The Reformation of the Decalogue: Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments in England, C.1485-1625

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T H E R E F O R M AT I O N O F T H E D E C A L O G U E

The Reformation of the Decalogue tells two important but previously untold stories: of how the English Reformation transformed the meaning of the Ten Commandments, and of the ways in which the Ten Commandments helped to shape the English Reformation itself. Adopting a thematic structure it contributes new insights to the history of the English Reformation, covering topics such as monarchy and law, sin and salvation, and puritanism and popular religion. It includes, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of surviving Elizabethan and early Stuart ‘commandment boards’ in parish churches, and presents a series of ten case-studies on the commandments themselves, exploring their shifting meanings and significance in the hands of Protestant reformers. Willis combines history, theology, art history and musicology, alongside literary and cultural studies, to explore this surprisingly neglected but significant topic in a work that refines our understanding of British history from the 1480s to 1625. Jonathan Willis is a reformation historian and Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Birmingham. He is author of Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England (2010); editor of Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (2015); and co-editor of Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe (2015) and Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (2016). He is also director of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies.

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Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History Series editors John Morrill

Emeritus Professor of British and Irish History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Selwyn College

Ethan Shagan

Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

Alexandra Shepard

Professor of Gender History, University of Glasgow

Alexandra Walsham

Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College

This is a series of monographs and studies covering many aspects of the history of the British Isles between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth century. It includes the work of established scholars and pioneering work by a new generation of scholars. It includes both reviews and revisions of major topics and books which open up new historical terrain or which reveal startling new perspectives on familiar subjects. All the volumes set detailed research within broader perspectives, and the books are intended for the use of students as well as of their teachers. For a list of titles in the series go to www.cambridge.org/earlymodernbritishhistory

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T H E R E F O R M AT I O N O F THE DECALOGUE Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments in England, c.1485–1625 J O N AT H A N   W I L L I S University of Birmingham

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/​24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi –​110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-​04/​06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/​9781108416603 DOI: 10.1017/9781108241526 © Jonathan Willis 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-​1-​108-​41660-​3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Adam

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Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgements Notes on the Text List of Abbreviations

page ix xi xiii xvii xix

Introduction: The Reformation of the Decalogue

1

P art I  T h e Ci vi l Of f i ce of the Law

15

1 Law

18 18 20 28 36 48 56 64 69

Introduction Species of Law Numbering the Commandments The Second Commandment Catholics, Protestants, and the Decalogue Blessings and Curses of the Law The Third Commandment Conclusions

2 Order

Introduction Heavenly Authority and Earthly Government The Fifth Commandment The Duty of Care Justice and Punishment The Seventh Commandment Conclusions

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72 72 76 89 104 112 122 129

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Contents

Part II  T h e eva ng eli ca l of f i ce of th e   l aw

1 33

3 Sin

135 135 138 141 149 157 163 172

4

177 177 179 186 192 198 206 212

Introduction The Depth of Sin The Tenth Commandment The Breadth of Sin The Sixth Commandment The Knowledge of Sin Conclusions

Salvation

Introduction Repentance Faith The First Commandment Rejecting the Law? Perfecting the Law Conclusions

Part III  T he practi cal of f i ce of t h e   l aw

217

5 The Godly

220 220 224 233 245 256 265 274 278

6 The ‘Ungodly’

281 281 283 297 317 331 336 343

Introduction: The Problem with Puritans Puritans, Pharisees, and the Charge of ‘Legalism’ Sin, Sacraments, and the ‘Puritan Penitential Cycle’ The Fourth Commandment Puritans and the Decalogue Dwelling Amongst the ‘Wicked’ The Ninth Commandment Conclusions Introduction Liturgy and Music Commandment Boards I: Text, Form, and Position Commandment Boards II: Royal Arms, Decoration, and Illustration The Eighth Commandment Popular Belief and Practice Conclusions

Conclusion: The Ten Commandments in England, c.1485–​c.1625

345

Bibliography Index

355 383

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Figures

2 .1 3.1 6.1 (a, b) 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6 .7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6 .12 6.13 6.14

Caroline royal arms, St Helen’s church Gateley, Norfolk page 88 Man gathering sticks upon the Sabbath (Numbers 15), Black Lion Inn, Hereford 167 Responses to the Ten Commandments in the Wanley Part Books 288 William Whittingham, Audi Israel (first verse) 292 Thomas Norton, Harke Israell (first verse) 294 Ten Commandments wall painting, St James’ church Camely, Somerset 307 Commandment board, Holy Trinity church Badgeworth, Gloucestershire 309 Commandment board, church of St Lawrence the Martyr, Abbots Langley, Herefordshire 310 Commandment board, church of All Saints Wimbish, Essex 311 Brass commandment board, St Nicholas’ church Little Horwood, Buckinghamshire 313 Board containing the Creed, commandments and Lord’s Prayer, church of St Michael and All Angels Lydbury North, Shropshire 315 Commandment board, St Mary’s church Preston, Suffolk (interior panels) 316 Commandment board, St Margaret’s church Tivetshall St Margaret, Norfolk 318 Commandment board, St Laurence’s Ludlow, Shropshire 320 Commandment board, church of St Mary the Virgin Great Snoring, Norfolk 321 Commandment board, All Hallows’ church Whitchurch, Hampshire 322

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Figures

Commandment board, church of St Mary the Virgin Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire Depictions of the breaking of the Seventh 6.16 (a, b Commandment in Whitchurch, Hedgerley and Hereford and c) (Phineas impales Zimri and Cozby, Numbers 25)

324 328

N.B. Colour versions of these images are available in the Resources section of the Cambridge University Press website that accompanies this book: www.cambridge.org/decalogue

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Tables

1.1 2.1 6.1

Catholic and Reformed numbering of the Decalogue Instances of the phrase ‘custos utriusque tabulae’ in the EEBO TCP full text corpus, 1500–​1700 Location and dedication of surviving commandment boards, c.1560–​c.1660

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page 30 84 304

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Acknowledgements

Researching and writing this book has been an extraordinary journey which began the best part of a decade ago, when in the process of writing a chapter on English reformers’ views on Church music for my doctoral thesis I stumbled across the incredible claim that dancing on the Sabbath was considered in some quarters to be a breach of all Ten Commandments, simultaneously. Since then I have accrued a significant number of debts –​ too many to mention, and I would like to thank everybody who has helped me with this project over the intervening years; I’m sorry that space and memory do not permit me to mention them all by name. This book would not have been possible without the award of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship between 2010 and 2013: I could not have wished for a more generous sponsor. These fellowships require significant investment from an academic institution, and so I would also like to thank first of all Durham University and its Department of Theology and Religion, which was my intellectual home as a fixed-​term lecturer in 2009–​2010 and during the first year of my Leverhulme fellowship in 2010–​2011. It was as the temporary resident of an enormous professorial office in Abbey House on Palace Green, looking out at the mighty edifice of Durham cathedral, that the detailed proposal for this project took shape. I would like to express my gratitude to the whole department, but especially Robert Song, Carol Harrison, Susan Royal, Miranda Threlfall-​Holmes, Gordon Raeburn and Natalie Mears for their kindness and friendship, and above all Alec Ryrie, whose shrewd advice on the initial research proposal and boundless intellectual generosity ever since has consistently provoked me to try to think smarter about the English reformation. One year into my Leverhulme fellowship I applied successfully for a lectureship in Early Modern History at the University of Birmingham; I am indebted to Corey Ross and Michael Whitby in particular for offering to support the move of the remaining two years of my Leverhulme fellowship from Durham to Birmingham. The Department of History at Birmingham, and in particular the Centre xiii

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Acknowledgements

for Reformation and Early Modern Studies, has been a warm and invigorating environment in which to work and finish this project. I would like to thank Hugh Adlington, Richard Cust, Michael Dobson, Elaine Fulton, Nikolas Funke, David Gange, Simone Laqua-​O’Donnell, Sabine Lee, Tom Lockwood, William Purkis, Margaret Small, Kate Smith, Erin Sullivan, Martin Wiggins, Gillian Wright, Simon Yarrow, and many others for their friendship and advice over the past five years. Tara Hamling has not only been a superb colleague, but her work on visual and material culture, and the experience of supervising doctoral students together, has inspired me to pursue new and exciting intellectual directions, some of which have come to fruition in this book. I must also thank my Birmingham students; in particular those taking my second and third year undergraduate courses whom I have bored more frequently than I probably should have on the subject of the Ten Commandments. The experience of supervising MA, MRes and PhD students has also been an intellectually enriching experience, and I am grateful to them all for what I have learned. I must also thank the School of History and Cultures and the College of Arts and Law at Birmingham for supporting my attendance at a number of conferences, and for awarding me study leave during the autumn of 2015, during which much coffee was drunk and a good deal of this book took on its current form. Comments and advice from attendees at conferences in the UK, Germany, Belgium and the USA, and audiences at seminar papers given at Birmingham, Cambridge, Exeter, the IHR, Oxford, St Andrews, Stratford-​ upon-​Avon and York, have also been enormously valuable:  thank you to (amongst others) Sarah Bastow, Stephen Bates, Eric Carlson, Susan Cogan, Anna French, Sylvia Gill, Ian Green, Bridget Heal, Arnold Hunt, Torrance Kirby, Beat Kümin, Charlotte Methuen, Matthew Milner, Sarah Mortimer, Andrew Pettegree, Laura Sangha, Elizabeth Tingle, Nicholas Tyacke, Alexandra Walsham, and Lucy Wooding. In particular, I  owe a great debt of thanks to Peter Marshall for the many ways he has helped, encouraged and inspired me over the years since supervising my doctoral thesis, and most recently for reading the whole manuscript of this book over a single rainy weekend in February on a family trip to Edinburgh: needless to say, all those errors which remain are entirely my own. I am extraordinarily grateful to the four series editors of the Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History Series for their praise of the manuscript, their helpful suggestions, and their willingness to see it published; and to Cambridge University Press and in particular Liz Friend-​Smith for her patience and efficiency.

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Acknowledgements

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Reasons of space prevent me thanking by name all of the archivists, librarians, churchwardens and key-​ holders whose assistance has been invaluable over the years, but my greatest debts are to my family. Thank you to my parents, who have never stopped believing in me; to my mother in particular, for reading everything I have ever written, and for our church-​ hunting adventures in deepest darkest East Anglia. Thank you above all to my husband Adam, who has driven the length and breadth of the country with me in search of (occasionally non-​existent) commandment boards; who has given me the moral support to continue through good times and bad; and who has also lived with this project from its inception. It is to him that this book is dedicated.

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Notes on the Text

Quotations from early modern printed and manuscript sources have been partially modernised for the purposes of easy comprehension: in particular i/​j and u/​v have been standardised in line with modern English. However, the original spelling of the titles of early modern books has been preserved. The year is taken to begin on 1 January (e.g. New Style) rather than on 25 March (Old Style): for dates occurring between 1 January and 25 March this is clarified in the text. Biblical quotations are taken from the Authorised (King James) Version, unless otherwise stated. Early modern printed books are listed in the footnotes without their Short Title Catalogue references, except for clarity in instances where multiple editions of the same text are being discussed. STC and Wing numbers of all printed texts are given in the bibliography.

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Abbreviations

Allen, Treasurie

Robert Allen, A treasurie of catechisme, or Christian instruction (1600), STC2: 366. Babington, Fruitful Babington, A very fruitful exposition of the Commandements by way of questions and answeres for greater plainnesse (1586), STC2: 1095. Barker, Painefull Peter Barker, A iudicious and painefull exposition vpon the ten Commandements (1624), STC2: 1425. Bossy, ‘Moral’ John Bossy, ‘Moral arithmetic:  Seven Sins into Ten Commandments’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1988). Brinsley, Watch John Brinsley, The true watch Or A direction for the examination of our spirituall estate (according to the word of God, whereby wee must be judged at the last day) (1606), STC2: 3775. Dod, Plaine Dod, John, A plaine and familiar exposition of the Ten commandements (1604), STC2: 6968. Downame, Abstract George Downame, An abstract of the duties commanded, and sinnes forbidden in the Law of God (1620), STC2: 7104. Dyke, Knowledge William Dyke, A treasure of knowledge: springing from the fountaine of godlinesse, which is the word of God (1620), STC2: 7431.5. Elton, Exposition Edward Elton, An exposition of the ten commandements of God (1623), STC2: 7620.5. Granger, Tree Thomas Granger, The tree of good and euill: or A  profitable and familiar exposition of the xix

newgenprepdf

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Greenham, Workes Hooper, ‘Declaration’

Lakes, Probe Perkins, Chaine

Whately, Pithie

Abbreviations Commandements, directing us in the whole course of our life, according to the Rule of God’s Word (1616), STC2: 12185. Richard Greenham, The workes of the reuerend and faithfull seruant of Iesus Christ M. Richard Greenham, ed. H.H. (1612), STC2: 12318. John Hooper, ‘A declaration of the Ten holy Commandments of Almighty God, 1548[9?]’, in Early Writings of John Hooper, ed. Samuel Carr (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1843), pp. 249–​430. Osmund Lakes, A probe theologicall:  or, The first part of the Christian pastors proofe of his learned parishioners faith (1612), STC2: 15136. William Perkins, A golden chaine:  or The description of theologie containing the order of the causes of saluation and damnation, according to Gods word (1600), STC2: 19646. William Whately, A pithie, short, and methodicall opening of the Ten commandements (1622), STC2: 25315.

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Introduction: The Reformation of the Decalogue

In a dance a man breakes the ten Commandements of God.

William Prynne, Histrio-​mastix: The players scourge (1633)

The Ten Commandments have their origin in the second book of the Hebrew Bible, which in time became the Christian Old Testament. The first book, Genesis, tells the story of God’s creation of the world, of mankind’s Fall in the Garden of Eden, of the devastation of the Flood, and of God’s forging of a special covenant with the nation of Israel. The book of Exodus picks up the story of God’s chosen people in a state of captivity in Egypt under the tyranny of Pharoah, and describes how God, through his servants Moses and Aaron, led them to safety through the miraculously parted waters of the Red Sea. Eventually, after sustaining the Israelites through their long desert sojourn, God himself descended upon Mount Sinai to commune with Moses. There, heralded by thunder and lightning and the sound of trumpets, cloaked in coruscating fire and wreathed in boiling clouds, God delivered his law to Moses on two tablets of stone.1 These first stone tablets were in fact short-​lived, for when Moses descended from Sinai to find the Israelites dancing around a molten calf his ‘anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount’. Moses then took the calf, burnt it, ground it into powder, and brewed the ashes of the idolatrous statue into a bitter tea which he subsequently forced the sinful people to drink.2 In response to this contrition, God told Moses to hew two more stone tablets from the mountain and descended once more onto Sinai where he delivered his law for a second time to Moses, who wrote out the Ten Commandments onto these two new ‘tables of testimony’. These physical embodiments of God’s law were

Exodus 31:18. Exodus 32:19–​20.

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The Reformation of the Decalogue

housed inside the Ark of the Covenant, within the inner sanctum of the Jewish Tabernacle. The Decalogue therefore had a privileged place, both physically and metaphorically, at the centre of the Jewish faith. Judaism came over time to recognise 620 commandments (or mitzvot) in total, including laws governing everything from religious ritual to diet, from sexual relations to criminal and judicial regulations. The early Christians emerged out of this culture of Jewish legalism (the Apostle Paul had himself been a Pharisee, a member of a Jewish sect emphasising strict observance of the Mosiac law), but they also sought to distance themselves from it. Christians therefore came to distinguish between the ‘moral’ laws of the Ten Commandments, which they held still to be binding, and the ‘ceremonial’ and ‘judicial’ laws whose precepts governed matters that were specific to Jewish faith and society, and which were therefore deemed no longer to apply to Christians. Early Christianity even disagreed over the numbering of the Decalogue, and whilst some Church Fathers (including Jerome) continued to back the Jewish division, it was the revised scheme favoured most notably by Augustine of Hippo which came to dominate in the Latin West.3 Insofar as they formed an important part of Scripture, the Ten Commandments were never precisely ignored by the Christian Church in the West. However, John Bossy has described how, for most of the medieval period, the attention of confessors and other writers on Christian morality tended to focus to a much greater extent on the more arresting and memorable framework of the Seven Deadly Sins.4 The renaissance of the Ten Commandments in the history of Western Christianity began falteringly in the fifteenth century, but it was really the reformation which catapulted the Decalogue back into a position of primacy. It is that new ascendency, broadly speaking, which this book seeks to describe and examine. The Ten Commandments loom large in the cultural imagination of the English-​speaking world even today. The idea that humanity’s important and complex relationships with God and with the rest of humankind can be comprehensively encapsulated in ten short instructions exerts a powerful hold. Human society is complicated, and the idea of a divine creator is humbling; in contrast, there is something comforting and attractive about a set of simple rules which promise to help you live a good and moral life, and perhaps even aid your chances of attaining eternal bliss. For more on the numbering of the commandments, and their reformation-​era re-​numbering, see Chapter 1. 4 Bossy, ‘Moral’, pp. 214–​34. 3

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Introduction

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In 2014, a collection of atheist and humanist organisations ran a competition called ‘The ReThink Prize’, the avowed aim of which was ‘crowd sourcing the Ten Commandments for the 21st century’. Members of the public were invited to submit ‘commandments’ online, and then vote for those which they felt most accurately reflected their principles. The ten winning submissions each received a prize of $10,000, and included maxims such as ‘there is no one right way to live’, ‘every person has the right to control over their body’, and ‘God is not necessary to be a good person or to live a full and meaningful life’.5 Twenty-​first century atheists, however, should not kid themselves into thinking that they are the first to attempt to reinvent the Ten Commandments, for Christians had already been doing so for millennia. This book is about one of those reinventions, probably the most significant of them all: the reformation of the Decalogue. The Ten Commandments loom rather smaller in the historiography of the English reformation. At the time of writing, the Brepols Bibliography of British and Irish History, the authoritative database of works of academic history written about the British Isles, produces no results at all for ‘Ten Commandments’ or ‘Decalogue’ when searching its index terms. Searches for occurrences of those terms appearing anywhere in the records of works written about the period c.1500–​c.1700 produces two results; a monograph on mid-​eighteenth century Italian opera in London, and a recent essay in Studies in Church History, written by the present author.6 The reasons for this conspicuous lack of attention are unfathomable. The English reformation catapulted the Decalogue from a relatively low value card in the medieval confessor’s deck –​far less important than the Seven Deadly Sins, and on a par with the commandments of the Church, the cardinal and theological virtues, and so on –​to the single most visible and important scriptural text in the whole of Christian religion.7 The Commandments were to be recited from the pulpit regularly –​more frequently than the other two principal pedagogic texts, the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer –​and taught as part of the catechism alongside the Pater Noster, the ‘Belief ’, and the sacraments. They were the first text ordered www.atheistmindhumanistheart.com/​the-​rethink-​prize/​ [accessed 9.12.2015]. Curtis Alexander Price, The impresario’s ten commandments: continental recruitment for Italian opera in London, 1763–​4 (London:  Royal Musical Association, 1992); Jonathan Willis, ‘The Decalogue, Patriarchy and Domestic Religious Education in Reformation England’, Studies in Church History, 50 (2014), pp. 199–​209. 7 On the Seven Deadly (or Cardinal Sins), see Morton W.  Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (Michigan: State College Press, 1952). 5

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The Reformation of the Decalogue

to be displayed publically in churches, painted directly onto the walls or on highly decorated boards. The Decalogue was integrated into the ­liturgy, and was also versified and included not once but twice in the runaway musical success that was the Sternhold and Hopkins Whole Booke of Psalmes. They were the subject of learned theological treatises and works of puritan practical divinity, as well as popular pamphlets and ecclesiastical injunctions. The godly wrote about them in their diaries, judges heard them preached about at meetings of the assizes, and parishioners were confronted by them at almost every turn.8 What, then, did the Ten Commandments mean to the English reformation? Why were they so prominent, and what impact did their prevalence have upon the processes of religious change and identity formation whose persistent tergiversations rocked the religious, social, political and cultural worlds of early modern England? The ubiquity of the Decalogue in the English reformation has not translated into historical interest; and in spite of the description of this state of affairs as ‘unfathomable’, it is nevertheless interesting to consider why this should be the case. The idea of the Ten Commandments, delivered by God himself to Moses on Mount Sinai and etched by his divine finger into two tablets of stone, communicates a sense of eternal, elemental and unchanging permanence. The lessons they teach –​about worshipping the Christian God, going to church on Sundays, honouring parents, and not killing, stealing from, or committing adultery with other people –​ seem like religious universals, somehow removed from the polemical cut and thrust of the confessional politics of the reformation era. Their weight and their utility also rest upon ostensible simplicity: these are ten straightforward instructions –​a rare instance of God telling it straight, rather than speaking through metaphor, allusion, figure or parable.9 As such, they have not just an elemental but also an elementary feel; and indeed during the reformation they formed part of the basic programme of foundational knowledge to be learned by children by rote along with the Creed and Lord’s Prayer, themselves texts which have received scant attention from Christopher Hill’s words on the English Bible might well be applied to the Decalogue alone:  it ‘became an institution in Tudor England –​the foundation of monarchical authority, of England’s protestant independence, the textbook of morality and social subordination’. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the 17th Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 4. 9 As David Steinmetz noted, ‘The impression created is that, while sixteenth-​century Christians differed sharply about the relationship of faith and works or about the distinction between law and gospel, they did not quarrel over the meaning of “do not steal” or “honour your father and mother”. Such an impression, however, is incorrect’. David C.  Steinmetz, ‘The Reformation and the Ten Commandments’, Interpretation, 43.3 (1989), p. 256. 8

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Introduction

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historians.10 The Ten Commandments have therefore remained hidden in plain sight: early modern historians have been ‘Decalogue-​blind’; unable to see the remarkable quality of the wood for the incredible quantity and apparent simplicity of the trees. This book has two principal arguments, both expressed by the ambiguity of its title. The first is that the reformation changed the Decalogue in profound ways; that it repurposed –​indeed reinvented –​the Ten Commandments as they had been commonly understood in the pre-​reformation Catholic Church. The biblical text stayed more or less the same, although Reformed Protestants tended to prefer the wording of the commandments taken from the Book of Exodus over the Deuteronomical enunciation favoured by Catholics. And, as many but not all scholars have noted, Reformed Protestants also chose an alternative numbering system for their Decalogue, following Jerome, Origen, and the Jewish and Eastern Orthodox Churches, while Luther and Rome kept to the traditionally dominant Augustinian position. However, the abstract meaning and practical use of the Ten Commandments were transformed utterly: they were confessionalised, polemicised, emphasised and utilised in a plethora of newly significant, complex and unexpected ways.11 This introduction began with a quotation from William Prynne’s Histrio-​mastix, a lengthy anti-​theatrical polemic which explained at some length the ways in which dancing on the Sabbath day comprised a breach of all Ten Commandments at once. It was this example of extraordinary cultural and theological gymnastics which first piqued my intellectual curiosity about the commandments. Just by looking at reformation-​era transformations of the Decalogue, therefore, we can learn an awful lot about the priorities and uncertainties of the English reformation itself.12 Contemporaries regularly compared God’s moral law to a mirror, but for historians it can also function as a prism through which we can refract a vivid spectrum of contemporary religious hopes, fears, and priorities. But more than that, and this is the second argument of the book, the Ten Commandments not only reflected but One notable exception is the passage of the Creed which refers to Christ’s descent into hell. See Peter Marshall, ‘The Reformation of Hell? Protestant and Catholic Infernalisms in England, c.1560–​ 1640’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 61.2 (2010), pp. 279–​98. 11 Naomi Tadmor has described how the Bible as a whole was not only translated, but also in a sense Englished by Tyndale and later biblical editors, to the extent that ‘the semantic shifts and transpositions, which took place in the processes of translation, affected not just individual words, but the construction of a social universe’. Naomi Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 19–​20. 12 For a fuller discussion of this quote, see Chapter 3, p. x. 10

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The Reformation of the Decalogue

also helped to shape the development of the reformation in England in a series of nuanced but significant ways. They buttressed ideas about law and order, and particularly about the rights and responsibilities of divine kingship and royal supremacy. They came to inform and define core theological concepts, such as sin, repentance, justification, faith, charity and sanctification. And they also helped to influence the development of both puritan and popular religious identities. The Ten Commandments, it turns out, were not just a concise set of guidelines handy for teaching children the basics about Christian morality: they were also extremely useful to think with. But as reformers embraced the Decalogue and sought to mould it to reflect their confessional priorities, they were in turn channelled to think not only with but also through the Ten Commandments. The process of sculpting is governed not only by the skill of the artist, but also by the condition of his or her tools, and the quality and nature of the raw materials. By choosing to work with and through the Ten Commandments, reformers were embracing a conceptual and discursive framework which exerted a palpable agency upon the finished product. In other words, the English reformation looked and sounded like it did, and English Protestantism evolved along the lines that it did, in part because of the special prominence and reformers’ distinctive understanding of God’s law. The historiographical neglect of the Ten Commandments should not be understated, but neither should it be exaggerated. In fact, there has in recent years been a gentle surge of interest in the commandments, marked not least by two international conferences, one of which has already resulted in an edited volume with another currently in the planning stages.13 Robert Bast has written extensively on the commandments in the context of early modern German catechisms, while Lesley Smith has recently published on the medieval interpretation of the Decalogue.14 Theological scholarship Dominik Markl (ed.), The Decalogue and its cultural influence (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013). Of six essays on the early modern Decalogue, however, only one –​by the present author –​ addressed the theological repurposing of the commandments; all the rest focussed on aspects of catechetical practice. Jonathan Willis, ‘Repurposing the Decalogue in Reformation England’, in Dominik Markl (ed.), The Decalogue and its cultural influence (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), pp. 190–​204; www.tencommandments.ugent.be/​node/​3 [accessed 10.12.2015]. 14 Robert Bast, Honor your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, c.  1400–​1600 (Leiden:  Brill, 1997); Robert Bast, ‘From Two Kingdoms to Two Tables:  The Ten Commandments and the Christian Magistrate’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte,  89 (1998), pp.  79–​95; Lesley Smith, The Ten Commandments:  interpreting the Bible in the medieval world (Leiden: Brill 2014). Most of Smith’s material is focussed on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although she does consider Mirk’s fifteenth century festial and Dederich of Münster’s Christenspiegel, the first printed German catechism. For an example of the inclusion of the Ten Commandments in medieval catechesis see Anne Hudson, ‘A New Look at the “Lay Folks’ Catechism”’, Viator, 16 (1985), pp. 243–​58. 13

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Introduction

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on the Ten Commandments is a livelier area of research, but relatively little of it is on the reformation or early modern period.15 Perhaps the most important piece of historical writing on the early modern Decalogue to date is the short but weighty essay by the great historian of Christianity John Bossy, who sadly passed away in October 2015 during the later stages of the writing of this manuscript. Bossy’s essay, ‘Moral arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments’, charted with aplomb the great shift that took place between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries, whereby the Ten Commandments replaced the Seven Deadly Sins as the preeminent ‘moral system’ of the western Christian world.16 The key figures in this transition were not Luther and Calvin, but Thomas Aquinas and Jean Gerson; as with so much else, the reformation-​era focus on the Decalogue was an intensification of pre-​existent trends within medieval Christianity, rather than a radical new invention. Bossy’s story was a pan-​European one which encompassed both Catholic and (latterly) Protestant Churches over the span of four centuries; not bad for a twenty-​page essay.17 The other major piece of Anglophone scholarship on the reformation Decalogue is J.  Sears McGee’s 1976 monograph The Godly Man in Stuart England. McGee deserves credit for attempting to place the Ten Commandments at the centre of his explanation of divergent religious identities in the wake of the English reformation; however, the concepts of ‘Anglican’ and ‘puritan’ which lie at the heart of The Godly Man have been comprehensively redrawn by forty years of evolving reformation historiography, not least the considerable oeuvres of Nicholas Tyacke and Patrick Collinson.18 For example, Patrick Miller, The Ten Commandments (Louisville Ky:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2009); Mark F.  Rooker, The Ten Commandments:  Ethics for the Twenty-​ First Century (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2010); Thorwald Lorenzen, Towards a Culture of Freedom: Reflections on the Ten Commandments Today (Eugene, Or: Cascade Bks, 2008). One recent exception to this early modern neglect is Christofer Frey, ‘Natural law and Commandments:  Conditions for the Reception of the Decalogue since the Reformation’, in Henning Graf Reventlow and Yair Hoffman (eds), The Decalogue in Jewish and Christian Tradition (London: T&T Clark, 2011), pp. 118–​31. 16 Bossy, ‘Moral’, pp. 214–​34. 17 Bossy’s focus was moral, cultural and social; not especially theological or religious. His essay was not principally concerned with individual belief or identity. His antennae were also more attuned to the diachronic, to changes over time, than to the synchronic, and to the similarities and differences between Catholic and Protestant use of the commandments in the immediate post-​reformation period. 18 E.g. Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists. The Rise of English Arminianism c.  1590–​1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Anglican Attitudes:  some Recent Writings on English Religious History, from the Reformation to the Civil War’, The Journal of British Studies, 35.2 (1996), pp.  139–​67; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2000); Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1991). 15

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The Reformation of the Decalogue

Where other historians have touched upon the Decalogue, they have done so only lightly; either by considering it in one particular context, or by looking at only one theme or commandment. Ian Green, for ­example, has considered the Ten Commandments in the context of English catechisms, analysing the messages of the authors and the variations in content between shorter and longer forms.19 In The Christian’s ABC he provides a useful summary of each commandment, concluding that while catechisms differed in emphasis, there were large measures of agreement in authors’ respective treatments of the Decalogue, and noting that discussion of the commandments constitutes ‘a rich and largely untapped vein of clerical thought on a wide variety of contemporary social and moral as well as religious issues’.20 By concentrating solely on the process and context of catechesis, however, there are significant aspects of the larger role of the Decalogue in post-​reformation English religion which fall outside of Green’s focus. Perhaps the most frequently-​discussed of the Ten Commandments has been the prohibition against idolatry contained within the second precept (in the Reformed numbering system). The work of Carlos Eire, Margaret Aston, Tara Hamling, Keith Thomas and others has drawn heavily upon the importance of the Second Commandment to explain the Protestant propensity toward iconoclasm.21 The precept forbidding the making of graven images was undoubtedly important in both formulating and expressing Reformed hostility to idolatrous worship, but taken out of context it does not tell anything like the whole story, for the whole of the first table was designed schematically to describe the proper worship of God; its subject, its ordinary nature, its end, and its extraordinary nature one day in seven. Idolatry was therefore discussed just as often in the context of the First, Third and Fourth Commandments as it Ian Green, ‘“For Children in Yeeres and Children in Understanding”:  The Emergence of the English Catechism under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37 (1986), pp.  397–​425; Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC, Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–​1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Ian Green, ‘The Dissemination of the Decalogue in English and Lay Responses to its Promotion in Early Modern English Protestantism’, in Dominik Markl (ed.), The Decalogue and its cultural influence (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), pp. 171–​89. 20 Green, The Christian’s ABC, p. 466. Some of these issues have been picked up in Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible, pp. 36–​41. 21 Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols: the Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Margaret Aston, England’s iconoclasts. Vol.1, Laws against images (Oxford:  Clarendon Press 1988); Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household:  Religious Art in Post-​Reformation Britain (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2010); Keith Thomas, ‘Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-​Reformation England (Woodbridge:  Boydell, 2006), pp.  16–​40; Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts (Routledge: London, 1993). 19

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was under the Second. In addition, as we shall see, the undue attention given to the renumbering of the Second Commandment has distracted from some of the other more significant changes taking place within the Reformed Decalogue. Some historians of the continental reformation have also begun to take an interest in the commandemnts. Ilja Veldman, for example, has explored visual representations of the Ten Commandments in print and manuscript form, whilst Maria Mochizuki has explored the material culture of the Decalogue in both domestic and ecclesiastical spaces in the Reformed Netherlands.22 Historians of the English reformation, until now, have lagged behind this trend. This book still owes a huge debt to the recent historiography of the English reformation, and particularly to the chief proponents of its post-​ revisionist phase, including Peter Marshall, Alec Ryrie and Alexandra Walsham. In a now famous phrase which has gradually attained the status of a kind of post-​revisionist ‘mission statement’, Walsham explained how: There is a growing conviction that too much ink has been spilt arguing about the pace, geography, and social distribution of conversion and change and too little charting the ways in which the populace adjusted to the doctrinal and ecclesiastical revolution as a permanent fact.23

Since those words first appeared in print in 1999, a great deal more ink has indeed been spilt in pursuit of a more sophisticated understanding of the cultural and psychological impacts of religious change over the course of the long reformation, particularly its later stages.24 However, while Ilja Veldman, ‘The Old Testament as a Moral Code:  Old Testament Stories as Exempla of the Ten Commandments’, Simiolus, 23.4 (1995), pp. 215–​39; Mia Mochizuki, ‘At Home with the Ten Commandments:  Domestic Text Paintings in Seventeenth-​Century Amsterdam’, in A.  Golahny (ed.), In His Milieu. Essays on the Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 287–​300; Mia Mochizuki, The Netherlandish image after iconoclasm, 1566–​1672: material religion in the Dutch golden age (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 23 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5. 24 E.g. David Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s cat:  travesties and transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (eds), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006); Alexandra Walsham, Charitable hatred:  tolerance and intolerance in England, 1500–​ 1700 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press 2006); Luc Racaut and Alec Ryrie (eds), Moderate voices in the European Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the dead in Reformation England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002); Laura Sangha, Angels and belief in England, 1480–​1700 (London:  Pickering & Chatto, 2012); Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds), The place of the dead, death and remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000); Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrsist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-​Reformation England (Yale: Yale University Press, 2002); Tara Hamling and Richard Williams (eds), Art re-​formed: re-​assessing the impact of the Reformation on the visual arts (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007); Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early 22

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much has been gained, we must also be careful to observe which areas of the garden of English reformation studies have been less well tended.25 In the ‘Introduction’ to a recent edited volume on Sin and Salvation in Reformation England, I  argued that theological topics –​amongst which we might well count the Ten Commandments –​have not fared particularly well in scholarship on the English reformation of late, although they are perhaps now beginning to experience something of a renaissance.26 As Walsham herself noted in the ‘Afterword’ to the same volume, ‘the “cultural turn” has not served theology well: it has left us with a conception of religion akin to a doughnut, with a hole in the middle’.27 Walsham also commented upon historians’ often subconscious Cartesian tendency to polarise belief and praxis, and this book is an attempt to reintegrate the two, in the mode of what is starting to be referred to as the cultural history of theology.28 It is also an attempt to contribute to the broader question of ‘whither the study of the English reformation’ and of the future direction of post-​revisionism. In part this is through its advocacy of the cultural history of theology approach, but it also does so by positing a dialectical model of religious change, and of the relationship between religious belief, practice and identity, in which the reformers’ message was shaped not only by the conceptual frameworks through which they expressed their ideas, but also by the genres through which they chose to communicate, and in Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jonathan Willis, Church Music and Protestantism in Post-​Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Alexandra Walsham, The reformation of the landscape: religion, identity, and memory in early modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds), Private and domestic devotion in early modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie (eds), Worship and the parish church in early modern Britain (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2013); Christopher Marsh, ‘“Common Prayer” in England, 1560–​1640: The View From the Pew’, Past & Present, 171 (May 2001), pp. 66–​94; John Doran and Charlotte Methuen (eds), Religion and the Household (Studies in Church History vol. 50. 2014); Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013); Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars restored:  the changing face of English religious worship, 1547–​c.1700 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007); Arnold Hunt, The art of hearing:  English preachers and their audiences, 1590–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 25 For the origins of this horticultural metaphor, as well as an astute analysis of recent developments in English reformation historiography, see Peter Marshall, ‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), pp. 564–​96. 26 Jonathan Willis, ‘Introduction’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2015), p.  3; Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c.1590–​ 1640 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad Gregory (eds), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 27 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Afterword’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 262–​3. 28 Willis, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.

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conversation with the laity whom they strove to indoctrinate. The process of reformation did not consist simply of the promotion and reception of a fixed set of ideas; it was a corporate enterprise created through the messy agglomeration of countless small-​scale actions and interactions. Ideas were –​ theology was –​continually refined as a result of practical experience. Identity was a product of the relationship between belief and practice, but it also played a crucial role in shaping both. Theology was a script which was continuously being re-​written by individuals effectively acting as de facto lay theologians in response to the experience of actually living as a Protestant in reformation England.29 This is a book about the Ten Commandments, but what gives it focus is that it considers the commandments as part of a cohesive whole: the Decalogue, God’s moral law. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not a book of ten chapters, with each providing a comprehensive discussion of the themes associated with a particular commandment. That would require not ten chapters, but ten books, or ten times ten books, even to scratch the surface of topics as expansive as crime, gender relations, family, violence, and so forth. Each commandment does receive its fair share of attention in the form of a series of ten case studies scattered throughout the book, as indicated by the table of contents. Readers wishing to explore what contemporaries thought about each commandment in turn can navigate the book in this way. What these case studies do in context, however, is to illuminate a specific theme or quality which can be found in the Decalogue more broadly, and it is hoped that readers of the book will find this ‘case-​ study’ approach fruitful, rather than being put off by the sudden appearance of a particular precept out of sequence. The organising principle of the book is not the order of the commandments, but the contemporary hermeneutical principle of the three offices or functions of the Decalogue. As a result, the book is split into three sections, each of which is prefaced by its own brief introduction. I will keep my comments here on the three offices short, as they are explored in greater detail later on, but they roughly correspond to the socio-​political, the theological, and the religio-​ cultural spheres respectively. The notion of the three offices of the law was a creation of the reformation, and it allowed the Ten Commandments to function differently at different times and in relation to different groups of people. The first function of the Decalogue was civil: that C.f. Alexandra Walsham’s observation that ‘theology is not a passive entity or thing. It is rather a dynamic process that is constantly modulating and altering’. Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation and “The Disenchantment of the World” Reassesed’, The Historical Journal, 51.2 (2008), p. 527.

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is, the Ten Commandments were to be policed by earthly magistrates, and all people were required to comply with their external demands or face secular justice and punishment. This office of the Decalogue is explored in two chapters: Law and Order. Chapter 1, Law, functions as an extended introduction to the reformation-​era commandments, and explores issues fundamental to understanding how they functioned in early modern England, such as the relationships between different species of law, the (re-​)numbering of the commandments, key differences between Catholic and Protestant interpretations, as well as the temporal blessings and curses instituted by God to encourage the keeping of his ordinances. Chapter 2, Order, looks specifically at the relationship between divine law and secular authority, especially the authority of princes, fathers, and judges. The second function of the Decalogue was evangelical; that is to say, it was closely tied to the theological operation of the evangelical doctrines of justification and predestination. The evangelical office of the Decalogue is examined in two chapters: Sin and Salvation. Chapter 3, Sin, demonstrates the paradox of the reformation commandments:  that the whole point of their enumeration was to damn sinful mankind, for whom they were impossible to obey with the spiritual perfection required by God. The commandments therefore came to define sin, and in turn the breadth and depth of the total depravity to which man was subject. Chapter  4, Salvation, shows that while the Decalogue was God’s tool to damn the reprobate, it also performed a crucial role in the salvation of the regenerate, by engendering within them feelings of repentance and driving them towards faith in Christ as the only true means of redemption. The post-​reformation significance of the Ten Commandments transcended the now defunct legal covenant of works, for craving to obey the law and thirsting to perform its works were crucial indicators of justification and sanctification. The third and final office of the law was practical, in that it offered the regenerate a guide and model for godly living. This office of the law is surveyed through two chapters: the godly, and the ‘ungodly’. Chapter 5, The Godly, considers the relationship between puritans and the Decalogue, and suggests that self-​examination by the precepts of the Ten Commandments in the way described as part of the process leading to evangelical conversion constituted a form of ongoing penitential cycle in the lives of the godly. Chapter 6, The ‘Ungodly’, interrogates the role of the commandments in the religious lives of ‘ordinary’ parishioners in post-​reformation England. It suggests that, by paying attention to the ‘rhetorical theology’ of the genres through which the Decalogue was communicated, we may be able to uncover some of the roots of popular ‘country divinity’. A short conclusion

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reiterates the main findings of the book, whilst suggesting how they may further change our view of the English reformation. Where it is important to do so I have tried to emphasise elements of change (and continuity) over time, but within the broadly thematic structure outlined above. Finally, two words, on sources and chronology. The potential quantity of relevant material for a study of this nature is vast; indeed, it is almost limitless. The text of the Decalogue has thus by necessity acted as a filter: it has been essential to omit a great deal of material on adultery, for example, in order to write meaningfully about the Seventh Commandment, and to leave out many sources relating to crime to write cogently about the Sixth and Eighth. My requirements have been quite strict: unless it is absolutely clear that a source is talking specifically about God’s law, or about an issue as it relates explicitly to the Decalogue, I have most often chosen not to include it. These decisions are based upon quite a finely-​honed sense of what is relevant, but they are ultimately arbitrary, and another researcher may have chosen (or in future choose) to draw the line slightly differently. The backbone of evidence running throughout the volume is printed material relating to the Decalogue as a whole: catechetical works, theological treatises, biblical expositions, sermons, polemic, pastoral writing, practical divinity, and more. I have used works by authors from a wide range of confessional and ecclesiological viewpoints, who occasionally agreed with one another about the Decalogue; this should not be taken to imply that their views were in all respects homogeneous. Incidental references to the commandments –​as a whole, or in part –​have also been sought out, collected, and deployed where relevant. There are further clusters of specific sources which inform particular chapters or sections of chapters. The latter part of Chapter 2, for example, examines a corpus of around fifty surviving assize sermons in order to scrutinise the rhetorical relationship between divine and secular law and justice in sermons preached before the judiciary. Chapter 5 draws upon more than twenty surviving ‘godly lives’ –​mainly diaries, with a smattering of biographies and autobiographies –​in order to explore the ways in which puritans utilised the Ten Commandments as part of their rich and complex spiritual lives. Chapter 6 breaks new ground by identifying and analysing a corpus of almost thirty physical survivals of reformation-​era commandment boards. The chronology of the book is focussed upon the long sixteenth century, c.1485–​c.1625. This is in order to incorporate important late-​medieval printed works on the commandments on the one hand, and to explore the evolution of the Decalogue into the post-​reformation period on other. The historiographical tendency in reformation studies today is to see the

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English reformation as increasingly long –​stretching far into the seventeenth and even the eighteenth centuries, and occasionally beyond.30 Doubtless a study of the commandments during the eras of Laudianism, Civil War, Interregnum, Restoration and Glorious Revolution would hold much value, but 1625 represents a convenient caesura at which to consider the initial impact of the reformation on the Ten Commandments, and vice versa. The consequence of a thematic mode of organisation is inevitably that change over time receives less emphasis than it might; I have tried to do so where I feel that it is particularly important, but it is hoped that the reader will be forgiving of the need to foreground certain kinds of coherence at the expense of others. Too much material, perhaps, has been left out; but undoubtedly too much has also been left in. There are at least ten more books to be written on the commandments; perhaps ten times ten. In what follows, I hope at the very least to persuade the reader that those books will be worth writing and reading, and that the English reformation was in no small part a reformation of the Decalogue.

E.g. Walsham, Reformation of the landscape.

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The Civil Office of the Law

The first use is civil and external, forbidding and punishing the ­transgression of politic and civil ordinance, as Paul writeth, 1 Tim. i.: “The law is given to the unjust.” Wherefore God commandeth the magistrates and superior powers of the earth to punish the transgressors of the law made for the preservation of every commonwealth. . . John Hooper, A Declaration of the Ten holy Commaundements of Almighty God (1548)

The English reformation entailed a fundamental reinterpretation of the Ten Commandments, God’s moral law. By examining the nature and extent of that reinterpretation, historians can therefore gain important insights into the nature and extent of the religious changes that together constituted the English reformation. Protestant writers in the reformation period commonly criticised their Catholic opponents for treating Holy Scripture like ‘a nose of wax’, ‘formable to any construction’, twisting and moulding it at will to suit their own devilish agenda.1 In the hands of evangelical and later Protestant divines, however, the Ten Commandments proved themselves to be remarkably flexible, and as reformers pressed and pinched them into shape they left behind a number of fingerprints and other telling marks. But more than that, because the Decalogue was presented as an incontrovertible statement of the divine will, it became not only a reflection of reformation-​era religious change, but also a way of moulding and justifying a Protestant confessional agenda. The commandments’ uncompromising prescriptions and proscriptions, demanding absolute obedience and subservience from the individual Christian, also rather resonated from the E.g. William Attersoll, The badges of Christianity. Or, A treatise of the sacraments fully declared out of the word of God (1606), p. 309; Thomas Adams, The happines of the church, or, A description of those spirituall prerogatiues vvherewith Christ hath endowed (1619), p. 357; William Gouge, The vvhole-​armor of God: or A Christians spiritual furniture, to keepe him safe from all the assaults of Satan (1619), p. 330; Phillip Stubbes, The second part of the anatomie of abuses conteining the display of corruptions (1583), sig. L3r –​just four examples from literally hundreds.

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beginning with the conservative and authoritarian reformation of Henry VIII. Alec Ryrie has described how Henry’s reformation built ‘a form of Christianity which was defined by kingship: God’s kingship, and Henry’s own’. In addition, he has suggested that the ‘central doctrine’ of Henry’s reformation ‘was the royal supremacy, and from that flowed all its other virtues: unity, obedience, good works, and a pragmatic piety’.2 In his comments on one of the draft revisions of The Institution of a Christian Man, the evangelical ‘Bishops’ Book’, Henry noted that the Christian’s priority was ‘to lyve well, and to kepe the Commaundementes of god . . . in this present life’.3 There is some evidence therefore that Henry VIII saw himself, and that others saw him, as a kind of Old Testament patriarch. Henry’s last wife, Catherine Parr, in her devotional manual The lamentacion of a sinner, likened her husband and king to Moses the lawgiver. Henry, she explained, was a ‘godlie and learned kynge’, sent by God ‘in these latter dayes, to reygne over us’ and remove ‘the vayles, & mistes of erroures’ with ‘the virtue & force of goddess worde’.4 The first office of God’s moral law was ‘civil and external, forbidding and punishing the transgression of politic and civil ordinance’.5 In other words, there was incumbent upon all humanity, elect and reprobate, a temporal obligation to obey the ten precepts of the Decalogue at least outwardly. Temporal obedience could even bring temporal rewards, in a strange reversal of the second, theological understanding of the law, according to which true good works earned nothing, were spiritual in nature, and stemmed from salvation as a consequence rather than a cause of mankind’s justification. However, the justice and obedience required by the first office of the law were not straightforwardly secular. Both the law itself, and the magistrates whose responsibility it was to promulgate and police it, were instituted by God. The language and authority of the commandments and of divine majesty therefore bled into other spheres, such as royal authority, the position of magistrates and justices, and the rhetoric of judgement and punishment. Not only was the English reformation Alec Ryrie, ‘Divine Kingship and Royal Theology in Henry VIII’s Reformation’, Reformation, 7 (2002), p. 77. 3 BL Royal MS 17.C.XXX, f. 147v, cited in Ryrie, ‘Divine Kingship and Royal Theology’, p. 76. 4 Catharine Parr, The lamentacion of a synner (1547), sigs. Dvv, Dvir. The parallel was also drawn by Miles Coverdale in the dedicatory epistle to Henry VIII of his 1535 translation of the Bible into English:  ‘and a continuall thankfulnesse both olde and yonge unto god, and to youre grace, for beinge oure Moses, and for bringynge us out of this olde Egypte from the cruell handes of our spirituall Pharao’. Miles Coverdale, Biblia, the Byble, that is, the holy Scrypture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully translated in to Englyshe (1535), sig. ☩iiiir 5 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 282. 2

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itself an exercise in theocratic kingship through Henry VIII’s enduring gift of the Royal Supremacy: Reformation England was also re-​envisioned as a theocracy through religious endorsements of and justifications for the exercise of civil governance and justice which were based in large part upon the authority of the Decalogue. The following chapters explore these themes at length. Chapter 1 begins by addressing questions of law; what precisely was God’s law, to whom did it apply, through what species was it expressed, and how was it to be interpreted? Chapter 2 moves on to the question of order: to what extent did the Ten Commandments condition and legitimate forms of secular authority, and in what ways did they affect the exercise of civil justice and views about the appropriateness of different forms of punishment?

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Law

Law. That, which hath the force of governing & moderating our actions. This is the general property of a Law. Hence come these phrases. The Law of the minde; the Law of the members; the Law of sin; the Law of God; the Law of the Spirit. Thomas Wilson A Christian dictionarie Opening the signification of the chiefe words dispersed generally through Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament (1612)

Introduction In 1622, Archbishop George Abbot published The coppie of a letter sent from my lords grace of Canterburie shewing the reasons which induced the kings majestie to prescribe directions for preachers. In it, he ordered that no Parson, Vicar, Curate, or Lecturer, shall preach any Sermon or Collation upon Sunday and Holy-​dayes in the afternoone in any Cathedrall or Parish Church throughout the Kingdome, but upon some part of the Catechisme, or some text taken out of the Creed, tenne Commandements, or Lords Prayer, (funerall Sermons onely excepted). . .1

This was part of a concerted effort on the part of King James I and his archbishop to restrain preaching on ‘the deepe points of Predestination, Election, Reprobation; of the Universalitie, Efficacie, Resistabilitie, or Irresistabilitie of Gods grace’, in order to deprive the increasingly heated conflicts between puritan and Arminian controversialists of oxygen. The implication is that the catechetical texts named as suitable sermon-​fodder were settled and uncontroversial. However, it is at their peril that historians approach the Ten Commandments in post-​reformation England with George Abbot, The coppie of a letter sent from my lords grace of Canterburie shewing the reasons which induced the kings majestie to prescribe directions for preachers (1622), p. 2.

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the view that they were a straightforward educational text, whose meaning and significance was clear and restricted to the most rudimentary stages of Christian education. In 1581, the minister John Baker justified his decision to write a treatise ‘upon the xii. Articles of our Christian faith’ with reference to the fact that ‘divers both of our countrymen, and others, have very paynefully and fruitefulle laboured, to set forth the exposition and meaning, both of the ten Commandements, & also of the Lordes prayer’; but we should not mistake ubiquity for triviality or irrelevance.2 God’s law was everywhere and the story of the Ten Commandments in England during the long sixteenth century is in many ways the story of a reformation of the Decalogue: not only was the Decalogue itself reformed during this period, but the reformation itself was shaped in crucial ways by the changing theological interpretation and practical application of the ten precepts of the moral law. This book will go on to demonstrate in detail some of the ways in which that shaping occurred, but this chapter is concerned primarily with establishing the key terms of reference for fleshing out the ways in which sixteenth-​century English-​men and -​women understood the Ten Commandments. We will begin by exploring types or ‘species’ of law. The observant reader will have noted that over the course of the last paragraph I have used the terms ‘Ten Commandments’, ‘Decalogue’, ‘God’s law’ and ‘moral law’ synonymously. This is not only because it would be tedious to write (and read) a single term over and over again. Rather, it is because these terms were treated by contemporaries as largely interchangeable; they possessed the same general sense, although they also conveyed subtly different shades of meaning. It is vital from the outset to understand the significance of and relationship between laws moral, judicial and ceremonial; laws of nature, Moses, and Christ; and between law and gospel; in order to truly appreciate the huge importance and vast scope of the reformed Decalogue. Secondly, this chapter will discuss the vital reformation-​era renumbering of the Ten Commandments. On the surface this was a relatively minor change, but its broader theological significance is widely underappreciated. One of the chief beneficiaries of this renumbering was the new Second Commandment, not to make any graven image, and this will be explored in detail in the first of the chapter’s two commandment case studies. We will move on to consider key differences between Catholics and Protestants over the Decalogue, and then the Third Commandment, not to take John Baker, Lectures of I.B. vpon the xii. Articles of our Christian faith briefely set forth for the comfort of the godly, and the better instruction of the simple and ignorant (1581), title page and sig. Aiir.

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the Lord’s name in vain. Finally, the chapter examines the blessings and curses contained within the Second, Third, and Fifth Commandments. Why were the commandments so important that the godly Essex minister George Gifford choose to defend the Book of Common Prayer from the condemnation of the Elizabethan arch-​separatist Henry Barrow on the basis that it contained the Decalogue?3 How was the seventeenth-​century cleric and physician William Bullein able to claim that only a person of no religious or moral belief whatsoever was capable of abandoning the rule of the Ten Commandments?4 As we proceed, the full weight, influence and magnitude of God’s law will become clear.

Species of Law Our starting point is to consider what the Ten Commandments actually were. They were a catechetical resource; they were a biblical text; but even more than that, they were the product of a direct historical manifestation of God before his chosen people. Of course the whole of scripture was believed to be divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, but the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai was the only occasion after Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden when God the Father descended to the earth to communicate directly with humanity. The Ten Commandments were the unmediated speech of the almighty: there was nothing figurative, allusive or metaphorical about their delivery or import. As William Camden explained, ‘Moses received of God a literall law, written by the finger of God, in the two Tables of the ten Commaundements to be imparted to all’.5 God’s physical presence during the giving of his law was important, and the Decalogue was imbued with a special quality because, of the whole of scripture, these were the only words which God himself had written down. The godly schoolmaster John Brinsley

Henry Barrow, A plaine refutation of M. G. Giffardes reprochful booke, intituled a short treatise against the Donatists of England (1591), p. 48. 4 William Bullein, A dialogue bothe pleasaunte and pietifull wherein is a goodly regimente against the feuer pestilence with a consolacion and comfort against death (1564), ff. 7r–​8v. 5 William Camden, Remaines of a greater worke, concerning Britaine, the inhabitants thereof, their languages, names, surnames, empreses, wise speeches, poësies, and epitaphes (1605), p. 152. A small number of commentators, such as the Protestant author and poet Christopher Lever and the Catholic convert (and later priest) Thomas Kellison, put forth an alternative view: that the commandments had been given to Moses ‘by the ordinance of Angels’, but most English Protestant writers stressed God’s personal authorship of the Decalogue. Christopher Lever, The holy pilgrime, leading the way to heaven (1618), p. 84; Matthew Kellison, A suruey of the new religion detecting manie grosse absurdities which it implieth (Douai and Rheims, 1603), p. 497. 3

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noted particularly that the commandments had been written by the Lord himself, and the geographical compiler Samuel Purchas explained that, uniquely amongst his laws, God had given the Decalogue ‘immediately’, with his own ‘voyce and finger’.6 Some godly authors were paradoxically keen to stress that knowledge of divine authorship of the commandments should not cause people to anthropomorphise God the Father, serving as a spur to idolatry of the mind. Calvin himself was concerned to point out that God’s digital authorship of the commandments should not be taken to mean ‘that God hath anie handes: but that the holy scripture speaketh so by a resemblance as if it were saide, the lawe was note written by mans hand: but God aprooved and ratified it by way of myracle’.7 Still, the consensus was that, however it had been achieved in practice, God himself had written the commandments. Not only that, he had written them in stone. Calvin took particular pains to note that ‘it was not his pleasure to use paper or parchment: but to have his law written in stone’, lending the precepts of divine law a gravity and permanence beyond that achieved by human laws or writing. Likewise, the controversial godly Hebraist Hugh Broughton observed that the Decalogue or ‘Tenne sayings’ had been ‘graven by God’ in two great stones, while the future dean of Canterbury John Boys explained that the Decalogue had been ‘openly proclaimed unto the world, ingraven in stone, written in a booke, kept for record in the Church’.8 God’s physical delivery of the commandments, his personal authorship of them, and the fact that his law was hewn indelibly into blocks of stone, all established the permanence and unchanging immutability of the commandments of the Decalogue, as something given by the creator to his people to endure for ever.9 John Brinsley, The fourth part of the true watch containing prayers and teares for the churches (1624), p. 78; Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage (1613), p. 17. The theologian Patrick Miller has written of the scriptural indicators of the weight and importance of the commandments, including the fact that they are given twice, directly to the people, written by the finger of God on stone, placed in the Ark of the Covenant, and that they are the first piece of legal material. Patrick Miller, The Ten Commandments (Louisville Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), pp. 3–​4. 7 Jean Calvin, The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (1583), p. 391. Cf. Thomas Cranmer, Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion for the synguler commoditie and profyte of childre[n]‌and yong people (1548), f. 25r. 8 Hugh Broughton, A reuelation of the holy Apocalyps (1610), p. 113; John Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures vsed in our English liturgie (1610), p. 84. Cf. Christiaan van Adrichem, A briefe description of Hierusalem and of the suburbs therof, as it florished in the time of Christ, trans. Thomas Tymme (1595), p. 40. 9 The first stone tablets given to Moses were broken and then replaced:  see above, ‘Introduction’, and also Jonathan Willis, ‘“Moral Arithmetic” or “Creative Accounting”? (Re-​)defining Sin through the Ten Commandments’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 70–​2, for more detail on the giving of the commandments, as well as Exodus, Chapters 31–​4. 6

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The people God had given his commandments to on Mount Sinai, however, were the Jews; no longer his chosen nation in the eyes of early modern Christian divines. This prompted a serious question:  to what extent did the Decalogue apply to English Protestants any more than the Deuteronomical and Levitical codes concerning civil, criminal and religious duties and punishments, such as the Jewish dietary prohibitions? In response, early modern churchmen, Catholic and Protestant, were all but unanimous in maintaining the validity of the Ten Commandments for Christians. They did so in the first instance by dividing the whole of the Mosaic laws into three distinct groupings: ceremonial laws, ordained for regulating the Jewish religion; judicial laws, instituted to police Jewish society; and the moral law, comprising the Ten Commandments. Two thirds of these, the ceremonial and judicial laws, had been abrogated by the coming of Christ, of whom they were figures. ‘What Ceremonial lawes remaine there to us which were not utterly abrogated by Christ?’ asked the puritan master of Pembroke College William Fulke. ‘As for the judicial preceptes of the Jewish lawe, who ever required the christians to be bounde unto theim?’10 By contrast, he claimed, there were no moral precepts that ‘we gainsaie’. The moderate puritan minister Nicholas Byfield railed against men who ‘take liberty to sinne, under pretense of their Christian liberty’, reminding them that ‘GOD hath freed us in Christianity from the ceremonial Law, not from the morall’.11 Commenting on the seventh of the Thirty-​Nine Articles, that concerning the Old Testament, the controversial preacher and sometime puritan Thomas Rogers noted a series of ­propositions, including that ‘Christians are not bound at all to the observation of the Judaical ceremonies’; that ‘the Judiciall lawes of the Jewes are not necessarily to be received, or established in any common wealth’, and finally that ‘no Christian man whatsoever is freed from the obedience of the lawe Moral’.12 While the ceremonial laws were to be rejected outright, and the moral laws applied to humanity for all eternity, the judicial laws were a slightly more complex issue. While they were not necessarily binding, it was likely that Christian societies would still want to punish many of the same crimes that had been condemned in the Deuteronomical and Levitical law codes. The solution, proclaimed Walter Raleigh in his history of the world, William Fulke, A confutation of a popishe, and sclaunderous libelle in forme of an apologie (1571), f. 64v. Nicholas Byfield, A commentary: or, sermons vpon the second chapter of the first epistle of Saint Peter (1623), p. 682. 12 Thomas Rogers, The faith, doctrine, and religion, professed, & protected in the realme of England (1607), p. 33. 10

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was ‘that the morall Judicialls of Moses doe partly binde, and partly are let free’. In other words, the crimes might be the same, but Christian princes were not bound to the same punishments as described in the Pentateuch; and indeed they were forbidden from instituting harsher punishments than those established by Moses.13 The judicial laws therefore had a quasi-​ adiaphoristic status, neither prescribed nor proscribed by scripture, and so were left to the discretion of the ruling secular magistrate.14 William Perkins described this broad consensus in detail in his commentary on Galatians. As a whole, the ‘policie, regiment, or law of Moses’ was abrogated with the coming of the Gospel into the world, at the Ascension of Christ. The ceremonial law was of two types; ceremonies which prefigured and signified the coming of Christ, and ceremonies ordering Jewish worship. The first group were fulfilled and abrogated by Christ’s coming, and the second concerning the Jewish faith clearly had no value for Christians. The judicial law was also of two types:  purely judicial laws which concerned the land of Canaan and the nation of the Jews were abrogated, whilst others which were judicial and moral (those which ‘serve directly and immediately, to guard and fense any one of the ten Commandements’) still applied. The moral law itself was not abrogated by the coming of Christ, but it was altered in three key respects. Firstly, it no longer offered a means of justification. Secondly, it no longer offered a malediction or curse to the godly.15 And thirdly, the rigor of the moral law was ameliorated; ‘for them that are in Christ, God accepts the indeavour to obay, for obedience it self ’. ‘Nevertheless, the law, as it is the Rule of good life, is unchangeable, and admits no abrogation. And Christ in this regard did by his death establish it’.16 The question of the extent to which the moral law applied to Christians was one which dogged Protestantism, one way or another, throughout the Walter Raleigh, The history of the world (1617), p. 293. Ronald B. Bond is therefore mistaken when he suggests that Thomas Becon’s argument that the Old Testament judicial punishments for adultery ought to be applied to Christians demonstrates a belief that the new law had not abrogated the old. Those laws themselves were not considered morally binding, but it was within the authority of Christian monarchs to institute similar punishments. Ronald B Bond, ‘“Dark Deeds Darkly Answered”: Thomas Becon’s Homily against Whoredom and Adultery. Its Contexts, and Its Affiliations with Three Shakespearean Plays’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 16.2 (1985), p. 195. For more on the punishment of adultery, see Chapter 2. 15 ‘There is no condemnation to them that are in Christ, Rom. 8.1’ 16 William Perkins, A commentarie or exposition, vpon the fiue first chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (1604), pp.  230–​4. Cf. William Perkins, A discourse of conscience wherein is set downe the nature, properties, and differences thereof (1596), pp. 14–​22. For Luther, the New Testament alone was not sufficient; the Old Testament was indispensable, as a book of Law to complement the book of Grace. Siegfried Raeder, ‘The Exegetical and Hermeneutical Work of martin Luther’, in Magne Sæbø (ed.), Hebrew Bible/​Old Testament (II Vols, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), Vol. II, p. 382. 13 14

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reformation. As Chapter 3 explores in more detail, the evangelical office of the Protestant Decalogue insisted that it was impossible for any man or woman to keep the commandments. Catholics, who believed that such obedience was not only possible but essential, took this denial as proof of Protestant antinomianism, or rejection of the moral law. The Lutheran chronicler Johannes Sleidanus was keen to defend his co-​religionists by pointing out that reformation-​era antinomianism did not have its origins in the works of Luther, who ‘doth plainly confute these thynges’.17 Matthew 5:17 was one of a number of important proof-​texts for the Protestant commitment to the Decalogue, in which Christ declared ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’ The unfortunately named epigrammatist and fellow of New College, Thomas Bastard, explained that ‘unlesse the fulfilling of the law be a repealing of the law, Christ cannot be said to abrogate the law’. The moral law remained ‘Magna charta, the great commandment. The Law of Ceremonies was a Law of jots and tittles compared. The judiciall Law was middle betweene both’.18 The bishop of Lincoln William Barlow, in a treatise directed against the Jesuit priest Robert Persons, argued logically that the Decalogue must still bind Christians, otherwise the godly would be free by grace to practice adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, and all the rest of the crimes prohibited by the commandments.19 In a similar vein, the separatist minister Henry Ainsworth explained that, seeing as sin was defined as the transgression of the law, where there was no law there was no transgression; therefore, to be freed from the law was to be freed from sin. This was a patently absurd proposition: there was ‘no apostasie’ that could ever free ‘the world now, from the Law of Christ’.20 As suggested by Perkins, however, the application of the moral law to Christians had been altered by the incarnation and redemptive sacrifice of Christ. Defending Luther from the Catholic charge that he believed ‘the ten commandements apperteine nothing unto us’, the preacher and controversialist William Charke explained that he was ‘speaking against such as urged the policie of the Jewes, and layde the yoke of Moses Law upon christians’, expounding instead the differences between the two covenants of God: the Mosaic covenant of works, which promised salvation in return for the (impossible)

Johannes Sleidanus, A famouse cronicle of oure time, called Sleidanes Commentaries (1560), f. clxijv. Thomas Bastard, Twelue sermons (1615), pp. 102–​6. 19 William Barlow, An answer to a Catholike English-​man (1609), p. 213. 20 Henry Ainsworth, A reply to a pretended Christian plea for the anti-​Chistian [sic] Church of Rome (1620), p. 19. 17 18

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fulfilment of the law, and the Christian covenant of grace, which offered salvation freely through faith in Christ and the promises of the Gospel.21 The puritan author Arthur Dent explained that the covenant of the law was conditional ‘and did no otherwise give life, and salvation unto men, but if they did performe it’, while the covenant of the Gospel was freely bestowed. The regenerate were therefore ‘under the obedience and institution of the law, but not under the curse of it; for they being in Christ are freed from that’.22 Regenerate Protestants were freed from the moral law insofar as it had promised salvation in return for keeping it (and cursed those who failed), but they were nevertheless obliged to obey its precepts. Insofar as the covenant of works had required obedience to the law on the strength of human nature alone it was abrogated, but ‘looke how farre the same morall law serves to give rules for the works of grace, and attendenth not on the covenant of works, but of grace, and of the Gospell; so farre it resteth in use for the servants of Christ’.23 The practical behaviours associated with both covenants –​the performance of the works of the law –​were superficially identical. However, under the covenant of works obedience to the moral law was the cause of justification, whilst under the covenant of grace it was the consequence. Therefore, ‘the Ten commandements, as they be a part of Moses law, do no whit bind us; but as they containe the eternal pleasure of God, they do & must continue’.24 The ultimate justification for the binding nature of the commandments upon the Christian conscience therefore rested not upon their Mosaic but their divine credentials. In other words, the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue, which comprised God’s moral law, were of the same essence or species as the other principal emanations of the divine will; the law of nature and the law of Christ.25 The future bishop of Oxford, John Bridges, explained that ‘there is no new and diverse doctrine delivered of Christ: but the doctrine of either Testament is one and the same,

William Charke, A replie to a censure written against the two answers to a Iesuites seditious pamphlet (1581), sigs. C7r–​v; c.f. William Charke, A treatise against the Defense of the censure (1586), pp. 199–​200. 22 Arthur Dent, A pastime for parents: or A recreation to passe away the time; contayning the most principall grounds of Christian religion (1606), sigs. D3v–​D4r. For a more detailed consideration of the role of the Commandments for the regenerate, see Chapters 4 and 5. 23 Robert Rollock, A treatise of Gods effectual calling, trans. Henry Holland (1603), pp. 25–​6. 24 Niels Hemmingsen, The faith of the church militant moste effectualie described in this exposition of the 84. Psalme, trans. Thomas Rogers (1581), p. 318. 25 The subject of natural law is in itself a vast one, and can be touched upon only briefly here. For a concise discussion of its role in English and continental theology, see W. J. Torrance Kirby, ‘Richard Hooker’s Theory of Natural Law in the Context of Reformation Theology’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 30.3 (1999), pp. 681–​703. 21

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agreeing with the Lawe of nature, engraven in Adam even in his creation, and at length set forth in the Tables of the tenne commaundementes’.26 Samuel Purchas likewise noted that ‘the whole Law was perfectly written in the fleshie Tables of his [Adam’s] heart’, before being renewed by God on mount Sinai.27 Meredith Hanmer, the historian and pluralist, explained that the precepts of the Decalogue were to be kept of all men, not because they were enjoined by Moses, ‘but because these lawes of the tenne commaundements are imprinted or written in the nature of men. Thereby giving us to understand, that the law of nature, is indeed the law of God’.28 Perhaps the fullest statement of this essential unity was in dramatic form, as described by the Carmelite friar turned evangelical bishop of Ossory, John Bale. Originally published in 1548, and then reprinted in 1562 as A newe comedy or enterlude, concernynge thre lawes of nature, Moises, and Christe, this peculiar play told the story of God’s ongoing efforts to save mankind through the issuing of various ordinances, only for each in turn to be corrupted by a colourful cast of anthropomorphised vices, including ‘Infidelitas’, ‘Sodomismus’, ‘Idolatria’, ‘Avaritia’, ‘Pseudodoctrina’, and so on. ‘Nature lex’ was identified as ‘A knowledge . . . whom God in man doth hyde/​In his whole workynge, to be to hym a gyde/​To honour his God, and seke his neyghbours helth’. Following the defeat of the law of nature, in came ‘Moseh lex’, explaining its role thus: The lord perceivyng, his fyrst law thus corrupted With unclene vices, sent me his law of Moses To se hym for synne, substancyallye corrected And brought in agayne, to a trade of godlynes. . .

