reign, see below, Chapter 8, pp. 183–4. 63

MacCulloch, ‘Importance of Jan Łaski in the English Reformation’, pp. 315–45; Martyr to Bucer, early February 1551, Gleanings, p. 233. 64

Martyr to Bucer, 10 January 1551 Gleanings, p. 229.

65

Martyr to Bullinger, 28 January 1551, OL, vol. 2, p. 487.

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nobility’.66 Later, when Hooper had given in, Vermigli wrote to Gualter of Zurich: ‘Hooper is delivered from all his troubles [as] I think you understand from others. I never failed him, and I always hoped well of his cause.67 Caught in a minefield, Vermigli nuanced his account; he seemed immersed in the affair, understanding its implications and prepared to air his views – with prudence. He had been of real political use to his patrons, but he had plenty of help. John Cheke, in particular, was an excellent mentor who shared his views about simplicity as regards church ceremonies.68 Cheke provided a translation for Vermigli to work from when preparations began for revising the 1549 Prayer Book. He also gave Vermigli a Cheke’s-eye view of English ‘parliamentary’ politics But what Dr. Cheke has told me gratified me not a little; he says that if they themselves [the bishops] will not effect the changes that are to be made [to the Prayer Book] the king himself will do it; and when he has come to Parliament, he will interpose his royal authority.69

All the evidence suggests a long and loyal friendship between these two. Even after Cheke’s recantation in Mary’s reign, Vermigli still called him his ‘friend’.70 He needed friends in London to counter-balance his troubles in Oxford. In January 1551, with Hooper still resistant, Vermigli moved to a canonry at Christ Church and took his wife to live in college lodgings. Broken windows and insults about concubines followed.71 In February, Hooper finally gave in, but the relief was clouded by widespread grief at the announcement of Martin Bucer’s death in Cambridge. There is a note of exceptional desolation in Vermigli’s comment: ‘O wretched me, as long as Bucer was in England, or while we lived together in Germany, I never felt to be in exile. But now I plainly seem to myself to be alone and desolate’.72 His reaction is understandable. Bucer had taken him in at Strassburg, taught him a lot and been an affectionate and regular correspondent, even though he may have felt somewhat excluded from the Vermigli-Cranmer 66 67

Ab Ulmis to Bullinger, 31December 1550, OL, vol. 2, p. 426. Martyr to Gualter, 25 April 1551, Gleanings, p. 262.

68

Martyr to Bucer, early February 1551, Gleanings, p. 232.

69

Martyr to Bucer 10 January 1551, Gleanings, p. 229. Martyr to an Unknown Friend, 15 March 1557, Gleanings, p. 373.

70

71 Vermigli was granted his canonry at Christ Church in October 1550, Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward VI (1549–51), 3, p. 174, cited by MacCulloch, ‘Peter Martyr and Thomas Cranmer’, HRR, p. 182; Simler, Life, LLS, p. 37. 72

Martyr to Conrad Hubert, 8 March 1551, OL, vol. 2, p. 491.


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duo.73 It even emerged that Vermigli and Bucer had discussed returning to Strassburg, possibly in a post-prandial moment, but it was not an indication that either of them felt settled.74 Cheke stepped in to offer sympathy and support to Vermigli on his bereavement. He began his letter of condolence with a set-piece eulogy of Bucer but ended as a friend who was fully aware of Vermigli’s anxieties about the bereaved family.75 Bucer’s death marked a downturn: ‘You would not believe with what bitterness, obstinacy, perverseness and inflexibility of mind we are resisted by our enemies’, he told Bullinger in April 1551.76 Loneliness in Oxford continued: at a time of political crisis (Somerset had been arrested again), Vermigli claimed: ‘I have no intercourse with any but students’. No doubt he needed to lie low but, coming from the Regius Professor, this seems revealing.77 Years later, in 1566, a very biased witness, the catholic Thomas Harding, depicted the Vermigli family holed up with other foreigners, excluded from Oxford life: ‘To how many private sermons was I called which in his house he made in the Italian tongue to Madame Catherine the Nonne of Metz in Lorraine, his pretensed wife, to Sylvester the Italian, to Francis the Spaniard, to Julio his man, and to me?’78 In fact, Vermigli’s Oxford circle was wider than that. The two young Zurich students, Ab Ulmis and Strumphius were assisting him and he knew at least two canons of Christ Church, Henry Sidall and James Curtop.79 There was one warm local friendship not highlighted by Simler: John Jewel, Reader in Humanity and Rhetoric, had acted as Vermigli’s notary during the Oxford 73 The suggestion is made by MacCulloch, ‘Martyr and Cranmer’, HRR, pp. 189–90; N. Scott Amos, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land: the English Correspondence of Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli’, in Frank James III (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations (Leiden, 2004), pp. 26–46. 74

Martyr to Conrad Hubert, 8 March 1551, OL, vol. 2, p. 491. Vermigli was remembering a conversation with Bucer ‘last summer’, that is, summer 1550. 75 Cheke to Vermigli, 10 March 1551, Gleanings, p. 238. This letter was probably meant partly for a public audience. It forms the first piece in the volume of memorial prose, De obitu doctissimi et sanctissimi theologi doctoris Martini Buceri (London: Reyner Wolfe, 1551), STC 5108. 76

Martyr to Bullinger, 25 April 1551, OL, vol. 2, pp. 493–4; Martyr to Bullinger, 27 January 1550, OL, vol. 2, p. 479. 77

Martyr to Bullinger, 26 October 1551, OL, vol. 2, pp. 499–500.

78

Thomas Harding, A Rejoindre to M. Jewels Reply (Antwerp, 1566), cited by John E. Booty, John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England (London, 1963), p. 74. Harding changed sides to support Mary Tudor’s government and remained a recusant. ‘Francis’ was Francisco Dryander, the Spanish reformer; Julio was Giulio Santerenziano, Vermigli’s faithful secretary. 79 Ab Ulmis spent ‘whole hours’ with him and was treated like ‘a son’, Ab Ulmis to Bullinger, 28 May, 1550, OL, vol. 2, p. 410; Martyr to Bucer 11 November 1550, Gleanings, p. 199; Sidall to Bullinger, 4 October 1552, OL, vol. I, p. 311.

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Disputation and remained an affectionate disciple, joining Vermigli in Strassburg and Zurich during the Marian exile.80 Lonely or not, Oxford’s professor had to go on lecturing. From 1550 until 1552, Vermigli gave a course in Oxford on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The locus de praedestinatione, which follows his exegesis of chapter 9, later became important for the development of English soteriology. The fact that modern theologians place radically different interpretations on this one locus is evidence that Vermigli, like other Italian reformers, can sometimes be hard to pin down. 81 His choice of Romans made it inevitable that he would discuss God’s plan for human salvation, which would lead to man’s free will – or lack of it. Thus, he connected with a topical subject already aired by his fellow Italians: Ochino’s predestination sermons were published in 1551; the Princess Elizabeth was drawn to discuss the subject with him.82 English travellers like Thomas Hoby and William Thomas were reading Francesco Negri’s controversial Tragedia ... intitolata libero arbitrio (Tragedy of Free Will) and Hoby translated the text in 1550.83 The story of Francesco Spiera, available in English translation in 1550, also provoked the question whether Spiera was just a bad man or somehow ‘predestined’ to sin. Italian reformers were providing food for predestinarian thought and Vermigli’s lectures were part of that context. In the locus on predestination, which dates from 1551–2, Vermigli suddenly alluded to the story of Spiera. It was a gripping illustration: ‘In our time indeed it happened that a certain man in Italy named Francis Spira inwardly felt that God had inflicted upon him this evil. But this I suppose was done to the terror of others’. An account of Spira’s recantation and death is followed by Vermigli’s analysis. He speculated that ‘God would in this man by a certain singular dispensation feare others away from like wickedness and impiety’, but rejected the idea as unlikely. Alternatively, ‘peradventure God did not put this into the head of Spira but the Devil, whose bond slave he was, having now renounced piety, to the end to drive him to utter desperation’. The tale was full of temptation to dangerous theology, precisely because it was not clear who caused Spiera’s agony: Spiera himself, God or the 80

John Craig, ‘Jewel, John (1522–1571)’, ODNB. Simler’s silence on this subject may have been due to Jewel’s temporary conformity at the beginning of Mary Tudor’s reign. 81 Vermigli began lecturing on Romans in March 1550, Ab Ulmis to Bullinger, 25 March 1550, OL, vol. 2, p. 401. Pietro Martire Vermigli, In Epistolam S.Pauli ad Romanos commentarii doctissimi … (Basel: P. Perna, 1558). ‘There is no doubt that what he published in 1558 reflects his earlier lectures’, James III, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Predestination, pp. 17–23 (p. 62, note 3). On differing interpretations, see Peter Martyr Vermigli, Theological Loci: Justification and Predestination, trans. and ed. Frank James III, Peter Martyr Library, vol. 8 (Kirksville MO, 2003), Introduction, p. xxix. 82 83

Ochino, Fouretene Sermons; see above, Chapter 2, p. 56. See above, Chapter 4, pp. 89–90; Hoby, Travail, p. 63.


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Devil. Vermigli tried to sort it out by making a distinction between God’s elect and the rest (including Spiera). He sounded ill at ease, but neither he nor most sixteenth century commentators (except Latimer) objected to the ‘providential’ theology of the story.84 In the last eighteen months of the reign, Vermigli was working in a more brutal political atmosphere. After imprisonment, followed by a short trial, the Duke of Somerset finally went to his illegal death on 22 January 1552. Also, the balance of power was changing, as the King’s minority was coming to an end.85 From the winter of 1552 onwards, the tensions between Cranmer and Northumberland became clear. There was little the Italian could do but bury himself in ‘contracts’ engineered by the Archbishop: revision of the Ecclesiastical Laws, the 1552 Prayer Book, consultation on the Articles of Religion. Of those three projects, only two were ever authorised by parliament; the Laws remained one of the mighthave-beens of English history.86 In October 1551 Vermigli was appointed to the eight man sub-committee responsible for revision of the Laws, which provided the chance to escape sometimes from Oxford and to see more of his English friends: Cheke, Cooke, Cox, Latimer, even Hooper joined him on the Commission. Vermigli and Cox were together on the drafting sub-committee. He probably met William Cecil at this time and Simler says that, while working on later drafts, he made two new friends, Walter Haddon and Rowland Taylor.87 Because these ‘laws’ were never passed, it is easy to lose contemporaries’ initial sense of excitement about the major changes ahead. Vermigli was working hard at Lambeth in February and March 1552.88 For him, as for Cranmer, the Laws were part of a much bigger, European, picture. The Reformatio offered a 84

Vermigli made a distinction between ‘them that are utterly without all feeling of piety’ and ‘the godly’, Vermigli, Commentaries … vpon the Epistle to the Romans (1568), STC 24672, pp. 288–312 (p. 301); Latimer, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 425. Vermigli himself told a very similar tale, but with a happy ending, about a man ‘in our own time at London in England’, LLS, Letter 152, p. 166. 85

Alford, Kingship, pp. 157–64.

86

Gerald Bray, Tudor Church Reform: The Henrician Canons of 1535 and the ‘Reformatio Legum Ecclesiaticarum’ (Woodbridge, 2000), Introduction, pp. lxxvi–xcix; Thomas Freeman, ‘“The reformation of the Church in this parliament”: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), 131–47 (p. 143). 87 The full Commission may not have met; for personnel, see Bray, Tudor Church Reform, Introduction, pp. xlvi–li; Simler, Life, LLS, p. 38; Haddon’s hand appears on the manuscript draft from October 1552, BL MS Harleian 426, cited by Bray, ibid., p. lvi; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 493–4. 88

Ab Ulmis to Bullinger 5 February 1552, OL, vol. 2, p. 447; Martyr to Bullinger, 8 March 1552, OL, vol. 2, p. 503; John Jackson, ‘Law and Order: Vermigli and the Reform of the Ecclesiastical Laws in England’, in James III (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations, pp. 267–90 (p. 271).

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chance to engage with the Council of Trent on social, legal, institutional – and doctrinal – fronts. Vermigli had already responded carefully to one of Trent’s theological decrees.89 Now he hoped the new laws might ‘replace the canons of Trent among the churches faithful to Christ’.90 But he saw a problem looming: laws need consent. He asked for Bullinger’s prayers ‘that they may obtain the sanction of Parliament, or else they will not possess any force or authority whatsoever’.91 His anxiety was prophetic. The hold-ups and hitches of the last phase of the Edwardian reformation have been expertly told and they will be summarised here only in so far as Vermigli was affected by them.92 Two things lay behind Cranmer’s conflict with the Duke of Northumberland and on both issues it is likely that Vermigli was (discreetly) on the Archbishop’s side. First, Northumberland’s group were identified with moves to seize church property.93 Second, Northumberland was nurturing some radical friends, among them Jan Łaski and the Scottish reformer, John Knox. 94 As we have seen, the Italian had not approved of Łaski’s part in the Hooper affair.95 It seems improbable that he liked the colourful new royal chaplain, John Knox, any better. Vermigli was orderly and did not react well to drama: these men were not his type and 1552 was not his year. Work on the laws stopped abruptly in June. However, there was brighter news on the new Prayer Book, to which Vermigli himself had contributed the Adhortatio, bidding the faithful to communion. He had also influenced rubrics directing that sick communion should be no longer a private affair: instead, the sick person’s family and friends should join in the celebration and reception of the sacrament.96 He was distinctly pleased with the drafts

89

Cranmer trailed the idea of a grand reformation ‘Council of London’, MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 501–2. Vermigli’s locus on justification in his Oxford lectures on Romans has been seen as ‘his first extensive interaction with the Council’, Vermigli, Theological Loci: Justification and Predestination, trans. and ed. Frank James III, Translator’s Introduction, p. xxxiii. 90

Martyr to Bullinger, 14 June 1552, Gleanings, pp. 280–83.

91

Martyr to Bullinger, 8 March 1552, OL, vol. 2, p. 504. MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 517–40.

92 93

Ibid., p. 523.

94

MacCulloch, ‘The Importance of Jan Łaski in the English Reformation’, p. 335.

95

However, Vermigli was very compassionate about Łaski’s bereavement, Vermigli to Utenhoven, 9 May 1553, Gleanings, pp. 293–5. 96 Martyr to Bullinger, 14 June 1552, Gleanings, p. 281; F.E. Brightman, The English Rite (2 vols London, 1915), vol. 1, p. cliv; vol. 2, pp. 828, 842–3. Alan Beesley shows that the Second Exhortation to attend communion in the 1552 Prayer Book is virtually identical with Vermigli’s Adhortatio, ‘An Unpublished Source of the Book of Common Prayer; Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Adhortatio ad Coenam Domini Mysticam’, JEH, 19 (1968), 83–8.


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of the Prayer Book, ‘all things are removed from it which could nourish superstition’.97 Northumberland, Knox and Łaski took a different view. The Prayer Book had received parliamentary approval and was already in press when the Privy Council suddenly ordered that it should be withdrawn for improvements on the specific of issue of kneeling for communion. When recalling the book, Northumberland ordered that the (now angry) Archbishop Cranmer should consult about the matter of kneeling with others: patronisingly, the Duke suggested Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Vermigli. Apparently the Italian himself was in better grace than the book to which he had contributed. Vermigli received another vote of confidence when the Privy Council tried to make sure he stayed in post at Oxford and was not recalled to Strassburg.98 In a worsening political situation, he was surviving. So was his one-time colleague at Lucca, Emmanuele Tremellio, who was teaching Hebrew at Cambridge, but was also proposed for a prebend at Carlisle in September 1552.99 Ochino was quiet at this time, but apparently riding the storm. It is noteworthy that Northumberland, locking horns with Cranmer and the bishops, did not also turn on the Archbishop’s Italian friends. The ‘black rubric’ directing that congregations should kneel at communion, to signify reverence but not adoration, provided a semisolution to the Prayer Book battle and was effectively a victory for Cranmer. In great haste the unconventional ‘rubric’ was inserted into the book on printers’ slips on 22 October 1552 and in that rough-hewn form the new rite was distributed. Despite the stormy passage, English worshippers were given a radically reformed communion service, strongly influenced by Vermigli’s theology of the Eucharist. That influence stemmed from his actual contributions and, probably even more important, from his discussions with Cranmer about Eucharistic theology. Englishmen did not, however, benefit from the Laws on which the Italian worked so hard. He was entrusted with the drafting of four highly technical sections of the code and his neat, italic hand litters one manuscript, dating from October 1552.100 Then Vermigli went quiet, he had been ill, and his wife was worse. In February 1553, Caterina Vermigli died and was buried

97

Vermigli to Bullinger, 14 June 1552, Gleanings, p. 281. BL Royal MS 18 C XXIV, fol. 287 v (note of a letter of 8 January 1553), cited by MacCulloch, ‘Martyr and Cranmer’, HRR, p. 195; OL, vol. I, p. 370. 98

99

Tremellio’s name was proposed to Cecil on 5 September 1552, BL Lansdowne MS 2, fol. 201r, cited by Alford, Kingship, p. 141. 100 Bray, Tudor Church Reform, liv–lxi; John Jackson, ‘Law and Order: Vermigli and the Reform of the Ecclesiastical Laws in England’, in James III (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations, pp. 267–90 (pp. 274–9).

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in Oxford.101 In March, in a sour political atmosphere, the Ecclesiastical Laws were finally defeated in the House of Lords, with bitter words from Northumberland, addressed to Cranmer and the bishops.102 In May 1553, when the King was already seriously ill, the new Catechism appeared, with the 42 Articles appended. There have been suggestions that Article XVII on predestination also reveals Vermigli’s influence, but there are important differences between his theology of double predestination and the less bold phrasing of the articles.103 Amidst frantic political manoeuvring, the teenage King made his will.104 He made reference to Cranmer’s and Vermigli’s unfinished business: he wanted the Laws to be published after his death. Edward VI also signed the device disinheriting Mary Tudor, making Lady Jane Grey Queen, and England ‘safe’ for the reformation. Edward VI was ‘making sense of his short life’.105 Vermigli may have been tempted to make sense of his exile and join his two patrons, Cranmer and Cheke, in supporting this alteration of the succession.106 But he went silent, as did Ochino and the rest of the strangers. The King died on 6 July, Mary Tudor rallied her supporters and a fortnight later she had triumphed and was Queen. Suddenly Vermigli had ceased to be a government adviser and became a suspect foreign heretic: he was ordered to stay at home in Oxford, ‘not to take a step without permission from the magistrate’.107 There are four main sources for Vermigli’s last weeks in England; two letters from Vermigli himself, one from his chatty secretary, Giulio Santerenziano; last, there is Josiah Simler’s colourful account, written nine

101

Vermigli to Bullinger, 4 October 1552, Gleanings, pp. 286–7.

102


103

J.P. Donnelly argues that the Article on Predestination (number 17, in both 42 and 39 Articles) is similar to Vermigli’s definition in his commentary on Romans, ibid, Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace (Leiden, 1976), p. 176. But see Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 235–6. Null shows how the clear predestinarianism of Cranmer’s private papers became more ambiguous in public statements (p. 222). Article X (1553) denied that God’s election involved compulsion: ‘yet nevertheless he enforceth not the will’ (ibid., p. 234). For Vermigli’s doctrine after 1547, see James III, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Predestination, pp. 73–86, especially pp. 84–85. 104

One expression of the general denial was the invitation Cranmer sent to the reformer Philip Melanchthon on 7 June 1553 to become Vermigli’s opposite number at Cambridge, John Schofield, Philip Melanchthon and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 172–3. 105

MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 40–41.

106

Cheke was appointed Principal Secretary on 2 June 1553. Thus, he was involved in preparing drafts of the succession device. Cranmer signed the document between 17 and 19 June 1553, MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 537–8, 540–41. 107

Simler, Life, LLS, p. 39.


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years later.108 All emphasised that Vermigli had been in danger and was isolated ‘since everyone, except only [Henry] Sidall and master [Walter] Haddon, had withdrawn from his society’.109 Vermigli finally gained permission to go to London to seek a safe conduct. There he visited Cranmer, who had already proposed publicly that they should join together in a disputation to defend the Edwardian revolution. Cranmer’s words are significant: Whereabout though that many do maliciously report of Mr Peter Martyr that he is a man of no learning and not to be credited, yet if the Queen’s Majesty will grant it, I with the said Mr Peter and other four or five which I will choose will by God’s grace take upon us to defend [the Prayer Book service and teaching].110

Despite that telling recognition that his Italian friend still had many enemies, Cranmer nonetheless placed him above all the other possible codisputants, English or Italian. Vermigli ‘was ready for the disputation’, but it never happened.111 The new government was not that stupid. Cranmer and Vermigli ended as they had begun: two academic and rather reserved men, who understood each other. There appears to have been real affection on both sides but, like humanist advisers all over Europe, Vermigli took care to please his patrons and serve his political masters. With regard to the Oxford Eucharistic Disputation in 1549, Somerset’s fall or Hooper’s defiance, he had never argued with his bosses. On the rebellions he seems to have taken Cranmer’s side. His innate caution was valuable in the political quicksands. Often he was bewildered by the difficulties of ‘founding a church’ in a nation which debated religion on every street corner.112 He seemed to relish the thought that the whole contentious business might be settled by ‘royal authority’ and throughout his (nearly) six years of exile he was a willing servant of that authority.113 108 Vermigli to Bullinger, Strassburg, 3 November 1553, OL, vol. 2, pp. 505–7; Vermigli to Calvin, 3 November, 1553, Gleanings, pp. 305–06; Julius Terentianus to John ab Ulmis, Strassburg, November 20, 1553, OL, vol. I, pp. 365–74; Simler, LLS, pp. 38–40. 109

Terentianus to John ab Ulmis, OL, vol.1, p. 370; Sidall eventually conformed. A declaration of the reverent Father in God Thomas Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury, condemning the untrue and slanderous reporte of some which haue reportid that he should sett up the Mass at Canterbury….1553 imprynted 1557, in Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 428–30 (p. 429). For the several different texts of this document, see David Selwyn, ‘Cranmer’s Writings: A Bibliographical Survey’, in Ayris and Selwyn, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 281–302 (pp. 284–5). 110

111 112


Martyr to Bucer, 15 January 1549, Gleanings, p. 74; Martyr to Bucer, 26 December 1548, OL, vol. 2, p. 468. 113 Martyr to Bucer, 10 January 1551, Gleanings, p. 229.

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His theological influence is beyond question. It is wrong to say that the Archbishop was completely reliant on him, as their conservative enemies did. But Cranmer had certainly borrowed from Vermigli new slants on the same doctrines and perhaps an even deeper knowledge of patristic sources. Influenced by Swiss theology, they were thinking on much the same lines about the hot topics of the day: the authority of rulers, rebellion, predestination and, especially, the Eucharist. Vermigli’s Tractatio was a powerful influence on Cranmer’s own famous piece on Eucharistic doctrine, the Defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the Sacrament.114 Because of his influence on the Archbishop, the Italian played an important role in the process of turning the English mass into a communion.115 On the other hand, it is unlikely that Vermigli altered Cranmer’s views on the theology of predestination very much, if at all. The Archbishop’s private papers show him to have been already a predestinarian when Vermigli arrived and his public statements on this contentious subject were more pastoral and more ambiguous than the mature theology of his Italian friend.116 Finally, in 1551, Cranmer chose Vermigli not just as a theologian but also as a competent canonist for work on the Ecclesiastical Laws, in preference to English lawyers.117 Their six-year collaboration created a close bond which compensated to some degree for the unrelenting hostility at Oxford. Vermigli spent considerable time on his contracts at Lambeth, reading, writing and textswopping. This led to contacts at court: King Edward VI had shown youthful interest; Cheke, Cox and Ponet were strong supporters; Udall, Norton and (informally) Cheke became translators, compensating in part for that ‘want of acquaintance with the English language’ of which Vermigli was acutely aware.118 It appears that Vermigli was somewhat less reliant than Ochino on the wider humanist court network and more dependent on his personal contacts with Cranmer and Cheke. Both Italians, however, had to please, work hard and do as they were told. Depicted as apostles, they were also servants. Finally, at their last dinner together in September 1553, Cranmer advised Vermigli to leave quickly and, if needs be, to flee. Then, as Simler noted, 114

Thomas Cranmer, A Defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the Sacrament (London: Reyner Wolfe, 1550), STC 6000, 6001; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 462–9, 490–91. 115 Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist, pp. 59, 75, 93; MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, pp. 87–9; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 382–3, 403–8. 116

MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 211–12. For Cranmer, repentance was ‘a sure sign of salvation’, and Article XVII ‘concentrates on how predestination provides assurance’, Null, Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 203–4 and 236. 117

Jackson, ‘Law and Order’, p. 289. Martyr to Rudolf Gualter, 1 June 1550, OL, vol. 2, p. 485; Martyr to Bucer, 10 January 1551, Gleanings, pp. 229–30; Löwe, Richard Smyth, p. 48. 118


123

‘The archbishops of Canterbury and York, along with bishops of London and Worcester were led off to prison’.119 Vermigli could not turn to other English patrons for help because John Cheke and Richard Cox had been arrested for having signed the device to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and Anthony Cooke was also imprisoned, suspected of complicity.120 Finally, Vermigli pointed out to ‘the councillors of the realm’ that he had not come to England ‘by his private wish but was summoned by the serene King Edward’. He was given his safe conduct, signed by the Queen, but left Giulio Santerenziano behind in London ‘to deceive them more effectually’.121 There is no mention of any contact with Ochino or other Italians – although they were leaving London in the same month. For greater safety Vermigli appears to have travelled alone and Simler says he hid in the home of a devout sea captain for two weeks before sailing.122 After weeks of dithering, Queen Mary’s government had decided that the strangers should go, and go quickly; according to Foxe, Bishop Stephen Gardiner arranged funding for Vermigli’s journey, ‘he gaue hym wherewith to beare his charges’.123 Castiglione remained in post in the Princess Elizabeth’s household but the other Italian-born members of this group returned to the European mainland. Vermigli went via hostile Antwerp to Strassburg; Tremellio found Strassburg’s theology uncongenial and moved on to Calvinist heartlands; Ochino went via Geneva, then Basel, to Zurich. English members of this Anglo-Italian nexus faced a Spiera-like choice: dissimulation or witness? conformity or conscience? Some more or less conformed, hiding their reformation sympathies: Ascham served Queen Mary, so did Udall. William Cecil resigned his post as principal secretary but undertook occasional specific commissions for the Marian government; the Princess Elizabeth has been seen as the leading Nicodemite of Mary’s reign.124 All the rest of this network left England for exile. Ponet’s movements are unclear but ultimately he and Morison settled in Strassburg, to Queen Mary’s disgust and Vermigli’s pleasure. The choice made by Cheke, Cooke, 119


120

McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke’, p. 242. 121 Simler, Life, LLS, p. 38; Vermigli to Bullinger, Strassburg, 3 November 1553, OL, vol. 2, pp. 505–6; Terentianus to Ab Ulmis, Strassburg, 20 November 1553, OL, vol. 1, p. 372. 122


123

Foxe, AM (1563), book 12, p. 1566; LLS, p. 126, note 12.

124

Ascham returned to England and became Queen Mary’s Latin Secretary on 7 May, 1554, O’Day, ‘Roger Ascham’, ODNB; MacCaffrey, ‘William Cecil, ODNB; Elizabeth Evenden, ‘The “Michael Wood” Mystery: William Cecil and the Lincolnshire Printing of John Day’, SCJ, 35 (2004), 383–95; Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, pp. 103–4.

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Francis Russell and others is significant for this history. Between 1553 and 1556, many English members of the ‘Italian connection’ travelled to Italy, bound for the Veneto, the seedbed of Italian reform.

CHAPTER SIX

Venetian Exile and English Propaganda False rumours have been circulated there [at Rome] by the malignants to alienate men’s minds from their devotion to the pope, availing themselves of the letters of certain Englishmen abroad in Italy on account of their bad religion. Pole to the Archbishop of Conza [Girolamo Muzzarelli], Nuncio at Brussels, London, 26 October 1555.1

By the spring of 1554, Vermigli was safely re-settled in Strassburg. On 9 May, he wrote to Calvin about the arrival there of Morison, Cheke and Cooke, who had all been given royal licence to leave England.2 Vermigli already knew the three Englishmen and he commented that they were ‘not less conspicuous for godliness than for learning’.3 Yet Cheke was restless: in May, accompanied by Sir Richard Morison, he visited Zurich and Geneva. On his return to Strassburg, he learned of the Queen’s anger at his visit to Calvin’s city. In need of a less provocative refuge, he decided on Italy. Having met his Italian contacts, Curione and Castellio in Basel, Cheke moved on to Padua, arriving on 10 July.4 He was no longer accompanied by Morison or Cooke, but by Sir Thomas Wrothe, another stout reformer.5 Cheke and Wrothe were the first arrivals of the two parties of English travellers in Italy with which this chapter will be principally concerned. Its objective is to trace the Italian exile of Englishmen who had already established connections with Italian reformers at the court of Edward VI. Then they became travellers in catholic Venice. Did their religious affiliations influence their Italian journeys? Was this a ‘religious’ exile, or a 1

CSP Venetian (1555–56), 255, p. 224; CRP 1415.

2

On Cheke’s exile, see John McDiarmid, ‘“To content God quietlie”: the Troubles of Sir John Cheke under Queen Mary’, in Elizabeth Evenden (ed.), 1556–57: the Crucible of English Confessional Conflict (Aldershot, forthcoming). I am very grateful to John McDiarmid for allowing me to read this paper prior to publication and for his most generous help; Strassburg Protocols, 1554–58, fol. 131v and fol. 167v, printed in Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles; a Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 1938, reprinted 1966), p. 362. 3

Martyr to Calvin, 9 May 1554, Gleanings, 103, pp. 316–17.

4

Strassburg Protocols, fol. 167v, printed Garrett, Marian Exiles, p. 362; Guggisberg, Sebastien Castellio, p. 60. 5

Cheke to Mason, Padua, 12 July 1554, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 247:1, p. 112; Garrett, Marian Exiles, p. 345.

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‘political’ one? This chapter will suggest that it was neither, but that these men were Nicodemites, trying to stay out of trouble in a very troubled place. The first group in the Veneto increased rapidly. In mid-August, came Sir Peter Carew, a new name in this book, known more as a soldier-adventurer than as a reformer, but he was fluent in Italian and had supported the Edwardian reformation.6 Before the end of August 1554, the Hoby brothers had arrived: Sir Thomas and his older brother, the sociable diplomat Sir Philip. In his Travail and lief of me Thomas Hoby, Hoby listed the Englishmen present in Padua at that time: ‘Sir Thomas Wroth, Sir Jhon Cheeke, Sir Henry Nevill, Sir John Cutts, Mr Bartie [probably Richard Bertie, husband of the Duchess of Suffolk], Mr Tamworth, travelling with three of Sir Anthony Denny’s sons, Mr Henry Cornwallis, Mr John Ashley, Mr Drurye, Mr Henry Kingsmill, Mr Windam, Mr Robert Carew, and Mathew his brother, Mr Brooke, Mr Orphinstrange, with diverse other. And shortlie after here arrived Sir Anthonye Cooke.’7 Cheke, the Hobys and their close friends stayed for about a year. In July 1555, about a month before they decided to leave Northern Italy, a second set of English travellers began to arrive. Their leaders were two noblemen equally conversant with Italian reform: the godly Sir Francis Russell, accompanied by some thirteen gentlemen, all of whom were sympathetic to reform. Then, early in 1556, Russell and his retinue met Sir Edward Courtenay, now made Earl of Devon, cousin to the Queen and to Cardinal Pole, translator of the Beneficio di Cristo.8 These Italian groups were different from English exiles in German and Swiss cities. The Venetian exiles were all men, travelling without their families; all were gentlemen and two (Russell and Courtenay) were nobles; the majority were learned and there were no churchmen.9 Most dissented from Mary Tudor’s catholic religion and virtually all disapproved of her

6 Sir John Mason to the Council, 26 August 1554, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 256, p. 116; J.P.D. Cooper, ‘Carew, Sir Peter (1514?–1575)’, ODNB. 7

Hoby also found his old friend Thomas Fitzwilliam still resident in Padua, Hoby, Travaile, pp. 116–17; Bartlett, English in Italy, pp. 109–22. 8 There were, in all, about fifty Englishmen in the Veneto during Mary Tudor’s reign, including: Sir William Pickering, once a pupil of Cheke; Thomas Dannet, a relative of William Cecil; last, Sir John Chichester, suspected of complicity in both Wyatt’s and Dudley’s plots, Kenneth R. Bartlett, ‘The Household of Francis Russell in Venice, 1555’, Medieval Prosopography, 2 (1981), 63–83 (pp. 71–2). In 1555, Thomas Wilson and Francis Walsingham arrived to study in Padua, see Woolfson, Padua, Biographical Register, pp. 280– 81 and 285. 9

Bartlett, English in Italy, p. 79.

VENETIAN EXILE AND ENGLISH PROPAGANDA

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marriage to Philip II of Spain.10 But no one who went to Venetian territory and left vulnerable families behind in England was likely to own up boldly to religious disaffection, nor to hating the planned Spanish marriage, nor to knowledge of the several plots against the Queen Mary’s regime. Instead, the reasons they gave for their journeys to the sun were smooth and gentlemanly, like Edward Courtenay’s need to see Italy and the world and Thomas Hoby’s claim that he accompanied his reformer brother Sir Philip, ‘to go to visit the baynes beyond the seas, for the better recoverie of a certaine old disease of his’.11 Their interest in therapeutic spas was well known and genuine but also convenient. Their smokescreens are symptoms of the problems with which this chapter will be concerned. Why did these men choose Italy? This question is related to the controversy about the part played by ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ more generally in the resistance to Queen Mary.12 The Venetian exiles have been depicted as ‘essentially political rather than religious refugees’.13 There are problems attached to this view. First, almost all of them had been sympathetic to the Edwardian reformation and several had befriended Italian reformers at Edward’s court. The cities they chose to stay in, Ferrara, Mantua, Padua and Venice all had traditions of Italian reform, as well as anti-Habsburg sentiment. Second, unlike all other cities of refuge, even moderate ones, Venice was catholic. Its hatred of the Habsburgs and habitual spats with the papacy made no difference to its unswerving religious devotion, and by 1553 the Venetian Inquisition was securely in place and watching, hawk-eyed, all contacts between English travellers and its own ‘heretics’. Venice was not a plotters’ playground but a very risky choice. Their wanderings in this distant location have received relatively little scholarly attention.14 In those troubled times, it is far from clear 10 David Loades, ‘The English Church during the Reign of Mary’, in John Edwards and Ronald Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 33–49. For differing views on the meaning of ‘catholic’ in Marian England, see Lucy Wooding, ‘The Marian Restoration and the Language of Catholic Reform’, ibid. pp. 49– 64 and William Wizeman, SJ, ‘The Pope, the Saints and the Dead: Uniformity of Doctrine in Caranza’s Catechismo and the Printed Works of the Marian Theologians’, ibid. pp. 115–38. 11

Devon to James Bassett, 29 May 1555, CSPDM, 181, pp. 96–7; Devon to Lady Maurice Berkely, 23 November 1555, CSPDM, 282, pp. 136–7; Hoby, Travaile, p. 103. 12 David Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 16 and 88. For the opposite view, see Malcolm R. Thorp, ‘Religion and the Wyatt Rebellion’, Church History, 47 (1978), 363–80 (especially pp. 363–4). 13 Bartlett, ‘Role of the Marian Exiles’, in Hasler (ed.), House of Commons, 1558– 1603, p. 104. 14

Kenneth Bartlett’s work is the main exception, English in Italy; ibid., ‘The Household of Francis Russell’; ibid., ‘The Misfortune that is wished for him: the exile and death of

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whose evidence we can trust: the exiles themselves (cautious), the English government (sick with suspicion) or foreign ambassadors and observers (engaged in diplomatic and confessional back-stabbing). In addition, traditional historical terminology distorts and confuses. Exile often involves fleeing in secret – but most of these men were travelling with the Marian government’s connivance: the authorities wanted rid of them. Exile can also signify an enforced and miserable banishment: ‘by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’. Some of the Venetian group, especially older men with families, like Cheke and Carew, were homesick and wifesick. On the other hand, Sir Thomas Hoby, whose Travail is an important source, sometimes seems to suggest that they were English gents enjoying a delightful (and harmless) Italian spree. By 1554 Venice’s ‘heretics’ were in trouble. The Venetian Inquisition, already in operation for six years, had the upper hand. We have seen that the house of the English ambassador had been a heretics’ hiding place during the tenure of Harvel and Vanni, whilst Vanni was still wearing his ‘protestant’ hat. But behold a changed Pietro Vanni: no longer recommending the works of German reformers, but assiduously serving a catholic government and therefore hostile towards English travellers, whom he saw as potential traitors to Queen Mary. Thus there was no longer an ambassadorial ‘safe-house’. These were dangerous times and the English travellers’ cover for contact with remnants of the Italian spirituali was blown by Vanni’s volte-face. Although some were lavishly entertained, they could not do anything in public to further their religion.15 The ambassadors of the Emperor, the King of France, the Queen of England and the Signoria of Venice were playing diplomatic games in which the exiles might become pawns.16 English travellers knew they were in danger; hence the retinues employed by those rich enough. The Venetians advised that Carew should go round Venice ‘well armed and appointed’ and gave permission for Courtenay to have an armed retinue.17 The dark, narrow calle of Venice were the perfect place for assault and Ambassador Vanni was not above instigating it. No

Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon’, Canadian Journal of History 16 (1979) 1–28. Woolfson, Padua, Biographical Register, pp. 205–89; Overell, ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy’, pp. 117–35. 15

For Venetian festivities, Devon to Sir John Mason, 2 May 1556, CSPDM, 418, p. 203; John A. Wagner, The Devon Gentleman: the Life of Sir Peter Carew (Hull, 1998), pp. 210–21. 16

E. Harris Harbison, Rival Ambassadors at the Court of Queen Mary (Princeton,

1940). 17

Wagner, Devon Gentleman, p. 210; CSP Venetian (1555–56), 385 and 386, p. 343.


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wonder Thomas Hoby highlighted pleasure trips, fishing and classical sight-seeing, but not prayer meetings.18 These Englishmen’s views about religion were manifest in the company they kept, in all they had done before they came to Italy and in what they did next. Their itineraries speak volumes. Often their visits to Italy were sandwiched between spells in Swiss and German ‘protestant’ cities. Once they reached the relative safety of those cities, discretion went to the winds. Morison and Cooke assured the Strassburg magistrates that they had been ‘banished by Queen Mary because they could not accept the religion of the papacy’; ‘they left their country on account of religion’.19 In the lands of the Reformation, their exile was all about religion; in Venice, records on the subject are almost non-existent. In both cases suspicion is the best policy. On arrival, Sir John Cheke struck a positive, humanist note: he planned ‘to learn … the Italian tongue, which he despair[ed] not of’. Since he had been Cardano’s host and Vermigli’s friend, he may have had some grounding already. Also, he aimed ‘philosophically to course over the civil law’.20 While at Padua he gave informal readings on Demosthenes’ Orations. Demosthenes was one of Cheke’s favourite authors and he was already well practised in the art of making classical literature convey relevant messages. He had used his Latin translation of Plutarch, De Superstitione, to comment on Henrician religious debates.21 Demosthenes was equally malleable stuff: he was remembered for defending Athenian liberty and advocating unity against the ravages of King Philip of Macedon. There was a happy coincidence of King Philips: for Athens, read England; for Philip of Macedon, read Philip of Spain. One of Cheke’s learned audience, Thomas Wilson, seems to have made that connection. Twelve years later, in Elizabeth’s reign, Thomas Wilson published his translation of ‘The three orations of Demosthenes … with those his fower orations titled expressly and by name against King Philip of Macedon’. His title included the solemn warning that Demosthenes was ‘most needfull to be redde in these dangerous dayes’ and, in a prefatory letter, he remembered Cheke’s lectures on the great Greek political thinker.22 Cheke’s point had been made and understood, but ‘told slant’ in relative safety. 18

Hoby, Travail, pp. 117–21. Strassburg Protocols, 7 September 1555 and 1 October 1555, vol. 33 (1555), fols 363r–363v and fol. 393v, printed in Garrett, Marian Exiles, p. 366. 20 Cheke to Sir John Mason, Padua, 12 July, 1554, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 247:1, p. 112. 19

21

McDiarmid, ‘Cheke’s Preface to De Superstitione’, especially p. 117. Thomas Wilson’s dedicatory letter to William Cecil, The Three Orations of Demosthenes chiefe Orator among the Grecians, in favour of the Olynthians, a people of 22

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About religion, too, Cheke was cautious, but whilst he was in Venice he wrote a Latin treatise, ‘An ecclesia posit errare’, ‘whether the Church can err’, generally known as ‘De Ecclesia’.23 His argument was based on the distinction between the visible church, which could fall into error, and the invisible one, made up of the elect and those who have the Spirit, which could never err irretrievably. Meditation on ‘them’ and ‘us’, a common theme for minority groups, was highlighted by the English exiles’ situation in Venice at the time Cheke was writing, for ‘they established a community but not an extra-territorial English Church, like their compatriots in Germany’.24 That was the price of travel in catholic states. Apparently they were not required to attend catholic services and later Cheke claimed that they did not do so. To that degree their spiritual situation was better than that of many protestant reformers in Marian England. Perhaps partly for that reason Cheke counselled caution: ‘there are times when even the good should keep silent because the times are bad, as the prophet Amos said’ (Amos 5:13). 25 His comments suggest a wistful Nicodemism. In private letters, only a few hints of Cheke’s loathing of catholicism are allowed to come through. Before he arrived in Italy, he had written to his wife, Mary Cheke, commenting that her own unhappiness was ‘happy’ because she was ‘not troubled with the strangeness of strangers, which thing, next to an evil Religion, is to my nature the most odious’.26 After arrival in Italy, on 22 July 1554, in a letter written to Sir William Petre, Cheke complained of Italian morals, ‘breaking of marriage a sport, murder in a gentleman magnanimity … religion [taken] to be the best that best agreeth with Aristotle’s de anima’.27 That was about as close as these exiled Englishmen came to direct criticism of catholicism in letters home. Thracia, now called Romania: with those his fower Orations titled expressly and by name against King Philip of Macedonie…, trans. Thomas Wilson (London: Henry Denham, 1570), STC 6578; Alastair Blanshard and Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Thomas Wilson’s Demosthenes and the Politics of Tudor Translation’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 12 (2005), pp. 46–80. William Temple was also present at Cheke’s ‘lectures’, Woolfson, Padua, Biographical Register, p. 275. 23

BL MS Harl. 417, translated and quoted in John McDiarmid,’ “To content god quietlie”, in Evenden (ed.), 1556–57: Crucible of English Confessional Conflict, forthcoming. 24 Bartlett, English in Italy, p. 79. 25 Cheke to Calvin, 12 October 1554, Opera Calvini XV(Corpus Reformatorum XLIII), no. 2029, cols. 266–7; BL MS Harl.417, ‘De Ecclesia’, fol. 180r, trans. and cited by McDiarmid, ‘“To content god quietlie”’; on erroneous laws and the subject’s ‘caution’, see ‘De Ecclesia’, fol. 189v. 26

BL Addit. MS 46367, fols 14v–15r, Cheke to Mary Cheke, 1554. I am indebted to John McDiarmid for this reference. 27 Cheke to Sir William Petre, Padua, 22 July 1554, CSP Foreign (1553–-58), 240, pp. 105–6; Kenneth Bartlett ‘The Strangeness of Strangers’, Quaderni d’italianistica, 1 (1980), pp. 46–63.


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The exiles’ letters were unyielding, partly because intercepts of private correspondence were common and the zealous Pietro Vanni was postmaster.28 Moreover, their ‘good behaviour’ was required by friends conforming to the Marian regime, who interpreted their Italian journey as a way of keeping out of trouble, a conciliatory act. Sir John Mason, shrewd English ambassador to the Imperial Court, was the stepfather of Cheke’s wife, Mary, and was helping maintain their children. He wrote: ‘Sir John Cheke is in Padua. I trust the Queen’s highness will be better to him for that he is not settled in such places where sects do bear rule’.29 Philip Hoby’s servant, Richard Scudamore, reminded his master that by keeping company with disaffected Englishmen on the way to Italy he had broken ‘promyses to dyuers of yor ffrendes’.30 Philip Hoby received that sharp criticism on arrival in Italy; it was a warning to stay out of trouble while he was there. Sir Peter Carew’s journey into Italy was understood in the same way. He had been involved in the failed conspiracy in the West Country in the winter of 1554, part of the many-pronged Wyatt’s rebellion.31 Before the government could arrest him, Carew had fled, first to France, then to Venice – a city he knew well already.32 Carew’s willingness to go to Venice was widely interpreted as indicating willingness to co-operate with the Marian government, a penance prior to amendment of life.33 That did not stop Ambassador Vanni trying to persuade the Venetian government to take legal action against him and then hiring ‘certain ruffians’ to assault, possibly to murder, Carew. 34 Yet Vanni was not completely ‘on message’; most contemporaries seemed to view exile in Italy not as ‘political’, not 28

Overell, ‘Nicodemite in England and Italy’, pp. 121 and 130.

29

Bartlett, English in Italy, p. 128; Mason to Sir William Petre, 4 August 1554, quoted by McDiarmid, ‘“To content god quietlie”’; abbreviated version in CSP Foreign (1553–58), 247, pp. 111–12; Cheke to Sir John Mason, Padua, 12 July 1554 (enclosure in preceding letter), ibid., 247:1, p. 112. 30 Scudamore to Philip Hoby, 2 March 1550, Letters of Sir Richard Scudamore to Sir Philip Hoby, September 1549–March 1555, ed. Susan Brigden, Camden Miscellany, XXX, Camden Society, 4th Series, vol. 39 (1990), 17, p. 123; ibid., pp. 77 and 85. 31

Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies, pp. 35–44.

32

Wagner, Devon Gentleman, pp. 209–11.

33

Queen Mary to Dr [Nicholas] Wotton, 29 April 1554, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 199, p. 80; Dr Wotton, to Queen Mary, 14 July 1554, ibid., 222, p. 96; Sir Peter Carew to Dr Wotton, 11 July 1554, ibid., 243:1, p. 109. 34 Wagner, Devon Gentleman, p. 21. For an Elizabethan account favourable to Carew, see John Hooker, (alias Vowell), The Life … of Sir Peter Carew, ed. J. Maclean (London, 1857); Vanni’s complete volte-face is evident in the justifications he was parroting for Queen Mary’s decision to burn Cranmer, Vanni to Queen Mary, 25 April 1556, BL Harley 5009 (Peter Vannes’ Letter Book), fols 94r–95r.

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as ‘religious’, but as neutral: a place that would not make things worse. The exiles’ own attitudes bear out this view. Sir Philip Hoby was reported to have said that, given one royal command, he would return home immediately.35 They wanted to go home more than they wanted to witness to their religion or to further any political programme. The Hobys ‘together with Mr Wroth Mr Cooke and Mr Cheeke, with their companies’ visited Mantua in the autumn of 1554. Then, in the summer of 1555, they began to think about leaving the Peninsula. We can only speculate on their reasons. At the end of 1554, Thomas Hoby noted numbly (and inconsistently) the abrogation of statutes in England against ‘the Bishop of Rome’s usurped authoritie’ and the reconciliation to the papacy by Cardinal Pole’s ‘full authoritie … being Legatus ex latere’.36 Viewed from the Veneto, that formal process of reconciliation changed everything. There could be no more feeble optimism: England was catholic and these exiles could be marooned for ever. Cheke’s illness in the early months of 1555 and the election of the zealot Pope Paul IV in May did not help matters: there was also an outbreak of plague in Padua. Meanwhile there was increasing certainty in England that the Queen was not going to have a child and also widespread unrest. 37 This may have raised the exiles’ spirits. They had one last Italian excursion together before leaving. Thomas Hoby wrote that on ‘XV day of July’ in 1555 his brother’s party left Padua to go to Caldero. Then, ‘After XXII day abodd at Caldero to take the water, we departed thence in the company of Mr Wrothe and Mr Cheke who were then cumm from Padua’ [because of the Plague].38 On 7 August, Cheke wrote to Calvin from Verona, saying he had had more than enough of Italy, with its ‘impiety’ and ‘superstition’. He recommended to Calvin an Englishman, Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford, who had just arrived in Venice.39 Then the Cheke-Hoby-Carew group left Italy.40 By 20 October 1555, accompanied by Wrothe, Sir John Cheke was back in Strassburg. He probably thought himself safe. When in Padua, Cheke’s group had overlapped with Russell’s for just over a month. By the time the next English retinue, led by Edward 35

Sir John Mason to Sir William Petre, 20 June 1554, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 227,

p. 99. 36

Hoby, Travaile, pp. 118–20.

37

Philip Hoby to Mason, Padua, 13 June 1555, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 383, pp. 173–4; Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies, pp. 136–45. 38 39

Hoby, Travaile, p. 120.

Cheke to Calvin, Verona, 7 August 1555, Opera Calvini XV (Corpus Reformatorum XLIII), no. 2264, cols 719–20. 40 Thomas Wilson remained behind in Padua.


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Courtenay, arrived in Italy in January 1556, John Cheke and his friends had been safely gone for six months. That fact is important. It is dangerous to view Cheke’s group as sharing objectives with the two noblemen, Russell and Courtenay. The Venetian government treated them differently: nobility mattered in Venice and the second group of high-profile visitors rapidly became pawns in the diplomatic game. Francis Russell had become the second Earl of Bedford at his father’s death on 14 March 1555, shortly before he arrived in Italy; Edward Courtenay, cousin to the Queen, had been made Earl of Devon just after Mary’s accession.41 Both had already been imprisoned for suspicious activities connected with the conspiracies of 1554. As Mary’s hopes that she was pregnant were found to be false, and Philip became more unpopular, Courtenay was, in the eyes of some hotheads, the Alternative King of England, the best possible husband for the Princess Elizabeth. As we have seen in previous chapters, both Russell and Courtenay were competent Italianists before they arrived. The Bedford household had employed Pietro Bizzarri as tutor and the Russells’ library was well stocked with books in Italian.42 Courtenay had known the language since before 1548, when he translated the Beneficio di Cristo; his longing to see Italy accorded with his humanist past.43 Their religious antecedents were less straightforward. Russell had been a reformer since he had been a student at Cambridge and was among those known to favour the gospel at Edward VI’s court.44 Courtenay, on the other hand, appears to have suppressed memories of his translation of the Beneficio; he had been playing the zealous catholic since Mary’s accession. His family connections were catholic and he had been personally devoted to the conservative Bishop Stephen Gardiner. Yet, in the months before his arrival in Italy, Courtenay had been keeping up contacts with known protestants like Russell, Sir Philip Hoby, and Sir Peter Carew, claiming that he wanted to make them ‘perfectly Catholic’. Later he averred his servants could not possibly be plotters because they were ‘catholics’. His religious position can only be described as enigmatic.45 41

Bartlett, ‘Misfortune’, p. 2. M. St Clare Byrne, ‘“My Lord’s Books”: The Library of Francis, Second Earl of Bedford, in 1584’, Review of English Studies, 7 (1931) pp. 385–405; see below, Chapter 9, pp. 200–201. 42

43 Overell, ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy’, pp. 121–4; Overell, ‘Edwardian Court Humanism’, pp. 216–18. 44

Wallace T. MacCaffrey, ‘Russell, Francis, second earl of Bedford (1526/7–1585)’, ODNB. Later Russell married Sir Richard Morison’s widow, Hudson, Cambridge Connection, pp. 38 and 55. 45

Devon to Sir Philip Hoby, 30 December 1555, CSPDM, 298, p. 142; Overell, ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy’, pp. 127–9, 131–4.

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Mary’s government saw travel as the best solution to the problem of dealing with these nobles. Russell was given his passport on 20 April 1555. He went first to the Imperial Court at Brussels, where ‘it seemed to him as if he were kept a prisoner here’, which was close to the truth.46 Then, in May, Edward Courtenay was released from prison in England and he, too, set off towards the Imperial Court-cum-penitentiary. Queen Mary did not want these two potential conspirators to meet, so Russell was allowed to leave for Italy.47 Bartlett has stressed that ‘all of the ten identifiable gentlemen abroad with the Earl [of Bedford] were Protestants’.48 One of them was Sir John Chichester, later arrested on suspicion of complicity in the conspiracies of 1556, named after Sir Henry Dudley. Another was William Page, a fluent Italian speaker who had run into trouble with his former boss, Ambassador Vanni, for declaring his wish to kill the Queen.49 Having failed to persuade the Venetians to let him interrogate Page, Vanni recommended him to Sir Philip Hoby’s service, presumably in order to get rid of him. Then Page passed into Russell’s employment. He crops up later in this history, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, apparently still interested in Italian reform texts and still expressing radical political views.50 Francis Russell’s godly retinue moved south to Rome, and then to the Kingdom of Naples. Cardinal Pole’s letter, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, protesting about ‘certain Englishmen abroad in Italy on account of their bad religion’, who were fuelling rumours in Rome, probably referred to Russell’s party. When they returned northwards, Courtenay, who had also ‘done time’ at the Imperial Court in Brussels, was released, free at last and heading south towards Venice. Their paths crossed at Ferrara in March 1556.51 Queen Mary’s plans to keep Russell and Courtenay apart had failed. The year 1556 turned out to be annus horribilis for several of this group.52 During Courtenay’s journey to Italy, there had already been 46 Federico Badoer, Venetian Ambassador with the Emperor, to the Doge and Senate, 10 May and 12 May 1555, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 77 and 79, pp. 67 and 69. 47

Hoby, Travail, p. 120.

48

Bartlett, ‘Household of Francis Russell’, p. 74; CSP Venetian (1555–56), 169, p. 145. Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies, pp. 210–11; Vannes to Queen Mary, 16 June 1554, CSP Foreign, (1553–58), 224 and 226, p. 97; Council of Ten to Michieli, 22 June 1554, CSP Venetian (1534–54), 903, p. 515; BL MS Harl. 5009, Peter Vannes’ Letter Book, Vanni to Philip Hoby, 7 December 1554, fol. 74v; Bartlett, ‘Household of Sir Francis Russell’, p. 78. 50 See below, Chapter 9, p. 192. 49

51 Russell wrote home from Ferrara, still enthusing about Naples, Bedford to Cecil, 24 March 1556, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 488, p. 219. 52

For Courtenay’s last months, see Bartlett, ‘Misfortune’, pp. 11–27; Overell, ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy’, pp. 129–35.


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four attacks on his servants. Ruy Gomez, King Philip’s closest advisor, was paying assassins to get to work when the Earl of Devon arrived in Venice.53 Courtenay himself was ‘molto dubioso’, fearful for his life.54 On arrival in Venice, he was allowed to carry arms and have more servants, an acknowledgement that he was a VIP with a security problem.55 He travelled through Mantua, Ferrara, Padua, and Venice, none of them places of safety in the mid-1550s. These cities had been the nursery of the Italian reformation; Mantua, home of the (usually) sympathetic Cardinal Gonzaga; Ferrara, influenced by French Calvinism; Padua, the University of Vermigli, Vergerio, Morison and Pole. Local religious tensions were still simmering, but the Venetian Inquisition was gaining control in the Veneto. These northern cities were also centres of resistance to Habsburg dominion in the Italian peninsula, in particular pro-French Ferrara. Courtenay enrolled as a law student at Padua.56 This seemed to accord with the humanist aspirations of his Beneficio days. He had plenty of invitations to stay elsewhere. There was Peter Vannes’ creepy suggestion: ‘a lodging with me, simple but clean and wholesome’.57 Then from Mantua there came a courtly invitation from Michael Throckmorton, Pole’s agent: ‘no man would be gladder to see you than I’.58 The Mantuan authorities respected Throckmorton and he had become prosperous.59 Despite the reform books in his library, he now had no sympathy for the ‘blind obstinacy’ of ‘heretics’ suffering persecution in Marian England.60 His long service to Pole gave him excellent credentials as a ‘catholic’ protector. By March 1556, he had already met Courtenay at Verona and Courtenay wrote to say that he would come to stay in Mantua soon, but he never went.61 Instead, he moved on to Ferrara, pro-French, anti-Imperial, therefore anti-English, where he met Francis Russell. Courtenay’s studiously innocent descriptions of his dutiful delivery of royal letters and his carriage trips 53

CSP Venetian (1555–56), 328, p. 294.

54

Badoer to the Doge and Senate, 6 June 1555, ibid., 123, p. 99.

55

Ibid., 385, 386, p. 343. Woolfson, Padua, pp. 17, 121.

56 57

Peter Vannes to Devon, 15 January 1555, CSPDM, 304, p. 146.

58

Michael Throckmorton to Devon, 14 June 1555, CSPDM, 193, pp. 99–100; Courtenay acknowledged another letter of invitation, now lost, dated 31 January 1556, Devon to Throckmorton, 13 March 1556, CSPDM, 320, p. 152. 59 AS Mantua, Archivio Gonzaga, busta 578, fol. 169r, Aloisio Schivenoglia to the Duke of Mantua, 17 August 1557; AS Mantua, Registrazioni notarili, 1558, Michael Throckmorton’s Inventory. 60

Michael Throckmorton to Devon, 17 March 1556, CSPDM, 330, pp. 155–6.

61

Devon to Michael Throckmorton, 13 March 1556, CSPDM, 320, p. 152.

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‘by the waterside’ suggest that he knew he was under suspicion.62 The Venetian ambassador reported this meeting in cipher.63 The whole episode is shrouded in mystery – but everyone thought something was afoot. Courtenay returned to Venice in May 1556. By then he knew the English government had discovered the next set of plots, commonly called ‘Dudley’s conspiracy’. He also knew that several of his own servants in England were being questioned. In the eye of this political storm, he took the incriminating step of going back to Ferrara, where it was claimed that he was offered a large bribe to join the King of France and the rebels in their plots to overthrow Queen Mary. But this evidence came from a suspect wishing to exonerate himself and it is not safe.64 Courtenay is said to have replied that ‘it was not for him to enter any King’s realm upon any subject’s promise’; thus, he ducked commitment. All Queen Mary’s government really had against Courtenay were his dangerous liaisons. By July 1556, the news from England was very bad. Several of Courtenay’s servants in England had been arrested, he complained that his correspondence was being intercepted (probably true: Vanni again). Worse still, he had received news of John Cheke’s kidnapping which had taken place in Antwerp on 15 May that year. Courtenay wrote that he was ‘sorry to name him’ because Cheke had been dragged back to England in disgrace. Carew, who had been arrested with Cheke, was freed with suspicious rapidity, possibly involved only as a dupe or decoy. The whole story, a famous historical ‘whodunnit’, falls outside the remit of this book. At first, the Venetian ambassador said that the arrests were made ‘on account of religion with regard to which both the one and the other have a very bad name’.65 Meanwhile, the Earl of Devon remained in Venice, frightened by Cheke’s arrest and those of his own servants. He bemoaned the fact that a plague epidemic had stopped the Venetian masques and partying, ‘where I had my greatest pleasure’.66 He moved back to Padua and there, six weeks later, Edward Courtenay was dead. It is still not certain if he was murdered 62

Devon to Sir John Mason, 29 March 1556, CSPDM, 343, pp. 167–8. For Courtenay’s ultra-careful wording of this letter and flattery of Ruy Gomez and others in power, see Bartlett, ‘Misfortune’, p. 20, n. 115. 63

Michiel to the Doge and Senate, 28 April 1556, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 466, pp. 423–4; Bedford to Cecil, Ferrara, 24 March 1556, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 488, p. 219; Bartlett, English in Italy, p. 175. 64

‘The examination of Martin Dore’, PRO SP 11/7 fol. 59, printed in Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies, pp. 258–64, see also, ibid., p. 172; Bartlett ‘Misfortune’, pp. 20–21. 65 Federico Badoer, Venetian Ambassador to the Emperor to the Doge and Senate, 17 May 1556, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 486, p. 452; Giovanni Michieli, Venetian Ambassador in England to the Doge and Senate, 19 May 1556, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 489, p. 454. 66

Devon to Lady Elizabeth Mason, 11 July 1556, CSPDM, 477, p. 226.


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but some contemporaries thought so and several people, especially Vanni and the Venetians, behaved very suspiciously. Two men already prominent in the Anglo-Italian network, which had developed at Edward VI’s court, were present at Courtenay’s deathbed. First, there was Ambassador Pietro Vanni: once a protector of Italian reformers, now a zealous Marian. Within hours of Courtenay’s death, Vanni filed a report of the young nobleman’s last illness. In encyclopaedic detail he related a series of accidents which he said had led to death: wet clothes, bumpy waggons and a fall downstairs. He stressed that he had arranged a catholic death, calling a priest; he recounted Courtenay’s inability to open his mouth to receive his last communion. It has generally been seen as suspicious that, a few days later, Vanni asked to be recalled from his post in Venice.67 Why so suddenly, why then? A few days later, the Venetian authorities gave secret orders for Courtenay’s letters to be sealed up in casket, then had the casket opened and some letters removed. Then the box was solemnly handed back to Vanni, as the English government’s representative. There is no doubt that the Venetians were hiding something and it is probable that Vanni was too.68 The second witness of Courtenay’s strange death was Pietro Bizzarri, Italian reformer, once an exile in Cambridge and at Edward VI’s court; once also the Russell family’s tutor. Many years later, in a reverential memorial, Bizzarri said he had been there and that the young Earl had been murdered.69 Thomas Wilson, friend of Cheke, humanist and stout reformer, present in Padua for Cheke’s readings on Demosthenes, delivered a discreet eulogy at Courtenay’s funeral in the Basilica of St Anthony in Padua. Wilson said a lot about Courtenay’s noble pedigree, his humanist interests, and virtually nothing about his religious beliefs.70 Vanni, Bizzarri and Wilson 67

Peter Vannes to Queen Mary, 18 September 1556, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 537, pp. 255–6; Mason’s reply to Vannes is dated 12 October 1556, BL, MS Cotton Vespasian, CVII, no. 49, fol. 200. 68

CSP Venetian (1556–57), 706, p. 794; ibid., 729–31, pp. 818–19. ‘Quod gravius est, inimicorum suorum fraudibus circumventus, non antea dolum et parricidiales manus sensit... languidum spiritum exhalavit’. (‘And what is worse, he breathed his last surrounded by the deceits of his enemies, and not before he recognised their evil intentions and murderous hands’), quoted and trans. Bartlett, ‘Misfortune’, p. 26; Pietro Bizzarri, Senatus Populique Genuensis … annales (Antwerp: Plantin, 1579), pp. 561–2, cited by Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri, p. 35, note 60. The lapse of time may improve the strength of this evidence; by 1579 Bizzarri had nothing to gain from the revelation. 69

70

Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, vol. 3, part ii, Catalogue of Originals, pp. 420–27; Albert J. Schmidt, ‘Thomas Wilson, Tudor Scholar-Statesman’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 20 (1957), pp. 205–18 (208); ibid., ‘Thomas Wilson and the Tudor Commonwealth: an Essay in Civic Humanism’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 23 (1959–60), 49–60.

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were all groping their way through diplomatic skulduggery and religious Nicodemism. By the time of Courtenay’s death in September 1556, most of the ‘Venetian exiles’ had left the Peninsula, though Wilson stayed on for further adventures. The rest, Cheke, Wrothe, Philip and Thomas Hoby and even Francis Russell, seemed to have been ‘doing time’ rather aimlessly, in a place of correction. There is a reformation leitmotiv to this exile, but sotto voce, as befitted protestants taking refuge in a catholic state. The exiles had gone as far as they dared in opposition to the Queen, but that was not very far: Cheke chose to lecture on Demosthenes’ orations against tyranny; Philip Hoby and Francis Russell were willing to employ the loudmouth William Page, who had already proclaimed his wish to assassinate the Queen. Russell and Courtenay hovered on the edge of subversive, proFrench groups in Ferrara. Yet their exile had achieved nothing constructive towards undermining the Marian government or affirming the ‘protestant’ cause. Instead, various shades of Nicodemism emerged. The steadily increasing persecution in London and Oxford, far worse than anything they had witnessed in Italy, took its toll. Thomas Hoby started to choke out politically correct phrases, like ‘the restitution of England again to owr holie mother, the Churche of Rome’.71 The general exodus from Italy of the first (Cheke’s) group of exiles from Italy in the late summer of 1555 suggests that they were all hoping to make their peace, sometime, somehow. And most of them did so. In November 1555, Thomas Hoby returned to England, to live mostly in the country, and was followed by his brother Philip the next year.72 After his kidnapping in Antwerp, Sir John Cheke, too, conformed. Through the spring and early summer of 1556, Cheke was worn down by imprisonment in London. His second recantation was accepted and Cheke testified to his ‘new’ religion in his old ambience, the court, ‘in the presence of the courtiers, by whom, having been the King’s schoolmaster, he is chiefly known’.73 Vermigli was shocked but tried to take a charitable view of his friend’s desperate situation. Cheke was released and died on 13 September 1557, feeling intense remorse, according to later protestant tradition.74 71 72

Hoby, Travaile, p. 120. Ibid., p. 126.

73 Michieli to the Doge and Senate, 21 July 1556, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 554, p. 536; ‘I yield under your direction,’ Cheke to Pole, 15 July 1556, CRP 1616. 74

Vermigli to an Unknown Friend, 15 March 1557, Gleanings, p. 373; Trinity College, Cambridge MS R.7.15 (James Catalogue, no. 753), John Bale’s Additions to Leland’s De Viris Illustribus: ‘Epistola doctoris Edwini Sandes ad Jac. Pilkyntonum’. I am indebted to John McDiarmid for this reference.


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During 1556 there was a spate of deaths of men who had been part of the Anglo-Italian network, adding to the mood of languid resignation: Richard Morison (in Strassburg); John Ponet (in Strassburg); Edward Courtenay (in Padua). It looked as if Francis Russell, at least, would hold fast to his faith. First, he went to Zurich where Rudolf Gualter thought ‘this cause [reformed religion] was far more dear to [him] than all other things whatever’. Yet in 1557 Russell, too, appears to have made his peace with the Marian government.75 Thus, Cheke, the two Hobys, Carew and Russell were all forced into uneasy compromise by their own wish to save their status and their skins. During their Italian exile they had waited for some shift in the political and religious ground. They were, as Philip Hoby put it, like men ‘slumbering’ between deliveries of the (infrequent) posts.76 There is no certainty that any one of them was a ‘political exile’ in the sense that they were plotting for a change of government in England. They had not given up their religion but theirs was not exactly a ‘religious exile’ either. All these men had known Italian reformers in the past at Edward VI’s court but, if they made contact with Venice’s remaining ‘heretics’, they did not leave records – which was wise. Apart from Cheke (forced into recantation) and Courtenay, most Venetian exiles stuck to their reformed faith, on the quiet, throughout their Italian exile and beyond; some would re-emerge as stalwart Elizabethan protestant gentlemen. Experience of exile in Italian catholic states had created accidie, subterfuge, but not sinewy resistance. In cities like Strassburg, Geneva and Emden, the exiles were freer. There, some of those who had been involved in the Italian Connection in Edward’s reign were producing books and listening to lectures which contemplated (sometimes advocated) resistance to catholic tyranny. Their ‘resistance theory’ and effective pamphlet literature have been studied elsewhere but brief mention is appropriate in this book because some of our Anglo-Italian network were involved.77 Vermigli and Ponet were both writing about resistance (though they did not agree), Morison was almost certainly helping anti-government pamphleteers and Cheke was (probably 75 Gualter to Russell, 16 January 1559, ZL, vol. 2, pp. 8–11. Gualter’s reference to Russell’s journey into Italy by way of Zurich is probably a mistake. MacCaffrey, ‘Russell, Francis, second earl of Bedford (1526/7–1585)’, ODNB; CRP 1919, p. 396; Pole’s friend, Alvise Priuli, noted (correctly) that Russell ‘likes’ Italians, Alvise Priuli to Antonio Piuli, from London, 27 November 1558, CRP 2311. 76 77

Philip Hoby to Mason, Padua, 6 June 1555, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 383, pp. 173–4.

Hudson, John Ponet; E.J. Baskerville, ‘John Ponet in Exile: a Ponet Letter to John Bale’, JEH, 37 (1986), 442–7; Barbara Peardon, ‘The Politics of Polemic: John Ponet’s “Short Treatise of Politic Power” and Contemporary Circumstance, 1553–1556’, Journal of British Studies, 22 (1982), 35–49; Jennifer Loach, ‘Pamphlets and Politics, 1553–8’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 48 (1975), 31–44.

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wrongly) suspected of doing so. Puzzlingly, several of the most effective anti-Marian pamphlets were packed with allusions to Italian affairs. The emergence of ‘resistance theory’ in Strassburg was gradual and Vermigli, exponent of the sinfulness of rebellion in Edward’s reign, was unwillingly involved. From 1554 he lectured on the book of Judges, in itself a political choice in a city which housed a sizeable community of religious exiles. Later, his locus on Judges 1:36 was slightly amended and printed as A Treatise of the Cohabitacyon of the Faithfull with the Unfaithfull. 78 Vermigli rarely tackled contemporary political issues in his scriptural commentaries and there were inconsistencies about tyrants and usurpers in his work on Judges. He never allowed the right of resistance to the private citizen, only to inferior magistrates, but he did develop ‘a real theory of resistance’. 79 In 1555, it did not take much to fuel English fires. His lectures were attended by several Englishmen: we know that John Jewel was there. John Ponet made use of Vermigli’s books while he was writing his Short Treatise of Politic Power, a work that went further than Vermigli ever did in affirming rights (then duties) of resistance. 80 Later, when Vermigli had moved to Zurich, the still more extreme resistance theorist Christopher Goodman would try to draw the Italian to comment on the matter but he failed to elicit a response.81 Yet, ineluctably, Vermigli had been associated with a (literally) life-and-death debate for some of the disenchanted English friends gathered around him in exile. His responses, guarded as they were, would not be forgotten. One avenue of passive resistance was still open to exiles in mainland Europe and to underground groups in England. The polemic attacking Queen Mary and King Philip’s regime was a substitute for warfare, emanating from ‘safe’ centres like Emden and Strassburg and also from secret presses in England itself. 82 There are multiple references to Italy in the titles and topics of several pamphlets and they deserve examination 78

(Strassburg, W. Rihel, 1555), STC 24673; Robert M. Kingdon, The Political Thought of Peter Martyr Vermigli: Selected Texts and Commentary (Geneva, 1980), Introduction, pp. XVI–XVII. 79

Ibid., pp. XV–XVI; Marvin Anderson, ‘“Royal Idolatry”: Peter Martyr and the Reformed Tradition’, ARG, 69 (1978), 157–201 (p. 179). 80 John Ponet, Short Treatise of Politic Power (Strasbourg, 1556), reprinted in Hudson, John Ponet, {1}–{183}, see also p. 24, note 17, and p. 177; Taplin, ‘Pietro Martire Vermigli’, ODNB. 81 82

Anderson, ‘“Royal Idolatry”’, p. 175.