And, after Moses’ law was in turn overcome, ‘Evangilium’ came in, declaring: Unfaythfulnes hath, corrupted every lawe. To the great decaye, of Adams posterytie were it not for me, which now do hither draw Al flesh wold perysh, no man shulde saved be. . .

Christ’s law was also overcome, and in the play it was only the intervention of the judgement of God the Father himself which finally managed to

John Bridges, A defence of the gouernment established in the Church of Englande for ecclesiasticall matters (1587), p. 135. 27 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage (1613), pp. 16–​17. 28 Meredith Hanmer, The Iesuites banner Displaying their original and successe: their vow and othe: their hypocrisie and superstition: their doctrine and positions (1581), sig. F1v. 26

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defeat unfaithfulness, at which point the laws of nature, Moses and Chris, were restored, alongside ‘Fides christiana’.29 Bale’s methods –​and in particular his dramatic depiction of God the Father as a speaking character on stage in a theologically unimpeachable Protestant play –​may have been unconventional, but his message regarding the essential unity of the laws of nature, Moses and Christ was utterly uncontroversial.30 As the Suffolk preacher George Estey explained, the moral law was ‘imprinted at the first in Adam and Eves hart’; afterwards, ‘when the light of it began to weare away, it was proclaimed to the world, engraven in stone’ in the Ten Commandments, and subsequently ‘Christ himselfe came to teach it’.31 The number of similar statements from other authors is almost beyond measure.32 Early modern Protestant divines understood the essential and incontrovertible unity of God’s will, God’s law, the natural law, the moral law, the Ten Commandments, and the law of Christ. Finally, as an expression of God’s will, the Decalogue was also understood as a handy abridgement of the broader canon of scripture, and especially as a summary of humanity’s obligations toward God and neighbour. The commandments were not a true ‘bible in miniature’ in the manner of the Book of Psalms, but at the very least they were entirely consonant with both Testaments.33 Johannes Carion described them as containing ‘the summe of the godly wysedome’, and comprehending ‘all maner of lawes and constitutions that can be any wher’.34 Hugh Broughton observed that the Ten Commandments ‘conteyned the summe of Divinitie’, suggesting that the 613 characters that made up the text of the commandments signified the 613 commandments contained within the laws of Moses, of which they were a summary.35 Calvin himself noted that ‘the John Bale, A nevve comedy or enterlude, concernyng thre lawes of nature, Moises, and Christe, corrupted by the sodomytes, Pharysies, and papistes (1562), STC2: 1288, passim. 30 David Steinmetz has articulated an opposing view, writing that ‘the law itself is not regarded by sixteenth-​century theologians as synonymous with the Ten Commandments’. David C. Steinmetz, ‘The Reformation and the Ten Commandments’, Interpretation, 43.3 (1989), p. 256. 31 George Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements (1602), STC2: 10546, sig. I6r. 32 See, for example, Heinrich Bullinger, Looke from Adam, and behold the Protestants faith and religion evidently proued out of the holy Scriptures, trans. Miles Coverdale (1624), pp. 36–​40; Edmund Bunny, A booke of Christian exercise appertaining to resolution, (1584), p. 36; Thomas Palmer, An essay of the meanes hovv to make our trauailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable (1606), pp. 96–​7; Johann Spangenberg, The su[m]‌of diuinitie drawn out of the holy scripture, trans. Robert Hutten (1548), sigs. A8v-​B2v; Pierre Charron, Of wisdome, trans. Samson Lennard (1608), p. 257; Christopher Lever, The holy pilgrime, leading the way to heaven (1618), pp. 82–​3; etc. 33 E.g. Hamlin, Hannibal, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 256. 34 Johannes Carion, The thre bokes of cronicles (1550), f. xiir. 35 Broughton, A reuelation of the holy Apocalyps, p. 113. 29

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doctrine comprehended in the ten commandements conteineth the full perfection of all wisedome’, whilst the Nottinghamshire minister Henry Langley explained that the sins described in the Decalogue were ‘laid open every-​where in the Scriptures’.36 The practice of listing additional biblical verses from both Testaments in support of particular commandments was common in catechetical and devotional works. For example, in support of the Second Commandment, the editor of Holinshed’s Chronicles Abraham Flemming cited John 1:18, 4:24 and 5:29, Acts 17:29, Wisdom 14:26 and 14:12, Baruch 6:72, Psalms 97:7, and Exodus 37:17.37 The law as comprehended within the Ten Commandments was therefore fundamental to understanding what it meant to be a Christian, and for trying to grasp how best to serve God. The significance of the commandments was not simply moral, ethical, or educational; the precepts of the Decalogue lay at the heart of the relationship between God and his people.

Numbering the Commandments God’s commandments issued in the Decalogue were therefore commonly accepted as a clear and compelling statement of the divine will, issued not once but over and over again in different forms for the benefit of humanity, in order to direct them in key areas of worship and social interaction. But what exactly were his commandments? The text of Exodus 20:1–​17 encapsulated various different precepts but they were not numbered and so the division of the commandments was neither immediately obvious nor a matter beyond contention. The precepts were also given twice; first in Exodus, and then again in Deuteronomy 5:6–​21, with small but significant differences in the precise wording and order of the instructions given. The question therefore arose for Protestant divines: were they to accept the traditional Catholic numbering of the Decalogue, or to experiment with an alternative scheme? Luther chose to maintain the status quo and retain the traditional division of the commandments, but that Reformed Protestants chose to embrace an alternative numbering system is widely known. Fortunately, the Reformed were not placed in the uncomfortable position of having to reject tradition in favour of novelty, because there were already two alternative numbering traditions in existence with patristic weight Especially in Psalm 15:1, Corinthians 6:9, Galatians 5, Ephesians 4, Colossians 3, James 3 and Revelation 22: Henry Langley, The chariot and horsemen of Israel (1616), p. 105. 37 Abraham Fleming, The conduit of comfort Containing sundrie comfortable prayers, to the strengthening of the faith of a weak Christian (1624), sigs. S7r–​T1v. 36

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behind them. No less a figure than Augustine of Hippo, the most-​cited church father of the reformation era and spiritual father of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, had advocated the version of the Decalogue which had been adopted by the Catholic Church.38 Augustine’s system was intellectually and numerologically attractive: it contained three commandments relating directly to man’s relationship with God, mirroring the three persons of the Trinity; and seven commandments relating to humanity’s relationships with its neighbours, in the manner of other septenary groupings such as the Seven Deadly Sins and seven works of corporal and spiritual mercy.39 The problem with this method of numbering the commandments was that it made of the First Commandment a loose, baggy monster, comprising the full text of Exodus 20:1–​6. More particularly, it meant that the commandment which began ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’, also included the prohibition ‘thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image’. To make ten commandments in total, Augustine cleverly employed the Deuteronomical version of the Decalogue to enumerate two separate species of coveting as the ninth and tenth precepts: firstly, coveting of a neighbour’s wife; and secondly, coveting of a neighbour’s house, manservant, maidservant, ox and ass.40 It is easier to illustrate the division of the text than to describe it, and Table 1.1 juxtaposes the alternative Catholic and Reformed numbering systems. The alternative numbering system embraced by Reformed Protestants had a longer history: it was the arrangement of the commandments traditionally embraced by the Jewish people; it had also been maintained by On Augustine’s influence during the Reformation, see Arnoud S. Q. Visser, Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–​1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For an example of his likening of the three commandments of the first table with the persons of the Trinity, see ‘Sermon 9 –​Discourse of Saint Augustine on the ten strings of the harp: sermon preached at Chusa’, in Augustine, The Works of St Augustine: Sermons I, 1–​19, on the Old Testament, intro. Michele Pellegrino, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John Rotelle (Brooklyn:  New City Press, 1990), pp. 264–​5. William Fulke claimed that Augustine was inconsistent in his numbering of the commandments: see William Fulke, D. Heskins, D. Sanders, and M. Rastel, accounted (1579), pp. 603–​4. 39 John Rainolds, The summe of the conference betwene Iohn Rainoldes and Iohn Hart (1584), p. 75. John Boys was one of few Protestant authors who attempted to retain the link between the first table and the persons of the trinity, suggesting that the first two commandments concerned God the Father as creator, the third God the Son as redeemer, and the fourth the Holy Spirit as sanctifier. John Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures vsed in our English liturgie (1610), p. 89. 40 Augustine also described the ten plagues of Egypt as corresponding to Pharaoh’s breaches of each of the Ten Commandments: see ‘Sermon 8 –​On the plagues of Egypt and the Ten Commandments of the law; preached in Carthage at the shrine of St Cyprian’, in Augustine, The Works of St Augustine: Sermons I, 1–​19, on the Old Testament, intro. Michele Pellegrino, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John Rotelle (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990), pp. 240–​58. 38

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The Civil Office of the Law Table 1.1. Catholic and Reformed numbering of the Decalogue

Exodus Chapter 20 (KJV)

Catholic/​ Reformed Lutheran numbering numbering

1.  And God spake all these words, saying, 2. I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

1

3.  Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 4. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

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5. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

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6. And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. 7. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

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12. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

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13.  Thou shalt not kill.

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14.  Thou shalt not commit adultery.

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15.  Thou shalt not steal.

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16.  Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

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17.  Th  ou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.

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8.  Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9.  Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: 10. But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: 11. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

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 The text in bold is the Ninth Commandment in the Catholic/​Lutheran numbering; the rest of the verse is the tenth. Reformed authors tended to use the text from Exodus, whereas Catholics usually quoted Deuteronomy 6: 6–​21. Deuteronomy 6:21 is arranged slightly differently from Exodus 20:17, and more naturally supports the Catholic division of the commandments.

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Greek Fathers including Gregory of Nazianzus, Origen, Athanasius and Chrysostom, and by Latin Fathers including Ambrose and Jerome.41 The appeal of this alternative system in the sixteenth century was principally that the division of the commandments better suited the theological priorities of the Reformed. Firstly, it made a separate precept of the prohibition against the making of graven images, putting idolatry front and centre in the list of God’s primary concerns regarding his proper worship.42 Eamon Duffy has suggested that iconoclasm was ‘the central sacrament of reform’, at its most fundamental level a concerted effort to purge potentially idolatrous images and objects from the Church.43 This stemmed from what Carlos Eire has described as a new interpretation (or rather reinterpretation) of worship, and ‘more specifically, of the relationship between the spiritual and the material’.44 The concept of idolatry –​essentially, incorrect or misapplied worship –​was the ‘other’ against which Calvinist true worship was defined. Sergius Michalski has suggested that Calvin’s reading of the Second Commandment was ‘inordinately important’ in conditioning his definition and understanding of idolatry, leading to the strict dictum that ‘“God should be admired in spirit” and not through material things’.45 As we will see shortly, definitions of the Second Commandment were capacious in the extreme, and an Old Testament injunction not to make and worship carved images was repurposed and redeployed in order to condemn all that reformers found offensive about Catholic worship, from the mass itself to elaborate music, pilgrimage, and devotion to saints and relics. Margaret Aston in particular has already described in detail the growth in importance of the Second Commandment, and it is not my intention to replicate her work here; although we should note, along Rainolds, The summe of the conference, pp. 76–​7. Diarmaid MacCulloch suggests that Cranmer was instrumental in adopting the Reformed numbering for the 1537 Bishops’ Book ‘to make a separate commandment of the order to destroy images, in contrast to Luther’s loyalty to the western Church’s traditional numbering’. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The Latitude of the Church of England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-​Reformation England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 42–​3; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer:  A  Life, (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1996), p. 192. Margaret Aston has observed that Tyndale’s presentation of the commandments in his translation of the Pentatech (published in 1530) clearly made of the prohibition against graven images a separate injunction, and that the change in ordering was rapidly picked up in John Frith’s translation of Patrick’s Places and George Joye’s Ortulus Anime, both also published in 1530. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts Volume I: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 413–​4. 43 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, C.1400-​c.1580 (2nd edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 480. 44 Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols: the Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 2. 45 Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts (Routledge: London, 1993), p. 65. 41

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with Aston, that while the renumbering of the Decalogue ‘gave fresh and conspicuous prominence to the scriptural authority that powered a radical change of outlook’, the textual reform of the commandments ‘emerged after, not before, reformation iconoclasts had set to work’.46 Reformers’ broader hermeneutical approach to the commandments suited perfectly their tendency to extend the prohibition against idolatry from a narrow injunction against image worship to a prohibition of all worship directed to any object, individual, ritual, belief or practice aside from God himself. Just as Christ in the Sermon on the Mount explained that the precept against the physical act of adultery also applied to adulteries of the eye and heart, so idolatrous behaviour could be assumed to take many different forms. This capacity of the commandments did not invent, but certainly facilitated, the exponential growth of the Reformed concept of idolatry.47 The renumbering of the commandments was not a major controversy of the reformation era, and most authors simply adopted the relevant framework without comment:  William Perkins for example, whose voluminous Golden chaine summarised just about the whole of theology, did not mention the competing numbering systems of Jerome and Augustine.48 Edmund Bonner, the Marian bishop of London, even used the Reformed framework for his Catholic pedagogical work A profitable and necessarye doctrine. He simply noted that Origen and Jerome numbered the commandments differently from Augustine. The text was the same irrespective of the numbering, and for Bonner this was a non-​issue: And for that also neyther in the one, or in the other maner of devydynge or reckenynge these tenne commaundementes, eyther the sense, the worde, or anye one of the matter is altered, no nor yet anye more or lesse in eyther of the sayde. ii. tables thereby conteyned. Therfore no man ought with thys our dyvisyon (wherein for certayne good consideratyons, we folowe Origene, & Saint Hierome) to be in any wyse, offended.49

The description of the Origen system as ‘our dyvisyon’ suggests a residual attachment to Henrician evangelicalism, and a certain distancing from Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, pp. 408–​44; Margaret Aston, ‘Rites of Destruction by Fire’, in Margaret Aston, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion 1350–​1600 (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), p. 292. 47 John Field, for example suggested that Catholic idolatry stemmed from their mistaken division of the Ten Commandments:  John Field, A caueat for Parsons Hovvlet concerning his vntimely flighte (1581), sigs. Diir–​v. 48 Perkins, Chaine, pp. 36–​101. 49 Edmund Bonner, A profitable and necessarye doctrine with certayne homelyes adioyned therunto. (1555), STC2: 3283.3. Italics mine. 46

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Rome, by the Marian bishop of London.50 Occasionally though, the issue of numbering did receive attention in more polemical works; Protestants in particular accused Catholics of concealing or even ‘stealing’ the Second Commandment against idolatry in order to justify their own deeply idolatrous worship. The puritan controversialist John Rainolds, in his conferences with the English Jesuit John Hart, accused Rome of, ‘under the colour of one Fathers judgement against all the rest’, concealing the Second Commandment from the people, ‘least your vile idolatrie, or imagedoulie as you smooth it, should grow (by the hearing thereof ) into mislike’.51 William Fulke rather colourfully described Roman Catholics as ‘rattes . . . which in their translation of the ten commaundementes for the peoples instruction, have cleane gnawen out the seconde commaundement, and because they cannot bite it cleane out of the Bible, they seeke all shiftes to hide it under the first commaundement’.52 Rather more matter-​of-​fact, the poet and London minister Thomas Drant criticised Catholic catechisms that ‘hath wiped out the second of the ten Commaundementes, and divided the last into twaine’, while William Chark accused his opponents of blotting out the Second Commandment ‘in al their Breviaries, Masse books, & Catechismes’.53 For Archbishop James Ussher, by concealing the Second Commandment, and specifying different species of worship under the First (latria to God and his image, hyperdulia to images of the virgin, and dulia to images of the saints), notable Catholic authors were making God the author of idolatry in the very place where he expressly forbade it.54 Almost all historiographical attention regarding the Protestant renumbering of the commandments has focussed on the significance of a separate, Second Commandment against idolatry. This was undoubtedly a momentous move, but I would like to suggest that the textual changes at the other end of the Decalogue were just as important, if not even more so. If the separating out of the second precept reflected and perhaps even accelerated the Reformed drive against idolatrous forms of worship, the elision of the two forms of coveting enumerated in the Augustinian This is consonant with the account of Tudor Catholicism provided by Lucy Wooding in her Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 51 Rainolds, The summe of the conference, p. 75. 52 William Fulke, A defense of the sincere and true translations of the holie Scriptures into the English tong (1583), p. 39. 53 Thomas Drant, Two sermons preached (1570), sig. Civ; William Charke, An answeare for the time, vnto that foule, and wicked Defence of the censure (1583), f. 67v. Cf. Philips van Marnix van St. Aldegonde, The bee hiue of the Romishe Church, trans. George Gylpen (1579), f. 10r. 54 James Ussher, An ansvver to a challenge made by a Iesuite in Ireland (1624), p. 452. Cf. Matthew Sutcliffe, The blessings on Mount Gerizzim, and the curses on Movnt Ebal (1625), p. 69. 50

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Decalogue into a single precept was equally theologically significant. Andrew Chertsey’s 1510 translation of the late-​medieval Fleur des commandments de Dieu had explained that the Ninth Commandment existed to condemn ‘all lecherous thoughtes & commaundeth clennesse of herte’, whilst the Tenth forbade ‘all evyll thoughtes of theft, covytyse, and avarice the whiche ben against the dyleccyon of this neyghboure’.55 The problems with such an interpretation were twofold. Firstly, whilst the objects of the sin were different –​people versus things –​the nature of the sin itself –​ ­covetousness –​was identical in both precepts. Chertsey’s language suggests that he may have had two of the Seven Deadly Sins in mind here, with the Ninth Commandment corresponding to lust, and the Tenth to avarice. The second problem, however, was that these sins were already prohibited by existing commandments earlier in the Decalogue. As William Chark observed in his riposte to the Jesuit Robert Persons, all lust with consent was forbidden within each of the commandments: returning to the Sermon on the Mount, Christ had made it clear that anger was forbidden by the Sixth Commandment, and lust by the Seventh. To re-​forbid lust was therefore irrelevant and redundant, as was re-​forbidding covetousness of material goods, which was prohibited implicitly by the precept against theft.56 This allowed Protestant divines to claim that the unified Tenth Commandment condemned something different, something not contained within any other precept, and indeed something which Catholics denied was a sin altogether: concupiscence, the residual stain of Original Sin. Commandments 1–​9 forbade sinful actions and sinful lusts in receipt of the consent of the will. Commandment 10, by contrast, forbade the sinful motions which existed in mankind both before and without the consent of the will. We will explore this theme further in Chapter 3.57 For now, it is enough to note that the Reformed renumbering of the Ten Commandments not only foregrounded the dangers of idolatry, it also enshrined in (divine) law what would become known as the theological principle of the total depravity of mankind. Eire has suggested that ‘the central focus of Reformed Protestantism was its interpretation of worship’, and a redefinition of the sacred from immanence Andrew Chertsey, Ihesus. The floure of the commaundementes of god with many examples and auctorytees extracte and drawen as well of holy scryptures as of other doctours and good auncient faders (1510), ff. 99r–​100v. 56 William Charke, A treatise against the Defense of the censure (1586), pp. 294–​99. 57 See also Jonathan Willis, ‘Repurposing the Decalogue in Reformation England’, in Dominik Markl (ed.), The Influence of the Decalogue:  Historical, Theological and Cultural Perspectives (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), pp. 190–​204. 55

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to transcendence, as encapsulated within the Second Commandment’s paean to true and condemnation of false worship. I would like to suggest that this reinterpretation of worship and concern for the perils of idolatry was itself a secondary consequence of a dramatic new anthropology which, drawing heavily on both Augustine and St Paul, saw mankind as rendered incurably iniquitous following the Fall, and therefore as inherently untrustworthy when it came to behaving properly in matters of worship and eschewing sin. It was the Reformed Tenth Commandment, not the Second, which was most significant when it came to defining and enshrining this new anthropology of iniquity. Other divisions and traditions regarding numbering had less noteworthy consequences, and will be dealt with only briefly. As has already been alluded to, Protestants maintained the traditional division of the commandments into two ‘tables’, recalling the two tablets of stone on which the original precepts of the Decalogue had been inscribed. The first table comprised those commandments which governed humanity’s relationship with God, and outlined the proper ordering of religious worship: the second table concerned humanity’s relationships with their neighbours, covering the commandments against murder, theft, adultery, and so on. As mentioned above, the Augustinian division of the commandments saw three in the first table and seven in the second, whilst that enumerated by Origen and Jerome and adopted by Reformed Protestants saw the first and second tables comprised of four and six commandments respectively. A  third tradition, dating back to Philo of Alexandria, which was occasionally mentioned but gained no traction in early modern commentaries, classified the Fifth Commandment to honour father and mother as a religious rather than a social obligation, rendering the two tables equal at five precepts apiece.58 Generally speaking, the commandments of the first table were seen as more important than those of the second, although there were exceptions. Calvin’s successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, explained that the commandments of the first table ‘doth excel the seconde, even asmuch as God doth excel any creature’.59 The Calvinist conformist George Hakewill, in his treatise against the Roman convert Benjamin Carier, accused English Catholics of making ‘great shew of morall vertue and civill

Philo of Alexandria, Philo Volume VII: On the Decalogue. On the Special Laws, Books 1–​3, ed. F.H. Colson (Loeb Classical Library 320. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1937), pp. 61–​9; Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures, p. 85. 59 Théodore de Bèze, A briefe and piththie summe of the Christian faith made in forme of a confession, trans. R.F. (1565), f. 28r. 58

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honesty, specially in matter of mortification and charitable workes’, whilst mangling the precepts of the first table, ‘making of foure but three, and of those three they breake the first and second’.60 William Perkins explained that, because of the priority of the duties of the first table over the second, ‘a man must rather disobey magistrates and parents, than dishonour God’, but he added as a caveat that moral duties of the second table took precedence over the ceremonial duties of the first. The example he gave was of a man who might legitimately break the ceremonial observation of the Sabbath to help preserve his neighbour’s life, his house being on fire.61 The two tables were also occasionally used as a means of summarising the Decalogue in terms of the two commandments of the Gospel, issued by Christ. A late sixteenth-​century edition of John Frith’s translation of a Latin treatise by the Scottish Lutheran martyr Patrick Hamilton explained that the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue ‘are briefly comprised in these two here-​under ensuing’: Thou shalt love thy Lord God with all thine hart, with all thy soule, and with all thy minde. That is the first and great Commandement: The second is lyke unto this, that is: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as they selfe. On these two Commaundements hangeth all the Law and the Prophets.62

These two precepts, explained the Somerset minister Richard Eburne, could themselves be summarised in a single law, which he termed ‘the royal law, or, the rule of equitie: prescribed to us by Christ’: ‘whatseover ye will that men do to you, even so do ye unto them’.63 Not only had God ‘given his lawe in so small roome, as everie man might count it upon his fingers ends’, he had also provided him with two summary commandments, reducible to a single rule to strive to live by.64

The Second Commandment Thou Shalt Not Make unto Thee Any Graven Image, or Any Likeness of Any Thing That Is in Heaven Above, or That Is in the Earth Beneath, or That Is in the Water under the Earth. Thou Shalt Not George Hakewill, An ansvvere to a treatise vvritten by Dr. Carier (1616), p. 119. William Perkins, A cloud of faithfull witnesses, leading to the heauenly Canaan (1607), pp. 312–​3. 62 Patrick Hamilton, A most excelent and fruitful treatise, called Patericks Places (1598), ff. 1r–​v. Matthew 22:37–​40. Cf. Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures, p. 85. 63 Matthew 7:12. Richard Eburne, The royal lavv: or, The rule of equitie prescribed us by our Sauiour Christ Math. 7.12 (1616), pp. 1–​2. 64 Jean Calvin, The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (1583), p. 391. 60 61

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Bow Down Thyself to Them, Nor Serve Them: for I the LORD thy God am a Jealous God, Visiting the Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children unto the Third and Fourth Generation of Them That Hate Me; And Shewing Mercy unto Thousands of Them That Love Me, and Keep My Commandments. Exodus 20:4–​6

As described above, the Second Commandment was one of the principal beneficiaries of the Reformed Protestant renumbering of the Decalogue, along with the Tenth, which will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 3.65 Commentators on the Ten Commandments tended to see each commandment set within a broader narrative framework comprising the whole table; whilst the First Commandment of the first table taught mankind to know God and believe in him, authors were almost unanimous in declaring the Second to be about the manner in which God should be worshipped. Gervase Babington explained that the first table was about honour and duty to God; the First Commandment was about inward worship and establishing that God was the one true God, whilst the Second was the first of three commandments concerning outward worship, beginning with the way and manner in which he would be served.66 Robert Horne noted that the First Commandment of the first table dealt with the person of God and the remaining three dealt with his worship; firstly the parts of it, secondly the right use of it, and thirdly the special duties required every seventh day.67 John Hooper’s landmark Edwardian treatise on the commandments took a slightly different approach, in suggesting that while the Third and Fourth Commandments taught how to honour God, the Second taught mankind specifically how not to.68 This was an unusual deviation from the generally-​accepted proposition that each commandment had both a positive and a negative dimension.69 The most frequently cited New Testament verse in support of the Second Commandment was John 4:24: ‘God is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth’.70 The worship of God in spirit and truth, according to his own word and will, was therefore an important vision of what pure Protestant worship ought to be; the very opposite of the carnal and false The blessing and curse within the Second Commandment will be examined later in this chapter. Babington, Fruitful, pp. 83–​4. 67 Robert Horne, Points of instruction for the ignorant (1617), sigs. Aviiv–​Biiir. 68 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 316. 69 See Chapter 3 for further discussion of this theme. 70 E.g. George Downame, An abstract of the duties commanded, and sinnes forbidden in the Law of God (1620), STC2: 7104, sig. C3v; Edward Dering, A briefe & necessary instruction verye needefull to bee knowen of all housholders (1572), STC2: 6679, sig. Biiv; Peter Barker, A iudicious and painefull exposition vpon the ten Commandements (1624), STC2: 1425, p. 89; Perkins, Chaine, p. 51. 65 66

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worship of the Roman Church which was based not upon God’s will but upon man’s vain inventions. Several authors felt compelled to justify the giving of the Second Commandment on the basis of the copious biblical evidence of mankind’s predilection for idolatrous behaviour. The Second was the longest commandment in the first table and the second-​longest in the Decalogue after the Fifth; John Dod explained that this was because God was aware of how likely mankind was to break it, given that ‘our nature is wonderfull prone to Idolatry, and wee are very apt and readie to worship God falsely and superstitiously’.71 Gervase Babington noted that God might have set down his requirements for how he should be worshipped better in a positive law than a negative one: however, there was ‘speciall wisedome’ in his decision, for ‘our natures are verie prone to the breache hereof, which by a negative is stronglier beate downe than by an affimative’.72 Thomas Cranmer’s Catechismus, a modified translation of his uncle-​in-​law Andreas Osiander’s 1533 Nuremberg catechism, retained the Lutheran numbering of the commandments, and therefore included the prohibition against idolatry as part of the First: nevertheless, in it he dwelt substantially on the dangers of idolatry, and noted that mankind, ‘from the firste tyme that he fell from God, hathe ever ben enclined and redy to ydolatry, and to bowe downe to creatures, rather than to looke up to God that made him’.73 Beginning with the negative aspect of the Second Commandment, and the text of the commandment itself, two actions or behaviours were specifically forbidden: the making of graven images,74 and bowing down to and serving them.75 With regard to the making of images, commentators adopted a number of subtly different positions, meaning that there was no exact consensus on what images were acceptable or unacceptable in a given context. Gervase Babington expounded upon three positions with regard to the making of images. The first –​an absolute prohibition even in secular matters –​he attributed to the Turk, whilst the second –​absolute ­permissiveness –​he saw as characteristic of ‘papists’. ‘The thirde judgement and best’ was ‘of them that thinke it lawful to make pictures of thinges Dod, Plaine, p. 56. Babington, Fruitful, pp. 84–​5. 73 Cranmer, Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion, ff. 20-​r–​v. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Cranmer, Thomas (1489–​1556)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2015 [www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​6615, accessed 10 June 2016]. 74 Exodus 20:4. 75 Exodus 20:5. 71 72

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which we have seen to a civill use, but not to use them in the Church and for religion’.76 The chief point of the commandment, Babington noted, was to forbid all pictures of God; for it was impossible to accurately represent his infinite nature. He used a charming analogy from portraiture to demonstrate God’s anger at being falsely represented: let us judge by our selves, who quickly woulde take it in great snuffe, if one picturing us should make either the eies too great, the nose too long or high, the eares, mouth, armes, hands, or anyie thing wrong. Yea, wee would burst it in pieces, bid away with it, and not abide the sight of it. Yet we dare abuse the God of heaven our creator and maker, and set up 20 thousande pictures of him in severall places, never a whit like him, for it is unpossible they shoulde be, neither one like another.77

John Brinsley explained that the commandment forbade not only images of the true God (including Christ), but also images of feigned Gods, saints and angels, images for any religious use (such as crucifixes), as well as ‘every outward representation, devised by a man, to be eyther a part of Gods worship or to teach some religious duty: for all such likenesses are expresly condemned’.78 Francis Bunny suggested that ‘this Commandment forbiddeth not the making of all images’, and that it was legitimate to represent men and women out of reverence or love for their authority, ‘or if they be made to garnish and beautify any place, or in any order civil respect’.79 Insofar as image-​making was concerned, George Chapelin specified that the commandment forbade the making of any images of God: bodily, or as an angel, man, beast, or celestial orb, and banned true images of false gods alongside false images of the true God.80 Stephen Denison singled out representations of the Trinity and its persons as particularly forbidden by the commandment, in agreement with John Dod, who described as ‘most abhorred’ those images ‘made to represent anie of the three persons’ of the Godhead.81 Even making an image of the incarnate Christ was ‘wicked’, because no image could be made to capture ‘the chief part of him’, i.e. his divinity; the same proscription applied to the Catholic notion of the

Babington, Fruitful, pp. 88–​9. Babington, Fruitful, pp. 92–​3. 78 Brinsley, Watch, p. 25. 79 Francis Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse: or, A plaine and familiar explanation of the ten commandements (1617), p. 50. 80 George Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction (1582), p. 262. 81 Stephen Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 30; Dod, Plaine, p. 63. For more information on Denison, including his ‘heavily predestinarian view of the world’, see Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), passim (quote at p. 15). 76

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transubstantiated host, as well as the sign of the cross.82 The Hampshire minister Osmund Lakes explained that images might be made for two uses, ‘either civill, for storie, remembrance or ornament: or religious for worship’. The former was acceptable, the latter not. He went further than most in suggesting that an image of Christ that ‘might bee, taken for civill use, though of all pictures the most dangerous to fall at, yet were in a sort tolerable’; but most agreed with William Perkins that ‘the image also of the crosse, and Christ crucified’ were unacceptable in any context.83 William Allen went so far as to suggest that the commandment forbade ‘to fancy in our minds any bodily likeness of the divine nature’; the only similitude of the creator permitted was that ‘we our selves must be the image of him, walking in true righteousnesse and holinesse, according to his most righteous and holy laws and commandments’.84 Images of the true God, and of false gods, were offensive enough in and of themselves, but the worshipping of such idols was even more heinous. William Whately explained that the Second Commandment forbade false worship both of the creator under any picture or statue, and of any creature, including angels or saints, the devil, sun, moon and stars, and any image or idol.85 A number of authors played upon the indignity of God’s supreme earthly creation, man, kneeling down and worshipping the object of his own limited creation. John Dod was not alone in noting that images were inferior to base men, let alone God, and paraphrased Psalm 135:15–​18, deriding them as idols that ‘have eyes and see not, eares and here not, hands and handle not, &c’.86 Another common trope was to account the idolatry involved in worshipping images of God and of false gods as a kind of spiritual adultery. Peter Barker described God’s jealous rage against the spiritual adultery of the idolater in graphic terms: As if the Lord should say, my heart did cleave unto thee, my soule did long for thee, I did kisse thee with the kisses of my mouth, I entred into a covenant with thee and thou becamest mine, neither can I in any case abide, that thou shouldest be unto any other, therefore let me bee as a bundle of mirrhe unto thee, let mee and none other lie betweene thy breastes.87 Dod, Plaine, p. 65. Cf. Thomas Granger, The tree of good and euill: or A profitable and familiar exposition of the Commandements, directing us in the whole course of our life, according to the Rule of God’s Word (1616), sig. B4r. 83 Lakes, Probe, pp. 28–​9; Perkins, Chaine, p. 44. 84 Allen, Treasurie, pp. 52, 59. 85 Whately, Pithie, p. 60. 86 Dod, Plaine, p. 62; c.f. Allen, Treasurie, p. 69. 87 Barker, Painefull, p.  76. Cf. Babington, Fruitful, pp.  104–​5; Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction, p. 265. 82

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Robert Allen also observed that ‘the Lord taketh to himself the title of jealousie against Idolaters, as against those which defile the marriage covenant’, in recognition of the fact that by diverting the worship due only to God elsewhere, idolaters were breaking their spiritual covenant with the lord, and therefore committing a form of infidelity.88 Several authors also highlighted image worship as an issue of particular danger for the unlearned, rejecting the traditional claim that religious images in churches should be accounted ‘lay-​men’s books’, a view also roundly condemned by the official Church of England Homily on the perils of idolatry.89 Francis Bunny judged that ‘it is very hard to finde any among the simple, who if they confesse the truth, do not kneele and pray to the image itself ’ when confronted with a religious picture’, while John Boys commented that, if pictures of God were a form of ‘Laymans Alphabet’, ‘these books are not imprinted Cum privilegio, but on the contrarie prohibited’.90 Thomas Cranmer argued that, contrary to educating the illiterate in the true faith, religious imagery in churches was more likely to teach parishioners false, erroneous and superstitious doctrine; the example he gave was ‘the picture of sayncte Mychael waying soules, and our lady putting her beades in the balaunce’, a common medieval trope of the mother of Christ interceding on behalf of penitent souls at the last judgement.91 John Dod dismissed the notion of images as laymen’s books briefly but effectively with reference to Habakkuk 2:18, calling them ‘teachers of lies’, while John Hooper mockingly asserted that ‘a man may learn more of a live ape than of a dead image, if both should be brought into the school to teach’.92 The making and worshipping of images were therefore amongst the most monstrous sins mankind was capable of committing; a form of spiritual adultery to which man was disproportionately prone, and by which the unlearned were unduly likely to be snared. The scope of the prohibition against idolatry, however, was deemed to be far greater than Allen, Treasurie, p. 70. The third part of the homily against images explained that St Paul himself had taught that those men and women who committed idolatry, which was spiritual adultery, were condemned to fall into carnal fornication and uncleanness: Romans 1:23–​24. Church of England, Sermons, or Homilies, appointed to be read in churches, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, of famous memory. . . (Dublin: Printed for Anne Watson and B. Dugdale, 1821), p. 190. 89 Church of England, Sermons, or Homilies, p. 152. 90 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse: or, A plaine and familiar explanation of the ten commandements, p. 51; John Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures vsed in our English liturgie (1610), p. 90. 91 Cranmer, Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion, f.  26v. For more on this trope, see Stephen Bates, ‘Salvatrix Mundi? Rejecting the Redemptive Role of the Virgin Mary’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 139–​56. 92 Dod, Plaine, p. 61; Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 322. 88

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the  simple act of image worship alone. Gervase Babington paraphrased the Second Commandment as ‘Thou shalt not worshippe me with any devise of thine owne, contrary to my wil and nature’; across the board, the narrow definition of idolatry pales into insignificance besides the much broader and more significant problem of ‘will-​worship’.93 As Peter Barker put it, the prohibition forbade false worship of the true God, or the giving of his true worship to a false god, ‘condemning such, as are stained with their own works, and goe a whoring with their owne inventions’.94 John Boys explained that the commandment outlawed ‘all strange worship’, and alleged that ‘to devise phantasies of God’ was as horrible as to say that there was no God, while John Brinsley noted that all will-​worship not warranted by the word of God, ‘though done in never so good an intent’, was in breach of the precept, ‘for Christ is the onely teacher of his Church, and sole ordainer of the meanes of his owne worship’.95 The Second Commandment was therefore reinterpreted to frame the self-​ avowedly biblicist brand of Reformed Protestantism as true religion, and to condemn all other traditions or innovations as intolerable superstition and indefensible idolatry.96 The ‘forbidding part’ of the Second Commandment, explained Richard Bruch, enjoined the faithful not to ‘prophane the lawfull worship of God with superstitious rites’; this prohibited all forms of idolatry, hypocrisy and profane behaviour, and condemned ‘the Papists and their images . . . unlawful representations of the god-​head, service and reverence done to such idols, and other shapes of the creatures’.97 In fact, unsurprisingly, a significant number of authors saw the exposition of the Second Commandment as the ideal place to put the boot in and attack their Catholic enemies. Stephen Denison listed a whole host of Catholic practices as prohibited by the precept, including popish traditions, monastic vows, and the Romish hierarchy itself.98 Under the category of ‘Will worship’, William Perkins produced an exhaustive list of ‘popish superstitions in sacrifices, meates, holidaies, apparel, temporarie and bead-​ridden prayers, indulgences, austere life, whipping, ceremonies, Babington, Fruitful, p. 83. Cf. Richard Greenham, ‘I must avoid all intentions and devises of man in the outward worship of God, which be contrarie or beside the word’: Richard Greenham, A briefe and necessarie catechisme (1602), sig. A6v. 94 Barker, Painefull, p. 75. 95 Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures vsed in our English liturgie, p. 90; Brinsley, Watch, p. 25. 96 Robert Allen explained that by this precept the sins of the Catholics were ‘utterly condemned’, and called popish worship of the bread in the sacrament ‘the most abominable idolatry of all’: Allen, Treasurie, pp. 56–​8. 97 Richard Bruch, The life of religion: or Short and sure directions (1615), pp. 133–​4. 98 Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 30. 93

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gestures, gate, conversation, pilgrimage, building of altars, pictures, Churches, and all other of that rabble’.99 Osmund Lakes produced a similarly extensive catalogue of sensual pleasures invented by the Church of Rome. ‘Were God carnally to be served’, he mocked, ‘there is no service under heaven comparable to that of the Romish Church; nothing in it being, that tickleth not the senses of a carnall worshipper’, from lights and pictures to delight the eye, to melodious sounds to tickle the ear, and from sweet incense to pleasure the nose to the taste of holy bread and the touch of the Pax, prayer beads, and so on.100 What is also striking is the fact that a number of authors passed up on such an obvious opportunity to ridicule and demonise their Catholic opponents.101 The Bible was full of examples of terrible punishments meted out by God against idolaters; Cranmer’s Catechismus referenced the 24,000 people slain by a divinely-​ordained plague ‘for ydolatrye’ described in the Book of Numbers.102 Peter Barker explained that English Protestants had to be held to a higher standard than gentiles, Jews, and even Catholics, and that idolatry was therefore a greater crime today than it had been in the past. ‘Let not us who have the bright light of the Gospell, come short in zeal of those which had but the dim candle-​light of nature’, he proclaimed; ‘let us not, who have the law of God in our mother tongue, pointing more directly to the true God; then any finger to the dyall, have our motions kindled with lesse true zeal than theirs were igne fatuo, which had the booke of God but clasped up in an unknown tongue’.103 Writing in the first flush of Edwardian optimism, even John Hooper, the radical evangelical bishop of Gloucester and Worcester could exclaim ‘God be praised! I may be short or write nothing at all in this matter, because such as I write unto, my countrymen, be already persuaded’ that images should not be made or honoured as a means of worshipping God.104 However, later commentators were less convinced that the English had managed to exorcise themselves of this particular demon, to the extent that they condemned not only idolatry itself, but also a wide range of ‘occasions’ of idolatrous behaviour. Perkins, Chaine, p. 47. Lakes, Probe, p. 36. 101 There are no obvious patterns in terms of early/​late works, or godly/​conformist authors, for those who chose to include Catholics practices under the Second Commandment and those who did not, who included George Chapelin, Edward Dering, George Downame, William Dyke, Edward Elton and George Estey. 102 Numbers 25: 1–​9. Cranmer, Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion, f. 22r. 103 Barker, Painefull, p. 81. 104 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, pp. 317–​18. 99 100

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The godly vicar of Butterwick in Lincolnshire, Thomas Granger, suggested that one of the principal occasions for idolatry was having fellowship with idolaters; either by marriage, by joining with them in a league or alliance, by selling them wares which could be put to popish uses, or by giving or selling ‘Popish books to the ignorant or wavering minded’.105 William Whately likewise condemned ‘familiar societie, leagues, and unnecessary covenants with Idolaters, and an uncautelous venturing upon their books, or going to their services’.106 To maintain familiar relations with idolaters not only condoned their offensive behaviour; it might be the first step on a slippery slope to committing idolatry oneself. John Dod explained that, if we would keep ourselves from idolatry, we must beware keeping company with idolatrous persons; having withdrawn from the true worship of God, mankind was easily caught and persuaded to anything.107 For William Dyke, however, it was specifically being present at an idolatrous service which was to be avoided.108 John Brinsley explained that Christians could show their approbation of idolatry and false worship merely by being present at idolatrous services, as well as by superstitious speech or gesture, and even by silence; it was the duty of the godly according to the Second Commandment to condemn false worship wherever they found it.109 Recalling the exiles’ campaign against Nicodemism during the reign of Mary I, William Perkins explained that it was unlawful to be present at Mass, or any idolatrous service, ‘though our mindes be absent’.110 Richard Greenham took a slightly more lenient view, describing the keeping of company with false worshippers as a ‘lesser occasion’; forbidden, and yet ‘we must, and may tolerate them, when we cannot helpe them’.111 It may be that while Perkins’ view was technically correct, Greenham’s was modulated to prevent godly readers of his own particular brand of practical divinity from separating themselves out of mixed parochial worship for conscience’ sake.

Granger, Tree, sig. B4r. Whately, Pithie, pp. 64–​5. 107 Dod, Plaine, p. 58. Cf. Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 30. 108 Dyke, Knowledge, p. 28. 109 Brinsley, Watch, p. 26. Cf. Edward Elton, who also condemned approbation of idolatry by presence, speech, gesture, and silence, as well as ‘all unncessarie dealing or familiaritie with Idolaters’. Elton, Exposition, p. 12. 110 Perkins, Chaine, p. 45. Cf. Andrew Pettegree, Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). On the ongoing importance of ‘anti-​Nicodemism as a way of life’ in the Elizabethan period, see Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–​1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Chapter 3. 111 Greenham, Workes, p. 74. 105 106

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Moving from proscriptions to prescriptions, the Second Commandment therefore did much more than simply enjoin Christians to eschew idolatry. Above all else, it required them to worship God according to his word, in spirit and in truth.112 Gervase Babington paraphrased the true meaning of the Second Commandment thus: ‘thou shalt in everie respect worship me according to my will and nature’.113 Peter Barker explained that, rather than flirting with spiritual adultery, true Christians had an obligation to be honest, dutiful and respectful brides.114 Encompassing the manner in which God was regularly to be worshipped, the Second Commandment enjoined nothing less than true religion itself. As John Bradford put it, the true worship of God was commanded not for God’s sake, but for the commodity of mankind; self-​interest alone was not an appropriate reason for worshipping God in the manner appointed by him, but it might certainly be a motivating factor.115 What the commandment charged believers to do was therefore to worship God as revealed in his word, and to make a more careful use of the ordinary means of holiness. This meant regularly hearing the word preached, reading the Bible, making use of books of godly instruction and education, avoiding the company of profane and idolatrous persons, and seeking out the company of the godly. Prayer was also commanded; in the words of John Brinsley, it was to be done ‘morning & evening at least:  in the most humble manner, as the perpetuall morning and evening sacrifice under the law’.116 Richard Bruch issued similar instructions:  humanity had a duty to care for all parts of God’s service, and to stir itself up to zeal by godly means. God’s service comprised diligent hearing of, reading and meditating on the word, reverent use of the sacraments, and participating in and benefitting from godly conference and instruction.117 Thus, discussions of the duties enjoined by the Second Commandment tended to be rather briefer and more straightforward than the lengthy explorations of possible sins and occasions for sin under the negative proscription. Ezekiel Culverwell asked his readers to examine whether they were fully engaged in the duties of private devotion, Francis Bunny explained that God’s service should be as his nature is:  spiritual and heavenly. Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse: or, A plaine and familiar explanation of the ten commandements, p. 31. Cf. John Gibson, An easie entrance into the principall points of Christian religion (1579), sig. Aiiv. 113 Babington, Fruitful, pp. 84. 114 Barker, Painefull, p. 126. 115 John Bradford, Sermons, Meditations, Examinations, &c., ed. Audrey Townsend (Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1853), p. 152. 116 Brinsley, Watch, p. 24. On the Protestant ‘practice of prayer’ see Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Chapter 8. 117 Bruch, The life of religion: or Short and sure directions, pp. 130–​1. 112

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including prayer, reading the scriptures and other godly books, meditation alone and conference with others, as well as the requirements of public worship, such as hearing the word preached, praying, singing, and receiving the sacraments.118 Stephen Denison reduced the core elements of pure worship down to three: the ministry of the word, the administration of the sacraments, and prayer, as did George Downame.119 The Second Commandment’s requirement for the correct administration of public worship, however, was not an uncontentious issue, and some radical authors took advantage of a natural opportunity to discuss controversial topics surrounding Church of England ceremonies and the question of adiaphora, or ‘things indifferent’.120 Robert Allen addressed the issue in circumspect terms, defining adiaphora as ‘such things as be not of idolatrous & superstitious institution and invention, but yet have in their kind bene superstitiously & idolatrously abused, & be not of necessary use for the worship of God’.121 Adiaphora thus defined were not automatically to be permitted or disallowed; rather, it was a matter of discretion for the Christian magistrate. Still, Allen gave a certain steer, warning those in authority to be careful not to give offense by allowing certain practices, or to cause the weak in faith to stumble in their pursuit of true religion. George Estey explained that the ministry of the word, sacraments and prayer were essential, but that in order to be permitted ceremonies had to meet four conditions. They needed to have warrant and strength from the word; to contribute to edification without causing scandal; to be comely (i.e. in agreement with the spiritual worship of God); and according to order.122 The semi-​separatist minister Henry Jacob’s reading of the Second Commandment led him to condemn all ‘Traditions and Ordinances of men’, including the wearing of the cope and surplice, kneeling to receive communion, and the making of the sign of the cross in Baptism.123 Puritan-​turned-​staunch-​conformist Thomas Rogers defended Ezekiel Culverwell, A treatise of faith wherein is declared how a man may liue by faith and finde releefe in all his necessities (1623), pp. 276–​7. 119 Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 30; Downame, Abstract, sig. C4v; 120 The definitive study of English adiaphora is still Bernard J.  Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean. Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens [Ohio]: Ohio University Press, 1977). 121 Allen, Treasurie, p. 60. 122 Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements, sig. L3r. 123 Henry Jacob, A confession and protestation of the faith of certaine Christians in England (1616), sigs. C1r–​v. Cf. the separatist minister John Robinson: ‘every such government & ministery not commanded by God, & Christ, is an Idoll, there forbidden, & all subjection unto it, as the bowing down unto an Idoll’. John Robinson, Of religious communion private, & publique (1614), p. 33. See also Henry Jacob, Reasons taken out of Gods Word and the best humane testimonies prouing a necessitie of reforming our churches (1604), p. 2. 118

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the practice of kneeling to receive communion from the godly Thomas Seffray’s contention that it was a breach of the Second Commandment. Firstly, he invoked Calvin, Cartwright and Gifford to suggest that the Book of Common Prayer contained multas tolerabiles ineptias, ‘but none intollerable impiety at all’.124 Secondly, he claimed that forbidding worship of God by kneeling in church would effectively mean that it was impossible to worship God in any fashion anywhere, as all worship of God was either at or before some creature. Thirdly, he maintained that the Second Commandment only forbade worshipping God at or before anything not appointed by himself for such use, while the bread and wine at communion were instituted by Christ himself at the Last Supper. The radical fringes of Jacobean puritanism had long moved past any acceptance of tolerabiles ineptias, or tolerable imperfections; this was now an inconceivable oxymoron as the two concepts had become mutually exclusive. Still, it is a mark of the malleability of the post-​reformation Decalogue that the same precept could be used to attack and defend the exact same propositions by opposing religious factions. Finally, a number of expositions of the Second Commandment from across the period extolled the importance of helps to worship as part of the positive duties enjoined by the precept:  namely, vows and fasting.125 William Perkins was keen to stress that these were furtherances of true worship designed to help Christians, and in no sense functioned as worship themselves. Godly vows were promises to God ‘which a Christian hath on his owne accord, without injunction, imposed upon himself, that he may thereby the better be excited unto repentance, meditation, sobriety, abstinence, patience, and thankfulnes towards God’, and were therefore not to be confused with popish monastic vows, which were roundly condemned as ‘will-​worship’.126 Likewise, fasting was not a service in and of itself, but an abstinence from ‘all delights and sustenance, that he [i.e. the Christian] thereby may make a more diligent search into his own sinnes, or offer most humble prayers unto God’. Thomas Granger, in an act of incidental self-​promotion, recommended the making of vows and the reading of godly books (such as his own) as helps to the true and pure worship of God.127 Edward Elton described special vows and fasting as ‘such things as do binde, and stirre up men to the performance of holy duties’, Thomas Rogers, Two dialogues, or conferences . . . Concerning kneeling (1608), sig. E2v. These two practices have been most recently examined in Ryrie, Being Protestant, pp. 130–​8, 195–​9. 126 Perkins, Chaine, pp. 52–​3. 127 Granger, Tree, sig. B3v. 124 125

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whilst Stephen Denison produced a slightly longer list of helps, including vows, fasting, the casting of lots, censures, and leagues of amity amongst the godly.128 Some of these practices were, in some quarters, themselves matters of controversy. Fasting and vows both had strong Catholic associations, and Osmund Lakes was keen to stress that fasting should not be tied down to a particular day, and that no righteousness should be attributed to the act itself, in an effort to distance godly fasts from traditional Catholic holy days.129 The casting of lots was also a potentially dangerous activity, more associated with taverns, and with the soldiers who presided over the execution of Christ and the dispersal of his garments, than with the true worship of the Lord.130 John Dod, however, possibly the most influential and authoritative of all expositors of the Ten Commandments, explained that the casting of lots had biblical sanction to be used in matters of weight to the deciding of doubts and ending of strife and contention. The example he gave was Acts 1:26, when the disciples cast lots to decide who was to replace Judas as the twelfth apostle. ‘Not knowing the fittest’ between the two candidates, Barsabas and Matthias, the eleven remaining apostles cast lots, and by doing so ‘they committed the matter to Gods special providence’.131

Catholics, Protestants, and the Decalogue At the most fundamental level, the text and prominence of the Decalogue represented an element of continuity across the growing reformation divide between Catholic and Protestant. However, as we have already seen, the reformation of the Decalogue by Protestants in general, and Reformed Protestants in particular, essentially created a new set of Ten Commandments, with a different text, numbering, and vastly different religious and theological implications. This study is mainly concerned with the effect of the reformation of the Decalogue upon English Protestantism in its various forms; to do the subject justice for both Catholics and Protestants would have necessitated adding a good deal more words and pages to a book which is quite long enough already. However, as the recent (and long overdue) renaissance in English Catholic studies has demonstrated, it is impossible to write a meaningful history of the English Elton, Exposition, p. 16; Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 30. Lakes, Probe, p. 32. 130 E.g. Matthew 27:35, anticipated by Psalm 22:18. 131 Dod, Plaine, p. 74. 128

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reformation without taking into account the beliefs and practices of its Catholic constituents.132 This section will therefore flesh out in broad terms some of the most important aspects of English Catholic interaction with and use of the Decalogue, as well as exploring Catholic views of Protestant practice, and vice versa. The most obvious difference between the Catholic and Protestant Decalogues, as mentioned briefly above and discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, is that Catholics believed that the Ten Commandments were there to be kept; or, more accurately, that it was possible for mankind to obey God’s law. Whilst Calvinist divines taught that only the elect could strive to live in accordance with the law, and that even then their deeds were only rendered acceptable to God through the extrinsic righteousness of Christ, Catholic theologians taught that everybody had an obligation and a capacity to fulfil the commandments. The rhetoric of Catholics and Calvinists could therefore sound very similar, but it applied to very different points in the soteriological process. For Calvinists, as we shall see in Chapter 4, striving to fulfil the commandments was something that only happened after justification, once salvation was achieved. For Catholics, by contrast, striving to fulfil the commandments was a way of trying to achieve salvation. Writing under Mary I, Bishop Bonner described the law of God almost in monastic terms, as ‘a rule given to us, of God for the good guydynge of our selves’.133 Bonner explained that the commandments were nothing less than the ‘lyne, rule, squyre, and compasse, whereby we maye reare our workes uprightly, frame our selfes in virtue constantly, and governe the course of lyfe into the haven of felicitie prosperouslye’. Bonner’s commandments were achievable, and the emphasis of his pastoral discussion was much more on enumerating good works to be performed, as opposed to the direction taken by most Calvinist authors, who tended to focus more attention on anatomising potential sinful breaches For example, Elizabeth Evenden and Vivienne Westbrook (eds), Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London: Continuum, 2011), Ethan Shagan, (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’ (Manchester: MUP, 2005). 133 Edmund Bonner, A profitable and necessarye doctrine with certayne homelyes adioyned therunto (1555), sig. eeiiiiv. 132

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of the Decalogue. Indeed, for Bonner, there was still implied within the commandments an echo of the old Jewish covenant of works: in return for striving to ‘observe and kepe the commaundementes of God to his pleasure’, mankind could expect ‘thereby [to] obtayne of him rewarde in heaven’, albeit it was important to keep them ‘with a right intention’ and for God’s love, honour and glory rather than formally, hollowly, or carnally.134 There was for Bonner no threefold office of the law, and no difference between the application of the commandments to divergent constituencies of the reprobate and the elect. Execution of the precepts of the Decalogue was possible for every Christian, not just a privilege reserved for Christ. Likewise, the Spanish Jesuit Gaspar de Loarte explained that ‘in these tenn commaundementes are we taught by our Lorde God, what his wil is that we doo, to gaine everlasting life withal’.135 Catholics therefore took the commandments incredibly seriously, but while their moral sense was very similar, their pastoral and theological role was almost the exact opposite of that sanctioned by Protestant divines. Whilst archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole enquired whether, in his diocese of Kent, ministers ‘do diligently teache their parishoners the articles of the faith, and the ten commaundementes’, but he did so with a very different set of priorities from those of Bishop Hooper in Gloucester and Worcester, just a few years before.136 The commandments were important for Catholics, but they did not hold quite the same prominence for them as they did for English Protestants, even as a moral guide, because of the additional range of behavioural frameworks which the Catholic Church habitually employed in its pastoral ministry. The humanist, Lord Chancellor, and Henrician Catholic martyr Thomas More, in a collection of catechetical material edited and published on the continent during the reign of Elizabeth, listed alongside the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue the six commandments of the Church, the Seven Deadly Sins, the six sins against the Holy Ghost, the four sins of scripture, the seven works of bodily and spiritual mercy, the five wits, the inward and outward senses, and the two powers of the soul.137 To give commandments of the Church equal billing with the precepts written out by Bonner, A profitable and necessarye doctrine with certayne homelyes adioyned therunto, sig. ffiir. Gaspar de Loarte, The exercise of a christian life, trans. Stephen Brinkley (1579), f. 175r. 136 Catholic Church, Articles to be enquyred of in thordinary visitation of the most reuerende father in God, the Lord Cardinall Pooles grace Archbyshop of Cannterbury wythin hys Dioces of Cantorbury (1556), unpaginated (Article 10). 137 Thomas More, A brief fourme of confession instructing all Christian folke how to confesse their sinnes (1576), ff. 34r–​38r. 134 135

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God himself on Mount Sinai was unthinkable for Protestant authors, especially as some of these Catholic ordinances either duplicated existing commandments or mandated actions which Protestants believed were in breach of the Decalogue. The first commandment of the Church, to hear mass, for example, was for Protestants a breach of the Second Commandment, as was the second, to fast on feast days. The third, to pay tithes and offerings, was for Protestants already comprehended under the Fifth Commandment, whilst the fourth, to confess once a year, was negated by the Protestant abolition of sacramental confession. The fifth commandment of the church was to receive the sacrament at Easter, again comprehended under the Protestant Second (and Fourth) commandments, whilst the sixth, not to marry at particular times, was again rendered irrelevant. Indeed, most of the requirements of these additional frameworks were co-​opted into the Protestant Decalogue, either as actions prescribed or practices forbidden, and so no longer required separate enumeration. Jacobus Ledesma, another Spanish Jesuit, also directly followed the Ten Commandments with the commandments of the Church and the Seven Deadly Sins in his catechetical dialogue, whilst the English Jesuit John Wilson grouped the Ten Commandments with the seven sacraments, three theological virtues, three cardinal virtues, seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost, the precepts of charity, the precepts of the Church, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, the eight Beatitudes, the five bodily senses, and the Seven Deadly Sins.138 By assembling such a long list of moral and ethical frameworks, both scriptural and non-​scriptural, Catholic authors simultaneously raised the status of traditional groupings such as the Seven Sins and commandments of the Church, while also rather diluting the singular importance of the Ten Commandments. If the Decalogue was such a perfect expression of God’s will, then why was it necessary to supplement it with so many additional lists of both divine and human invention? Protestant authors faced a different problem. By trying to replace a system of such complexity with just ten commandments, the precepts of the Decalogue were, as we shall see in Chapter 3, forced to carry an awful lot of additional weight, which over time inevitably resulted in them becoming distorted from their original sense. Catholics and Protestants also differed in key respects over some of the prescriptions and proscriptions comprehended under each commandment, Jacobus Ledisma, The christian doctrine in manner of a dialogue betweene the master and the disciple Made by the Reuer. Fa. Iames Ledesma of the Society of Iesus (1597), p. 26; John Wilson, The treasury of deuotion Contayning diuers pious prayers, & exercises both practicall, and speculatiue (1622), pp. 8–​20.