F.S. Isaacs, ‘Egidius van der Erde and his English Printed Books’, The Library, 4th Series, 12 (1931–32), 336–52; Andrew Pettegree, ‘The English Church at Emden’, in ibid. (ed.), Marian Protestantism, pp. 23–9. Cheke’s Latin translation of Cranmer’s Defensio was published at Emden in 1557, ibid., p. 126 and Appendix, numbers 20 and 21; Evenden, ‘The “Michael Wood” Mystery’, pp. 383–95.


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here. In addition, the gossiping foreign ambassadors in London (not reliable witnesses) were all agreed that Italians and Italianate Englishmen were contributing to the problems of Queen Mary’s government. In the eyes of the Venetian ambassador, English exiles in Italy were implicated: ‘Wherever they go, whether to Italy, Germany, or France, they licentiously disseminate many things against the English government and the present religion’.83 According to Simon Renard, the histrionic Imperial ambassador, Italians in London were causing trouble: ‘there are countless Italians here [in London] as violent partisans as the French themselves, who go about talking as evilly as they know how in merchant circles’.84 A month later he reported that his opposite number, the Venetian ambassador in London, Giacomo Soranzo, was running an anti-government gang, which included several of London’s Italian exiles.85 Then, in May 1555, Michieli, the newly appointed Venetian ambassador, noted that over a thousand copies had been disseminated in London of a ‘Dialogue’, ‘full of scandalous and seditious things against the religion and government’. Princess Elizabeth’s Italian tutor Giovanni Battista Castiglione was under suspicion in connection with this text and imprisoned. It was the first of several periods he spent in the Tower in Mary’s reign.86 At the end of the same year, Michieli wrote: Of late a large quantity of books printed in England have been distributed clandestinely throughout London … vituperating the acts of extortion and oppression exercised in his [King Philip’s] realms, principally in the Kingdom of Naples and the Milanese … the book is supposed to come from Strasbourg from the English who are there....

He was right; there were two titles, now both lost: ‘The Mourning of Milan’ and ‘The Lament of Naples’. Michieli said that, according to the lost books, Italians had been debarred by their Spanish overlords from holding office in their own lands, ‘the author warning the English, to whom the book is dedicated, that the like will befall them also’.87 Resentments 83

Michieli to the Doge and Senate, 11 November 1555, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 274,

p. 243. 84

Simon Renard to the Emperor, 18 September 1554, CSP Spanish (1554–58), p. 50.

85

Renard to the Emperor, 13 October 1554, ibid., p. 64. Michieli to the Doge and Senate, 13 May 1555, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 80, pp. 69–70. 86

87 Michieli to the Doge and Senate, 3 December 1555, ibid., 297, p. 269. We know of the existence of these titles from ‘J. Bradford, serving man’, The copye of a letter sent by Iohn Bradforth …to the erles of Arundel, Darbie, Shrewsburye and Penbroke…(n.p., n.d.), [2nd

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of ‘Italian’ states subjected to Philip II, like Milan and Naples, were being conflated with English politics in an attempt to provoke fears of job losses under Spanish domination. Another bitter pamphlet, printed in Emden in 1555, had the same theme: A Warnyng for Englande conteyning the horrible practises of the King of Spayne in the Kingdome of Naples.88 Eight daring pages are packed with inflammatory detail about Spanish abuses. ‘Insider’ knowledge, not just of Italy, but also of Italian reform, is certain in A copye of a verye fyne and wytty letter. 89 This is a mass of fabrications but they were based on accurate knowledge: the supposed author of the letter was ‘Lewis Lipomanus, bishop of Verona’; Cardinals Pole and Contarini featured prominently; Michael Throckmorton’s name was given as the supposed translator. He was identified as ‘Curtigiane of Rome’. The pamphlet attacks the Marian government’s supposed mistreatment of the English nobility but ends with a section highlighting the wish of the ‘Lords of Venice’ to distance themselves from the repression of German protestants (there were echoes here of earlier Venetian reform sympathies). All these allusions reveal a writer familiar with Italian reform history and Venetian politics. Probably the author was that skilled propagandist Richard Morison, resident in Strassburg, who had once been Michael Throckmorton’s student friend and had then turned into an enemy. He was not above appropriating Throckmorton’s name for his own polemical purposes.90 Also, the Cheke-Hoby group of Venetian exiles, who had visited Throckmorton’s adopted city of Mantua in the previous year, may have contributed. As the government became increasingly anxious about the pamphlets, suspicions fell on those left in London. In June 1556, Castiglione was arrested for the third time since Mary’s accession. He was suspect because of his close alliance with the Princess Elizabeth’s household, where a cache of seditious and heretical books had been found. His activities were seen

edn Wesel ? J. Lambrecht? 1556], STC 3504.5, sigs F1–2; Jennifer Loach, ‘Pamphlets and Politics, 1553–8’, p. 32. 88 STC10024. On King Philip of Spain’s recent acquisition of the Kingdom of Naples, see José Ignacio Tellechea Idigoras (trans. Ronald Truman), ‘Fray Bartolomé Carranza: a Spanish Dominican in the England of Mary Tudor’, in Edwards and Truman eds, Reforming Catholicism, pp. 21–31 (p. 28). 89

A copye of a verye fyne and wytty letter sent by Lewes Lippomanus … translated out of the Italyan language by Michael Throckmerton (‘Curtigiane of Rome’ [i.e. Emden: E. van der Erve], 1556), STC 15693 and 15693.5, sig Aii; Loach, ‘Pamphlets and Politics’, p. 44. 90

Sowerby, ‘Careers of Richard Morison’, p. 344; Overell, ‘An English Friendship and Italian Reform’, pp. 492–3.


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as important enough for him to be tortured so severely that it made him permanently lame.91 Michieli, the Venetian ambassador, suggested that Cheke, too, had been involved with the seditious pamphlets: ‘[Cheke] runs some risk of faring badly should he be found guilty of having compiled one of those books against the King and Queen and the present state of affairs which were privily circulated here [in London]’.92 Then the speculations about Cheke’s supposed role in the propaganda petered out. The government did not try him for sedition, but for heresy: had they had solid evidence, they would almost certainly have used it.93 Cheke emerges as a worried Nicodemite rather than a subversive. He had condemned rebellion in Edward VI’s reign and his treatise De Ecclesia, written in the Veneto, seems to allow keeping silent in bad times. In a letter to William Cecil, written shortly after he had left Italy, Cheke suggested that Cecil (then conforming) was trying ‘to content god quietlie’.94 They are not the comments of a hothead pamphleteer. Cheke may have contributed a few learned ideas (especially to the work of his fellow humanist, John Ponet) but that was probably the extent of his input. All the same, Italian affairs had been a recurrent theme. This prominence can partly be explained by the fact that the pamphleteers’ bête noir, King Philip of Spain and England, also ruled Italian states. In addition, some frustrated exiles returning from the Veneto may have joined in the writing. Certainly, however, all these Italian allusions reflect the fact that individuals like Ponet and Morison had become thoroughly Italianate Englishmen, partly through their longstanding contacts with Italian reformers. They were able to make their insider knowledge into ammunition for their own and their friends’ outspoken attacks on Queen Mary’s government. In this decade of Imperial advance and fear of catholic victory in Europe, Englishmen were not the only ones resorting to the press. As we have already seen, an allied Italian polemic dealt not so much with groups and governments as with the need for individual witness and action. This propaganda was directed especially at those who could have furthered reform in Italy and had so signally failed to do so. It was true that many, 91

Michieli to the Doge and Senate, 2 June 1556, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 505, p. 475; CSPDM, 456, pp. 218–19; ‘Castiglione, Giovanni Battista’, DBI. 92 Michieli to the Doge and Senate, 9 June 1556, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 510, p. 480. There have been assertions that Sir John Cheke was ‘the director of propaganda’ (Garrett, Marian Exiles, p. 49), or was likely to have been ‘an anti-Habsburg propagandist’ (Bartlett, English in Italy, p. 157). 93

David Loades, ‘The Press under the Early Tudors’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 4 (1964–68), 29–50 (p. 40). 94 Cheke to Cecil, February 1556, see McDiarmid, ‘“To content god quietlie”’.

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once influenced by the spirituali, had stayed on in Italy and had gone to ground. They were all Nicodemites – just part of a cast of thousands throughout Europe. Yet Italian polemicists in exile, led by Pier Paolo Vergerio, asserted vehemently that their Nicodemism was the ultimate, unforgivable sin. They also depicted that half-Italian Englishman, Cardinal Reginald Pole, as the greatest Nicodemite in Europe.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Pier Paolo Vergerio and Cardinal Pole … it is thought of hym [Pole] that toward his latter ende, a litle before hys comming from Rome to England, he began somewhat to sauour the doctrine of Luther, and was no lesse suspected at Rome. John Foxe, The Ecclesiastical History … containing the Acts and Monuments (1570).1

While the Venetian exiles ‘slumbered’ and longed for change, those who had remained in England were experiencing years of intense drama: a catholic Queen, the return of Cardinal Pole, reconciliation to the papacy, and then fierce persecution.2 Anglo-Italian ties, far from dissolving in the reign of Mary Tudor, were revivified, but in a radically changed form. Italian reformers like Ochino, Vermigli and Tremellio may have been bundled into boats bound for mainland Europe, but other Italian ghosts were less easily dealt with. The Nicodemite Francesco Spiera, safely dead in Padua, came into his own in Marian England because his story was so painfully relevant to the persecution.3 Meanwhile, Spiera’s chronicler, Pier Paolo Vergerio, continued to pour anti-Nicodemite propaganda into an England where many found themselves tempted to be ‘Nicodemites’. 4 Also, Cardinal Reginald Pole, who had left England for Italy as a result of Henry VIII’s policies, was summoned to reverse them in 1553. Pole’s past as an ‘Italian’ reformer was not forgotten; his critics, led by Vergerio, made sure of that, calling him a Nicodemite and a traitor. Thus, the kaleidoscope was shaken; in Queen Mary’s reign we are dealing with different patterns, but strong connections, between England and Italian reform. As persecution threatened in 1553–54 and reformers faced imprisonment, perhaps death, they needed myths that might help them ‘play the man’ and Spiera fitted the bill: he had given in under pressure, they must not. The reformer, John Bradford was the first to make explicit use of the tale. Before Francis Russell went into exile, he had been taken into the custody of the 1

Foxe, AM (1570), book 12, p. 2158.

2

CSP Foreign (1553–58), 383, pp. 173–4. For English knowledge of Spiera in Edward VI’s reign, see Chapter 4, pp. 84 and 99.

3 4

Peter Matheson thinks it is ‘a category mistake to see the literature of this period as propaganda’, The Rhetoric of Reformation (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 248. However, much midsixteenth century literature set out to persuade and change opinion, so the word remains a useful anachronism.

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sheriff of London after his part in the Jane Grey debacle. Bradford wrote to him from his own prison cell: ‘Remember Lot’s wife which looked back; remember Francis Spira’. It was well pitched – an Italian story to stiffen the resolve of an Italianate Englishman.5 Bradford’s ‘take’ on the Spiera story was noticeably different from Latimer’s. Latimer had mused, theologised, finally criticised the merciless message.6 Bradford’s reference was quick, to the point, unencumbered by theological niceties. The situation was too urgent for the underlying moral to be softened in any way. The screws were on. Russell, however, escaped the worst. Suspected of involvement with the rebel Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1554, he was given licence to travel and headed for Italy, as we have seen. Things turned out far worse for Bradford, who remained in prison until his execution on 1 July 1555. Writing from prison, he included Spiera in his own prayer against failure of faith: ‘Oh let us not so run down headlong into perdition, stumbling on those sins from which there is no recovery ... as it chanced to Lot’s wife, Judas Iscariot, Francis Spira and to many others’. That prayer became well known among reformers and was published as part of Bradford’s Exhortation to the Brethren. Then Myles Coverdale put Spiera on a list of sinners identical to Bradford’s: Lot’s wife, Judas, and Spiera.7 This litany of anti-martyrs began to imprint the Italian story on English consciousness. Before Lady Jane Grey’s execution as a traitor, she was said to have used the Spiera story to warn her elderly chaplain, Thomas Harding, against collaborating with the Marian regime: her words were reported in the Epistle of the Ladye Iane, clandestinely printed by John Day: ‘Remember the horrible history of Julian of old, and the lamentable case of Spira of late, whose case (me thynke) should be yet so green in your remembrance, that being a thing of our time, you should fear the like inconvenience seeing you are fallen into the like offence’. 8 In 1563, John Foxe included Jane Grey’s reference to Spiera in his ‘Book of Martyrs’.9 Thus Spiera entered the English psyche and there he stuck for the next three hundred years. Whenever they faced temptation, English Protestants

5

MacCaffrey, ‘Francis Russell, second earl of Bedford, ODNB; Bradford, Writings, vol. 2, p. 80. 6

Latimer, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 425; see above, Chapter 4, p. 99. Bradford, Writings, vol. 1, 433 and vol. 2, 80; Myles Coverdale, Works, George Pearson (ed.), PS (2 vols, Cambridge, 1854–56), vol. 2, 276. 7

8

Jane Dudley, An epistle of the Ladye Iane ... to a learned man of late falne from the truth of God’s most holy word (no place, no printer, 1554), STC 7279, sig Bii. 9

John Foxe, AM (1563), book 10, p. 922; AM (1570), book 10, p. 1583.

PIER PAOLO VERGERIO AND CARDINAL POLE

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were to ‘remember Spira’.10 This was a useful transference mechanism because Spiera was foreign and had already died, leaving the thousands of living English Nicodemites in the clear, not identified with deceit, not deserving damnation. Of course, no one admitted to being a Nicodemite: that was a role reserved for the other, the stranger, the social sinner. As Alexandra Walsham has observed, ‘In a world which defined itself in terms of polarities and contrarieties, nicodemism and dissimulation were deeply disturbing’.11 Enter Reginald Pole: according to some Italian polemicists, led by Vergerio, he was the worst deceiver of all, because he had known the truth in the years when reform began in Italy and had then moved to defend the pope, abandoning his own beliefs and thereby losing his very soul. The Cardinal became Vergerio’s main living target, viewed as a dissimulator, like Spiera, though much more dangerous because of his public position. Vergerio’s viewpoint was shared by Francesco Negri, equally ‘amazed at Cardinal Pole of England’, whom he characterised as sitting ‘astride two saddles’.12 Both of them depicted Pole as the arch-Nicodemite of all Europe. Between 1553 and 1555 Pole became Vergerio’s obsession. This sprang partly from personal jealously: while Pole ‘increased’, Vergerio had ‘decreased’. Pole’s conformity had brought a red hat, almost the papal throne, whereas by 1553 Vergerio was seeking a job commensurate with his talents. He claimed that witnessing the death of Spiera had been his final push to leave the Catholic Church for a new, self-appointed vocation as ‘Bishop of Christ’. In the two years that followed, while he acted as minister to a small ‘protestant’ community in Rhaetia, he began to address a vast European audience. Pierre Bayle, commented that ‘few books were read with more enthusiasm than the writings of Vergerio’. 13 He was prolific: in the four years after his flight into exile in 1549 dozens of pamphlets and books appeared. Most of them were intended to make the spirituali 10

Overell, Exploitation of Spiera, pp. 632–4; ibid., ‘Recantation and Retribution: “Remembering Francis Spira”’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Retribution, Repentance and Reconciliation, SCH, 40 (2004), pp. 159–68. 11

Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006) p. 203. 12 Francesco Negri, Della tragedia intitolata libero arbitrio, second edition ([Basel, Oporinus, 1550 [1551]), quoted by Caponetto, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth Century Italy, p. 101; G. Zonta, ‘Francesco Negri l’eretico e la sua tragedia “Il libero arbitrio”’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 67 (1916–17), 265–324 and 68 (1916– 17) 108–60 (pp. 139–40); Edoardo Barbieri, ‘Opere di Francesco Negri in Gran Bretagna’, Aevum, 71 (1997), 691–709 (695–7). 13

Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Paris, 1820), vol. 14, p. 363; Robert A. Pierce, Pier Paolo Vergerio the Propagandist (Rome, 2003).

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in Italy, and covert reformers everywhere, come clean and declare their ‘real’ beliefs. The tale of Spiera remained his greatest popular success: a message concealed in an account of individual betrayal. The technique of focusing on individuals’‘stories’ had further possibilities and that is where Pole comes in: he had not even had the grace to despair (in public, at least); instead he appeared to have got off scot-free but Vergerio was determined not to let him. In chapter 1, we saw Pole’s tightrope walk between belief in justification by faith and loyalty to the papacy. He appears to have agonised through the late 1540s, perhaps privately he reconsidered some of his views, but he delayed signing the Council of Trent’s decree on justification. In 1548–9, he made contact with Edward VI’s government. Not much came of it.14 The next year he narrowly missed being elected pope. Seeming unperturbed, if not actually relieved, he co-operated readily with the man elected in his stead, Pope Julius III.15 Julius helped him achieve an emotional, if superficial, reconciliation with the zealot Cardinal Carafa, later to become Pope Paul IV. Carafa and other leading figures in the reorganised Roman Inquisition continued to suspect the spirituali and Pole’s position became more uneasy as several of his erstwhile friends were questioned. His reactions were mixed, silence, occasional self-defence, finally, in 1553, a weary withdrawal from curial politics.16 His longed-for retreat in the Benedictine house of Maguzzano, on faraway Lake Garda, was interrupted suddenly when Mary Tudor came to the throne of England. In early August 1553, he was made legate responsible for the reconciliation of England. Once more Pole was centre stage, an erstwhile Italian reformer chosen to lead a new Marian-style reformation of the English Church. From Vergerio’s point of view, the Cardinal had compromised and prospered, whereas he, Vergerio, once also a rising star of ecclesiastical diplomacy, was now struggling for recognition. In October 1553, as Pole began his long, much-interrupted journey to England, Vergerio gave up his job hunt, which had included his trawl for work at Edward VI’s court.17 He accepted the post of Rat (adviser) to the Lutheran Duke Christoff von Württemberg. In so doing, he damaged his emergent reputation amongst English reformers, most of them less than friendly towards Lutherans. Vergerio’s attacks were distinctly ad hominem. Even in Calvin’s polemic, the Nicodemite enemy remained generalised and nameless; it was too risky to ‘out’ prominent people. Not so the Italians: Vergerio and 14


15

Mayer, ‘The War of the Two Saints: the Conclave of Julius III and Cardinal Pole’, CPEC, IV. 16

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 237–44; Mayer, Pole, pp. 196–8.

17



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Negri named names, especially Pole’s. It was a technique likely to frighten off many English readers, culturalised as Nicodemites since early in Henry VIII’s reign.18 Paolo Simoncelli, who has made a detailed study of ‘the case against Pole’, thinks Vergerio shifted key somewhat about the time that Pole set off for England. In a new piece, entitled Consilium episcoporum Bononiae congregatorum, he began to upbraid Pole not just as Nicodemite but as a one-time sympathiser, now working for the enemy, helping the catholic powers to take action against protestants. Pole, the Nicodemite, was becoming Pole, the Persecutor. 19 In both manifestations, he was the Anti-Nicodemites’ Prince of Evil. After fifteen months’ delay caused by papal and imperial politics, Pole reached England on 24 November 1554. On St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, he appeared in parliament to pronounce absolution for the twenty-one years of separation from the Church of Rome. Then this onetime Italian reformer began his herculean task. He was accompanied by friends who had also lived in Italy and shared his beliefs. Their journey was another of the ‘migrations’ important for this history. In our last chapter, Englishmen went to Venice: Cheke, the Hobys, Carew, Courtenay, and Russell et al. In a parallel move, Pole and his Italian ‘family’ came to England: his closest friend, Alvise Priuli; Richard Pate, who had once held beliefs on justification ‘virtually indistinguishable’ from Luther’s;20 Thomas Goldwell, sometime part of Pole’s household in Italy who now became the Pope’s agent in England and, from 1555, Bishop of St Asaph.21 Niccolò Ormanetto, Pole’s datary, had once been part of the group associated with the spirituale Bishop Giberti.22 Henry Cole, a student in Padua with Morison and Throckmorton, had been back in England since 18

Eire, ‘Prelude to Sedition’, pp. 124–5; Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti-Nicodemite Propaganda and England’, pp. 296–9; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 137; Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 70–71, 84. 19

Consilium quorundum Episcoporum Bononiae congregatorum, quod de ratione stabiliendae Romanae Ecclesiae Iulio III Pont. Max. datum est (Tübingen, 1553), 94v–104v, at 104r–v, cited by Paolo Simoncelli, Il caso Reginal Pole, p. 97. Simoncelli may overstate the change because the Nicodemite theme remained audible, Overell, ‘Vergerio’s AntiNicodemite Propaganda and England’, p. 308. Heinrich Lutz ‘Cardinal Reginald Pole and the Peace Conference of Marcq’, in E.I. Kouri and Tom Scott (eds), Politics and Society in Reformation Europe (Basingstoke, 1989), pp. 329–53 (p. 348). 20

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 149–59 (p. 159); Kenneth Carleton, ‘Pates, Richard (1503/4–1565)’, ODNB. 21 Goldwell was regarded as being part of Pole’s familia at Viterbo in the 1540s, T.F. Mayer, ‘Goldwell, Thomas (d. 1585)’, ODNB. 22

Ormanetto was more a loyal man of business than a fervent reformer, but see Paolo Preto, ‘Un aspetto della riforma cattolica nel Veneto: l’episcopato padovano di Niccolò Ormanetto’, Studi veneziani, 11 (1969), pp. 252–63. I am indebted to Tom Mayer for his generous help on these points.

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1538; he now became Archdeacon of Ely in 1553 and later Vicar General in the archdiocese of Canterbury.23 Did the reform ideals of their Italian salad days find echoes in the reform of the English Church of Mary Tudor? Pole’s activities in England were under scrutiny all over Europe: at the Imperial court, in the papal curia, in cities and courts troubled by everincreasing confessional conflict. In cities like Strassburg and Basel, English Protestants in exile assessed Pole’s likely influence on the persecution and fed damaging information to Vergerio. Richard Morison, in particular, had close contacts with him, dating from the closing years of Edward VI’s reign.24 The propaganda bombardment of Pole in Mary’s reign was clearly the result of Anglo-Italian co-operation. In January 1555, a mere month after his arrival in England, Pole commented on a newly published book, which he found ‘nasty’.25 The offending text was in fact a hostile publication of his own De Unitate, written against Henry VIII almost twenty years before.26 Then Pole had condemned all heretics, referring to them as ‘the seed of the Turks’. He had gone so far as to advise the emperor to take up arms against them. In Mary Tudor’s reign, however, when he was cast as peacemaker of Europe and legate for the reconciliation of England, this was appalling publicity and devastating timing. The man who said he came ‘not to condemn’ appeared to be advocating a crusade. The publication of the full version of the book, Reginald Poli … pro ecclesiae unitatis defensione followed in 1555, with a bitter preface, to which Vergerio openly attached his name.27

23

Henry Cole was not formally part of Pole’s household in Italy. He returned to England and was pardoned for contacts with Pole and Throckmorton in 1544. His religious opinions during Edward VI’s reign are uncertain, T.F. Mayer, ‘Cole, Henry (1504/5–1579/80)’, ODNB. 24 Vergerio to Bullinger, March–September 1552, Korrespondenz Graubünden, 180/2 p. 246; 187/2, p. 256; 191/1, p. 256, quoted in Emidio Campi, ‘Pier Paolo Vergerio ed il suo epistolario con Heinrich Bullinger’, in Ugo Rozzo (ed.), Pier Paolo Vergerio il Giovane un polemista attraverso L’Europa del Cinquecento (Udine, 2000), pp. 277–94 (pp. 286– 7); Tracey Sowerby, ‘The Careers of Richard Morison’, pp. 121, 312; Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, Appendix 1, p. 251. 25

Pole to Otto Truchess (Cardinal of Augsburg), 19 January 1555, CRP 1034; compare CSP Venetian (1555–56), 13, p. 8. Pole had been forewarned in a letter from an anonymous ‘German’ received the year before, Pole to Otto Truchess, 20 June 1554, CRP 885. 26

Cardinal Morone refers to a letter from ‘a German’, one of those ‘unable to control their tongues and pens’, Morone to Pole, 25 May, 1554, CRP 873; ibid., A.M. Querini Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli S. R. E. Cardinalis et aliorum ad ipsum pars I–V (5 vols, Farnborough, 1967), vol. 4, pp. 149–50; Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, 114–15, 121–2; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 258–9. 27

Oratio R Poli, qua Caesaris animum accendere conatur et inflammare ... cum scholiis Athanasii, (Venice? [Augsburg?] 1554), ‘Athanasius’ who added the notes was Vergerio;


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In reissuing De Unitate, Vergerio had hit a weak spot, but his barrage continued. His Giudicio sopra le lettere di tredici huomini illustri and the Epistolae duae duorum amicorum were both published in 1555 and continued the double-pronged attack on Pole as Nicodemite and Pole as Persecutor. The first emphasised how Pole had led others, like Flaminio, astray, teaching them to ‘keep quiet, dissimulate, escape’. His followers explained his actions by saying that he was ‘awaiting the time’. Then he had returned to England where pure doctrine had existed under Edward VI; he had made the nobility kneel and then he had absolved those who had once believed in justification by faith alone.28 It was a clear reference to the emotional reconciliation scene in Parliament on St Andrew’s Day in the preceding year. Someone was feeding English news to the Italian propagandist. In the second letter of the Epistolae duae, Vergerio claimed that Pole had formerly believed in salvation by faith; either he had now lapsed from his beliefs or he had never been serious in the first place. In addition, he had imprisoned Cranmer, and sent others like Hooper, Rogers and Rowland Taylor to their deaths. John Ponet, ‘the real bishop of Winchester and real servant of Jesus Christ’ had been forced into exile and Stephen Gardiner had replaced him. That very specific jibe suggests that Ponet, at the heart of the English exiles’ propaganda production in Strassburg was acting as Vergerio’s ‘reuters’ correspondent. The message to Europe was clear: Pole was Nicodemite, Persecutor and Traitor: ‘I say to you, one of you has betrayed me.’29 Does this Italian vitriol ring true? Vergerio’s accusations need to be set against the evidence. Pole’s years in England have been the subject of several scholarly studies: this chapter will draw on them but will not repeat the detail.30 Our purpose is to trace the trail from Italy to England, from Reginaldi Poli, Cardinalis Britanni … pro Ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, libri quatuor ([Strassburg], 1555). 28 ‘… il Polo havrebbe voluto dar ad intendere, che haremmo potuto farci avanti con la pura dottrina, tacendo, dissimulando et fuggendo ... I suoi devoti rispondevano che egli aspettava tempo’, [P.P. Vergerio], Guidicio sopra le lettere di tredici huomini illustri pubblicate da M. Dionigi Atanagi et stampate in Venetia nell’ anno 1554 (n.p., 1555), pagination not continuous, quoted by Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, pp. 142–3. [P.P. Vergerio], Epistolae duae duorum amicorum, ex quibus vana flagitiosaque Potificum Pauli Terzij et Iulij Tertij et Cardinalis Poli et Stephani Gardineri pseudoepiscopi Vuintoniensis Angli, eorum adulatorum sectatorumque, ratio, magna ex parte potest intelligi, (n.p., n.d. [1555]). 29

Epistolae duae, sigs B1v, B3r–v, B4v. The text is printed by Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole as Appendix 1, pp. 243–52 (pp. 251–2). 30 Rex H. Pogson, ‘The Legacy of the Schism: Confusion, Continuity and Change in the Marian Clergy’, in Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler (eds.), The Mid-Tudor Polity, c. 1540–1560 (London, 1980), pp. 117–36; Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, ‘Ignatius Loyola and Reginald Pole: A Reconsideration’, JEH, 47 (1996), 257–73; John Edwards and Ronald Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2005);

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Viterbo to Canterbury. Had Pole betrayed that Italian reform tradition he had once held dear? Was Pole still influenced by the ideals of the spirituali or was there a complete reaction, ‘a betrayal’, as Vergerio claimed? In terms of doctrine, Vergerio had a point. Pole had reconsidered his views on justification by faith alone – the belief which had been the distinguishing mark of the spirituali. His clearest admission of this change was made in 1554, a few months before his arrival in England, in a letter written to Otto Truchess, Cardinal of Augsburg.31 Pole noted the accusations from the anonymous ‘German’ (Vergerio) that he had known the truth about salvation but tried to keep it secret. In attempting to describe his beliefs, Pole now presented a cocktail, the Apostle Paul ‘interpreted by the church’, shaken together with the Apostle James ‘interpreted by the church’. He said that when he had been in Italy he had taught others to show by the example of their lives the importance of St James’s view that we are justified by works. If we set that remark against the teaching of the Beneficio, Pole had changed. The Beneficio, with which he had been so closely associated, had made much of works, but only as a consequence of faith, never as a means of justification. When the Beneficio was published in 1542, the ‘interpretation’ of the church had not been mentioned, but now, according to Pole, it was paramount. Amidst the earthquakes of the intervening years, Pole, always loyal to the Catholic Church, had only gradually taken shelter within its doctrines. He had not accepted formally the complex definitions in the Decree of Justification at the Council of Trent in 1547. Only in 1554, facing the prospect of enormous responsibility for the reconciliation of England and undermined by vicious propaganda attacks, did Pole declare himself – and even then his views appeared in a letter not sent at the time of writing.32 The years intervening suggested that there was some substance in Vergerio’s charges of Nicodemism. But the spirituali had other strings to their bow. They were inheritors and proponents of a powerful Italian tradition of pastoral reform. In 1537 Pole had been a member of the commission that produced the very critical report known as the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia.33 His friends among the spirituali, like Giberti in Verona and Morone in Modena, put many of the ideals of the Consilium into practice in their dioceses. ‘What survived Eamon Duffy and David Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2006). The last two collections contain several important studies, which are cited separately below. 31

Pole to Otto Truchess, 20 June 1554, CRP 885.

32

Belief in justification by faith is still apparent in earliest versions of Pole’s MS ‘De reformatione’, ca. 1547, Mayer, Pole, p. 181; Fenlon dates the point by which Pole finally accepted the Tridentine doctrine of salvation as late as 1554, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 202–5. 33

Bowd, Reform before the Reformation, pp. 220–23; Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, pp. 143–9.


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was their contribution to the pastoral renewal of the Church.’34 When he came to England, Pole still believed in purifying the system as a means of purifying souls. But there was a difference. He faced not a neglected diocese but a country in complete reversal: church property seized in the dissolution, no prayer books, no ordinals, even the bishops and the clergy needed individual absolutions and dispensations before they could begin to undo ‘the legacy of the schism’.35 Sorting out this chaos was his priority. First, Pole fought tooth and nail for the return of church property, insisting that the ‘thefts’ of the dissolution and the Henrician and Edwardian reformations had to be rectified. On this vexed issue, he lost the war, conceding ground in battle after battle, but he never gave up, still urging voluntary renunciation of ‘stolen’ Church property on the citizens of London in 1557.36 As his correspondence makes clear, he and his staff attended patiently to the detail of ecclesiastical administration, the permissions, absolutions and dispensations. They worked hard (sometimes counterproductively hard) to settle the ‘uncertainty [which] was the chief legacy of the schism’.37 Yet modern scholarship suggests that this dogged administrative grind was beginning to bear fruit and that, had Pole and the Queen not died in 1558, this might be remembered as a successful restoration of catholicism in England.38 In this re-formation, far from betraying his Italian past, Pole was much influenced by it. He had less than half of Mary’s short reign to show results: he started late, at the end of 1554, and Pope Paul IV took away most of his legatine powers in 1557. Pole did not become Archbishop of Canterbury until December 1555, after Thomas Cranmer was condemned. Thus the Synod, which began in London on 2 December 1555, was his big chance to set his new house in order and he made the most of it. The Synod’s decrees were wide ranging: proper pastoral care depended on residence by bishops in their dioceses and priests in their parishes; once resident, they should preach often and arrange regular catechism; early preparations were made for an English translation of the Bible; perhaps most important, 34 35

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 256. Pogson, ‘Legacy of the Schism’, pp. 117–136.

36

Dermot Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, in Edwards and Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism, pp. 81–97 (p. 93); Duffy, ‘Cardinal Pole Preaching’, in Duffy and Loades, Church of Mary Tudor, pp. 176–200 (p. 189); Mayer, Pole, pp. 215–20. 37

See the stream of minor permissions in CRP, vol. 3. The number of individual dispensations from the Lenten fast finally necessitated a general dispensation, CRP 1081; Pogson, ‘Legacy of the Schism’, p. 117. 38

Especially, T.F. Mayer, ‘The Success of Cardinal Pole’s Final Legation’, in Duffy and Loades, Church of Mary Tudor, pp. 149–75 (p. 174); Mayer, Pole, pp. 297–8. For a review of historiography, see William Wizeman, SJ, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 6–9.

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new seminaries attached to cathedrals were to provide a well-educated and committed clergy.39 In these decrees there is a strong echo of the reform ideals of the spirituali, but they should not have all the credit. Pole was drawing on a rich tradition of Italian ecclesiastical reform which had been gathering pace steadily since the early decades of the century and of which the Camaldolese, the Cassinese, the spirituali and the conservatives, the so-called ‘intransigenti’, all formed part. That tradition would culminate in the Council of Trent’s third session in 1563. Pole’s achievement was to apply the high ideals he had absorbed in Italy to the desolate English church, well before the whole Church began to set its house in order. All the spirituali had made much of education: Pole himself was a humanist and his households in Padua and Viterbo had been centres of learning. Study had been his escape, sometimes a substitute for action, but now it inspired his commitment to education in Marian England. Just as the clergy were to have their seminaries, so Oxford and Cambridge would become centres of catholic learning once more. In Oxford, at least, it worked; Pole’s plant rooted deeply, as Elizabethan reformers found to their cost.40 Pole became Chancellor of Cambridge in 1555 and of Oxford in 1556. In a neat piece of academic head-hunting he brought his friend, the distinguished Spanish Dominican theologian, Fray Pedro de Soto, to England, and then to Oxford, where he remained ‘very much the Cardinal legate’s man’. Another Spanish Dominican, Juan de Villagarcia, went to teach at Pole’s old college, Magdalen, in November 1555, and later took over Vermigli’s old post, as Regius Professor. Bartolomé Carranza, later Archbishop of Toledo, was also briefly resident in Oxford.41 The effect of their presence was to reconnect England with European learning, much as Cranmer’s imported foreign academics had done in the previous reign.42 Whether catholic or protestant, English reformations relied heavily on learning and inspiration from the mainland.43

39

Mayer, Pole, pp. 235–45.

40

Jennifer Loach, ‘Reformation Controversies’, in James McConica (ed.), The Collegiate University, pp. 363–96 (p. 381), volume 3 of The History of the University of Oxford, general ed. T.H. Aston (4 vols at present, Oxford, 1986). Pogson takes a less favourable view, ‘Legacy of the Schism’, pp. 131–3. 41 Andrew Hegarty, ‘Carranza and the English Universities’, in Edwards and Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism, pp. 153–72 (p. 158). 42

John Edwards, ‘Spanish Religious Influence in Marian England’, in Duffy and Loades, Church of Mary Tudor, pp. 201–26 (pp. 209–11); J.I. Tellechea Idigoras, Fray Bartolomé Carranza y el Cardenal Pole. Un navarro en la restauración católica, pp. 264, 269 and 270, cited by Mayer, Pole, p. 293; Loach, ‘Reformation Controversies’, p. 379. 43 For the continued importance of earlier Henrician influences, see Lucy Wooding, ‘The Marian Restoration and the Language of Catholic Reform’, in Reforming Catholicism, pp. 49–64 (pp. 58–9); Wizeman, Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church, pp. 7–8.


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Acting specifically on his legatine authority, Pole ordered thorough visitations of both universities in summer 1556 and his datary and friend, Ormanetto, was prominent among the Visitors in both foundations. Carranza also claimed to have taken part at Oxford. These were Pole’s visitations, with Pole’s ‘foreign’ friends in the vanguard.44 Temporary injunctions preceded full amendment of the college statutes. Like injunctions the world over, they sound grim, but there were humanist highlights; lecturers were to be loyal their texts, without forcing them; they were to promote discussion, staying behind afterwards to talk to their students (shades of Viterbo?). Yet Flaminio, Carnesecchi and the rest of Pole’s Italian scuola would not have enjoyed life in his reformed universities. English scholars, like English clergy, were to learn to obey – and that had never been his Italian friends’ strong point. Their clever playfulness gave way to a very earnest Christian and catholic variety of humanism. Philosophy lecturers were to give priority to opinions that ‘dissent least from Christian truth’ and in both Oxford and Cambridge cartloads of books were burned. All the colleges were to be disinfected from the ‘heresy’ Vermigli, Bucer, Tremellio et al. had so carefully instilled.45 There were exhumations of the remains of foreign ‘heretics’ laid to rest in Edward VI’s reign; Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius at Cambridge and Caterina, Vermigli’s wife, in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. Pole intervened personally in the Oxford exhumation, thus providing John Foxe with one of his best scoops. As Foxe presented the story, the Oxford locals were asked about Caterina Vermigli’s beliefs before the exhumation took place. They were defensive: they ‘knew not what religion she was of, by reason they understood not her language’. But later, encouraged by Carranza, Pole himself wrote to the dean of Christ Church with orders ‘that he should dyg her [Caterina] vp, and lay her out of christian buryal, because shee was interred nigh vnto S. Frideswides riliques, sometyme had in great reuerence in that College’.46 Vermigli’s biographer Josiah Simler said that since Pole ‘could not burn Martyr with flames, something he wished for and would have watched with greater pleasure, he vented his wrath on the dead body which had belonged to his wife’.47 The act formed a bleak postscript to the divisions that had blighted Italian reform.

44

Hegarty, ‘Carranza and the English Universities’, pp. 162–3.

45

Injunctions for Oxford, 6 November 1556, CRP 1768; Injunctions for Cambridge, 18 March 1557, CRP 1911; Claire Cross, ‘The English Universities, 1553–58’, in Duffy and Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor, pp. 57–76 (especially p. 71); Mayer, Pole, pp. 239 and 293. 46 Foxe, AM (1563), part 5 iii, p. 1571; (1570), book 12, p. 2153; (1576), book 12, p. 1859; (1583), Book 12, p. 1968; CRP 1769; Hegarty, ‘Carranza and the English Universities’, p. 167. 47


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As preaching had driven reform in Italy in the 1540s, so Marian pulpits were the dynamic force of this restoration. When heresy had threatened in the early 1540s, Pole and Morone had sent in preachers.48 Yet their campaigns had brought infinite trouble and some historians have argued that Pole was wary of repeating the experiment in England.49 Others, however, conclude that Pole was not unsympathetic, just unwilling to throw preaching at every problem. In a letter to Bartholomé Carranza, Pole said that Londoners remained resistant to re-conversion: Of course I don’t on that account deny the necessity of preaching the Word, but I do say that the Word can be more of a hindrance than a help, unless it is proceeded or at the same time accompanied by the establishment of Church discipline.

That comment suggests no more than caution but the reason Pole gave for his view is reminiscent of the Italian debacle: ‘Carnal men turn [preaching] into an empty ear tickling entertainment’. 50 Pole’s own record in the pulpit, once thought pitiful, has been upgraded in recent studies. Twelve of his sermons survive and probably there were more, a better score than many contemporaries.51 Hugh Latimer once said he thought Pole could have been a good preacher, and he was well qualified to comment.52 Thus there was no absolute volte-face: his truth was evolving, shaped by a lifetime of diverse experience and cataclysmic change. His generation had seen the veil of the temple split: complete consistency was impossible. He retained the classic reforming programme of the spirituali bishops. In Italy, he had favoured preaching campaigns, in England he still believed in sermons, but did not see them as a panacea; humanism inspired his university reforms, but fear of heresy overshadowed them. The passions 48

Pole himself had written a tract on preaching, De modo concionandi, which is now lost; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 49–50 and Mayer, Pole, p. 250. 49 Thomas McCoog wrote of ‘Pole’s aversion to preaching’, ‘Ignatius Loyola and Reginald Pole: A Reconsideration’, p. 270; Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), p. 224. 50 Pole to Carranza, 20 June 1558, Eamon Duffy’s translation in ‘Cardinal Pole Preaching: St Andrew’s Day 1557’, in Duffy and Loades (eds), Church of Mary Tudor, pp. 176–200 (p. 181); Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, vol. V, pp. 72–3; CRP 2252; Thomas Mayer, ‘A Test of Wills: Cardinal Pole, Ignatius Loyola, and the Jesuits in England’, in Thomas McCoog, SJ (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 21–39; Dermot Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, in Edwards and Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism, pp. 81–97. 51 52

Mayer, Pole, pp. 250–51; Duffy, ‘Cardinal Pole preaching’, pp. 198–9. Latimer, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 173.


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of the Italian spirituale had given way to the caution of the Legate and Archbishop, without obliterating all the original ideals. Only on justification by faith had he changed his views absolutely. Vergerio highlighted that change above all others. It was that which he could not stomach, that which gave rise to persistent taunts that Pole had betrayed his past. But what of the other grave charge that Pole the Nicodemite had turned coat so completely that he had become Pole the Persecutor? Most sixteenth century people believed in the ‘pedagogy of fear’ as a way of correcting religious error.53 Italian reformers could be as belligerent about their own rightness as most of their contemporaries. The authors of the Beneficio made cut-and-dried distinctions between ‘true’ Christians and ‘false’ Christians with ‘Hebrew minds’;54 Flaminio, Vermigli, Ochino and Vergerio himself were all hostile to perceived error and Pole was true to type. On heresy, as on most issues, his perspective was international; he thought his role was to make heretics see sense and thus to heal divided Christendom. In Italy, the crunch had not fully come, there had been flights, but relatively few deaths; recantations remained the norm.55 Pole himself had ‘rescued’ heretics, claiming that he had brought about Flaminio’s change of heart in 1541–42. Five years later he had intervened to save Carnesecchi from Inquisition enquiries. These experiences were his blueprint for England: ‘He expected a quiet return to harmony, not a fight to the death’.56 But rules and personalities had changed. The Council of Trent’s first session (1546– 47) had made orthodoxy somewhat clearer, therefore heresy could seem more perverse. In England, Pole would encounter not impulsive humanists, like Flaminio and Carnesecchi, but argumentative and experienced ecclesiastical dignitaries. There were rumours that he hoped to have a private conference with the three eminent prisoners in Oxford, Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer.57 However, the cards were stacked against him. The prisoners were famous and still defiant, while Pole himself was under hostile international scrutiny, particularly at the Imperial court and in Spain. On one side, propagandists like Vergerio and Negri watched and taunted; on the other, Gianpietro Carafa, an equally critical observer, became Pope Paul IV. As we have seen, Vergerio held Pole personally responsible for several of the executions which began in 1555, referring specifically to those of 53

Walsham, Charitable Hatred, pp. 40–49.

54

See above, Chapter 3, p. 69. Christopher F. Black, Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Italy (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 13. 55

56

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 218, 238–9; Pogson, ‘Legacy of the Schism’, p. 122 and quotation at p. 134. 57 Thomas Sampson to Calvin, 23 February 1555, OL, vol. 1, p. 171.

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Hooper, John Rogers and Rowland Taylor. It was an easy case to make: Pole arrived at the end of November 1554 and Rogers, the first to suffer, went to the stake little more than two months later, on 4 February 1555. But in reality the timing was jurisdictional and legal; only after the formal reconciliation process did the authorities have full power to proceed against heresy. It was not all Pole’s fault. Vergerio also noted Cranmer’s imprisonment among Pole’s crimes.58 Cranmer had been in prison since September 1553, partly as a result of the attempt to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne and partly because he symbolised the Edwardian Reformation, which the new Queen hated. The formal Oxford ‘disputation’ involving Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer took place in April 1554, intended to trump Vermigli’s disputation there five years earlier.59 Then the three were returned to imprisonment. All that had happened before Pole had even arrived. When Cranmer’s trial began in September 1555, the legate had been in England for nine months. Yet he was edged out of proceedings, conducted on papal authority, with the powers of the Inquisition deputed to James Brookes, Bishop of Gloucester. The whole sickening drama of Cranmer’s trial and his ‘recantacyions’ was played out with the Legate absent.60 In Italy he had withdrawn in face of trouble on several occasions. Now it was easier; the procedures set up by the pope meant that he could distance himself, and he did. Ridley and Latimer were burned on 16 October 1555, while Cranmer watched in anguish. Pole still seemed hopeful that he might rescue the Archbishop, who had asked for a face to face conversation.61 Pole wrote two long letters. The first, known as De Sacramento, was a detailed reaffirmation of the Eucharistic traditions of East and West. De Sacramento appears to have been sent to Cranmer at one of his lowest moments, just after the executions of his friends. Pole’s words were strong. Like the Queen, he thought Cranmer’s sin was great because he had led others into sin: he had been Satan in the English Garden of Eden.62 Possibly Cranmer never read this missive, but that same autumn he wrote a long appeal to the Queen, who passed it to Pole for reply. Cranmer had said that if anyone could convince him about papal authority and the Eucharist, he would submit. The topics chosen show how far the goalposts had moved; justification, the idée fixe of the spirituali, had slipped off the agenda. 58 Epistolae duae duorum amicorum [1555], sigs B3r–v, in Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, pp. 250–51. 59

MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 564–7; Loach, ‘Reformation Controversies’, p. 375.

60


61

Pole to Philip, 24 October 1555, CRP 1414; Mayer, Pole, pp. 233–5. Mayer, Pole, pp. 233–4; Pole to Cranmer, ‘De Sacramento’, 23 October [?] 1555, CRP 1411. 62


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Pole’s reply of 6 November 1555 exudes incomprehension. He said he would try argument by reason, as Cranmer had asked, but it was pointless because Cranmer had not become a heretic in the normal way, through reason; God had blinded Cranmer (this came twice). Pole’s last warning, however, seemed to come from the heart: ‘I say if you be not plucked out by the ear, you be utterly undone both body and soul.’63 In the winter 1555 and the early spring 1556, others secured Cranmer’s six anguished recantations. Since he had repented, canon law decreed that his life should have been spared, as Pole was undoubtedly aware. On 17 March 1556, however, Cranmer was told he was to be executed all the same.64 In Venice, the ambassador Pietro Vanni parroted the justification that Cranmer’s ‘obstinacy’ and ‘iniquity’ forced the Queen to ‘minister justice’.65 That was an extreme version of the official line, but the policy backfired. Defiant at the end and having cancelled all his former recantations, Cranmer was burned on 21 March. Astonishingly, Pole’s extant correspondence for that month makes no reference to the unfolding drama. His Italian absences at moments of crisis were now augmented: the list ran as follows: Regensburg (1541–2); Trent (1546–7); Rome (1553); Oxford (1556).66 The Cardinal Legate, once an Italian reformer, remained a bystander at the execution of the greatest protector of those other Italian reformers once exiled in Edwardian England. Yet Pole said he believed in rescuing ‘rebel sons’ and he did not always stand by.67 Several Edwardian churchmen had reason to be grateful to him, among them the ‘Nicodemite’ and serial recanter, Edward Crome, whose ‘subtle shadows’ had puzzled reformers and catholics alike.68 John Cheke too, having been kidnapped and brought back to England just after Cranmer’s execution, approached Pole for help, perhaps because he had heard good reports during his Italian exile, or because his family and humanist friends 63

Pole to Cranmer, 6 November 1555, CRP 1421. For a summary, MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 579–83, quotation at p. 583. The manuscript is badly damaged, which makes all assessments unreliable. De Soto told Pole that Cranmer was a hardened and hopeless case, see CRP 1414 and 1415. 64

MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 597. Pietro Vanni to Queen Mary, 25 April 1556, BL MS Harl. 5009 (Peter Vannes’ Letter Book), fols 94r–95r. 65

66

Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 56–61, 134–6; Mayer, Pole, pp. 106–12, 153– 61, 201–2. 67 Pole to Otto Truchess, 20 June 1554, CRP 885 (p. 317); Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, pp. 89–90. 68

Mayer, Pole, pp. 273–4; for Pole and the executions in Kent, ibid. p. 276 and Patrick Collinson, ‘The persecution in Kent’, in Duffy and Loades, Church of Mary Tudor, 309–33 (p. 321). Susan Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation during the English Reformation: the Subtle Shadows of Dr. Edward Crome’, JEH, 44 (1993), 224–42.

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thought well of the Cardinal.69 Pole sent Feckenham, Dean of St Paul’s, to see him; ‘I yield under your direction … thanks for your counsel’, Cheke wrote to Pole.70 His second recantation was accepted and the penitent absolved. Humanist had helped humanist. In addition, the Cardinal’s instructions to commissioners proceeding against heresy were unusually lenient, allowing heretics under investigation as many loopholes as possible.71 At least twice he countermanded the harsh decisions of ‘Bloody’ Bonner, Bishop of London: ‘the Council not the Cardinal-Legate was Bonner’s daily master’.72 Thus Vergerio’s worst accusations, that Pole was a determined Persecutor, were not true. His most recent biographer, Tom Mayer, thinks him ‘potentially tolerant’.73 Two very different contemporaries thought Pole was less harsh than most. The English Protestant martyrologist John Foxe and the Spanish Cardinal Bartholomé Carranza agreed on nothing except their shared view that Pole was not fully in favour of the persecution. The Spaniard deplored his leniency, thinking him ‘more easygoing in the pursuit of heresy’.74 Foxe was reluctantly, partially, impressed: Pole was ‘none of the bloody cruel sort of papists’.75 Some speculated that he was fending off suspicions that he was too soft – suspicions which arose from his own history as a ‘Lutheran’ in Italy.76 He was a very powerful figure in the Marian restoration, yet for much of his brief period of authority he was walking on eggshells.

69

See Cheke’s father-in-law’s opinion of Pole, Sir John Mason to Queen Mary, 23 October 1554, CSP Foreign (1553–58), 280, p. 130. 70 Cheke to Pole, 15 July 1556, CRP 1616; Michieli, the Venetian Ambassador in London, reported that Cheke had spoken to Pole, 21 July 1556, CSP Venetian (1555–56), 554, p. 536. 71 Mayer, A Reluctant Author: Cardinal Pole and his Manuscripts, Catalogue 7e, cited by Mayer, Pole, p. 277. 72

CRP 1593 and 1675; Gina Alexander, ‘Bonner and the Marian Persecutions’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 157–75 (p. 175). 73

Mayer, Pole, p. 278; Mayer, ‘“Heretics be not in all things heretics”: Cardinal Pole, His Circle and the Potential for Toleration’, in J.C. Laursen and C.J. Nederman (eds), Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 1998), pp. 107–24 and reprinted in CPEC, I; Rex Pogson ‘Reginald Pole and the Priorities of Government in Mary Tudor’s Reign’, HJ, 18 (1975), 3–20 (p. 10). 74

The report of Carranza’s criticism that Pole was ‘más blando’ came from Luis Venegas, quoted in J.I. Tellechea Idigoras, Fray Bartolomé Carranza y el Cardinal Pole. Un navarro en la restauración catolica, 1554–58 (Pamplona, 1977), pp. 49–52 (51–2), quoted and translated in Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, p. 88; Edwards, ‘Spanish Religious Influence’, pp. 207–9. 75

Foxe, AM (1570), book 12, p. 2158; (1583) book 12, p. 1973. Bernardo Navagero to the Chiefs of the Council of Ten, 12 June 1557, CSP Venetian (1556–57), 933, pp. 1161–2. 76


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That was especially true after the summer of 1555. Pope Julius III died, his successor Marcellus II lasted three weeks and on 23 May 1555 Cardinal Carafa, Pole’s enemy, became Pope as Paul IV.77 He began to accuse Pole of ‘protestant’ opinions and of persisting in grave dissimulation ever since his involvement with Italian reform had begun. Quite suddenly, in the case against Pole, Vergerio and the Pope were on the same side. In a rapid damage limitation exercise Vergerio backed off. Instead, his fire was turned on other targets, such as the Pope himself and the last session of the Council of Trent.78 His long campaign against Pole was over. It had been anti-Pole as well as anti-Nicodemite. Its objective seemed to be the destruction of an Englishman’s career. The longer Vergerio continued in that vein, the greater the danger of an own goal. Englishmen on both sides of the religious divide began to close ranks and to react negatively to his attacks. English ‘protestants’ had once seemed to be Vergerio’s natural allies. In Edward VI’s reign his pamphlets, especially the accounts of Spiera and his fulsome praise for King Edward VI had attracted them. Then, when Mary came to the throne, there was fellow feeling as they, like him, left their country for religion’s sake. Yet in exile they gained a wider European perspective and consequently some began to cold-shoulder him; though clearly not for Pole, they became definitely against Vergerio. The majority of them leaned towards the theology of Calvin and Bullinger, while Vergerio had taken up post at the court of the Lutheran Duke of Württemberg. After all his furious attacks on dissimulation in others, now some exiles thought he was playing a double game. In 1557 Jan Utenhove, one-time leader of the Dutch Stranger Church in London, complained to Bullinger and Vermigli: ‘While he [Vergerio] was here, however, he conformed himself to us and asserted and pretended that he entirely agreed with us’. John Burcher informed Bullinger that Vergerio had promised that he would not introduce the Lutheran-leaning Confession of Augsburg but was nonetheless teaching Waldensian doctrine ‘corrupted by Luther’. Moreover, he had ‘not conducted himself with becoming moderation’.79 (Moderation had never been Vergerio’s priority.) The exiles’ negative impressions were to re-surface during Elizabeth I’s reign. After 1557 Pole was facing an enemy far more dangerous even than Vergerio. Gianpietro Carafa, Pope Paul IV, hated the Habsburgs and he hated heretics. In the latter category came the spirituali and all those who had sympathised with them. Therefore, the spectre of Italian reform haunted the 77

For Tom Mayer’s view that, as late as 1557, Pope Paul IV ‘did not have his mind entirely made up about Pole’, see Pole, pp. 309–10. 78 79

Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, pp. 144–5, 158, 175–9.

John Utenhovius to Henry Bullinger and Peter Martyr, Wladislaw, 23 June, 1557, OL, vol. 2, p. 603; John Burcher to Henry Bullinger, Cracaw, 1 and 16 March, ibid., pp. 693–5.

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last two years of Mary’s reign. ‘Her’ legate, her cousin, came to be viewed in Rome as a heretic, mostly because he had once been one of the spirituali. By 1557, Paul IV’s anti-Habsburg policies had brought war between Spain and the papacy. In April came the revocation of the powers of all legates within Spanish possessions. When Pole’s turn came, he offered immediately to assist a new legate, if one was appointed, adding that in defence of papal authority, he would be ‘ready to hazard even my own life’.80 On 14 June the elderly William Peto was named as his successor, though generally thought to be far too old for the demanding job. A week later Pole was recalled to Rome, but he probably never saw the official letter and he never went.81 Meanwhile in Rome, the concerted attack on the spirituali had begun. During May and June 1557, Morone, Sanfelice and Soranzo were hauled in; Pole’s close friend Alvise Priuli was under suspicion. Rumours that Pole would be next on the Inquisition’s list were almost certainly correct.82 There were several depositions damaging to Pole and there were devastating accusations against him, listed in the semi-official Compendium processuum Sancti Officii Romae.83 The Inquisition’s supporters even referred to such a despised ‘authority’ as Vergerio, the apostate bishop: that was some measure of their determination to destroy Pole. It took some six months, and several torn-up drafts, before Pole defended himself explicitly in a message clearly intended to reach the Pope. Later, in January 1558, the Cardinal of England accused Pope Paul IV of speaking ‘with a dissimulating spirit’ – precisely the charge Vergerio had so often levelled against Pole himself. 84 Being victimised can make a person more popular. Throughout the several English reformations the governing classes had usually stuck together, proving that friendship networks and kinship ties were more enduring than religious divisions. There were signs that Pole was trusted – sometimes in unexpected quarters. From imprisonment in the Tower before his death, the

80

On Vatican politics and the revocation, see CRP, volume 3, Introduction, pp. 8–10; Pole’s office as legatus natus went with the office of Archbishop and that was not cancelled. Pole to Paul IV, 25 May 1557, CRP 2010; Pole to Carlo Carafa, 25 May 1557, CRP 2011. 81

Mayer, Pole, pp. 313–14.

82

Pole to Paul IV, 30 March 1558, CRP 2211; CSP Venetian (1556–57), 939, p. 1173; Pole to Pope Paul IV, 30 March 1558, CSP Venetian (1557–58), 1209, pp. 1480–82. 83 For instance, the deposition of Gabriel Martinet 12 October, 1557, Processo Morone, vol. 6, pp. 287–92. On Compendium, ibid., vol. 1, 15–19. Despite suggestions that there was a processo against Pole himself, none has survived, Mayer, Pole, pp. 334–5. 84 Mayer, Pole, p. 332. The drafts included Pole’s ‘Apologia’, a piece of plain speaking, written about August 1557, Pole to Paul IV, before ca. 1 August 1557, CRP 2076, summarised by Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 272–7. Though not sent, its existence was not kept completely secret, Mayer, Pole, p. 320; ‘con animo simulato’, Instructions for Rev. Gianfranceso Stella [Pole’s emissary], 10 January 1558, CRP 2157.


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reformer John Hooper had approached him for help.85 Core support came from the humanists. Roger Ascham and William Cecil remained in England, prepared to collaborate with Mary’s government. In May 1554, Ascham was confirmed as Latin secretary to Queen Mary, the post he had taken over from Pietro Vanni in the previous reign. On Pole’s arrival in England, Ascham found himself treated as a friend. They had lunch together and discussed mutual acquaintances and humanist books. Pole showed Ascham the book that had given him so much trouble, Vergerio’s hostile publication of De Unitate. Then Pole’s devoted friend Priuli (who also won Ascham’s admiration) asked if Vergerio’s name in the preface could possibly be a pseudonym of the humanist Johannes Sturm. In September 1555, Ascham passed all this on to Sturm, showing contempt for Vergerio’s outpourings: ‘I confirmed that not only was his very wordy style different from yours but that to have done such a thing was very far from your attitudes and intentions’.86 Ascham’s reaction was probably typical: it was Vergerio, not Pole, who had broken the humanists’ rules of decent behaviour. John Cheke praised Pole, not just for clemency but also for his ‘learning’.87 William Cecil, escorted the Cardinal to England late in 1554 and also attended him on his short journey to Marcq, near Calais, for the unsuccessful peace conference in 1555, at which Pole presided. Cecil was granted a personal dispensation to eat milk and meat in Lent (but so were many others). In his will, Pole bequeathed to Cecil a silver ink-stand.88 He seems not to have realised that Cecil was playing a risky double game, also supporting the exiles and involved with home-grown protestant propaganda; political operators like the future Principal Secretary usually outwitted him.89 Through their Italianate friend, Richard Morison, the Ascham-Cheke-Cecil trio had been familiar with the world of Italian reform that Pole had once inhabited. They knew he had detached himself from that world and chosen 85

Hooper to Pole, 29 November 1554, CRP 992.

86

Ascham to Johann Sturm, 14 September 1555: ‘Est hic cum Cardinale quidam patricius Venetus D.Priulus electus episcopus Brixiae, valde doctus in omni genere litterarum, et vir perhumanus …. Hic perquisivit a me, an non putarem Praefationem Vergerii praefixam libro Poli a te fuisse scriptam. Aperte affirmabam non solum illum stylum longissime discrepare a tua scriptione, sed tale etiam factum, valde abhorrere a tuo animo e cogitatione’, Roger Ascham, Epistolarum libri quatuor (Oxford 1703), p. 53. In 1555 Ascham translated Pole’s Oration to parliament and the two shared an admiration for the Portuguese humanist and bishop, Jeronimo Osorio, Ryan, Roger Ascham, p. 208; CRP 1172. 87

Cheke to Pole, 15 July 1556, CRP 1616. Lutz, ‘Pole and the Peace Conference of Marcq’, pp. 329–53; Pole to Sir William Cecil, 16 February 1555, CRP 1075 and Pole’s Last Will and Testament, 4 October 1558, CRP 2286. 88

89

Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1955), pp. 105 and 112; Evenden, ‘The “Michael Wood” Mystery’, pp. 383–95.

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the papacy, wrongly in their view. Now, in the pontificate of Paul IV, the papacy appeared to be rejecting him. But English humanists preferred a learned, if enigmatic, English nobleman to a volatile, paranoid pope. By the end of Mary’s reign there was a powerful movement to protect Pole. The Queen sided with him and against Paul IV. Pole claimed that he had not obeyed the summons to Rome because the Queen had prevented him from reading letters from the Pope; she also resisted attempts at extradition. King Philip, too, ignored his confessor’s advice and often backed the Cardinal against the Pope. 90 After Caranza’s departure from England, Pole seemed more certain of his place as the Queen’s chief counsellor.91 Pole died on the same day as Queen Mary, 17 November, 1558. Pietro Carnesecchi commented that ‘in the eyes of the world’ he had died unhappily, ‘being regarded in Rome as a Lutheran and in Germany as a Papist’.92 How his beliefs were regarded in Marian England is far from clear. Was he pigeonholed as ‘Lutheran’ because of his earlier involvement with Italian reformers? It is unlikely; England had moved on.93 One effect of the schism and the reconciliation was to concentrate minds on immediate practical change, institutional and sacramental. The doctrine that dominated the Queen’s own thinking and sent most of the ‘heretics’ to the stake was that of the Eucharist, not the theology of salvation. The issue on which all Italian reformers had concentrated, and with which Pole had once been identified, was no longer the heart of the matter.94 Now, as Cardinal Legate, he seemed to fix on repentance, restoration of the Church’s property, the sacraments, monasteries, poor relief and obedience: in short, what should be done; doing right would put right the huge rift and re-educate the people. At one point in his St Andrew’s Day sermon to the citizens of London in 1557 he alluded to his Italian experience, ‘I can speak of the country I came from’. He said that in Venice, Florence, Milan, Bologna and Rome, there were many monasteries and hospitals for the poor, whereas England had been neglectful of almsgiving. From there, it would have been but a short step to point out that good works, like founding hospitals, helped towards salvation. But in

90

Pole to Paul IV, before ca. 1 August 1557, CRP 2076; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 269–72. Late in the reign, Philip II’s support for Pole became more uncertain because of warring factions at his court, Mayer, Pole, p. 343. 91

On ‘hawks and doves at court’, see Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, pp. 85–9

(p. 89). 92 ‘in opinione a Roma di lutherano et in Alemagna di papista’, Processi Carnesecchi, vol. II, part 2, p. 492; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 280. 93

Carl Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and the English Reformers 1525–1556 (Oxford, 1994), p. 289. 94

Wizeman, Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church, pp. 96–116.


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1557 he avoided the technical terms about justification that had helped to split Christendom: ‘But of them that use mercie and gyve alms to other, that ys the veraye waye to enjoye all the grace and benefyts of God granted to the Church’.95 The ‘benefit of Christ’ had become ‘the benefyts of God’. Now these were ‘granted to the Church’, not the individual believer; the Church sustained and contained the whole process of salvation. The man who led the English Church as Archbishop of Canterbury was necessarily different from the leader of the small, humanist group in Viterbo which had revised the Beneficio di Cristo. Yet Vergerio had not been alone in emphasising Pole’s ambiguities. The Venetian ambassador said that Pole’s ‘respect’ for others made people think he was ‘very cold’.96 The Count de Feria found him ‘a good man but very lukewarm’, whilst perceptive modern analysts highlight the ‘encompassing atmosphere of evasiveness about what was on his mind’ and his trick of ‘never putting an idea the same way twice’.97 Such traits were partly his personal make-up but also the battle scars of many spirituali.98 In some ways, this ambiguity was especially useful in Marian England, where Nicodemism had become institutionalised.99 English Nicodemites, like Cecil, Ascham and Cheke, may even have drawn inspiration for their own difficult position from Pole’s complexities. In May 1557, Giovanni Michieli, the Venetian ambassador to England, retired from his post after three years in London. In his detailed hand-over report, he said that Pole had proved able to ‘to gain the English entirely … he was their countryman and spoke their language’. But he also noted that in his personal affairs Pole ‘employs none but Italians’. The ambassador was observing effects of the tug-of-war between England and Italy that had dominated Pole’s life. 100 He had almost become Italian and he returned to England in 1554 shaped by his Italian experiences, including the wound of Italian reform. It lay at the deepest point of his being, his religion. The world of Viterbo, faraway, long past, continued to resonate with the affairs of England. There were positive effects, principally the Italian experience and conviction which drove forward Pole’s reforms of the Marian church. 95 Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, vol. 3, part 2, Catalogue of Originals, pp. 482–510 (p. 494); Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, pp. 93–4. 96

Michieli, ‘Report of England’, 13 May 1557, CSP Venetian (1556–57), 884, p. 1070. Count Feria to Father Ribadeneira, 22 March 1558, CSP Spanish (1554–58), 415, p. 370; Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 284; Mayer, Pole, p. 441. 97

98

Menchi, ‘Italy’, pp. 181–96.

99

Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, pp. 101–11; Overell, ‘Vergerio’s Anti-Nicodemite Propaganda and England’, pp. 298–9; Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 70–71. 100

Michieli ‘Report of England’, 13 May 1557, CSP Venetian (1556–57), 884, p. 1071.

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Those reforms, revived by Cardinal Morone before the next meeting of the Council of Trent, were to be influential for the whole Church, as was the ‘memory’ of the English Cardinal and the reform tradition he came to symbolise.101 His European outlook and his ‘Cranmerian’ willingness to import foreigners to the universities were also beneficial. The voice of the 1557 sermon and some letters of his last year in England is assured, pastoral, topical, as if he had begun to ‘settle’. Always conscious of his blue blood, in the company of the spirituali Pole had become more so; he was ‘a courtier by conviction’, in that role attempting to instil some restraint.102 His personal influence was immense but in England, as in Italy, there were principalities and powers he did not – perhaps could not – restrain. In the background lay accusations relating to his own ‘heretical’ Italian past: from Vergerio, Negri, the Inquisition, and later from Pope Paul IV. If he was severe, he was called a betrayer; if lenient, a heretic. That dilemma, arising directly from his involvement with Italian reform, both shadowed and sensitised his leadership of the storm-tossed English church. He continued to think ‘Italy no less his country than England’.103 He was only really known to the small group of protégées, ‘his accursed school … his apostate household’, formed in Italy, re-established in England.104 In Pole’s last illness, in the autumn of 1558, his main concern was for them and for their perilous future.105 At first he opposed the Princess Elizabeth’s accession, but then accepted it as inevitable.106 He stressed that he had lived and would die loyal to the Catholic Church and the papacy.107 There had never been much doubt of it. Yet his enigmatic presence, combined with Vergerio’s persistent attacks, had reinforced memories of the spirituali and the conflicts they engendered. Thus Italian reform was woven into English history, even during the reign of the most catholic Queen.

101 For the ‘myth’ of Pole, see Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole, especially p. 24, and Mayer, Pole, pp. 356–86. For the ‘memory’, see Dermot Fenlon, review of CRP, RSLR, 42 (2006), pp. 345–56 (pp. 351–6). 102 Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the Pulpit’, pp. 93–9 (p. 95); Duffy, ‘Cardinal Pole Preaching’, pp. 190–91. 103

Michieli, ‘Report of England’, 13 May 1557, CSP Venetian (1556–57), 884, p. 1074. The words of Pope Paul IV, reported by Bernardo Navagero to the Doge and Senate, 23 October 1557, CSP Venetian (1556–57), 1067, p. 1350. 104

105

Pole to Philip II, 23 September 1558, CRP 2282.

106

Pole to Elizabeth I, 14 November 1558, CRP 2308.

107

Pole’s Will, 4 October 1558, CRP 2286.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Elizabethan Aftermath, 1558–1572 But I know your prudence; and you know the character and disposition of us islanders. John Jewel to Peter Martyr Vermigli, London, 2 November 1559.1

According to John Foxe’s account, Edwin Sandys was having dinner with Vermigli in Zurich when he heard of the news of Queen Elizabeth’s accession. Sandys and John Jewel had put down roots in exile, both sometimes living in Vermigli’s household: ‘strangers are made our friends’.2 On Vermigli’s move from Strassburg to Zurich in July 1556, they had accompanied him. Three years later, the two Englishmen had mixed feelings about returning to England, but did not delay their journey. When they arrived early in 1559, they both hoped that their Italian friend and teacher would soon follow, to take up his place as adviser to the resumed English (protestant) reformation. It was not to be: for all the one-time spirituali, Edwardian simplicities became Elizabethan complexities. In Elizabeth’s reign we see some powerful results of earlier Anglo-Italian connections but not their happy restoration. Amidst the general protestant rejoicing in the first year of the reign, there were plenty of people remembering old Anglo-Italian links. John Foxe, still in Basel, was sending messages for Ochino to provide stories of Italian reformer-martyrs for his great book-in-progress.3 Italians were working hard to keep their own names in the air. Vergerio muscled in quickly from his position at the Lutheran court at Württemberg. He wrote to Sir Henry Killigrew on 26 December 1558, and followed it up with a letter to the Queen apologising for not appearing in person, proposing to send his nephews instead.4 The Basel Italian contingent added their voice: Castellio wrote a personal letter to the Queen and was considering

1 The Zurich Letters, Hastings Robinson (ed.), PS (2 vols, Cambridge, 1842, 1845) (hereafter cited as ZL), vol. 1, p. 46. 2

Foxe, AM (1583) 12, p. 2089; The Sermons of Archbishop Sandys, J. Ayre (ed.), PS (Cambridge, 1841), pp. xvi and 296. 3 ‘ … if you will obtain from Master Bernardine [Ochino] and the other Italians resident in your city a short statement of such occurrences of this kind [martyrdoms] as may have taken place in Italy … ’, Foxe to Henry Bullinger, Basel, 13 May 1559, ZL, vol. 1, p. 25. 4

BL Add. MS 35830, fol. 37; BL Add. MS 29587, fol. 1.