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although the large amount of overlap between them should not be dismissed. This is not the place for a full comparative analysis of each precept, in part because the discussions of individual commandments are embedded thematically across the chapters within this volume. But it may be instructive to highlight a few important points of contrast (and similarity) in relation to the First Commandment. In Bishop Bonner’s exposition, for example, his organising principles were fear, faith, hope and charity. Compared to Protestant expositions, however, there was relatively little on the nature of faith.139 Bonner condemned those who failed in their bounden duty to believe in God, numbering first the pagans, secondly the Jews, thirdly the Turks, fourthly ‘all heretikes’, and fifthly those who set their hearts and minds upon worldly things above God. The word ‘Protestant’ was notable by its absence, along with any similar term to designate English evangelicals.140 In general, Protestants tended to use the commandments to condemn in detail the false worship of the Catholic Church in an act of theological self-​definition through ‘othering’ and disassociation. Catholic authors, however, stood on firmer foundations of history and tradition, and so tended to dismiss general categories of error without referring specifically to the contemporary Protestant threat. Thomas More’s exposition of the same commandment likewise failed to mention Protestantism, instead cautioning in general against ‘not beleeving, in douting, or curiously searching the points and partes of the Catholike faith’.141 At times, More’s reforming humanist discussion is entirely congruous with later Protestant and even puritan commentaries, for example in his warning ‘not to put any fond trust in our own merites as of our selves, or to trust in any earthly things and creatures’. At other times the gulf could not have been wider, such as his instruction under the First Commandment to honour the saints and the ceremonies of the Church. In Cardinal Bellarmine’s discussion of the First Commandment, the imaginary catechumen even enquires whether or not Catholic honour of saints, relics and images constitutes idolatry, ‘for it seemeth, that wee adore all these things, seeing we kneele unto them and prayer unto them as we doe unto God’. The response of the master to his student is telling: ‘the holie Church is the spouse of God . . . and hath the holy Ghost for

Cf. the discussion of the First Commandment, in Chapter 4. On the early modern use of the term ‘Protestant’ see Peter Marshall, ‘The Naming of Protestant England’, Past and Present, 214 (2012), pp. 87–​128. Bonner, A profitable and necessarye doctrine with certayne homelyes adioyned therunto, sig. hhiir. 141 More, A brief fourme of confession instructing all Christian folke how to confesse their sinnes, ff. 20v–​21v. 139 140

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her master. And therefore there is no danger that she should be deceived, or that she should doe or teach others to do any thing that were against the commandements of God’.142 More specifically, the master noted that Catholics worshipped God through such representations, and not the representations themselves, meaning that they were not idols. One of the most distinctive features of Catholic discussions of the Decalogue, both pre-​and post-​reformation, was a preoccupation with the numerological significance of the commandments. For Catholics, numerology was a way of stressing and accentuating the importance of the Decalogue; for Protestants, however, such practices were (more or less) to be rejected as superstitious, and the numerological dimension disappears almost entirely from Protestant exegesis. In attacking the Catholic insistence on the duration of Lent as being forty days, Archbishop Abbot cited the numerological reasoning of figures such as Thomas Aquinas and Gregory the Great: First because the vertue of the ten commaundementes is fulfilled by the foure bookes of the holie Gospell. And the number of ten being multiplyed by foure, ariseth to fortie. Or because in this mortall body we consist of the foure elementes, by the pleasures of which bodie we goe against the commaundements of the Lord, which are received by the ten commaundements. Whereupon it is fit that we should afflict that flesh fortie times.143

‘What adoe there was to hammer it to this set number’, Abbot commented; ‘it is marveilous to beholde’.144 The Italian Dominican friar Giacomo Affinati used the Ten Commandments to explain Christ’s reference in Matthew 18:21–​22 to Peter forgiving his brother’s sin not ‘until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven’. To get from seven to seventy-​ seven, Affinati explained, it was necessary to multiply by eleven; that is, ten for the number of the commandments, and one more for the transgression of them.145 The significance of eleven as the ‘number of sin’ had been described by Augustine in The City of God; indeed, most late-​medieval Robert Bellarmine, An ample declaration of the Christian doctrine, trans. Richard Hadock (1604), pp. 124–​6. 143 George Abbot, The reasons vvhich Doctour Hill hath brought, for the vpholding of papistry, which is falselie termed the Catholike religion (1604), p. 397. 144 Cf. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Batman vppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum, trans. Stephen Batman (1582), f. 150v. 145 Giacomo Affinati, The dumbe diuine speaker, or: Dumbe speaker of Diuinity, trans. A.M. (1605), pp.  280–​1. Jerome interpreted Christ’s instructions as forgiveness not 77 (70+7) times, but 490 (70x70). Four hundred and ninety, he explained, was essentially 49 (‘the last figure’ was ‘nullo, which of it selfe is nothing’). Four and nine was 13, signifying the twelve articles of the faith, plus one to signify our failing in them. 142

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and early modern numerology stemmed from the writings of the Church Fathers. Augustine had explained, ‘seeing that the lawe lieth in the number of ten, as the tenne commandements testifie, eleaven over-​going ten in one, signifieth the transgression of the law, or sinne’. It was for this reason that there were eleven hair-​cloth veils made for the ancient Jewish Tabernacle, ‘for in haire-​cloath is the remembrance of sinne included, because of the goates that shalbe set on the left hand’.146 In his Old Testament sermons Augustine also drew parallels between the Ten Commandments and the ten plagues of Egypt, and with the ten-​stringed harp the decachordon.147 The Italian humanist Antonio Brucioli, in his commentary on the Song of Songs, interpreted the threescore valiant men of Israel situated around the bed of Solomon as signifying the Ten Commandments of the Law multiplied by the six days it took God to complete the work of creation.148 Thomas Bell, after his famous conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, ridiculed this sort of ‘superstition used in poperie’ as ‘grosse and ridiculous’, and highlighted specifically the Romish tendency to condone prayers only in odd-​numbered groups of one, three, five or seven, ‘because forsooth God is not pleased with an even number’.149 In which case, Bell jested mockingly, ‘I inferre first, that God is not pleased with the ten commandements, which he gave himself ’. But while Protestants did not tend to cite patristic numerology in their pastoral, devotional or theological works, they occasionally recorded such curiosities in encyclopaedic or antiquarian collections. The legal writer John Cowell, for example, explained that Sexagesima was so called ‘because the number of sixtie consisteth of sixe times tenne: sixe having reference to the sixe works of mercie, and tenne to the tenne commandements’.150 In describing King Solomon’s Temple, the Protestant author John Carpenter explained that the ten candles and candlesticks were an allusion to the Ten Commandments, while Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine, Of the citie of God vvith the learned comments of Io. Lod. Viues, trans. I.H. (1610), p. 558. 147 Augustine, The Works of St Augustine:  Sermons I, 1–​19, on the Old Testament, intro. Michele Pellegrino, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John Rotelle (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990), pp. 240, 264. Cf. Anglicus, Batman vppon Bartholome, f. 419v. 148 Song of Songs 3:7. Antonio Brucioli, A commentary upon the Canticle of Canticles, trans. Th. Iames (1598), p. 66. 149 Thomas Bell, The suruey of popery vvherein the reader may cleerely behold, not onely the originall and daily incrementes of papistrie, with an euident confutation of the same. . . (1596), pp.  488–​9. John Speed also mocked the idea that ten (commandments) plus four (gospels) multiplied by three (persons of the Trinity) gave the number forty-​two (generations from Abraham to Christ). John Speed, A cloud of vvitnesses and they the holy genealogies of the sacred Scriptures (1620), p. 82. 150 John Cowell, The interpreter: or Booke containing the signification of vvords wherein is set foorth the true meaning of all, or the most part of such words and termes, as are mentioned in the lawe vvriters, or statutes of this victorious and renowned kingdome (1607), sig. Hhh1r. 146

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Stephen Batman noted that ‘two V.V. endwise ioyned maketh an X. which is in number 10, ye figure of the Law, nature & grace so ioyned togethers called the law of the tenne commaundementes’.151 Catholic treatments of the Decalogue were therefore frequently embedded within a number of rich existing traditions:  of patristic scholarship (including Augustinian numbering); of traditional exegesis; and of contextual deployment alongside a wide range of other moral frameworks, both scriptural and customary. Catholic authors therefore tended to view the Protestant repurposing of the Decalogue with a combination of automatic dismissal and outright horror. The Flemish Jesuit Leonardus Lessius was one of many to voice the most common accusation, ‘that the Lutherans Religion teacheth, that the Decalogue, or ten Commandments appertaine not to the faithful, as neither the ceremoniall and judicial lawes also’.152 This was a false accusation, but there was enough truth in it to make the allegation plausible that Protestants allowed and even condoned actions and behaviours ‘that be prohibited and forbidden by the decalogue’, including to ‘adore Idols, contemne parents, make no reckoning of Magistrats, commit murthers, adulteryes, robberyes give false testimonies, and such like’. The Catholic charge of Protestant antinomianism will be explored in more detail in Chapter 4, but suffice it to say here that the concept of justification by faith alone was either beyond the comprehension of Catholics such as Lessius or, more likely, that such authors wilfully misinterpreted the Protestant doctrine for their own polemical ends. Protestants such as Luther and Calvin taught, Lessius explained, that ‘Christ hath with his bloud redeemed, and delivered us from all sins, and lawes, in so much as from this tyme forward no law bindeth us in conscience’. The dangerous consequence of such a belief, Lessius explained, was that ‘Heere we are in expresse words freed from the decalogue, and from all precepts of Sacraments’.153 The English Catholic missionary priests Oliver Almond and Matthew Kellison made similar accusations in print, damning Luther ‘for contending that the law appertained not unto Christian men’ and suggesting that ‘the alleaged doctrine of Calvin bringeth all lawes in contempt and looseth the bridge to all malefactours’.154 Protestant condemnation of John Carpenter, Schelomonocham, or King Solomon his solace (1606), ff. 108v–​109r; Stephen Batman, The golden booke of the leaden goddes (1577), ff. 22v–​23r. 152 Leonardus Lessius, A consultation what faith and religion is best to be imbraced, trans. William Wright (1618), pp. 159–​60. 153 Lessius, A consultation what faith and religion is best to be imbraced, p. 164. 154 Oliver Almond, The vncasing of heresie, or, The anatomie of protestancie (1623), p.  36; Matthew Kellison, A suruey of the new religion detecting manie grosse absurdities which it implieth (Douai and Rheims, 1603), p. 500. 151

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Catholics on the basis of their use of the Ten Commandments tended to be less theologically sophisticated, and polemically blunter. The Church of England clergyman Thomas Adams explained that the pope had exceeded even God himself in managing to condense all Ten Commandments into two words: Da pecuniam; give money; a claim echoed by George Salteren.155 In a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, Thomas Thompson catalogued how the pope (or Antichrist, to give him his proper title) willingly broke all Ten Commandments by atheism and magic, idolatry and superstition, blasphemy, profanation of the Sabbath, dominion over kings, murdering the Saints of God, fornication and adultery, theft of land, lies and false wonders, and ‘the indulgence of raging concupiscence’.156 Thomas Lupton suggested that Catholics had effectively inverted the Decalogue, whilst Thomas Taylor and Joseph Hall claimed that whilst the Catholic Church made a great show of piety, it lacked inner devotion, and had therefore forfeited its status as a bride of Christ.157 The Ten Commandments were not an issue of particular polemical contention between Catholics and Protestants; in comparison to the most prominent issues, such as the nature of the real presence in the eucharist, or the question of papal supremacy, they barely register as a footnote. However, their different interpretations of the Decalogue served to reinforce major theological differences between Catholics and Protestants, as these fleeting references show. Like the broader canon of scripture from which they were drawn, divergent interpretations of the Decalogue turned shared history and tradition into a point of fundamental theological difference.

Blessings and Curses of the Law The next chapter will explore in more detail the duty of secular magistrates to uphold and police the values of the Ten Commandments (and the reciprocal role of the Decalogue in guaranteeing the authority of the secular Thomas Adams, The happines of the church (1619) p. 119; George Salteren, Sacrae heptades, or Seaven problems concerning Antichrist (1625), p. 202. 156 Thomas Thompson, Antichrist arraigned in a sermon at Pauls Crosse, the third Sunday after Epiphanie (1618), pp.  70–​1. Cf. George Downame, A treatise concerning Antichrist divided into two books (1603), pp. 77–​8. Christopher Carlile was therefore a moderate in suggesting that the pope only broke the first two commandments: Christopher Carlile, A discourse Wherein is plainly proued by the order of time and place, that Peter was neuer at Rome (1572), f. 38v. 157 Thomas Lupton, The Christian against the Iesuite (1582), ff. 85v–​86r; Thomas Taylor, Tvvo sermons the one A heavenly voice, calling all Gods people out of Romish Babylon (1624), p. 7; Joseph Hall, Quo vadis? A  iust censure of travell as it is commonly vndertaken by the gentlemen of our nation (1617), p. 79. 155

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magistracy). But the commandments had another earthly relevance, in the form of the blessings they promised to those who kept them, and the dire curses threatened against those who failed in their obedience. The Decalogue contained two explicitly formulated blessings, and two curses, spread across the Second, Third and Fifth commandments. The Second Commandment contained both a blessing and a curse: Exodus 20:5 promised to visit ‘the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me’, whilst Exodus 20:6 promised that God would shew ‘mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments’. The Third Commandment contained an ominous curse: Exodus 20:7 warned that God would ‘not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain’. By contrast, the Fifth Commandment contained an important and rather more specific blessing:  Exodus 20:12 promised that, for those who honoured their parents, ‘thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee’. From the outset, however, the question of whether true Protestants could expect to be rewarded for their good faith in this life, as opposed to (or rather as well as) in the next, was a complicated issue. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber posited the existence within seventeenth-​century Calvinism of a kind of prosperity gospel; a link between the notions of dignity of calling, predestination, worldly success, and spiritual health, through which temporal fortune was seen as a sign of divine favour.158 Sidestepping discussion of the problems with Weber’s broader thesis, that particular claim has been challenged and problematised on a number of fronts, not least by Alexandra Walsham’s research into the doctrine of providence in early modern England. Post-​reformation divines, Walsham has suggested, postulated ‘an inverse relationship between prosperity and piety’, reminding ‘their flocks that “those whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth”’, while ‘those who tasted not of the cup of His wrath were in all likelihood “bastards, and not sons”’.159 The circle may be squared by recognising, with Walsham, that this species of ‘experimental providentialism’ ‘was both suspiciously self-​conforming and potentially egotistical in the extreme’; ‘a set of rose-​coloured spectacles through which Max Weber, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (London: Routledge, 2001), passim. 159 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in early modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.  16–​17. Cf. the mentality of the Edwardian Church explored in Catherine Davies, ‘“Poor Persecuted Little Flock” or “Commonwealth of Christians”:  Edwardian Protestant concepts of the Church’, in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (eds), Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England (1987), pp. 78–​102. 158

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the setbacks, no less than the successes, of “professors of the faith” were transformed into emblems of divine approbation’. Or, as William Tyndale had it, although ‘we must needs be baptised in tribulations . . . when the child submitteth himself unto his father’s correction and nurture, and humbleth himself altogether unto the will of his father, then the rod is taken away’.160 In other words, both good and bad fortune could serve to reinforce the confidence of the godly in their elect status. Beginning with the Second Commandment, it is clear that post-​ reformation English divines were keener to stress the curse than the blessing, and were also less equivocal over its temporal application. Several authors noted that the promise of ‘mercy unto . . . them that love me’ should be of comfort to poor but godly parents and their children and that, given a choice, it was better to have godly than wealthy parents.161 The promise of ‘mercy’ was interpreted predominantly in soteriological terms, but where authors differed, or struggled, was in the precise relationship between the mercy offered and principle of heredity. Robert Allen suggested that the blessing would last until world’s end, providing that the commandment was kept by subsequent generations, and that it guaranteed the salvation of children who died in infancy. ‘What if the children of faithful parents dye before they know what belongeth to the true worship of God, neither have knowledge and faith to love him and to keepe his commandments’, he asked? The answer came: ‘there is not withstanding very comfortable hope, because they are within the compasse and charter of the covenant’.162 The contention that keeping the Second Commandment generated a soteriologically efficacious covenant which guaranteed the afterlives of the children of godly parents in cases where they died before coming to maturity of faith was not widely expressed; most authors commented in woollier language on the generosity of God’s mercy. John Dod explained that the commandment taught that ‘the best way for anie man to do good to his children, is to be godly himselfe’, while Richard Greenham suggested that ‘God will blesse his true worship in the true worshippers and their posteritie, unto the thousand descent’.163 William Perkins observed that the promise in the Second Commandment demonstrated that God’s mercy exceeded his justice, but cautioned that ‘we may not surmise, that this Tyndale, ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, p. 140. He also noted that ‘we see the Turks far exceed us Christian men in worldly prosperity, for their just keeping of their temporal laws’. Ibid, p. 175. 161 E.g. Barker, Painefull, p. 140; Dod, Plaine, p. 82. 162 Allen, Treasurie, p. 73. 163 Dod, Plaine, p. 81; Greenham, Workes, p. 75. 160

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excellent promise is made to every one particularly, who is borne of faithful parents’, for the bible was full of examples of godly children born to ungodly parents, and ungodly children born to godly parents.164 The blessing only rewarded the godly and their godly seed, and therefore taught that parents who wanted to see their children free from sin should instruct them carefully in pure worship, and that ‘children, if they meane to bee freed from Gods punishments, should especially seeke from their parents, to learne to worship GOD purely.’165 The curse in the Second Commandment was also pastorally and logically problematic, as it suggested that innocent children might be punished for sins committed by their fathers which they had not committed and which they might themselves condemn. The standard solution to this seemingly vindictive inequity was to suggest, along with Gervase Babington, that the curse only applied to children who followed in their fathers’ wickedness and not otherwise.166 Peter Barker explained that visiting iniquity on the children of idolaters did not mean taking away any blessings they were in possession of; rather, it meant not supplying them with the grace they already lacked, something entirely consonant with God’s justice if not exactly an expression of his mercy. Parents should therefore take great care in discharging their duties to God, Barker made clear, for fear of the plagues that might visit them and their children otherwise.167 In like manner, George Chapelin took pains to point out that God was not punishing innocent children for the sins of others: but for as much as the children are alreadie even of themselves & their own nature accursed, God being provoked of the father and mother abandoneth and forsaketh them, leaving them in their proper nature, that in following the way of their fathers, they may feele the wrath and vengeance of God, not only for the sinnes of their fathers, but also for their owne.168

God’s action was therefore reasonable and just for two reasons; firstly, because all of mankind in its reprobate condition was already justly sentenced to eternal damnation by virtue of original sin, quite apart from the sins they continued to commit as part of day-​to-​day life; and secondly, because idolatrous parents were more likely than not to have idolatrous Perkins, Chaine, p. 44. Bruch, The life of religion: or Short and sure directions, p. 136; Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements, sig. L7r. 166 Babington, Fruitful, p. 113. 167 Barker, Painefull, pp. 129–​31. 168 Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction, pp. 265–​6. 164 165

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children. William Perkins noted that ‘to visit, is not onely to punish the children for the fathers offences, but to make notice, and apprehend them in the same faults: by reason they are given over to commit their fathers transgressions, that for them they be punished’.169 The most hard-​line approach to the Second Commandment was that of Robert Allen. Asked whether it wasn’t unfair that God should punish children to the third or fourth generation, he replied, ‘it is rather of wonderful mercie, that he doth so graciously limite and restraine the curse: seeing he might justly withdraw his grace from the whole posteritie of the Idolaters, as from an illegitimate and bastardly seede’.170 Allen was not prepared to see God cast off the next generation entirely, however; any who forsook the sins of their fathers would be accepted, and the covenant in them and their children renewed by God. But, if the children of idolatrous parents were to die before they were able to discern their idolatry, ‘they are doubtlesse in a fearful estate’. God’s reason for offering a blessing and a curse in the Second Commandment was essentially to incentivise mankind; to encourage them to keep it.171 His motivation for including such dire imprecations was the jealous defence of his sacred covenant with humanity, the breach of which (idolatry) was spiritual infidelity; William Perkins, John Dod, and George Chapelin all commented on God’s ‘jealousy’ in this context, although George Estey contended that jealousy was a fault and so not to be ascribed to God; he offered ‘zealous’ as a more fitting translation.172 The curse inherent in the Third Commandment received scant attention from commentators, in part because of its comparatively vague phrasing. It helped to underscore the severity of the sins prohibited by the commandment itself –​blasphemy, perjury, bringing God’s name into disrepute –​but it contained no specific threat, just a general warning of doom. This very vagueness was, according to George Estey, a deliberate ploy on God’s part. The certainty of punishment was indicated by the choice of the words ‘will not hold him guiltless’, but ‘no kind of punishment’ was named ‘that wee may looke for at all’.173 In other words, knowing that something bad was going to happen, but not knowing what or when, would keep humanity on its toes and stop sinners from ever feeling safe Perkins, Chaine, p. 44. Allen, Treasurie, pp. 71–​2. 171 ‘And lest any should presume, God hath fensed in this commandement with a very strong reason’. Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures, p. 90. 172 Perkins, Chaine, pp.  43–​4; Dod, Plaine, p.  75; Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction, p. 265; Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements, sig. L4v. 173 Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements, sig. M2v. 169 170

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or complacent in respect of God’s vengeance. Richard Greenham noted that the Third Commandment’s curse implied ‘that God will certainely punish the dishonouring of his Name in any sort’, in order ‘to make us more fearefull to dishonour him, and more carefull to glorifie his Name’, while William Perkins merely observed that the word ‘guiltless’ meant that ‘he shall not be unpunished’.174 Richard Bruch warned sinners that whilst secular rulers were slow to punish the abuse of God’s name, God himself would be revenged upon them swiftly, surely and severely. The sin of blasphemy, Bruch cautioned, had in it neither pleasure, profit nor good, and therefore ‘when the Lord hath spoken and threatened sure vengeance, who will not be terrified’?175 The nature of God’s punishment was unclear, but several authors hinted that it would be temporal in nature, visited upon the sinner during his lifetime. George Estey’s cryptic discussion of the secret nature of God’s curse certainly suggested as much, and John Hooper was rather plainer. ‘As for those that be common swearers’, he counselled, ‘and be suffered to blaspheme without punishment, it is so abominable, that the magistrates, they that swear, and all the commonwealth where as they dwell, shall at length smart for it’.176 In other words, God, through his providence, would punish not only the individual, but also the negligent magistracy, and indeed the entire country, holding none of the offending parties ‘guiltless’. Robert Allen summarised it thus; as it is our blessing to have our sins forgiven, because the sin being forgiven the punishment is also remitted, so it is our curse and misery, the sin imputed, that vengeance will certainly follow.177 Lastly, of all the blessings and curses in the Decalogue, the one to receive the most attention was that of the Fifth Commandment; that in return for keeping it ‘thy days may be long upon the land’. On the surface of it this was a simple temporal blessing awarded to individuals who honoured their ‘parents’, whether their natural father and mother or their superiors in age or calling.178 For Richard Bruch, the blessing was a simple quid pro quo for parental obedience secured not through divine intervention but by virtue of the caring office of the father itself. The days of children were to be prolonged through the love, care and prayerfulness of their parents; ‘herewith they procure this blessing from God upon us’.179 The Greenham, Workes, p. 75; Perkins, Chaine, pp. 54. Bruch, The life of religion: or Short and sure directions, pp. 146–​8. 176 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, pp. 335–​6. 177 Allen, Treasurie, p. 90. 178 On the Fifth Commandment, see Chapter 2. 179 Bruch, The life of religion: or Short and sure directions, p. 168. 174

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consensus amongst the majority of commentators, however, was that this was a providential blessing, the author and agent of which was God himself. Peter Barker explained that ‘men are full of holes and take water at a thousand breaches’; long life, therefore, was a blessing of God, and not one to be viewed lightly.180 To Edward Elton, long life was not a gift to be frittered away; it was given specifically ‘that in it we may use all good meanes to attaine to life and salvation’. Elton was also concerned to establish the fact that long life was not the result of ‘nature or good constitution of the body’, but rather that it was ‘of the good pleasure and providence of God’.181 Several authors were keen to suggest that God’s blessing went beyond mere long life, and that it also promised a more comfortable existence. Edmund Bunny remarked that long life itself was not necessarily a blessing; it could be full of pain, and furthermore it was not a privilege reserved to the godly, for many times wicked men lived (too) long as well. What was promised to the faithful by the Fifth Commandment, therefore, was a long life the bitterness of which was seasoned by the sweet comfort of God’s favour.182 Likewise, George Chapelin suggested that the blessing promised prosperity in addition to long life, while George Estey proposed that man’s additional days would not be spent ‘in sicknes, want, disgrace’, but ‘flourishing in good health, and outward favours of God’.183 This promise of living a long, healthy, prosperous and otherwise blessed existence, however, presented divines with a pastoral difficulty; manifestly this could not always be (and was not always) the case, even for the godly. A significant proportion of commentators were therefore careful to manage the expectations of their readers accordingly. John Boys explained that God only promised long life insofar as it was a blessing; if he chose instead to shorten the days of dutiful children on earth, and instead grant them everlasting life in heaven, he was not breaking but rather keeping –​and even exceeding –​his original promise.184 Gervase Babington made precisely the same argument; that so far as long life was a benefit God would grant it, ‘but if in wisedome he knowe it better for them to be gathered to their fathers, then hee taketh them away and recompenceth want of temporall life with eternall’.185 This was not a case of God breaking his promise, but Barker, Painefull, p. 226. Elton, Exposition, pp. 123–​4. 182 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse:  or, A  plaine and familiar explanation of the ten commandements, p. 166. 183 Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction, p. 284; Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements, sig. P3v. 184 Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures vsed in our English liturgie, pp. 99–​100. 185 Babington, Fruitful, p. 243. 180

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rather of delivering much more than his original pledge. George Chapelin, William Perkins and Osmund Lakes all agreed that God might legitimately commute his blessing of long life from the temporal to the eternal sphere, with Robert Allen going further than most by suggesting that under such circumstances the gift of long temporal life might be transferred from the individual concerned to their offpsring.186 However, while George Estey noted that God’s promise was expedient and contingent, rather than general and perpetual, he warned that it was not to be taken as an indication of salvation, for the temporal blessing of the Fifth Commandment was occasionally bestowed upon the wicked.187 Several authors were also keen to stress that the blessing of the Fifth Commandment contained within it an implicit curse. It might sometimes seem that the obedient die soon while the wicked live for a long time: To this we may answere, that the reprobate lives but to heap up wrath, against the day of wrath, and to make up a greater measure of his sins, that God may make up a greater measure of vengeance . . . but, for the godly, if God call them away, it is to bring them to a better place, that they may be taken from the evill to come.188

John Boys noted that there was no reason that any who failed to honour those that gave them life should expect to enjoy long life themselves, while John Norden called upon God to punish ‘careles and disobedient Children’ by withholding his blessings and depriving them of their liberty and living.189 The blessings and curses offered by the Second, Third and Fifth Commandments were somewhat disparate in nature –​both spiritual and temporal, general and specific –​but did they do any more than buttress the keeping of certain precepts with additional rewards for obedience and threats for failure to obey? Perhaps not. And yet, by establishing a series of discrete covenants associated with the keeping and breaking of individual commandments, the blessings and curses may have helped to condition popular reception of the Decalogue as a whole. In other words, by suggesting that believers might find temporal and even spiritual rewards by obeying certain of God’s precepts, the blessings and curses may have Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction, p. 284; Perkins, Chaine, p. 67; Lakes, Probe, p. 174; Allen, Treasurie, p. 141. 187 Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements, sig. P3v. 188 Dod, Plaine, p. 248. 189 Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures vsed in our English liturgie, p. 99; John Norden, A pensiue mans practise (1584), f. 42r. Cf. Robert Allen, who simply referred to Deuteronomy 21:18–​21, which stipulated that disobedient children should be stoned to death: Allen, Treasurie, p. 146. 186

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contributed to a more general sense that God would reward those who kept his law, and punish those who broke it. Whilst such an inference might not seem too controversial, let us not forget that Protestants of all kinds rejected the Catholic insistence on the individual’s performance of good works as a requirement for attaining salvation, preferring instead to see the keeping of the works of the law as the product of the increasingly sanctified nature of the elect. As Chapter 6 will explore in more detail, it may well be that some elements of ways in which divines espoused the Ten Commandments –​in this instance, the blessings and curses –​actually contributed towards the ‘country divinity’ and ‘rustic pelagianism’ which the same divines were so quick to condemn.

The Third Commandment Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the LORD thy God in Vain; for the LORD Will Not Hold Him Guiltless That Taketh His Name in Vain. Exodus 20:7

This chapter closes with an exploration of the Third Commandment. Demanding simply that the faithful should not take the name of the Lord in vain, the precept appears at first glance to be a vigorous but narrow condemnation of blasphemy.190 In the eyes of Thomas Becon, the curse contained within the commandment was proof that God ‘manifestly declareth how great the synne . . . of swearing is in his sight above al other vices’, making breaches of the Third Commandment amongst the most serious in the whole of the Decalogue.191 Becon condemned the practice of swearing by God’s name –​‘Gods flesh, Gods bloud, Gods hart’, etc. –​as one which rent and tore the body of Christ itself, making English swearers worse sinners than the Jews who had called for Christ’s crucifixion. However, while this was a common medieval trope, Becon was one of only a few post-​ reformation English authors to maintain it.192 Most divines approached Blasphemy was of course condemned by the commandment. Francis Rous called it ‘a great burthen of this lland’ and ‘a heavy, yet unprofitable sinne’. Francis Rous, Meditations of instruction, of exhortation, of reprofe (1616), p. 186. For a historiographical discussion of blasphemy see David Manning, ‘Blasphemy in England, c.1660–​1730 (Cambridge University PhD thesis, 2008); David Manning, ‘Blasphemy in the Christian Idiom, c.1500-​c.2000’, Historical Journal, 52.3 (2012), pp.  883–​97 [review article]; David Nash, ‘“To Prostitute Morality, Libel Religion, and Undermine Government”: Blasphemy and the Strange Persistence of Providence in Britain since the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Religious History, 32.4 (2008), pp. 439–​56. 191 Thomas Becon, An inuectyue agenst the moost wicked [and] detestable vyce of swearing, newly co[m]‌piled by Theodore Basille (1543), ff. xvixviiv. 192 See Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing:  a social history of foul language, oaths and profanity in English (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1991), pp.  61–​70. Another author to employ the same image was Perkins, Chaine, p. 55. 190

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the Third Commandment by first explaining that by ‘name’ was meant not only God’s titles, but also his word, works, attributes, and even person. ‘The name of God, is God himselfe’, declared George Chapelin, ‘with his majestie, and his vertues, as his power, force, wisdom, righteousnesse, justice, favour, truth, mercie, goodnesse, &c’.193 God’s name signified God and his attributes, his glory and renown, his titles, his word, his prescribed religion, and his works, explained George Downame.194 The third precept of the Decalogue therefore encompassed any profanation of anything at all to do with God, from his appellation or his creation to his worship. Swearing was a prominent element of the behaviours prohibited by the commandment, but it was by no means the whole story. We will begin by charting the extent of the negative proscriptions of the precept, before turning to the positive practices prescribed. There was no absolute consensus on the precise list of actions which comprised the breach of the Third Commandment, but neither were there serious disagreements; all authors presented a series of subtle variations on a common theme. Richard Bruch explained that there were three things forbidden by the precept: the swearing of needless or unholy oaths; unreverent speech about or abuse of God and his word, works or titles; and for mankind to disgrace a holy profession by unholy conversation.195 Gervase Babington produced a much longer list, condemning prayer without affection, conjuring and witchcraft, the use of biblical texts like the pater noster as charms, the making or keeping of ungodly vows, and light speaking of the lord, especially during sports, plays, or other pastimes. Babington also suggested that putting the Lord’s name before ‘wicked instruments’ was a breach of the commandment, thereby condemning papal bulls, pardons, and ‘the sentences of condemnation against Gods children in Queene Maries dayes’.196 Peter Barker referred to the tongue as ‘a little member, but . . . an unruly evill, full of deadly poison’; it was a good servant if ruled strictly, but a terrible master if humanity let it rule over them. Barker dwelt at length on the ways in which God’s word was abused in breaches of the commandment, including ‘when men abuse it to any charmes or any sorcery whatsoever’. He censured the bad use of scripture, the failure to put it to good use, and any who mocked God’s word or made a jest of it. Perhaps most interestingly, Barker also suggested that Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction, p.  270. Cf. Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements, sig. L8r: ‘Gods name is himself and he is his name’. 194 Downame, Abstract, sig. D5v. Cf. Elton, Exposition, p. 19. 195 Bruch, The life of religion: or Short and sure directions, p. 143. 196 Babington, Fruitful, p. 149. 193

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the commandment laid down core principles of scriptural interpretation and exegesis, by asserting that it forbade maiming the sentences or adulterating the sense of scripture through adding to or altering the word, or colouring or changing the meaning ‘to make the tune sound to our key’.197 Presumably unaware of the irony of his own idiosyncratic interpretation, he went on to instruct readers not to take figuratively in scripture that which was to be taken literally, or to take literally that which was meant to be taken as a figure. Perhaps the fullest list of sins comprehended under the Third Commandment was provided by William Perkins. Perkins began with perjury or ‘foreswearing’, a kind of master-​sin which encompassed lying, false invocation of God’s name, contempt of his threatenings, and lies in respect of man’s covenant with God. Next came false swearing, followed by swearing in common talk, and swearing by something other than God. Fifthly, Perkins listed blasphemy, ‘which is a reproch against God’, and cursing our enemies came sixth.198 He also condemned using the name of God carelessly in common talk; abusing God’s creatures; the casting of lots ‘as when we search what must be (as they say) our fortune’ by dice or bones; all superstition, including beliefs about good and bad luck and charms; astrology and magic; popish sacramentals; jests and scoffs made of scripture; lightly passing over God’s judgements; and dissolute conversation.199 A list of no fewer than fifteen categories, each of which was further sub-​divided through the use of scriptural examples, helped Perkins to turn the Third Commandment into an uncompromising condemnation of profanity, based upon a strongly Calvinist sense of what constituted true and false worship. Certain of these prohibitions received greater attention from authors than others. Robert Allen also highlighted the irreverent use of God’s name in interludes, dice-​play, fortune-​telling, charms, sorcery, conjuration and witchcraft, along with ‘all wrathfull cursing and banning of others, either man or any other creature’.200 Osmund Lakes discussed witchcraft at some length, condemning witches, soothsayers, wise-​men, cunning-​men and conjurers. Questioned by the imaginary pastor about witches ‘falslie condemned for such, using naturall meanes of hearbes and other creatures fit for cure of sickness’, Lakes’ catechumen responded, ‘therein also is the subtiltie of Satan to be suspected, that he may seeme to be, not a divell, Barker, Painefull, pp. 152–​9. Perkins, Chaine, pp. 59–​61. 199 Cf. Lambert Daneau, True and Christian friendshippe With all the braunches, members, parts, and circumstances thereof, trans. Thomas Newton (1586), sig. G2r. 200 Allen, Treasurie, p. 85. 197 198

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but a Physitian, or an Artist’.201 Lakes was, however, also keen to distinguish between the condemnable practice of astrology, along with divination by flying birds, reading entrails, setting lots and palmistry, and ‘the commendable effects of the art Astronomicall’. Denunciations of magic, although not quite as common as discussions of sins of speech, came thick and fast in commentaries on the Third Commandment, although they also occasionally featured in expositions of the First and Second. Bishop Hooper noted that ‘those abuse the name of God that seek help of damned spirits, or of such souls as be departed out of this world . . . those men in English be called conjurers, who useth arts forbidden by God’s laws’.202 Even the pagan authors of the classical world, he observed, condemned magic and superstition, and Hooper further explained that soothsaying and prognostication were also in breach of the commandment. Although he confused the actual terms astrology and astronomy, he praised ‘he that knoweth the course and motions of the heavens’, but condemned ‘who taketh upon him to give judgment and censure of these motions’. John Dod specifically censured the profane use of God’s word in charms and other kinds of sorcery, whilst Stephen Denison warned against the abusing of Gods titles by cursing or witchcraft.203 Archbishop Cranmer outlined five ways in which the Lord’s name was taken in vain: firstly by giving his name and titles to false gods; secondly, by swearing deceitfully; thirdly, by cursing; fourthly by abusing the word of God; and finally, by abusing it in ‘charmes, witchcraft, sorceries, nicromancies, inchauntementes, & conjuringes’.204 All such magic, he explained, was nothing but lies, guile, and subtle trickery, whereby the devil attempted to drive men to commit terrible sins. If the negative aspect of the Third Commandment focussed on the assorted ways in which God’s name, word and creatures might be profaned, the positive injunction was in essence simple; to frame all speech and actions to the furthering of his name and glory. For Thomas Granger, the duties required by the third precept could be summed up in seven major requirements:  the reproof and correction of sins against the commandment; the taking only of lawful and religious oaths; private instruction of families; to look for occasions to praise God’s greatness as manifested in his word and works; to use the name of God only with reverence and Lakes, Probe theologicall, pp. 79–​81. Hooper, ‘Declaration’, pp. 326–​33. 203 Dod, Plaine, p. 97; Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 31. 204 Cranmer, Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion, ff. 20r–​25r. 201

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in weighty affairs; ‘zeal of Gods glory above all things in the world’; and sanctification of God’s gifts and ordinances by the word and by prayer. William Perkins produced a similar summary, starting with zeal, and then moving on to the reverent use of God’s titles, the holy commemoration of his creatures, the proper swearing of oaths, and the sanctification of his ordinances.205 This sanctification, Perkins explained, was by means of the word, and also by prayer. By the word mankind was instructed whether, in what place, at what time, with what affection, to what end, and after what holy manner God allowed the use of such things. Prayer itself comprised two additional duties; petition and thanksgiving, by which man obtained assistance from God by his grace and responded with thankful magnification of his name. The First Commandment concerned who was to be worshipped –​God –​and the Second how he was to be worshipped –​in truth and spirit, and without idolatry. The Fourth Commandment set out the particular worship of the Sabbath day; the role of the Third was therefore, in the words of Robert Allen, ‘first, to show what ought to be the ordinarie course of the whole life and conversation of the true worshipper of God’, and ‘secondly, to declare what is the chiefe ende of life’; the honour and glory of God.206 The Third Commandment, Allen explained, was aimed particularly at all those who turned up to church on Sundays and sat through the service, but who as soon as they passed out of the church door let their thoughts and life drift to loose and libertine things. John Boys took a slightly different route to the same destination; the function of the Third Commandment, he explained, was to describe the end of God’s worship; in other words, the aim of the commandment was God’s glory.207 Most authors made a point of clarifying for the benefit of their readers that the Third Commandment did not forbid the swearing of lawful oaths, for example as part of the judicial process.208 This was, either implicitly or explicitly, a pointed rejection of the Anabaptist position on the unlawfulness of oaths.209 Gervase Babington noted that ‘the Anabaptistes have thought this lawe a ceremonial lawe, and now abrogated’, but argued that to swear a true and proper oath was in actual fact ‘both lawful and a glorie to God’.210 To swear as he ought, man must first establish that Perkins, Chaine, pp. 59–​61. Allen, Treasurie, p. 80. 207 Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures, p. 90. 208 E.g. Richard Cosin, An apologie for svndrie proceedings by iurisdiction ecclesiasticall (1593), pp. 2–​3. 209 On the suggested Lollard origins of the English reformers’ position on oaths, see Henry G. Russell, ‘Lollard Opposition to Oaths by Creatures’, The American Historical Review, 51.4 (1946), pp. 668–​84. 210 Babington, Fruitful, p. 131–​34. 205

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the matter was true to God’s honour and the benefit of his brother; secondly, that he was lawfully called to swear before a magistrate; thirdly, that the oath must be sworn by the name of God and none other; and lastly, that the affection of the person swearing ought to be good. A lawful oath, expounded Richard Greenham, was one sworn in God’s name in justice, judgement and truth.211 Robert Allen explained that humanity had an obligation to call on God in swearing solemn oaths to establish the truth in matters of doubt or controversy, alongside duties to speak well (and to cause others to speak well) of God; to live and behave well in a godly calling; and to confess any lapses into sin and return quickly to God ‘that our repentance may be as notable as our fall’.212 Francis Bunny also noted that there were many good uses of an oath, such as the ending of strife and controversies, as well as in assuring bargains and covenants, and in binding servants to faithful service.213

Conclusions Unlike the rest of the chapters in this book, this chapter has not set out to make a single overarching argument. Rather, it has attempted to introduce the reader to some of the themes, concepts, and contextual knowledge, without which it would be impossible to appreciate the significance of the Decalogue in sixteenth-​century England. We began by exploring the significance and multivalence of the post-​reformation concept of ‘law’. In one sense the Ten Commandments were simply a set of rules that had been given to the Jews a long time ago on Mount Sinai, but in another they were a living expression of the divine will; an echo of the law of nature grafted into humanity at creation, the single commandment given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden for the fulfilment of which God’s son later lived on earth and was crucified. The two tablets of stone inscribed by God’s own finger and given to Moses as described in the Book of Exodus were qualitatively the same as the natural law written by God on the fleshy tables of man’s heart. While the ancient Jewish ceremonial laws were therefore abrogated by the coming of Christ and had no claim of authority over Christian men and women; and whilst the judicial laws of Moses were partly superseded and partly remained in force at the discretion of the Greenham, Workes, p. 75. Allen, Treasurie, p. 85. 213 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse:  or, A  plaine and familiar explanation of the ten commandements, pp. 66–​7. 211 212

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Christian magistrate and commonwealth; God’s moral law, as expressed in the Ten Words of the Decalogue, remained a binding force on Christians everywhere. This chapter has also explored the most obvious way in which the reformation changed the Ten Commandments:  by renumbering them. By expressing a preference for the giving of the commandments in the Book of Exodus over their repetition in the Book of Deuteronomy, and by opting to follow the august fathers Origen and Jerome over the patristic colossus Augustine, Reformed divines abandoned the practice of their Catholic and Lutheran brethren in favour of the numbering system used by Orthodox Christians and Jews. The significance of this move has hitherto primarily been seen in terms of securing the centrality of the concepts of iconoclasm and idolatry at the heart of English Protestantism’s vision of itself and its enemies. However, what is often neglected but may have been more theologically significant in the long run was the fact that the elision of the two forms of covetousness to form the new Tenth Commandment facilitated the development of a precept which forbade unconscious concupiscence itself. The reformed Tenth Commandment therefore acted as an important underpinning for the Calvinist stress on the total depravity of human nature, and its moral and religious investment in the Pauline dichotomy between corrupt flesh and pure spirit. In other words, the Reformed Tenth Commandment acted as both expression and guarantor of a new anthropology of iniquity. Moving on the first of ten individual commandment case studies, this chapter charted in detail the twists and turns of Reformed exegesis of the Second Commandment. As well as forbidding the making of graven images, the commandment labelled all ‘will-​worship’ dangerous and heretical, thereby characterising a carnal and idolatrous Catholic other against which pure Protestant worship could be defined. The true worship of God was spiritual and honest; false worship was fleshy, and designed to beguile the senses whilst simultaneously bewitching the mind. False worship of the true God was even worse than the worship of false gods, worse than atheism itself, placing the supererogation of the Romish hierarchy at the apex of a gross pyramid of sinful idolatry. Indeed, God saw idolatry as nothing less than spiritual adultery, a crime which he punished jealously and with righteous anger. Next it considered the differences between the Catholic and Protestant Decalogues. Catholics viewed the commandments as an important ­practical and moral guide to be followed in return for divine favour, and they contextualised the precepts of God’s law alongside a series of

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commandments of the Church and a whole range of other scriptural and non-​scriptural moral frameworks. Protestants, on the other hand, focussed their moral teaching almost exclusively on the Decalogue, and created a series of different roles or functions for it: in facilitating obedience to temporal government; in condemning the reprobate to hell and driving the elect to Christ; and in providing the godly with a practical guide to use in striving towards sanctification. The reformation also saw a gradual confessionalisation of the Decalogue, during which individual precepts were reshaped to support a particular religious standpoint, and to condemn all others in general (and sometimes quite specific) terms. Catholics also remained more closely attached to patristic tendencies to emphasise the numerological significance of the commandments, whereas for Protestants this strand of exegetical tradition remained at best a curiosity, and at worst a superstitious distraction. The Ten Commandments contained a number of specific blessings and curses over and above their collective nature as a body divine law, which promised the possibility of both temporal and eternal joy and suffering to believers and unbelievers. These specific covenants may have unconsciously encouraged Protestants to see the Decalogue in what for educated divines were uncomfortably transactional terms, and it is the contention both of this section and of Chapter  6 that the Decalogue played a not inconsiderable role in facilitating a particular manner of piety –​referred to pejoratively by contemporaries as ‘countrie divinitie’ –​amongst a large swathe of the population of post-​reformation England. Finally, it looked in more detail at the requirement of the Third Commandment for believers to live an honest life in a godly calling, and to frame all their actions towards the glory of the creator. The precept against the taking of the Lord’s name in vain did not condemn all swearing and oaths, but rather censured any profanation of God’s name, titles, attributes, persons, religion, word or creatures. This initial survey should therefore stand us in good stead as we move forward to consider in more detail the three offices of the law in reformation and post-​reformation England.

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But, since euery lawfull Christian Prince, is Supreme gouernour of his owne subjects in things Spirituall and Temporall, or, which is all one, is Custos utriusque Tabulae, Keeper of both Tables: to deny that of their Soveraigne, is to deny him to be their lawfull Prince. Richard Harris, The English concord in ansvver to Becane’s English iarre (1614)

Introduction In 1998, Christopher Marsh coined the phrase ‘compliance conundrum’ to describe one of the central problems of post-​revisionist English reformation historiography: how, within the space of a generation, was a population of loyal Catholics converted into a country of ardent Protestants, with comparatively little resistance?1 One response to such a proposition has been to reject it; if not outright, then by chipping away at its various elements until it becomes meaningless. Just how loyal were those medieval Catholics?2 How Protestant were those post-​reformation parishioners?3 How do we judge the quality and quantity of resistance?4 Ethan Shagan, for example, has suggested that the reformation was not forced onto a reluctant populace at all; rather, the English people (or at least a significant portion of them) were active collaborators who stood to benefit financially, materially, or socially from the government’s agenda of religious change.5 Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-​Century England (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 197. E.g. J. F. Davis, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation in England’, in Peter Marshall (ed.), The Impact of the English Reformation 1500–​1640 (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 37–​54. 3 E.g. Christopher Haigh. ‘“A Matter of Much Contention in the Realm”: Parish Controversies over Communion Bread in Post-​Reformation England’, History 88 [no.291] (2003), pp. 393–​404. 4 Eamon Duffy, Fires of faith:  Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven & London:  Yale University Press, 2009); See also Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers:  a History of the English Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 5 Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 1 2

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As important as such nuance may be, in broad brush strokes the facts still remain that one of the most devoted Catholic countries in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century had become one of the continent’s most important Protestant powers by the end of it, and that while this transition was accompanied by the ongoing threat of state-​sanctioned persecution and punctuated by occasional flashpoints of rebellion, for most people conflict was the exception rather than the norm. Most of the population of England did not experience inter-​confessional violence on anywhere near the same level as, for example, France during the religious wars.6 The aim of this chapter is not to provide a detailed study of the enforcement of the English reformation.7 Rather, it is to explore in detail the first office of the Decalogue in the context of sixteenth century England: that is, the application of the Ten Commandments to the realm of secular governance and civil affairs. Niels Hemmingsen described the ‘Externall (or outward) use of Lawe’ as being ‘by discipline to gouverne ye people, that in outward honesti of manners, they might live quietly, according to the Law, and that they should not commit any heinous wickedness, openly, which is forbidden in the law of God’.8 This office of the law, Hemmingsen explained, applied particularly to parents, magistrates, masters, tutors, and ministers of the word, who all had a duty to ‘dillygently take heede, that such as bee committed to their charge, doo live, in outwarde honestye of life, soundly, and shamefastly’. The law of God, he clarified, was ‘called, MORAL, bycause it is a certaine common rule, according unto which every manne should direct, and frame his manners’.9 Chapter 1 explored the varieties and validity of concepts of divine law in reformation England; this chapter moves on from the abstract theory to look at how, in context, those ideas came to condition concepts of authority and order. Its c­ ontention is that during the English reformation, the Ten Commandments came to inform ideas about secular authority and justice in a manner and to an extent which was unprecedented. They did this in several ways, but principally by establishing uncontrovertibly that secular (and especially royal)

E.g. Mack P.  Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–​1629 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7 In the manner, for example, of G.R. Elton, Policy and police: the enforcement of the Reformation in the age of Thomas Cromwell (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Cf. G.W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the remaking of the English Church (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005). 8 Niels Hemmingsen, The vvay of lyfe A Christian, and catholique institution comprehending principal poincts of Christian religion, trans. N. Denham (1578), p. 31. See also Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 282. 9 Hemmingsen, The vvay of lyfe, p. 31. 6

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authority was divinely ordained and subject to no earthly constraints, especially not to the meddling pretentions of popes. Concepts of divine law and royal authority were intertwined in reformation England perhaps more tightly than anywhere else in sixteenth-​century Europe through the mechanism of the royal supremacy. As Alec Ryrie has noted, the author of that supremacy, Henry VIII, viewed religious issues refracted through the lens of kingship; ‘a key consequence of this was a theology in which law, whether divine or royal, was of the highest importance’. Henry therefore conceptualised God primarily as ‘a king in his role as lawgiver’, seeing the creator as a being ‘much like himself ’.10 This was an egotistical self-​fashioning utterly in tune with the rhetoric of the broader magisterial reformation which, as Ronald Rittgers has explained, aimed to remove power over the Church Militant from the manicured hands of the Romish whore of Babylon and safeguard it under the protection of the mailed fists of divinely ordained temporal rulers.11 Henry was reputed to have called Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man ‘a book for me and all kings to read’.12 The questionable source for this claim is Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, but the reasons why it remains so plausible are manifold: in that work, Tyndale explained that ‘the king is, in this world, without law, and may at his lust do right or wrong, and shall give accounts but to God only’; ‘the obedience of all Degrees’ was ‘proved by God’s word’.13 ‘God’s word’ in this respect extended far beyond the Decalogue, of course, although as will be seen below the Fifth Commandment became a foundation text for all species of hierarchical relationships. Lucy Wooding has observed that ‘in Henry’s own mind, and more importantly in his propaganda, he was dismissing all worldly authorities to hang instead on the authority of Scripture’.14 The notion of God’s moral law was a key constituent of a greater reservoir of scriptural precedents for royal authority, Alec Ryrie, ‘Divine Kingship and Royal Theology in Henry VIII’s Reformation’, Reformation, 7 (2002), p. 65. See also Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 58. 11 Rittgers Ronald, The Reformation of the Keys (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 4. Cf. Thomas, Ingmethorpe, A sermon vpon the words of Saint Paul, Let euerie soule be subiect vnto the higher powers wherein the Popes soueraigntie ouer princes, amongst other errors, is briefly but sufficiently refuted, and the supremacie of the King, by cleare euidence and strong proofe auerred (1619). 12 Malcolm B.  Yarnell III, Royal Priesthood in the English Reformation (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 129. 13 William Tyndale, ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’ (1528), in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1848), pp. 168, 178. 14 Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 61. 10

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alongside Romans 13:1, 1 Samuel 26:9, Psalm 82:6, and so on.15 Malcolm Yarnell has therefore described Henry VIII’s picture of himself ‘as a sacral king with supreme authority over the church and state’.16 By establishing the total supremacy of the monarch over temporal matters, including the government of the visible church, Tyndale, Luther and others were condemning the Pope’s usurpation of secular authority; indeed, writing ‘against the pope’s false power’, Tyndale claimed that ‘whoseover without the commandment of the temporal officer, to whom God hath given the sword, layeth hand on the sword to take vengeance, the same deserveth death in the deed-​doing’.17 As Elton noted in Policy and Police, the whole Henrician annulment case was built around the validity of aspects of the Old Testament law, and Old Testament kings became the models for English reformers.18 This could have equated to the issuing of a carte blanche to keen tyrants and enthusiastic despots; however, the Ten Commandments not only helped to establish the divine nature of secular authority, they also played an important role in shaping and thus limiting it.19 As Tyndale noted, the king was a brother in Christ except in respect of judgement when his duty was to preach ‘the sharp law of vengeance. Let him take the holy judges of the Old Testament for an ensample, and namely Moses, which in executing the law was merciless; otherwise more a mother unto them, never avenging his own wrongs, but suffering all things’.20 This chapter will begin by exploring further the ways in which the Ten Commandments came to shape ideas about royal authority and The third part of the homily on obedience stated: ‘this is God’s ordinance, God’s commandment, and God’s holy will, that the whole body of every realm, and all the members and parts of the same, shall be subject to their head, their king . . . and (as St Paul writeth) “for conscience’ sake, and not for fear only”’. Romans 13 was essentially a gloss on the second table of the Decalogue. ‘The third part of the sermon of obedience’, Sermons, or Homilies, appointed to be read in churches, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, of famous memory (Dublin: Printed for Anne Watson and B. Dugdale, 1821), p. 97. 16 Yarnell, Royal Priesthood in the English Reformation, p. 123. 17 Tyndale, ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, p.  188. In consonance with theories of imperial kingship being expounded by contemporaries as part of Henry VIII’s great matter, Tyndale was expounding here the principle of princeps legibus solutus, outlined in the Justinian Digest and debated at length by medieval jurists. 1 Samuel 26: 7–​12, cited by Tyndale and by most authors on this subject, made it clear that kings were the Lord’s anointed, above correction or reproach. 18 G. R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 175. 19 David Kastan has suggested that, while the English Bible helped to accomplish the break with Rome and the idea of England’s election, ‘it never became an effective agent of Tudor absolutism’. This chapter argues that the Ten Commandments did just that, but we should also be alert to the ways in which they helped to condition that same ‘absolutism’. David Kastan, ‘“The noyse of the new Bible”; reform and reaction in Henrician England’, in Claire McEachern and Deborah Shuger (eds), Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 62–​3. 20 Tyndale, ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, p. 203. 15

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orderly government, before moving on to examine notions of authority and responsibility more broadly through the Fifth Commandment to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’. It will then consider the extent to which concepts of divine law informed the exercise of justice in England, in particular through the rhetoric of sermons preached at meetings of the Assizes, and then through an exploration of the Seventh Commandment, and the debate over whether the crime of adultery ought to be punishable by death.