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‘intensifying’ his relations with England;5 Curione published his own observations on the English reformation in 1560.6 Not to be outdone, Guido Giannetti da Fano, purveyor of the Beneficio, wrote to Sir Francis Russell, to Sir William Cecil and then to the Queen, trying to recover his English benefice, but also providing diplomatic information.7 The Italian chorus was expecting to be included in the next English act. Vermigli wrote to Elizabeth on 22 December 1558 in a letter brimming with scriptural rejoicing at her accession but finally recommending ‘due vigour’ and ‘stringent laws’, shoring up his case with a string of Old Testament and classical examples of the proper exercise of queenly power: Elizabeth, like Jael, should ‘smite the head of Jabin with the hammer of your might and drive it into the ground’.8 The Queen, facing an acutely difficult period of transition, did not reply. Nonetheless, Vermigli continued to pay a lot of attention to his English disciples and their country’s troubled reformation. His commentary on Romans, published in 1558, was dedicated to Sir Anthony Cooke. His great Defensio against Stephen Gardiner, part of English Eucharistic controversy, appeared the next year and was dedicated to the new Queen. It was the reply his friend Cranmer had never had the chance to write.9 The group of English patrons of Italian reform was sadly depleted by the sequence of deaths between 1556 and 1558: Morison; Ponet; Courtenay; Cheke; Cranmer had died at the stake and Pole in his bed.10 Nonetheless, the Italian connection went on, strengthened by those who had been close 5

Castellio’s Dialogi Sacri appeared in London in 1560, Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio, pp. 173–4. 6 Olympiae Moratae Opera (Basel: P. Perna, 1558, 1562, 1570, 1580); second, third and fourth editions were dedicated to Elizabeth I, see Ruth Chavasse, ‘Humanism in exile: Caelio Secondo Curione’s learned women friends and exempla for Elizabeth I’, in S.M. Jack and B.A. Masters (eds), Protestants, Property, Puritans: Godly People Revisited, Parergon, NS 14 (1996), pp. 165–86 (pp. 177–8). 7 Guido Giannetti [da Fano] to Cecil, 2 December 1559, CSP Foreign (1559–60), 362, pp. 156–7; ibid. to Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford [in Italian], same date, ibid., 363, p. 157; same to Cecil, 20 January 1560, ibid., 598, pp. 292–3; same to Cecil 30 March 1560, ibid., 931, p. 494; Stella, ‘Guido da Fano’, pp. 219–20. 8

Vermigli to Queen Elizabeth, 22 December 1558, LLS, 200, pp. 170–7 (pp. 175–6); also printed in Gleanings, pp. 383–90. Vermigli seems to have mixed up the story of Jael with that of Sisera, Judges 4: 17–22. 9

Peter Martyr Vermigli, In Epistolam s. Pauli apostoli ad Romanos … commentarii (Basel: P. Perna 1558); ibid., Defensio doctrinae veteris et apostolicae de sacrosanto eucharistiae sacramento (Zurich: C. Froschauer, 1559); A Bibliography of the Works of Peter Martyr Vermigli, compiled by J. P. Donnelly, in collaboration with Robert M. Kingdon; with a Register of Correspondence by Marvin Anderson (Kirksville, MO, 1990), pp. 32–3. 10

Pole’s death in 1558 was followed by a further hostile publication of his De Unitate in the form of a translation of Vergerio’s Oratio, The seditious and blasphemous oration

ELIZABETHAN AFTERMATH, 1558–1572

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to Vermigli during the exile and especially by Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, always Italianate and ‘recognised even overseas as aristocratic leader of the reform party in England’.11 Elizabeth’s servant, Gianbattista Castiglione, survived his ghastly prison experiences during the Marian regime and was now honoured as a gentleman of the Privy Chamber.12 Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, prominent in the Elizabethan diplomatic service, became an interested friend of several Italians. Edmund Grindal, ‘Germanical’ in nature, was known also for his friendships with Italians: ‘my most dear friend in England’, Vermigli called him.13 At the top of the tree, William Cecil, now Principal Secretary, was still well disposed towards individual Italians but cautious and gloomy about the future of religion in England.14 In the very early months of the reign there were hopes to ‘bring back Italians’, especially Vermigli: ‘The zeal of the Queen is very great … but still the work is hitherto too much at a stand’, wrote Anthony Cooke, a surviving member of the Anglo-Italian inner circle in Edward’s reign. Cooke had put Vermigli’s letters into the Queen’s own hands, together with a letter from Bullinger and then he watched her reaction carefully: How exceedingly she was affected by the perusal of them Cecil can bear witness for he saw her tears arise as she was reading them. She enquired whether you were willing to return to England, for she had heard, it seems, something of the kind. She will write I hope on this subject....15

Elizabeth dried her tears and never wrote, but continued to make polite conversation. Jewel reported that ‘The Queen both speaks and thinks most honourably of you: she lately told Lord Russell that she was desirous of inviting you to England’.16 There was some quarrel in their ranks: Jewel did not like Cooke, who was ‘mightily angry with us all’. Good friends must be realistic, so Jewel warned Vermigli: ‘Unless you should be seriously, of Cardinal Pole … translated into English by Fabian Wythers [London : Owen Rogers, [1560]], STC 20087. 11

Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), p. 31.

12

‘Gianbattista Castiglione’, DBI. LPL, MS 2010, fol. 114, cited by Patrick Collinson, ‘Grindal, Edmund (1516x20– 1583)’, ODNB; The Remains of Edmund Grindal, William Nicholson (ed.), (Cambridge, 1843), pp. 244–5. 13

14

Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–69 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 26–8; Brett Usher, William Cecil and Episcopacy, 1559–1577 (Aldershot, 2003); Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005), p. 271. 15

Anthony Cooke to Peter Martyr, 12 February 1559, ZL, vol. 2, p. 13.

16

John Jewel to Peter Martyr, 28 April 1559, ZL, vol. 1, p. 20.

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earnestly and honourably recalled, I for my part, will never advise your coming’. Jewel was casting about for someone to blame for the Queen’s coolness: For our [queen] is now thinking of [joining] the league of Smalcald; but there is one who writes to her from Germany that this can by no means be brought about if you should return to us. Who this person is, – if I tell you that he was once a bishop, that he is now an exile, an Italian, – a crafty knave, – a courtier, – either Peter or Paul, – you will perhaps know him better than I do.17

Jewel’s suspect was ‘Peter or Paul’ Vergerio, now acting against Vermigli, his fellow Italian reformer. It was a case of having Vergerio (and the Lutherans) or Vermigli (and the Zurichers) but not both. Jewel appeared certain that negotiations for alliance with the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League, backed by Vergerio’s machinations, were blocking the invitation. He was right, in part. Susan Doran comments that ‘in the first decade for a mixture of personal and political reasons, she [Elizabeth] presented herself as a co-religionist with the Lutheran princes’.18 She told the Spanish ambassador, the Count de Feria, that she ‘wished the Augustanean [broadly Lutheran] confession to be maintained in her realm … [but ] it would not be the Augustanean Confession, but something else very like it’. Vergerio was pacified with the assurance that the Queen had ‘no intention of departing from that mutual agreement of Christian churches among which that of Augsburg appears to her to be the most weighty’.19 In November 1559, Jewel wrote telling Vermigli that the Queen ‘was [my italics] altogether desirous that you should by all means be invited … but since then the deliberations about Saxony and the embassy from Smalcald have put an end to those counsels’.20 He was watching ‘the slow paced horses retard the chariot’.21 Ten letters later, Vergerio was still cast as the villain of the piece: ‘we do not see what could hinder you, unless

17 John Jewel to Peter Martyr, Strassburg, 26 January 1559, ZL, vol. 1, p. 8; same to same, 28 April 1559, ZL, vol. 1, pp. 20–21. 18

Susan Doran, ‘Elizabeth I’s Religion: The Evidence of her Letters’, JEH, 51 (2000), 699–720 (p. 718). 19 Count de Feria to the King [Philip II], April 1559, CSP Spanish (1558–67), 29, pp. 61–2; [Cecil?] to Vergerio, 6 February 1559, CSP Foreign (1558–59), 304, p. 115; for the suggestion that Elizabeth was ‘laying a false trail’, Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Marian Exiles and the Elizabethan Settlement’, ibid., Marian Protestantism, pp. 129–50 (p. 134). 20

Jewel to Martyr, 5 November 1559, ZL, vol. 1, pp. 53–4. The embassy offering the Duke of Saxony’s marriage to Elizabeth had arrived in the previous month. 21

Jewel to Martyr, 16 November 1559, ZL, vol. 1, p. 55.


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perhaps as I suspect, and as I have sometimes written to you, Peter and Paul have stopped the way to your return. Woe betide such apostles.’22 In the previous chapter we saw that Vergerio’s Lutheran stance had antagonised English reformers and Jewel certainly shared that reaction. Vergerio remained interested in English affairs, just as he had been in Edward VI’s and Mary’s reigns. Early in 1559, he told Sir Henry Killigrew that to recall Vermigli to England would damage Elizabeth’s popularity among the Lutherans, making it seem as if her doctrine was contrary to theirs.23 The experienced English agent in Germany, Sir Christopher Mundt, tired of Vergerio’s ‘busy and curious intermeddling’, concluded that the irrepressible Italian wanted ‘to go to England either as an ambassador, or, for himself, to preach there’.24 By April 1560 rumours against Vermigli were circulating in England; Sandys wrote darkly that ‘the best persons are always the worst spoken of’.25 In November Jewel admitted ‘A rumour was everywhere circulated about you unfavourable to yourself, painful to us all and to myself especially most distressing’. 26 Someone was lobbying behind the scenes. In addition, Vermigli’s supporters were becoming distracted by promotion and responsibility. Jewel was appointed Bishop of Salisbury in July 1559. Sandys was given the see of Worcester in December. Slowly their life as Elizabethans began to rub out their old life as disciples of foreign theologians.27 Jewel’s letters to Vermigli became much less frequent, though still affectionate. Not all Vermigli’s friends and students were unequivocally ‘Queen’s men’ and that may have contributed to the royal reserve. Thomas Sampson and Laurence Humphrey, once called ‘the original intellectual leaders of Tudor Puritanism’, had both been Vermigli’s students: Sampson had also studied Hebrew with Emmanuele Tremellio in Geneva.28 They were both uncertain about accepting office in Elizabeth’s imperfectly reformed church. Edmund Grindal hesitated, then decided that it was better to influence the 22

Jewel to Martyr, 1 June 1560, ZL, vol. 1, p. 81.

23

Vergerio to Sir Henry Killigrew, 1 February 1559, CSP Foreign (1558–59), 297, pp.

111–12. 24

Mundt to Cecil, 26 April 1559, CSP Foreign (1558–59), 569, p. 225.

25

Sandys to Martyr, 1 April 1560, ZL, vol. 1, p. 74. Jewel to Martyr, 6 November 1560, ZL, vol. 1, p. 92.

26

27 N.M. Sutherland, ‘The Marian Exiles and the Establishment of the Elizabethan Regime’, ARG, 78 (1987), 253–86 (p. 284). For a review of earlier historiography, ibid., pp. 253–6. 28 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), p. 148; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Humphrey, Laurence (1525x7–1589)’, ODNB; Alec Ryrie, ‘Sampson, Thomas (c.1517–1589)’, ODNB.

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Church from within, a decision for which he gained Vermigli’s agreement.29 Sampson’s was a trickier case of conscience. His principal problems were the use of the crucifix (notoriously, on the altar in the royal chapel) and vestments. Vermigli, miles away, in Zurich’s entirely different religious culture, vacillated. In July 1559, he advised Sampson not to administer the sacraments until ‘these intolerable blemishes’ (principally the crucifix) had been removed.30 By the end of that year, when many crucifixes had gone, he came down on the side of not resigning over vestments: ‘You may therefore use those habits either in preaching or in the administration of the Lord’s Supper provided that you persist in speaking and teaching against the use of them’.31 It was not a solution likely to impress the Queen. When Sampson asked Vermigli to write to Elizabeth I directly, his reply was gloomy but realistic: ‘I do not think any letter of mine will have much weight. I have already written twice publicly and privately and have been unable to discover whether my letters were received.’32 Finally, he got an answer – of sorts. In the spring of 1561, two letters arrived from England. They came from two noblemen – not from the Queen, nor from the bishops, but individuals were often used for government tasks.33 These two letters do not survive and are known only from Vermigli’s replies. His friend and contemporary biographer, Josiah Simler, said they were explorations of intention rather than firm invitations: ‘the queen was ready to invite him back by sending a message for that purpose, provided she was sure of his intention’.34 Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford, once an exile in Venice and Zurich, was one of the signatories (an obvious choice) but the identity of the other is uncertain. Compared to Archbishop Cranmer’s confident invitations in 1547, these were damp squibs. Vermigli’s refusal took the heat out of the situation. He said he had been advised against the journey on grounds of his age (then 61) and the fact that ‘the labours [in England] will be more grievous to me than those we have here.’35 That was true: according to Jewel’s gloomy report, all the 29 Martyr to Grindal, 28 January 1560, Lambeth Palace Library MS 2010, 73, fol. 114, cited by Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519 –83; the Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979), p. 96. 30

Martyr to Sampson, 15 July 1559, ZL, vol. 2, p. 27.

31

Martyr to Sampson, 1 February 1560, ZL, vol. 2, p. 39.

32

Martyr to Sampson, 20 March 1560, ZL, vol. 2, p. 48. Mears, Queenship, pp. 50–72. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners had agreed that the bishops should contribute to travel costs of learned strangers returning to posts at the universities, but few came, C.M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford, 1983), p. 25. 33

34

Simler, Life, pp. 46–7. Martyr to the Earl of Bedford, July 1561, Gleanings, pp. 400–402; Vermigli to a Nobleman in England, 22 July 1561, ZL, vol. 2, pp. 57–9. The other nobleman may have 35


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Italian’s work in Oxford had been completely uprooted by Fray Pedro de Soto, Pole’s friend.36 With Vermigli’s decision, prospects of any Italian come-back began to fade – though it was a slow process. Throughout the early 1560s there were projects to hook other Italian reformers, but none of them stayed for long, as we shall see. Times had changed since Vermigli, Ochino, and company had dug in for the whole of Edward’s reign. To explain this difference, we need to look at the wider picture, at the changes which made the Elizabethan welcome so much less warm. International relations were changed radically by the Franco-Spanish peace treaty in April 1559. From then on, there was fear that the two (big) catholic powers could begin to combine against (small) protestant ones. In face of this threat, Elizabeth and her Principal Secretary were both conscious of England’s vulnerability, but they did not always pull together. Cecil, in particular, was acutely aware of the dangers of Franco-Spanish confessional alliance and committed to helping co-religionists, like the Huguenots, Scottish Lords and Dutch protestants, whilst trying not to fall out with the useful Lutheran princes.37 By contrast, Italians lacked any political usefulness. They were not a united exile community but were scattered across the factions of protestant Europe: Geneva (where there was a very large group), Zurich (which took in many Italian Locarnese reformers), Strassburg, Basel, Germany, Moravia. That Italian diaspora carried a price: selecting advisers from one lot would upset the others. The Vergerio versus Vermigli negotiations in 1559 had revealed that. Calvin’s dominance on the European Protestant scene, dating from about 1553, compounded the problem. Calvin thought well of Vermigli, who shared many of his views, but not of Italians in general, especially after several of them had criticised the burning of Servetus in Geneva in 1553, and some had begun to harbour anti-Trinitarian thoughts as well.38 What Calvin thought had not mattered much in Edwardian England, but now it did, even though the Queen did not care for him. The Queen’s own metamorphosis was the single most important factor. The humanist Princess, translator of Ochino’s sermons, turned into a Queen who was cool towards most leading foreign reformers. Her been Thomas, Duke of Norfolk. See also, Martyr to Bishop Parkhurst, 23 August 1561, Gleanings, pp. 422–4. 36

Jewel to Martyr, 22 May 1559, ZL, vol. 1, p. 33. Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 26–9; David Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, in Susan Doran and Glenn Richardson (eds), Tudor England and its Neighbours (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 139–77. 37

38

Adorni-Braccesi, ‘Religious Refugees from Lucca’, pp. 351–3; Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, pp. 60–61, 65–6.

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own Protestantism remained ‘Erasmian, evangelical and Lutheran (of the Melanchthon ilk)’: ‘conservative’ and ‘idiosyncratic’.39 Had Italian reformers remained unreconstructed spirituali of the vintage of the very early 1540s, she and they might have had a lot in common. But it was not so. By 1558 they had drunk deep at the wells of mature protestantism in Strassburg, Zurich and Geneva – cities that had schooled some English exiles who now seemed set on disrupting her rule. The Queen blamed foreign reform leaders (especially Calvin) for John Knox’s terrible trumpeting against all women rulers.40 Resistance theorists like Christopher Goodman and John Ponet were little better, and so Vermigli, who had befriended them both in Strassburg, may have been suspect by association.41 Cecil underlined the intensity of her feelings, which he shared: ‘Of all others Knox’s name, if it be not Goodman’s, is most odious here, and therefore I wish no mention of him hither’.42 Several foreign reformers were caught up in the Queen’s outrage against their English protégés, which was unjust in Vermigli’s case because he had carefully avoided implying agreement with Ponet’s and (especially) Goodman’s political ideas.43 Last, there was the changed English reaction to exile itself. We have seen the Edwardian reverence for the Italian strangers as quasi-martyrs. But the Marian persecution had diluted that; England had produced nearly three hundred of its own real martyrs and consequently foreign exiles became less significant, less necessary as patterns of Christian perseverance. After 1558, Italian reformers faced an environment utterly changed, diplomatically, politically, philosophically: not yet xenophobic, certainly not anti-reform, but shaken by too much religious revolution, suspicious, unwilling to commit to foreigners, especially those with no real political clout. All the same, some Anglo-Italian contacts continued, often initiated by Englishmen. Emmanuele Tremellio, Jew turned spirituale and Reader in 39 Doran, ‘Elizabeth I’s Religion’, p. 720; Alexandra Walsham, ‘“A very Deborah”; the Myth of Elizabeth as a Providential Monarch’, in Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (eds), The Myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 143–68 (p. 146). 40 John Knox, The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women ([Geneva : J. Poullain and A. Rebul], [1558]), STC 15070; ibid., Appellation …. to the nobility and estates of Scotland (Geneva: [J. Poullain and A. Rebul, 1558]), (STC 15063). 41 Ponet, Short treatise of politic power, STC 20178; Christopher Goodman, How superior powers ought to be obeyed (Geneva: John Crispin, 1558), STC 12020; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 221–7; Jane E.A. Dawson, ‘Goodman, Christopher (1521/2–1603)’, ODNB. 42

Cecil to Sadler and Croftes, 31 October 1559, CSP Foreign (1559–60), 167, p. 73. Anderson, ‘Royal Idolatry: Peter Martyr and the Reformed Tradition’, pp. 174–9; see above, Chapter 6, p. 140. 43


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Hebrew at Cambridge in Edward’s reign, was drawn into the English net in 1561, the year of Vermigli’s polite refusal to consider a return. Diplomacy was becoming Tremellio’s second string and Francis Russell and Nicholas Throckmorton met him in Orleans in 1561, where they were all three on diplomatic missions.44 The Englishmen persuaded him to undertake further negotiations to bring German protestant princes into an anticatholic coalition. On 9 May 1561 Throckmorton wrote to the Queen that Tremellio was ‘a sober wise man, and for his skills in many tongues much to be made of’. Then, in a letter to Cecil, Throckmorton depicted Tremellio as ‘a very necessary minister for the Queen, wise, honest and sincere, besides that he is well learned in the tongues and has many of our neighbours languages very familiar’.45 In a shift indicative of Elizabethan attitudes, the Italian was wanted for his diplomacy and languages, not his theology. The Englishmen’s ‘head-hunting’ failed because, in the meantime, Tremellio accepted a job at the University of Heidelberg from the Elector Palatine. It is likely that for him, as for Vermigli, England was not moving fast enough towards Geneva-Zurich theology to be an appealing place of work.46 Pietro Bizzarri, another survivor of the Edwardian old guard, tried to regain English attention in the role of a courtly poet and literary figure.47 Bizzarri dedicated works to Cecil and to Russell, both of whom he had known well in Edward VI’s reign and then dedicated an exquisite manuscript De principe tractatus to Elizabeth as a New Year’s gift in 1561.48 These baits failed, partly because Bizzarri blundered into contacts with Mary Queen of Scots and her court – not the way to Queen Elizabeth’s heart. 49 In 1564 he began working for Cecil as an informer based in Venice, and later served Walsingham as well. He was mocked by English humanists 44 Kenneth Austin, ‘Immanuel Tremellius and the Avoidance of Controversy’, in Luc Racault and Alec Ryrie (eds), Moderate Voices in the English Reformation (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 70–89. 45 Nicholas Throckmorton to Queen Elizabeth, 9 May 1561, CSP Foreign (1561–62), 189, p. 106; Throckmorton to William Cecil, 9 May 1561, ibid., 190 (1), p. 107. I am grateful to Kenneth Austin for allowing me to draw on his paper, ‘Immanuel Tremellius: Hebraist in the service of Reform’, presented at the Reformation Studies Colloquium, University of Warwick, 3–5 April, 2000. 46 Kenneth Austin, ‘Immanuel Tremellius and the Avoidance of Controversy’, p. 87. On Tremellio’s diplomacy, see E.I. Kouri, England and the Attempts to form a Protestant Alliance in the late 1560s: a Case Study in European Diplomacy (Helsinki, 1981), pp. 25, 31–6, 53, 55, 90. 47 48

Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri, pp. 37 and 46; Barker, ‘Perils of Publishing’, pp. 128–34.

BL MS Royal XII A48, cited by Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri, pp. 40–41. Francis Cairns, ‘Pietro Bizzarri, Italian Humanist and Protestant Exile, 1525–c.1586’, Studi Umanistici Piceni, 12 (1992), 57–72 (pp. 67–8); Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri, p. 55. 49

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for his high-flown language and manners, but proved useful in a role ‘half way between a spy and a journalist’.50 Towards the end of his long career he depicted the English court as a place where he had ‘uselessly wasted time and hope’. Clearly his Elizabethan experiences had not been up to Edwardian standards and his metamorphosis into minor spy reflects the general trend among Italian exiles to seek secular employment in the new reign.51 The career of Giacomo Aconcio was the only instance of significant Italian intervention in religious affairs in the whole of Elizabeth’s reign. Aconcio was a recent convert who appears to have been influenced by Bernardino Ochino, spending nearly a year in the Italian Locarnese community in Zurich, where Ochino was pastor. Between 1560 and 1563 the two were making very similar points about persecution.52 It was an era when protestant rules and doctrines were being defined and both these men feared that rule-makers might become dictators and persecutors – ‘a new papacy’, in Ochino’s words.53 Aconcio left Ochino and Zurich in 1558 and travelled via Basel to Paris, where he met Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, who recruited him as a military engineer.54 In December 1559 he petitioned for a patent and he was granted a royal pension two months later.55 By August 1560, Jewel was using him to transfer money to Ochino (via Vermigli). Then Aconcio went to London and took over Ochino’s English business affairs, trying to recover goods left behind in Richard Morison’s house, and also the Canterbury prebend given to Ochino in Edward VI’s reign. He was described as being ‘with the Earl of Beford’; Jewel, Cooke and Thomas Wroth all knew him; Cecil was

50 There was no ambassador in Venice after Vanni’s hasty departure in 1556. Bizzarri wrote to Cecil from there on a very regular basis between 1565 and 1568, Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri, pp. 49–50; Barker, ‘Perils of Publishing’, p. 127. 51 Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri, p. 43. Bizzarri made short visits to England in 1570 and 1586 and probably died sometime after 1586, Barker, ‘Perils of Publishing’, pp. 129–41(p. 140). 52

Aconcio, a native of Trent, left Milan in 1557, where he had been secretary to imperial governor of Milan, Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo. The Italian community in Zurich gave him money, Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 98. 53

Ochino said of the Reformed Churches: ‘et ego ne in eis novi Papae existant timeo’, Bernardini Ochini Senensis Dialogi XXX, in duos libros divisi (2 vols, Basel: P. Perna, 1563), vol. 2, pp. 283–4, quoted by Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 138. On tensions about this issue in Zurich and its environs, ibid., pp. 151–2, 216–27. 54

Throckmorton to Cecil, 25 August 1559, CSP Foreign (1558–59), 1246, pp. 499–

500. 55

Acontius to Queen Elizabeth, December ? 1559, CSP Domestic, Elizabeth (1601–1603, with Addenda to vol. 9, 1547–1565), Robert Lemon (ed.), (London, 1870), no number given, p. 495. On Aconcio’s engineering career, see Lynn White Jnr, ‘Jacopo Aconcio as Engineer’, American Historical Review, 72 (1967), 425–44.


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furthering his career, as was Gianbattista Castiglione.56 Gathered round Aconcio in the early 1560s were the remnants of an ‘Italian connection’, stretched over three reigns and still functioning. By the summer of 1560, however, he was in trouble for supporting opponents of persecution and defending the persecuted, in this case some Anabaptist members of the re-established Dutch Stranger Church in London. Aconcio became involved through his friend, Adrian Haemstede, then deputy minister to the church of Dutch strangers and martyrologist of Dutch reform. Then Castiglione joined in the fray, risking his own flourishing position at court. Haemstede, Aconcio and Castiglione defended their case against the blistering condemnations of the strictly Calvinist French Strangers, led by Nicholas des Gallars and the more temperate criticism of Vermigli, still observing from afar: ‘Adrian [Haemstede] who has upset the church seems to have acted immoderately’.57 Edmund Grindal was dragged in to adjudicate, in his new role as Bishop of London because the post now included responsibility as superintendent of London’s Stranger Churches. He took an uncharacteristically hard line.58 Haemstede and the Anabaptists were exiled; Castiglione and Aconcio were banned from communion in London’s stranger congregations. Thereafter, Aconcio was forced to appear to concentrate on engineering, the secular and more obviously successful part of his life in England.59 However, during or shortly after his bruising experience in the row about persecution, Aconcio began writing his most famous book. In this, the Stratagematae Satanae, he argued that intolerance and persecution were among ‘Satan’s Stratagems’. In England in the early 1560s such views were distinctly avant-garde. When the text was finished, Aconcio decided (wisely) to take it to Basel for publication (in 1564 and 1565). His radical message was to attract much interest in mid-seventeenth century England: 56

Jewel to Martyr, 22 May 1560, ZL, vol. 1, p. 78; Bernardinus Ochinus to Cecil, 25 August 1561, CSP Foreign (1561–62), 454, p. 277. 57 E.R. Briggs, ‘An Apostle of the Incomplete Reformation: Jacopo Aconcio (1500– 1567)’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 22 (1976), 481–95; P. Denis, ‘Un combat aux frontiers de l’orthodoxie: la controverse entre Acontius et Des Gallars sur la question du fondement et des circonstances de l’Eglise’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance, 38 (1976), 55–72; Vermigli to the Stranger Church at London, 15 February 1561, LLS, 266, pp. 184–7. 58

Patrick Collinson, ‘Calvinism with an Anglican Face; the Stranger Churches in Early Elizabethan London and their Superintendent’, in ibid., Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London,1983), pp. 213–44; Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica italiana a Londra, pp. 326–34; Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, pp. 134–40; O.P. Grell, ‘Exile and Tolerance’, in Grell and Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, pp. 164–81 (pp. 180–81). 59

White, ‘Aconcio as Engineer’, pp. 435–41.

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‘Satan’s kingdom cannot long continue where there is liberty of opinion in regard to religion’; ‘There is none of us that does not nurse the papacy within his breast’, he wrote. 60 The last was a distinctly Ochinian theme. While Aconcio was engaged in the argument about persecution in London, Ochino was at work on his ‘Laberinti’ in Zurich. His ‘Labyrinths of Free Will’, superficially a book about free will and predestination, appeared to be mockery of all attempts to define those doctrines. The last section of the text includes the triumphant tease: ‘If we are obliged to think we are free, Augustine will be damned and Chrysostom would be a great heretic if we were to believe that we are not free, and with him all the Greek doctors’. In an echo of the spirituali’s favourite phrase, Ochino warns that to keep up these disputes would be ‘to the detriment of God and of the great benefit of Christ’. There is a disillusioned tone and the long book concluded with a plea for the end of dissension through ‘learned ignorance’. The Laberinti appeared in 1560, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, with a very personal recollection of Ochino’s own conversation with the young Princess Elizabeth, who had ‘asked about her doubts concerning predestination’ in Edward VI’s reign.61 Such reminiscences for old times’ sake did not work with Elizabeth, Queen of England. Ochino’s flattering dedication was ignored, like Vermigli’s congratulatory letter at the start of the reign. Although the Laberinti was not incompatible with Zurich’s orthodoxy, there were patches of thin ice on the subject that had worried ‘G.B.’, Ochino’s Edwardian editor, the nature of the elect. New cracks were appearing: Ochino’s anti-dogmatic tendency on the Eucharist; his criticisms of the church leadership and of ‘false brethren’ (‘falsi fratelli’); his horror of persecution ‘without end’ (‘senza fine’). ‘You must know that for around forty years many churches have been reformed and that all of them think themselves entirely perfect.’ 62 Like Aconcio, the older man was now at odds with protestant dogma; Ochino had fared far better amidst the relative uncertainties of Edwardian England. In 1563, his Dialogi XXX, published in Basel without official approval, became one of European Reformation’s major scandals.63 Other Italian 60

Giacomo Acontio, De stratagematibus Satanae in religionis negotio [Basel: P. Perna, 1564/5]; ibid., Stratagematum Satanae libri VIII, ed. Giorgio Radetti (Florence, 1946), p. 596, quoted by Taplin, Italian Reformers, p. 149; Walsham Charitable Hatred, p. 236 and quotation at pp. 244–5. 61 See above, Chapter 2, p. 56; Bertrand-Barraud, Les idées philosophiques de Bernardin Ochin, pp. 98–100. 62

Here I am relying on Taplin’s incisive analysis of changes in Ochino’s thought at this time, see ibid., Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church pp. 115–25; Ochino, Disputa…della Cena (Basle: [P.Perna], 1561), pp. 258–9, quoted by Taplin, pp. 123–4. 63

Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, pp. 125–69; Mark Taplin, ‘Bernardino Ochino and the Zurich Polygamy Controversy of 1563’ (unpublished MLitt


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reformers were dragged into the brouhaha: Castellio had translated the Dialogi into Latin; Curione had inspected the Italian version (somewhat superficially, it seemed). Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford, was the dedicatee of the first section.64 That dedication suggests the beleaguered Ochino might have been ready to pack his bags for England, but the book’s contents made it certain that he would never be invited back. In these notorious dialogues, ‘Ochinus’ faces a succession of heterodox opponents and seems to let them more or less win the argument on important doctrinal questions: salvation, the nature of the elect (yet again), the Trinity, persecution and, most famous of all, polygamy. The last caused the biggest scandal in Europe’s protestant communities, all anxious to be portrayed as ‘safe on sex’. In Dialogue 21, ‘Telipolygamus’, who wanted several wives, argued with ‘Ochinus’, who seemed, as the censors pointed out, ‘lukewarm’ and to be engaging in ‘impure chatter’. Finally and fatally, ‘Ochinus’ threw in the sponge: ‘If you then do that to which God shall incline you, so that you are that you are led by Divine Instigation, you shall not err. For it can be no error to obey God’.65 Here was every ruler’s and every church leader’s nightmare – conscience appealing to God against the laws. On persecution, Ochino’s comments were equally ambiguous. In Dialogue 28, ‘whether heretics should be persecuted’, Ochino addressed an issue embedded in the lives of all the Italian spirituali, whether they ended life as ‘catholic’, ‘protestant’ or somewhere different. Ochino had not forgotten some useful catholic history. An interlocutor called ‘Cardinal Morone’ is suddenly spirited into Dialogue 28, to condemn persecution as useless, on grounds that it makes hypocrites not martyrs.66 Heinrich Bullinger and the Zurich Council pronounced Ochino’s dismissal from his post as preacher and insisted upon banishment. The following year the old man died as an exile in Moravia. Suddenly, publication of Ochino’s works in the European mainland slowed and nearly stopped, but English

thesis, University of St Andrews, 1995), pp. 26–45, 52, 57. I am grateful to Dr Bruce Gordon for alerting me to this valuable study. 64

Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 159, note 205. Philip McNair, ‘Ochino’s Apology: Three Gods or Three Wives’, History, 60 (1975), pp. 353–73 (quotation at p. 364); Bainton, Bernardino Ochino, p. 187, cited by Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, pp. 161–2. For Ochino’s dependence on the Dialogus Neobuli (1541), probably by Johannes Lening, see Taplin, ‘Ochino and the Zurich Polygamy Controversy ’, pp. 26–46. 65

66

The Inquisition’s articles against Cardinal Morone had been published as part of Vergerio’s propaganda, among them the charge that the Cardinal was opposed to the punishment of heretics, see Firpo and Marcattto, Processo Morone, vol. 5, pp. 366–79, cited by Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 131.

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editors were to take their own, more tolerant line, as we shall see in the next chapter. Nonetheless, the post-Ochino syndrome affected English reactions profoundly. A scandal so public and so severe gave rise to the suspicion that other Italian reformers were troublemakers, rebels and heretics, rotten apples in the protestant basket. Persistent squabbles and charges of heterodoxy in the Italian Stranger Church in London did not help the Italians’ image; neither did their Spanish co-worshippers and gate-crashers.67 After Michelangelo Florio’s departure in disgrace in 1553, there had been no official congregation for nearly twelve years. Although the French and Dutch congregations were re-constituted in 1560, London’s Italians had to await the arrival of a new minister, Hieronimo Ferlito, in 1565; formal reestablishment of the Church in its old premises in Chapel of the Mercers’ Hall in Cheapside followed in 1568. Even then, the Italians were too small and too troubled a group to become ‘a Trojan horse’, bringing pure religion into the heart of Elizabethan London.68 Numbers decreased steadily in the course of Elizabeth’s reign.69 In 1568, the congregation comprised about 160 people; most were Dutch, with a significant English cohort who attended partly to hear the Italian language.70 The Italian Church on which Cranmer had once expended tender care had only about forty ‘real’ Italians on its books.71 Spanish exiles who used the Italian Church’s premises caused trouble and suspicion: the Spanish theologian Antonio del Corro latched on to the congregation, then fell out with them after publication of his Table de L’Oeuvre de Dieu (1569) brought accusations of unorthodoxy.72 When the Italian pastor Ferlito died in 1570, his successor, Giovanni Battista Aurelio, brought a Calvinist French-ness in discipline and theology, but much-needed continuity.73 However, accusations of 67

Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica italiana’, pp. 332–3; Collinson, ‘Calvinism with an Anglican Face’, pp. 213–44 (pp. 227–44). 68 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Puritans and the Foreign Reformed Churches in London’, in ibid., Godly People, pp. 245–72; Walsham, Charitable Hatred, pp. 254–5. 69

Boersma and Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, p. 30. Ferlito tried to establish friendships with Walsingham and Cecil, ibid., p. 24, Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica italiana’, pp. 335–43. 70

Boersma and Jelsma, Unity in Multiformity, pp. 25–6.

71

The Dutch contingent was probably the remnant initially expelled from the Dutch Stranger Church because they were in favour of revolt against Habsburg rule in their home country, but later the Dutch Church itself formally supported rebellion, ibid., pp. 26–7, 29. 72

Ibid., p. 37; Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica italiana’, pp. 343–53; Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 93–4. 73

Aurelio, who remained in post until 1596, was a Calabrian Waldensian, educated in Geneva in a tradition different from that of the original ‘spirituali’, see Boersma and Jelsma,


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heresy and moral shortcomings were endemic, reaching a high point with the arrival of the radical Francesco Pucci in 1572.74 The small church’s troubles, combined with London’s increasing xenophobia, had a negative impact on English perceptions of Italian reform.75 The mid-1560s were a turning point in the history of the original spirituali and founder members of the Anglo-Italian network. By then they were old men. A string of deaths brought the end of their personal influence, though their books seemed to take on new life, a phenomenon we shall be examining in the next chapter. Vermigli died in Zurich on 12 November 1562, with Ochino in attendance at his deathbed.76 Ochino died in exile and disgrace in Moravia in 1564. Aconcio’s death followed in 1566 or 1567. Curione remained in Basel until his death in 1569. It was the end of an era. Tremellio, however, made brief visits to England. In 1568 he stayed with Archbishop Matthew Parker, whom he had known in Cambridge in Edward VI’s reign. In 1569 Tremellio’s literal Latin translation and edition of the Syriac New Testament was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. He lived on until 1580, almost always working in Calvinist universities and states.77 Meanwhile, the Englishmen who had been most closely involved with Italian reformers were distracted by their new Elizabethan lives. Jewel and Sandys were now busy in their dioceses and anxious not to be viewed as too ‘foreign’ in their sympathies. Cooke was to be found mostly on his Essex estates and never in favour with the Queen. Anne Cooke had married Nicholas Bacon and concentrated on making her household a Protestant Jerusalem, translating Jewel’s famous Apology but no more Italian books.78 Principal Secretary William Cecil was still Unity in Multiformity, p. 43; Firpo, ‘La comunità evangelica italiana’, pp. 334–5, 410–12. 74 White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, p. 93; Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford, pp. 106–10; L. Firpo, ‘Francesco Pucci in Inghilterra’, Revue internationale de philosophie, 5 (1951), 158–73. 75 Many Italians attended English parish churches. By 1583 the Italian Church had 57 foreign members, and by 1593 there were only 29, Boersma and Jelsma, ‘Unity in Multiformity’, p. 30. 76 Frank James III, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations, p. xxii. 77

Austin, From Judaism to Calvinism; … Immanuel Tremellius, pp. 73–5, 116–18; Matthew Parker, De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae et privilegiis ecclesiae Cantuariensis, cum Archiepiscopis eiusdem 70 (London, 1572), p. 410, cited by Austin, ‘Immanuel Tremellius and the Avoidance of Controversy’, p. 74. On Parker’s knowledge of Tremellio’s Italian background, see Mayer, Pole, pp. 54–5, note 179; Robert J. Wilkinson, ‘Immanuel Tremellius’ 1569 Edition of the Syriac New Testament’, JEH, 58 (2007), 9–25. 78 McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke’, pp. 245–50; on Anne Cooke and the Bacon family, see Norman Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford and Malden, MA, 2002), pp. 53–4.

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reading Bizzarri’s letters in Italian. Of the original Edwardian group, only Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford continued to function as an important nobleman at court, a fervent protestant and a true inglese italianato.79 Roger Ascham, always more tenuously linked to the group, now deserted. The Italianate Englishman was a ‘devil incarnate’, he said: it was best not to go near Italy but instead to stay at home and read Castiglione’s Courtier: ‘And I marvell this booke is no more read in the Court than it is, seing it is so well translated into English by a worthie gentleman, Syr Th. Hobbie’.80 Ascham’s attitudes were not all that common. Italian influence in poetry, drama and music was incalculable in Elizabeth’s reign, but as regards religion there was caution and the original Italian reformers were no longer present, in most cases no longer alive, to inspire their English colleagues. A new generation of Italian protestants arrived in England, like the lexicographer John Florio (son of the London minister Michelangelo Florio) and the lawyer Alberico Gentili.81 They did not focus primarily on religious matters, but on the business of making a living, as language teachers, lawyers, doctors, musicians and merchants. In most cases their families had fled their homeland, they were Italian by descent but often partly educated in protestant cities of exile. They are not the subject of this book. By the end of the 1560s the real bond of the old connection – strong links to ‘original’ spirituali exiled in England during the two preceding reigns – had loosened for ever. What remained was memory and myth: also books, scores of them. Models and exemplars were common in the discourse of these years, partly because they provided the dissatisfied with an indirect way of criticising royal policy: the pious past was held up as a mirror to the imperfect present. There were none-too-subtle references to Old Testament rulers who had done right by their people: Josiah, Esther, Hezekiah – later,

79

Firpo, Pietro Bizzarri, pp. 43–4.

80

Roger Ascham, The scholemaster or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong (London: John Day, 1570), STC 832, pp. 20v, 26r. 81 John Florio, Florio his firste fruites ([London]: Thomas Dawson, for Thomas Woodcocke, [1578]), STC 11096; ibid., Florios second frutes (London: [by T. Orwin] for Thomas Woodcock, 1591), STC 11097, and ibid., A vvorlde of wordes, or Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English (London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598), STC 11098. All became popular introductions to Italian language and culture, Frances Yates, John Florio (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 19–28, 45, 48–9, 55–60; Michael Watt, The Italian Encounter with England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 157–254; Alberico Gentili, De Legationibus, Libri Tres (Londini: Thomas Vautrollerius, 1585), STC 11737.


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Deborah became the favourite. Then, there was the Queen’s late brother, the young Josiah and his ‘pure’ reformation.82 In these memories Edward VI’s Italians were included, but the dramatis personae were subtly changed: the old order of appearance, ‘Bernardino and Peter Martyr’, disappeared for good. For instance, in the first edition of Actes and Monuments (1563), Ochino’s presence in Edwardian England was not acknowledged at all, but Vermigli was presented as ‘the renoumed clarke’.83 Foxe referred to the Italian’s Eucharistic teaching at Oxford – fleetingly at this stage, but the account of his Disputation became much longer in the 1570 edition.84 By then, Vermigli was himself presented as a kind of martyr, who had travelled, taken ‘so earnest paynes’ and was rewarded ‘with so vngentle a recompence of ingratitude’ when his dead wife’s bones were exhumed (on Pole’s orders) in 1557.85 Yet, even in the first edition, there was a poignant account of Archbishop Cranmer’s offer to defend the Edwardian reformation at Queen Mary’s accession, supported by his Italian friend in 1553.86 By 1563, the year after Vermigli’s own death, he had been made part of Foxe’s history and therefore part of English myth. Foxe’s account seems to have jogged memories. Citations of Vermigli’s supposed opinions became common, especially at times of bitter controversy. Detailed studies of the Second Vestiarian Controversy and the Admonition Controversy are available elsewhere.87 Our interest here is in the widespread use of the Vermigli label, ‘approved by Peter Martyr’, appropriated by both sides in arguments about clerical garb and finally (in the Admonition) about episcopacy itself. On one side, rebels against ecclesiastical policies grouped under the Vermigli standard against a government and nation perceived to be lukewarm in the cause of reform. On the other, the bishops (under obedience to the Queen) urged that Vermigli had favoured conformity. Both versions contained a germ of truth. Vermigli had indeed counselled moderation and obedience, especially in his letters. But he had chosen to live in purified Zurich and he had chosen 82

Alexandra Walsham, ‘“A very Deborah”: the Myth of Elizabeth as a Providential Monarch’, pp. 143–68. For models and patterns of godliness evident in the allegorical painting Edward VI and the Pope (c.1568–71), see Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 2–5, 26– 36 and 97–107. 83

Foxe, AM (1563), book 12, pp. 1550 and 1566.

84

Ibid., book 4, pp. 841 and 846; John Foxe, AM (1570), book 9, pp. 1552–55.

85

Foxe, AM (1570), book 12, pp. 2153.

86

Foxe, AM (1563), book 10, p. 905; book 11, p. 1474. J.H. Primus, The Vestments Controversy (Kampen, 1960); Donald J. McGinn, The Admonition Controversy (New Brunswick, 1949). 87

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not to return to English religious compromise. Behind all the arguments lay the issue of authority. The Queen, her Council and the Bishops wanted a church under orders and the rebels did not. Vermigli’s opinions were used and abused in the Elizabethan Vestiarian Controversy for two main reasons. First, in Edward VI’s reign, he had explicitly addressed a similar conflict, in a letter urging John Hooper to obey orders about ecclesiastical garb and finally Hooper had given in.88 Vermigli’s letter, written some fifteen years before, became a weapon, especially but not exclusively, for those urging conformity. Second, Vermigli’s ‘scholastic’ style usually involved the careful examination of conflicting viewpoints. English controversialists could mine his voluminous writings and make him seem to support their own view and, recently dead, he could not answer back. For instance, Robert Crowley, attacked Archbishop Parker’s suspension of recalcitrant clergymen in 1565–66; he commented that Vermigli’s opinion ‘hath in this matter bene oftentimes asked’ and ‘Although he do in some case thinke that they [vestments] maye be borne with for a season; yet in our case he would not have them suffrered to remaine in the church of Christ’.89 In reply, Archbishop Parker and his allies published two tracts, with extracts from the writings of ‘notable learned fathers’ supporting the case for conformity and obedience; Vermigli’s letter to the prisoner John Hooper, written in 1551, was prominent among them.90 In Oxford, with its inrush of ‘new’ reforming academics, the Italian became an especially important standard of truth. He had disputed and taught there; his wife, Caterina, was made into a reformation martyr there, when her remains were reburied together with those of St Frideswide in 1561. In a complete about-turn, her husband, sometimes hated in the conservative Oxford of Edward VI’s reign, became Elizabethan protestant Oxford’s soul-mate and hero. Martyr’s one-time students, Sampson and Humphrey, were in the vanguard of the protest against vestments. Sampson was ejected from his deanery at Christ Church in 1565; at Magdalen, Humphrey held on (just) 88

Vermigli to Hooper, 4 November 1550, LLS, 48, p. 103; also in Gleanings, pp. 187–96; see above, Chapter 5, p. 113. 89 Robert Crowley, A briefe discourse against the outwarde apparell and ministring garmentes of the popishe church ([Emden: Egidius van der Erve], 1566), STC 6079, sig. Cii. 90

Matthew Parker, A brief examination for the tyme, of a certain declaration … In the end is reported, the judgement of two notable learned fathers, M. doctour Bucer, and M. doctour Martir… translated out of the originals, written by theyr owne handes, purposely debatying this controversie (London: Richard Jugge, [1566]), STC 1037; Philipp Melanchthon, Whether it be mortal sinne to transgress civil laws 1566 … The judgement of Philip Melanchthon … The resolution of D. Hen. Bullinger and D. Rod. Gualter, of D. Martin Bucer and D. Peter Martyr concerning the apparel of ministers and other indifferent thinges (London: Richard Jugge [1570?]), STC 10391.5.


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as president of Magdalen College and Professor of Divinity (Vermigli’s old job). When the Queen made her state visit to Oxford in 1566, the Public Orator, Thomas Kingsmill, praised her for recalling the followers of ‘Martyr’ and giving the divinity chair to Humphrey, ‘constant hearer of Martyr and heir of his merits’. It was said that Elizabeth snubbed the orator: ‘You would have done well had you had good matter’.91 The habit of referring to Vermigli continued into a ‘fresh phase of reforming purification’ ca.1568–71.92 In frightening sequence came Mary Queen of Scots’ imprisonment in England (1568); the Northern Rising (late in 1569); the bull Regnans in excelsis declaring Elizabeth excommunicate and her subjects free from their allegiance (February 1570). All three underlined the catholic threat. As the godly cast about for causes of these perils, they fixed on the fact of incomplete reform. King Edward had begun the good work, but Queen Elizabeth had failed to finish it. Most people still found it impossible to say so directly – though some implicit criticism was apparent in the 1570 edition of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’.93 Edwardian and foreign models continued to provide a useful metaphor for the godliness which the Queen and her advisers lacked. In the House of Commons on 6 April 1571, William Strickland, MP for Scarborough, daringly recalled Good King Edward and his foreign gurus. He claimed ‘Peter Martyr’ and Paul Fagius had written a confession of faith and he required a fellow member, Thomas Norton, to produce it for discussion in the House. The intemperate Strickland’s additional demand, revision of the Prayer Book, went too far and he was expelled from the house and temporarily imprisoned. He also had his facts wrong. There was indeed a move afoot to reintroduce, not a ‘confession of faith’, but the draft Edwardian church laws of 1552, to which Vermigli had contributed a lot, as we saw in chapter 5. The projected revival of the Laws was led by Thomas Norton, once translator of Vermigli’s letter to the Duke of Somerset in 1550. Norton was aided by John Foxe, with Laurence Humphrey, Vermigli’s old student, also ‘in the know’.94 Christened the Reformatio 91 Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 837, fol. 22; William Roper, Vita D. Thomae Moriae (London, 1716) (pp. 69–179 = Epistolae Orationes aliquammultae Academiae Oxoniensis), p. 108, cited by Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford, p. 39; Freeman, ‘Laurence Humphrey’, ODNB. 92

The phrase is Margaret Aston’s, The King’s Bedpost, p. 214.

93

Thomas Freeman, ‘Providence and Proscription: The Account of Elizabeth in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, in Doran and Freeman (eds), The Myth of Elizabeth, pp. 27–55 (pp. 44–45). 94

Thomas Freeman, ‘“The Reformation of the Church in this Parliament”: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), 131–47; Bray, Tudor Church Reform, lxxxvi-xcix (esp. p. lxxxi); Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth, T.E. Hartley (ed.), (3 vols, Leicester 1981–95), vol. 1, pp. 200–201, 225, 248;

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Legum Ecclesiaticarum, the Edwardian draft was finally published by Foxe aided and abetted by John Day in April 1571. In his preface, Foxe did not mention Vermigli in person but he praised ‘the diligence of those learned zealous men who were in charge of compiling these laws’.95 Once again, Foxe was jogging memories of earlier purity and its Italian ingredients. Close to the time of the publication of the Reformatio, in his 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments, John Foxe had shown his awareness of a different sort of Italian reformer, those actually martyred in Italy.96 His main source for some eleven ‘lives’ was the Basel humanist and martyrologist, Heinrich Pantaleon.97 If Ochino ever collected and sent martyr stories, as Foxe had asked him to, his contribution was carefully suppressed. What stands out instead is the absence of any direct connection between the martyrs and the spirituali, or between these martyrs and England’s Italian exiles.98 Foxe’s Italian martyrs seem ‘New Age’, seen through the lens of Basel and Geneva, often moving from Geneva to their homeland to proselytise and be executed. They emerge as a different branch of Italian reform, their insouciant daring contrasting with Vermiglian gravitas.99 The long section, however, reveals Foxe’s awareness of Italy’s reform and its outcomes on the mainland, as in England. Hot on the heels of Foxe’s 1570 edition and the Reformatio affair in Parliament, there followed yet more bitter political and ecclesiastical N.L. Jones, ‘Religion in Parliament’, in D.M. Dean and N.L. Jones (eds), The Parliaments of Elizabeth (Oxford, I990), pp. 117–38 (p. 122). 95

Reformatio Legum Ecclesiaticarum (London: John Day, 1571), STC 6006, preface,

sig Av. 96

Foxe, AM (1570), book 7, pp. 1068–73.

97

Heinrich Pantaleon, Martyrum Historia. Hoc est, Maximarum per Europam Persecutionum ac Sanctorum Dei Martyrum … Commentarii (Basle: Oporinus, 1563). Pantaleon’s work was conceived as a companion volume to Foxe’s Latin martyrology, see Mark Greengrass and Thomas S. Freeman, ‘The Acts and Monuments and the Protestant Continental Martyrologies’, pp. 4, 17–18, John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, Online Variorum Edition, Introductory Essays. The story of Enzinas (or Francis Dryander) comes from Jean Crespin, Actiones et Monimenta Martyrum (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1560), otherwise Foxe’s material is taken, often on a word-for-word basis, from Pantaleon. Often Foxe also repeats Pantaleon’s source citations. Up to the martyr stories of 1554, Pantaleon is generally repeating Crespin or Rabus, but from that point he updates these sources with original accounts he probably obtained, directly or indirectly, from Italian emigrés in Basel and Zurich. So there is a tendency to reflect on the Italians associated with Swiss Protestants, rather than on the spirituali. There is also a tendency to highlight the 1550s, the period covered most extensively by Crespin and Pantaleon. I am much indebted to Tom Freeman for the above and for his unfailingly generous help. 98 Salvatore Caponetto, Il riforma protestante nell’ Italia del Cinquecento (Turin, 1992), pp. 253–5. At least one Italian martyr, ‘Johannes Alosius’ (Gian Francesco Alois), had been taught by Valdés and Flaminio, ibid., p. 390. 99

Foxe’s account ends with the Calabrian massacre in 1560, AM (1570) p. 1074.


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conflict and recourse to the supposed opinions of ‘Dr Martyr’. Further official attempts to make the clergy obey provoked the Admonition to the Parliament, a bitter attack on the unscriptural shortcomings of the Elizabethan church and finally on the institution of episcopacy itself.100 This fuelled an extended controversy between John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright (the most prominent Elizabethan advocate of a presbyterian church order). Both played the ‘Martyr’ card, but Whitgift more often and more effectively.101 Vermigli’s opinions had long been used as ammunition for English debates: the Oxford Disputation on the Eucharist; his sermon on the 1549 rebellions; his advice to Hooper on vestments; his correspondence with Grindal and Sampson about conformity and vestments. Yet now the reverent opportunism of Edward VI’s reign had given way to Elizabethan textual tennis. The Italian was being forced to mean whatever he was required to mean in controversies of which he had absolutely no direct, personal knowledge. For many, the Admonition to the Parliament represented a coda. This daring attack on the Elizabethan church also led to an irreparable split in the opposition to the religious policies of the Queen and her Bishops. In the same year, events in France and the Netherlands, particularly the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, forced deep concern about the disunity of England’s Church in face of the catholic menace. From this came a willingness among moderates to back off from absolute defiance of the government, as well as from absolute conflict with the radicals.102 Although dissent continued in Elizabethan parliaments and pulpits, by 1572 there was a significant group, profoundly influenced by foreign reformers, which nonetheless began to settle for the possible as regards the incompletely reformed English Church. Several of Vermigli’s admirers, Humphrey, Sampson, Foxe, Norton, were among them, though Sampson continued to hanker helplessly after the days of Good King Edward.103 In religion they 100 John Fielde, An admonition to the Parliament [Hemel Hempstead?: J. Stroud?, 1572], STC 10847. 101

For this debate, see Gary Jenkins, ‘Peter Martyr and the Church of England after 1558’, in Frank James III (ed.), Vermigli and the European Reformations, pp. 47–69. Jenkins’ initial claim that I think Peter Martyr ‘a marginal character in the formation of the English Protestant mind’ (ibid., p. 47, note 1) is a misinterpretation of an argument relating specifically to Vermigli’s recall to England, see Overell, ‘Peter Martyr in England 1547–1553: An Alternative View’, pp. 103–4. 102 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 40; Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and Religion (London, 1994), p. 35. 103

For Norton’s reaction, see Freeman, ‘“The reformation of the Church in this parliament”’, pp. 146–7; Humphrey criticised the ardour of ‘new’ nonconformists, Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford, pp. 45–9; Freeman, ‘Humphrey’, ODNB; Ryrie, ‘Sampson’, ODNB.

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had been left behind by those more radical (and more presbyterian) than they were, while foreign affairs demanded as much unity as was possible in an island exhausted by religious strife. It was a time of refocusing and, in the process, English admiration for Italian reformers found new forms of expression. Some of the godly, anxious both to preach their gospel and withstand the catholic threat, turned away from divisive matters of church polity – vestments, bishops and the like – to the dissemination of ‘good’ theology, most of it foreign theology. The purifiers’ message was partially diverted into a torrent of translations, including many works of the spirituali, pouring from the presses of London’s godly stationers throughout the 1570s and well beyond.

CHAPTER NINE

A Literary Epilogue In this little book is that benefite which commith by Christ crucified to the christians truly and comfortably handeled: which benefit if all Christians did truly understand and faithfully embrace, this division would vanish away and in Christ the christians sholde become one. Arthur Golding’s ‘Preface to the English Reader’ of his translation of the Beneficio di Cristo, 1573.1

Thus the Beneficio, scandal to Venetian society, became a treatise of unity in Elizabethan England. This and many other Italian books played a greater part in the flowering of English theology and literature than has ever been noticed. This success was partly because they fitted Elizabethan theological requirements: solifidian, certainly predestinarian, but not too extreme. Most analysts agree that by the 1570s there was a broad consensus centred on the doctrine of predestination. But there was also a tendency to pick and mix from many protestant traditions and especially from Edwardian ‘veins of doctrine’, which included the theology of Zurich.2 In that Edwardian-Zurich legacy, Italians had played a prominent part, especially Vermigli. He was made into one of the revered theologians of the mainstream Elizabethan tradition, but Elizabethans were not inclined to abandon the rest of the spirituali, even the disgraced Ochino. In the second half of Elizabeth’s reign, there was conspicuous consumption of religious books. Many of the godly, frustrated in their hopes to secure change in Parliament, turned their energies to translating and publishing theology. John Foxe, always a ‘European’ and himself a keen translator, began in the early 1570s to promote translations from the spiritual theology of mainland reformers, translating Luther’s commentary

1 Benedetto da Mantova, The Benefit that Christians receive by Jesus Christ Crucified … A. G. (London: [Thomas East] for Lucas Harrison and George Bishop, [1573]), STC 19114; Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 275. 2 White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, pp. 11, 61, 81, 83; Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982); Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford, pp. 74–5, 92; MacCulloch, Later Reformation, pp. 59 and 71; Patrick Collinson, ‘England, 1558–1640’, in Menna Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism (Oxford, 1985), pp. 197–225; see also Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter Revolution’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973), pp. 119–43 (p. 120).

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on Galatians – a work that spoke comfort to troubled souls.3 That book’s immense success suggests an emerging slot for Italian ‘comfort’ theology, in works like the Beneficio and Ochino’s sermons. English translations of Calvin’s books, too, reached their high point at this time. An astonishing 91 of them appeared during the whole sixteenth century but the 1570s and 1580s saw a sudden spate of long texts, a ‘particular peak’ of Calvin’s heavier theological works.4 That same period was the great age of Italian religious books in England. Censorship was not routine, only ‘an ad hoc response to particular texts’.5 The government had plenty of worrying publications on its hands: the Admonitions, Stubbes’s Gaping Gulf, then Martin Marprelate’s libellous tracts.6 No one was out to censor respectable-looking religious books, Italian or otherwise. Godly stationers could print such works without entering into conflict with the Queen, the Council or the Commission. And print they did. The flood of Italian reform literature appearing on the ever-expanding London book market in the ‘long seventies’, from 1569 until about 1584, was predominantly the work of the ‘original’ spirituali: Curione, Flaminio, Ochino, Vergerio and Vermigli. The stationers responsible can all be identified as reformers, famous names in a trade dominated by the godly: John Day and William Seres, who both owed a lot to William Cecil’s favour;7 Lucas Harrison and George Bishop, ‘men well minded towards godliness and true religion’;8 Henry Denham, who headed the syndicate of stationers sharing the huge investment in Vermigli’s Common Places. They were not part of an 3 Commentarie … upon the Epistle to the Galathians (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1575), STC 16965; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Foxe, John (1516/17–1587)’, ODNB; Patrick Collinson, ‘England, 1558–1640’, p. 215. 4 Francis Higman, ‘Calvin’s Works in Translation’, in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis (eds), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 82–99 (p. 88). 5

Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997),

p. 222. 6 See above, Chapter 8, p. 187, John Stubbes, The discouerie of a gaping gulf vvhereinto England is like to be swallovved by another French mariage, if the Lord forbid not the banes, by letting her Maiestie see the sin and punishment thereof ([London : Printed by H. Singleton for W. Page], 1579), STC 23400; Martin Marprelate, Pseud., Oh read ouer D. Iohn Bridges, for it is a worthy worke: or an epitome of the fyrste booke, of that right worshipfull volume, written against the puritanes,Printed oversea, in Europe ([i.e. East Molesey, Surrey: Robert Waldegrave], 1588), STC 17453. 7 Peter Blayney, ‘William Cecil and the Stationers’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), The Stationers Company and the Book Trade, 1550–1990 (Winchester, 1997), pp. 11–34. 8 Niels Hemmingsen, A Postil … or exposition of the Gospels … translated into English by Arthur Golding (London: Henry Bynneman for Lucas Harrison and George Bishop, 1569), STC 13061), Golding’s dedication to Sir Walter Mildmay, sig. aiii.

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‘oppositional puritan press’ but instead ‘a constituency of reform minded printers … particularly astute at comprehending the acceptable limits of reform advocacy’.9 They rescued what they could from the conflicts and disappointments of the first decade of the reign. In a country where many felt they had been denied the practice of ‘pure’ reformation, translation of the literature of European reform was a catharsis. First, however, a brief retrospect is needed to highlight two Italian publications which had appeared a few years before the boom period. Especially important was the translation into English and publication by John Day in 1564 of a translation of Vermigli’s Commentary on Judges, three years after the appearance of the Latin original in Zurich in 1561 and just two years after the author’s death.10 This was based on lectures given at a politically charged moment, in Strassburg during the Marian exile in the presence of several Englishmen. That audience probably prompted Vermigli’s very cautious consideration of issues like resistance to tyranny, as we have seen. Elizabethans were still digesting (and usually rejecting) the ideas of resistance theorists like Ponet and Goodman. Therefore, this English translation was topical stuff and Vermigli’s firm advocacy of obedience (for most people, most of the time) would have gained general approval.11 We do not know if his extremely cautious exceptions for lesser magistrates in extremis were noted in the very different circumstances of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Another Italian work appearing in the 1560s, before the flood of Italian literature began to come off English presses, was Curione’s satire, Pasquino in Estasi. This had been written in Latin in 1545 and turned into Italian, possibly by the author’s friend Bernardino Ochino.12 The English translation, which appeared in 1566, was given the title Pasquin in a Trance and the translator was a tantalisingly anonymous ‘W.P.’ Recently, two scholars have opted for William Punt; William Page used to be seen 9

Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England, p. 173.

10

In Librum Iudicum … Commentarii (Zurich, 1561); Most fruitful and learned Commentaries of Doctor Peter Martir Vermil Florentine: Running title: ‘A commentary on the Book of Judges’ (London: John Day [1564]), STC 24670; James Pilkington’s ‘Homily on Drunkenness and Gluttony’ includes parts of Vermigli’s Commentary on Judges, compare STC 13651 with STC 24670. 11 Kingdon, Political Thought of Peter Martyr Vermigli, pp. 155–7. See above, Chapter 6, p. 140. 12

Celio Secondo Curione, Pasquine in a traunce (London: Wylliam Seres, [1566?]), STC 6130; reprinted, ibid., (London: Thomas Este, 1584), STC 6131. For lively analysis and full bibliographical details, see Letizia Panizza, ‘Pasquino among Anglican reformers: The two editions in English (1566 and 1584) of Caelio Secundo Curione’s Pasquino in Estasi’, in Chrysa Damianaki, Paolo Procaccioli and Angelo Romano, Ex marmore, pasquini, pasquinisti, pasquinate nell’ Europa moderna (Manziana (Rome), 2006), pp. 407–27.

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as the most likely man, but very little was known of him.13 In this book, Page has begun to emerge from Italian shadows: an Englishman on the periphery of this Italian connection; one of the English group in Venice in 1554, the would-be assassin of Queen Mary. Ambassador Pietro Vanni sacked him and tried to pass him on to Sir Philip Hoby; then Page moved to the service of Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford. He became Russell’s servant in Venice in 1556 and remained his client after their return to England, serving as MP for one of the Bedford family’s West Country constituencies. This outspoken Englishman had been a good Italianist, so there is no doubt that he could have made the translation and Curione’s satire of the Pope would have been right up Page’s street. He was a born rebel, anti-authoritarian to the core, especially when that ‘authority’ was catholic. He was also the William Page, identified as Bedford’s servant, who was Stubbes’s co-defendant in the trial that followed publication of The Gaping Gulf.14 Page seemed more than ready to ‘have a go’ at popes and monarchs. Unsurprisingly, W.P’s Pasquin reappeared in a new edition at the height of the anti-papal and anti-Spanish scares in the 1580s. This Elizabethan Pasquin was found in the library of Page’s protector, Francis Russell, Italianate, pious and protestant, just like Page himself.15 Such a life history suggests that the identification of the subversive Page as Pasquin’s ‘W.P.’ translator is the right one. The ‘long seventies’ were the golden age, when Italian reform publications appeared in London on an almost annual basis. The considerable investment risks were surmounted by the printers’ extraordinary commitment. In this short period they issued almost all the significant texts of Italian reform and took several real risks in doing so. First, the publications will be listed, and comment on this startling revival will follow: 1568 Vermigli’s important Commentary on Romans, published by John Day.16

13 Ibid., pp. 410–11. See, Sidney Lee’s article, ‘Garter, Bernard (fl. 1565–1579)’, rev. Matthew Steggle, ODNB. 14

Kenneth Barnes, ‘John Stubbe, 1579: the French Ambassador’s Account’, HR, 64 (1991) pp. 421–6; Natalie Mears ‘Counsel, Public Debate and Queenship: John Stubb’s “The discoverie of Gaping Gulf”, 1579’, HJ, 44 (2001), pp. 629–50. 15 16

See below, p. 201.

Pietro Martire Vermigli, Most learned and fruitfull commentaries … upon the epistle to the Romanes… lately translated out of Latine into Englishe by H. B.[Henry Billingsley], (London, John Day [1568]), STC 24672. In this superbly presented edition, the work was dedicated to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Day’s patron, Elizabeth Evenden, A Biography of John Day, in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Variorum Edition Online (version 1.1 – Summer 2006). http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/johnfoxe/apparatus/evendenbiogjdayessay.html

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1569 Vermigli’s Godly Prayers compiled out of Davids Psalms, published by William Seres.17 1570? Ochino’s Sermons concerning the predestination and election of God, published by John Day.18 This was a reissue of the composite volume of 1551, which had included all the Edwardian translations of Ochino’s sermons. 1570 A reissue of Edward Aglionby’s (1550) translation of Gribaldi’s account of the story of Francesco Spiera.19 1573 Il Beneficio di Cristo was published in English for the first time, not in Edward Courtenay’s version, but in a new translation from the French by ‘A.G.’, almost certainly Arthur Golding, perhaps the most famous of all Elizabethan translators.20 1575 Golding’s translation of Il Beneficio di Cristo was reissued.21 1576 Vermigli’s Commonplaces appeared in the original Latin collection, edited by Robert Masson, with Masson’s prefatory letter to Sir Anthony Cooke, one of the few original members of the Anglo-Italian connection who were still alive.22 1577 Golding’s translation of the Beneficio may have been reissued.23 1577? (often given as 1573?) Francesco Negri’s A certayne tragedy entitled Freewyl, translated by Henry Cheke, son of Sir John Cheke.24 17 Pietro Martire Vermigli, Most godly prayers compiled out of Dauids Psalmes by D. Peter Martyr. Translated out of Latine into English by Charles Glemhan. G. Seene (London: William Seres, 1569), STC 24671. 18 Bernardino Ochino, Sermons of Barnardine Ochyne to the number of twenty five concerning the predestination and election of God, trans. A.C[ooke, Lady Bacon and R. Argentine], (London: John Day, [1570?]), STC 18768 [reprinted from STC 18766]. 19 Matteo Gribaldi, A notable and marueilous epistle of the famous doctour, Matthewe Gribalde, Professor of the lawe, in the Vniuersitie of Padua: co[n]cernyng the terrible iudgemente of God, vpon hym that for feare of men, denieth Christ and the knowne veritie: with a preface of Doctor Caluine (London: Henry Denham [and J. Kingston?] for William Norton, [1570?]), STC 12366. 20 Benedetto da Mantova, The Benefit that Christians receive by Jesus Christ Crucified ... translated out of French into English by A.G. 1573 (London: [Thomas East] for Lucas Harrison and George Bishop, [1573]), STC 19114; M.A. Overell, ‘Arthur Golding’s Translation of the Beneficio di Cristo’, Notes and Queries, New Series, 25 (1978), 424–6. 21

Benedetto da Mantova, The benefite that Christians receyue by Jesus Christ crucified. Translated out of French into English by A.G. ([London]: H. Bynneman, for Lucas Harrison and George Bishop [1575]), STC 19115. 22

Petri Martyris Vermilii, Florentini praestantissimi nostra aetate theologi, Loci communes (Londini: Ex typographia Ioannis Kyngstoni, 1576), STC 24667. 23 This issue does not appear in the revised STC, but see Prelowski, ‘Beneficio di Cristo’, in Italian Reformation Studies, pp. 95–102. 24

A certayne tragedie wrytten fyrst in Italian, by F.N.B. entituled, Freewyl, and translated into Englishe, by Henry Cheeke (London: Richard Jugge, 1573?), STC 18419. On dating and attribution, see Carlo M. Bajetta, ‘Tracing a lost context: Henry Cheke’s Freewyl’, Aevum, 71 (1997), 711–30.

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1578 Vermigli’s Exposition of the xii articles of our Faith, commonly called the Apostles Creed, translated by ‘T.E.’.25 1579 Aconcio’s Una esortazione al timor di Dio, in Italian, edited with a preface by Gianbattista Castiglione.26 1580 Another issue of the Beneficio di Cristo in Golding’s translation.27 1580 A new translation of Ochino’s Sermons on Faith, Hope and Charity by William Phiston.28 1580 A collection of Vermigli’s writings on (the dangers of) dancing, made by Robert Masson.29 1581 A play about Francesco Spiera by Nathaniel Woodes, in two versions with different endings, one happy and one sad.30 1583 Vermigli’s Common Places, translated into English by Anthony Marten.31 1583 An expanded version of Robert Masson’s Latin version (1576) of Vermigli’s Common Places.32 1584 A second edition of W.P.’s translation of Curio’s Pasquino.33 25 Pietro Martire Vermigli, A briefe and excellent exposition of the xii articles of our faith, commonly called the apostles creed … Written first in Italian … and lately translated into Englishe by T.E. (London: H. Jackson [1578]), Bibliography of Peter Martyr Vermigli, pp. 132–3. This is not listed among Vermigli’s works in STC. 26

Iacopo Aconcio, Vna essortatione al timor di Dio, In Londra, Appresso Giouanni Wolfio, seruitore de [l’]illustrssimo signor Filippo Sidnei (London: John Woolfe [but printed abroad], [1579?]), STC 92. 27

Aonio Paleario (misattribution), The benefite that Christians receive by Jesus Christ crucified translated out of French into English, by A.G. (London: George Bishop and Thomas Woodcocke, 1580), STC 19116. 28

Bernardino Ochino, Certaine godly and very profitable sermons, of faith, hope and charitie… translated by William Phiston of London, student (London: Thomas East, 1580), STC 18769. 29

[Pietro Martire Vermigli], A briefe treatise, concerning the vse and abuse of dauncing, collected … by paister Rob Massonius: and translated into English by I.K. (London: Iohn Iugge [1580], STC 24664. 30

Nathaniel Woodes, An excellent new commedie intituled, The conflict of conscience (London: Richard Bradocke, 1581), STC 25966.5. 31 Pietro Martire Vermigli, The common places of the most famous and renowmed diuine Doctor Peter Martyr … translated and partlie gathered by Anthonie Marten (London: [by Henry Denham and Henry Middleton] at the costs and charges of Henrie Denham, Thomas Chard, William Broome, and Andrew Maunsell, 1583), STC 24669. 32

Pietro Martire Vermigli, Loci communes D. Petri Martyris Vermilii, Florentini, sacrarum literarum in schola Tigurina professoris: ex varijs ipsius authoris scriptis, in vnum librum collecti, & in quatuor classes distributi. Quam multa ad priorem editionem accesserint, ex admonitione quam prima pagina exhibebit, facilè lector deprehendet (Londini: Thomas Vautrollerius typographus, 1583), STC 24668. 33

6131.