Heavenly Authority and Earthly Government God’s moral law demanded obedience from his creation. This obedience was so natural and fundamental that, in principle, even dumb animals were inherently prone to it. The dean of Rochester and future bishop of Gloucester Godfrey Goodman, writing in 1622 about The religion of dumbe creatures, explained that ‘truly, for the practice of their religion in their lives and conversations, which appears in the keeping and fulfilling of this decalogue or naturall law, I cannot but greatly admire them’.21 This natural ability of his creatures to obey God’s law, however, had been deformed in humanity by Adam and Eve’s sinful actions in the Garden of Eden. Calvin noted that God had therefore instituted ‘politike lawes’ for ‘civill government’, ‘not to stablishe perfect holinesse among us, but to remedie the vices whereunto we be inclined’.22 In other words, secular justice was instituted by God in order to attempt to rein in and control the sinful tendencies of post-​lapsarian humanity. The JP, MP, Sheriff and baronet Thomas Palmer explained that all law was, in essence, divine, having as its ‘derivation and spring-​head from the eternall fountaine of reason of the will of God’. In practice there were three kinds of law: the laws of God, nature, and men, ‘since the revelation of that divine will of God hath not beene manifested in one and the same manner always to all people’; but all were consonant and worked in tandem with one another.23 The Mosaic law and the law of Christ were progressively clearer restatements of the moral law, for the benefit of the increasingly spiritually degenerate human race.24 Godfrey Goodman, The creatures praysing God: or, The religion of dumbe creatures (1622), p. 26. Jean Calvin, The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (1583), p. 687. 23 Thomas Palmer, An essay of the meanes hovv to make our trauailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable (1606), pp. 95–​6. 24 Palmer, An essay of the meanes hovv to make our trauailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable, p. 96. For more detail on these laws, and the relationship between them, see Chapter 1. 21 22

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Indeed, as Calvin himself noted, the repetition of the commandments in Deuteronomy was merely God’s way of upbraiding ‘the people of Israel with their brutish dulnesse, in repeating his lawe unto them the second time’.25 Robert Allen described the law of God as ‘the fundamental rule and ground of all wisdom, righteousness and holiness’, ‘more to be desired than gold, and more earnestly to be sought after than any jewel or treasure’.26 Virtue itself was defined by Allen as consisting ‘of perfect obedience to the Law’.27 Consequently, the Ten Commandments were commonly seen as containing ‘the summe of the godly wysedome, and in a brefenesse doth comprehende all maner of lawes and constitutions that can be any wher’.28 The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, and their repetition and summary in the New in Matthew 7:12 and 22:37, were labelled by the Somerset minister Richard Eburne as ‘a Royal Law propounded unto us, and enacted by Christ himselfe’, which formed the ‘principall and notable Grounde of humane lawes’.29 As explored in the introduction to this chapter, ideas of divine law and royal authority rapidly became fused during the early stages of the English reformation. Towards the end of his life, the head of Magdalen College and moderate puritan Laurence Humphrey, recalling the Pilgrimage of Grace some fifty years after the event, attributed Tudor England’s largest and most serious popular rebellion to the fact that ‘in the raigne of Henry the eight by Parliament, the Lords praier and the ten commandements were decreed to be learned in English’.30 The Dorset minister Peter Barker explained how the pope was guilty of concealing and perverting the Decalogue, before describing in graphic detail how the monarchs of England had destroyed him, seeing God’s laws taught and observed throughout the realm: ‘King Henry broke his right leg of rents and revenewes’, ‘Kind Edward the sixt broke his left leg, of Idolatrous service’, and finally ‘our late Q. Elizabeth of famous memory crushed his head, like the woman who cast a peece of a milstone upon the head of Abimeloch, and brake his braine-​pan’.31 Perhaps the most extraordinary literary expression Calvin, The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, p. 2. Allen, Treasurie, sigs. Aiiv, Avv. 27 Allen, Treasurie, p. 23. 28 Johannes Carion, The thre bokes of cronicles (1550), ff. xiv-​xiir. 29 Richard Eburne, The royal lavv: or, The rule of equitie prescribed us by our Sauiour Christ Math. 7.12. Teaching all men most plainly and briefely, how to behaue themselues iustly, conscionably, and vprightly, in all their dealings, toward all men (1616), p. 2. 30 Laurence Humphrey, A view of the Romish hydra and monster, traison, against the Lords annointed (1588), pp. 119–​20. 31 Barker, Painefull, p. 10. 25 26

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of the confluence of secular and divine authority in Tudor England was the anonymous 1547 An heavenly acte concernynge how man shal lyve made by our suffraine lorde God. This short but astonishing publication consisted of a first-​person disquisition by God himself on how to settle the matter of religion in England; it could equally have been a record of a speech made by Henry VIII, declaring that ‘we have prepared eternal rest for man so that after this he wil kepe convenant with us, and live in our laws and statutes that we have set forth by our high court of parliament, both of lords spiritual and temporal to the same consenting’.32 The character of God proceeded to paraphrase the Decalogue as a series of acts of parliament; ‘further it is enacted, thou shalt not kil. Thou shalt not stele. Thou shalt not beare no false wytnes’.33 God’s was the only voice to speak, but this imaginative recreation of a heavenly parliament was fully staffed by a cast of biblical officers: Christ as vicegerent, John the Evangelist as Lord Secretary, the Apostle Paul as Lord Chancellor, David the Psalmist as ambassador, Moses as Speaker, and so on. ‘Be it knowen therefore’, God concluded, ‘that thys is the first and the last parliament that we have or wyll enact oure lawes for evermore’.34 It surely says something about the Henrician reformation that the natural way to look back on it in 1547 was as a divine parliament, enacting as law the Ten Commandments, and presided over by a caricature of God the father who at a distance could easily have been mistaken for Henry VIII himself. Indeed, Henry had presciently auditioned for the role of God a decade earlier in 1537, as evidenced by his attempt to re-​write the text of the Ten Commandments in the evangelical formulary The Institution of a Christian Man. Amongst other emendations, Henry proposed replacing the text within the First Commandment, ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me’, with the modified phrase ‘Thou shalt not have nor repute any other God, or gods but me Jesu Christ’. One can only imagine the titanic effort required by Cranmer to marshall all his tact and self-​restraint, as he responded to his capricious master’s annotation with the comment that here be set forth the ten commandments, as they were written by God in the two tables. And it seemeth better to read these commandments, taken out of the scripture, even as they be there written, without any addition,

Anon, An heauenly acte concernynge how man shal lyue made by our suffraine lorde God the father, God the sonne, and God the holye goost, and al the whole clergie in heuen consenting to the same (1547), sig. Aiiir. 33 Anon, An heauenly acte, sig. Aviir. 34 Anon, An heauenly acte, sig. Bviir. 32

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than that we should alter the words of scripture, and specially God’s own commandments.35

The fusion of divine law and royal authority may have lent itself most naturally to a Henrician context, but it was an association which remained strong throughout the period, and may indeed be seen as a continuity stretching from the start of the reformation through to early Stuart expressions of the divine right of kings.36 The dean of Salisbury and future bishop of Oxford, John Bridges, explained in his tellingly titled The supremacie of Christian princes over all persons throughout their dominions, that ‘whatsoever the question is: if it be of the lawe, so farre forth as pertaineth to the ten commandments of the tables’, or to any other division or species of law, there was ‘no parte ecclesiasticall or temporall, exempted from the oversight, care, direction & appointment of the king’.37 The legal writer Richard Crompton expounded the manner in which God, ‘knowing in his everlasting wisedome, how necessarie, good, and wholesome lawes should be for the government of his people’, firstly ‘gave the lawes of the tenne commandments in the mount Sinay’, and then ‘ordained Kings, Princes, and Governors, to rule and order their subjects, and to punish the offenders thereof by these lawes’ and others of their own devising.38 Heinrich Bullinger in the sixth sermon of the second of his Decades, a work dedicated to Edward VI, explained that: The magistracy, by the scriptures, may be defined to be a divine ordinance or action, whereby the good being defended by the prince’s aid, and the evil suppressed by the same authority, godliness, justice, honesty, peace, and tranquillity, both public and private, are safely preserved. Whereby we gather, that to govern a commonweal, and to execute the office of a magistrate, is a worship and service to God himself.39 ‘Corrections of the Institution by Henry VIII with Cranmer’s Annotations’, in The Works of Thomas Cranmer Volume II: Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), p. 100. 36 For example, Roger Manning has called the Henrician and Edwardian alienation of episcopal jurisdiction ‘spectacular and dramatic’. Roger B. Manning, ‘The Crisis of Authority during the Reign of Elizabeth I’, The Journal of British Studies, 11.1 (1971), p. 1. Peter Marshall has also recently discussed Henrician and Edwardian religious reforms in particular in terms of the ‘confessionalisation’ of the English state: Peter Marshall, ‘Confessionalisation, Confessionalism and Confusion in the English Reformation’, in Thomas Mayer (ed.), Reforming Reformation (Ashgate: Farnham, 2012), pp. 43–​64. 37 John Bridges, The supremacie of Christian princes ouer all persons throughout theor dominions, in all causes so wel ecclesiastical as temporall (1573), pp. 272–​3. 38 Richard Crompton, The mansion of magnanimitie (1599), sig. I3v. 39 Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger:  the first and second decades, trans. H.I, ed. Thomas Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), p. 309. 35

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For Bullinger the duty of the magistrate to hold himself tightly to God’s laws was paramount. In religious matters, there was no cause ‘why the king or magistrate should suppose, that power is given to him to make new laws touching God’; rather, ‘for as every magistrate is ordained of God, and is God’s minister, so must he be ruled by God, and be obedient to God’s holy word and commandment’.40 Temporal governors had more latitude to tweak civil laws to their own situation and needs. However, Bullinger concluded, ‘For civil and politic laws, I add thus much, and say, that those seem to be the best laws, which, according to the circumstance of every place, person, state, and time, do come nearest unto the precepts of the ten commandments’.41 Just as celestial and temporal law and authority were seen as mutually reinforcing, so the office of the magistrate was seen as a divine office. The chronicler Thomas Lanquet explained how, after the delivery of the Israelites from Egypt and the issuing of the Ten Commandments, ‘God gave to them a certaine politike governaunce, and a special kingdom, in which nothing wanted, that apperteined to the true worshipping of god priesthode, and civile justice’.42 Similarly the English, as God’s new chosen people, could and should expect a civil and political regime infused with order and divine justice. In return for his divine office, therefore, the magistrate was obliged to protect and police God’s laws.43 Kings, wrote John Ponet, were ‘subjecte and ought to be obedient to Goddes lawes and Worde. For the hole decalog and every part thereof is aswell written to kinges, princes, and other publike persons, as to private persons’.44 It was not lawful for a king to break the commandments, Ponet explained; in fact, he was ‘bounden and charged under greater paines to kepe them than any other, bicause he is bothe a private man in respecte of his owne persone, and a publike in respecte of his office’.45 As one might expect from one of the key figures in the development of so-​called ‘Calvinist’ resistance theory, Ponet’s position in respect to the relationship between kings and Bullinger, the first and second decades, pp. 333–​4. Bullinger, the first and second decades, p. 343. Likewise, in looke from Adam Bullinger noted that all civil law was effectively comprehended within the second table of the Decalogue, and the general principle to ‘Love thy neighbour as thy selfe’: Heinrich Bullinger, Looke from Adam, and behold the Protestants faith and religion evidently proued out of the holy Scriptures against all atheists, papists, loose libertines, and carnall gospellers, trans. Miles Coverdale (1624), p. 51. 42 Thomas Lanquet, An epitome of chronicles (1559), ff. 25v-​26r. 43 On the association of England and biblical Israel, see Michael McGiffert, ‘God’s Controversy with Jacobean England’, American Historical Review, 88.5 (1983), pp. 1151–​1174. 44 John Ponet, A shorte treatise of politike pouuer and of the true obedience which subiectes owe to kynges and other ciuile gouernours (1556), sig. Ciir. 45 John Ponet, A shorte treatise of politike pouuer, sig. Ciiv. 40 41

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the law was a radical one. Kings, Ponet noted, were merely conduits of divine power, not powerful men in themselves. The person of the king was therefore bound to be subservient to the ordinances which it was the office of the king to preside over. As we will see below, the more usual position was to place kings above judgement by men, but to stress that they would eventually be accountable for their actions before God.46 Commentators throughout the period of the reformation were therefore all but unanimous in holding that, just as the monarch owed their authority to divine law, so their office consisted primarily of the promotion and enforcement of the holy precepts of the Decalogue. In his translation of Philippus Caesar, Thomas Rogers explained that the magistrate was principally appointed of God to two essential offices: firstly, ‘that he sound himself the tenne Commaundements, or cause them to be published, inculcated, and repeted in the eares of the people’, and secondly to be ‘a vigilant keeper and executor of the tenne commaundementes, and by the severitie of punishment mainaine them’.47 In essence, this was the advocacy of a form of Theocratic kingship, modelled upon the fearless magistrates of the Old Testament.48 In such a context, it is worth recalling the frequent parallels drawn between the reforming Tudor monarchs and Old Testament patriarchs, princes and prophets, including Henry VIII as Moses, Edward VI as Josiah, and Elizabeth I as Deborah.49 For Sir Walter Raleigh, musing upon the Ten Commandments while imprisoned in the Tower, the consequence of human society failing to obey the Decalogue was chaos; ‘if we did not for our ownesakes strive to observe these lawes: all societie of men, and all indevours, all happinesse and contentment in this life would bee taken away: and every state and commonweale in the world fall to the ground and dissolve’.50 As such, it was essential that human law was formulated upon heavenly principles, ‘for there is no law just and Cf. the discussion of ‘Justice and Punishment’ later in this chapter. Philipp Caesar, A general discourse against the damnable sect of vsurers grounded vppon the vvorde of God, trans. Thomas Rogers (1578), f. 31v. 48 As Patrick Collinson notes, Henry VIII did not invent the politicisation of religion (or the sacralisation of politics), but perhaps we can credit him with the biblicisation of kingship. Patrick Collinson, ‘The politics of religion and the religion of politics in Elizabethan England’, Historical Research, 82:215 (2009), p. 75. 49 E.g. Catharine Parr, The lamentacion of a synner (1547), sig. Dvir; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor church militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Allen Lane 1999), Chapter 2; John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (1570 edition) (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011) www.johnfoxe.org [Accessed: 21.10.2015], p. 1522; Alexandra Walsham, ‘“A Very Deborah? The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds), The Myth of Elizabeth (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 143–​68, etc. 50 Walter Raleigh, The history of the world (1617), p. 287. 46

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legitimate (saith S.  Augustine) which the Law makers have not derived from the eternall’ or drawn out of the law of nature.51 Magistrates only fulfilled their office as ministers of God, Thomas Rogers recorded, ‘when they judge according to Gods lawes’, which laws were ‘either imprinted in the minds of al and everie man, and are for that termed the lawes of nature; or else written in the worde of God, which is the scripture, and are called the Decalog or Ten commandments’.52 To conduct themselves otherwise, and enact authority contrary to the laws of God, was nothing less than to prosecute ‘the law of Satan’.53 It was the duty of the minister, explained Henoch Clapham, to rail against breakers of the law, and to sting the conscience of the magistrate to act; but it was the magistrate, and he alone, who ought to punish and if necessary put to death transgressors of the moral law, and to put adversaries of true religion to the sword.54 The Marian exile, diplomat and future Privy Councillor Thomas Wilson described the difference between political laws and the gospel by designating the former as designed to ‘cause an outward discipline to be observed even of the wycked, so that thei dare not offende outwardlye for feare of corporall punishement’.55 The magistrate who enforced this discipline and administered this punishment was ‘ordeyned of God’, and his first charge was ‘to sette forth the ten commaundementes geven to Moses, in the stony tables, and to cause them to be observed universallie, punishing the offendurs for their evil dedes corporallye’.56 Any other laws passed by him should ‘not dissent from these x’. Rogers held the common opinion that the judicial laws of the time of Moses were no longer binding upon Christians as they had been upon the Israelites; however, he made it clear that it was the Christian magistrate’s duty to legislate a new set of judicial laws, of ‘actes of Parliamente made for the reformacion of thinges that be amisse, and Magistrates apointed to punish such as breake the ten commaundementes, called the morall lawe’.57 It was not only English commentators who argued for the God-​given status of the Raleigh, The history of the world, p. 289. Thomas Rogers, The general session conteining an apologie of the most comfortable doctrine concerning the ende of this world (1581), p. 74. 53 Rogers, The general session, p. 74. 54 Henoch Clapham, Three partes of Salomon his Song of Songs, expounded (1603), p.  181. The early Reformation origins of the view that godly monarchs had a duty to persecute the enemies of true religion has been described by Karl Gunther in Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–​1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Chapter 2. 55 Thomas Wilson, The rule of reason, conteinyng the arte of logique (1551), sig. Dviiiv. 56 Wilson, The rule of reason, sig. Eir. 57 Wilson, The rule of reason, sig. Eiiir. 51 52

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magistrate, and his duty to prosecute the precepts of the Decalogue.58 The Lutheran legal and theological writer Christoph Hegendorph, in a pedagogical work for families, explained that by the First Commandment ‘al Magistrates do learn that thei shuld always feare God, and therefore they neither do nothyng, nor judge nothing whiche may eyther oppugne god or displease hym’.59 The Lutheran legal scholar Johannes Ferrarius noted that, while ‘a magistrate ought to be politicque and civil’, it was also his duty to ensure ‘that Goddes lawes muste be joyned with mannes ordinaunces’ and that ‘the tenne commaundementes muste be kepte’.60 No less a figure than Johann Sigismund, the Calvinist Elector of Brandenburg, in a proclamation issued in 1614 and translated into English the same year, described his role ‘as Soveraigne of these countries by God appointed to follow and use our office according unto the first and the second Table of the ten Commandements of God’.61 Earlier in this section it was noted that the concept of the authority of the magistrate being ordained by God’s law, and of the duty of the magistrate to execute the Ten Commandments, were essential continuities across the reformation period, and across a spectrum of ecclesiological positions. The range of authors cited above –​from William Tyndale to Catherine Parr, Heinrich Bullinger and John Ponet, through John Bridges and Laurence Humphrey to Henoch Clapham and Peter Barker –​certainly support this contention. However, it is worth noting the development of a trend towards the end of the period covered by this book in describing the monarch with a particular form of words; ‘custos utriusque tabulae’, ‘the guardian (or keeper) of both tables (of the law)’. Table 2.1 shows the usages of this phrase in the EEBO TCP corpus of full-​ text early English books.62 This is a crude metric, which only includes data from a limited number of early modern published texts, and which measures only one specific form of words as opposed to the broader concept described, but it For an example of the reception of continental political theology in Tudor England, see Torrance Kirby, The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Leiden:  Brill, 2007), especially Chapter 3. 59 Christoph Hegendorph, Domestycal or housholde sermons for a godly housholder, to his children and famyly, trans. Henry Reiginalde (1548), sigs, Cvir-​v. 60 Johannes Ferrarius, A vvoorke of Ioannes Ferrarius Montanus, touchynge the good orderynge of a common weale, trans. William Bauande (1559), f. 196v. 61 John Sigismund, A proclamation, published by the high and mightie Prince Elector Iohn Sigismond Marquesse of Brandenburgh, the foure and twentieth day of February anno 1614, trans. Mich. Vanderstegen (1614), p. 6. 62 As of October 2015. 58

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The Civil Office of the Law Table 2.1. Instances of the phrase ‘custos utriusque tabulae’ in the EEBO TCP full text corpus, 1500–​1700 Period

Occurrences

1501–​1600 1601–​10 1611–​20 1621–​30 1631–​40 1641–​50 1651–​60 1661–​70 1671–​80 1681–​90 1691–​1700

0 3 hits in 3 records 3 hits in 2 records 6 hits in 6 records 8 hits in 8 records 24 hits in 21 records 25 hits in 24 records 24 hits in 21 records 12 hits in 11 records 20 hits in 19 records 6 hits in 5 records

Source: Data gathered from https://eebo.chadwyck.com [October 2015].

is striking that the phrase is not used at all during the sixteenth century, and that it peaks in the middle decades of the seventeenth, specifically during the periods of the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration, with a drop in the 1670s, a rise in the decade of the Glorious Revolution, and a significant reduction thereafter. The first documented occurrence of the phrase was in a presbyterian publication by William Stoughton (not to be confused with the later colonial official of the same name), printed in Middelburg by Richard Schilders in 1604. Stoughton argued that moral offences currently under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, such as adultery and slander, ‘ought no more to be exempted, from the Kings temporall Courtes, then matters of theft, murther, treason, and such like’, on the basis that: there is no crime, or offence of what nature or qualitie soever, respecting any commaundement, conteyned within either of the two tables, of the holie law of God . . . . [but that] hath bene evermore, and is now punishable, by the Kings Regall, and temporall jurisdiction.63

In support of his contention, Stoughton argued that in the case of ­heresy examinations, ‘the King being custos utriusque tabulae’ had ‘power by William Stoughton, An assertion for true and Christian church-​policie VVherein certaine politike obiections made against the planting of pastours and elders in every congregation, are sufficientlie aunswered (Middelburg: Richard Schilders, 1604), pp. 116–​7.

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his Kinglie office, to enquire of heresie, to condemne an hereticke, & to put him to death’ without the interference of ‘the Bishoppes, by their Episcopall, and ordinarie spirituall power’.64 This was a clever repurposing of the Henrician argument against papal supremacy, this time turning the authority of divine right monarchy into a puritan weapon with which to attack the notion of jure divino episcopacy.65 Given that the focus of this book is on the period c.1485–​c.1625 I will only consider in more detail occurrences of the phrase until the beginning of its first peak in the 1640s. In that time, it was used by authors across the religious spectrum, from Independents and puritans, through mainstream Protestants to avant-​garde conformists. Indeed, the next use after Stoughton was by the avant-​garde conformist preacher and then bishop of Chichester, Lancelot Andrewes. In a sermon preached before the king in 1606, Andrewes described Moses as ‘custos utriusque Tabulae’ in order to make the point that in biblical times this power had been the reserve of the chief magistrate and not the high priest, Moses’ brother Aaron.66 His broader point, therefore, was that the king alone had the right to summon religious councils and assemblies; it was not acceptable that ‘the godly among the people, might doe it of themselves’.67 Whatever later developments might occur, therefore, the divine authority of the monarch and his duty to guard the precepts of the Decalogue could be taken as axiomatic in the first decade of the seventeenth century, even if that axiom could be employed by both presbyterians and avant-​garde conformists for their own utterly divergent polemical and confessional agendas. In 1614, the clergyman and anti-​Catholic controversialist Richard Harris used the same argument to defend the right of the English Crown to put to death Catholics for treason. ‘Who can denie that it is treason’, he began, ‘for any subjects to deny their Soveraigne to be their lawfull Prince?’ ‘But’, he reasoned, ‘since every lawfull Christian Prince, is Supreme governour of his owne subjects in things Spirituall and Temporall, or, which is all one, is Custos utriusque Tabulae, Keeper of both Tables: to deny that of their Soveraigne,

Stoughton, An assertion for true and Christian church-​policie, pp. 119–​20. For further context on the broader debates, see J.P. Somerville, ‘The Royal Supremacy and Episcopacy “Jure Divino”, 1603–​1640’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 34.4 (1983), pp. 548–​58. 66 Lancelot Andrewes, A sermon preached before the Kings Maiestie, at Hampton Court, concerning the right and power of calling assemblies (1606), pp. 18–​19. In another sermon preached that year, Andrewes described Moses again as guardian of both tables. Lancelot Andrewes,  Concio habita coram serenissimo, Iacobo, Angliae, Scotiae, Franciae et Hyberniae Rege, fidei Defensore, &c. Apud curiam Hamptoniensem (1608), p. 18. 67 Andrewes, A sermon preached before the Kings Maiestie, at Hampton Court, pp. 53–​4. 64 65

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is to deny him to be their lawfull Prince’.68 This was an unashamedly circular defence of the royal supremacy in order to attack the power of the papacy and the right of English Catholics to oppose their divinely appointed monarch, based again on his role as guardian of God’s laws. No less a figure than James I himself, in the Basilicon Doron, advised his son to ‘study to be well seene in the Scriptures . . . as well for the knowledge of your own salvation, as that ye may be able to containe your Church in their calling, as Custos utriusque Tabulae’.69 As the Norfolk preacher Samuel Garey reminded the bench before the assizes at Thetford and Norwich in 1619, ‘a godly Magistrate is custos utriusque Tabulae, an happy instrument for the glory of God, and good of men’.70 The phrase was therefore employed by individuals from across the religious landscape of the early-​seventeenth-​ century Church of England. Joseph Hall, the dean of Worcester and future bishop of Exeter and Norwich, clarified in a sermon that only one who was ‘custos utriusque tabulae’ could legimately declare a holy war.71 But it is striking that most of the people who employed the term (prior to 1640 at least) were politically and religiously closer to Stoughton than to Andrewes, Hall, or James I. In other words, the phrase appeared most frequently on the printed pages of works by godly authors. Samuel Purchas, at a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, mulled over the ‘qualities of a king’, stressing his accountability to God: under whom, hee executeth power: that also limited by his Law, either in Commission, to command for God, as he is Custos utriusque Tabulae, or in permission of things, naturally indifferent, to be disposed by his wisdom, for the common good, and to lose their indifferencie in use, upon his command, or prohibition.72

It might seem counter-​intuitive to hear this paean to the divine right of kings disproportionately on the lips of puritan pamphleteers, but of course that was probably not the sense in which it was most frequently employed by them. To refer to the king as ‘custos utriusque tabulae’ was to recognise Richard Harris, The English concord in ansvver to Becane’s English iarre: together with a reply to Becan’s Examen of the English Concord. By Richard Harris, Dr. in Diuinitie (1614), pp. 160–​1. 69 James I, King of England, The vvorkes of the most high and mightie prince, Iames by the grace of God, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, defender of the faith, &c. (1616), p. 175. 70 Samuel Garey, Ientaculum Iudicum: or, a breakefast for the Bench (1623), p. 21. 71 Joseph Hall, The vvorks of Ioseph Hall Doctor in Diuinitie, and Deane of Worcester With a table newly added to the whole worke (1625), p. 452. 72 Samuel Purchas, The kings tovvre and triumphant arch of London. A sermon preached at Pauls Crosse, August. 5. 1622 (1623), p. 64. 68

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but also simultaneously to attempt to limit and direct his power; to remind him that his ultimate fealty was to God; and also to chastise him, and urge him to divert his energies more vigorously into punishing idolaters and Sabbath-​breakers and building a godly new Jerusalem. As the sometime godly (and repeatedly scandal-​prone) minister Stephen Jerome put it in a pamphlet celebrating the failure of Prince Charles’ Spanish Match, it was the duty of the ‘Christian Magistrate, as he is custos utriusque Tabulae, a keeper of both the tables of the law’ to ‘looke that Gods plough go forward, in duties religious towards God’.73 Arthur Hildersam, in a lecture preached at Ashby-​de-​la-​Zouch, explained that the magistrate was ‘by his calling . . . Custos utriusque tabulae, and charged with the law of God to see it kept by those that are under his authority’, including being ‘bound by Gods law’ to punish the sin of adultery and fornication with as much vigour as more obviously secular offences such as theft.74 John Milton would eventually go on to lable the idea of the Christian magistrate as ‘keeper of both tables’ as ‘false and deceivable’ in A treatise of civil power in ecclesiastical causes as part of an early defence of religious toleration. John Perry has suggested that Milton’s position may in turn have helped to inform the early opposition to toleration of the philosopher John Locke, who later in life would be one of its fiercest advocates.75 The association of royal and divine authority was tightly interwoven, not just in elite works of theology and polemic, but also in the fabric of the parish churches of England, and the liturgy which was enacted there. The Communion service outlined in the Book of Common Prayer began with the priest rehearsing the Ten Commandments, after every one of which the congregation spoke in unison ‘Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law’.76 Directly following the rehearsal of the commandments fell the Collects: the Collect of the day, and one of the two royal Collects. The first of these required subjects of the monarch to duly consider that he (or she) was the embodiment of divine authority, Stephen Jerome, Englands iubilee, or Irelands ioyes Io-​paean, for King Charles his welcome With the blessings of Great-​Britaine, her dangers, deliuerances, dignities from God, and duties to God, pressed and expressed (1625), p. 56. 74 Arthur Hildersam, CVIII lectures vpon the fourth of Iohn Preached at Ashby-​Delazouch in Leicester-​ shire (1632), pp. 77–​8. 75 John Milton, A treatise of civil power in ecclesiastical causes shewing that it is not lawfull for any power on earth to compell in matters of religion (1659), p. 81; John Perry, The pretenses of loyalty: Locke, liberal theory, and American political theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 81. 76 ‘The Book of Common Prayer’ (1559), Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer set forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, William Keatinge Clay (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1847), pp. 181–​2. For a closer analysis of the place of the Decalogue within the liturgy, see Chapter 6. 73

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Figure 2.1.  Caroline royal arms, St Helen’s church Gateley, Norfolk.

in order to faithfully serve, honour, and humbly obey him (or her). The second recalled ‘that the hearts of kings are in thy rule and governance, and that thou dost dispose and turn them, as it seemeth best to thy godly wisdom’.77 Kings were God’s anointed, and royal law had the force of the divine will behind it. The ambiguity surrounding the use of the title ‘guardian (or keeper) of the tables of the law’, however, throws into question the motivation behind the fine Caroline painted royal arms at the church of St Helen at Gateley in Norfolk (Figure 2.1). Along the top of the narrow wooden frame, picked out in gold against the black background, are the words ‘CVSTOS VTRIVSQVE TABVLÆ’. Was this an act of latent royalism, or a coded way of expressing hope that a wayward king might one day take more seriously his duty to promulgate and police the Ten Commandments throughout his kingdom? As we have seen, the motto could be employed by presbyterians to attack episcopacy, Laudians to attack puritans, conformists to attack popery, and puritans to

‘The Book of Common Prayer’ (1559), pp. 182–​3.

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scold the monarchy itself. None of these rhetorical positions would have been possible, however, if the principle had not become inviolable during the course of the English reformation that royal and divine law were intertwined to the point of co-​dependency.

The Fifth Commandment Honour thy Father and thy Mother That thy Days May be Long upon the Land which the LORD thy God Giveth Thee. Exodus 20:12

No commandment better encapsulated the principles and duties of secular authority and obedience than the fifth.78 In his Catechismus, Thomas Cranmer explained that the precept to honour father and mother was ‘the first and chief commaundemente of the second table, which doethe teach us, how we oughte to behave oure selfes towarde our neyghboure’.79 John Dod noted that the Fifth was ‘the first Commandement of the second table, upon which all the rest do depend: so heare, if this first commandement were wel observed, both of superiours and inferiours, there could be no disorder against any of the commandments following’. ‘All disorders in the other’, he added, ‘doe floe from hence: that either superiours are negligent in performing their duties of governing, or else inferiours are proud and stubborne, and refuse to obey their superiours.80 In other words, the Fifth Commandment was a divinely instituted charter for the maintenance of secular authority and temporal hierarchy. As John Bradford put it in his ‘Meditation upon the Ten Commandments’, now God ‘settest before mine eyes them whom thou for order’s sake and the more commodity of man in this life hast set in degree and authority above me’.81 Peter Barker likened the state of the commonwealth devoid of hierarchy to the chaotic condition of the earth at the start of creation, when it was ‘without forme, In addition, Robert Bast has observed that ‘this commandment enjoyed dispropotionate emphasis in the teaching schemes of late-​medieval and early modern Catholics and Protestants because it gave contemporaries a rubric for the articulation of moral directives with which authorities expressly hoped to strengthen the fundamental instiutions of society:  home, church and “state”’. Robert J.  Bast, ‘The Political Dimension of Religious Catechisms in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Europe, La Révolution française, 1 (2009), p. 3. See also Robert J. Bast, Honor your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, c. 1400–​1600 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997). 79 Thomas Cranmer, Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion for the synguler commoditie and profyte of childre[n]‌and yong people (1548), f. 38v. It is worth noting that due to Cranmer’s retention of the traditional numbering of the commandments due to his catechism’s Lutheran origins this was actually his Fourth Commandment. 80 Dod, Plaine, p. 181. 81 John Bradford, Sermons, Meditations, Examinations, &c., ed. Audrey Townsend (Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1853), p. 161. 78

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void, and darknes was upon the deepe’.82 The hierarchy, superiority and subjection ordered by the Fifth Commandment were therefore governing principles of both human society and the natural world.83 Hierarchy was ‘Gods ordinance, which to crosse is to warre against God’. This discussion of the Fifth Commandment will begin with an exploration of the persons to whom honour was ordained to be shown, before moving on to consider the nature of that honour, in general and according to a series of specific offices and relationships. The Fifth Commandment was not only about hierarchy and subjection, however, and the implicit duty of care required by the precept will be explored in the next section. The temporal blessing inherent in the commandment, ‘that thy days may be long upon the land’, was considered in Chapter 1. Almost all expositors of the Fifth Commandment began by establishing that the named persons ‘father’ and ‘mother’ should be taken to represent the full gamut of authority figures that humanity might be subject to during the course of their lives. At its most basic, such a range might simply encompass ‘thy parent . . . [as] Gods instrument for thy naturall being: thy Prince Gods instrument for thy civill being’ and ‘thy Pastor Gods instrument for thy spirituall being’; this was the tripartite structure adopted by the Kent minister and future dean of Canterbury cathedral John Boys.84 Richard Greenham’s imaginary catechumen elaborated that ‘by Father and Mother’ were to be understood ‘not only my naturall parents, but also all those whom God hath set over me, for my good, as Magistrates, Ministers, Maisters, &c.’.85 Francis Bunny also wrote initially of the obedience due by inferiors toward fathers, kings, magistrates and ministers, but went on to expand his discussion to include masters, elders and schoolmasters.86 The vicar of Stratford-​upon-​Avon and moderate puritan writer, Nicholas Byfield, explained that the authority of masters over servants came not by nature, nor by the laws of man, but by the law of God, and specifically the Fifth Commandment.87 It is worth mentioning, however, that although the application of the Fifth Commandment to a whole range of hierarchical relationships rapidly became the norm amongst post-​reformation Barker, Painefull, p. 205. Barker, Painefull, p. 206. 84 John Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures vsed in our English liturgie (1610), p. 98. 85 Richard Greenham, A briefe and necessarie catechisme (1602), sig. B1r. Cf. George Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements (1602), sig. O1v. 86 Francis Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse: or, A plaine and familiar explanation ofr the ten commandements (1617), p. 119, 139, 142. 87 Nicholas Byfield, A commentary: or, sermons vpon the second chapter of the first epistle of Saint Peter (1623), STC2: 4211, p. 730–​2. 82 83

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divines, it was neither instant nor the only possible direction of travel. The Henrician evangelical Thomas Solme in his traetys callyde the Lordis flayle added a substantial defence of the view that the Fifth Commandment ‘is a particulere commaundement for the carnall father & sone, and by nomens can suffere an allegory or popysche morall’.88 Especially invidious in the political climate of the day was the category of spiritual father, which bound all mortal men, including princes, to obey the Roman clergy.89 Still, the polemical context which gave rise to Solme’s treatise, printed in Antwerp in 1540, soon gave way to a home-​grown Protestant clericalist imperative which rapidly became the dominant theme. Expansion of the named authority figures of father and mother to encompass every conceivable superior became the norm, meaning that expositions of the Fifth Commandment were generally similar in tone but often differed in detail and precise scope. One of the most extensive lists was probably that enumerated by Robert Allen, in his Treasurie of catechism. By father and mother, he explained, were meant in the first place natural parents. Secondly came civil magistrates, comprising kings and princes, judges and justices, and all those in public office under them. Next were pastors and teachers of the word, followed by schoolmasters, teachers of languages and the liberal arts, those with wardship of fatherless children, and masters of manual trades and occupations. In fifth place were ‘all that be any way specially beneficiall to any of us’, a somewhat enigmatic category, followed in last place by ‘the aged in yeares, and all that are our ancients in grace and godlinesse’.90 Rather than listing their names, bishop of Derry George Downame explained that superiors were distinguished ‘according to the societies wherein they govern’, for instance in the family, schools, universities, Church and commonwealth’.91 For Edward Dering the list of authority figures to be obeyed comprised parents, princes and rulers, pastors and ministers, masters and teachers, the aged and gray-​haired, ‘and also all maner of Superiors’.92 Perhaps the widest leap, however, was taken by the Staffordshire minister and writer on swimming, Everard Digby. In his dissuasive from taking away the lyuings and goods of the Church, Digby explained that man must honour ‘our heavenlie father, which hath begotten Thomas Solme, Here begynnyth a traetys callyde the Lordis flayle (Basel [Antwerp], 1540), sig. Dviir. Solme, the Lordis flayle, sig. Dviir–​Dviiir. 90 Allen, Treasurie, p. 119. 91 Downame, Abstract, sig. G1v. 92 Edward Dering, A briefe & necessary instruction verye needefull to bee knowen of all housholders, whereby they maye the better teach and instruct their families in such points of Christian religion as is most meete (1572), sig. Biiv 88 89

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us of the true spiritual imortal seed’, and ‘our spirituall mother, the holy catholique church, whose children we are before we have our perfect being in the flesh’.93 God was of course the ultimate archetypal authority figure, but most commentators considered him adequately dealt with by the First Commandment (indeed, by the whole of the first table) and did not drag him into discussions of the fifth. Digby’s use of the commandment to honour father and mother to defend the authority of the institutional Church of England demonstrates the outer limits of the considerable flexibility with which this precept was treated. What justification was there for treating these other offices under the title of natural parents? Several authors felt that the objects of their pedagogical efforts deserved an answer to this question. Robert Allen’s response was amongst the fullest, enumerating four separate reasons. Firstly, parents were by law and nature ‘the first and most ancient degree of honour among men’, and therefore the names mother and father could stand for all the rest that came afterwards. Secondly, the ‘loving tender’ government of parents within the family unit was to be ‘the principall patterne whereunto all other government is to be framed’; the names mother and father established not only the principle but also defined the qualities by which the rule of inferiors by superiors was supposed to operate. Thirdly, Allen explained, the ‘child-​like subjection’ of infancy was a form of training for future thraldom; ‘our preparation to all other obedience and subjection’. Hierarchy was a principle of life which began in childhood, but lasted until death. And finally, the natural order of a commanding parent and obedient child was a way of illustrating more broadly ‘how acceptable to God is subjection of inferior to superior, and how grievous it is when a superior is undutiful’.94 The future bishop of Winchester, Thomas Bilson, explained that princes were comprehended under the name of parents because of their obligation to ‘rule their families with fatherly coercion’, and because ‘the first fountaine of princely power by Gods allowance was fatherly regiment’.95 Peter Barker noted that the duty of honour was owed principally to God, and thus ‘to all such as represent the person of God upon earth’.96 The French philosopher and legal theorist Jean Bodin drew a distinction in his influential Six Livres de la République (printed in English translation in

Everard Digby, Euerard Digbie his dissuasiue From taking away the lyuings and goods of the Church (1590), p. 52. 94 Allen, Treasurie, p. 120. 95 Thomas Bilson, The perpetual gouernement of Christes Church (1593), p. 4. 96 Barker, Painefull, p. 193. 93

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1606) between the natural authority of the father over his children, and the power to command which was given to other superior officers by God; for Bodin, the power of the father was of a fundamentally different kind from the power of princes, magistrates, masters, captains, and so on.97 However, for most of the English commentators under consideration, the authority of the father of the household was a perfect fit for describing the authority of fathers of the nation, spiritual fathers, and indeed the whole intensely patriarchal and hierarchical society of early modern England. Not only did authors radically expand the number of individuals to whom the Fifth Commandment was deemed to demand deference, both in terms of named offices and categories of authority, they also enlarged the scope of the commandment in ways which had the effect of significantly diluting the very principle of authority they sought to describe. One of the most important ways in which they did so was by talking not only about the responsibilities owed by inferiors to superiors, but also the duties with which superiors were obliged to care for inferiors; this will form the subject of the next section of this chapter. Several authors, however, also spoke about the respect owed by individuals to equals, and even to themselves. John Brinsley explained that the Fifth Commandment was instituted by God ‘for preserving the honour and dignitie which he hath bestowed upon every one’.98 Special duties were therefore owed not only towards superiors and inferiors, but also ‘towards equalls’ and ‘ourselves’. With regards equals, Brinsley clarified, men and women had a duty to hold them in ‘reverent estimation as of brethren or sisters, preferring them before our selves’.99 Toward ourselves, there was an obligation of ‘mainteinance of our reputation according to our places, walking uprightly in every duty, to grace our profession’.100 William Perkins also noted that man had a duty ‘toward all our equals’ to ‘thinke reverently of them’, and warned, ‘let nothing be done through contention or vaineglorie, but in meekness of minde, let every man esteeme other better than himselfe’.101 William Whately explained that the commandment applied both to self and others; with regards to self, it required believers to take notice of their place and Jean Bodin, The six bookes of a common-​weale, trans. Richard Knolles (1606), p. 20. Brinsley, Watch (1606), p. 37. 99 Cf. Stephen Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 36: ‘the duties of equals, which are: first, in giving honour to go before one another: secondly, to be courteous to one another: thirdly, to do mutuall good one to another.’ 100 Brinsley, Watch, p. 38. Cf. Granger, Tree, p. 37: ‘a man must preserve and maintaine with modesty, the dignity that is his own person’. 101 Perkins, Chaine, p. 69. 97 98

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duties, labour for the graces to perform those duties, and to be satisfied with and maintain the dignity of their place.102 Bonds and obligations tying men and women to other men and women were categorised as either natural or spiritual, with natural bonds either arbitrary (i.e. friendship) or necessary (by kinship or degree), and relationships of degree marked by either equality or inequality (superiority or inferiority). Whately described friendship as ‘a special obligation of amitie or good will’, and further broke it down into two kinds: common and imperfect, or perfect and peculiar.103 Duties of friendship included befriending none but ‘vertuous, honest and religious persons’, friendly carriage, showing affection, and helpfulness, plainness of speech, and ‘trustinesse in all things’.104 In other words, the injunction to honour mother and father was taken by some authors to create a binding code of conduct which applied to every conceivable human relationship, even with oneself. Expansion of the number of persons comprehended under the names ‘father’ and ‘mother’ were one of two primary ways in which the scope of the Fifth Commandment was widened. The other concerned the nature of the ‘honour’ which the precept required and, further, the specific duties commanded and actions prohibited. What did it mean then, this request to ‘honour’ father and mother? The early fifteenth century dialogue Dives and Pauper, printed in 1493, explained that the commandment required an individual ‘not only to worshipe fader & moder with such reverence doing but also to worship them with helpe at nede.’105 Although in some ways the anonymous 1538 treatise The Paternoster, the crede, and the commaundementes of God in Englysh had a decidedly evangelical tinge, in its explanation of the injunction to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’ it was relatively traditional. It followed the Catholic numbering system, and linked the full text from Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 6 with other relevant places in the bible, including Matthew 15 and Ephesians 6. Obedience to the commandment was deemed to consist of wilful obedience and meekness. Luther had gone further in his Sermons on the Catechism, delivered in 1528. Of the Fifth Commandment (the fourth in the Lutheran numbering), Luther wrote that here God ‘uses not the words “love”, “obey”, or Whately, Pithie, p. 97. Whately, Pithie, pp. 98–​9. 104 Whately, Pithie, pp. 100–​2. 105 This requirement, explained the Pauper, stemmed from the instructions concerning widows given by St Paul in his first letter to Timothy (Tim. 5:3–​16). Henry Parker, Here endith a compendiouse treetise dyalogue. of Diues [and] paup[er]. that is to say. the riche [and] the pore fructuously tretyng vpon the x. co[m]‌manmentes (1493), sig. miiv. 102 103

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“do good to”, but rather the noble word “honour”. He has put father and mother next to himself and uses the word with which one honours him . . . honour is not paid merely with the body, with bows and doffing the hat, but rather by respecting them, by honouring them with your heart’.106 The basic message of Luther’s whole series of sermons on the Commandments was that the believer must fear and trust God, and so unsurprisingly he explained that one of the best ways of honouring father and mother was in fearing and trusting God.107 Cranmer’s Catechismus suggested that honour of parents entailed fear, dread, reverence, obedience, and love; an appropriately ‘transitional’ interpretation, combining aspects of Luther’s thought with later reformed tendencies.108 John Hooper explained that the Fifth Commandment began with the names of father and mother because, after and next to God, it was to them that individuals owed most reverence. The true nature of honour, he argued, was best summed up by the Hebrew word Cabad, which had ‘a greater energy and strength than one word in Latin or English can express’.109 The meaning of honour in the context of this commandment was therefore ‘to set much by’, ‘to have in estimation’, ‘to prefer and extol’. It required more than external reverence: fair words and outward gestures meant nothing without the inward affections and love of the heart. Fathers Hooper declaimed, silently dropping the feminine, were ‘as it were a second God appointed for us upon the earth’.110 Later writers differed slightly on the nature of the honour enjoined by the Fifth Commandment, both with earlier authors and amongst themselves. Gervase Babington defined the honour required as ‘reverence, obedience, & maintenance, if neede require’. Reverence consisted of ‘a true acknowledging in my heart and minde of that superioritie, which God hath given either my parentes, or any person’, together with the willing declaration of the same.111 The proof that reverence was divinely commanded came, of course, from scripture; from Christ’s reverence of Mary (Luke 2)  and Solomon’s bowing down before his mother (1 Kings 2).112 Obedience was defined by Babington as ‘the performance of Parentes will so farre as lyeth in our power, and lawfully we may’, while maintenance Martin Luther, ‘The Fourth Commandment’, from ‘Ten Sermons on the Catechism’, Luther’s Works, Volume 51: Sermons I, ed. and trans. John W Doberstein (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), p. 146. 107 Luther, ‘Ten Sermons on the Catechism’, p. 147. 108 Cranmer, Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion, f. 42r. 109 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 355. 110 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 356. 111 Babington, Fruitful, p. 208. 112 Babington, Fruitful, p. 208. 106

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rested in ‘a thankful sustaining of the want of our parents either by our riches, counsel, strength, or any other thing, which God hath blessed us withal, and they have not’.113 Peter Barker adopted the same tripartite definition of honour in respect of parents: reverence of their persons, obedience to their precepts, and relief of their wants.114 For Barker, reverence did consist in part of external shows of respect, such as uncovering the head, bending the knee, and giving place.115 The self-​styled ‘minister of Gods word’ Richard Bruch defined the honour due to superiors in line with the Fifth Commandment according to a slightly different three-​part framework: obedience in all things; faithful dealing; and kindness and respect.116 Edward Dering explained that to honour our parents was to ‘feare, love, obey, and reliefe them, or anye other that are unto us in their steede’, but overall it was only a minority of commentators who counted ‘relief ’ as a general duty of the subordinate. Suggesting that it was a potentially controversial interpretation, Gervase Babington’s imaginary catechist exclaimed, ‘but how dare we interprete the commaundement thus:  Honour they Parentes: that is mainteaine them as thou art able and they have neede?’117 The answer came, ‘beside the testimonies of scripture nowe alledged to proove it, the spirite of God hath added reasons to urge it, and there are also examples to persuade it, and fearefull experiences of Gods wrath upon the contrarie to feare us from it’.118 Peter Barker made a similar argument by drawing not upon scripture but the evidence of the natural world: as the boughs of trees naturally incline and bend themselves towards the root from which they took their original, shedding their leaves and fruits to fall down and nourish it, so ought children to care for their parents in their old age.119 Perhaps a more typical definition of honour was John Dod’s triumvirate of reverence, obedience and thankfulness, or Robert Allen’s quartet of reverence, obedience, thankfulness and prayer.120 Expositors of the Fifth Commandment disagreed slightly on the precise nature of the ‘honour’ to be shown to superiors in general, and also on the extent to which different forms of office required a specific set of duties from subordinates. These differences appear to have stemmed from the Babington, Fruitful, pp. 223, 226–​7. Barker, Painefull, p. 193. As did John Boys. Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures, p. 98. 115 Barker, Painefull, p. 194. 116 Richard Bruch, The life of religion: or Short and sure directions teaching how to 1 beleeue aright. 2 Liue aright, & 3 pray aright (1615), STC2: 3927160. 117 Babington, Fruitful, p. 227. 118 Babington, Fruitful, p. 228. 119 Barker, Painefull, p. 194. 120 Dod, Plaine, p. 186; Allen, Treasurie, p. 121. 113 114

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length of the catechism and the personal preferences of the author, rather than any particular confessional or devotional alignments.121 Firstly, some authors formulated additional duties for children to show honour to their parents, although most comprehended these obligations under their opening discussion of the general requirements of the commandment. Stephen Denison summarised the duties of children to parents separately but in brief, as being ‘reverence, obedience, and thankfulnesse’, akin to the general concepts of honour explored above.122 Edward Elton took the same duties of ‘1. Reverence. 2.  Obedience. 3.  Thankefulnesse’ as his starting point, but expanded significantly upon them in their specific application to the parent/​child relationship.123 Reverence was to be expressed inwardly by thinking reverent thoughts, and by esteeming parents and loving them, and outwardly through reverent words and actions.124 Obedience was to be displayed by cheerfully yielding to parental command and quietly and patiently suffering correction; thankfulness by yielding comfort and succour to parents, praying for them, ‘and in committing their bodies to the grave being dead, after an honest and seemely manner’.125 Richard Greenham explained the duties of children to ‘reverently and obediently’ receive the instructions, commandments and corrections of their parents, and ‘to succour and pray for them’. The opposite behaviours were forbidden; for example, refusing parents’ instructions or neglecting duties belonging to them.126 George Downame provided a rather more exhaustive list of duties, largely based on scripture: children were obliged to revere their parents,127 stand in awe of them,128 obey them in the Lord,129 show themselves thankful by helping with their goods and service,130 submit themselves to their parents’ instruction and correction,131 be ruled contentedly in matters such as marriage,132 preserve their parents’ goods, and love and reverence those near and dear to them (as well as eschewing the opposite vices).133 The minister of Butterwick in Lincolnshire, Thomas Granger, William Perkins for example, perhaps the epitome of ‘godly’ expositors, wrote only of the duties owed to parents and magistrates, although he did so at length. 122 Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 34. 123 Elton, Exposition, p. 67. 124 Elton, Exposition, p. 68. 125 Elton, Exposition, pp. 69–​70. 126 Greenham, A briefe and necessarie catechisme, sig. B1v. 127 Genesis 31:35; Matthew 21:30; Malachi 1:6. 128 Leviticus 19:3. 129 Ephesians 6:1; Colossians 3:20; Proverbs 23:22; Luke 2:51. 130 Matthew 15:4–​6; 1 Timothy 5:4; Genesis 47:12; Luke 15:29. 131 Proverbs 1:8, 22:19, 4:4; Hebrews 12:7–​9, 5:8. 132 Genesis 28:1–​2, 7. 133 Downame, Abstract, sigs. G5v–​G6r. 121

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listed five duties of children to their parents, the first four of which were buttressed by scriptural references: these duties encompassed cheerful reverence (love and fear); obedience of lawful commandments; helping their infirmities and providing for them in old age; bearing with and concealing their infirmities; and defending their parents from adversaries.134 William Dyke observed that children owed their parents both inward and outward reverence, with the latter declared ‘by rising up, and bowing downe before them’, being silent whilst they were speaking, and giving them their proper titles of respect.135 Strikingly, what was being endorsed was not simply obedience, but a manner of obedience which embraced subjection as naturally and divinely ordained, and which encouraged children to love their parents and bear their chastisements with patience and kindness. This idealised model of childhood deference formed the prototype for all other subordinate relationships.136 Moving beyond parents and children, probably the most commonly-​ discussed form of subaltern obedience was that owed by subjects to princes, governors, and other kinds of temporal magistrate.137 Thomas Cranmer explained in his Catechismus that ‘magistrates & superiours powers ought to be honored and feared, even as our fathers and mother’. The reason for this was that ‘by theim we be defended from our enemies’, and ‘of theim we receave lawes and statutes wherby we may live in peace’. Therefore, he wrote, ‘we ought to be glad and wyllynge to paye to them tribute, taxes, tollages & subsidies, wherby they may be the better able to maintaine the tranquillity of ye commen welth’.138 Most authors, like Cranmer, stressed the vast extent of secular authority. Robert Allen did so by listing relevant quotations from scripture under the four broad headings of reverence, obedience, thankfulness and prayer, including Proverbs 24:21, 1 Peter 2:13, 2 Samuel 18:3 and 1 Timothy 2:1–​2.139 William Perkins began his discussion of duties ‘towards those that are our superiours in authoritie’ with Romans 13:1, ‘Let every soule be subject to the higher powers’.140 ‘We Granger, Tree, p. 20. Dyke, Knowledge, p. 37. 136 For more on this, see Jonathan Willis, ‘The Decalogue, Patriarchy, and Domestic Religious Education in Reformation England’, in John Doran and Charlotte Methuen (eds), Religion and the Household (Studies in Church History vol. 50. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), pp. 199–​209. 137 It is telling that while Protestant authors tended to name secular magistrates first after parents, Catholic authors tended to describe ‘spiritual fathers’ first. Cf. Thomas More, A brief fourme of confession instructing all Christian folke how to confesse their sinnes (1576), ff. 24r-​v. 138 Cranmer, Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion for the synguler commoditie and profyte of childre[n]‌and yong people (1548), f. 48v. 139 Allen, Treasurie, pp. 121–​2. 140 Romans 13:12, Colossians 3:23. Perkins, Chaine, p. 128. 134 135

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are to be admonished to obedience’, he continued, ‘because every higher power is the ordinance of God, and the obedience which we performe to him, God accepteth as though it were done to himself and to Christ’; ‘whosever therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God’.141 Obedience was even due to superiors ‘although they be cruell and wicked, but not in wickedness’.142 Francis Bunny explained that as well as submission subjects also owed their princes and magistrates ‘maintenance fit both for their estate and for the defence of the Common-​wealth’; they also had a duty to pray for them.143 Osmund Lakes characterised the obedience owed by subjects to the monarch as a form of ‘subjection unto him, as unto the Ordinance of God, not for feare alone, but even for conscience sake’. This subjection involved an attitude of reverent awe and dread to his person; answering his call for defence of the realm; paying ‘Customes, Subsidies, Tributes or other exactions, with a willing and cheefull heart’, and praying for his prosperity and ‘the happie continuance of his raigne’.144 The duty to cheerfully bear the economic costs of citizenship is noticeable in a range of expositions, even those which stemmed from the pens of more godly authors.145 There was clearly some considerable intellectual movement from the original precept regarding honouring father and mother, through the general principle of being subject to the higher powers, to a specific requirement to pay your taxes on time and in full, but this was consonant both with the general principle of hierarchy, and the specific early modern context within which expositors were writing. Some authors, however, were also keen to stress the limits of the obedience required by subjects, especially from a tyrannical king. Amongst the actions prohibited by the Fifth Commandment, George Downame listed ‘to disobey their lawfull commandements’ (Joshua 1:18), implying the possibility of disobedience when it came to any commandments deemed unlawful.146 Edward Elton made his caveats more explicit when he detailed the duty of subjects ‘in yielding willingly and readily so farre forth as they are able’ to the magistrate, and only ‘in all things honest and lawfull’.147 Thomas Granger spelled out that subjects owed submission to their ruler’s C.f Elton, Exposition, pp. 96–​7. 1 Peter 2:18. Perkins, Chaine, p. 69. 143 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, pp. 129–​30. 144 Lakes, Probe, p. 138. 145 For example, Stephen Denison described the duty of subjects of magistrates ‘in paying them their tribute’. Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 36. William Dyke listed the duties of subjects as ‘subjection, tribute, prayer’; Dyke, Knowledge, p. 40. 146 Downame, Abstract, sig. H3r. 147 Elton, Exposition, pp. 96–​7; 141 142

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power when it came to unlawfull commandments, but not obedience.148 Gervase Babington explained that ‘the limittes both of the Magistrates bidding and our obeying, are these two, pietie and chastity, contrarie to these must neither they command, nor we do’.149 The possibility of resistance under the Fifth Commandment was explored in most detail by the Hampshire minister Osmund Lakes. Generally, he explained, tyrants were God’s rods and scourges for the faithful to endure.150 However, obedience was not required to commandments enjoining actions contrary to God’s will: it was better, in other words, to obey God and offend man, than vice versa. The options when it came to resistance were not attractive. Rebellion was not permitted, and ‘if thou canst not eschew by flight or other meanes lawfull his violence and persecution’, the only option was to ‘stand forth as a Witnesse of his truth against the persecutors face, even to the losse of thy life and goods in hope to receive them againe to blessed immortalitie’.151 Most commentators also engaged in a specific discussion of the duties owed by servants to their masters. For Richard Greenham, these were much the same as those owed by children to their parents: ‘servants ought in feare and trembling to submit themselves to the instructions, commandements and corrections of their Maisters, and to doe no eye-​service to them’.152 Peter Barker also condemned ‘eye servaunts, which will doe good service, but yet no longer than their masters eye is upon them’; he also had harsh words for those who were overly familiar, prone to grumbling, or treacherous.153 William Whately explained that servants were obliged to be ‘painfull and diligent in their business, as well in the absence as the presence of the governors’; they also had to be trustworthy ‘in saving and keeping their Masters goods committed to them’.154 George Downame mapped out a detailed table of duties of servants, from common obligations (love, reverence, fear and obedience), to a list of ‘more peculiar’ requirements, such as diligence, faithfulness, secrecy, thriftiness (for their master’s profit), and care to please their masters in all lawfull things.155 Robert Allen, as with parents and magistrates, assembled a number of scriptural quotations to

Granger, Tree, p. 32. Babington, Fruitful, p. 232. The scriptural proofs of this were the disobedience of the midwives in Exodus 1 (‘and the Lorde blessed them for it’), the three children in Daniel 3, and 1 Kings 18. 150 Lakes, Probe, p. 133. 151 Lakes, Probe, p. 134. 152 Greenham, Workes, p. 76. Cf. Greenham, A briefe and necessarie catechisme, sig. B1v. 153 Barker, Painefull, p. 204. 154 Whately, Pithie, p. 120. 155 Downame, Abstract, sig. G6v. Cf. Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 34. 148 149

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illustrate the duties of servants under the headings of reverence, obedience, prayer and thankfulness, such as Ephesians 6:5: ‘Servants be ye obedient to them that are your maisters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling in singlenesse of your hearts, as unto Christ’.156 John Dod explained that, as with parents, magistrates, and God himself, servants ought to reverence their Governors both inwardly and outwardly. Servants were also warned to have a care for their master’s good name and credit, ‘and not blazing abroad their infirmities’.157 As noted above, secrecy and discretion were considered praiseworthy attributes of a servant. The decidedly unattractive alternative was the servant who came as a spy into the house, ‘to bewray the infirmities of the family: and if they can finde a fault, or weaknesse in their governours, then out it must to the disgracing and defacing of the maister, and to bring an evill report upon him’.158 Loyalty was therefore valued in service above absolute honesty, at least insofar as it contributed to the protection of reputation and social credit.159 Thomas Granger itemised no fewer than eight duties commanded and thirteen vices forbidden concerning the behaviour of servants. Duties included humble subjection, obedience, loyalty, diligence, contentedness, submission to correction, ‘secrete and counsel keeping’, and the giving of godly example by Christian service to profane masters.160 Vices enumerated included the familiar ‘eye-​service’, answering back, petty theft, refusing correction, unprofitable service, ‘to serve for wages rather then for conscience sake’, discovering their master’s infirmities, treachery, speaking ill, not hindering their master’s enemies, flattering in hope of preferment, telling lies to stir up discord, or obeying a wicked master’s commandments.161 Such lists give a substantial insight into the nature of the complex and important relationship between master and servant in early modern England, both in term of presenting an idealised vision of how such associations should operate, and also in anatomising what were presumably relatively common problems. Servants were not simply employees; they were members of a household, and the unscrupulous could use their knowledge and position to make or break the fortunes Allen, Treasurie, pp.  124. The same verse was cited by numerous authors, including Babington, Fruitful, p. 235. 157 Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 34. The same was observed by Elton, Exposition, p. 84. 158 Dod, Plaine, p. 205. 159 On the importance of notions of credit and social worth in Tudor society, see Alexandra Shepard, ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England, c.1560–​1640’, Past and Present, 167.1 (2000), pp. 75–​106; Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Alexandra Shepard, The Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, 1560–​1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 160 Granger, Tree, pp. 23–​4. 161 Granger, Tree, pp. 25–​6. 156

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of their masters. As William Dyke noted, the mark of a good servant was one who would ‘preferr their Maisters business before their owne’.162 Given that almost all expositions of the commandments were written by clerical authors, it is not surprising that some chose to express strongly-​ held beliefs on the nature of the relationship between ministers and their parishioners. Francis Bunny explained that the chief honour that could be done to the minister was ‘obedience to his Word, and hee is to be accounted of as Gods messenger, who is sent to teach Gods will, therefore his office is highly to be esteemed of ’.163 The words of the minister, Bunny explained, were to be received with reverence, ‘that they being printed in our heart, may also by Gods good grace work in us newnesse of life, and a godly reformation’. So far so lofty; it is interesting to note that later authors (conformist, but especially puritan) waxed extremely lyrical about the duties owed to ministers, and their importance in the soteriological process: earlier writers such as Tyndale, Cranmer and Hooper are noticeable by their comparative silence on the matter, a reflection of the ebb and flow of (anti-​)clericalist sentiment over the course of the English reformation. Bunny also took the opportunity provided by his catechetical exposition of the Fifth Commandment to get off his chest some personal grievances regarding the economic mistreatment of the pastoral ministry. ‘This is a lesson very needful to bee taught in many places of this Realme’, he declared, ‘where very small pensions are appointed to Ministers of the Word, and that causeth small teaching of the people in such places’.164 Even where respectable livings were appointed by law, ‘yet the hearts of many of the people are not open enough to part from that which they ought to give’; in other words, the payment of tithes was not being properly observed. The under-​payment (or non-​payment) of tithes was, in the eyes of Bunny, a crime which diminished their pastor’s maintenance and robbed him of his due: it was the duty of parishioners not only to be partakers of the spiritual teaching of the clergy, but also ‘to minister to them in carnall things’.165 The duties owed by people to their ministers, summarised William Dyke, were to hear and obey their doctrine, to maintain them, and to be subject to their just and righteous censures.166 Edward Elton enumerated the duties of the people to their pastor under the headings of reverence, submission, assistance and thankfulness. In terms of reverence, the people were Dyke, Knowledge, p. 39. Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p. 135. 164 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p. 136. 165 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, pp. 136–​7. Cf. Babington, Fruitful, p. 234. 166 Dyke, Knowledge, p. 40. 162

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obliged to hear their minister preach the word, and view him as a messenger ‘standing in Christ his stead, and as Gods steward and disposer of his secrets to them’. In terms of submission, they were to be willingly taught and guided by him. Under assistance, Elton did not mention financial maintenance, but rather focussed on moral support ‘to execute and fulfil his ministeriall office’.167 Stephen Denison listed comfortable maintenance as one of seven duties of the people to their ministers, alongside respecting them, hearing them, obeying their doctrine, following them in the path to goodness, not suffering them to be wronged, and praying for them.168 John Dod detailed just three duties for the people to perform for their minister, but did so at great length. The first was to hold their minister in reverent account and estimation, and Dod reserved special ire for ‘young and vaine persons’ ‘growne to that height of impudencie and shamefulnesse’, who set the sinfulness of their lives against the wholesome doctrine of the ­minister.169 The second duty was obedience to the doctrine of the minister, and here Dod criticised individuals who ‘bragge of their good dealing with the minister’ but failed to take his words to heart as ‘ill sheepe’. Finally, Dod condemned those who failed to yield ‘sufficient maintenance’ to the minister, ‘both for his reliefe & sustenance, as also for his defence against the wrongs of ill disposed persons’.170 Finally, expositors of the Fifth Commandment named a range of other subordinates, and described the duties they owed to their superiors. Osmund Lakes, the Hampshire vicar, was probably drawing upon both his youthful experience as a scholar and his later time as a Fellow, Proctor and then Vice-​Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, when he wrote of the duties owed by students to their tutors and to officials within the university (Chancellors, Proctors and Taxers) and the college (Provosts, Presidents, Deans, Lecturers and Tutors).171 Students were advised to show the same affection to all these officials as to their parents, indeed more, ‘because they minister as good, or better things to them, then their parents Elton, Exposition, pp. 90–​2. Thomas Granger also failed to mention economic support, focussing on the duty ‘to maintaine him against the wrongs of wicked men’. Granger, Tree, p. 34. Neither did John Brinsley: Brinsley, Watch, p. 40. 168 Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 35. George Downame explained that people had the duty to the minister to ‘allow them liberal maintenance’: Downame, Abstract, sig. G7v. 169 Dod, Plaine, pp. 230–​1. 170 Dod, Plaine, pp. 232–​3. 171 Lakes was admitted to King’s College, Cambridge, as a scholar from Eton in 1562; he proceeded BA in 1566–​7, MA in 1570, and BD in 1579–​80. He was a Fellow 1565–​80, Proctor 1577–​8 and Vice-​ Provost 1579, before becoming vicar of Ringwood in Hampshire. See Amumni Cantabrigienses, Part I From the Earliest Times to 1751, Volume III KAILE-​RYVES, ed. John Venn and J.A. Venn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), p. 35; Lakes, Probe, p. 144. 167

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doe’. Students should show reverence, Lakes described, ‘by a willing subjection of their minds, wholly laid downe at their [tutors’] feet to be taught and framed’.172 John Dod did not discuss academic matters, but did devote some attention to the duties of men and women to their superiors in gifts. Such gifts were to be honoured as they stemmed ultimately from God: to fail to do so was to ‘clip the Lords coyne’.173 Inferiors were also bound ‘to make a good use of the gifts that others have beyond them’ by imitating their virtues: ‘as they must reverence these graces in an other, so they must labour for them in themselves’.174 Several authors also mentioned inferiors in age, and the duties they owed to their elders and betters. William Whately explained that ‘not all difference of age makes them betwixt whom it is, unequals’; it only counted when there was ‘such a difference whereby one might be the childe, the other the parent in regard of age’.175 In such circumstances the younger were bound to show honourable respect by rising before their elders, ceding them first place, and allowing them to speak first; also in consulting with them over any doubts, ‘preferring their advice to their owne greene concernes’. Robert Allen warned readers to ‘rise up before the horehead, and honour the person of the old man’, while John Dod noted that younger persons ought to shew a reverent opinion of the ‘auncient’, ‘in regard that they carry upon them, as it were, a print of GODS eternitie’.176

The Duty of Care At first glance then the Fifth Commandment was a veritable charter of authoritarianism, granting just governors and budding tyrants alike carte blanche to demand reverence and obedience from their inferiors in all walks of life. Early modern society was intensely hierarchical and patriarchal, and in this sense the Ten Commandments in general, and the Fifth Commandment in particular, were interpreted in a way which solidly supported the status quo.177 The message was clear: know your place in the Lakes, Probe, p. 145. Cf. Allen, Treasurie, p. 123; Downame, Abstract, sig. G6v. Dod, Plaine, p. 240. Cf. Dyke, Knowledge, p. 40. 174 Dod, Plaine, p. 241. Cf. Downame, Abstract, sig. F5v; Whately, Pithie, p. 108. 175 Whately, Pithie, p. 106. 176 Allen, Treasurie, p. 125. Dyke also quoted Leviticus 19:32 in requiring the young to ‘arise up before’ the old: Dyke, Knowledge, p. 40. Dod, Plaine, pp. 243–​4. Dod concluded that this ‘doth sharpely reprove the customable rudenesse of our young persons, that shew no token of reverence to their elders, in rising or uncovering before them; but use such behaviour towards them, as if they were their companions or play fellowes’. 177 For a description of this patriarchal status quo see (for example) Merry E. Wiesner-​Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (3rd. edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 172 173