Celio Secondo Curione, Pasquine in a traunce (London: Thomas Este, 1584), STC

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Thus, these stationers chose to ‘do Italian’ at a time when there were plenty of mainstream reformation works certain to attract readers: Calvin, Bullinger, Beza, with Luther still going strong. Yet alongside the famous names, we have Ochino, the Beneficios and the tragedies of Francesco Spiera. There were expensive items, like Vermigli’s influential Commentary on Romans, based on lectures given in Oxford in 1550–52, dedicated to Sir Anthony Cooke and remembering ‘the incredible piety of that famous king Edwarde the vi’. 34 Published by John Day, it appeared at a time when Calvinist views about predestination were beginning to permeate English universities, and Vermigli’s comments on that topic, appearing at the end of Romans 9, were enough like Calvin’s to be well received. Yet some of these Italian publications were much more risky: if the date given in the Short Title Catalogue for the reissue of Ochino’s sermons (1570?) is even approximately correct, John Day saw fit to produce the book when almost all publishers on the European mainland found Ochino simply too hot to hold. Day, experienced reformer-publisher, knew the territory: it is unlikely that he was ignorant of the scandal in Zurich seven years earlier.35 Shrewd business sense probably entered into his calculations: the title he chose included the magic words ‘predestination and election’; in this predestinarian heyday, the author was a risk but the doctrine would sell. Gribaldi’s version of the story of Francesco Spiera, translated by Edward Aglionby and first published some twenty years earlier, was probably reissued at about the same time as Ochino’s sermons. Once again, the London printers were either audacious or ill-informed. By this time, Gribaldi was persona non grata in protestant Europe. He had been condemned for antitrinitarian views in the late 1550s, yet his name appears, bold as brass, in this title.36 The new translation of Il Beneficio di Cristo, which appeared in 1573, was safer. As we have seen, the Beneficio’s theology of salvation was that of the ‘early reformation’, only mildly predestinarian, but unlikely to offend Elizabethans well used to coping with the more contentious refinements of that doctrine. The phrase the ‘benefit of Christ’ was by now familiar to sermon-gadders as well as theologians, so that may have drawn readers.37 34

Vermigli, Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Anthony Cooke, STC 24672, sig. Ai.

35

STC 18768, reprinted from 18766; Overell, ‘Bernardino Ochino’s Books’, pp. 210–11; John King, ‘John Day, Master Printer of the English Reformation ’, pp. 200–208; Elizabeth Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot, 2008). 36 37

STC 12366; Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, pp. 60–61, 137, 154.

It occurs in sermons by Fulke, Perkins, as well as Calvin and Niels Hemmingsen. There are interesting similarities in John Foxe’s very popular, A sermon of Christ crucified, beginning ‘Amongst all the benefits of Almightie God’ (London: [John Kingston for] John Day, 1575), STC 11243.

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As we saw in chapter 3, the Beneficio had been translated into English by Edward Courtenay in 1547, but never published. The new version was distinctly better than Courtenay’s stiff prison-prose; even in translation at second hand from the French, it had distinct vitality.38 The translator appears as just ‘A.G.’. Two famous names have been suggested: Anthony Gilby, fervent protestant, radical Leicestershire ‘puritan’ leader, and Arthur Golding, translator, also devoutly protestant, but a moderate, more or less satisfied with the Elizabethan settlement. Bibliographical and historical evidence makes it virtually certain that this was Golding’s work.39 He worked on religious books and the classics, becoming famous for his version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.40 A series of important religious translations followed, including works of reformers like the Lutheran Niels Hemmingsen, David Chytraeus and, pre-eminently, Calvin.41 Golding was determined to use his linguistic skills in the service of ‘godliness’ but chose a theologically mixed bunch. Like the author of the Beneficio (Flaminio) and its first English translator (Courtenay), Golding was a humanist. In all three phases, capacious Christian humanism was the context for this ‘litle boke’, one of the sixteenth century’s shorter religious classics.42 Golding’s eirenic preface forms a moving epilogue to the searing religious strife of the sixteenth century and has been used as such.43 ‘This may be counted among the greatest evils with which this age is infected that thei which are called christians are miserably divided about Christ....’ His dream that ‘division would vanish away’ is quoted at the beginning of this chapter.44 Skilled translator that he was, Golding had picked up that kernel of unity which had made later ‘catholics’ like Pole, Morone and Flaminio, as well as later ‘protestants’, like Vermigli and Ochino, act as one in promoting the Beneficio. Golding’s reading of the text may serve to explain why so many Italian books were revived at this time. It is possible 38

Du bénéfice du Iesu Christ crucifié envers les Chrestians (Lyons, 1545), reprinted in Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 89–153. For a list of all sixteenth century editions and translations, see Caponetto, Beneficio, pp. 504–11. 39

Overell, ‘Arthur Golding’s translation of the Beneficio di Cristo’, pp. 424–6. The fyrst fovver bookes of P. Ouidius Nasos worke, intitled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into Englishe meter by Arthur Golding Gent (London: William Seres, 1565), STC 18955. 40

41

Niels Hemmingsen, A Postil… or Exposition of the Gospels (London, 1569), STC 13061; David Chytraeus, A Postil…of certeyne Epistles (London, 1570), STC 5263; Calvin, see STC 4434, 4442, 4444, 4448; L.T. Golding, An Elizabethan Puritan; Arthur Golding (New York, 1937). 42

Courtenay’s dedication to the Duchess of Somerset, CUL, Nn 4. 43, fol. 3r.

43

MacCulloch, Reformation, p. 708. Caponetto, Beneficio, p. 275.

44

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that for him and his contemporaries the spirituali were interesting precisely because they were identified as early reformers, moderates, outside current controversies. To translate and publish their work may have been seen as a way of extending the area of agreement and ventilating the theological hothouse. The next translation project was an English version of Francesco Negri’s Tragedy of Free Will, first published in 1546. We have already seen that Negri’s text had interested English humanists in the era of John Cheke: William Thomas provoked his Italian opponents by referring to it; Thomas Hoby said he had translated it. Now John Cheke’s son, Henry, claimed responsibility for the new translation. It is possible that Cheke the younger was drawing on the (now lost) translation made in 1550 by Hoby, his father’s fellow exile. Echoes of Edwardian enthusiasms can be heard in Henry Cheke’s assumption that translating Negri would please his uncle Lord Burghley, who, as Sir William Cecil, had been allied to the Italian group in Edward VI’s reign.45 Then came the beginning of a big Italian success story: Vermigli’s Loci Communes. The Loci were reflections on biblical doctrine inserted in Vermigli’s commentaries and we have already noted the influence of his loci on justification and predestination, probably partly written while he was professor at Oxford.46 The 1576 collection, edited by Robert Masson, minister to the French Stranger Church in London, started the process whereby ‘Doctor Peter Martyr’s’ ‘Common Places’ became recommended reading in universities and learned households for the rest of Elizabeth I’s reign.47 As a publisher’s venture, issuing Vermigli’s Loci was an expensive but safe choice. It is much less easy to account for other, more daring, Italian projects in the years 1580–83. The only member of the original Edwardian Italian group still prominent at court was the Queen’s old tutor, Gianbattista Castiglione, made a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber after Elizabeth’s accession. He had survived the brouhaha about intolerance in the Dutch Stranger Church in 1559–60, in which he had supported his friend, the tolerationist Giacomo Aconcio. Aconcio was remembered as a radical who distrusted dogma and had dared to see persecution as one of ‘Satan’s Stratagems’. In 1579, the rogue stationer John Wolfe published Castiglione’s edition of Aconcio’s Una essortatione al timor di Dio, dedicated to the Queen and bound together with poems written by Castiglione himself. Although 45 Hoby, Travail, p. 63; Edoardo Barbieri, ‘Opere di Francesco Negri in Gran Bretagna’, Aevum, 71 (1997), 691–709; Bajetta, ‘Tracing a lost context: Henry Cheke’s Freewyl’, Aevum, 71 (1997), 711–30 (pp. 717–24). 46 47

See above, Chapter 5, p. 116. Jenkins, ‘Peter Martyr and the Church of England after 1558’, pp. 58–69.

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this work was less contentious than Aconcio’s Stratagemata Satanae, it was left in the original Italian, probably for safety.48 In the following year, 1580, one William Phiston, ‘student’, far outdid Castiglione’s boldness by raising the spectre of Ochino once more. These Sermons of faith, hope and charitie, dated way back to Ochino’s first exile in Geneva between 1542 and 1545, but after the Zurich heresy scandal, nothing by Ochino was completely safe. The sermons needed skilful presentation – and Phiston knew how. First, in his dedication to Archbishop Grindal, then Archbishop of Canterbury, he came clean about Ochino’s disgrace: ‘Only this is reported of him that in his latter years, howsoever it fell out I wot not, but he, by his fall, declared manifestly what and how vehement the frailty of human nature is ... but yet it is certain that once he was zealous ... nothing inferior ... in perfect judgement’. Thus a cheeky English ‘student’ excused what protestant Europe’s religious leaders had condemned. He also implicated Edmund Grindal, already under house arrest since 1577 for opposing the Queen’s orders. In a second preface, Phiston praised the Queen’s ministers for their toleration. This was belt and braces: ministers praised for toleration were being warned against intolerance towards Phiston’s dubious author.49 In publishing Ochino’s and Aconcio’s works, London’s stationers were doing their own thing, ignoring the likely displeasure of Zurich and Geneva. Nathaniel Woodes’s Conflict of Conscience, a morality play about the story of Spiera, appeared in 1581 in two different forms. One ended in suicide: ‘He hath hanged himself with a cord’, as Gribaldi had hinted Spiera might. Woodes’s other version had Spiera finally converted, in a warm Christian glow – not what Vergerio and the other Italian authors had had in mind. Woodes was using the English translation of 1550; some passages are straightforward versifications of Aglionby’s words. It was further proof of the way these Italian books survived the switchback sequence of Tudor reformations.50 Significantly, Woodes’s prologue describes the story as ‘to 48

STC 92; Aconcio’s Una essortatione was the first book issued by Day’s one-time Italian apprentice, John Wolfe, see Wyatt, Italian Encounter, p. 186. 49 STC 18769, pp. 1–2, 59–60. John Foxe noted ‘Ochinus’ on his list of authors condemned by Queen Mary but sidestepped the task of defending him, ‘neither doeth my laisure serue now to wryte Apologies in defence of these Authors here condemned’, AM (1583), book 11, pp. 1597–8; Patrick Collinson, ‘Grindal, Edmund (1516x20–1583)’, ODNB. 50 Nathaniel Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience (1581), ed. Herbert Davies and Frank Percy Wilson, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford, 1952); ibid., first version, line 30; compare lines 2410–13 in first and second versions; Celesta Wine, ‘Nathaniel Wood’s “Conflict of Conscience”’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 50 (1935), 661–78; William A. Jackson, ‘Woodes’s “Conflict of Conscience”’, TLS, 7 September 1933,

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most men fully knowen’, a process to which John Foxe had undoubtedly contributed a great deal. Spiera had even formed part of his solemn last word in his very long ‘Book of Martyrs’, entitled ‘Admonition to the Reader’.51 Two more Vermigli publications appeared in 1583: Anthony Marten’s immensely successful English translation of Vermigli’s Common Places and also a restructured edition of Masson’s Loci Communes. The production of the English version cost so much that only a syndicate of Stationers could sustain the outlay – all of them known for being godly.52 Their investment was justified, attracting hundreds of readers for the rest of the sixteenth century. Patrick Collinson stresses the importance of the Common Places for the development of English religion: ‘But if we were to identify one author and one book which represented the centre of theological gravity of the Elizabethan Church, it would not be Calvin’s Institutes but the Common Places of Peter Martyr’.53 And Diarmaid MacCulloch agrees: ‘When clergy in Elizabeth’s church looked for a reliable and authoritative theological guide they were likely to turn to Martyr’s Common Places (English edition 1583) or to the fearsomely comprehensive collection of sermons contained in Bullinger’s Decades’.54 Thomas Cartwight spoke of his own reading of Peter Martyr, recommending to students: ‘for singular and much reading, Mr Martyr; saving that his Commentaries are rather Commonplaces’. By the time of the Barrett controversy about free will and predestination in Cambridge in 1595, amongst Barrett’s many supposed errors was his ‘most bitter railing upon those worthy men Calvin, Peter Martyr, Beza and Zanchius and others, to the great offence of the godly’.55 Many Colleges and university-educated men owned the work, usually in the Latin version.56 There were a few demurring voices. Archbishop Whitgift pointed out that there was no article of religion which prevented the conscientious criticism of Calvin, Beza or Peter Martyr ‘for the doctrine of the Church of England doth in no respect depend on them’.57

592. For dissemination of the Spiera story in England, see Overell, ‘Exploitation of Spiera’, pp. 632–7; ibid., ‘Recantation and Retribution: “Remembering Francis Spira”’, pp. 164–8. 51 Foxe, AM (1570), book 12, p. 2312; AM (1576), book 12, pp. 2002–3; Leslie Mahin Oliver, ‘John Foxe and the “Conflict of Conscience”’, Review of English Studies, 97 (1949), 1–9. 52

STC 24669.

53

Collinson, ‘England, 1558–1640’, p. 214. MacCulloch, Later Reformation, p. 71.

54 55

Thomas Cartwright, ‘Letter for Direction in the Study of Divinity’ in Cartwrightiana, A. Peel and L.N. Carlson (eds) (London, 1951), pp. 113–14, 125; H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 344–5. 56

Jenkins, ‘Peter Martyr and the Church of England’, pp. 58–60. Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B 14/9, p. 3, cited and quoted in White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, p. 104. 57

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Anthony Marten, translator of the English version of the Commonplaces, was not a professional like Golding, but ‘a sewer at the royal court’. He reminded readers that Vermigli was ‘a right Evangelist’, ‘a very Apostle’ ‘not your countryman indeed but yet one that for your sakes passed many dangerous brunts by sea and land … that left his own wealth and quietness to instruct you in truth and goodness’. Of course, this was literary licence: when Vermigli left Italy in 1542, he had no idea that he might one day ‘instruct’ Englishmen. Other themes of Marten’s long prefaces, like anti-papalism, catholic missionary priests, the threat of war, show his determination to make Vermigli’s theology serve contemporary Elizabethan concerns. The translator, whose own anti-papal fervour fast turned apocalyptic, praised Vermigli for ‘a particular discoverie of the Romaine Antichristian kingdome’.58 Anti-papal themes had never been far below the surface in the English reception of spirituali: Ochino’s Tragedy, Negri’s Freewyl, Vergerio’s propaganda, Curione’s Pasquin. Now Vermigli’s Commonplaces, too, were harnessed to Elizabethan hatred and fear, gathering steam through the 1580s. Anti-papal motivation was evident once again in the reissue of Curione’s Pasquin the next year, printed by Thomas Este, a collaborator of John Day.59 As English protestants succumbed to anti-catholic and antiSpanish war fever, they had become particularly interested in ‘Italiansagainst-the-pope’. Before we leave the Elizabethan rediscovery of the literature of Italian reform, we should visit the libraries of Edwardian founder-members of this connection still alive, and still reading these Italian texts. The Cooke tribe had certainly remained readers. When Robert Masson translated Vermigli’s Loci Communes, he sent a presentation copy to Mildred, Lady Burghley; and Anne Cooke, Lady Bacon, once Ochino’s translator, also owned a copy.60 A subtle combination of love of the Italian language and belief in godly reformation was evident in the books owned by Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford, at his death in 1584. Probably he was taught some of his Italian by Pietro Bizzarri. Russell’s fluency had graced many a diplomatic mission, and the inventory of ‘My Lord’s Books’ reads like a litany for the Anglo-

58 Anthony Marten’s ‘Preface to the Christian Reader’, in Vermigli, Common Places, STC 24669, sigs Aj and Aij; ibid., Epistle to the Queen, sig. aiii; see also Anthony Marten, A second sound, or, Warning of the trumpet vnto judgement, wherein is proved that all the tokens of the latter day are not onelie come, but welneere finished (London: Andrew Maunsell, 1589), STC 17491. 59 Curione, Pasquine in a Traunce (London: Thomas Este, 1584), STC 6131; Panizza, ‘Pasquino among Anglican Reformers’, p. 412. 60

Caroline Bowden, ‘The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley’, The Library, 6 (2005), pp. 3–29 (pp. 11, 19); see Appendix, number 37, p. 29.

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Italian exchange.61 First, ‘the true way to reform ye church in Italiane’ – was almost certainly the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia produced in 1538, before the spirituali were in trouble in Italy. More predictably, Bedford had acquired ‘P. Martier’ [Vermigli’s] Commentaries on Judges and Romans, and no less than three copies of his Commonplaces, two in ‘in red lether’ and one ‘in yealowe lether’.62 The ‘treatise against ye Supremacy of ye B. of Rome’ may have been Ochino’s Tragedy (1549) .63 Ubaldini’s Life of Charles the Great appears, as does a ‘History of Italy’, almost certainly the one by that Italianate protestant, William Thomas. The ‘Exhortation to ye feare of God’ is Aconcio’s Essortatione, translated by Castiglione: Bedford would almost certainly have known both author and translator.64 (Strangely, Pietro Bizzarri, one-time member of the Bedford household, does not appear on the list, even though his Historia della guerra fatta in Ungheria was dedicated to the Earl.) 65 ‘Pasquyne of news owt of heaven, purgatory and hell’ is Curio’s Pasquin in a traunce: we have already noted Russell’s long-standing patronage of William Page, the likely translator of this volume.66 Thus, on the Duke’s bookshelves in 1584 we have evidence of an old network: Aconcio, Curio, Ochino, William Page, William Thomas, Ubaldini, Vermigli. Aged Francis Russell was revisiting Italian reformers he had known since he was a young man, in London, then in exile in Venice and Zurich. Strange things happened in publication history after 1584. Suddenly Vermigli dropped off English lists. His name does not appear in the Short Title Catalogue at all in the seventeenth century, although new printing of his Loci Communes continued on the European mainland.67 Conversely, Ochino was to have a minor comeback, especially during the divorce controversy in the mid-seventeenth century. Equally unpredictable was the appearance of a brand new ‘Italian Protestant’: the unfathomable Venetian friar, Fra Paolo Sarpi. Early seventeenth-century English internationalists, in search of protestant alliances, were ready to pick up any rebel Italian 61 Muriel St. Clare Byrne, ‘“My Lord’s Books”: The Library of Francis, Second Earl of Bedford, in 1584’, Review of English Studies, 7 (1931), pp. 385–405; for inventories, see pp. 396–405. 62

Ibid., p. 397.

63

If this is Ochino’s tragedy, the use of the word ‘treatise’ is strange. Alternatively, see STC 4325. 64

William Thomas, The historie of Italie ([London: Thomas Berthelet] [1549]), STC 24018; Petruccio Ubaldini, La vita di Carlo Magno Imperadore (Londra: Giovanni Wolfio: 1581), STC 24486; Aconcio, Vna essortatione al timor di Dio [1579?]), STC 92. 65

Pietro Bizzarri, Historia della guerra fatta in Ungheria (Lyons: Guillaume Rouillé, 1569); see above, Chapter 4, p. 96. 66 67

See above, p. 192. Donnelly, Bibliography … of Peter Martyr Vermigli, pp. 110–26.

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who might aid their ideological cause. They printed Sarpi’s works attacking the papal interdict placed on the Venetian Republic.68 Then, his influential History of the Council of Trent was smuggled into London, where it appeared in Italian, English and Latin editions between 1619 and 1620.69 When he attacked the Pope and the Council of Trent as erroneous and corrupt, Sarpi sounded like part of an older Italian reform tradition. In the light of the long connection with which this book has been concerned, it is not surprising that some of his Jacobean supporters chose to present him as ‘a sound Italian Protestant’ and to announce that Venice was still full of them.70 To more sceptical contemporaries and most modern historians, the link was anachronistic, even euphoric, but it is testimony to the imprinting of Italy’s reform history on English minds.71 Other long Italian shadows passed across the book lists. The Beneficio, one of the earliest and perhaps most authentic expressions of the ideas of the spirituali, had at least two re-editions in the 1630s.72 Ochino’s Dialogue of Polygamy was used by Milton and then translated and printed as part of the mid-century divorce controversy. Ochino’s Tragoedie seems to have been an inspiration for Milton’s greatest characterisation, that of the heroic Satan in Paradise Lost.73 Nicholas Ferrar translated an Italian reform work that the sixteenth century English translators had overlooked: Juan de Valdes’ One Hundred and Ten Divine Considerations, an early

68

STC 21757; 21759; 24719.

69

[Paolo Sarpi], Historia del Concilio tridentino (Londra: Giovan. Billio, regio stampatore [1619] [ed. M.A. De Dominis]), STC 21760; [ibid.], The historie of the Councel of Trent (London: Robert Barker, and Iohn Bill, printers to the Kings most Excellent Maiestie [1620]), STC 21761; [Ibid], Petri Suauis Polani Historiae Concilii Tridentini libri octo, ex Italicis summa fide & accuratione Latini facti Augustae Trinobantum [i.e. London : Bonham Norton and John Bill], [1620], STC 21764. 70 Sir Henry Wotton to the Earl of Salisbury, 13 September 1607, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. L.P. Smith (2 vols, Oxford, 1907), vol. 1, p. 399; The Life and Letters of John Donne, E. Gosse (ed.) (2 vols, London, 1899), vol. 1, p. 199. 71

David Wooton, Paolo Sarpi, Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge,

1983). 72

[Benedetto da Mantova], The benefite of Christs death, or the glorious riches of God’s free grace which every believer receives by Jesus Christ, and him crucified. First compiled and printed in the Italian tongue: and afterwards translated and printed in the French tongue: and out of French into English, by A..G. (London: I.L[egat] for Andrew Hebb, 1633), STC 19117; ibid., (London : E.G[riffin] for Andrew Hebb, 1638), STC 19118. 73

Bernardino Ochino, A dialogue of polygamy, written originally in Italian (London: John Garfeild, 1657), Wing O126; L.A. Wood, The Form and Origin of Milton’s AntiTrinitarian Conception (London, Ontario, 1911); Richard Garnett, A History of Italian Literature (London, 1898), p. 199.

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inspiration for many of the spirituali.74 Aconcio was rediscovered by William Chillingworth and John Goodwin and many after them who were willing at least to explore the path of toleration.75 Francesco Spiera’s transition to popular fame in England was the most dramatic of all. Stationers’ lists suggest that this had more success and endured longer than any other text emanating from the incomplete and enigmatic reform in Italy. The story, well known in England since 1550, percolated steadily; an unknown English ballad-writer (1587) and Thomas Beard’s Theatre of Gods Judgements (1597), retold the tale.76 They were in some sense returning the story to the popular culture whence it came. No other Italian reform book had as good a story line and part of its verve lay in the Italian writers’ use of older popular conventions: the medieval ars moriendi, the negative exemplar, the despairing suicide.77 Popularisation was completed by a reworked English version of the story, published in 1638 by Nathaniel Bacon. His Fearful Estate of Francis Spira went into multiple editions and versions.78 Thus Spiera, no longer just the archetype Nicodemite, became a staple of the Puritan literature of despair and retribution.79 In Bacon’s adaptation, Spiera’s tale appeared among John Bunyan’s ‘few books and little learning’. In Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), Bunyan referred to Spiera’s plight as ‘salt rubbed 74

Juan de Valdés, The hundred and ten considerations of Signior Iohn Valdesso (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1638), STC 24571; ibid., Divine considerations treating of those things which are most profitable, most necessary and most perfect in our Christian profession (Cambridge: ed. Roger Daniel, 1646), Wing V22; Nicholas Ferrar was the translator and George Herbert added notes and criticisms. 75

Iacopo Aconcio, Stratagematvm satanae libri octo (Oxonij: J. L. impenlis Gulielmi Webb, 1631), STC 92.7; ibid., Satans stratagems, or The Devils cabinet-councel discovered … together with an epistle written by Mr John Goodwin (London: John Macock, 1648), Wing A443; William Chillingworth, The religion of protestants a safe way to salvation (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, [1638]), STC 5138.2. 76

Jean de Chassanion, The theatre of Gods iudgements: or, a collection of histories out of sacred, ecclesiasticall, and prophane authours… translated out of French and augmented … by Thomas Beard (London: Adam Islip, 1597), STC 1659. The story of Spiera was probably a source for Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Lily B. Campbell, ‘“Doctor Faustus”: A Case of Conscience’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 67 (1952), 219–39 (p. 226). 77

Overell, ‘The Reformation of Death in Italy and England’, pp. 5–21 (pp. 6–9).

78

Nathaniel Bacon, A Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira (London: I.L. for Phil. Stephens and Christoph. Meredith, 1638), STC 1178 and in multiple reissues thereafter, STC 1177.5–1179; Wing B357–366. 79 Michael MacDonald, ‘“The Fearful Estate of Francis Spira”: Narrative, Identity and Emotion in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), 32–61; John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1990), pp. 37–8; Overell, ‘Recantation and Retribution: “Remembering Francis Spira”, pp. 159–68; ibid., ‘Exploitation of Francesco Spiera’, pp. 634–7.

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into a fresh wound’ – which boosted sales. Bacon’s Fearful Estate was reissued at least eleven more times between 1660 and 1700.80 New age ‘Second Spieras’ followed, ‘atheists’, ‘backsliders’ and ‘profaners’, their stories always trading on fear and belief in damnation.81 In the English accounts of Spiera, as in the many other providence stories, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture were closely interwoven to the point where bad theology became invisible.82 The Italian writers’ original purpose had been to combat apostasy, but in seventeenth and eighteenth century English culture, Spiera, chameleonlike, came to symbolise a complex cluster of prohibitions: do not despair, do not try suicide, do not do anything wicked, do not forget death. With that last message intact, he slipped quietly into Samuel Richardson’s novel, Clarissa. We find the heroine receiving a sinister book parcel from her vindictive family: A Drexelius on Eternity, the good old Practice of Piety and a Francis Spira. My brother’s wit I suppose. He thinks he does well to point out death and despair to me.83

********* It is fitting that this humanist history should end with Clarissa’s book parcel. Books and texts had been the currency of the Anglo-Italian connection ever since it began with English students text-swopping in the University 80 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), Roger Sharrock (ed.) (London, 1966), p. 51; David Renaker, ‘John Bunyan’s misattribution to Francis Spira of a remark by Nathaniel Bacon’, Notes and Queries, NS 25 (1978), 25; Wing B358B–B366A. 81 For instance, Richard Sault, The Second Spira … recommended to all young persons to settle them in their religion (London: John Dunton, 1693), Wing S733; J435A; J 437; S4986; S2825A. 82 Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, pp. 86, 326–7; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 112–14; Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (London, 1981), p. 207. 83

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or the History of a Young Lady, Everyman’s Library (4 vols, London, 1965–7), vol. 2, pp. 256, 262 (Letter 74, Clarissa to Miss Howe); I owe this quotation and reference to the late Alan Overell. Hieremias Drexelius (Jeremiah Drexel) a Jesuit, was popular with protestant readers; his De Aeternitate Considerationes (1620) was translated into English by R. Winterton as The Considerations of Drexelius upon Eternity (London: N. Alsop, 1632), STC 7235. Lewis Bayly was the author of The Practise of Pietie (London: J. Hodges, 1612), STC 1601.5. The last publication of Spiera’s story that I have found was in 1815, in a cheaply produced Scottish collection of scare stories, An awful memorial of the state of Francis Spira after he turned apostate from the Protestant Church to Popery (Falkirk: T. Johnson, 1815).

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of Padua. Then came Pole’s incendiary De Unitate; Courtenay’s lonely work on the Beneficio; Ochino’s passionate sermons; Vermigli’s Eucharistic Treatise and biblical Commentaries; last, the story of Francesco Spiera, infiltrating English providence literature for centuries. Translators’ and editors’ prefaces had stressed two things: Italian reformers were holy and they were learned. Exile had sanctified them and given ‘sufficient proteccion’ to their writings. Learning was their other attribute: Ochino’s sermons and theology had ‘high style’, ‘profound lerning’.84 Friends and enemies alike commented on Vermigli’s ‘erudition’, he was ‘that great Rabbin’ and in the great majority of sixteenth century references he is Doctor Peter Martyr.85 He had come to ‘to instruct you in truth and goodness’.86 Translators had found what they probably expected – the fabled Italian humanist learning. English familiarity with recent events in the Peninsula was also clear: there is a matter-of-fact acceptance that these men had been ‘preachers’ and that reform had touched Italy, like the rest of Europe.87 In contrast to many modern students, they did not find this religious movement unexpected, ‘un-Italian’. Contemporaries did not regard it as ‘a micro-history of defeat’ and English stationers were prepared to invest heavily in its literature.88 There was a brisk expectation that Italian works were marketable even when they were risky: they were made to fit the English mood and the English moment. The defining moment came at the court of King Edward VI between 1547 and 1553. In an unusual series of events, reformers born in catholic Italy were recruited to staff the English Reformation. They were supplied with travel money, good jobs, translators, hospitality at Lambeth and audiences in London for sermons delivered in Italian. Edward VI’s reformation was open to experiment, Europhile – and radical.89 Its radicalism was fuelled by constant interaction with mainland Europe through humanism, the circulation of printed texts and sheer political necessity. This book has revealed a neglected aspect of that exchange – a forceful English interest in the personnel and texts of Italian reform. In the space of five years 84 Ochino, Fouretene Sermons (trans. Anne Cooke), STC 18767, sigs aiii–v; ibid., Sermons [six] (trans. Richard Argentyne), STC 18765, sig. aiii; Sermons of Barnardine Ochyne (to the number of .25), STC18768, sigs Aii–v. 85 Thomas Harding, A confutation of a Book intituled an Apologie of the Church of England, by Thomas Harding Doctor of Divinitie (Antwerp, 1565), STC 12762, p. 82. 86

Vermigli, Common Places, Marten’s ‘Preface to the Christian Reader’, sig. Ai (my

italics). 87

Ochino, Sermons [six], (Richard Argentyne), STC 18765, sig aiii.

88

Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’, pp. 181–2.

89 Diarmaid MacCulloch has argued that the 1552 Prayer Book represented ‘the most radical stage the English reformation would ever reach’, ‘The Myth of the English Reformation’, JBS, 30 (1991), 1–19, p. 18.

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between 1546 and 1551 Vermigli, Ochino, Tremellio, Giannetti da Fano, Bizzarri, et al. arrived, the Beneficio was read by the King, six volumes of Ochino’s writings and two of Vermigli’s were translated and published, and the story of Spiera was translated and became current at court. It was an impressive entry. Hugh Latimer stressed that these Italian exiles were worth every penny they earned, yet they were not independent.90 Like good humanists everywhere, Ochino, Vermigli and the others had to respond to real life – English life – by producing texts on the Eucharist, the rebellions, the final overthrow of the Pope. The English were not sheltering refugees; they were employing defenders of their cause; the history of humanism is littered with such ploys. These one-time spirituali had fled Italy to avoid ‘preaching Christ behind a mask’, yet to survive in England they had to please. That hard fact of protégé-patron relations has been a leitmotiv of this book. Some contemporaries depicted Italian strangers as apostles to the English nation, but there was no such thing as a free exile. We have also focused on a network, a ‘connection’, not in order to belittle individual strangers’ achievements, but to explain them. The Italians’ success, especially in Edward VI’s reign, was due to friends in high places, to contacts. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was the greatest intermediary, but other English supporters have been highlighted, many of them also ‘Cambridge Connection’ people: John Cheke, John Ponet, Richard Morison, Sir Anthony Cooke’s household and especially his daughter Anne, William Cecil, Thomas Hoby and William Thomas. All were putting their personal support, connections, fluency and linguistic skills at the disposal of Italians. Every enabler and participant on the English side was a humanist (including the Nicodemite, Edward Courtenay).91 As humanists they were already initiates within an intricate international support system. The nexus included Italian reformers not in England but willing to consider invitations. Curione, Castellio and Vergerio seem to have been engaged in a ‘notice me’ campaign, lobbing book dedications at auspicious moments. They helped oil the wheels by introductions, elegant dedications and compliments – humanist rituals transferred into reformation culture. This humanist background explains the continued vitality of the AngloItalian exchange. Contemporary comments suggest that just being Italian helped these strangers, serving as a guarantee that they had ‘learning’. Their (sometimes pure Tuscan) Italian was accessible to many who knew Latin. There was the cachet of having come from the land of the classic, which many Englishmen still wanted to visit. The Reformation did not 90 91

Latimer, Sermons, vol. I, p. 141 (22 March 1549). See Overell, ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy’, pp. 127–9, 133–4.

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destroy Italy’s cultural magnetism: Thomas’s History of Italy and Italian Grammar and Hoby’s Travaile set the positive tone, Roger Ascham’s more suspicious Scolemaster came much later.92 Sometimes Hoby and Thomas transcended the black-and-white confessional categories that might have made Italy seem like an enemy territory. The sizeable English exile contingent in the Venetian republic during Mary Tudor’s reign suggested that others wanted to make the same imaginative leap. Throughout this book, religion has been viewed as part of a complex culture. Humanism, travel, Italian language, literature and reputation for the ‘gentlemanly arts’ combined with religion to strengthen the network and generate an exceptional level of English goodwill. There was a darker side to Anglo-Italian contacts. Our history has been interlaced with Nicodemite themes and anguished personal dilemmas: Vermigli in Lucca; Ochino on the road to Mantua; Pole at Viterbo; later Russell, Bradford, Castiglione and Cheke imprisoned in Marian London; last, Thomas Cranmer’s agonised recantations in Oxford. Italians and Englishmen faced their generation’s most terrible questions: must I witness or deceive, stand firm or run away, live or die? Italians in Edwardian England were exiles, witnesses to the gospel. By contrast, the English who befriended them were compromised, simply by having survived Henry VIII’s helter-skelter reformation. Therefore, Italians and other strangers came to be revered as quasi-martyrs in a court full of wistful quasi-Nicodemites. When the Italian propagandist Vergerio turned his searchlight on England, he added to English guilt. Even in the Edwardian Promised Land, where most reformers did not need to be especially brave, they were forced to meditate on bravery, witness, Nicodemism, the shining example of immigrant Italians and the dreadful story of Francesco Spiera. These positive and negative Italian patterns were there, ready made, at the beginning of the Marian persecution. This book’s approach has been inclusive, retaining within the group called ‘Italian reformers’ those spirituali who left the catholic church and those who remained within it. It followed that Mary Tudor’s reign, so different from her brother’s in most other respects, continued the Italian connection, almost in mirror image. Cardinal Pole, an ‘Italian’ reformer, came to help the English government sort out the English church, much as Vermigli and Ochino had done. Pole, too, was very much a humanist; he, too, had once chosen exile; he, too, had his problems with the Pope. Like Italian reformers in Edward VI’s reign, he found a considerable degree of English goodwill when he arrived at the end of 1554. While many of those involved in the Anglo-Italian network had fled to exile (often to the Veneto), 92

Kenneth Bartlett, ‘Travel and Translation: The English and Italy in the Sixteenth Century’, Annali d’ Italianistica 14 (1996), 493–506 (p. 503).

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some remained in England: Cecil, an occasional conformist, accompanied Pole on his journey to England; Ascham still in post was prepared to be friends; even Cheke, kidnapped and dragged back to Queen Mary’s court, found a good word for Cardinal Pole’s counsel and ‘learning’. Moreover, Vergerio’s vociferous attacks, now focused on Pole’s own ‘Nicodemite’ life story, disposed some Englishmen to tolerance towards their complex countryman. Several of Pole’s staff had drunk at the springs of Italian reform: Pate, Priuli, Lily, Goldwell, even (rather sparingly) Ormanetto. Their theology of salvation was no longer that of the Beneficio (belatedly Pole admitted it). Yet other ideals of the spirituali were taking new shape, transmogrified, and refocused. Pole and his friends in England were being humanists, proselytising first and foremost the universities and the students, as Vermigli and Tremellio had done five years earlier. They continued the ‘Cranmerian’ import of foreigners to teach at the universities. As he set out to purify the crumbling church by imitation of the counsels of the Gospels, backed by the Italian Consilium of 1538, Cardinal Pole was at one with his background as an (almost) Italian reformer. ‘Reformatio’ had always been a theme of the spirituali: Ochino’s Tragoedie had traced the cosmic purification of the English Church and then Pole brought a similar vision to the real-life problem. Italian reformers had been imported to serve England’s conflicting reformations twice in a decade and modern scholarship suggests Pole’s English version of Italian ideals was beginning to take root when he and Queen Mary died.93 So why did the pattern break up at the famously humanist court of Queen Elizabeth? The Queen’s own religion seemed to be of the old humanist sort with which the spirituali had been identified; she even spoke Italian, had even translated Ochino. So – why no re-admission of Italians to the corridors of power – or even of Lambeth Palace? To answer such questions this book has identified a sea change affecting the whole group, Englishmen and Italians alike. In the two years before Elizabeth’s accession, death had taken off many leading actors in the Anglo-Italian network: Morison, Ponet, Courtenay, Cheke and Pole; Cranmer and wild William Thomas had been executed. They were the ‘originals’ and without them a new generation had much less clout, less personal acquaintance with the founder-spirituali. They had not been in on the act from the start. In private, Vermigli’s disciples during the exile, Anthony Cooke, John Jewel, Edwin Sandys, all criticised bitterly the new mood at Elizabeth’s court, and Vermigli commented that the Queen never even answered his letters.94 Jewel and his friends blamed 93

Mayer, ‘Success of Cardinal Pole’s Final Legation’, pp. 149–75 (p. 174).

94

Martyr to Sampson, 20 March 1560, ZL, vol. 2, p. 48.

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‘our Deborah’, in particular for not singling out Vermigli and inviting him back – never mind the rest of the Italians, all vying to be noticed and invited. Yet there were difficulties in treating Vermigli as a special case, revealed in the much delayed (and now lost) letters finally sent to him on the Queen’s behalf. He came in the category ‘Italian reformer’, like the rest. He was part of this complex network, woven tightly, often tangled, through three reigns. By 1560 the network included a cohort of Englishmen, re-educated in exile, now able to provide that European slant for which Cranmer had once looked to foreigners. Several had been taught by Vermigli himself; they must increase while the stranger theologians decreased. The new mood included greater suspicions towards strangers of all nationalities.95 The patronising, ‘preachifying’ letters of some protestant leaders on the Queen’s accession made her frosty, inclined to manage without them, though their views could not be completely ignored.96 The most important diplomatic constraint came when the catholic powers made peace in 1559. Thereafter, managing relations with fellow protestants, England’s potential allies, required china-shop delicacy – but rarely received it. Low on the list of Elizabethan concerns were the erstwhile spirituali, scattered widely across the divisions of the fissiparous Christian world, defenceless and sometimes state-less. Some remained in Italy (as wistful catholics or Nicodemites), the now ‘protestant’ sort were usually found residing and serving in Lutheran, Calvinist and Swiss states. There was no Italian protestant community. For the English government to import an Italian from one group of European protestants might antagonise all the others and that was dangerous for the vulnerable island. It had become impossible to identify Italians as a group with any particular theological affiliation. Few (Vergerio excepted) were found in Lutheran courts and cities, a disadvantage in the early years when the Queen presented herself as a Lutheran fellow traveller.97 Some Italians had become ‘safe’ academics of a Calvinist colouring (Vermigli, Tremellio, Zanchi); others moved towards anti-Trinitarian ideas (the Sozzini, Gribaldi). Ochino, minister at Vermigli’s deathbed in Zurich in 1562, was declared a heretic just a year later by his fellow protestants. As a group, 95

Andrew Pettegree ‘The French and Walloon Communities in London, 1550–1688’, in Grell and Scribner (eds), From Persecution to Toleration, pp. 77–96 (p. 96) ; Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars, 1603– 1642 (Leiden and New York, 1989) pp. 11–14. 96 Melanchthon may have been an exception, her ‘soulmate’. On his and others’ reputations, see John Schofield, Philip Melanchthon and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 189–204 (p. 204). 97

Doran, ‘Elizabeth I’s Religion: The Evidence of Her Letters’, p. 718.

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Italians came to appear unreliable – especially in the eyes of protestant leaders like Calvin and even the patient Bullinger found them tiresome, except for Vermigli.98 While ‘Little England’s’ publishers still took some breathtaking risks on Italian books, the Queen and her government had to be more cautious in dealing with, or inviting, Italian reformers in person: politically speaking, they were not worth the trouble they might cause. Moreover their names and their history brought to mind some deeply personal wounds. Italians were among Europe’s early exiles, a distinctive sort, in flight from the Roman Inquisition. Since 1542 their careers had been bound up with the great Nicodemite questions and, later, with Vergerio’s noisy anti-Nicodemite answers. Ad nauseam he had pointed to Spiera’s desertion and Pole’s compromises, fixing international attention on the dramas being played out in England, all through the years when Princess Elizabeth and William Cecil had themselves compromised. Italians in exile had become associated with that firm stand which the Queen and her chief minister had not taken.99 The last knot in the tangled web of Anglo-Italian relations concerned two related controversies of the first decade of the reign: resistance to authority and purifying the church of ‘idols’, like crucifixes and vestments. The Queen hated resistance in all its forms and on this matter Vermigli, at least, was blameless, always keen on royal authority.100 But old friendships were remembered. John Ponet had been among the Italians’ strongest supporters and Christopher Goodman had stayed in Vermigli’s house. That rebel of conscience, Thomas Sampson, had studied with Tremellio and he harassed Vermigli and sent messages to Ochino to pronounce against vestments, until Italian patience wore thin.101 Lawrence Humphrey,

98 Adorni-Braccesi. ‘Religious Refugees from Lucca in the Sixteenth Century’, p. 351; Bullinger made an exception for Vermigli ‘I have often been amazed by the fact that although Vermigli was from the Florentine aristocracy and from Italy, he had none of the characteristics that we associate with Italians …’, Bullinger to the Nuremberg Jurist, Christoph Herdesian, September 1571, cited in Antonio Rotondò, ‘Sulla diffusione clandestina delle dottrine di Lelio Sozzini, 1560–1568’, in ibid., Studi e ricerche di storia ereticale italiana del Cinquecento (Turin, 1974), p. 88 and quoted in Taplin, Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, p. 164. 99

Historians of political theory point to the connection between insisting on witness (the anti-Nicodemites’ position) and defending resistance itself (the Ponet-Goodman stance), Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 199–228; Carlos M. N, Eire., ‘Prelude to Sedition: Calvin’s attack on Nicodemism and Religious Compromise’, ARG, 76 (1985), 120–45 ( pp. 141–4). 100

Marvin Anderson, ‘Royal Idolatry: Peter Martyr and the Reformed Tradition’, ARG, 69 (1978), 157–201. 101

Martyr to Sampson, 20 March 1560, ZL, vol. 2, p. 48.

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also a leading rebel, was seen as ‘hearer of Martyr’, ‘heir of his merits’.102 Sometimes, unfairly, people are judged by their friends. Thus, Italian reformers were not found top jobs, as they had been in the reigns of the Queen’s two immediate predecessors. Second generation Italian reformers who did arrive were sidelined into safe secular occupations, like the lexicographer and language teacher John Florio. Yet stopping the return of Italian guides for the English church did not erase the old connection. Vermigli’s learned opinions could still be inserted into English debates, as they had been in Good King Edward’s reign. Then it had been about rebellion and the Eucharist; in Elizabeth’s reign it concerned crucifixes, vestments, episcopacy – and the pope, always the pope. The salient difference after the mid-1560s was that England’s original spirituali had either died, or long gone away. English opportunism, never far below the surface in this history, had free rein. The mid-Elizabethan flood of Italian reform publications was part of a wider book market expansion, but Italian opponents of the pope were especially good for sales. John Foxe, John Day and a dedicated band of godly translators and printers fitted Italian spirituali and then Italian martyrs into the national myth; even Pole was given a half-good press, benighted, of course, but suspected of Lutheran leanings and ‘none of the bloody cruel sort of papists’.103 The printers did a sterling job, too, publishing Ochino and Aconcio, despite the risk, and Vermigli’s weighty commentaries and ubiquitous Common Places, despite the cost.104 England’s Italian reformers were still ‘sanctified’ in their absence, perhaps partly because of their absence. The ‘Martyr’ publication boom did not last long into the seventeenth century, but the once-scandalous Beneficios were presented as a salve for mounting religious strife in the 1630s, while Aconcio inspired the tolerationists. Ochino’s comments on polygamy fuelled the English divorce controversy and his ebullient Satan seems to have bounced into Paradise Lost. Francesco Spiera haunted John Bunyan and was forced to fit every perceived risk to English morality for two more centuries.105 The Elect Nation had grown more cautious about Italian reformers but still went on reading their books.

102

Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford, p. 39; see above, Chapter 8,

note 92. 103

On martyrs, Foxe, AM (1570), book 7, pp. 1068–73; on Pole, Foxe, AM (1570), book 12, p. 2158. 104

STC 18769; STC 92; STC 24667; STC 24669.

105

For instance, Wing B366A; S733; S4986; S2825A; W1294B.


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Index Aconcio, Giacomo 176–8, 181, 194, 197–8, 201–3, 211 Stratagematum Satanae libri VIII 177–8, 197–8, 203 Admonition Controversy 183–4, 187, 190 Aglionby, Edward 12n50, 84, 98, 193, 195, 198 Alford, Stephen 49n50 anti-Nicodemite literature 8n33, 98–9, 145, 149, 161, 210 anti-papalism 90, 94, 200, 211; see also pope; Rome, bishop of anti-trinitarian 173, 179, 202, 209 Antwerp 123, 136, 138 Argentyne, Richard 47–9, 54, 205 Ascham, Roger 85–7, 91, 96, 123, 163, 165, 182, 207 Aston, Margaret 184–5 Augsburg 24, 26, 43, 57, 90, 92 Confession of 161, 170 Austin, Kenneth 97n80, 175n45 Baldwin, William 55, 94 Bartlett, Kenneth 127n14, 134 Basel 24, 47, 57–8, 86, 89, 123, 125, 150, 167, 173, 176–8, 181, 186 Beccadelli, Ludovico 21, 25–6, 35, 63 Bembo, Pietro 20–21, 25 Benedetto da Mantova 4, 14, 29–32, 61, 64, 189, 193, 202 Benedictines 29, 32, 65, 67–8, 148 Beneficio di Cristo 4, 10, 14, 29, 31, 189, 202 in England 10, 14, 48–9, 61–79, 83, 94, 107, 126, 133, 165, 189, 193–6, 202 in Italy 4, 19, 29, 31–2, 35, 79 Bible 3, 6, 9, 18–19, 27, 58, 86, 153 New Testament 181 Old Testament 168, 182 Bizzarri, Pietro (Pietro Bizari) 42, 58, 78, 85–7, 96–7, 133, 137, 175–6, 182, 200–201, 206

Bonner, Edmund 46, 160 Book of Common Prayer (1549) 9, 53, 70, 107–8, 114 (1552) 9, 114, 117–19, 121, 185, 205n9 book trade 4, 5, 14, 182 in England 46, 49, 84, 141–3, 147, 189–90, 210 in Italy 4–5, 8, 10, 20, 27, 33, 37, 79, 89, 92 Bradford, John 57–8, 96, 145–6, 207 Bucer, Martin 42–4, 52–3, 57–60, 90, 98, 103, 106, 108–15, 121, 155, 184 Bullinger, Heinrich 59, 93, 96, 98, 109, 113–20, 123, 150, 161, 167, 169, 179, 184, 195, 199, 210n98 Bunyan, John 203–4, 211 Calvin, John 4, 30, 32, 48, 58–9, 64–5, 69–71, 98, 125, 130–32, 148, 161, 173–4, 190, 195–6, 199, 209–10 Calvinism, Calvinist 3, 32, 135, 177, 180–81, 209 Cambridge 59, 85–6, 91, 96–7, 104, 109, 114, 119, 133, 137, 154–5, 175, 181, 199, 206 Cambridge Connection 9, 85–6, 91, 96, 206 Cameron, Euan 3, 105 Caponetto, Salvatore 4n11, 17n4 Carafa, Gianpietro, see Paul IV, pope Cardano, Girolamo 86–7, 97, 129 Carew, Peter 126, 128, 131–3, 136, 139, 149 Carnesecchi, Pietro 31–2, 64, 79, 155, 157, 164 Carranza, Bartolomé 154–6, 160n74 Cassinese Benedictines 65, 154 Castellio, Sebastien 58–9, 86–7, 125, 167–8, 179, 206

244

INDEX

Castiglione, Giovanni Battista (Gianbattista) 78, 85, 94, 96, 123, 141–2, 169, 177, 194, 197–8 catholic, use of word 1, 2, 127n10, 133, 207 Cecil, William 53–4, 57, 85–6, 91, 112, 117, 119, 123, 134, 143, 163, 165, 168–81, 190, 197, 206, 208, 210 censorship 4, 46, 179, 190; see also Index, Indices, of prohibited books Charles V, Emperor 39, 42–3, 57 Cheke, Henry 90, 193, 197 Cheke, John 9, 12, 38, 51, 58, 81n3, 85–7, 91, 96–7, 100, 106, 110, 112–17, 120, 122–3, 125–6, 128–33, 136–9, 141–3, 149, 159–60, 163–5, 168, 193, 197, 206–8 and Bernardino Ochino 51, 110 and Pietro Martire Vermigli 51, 106, 110, 113–17, 120, 122–3, 138 and Reginald Pole 159–60, 163, 165 during Marian exile 125–33, 136–8, 142–3 Cole, Henry 22, 24, 149–50 Collett, Barry 29, 65, 68 Collinson, Patrick 39, 180, 199 Colonna, Vittoria 27, 33–4, 71 Compendium processuum Sancti Officii Romae 162 Consilium de emendanda Ecclesia 29, 152, 201 Contarini, Gasparo 18–19, 29–34, 142 Cooke, Anne 23, 41, 48–9, 54, 63, 78, 94, 181 Cooke, Anthony 9, 12, 48, 54, 85–7, 91, 123, 168–9, 181, 193, 195, 206, 208 Courtenay, Edward, Earl of Devon 9, 36, 48, 61–80, 90, 96, 107, 111, 126–8, 133–9, 168, 193, 196, 205–6, 208 and Beneficio di Cristo 61–80, 90, 196, 205 in Italy during Marian exile 126–8, 133–9, 149

Coverdale, Myles 146 Cox, Richard 81, 85, 100, 104, 108–9, 117, 122–3 Cranmer, Thomas 1, 7–9, 11–12, 21, 23, 39, 43–60, 66–76, 80–81, 87, 91, 97, 100, 103–24, 131, 140, 151, 153–4, 157–9, 168, 172, 180, 183, 206–9 and Beneficio di Cristo 66–76, 80 and Bernardino Ochino 8, 43–60 and Emmanuele Tremellio 97 and Pietro Martire Vermigli 8, 41, 43–5, 51, 103–24, 168 and Reginald Pole 44, 151, 153–4, 157–9 crucifix 172, 210–11 Curione, Celio Secondo 30, 38, 58, 84–6, 125, 168, 179, 181, 190, 191–4, 200, 206 Curione, Orazio 58, 86 Da Fano, Guido, see Giannetti (Zanetti), Guido (da Fano) Day, John 53–5, 123, 146, 186, 190–95, 198, 200, 211 Demosthenes 129–30, 137–8 Three orations 129 Donzellino, Girolamo 95 Doran, Susan 170 Dudley, Henry 134, Dudley’s conspiracy 126, 134, 136 Dudley, Jane, see Jane Grey, Queen of England Dudley, John, see Northumberland Edward VI, King of England 1, 9, 10, 11–13, 23, 38–9, 41, 43–50, 53–5, 59–60, 62–6, 68, 75–6, 79–101, 111, 120–23, 125, 137, 143, 151, 161, 169, 171, 173–5, 178, 181, 183–9, 193, 195, 197, 205, 211 and Il Beneficio di Cristo 63–6 and Ochino’s Tragoedie … of the uniuste usurped primacie of the bishop of Rome 49–50, 84 and Vermigli’s Tractatio de sacramento Eucharistiae 111

INDEX

245

and Pietro Martire Vermigli 13, 106, 123, 105, 155, 167, 183 and Reginald Pole 145, 160, 211 France 128, 131, 136, 141, 187 Freeman, Thomas 186n97

Edwardian reformation 118, 126–7, 153, 183 Elizabeth I, Queen of England as Princess 9, 12, 42, 46–9, 56–7, 60, 62–3, 78, 83, 85, 87, 96, 116, 123, 133, 141–2, 166 as Queen 1, 5, 13, 56–7, 113, 167–88, 197, 208–11 and Giovanni Battista Castiglione 96, 123, 141–2, 169, 177, 197 and Bernardino Ochino 9, 42, 46–9, 56–7, 60, 78, 116, 178 and Pietro Martire Vermigli 168–74, 185 eucharist, see sacraments evangelical, use of word, 2n6, 11, 81n2, 174n39 exile attitudes to 2, 9, 11, 35, 38, 47, 55, 59–60, 94, 131–2, 174, 206–7, 209–10 Marian exile 12, 23, 86, 116, 139–43, 161, 191 Venetian exile 12, 38, 125–45, 201, 207

Geneva 10, 38, 43, 47, 58–9, 123, 125, 139, 171–5, 180n73, 186, 198 Gentili, Alberico, 182 Germany 4, 114, 130, 141, 164, 170–71, 173 Gheri, Cosimo 25–6 Giannetti (Zanetti), Guido (da Fano) 29, 37–9, 44, 78–80, 94–5, 168, 206 Giberti, Gianmatteo 29, 33–4, 149, 152 Goldwell, Thomas 13, 149, 208 Gonzaga, Ercole 4, 25, 29, 33–4, 135 Goodman, Christopher 140, 174, 191, 210 Gribaldi, Matteo 12, 84n20, 193, 195, 198, 209 Guido da Fano, see Giannetti (Zanetti), Guido da Fano

Fenlon, Dermot 3n7, 152n32, 160n74, 164n91, 165–6 Feria, Count de 165, 170 Ferrara 19, 37, 127, 134–6, 138 Firpo, Massimo 65 Flaminio, Marcantonio 27, 29–33, 36, 64–5, 69–71, 76, 79, 83, 151, 155, 157, 186, 190, 196 and Beneficio di Cristo 29–33, 64–5, 69–71, 196 Florio, John 182, 211 Florio, Michelangelo 53, 85, 88, 100, 180 Fox, Alistair 6, 72, 82, 86 Foxe, John 2, 13, 64, 105–6, 108, 117, 123, 146, 155, 160, 167, 183–9, 189, 195n37, 197, 199, 211 ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Bernardino Ochino 106, 167, 186, 198 and Francesco Spiera 146n43, 199 and Italian martyrs 186, 211

Harvel, Edmund 17, 20, 23, 26–8, 36–7, 88–9, 95, 128 Henry VIII, King of England 4, 6–7, 11 divorce 6, 22–4, 44, 47, 78, 95 Henrician reformation 4, 7, 11, 23, 26, 28, 37–8, 45, 49, 62, 65–6, 78, 88, 96, 145, 149–50, 207 and English Nicodemism 4, 65, 67, 207 historians 3, 6, 8–10, 20, 34, 44, 75, 156, 202 historiography 82, 153n38, 171n27 Hoby, Philip 126–7, 131–4, 138, 142, 149, 192, 206 Hoby, Thomas 89–91, 116, 126–9, 132, 138–9, 142, 149, 197, 206–7 Hooper, John 42, 53, 113–14, 117–18, 121, 151, 163, 184, 187 Huguenots 173 humanism 5–6, 6, 10, 17, 19, 62, 155–6, 196, 205 concept of 5–6,

246

INDEX

and Italian reform 10, 17, 19, 196 protestant humanism 82–3 Tudor humanism 10, 62, 82, 205–6; see also humanists humanists 6, 9, 10, 28, 44, 92, 206–8 Italian humanists 9, 10, 14, 17, 24, 42, 78, 86, 157, 206 English humanists 10, 14, 31, 44, 80–85, 92, 100, 163–4, 175, 197, 208 Humphrey, Laurence 171, 184–5, 187, 210–11 Index, Indices, of prohibited books 4, 10, 34; see also censorship Inquisition Roman 10, 31, 33–4, 43, 64, 77, 79, 148, 157–8, 162, 166, 179, 210 Venetian 12, 36, 95, 98, 127–8, 135 Italian Church in London 5, 45–6, 53, 180–81 Italian language 89, 155, 175, 200, 211 knowledge of, in England 9, 43, 72, 89, 180, 200, 207 Jane Grey, Queen of England, 100, 120, 123, 146, 158 Jewel, John 115–16, 140, 167–73, 176–7, 181, 208 Julius III, Pope (Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte) 36, 148, 161 justification 67, 74, 89, 107, 118, 148–9, 152, 158, 165, 197 by faith 36, 66–7, 71–2, 148–9, 151–2, 157, 197 by works 36, 65–6, 71–2, 152 Kirby, W.J. Torrance 110n46 Knight, Thomas 89 Knox, John 53, 118–19, 174 Lambeth Palace 1, 44, 75, 97, 103, 107, 111, 117, 122, 205, 208 Łaski, Jan (John à Lasco) 44–5, 53, 58–60, 113, 118–19 Leonico, Niccolò Tomeo 20, 25–6 Lily, George 22–4, 36, 38, 208

Locarnese community 173, 176 London 5, 10, 13, 33, 39, 41–61, 78–9, 88, 96–7, 100, 103–4, 114, 117–19, 121–5, 138, 141–3, 146, 153, 156, 160–61, 164–5, 167–8, 176–82, 188, 190, 192, 195, 197–8, 201–2, 205, 207 Luther, Martin 2, 4, 8, 18–19, 27, 32, 48–9, 65, 68–70, 145, 149, 160–61, 189, 195 Lutheran 3, 18, 30, 32, 65, 108, 148, 160–61, 164, 167, 170–74, 196, 209, 211 McConica, James 72, 80 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 3n9, 11, 48, 50, 103n1, 106, 199, 205 McDiarmid, John 81nn2 and 3, 125n2, 136n26, 138n74 McLelland, Joseph, 109n41 Machiavelli, Niccolò 7, 57, 73n62, 89, 91 Mann, Nicholas 5 Mantua 27, 31, 34, 127, 132, 135, 142, 207 Marprelate, Martin 190 Marshall, Peter 1n1 Marten, Anthony 14, 105, 194, 199–200, 205 Mary I, Queen of England 1, 3, 12, 13n56, 37 as Princess 62, 98, 100, 120 as Queen 1, 3, 8, 12–13, 37, 80, 90, 100, 104, 114, 120, 123, 126–9, 133–6, 140–43, 145, 148, 150, 153, 161–4, 183, 192, 198n49, 207–8 and Reginald Pole 148, 150, 153, 161–4 Mason, John 131, 137n, 160 Masson, Robert 193, 197, 199, 200 Mayer, Thomas 21, 32, 34n95, 149n22, 160, 161n77, 165 Melanchthon, Philip 19, 32, 48, 59, 65, 68, 120, 174, 184n209 Michieli, Giovanni 141, 143, 160, 165 Milan 141–2, 164 Morison, Richard 7–8, 23, 92

INDEX

247

as ambassador 57, 90–94 during Marian exile 123, 125, 129, 139, 142 in England 8–9, 23, 25, 28, 39, 44, 49n48, 57, 85–6, 91, 106, 108, 163, 176, 206, 208 in Italy 7, 8, 22–6 Morone, Giovanni 29, 35, 152, 156, 162, 166, 179, 196

Laberinti 56, 178 Dialogi XXX 176, 178–9 Ormanetto, Niccolò 149n22, 155, 208 Oxford 41–2, 45, 54, 91, 93, 99, 100, 103–22, 138, 154–9, 173, 184–5, 187, 195, 197, 207 Oxford Disputation, 91, 108–11, 116, 121, 158, 183, 187; see also Vermigli, Pietro Martire

Naples 29–32, 43, 65, 68, 78–9, 134, 141–2 Negri, Francesco 33, 89–90, 94, 116, 147, 149, 157, 166 Tragedia … intitolata libero arbitrio 89–90, 94, 116, 147, 193, 197, 200 Nicodemism 130, 138, 144, 152, 165, 207 Nicodemites 8, 35, 69, 92, 98, 99, 100, 123, 126, 143–9, 151, 157, 159, 165, 203, 207–10 Northumberland, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, Duke of 44, 53, 59–60, 100, 111–13, 117–20 Norton, Thomas 112, 117n86, 122, 185–7

Padua 6–8, 14, 19–27, 37–8, 84, 91, 98, 125–9, 131–2, 135–7, 139, 145, 149, 154, 193n19, 204–5 Page, William 134, 138, 191–2, 201 papacy; see popes Parker, Matthew 181, 184 Parliament 114, 118, 151, 185n94, 186–7, 203 Parr, Catherine Queen of England 47n37, 83–4, 90 Parr, William 46, 90 Pate (Pates), Richard 13, 149, 208 Paul III, Pope (Alessandro Farnese) 25, 47, 93–4 Paul IV, Pope (Gianpietro Carafa) 29, 132, 148, 153, 157, 161–2, 164, 166 Paul, St 26, 54, 69, 74, 108, 116 persecution 1, 5, 10–14, 59, 84, 98, 135, 138, 145, 150, 157–66, 174, 176–9, 197, 207 Peter Martyr, see Vermigli, Pietro Martire Peto, William 162 Philip, King of Spain and England 127, 142, 164 Pilgrimage of Grace 28 Pole, Reginald and England 13, 57, 61–2, 76–80, 89, 104, 124, 132–5, 142, 144–66, 168–9, 173, 183, 196, 205–11 Pro ecclesiae unitatis defensione 28, 77, 150–51, 163, 168, 205 in Italy 1, 7, 8, 15, 20–38, 44, 64, 71, 93, 95, 145, 148, 164 polygamy 179, 202n73, 211; see also Ochino, Dialogue of Polygamy

Ochino, Bernardino and England 9, 12, 14–15, 41–61, 63, 77–80, 82, 84–7, 90–91, 94, 96, 100, 103–107, 110–12, 116, 119–20, 122–3, 145, 157, 167n3, 173, 186, 190–91, 193–8, 200–211 Dialogue of Polygamy 202 Dialogus Regis et populi 51–3, 59, 110 Sermons published in England 5, 11, 41, 47–8, 54, 87, 193–5, 198, 205 Tragoedie … of the uniuste usurped primacie of the bishop of Rome 49–50, 52–3, 59–60, 80, 84, 87, 202, 208 in Italy 10, 29, 33–9 in Zurich 8, 176–81, 186

248

INDEX

Ponet, John 9, 12, 44, 49n50, 52, 75, 85–8, 100n90, 105, 112, 122–3, 139, 143, 151, 168, 174, 191, 206, 208, 210 Short Treatise of Politic Power 139– 40, 174n41; see also resistance, resistance theory pope, popes, papacy 4, 7, 9, 11, 28, 36, 47, 49–50, 89, 94, 99, 107, 125, 127, 129, 132, 145, 147–9, 158, 161–2, 164, 166, 176, 192, 200, 202, 211; see also anti-papalism; Rome, Bishop of prayer, prayers 29, 79, 87, 112, 118, 129, 146, 153, 193n17 Prayer Book, see Book of Common Prayer predestination 54, 56, 66, 70–71, 116, 120, 122, 178, 189, 193–5, 197, 199 propaganda 8n33, 67, 91, 110, 143–4, 145n4, 150–52, 163, 179n66, 200 protestant use of word 1n1, 2–3, 82, 196, 209 Punt, William 191–2 rebellions 51n60, 60, 77, 121, 187, 206 rebels 51, 110–11, 136, 180, 183–4 reform concept of 1–15, 150, 152, 166, 185–6, 202, 205, 207–8 reformation concept of 3, 13, 39, 154, 183, 191, 205n89, 207–8 resistance 61, 110, 127, 139 resistance theory 139–40, 191, 210 and anti-Nicodemism 8n33, 210n99 Rivius, Joannes 95 Rome 7, 31, 33–4, 37, 66, 78–9, 89n47, 94, 125, 134, 138, 142, 145, 149, 159, 162, 164 Bishop of 37, 49, 92, 94, 132, 201; see also pope, popes, papacy Russell, Francis, Duke of Bedford

in England 12, 58, 96, 124, 145–6, 168–9, 172, 175, 179, 182, 192, 200–201, 207 his library 200–201 in Italy 7, 126, 132–9, 149 Ryrie, Alec 1, 3 sacraments 19, 22, 118–19, 164, 172 eucharist 9, 70, 73, 103, 106, 107–9, 111, 119, 121–2, 158, 164, 168, 178, 183, 187, 205–6, 211; see also Vermigli, Pietro Martire, Tractatio de sacramento Eucharistiae communion 70, 108, 118–19, 122, 137, 177 Salisbury, diocese of 78n91, 95, 171 Sampson, Thomas 171–2, 184, 187, 210 Sandys, Edward 167, 171, 181, 208 Santerenziano, Giulio 45, 115n78, 120, 123 Sarpi, Paolo 14, 201–2 Schutte, Anne Jacobson 11n49, 35n99 Scriptures, see Bible Seidel Menchi, Silvana 1, 3n7, 4, 72, 205 Selwyn, David 75, 107 Seres, William 54, 190, 193 Seymour, Edward; see Somerset Shagan, Ethan 50–52, 70n42, 111n49 Simler, Josiah 21, 33, 105–9, 112n56, 115–17, 120–23, 155, 172–3 Oratio de vita et obitu … D. Petri Martyris Vermigli 21n22, 33, 105, 120, 155, 172 Simoncelli, Paolo 149, 166n101 Somerset, Edward Seymour, Duke of 37, 44, 49n50, 50–51, 57, 59, 76–7, 93, 107, 115, 117, 185 and Bernardino Ochino 50–52, 59, 61–2 and Edward Courtenay 61–2 and Pietro Martire Vermigli 93, 107, 111–12, 115, 117, 121, 185 Soranzo, Vittore 92, 162 Sowerby, Tracey 23n37 Spain 127, 129, 142n88, 143, 157

INDEX

Spanish 3, 29, 72, 74, 100, 115n78, 127, 141–2, 154, 155n42, 160, 162, 170, 173, 180, 192, 200 Spiera, Francesco, also Francis Spira 36, 92, 98–9, 210 accounts and stories of 11, 98–9 in England in the sixteenth century 12, 14, 84, 98–100, 116–17, 123, 145–8, 161, 195–5, 198–9, 203–5, 210 in the seventeenth century and after 203–7, 211 spirituali 7–8, 10n44, 13, 17–39, 90, 92–6, 104, 128, 144, 147–8, 152, 154, 156, 158, 161–2, 165–7, 174, 178–82, 186, 188, 190, 197, 200–203, 206–11 and Englishmen in Italy 7–8, 17–39, 152 use of word 2, 30 Starkey, Thomas in England 8, 23 in Italy 8, 20, 22–5 Strassburg 10, 12, 23, 35, 43, 90, 100, 104, 106, 114–16, 119, 123, 125, 129, 132, 139–42, 150–51, 167, 173–4, 191 Stubbes, John 192 Gaping Gulf 190n6 Taplin, Mark 89, 178 Tedeschi, John 6n24, 17n4 Thomas, William 37–9, 81, 85, 88–9n45, 90–91, 116, 197, 201, 206, 208 Throckmorton, Michael 7n31 and England 27nn57, 28, 76–8, 80, 142 in Italy 22–4, 27, 38, 135, 142 his library 27–8, 77n85 Throckmorton, Nicholas 169, 175–6 Trapp, J.B. 82n7 Tremellio, Emmanuele 30, 38–9, 42, 103n3, 123, 171, 181, 206–10 and England 30, 39, 85, 97, 100, 103n3, 119, 155, 174–5, 181, 208, 210

249

in Italy 30, 38, 94 Trent, Council of 4, 36, 58–9, 66, 81, 93, 118, 157, 161, 166, 202 Paolo Sarpi’s History of 202 Reginald Pole’s reactions to 148, 152, 154, 157, 159 Truchess, Otto 150, 152 tyranny 138–9, 191 Ubaldini, Petruccio 78, 97, 201 Udall, Nicholas 73, 11–12, 122–3 Valdés, Juan de 29–32, 43, 65, 67–8, 70n43, 79, 202 Valgrisi, Vincentio 89n45 Vanni, Pietro (Peter Vannes) 44, 78–9, 89n50, 95–6, 128, 131, 134–7, 159, 163, 176n50, 192 Venice 4, 7, 8, 14, 17–40, 65, 75, 78–9, 86, 88–90, 95, 97–8, 125–44, 149, 159, 164, 172, 175–6, 192, 201–2 English exile in, during reign of Queen Mary 12, 125–45 reformers in 4, 7, 14, 19, 23, 26, 37, 78–9, 89n45, 95, 128, 139 Vergerio, Pier Paolo and England 41n3, 55, 84, 92–4, 94n67, 144–66, 167, 168n10, 170–71, 179n66, 190, 198, 200, 206–10 and Reginald Pole 145–66 and Francesco Spiera 11, 35n99, 92, 99, 210 in Italy 8n33, 11, 15, 35–6, 84n20, 92, 99 Vermigli, Pietro Martire (Peter Martyr) and England 1, 8, 9, 12–15, 41–5, 51, 54, 61, 70, 77–80, 82, 85–8, 90, 93, 99–101, 103–24, 139–40, 145, 154, 155, 157, 158, 167–201, 205–11 Commentary on … Romans 54, 99, 116n81, 117, 118n89, 120n103 Common Places 14, 190, 194, 199, 205, 211

250

INDEX

Epistle to the … Duke of Somerset 111–12 Exposition of xii articles of our faith 194n25 Godly Prayers compiled out of David’s Psalms 193 Most faithful and learned Commentaries … on Judges 140, 191, 201 Tractatio de sacramento Eucharistiae 73, 103, 107n28, 11, 122 Treatise of the Cohabitacyon of the Faithfull with the Unfaithfull 140 Use and abuse of dancing 194 in Italy 8, 10, 21, 29, 30, 33, 36, 38, 39 vestments, controversies regarding 113, 172, 184 involvement of Pietro Martire Vermigli in Edward VI’s reign 113–14, in Elizabeth I’s reign 172, 183–4, 187–8, 210, 211

Viterbo 28, 31–4, 65, 76, 149, 152, 154–5, 165 Waldenses, Waldensian 38n116, 161, 180n73 Walsham, Alexandra 147, 204n82 Wilson, Thomas 73, 85, 126, 129–30, 137 Woolfson, Jonathan 20n17, 24, 38, 78n91 Wrothe, Thomas 125, 132, 138 Württemberg, Christoph von, 148, 161, 167 Wyatt, Thomas ‘the elder’ 7–8 Wyatt, Thomas, ‘the younger’ 126, 146 Wyatt’s rebellion 126–7, 131, 146 Yonge, John 76–7 Zurich 8, 14, 38, 59, 108n54, 109, 113–16, 123, 125, 139–40, 167, 170, 172–9, 181, 183, 186n97, 189, 191, 195, 198, 201, 209

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