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social order, and do not seek to rise above or subvert it. Ultimate obedience may have been due to God above man, but submission to human authority was itself a divinely-​ordained precept. Inferiors had a duty to disobey any commands contrary to God’s law, but they were also obliged to calmly and meekly embrace the temporal punishments for such godly disobedience, even unto death. However, as this section will go on to demonstrate, that state of affairs was only half the story. Expositors of the Ten Commandments were not only aiming in their publications to shape the behaviour of the governed, but also that of those in authority. The duties of obedience incumbent upon inferiors were therefore inevitably counterbalanced by a series of responsibilities to be observed by superiors. This section will explore those responsibilities according to the same broad categories that were introduced above, beginning with parents, and moving on to rulers and other secular magistrates, masters of servants, ministers, and other superior offices. Starting with parents, Richard Greenham explained that they had a duty to teach, correct, pray for and provide for their children out of conscience to God’s ordinance. As a rule of thumb they were bound to conduct themselves firstly as they would have had their parents in the past act toward them, and secondly as they would have their children be dutiful to them thereafter.178 Stephen Denison listed seven responsibilities of parents in caring for their children: dedicating them to God, instructing them, correcting them, providing for them, bringing them up in a lawfull calling, well bestowing them in marriage, and giving a good example to them.179 This was more than three times the specific number of duties of obedience he set down for children, establishing a comprehensive template for good upbringing from birth to adulthood. Thomas Granger listed eight duties of parents to their children, in comparison to only five of children to their parents. These ranged from the obligation of the mother to preserve the life of her child, and to nurse it, through that of fathers to provide for the maintenance of wife and child, to the duties of both parents to bring up their offspring in the true Christian faith, correct and chasten them with wisdom and moderation, train them in a profession or calling, have a godly care for their marriage, and consecrate them wholly to the Lord.180 In enumerating vices forbidden of parents, Granger, like Denison, listed giving ‘evill example’ and speaking ‘any thing that may corrupt their minds’, Greenham, Workes, p. 76. Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 34. 180 Granger, Tree, pp. 19–​21. 178 179

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while William Lowth’s 1581 translation of Barthelemy Batt’s The Christian mans closet declared that ‘fathers and maisters which withholde their children and families from hearing and learning the worde of God . . . are not only wicked and injurious to themselues, but also to their whole families’.181 Not only, then, did parents have a range of specific duties to perform to care for their children; they also had a general obligation to live lives that were literally exemplary in order to avoid setting a poor standard of behaviour to be emulated. In that sense, the rigours of responsibility were much stricter than the requirements of obedience. George Downame explained that mother and father were each obliged to express love for their children and care for their natural and spiritual needs. Again, this meant educating them, bringing them up in an honest calling, and when the time came contracting a good marriage for them. This was alongside their more general duties as householders, to provide ‘food, raiment, rest, and recreation’, to rule their children in the lord, to educate them in religious matters through private catechising and the public ministry, and setting an example in the practice of Christian duties.182 The responsibility of parents was to bring children up, not for their own selfish benefit, but according to the proper needs of the child. In terms of raising them up in a calling, therefore, parents were ‘to observe and discern their aptnesse, and so to fit them for callings accordingly’ and not ‘to force them to such courses for gaine, for which they have no aptnesse nor disposition’.183 When it came to wedlock, parents were bound ‘to marrie them in the lord, or to keepe them unmarried if they see fit’, and not ‘to keep them unmarried when there is no need to marry them’, or ‘to force them to marry such whom they affect not’, or to marry them to a ‘profane person’.184 Expositions of the Fifth Commandment also occasionally instructed wives how to behave towards their husbands, and husbands how to care for their wives. Edward Elton explained that the due respect and carriage of the wife toward her husband ‘standeth in yielding to him subjection, loyaltie, and faithfull love, helpe and comfort’.185 Subjection consisted of inner and outer reverence and obedience; loyalty and faithful love comprised chastity and secrecy, and providing help and comfort in respect of his body, outward state, and soul. The office of the husband toward his wife ‘standeth in a right and wise Barthélemy Batt, The Christian mans closet Wherein is conteined a large discourse of the godly training vp of children, ed. William Lowth (1581), ff. 31v–​32r. 182 Downame, Abstract, sigs. G3v–​G4r. 183 Dyke, Knowledge, p. 41. 184 Dyke, Knowledge, pp. 41–​2. 185 Elton, Exposition, p. 73–​6. Italics in the original. 181

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usage of his powr and authoritie over his wife, in tender love to her, and in giving honour to her’.186 Osmund Lakes used a familiar phrase to describe the duties of the monarch to their people –​‘keeper of both Tables’ –​and characterised their duty as being ‘to walke with an even foote in religion and righteousnesse, under paine of severe punishment to the transgressour’.187 Lesser magistrates were required to lead their subjects with equity ‘to nourture and instruction’, favouring the virtuous and ‘with love embracing and procuring the health, turning and reclaiming the person gone aside’.188 This was a fatherly love and care which required even the chastisement of the wicked to be administered with a desire to see the offender reformed and rehabilitated back into society, for the good of both the individual and the commonweal. William Perkins outlined a threefold duty of magistrates toward their subjects:  to rule them in the Lord; provide such things as were needed for their body and soul; and to punish their faults, ‘the lighter by rebuking, the greater by correction’, according to ‘an holy manner of punishing the guilty’.189 Contrary sins included negligence in government and providing for subjects’ good estate, too much lenity in correction, and ‘overmuch crueltie and threatenings’.190 William Dyke provided a similar list of instructions: secular rulers were obliged first and foremost to provide teaching for the people, to maintain true religion, and to compel their subjects to resort to church. Beyond that, his (or her) obligation was ‘to decree good laws, and to see them duly executed’; to preserve peace, the commonwealth and honest life; to punish evil and defend good; and to avoid the contrary vices.191 Francis Bunny explained that, ‘if they know how to behave themselves as Parents over their children’, governors would soon learn what duties they had to perform for their subjects, ‘for the very title of fathers and mothers whereby here they are noted, teacheth them, that they must use the talent of authority which God hath given them, with tender affection to the good of them who are placed under them’.192 This general attitude of ‘fatherly love’ was to be realised through the performance of a number of specific duties. Like other ministerial commentators, Bunny’s first priority for the civil magistracy was ‘to maintaine the Elton, Exposition, p. 77. Lakes, Probe, p. 148. 188 Lakes, Probe, p. 148–​9. 189 Perkins, Chaine, p. 70. 190 Perkins, Chaine, p. 72. 191 Dyke, Knowledge, pp. 43–​4. 192 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p. 155. 186

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truth of the Gospell by all meanes they can’, followed by ‘good and quiet government of the people’.193 Most commentators moved in the direction of stressing the duties of superiors, but not everyone did. Cranmer’s Catechismus described duties of obedience by children and other inferiors, but not the corresponding responsibilities of superiors. However, it is likely that this was a concession to genre (the work was aimed toward ‘the synguler commoditie and profyte of children and yong people’) rather than a point of significant political or theological difference.194 Stephen Denison’s compendious catechisme was therefore more typical, in noting that the duties of magistrates to subjects ‘stand in ruling them in godlinesse, peace, and honestie’.195 Those authors who discussed the duties of ministers and parishioners were also sternly prescriptive about how best the clergy ought to serve the laity, in order to earn both their tithes and their spiritual authority. According to John Dod, the first duty of the minister was ‘to be a good example & patterne unto his people in love, in faith, in patience, & in every good worke’. This was for several reasons. Firstly, the minister who ‘if he lay load of doctrine upon others, and do nothing himselfe’, would be opening himself up to the charge of hypocrisy. And secondly, the minister who showed no evidence of being able to govern himself or his own family, would hardly inspire confidence in the community that he was able to effectively govern his flock.196 The second duty of the minister was ‘to preach the pure word of God’; to feed his flock with wholesome doctrine to nourish their souls. Dod left matters there, whereas Thomas Granger saw fit to enumerate no fewer than nine separate duties of ministers to their parishioners, all with copious underpinning of scriptural citations. The first was to preach the word; the second was diligence in catechising, and the third to ‘teach, exhort, rebuke, with all authoritie, as the Embassadors of God’.197 The remaining duties were really variations on the same broad themes: to set forth the authority and power of God over Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, pp. 156–​8. Cf. Allen, Treasurie, p. 128. Cranmer, Catechismus, ff. 48v–​49r. For quote, see title page. The Bishops’ Book, or Institution of a Christian Man, which Cranmer had an important part in shaping, did talk about the office of the prince in seeing ‘that the right religion and true doctrine of Christ may be maintained and taught’, along with the responsibility to pass good laws, benignly hear subjects’ complaints, and punish evildoers. ‘The Institution of a Christian Man’, in Formularies of Faith put forth by Authority during the reign of Henry VIII, ed. Charles Lloyd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1825), p. 153. 195 Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 36. 196 Dod, Plaine, pp. 234–​5. 197 Granger, Tree, p. 32. In comparison, Robert Allen did not enumerate any specific duties, but simply instead instructed his readers to look at Deuteronomy 33:10, Ezekiel 33:7 and 34:4, John 21:15–​17, Acts 20:28, Thessalonians 2, 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1: Allen, Treasurie, p. 128. 193 194

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men’s consciences; to be constant, bold and fearless in the discharge of their calling; to beat down prideful sinners, raise up the sorrowful, comfort the afflicted and bear with the weak; to give Christian example; to pray and give thanks, and so on.198 Edward Elton took a more systematic approach, beginning with the duty of the minister to apply his gifts for the good of his parishioners’ souls, and encompassing diligent and faithful preaching of the word, opening up the wholesome doctrine contained therein, exhorting and stirring the people to piety and good duties, and rebuking the sinful. Elton, Bermondsey puritan and scourge of maypoles, was one of few commentators to also specify the duty of the minister to undertake ‘a wise and right dispensing of the sacraments’, although he did so hand in hand with a call to examine parishioners to ascertain their fitness for communion.199 Finally Elton, like other commentators, spoke of the importance of the minister in acting before his parishioners ‘in all holy example and being a patterne of holy life to them’, both in the practice of good works and the stoic suffering of misfortune. George Downame, like a number of authors, seized upon the words of 2 Timothy 4:2 to explain that ministers had a duty to preach the word both in and out of season, and went to especial lengths to demonstrate the ways in which the minister ought to be an example to his flock. In general he was to be blameless: in particular, towards God he was to be godly; towards his neighbour to be just, charitable, meek, courteous and liberal; and towards himself he was to be sober, temperate, chaste, and modest.200 Sins in breach of this commandment for ministers included ignorance, idleness, and non-​residency. Masters were also deemed to have a wide range of obligations towards their servants by expositors of the Fifth Commandment, expanding their right to expect obedience into a broad range of responsibilities owed to subordinates. According to Richard Greenham, masters owed their servants three principal duties of care: to teach them, correct them, and to pray for them.201 William Whately explained that masters had a duty to see God’s name worshipped, to catechise in true religion, to provide things necessary for their servants, to set them fit employment, and to redress and reform their ‘disorders’. The key to their conduct was fairness and Granger, Tree, p. 33. Elton, Exposition, pp.  94–​6. Cf. Denison, A compendious catechisme, p.  34. This is in line with the broadly accepted argument made by Arnold Hunt that the sacraments formed an important component of puritan divinity: Arnold Hunt, ‘The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England’, Past & Present 161 (November 1998), pp. 39–​83. 200 Downame, Abstract, sig. G7v–​G8r. 201 Greenham, Workes, p. 77. 198 199

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moderation: servants were to be employed ‘moderately in work, neither toyling them, nor giving them leave to be idle’.202 These same themes arise again and again: care of body and soul, reasonable work and appropriate discipline. Peter Barker warned masters to keep their servants well fed, to care for them in times of sickness, to allow them ‘lawfull times of honest recreation’, to pay them their wages, and he explained that ‘in regard of the soule, he is a Seraphim to kindle their zeal’.203 As might well be expected, these clerical authors put considerable stress on the religious education and behaviour of servants, an interpretation of the Fifth Commandment which was given additional weight by the text of the fourth.204 In addition, the intimate context of the household meant that the master/​servant relationship was perhaps the closest of all to that between natural parents and their actual children. Gervase Babington clarified that masters were given superiority above others ‘not that he shuld rule as a tyrant over them, but to love, cherish, & defend them even as a father his children, they doing him true & faithfull service’.205 John Dod chose a slightly different emphasis, because of course unlike the birth of natural children, households had a degree of choice over which servants they employed. Dod warned masters ‘to take none into their family, but Christians’, noting that ‘if they be not faithfull to God, as sure as God lives, they will never be faithfull to their Master’.206 A wicked servant might also infect the rest of the household with ill behaviour. After choosing the proper person, masters had a responsibility to ensure that their servants laboured dutifully first in religious matters, and secondly in the works and business of their calling, providing correction, recompense, proper diet and care when sick as appropriate.207 Finally, authors extended the concept of a duty of care as enjoined by the Fifth Commandment to a range of other officers and relationships. Osmund Lakes wrote not only of parents, magistrates, ministers, university governors and masters, but also town officers, tutors, solicitors, foster fathers, nurses, patrons and military captains. Unusually, he even described the duties of ‘physitions’ and ‘chirurgeons’ to their patients according to the precept. These duties required the medical practitioner to carefully Whately, Pithie, pp. 114–​6. Edward Elton noted that masters should require from servants ‘things also proportionable to their abilitie and strength’: Elton, Exposition, p. 86. 203 Barker, Painefull, p. 203. 204 Through reference to ‘manservant’ and ‘maidservant’ in the injunction to ‘remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy’. See Chapter 5 for more information on the Fourth Commandment. 205 Babington, Fruitful, p. 235. 206 Dod, Plaine, p. 210. Cf. Denison, A compendious catechisme, pp. 34–​5. 207 Dod, Plaine, pp. 212–​15. 202

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enquire out the cause of his patient’s malady; not to string out the treatment of rich patients to earn more money; to pray for success; and to show pity and compassion to the sick.208 With regard to schoolmasters and tutors, John Brinsley described their obligation to practise ‘painfully & constantly [the] most profitable courses, for the speedier furnishing [of ] their schollars, with the best learning & manners’ to the greatest good of the students themselves, the Church, and the country.209 Furthermore, tutors were compelled to draw on and encourage their students, with a mixture of rewards and moderate correction, abhorring cruelty. And finally, they were duty bound to endeavour to be ‘a patterne to them of all vertue’, so to procure more true reverence for themselves, and blessings for their scholars. The old were deemed by William Dyke to have a general obligation to the young to teach them honest things (and not dishonest things), and ‘to procure reverence to themselves by their grave & wise carriage’, taking care not to provide an example of loose living.210 For George Downame, ‘the Ancient, or superior in age’ ought to be ‘sober and grave’, ‘patternes and precedents of good things to the younger sort’, and ‘by their wisedome and experience to advise and instruct the younger’.211 In other words, in early modern society age was expected to confer wisdom and experience, and the elderly therefore had a duty to convey the same actively through dispensing sage advice and passively by living a life of sober dignity for others to aspire to. Lastly, several authors discussed the responsibilities of superiors of gifts, in very similar terms. The gifted were bound to interact modestly and kindly with the less gifted, and to employ their gifts willingly and humbly in the service of others.212 Those gifted with material wealth, in contrast, were obliged to practise bounty and munificence to benefit the poor. John Dod explained that to do otherwise was to invite God’s curse and become despised: ‘and better that they and their giftes should perish, then that they should have them, to doe no good to others, but to set uppe themselve above their brethren’.213 The Fifth Commandment then was not merely a charter for tyrants demanding unconditional obedience, with inferiors to be treated as Lakes, Probe, p. 154. Cf. Allen, Treasurie, p. 137. Brinsley, Watch, p.  44. Osmund Lakes had some no-​nonsense management advice for heads of colleges and universities, calling on them to busy themselves with ‘culling and drawing out the Droanes and Non-​proficients, which sucke the fatnesse of Fellowships, yea and Offices too, and so keep out wits of better hope’: Lakes, Probe, p. 153. 210 Dyke, Knowledge, p. 45. 211 Downame, Abstract, sig. F6v. Cf. Allen, Treasurie, p. 129. 212 Whately, Pithie, p. 107. 213 Dod, Plaine, p. 243. 208 209

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chattels and used according to their superiors’ whims. For a start, several authors were keen to stress the difference between obedience and submission in the face of tyrannical commands, most especially those which were contrary to God’s own law.214 Inferiors were morally bound to hold God’s authority in the very highest esteem: if commanded to act in an ungodly way, they were therefore permitted to disobey, but also compelled to submit themselves to any punishment or chastisement as a consequence. But secondly, expositions of the Fifth Commandment spent as much –​ sometimes more –​time explaining the duties and responsibilities of care incumbent upon superiors, as they did the burdens of obedience upon inferiors. Early modern England was an intensely hierarchical society, but that meant not only the subjugation of the bottom portions of the hierarchy by the few at the top, but that every office and calling at every point across the whole of the social spectrum entailed within it a complex nexus of duties and responsibilities. Early modern England was also a patriarchy, which not only meant that (for the most part) fathers and male authority figures held absolute power, but also that all relationships between superiors and inferiors were to be inflected with the values of fatherly love and paternal affection. Correction was always advised to be moderate, and corporal chastisement always applied in order to reform behaviour and protect broader society, not simply to punish the evildoer. Of course the descriptions in these texts of the relationships between rulers and subjects, parents and children, masters and servants, ministers and parishioners and so on were idealised; but that is really the point. Through these expositions of the commandment to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’, early modern England shaped, represented to and indoctrinated within itself a flawless (albeit fictional) aspiration of how society could and should look: a Christian utopia; a New Jerusalem.

Justice and Punishment We have seen that the Ten Commandments, and the Fifth in particular, did much to condition the ways in which order, authority and obedience came to be understood as not only natural and moral but also social, political Hooper directed the faithful to obey the superior powers ‘in all things, where they command thee nothing against God’s laws’, and even the second part of the homily on obedience observed that good Christian people may undoubtedly ‘not obey kings, magistrates, or any other, (although they be our own fathers,) if they would command us to do anything contrary to God’s commandments.’ Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 356; ‘The second part of the sermon of obedience’, Sermons, or Homilies, appointed to be read in churches, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, of famous memory (Dublin: Printed for Anne Watson and B. Dugdale, 1821), p. 97.

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and above all religious duties in the reformation and post-​reformation periods. But given that God had chosen to reveal his will to Moses and his people on Mount Sinai specifically in the form of a law, the question remains as to how far the Decalogue came to inform the theory and exercise of justice in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.215 One of the arenas where divine law and secular justice came together most frequently and visibly was in the sermons customarily preached at the beginning of meetings of the assizes, the criminal courts courts which dealt with serious felonies such as grand larceny, rape, murder and witchcraft; all crimes which were punishable by death. There were six assize circuits in England, and twice a year judges rode out across each circuit and held sessions at half a dozen or so assize towns over the course of several months.216 The sermons preached before these benches of judges therefore provided preachers with an important opportunity to comment upon and engage with key participants in the exercise of secular justice in England. As Arnold Hunt has observed: the sermon, strategically positioned at the opening of the assizes, served two very important functions: first, to set the moral and critical tone of the whole proceedings, and secondly, to bring together the Crown’s representatives and the country élite in an elaborate public show of amity and unity.217

This section considers evidence taken from around fifty assize sermons preached and subsequently printed between 1571 (the date of the first surviving example) and 1625.218 Recently, there has been something of a resurgence of historical interest in sermons, for a long time a ‘Cinderella subject’ of early modern history.219 That neglect has, since the start of the current millennium, been well and truly overturned.220 Assize sermons as Cynthia Herrup, for example, has noted that in the seventeenth century, ‘the ideal of the “godly magistrate”, a man who saw himself as a partner with the monarch in a fight against all forms of corruption, typified a new approach to the notion of good governance’. Cynthia Herrup, ‘Law and Morality in Seventeenth-​Century England’, Past and Present, 106 (1985), p. 104. 216 J. S.  Cockburn, A history of English Assizes 1558–​1714 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 34–​48. 217 Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing:  English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 306. 218 I would like to thank Hugh Adlington for sharing with me his unpublished bibliographical database of early modern assize sermons. 219 Hunt, The Art of Hearing, p. 2; see also Mary Morrissey, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, The Historical Journal, 42.4 (1999), pp. 1111–​23. 220 E.g. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–​ 1750 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2000); Peter McCullough, Sermons at court: politics and religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–​ 1642 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011); Eric Joseph Carlson, ‘The Boring of the Ear:  Shaping 215

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a sub-​genre have also been relatively overlooked:  in the words of Hugh Adlington, they have been ‘regarded as little more than a platitudinous formulary concerning the divinely endorsed authority of magistrate and monarch’, although there is already a small and growing literature devoted to them.221 Printed assize sermons suffer from many of the same methodological problems as printed sermons more generally. First off, we can never be entirely sure how closely the sermon printed resembles the sermon preached; texts were usually revised by their authors for print, and therefore the published sermon may have differed markedly in length, tone, and even content, from the words as they were originally spoken. Secondly, it is one thing to peruse the text of a sermon but quite another to speculate upon the message which the audience may have taken from it.222 Only in those very rare instances where we can compare listeners’ notes to the preacher’s text do we stand some chance of commenting upon the ways in which the meaning of the sermon might have been received, and even then, of course, the likelihood is that everybody in the audience took something slightly different away with them. What assize sermons do provide, which we often lack, is a sense of when, where, and to whom the sermon in question was preached. As Hugh Adlington has noted, ‘that a sermon’s contemporary resonance should depend profoundly upon the precise historical conditions of its preaching or publication is now a critical commonplace’.223 Assize sermons preached before magistrates and people might be used either to congratulate, counsel or critique their audience, and so aimed to influence the exercise of justice just as often as they happened to reflect or represent it. However, considered as a corpus, some prominent themes do emerge which demonstrate beyond doubt the importance of concepts of divine law in the exercise of secular justice. First and foremost in these sermons, judges, like kings, were frequently described as godlike, or at least as God’s deputies acting in his stead and prosecuting his law. As William Westerman, the minister of Sandridge in the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540–​1640’, in Larissa Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2001), Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Hugh Adlington, Peter McCullough and Emma Rhatigan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); etc. 221 Hugh Adlington, ‘Restoration, Religion, and Law: Assize Sermons, 1660–​1685’, in Hugh Adlington, Peter McCullough and Emma Rhatigan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 426; Hunt, The Art of Hearing, pp. 306–​320; Barbara J. Shapiro, ‘Political Theology and the Courts: A Survey of Assize Sermons c.1600–​1688’, Law and Humanities, 2.1 (2008), pp. 1–​28. 222 Hunt, The Art of Hearing, pp. 148–​9. 223 Adlington, ‘Restoration, Religion, and Law’, p. 424.

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Hertfordshire, explained at the Hertford assizes, ‘now therefore (Grave fathers) remember your publike callings, that your sword, and your sentence, your judgement & vengeance is the Lords: Remember that by title you are Gods’.224 The vicar of St Stephen’s Norwich, Matthew Stoneham, remonstrated with the bench toward the end of a sermon at a meeting of the assizes in his home city to ‘take heed what you do’, ‘seeing then ye execute not the judgements of man . . . so base, . . . weake, . . . contemptible, but of the Lord, . . . so glorious, . . . mightie, . . . dreadfull’.225 John Dunster, a Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford, preached at a meeting of the Oxford assizes held in St Mary’s church on 24 July 1610, and reminded the assembled magistrates that ‘you are the governors sent of God and our Soveraigne for the punishment of evill doers, and the praise of them that do well’.226 This was not a direct invocation of the Ten Commandments; however, as a reminder issued to the judges that they were primarily responsible for executing the judgements not of man but of God it must surely have put them in mind of God’s own eternal moral law. Robert Wakeman, fellow of Balliol College, explained that judges and magistrates were nothing less than the vicegerents and lieutenants of God on earth, ‘the Commisioners not of an earthly King, but of the King of heaven and earth’.227 Several authors commented that judges and the law essentially existed in a form of perfecting symbiosis with one another. As the preacher William Est put it: the written law, how good soever it be, is dead in it selfe . . . the Magistrate therefore is added, to revive this dead body of the law . . . by which conjunction, the law becomes a Magistrate, and the Magistrate a law: the Magistrate lendeth a mouth to the law to speake and the law teacheth him a rule to speak aright.228

The discussion of law here is ambiguous: is the preacher describing man’s law, or Gods? This is shown to be a false ambiguity, however, for God’s law was the basis of all human law, and civil law had a duty to be compliant William Westerman, Two sermons of assise:  the one intituled; A  prohibition of reuenge:  the other, A sword of maintenance (1600), STC2: 25282, p. 65. Cf. Anthony Cade, A sermon of the nature of conscience which may well be tearmed a tragedy of conscience in her (1621), p. 14, who called judges ‘Gods, executing Gods office, in Gods place, unto Gods people’. 225 Matthew Stoneham, Two sermons of direction for Judges and Magistrates (1608), p. 82. 226 John Dunster, Caesers Penny, or a sermon of obedience (1610), p. 28. 227 Wakeman’s sermon text was 2 Chronicles 19:6; ‘And he said unto the Judges, take heede what ye do: for ye execute the judgements not of man but of God, and he will be with you both in the cause and judgement’. Robert Wakeman, The judges charge (1610), pp. 2–​4. 228 William Est, Two Sermons. The Christians Comfort in his Crosses . . . and the Judges and Juries Instruction (1614), p. 1. 224

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with the letter and spirit of divine law. ‘Remember that you are heere placed in Gods stead’, admonished the controversial rector of Coleorton Thomas Pestell at a meeting of the Leicester assizes; ‘nay, Ipse Dixi, I have saide yee are Gods’!229 The God-​given authority of judges brought with it a series of duties and obligations. The Wiltshire clergyman (and relative of the Jesuit Robert Persons) Bartholomew Parsons, preached at the Salisbury assize in 1616 on what he called ‘The magistrates charter’. Psalm 82:6 declared that judges, ‘yee are Gods’, and Daniel 4:34 confirmed that all civil power had its authority directly from God himself, but in the exercise of that power judges were obliged to display godly attributes such as wisdom, justice, clemency and mercy.230 The Ipswich preacher Samuel Ward, speaking at the Bury assizes in one of the most frequently-​reprinted assize sermons of the seventeenth century, cited Moses himself as ‘the Archetype or first draught of Magistracie’, ‘the greatest Law-​giver that ever was, and father of all Law givers’.231 Judges and magistrates were therefore obliged to display four essential characteristics: they were to be men of ability, God-​fearing, men of truth, and possessed of a hatred of covetousness.232 In a provocative sermon, the Fellow of Merton College William Dickinson instructed the magistrates at the assizes in Reading that there was a difference between earthly judges ‘in subordinate and delegate powers’ whose role was ‘to interpret Law and settle differences betweene particulars according to that scantlying and measure which is prescribed them’, and the office of God ‘The Judge . . . that Majesty and Architectonicall power, which out of its owne absoluteness setteth downe a Law, and appointeth a publike measure . . . whereby all mens actions are to be squared and adjudged’.233 The minister of High Ongar in Essex William Pemberton explained that because the order and authority of judges and magistrates was ordained by God, ‘Governors must therefore in all their acts and designes, ayme at the right end and scope of government, the glory of God in the good of men’.234 Thomas Pestell, Morbus epidemicus, or the churles sicknesse. In a sermon preached before the Judges of the Assises (1615), p. 20. 230 Bartholomew Parsons, The magistrates charter examined (1616), pp. 1, 4, 25–​8. 231 ESTC shows that the sermon was first printed in 1618, and then reprinted in 1621, 1623 and 1627. In 1628 and 1636 it was reprinted twice more as part of a collection of Ward’s sermons and treatises. 232 Samuel Ward, Jethro’s Justice of Peace (1627), pp. 3–​5. Richard Carpenter also called upon magistrates to demonstrate ‘Moses courage’ in executing their duty: Richard Carpenter, The conscionable Christian: or, the indevour of Saint Paul (1623), p. 70. 233 William Dickinson, The Kings Right, briefely set downe in a sermon preached before the Reverend Judges at the Assizes held in Reading for the County of Berks (1619), sig. B3r. 234 William Pemberton, The charge of God and the King to Judges and Magistrates for execution of Justice (1619), sig. A4v. 229

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A number of authors also warned judges to conduct themselves bearing in mind that they too would one day by judged by God at the ‘heavenly assizes’ of the Last Judgement. In the first ever printed assize sermon, preached at Blandford Forum in 1571, William Kethe warned ‘you which be the Magistrates, and fathers of this our country’ to ‘so quyte your selves in your offices, that negligence be not layd to your charges, at that great and dreadful day’.235 Similarly, William Westerman cautioned the judges at Hertford to ‘forget not that you have a maister and a Judge in heaven’, while George Macey thundered to the assembled worthies at Chard in Somerset that, if they neglected their duties, they would be ‘brused with the rod of power and the breaking of them shall be as the breaking of a potterspot’, ‘the greatest potentates in the worlde being but as clay in the hande of the potter’.236 Judgement was not surprisingly a common theme in these sermons –​perhaps the commonest –​and the parallel between the current exercise of secular justice and the coming Day of Judgment was one which few preachers could resist. ‘Let the view of these Assises whisper to your conscience a Memorandum of those universall Assises’, cautioned the Devonian minister John Bury at Exeter: ‘remember in all your projects and courses, that the Lord Judge, and your Conscience the Witnesse, doe now stand watching what you doe, and will then discover all, when you shall stand to your triall for life or death’.237 Many authors went further than commenting upon the general similitude of the duties of earthly judges with the office of God’s heavenly judgement, and warning judges and magistrates to conduct themselves in the image of God’s justice and with an eye on their own impending judgement. They did so frequently by explaining that civil law and justice had a particular responsibility to accord with and prosecute God’s own law; specifically, the precepts of the Decalogue.238 At a sermon preached at the Taunton assizes, William Sclater warned magistrates that ‘ye utterly mistake the matter, if because yee have the moderation of humane Lawes, yee thinke your selves exempt from the strictest observance of the Lawes of God’.239 John Hoskins addressed himself to the assembled dignitaries at William Kethe, A Sermon made at Blanford Forum, in the Countie of Dorset (1571), f. 22v. Westerman, Two sermons of assise, p. 65; George Macey, A sermon preached at Charde in the countie of Somerset, the second of March 1597 (1601), p. 3. Cf. Nathaniel Bownd, Saint Pauls Trumpet Sounding an Alarme to Judgement (1615), p. 83; John Squire, A sermon preached at Hartford Assises (1617), p. 22; Carpenter, The conscionable Christian, p. 15. 237 John Bury, The schole of godly feare. A sermon preached at the Assises holden in Exeter (1615), p. 30. 238 E.g. Barnabe Barnes, Foure bookes of offices enabling privat persons for the speciall seruice of all good princes and policies (1606), p. 152. 239 William Sclater, A Sermon preached at the last general assise holden for the County of Sommerset at Taunton (1616), p. 10. 235 236

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Hereford in 1615, ‘(right Honorable, right Worshipful) whom God hath made Custodes utriusque Tabulae, Commissions to enquire, Justices of Oier and Terminer, to determine of offences belonging unto both Tables, as far as they may be discovered’.240 It was not just the monarch, but also by extension his judiciary, who were the keepers of both tables of the law. William Kethe explained to the magistrates of Dorset that their duty was not only to see common quietness kept amongst the people, but also to defend the honour and glory of God, ‘I meane to execute justice upon such as transgresse the lawes of God’.241 William Pemberton elucidated the same point at greater length: governors were duty bound, in all their acts and designs, to strive towards the glory of God and the good of men. This aim was to be ‘most happily achieved, if they shall principally eye and respect both the Tables of Gods law, whereof they are the Great-​Lords Keepers’. The religion and piety of the first table was deemed ‘the basis and foundation of a truly prosperous politie’, and the equity and justice of the second ‘the nerves and sinews of human society’.242 There was, accordingly, a positive duty incumbent upon the judiciary to uphold the Ten Commandments, and a negative prohibition in force not to contradict them. ‘How can that be good in the law of any Common-​weale’, asked the Winchester prebendary Abraham Browne at his home assizes, ‘that breaketh one of the ten Commandements’?243 In a cautionary aside to the legal eagles of the county, he explained, ‘judge righteous judgement, shew not Art of Law in the lawes of men against the law of God’. The lecturer at St Saviour’s Southwark, Thomas Sutton, called upon the assembled justices to be ‘like Jethroes Judges . . . having Gods Law that was once written in Tables of stone, firmely and plainly written in the fleshy tables of your heartes’.244 A number of preachers stressed that it was to both tables of the Decalogue that their listeners owed adherence, not only the second concerning civil matters, or indeed the first concerning God. Immanuel Bourne explained to the assembled grandees at the Derby assizes that ‘thou mayest not take care of the first Table onely, and neglect the Second: nor of the Second only, and neglect the first’, while Thomas Scott condemned John Hoskins, Sermons preached at Pauls Crosse and elsewhere (1615), p. 13; cf. Garey, Ientaculum Iudicum, p. 21. 241 Kethe, A Sermon made at Blanford Forum, f. 8r. 242 Pemberton, The charge of God and the King, sig. A4v. Samuel Ward labelled safeguarding the first and second tables of the Decalogue as part of the ‘principall scope of Magistracie’: Ward, Jethro’s Justice of Peace, p. 35. 243 Abraham Browne, A Sermon preached at the assises, holden at Winchester (1623), pp. 27–​8. 244 Thomas Sutton, Jethroes counsel to Moses: or, a direction for Magistrates (1631), p. 27. 240

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the seeming-​godly merchant, ‘curious in the duties of the first Table, which touch not the corruptions of his profession; but for works of mercy commanded in the second Table, he knows not what they meane’.245 Robert Sanderson cited, not the Ten Commandments themselves but Christ’s new Testament summary of them in what he termed a ‘golden rule’. ‘Let that golden rule . . . proposed by our blessed Saviour himselfe as a full abridgment of the Law and Prophets be ever in your eye’, he implored the congregation of judges and local worthies gathered in Lincoln for the assizes; ‘even to doe so to other men, and no otherwise, than as you could be content, or in right reason should be content, they should doe to you and yours, if their case were yours’.246 Arnold Hunt has suggested that, in the past, historians have ‘perhaps been too inclined to take the rhetoric of magistracy and ministry’, in other words the rhetoric of sermons such as these, ‘at face value’ rather than as ‘a means of negotiating a tense and delicate relationship’.247 Sermons before magistrates, just like sermons before the people, or even the royal court, were capable of being framed in critical rather than laudatory terms.248 At the same time, however, Hunt himself has acknowledged that many of ‘the scriptural and moral commonplaces that formed the staple fare of assize sermons were often repeated by judges and justices, with very little alteration, in their own speeches’.249 Calls for judges to hold to the principles of divine law may in part have been framed by preachers as a reproach, to remind them of their duty and in an effort to reform an imperfect justice system, but they were also standard commonplaces, and in that sense at least uncontroversial. They might even be effective. In justifying the printing of his sermon delivered at the beginning of the Sussex assizes, William Overton described how the judges, once they had heard it, ‘tooke occasion thereby, to give a verye quicke, and vehemente charge to the graund Jurie, yea, and to the Justices themselves . . . to looke more narrowly to matters of Religion . . . and to search out, and see punished all that were offenders to the contrary’, although we should probably take Immanuel Bourne, The anatomie of conscience or a threefold revelation of those most secret Bookes. . . (1623), p. 28; Thomas Scott, The high-​wayes of God and the King (1623), p. 64. 246 Robert Sanderson, Ten sermons preached I. Ad clerum 3. II. Ad Magistratum 3. III. Ad Populum 4 (1627), p. 214. 247 Hunt, The Art of Hearing, pp. 316–​8. 248 For an example of the differences in tone that could appear in sermons in different contexts, see Sarah Bastow, ‘Sin and Salvation in the sermons of Edwin Sandys: “Be this sin against the Lord far from me, that I should cease to pray for you”’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 209–​22. 249 Hunt, The Art of Hearing, pp. 316–​8. 245

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these claims with a generous pinch of salt.250 The general principle that the law of God was possessed of a greater authority than all temporal laws resonated through these assize sermons, and throughout society more broadly. Matthew Stoneham, in the first of two sermons ‘of direction for judges and Magistrates’ preached before the bench in Norwich, gave four reasons why God’s law should be set above the king’s, the last of which observed that ‘there can be no common-​weale where the law of God is not . . . let Theologie die, and no policie can live’.251 William Pemberton explained that God, king, law, magistrate and people were all entwined in a common endeavour of justice, the ultimate purpose of which was to pronounce the glory and supremacy of the creator: God is the ordeyner of our King, the King the image of God, the Law the worke of the King, Judges interpreters of our Law, Magistrates with them dispensers, Justice our fruit of Law dispensed, this fruit of justice the good of the people, the good of the people the honour of our King, this honour of our king, the glory of God, the ordeiner, orderer, and blesser of all.252

Before the Fall in the Garden of Eden, William Hayes explained to the justices in St Mary’s Oxford in 1624, ‘the positive Law, and Man, were once of equal extention’; it was only after the Fall that it became necessary for ‘humane power’ to ‘put on Majestie’, and for ‘angry justice . . . to discipline their enormities with a rougher hand’, giving rise to the rule of national and civil laws.253 Divine and civil law were therefore different in expression but (in theory at least) identical in essence. Finally, it is also worth noting that, even where the authors of assize sermons did not mention either law or the Decalogue explicitly, it is clear that the morality of the Ten Commandments suffused discussions of sin and criminality across the board. Occasionally this was through the implicit discussion of specific commandments. For example, William Younger, at a sermon preached before the assizes at Thetford in Norfolk, explained that incest was forbidden as a species of adultery by the table of the heart, ‘which God afterward wrote in Tables of stone’.254 William Westerman alluded to the language of the commandments when inveighing against

William Overton, A Godlye and pithie Exhortation, made to the iudges and uistices of Sussex (1579), sig. Aiiir. 251 Matthew Stoneham, Two sermons of direction for Judges and Magistrates (1608), p. 19. 252 Pemberton, The charge of God and the King, sigs. A8r-​v. 253 William Hayes, The paragon of Persia; or the lawyers looking glasse. . . (1624), pp. 19–​20. 254 William Younger, the Nurses Bosome (1617), p. 30. 250

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the sins of blasphemy, adultery, and the bearing of false witness, complaining that while those who committed such sins ‘stand not in your Kalender condemned to die’, those crimes were judged by God as amongst the most heinous.255 William Kethe called upon the justices of Dorset to prosecute Sabbath-​breaking with greater fervour, while Thomas Pestell railed against the evils of covetousness before the judges in Leicester.256 Miles Smith, in condemning pride at a meeting of the Worcester assizes as ‘the summe of al naughtiness’, fell back on the language of the Decalogue to stress the depths of its evil, describing it as idolatry, sacrilege, theft, murder, adultery, false witness and covetousness.257 Others referenced the commandments more obliquely, but in ways which would surely have held strong resonances for the audience of listeners, by naming notorious biblical characters who had flagrantly flouted God’s laws (including Absolon, Jezebel, Achan, Ahab, Zimri and Cozby), as well as victims of infamous sinners (Naboth) and agents of God’s vengeance (Phineas).258 As Chapters 5 and 6 explain in greater detail, by the end of the sixteenth-​ century these and other characters had become ciphers for the breach of God’s commandments, in both written discussions and visual representations. In sum, the evidence of assize sermons suggests that the tropes and values of the Ten Commandments were ubiquitous at least in the rhetoric of magistracy and ministry, and perhaps also in the exercise of justice itself. The Decalogue helped to justify the authority of the magistrate, but it also permeated the values of justice which early modern society represented to itself at the start of the meetings of the most serious of the provincial criminal courts. Whether or not the actions of the judiciary lived up to this ideal must wait to become the subject of another book; what is clear is that the rhetoric of justice in post-​reformation England aspired to the same values of patriarchy and theocracy as expressed in the Ten Commandments, and as practiced by the judges and kings of the Old Testament. Westerman, Two sermons of assise, p. 28. Kethe, A Sermon made at Blanford Forum, f. 8v; Pestell, Morbus epidemicus, p. 2. 257 Miles Smith, A learned and godly sermon preached at Worcester at an Assise (1602), pp. 15–​16. 258 E.g. Macey, A sermon preached at Charde, pp. 24–​8, 33; Lancelot Dawes, Two sermons preached at the Assises holden at Carlisle (Oxford, 1614), pp. 4–​5; Squire, A sermon preached at Hartford Assises, p. 14; Samuel Burton, A sermon preached at the Generall Assises in Wawicke (1620), p. 26; Hayes, The paragon of Persia, p. 11; Sanderson, Ten sermons preached, pp. 238–​56, Carpenter, The conscionable Christian, pp. 71–​2; Hannibal Gamon, Gods just desertion of the unjust: and his persevering Grace to the Righteous (1622), p. 11, 20; and so on. On the significance of the example of Phineas in particular, see also Gunther, Reformation Unbound, pp. 149–​50. 255 256

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The Seventh Commandment Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery. Exodus 20:14

No commandment better illustrated the reformation-​era blurring of the boundaries between divine law and secular justice than the Seventh. In early modern England, of course, adultery was treated as a moral offence, and therefore came under the purview of the ecclesiastical rather than the secular courts.259 The sentences convicted adulterers could expect from such courts ranged from excommunication to public penances, which were often in practice commuted to fines, especially for wealthier male offenders.260 This ‘soft’ punishment was in stark contrast to God’s commandment to Moses that ‘the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death’.261 This section will begin by considering briefly the severity with which breaches of the Seventhth Commandment were viewed, before mapping the extent to which the precept was expanded beyond adultery itself to include an extraordinarily wide range of ‘sins of the flesh’.262 Finally, it will consider the debate amongst reformers over whether the crime of adultery ought to be punishable by death. Sins against the Seventh Commandment, the Kent cleric John Boys explained, were amongst the most serious in the Decalogue; more serious certainly than sins against the Third and Sixth. The reasoning for this was that murderers and swearers ‘become many times exceeding sorrowfull after the fact’, whilst the wanton ‘even in the middest of his repentance sinneth afresh’.263 Carnal sins were inherently pleasurable on a sensual level and so they possessed a greater magnetic draw on weak-​willed mankind than other deeds born of (say) anger or thoughtlessness. The lecturer at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, George Estey, noted that to breach the Seventh Commandment was a more serious fault than to steal because ‘in God’s law, he who did steale, did onely make restitution foure or five

Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 238–​81. 260 Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, pp. 323–​61. 261 Leviticus 20:10. 262 For a more detailed consideration, see Jonathan Willis, ‘“Moral Arithmetic” or “Creative Accounting”? (Re-​)defining Sin through the Ten Commandments’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 69–​87. 263 Boys, An exposition of al the principal Scriptures, p. 101. 259

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fold: but he that committed adultery was put to death’.264 In fact a number of authors made the point that, in biblical times, adulterers had been condemned to death for their crimes. This was not often invoked as part of an explicit argument that such punishments should be resurrected, but it did serve to underscore that adultery was one of the most heinous of all crimes in the eyes of the almighty. Gervase Babington added ‘some thing concerning the punishment of them that breake this commaundement’ at the end of his discussion, noting that the law of God prescribed death for adultery and forced marriage for fornication. The Athenians had also punished adultery with death, and in the time of King Canute the English had cut off the noses and ears of adulterous women. And, of course, there was to be a ‘spirituall punishment’ of adultery which ‘was ever, is, and shall be damnation of bodie and soule in the pit of hell without repentance’.265 Francis Bunny repeated that the biblical punishment for fornication was also death, while Hooper noted that by killing adulterers the honest party was left free to remarry, a kindness of which current English law fell short.266 John Dod observed that the sin of adultery was worse than both murder or theft on the basis that it killed the souls of both parties rather than just that of the perpetrator. He also observed a number of additional consequences of the sin: fire in the bones and incurable disease; extreme poverty; destruction of goods, body and soul; loss of reputation; and theft, insofar as acts of adultery which resulted in pregnancy foisted one man’s child upon another man’s possession.267 Finally, the ‘arch puritan’ preacher William Gouge explained that there was ‘no sinne thorowout the whole Scripture so notoriously in the severall colours thereof set forth’ as adultery. It was not only committed against the souls, bodies, names and goods of the parties involved, but also against the husband and wife of each party, the children born of the liaison, and the broader family, town, city, nation, and Church ‘where such uncleane birds roost’. Worst of all though it was a sin against each person of the Trinity itself: ‘the Father (whose covenant is broken) the Sonne (whose members are made the members of an harlot) and the Holy Ghost (whose Temple is polluted)’.268 Having established the gravity of the precept, authors proceeded to explore in minute detail every twist and turn of the duties commanded,

Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, sig. Q7v. Babington, Fruitful, p. 345. 266 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p. 192; Hooper, ‘Declaration’, pp. 383–​6. 267 Dod, Plaine, pp. 284–​5. 268 William Gouge, Of domesticall duties eight treatises (1622), p. 220. 264 265

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and especially vices forbidden, under the simple injunction not to commit adultery. In explaining the imperative of God’s Seventh Commandment to his imaginary catechumen, the Cornish clergyman John Carpenter did not even use the word adultery; in its place, he used one of the most commonly employed catch-​all alternatives, ‘uncleanness’.269 Sins against this commandment therefore included not only the act of adultery itself, but all manner of sexual sins. According to George Downame, these were to be categorised by partner and consent, and included rape, fornication (both faithful concubinage and serial whoremongery), incest, buggery and sodomy, bestiality, and carnal relations with ‘unclean spirits’ such as Incubi and Succubi.270 William Perkins cautioned against the polygamy of the Old Testament patriarchs, excusable at the time but no longer. He also condemned intercourse with the Devil, the failure to show seemliness or honesty within wedlock, and ‘nocturnall pollutions’.271 William Whately produced a systematic account of sins forbidden regarding the sexual act itself. Abuse of the facility of intercourse could be committed by the individuals themselves (masturbation) or with other humans of the opposite sex (adultery, fornication) or same sex (sodomy) or with non-​humans (bestiality). Sins of fornication outside of marriage could be classified according to the manner of committing them (e.g. violent rape, or through magic and charms, which Whately considered to be worse), or by the person with whom they were committed, for example with kin (incest).272 Most authors also observed that the Seventh Commandment regulated the institution of marriage more generally; both preparations leading up to it, and its conduct thereafter. Richard Greenham explained that breaches of the commandment in this respect included marrying one of false or no religion, marrying within the prohibited degrees or without the consent of parents, and through the intemperate use of the marriage bed.273 Osmund Lakes clarified that the aim of the commandment was ‘for the propagation of an holy seed to be made upon earth by man’; everything which detracted from that end was therefore a sin and breach of the law. In terms of marriage, this included failures of preparation –​such as the husband not having the wit, wealth, trade or education to make a success of the venture –​ and entering into marriage for an unlawful end, such as the satisfying of lust, the gaining of wealth, the making of family alliances or for some John Carpenter, Contemplations for the institution of children in the Christian religion (1601), sig. E2r. Downame, Abstract, sig. I5r. 271 Perkins, Chaine, p. 84; Cf. Brinsley, Watch, p. 55. 272 Whately, Pithie, p. 174. 273 Greenham, Workes, p. 77. 269 270

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other temporal advantage.274 William Whately enumerated a range of sins of adultery in respect of marriage, from entering into it incorrectly (with one pre-​contracted, for example), through to the abuse of marriage itself, by desertion of the marital partner, or the unsanctified, unseasonable or immoderate use of the marital bed.275 The true potential of the Seventh Commandment for reforming individual behaviour and Christian society, however, lay not in its proscription of particular sexual misdeeds, but in its interdiction against all allurements to carnal, unclean or wanton behaviour. It was not only the sin itself, but all occasions which might give rise to it, which were forbidden by God’s holy law.276 The precept therefore forbade, alongside the adulterous act itself, various different ‘adulteries’; of the eye, the heart, the mouth, the hand, of apparel, and so forth. John Hooper used the Seventh Commandment to inveigh against ‘all excess of meat and drink’, women covered in precious stones, long hair on men, ‘unchaste and filthy communication’, and more.277 Thomas Granger elucidated further:  the seventh precept prohibited friendship or familiarity with ‘uncleane’ persons, naked pictures ‘which are allurements of lust’, the wearing of cosmetics or elaborate hairstyles, gadding abroad ‘to gaze and be gazed on’, sweet perfumes, and an eclectic catalogue of behaviours including ‘squint-​lookes, glances, minsing, tripping, jetting, amorous countenances, tinkling, creaking’, and ‘alluring gestures’.278 Often such seemingly random prejudices had impeccable scriptural foundations. Robert Allen, for example, cited Isaish 3 in support of his condemnation of ‘the curious pride, & wanton nicenesse of women in apparell’, which threatened death and baldness to the haughty men and women of Jerusalem respectively.279 But the Seventh Commandment also gave commentators the chance to grind some distinctively early modern axes. Perhaps the most common of these were drunkenness, dancing, and theatrical entertainments:  Stephen Denison began his list of causes of uncleanness with ‘stageplayes, wanton books, the suffering of whorehouses, wanton dancing, strange attire, idleness, excess in eating and drinking’.280 Robert Horne provided a similar list of bodily Lakes, Probe, p. 144. Whately, Pithie, p. 175. 276 For a more systematic discussion of the ways in which the commandments were magnified by authors, see Chapter 3. 277 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, pp. 377–​8. 278 Granger, Tree, pp. 45–​7. 279 Allen, Treasurie, p. 197. 280 Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 34. 274 275

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provocations to adultery, including immodest apparel, intemperant consumption of food and drink, wanton pictures, lewd pastimes, uncleane songs and ditties, houses of open whoredome, excessive sleep and idlenesse. The most ire, however, was reserved for ‘mixt dancing, of men and women, where all dores are set open for whoredom to come in’ via the fleshy dalliance of the eye, the hand, the mouth, and the ‘mincing foote’.281 Gervase Babington concurred with Horne that ‘much experience hath too wel proved’ the link between dancing and uncleanness, and came to much the same conclusion about ‘these prophane and wanton stage playes or interludes’.282 Such prohibitions lacked explicit biblical sanction, but John Brinsley suggested that ‘wanton pictures, playes, dancing or dalliance’ were so sinful that ‘of the very beholding thereof, every ones conscience will tell him the daunger, when it is truly awaked’, on the basis that they were breeding grounds for the ‘wanton thoughts and lusts condemned by our Saviour. Mat. 5. 28’ in the Sermon on the Mount.283 That a straightforward commandment against adultery could be used as the basis for condemning three of the Seven Deadly (or capital) Sins (lust, gluttony and sloth), as well as dancing and stage plays, demonstrates the flexibility of the commandments, and also their importance for divines trying to bring about a broader reformation of manners; to reform culture and society according to a stricter set of moral principles inspired by, but also significantly more advanced than, the biblical ethics of the Decalogue. The principal virtue commanded by the Seventh Commandment was chastity: Richard Bruch suggested its preservation through continuous watchfulness over all of the body’s members; the taming and subjection of the flesh; and the use of the remedy appointed by God against incontinency (i.e. marriage): several writers observed the well-​worn dictum from 1 Corinthians 7:9 that it was better to marry than to burn in hell.284 John Bradford reminded readers that their bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit and that they should be kept pure accordingly. He also noted that husbands should be grateful to God not only for attempting to secure their own chastity but also for guaranteeing that of their wives, giving the prayer, ‘grant to me and my wife, that we may dwell together according to knowledge, and may keep our vessels in holiness’.285 In a work translated from the French, George Chapelin explained that it was not enough simply not Robert Horne, Points of instruction for the ignorant (1617), sig. Bviiir. Babington, Fruitful, p. 316–​18. 283 Brinsley, Watch, p. 57. 284 Bruch, The life of religion, p. 181; Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p. 199; Downame, Abstract, sig. I6r. 285 Bradford, Sermons, Meditations, Examinations, &c., pp. 166–​7. 281

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to commit the deed of adultery; what the commandment required was for all evil thoughts to be plucked up at the root, and for heart, eyes, hands and all other body parts to be kept clean and undefiled.286 Body and soul were to be kept chaste, allurements to uncleanness avoided, and the senses soberly used.287 As William Perkins explained, modesty and sobriety entailed maintaining the opposite virtues to the sins denounced: so apparel ought to be necessary, honest, commodious and frugal; food and drink ought to be consumed with sobriety and moderation, and so forth.288 The question of how adultery ought to be punished was a topic which attracted considerable interest over the course of the reformation. We have already noted that a number of authors commented upon the fact that sentences for adultery had been much harsher in biblical times than was the case in contemporary society; and Chapter 5 explores in more detail attempts to enforce a more stringent punishment for the crime, culminating in the infamous puritan adultery act of 1650, which finally made adultery an offence punishable by death.289 What is worth noting, however, is that these were pressing concerns not just for interregnum puritans, but from the very earliest stages of the reformation. One of the great martyrologist John Foxe’s less well-​known works is a Latin treatise of 1548, entitled De non plectendis morte adulteris Consultatio (‘a consideration of not punishing adulterers with death’). In this treatise Foxe, often considered a spiritual father of the puritan movement for his thoroughgoing evangelical principles, somewhat unexpectedly played the part of the forgiving sinner. In the introductory epistle, he suggested that the majority of the population were more given to condemnation of adulterers than to the prospect of pardoning them, and he marvelled at the complacency of those who were so quick to abhor in others a sin to which they might easily fall victim themselves.290 Foxe called upon ministers to moderate the severity of the law with calls for charity and mercy, not to increase it by sounding the trumpets of war; further, he reminded his readers that the judicial laws of the Old Testament which demanded the death penalty for ESTC records that the French original has not been traced. George Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction (1582), p. 297. 287 Ezekiel Culverwell, A treatise of faith wherein is declared how a man may liue by faith and finde releefe in all his necessities (1623), p. 279. 288 Perkins, Chaine, pp. 86–​7. 289 See Chapter 5; on the adultery act, see Keith Thomas, ‘The Puritans and Adultery –​The Act of 1650 Reconsidered’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 257–​82. 290 John Foxe, De non plectendis morte adulteris Consultatio Ioannis Foxi (1548), sig. Aiiv. 286

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adultery were superseded, and that Christ himself showed nothing but compassion to adulterers.291 Overall Foxe’s treatise was humane, graceful, and pragmatic; he made a principled argument that the brutal punishments of the Old Testament no longer applied, and a practical one that ministers should find better ways of spending their time than agitating solely against adulterers. It was not part of Christian discipline to advance the death penalty except in the most serious of cases, he concluded, and there was no religious necessity to drive Christians to do so; rather, it was a matter for civil magistrates to decide upon as they saw fit.292 Equally interesting was the reply to Foxe’s treatise the following year by the prolific Bedfordshire evangelical, cleric, author and translator George Joye; A contrarye (to a certayne manis) consultacion:  that adulterers ought to be punished wyth deathe. Joye quoted Leviticus 20 and Deuteronomy 22 on his title page, and explained to his readers that he was persuaded to reply to Foxe’s Latin treatise in English ‘that all men might knowe, how parellous was the tytle of the latyne boke, and howe ungodly the autor thereof had perverted and wrested the holy scryptures’.293 Joye’s argument was essentially that adultery had become the great sin of the age and the great disgrace of England precisely because the harsh sanctions of biblical times had been abandoned.294 Whilst the judicial precepts of the law had indeed been abrogated, the punishment of adultery by death remained in the power of the magistrate, and was grounded within the law of nature and the Ten Commandments themselves.295 He explained that the grounds for the punishment of thieves and murderers with death for their breaches of the Sixth and Eighth Commandments were the same as those belonging to the Seventh; furthermore, adultery ought to be punished more harshly than theft, for to steal a man’s wife was a far greater crime than to steal his temporal goods. Where Foxe pleaded with his readers to hate the sin but love the sinner, Joye asked, ‘shoulde we not hate those open synners and their offences, which God so abhoreth and al godly men’?296 More than double the length of Foxe’s original treatise, the object of Joye’s visceral and bilious rant was finally realised a century later with the passage of the 1650 Foxe, De non plectendis, sigs. Avr, Biv, Biir. Foxe, De non plectendis, sig. Cviiv. 293 George Joye, A contrarye (to a certayne manis) consultacion: that adulterers ought to be punyshed wyth deathe (1549), sig. Aiir. 294 Joye, A contrarye (to a certayne manis) consultacion, sig. Aiiir. 295 Joye, A contrarye (to a certayne manis) consultacion, sig. Avr. 296 Joye, A contrarye (to a certayne manis) consultacion, sig. Biiv. 291 292

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adultery act.297 It was the spirit of Joye, not Foxe, which more accurately embodied this aspect of later puritanism. ‘Shall a Christian professor hold his peace’, Joye had asked: seinge, God robbed of his glory, his lawes & commaundements broken his holy so auncient institution, never yet  altered, now violated contemned & trodden under fote unpunished? yea and that amonge the Christianes? Except adultery be punished by death it be the greatest slander to the realm and the gospel, and one of the just causes whereby the realm shall be grievously plagued, causing the damnation of many.298

Cynthia Herrup has observed that two levels of law operated in early modern England, mirroring two distinct scriptural inheritances; on the one hand, ‘the formal law, inflexible and awesome in its punishments, reflected the God of the Old Testament’, whilst, on the other ‘the law as endorsed followed the gentler mood of the New Testament’.299 Debates over the punishment of adulterers encompassed both of these inheritances, but while William Perkins would argue that without mitigation of the severity of the law there could be no equity, it was the uncompromising position of Joye which informed the interregnum adultery act.

Conclusions This chapter has sought to demonstrate that the Ten Commandments helped to inform ideas of order, authority and justice in England throughout the period of the reformation. They did this in part by buttressing the power of monarchs, drawing explicit parallels between the laws of God and the laws of the king. Through the image of Moses the lawgiver, this parallel had particular resonance during the idiosyncratic theocracy of Henry VIII, whose instrument of royal supremacy became the organising principle of religious change in England. However, the commandments not only helped to establish the divinely-​ordained status of secular power; Ronald B. Bond has noted that a ‘veritable chorus’, including Thomas Cartwright, Philip Stubbes, Matthew Hutton and Lancelot Andrewes called for the adotion of Mosaic standards against adulterers. See Ronald B Bond, ‘“Dark Deeds Darkly Answered”:  Thomas Becon’s Homily against Whoredom and Adultery. Its Contexts, and Its Affiliations with Three Shakespearean Plays’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 16.2 (1985), p. 197. See also Wifrid R. Prest, ‘The Art of Law and the Law of God: Sir Henry Finch (1558–​1625), in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries:  Essays in Seventeenth-​Century History presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 99. 298 Joye, A contrarye (to a certayne manis) consultacion, sig. Bvr. 299 Herrup, ‘Law and Morality in Seventeenth-​Century England’, p. 111. 297

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they also played an important role in conditioning expectations about the ways in which that power was supposed to be executed. Kings and queens were instituted by God, yes, but for a specific purpose: they were to be custos utriusque tabulae –​keepers of both tables, guarantors of civil and external obedience to the moral law of the Decalogue. This was a position held by commentators across the religious spectrum, but articulated most forcefully by puritans as a way of trying to engender and guarantee the further reformation of religion in a direction of which they approved. Monarchs therefore had a duty themselves not to forget from whence their power came, or upon what conditions it rested, for tyrants were guaranteed to meet their comeuppance either in this life or the next. That was scant comfort for the men and women who had to submit to the chastisements of the superior magistrate, even if their disobedience to any orders which contravened the word or law of God was legitimate. But in heavenly principle, if not earthly practice, rulers were subject to the same natural law as their subjects. Much of the discussion of the duties and obligations of superiors and inferiors stemmed from commentaries upon the Fifth Commandment, to honour father and mother. The names of natural parents were seen as archetypes for a huge range of hierarchical relationships, from rulers and subjects, masters and servants, ministers and parishioners, to old and young, and between those with a greater or lesser set of gifts in any aspect of life, including learning and godliness. The use of this language of parenthood was no accident, for it made of subjection a natural state, and encouraged inferiors to see their childhood submission as a pattern to be emulated throughout their lives. The ‘honour’ demanded of inferiors by their superiors could take many forms: from external respect to internal reverence, from unthinking obedience to practical assistance, such as the paying of taxes and tithes, and the furthering of a master’s business interests and reputation. However, the qualitative nature of the parent/​ child relationship cut both ways, meaning that superiors were expected to shoulder an expansive duty of care with respect to their inferiors and dependents. Patriarchy was therefore not simply a charter for authoritarianism and exploitation, but (in its idealised state) described a relationship conditioned on both sides by love, care, and responsibility. Parents of all kinds were obliged to ensure that their charges were properly brought up in Christian religion: monarchs were required to protect their subjects, ministers to preach and administer the sacraments honestly and wisely, masters not to overburden their servants with work, and the gifted to use their talents for the benefit of all. Furthermore, not only did the Fifth

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Commandment require specific duties of particular offices, it also required all superiors to live exemplary lives in order to set the best example possible for their subordinates to follow. In theory then, patriarchy was as limiting and exhaustive a doctrine for authority figures as it was for those under their control, although in practice the exhortations of expositors of the commandments should be seen as outlining an idealised state of affairs, not as describing the reality of the situation. Many of the same tropes used to describe and reinforce the authority of kings and ‘magistrates’ in general were applied to members of the judiciary as viewed through the significant but neglected genre of assize sermons. Again, it is important to note that preachers were trying to shape reality just as much as they were engaged in describing it, and so we should not take their words purely at face value. However, it is also clear that they and the authorities who approved them to preach, and subsequently to print their sermons, were sympathetic to the idea that the role of justice in post-​reformation England was to safeguard society, by protecting the Church and by punishing the most heinous crimes in the eyes of God and men: those outlined in the two tables of the Decalogue. Judges, complainants, witnesses, defendants, indeed everybody involved in the legal process were encouraged to conduct themselves honestly, with one eye fixed on the impending day of heavenly Judgement at which no preferment would be given on the basis of earthly rank or position. Judges, like kings, were ordained by God primarily to prosecute his laws: and indeed the perfect functioning of the commonwealth was utterly reliant upon their execution of this vital duty. The Seventh Commandment provides an interesting case study in the blurring of sacred and secular law and justice over the period of the reformation. Adultery, traditionally a moral offence under the purview of the ecclesiastical courts, was in 1650 made punishable by death by Act of Parliament.300 This was not simply an unprecedented move by a puritan government operating in extraordinary times, however; rather, it built upon a tradition of evangelical wrangling over the severity of sins of the flesh going back at least a century, to the Edwardian debate between Foxe and Joye.

In addition, see Chapter 5 for a discussion of the attempt to strengthen the punishment of adultery through the abortive Edwardian Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum.

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The second use of the law is to inform and instruct man aright, what sin is, to accuse us, to fear us, and to damn us and our justice, because we perform not the law as it is required . . . howbeit the law concludeth all men under sin, not to damn them, but to save them, if they come to Christ. John Hooper, A Declaration of the Ten holy Commaundements of Almighty God (1548)

In spite of the many bitter differences engendered by the reformation, Protestants and Catholics continued to share several essential Christian priorities. Perhaps the most fundamental of these was the desire to achieve salvation: to have their relationship with God restored to a state of prelapsarian perfection, and thus to aspire post-​mortem to a joyous and everlasting heavenly repose with their Creator. ‘An exhortation against the fear of death’, published in 1547 as part of the first book of homilies, declared that a Christian man was ‘the very member of Christ, the temple of the Holy Ghost, the son of God, and the very inheritor of the everlasting kingdom of heaven’. For the true Christian, death would be ‘no death at all, but a very deliverance from death, from all pains, cares, and sorrows, miseries, and wretchedness of this world, and the very entry into rest’.1 An intrinsic element of this soteriological preoccupation was an equally powerful concern for the avoidance (insofar as was possible) of sin. Sometime godly minister Thomas Rogers was one of many authors of all religious opinions who echoed the Apostle Paul’s judgement in his Letter to the Romans, that ‘the wages of sinne is death’.2 It was not bodily death, however, but ‘An exhortation against the fear of death’, Sermons, or Homilies, appointed to be read in churches, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, of famous memory (Dublin, 1821), p. 77. Romans 6:23; Thomas Rogers, The general session conteining an apologie of the most comfortable doctrine concerning the ende of this world (1581), p. 81; Henry Langley, The chariot and horsemen of Israel A discourse of prayer (1616), p. 106; Thomas Beard, A retractiue from the Romish religion contayning thirteene forcible motiues, disswading from the communion with the Church of Rome (1616), p. 175; etc.

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eternal damnation which was truly to be feared. The author and clergyman Robert Horne explained that the punishment for all ‘ungodly sinners’ was hell; ‘that everlasting fire, or treasury of secret fire, prepared and kept in a place of the greatest distance from heaven’.3 The punishments of hell were greatly to be feared. Not only would ‘every member of the body, and of the soule’ be tormented ‘not for some thousands of yeeres, and so an end, but for thousands and upon thousands, and thousands that no end’. The greatest torment of all would be separation from God: ‘if the absence of the Sunne cause darknesse; what joy must needes be lacking, and sorrow abound where the Sun & God of salvation shall never in the beautifull beames of his presence be seene any more’?4 The central role of the Ten Commandments in defining and redefining the theological concepts of sin and salvation during the English reformation is very rarely remarked upon by historians of the period. What is more, the significance of the Decalogue in conditioning practical and pastoral responses to the critical imperatives to avoid sin and attain salvation has gone largely unrecognised. And yet the second office of the law, John Hooper explained in 1548, was ‘to inform and instruct man aright, what sin is’ and ‘to save them, if they come to Christ’.5 I have termed this the ‘evangelical’ office of the law for, as I will argue, it played an essential role in defining the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith alone.6 The following chapters demonstrate the centrality of the Ten Commandments to the Protestant concepts of sin and salvation, from the writings of Tyndale and other early English evangelicals through to late-​ Elizabethan and Jacobean conformists and puritans. They also explore and explain some of the paradoxes of the evangelical office of the law; for while the Decalogue acted as the mainspring of orthodox Protestant soteriology, it also facilitated a number of more radical religious responses, including separatism and antinomianism.

The author Robert Horne (1564/​5-​1640) should not be confused with his namesake, Robert Horne (1513/​15–​1579), the Elizabethan bishop of Winchester. 4 Robert Horne, Points of instruction for the ignorant (1617), Sig. Cvv-​Cvir. 5 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 282. 6 The Danish Lutheran theologian Niels Hemmingsen called this the ‘internall (or inward) use of the Lawe’: Niels Hemmingsen, The vvay of lyfe A Christian, and catholique institution comprehending principal poincts of Christian religion, which are necessary to bee knowne of all men, to the atteyning of saluation, trans. N. Denham (1578), p. 38. 3

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We (saith he) “are by nature the children of wrath;” which thing the law doth but utter only, and helpeth us not, yea, requireth impossible things of us. The law when it commandeth that thou shalt not lust, giveth thee not power so to do, but damneth thee, because thou canst not do it. William Tyndale, The Wicked Mammon (1527)

Introduction The Protestant reformation fundamentally reconfigured the Christian concept of sin. In the religious framework endorsed by the late-​medieval Church sin was a fact of life, rather like debt. Salvation was conceptualised as a broad and diverse economy, in which individuals could record their sins, confess them to a priest and make restitution in a complex but ultimately logic-​governed system of spiritual accounting. Sinning meant incurring spiritual debt, but it was possible to repay that debt through the performance of a range of deeds deemed meritorious by the Church. It was also possible to pay off the spiritual debts of the dearly departed –​ to speed the passage of their souls through purgatory –​and to accrue a store of credit against one’s own inevitable earthly demise; a sort of divine insurance policy.1 Most individuals invested financially and spiritually in a range of options to suit their pious inclination and material circumstances, from indulgences to chantries, pilgrimages to fraternities, relics to funeral doles for the poor, amassing a varied portfolio of post-​mortem provision. In practical terms, this system required that people should in See, for example, Robert Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England:  Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge, 2007); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (2nd edition. New Haven, 2005), ­chapters  3, 4, 5, 10); John Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–​1700’, Past and Present, 100 (1983), pp.  29–​61; Clive Burgess, ‘“By Quick and by Dead”, Wills and Pious Provision in Late Medieval Bristol’, English Historical Review (1987), pp. 837–​858; Jacques Le Goff, The birth of Purgatory, ed. Arthur Goldhammer (London, 1984); etc.

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the first instance, either with the help of a priest or independently, be able to identify sinful behaviour in order to be able to go on to take the appropriate remedial action. John Bossy and others have described how, for most of the Middle Ages, the primary guide for the identification of sin was the unscriptural but extremely memorable septenary system of the Seven Deadly (more properly Cardinal) Sins.2 The purpose of this framework was not to establish that pride, envy, wrath, avarice, gluttony, sloth and lechery constituted a comprehensive list of all possible sins, but rather that they embodied a nigh-​on comprehensive list of motivations for sinful behaviour: a group of heads, categories, or ‘Capitals’, under which the full gamut of sinful acts and urges could be realised and explored. The shift from the Seven Cardinal Sins towards the Ten Commandments –​ which after all had the weight of scripture behind them –​was given strong support by the early fifteenth-​century theologian and Chancellor of the University of Paris Jean Gerson.3 However, it is important to note that while the Commandments came increasingly to be used in addition to (or even in place of ) the Sins over the course of the fifteenth century, in practice they fulfilled precisely the same function as the list they replaced. Indeed, just as medieval Christians could turn to a range of resources designed to help them earn spiritual credit, so too they could resort to a large number of classificatory systems calculated to help them analyse their behaviour. Andrew Chertsey’s late-​medieval devotional tract The floure of the commaundementes of god was somewhat typical in this respect.4 On the title page of the Floure, a metrical versification of the commandments was flanked on the left by a horned Moses, and on the right by a contemporary bishop, the modern image of the great prophet himself.5 Following the Decalogue, glossed as the ‘x commayndementes of the lawe’, were listed the ‘five commandments of the church’, this time flanked by images on the left of the Pope, crowned and enthroned, and on the right by a group of kneeling secular rulers. The commandments of the Church were enumerated as: hearing John Bossy:  ‘Moral arithmetic:  Seven Sins into Ten Commandments’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988), p. 215. Deadly sins were those sins leading to damnation, and were not standardised. Cardinal sins were the most important sins, and were standardised into the (more or less) stable sequence of pride, envy, wrath, avarice, gluttony, sloth and lechery. See Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (Michigan: State College Press, 1952), p. 43. 3 Bossy: ‘Moral arithmetic’, p. 224. 4 The Floure was a translation of a French treatise, with an original verse prologue, prepared for the printer Wynken de Worde and published first in 1510, and then again in 1521. 5 Andrew Chertsey, Ihesus. The floure of the commaundementes of god with many examples and auctorytees extracte and drawen as well of holy scryptures as of other doctours and good auncient faders (1510), sig. A1r. 2

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mass; annual confession; annual communion; hallowing feast days; and fasting during lent. Chertsey was keen to demonstrate to the reader how the Ten Commandments mapped on to some of the other memorable lists provided by the Church; for example, the three commandments of the first table were shown to be married to the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, while the seven commandments of the second table corresponded to the seven works each of corporal and spiritual mercy, as well as to the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude.6 Seven Sins did not divide mathematically into Ten Commandments, but Chertsey’s ensuing moral arithmetic was impeccable. All the precepts of the Decalogue forbade pride, while avarice, the love of things more than God, was forbidden by numbers One, Three, Six and Ten. Sloth could be the reason for failing to fulfil any of the Ten Commandments, whilst ire and envy were comprehended under the Fifth. Gluttony was a love of the body which exceeded the love of God, and therefore broke the First Commandment through idolatry, the Third because greed prevented true worship (in the form of fasting), and the Seventh if it moved a sinner to lechery. Lechery or lust, the sister of gluttony, was a breach of commandments Seven and Nine.7 Chertsey also described the seven types of sin which each of the seven sacraments had been designed to counter. Baptism was instituted to combat original sin, extreme unction venal sin, penance mortal sin, confirmation weakness of faith, ordination ignorance, and the Eucharist inordinate affections.8 In other words, the commandments simply reinforced and were interchangeable with the rest of the Church’s traditional lists of sins and virtues: they were just one more way of enumerating a traditional system of Christian ethics, with the added advantage that they did so via an authentically scriptural framework. This sophisticated hermeneutical scheme of correspondences and connections can be seen in Catholic works of instruction throughout the sixteenth century. For example, Bishop Bonner’s A profitable and necessarye doctrine of 1555 contained expositions of the Seven Deadly Sins, the principal virtues and the eight Beatitudes, while his honest, godlye instruction for children (published the same year) included the seven works each of corporal and spiritual mercy, and the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost.9 According to the traditional Catholic/​Augustinian numbering. Chertsey, Ihesus. The floure of the commaundementes of god, f. 13r. 8 Chertsey, Ihesus. The floure of the commaundementes of god, f. 18r. 9 Edmund Bonner, A profitable and necessarye doctrine with certayne homelyes adioyned therunto (1555), sigs Aaaiiir-​Cccivr; Edmund Bonner, An honest godlye instruction and information for the tradynge, and bringinge vp of children (1555), sigs Aiiv–​Aiiir. 6 7

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Cardinal Bellarmine’s 1598 Dichiarazione più copiosa della dottrina cristiana, translated into English by Richard Hadock and published in Douai in 1604 as An ample declaration of the Christian doctrine, taught readers not only the Ten Commandments, but also the Seven Deadly Sins, the six sins against the Holy Ghost, and the four sins so ‘manifestly enormous’ that they cried out to heaven for vengeance.10 The overall stress was on practical utility: on the most effective way of communicating knowledge of moral and immoral behaviours to the believer, in order to help them to amend their life, and make restitution for sin through the appointed sacramental means.

The Depth of Sin The contrast between this traditional Catholic interpretation and Protestant conceptions of sin and the function of the Decalogue could not have been greater. From Luther onwards, Protestantism had been constructed around a fundamental belief in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The necessity of a doctrine which attributed salvific agency solely to divine grace freely given by a merciful and benevolent creator stemmed in large part from the strength of Luther’s Augustinian belief in the total depravity of mankind after the Fall. Humanity’s innate and absolute corruption rendered it incapable of contributing in any meaningful way to its own salvation in the manner in which the late-​medieval Church required. In this new schema, salvation was a gift of God, but the other side of the soteriological coin rendered inevitable damnation as the default fate of post-​lapsarian humankind. If God’s mercy meant that some might be saved, his justice demanded that all others be punished for their irredeemable degeneracy. ‘Depravity’, ‘degeneracy’, ‘corruption’ and ‘sin’ were not abstract terms, however. The framework for understanding sin and its consequences was constructed by Protestant divines exclusively around the Ten Commandments. The law of God was the perfect expression of his will: Calvin himself, in his sermons on Deuteronomy, declared that ‘the law which is conteined in the tenne commandements is an infallible rule. When we have that abridgement, we have therein the will of God fully warranted unto us’.11 Sin was defined simply as a thought, word or deed Robert Bellarmine, An ample declaration of the Christian doctrine, trans. Richard Hadock (1604), pp. 257–​70. These four latter were enumerated as ‘wilful murder’, ‘carnall sinnes against nature’, ‘oppression of the poore’ and ‘to defraud workmen of their wages’. 11 Jean Calvin, The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (1583), p. 816. 10

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in contravention of the divine will; all sins were therefore comprehended under the ten terse dictates of the Decalogue. ‘What is actuall sinne?’, asked the ‘puritan stormy petrel’ William Dyke in his posthumously-​published A treasure of knowledge. He went on to answer: ‘It is the breaking of the Law of God, in thought, word and deed’.12 Sin was defined as a breach of God’s law, and so within the Ten Commandments could be identified the full gamut of human sinfulness. Furthermore, intrinsic corruption meant that all human action was inherently sinful without the intervention of divine grace. ‘Thus we have heard’, intoned the second part of the ‘sermon of the misery of mankind’, ‘how evil we be of ourselves . . . for in ourselves (as of ourselves) we find nothing, whereby we may be delivered from miserable captivity; into the which we were cast, through the envy of the devil, by breaking of God’s commandment in our first parent Adam’.13 In other words, while the purpose of the ‘Catholic’ Ten Commandments was to form a guide for the identification of sin in order to empower the believer to make amends for it and live a godly life, the role of the ‘Protestant’ commandments was to reveal in full the horrifying depth and breadth of human sinfulness, in order to condemn them to everlasting damnation. This process was only the first phase in the overarching narrative of evangelical conversion. But the law had a vital role in explaining the full depth and breadth of sin and presenting the extent of human corruption to the sinner, in order that the knowledge of sinfulness and incapacity might lead them to repentance and thence to faith and the promises of the gospel. The role of the Ten Commandments in establishing the depth of sin was discussed at length by the pioneering evangelical, biblical translator and Protestant martyr, William Tyndale. In his prologue to the quarto edition of the English New Testament of 1525, reprinted several years later as A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, Tyndale set out to define the basic elements of the Christian faith, including terms such as Old Testament, law, Moses, nature, grace, deeds and faith. The Old Testament was ‘a book, wherein is written the law of God’, and the law, whose minister was Moses, was given to the faithful to bring them ‘into knowledge of themselves, Dyke, Knowledge, p. 19. The description of Dyke is Collinson’s: Patrick Collinson, ‘Dyke, Daniel (d. 1614)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [www.oxforddnb .com/​view/​article/​8356, accessed 24 March  2014]. The 1647 Westminster Confession described ‘every sin, both original and actual, [as] being a transgression of the righteous law of God and contrary thereunto’. Documents of the English Reformation, ed. Gerald Bray (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2004), p. 493. 13 ‘A sermon of the misery of mankind’, Sermons, or Homilies, p. 14. 12

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their true nature and deeds’.14 Like other commentators, Tyndale followed Paul in his letter to the Corinthians in describing the function of the law in this respect as ‘the ministration of death’.15 In Tyndale’s words, ‘it killeth our consciences, and driveth us to desperation.’ Mankind was completely powerless to fulfil the commandments: ‘neither is there any more power in us to follow the will of God, than in a stone to ascend upward of his own self ’.16 The evangelical author and composer John Merbecke, in his booke of notes and common places, explained that ‘to be under the lawe, is nothing els, but to be bounde or subject unto sinne, for the law through sinne, condemneth us, as guiltie’. Merbecke also referred to the law as ‘the ministration of death and damnation’, for ‘in the lawe we are proved to be the enemies of God, and that we hate him’.17 The whole point of the repurposed law –​and therefore of the commandments –​in this revolutionary Protestant schema was to demand the impossible, and to condemn individuals when they inevitably failed to deliver. William Dyke explained that the law was of ‘great use’ to the unregenerate in three principal ways: in discovering their sin, in aggravating and increasing it, and in pronouncing the sentence of death against them.18 In The Wicked Mammon, published in 1527, Tyndale spelled this out with reference to the Seventh Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ had expanded the scope of the commandment beyond the simple act of adultery, saying: ‘that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’. The Seventh Commandment thus acted as a prohibition not only of the act of adultery itself, but of lust, and of all acts born of lustful impulses. Yet the sinful nature of fallen man was unable to comply with such a simple instruction: as Tyndale had it, ‘the law when it commandeth that thou shalt not lust, giveth thee not power so to do, but damneth thee, because thou canst not so do.’19 The same was true for all of the commandments. Protestant divines therefore extended the reach of the long arm of the law far beyond the text of the Decalogue itself. Most commentators on the Decalogue established a number of rules for the better understanding of God’s commandments. Chief amongst these was that every commandment had an internal, spiritual, dimension as well as William Tyndale, ‘A Pathway into the Holy Scripture’, in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge, 1848), p. 8. 15 2 Corinthians 3:7; Tyndale, Pathway, p. 10. 16 Tyndale, Pathway, p. 18. 17 John Merbecke, A booke of notes and common places (1581), p. 613, 615. 18 Dyke, Knowledge, p. 22. 19 Tyndale, Mammon, p. 48. 14

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an external civil one. As Hooper put it, ‘man’s laws only requireth external and civil obedience; God’s laws, both external and internal’.20 William Dyke explained that ‘the Law is spirituall, and therefore is given to rule and order as well the inward man as the outward’.21 Richard Greenham listed four ‘speciall uses’ of the commandments, the third of which stipulated that ‘because God is a spirit, therefore his commaundements are spirituall, and require spirituall obedience’.22 Christ’s commentary on the commandments in the Sermon on the Mount, then, established a principle that was extraordinarily powerful, and endorsed at the highest scriptural level. Formal outward compliance with the commandments was inadequate and had to be matched by a sincere and flawless inner compliance, which was impossible to achieve. As the young Dudley Fenner described it, God’s law had to be kept ‘not onely in action, but also in the thoughtes of the heart and wordes of the mouth’.23 With regards the Sixth Commandment, ‘thou shalt not kill’, Christ said: Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.24

Accordingly, Greenham wrote that the Sixth Commandment forbade ‘all anger, hatred, or envie’, making any expression of the emotion of anger a breach of the law.25 This punishment arose, Abraham Flemming explained, because God could spy into the ‘secreat malice’ of the heart, and so even the casual insult raca, ‘idle braine, a biword spoken in contempt, and despight’ was worthy of civil punishment and spiritual damnation.26

The Tenth Commandment Thou Shalt Not Covet thy Neighbour’s House, Thou Shalt Not Covet thy Neighbour’s Wife, Nor His Manservant, Nor His Maideservant, Nor His Ox, Nor His Ass, Nor Any Thing That Is thy Neighbour’s. Exodus 20:17 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 274. Dyke, Knowledge, p. 23. 22 Greenham, Workes, p. 73. Cf. Perkins, Chaine, p. 37; Allen, Treasurie, pp. 25–​6, etc. 23 Dudley Fenner, A brief treatise vpon the first table of the Lawve, orderly disposing the principles of Religion, whereby we may examine our selves (1588), sigs. E3v–​E4r. 24 Matthew 5: 21–​2. 25 Greenham, Workes, p. 77. 26 Abraham Fleming, The conduit of comfort Containing sundrie comfortable prayers, to the strengthening of the faith of a weak Christian (1624), sigs. T8r-​v. 20 21

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Nothing conveyed the role of the Protestant Decalogue as a ‘ministration of death’, as a comprehensive and thoroughgoing illustration of the terrifying depth of human sinfulness, more effectively than the Tenth Commandment. The Reformed renumbering of the commandments after the Jewish/​Orthodox Christian tradition has been discussed at length in Chapter  1, but is worth recalling at this point.27 The Catholic order, to which Luther continued to subscribe, made one single lengthy First Commandment out of the text of Deuteronomy 5:6–​10, including the injunctions to ‘have none other gods before me’ and to ‘not make unto thee any graven image’. In order to make up Ten Commandments in total, this method of numbering separated Deuteronomy 5:21 into two distinct commandments:  the Ninth, ‘Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour’s wife’, and the Tenth, ‘neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour’s house’ or goods. The sequence of the Deuteronomical enumeration of wife, house, field, servants, animals, supported a textual division between a man’s wife and his property, goods and chattels.28 The Reformed tradition differed from this in three important respects. Firstly, reformed authors preferred the text of Exodus 20 to that of Deuteronomy 5: this was the first, divine, unmediated expression of the Decalogue, as opposed to the version of it delivered later and second-​hand to the people by God’s human representative, Moses.29 Secondly, as is often observed, reformed divines followed Orthodox Christian and Jewish commentators in placing an increased emphasis on the prohibition against the making of graven images in Exodus 20:4–​6 by making it a separate commandment. Thirdly, textual and exegetical factors, as well as simple mathematics, therefore demanded that the prohibitions outlined in Exodus 20:17 be treated as a single commandment, comprehending all forms of coveting.30 This aspect of Reformed Protestant moral arithmetic is not often remarked upon. If it is mentioned at all, the compression of the two forms of coveting in the Catholic system into one is seen simply as a practical consequence of the need to reduce the total number of commandments back down to ten, given the categorical imperative of the itemisation of a distinct prohibition against idolatry in the new Second Commandment. Bossy, for example, called the exposition of the second table ‘a less See Chapter 1. In contrast, the order of Exodus 20:17 was house, wife, servants, animals. 29 This ‘Priestly’ mediation of the divine will also suited the Catholic tradition, along with the more convenient wording. 30 Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s. 27

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controversial matter than that of the first’, which ‘for the most part entailed only a rearrangement of the moral teaching conveyed by the Seven Sins’.31 The following discussion, however, suggests that the restructuring of the reformed Tenth Commandment was of fundamental theological importance. Indeed, if anything, the Tenth Commandment was even more significant in conditioning English Protestantism than the Second. What was the Tenth Commandment actually for? The late-​medieval treatise Dives and pauper explained that, ‘in the viii. preceptes bifore god forbedith all wycked werkes’, and that ‘in these ii. last he forbedith al wycked wylles and consent to synne. for with outen wylle and assent of the hert is no synne done’.32 Traditionally then, the commandments against coveting provided a spiritual, inward dimension to the identification and categorisation of sin. Beyond the level of the scriptural text itself, Dives and pauper struggled somewhat with the exegetical division of the two last commandments. The Ninth Commandment, the author suggested, dealt with ‘covetise of a nother mans gode [i.e. goods] nat movable’, as well as ‘covetise of the iye’, while the tenth forbade ‘covetise of a nother mannes gode mevable’ and ‘covetise of the flessh’. To covet a man’s servant, wife or child ‘as for possession and servyce’ was therefore covetousness of the eye, and a breach of the Ninth Commandment, whilst covetousness of the same subjects ‘for mysluste of the flesshe’ was in breach of the tenth.33 Overall this was a relatively simple concept to grasp: commandments 1–​8 concerned outward deeds, whilst 9–​10 dealt with internal desires. Andrew Chertsey’s floure of the commandementes of god actually reversed the order of Dives and pauper. For Chertsey, it was the Ninth Commandment that ‘defendeth all lecherous thoughtes & commaundeth clennesse of herte’, whilst the tenth ‘defendeth all evyll thoughtes of theft, coveytyse, and avaryce the which ben agaynst the dyleccyon of this neyghboure’.34 But there was uncertainty, repetition and redundancy built into Chertsey’s exposition. His discussion of the Seventh Commandment explained that this precept ‘treateth of lechery that a man commytteth in operacyon’. He summarised this in the form of a short rhyme: Kepe the from lecherye & thoughtes yll Mysuse not thy body with wife ne mayde Bossy: ‘Moral arithmetic’, p. 232. Henry Parker, Here endith a compendiouse treetise dyalogue. of Diues and pauper. that is to say. the riche and the pore fructuously tretyng vpon the x. commanmentes (1493), sig. fiiiiv. 33 Parker, Diues and pauper, sig. hiiiir. 34 Chertsey, Ihesus. The floure of the commaundementes of god, ff. 99r–​100v. 31

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The Seventh Commandment itself, then, forbade ‘thoughtes yll’ and commanded ‘good mynde’. Whilst the Ninth Commandment was justified on the basis that it ‘defendeth all lecherous thoughtes & commaundeth clennesse of herte’, this message had already been effectively delivered alongside the proscription of actual adulterous acts two commandments earlier. This uneasy status quo was unacceptable to English Protestant divines for two (related) reasons. Firstly, the organisational fiction of a division between ‘outward-​facing’ and ‘inward-​facing’ commandments was unsustainable in light of the fact that, as mentioned above, the spiritual dimension of every commandment was fast becoming a fundamental hermeneutical principle for interpreting the Decalogue as a whole. Secondly, while on the surface of it there was not necessarily a serious problem with stressing that God really disapproved of lecherous thoughts, there was a worrying corollary: the implication that God’s law itself could contain repetition and redundancy. As a perfect expression of the divine will, it was inconceivable that God would frame his intentions so carelessly. As George Estey noted, ‘it is commonly called the Decalogue, or ten wordes, or Commaundements, for that there be ten. The morall law, for that it setteth downe all duties for manners of mankind’.36 John Dod, in his blockbuster A plaine and familiar exposition of the Ten commandements, wrote in relation to Exodus 20: 1 (‘And God spake all these words, saying . . .’) that ‘God spake not the first Commandement only, nor the second, or third, and left there: but he spake them all; and gave as strict a charge to keepe every one, as anie one; and no one was uttered by Gods voice, or written with his owne finger, more then other.’37 Thomas Bell made the point even more clearly: ‘if no other thing were prohibited in this commandement . . . there shoulde bee but nine precepts in the Decalogue: seeing the last should be no newe Commaundement, but only a bare recital or repetition of the nine former precepts’.38 The Ten Commandments represented ten precepts of equal importance. There was no room for repetition or redundancy. The Reformed interpretation of the Tenth Commandment was therefore forced to break new ground, and the fusion of all forms of covetousness Chertsey, Ihesus. The floure of the commaundementes of god, ff. 99r–​100v. George Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements (1602), sigs. I6r-​v. 37 Emphasis added: this is the section of the verse which Dod’s commentary refers to. Dod, Plaine, p. 9. 38 Thomas Bell, The Iesuits antepast conteining, a repy against a pretensed aunswere to the Downe-​fall of poperie, lately published by a masked Iesuite Robert Parsons by name (1608), p. 82. 35 36

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into a single commandment was actually helpful in this.39 This new commandment probed deeper than ever before into the souls of humanity, and its scope was significantly redrawn in order to classify concupiscence itself as a sin.40 ‘And in this precept’, Hooper intoned, ‘is declared specially our infirmity and weakness, that we are all miserable sinners . . . for never was there nor ever shall be, only Christ excepted, but offended in this precept, to what perfection or degree of holiness soever he came into’.41 Concupiscence, the lasting stain of Original Sin, was an integral part of the human condition. Under this approach to the Decalogue, it was also a breach of the Tenth Commandment, and therefore an actual sin, a death sentence, and clear grounds for reprobation. The Tenth Commandment effectively underwrote all the others, and in doing so functioned as a final coup de grâce to the embattled human soul. Its keeping required ‘such a charity and sincere love towards God and man, that the mind should not have as much as any contrary motion, or any resistance at all, to stain the glory and beauty of this love’. Even the glorious company of the saints had fallen in some ways short of this illustrious goal. The essence of concupiscence was hatred of God and heavenly things, stemming from the love of self and of earthly things. The Tenth Commandment was therefore stern and uncompromising, the very embodiment of the righteous judgement of God. Hooper went on to explore its full implications: In this commandment is not only forbid the effect of ill, but also the affect and desire towards ill: not only the affect, lust, concupiscence, proneness, inclination, desire, and appetite towards ill; but also, when man is most destitute of sin, and most full of virtue, most far from the devil, and nearest to God . . . yet is his works so imperfect, that if it were not for the free, liberal, and merciful imputation of justice in Christ Jesu, man were damned . . . . He that considereth this precept well, shall the better perceive the greatness of God’s infinite mercy, and understand the article and doctrine of free justification by faith.42 Luther’s approach to the Ninth and Tenth Commandments is an interesting subject, although it cannot be addressed at length here. In his sermons on the catechism, aimed predominantly at children, he took a characteristically idiosyncratic (and anti-​semitic) approach, almost dismissing them with the comment that ‘these last two commandments were, strictly speaking, given especially to the Jews, although they also concern us . . . cunning appears to have been very much the rule among the Jews.’ ‘Ten Sermons on the Catechism, November 30 to December 18, 1528’, in Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 51: Sermons I, ed. and trans. John W Doberstein (Philadelphia, 1980), p. 160. 40 Jean Delumeau noted that ‘the long-​standing Augustinian notion that temptation is sin’ was ‘one of the deepest convictions of classic Protestantism and the point of departure for Luther’s thinking’. Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear. The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th-​18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 499. 41 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 410. Cf. Babington, Fruitful, p. 504. 42 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 411. 39

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The full implications of the Decalogue for the evangelical concept of salvation will be explored in the following chapter. Its significance in terms of the present discussion is that it was not only actions, words, or even thoughts which were deemed sinful by the Tenth Commandment: it was mankind’s innate ‘proneness’ towards sin which was itself to be accounted as a deadly breach. It was through redrawing the commandments in this way that the reformers were able to justify and underpin the soteriological notion of ‘total depravity’, and to radically redraw their relationship both with salvation, and with God, in the light of their new anthropology of iniquity. This view of the Tenth Commandment became dominant in the English Church during the 1540s. As early as 1537, the evangelical ‘Bishops’ Book’ embraced fully this interpretation of the law: ‘in this last precept’, it declared, ‘be forbidden the inward affections of our hearts . . . all inward motion, desire, delight, inclination, and affection unto evil; which things be so rooted and planted in all us the children of Adam, even from the first hour of our birth’.43 Corruption and evil were ever present in the nature of man, and damnable in the baptised Christian even if they never committed any sinful offence by acting on those urges. Even though it was impossible in this life, and hopeless in any case without the aid of divine grace, the Tenth Commandment bound sinners to a life of ‘continual resisting and fighting against the said corruption, concupiscence, and evil desires’, in order to condemn them to everlasting death for their failure.44 This view was radically revised in the 1543 ‘King’s Book’ to something approximating the traditional Catholic view. Its exposition of the Tenth Commandment stated that the precept forbade neither words nor deeds, but rather ‘the inward consent of the heart to all unlawful motions, desires, delights, inclinations, and affections unto evil’.45 Although the language was similar, the meaning was completely transformed by the reintroduction of the concept of ‘consent’. The crux of the evangelical office of the law was that it condemned unlawful motions in toto, not only those which received the consent of the will. These years clearly marked a transitional period during which competing and contradictory approaches to human anthropology and original sin could co-​exist, sometimes even within the same text. The ‘Bishops’ Book’, or The Institution of a Christian Man (1537), in Formularies of Faith put forth by authority during the reign of Henry VIII, ed. Charles Lloyd (Oxford, 1825), p. 169. 44 The Institution of a Christian Man, p. 171. 45 ‘King’s Book’, or A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man (1543), in Formularies of Faith put forth by authority during the reign of Henry VIII, ed. Charles Lloyd (Oxford, 1825), p. 331. Emphasis mine. 43

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anonymous The Pater noster, the crede, and the commaundementes of God in Englysh, published in 1538, for example, contextualised the commandments against the Five Wits and Seven Deadly Sins in what can only be described as a ‘traditional’ manner. It also maintained the Catholic division of the commandments, retaining the division between two forms of coveting in the ninth and tenth. Of the transgression of these commandments, however, the author wrote that ‘the last two preceptes are the very marke set before us . . . for our evyll desyres wyll never be utterly destroyed untyll our fleshe be brought and renewed . . . in the lyfe to come and not untyll that tyme’.46 It was of course the radical, thoroughgoing interpretation of the Tenth Commandment by leading evangelicals including Tyndale, Hooper and Cranmer which rapidly became ascendant. The depth of sin as indicated by the Tenth Commandment was not simply the concern of early evangelical divines, however. It was also a theme to which later puritans readily warmed. Edward Elton, deemed by Richard Baxter to have been one of the greatest puritan authors of the great age of puritan writing, suggested two principal areas to which the strictures of the Tenth Commandment applied: ‘the pronenesse and inclination of our corrupt nature to evill . . . in every man and woman descended from Adam by natural generation’, and the effects and fruits of this inclination. These fruits themselves took two specific forms: firstly, evil and inordinate concupiscence, every motion, even the first motion, comming from the rebellion of nature, wherby wee are stirred up to evil, and doe with delight thinke any thing contrarie to the true love of God or man, though we never give consent of will to commit that evil . . .

and secondly, believers allowing themselves to become infected by motions of evil put into their minds by ‘Satan or evill men’47 The godly might take comfort at their finely-​honed ability to quell sinful impulses, and to abstain from forbidden behaviours, but they did so at their peril; for the Tenth Commandment declared those very impulses themselves to be sinful, whether they received the consent of the will or not. While The Pater noster, the crede, and the commaundementes of God in Englysh (1538), sigs. Dir–​Diiir. Baxter’s description of Elton is paraphrased by R. A. Christophers, ‘Elton, Edward (c.1569–​1624)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​66222, accessed 1 April 2014]. Elton, Exposition, pp. 254–​5. Cf. Edward Elton, Gods holy mind touching matters morall, which himselfe uttered in Tenne Words or Tenne Commandements (1625), Wing: E650cA, p. 369, posthumously published by Daniel Featley. 800–​900 copies of Gods Holy Mind were publicly burned at Paul’s Cross in February 1625 ‘because of objections to its treatment of the sabbath and deathbed communion’, although Elton seems otherwise to have been ‘innocuously conformist’. See Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts Volume I: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 388.

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late-​medieval sin was often discussed in transactional terms, the preeminent discourse in reformation England was of sin as a sickness; a corruption, a frightening malady which led inevitably to a terminal diagnosis. William Whately noted that sins of commission comprehended under the Tenth Commandment extended to ‘bad motions’ stemming ‘from our own corrupt hearts’, either waking ‘in fancies of our mindes’ or ‘sleeping, in dreames’.48 The fact that concupiscence itself –​that is, sinful motions lacking consent of the will –​was a sin meant that it was not only possible, but at best likely and at worst inevitable, that men and women would sin in their sleep.49 The godly Dorset minister Peter Barker called the Tenth Commandment ‘the perfection of Gods law’, and in a series of highly allusive metaphors referred to it as ‘the Sun-​beame in which the least mote may be discerned’ and ‘as a sword which cuts asunder the heart strings of every fleting imagination, though we yield no consent, or cast & plod how to bring it into act’. ‘The other Commandements’, Barker declared, will not let Satan have a chamber to dwell in the heart, this, thrusts him out as soone as he looks in at the doore’.50 It was not only early evangelicals and puritan divines who held to this definition of the Tenth Commandment: the view was also solidly part of the theological mainstream.51 Gervase Babington, the Bishop of Worcester whose ‘Calvinist episcopalianism’ fell somewhat short of actual puritanism, wrote that through this commandment ‘the Lorde plainely forbiddeth all inward desire of any thing unlawfull to be done although we never consent unto it, as the rebellion of the flesh’.52 ‘Here is condemned the verie entrance and being of anie vile conceit within us for any time’, he explained, ‘though upon some better wakening, we repell it, and abhorre it, and thrust it away without his act’. Belief in the full depth of sin as indicated by the evangelical office of the Decalogue was a mark of distinction not between puritans and conformists, but between English Protestants and their Catholic foes. In his Ample Declaration of the Christian Doctrine, Whately, Pithie, p. 251. For a fuller discussion of godly attitudes to slumber, see Alec Ryrie, ‘Sleeping, Waking and Dreaming in Protestant Piety’, in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (2012), pp. 73–​92. 50 Peter Barker, Painefull, pp. 305–​6. 51 The second part of the homily on the misery of mankind called humanity ‘crab-​trees, that can bring forth no apples’, ‘miserable and wretched sinners’. ‘A sermon of the misery of mankind’, Sermons, or Homilies, p. 14. 52 Babington, Fruitful, p.  488. John S.  Macauley, ‘Babington, Gervase (1549/​ 50–​ 1610)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [www .oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​973, accessed 1 April 2014]. 48

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the Jesuit and cardinal Robert Bellarmine explained that sin was ‘nothing else but a voluntary committing or omitting against the lawe of God’.53 Explaining further, Bellarmine noted that a sin had to consist of three formal elements: the commission of a forbidden act (or omission of something commanded); for that act to be a breach of divine law; and for the act to have been committed (or omitted) voluntarily and with the consent of the will.54 Quite simply, for Catholics an act performed without the consent of the will could not be considered sinful. As Bellarmine put it, ‘if one blaspheme when he sleepeth, or hath not the use of reason, or probably knoweth not, that such a word is blasphemie: in such case a man sinneth not: because there is no consent of the will’.55 This view sat in stark contrast to that of William Whately for example, who as we have just seen saw sin as an inevitable somnambulant condition (‘sleep-​sinning’?). The Protestant convert and former Catholic priest Thomas Bell, in The Iesuits antepast, cited both Augustine and Paul in defence of the view that concupiscence of the flesh was indeed sin, both materially and formally. Actual (voluntary) concupiscence was already prohibited by the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Commandments:  the Tenth, therefore, prohibited the very existence of formal, original and unconscious concupiscence. ‘No scripture can be produced’, he concluded, ‘which denyth that Originall concupiscence with the involuntary motions thereof, is properly sin’.56 The Decalogue was therefore the means for a daring and striking redefinition of not only sin, but of humanity itself. Perhaps more than any of the others, the Tenth Commandment enabled Reformed divines to re-​make humanity in their own theological image: to hardwire sin into the human condition to a new and unprecedented extent, and define a new anthropology of iniquity. The last precept of the Decalogue was instrumental in the confessional reshaping of the religious and moral landscape of early modern England.

The Breadth of Sin At first glance, one potential shortcoming of the Ten Commandments over the Cardinal Sins was in the range of sinful behaviours comprehended Emphasis mine. Robert Bellarmine, An ample declaration of the Christian doctrine, trans. Richard Hadock (1604), pp.  246–​8. For a more detailed discussion of Bellarmine and Bell, see Jonathan Willis, ‘Repurposing the Decalogue in Reformation England’, in Dominik Markl (ed.), The Influence of the Decalogue: Historical, Theological and Cultural Perspectives (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), pp. 190–​204. 55 Bellarmine, An ample declaration of the Christian doctrine, p. 248. 56 Bell, The Iesuits antepast, pp. 80–​3; cf. Walter Raleigh, The history of the world (1617), p. 286. 53

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under each classificatory system. The Cardinal Sins were not designed to be a comprehensive list of actual sins, but rather a list of ‘final causes’ which gave rise to particular sins in humanity.57 Greed, for example, could be a motivating factor in theft or murder; lust could act as a prompt to rape or adultery, and so on. As John Bossy noted, ‘the Seven Sins were more a system of indicative moral planning than a code’ per se; the commandments, on the other hand, were precise injunctions or prohibitions relating to the commission of specific actions.58 Ostensibly then, the usurpation of the place of the Seven Sins by the Ten Commandments might have resulted in a much narrower conception of sin, limited by the subject matter of the individual commandments themselves. However, as mentioned previously, the Decalogue was deemed to be a faultless system of governance, not to mention a microcosm of the whole of divine scripture and a perfect expression of God’s will. Expositors of the commandments therefore developed a system of exegesis which exponentially expanded not only the depth, but also the breadth of coverage of each individual commandment and of the Decalogue as a whole.59 At all stages the law of God embodied contradiction, and so the Bishop of Derry George Downame saw no problem in opening his An abstract of the duties commanded, and sinnes forbidden in the Law of God (1620) with the following: Whereas the holy Ghost testifieth, that the Law of God, (though propounded in ten words) is so perfect, that nothing may be added to it, and so large, that nothing may bee compared therewith: It must therefore bee confessed, that the sence of the Commandements is so to be inlarged, as that they may be vnderstood to bee the perfect Pandects (as it were) of Christians; forbidding all vices which the Lord condemneth in his Word; and commanding all morall duties which he requireth at our hands.60

God’s law was at once comprehensive and in need of enlargement:  the resolution of this apparent contradiction was in the conceit that exposition was necessary not because the commandments themselves were flawed, but because humanity’s understanding of them was inevitably imperfect and therefore in need of guidance.

Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins, p. 43. Bossy: ‘Moral arithmetic’, pp. 216–​7. 59 As Thomas Tentler has noted, ‘for all their condemnation of the inquisitorial confessor, magisterial Protestants managed to create a long list of sins and a strict sense of sin’. Thomas Tentler, ‘Postscript’, in Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T.  Thayer (eds), Penitence in the Age of Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 252. 60 Downame, Abstract, sig. Avr. 57

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Authors accordingly developed a number of analytical tools designed to tease the full meaning out of each commandment. Downame, for example, named five rules for the expounding of each precept. Firstly, wherein any duty was commanded the contrary vice was by implication also forbidden, and vice versa. Every commandment therefore contained two parts:  an affirmative and a negative, each of which could either take the form of a deed of commission or omission.61 This doubled (or quadrupled) at a stroke the duties required by the Decalogue: the Seventh Commandment, for example, not only forbade adultery but enjoined chastity and fidelity; the Fifth Commandment contained, not only an injunction to honour father and mother, but also necessarily forbade any action that might lead to their dishonour. William Dyke’s second rule (of four) ‘for the better understanding of the Law’ described that ‘in every commandement there be two parts, affirmative and negative, whereof the one is expressed, and the other understood’.62 The Suffolk minister Robert Allen’s Treasurie of Catechisme, dedicated to his patron Sir Nicholas Bacon and his wife, Lady Anne, contained no fewer than eight rules for understanding the commandments. The third of these stated that: to the more thorough understanding of the Law of God, we are to observe, that what evill or sinne soever is forbidden in any Commandement, there the contrary good thing or vertue is commanded: and on the other side, what good thing soever is commanded, there the contrary evill thing is forbidden.63

Richard Greenham’s briefe and necessary catechisme contained four ‘especial uses’ by which the commandments could be better understood, the first of which stated that ‘in every commaundement where evill is forbidden, the contrarie good is commanded: and where any good is commanded, the contrarie evill is forbidden’.64 So in the First Commandment, ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods but me’, ‘even that which the words do import’ was forbidden, whilst the good commanded was ‘to have God my onely God, and to be alwaies in his presence’.65 Dyke even attempted to represent the dual nature of each commandment visually and typographically through the spatial layout of the printed page, with virtues commanded running down one side of each page, and vices forbidden running Downame, Abstract, sigs. Avv–​Avir. Cf. Perkins, Chaine, p. 37. Dyke, Knowledge, p. 23. 63 Allen, Treasurie, p. 26 64 Richard Greenham, A briefe and necessarie catechisme (1602), sig. A5v. 65 Greenham, A briefe and necessarie catechisme, sig. A5v. 61 62

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down the other. He also aimed to map correlating virtues and vices on to one another; for example, in describing the Fifth Commandment, obedience was paired with disobedience, relief with neglect, love with hate, subjection with rebellion, and so on. Where possible, the pairings were both supported with appropriate scriptural references, but this was not always the case and therefore not deemed essential: if a prescription could be supported by scripture, the proscription of the obverse could be reasonably inferred without scriptural backing, and vice versa. One confusing feature of Dyke’s approach was that the relative positioning of virtue and vice on the page was dictated by whether the individual commandment began with a prescription or a prohibition. Moving from the Fifth to the Sixth Commandment was therefore potentially hazardous for the careless reader, as the list of commands on the left hand side of the page turned into a list of forbidden behaviours, and the vices on the right became the virtues to be emulated. Downame’s second rule stated that ‘under one particular vice mentioned in the Commandement, all of the same kind are forbidden; and under one particular commanded, all of the same commanded’.66 For Downame, this was another way of explaining the proposition treated earlier, that the law was possessed of a spiritual dimension. Following Christ and the Sermon on the Mount therefore, ‘unadvised anger is murther; and looking upon a woman to lust after her, is forbidden under the name of adultery’.67 Each prescription and proscription therefore demanded obedience not only in deed, but in word and thought too. In this way, Ten Commandments could very quickly become twenty (prescription and proscription), then forty (omission and commission), and thence 120 (in thought, word and deed). Here, Downame was conflating two distinct issues, which other authors treated separately.68 For Richard Greenham, the notion that ‘God is a Spirit, and therefore his commaundements require a spirituall obedience’ was a discrete point. This stemmed, as with Downame, from Christ’s expansion of the Sixth and Seventh Commandments in the Sermon on the Mount to censure prohibited thoughts and words alongside the deeds described in the commandments themselves. Greenham, however, included a separate rule for understanding that ‘in every commaundement, manie more evils are forbidden, & many more good things commanded, then in worde are expressed’.69 This was not just about establishing a spiritual Downame, Abstract, sig. Avir. Downame, Abstract, sig. Aviv. 68 Cf. Perkins, Chaine, p. 37. 69 Richard Greenham, A briefe and necessarie catechisme (1602), sig. A5v. 66

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dimension to the principal offence named by each commandment: it was about creating a series of categories of offence, each comprehended within the parameters of a single commandment. The godly Lincolnshire minister Thomas Granger, for example, was representative (if unusually thorough) in dramatically expanding the number of actions proscribed by the Seventh Commandment (‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’). As well as adultery itself, and staying (for the time being) within the realm of physical acts, Granger explained that this commandment specifically prohibited strange pleasures with beasts, carnal pleasures with evil spirits, buggery or sodomy with one of the same sex, masturbation, incest, ravishment, polygamy, the stealing of virgins, abuse of marriage, marriage with one unlawfully divorced, and of course plain old fornication.70 William Dyke also treated both aspects of Downame’s second rule separately. His first described that ‘in every commandement there is a figurative speech, whereby more is commanded or forbidden then is named’, while his fourth stated that ‘the Law is sprituall, and therefore is given to rule and order as well the inward man as the outward’.71 Robert Allen took a slightly different approach. His fourth rule declared, ‘that under one thing expressely either commanded or forbidden, all of the same kind . . . are likewise either commanded or forbidden . . . as having a mutuall relation the one to the other’, but he went one step further in explaining that ‘what soever causeth or any way helpeth and furthereth the same’ were to be treated ‘as coadiutors and accessaries thereunto’.72 In other words, the Ten Commandments acted as a plain backdrop over which divines could embroider on their moral fabric a design of ever-​increasing complexity. Almost by accident, the systematic and logical exposition of each commandment had as its inevitable by-​ product the creation and inculcation of new forms of religious and moral subjectivity. Through attempting to explain the commandments, divines radically altered their meaning to support their own culturally and theologically conditioned moral and religious priorities and preoccupations. Allen’s fourth rule discussed above takes us to Downame’s third, which required that ‘where any duty is commanded, there the meanes which tend thereto are enioyned; and where any vice is forbidden, there the meanes, provocations and allurements tending thereto are also forbidden’. This was the point at which the breadth of the law really began to expand exponentially. The number of means, provocations and allurements which Granger, Tree, p. 45. Cf. Barker, Painefull, pp. 266–​70. Dyke, Knowledge, p. 23. 72 Allen, Treasurie, p. 26. 70 71

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could give rise to sins of omission or commission in thought, word or deed relating loosely to the broad themes of each commandment was not only almost beyond measure, it was again an intensely subjective issue. Almost anything could conceivably act as a ‘coadjutor’ or ‘accessory’ to sin for somebody, sometime, somewhere. As Paul had written in the Epistle to Titus, ‘unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled’.73 The sinful inhabitants of reformation England were anything but pure, and so the world was full of provocations and allurements to sin. Greenham treated the same issue in his fourth rule for understanding the commandments, explaining that ‘in every Commaundement where evill is forbidden, there the occasions of evill are also forbidden, and where good is commanded, there also the occasions of good are commanded’.74 William Perkins’ third rule stated that ‘under one vice expressly forbidden, are comprehended all of that kind, yea, the least cause, occasion, or entisement thereto’.75 Again, taking Thomas Granger’s exposition of the Seventh Commandment as both a typical and somewhat extreme example of this tendency in practice, godly authors were capable of producing extraordinary lists of occasions, provocations and accessories to sin. Provocations to adultery (and other sins of that nature) were deemed by Granger to include ‘fellowship or familiarity with unclean persons’, naked pictures, ‘painting of the face, laying out of the haire, curling, crisping, curious binding, and strange attires’, as well as ‘gadding abroad to houses, through the streetes, meetings, and companies to gaze and to bee gazed on’; not to mention ‘squint-​lookes, glances, minsing, tripping, jetting, amorous countenances, tinkling, creaking, alluring gestures’, ‘mixt dancing of men and women together’, and ‘sweet perfumes, and costly smels.76 Any appeal to sight, sound, touch, taste or smell, could act as a gateway to sin; before they knew what was happening, an unsuspecting sinner could end up waist-​ deep in a more serious moral quagmire, such as adultery or fornication. The young Thomas Gataker sounded a more cautious note. It was true, he conceded, that ‘the Commandements that forbid any sinne, forbid those things also that may be occasions of that sinne’. But it was also the case Titus 1:15. Richard Greenham, A briefe and necessarie catechisme (1602), sig. A5v. Robert Horne treated the term ‘occasion’ rather differently, discussing not the occasions through which a commandment might be broken, but rather considering the occasion for which the commandment was given. For example, the ‘occasion’ of the Sixth Commandment was ‘our fierce and murtherous nature’. Horne, Points of instruction for the ignorant, sig. Bvir. 75 Perkins, Chaine, p. 37 76 Granger, Tree, p. 45. 73

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that ‘they inhibit not generally the use of all things to all, that any doth or may take occasion of evill by’. In other words, ‘they forbid them to those to whom they are that way dangerous, not to those that may and doe use them without danger in that kinde’.77 Excessive consumption of alcohol was a sin pursuant to lust and carnal excess; moderate drinking was perfectly acceptable. If moderate drinking was, for a certain individual, an occasion for violence or an enticement to sexual indiscretion, then that too was a breach of the commandments, but only for them. George Estey, on the other hand, observed more generally that ‘scandall is the occasion of sinne, in which respect Paul biddeth to take heed, that our weake brother perish’.78 It could therefore follow that an occasion for sin might not only be specifically forbidden for the individual in whom it could provoke a sinful act, but also that it might be generally forbidden in case weaker brethren were influenced thereby into sinning themselves. The five principles described above were those most commonly employed by authors to stress the depth and breadth of sin: that is, that each commandment had a positive and a negative aspect; each entailed sins (or obligations) of commission and omission; each possessed a spiritual and a worldly application; that more thoughts, words and deeds were comprehended under each commandment than explicitly mentioned in the text; and that occasions for virtue and vice were respectively commanded and forbidden under the scope of each precept.79 Beyond this core consensus, authors chose to stress a range of other special uses, rules and applications of the commandments. Downame’s fourth interpretive rule demanded that ‘where any duty is commanded, or vice forbidden, there also the signes are commanded, or forbidden’.80 As Downame noted, ‘touching vices, we are taught to abstaine from all shew of evill’ and to give a good example to others. ‘Haughty lookes’, ‘strange apparell’ and ‘haunting of suspected places’ were to be avoided as signs of pride or incontinency, even if in practice the actions concerned were genuinely innocent. This was a much more expansive portrait of the breadth of sin than that provided by Gataker. For the latter, an occasion for sin was only prohibited Thomas Gataker, Of the nature and vse of lots a treatise historicall and theologicall (1619), p. 195. Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, sig. P6v. The biblical reference is to 1 Corinthians 8:11. 79 Christopher Haigh has noted that each commandment ‘was extended so that they were impossible for mere mortals to fulfil’, suggesting that most honest self-​critics cannot but have fallen short, and that while the doctrine could be comforting, it could also lead to despair. Christopher Haigh, ‘The Taming of Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, History, 85.280 (2000), pp. 578–​9. 80 Downame, Abstract, sig. Aviir. 77 78

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in the special case that it applied to a specific individual. Downame, on the other hand, came very close to suggesting that all potential occasions for sin should be generally prohibited, in case the public display of such activity acted as a bad example to an observing third party. It is tempting to try to read into this a particularly puritan concern with the performance of piety, and an echo of the argument made by Peter Lake that puritan awareness of anti-​puritan critiques could actually serve to engender the forms of behaviour (such as hypocrisy) from which they so strenuously attempted to distance themselves.81 However, Bishop Downame was a moderate, noted equally for his defence of jure divino episcopacy as for his virulent anti-​Catholicism, and so it is likely that this was simply a sincere expression of concern regarding the practical occasions of sin.82 Downame’s fifth and final rule stated that duties were to be ‘procured’ and vices avoided ‘not in ourselves only, but also in others’.83 Not many commentators enumerated this as a separate obligation, but the substance was implicit in all expositions of the commandments: the Seventh, for example, meant not only keeping chaste oneself, but also doing ones utmost to procure chastity in others. Robert Allen outlined no fewer than eight instructions ‘to the more full & thorough understanding of the Law of God’, most of which touched upon familiar concepts, but their formulation as a list of eight distinct rules was unusual. Allen’s second rule, for example, endorsed the common assumption that ‘the morall duties of the first table which more directly concerne the glory of God, are in their own nature and kind more excellent then the duties of the second table, which belong to men’, and therefore that ‘the transgression of the first table is greater & more heinous then of the second’.84 William Perkins, on the other hand, explained in his second rule that the prohibition in each commandment ‘bindeth at all times, and to all times’, but that the affirmative element ‘bindeth at all times, but not to all times’: therefore, ‘negatives are of more force’.85 John Peter Lake, ‘“Thou Look’st like Antichrist in that Lewd Hat!!: Puritans, the Stage, and the Market in the Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair’, in idem and Michael Quester (eds), The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat:  Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-​Reformation England (New Haven, 2002), pp.  582–​3. See also Patrick Collinson, ‘Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair: The Theatre Constructs Puritanism’, in David Smith, and Richard Stier and David Bevington (eds), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–​1649 (Cambridge, 1995), pp.  157–​69, for the original argument on which Lake’s reinterpretation is based. 82 It is a neat illustration, though, that such concerns were not restricted to the ‘godly’. Kenneth Gibson, ‘Downham, George (d. 1634)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​7977, accessed 2 April 2014]. 83 Downame, Abstract, sig. Aviir. 84 Allen, Treasurie, p. 26. 85 Perkins, Chaine, p. 37. 81

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Hooper, in his Declaration of the Ten holy Commandements of Almighty God, listed seven rules ‘wherewith he prepareth them unto the receiving of the ten commandments’, including confidence in the truth of God’s word, reverence for the magistrate, obedience to God and man, and ‘to add nothing unto this law, neither to take any thing from it’.86 Again, these were familiar themes in expositions of the Decalogue, but their distillation into a discrete rubric for understanding the commandments was not picked up by later authors.

The Sixth Commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill. Exodus 20:13

The breadth of the Law is not easily summed up by a single commandment in quite the same way as the Tenth defined the reach of the Decalogue to the deepest and darkest recesses of human concupiscence. In terms of illustrating the exponential growth in the application of the law, however, the Sixth Commandment is as good a choice as any. As discussed above, it also acted as a biblical precedent for the expansion of the scope of the commandments, through Christ’s directive that ‘whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment’, ‘whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council’, and ‘whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire’.87 The understanding that each commandment was possessed of a positive and a negative aspect, a spiritual and a temporal dimension, an application in thought, word and deed, that it applied to more actions than those named in the commandment text, and that it also encompassed all occasions of and enticements to sin, created a conceptual space within which authors could mould the commandments into almost any shape they desired. Far from existing as a timeless and universal moral code, the English reformation witnessed a process through which divines constructed a new morality almost from the ground up, using the text of Exodus 20 as a sturdy foundation on which to build an elaborate and culturally conditioned ethical superstructure. For William Perkins, the use of the word ‘kill’ in the commandment was ‘a Synecdoche: for killing signifieth any kind of endamaging the person of our neighbour’.88 The negative part of the commandment, the prohibition, was therefore to be understood not simply as ‘thou shalt not kill’, but rather Hooper, ‘Declaration’, pp. 286–​93. Matthew 5: 21–​22. 88 Perkins, Chaine, p. 73. 86 87

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as ‘thou shalt neither hurt, nor hinder, either thine own, or thy neighbours life’.89 In the manner common to all authors (albeit to a greater or lesser degree), Perkins then went on itemise the sins comprehended under this injunction. Breaches against ones neighbour could take the forms of sins in heart, in words, in countenance and gesture, and in deeds.90 Sins in heart consisted of hatred, unadvised anger, envy, grudges, want of compassion, forwardness, and desire of revenge.91 Sins in words comprised bitterness in speaking, reproaches and railing, contention, brawling, crying (‘an unseemely elevation of the voice against ones adversarie’), and complaints ‘to every one of such as offer us injuries’.92 Sins in countenance and gesture included ‘all such signes, as evidently decipher the malitious affections lurking in the heart’, which (unusually) Perkins refrained from itemising.93 Sins in deeds including fighting with or beating a neighbour, procuring in any way his death, exercising tyranny in inflicting cruel punishments, using any of God’s creatures harshly, taking advantage of a neighbour’s infirmity to use him discourteously, and injuring the feeble, the poor, orphans or widows.94 Perkins’ explication of the Sixth Commandment included the following peculiar injunction: if thou finde a birds nest in the way, in any tree, or on the ground, whether they be young, or egges, and the damme sitting upon the young, or upon the egges, thou shalt not take the damme with the young, but shalt in any wise let the damme goe, and take the yong to thee, that thou maist prosper and prolong thy daies.

To move from ‘thou shalt not kill’ to the protection of broody avians was quite a stretch, by any standards.95 But most of Perkins’ examples Allen rendered the same sentiment as ‘God forbiddeth all cruelty, greater or lesse, in this Commandement’. Allen, Treasurie, p.  156. Whately framed the obligation in more positive terms: ‘and it enjoynes all such common duties, as appertaine to our selves and our neighbours, in regard of the safety of their and our person’. Whately, Pithie, p. 141. 90 As Thomas Becon had it, this commandment required ‘that we slay no man, nor do no man no harme, but walke charitably towarde all men, speke & reporte well of all men, healpe, comforte and socour them, yea though they be our extreme enemies, & seake our death’. Thomas Becon, A new yeares gyfte more precious than golde worthy to be embrased no lesse ioyfully than tha[n]‌kfully of euery true christe[n] man (1543), sig. Giv. 91 Dod recommended meditating on our own sinfulness and vileness as a means of keeping from rash anger. Dod, Plaine, p. 256. 92 Babington wrote that ‘men doe use to kill by their tongues’ through ‘slanders, reproches, mocks and tauntes’. Babington, Fruitful, p. 275. 93 Osmund Lakes listed ‘unseemely dalliance or toying, writhing or distorting of the mouth . . . brow beating, or sower bending of the browes: gnashing or grinding of the teeth; holding up the fist, or what other gesture the crooked man can make of discontent or menacing’. Lakes, Probe, p. 181. 94 Perkins, Chaine, pp. 73–​5. 95 Perkins, Chaine, p. 74. 89

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came  with a biblical citation: the example of the bird’s nest was taken from Deuteronomy 22:6. Both the Decalogue and the whole of scripture were expressions of the divine will; the former in microcosm, the latter in macrocosm. It therefore made perfect exegetical sense that all of the lessons contained within the scriptures as a whole were consonant with and could in some manner be identified in at least one of the Ten Commandments.96 Rather than limiting, the precepts of the Decalogue were therefore merely a jumping-​off point to a vast moral landscape based upon the whole of the Bible, and authors like Perkins were in the privileged position of cartographer and guide, with free rein to sketch in the topographical details as they saw best. Perkins went on in his exposition: the Sixth Commandment also forbade not killing when the law required death, and therefore (by implication) condemned ‘Popish Sanctuaries . . . wherein murtherers shelter and shroud themselves from the danger of the law’.97 The commandment also prohibited actions which impacted negatively on the soul of a neighbour. These crimes could relate to scandal and offence, or to occasions of strife and discord, and even to more prosaic negativity, such as ‘when we returne snappish and crooked answers’. Ministers in particular sinned against their parishioners in this respect when they failed to preach the word of God, or preached negligently. For any man to ‘hurt, kill, and endanger himself ’ counted as a sin against his own person in breach of the commandment. Perkins’ lengthy prose exposition of the commandment, brimming over with biblical citations, can be instructively contrasted with the approach taken by William Whately. Advertised in its title as pithie short and methodicall, Whately was certainly pithy and methodicall, even if his claims to brevity were somewhat overstated. The result was a ruthlessly systematic breakdown of each commandment, with the negative aspect of the Sixth Commandment going on for thirteen tightly-​packed pages. Every conceivable breach was considered, by omission and commission, by excess and defect, in the present and to come, directly and indirectly, with regard to self and other, for manner and matter, in word, countenance, deed and thought, against spiritual and natural life. From a single trunk, sins branched outwards again and again to form a dense canopy, driving home the essential message that the weight of sin was crushing John Carpenter wrote that the ‘perfection’ of the Ten Commandments lay in the fact that the ‘indeede conteineth the very summe of all other commandements’. John Carpenter, Schelomonocham, or King Solomon his solace (1606), ff. 108v–​109r. 97 Hooper wrote that pardoning the guilty was not a work of charity or mercy, but an abdication of justice. Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 370; Perkins, Chaine, p. 74. 96

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and oppressive, blocking out all light and hope of salvation. Breaches of the Sixth Commandment comprehended under Whately’s framework, which contained no explicit biblical references, included ‘building staires, or other like things dangerously’, over-​working beasts, abusing Christian liberty, adopting ‘a sowre, fierce, angry, discontented looke, and dogged carriage’, ‘rigorous standing upon ones right’, and even excessive meekness, ‘so that sinne maketh not one angry’.98 It was even possible to interpret the four monosyllables ‘thou shalt not kill’ as condoning murder –​that is, the state sanctioned execution of criminals as part of the judicial process. It was also possible to justify anger by reference to a commandment which condemned sins of wrath, for it was an individual’s duty to express a righteous anger against the sinful behaviour of themselves and others.99 Like the scholastic theologians ridiculed by Erasmus in his Praise of Folly, who ‘distort and reshape Holy Scripture however they like (just as if it were a lump of wax)’, authors from Hooper to Perkins, Downame to Greenham, Babington to Granger, each placed their own individual stamp on the reformed concept of sin, whilst also contributing to the greater shared endeavour of re-​sculpting Protestant religious and secular morality along unmistakably post-​reformation lines.100 The exegetical expansion of the Sixth Commandment was a perfect example of the ways in which divines could reshape God’s eternal law to address specific contemporary concerns, for example the ‘inhumane and cruel’ usage of animals in sport.101 This created a shifting and subjective moral landscape, which was constantly changing and reinventing itself anew. While it was the negative exposition of the commandments which most obviously illustrated the breadth of sinful behaviours to which mankind might succumb, the positive dimension of charitable actions prescribed also helped to illuminate the awesome scope of potential sinfulness because of the category of sins of omission:  that is, sinning by default through neglecting those works commanded. A  good number of commentators on the Sixth Commandment enumerated the duties it prescribed in fairly broad terms. Gervase Babington, for example, characterised the affirmative part of the commandment as requiring ‘all care and preservation’ of Whately, Pithie, pp. 152–​64. Babington rejected the notion that ‘is all anger forbidden to a Christian’: ‘it is lawfull for a man in time, place, in his office, & for a just cause to be angrie in a convenient measure, as it is unlawfull otherwise.’ Babington, Fruitful, p. 289. 100 Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, ed., trans. & comment. Clarence H. Miller (London: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 94. 101 Granger, Tree, p. 42. 98

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life: where anger was forbidden, gentleness was commanded; well-​thinking in place of misliking, love for hate, good favour for envy, and so on.102 Peter Barker explained that ‘our owne lives must be deere unto us’, and that ‘we must carefully looke to the safety of our brethren’.103 John Hooper wrote that, by the Sixth Commandment, God had charged mankind ‘that in case we can do any thing for the help of our neighbour, we diligently apply our service to his use, and to procure the things that appertain unto his tranquillity, to save him from adversities, and to give him our helping hand, when his troubles shall require’.104 Thomas Cranmer explained that, according to the affirmative dimension of the precept, it was mankind’s duty to live in peace with all men, to reconcile those at variance, and to provide comfort and succour to a neighbour in all his necessities, troubles and afflictions.105 Richard Greenham also advised that it was humanity’s obligation to be at peace with itself, although he at least inserted the caveat ‘as much as is possible and in us lieth’; it was also man’s duty to seek to preserve the health of his brother in thought, word and deed.106 Osmund Lakes explained that God, ‘the lover of concord and unitie . . . hath bound mankind in unitie together’; therefore, ‘he would have every man to maintaine the safetie of al, and not to break or diminish this bond of unitie by any meanes’.107 Several authors stressed that Christian men and women had a special duty to embrace their enemies: Edward Dering paraphrased the gospel of Matthew in declaring that ‘we should do good unto all, yea even to our enemies, and love one another as our selves’, whilst George Chapelin cited scripture in support of the contention:  ‘for it is written, vengeance is mine: I will repay saith the Lorde. Therefore, if thine enemie hunger, feede him; if he thirst give him drinke. For in so doing, thou shalt heape coals of fire on his head’.108 While authors focussed more of their attention on producing detailed lists of sins forbidden by the Sixth Commandment than on lengthy explanations of virtues commanded, a good many did take time to expand in greater detail upon the attitudes and actions incumbent upon the godly, Babington, Fruitful, pp. 292–​3; cf. Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p. 187. Barker, Painefull, pp. 256–​7; cf. Stephen Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 37. 104 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p.  367; cf. John Gibson, An easie entrance into the principall points of Christian religion (1579), sig. Aiiir. 105 Thomas Cranmer, Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion for the synguler commoditie and profyte of childre[n]‌and yong people (1548), ff. 61r–​62r; cf. Dyke, Knowledge, p. 45. 106 Greenham, Workes, p. 77. 107 Lakes, Probe, p. 179. 108 Edward Dering, A briefe & necessary instruction verye needefull to bee knowen of all housholders (1572), sig. Biiijr; Romans 12:19–​20; George Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction (1582), p. 286. 102 103

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the neglect of any of which further constituted a grave sin and a breach of the precept. In his index of affirmative concordances of scripture belonging to the Sixth Commandment, Robert Allen listed alms, mercifulness, goodness, clemency, gentleness, meekness, long-​suffering, peace-​making, good counsel, discretion, friendship, kindness, fortitude, rejoicing, cheerfulness, mourning for evil, and ‘mirth lawfull and godly’.109 John Bradford provided a similar shopping basket of virtues, including ‘bowels of mercy, humility, patience, meekness, long-​suffering, gentleness, peace, charity, and all kind of brotherly love’.110 Richard Bruch explained that the commandment required Christians to be peaceable in conversation, with hearts full of pity and compassion, whilst Edward Elton and George Estey both emphasised the importance of cheerfulness of heart and honest and lawful mirth and rejoicing; Elton went so far as to suggest that such a disposition could be aided ‘using the helpe of Musicke, by singing or playing on an instrument of Musick, or by hearing others sing or play; so as it be with moderation, and in due time and season’.111 Authors also enumerated a range of more concrete actions and behaviours required by the commandment. Several discussed the importance of winning one’s neighbour to the profession of Christian religion, enjoined to do so, let us recall, by the precept ‘thou shalt not kill’. This was care not just for the earthly life of a neighbour, but also to attempt to procure the health of their immortal soul.112 Other authors placed within the ambit of the Sixth Commandment the specific duty to carry out the corporal works of mercy. John Dod explained that Christ himself condemned as ‘goates, limbes of the devil and firebrands of hell’ those who ‘gave not meat to the hungry, and drinke to the thirsty, and cloathed not the naked, and visited not the sick and imprisoned’, whilst Robert Horne enjoined the faithful ‘to do whatsoever may preserve or cherish our Neighbours life, or our owne: exercising the works of mercy, pitty, compassion, and tendernes toward all’.113 Finally, a minority of authors treated the positive aspect of the Sixth Commandment with the same exegetical vigour and thoroughness as Robert Allen, Concordances of the Holy Prouerbs of King Salomon and of his like sentences in Ecclesiastes (1612), sig. Ccc1r. 110 John Bradford, ‘A Meditation upon the Ten Commandments’, in John Bradford, Sermons, Meditations, Examinations, &c., ed. Audrey Townsend (Volume I.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1853), p. 166. 111 Richard Bruch, The life of religion: or Short and sure directions (1615), p. 171; Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, sig. P7r; Elton, Exposition, p. 155; on reformers’ attitudes to music, see Jonathan Willis, Church Music and Protestantism in Post-​Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), Chapter 2. 112 E.g. Granger, Tree, p. 43; Perkins, Chaine, p. 80. 113 Dod, Plaine, p. 252; cf. Matthew 25. Horne, Points of instruction for the ignorant, sig. Bviv. 109

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the negative. John Brinsley explained that the precept required all means whereby man was able to preserve the life and health of body and soul, from clothing and diet to holy mirth, as well as seeking refuge from violence and danger, seeking help from medical professionals in times of sickness, taking exercise, and avoiding all things perilous, from contagious disease and violence to rash adventure, grief, anger, envy and excess.114 George Downame, like Brinsley, dwelt at length on helps to physical health, such as temperance of diet, sobriety in drink, moderate sleep and labour, honest and moderate recreation of body and mind, and the appropriate use of physic.115 To temperate use of food, apparel, rest and sleep, William Whately added ‘even sometimes also nuptial society of generacion and the like’, whilst William Perkins spent some discussing the obligations borne not only toward the living, but also towards the dead:  the Sixth Commandment required that ‘a funeral . . . be solemnized after an honest and civil manner’.116 Perkins also listed a series of miscellaneous charitable duties drawn from the Old and New Testaments, including allowing the hungry to eat grapes from their neighbours’ vineyards, and plucking corn from their neighbours’ fields.117 To fail in any of these good, lawful and charitable actions was effectively as heinous a sin as murder in the eyes of God; to fail in any part of the law was to fail in it all.

The Knowledge of Sin The evangelical office of the Decalogue went farther than simply establishing beyond doubt the depth and breadth of human sinfulness. Sin was not an abstract or remote quality, an unfortunate fact of life to be accepted and quietly filed away at the back of your mind. Sin was personal and immediate, and the knowledge of sin was an essential phase in the prosecution both of God’s justice and his mercy. For different but equally important reasons, both the regenerate and the unregenerate had to have the full enormity of their own particular sinfulness declared to them. ‘Knowledge’, decreed the Redich family chaplain and armchair nonconformist William Bradshaw, was ‘the foundation and beginning of all saving graces’. Until a man ‘by the knowledge of the Law have his sinne, and the curse of God due to him for sinne, effectually discovered in him . . . he can never desire nor esteem Brinsley, Watch, pp. 45–​8. Downame, Abstract, sigs. I2v–​I3r. 116 Whately, Pithie, pp. 143–​4; Perkins, Chaine, pp. 79–​80. 117 Perkins, Chaine, p. 80. 114 115

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of Christ’.118 The moderate godly minister William Burton explained to his own imaginary catechumen that ‘it is necessary that we should understand everie point of the law of God’, and that ‘without the speciall knowledge of the law’ salvation was impossible, ‘for the greatnes of our sin, and corruption discovereth the riches of his mercy & favour towards us’.119 ‘He that frameth his life according to the tenne commaundementes, may wel say that he hath the perfect righteousness’, wrote Calvin, ‘but forasmuch as we come farre short of it, and can by no meanes come neere it so long as wee bee clothed within our flesh:  let us acknowledge ourselves to be wretched sinners, and resort for refuge to the mercy of God’.120 A generation before, the father of English evangelicals, William Tyndale, recalling the apostle Paul, had remarked that since the time that it had been given the sole purpose of the law had been ‘to utter sin only, and to make it appear as a corrosive is laid unto an old saw, not to heal it, but to stir it up, and make the disease alive, that a man might feel in what jeopardy he is.’121 As he wrote in his treatise on the sacraments, ‘the nature of man is so weak, so feeble, and so frail, that he cannot but sin, as there is no man that liveth and sinneth not.’122 John Carpenter used the warmer metaphor of candles to describe how the Ten Commandments taught and instructed the people in the light of ‘the doctrine of the right knowledge of God’, and George Wither informed the young that ‘the knowledge of ourselves issueth out of the sounde understanding of the lawe, contained in the ten commaundements’.123 Authors adopted several theological, rhetorical and pastoral strategies for stressing the sheer impossibility of keeping the commandments and the all-​pervading nature of sin. One was to emphasise the innumerable quantity of sins which humanity inevitably committed. William Perkins, William Bradshaw, A direction for the weaker sort of Christians shewing in what manner they ought to fit and prepare themselues to the worthy receiuing of the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ (1609), pp. 74–​5. Victoria Gregory, ‘Bradshaw, William (bap. 1570, d. 1618)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [www.oxforddnb.com/​ view/​article/​3205, accessed 3 April 2014]. 119 William Burton, Certaine questions and answeres, concerning the knovvledge of God (1591), f. 67r. 120 Calvin, sermons . . . vpon the fifth booke of Moses, p. 753. 121 William Tyndale, ‘A Prologue into the Second Book of Moses, called Exodus’, in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge, 1848), p. 416. 122 William Tyndale, ‘A Brief Declaration of the Sacraments’ (c.1533), in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge, 1848), p. 359. 123 Carpenter, Schelomonocham, f. 108v; George Wither, Certaine godly instructions verie necessarie to be learned of the younger sorte, before they be admitted to be partakers of the holie Communion (1580), sig. Aivv. 118

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in his Two Treatises, asked the reader to ‘take a view and consider all the horrible sins that be practised in any part of the world, either against the first or second table’. ‘Whatsoever they are’, he reflected, ‘the spawne and seede of them is even in that man that is thought to be best disposed by nature’.124 He went on to supply two powerful visual similes to develop his point further: Touching actuall sinnes, they shalbe found by examination to be innumerable as the haires of a mans head, & as the sands by the sea shore: if any will but search themselves a little by the ten commandements of the Decalogue, for all their sinful thoughts, words, and deeds against God and man.125

Perkins parphrased the same language in A Golden Chaine,126 and one or the other (or both) appears to have made a powerful impression on the young Nehemiah Wallington, who wrote in one of his early notebooks that his sins ‘were more in number than the sand on the seashore or the haires of mine head’.127 John Brinsley also recommended that believers try themselves by the Ten Commandments, but warned that knowledge of sin would bring a wounded conscience, ‘and then will follow’ shame (as in Adam), sadness (as in Naball), terrible feare (as in Belshazzar) and despair (as in Cain, Saul and Judas).128 Finally, sinners would suffer ‘a hell in our consciences that wee shall be as the raging sea, casting our owne shame, the work of conscience beginning to gnaw without hope of release or any ease’. Such a condition ‘barreth us out of heaven’ and ‘thrusts us into hell to abide the torment thereof with Sathan & his Angells for evermore’.129 Another common trope built upon the biblical contention of James 2:10: ‘For whosoever shall keep the whole law and yet offend on one point, he is guilty of all’. Abraham Fleming’s A monomachie of motives in the mind of man commented on the consonance of the law and the gospel in this respect: the lawe . . . hath taught us this lesson, that he is accursed, and in state of damnation, that transgresseth the two tables of the ten commandements: and the same is ratified also by the testimonie of the Gospell, which William Perkins, Tvvo treatises· I. Of the nature and practise of repentance. II. Of the combat of the flesh and spirit (1593), p. 17. 125 Perkins, Tvvo treatises, p. 17. 126 ‘Thus it will come to passe, that wee shall plainely see our wretched estate, and acknowledge that our sinnes be in number as the haires of our head, & as the sands by the sea shore.’ Perkins, Chaine, p. 744. 127 Nehemiah Wallington, ‘A Record of Gods Marcys (GL MS 2014)’, in The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–​1654: a selection, ed. David Booy (Aldershot, 2007), p. 49. 128 Cf. Genesis 3; 1 Samuel 25; Daniel 5; Genesis 4, 1 Samuel 28, Matthew 27. 129 Brinsley, Watch, pp. 1–​6. 124

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Even the playwright Thomas Dekker made use of the notion, as a tired retort placed in the mouth of a pregnant nun in response to an inquisitive friar: ‘Devout father, to make a rehearsall of my sinnes is folly; to tell what particular offences have scapt from me is needlesse, because in one briefe word, as he that sinnes in one of the ten commandements breakes all’.131 Another variation on this general theme was to suggest that particular sins were so heinous as to represent a breach of all Ten Commandments. The tendency was for authors to reserve this treatment for the most serious offences, but by implication (and on the logic of James 2:10) the same case could be made for any sin at all. Indeed, some authors made the additional point that the smallest action in contravention of one of God’s commandments was still treated as a monstrous sin. In his discussion of the Fourth Commandment, John Dod used the example of ‘the man that would gather stickes upon the Sabbath’ from Numbers 15:32–​5 to illustrate this point. The significance of the incident was that, although the action itself was small, ‘he did it indeed contemptuously’, and ‘because the thing he then did, was small, he helped to give an ill example of libertie to others’. ‘He did the smallest worke’, Dod explained, ‘yet that little worke was so great sinne, that God appoints him to be stoned to death for it’.132 The lesson of the man from Numbers, stoned to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, was certainly well-​known to the inhabitants of Whitchurch (Hampshire), Hedgerley (Buckinghamshire), and Hereford, where he illustrated the breach of the Fourth Commandment, in the latter instance in the local inn (Figure 3.1). The most serious sin of all time was Adam and Eve’s picking and eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, against God’s first original commandment.133 Daniel Dyke, son of William, used this incident as an example of just how many sins could be contained within one small action, for ‘a little pinne, specially being poisoned may pricke mortally, as well as a great sword’.134 In order to underscore the gravity of Adam and Eve’s Ambrosius Autpertus, A monomachie of motiues in the mind of man: or a battell betweene vertues and vices of contrarie qualitie, trans. Abraham Fleming (1582), p. 211. 131 Thomas Dekker, The ravens almanacke foretelling of a [brace] plague, famine, and ciuill warre, that shall happen this present yeare 1609 (1609), sig. C1r. 132 Dod, Plaine, p. 153. 133 Genesis 3:1–​7. 134 Daniel Dyke, Tvvo treatises. The one, of repentance, the other, of Christs temptations (1616), STC2: 7408, p. 246. 130

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Figure 3.1.  Man gathering sticks upon the Sabbath (Numbers 15), Black Lion Inn, Hereford.

transgression, Dyke claimed that the eating of the apple forbidden by God was a breach of all Ten Commandments at once. For the first table, Dyke wrote of Adam’s ‘infidelity doubting both of Gods truth and goodnesse, contempt of, and rebellion against God, preferring of Sathan before God, and in the prophanation of that fruit he ate, which was a sacrament’. There are reasonable grounds to support the breach of the First Commandment, and perhaps also the Second, but the Third and Fourth are a little more of a stretch. As for the second table, Dyke wrote that Adam: broke the fift commandement in his unthankefulnesse to God his father, that gave him his being . . . . The sixt in the murther of himself, and all his posterity bodie and soule. The seaventh in his intemperancy. The eight in

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‘Take we heed now of the deceit of sinne’, he cautioned, ‘it shewes little sometimes, but oh the bundle of mischiefe that is lapped up in that little’. Most of these analogies were fairly convincing, although with regards to the Seventh Commandment, against adultery, the ice he was treading on was perhaps rather thin. All divines could, presumably, agree that the events in the Garden of Eden leading to the Fall and Original Sin were hardly mankind’s finest hour, but the same trope was used by others to argue a more polemical stance. The nonconformist minister Robert Parker, who spent the last months of his life ministering to English troops in the Netherlands, applied the same framework to the making of the sign of the cross at baptism, that perennial bugbear of the hottest of English Protestants.136 Parker effectively constructed his lengthy treatise A scholasticall discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist in ceremonies around the framework of the Decalogue.137 Although divided into many sections, the principal chapters which delineated the first part of the work mirrored the first four commandments of the Decalogue, i.e. the precepts of the first table: ‘the idolatrie of the Crosse’; ‘The superstition of the Crosse’; ‘The Hypocrisie of the Crosse’ and ‘The Impietie of the Crosse’. Parker described the cross as ‘idolatrie against God’, ‘an image flatly forbidden by the second commandment’, and as an object which ‘mocketh the Lords Sabboths, in darkening them: guiding the popish Processions, and with whorishe braverie, in the worship of God’.138 Part two of the treatise was structured around the commandments of the second table: ‘injustice’ against authority, ‘murther’, ‘adulterie’, ‘wrong’, ‘slaunder’ and ‘concupiscence’. On each point, Parker explained in detail how the cross broke the relevant commandment: on the seventh, for example, he wrote that as an ‘abhominable idol’ the cross brought about ‘the spirituall adulterie of the soule’.139 Parker’s claim Dyke, Tvvo treatises, p. 247. Keith L. Sprunger, ‘Parker, Robert (c.1564–​1614)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​21334, accessed 4 April 2014]. 137 The same approach had been taken by Luther, and later by the English humanist and tutor Roger Ascham, as a basis upon which to attack the Catholic Mass. See Lucy Nicholas, ‘Sin and Salvation in Roger Ascham’s Apologiaa pro Caena Dominica’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 87–​100. 138 Robert Parker, A scholasticall discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist in ceremonies: especially in the signe of the crosse (1607), sigs. Ccr–​Ddv. 139 Parker, A scholasticall discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist, p. 1, 451, 99, 101, 110, 136. 135

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that the making of the sign of the cross at baptism was a breach of all Ten Commandments seems to have caught the attention of a number of other divines, and we find his conclusions being cited approvingly by Thomas Gataker regarding gambling with dice, and also by the separatist minister Francis Johnson.140 Perhaps the most extraordinary claim of all was that each of the Ten Commandments could be broken by that most heinous of all offences, dancing: As first, Thou shalt haue no other Gods but me, &c. For in dancing a man serues that person, whom hee most desires to serue . . . . He sinnes against the second Commandement, when hee makes an Idol of that hee loues . . . . Against the third, in that oathes are frequent amongst dancers. Against the fourth, for by dancing the Sabboth day is profaned. Against the fift, for in the dance, the parents are many times dishonoured . . . . Against the sixt, A man killes in dancing, for euery one that standeth to please another, he killes the soule as oft as hee perswadeth vnto lust. Against the seuenth; For the partie that danceth, bee it male or female, committeth adultery, with the partie they lust after . . . . Against the eighth Commandement a man sinnes in dancing, when hee withdraweth the heart of another from God. Against the ninth, when in dancing hee speakes falsely against the truth. Against the tenth, when women affect the ornaments of others, and men covet the wiues, daughters, and seruants of their neighbours.141

This extraordinary piece of exegesis originated not in reformation England, but in France: it featured in Samson Lennard’s 1624 translation of Jean-​ Paul Perrin’s early sixteenth-​century history of the ancient inhabitants of the Vaudois. It clearly caught the imagination of English Protestants, however. Lennard’s text was printed three times in 1624, once as The bloudy rage of that great antechrist of Rome and twice as Luther’s fore-​runners, or, A cloud of witnesses deposing for the Protestant faith. The section on dancing was also repeated in Prynne’s Histrio-​mastix of 1633, and Penn’s 1669 No cross, no crown.142 The role of the law in bringing people to the knowledge of their sin was sometimes described using the metaphor of the mirror or ‘glasse’. Writing Of Christ and his Office, Bishop Hooper explained that ‘only the law declareth how great an ill sin is; and the man that beholdeth the will of Francis Johnson, An advertisement concerning a book lately published by Christopher Lawne and others (1612), p. 10; Gataker, Of the nature and vse of lots, p. 194. 141 J. P. Perrin, The bloudy rage of that great antechrist of Rome and his superstitious adherents, against the true church of Christ, trans. Samson Lennard (1624), pp. 65–​6. 142 William Prynne, Histrio-​mastix The players scourge, or, actors tragaedie, divided into two parts (1633), p. 231; William Penn, No cross, no crown, or, Several sober reasons against hat-​honour (1669), pp. 87–​8. 140

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God in the law, shall find himself, and all his life, guilty of eternal death’. The only way for humanity to examine and know its sinfulness was by the light of scripture, ‘and he that will behold himself well in that mirror and glass, shall find such a deformity and disgraced physiognomy, that he will abhor his own proportion so horribly disfigured’.143 It was the ‘Lawes office to detech [detect] sin, as a looking glasse to bewray spots’; sin was to be known ‘by the glasse of Gods Law, which being looked into sheweth sinne, and so killeth’.144 Francis Bunny, the younger brother of Edmund, described the law as ‘a true glasse, wherein if we looke without partialitie, we shall behold ourselves as we are, that is sinners’, while John Brinsley explained that ‘the Glasse of the Law’ was a means, through every commandment, of ‘beholding our owne natural misery’.145 In one sense, the law was like a terrible fairground mirror, designed to display a distorted and corrupt image of humanity back to all who looked upon it. The horrifying truth, however, was that this fearsome reflection in fact betrayed the awful reality of the miserable human condition. Humanity was possessed of a kind of reverse spiritual dysmorphic disorder: perceiving themselves to be ordinary, it took the Ten Commandments of the law to pull back the veil and show them how irredeemably sunken into sin they had become. The law was ordained ‘out of the which they might lerne the will of God, what sinne, right or unright is, and to know themselves, to goe into themselves, and to consider how that the holy works which God requireth, are not in their owne power’.146 The evangelical office of the Decalogue applied both to the regenerate and to the unregenerate. For the regenerate, it had a vital role in bringing sinners through knowledge of sin to repentance; and thence (by means of acknowledgement of their helplessness) to seek salvation in Christ. For the unregenerate, however, it had a very different purpose. Failure to fulfil the Ten Commandments was effectively the charge sheet on the basis of which mankind was sentenced to eternal death: it was the crime for which God’s justice demanded everlasting damnation. Arthur Dent, in a work titled (without conscious irony) A pastime for parents:  or A  recreation to passe away the time, had the father in the dialogue ask his child, ‘sith then the law doth condemne and not save. Sith it sheweth our diseases, but can Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 88. Whately, Pithie, sig. A2v; Lakes, Probe, p. 3. 145 Francis Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse: or, A plaine and familiar explanation of the ten commandements (1617), p. 229; Brinsley, Watch, p. 12. 146 Heinrich Bullinger, Looke from Adam, and behold the Protestants faith and religion evidently proued out of the holy Scriptures, trans. Miles Coverdale (1624), p. 44. 143 144

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give us no remedie, wherefore then serveth it?’ Concerning the unregenerate, there were four functions. Firstly, the law revealed their sins, acting in the now familiar role as a mirror to bring them to a full knowledge of their corruption. Secondly, the law served to stir ‘up the affections of sinne in them, not of it selfe, but through their default’. The law, in defining sin, therefore also had a significant role in creating it. Thirdly, the law engendered in the unregenerate ‘a feeling of the wrath of God, of death, and damnation, without offering any hope of pardon, and therefore to them it is the minister of death’. The commandments declared not only the crimes of the individual, but also their guilt, and the inevitable sentence of damnation. Finally, the Decalogue ‘doth augment sin in them accidentarily, that is, by reason of their great corruption which declineth from that which is commanded, but inclineth to that which is forbidden’. Being in possession of the knowledge of sin, human concupiscence was drawn magnetically towards the commission of further sins and away from the exercise of virtue.147 In other words, sin restrained by the law raged even more fiercely in the unregenerate after the law was declared to them than it did before. Dent conveyed this in a series of powerful images: even as a waterbrooke being stopt with a damme everwart, it doth surg and swell the more, till it breake over the damme: so sinne being restrained by the Law doth increase, and rage more in men not regenerate, for their will being not reformed, doth ever tend to that which is forbidden.

Before the knowledge brought by the Ten Commandments sin was present but neither known, felt nor perceived. Dent likened this to ‘corrupt humours’ not felt ‘till the purgation come’, or to a snake hibernating during winter ‘but when the hote Sunne shineth upon her, then shee reviveth, writheth, and stingeth, and sheweth her venomous nature.’148 William Tyndale identified two responses of the unregenerate in the face of the condemnation of the law. The first category of people consisted of those who tried to justify themselves through outward deeds and obedience, through the performance of the works required by the commandments.149 Such a person who sought to achieve salvation through external fulfilment Arthur Dent, A pastime for parents: or A recreation to passe away the time; contayning the most principall grounds of Christian religion (1606), sigs. D2r-​v. William Dyke identified three functions of the law for the unregenerate: to discover their sin, to aggravate and increase it, and to pronounce the sentence of death against them. Dyke, Knowledge, p. 22. 148 Dent, A pastime for parents, sigs. D2v–​D3r. 149 Tyndale, Pathway, p. 12. 147

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of the covenant of works could not accept the impossibility of fulfilling the law: and so they would either end up fooling themselves into thinking that they could earn their own way into heaven without Christ’s grace, or by wishing that there was no law, and considering God to be a hateful tyrant. In his Prologue to the Book of Jonas, Tyndale wrote that: When hypocrites come to the law, they put glosses to, and make no more of it than of a worldly law, which is satisfied with the outward work, and which a Turk may also fulfil: when yet God’s law never ceaseth to condemn a man, until it be written in his heart, and until he keep it naturally without compulsion.150

The mark of this manner of hypocrite was that he tried to put a mask or ‘visard on the face of the law’ to give it a pleasing countenance: the true believer who looked into the face of the law saw nothing but the ‘strong pains of hell’. The law looked upon fallen man ‘with so terrible a countenance, and thundereth in his ears, that he dare not abide, but turneth his back and to go; and the enemy assaileth him on the other wise, to persuade him that God hath cast him away’.151 The second class of false believers identified by Tyndale consisted of those who: give themselves unto all manner vices with full consent and full delectation, having no respect to the law of God . . . but say, God is merciful, and Christ died for us; supposing that such dreaming and imagination is that faith which is so greatly commended in holy scripture.152

Such ‘voluptuous swine’ showed God neither the fear that was due to him, nor gave thanks for his mercy. The only correct response to the evangelical office of the Decalogue was terror. Libertinism, over-​confidence, self-​ assurance and disregard were the hallmarks of the unregenerate who, rather than looking into the face of the law and despairing, chose to deceive themselves into perceiving a more pleasing mien. The wages of this sort of delusion was death.

Conclusions During the English reformation, the place of the Ten Commandments as the primary tool for analysing sinful behaviour was cemented. The Seven Cardinal Sins did not vanish overnight, but their long afterlife was William Tyndale, ‘Prologue of the prophet Jonas’, in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge, 1848), pp. 449–​50. 151 Tyndale, ‘A Brief Declaration of the Sacraments’, p. 359. 152 Tyndale, Pathway, pp. 12–​13. 150

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primarily a literary and figurative one.153 To end the story there, however, would be a grave error. The true significance of the Decalogue was not in identifying sin, but in defining (or rather, redefining) it. Sin and morality were reshaped in a manner which was distinctively Protestant, and which consciously sought to distance itself from a Catholic past which it perceived to be full of ignorance and error. Idolatry and superstition, explained John Dod, were defined in the Second Commandment as hatred of God: This confutes such people as, in their blind charity will say of papists, Oh they be good honest men: and though they have not so strict a regard of Gods worship, as he commands, yet I hope they love God and have a good heart to him. Nay, they be not honest persons, nor they do not love God but they hate him.154

The recasting of sin, however, was not primarily a polemical device (even though it functioned effectively in this respect): it was a theological one. The redefinition of sin lay at the heart of the evangelical office of the law and of the Protestant concept of justification by faith alone. Indeed, it was this concept of sin which gave meaning to the redeeming sacrifice of Christ himself, for without the need for redemption from sin that sacrifice would have been irrelevant. Sin was therefore a vital part of Christian soteriology and Christology, and as we have seen was defined primarily in terms of a breach of the laws of nature, Christ, and the Ten Commandments.155 Sinners therefore had to be disabused of the notion that they could contribute towards their own salvation by acquiring merit through the performance of works of supererogation. Rather, they had to be brought to a full knowledge of their own absolute corruption in order to be chastened and brought to Christ as humble penitents. This was the primary evangelical function of the Law: to utter death and damnation to fallen humanity. This function was achieved in a number of ways. Firstly, divines emphasised the unfathomable depth of sin: that is, the impossible total obedience required by the law. The Ten Commandments forbade not only wicked acts, but also sinful gestures, words, and even thoughts. To sleep with a woman who was not your wife was certainly adultery: but so was speaking For more on the early modern afterlives of the Seven Sins, see the forthcoming work of Eric Carlson. I am grateful to Professor Carlson for discussing his ideas about the repurposing of the Seven Deadly Sins with me during the early stages of this project. 154 Dod, Plaine, pp. 79–​80. 155 E.g. Bullinger, Looke from Adam, pp. 48–​9. 153

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to her with lascivious intent, or even looking at her with lust in your eye. The commandments were a spiritual law, and demanded a spiritual obedience. This perfect obedience extended beyond deeds, words, and even conscious thoughts and desires, to the unconscious motions of the human mind: to formal concupiscence, those evil stirrings arising from mankind’s innate corruption. Even when those stirrings did not receive the consent of the will they remained evidence of sin: the overcoming of a sinful urge was nothing more than a damning proof of the existence of that urge in the first place. Humanity was a walking moral cesspit, sinning as easily and as naturally as breathing; awake, and even whilst asleep. Secondly, divines expounded at great length upon the enormous breadth of sins to which fallen humanity was prone. These were explained in terms of the requirements of the Ten Commandments, but imperfect mankind required considerable guidance in understanding the full implications of God’s perfect law. Not only were commandments to be understood spiritually as well as temporally, each one was also possessed of a positive and a negative aspect, and a spiritual and temporal one, which could be broken or fulfilled by deeds of omission or commission. Many more sins of the same type were comprehended under each commandment than those explicitly named: perpetrators of fornication, masturbation, buggery and bestiality were as guilty of ‘adultery’ as any disloyal husband or wayward wife. Furthermore, the commandments required that individuals avoided not only named (and implied) sins themselves, but also enticements, provocations, allurements and occasions to sin. These were, in practice, almost impossible to comprehensively enumerate, although most authors made a spirited attempt at compiling as detailed a list as possible. Opportunities to sin varied according to individual, context, and office. Commentators disagreed over whether sins of ‘provocation’ or ‘occasion’ were of limited or general application: for even if you were not personally affected by a potential occasion for sin, there was always a danger that you could set a poor example for any weaker brethren observing your actions, thereby committing another grave sin in the process. Beyond establishing the terrifying depth and breadth of sin in general terms, divines also did their best to ram home the enormity of human corruption to the individual, with the goal of driving them to a knowledge of sin to which the only acceptable response was utter despair. The least sin, the smallest action, the most inconsequential slip, was counted as grave a transgression as the most serious debauchery. Displaying an angry countenance was no better than murder; thinking lustful thoughts was no more acceptable than the act of adultery; and gathering sticks on the Sabbath

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was seen by the almighty himself as worthy of punishment by violent execution. Not only that, but adherence to the commandments was an all or nothing affair: to fail in the least point of one was to fail in them all, to be condemned utterly, and to be subject to the full force of the law. A breach of one commandment was a breach of them all, and some authors even went so far as to suggest that certain sins were so heinous as to represent a breach of all Ten Commandments simultaneously. When faced with the shocking enormity of their depravity, the sinner faced one of two predestined pathways (of course they had no choice of which). The regenerate, perceiving the helplessness of their situation, turned to God, and it is here that the next chapter will take up the story of the Ten Commandments in conditioning the journey of the believer towards faith and salvation. The unregenerate might respond in several ways: they might disregard the law and carry on sinning with self-​proclaimed impunity; they might begin to hate God for the harshness of his justice; they might put faith in their own ability to fulfil the law and earn salvation; or they might put their trust naively and shallowly in God’s mercy, without coming to a proper understanding of the righteousness of his justice in declaring them damned. English Protestant divines disagreed on some of the details in their discussions of the role of the Ten Commandments in defining sin. Were there four rules for interpreting the commandments, or six, or eight? Were provocations to sin general or specific in their application? Were occasions such as excessive drink allurements to sin under the Sixth, Seventh or Ninth Commandment? The answer to the latter was probably: all three. But in general, there was a surprising level of concordance between divines of all inclinations: conformists, moderate puritans, radical puritans, and even nonconformists. Neither can this be treated merely as evidence of a ‘Calvinist’ consensus in the late-​Elizabethan and Jacobean Church, although it certainly does nothing to disabuse that notion.156 For the essential priorities of early seventeenth-​century divines such as Perkins, Dyke, Bailey and Dod were the same as those of Elizabethan, Edwardian, and even Henrician evangelicals:  Tyndale, Hooper, Becon and their fellows. On the notion of a ‘Calvinist consensus’ in the Elizabethan Church, see Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-​Revolution’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (1973), pp.  119–​43, and Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists. The Rise of English Arminianism c.  1590–​1640 (Oxford:  Clarendon, 1990). For a critique of this view see Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002); and for a more balanced consideration see Peter Lake, ‘Introduction:  Puritanism, Arminianism and Nicholas Tyacke’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-​Reformation England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 1–​15.

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Later authors perhaps sketched in the terrain with a greater level of detail than their predecessors, but they did so within the same essential borders as mapped out by the first generation of reformers. The English reformation re-​made the notion of sin in its own image through the Ten Commandments, establishing the apparent absolutes of theological and moral truth as malleable products of a subjective and culturally informed blend of imaginative exegesis and outright fiction. Later more radical expositions differed not in nature, but only in degree.

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Hereby we know that we know him, if wee kepe his commandements: the meaning wherof, is, that the conscionable endeavour to frame our lives, according to Gods will revealed in his word, is a most certen mark, that we be true beleevers, and so the true children of God.

Ezekiel Culverwell, A Treatise of Faith (1623)

Introduction The previous chapter showed that during the English reformation the Ten Commandments did not simply become the pre-​eminent mechanism for identifying sinful behaviour; more significantly, they took on the function of redefining sin itself. The creation of a Protestant Decalogue gave rise to the formation of a distinctively Protestant concept of sin, and of a new confessionally specific system of morality and ethics. This new moral system naturally shared much with Catholicism by virtue of 1500 years of a shared Christian past. But there were also fundamental differences, both conceptually, and also in terms of the detail. Conceptually, the model of sin to which the Protestant Decalogue gave rise had a different theoretical underpinning and theological function from that which it replaced: as we have seen, concupiscence was redefined as actual sin, and the sinful behaviours outlined by the Ten Commandments were cast as not merely difficult to avoid but literally inescapable. Gone was the comforting sacramental cycle of sin, repentance, priestly absolution and the repayment of the spiritual debt incurred by the sinful act through an appropriate penance. According to the Protestant Decalogue, all sins were worse than mortal. All sins were transgressions of the law of God, and the penalty for such transgression was death; there was no earthly contrition, absolution or restitution. The natural doom of all mankind was physical death and everlasting spiritual damnation. Only the supernatural balm of divine grace could rescue the helpless sinner from a fate literally worse than death, 177

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and such grace could only be sought from God himself; it was no longer available by means of a clerical intermediary. In terms of detail, the construction of lists of individual sins by English Protestant authors was not only contextual and rhetorical (as it had always been): it was also polemical, and it reached further and deeper into the recesses of the human soul than ever before. In several key respects, the model of Protestant morality and virtue was constructed in opposition to Catholic sinfulness, the concept of which was shaped around starkly contrasting interpretations of key aspects of certain commandments (for example, the First and Second Commandments’ prohibition of idolatry and false worship). A discussion of the Decalogue and salvation in reformation England might therefore appear to have relatively little to offer. On one level, the commandments were supremely unimportant for salvation, as anybody who strove to earn a place in heaven through the keeping of them would in the final instance learn that their efforts were utterly inadequate. And yet the Ten Commandments of the moral law were also central to the process of evangelical conversion, as conceptualised by Protestant divines from Becon to Bayly and Tyndale to Topsell. This chapter will explore and explain the role of the commandments in bringing the elect to salvation through divine grace and the gift of justifying faith in Christ. The first section will examine how they brought about repentance, and describe the evangelical office of the law as a ‘scholemaster unto Christ’.1 The second will chart the facility of the Decalogue in conditioning not just faith itself, but also the knowledge or awareness of faith, with particular reference to the First Commandment. The final part of the chapter will consider radical visions of salvation in reformation England; that is, visions which deviated from the normative Reformed Protestant understanding and which embraced more extreme (even heretical) interpretations. These alternative definitions centred most often around one of two positions which were ostensibly diametrically opposed, but which in reality possessed many important similarities: the rejection of the law, and the perfection of the law. The nature and significance of repentance as one of the foundational ‘Protestant emotions’ has recently been considered by Alec Ryrie. Ryrie notes that while the culture of repentance is ‘not attractive’ to modern sensibilities, it ‘almost constituted the Christian life’ for committed early modern Protestants. However, other than noting that ‘by far the most widespread method’ of self-​ examination for sin was to use the Ten Commandments, the importance of the Decalogue is not extensively explored in his work (indeed Professor Ryrie kindly directs the reader towards this book for additional information). Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 49–​50, 57, 57 n46.

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Repentance On the famous ordo salutis table contained within William Perkins’ best-​ selling theological treatise A golden chaine, the elect (as represented by the pale line of salvation) and the reprobate (signified by the black line of damnation) first part company following their departure from a shared ‘state of unbeleefe’. From this unbelief, the elect were brought by the love of God to an effectual calling and faith, whilst the reprobate began to experience the hatred of God and a series of false, ineffectual and sinful beliefs, thoughts and behaviours. This soteriology is reflected in the writings of Perkins and other Calvinist divines; however, the famous chart, complex though it is, misses out some of the finer detail present in the lengthier textual treatments. As the previous chapter demonstrated, the first aspect of the evangelical office of the law was as the ‘ministry of death’, presenting sinful mankind with the knowledge of the supreme depths of their corruption and the impossible breadth of their transgressions. The practical difference between the elect and the reprobate was in their reaction to this knowledge. The reprobate, as we have seen, were doomed to fall into one of a number of traps. However, for elect Christians confronted with the full knowledge of their sinfulness as attested to by the Decalogue, there was only one true path to follow; and each and every step along that narrow path to salvation continued to be defined and confirmed in relation to (amongst other things) the Ten Commandments. The knowledge of sin declared by the Decalogue led the regenerate not to the delusional mental states of the reprobate, but to a sense of terror at the justice of God’s cause against them, and horror at the number and magnitude of their offences against his majesty. This acceptance of the righteousness of the divine judgement against them engendered sorrow in the regenerate for their actions and a desire to repent for sin, even though the elect possessed the knowledge that the stain of sin could never be washed away by mere human repentance. Repentance for innumerable sins committed presaged a realisation of the enormous extent of God’s mercy; a turn to Christ as the only means of salvation; and ensuing gratitude for that act of incalculable forgiveness. In A booke of Christian exercise appertaining to resolution, Edmund Bunny’s Protestant emendation of the Jesuit Robert Persons’ Book of Resolution, the elder Bunny brother described the terror of the Jews when God descended upon Mount Sinai to deliver the Ten Commandments:  ‘The trumpets sounded mightilie in the aire: great thunder brake out from the sky, with fearce lightenings, horrible clouds, thick mists, and terrible smoke rising

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from the mountain’.2 ‘In the midst of al this majestie, and dreadful terror, God spake in the hearing of al’ the words of the Decalogue; then, Bunny continued, should not Christians, living in England in the present day, ‘greatly tremble to break this law, delivered us with such circumstances of dread and fear’. The terrifying circumstances under which the law had been promulgated were a signifier of the seriousness with which man ought to regard it; ‘for so we see always great princes laws to be executed upon the offenders with much more terror than they were proclaimed’.3 The appropriate reaction to the knowledge of sin to which the Ten Commandments brought sinful man was therefore abject terror. This correspondence between the terror instilled by the original proclamation of the Mosiaic law and the terror with which sinners were expected to react to the knowledge of their breach of that law was also remarked upon by the early evangelical reformer Thomas Becon. In his model sermon written for Whitsunday, he explained that: Wherfore, even as there was a very dreadfull sight in the mount, when GOD spake, and all thynges so troubled with thunder & lyghtnynge that the hyll did smoke, and semed to be moved: So is this alwayes the propretie of the law, when it worketh effectuously in the hearte, to terrifie and feare, and to dryue a man to desperation . . .4

The majesty of the Decalogue’s pronunciation of the damnation of mankind was even more terrible than the awesome majesty of God when he himself had descended bodily to earth to deliver his law to the nation of Israel. It is therefore difficult to overstate the depths of the terror which divines described as beginning the process of repentance in the regenerate.5 Edmund Bunny, A booke of Christian exercise appertaining to resolution, (1584), p. 37. Cf. William Tyndale; ‘The lawe was giuen in thunder, lightening, fire, smoke, and the voice of a trumpet and terrible sight . . . . That thunder, except the raine of mercie be joined therewith, destroieth all, and buildeth not. The law is a witnesse against us, and testifieth that God abhorreth the sins that are in us, and us for our sinnes sake’, cited in John Merbecke, A booke of notes and common places (1581), p. 610. 3 Bunny, A booke of Christian exercise, p. 37. 4 Thomas Becon, A new postil conteinyng most godly and learned sermons vpon all the Sonday Gospelles, that be redde in the church thorowout the yeare (1566), ff. 274v–​275r. The Jesuit theologian Leonardus Lessius ridiculed the Calvinist ‘consideration’ ‘that the paine of the damned is nothing else, then to feele God an adversary . . . by which words he plainely insinuateth, that hell is nothing els, but vaine terrors’. Leonardus Lessius, A consultation what faith and religion is best to be imbraced, trans. William Wright (1618), p. 165. Cf. Bunny, A booke of Christian exercise, p. 50: ‘consider then the eternal separation that then must be made: of fathers & children; mothers & daughters; frinds and companions: the one to glorie, the other to confusion, with out ever seeing one the other again’; Robert Horne, Points of instruction for the ignorant (1617), Sig. Cvv–​Cvir. 5 Ryrie has discussed the significance of despair for English Calvinists, suggesting that the emphasis of Calvinism on despair did little to discredit the theological basis on which it was formulated: ‘just 2

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This process of instilling in the regenerate a suitable sense of terror at the fate that justly awaited them, and of horror at the awful magnitude of their own sinfulness, was described most eloquently by the early pioneer of so many of the lasting priorities of English reformation thought, William Tyndale. ‘A Christian therefore’, he wrote in The Wicked Mammon, ‘when he beholdeth himself in the law, putteth off all manner righteousness, deservings, and merits, and meekly and unfeignedly knowledgeth his sin and misery, his captivity and bondage in the flesh, his trespass and guilt’.6 The necessary response of the true believer when humbled before the law was simple: to ‘meekly knowledge my sin, weeping in mine heart, because I cannot do the will of God’.7 The true meaning of Christ’s words to the young man in Matthew 19:17, ‘if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments’, was explained by Tyndale thus: ‘remember that when God commandeth us to do any thing, he doth it not therefore, because that we of ourselves are able to do that he commandeth; but that by the law we might see and know our horrible damnation and captivity under sin’.8 Ninety years later, Daniel Dyke explained that the function of the Law was in ‘setting out to us that most rigorous and precise justice of God, and his infinite, and implacable wrath against sin’, leaving man ‘in utter desperation’.9 Dyke described a two-​stage model in his treatise, with repentance consisting first of humiliation, followed by reformation. Humiliation was wrought by the law, whose ‘shrill trumpet’ served to arouse ‘the sinners drousie conscience’ and ‘presenteth him with that fearefull spectacle of eternall death and condemnation’. Not only would the believer ‘see hell with a wide and gaping mouth ready to devoure him, but even in a manner feelth himselfe in hell already’.10 This function of the Law, Hooper explained, appertained ‘as well unto the infideles, as to the fideles; to such as be not regenerated, as to those that be regenerated: for those that she cannot bring to Christ, she damneth’.11 Their elect status notwithstanding, therefore, the chosen were not in for an easy ride, and the experience of because a doctrine is unappealing does not make it false’. However, he underestimates the significance of the law in conditioning this sense of despair. See Ryrie, Being Protestant, p. 30. See also John Stachniewski, The persecutory imagination: English Puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 6 William Tyndale, ‘The Wicked Mammon’ (1527), in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848), p. 75. 7 Tyndale, ‘The Wicked Mammon’, p. 76. 8 Tyndale, ‘The Wicked Mammon’, p. 81. 9 Daniel Dyke, Tvvo treatises. The one, of repentance, the other, of Christs temptations (1616), pp. 4–​5. 10 Dyke, Tvvo treatises, p. 20. 11 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 282.

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the early stages of justification was identical to the damnation experienced by the reprobate. The godly Sussex clergyman William Attersoll explained that there were four points to be observed in the self-​examination of the regenerate:  knowledge, faith, repentance and reconciliation. Repentance was placed by Attersoll after faith (other divines including Tyndale ordered repentance before faith12), and he described it as a duty ‘to abhorre and detest our sins, to hate them with an unfained hatred as our deadly and most dangerous enemies, and to have godly sorrow for them’.13 The Decalogue enumerated sins not only to condemn the reprobate, but to enable the godly sinner to come to the realisation that they were hopeless and helpless without external (divine) intervention, and also to facilitate an appropriate expression of repentance. Gervase Babington provided a model prayer for the sinner to acknowledge the depth of their sin against the Ten Commandments, and described the penitent as begging for divine mercy with ‘my flesh shaking, mine eies watering, my soule groning, and all the stringes of my heart inlarged’.14 With reference to his failure to keep even the First Commandment, he wrote: ‘O deare father, rent my heart and give me feeling, cleave it a sunder, by the pearcing sprite, that from it may flowe the teares of true repentaunce, strike good Lorde this hard rocke of mine, that it may gushe out sorowfull water for so fowle offence’.15 For Daniel Dyke repentance was an entirely separate process from the brutal unbottoming of the soul by the knowledge of sin: ‘the spirit by the hammer of the Law having broken us, doth in the next place by the fire of the Gospell melt us’ in order to make the sinner whole again. For Tyndale, in contrast, ‘repentance goeth before faith, and prepareth the way to Christ, and the promises’.16 The precise theological ordering of the process notwithstanding, the law had a central role in the trope of evangelical conversion, especially in creating the conditions in which repentance and faith (or faith and repentance) could take root in the individual believer. ‘For scripture teacheth, first repentance, then faith in Christ, that for his sake is forgiven to them that repent’. William Tyndale, ‘A prologue into the third book of Moses called Numeri’, in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848), p. 434. 13 William Attersoll, The badges of Christianity. Or, A treatise of the sacraments fully declared out of the word of God (1606), p. 351. 14 Babington, Fruitful, p. 513. 15 Babington, Fruitful exposition of the Commandements, p. 82. 16 William Tyndale, ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’ (1528), in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1848), p. 261. 12

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The most common topos for describing this function of the Decalogue is to be found in references to the law as the ‘scholemaster unto Christ’. Taking its inspiration from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the notion of the Ten Commandments as having been instituted specifically for the purpose of bringing the faithful to Christ was ubiquitous in their discussion and exposition in early modern England.17 The early seventeenth-​century author and poet Christopher Lever enumerated four reasons for God’s ordination of the Law: the fourth of these was that ‘by the severity thereof wee might be disciplined, and made fitte for the mercy of the Gospell’. The Law was ‘sayd to be a Schoolemaster, by whose directions wee are led to our salvation Jesus Christ’.18 The musician and prominent Tudor evangelical John Merbecke, in his booke of notes and common places, explained at length how the law functioned as a schoolmaster. Just as a schoolmaster was appointed to oversee the child only for a certain time, so the chastisements of the law would give way in due course to the more tender embrace of the gospel.19 It was the job of the schoolmaster to administer discipline and instruction, in order to profit the child and make it a responsible adult. Therefore, the law of God ‘doth not only terrifie and torment (as the foolish schoolmaister beateth his scholers & teacheth them nothing) but with his rods he driveth us to Christ’.20 The Lutheran theologian David Chytraeus, whose A postil or orderly disposing of certeine epistles was translated into English and published in 1570, discussed two uses of the law as named by Paul: the first was to shew ‘all men too bee prisoners of sinne’, and the second was to be ‘our schoolemaster unto Christ’.21 The duties of the schoolmaster in this respect were deemed by Chrytraeus to be threefold: ‘the first is too teach: the second too frame manners: and the third too chastice or punish the offenders’.22 The Ten Commandments accordingly taught Christians ‘the hugenesse and horriblenesse of sinne, and by pronouncing us subject too Gods wrath and everlasting damnation, driveth us to seek our own Phisitian and helper the sonne of God’.23

Galatians 3:24: ‘Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.’ 18 Christopher Lever, The holy pilgrime, leading the way to heaven (1618), p. 86. 19 John Merbecke, A booke of notes and common places (1581), p. 609. 20 Merbecke, A booke of notes and common places, p. 609. 21 David Chytraeus, A postil or orderly disposing of certeine epistles vsually red in the Church of God, trans. Arthur Golding (1570), pp. 41–​2. Cf. Christoph Hegendorph, Domestycal or housholde sermons for a godly housholder, to his children and famyly, trans. Henry Reiginalde (1548), sig. Avr. 22 Chytraeus, A postil or orderly disposing of certeine epistles, p. 42. 23 Chytraeus, A postil or orderly disposing of certeine epistles, p. 43. Cf. Lakes, Probe, p. 4. 17

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The operation of the law as ‘schoolmaster’ for the regenerate was therefore a more benign characterisation than the other Pauline notion of the ‘ministration of death’. Francis, the younger Bunny, noted that ‘the most comfortable use of the law is therefore not to hope by observing or keeping it, to merit at Gods hands the kingdome of glory, as Papists do . . . but to looke unto . . . Christ’.24 Here was a recognition that the Christian might begin weak and yet strengthen in the faith; that with appropriate help and instruction they might aspire to spiritual maturity. Arthur Dent spoke of three special applications of the Law pertaining to the regenerate: the last of these was that it functioned as ‘their schoolemaster to Christ’.25 In the commentarie on the first five chapters of Galatians, William Perkins commented that the law acted as a ‘schoolemaster to Christ, for two causes’. Firstly, because ‘it points out and shadowes forth unto us Christ, by bodily rudiments of ceremonies and sacrifices’. And secondly, ‘because the law, specially the morall law, urgeth and compelleth men to goe to Christ’. It achieved this by shewing ‘the damnation that is due unto us . . . and thus it inforceth us to seeke for help out of our selves in Christ’. ‘The law is then our schoolemaster’, he noted, ‘not by plaine teaching, but by stripes and correction’.26 Perkins continued the metaphor to make the point that, once men were well-​schooled in the law, ‘then must they be taken up to an higher forme, and be taught by an other schoolemaster, which is Faith, or the Gospel’. The lesson of the Gospel was ‘that men after they are humbled, must flie to the throne of grace, beleeve in Christ, and with all their hearts turne unto God’.27 John Bradford explained, ‘the law will not leave man in arrogancy or presumption, but will rather bring him to desperation . . . thus, you see, the law, where she is schoolmaster, bringeth into all humbleness of mind at the least’.28 The law was justified in giving the regenerate a taste of the terrors of hell, in order to drive them towards a realisation and

Francis Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse: or, A plaine and familiar explanation of the ten commandements (1617), p. 230. 25 Arthur Dent, A pastime for parents: or A recreation to passe away the time; contayning the most principall grounds of Christian religion (1606), sig. D3v. Cf. Dyke, Knowledge, p. 22. 26 William Perkins, A commentarie or exposition, vpon the fiue first chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (1604), p. 229. Cf. Jean Calvin, The sermons of M. Iohn Caluin vpon the fifth booke of Moses called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (1583), p. 911: ‘Let us learne therefore to profite in the schoole of our GOD, while it pleaseth him to use the office of a schoolemaster towards us, and let us not doubt that any thing shall be wanting unto us, when we come to him to bee taught’. 27 Perkins, A commentarie or exposition, vpon . . . Galatians (1604), p. 229. 28 John Bradford, ‘Preface to Artopoeus on the Law and the Gospel’, in idem, Sermons, Meditations, Examinations, &c., ed. Audrey Townsend (Vol. 1.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1853), p. 6. 24

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acceptance that salvation could not be accomplished through their own flawed and imperfect works, but only though Christ’s sacrifice. The concept of repentance was therefore strongly wedded to the Decalogue. Perkins described the practice as ‘a work of grace arising of a godly sorrow’, whereby a man turns from all his sins unto God, and brings ‘forth fruits and worthy amendment of life’.29 It is important to note that repentance was not deemed to stem from the law itself: as Perkins noted, ‘the law neither reveals faith nor repentance: this is a proper worke of the gospell’. However, ‘neither do we abolish the law, in ascribing the worke of repentance to the gospel only: for though it be no cause, yet it is an occasion of true repentance’.30 It was the function of the Decalogue as ‘schoolmaster’ which brought believers to the point at which the Gospel was able to facilitate the process of repentance in the faithful through the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, the Ten Commandments also defined the sins against which the faithful were expected to turn their backs, as well as the ‘fruits’ which were the demonstration and proof of their continuing amendement of life (of which more anon). Whilst the law was not the active agent in actually bringing about repentance, it was a vital catalyst in facilitating the process. As Perkins explained, ‘if it bee said, that the law is a schoolemaster to bring us to Christ, the answer is, it brings men to Christ not by teaching the way, or by alluring them: but by forcing and urging them’.31 It was the law’s job to bring the horse to water, but only the gentle enticements of the gospel could actually make it drink. The law also provided the framework within which the practical business of repentance could operate. Of four ‘speciall duties’ enumerated by Perkins in the practice of repentance, the first was ‘a diligent and serious examination of the conscience by the Lawes and commandementes of God, for all manner of sinnes both original and actuall’.32 Having humbled the sinner before God, it was the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue which began the process of salvation through creating the necessary preconditions for repentance, and also by providing a framework within which specific sins William Perkins, Tvvo treatises· I. Of the nature and practise of repentance. II. Of the combat of the flesh and spirit (1593), p. 1. Cf. Thomas Wilson, An exposition of the tvvo first verses of the sixt chapter to the Hebrewes in forme of a dialogue (1600), STC2: 24966, pp. 12–​13. 30 Perkins, Tvvo treatises, p. 9. 31 Perkins, Tvvo treatises, p. 9. Wilson may have counted the action of the law as part of the initial stages of repentance, but the role is virtually the same: ‘as the word of the Law doth prepare and begin repentance: so it is effected and wrought by the word of the Gospell’. Wilson, An exposition of the tvvo first verses of the sixt chapter to the Hebrewes, p. 13. 32 Perkins, Tvvo treatises, p. 17. For further discussion of repentance in the ongoing context of ‘experimental Calvinism’ and Puritan practical divinity, see Chapter 5. 29

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could be repented of, and specific actions could be held up as a model for the amendment of the godly life.

Faith The fruits of faith and the ensuing amendment of life is a theme to which we will return, but first we must explore the role of the Decalogue in defining faith itself. The redefinition of faith was at the heart of the reformation project, from Luther’s emphasis on the concept of ‘justification by faith alone’ onwards. Faith occupied a central role in Luther’s theology, allowing him to maintain a seemingly contradictory insistence both on the extrinsic nature of divine grace in the justified individual, and the real, internal presence of Christ within the saved. Faith was a divine gift freely given to the justified, ‘the means by which the man under grace may depend and grow in his spiritual life’.33 In Luther’s thought, faith took on many of the traditional functions of grace in the process of justification. Grace itself was redefined: it was no longer a ‘quality’; rather, it was a condition through which God expressed his ‘absolute favour . . . towards an individual’. Instead, it was faith in Christ which was to be understood as effecting the ‘renovation and regeneration’ of the new man within the believer.34 Tyndale described ‘true faith’ as ‘the gift of God . . . given to sinners, after the law hath passed upon them, and hath brought their consciences unto the brim of desperation and sorrows of hell’.35 In the process of justification, as understood through the narrative of evangelical conversion, the gift of faith marked only the beginning point at which the former reprobate embarked upon a lifelong journey of spiritual rejuvenation. From this point onwards, they could theoretically count themselves as amongst the saved; however, sure and certain knowledge of election (and reprobation) was reserved to God himself. Reformers, therefore, faced a series of practical problems. Firstly, if a re-​defined concept of faith was such a central component of salvation, it was important for pastors to be able to discern in their flocks, and for individuals to be able to discern in themselves, the right kind of faith. And secondly, if justification proceeded from faith alone on the basis of divine Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei:  A  History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 201. 34 McGrath, Iustitia Dei, p. 201. 35 William Tyndale, ‘A Pathway into the Holy Scripture’, in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848), pp. 12–​13. 33

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predestination without any possibility of a positive contribution by the performance of meritorious works (or without the risk that misdeeds could endanger that salvation), was it still possible to instil in people the importance of behaving well and acting in a good, Christian manner? In other words, if behaviour no longer influenced salvation, how on earth were ministers to persuade their flocks of the need to behave well? The answer to these pastoral, emotional and social quandaries lay in the Decalogue. First and foremost, though, did the moral law still even apply to justified Christians?36 Yes, and no. As Tyndale explained: by faith are we saved only, in believing the promises . . . our saving [is] imputed neither to love nor unto good works, but unto faith only. For love and works are under the law, which requireth perfection and the ground and fountain of the heart, and damneth all imperfectness. Now is faith under the promises, which damn not; but give pardon, grace, mercy, favour, and whatsoever is contained in the promises.

Justification did not render man perfect and whole –​in Luther’s phrase, he was simul iustus et peccator, at the same time just and a sinner. The extrinsic nature of divine grace meant that, beneath his alien cloak of righteousness, concupiscent man was still a sinful and corrupt being.37 The Christian therefore had to be counted free from the covenant of works, which named everlasting damnation as the punishment for sin, and was instead comprehended under the covenant of grace. It was on the basis of this piece of theological sleight of hand that his Catholic opponents attacked Luther, and Protestants more generally, accusing them of teaching that ‘the Ten commandements appertaeine nothing unto us’. The puritan lecturer William Charke acknowledged that Luther had expounded the differences between the covenant of works (comprehended by the ministry of Moses) and the covenant of grace (contained within the mercy of Christ), and had taught that ‘the law doth not apperteyne unto us, as it did the Jewes’.38 But while Christians were no longer under the covenant of works per se, they were still bound by the moral obligations of the law. Charke explained Luther’s position; that ‘we receive and acknowledge Moses for a teacher in deede, whence we learne much wholesome doctrine’, and that the Commandments were ‘universally commanded of all men’, ‘to be kept For a more rounded discussion of this question, refer back to Chapter 1. William Attersoll explained that, for the elect, ‘if we be displeased with our selves for our sinnes, God wil be wel pleased with us, and cloath us with the righteousness of Christ’. Attersoll, The badges of Christianity, p. 369. 38 William Charke, A replie to a censure written against the two answers to a Iesuites seditious pamphlet (1581), sigs. C7r-​v. 36 37

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of all and apperteyne unto all’.39 Arthur Dent’s imaginary catechumen explained the same point to his father in A pastime for parents: ‘the children of God are under the obedience and institution of the law, but not under the curse of it, for they being in Christ are freed from that’.40 The covenant of works was thus abrogated for Christians, and replaced by the covenant of Grace. Christians did not have to perform works in order to earn their salvation –​an impossible requirement for fallen humanity, which lacked the capacity to perform such works in a manner acceptable to God. Grace and faith were freely given to Christians. But the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue still acted as a binding moral imperative, even if they lacked the legal (or soteriological) status of a covenant.41 Perhaps ‘binding’ is the wrong word –​because it was in fact love of and voluntary obedience to the law that was the defining characteristic of a true and justifying faith.42 For William Attersoll, faith meant the possession and expression of ‘an unfained love and desire of righteousness’. The same law which first led unbelievers to the Gospel therefore also had a subsequent role as the touchstone of faith for the converted. As Tyndale explained, those who had been unbottomed by the law, brought to deep despair, and turned to trust in the promises of God, would through faith consent to the law and acknowledge that it was right and good. The true believer would ‘have delectation in the law (notwithstanding that they cannot fulfil it as they would, for their weakness); and they abhor whatsoever the law forbiddeth, though they cannot always avoid it’.43 Having been brought to misery and desolation by the law, it was the mark of the true believer that they began to love and desire to fulfil it. Thomas Wilson summarised the teaching of the moral law as ‘to love God with all our soule, Charke, A replie to a censure, sigs. C8r-​v. Dent, A pastime for parent, sig. D3v. 41 Rohr has noted that ‘Centres of Reformed Protestantism developed a pattern of theology related to their political theory of natural law and social contract, interpreting the divine-​human relationship as grounded on divine law and a covenant with God. In such a conception, though grace was affirmed as God’s giving, major emphasis came to be placed on human obedience to the law of love for covenant fulfilment’. It is this tradition (rather than Calvin’s) which Rohr contends informed English Protestantism though Tyndale, Frith, Bale, Hooper, and Elizabethan and seventeenth-​ century puritanism. John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), p. 23. 42 Alan C. Clifford notes that Cranmer, Hooper, Tyndale and others all held that a lively Christian faith was necessarily accompanied by repentance and a steadfast determination through God’s grace to obey him and keep his commandments, observing that ‘the conclusion is inescapable that whereas Christ’s death is the sole meritorious cause of justification, obedience is also a necessary condition of salvation’. Alan C. Clifford, Atonement and Justification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 174. 43 William Tyndale, ‘A Pathway into the Holy Scripture’, p. 14. 39 40

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might and heart: and our neighbour as our self ’, and explained that love was the sum of the law ‘because our duties to God and man are nothing worth, unless love beget them’; that is, only acts performed through faith were to be accepted as worthy.44 This desire to fulfil the law was the mark of a true faith; proof that an individual was on the right track, and not possessed of a temporary, false or carnal faith. As the godly Nonconformist minister Ezekiel Culverwell put it, ‘hereby we know that we know him, if wee kepe his commandements: the meaning wherof, is, that the conscionable endeavour to frame our lives, according to Gods will revealed in his word, is a most certen mark, that we be true beleevers, and so the true children of God & heires of Glory’.45 Elsewhere, Culverwell explained that ‘the keeping of Gods commandements . . . is made a sure mark of saving grace’.46 A willingness to submit oneself to the stringent rule of the Ten Commandments was an essential trait of the godly, and a guarantor of true faith. The irony was that the reprobate who were under the covenant of works railed against God’s terrible justice, while the elect under the covenant of grace craved to submit themselves to the strictures of the moral law. William Perkins termed it an ‘infallible mark of the child of god’ that he be obedient not ‘unto some fewe of Gods commuandements, but unto them all without exception.’47 A  desire to keep the Ten Commandments was therefore one of the hallmarks of a true and lively justifying faith. Richard Rogers, the minister, godly author, and sometime friend of Culverwell, wrote that the work of true faith in ‘the better sort of people, and such as have received the first fruites of the spirit’ included giving ‘assent to every part of the word of God, and submit[ting] themselves thereto, promises, threats and commandements’.48 The true nature of an authentic and lively faith went far beyond simply possessing and expressing a desire to fulfil God’s moral law, however. In his A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, Tyndale explained that ‘by the fruits shall ye know what the tree is. A man’s deeds declare what he is within’.49 Wilson, An exposition of the tvvo first verses of the sixt chapter to the Hebrewes, p. 11. Ezekiel Culverwell, A treatise of faith wherein is declared how a man may liue by faith and finde releefe in all his necessities (1623), pp. 224–​5. 46 Culverwell, A treatise of faith, p. 224. 47 William Perkins, An exposition of the Symbole or Creed of the Apostles (1595), p. 445. 48 Richard Rogers, Seuen treatises containing such direction as is gathered out of the Holie Scriptures, leading and guiding to true happines, both in this life, and in the life to come (1603), p. 80. Cf. Brinsley, Watch, pp. 18–​19. 49 Although of course such works ‘make him neither good nor bad’. William Tyndale, ‘A Pathway into the Holy Scripture’, p. 23. Cf. John Bate, The portraiture of hypocrisie, liuely and pithilie pictured in her colours wherein you may view the vgliest and most prodigious monster that England hath bredde (1589), sig. Aiiiiv. 44 45

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The fruits of a true, justifying faith were the works of the moral law; in other words, the duties enjoined by the Ten Commandments. The law was the diagnostic test and Christ was the physician; through Christ believers had a promise that they would be made whole again, and granted health, otherwise defined by Tyndale as ‘power or strength to fulfil the law, or keep the commandments’.50 It was the job of the Holy Spirit to aid believers in keeping from temptation. Therefore, not only was love of the law a mark of true faith, but the keeping of the law –​still impossible in its entirety for any save Christ –​was additional evidence of salvation. In Matthew 17 Christ had said ‘if thou wilt enter life, keep the commandments’, and in The Wicked Mammon Tyndale provided the following gloss: it was only ‘the Spirit of God’ which had the power to ‘loose us, strength us, and to make us able to do God’s will, which is the law.51 In other words, men and women who attempted to perform the works of the law in the belief that they were able to would soon find that they could not; whilst men and women who wished to perform the works of the law out of love, but realised that they were incapable, could be empowered through Christ to keep the commandments (although they would also inevitably fail in their endeavours and so sin from time to time). There were only two things required of a Christian, Tyndale wrote in his prologue to Matthew’s Gospel: steadfast faith and trust in God, and a turning away from evil and towards God, ‘to keep his laws, and to fight against ourselves and our corrupt nature perpetually.’52 Justification was the first stage in a healing process which would bring about an eventual transformation of human nature. The power of the Holy Spirit was such that it turned the believer ‘unto a new nature, so that he loveth that which he before hated, and hateth that which he before loved; and is clean altered, and changed, and contrary disposed; and is knit and coupled fast to God’s will’.53 In other words, the only righteousness valued by God was trust in the promises of God, which could only stem from the law’s work in confounding the consciences of men. As Tyndale’s prologue to the Pentateuch had it, ‘to walk with God is to live godly, and to walk in his commandments’.54 This underscored the depth of God’s Tyndale, ‘The Wicked Mammon’, p. 79. Tyndale, ‘The Wicked Mammon’, p. 81. 52 William Tyndale, ‘The prologue upon the gospels and epistles’, in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1848), p. 471. 53 Tyndale, ‘The Wicked Mammon’, p. 55. 54 William Tyndale, ‘A Table expounding certain words in the first book of Moses, called Genesis’, in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848), p. 409. 50 51

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mercy, and caused humanity to thirst to fulfil the law, while simultaneously mourning their inability to fulfil it perfectly. Authors from Tyndale onwards were clear: mankind’s actions were only rendered acceptable to God through Christ’s merciful sacrifice and the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, there was nothing inherent in any work that was pleasing to God in and of itself: rather, it was the desire of the justified man to please God in spite of his own shortcomings which counted. Both heathen and Christian children might honour their father and mother, but only the works of the Christian faithful were sanctified and therefore pleasant unto God; the same works proceeding from an unsanctified nature were lacking in faith and the word, and were therefore unacceptable (even repugnant) to God.55 William Attersoll explained that ‘there is no meanes or remedy in ourselves or in any creature, but onely in Jesus Christ the eternal son of god, who . . . maketh our duties (though weake) acceptable to his father’.56 By its fruit was the tree to be known, and so the justified believer demonstrated their elect status through the performance of the works of the law: but it was only their godly nature that rendered those works good. As Thomas Bentley explained for the benefit of godly matrons, ‘if we by faith be trulie graffed in Jesus Christ, and call upon God to salvation, we will no more bring foorth the works of the flesh, but the fruits of the spirit’.57 Ezekiel Culverwell expounded how the performance of holy duties was an essential part of ‘living by faith’, reassuring the doubtful that ‘we who be so full of frailty, and so weake in grace, may yet be able to performe . . . the ten commandements . . . in such manner, as may bee pleasing to him’.58 The same works which earned a sentence of everlasting damnation in the reprobate were pleasing to God when performed by the elect. The Decalogue was therefore capable of performing a series of vital yet entirely contradictory roles, dependent upon the context in which it was employed. It sat at the centre of both sin and salvation, the author of despair in the reprobate and of assurance in the elect. The German Calvinist theologian Bartholomäus Keckermann, whose Ouranognosia was translated into English and published in 1622, explained that three things were requisite to good works: that they should spring from a true faith; be commanded by God; and be done for the glory of God. Citing Romans 14:23, Keckermann noted that ‘whatsoever is not Becon, A new postil, f. 37v. Attersoll, The badges of Christianity, p. 353. 57 Thomas Bentley, The monument of matrones conteining seuen seuerall lamps of virginitie, or distinct treatises (1582), p. 238. 58 Culverwell, A treatise of faith, p. 270. 55 56

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of Faith, is sinne’, and called ‘the Morall Law, or the Decalogue’ ‘the rule and square of our good workes’.59

The First Commandment I Am the LORD thy God, Which Have Brought thee Out of the Land of Egypt, out of the House of Bondage. Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me. Exodus 20:2–​3

Perhaps no single commandment better embodied the perfect faith and love of God and his law which divines expected and required of their flock than the first. Hooper called it ‘the ground, original, and foundation, of all virtue, godly laws, or Christian works’, while Thomas Becon simply referred to it as ‘the first and greatest commandement’.60 In his best-​selling blockbuster on the commandments, John Dod was slightly unusual in considering the first sentence of the First Commandment as a separate preface. He explained that this preface contained ‘a preparation, to stir us up with all care, and conscience to keepe the law of God’ regarding all of the commandments in general, and the First Commandment in particular.61 The introduction of the Decalogue in Exodus 20:1, ‘God spake all these words, saying . . .’, and the use of the first person pronoun, ‘I am the LORD thy God’, established the heavenly father as the direct author of all of the ensuing laws. All scripture, Dod noted, was to be regarded as proceeding from God, but ‘so more neerely these tenne words, because they be after a more speciall sort his words’.62 Other laws and scriptures were delivered by angels, prophets and men, but these words had been spoken by God himself, and inscribed on tablets of stone with his own finger for the benefit of mankind.63 The Decalogue was therefore a perfect encapsulation of ‘wonderful and perfect holiness’: there was no good duty which its precepts did not enjoin, and no sin which they did not forbid.64 Moving on to the First Commandment proper, Dod followed the pattern Bartholomäus Keckermann, Ouranognosia. Heauenly knowledge A manuduction to theologie, trans. Thomas Vicars (1622), STC2:  14896, p.  129. The same phrase was used by Francis Bunny:  ‘[the Law] is to us as to a workman his rule and square, according to which we ought to frame all our actions’: Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p. 231. 60 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 293; Thomas Becon, A new postil (1566), f. 134v. 61 Dod, Plaine, p. 1. 62 Dod, Plaine, p. 2. Cf. Allen, Treasurie, p. 29. 63 Peter Barker explained, ‘the Decalogue was the immediate word of his owne mouth, he did write himself, he made his own pen publike Notary of his tongue, his own finger was the pen’. Barker, Painefull, p. 2. For more on God’s authorship of the Decalogue, see Chapter 1. 64 Dod, Plaine, p. 3. 59

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outlined in the previous chapter, explaining that it was possessed of both a positive and a negative aspect. Considering the positive first, he explained that ‘the drift of this Commandement is, that we should sanctifie God in our hearts, and give him his full priviledge’. The text of the commandment made reference to the deliverance of the Jews by Moses from their captivity in Egypt: how much more then, explained Dod, should the Christian be grateful for his redemption by Christ, ‘for that is more excellent then the deliverance out of bondage, by how much the state of unregeneracy is more grievous than their corporall thraldome’.65 The First Commandment enjoined nothing less than belief itself. As Richard Greenham described it, it required the believer ‘to have God to be my onely God, and to be alwaies in his presence . . . [and] to give him all things which be proper and peculiar to his majesty’.66 It bound the Christian ‘to beleeve in God, to love God, to feare and obey him, to pray unto him and praise him’.67 These duties of ‘faith, love, feare, obedience, prayer and thanksgiving’ were at the heart of what it meant to be a Christian, and formed the basis of all the duties outlined by the other nine commandments. To obey the First Commandment was therefore to have faith, but not of a simple, carnal or superficial kind:  rather, it was to demonstrate possession of an active, true and lively faith. Stephen Denison’s list of duties enjoined by the First Commandment was similar to Greenham’s:  to know God, to have him as our only God, to adore, believe, love, fear and reverence him, to show him joy, give him glory, submit to him in obedience, request his aid in extremity, and to seek to become more united to him.68 For Robert Allen, the words ‘I am the Lord thy God’ were effectively a covenant and a promise from God between himself and mankind. The conditions of the covenant were impossible for man to fulfil alone and unaided, even though God was asking no more of humanity than he had fitted Adam and Eve for in the beginning, before the Fall. The specific requirements of the First Commandment were that ‘we do constantly yield to him alone all service and worship’.69 Allen’s definition of ‘worship’ was all encompassing: true worship of God consisted in holy meditation on his word, works, creation and government. This ‘holy meditation’ involved no fewer than seventeen different attitudes to Dod, Plaine, pp. 25–​6. Greenham, Workes, p. 73. Cf. Barker, Painefull, p. 35; George Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements (1602), sig. K7v. 67 Greenham, Workes, p. 73. 68 Stephen Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 29. 69 Allen, Treasurie, pp. 32–​5. 65 66

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be deployed by the faithful in their contemplation of the divine:  faith, trust, belief, hope, love, zeal, fear, reverence, humbleness, sobriety of mind, right use of blessings, patience, meekness, endurance of affliction, prayer, thanksgiving, and dedication to the honour and praise of God’s name.70 Each of these qualities had a positive definition, and Allen also outlined the ways in which Christians could fail to make the grade in each essential respect, through either excess or deficit. To give a single example, ‘zeal’ was defined as ‘a special fruit of love, longing after the glory of God’. Too much zeal, however, was to be condemned in excess as leading to superstition and idolatry, whilst a deficit of zeal inevitably resulted in lukewarmness of affection.71 Allen’s was thus was a loving and detailed pen portrait of a true and lively justifying faith, defined in contradistinction from the hollow, carnal and empty will-​worship of the unregenerate or the papist. The Protestant virtue of patience was contrasted against ‘popish & voluntarie whipping of men’, and in opposition to the Protestant virtue of prayer he condemned excessive ‘babling, prayer of superstitious & blind devotion’ and ‘prayers to Saints or Angels’.72 In other words, the exposition of the First Commandment was both a theological and also a polemical (re-​) construction of what it meant to have true faith, to believe in God, and to worship him in an appropriate manner. The opposite of a true Christian faith inevitably bore substantial similarities to Roman Catholicism. Of all the many attitudes enjoined by the First Commandment, however, the two most important were simply to love God, and to fear him. These were the two basic responses to God’s two principal attributes: his mercy and his justice. Gervase Babington explained that ‘feare is a reverent awe of God, whereby we are loth to offende him, both because we love him, and because he is able to punish us’.73 For Babington, the simplicity of the First Commandment was matched only by its enormity. Belief in God was a fundamental precondition for religion, but to contemplate in full the relationship between mankind and his creator was an awesome prospect. ‘This is but one Lawe of ten, and containeth but a few duties in respect of all that I owe to thee and my brethren’, Babington explained: yet ah Lorde, with wailing woe I speake it, so guiltie I see my self, so fowle and ouglie before thy face, and so full of breaches everie way, even of this one commandement, that I am ashamed and confounded to lift up mine Allen, Treasurie, pp. 35–​6. Allen, Treasurie, pp. 36–​41. 72 Allen, Treasurie, p. 41. 73 Babington, Fruitful (1586), p. 29. 70 71

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eies unto thee my God. For mine iniquities are increased over mine head, & my trespasses are growen up to the heaven . . .74

Others were more positive in tone. Thomas Granger outlined ‘five signes of the true love of God’, including:  unfeigned faith; love of the word; love of brethren; rejoicing to think and talk of Christ; and love of all things pertaining to his service.75 The Hampshire minister Osmund Lakes approached the First Commandment from an innovative angle, by asking, ‘if some Atheist would deny it, how couldest thou convince him [that there is a God]?’ The learned parishioner in the discourse replied that ‘if the spirit of God did not reveal it to him, nor gave he credit to the word that teacheth it:  I  would send him to the workmanship of heaven and earth, and prove him with the touch of his owne conscience, whether it accused or excused him’.76 The First Commandment required not just a love of God himself, but also of his creation:  of the great work of the natural world and of all the creatures that dwelt therein. Lakes explained that it was through faith that man was joined in fellowship with God, and it was faith that ‘getteth and applieth Christ, the end and performer of the law unto us; by and for whose righteousnes we please’.77 The godly Banbury minister William Whately described the First Commandment as ‘a total and general subjection of the whole man in all the powers of it unto him, called in Scripture, a being holy as God is holy’.78 Whately itemised an enormous range of affirmative duties for the first precept of the Decalogue: from perfect knowledge, faith and humility to love, fear, joy and confidence; from godly speech to actions of conference, thankfulness and patience; from imagination and memory to affection, virtue, and appetite; even down to an injunction only to employ the ‘locomotive facultie’ for ‘good and lawfull actions’.79 Impossible for the unregenerate to attain, and only possible for the regenerate to aspire to with the application of Christ’s righteousness through the medium of the Holy Spirit, the First Commandment outlined in extraordinary detail how to think, feel, speak, act and in essence be a true and godly Christian. Babington, Fruitful (1586), p. 67. Granger, Tree, pp. 3–​4. Dod called love the chief duty and first fruit of knowledge. Dod, Plaine, p. 33. 76 Lakes, Probe, p. 7. Cf. Edward Elton, who explained that the First Commandment required three sorts of faith: ‘fundamental’ (apprehending the essence and being of God), the ‘faith of miracles’ (apprehending the power of God), and the ‘faith of history’ (apprehending the truth of God as revealed in his written word). Elton, Exposition, p. 8. 77 Lakes, Probe, pp. 10–​11. 78 Whately, Pithie, p. 3. 79 Whately, Pithie, p. 3–​20. 74 75

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The nature of the faith enjoined by the First Commandment as illustrated by these authors was a distinctively Protestant one, and this was confirmed even more strikingly by their exploration of the sins forbidden by the precept. The godly Lincolnshire pastor Thomas Granger explained that the occasion for breaching the First Commandment was most commonly lusting after false gods.80 Not to know God was, in effect, not to have faith, and so Granger outlined ‘five signs of secret Atheisme’ in breach of the precept, including not seeking to know God; denying his providence and justice; living in carnal security without fear of sin; lusting after the wealth and pomp of the world; and ‘to revolt from God, because wee have not our owne present desires’.81 Atheism itself was forbidden by the First Commandment, and it was therefore implicit that all unregenerate sinners were to some extent atheists as a result of their inevitable failure to obey the precept. Peter Barker explained that to truly love God was to hold him closer than kindred, riches, and oneself. He criticised those ‘who can bee contented to follow Christ in a calme, but being unlike the disciples, will give him over in a troublesome sea’, and held up the Marian martyrs as a prime example of men and women whose faith held strong in the face of adversity: these were good grapes, and feared not the presse, were good gold, and feared not the fire, were good corne, and feared not the flayle, or grinding of their bodies, with the teeth of the wilde beasts, they desired to hold life with Christ, and therefore feared not death for Christ, and if some of them through infirmity of the flesh, have a little yeelded to their enemies, and stained their cheeks with blushes of recantation, yet like valiant souldiers after flying did againe fighte . . .82

The Marian martyrs therefore stood as a model of true and lively faith to which the individual should aspire; but faith could also be defined negatively, against what it was not; namely, the false worship of the Church of Rome. Dudley Fenner explained that the First Commandment forbade believers ‘to cleave to much to the holinesse of places and persons distinct’, while John Dod wrote that Christians ought ‘to have no other thing Granger, Tree, sig. B1r. Granger, Tree, pp.  3–​4. On atheism, see Lucien Febvre, The problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: the Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Michael Hunter, ‘The Problem of “Atheism” in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 35 (1985), pp. 135–​157. For a discussion of contemporary anti-​atheist works, see Leif Dixon, ‘William Perkins, “Atheisme”, and the Crises of England’s Long Reformation, Journal of British Studies, 50.4 (2011), pp. 790–​812. 82 Barker, Painefull, pp. 44–​6. 80

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whereon wee set our delight, or which we steeme, more than God . . . for whatsoever withdraweth anie thing in us from God, that is a straunge god unto us’.83 Anything man held before God was by default a strange and false god, and therefore an idol, the adoration of which was idolatry. George Chapelin demonstrated to his readers that all pagans and heathen with a multitude of gods were thereby condemned; as well as ‘the Papists . . . which do worship and call upon Sainctes’; those who conceived of God as a fantasy and not as manifested in the word; anti-​Trinitarians; and anybody doubting his power and providence, or who sought other means of aid (such as witches).84 John Brinsley, in his enormously successful spiritual manual The True Watch, explained that breaches of the First Commandment were in fact ‘the mother sins, of all the fearefull abominations that are committed in the world’.85 He highlighted four categories of sin against the precept: atheism, ignorance, infidelity and carnal confidence. Of these four, carnal confidence, defined as ‘trusting in vanity, even in any thing but God’, was by far the most widespread, and (like Chapelin) under this branch he comprehended ‘the sinne of witchcraft’ and ‘having other Gods . . . whether the Pope of Rome, as all the Papists reverence his word, and ordinances above Gods: or any of the Saints, whom they invocate’.86 In his ‘Meditation upon the Ten Commandments’, John Bradford rehearsed the breach of the First Commandment in the form of a penitential prayer thus:  ‘in times past horribly I  have broken this thy law in trusting in thy creatures, calling upon them, loving, fearing, and obeying many things besides thee and rather than thee; even so at this present I am a most miserable wretch’.87 To have true faith was to desire to keep the commandments, and to keep the commandments was a demonstration of true faith. On the contrary, to break the commandments (and especially the First) was to demonstrate that you were possessed of either a false faith or no faith at all; and to act without faith was a serious breach of the commandments and therefore both a sign of reprobation and a crime whose only punishment could be damnation. The First Commandment reminded Christians that ‘I am the Dudley Fenner, A brief treatise vpon the first table of the Lawve, orderly disposing the principles of Religion, whereby we may examine our selves (1588), sig. B4r; Dod, Plaine, p. 26. 84 George Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction (1582), pp. 254–​5. 85 Brinsley, Watch, p. 20. 86 Brinsley, Watch, p. 21–​3. 87 John Bradford, ‘A Meditation upon the Ten Commandments’, in idem, Sermons, Meditations, Examinations, &c., ed. Audrey Townsend (Volume I.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1853), p. 151. 83

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LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me’. Faith probably did not seem like such a high price to pay in gratitude for such a deliverance, along with fear of the awesome power of divine judgement, and love and thanksgiving for the merciful gift of salvation.

Rejecting the Law? The Decalogue therefore had a central role to play in the essentials of salvation as understood, taught and explained by English divines from a wide range of chronological and ecclesiological backgrounds:  from conveying knowledge of sin to ushering in repentance, and acting as a schoolmaster to bring the faithful to Christ and the promises of the gospel. In addition, a love of and lust to fulfil the law was a defining characteristic of justifying faith, and the performance of the works of the law was further proof of regenerate status. Finally, perhaps no commandment better summed up the strong association between salvation and the Decalogue than the First, in establishing the nature of a true and lively faith and also the types of behaviour the faithful must endeavour to cultivate or eschew in order to establish an honest, healthy and loving relationship with their creator. However, not all relationships with the divine were deemed healthy, and not all soteriologies were strictly orthodox where the Decalogue was concerned. The final two sections of this chapter will explore some of the ideas that existed beyond the mainstream theological consensus of the reformation Church of England as outlined above through a pair of detailed examples, prefaced by a more general discussion.88 Where the Ten Commandments were concerned, heterodoxy tended to coalesce around what on the surface appeared to be two extreme and opposing tendencies, although in fact they were closely related. The first of these, which will be considered here, was the rejection of the law. The second, which will form the subject of the next section, was the perfection of the law. First then: the rejection of the Law. This is a topic about which we now know much more than we did a decade or so ago, thanks primarily to the The value of the case study approach has been eloquently described by Chris Marsh (apropos Carlo Ginzburg):  ‘The fundamental principle of microhistory is that by radically reducing the scale of observation a more compelling and a more realistic account of life in past societies can be achieved. In the words of Carlo Ginzburg, “a close reading of a relatively small number of texts, related to a possibly circumscribed belief, can be more rewarding than the massive accumulation of repetitive evidence”’. Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–​1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 11.

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painstaking researches of David Como, and his important book Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-​Civil War England.89 For, of course, the term ‘antinomian’ means literally ‘against the law’, and has the specific theological sense of describing a viewpoint which rejects the Ten Commandments as having any moral authority for Christians. Como’s study of antinomianism takes as its starting point the publication in 1645 of Edward Fisher’s book The Marrow of Modern Divinity –​which triggered a controversy that went on to last for over seventy years  –​but seeks to move attention backwards in time, in order to trace the process ‘whereby these striking forms of [civil-​war-​era] social and religious radicalism emerged from the bosom of pre-​civil war puritanism’.90 Como argues for the existence of ‘a crisis that may justly be called “England’s antinomian controversy” ’ amongst the (largely metropolitan) godly community during the 1620s.91 His work methodically reconstructs much of the ‘small and cliquish’ community of early Stuart religious radicalism, and I do not seek to replicate or challenge his conclusions here, only to add to and modify them somewhat.92 What I do intend to do is to explore two sixteenth-​century examples of certain of the same ideas and opinions which resurfaced later in the milieu of Como’s pre-​civil war puritan London; not in an attempt to establish a genealogical continuity of dissent, but to illustrate that in the same way that the revolutionary theologies of the 1640s had their precursors in the acrimonious debates of the 1620s, so those debates had their forerunners in the form of muted expressions of Elizabethan heterodoxy. ‘The antinomian community of pre-​civil war England’ may have ‘served as a spawning ground for later forms of sectarian religiosity, both in terms of ideological content and personnel’, but it seems just as likely that such a spawning ground would itself have taken many decades, conceivably half a century or more, to form.93 In truth, this is part of a larger argument. Como has suggested that pre-​civil war antinomianism was a particular reaction against the practices and priorities of pre-​Civil War puritan David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-​Civil War England (Stanford Calif.: Stanford UP, 2004). 90 Como, Blown by the Spirit, pp. 2–​13. 91 Como, Blown by the Spirit, p. 3. For a wider study of the febrile religious atmosphere of early Stuart London, see Peter Lake, The boxmaker’s revenge: ‘orthodoxy’, ‘heterodoxy’, and the politics of the parish in early Stuart London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), and Peter Lake and David Como, ‘“Orthodoxy” and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the production of “Consensus” in the London (Puritan) Underground’, the Journal of British Studies, 39.1 (2000), pp. 43–​70. 92 Como, Blown by the Spirit, p. 8. 93 Como, Blown by the Spirit, p. 23. 89

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practical divinity.94 That practical divinity will form part of the focus of Chapter 5, but for now, suffice it to say that many of the concerns associated with early seventeenth-​century puritan divinity can also be read backwards to a collection of ambiguities and anxieties which had their genesis much earlier in the sixteenth century, in some instances in the origins of the English reformation itself.95 Como acknowledges that antinomianism did not spring up, fully-​ formed, in London in the 1620s. He identifies a number of important influences of and precursors to the early-​Stuart controversies: most notably the 1609 Rule of Perfection by the English Capuchin William Fitch, the medieval devotional Theologica Germanica, and the works of the German mystic Hendrik Niclaes. He acknowledges, and so do I, another important book, this time on the early history of English antinomianism, and more specifically that sect inspired by Niclaes’ writings which came to be known as the Family of Love. Still the definitive work on English Familism, Christopher Marsh’s book is a detailed genealogical study which examines in detail the ‘antinomian perfectionist theology’ of this secretive and unorthodox sect.96 Again, I do not seek to significantly challenge or restate Marsh’s conclusions regarding the Family. This is not a book about antinomianism, or a book about the Family of Love; but it is a book about the Decalogue, and a brief foray into the world of sixteenth-​century heterodoxy and the language of anti-​legalist accusation and defence can shed a little light, both on that world itself, and also on to the world of orthodoxy against which it was defined. To begin with a general discussion on the use of language, it is important to note that most of the ‘antinomians’ in early modern England were polemical constructions: that is, most of the people accused of rejecting the moral law during the English reformation in fact held no such conscious position. Principally, the charge of antinomianism was a common accusation levelled by Catholic polemicists at all Protestants. The English Roman Catholic priest Oliver Almond wrote in The uncasing of heresie, or, The Anatomie of protestanticie that ‘all the chiefe doctrines and principles of Como, Blown by the Spirit, pp.  117–​31. See also Kenneth Parker and Eric Carlson, ‘Practical Divinity’:  The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 1998), and David Como and Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: The Strange Case of Peter Shaw and its Contexts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50.4 (1999), p. 695. 95 In this respect I am sympathetic to the arguments of Karl Gunther about the early evangelical origins of Elizabethan religious radicalism: see his Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–​1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 96 Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–​1630 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 33. 94

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Protestancie’ were ‘old condemned heresies; and that the most damned heresies that ever were hatched in any age’.97 Almond accused the Protestants of reanimating (amongst others) the ideas of ‘Capronimus [who] standes condemned of heresie, both by S. Augustine, and S. Epiphanius, for contending that the law appertained not unto Christian men: which is one of Luthers prime doctrines’.98 Almond quoted extensively (if selectively) from Luther to try to drive home his contention and, on the surface at least, most of his selections appeared quite damning: Wherefore if thou be wise, banning farre off, stuttering and stammering MOYSES with his Law; neither let his terrours & threats any way move thee, but do thou simplie suspect him as an heretike, an excommunicated person, a damned wretch, far worse then the Pope & the divel himselfe, and therefore in no case to be heard, &c. Hetherto Luther.99

In sum, Almond claimed, ‘they maintaine that the Law of God, or the ten Commandements are impossible to be kept, no not though a man be never so much assisted or holpen by Gods grace’.100 This was a clear and deliberate misrepresentation of the Protestant position, even if it fell just short of outright falsification. Protestants, as we have seen, rejected the covenant of works embodied in the Mosiac law as a means to salvation, but they still regarded its moral precepts as spiritually binding for all Christians. To claim that ordinary men and women could completely fulfil the Law, even with the help of divine grace, was to denigrate the meritorious and redemptory sacrifice of Christ; but as we have seen, the regenerate were expected to strive to keep the law, and their efforts (whilst they remained imperfect) were guaranteed to be rendered acceptable by a merciful creator. The Catholic priest and regius professor at Rheims, Matthew Kellison, wrote A suruey of the new religion detecting manie grosse absurdities which it implieth in order to persuade James I of the truth of the Catholic faith through reasoned scriptural argument and the exposure of the manifest ‘absurdities’ of Protestantism.101 Kellison wrote ‘that the alleadged doctrine Oliver Almond, The vncasing of heresie, or, The anatomie of protestancie (1623), p. 32. ‘Capronimus’ may have been a reference to the eighth-​century iconoclast Byzantine emperor Constantine V, nicknamed ‘Copronymus’ (‘dung-​named’), although given the dates of Augustine it seems likely that Almond may have confused him with the second-​century gnostic Carpocrates of Alexandria, who more notoriously rejected the application of the moral law. Almond, The vncasing of heresie, p. 36. 99 Almond, The vncasing of heresie, p. 38. 100 Almond, The vncasing of heresie, p. 40. 101 Peter Milward, ‘Kellison, Matthew (1561–​1642)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​15290, accessed 26 June 2014]. 97 98

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of Calvin bringeth all laws in contempt’, both human and divine, and ‘looseth the bridle to all malefactours’.102 The Protestant opinion that no form of law or authority was binding meant that ‘one of the tenne commaundementes must be blotted out, because if we are not bound to obey our parentes . . . we are not bound to honour our parentes’. It was indeed the Protestants’ contention, according to Kellison, that ‘the tenne commaundementes bynde us not in conscience’.103 ‘What securitie hath a Prince amongst such lawless subjects?’, Kellison rhetorically asked his royal dedicatee, in an attempt to deflect the label of disloyalty from his Catholic brethren.104 The logical conclusion of Calvin’s perverted antinomian theology was libertinism and chaos: ‘so if a man beleeve that Christs justice is his, he needeth not to care for fulfilling the commaundements, because nothing is commanded, nether need he to feare fornications, adulteries, murders, and such like treacheries, for none of these villanies are forbidden him’.105 As we have seen, this was a clear misrepresentation of Reformed theology, which made love of the law and performance of the works outlined in the Ten Commandments hallmarks of a justifying faith. And yet there was enough of a ring of truth in the (mis-​)representation of mainstream Protestant theology to mount a reasonably convincing case to the contrary. ‘I reported Luther to say, the tenne commaundements appertaine nothing to us’, explained Robert Parsons in A defence of the censure, ‘which verie words both M. Hanmer and M. Charke doe graunt to be in Luther’. ‘Marie they make long discourses upon his meaning’, he granted, ‘whereby it is is easie to putt on a colourable defence or excuse upon any thing. But let the reader consider how these woordes doe sownd in the eares of the people’.106 The Protestant doctrine of the law was not antinomian, but it was complex and in many respects counter-​intuitive, and so it was easy for a skilled rhetorician like Persons to draw from it what (to all intents and purposes) could certainly be made to look like a form of antinomianism.

Matthew Kellison, A suruey of the new religion detecting manie grosse absurdities which it implieth (Douai and Rheims, 1603), p. 500. Cf. the Jesuit Leonardus Lessius, ‘the Religion of Luther, and Calvin both do quite thrust out of mens minds the feare of God, and yeald a liberty to all manner of wickednes’: Lessius, A consultation what faith and religion is best, p. 159. 103 Kellison, A suruey of the new religion, p. 501. 104 Kellison, A suruey of the new religion, p. 503. 105 Kellison, A suruey of the new religion, p. 535. 106 Robert Parsons, A defence of the censure, gyuen vpon tvvo bookes of william Charke and Meredith Hanmer mynysters, whiche they wrote against M. Edmond Campian (1582), STC2: 19401, p. 52. Cf. Lessius, ‘the Lutherans Religion teacheth, that the deaclogue, or ten Commandments appertaine not to the faythful, as neither the ceremoniall and judicial lawes also’: A consultation what faith and religion is best, p. 159. 102

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In a sense then, ‘antinomian’ was one of a string of derogatory insults to hurl at religious enemies of all confessional stripes, along with ‘atheist’, ‘anabaptist’, ‘arian’, and so on. But just as Catholics were especially vulnerable to the charge of Pelagianism in relation to the excessive emphasis which some nominalist theologians within the late-​medieval church had placed on works righteousness, so the charge of antinomianism was revealing in that mainstream Protestant theologians struggled with their relationship to the law, especially in terms of reconciling absolute theological consistency with the necessities of practical divinity and pastoral care. English Protestants were understandably vigorous in defending themselves against such heinous accusations, perhaps because they struck something of a raw nerve. The future head of Pembroke College William Fulke wrote indignantly against his Catholic opponents in 1571; ‘it is a straunge matter to see your boldness. What morall preceptes of God do we gainsaie? doe wee not teache menne to observe all the tenne Commaundementes?’107 On the accusation that Protestants ‘denieth that the morall preceptes are possible to be kepte of man’, of course, Fulke responded in the affirmative. Only Christ had managed to keep the moral precepts of God, but Fulke deemed it unnecessary ‘to make a large discourse’ on the subject, ‘our doctrine, being so commonly knowen the worlde’.108 The Danish Lutheran theologian Niels Hemmingsen, whose The way of lyfe was published in English in 1578, condemned true antinomianism in strident terms, labelling it a ‘poysoned contagion’ based upon no other foundation ‘then upon the deceiptes, and lying subtilities of the Divell, which stirreth up men, to seduce one another, from the puritye of the true Doctrine of the Lawe and the Gospell’.109 Seeing that Christians were enjoined to love God and their neighbours, ‘why shall it not bee also lawfull for them to knowe, in what sorte they ought to perfourme the same?’110 Against the ‘antinomian’ affirmation that Christians were not under the law but under grace, Hemmingsen cited Paul in order to prove that, while they were not subject to ‘the condemnatory sentence of the law’, the Christian ‘hath neede of the Doctrine of the lawe, which must bee the rule of his life; shewing him what doth please God, and what is contrary to his Godly will’.111 The use of William Fulke, A confutation of a popishe, and sclaunderous libelle in forme of an apologie (1571), ff. 64r-​v. 108 Fulke, A confutation of a popishe, and sclaunderous libelle, ff. 64v. 109 Niels Hemmingsen, The vvay of lyfe A Christian, and catholique institution comprehending principal poincts of Christian religion, trans. N. Denham (1578), p. 18. 110 Hemmingsen, The vvay of lyfe, p. 19. 111 Hemmingsen, The vvay of lyfe, p. 20. 107

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the term ‘antinomian’ as part of the language of theological insult therefore sheds a good deal of light upon Catholic and Protestant perceptions of one another, and of themselves. It is doubtful, of course, that many Catholic polemicists actually thought that Protestants were committed antinomians: while some attacks focussed on the Protestant rejection of the law, at other times they highlighted the injustice of the contrary Protestant contention that it was impossible for man to fulfil the law. In all likelihood, the tactical highlighting of these contrary heterodoxies was simply part of a broader strategy aimed at exposing the theological incoherence of the opposing position, in an attempt to prosecute a polemical war of death by a thousand cuts. But it nevertheless serves to highlight the difficulty which Protestants might occasionally face in their attempts to coherently expound such a difficult concept, one which involved the interplay of so many complex and contradictory ideas. What though of bona fide antinomians? It seems only natural that the confusion with which Catholic opponents deliberately tried to (mis) represent the Protestant position may have occasionally arisen in a less polemically charged context, but the phenomenon is, somewhat predictably, difficult to trace. The work of Marsh in particular on the perfectionist antinomian tradition of the Family of Love is still the best portrait we have of a network of antinomian belief within sixteenth-​century England, and there is little point in summarising his findings here.112 Tantalising fragments from the 1570s, however, suggest the existence of an antinomian backlash to puritanism significantly earlier than the events of the 1620s which form the basis of Como’s thesis.113 The English State Papers contain a pair of letters written to the Queen from one Robert Banister, whom the calendar for the Landsdowne MSS labels ‘a Religious mad-​man, who seems to have conceded great indignation against of puritans his prosecutors’.114 Banister, who spelled his Christian name ‘Robart’, spoke of his See Marsh, The Family of Love, passim. Banister’s letters are dated 1578. As Christopher Marsh has explained, ‘in 1573, no printed work by H.N. was available in English. By 1575, a well-​connected English Familist could choose from eighteen texts, most of them newly revised and translated versions of works originally composed in the middle decades of the sixteenth century’. Marsh, The Family of Love, p. 17. 114 British Museum MS Dept., Catalogue of the Lansdowne Manuscripts in the British Museum (Georg Olms Verlag, 1819), p. 190 (no. 99.4). No other scholar seems yet to have chanced upon Banister’s letters –​to the best of my knowledge they are not referenced in any published work on the topic, including those of Como and Marsh. The only other probable contemporary reference to Banister I have managed to locate is in a treatise by Thomas Rogers, which condemns in turn ‘the Manichies’, ‘Brownist Glover’, ‘Iohannes Islebius, and his followers, the Antinonies’, and ‘Banister (among our selves) who held how it is utterly evill for the Elect, so much as to thinke, much lesse to speake, or heare of the feare of God (which the Law preacheth)’. This antinomian sentiment is 112 113

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great wronging and his ‘long imprisonment, in bridewell’, and claimed to have given the queen ‘the most nedfull, & comfortable booke, for this devided, & peralous time . . . called a newe yeares gyft, wherein I  prophised, as now is fulfilled, that I shuld, with paule, be foursed to apeale for ayde at your mighty Sesares, & gracies governement’.115 Banister’s persecutors were ‘the presies puritanes, that spye moses motes in every eye’, and he warned of the reformation they sought to enact upon the Church of England; ‘which verily wold be a deformation, a Juish church, from a christian, sad newes, for gladtidinges, death, for life, feare, for boldness, & Justes, for free marcy’. Banister’s description of a puritan Church as ‘Jewish’, his accusation that his enemies saw ‘moses motes’ everywhere, and his suggestion that their ‘deformation’ would substitute death for life and justice for free mercy, betrays a deep unease at the Calvinist (and indeed Pauline) interpretation of the law as a ministry of death, and of the binding nature of the moral law upon the righteous. A puritan Church, Banister alleged, would be ‘a right phrasies [i.e. Pharisees’] state, which were most abominable to be sene, in the raigne of the gospel’.116 By his own confession, Banister was accused by his persecutors of being ‘on of the phamily of lewde love’; it was on this charge he claimed that he had been ‘laide in prison’. This may have been a clever (or not-​so-​clever) double bluff on Banister’s part, for his language was in many ways redolent of Familist prose: he spoke of ‘the love & marcy of god’, ‘the great love of the forgever’, ‘the most lawdable name of gods love’, and described himself as one ‘that zealously love Christ’, whilst accusing puritans of belonging to a ‘vile, & most faulse family’.117 Whether or not he was a member of the Family of Love, however, Banister was certainly a species of ‘country antinomian’, criticising the ‘Juish hartes’ and ‘phariseys spretts [i.e. spirits]’ of his puritan opponents.118 ‘For they are not certainly reminiscent of Robert Banister, and Rogers’ use of the past tense ‘held’ suggests that in 1607 the Banister affair was some time ago, albeit within recent memory. Thomas Rogers, The faith, doctrine, and religion, professed, & protected in the realme of England (1607), p. 39. 115 There is no record of any such work in the ESTC. Banisters reference is scriptural:  when Paul was imprisoned with the Jewish population he appealed to Caesar to be transferred to Rome. Acts 25: 11, ‘For if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die: but if there be none of these things whereof these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I appeal unto Caesar.’ BL Lansdowne MS 99, f. 8r. 116 BL Lansdowne MS 99, f. 8r. On the polemical link between puritans and Pharisees, see Chapter 5. 117 On Familist belief, see Marsh, The Family of Love, Chapter 2, pp. 17–​51. 118 BL Lansdowne MS 99, ff. 8r–​9v. The question of Banister’s identity is frustratingly elusive. He claimed to have been defamed by name ‘in every pulpit openly’ by his opponents, and to be ‘a gentleman boren, of Wourshipfull kinn’, but it has not yet been possible to identify him on that basis.

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suere, that all sinnes is forgeven them’, he explained, ‘as ther sinnes past, present, & to be don, but by ther sarvys, they hope to win gods love’.119 Ambiguities, inconsistencies and contradictions in Protestant divines’ discussion of different aspects of the complex and multivalent role of the law in Calvinist theology allowed Banister to present his antinomianism as orthodoxy; a renewed doctrine of justification by faith in stark contrast to the Pharasaical Jewish legalism of the puritan sect. This was both a polemical and a theological model which later antinomians would endorse wholeheartedly.120

Perfecting the Law My second example relates not to the outright rejection of the law but to the doctrine of the perfection of the law, which was one of the principal characteristics of the ‘perfectionist’ or ‘inherentist’ branch of antinomianism. In the words of Como, ‘on this view, believers were held to be free from the law and sin in that they had achieved an inherent perfection that rendered them actually pure in this life’.121 The subject of this case study is a treatise dated 1585 by the enigmatic figure E.G., entitled A present preseruative against the pleasant, but yet most pestilent poyson, or the privie libertines, or carnall Gospellers.122 E.G. is tricky to identify, but luckily as well as his short treatise there also survives a refutation of it written by Stephen Bredwell. Bredwell himself is an interesting figure, better known to historians as the author of The raising up of the foundations of Brownisme, in which he argued for a via media between separatism and conformity through remaining ‘in but not of the corrupt worldly Church’.123 Bredwell’s reply to E.G. was entitled A Detection of Ed. Glovers hereticall confection lately contrived and proffered to the Church of England, under the name of BL Lansdowne MS 99, f. 9r. On the anti-​legalism of later English antinomians, see Como, Blown by the Spirit, p.  34. On Puritans and Pharisees, see Chapter 5. 121 Como, Blown by the Spirit, pp. 38–​9. Como also observes that this strain of antinomian thought owed much to Hendrik Niclaes. For more on Niclaes and the Familist tradition of perfectionism, see Marsh, The Family of Love, pp. 21–​3. 122 Published by R. Ward in 1585. R Ward was probably the London printer Roger Ward, who in the 1570s was taken to court by John Day for illegally breaching his monopoly by printing copies of the A.B.C. with the Catechism without permission, and who in the 1580s and 1590s printed works by, amongst others, Theodore Beza, Robert Green, Henry Smith and Christopher Ocland. 123 Stephen Bredwell, The rasing of the foundations of Brovvnisme Wherein, against all the writings of the principall masters of that sect . . . (1588); Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 159–​60. 119 120

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A present preservative.124 Bredwell therefore conveniently identified E.G. as Ed[ward] Glover. Glover seems to have been a somewhat liminal figure, operating in the shadowy radical penumbra of the Elizabethan puritan movement. He is briefly mentioned in the context of the proceedings of the Dedham Conferences.125 In the published edition of the proceedings, the editors noted that he was the author of A present preservative, and commented that ‘little is known of Glover, whose views seem to have placed him in the anti-​antinomian tradition of the so-​called Free Will Men. This is the only evidence we have that he was active as a proselytiser in South Suffolk.’126 Bredwell appended to his treatise ‘an admonision to the followers of Glover and Brown’, clearly linking Edward Glover with the religious separatist Robert Browne (against whom Bredwell was to publish two years later), either directly in terms of theology, or (more likely) because both men appeared to him to represent a similarly severe threat. Bredwell also noted that Glover had been examined by the godly conformists William Whitaker and Stephen Egerton, and that these conferences had revealed great and manifest heresies over and above those discussed in A present preservative.127 It is worth recalling here, as early as the 1580s, David Como’s observation that ‘the subterranean world of intra-​puritan Bredwell’s treatise was printed in 1586 by John Wolf, himself the ringleader of a group of disaffected printers who was reconciled into the Stationers’ Company in 1583, only to become embroiled in a Star Chamber suit with John Day the following year, months before the latter’s death. I. Gadd, ‘Wolfe, John (b. in or before 1548?, d.  1601)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​29834, accessed 29 April 2012]. Bredwell, a ‘student in physick’, dedicated the text to his cousin Thomas Hussey, 125 John Rylands English MS 874, edited by Patrick Collinson, John Craig and Brett Usher and published by the Church of England Record Society (volume 10)  as Conferences and Combination Lectures in The Elizabethan Church, 1582–​1590 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003). 126 Conferences and Combination Lectures, pp. 29–​30. Glover’s A present preseruative began with a quotation from 2 John 1.9–​10. The following two chapters of 2 John 1 (not cited by Glover) read: ‘Having many things to write unto you, I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full. The children of thy elect sister greet thee. Amen’. (KJV, but the wording of the Geneva Bible is very similar here). The minutes of the 40th meeting of the Dedham conference in February 1586 at Barfold in Suffolk noted that the advice of the brethren had been sought on how best to deal ‘with some that were seduced by Glover’. Collinson, Craig and Usher note that this was probably ‘a flash in the pan’ and that ‘History knows of “Brownists” and even of “Barrowists”, but not of “Gloverites”.’ And yet the minutes indicate that he had clearly managed to ‘seduce’ some followers, and it is just possible that in his unspoken allusion to 2 John 1: 12–​13 he was reassuring them that what followed in print was a watered-​down version of his doctrine, and that he was only prepared to discuss some things privately with friends. 127 Certainly Bredwell’s treatise indicates that there were many ‘unsound conclusions’ to be proved by the reports of Glover’s conferences with Whitaker and Egerton, including a suggestion that he did not hold concupiscence to be a sin; that man was not justified by faith alone; that a distinction stood between mortal and venial sins; and that the commandments were abrogated and love made to stand in their place. Bredwell, Detection, p. 58, 116, 119. 124

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debate . . . contained within it the seeds of the much more dramatic theological infighting of the 1640s’.128 Glover’s heresy is fascinating in its own terms, but also because it allows us to think usefully about the mainstream evangelical use of the law and some of the pastoral and theological tensions to which it could give rise. These tensions were given unusually forceful expression by Glover’s treatise and Bredwell’s response. Admittedly, in terms of the great religious controversies of the age this debate has (until now, literally) registered as barely a footnote, but it can nevertheless be taken as indicative of the uneasy interpretive framework surrounding the Ten Commandments which, as we have seen, lay at the heart of sixteenth-​century English Protestantism, from the writings of the earliest evangelicals through to the rapid proliferation of disagreement and dissent that came to characterise the early part of the seventeenth century. Bredwell accused his opponent of pursuing the ‘heresie of free will’: of being a Pelagian, a Brownist and, for good measure, a Papist and an Anabaptist.129 Latter historiography, if it is has noted Glover’s existence at all, has broadly agreed, labelling him as a free-​willer and anti-​antinomian. There are elements of credibility in all of these accusations, but they also fail to get to the heart of the matter. Glover’s idiosyncratic theology centred not on free will, nor on congregationalism; neither was it even aimed particularly at those who would deny the applicability to the elect of God’s moral law as set out in the Ten Commandments. Rather, Glover’s issue was with a certain interpretation of the Decalogue: that is, with the prevailing Protestant theology concerning the evangelical function of God’s law, and its ongoing role in defining sin and salvation in and for the regenerate. A present preseruatiue was intended to combat a very specific disease that had been identified by Glover; a ‘lurking and secret serpent’ which ‘poysoneth mens mindes, and sleath their soules’. The particular poison Edward Glover wrote to counter was a ‘pestilent persuasion’ whereby, in order to please their disciples (who wished to be made secure in their salvation notwithstanding the manifest enormity of their sins), libertine teachers preached that those who were sinful in their lives could still believe themselves pardoned in Christ, so long as they condemned their sins and believed themselves elect and predestined to salvation, ‘as if they can not possibly bee damned, what sinne soever they commit’.130 In other words, Como, Blown by the Spirit, p. 21. Bredwell, Detection, p. 6, 10, 42, 47, 58, 116, 119. 130 Glover, A present preseruative, sig. Aiir. 128

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this was a rejection not of antinomianism, but of the increasingly common tactic evident in puritan practical divinity which aimed to ease troubled consciences by emphasising human imperfection and by employing a range of means by which distressed members of the godly community could seek assurance of salvation. As will be explored in more detail in the next chapter, it was something of a commonplace that the enumeration of sinful behaviours through detailed and conscientious soul-​searching was one of the key means towards the strengthening of faith and assurance, by reminding the godly of their incapacity and engendering in them further repentance for sin and trust in Christ’s promises of forgiveness.131 Glover’s tract was not anti-​antinomian, but specifically oriented against the developing practice of ‘practical predestinarianism’ or experimental Calvinism, rejecting the doctrine of assurance as nothing more than a wicked placebo to ease the consciences of libertines, hypocrites and carnal gospellers.132 Ironically, it was precisely the same theological and pastoral desire to reform inner life and faith, and not just formal belief and religious practice, which lay behind both the puritan move towards practical divinity and Glover’s rejection of the same.133 Following his introductory remarks, Glover proceeded to structure his short treatise around a number of ‘poisonous’ subversions of scripture, to combat each of which he offered his own interpretive preservative. Beginning with the Epistle to the Romans, Glover described how his enemies used chapter seven to contend that Paul was at one and the same time a sanctified man and a child of God, and yet also felt the power of sin forcing him to commit evil acts against his will.134 Glover claimed that in this place Paul was describing not his present situation, but his previous estate before he was made regenerate. Romans 5, he contended, proved that it was Paul’s view that the regenerate man was dead to sin and could not therefore live but in righteousness. Glover rejected the point of doctrine that the flesh continuously lusted against the spirit even after justification, meaning that the godly man was unable to perform all the righteous acts which he willed. Galatians 5.16, Glover suggested, was scriptural proof that while the flesh of all men lusted against the spirit, it would not and could not prevail in the regenerate.135 Indeed it was only by mortifying See Chapter 5. For a discussion of the categories of ‘credal’ and ‘experimental’ Calvinism, see R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 133 As David Como has remarked, antinomianism was part of the ‘cultural landscape’ of puritanism. Como, Blown by the Spirit, p. 30. 134 Romans 7:19: ‘For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ 135 ‘This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.’ 131

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the works of the flesh that the regenerate man could prove himself worthy of inheriting the kingdom of God. The logic of the orthodox position, Glover claimed, was that concupiscence was being elevated to a position from which it was capable of overturning the good deeds commanded by God himself. That is to say, justification in Glover’s theology not only gave men the desire to live in obedience with the Ten Commandments: it also gave them the means to do so perfectly. To profess the desire without demonstrating the means was to expose oneself as a fraud, a hypocrite, and a delusional and unregenerate sinner. The fruits of the law, Glover contended, could only proceed from an individual who was freed from the law, in the sense that they were entirely free from sin. ‘And therefore’, he wrote: all the foresaid fruites may proceede onely from the force of conscience, knowing and approving naturally the lawe of God to be good, that so when wicked men sinne notwithstanding against conscience, they might thereby be made unexcusable at the day of judgement.136

In other words, and in radical disagreement with the prevailing theological consensus, the reprobate were permitted to have not only the knowledge of, but even a lust towards the fulfilment of the law: it was only their failure to prosecute the logical requirements of their own conscience in obedience to the divine will which rendered their behaviour inexcusable, damning them into the bargain. To maintain the conventional view of the regenerate man as simul iustus et peccator was, in Glover’s eyes, to make God’s promise of salvation, Christ’s redeeming death, and the grace imparted by the Holy Spirit, subject to the bondage of sin and the tyranny of Satan.137 This was a significant reconceptualisation, although not quite an outright rejection, of the role of the Decalogue in the process of salvation. The role of the Ten Commandments, as we have seen, was to show mankind the blackness of human nature and the enormity of sin, which it was hoped would engender knowledge, despair, repentance, and finally trust in Christ’s promises as the only certain route to salvation. Following justification, the law conditioned the nature and fruits of a true and lively faith. Mainstream Protestantism held that it was Christ’s unique distinction to Glover, A present preseruative, sig. Aiiiir. Tim Cooper has argued that we are mistaken to see antinomians as part of a ‘radical’ tradition but Glover was certainly unorthodox by the prevailing standards of his day, and his rejection of the notion that justified man could be simul iustus et peccator was some distance from Luther, from whom Cooper claims antinomians drew their inspiration. Tim Cooper, ‘The Antinomians Redeemed: Removing Some of the “Radical” from Mid-​Seventeenth Century English Religion’, The Journal of Religious History, 24.3 (2000), pp. 247–​62.

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have been the only person to perfectly fulfil the law, and so the faithful had both the example of Jesus as outlined in the gospels as well as the starker blandishments of the stone tablets handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai as two sides of the same coin, to aid them in their continuing efforts towards reformation of life. Through the application of the Law in its third and final office it was possible to grow in holiness; to become gradually more and more sanctified, and therefore closer and closer to God. However, as the sixteenth century wore on, divines took increasing pains to warn the faithful of the dangers of spiritual overconfidence and arrogance, and so continued to stress the second office of the law (the ‘ministry of death’, as it consisted of self-​examination, knowledge and repentance) as a means of strengthening and affirming faith in and dependence upon Christ and the fruits of his sacrifice. Christ’s fulfilment of the law was impossible to re-​enact, and so while the justified could expect to see works of charity beginning to issue forth as the fruits of their faith, they would continue to discover in themselves the odd rotten apple; the worms of concupiscence, conscious lust and actual sin. For Glover, this acceptance of the inevitability of the continuation of sin in the thoughts, actions –​indeed, the very flesh –​of the elect was an unbearable proposition. Glover allowed for the ongoing importance of repentance in a rather different way, but for him it was impossible that grace and sin could co-​exist in the regenerate, as that implied that the Holy Spirit lacked either the desire or the power to overcome sin. For Glover then the second, evangelical office of the Law had no continuing role to play in the life of the regenerate. Rather, their life was conditioned wholly by the Law’s third office; that is, by the need to obey in every respect and live life in full accordance with the Ten Commandments. Possession of the knowledge that they were contravening God’s law, Glover explained, made the breach of the commandments by those who desired to fulfil them even more serious than those sins committed by ignorant heathen or pagans.138 By contrast, to be regenerate was to be given the power through Christ to refrain from sin, ‘and keepe the holy commandements. And therefore when as we finde not this strength and power it is madness to think that we have Christ’.139 ‘For when as I know both by the written worde and by the lawe of nature, or testimonie of my conscience that I am in daunger of everlasting death, if I commit the sinne, which my flesh lusteth and desireth, and yet I will commit it, and so serve and obey the wicked lust, God must needs in justice rather condemne me for the same: then him, who hath neither the knowledge, nor that remorse of conscience to give him warning both of the sin and danger thereof as had I.’ Glover, A present preseruative, sig. Biiiv. 139 Glover, A present preseruative, sig. Biiiiv. 138

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Recent work by historians such as Peter Lake, David Como and others has already done much to reveal the contested nature of some of the issues surrounding antinomianism, perfectionism, radical puritanism and predestination amongst the shadowy and heterodox metropolitan communities of pre-​Civil War London. But although it took them a long time to bloom, it seems probable that the seeds for these later debates were sown much earlier. Edward Glover and Robart Banister flowered relatively quickly, but in truth it was the first generations of Reformers who planted the seeds of interpretive ambiguity over the relationships between obedience, faith, works, law, and earthly and heavenly reward. The Decalogue may have been almost universally accepted as ‘Our Schoolemaster unto Christ’, but the authority and certainty it seemed to offer was in fact open to debate, and to manifold use and abuse.

Conclusions The evangelical office of the law sat at the very heart of English reformation soteriology. As an embodiment of the Mosaic covenant of works, the purpose of the Ten Commandments was to be impossible for fallen humanity to fulfil and to bring sinners to a full knowledge of the breadth and depth of their sinfulness. For the unregenerate, this was the extent of their engagement with the law: an inability to keep the Ten Commandments was both cause and consequence of their eternally predestined damnation. For the regenerate, however, their relationship with the Decalogue continued to evolve. The reason for which the law pronounced the sins of the elect was in order to bring them to a knowledge of their innate incapacity, so as to inculcate repentance, and thence to act as a ‘schoolmaster’ to bring them to a justifying faith in Christ. Divines disagreed on some of the finer details; for example, whether repentance was an essential precondition for the gift of a true and lively faith, or its first fruit. But in all its essential points the Decalogue helped to define and shape each stage of the process of evangelical conversion. The re-​purposed commandments also helped to condition, both theologically and pastorally, the notion of faith itself. Whilst railing against the injustice of the Law was the natural state of the unregenerate masses who were condemned by the covenant of works, those freed from legal bondage by the covenant of grace willingly submitted themselves to its just strictures. Elect English Protestants were liberated from the tyranny of the Law, but one of the hallmarks of their election was a deep spiritual hunger to serve God’s will as expressed in The Ten Words delivered upon Mount Sinai. The saving grace won by Christ’s sacrifice

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meant that regenerate Englishmen and -​women could reasonably expect to see the fruits of their faith made manifest in the keeping of the Ten Commandments –​the performance of the works of the law. These works, however, were indisputably the consequence of salvation, never the cause, and remained imperfect. The elect were not purged of sin; they continued to battle the fleshy concupiscence that was their birthright stemming from the Fall, but in the hope and trust that works accomplished by and offered in good faith would be treated as acceptable to God, however far from perfection they were in reality. The evangelical office of the law therefore embodied a crucial contradiction. The Ten Commandments were both impossible to be kept, and essential to be kept. They were both the author of eternal death and the means to everlasting life; the very definition of sin and the assured declaration of salvation. There was a perfectly sound theological explanation for and resolution of this contradiction: which is that they were one thing to the reprobate and another thing to the regenerate. Romans 7 was quite clear that ‘the law without spirit doth but breed condemnation and death’.140 With the addition of the spirit, however, the law took on a whole new significance in the lives of the elect. I have referred several times to the ‘narrative of evangelical conversion’, which is what this essentially was: a linear story in which the human was born unregenerate and lived in sin; at some point experienced a moment of change in which they received the gift of justifying faith; was transformed; and lived the rest of their life as a quest for sanctification, striving to live up to the impossible standards of the law and near enough succeeding with the aid of divine grace and mercy. This narrative of conversion made sense for the first generation of reformers and for the flocks to whom they preached, for these were individuals who could identify in their former adherence to a corrupt and discredited faith a specific period of time before regeneration: could recognise (or at least construct) a moment of conversion when they abandoned their bad old ways and began to profess their faith in the new doctrines; and could then proceed to live out the rest of their lives in the zeal of the gospel. But amongst the second and third generations of reformers, and amongst their congregations, the utility of such a narrative was less obvious. With no clear ‘before’, conversion experience, or ‘after’, the vast majority of people were presumably left feeling stumped, and not a little let down. Were they saved, or weren’t they? Did the law exist to condemn them, or to show Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction, p. 328.

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them that they were saved? What began as a simple, one-​time event –​from sinner to saint in one easy justification –​started to be conceived of as a more gradual and iterative process, in which the individual might only begin to gain insight into their own spiritual condition after many cyclical repetitions of the narrative outlined above:  self-​examination for sin, knowledge, despair, repentance, faith, and a desperate searching for the fruits of faith –​eventually leading back once again to a re-​examination for signs of sin, and so on and on. It is this process taken to extremes, presided over, governed and defined by the Ten Commandments, which in large part defined English puritanism, and that will be the subject of the next chapter. What this chapter has also sought to demonstrate, however, is that puritan practical divinity and experimental Calvinism were only one of a range of possible responses to the uncertainty outlined above, engendered by the peculiar contradictory centrality of the Decalogue in mainstream theological thought. While the mainstream approach was by definition the most common (popular is perhaps the wrong word), a second response was to condemn the Jewish legalism of puritan practical divinity as neo-​ Pharasaical, and to reject the idea that the Mosiac Law continued to exert any binding force on the true believer in the new age of the Gospel.141 This was the position which Robart Banister argued, in his somewhat frenetic epistolary communications to the queen. A third possible response was to repurpose the Ten Commandments yet again, as something which the elect could fulfil with ease once the regenerative power of Christ was brought to bear upon the last vestiges of satanic influence and concupiscent lust as yet remained in the saved. Christ had fulfilled the law once, and he could do it again, this time on behalf of the faithful with whom he was ‘ingraffed’. This was the position adopted by the radical nonconformist Edward Glover, and by an unknown number of his followers, forgotten to (if indeed they were ever rememberd by) history. A fourth option, so-​called ‘country divnity’, will be explored in Chapter 6. These were but some of the possible responses; there were certainly more, in the variety of heterodox and nonconformist individuals and communities which numerous researches have identified as springing up long before the more visible and heated disintegration of the increasingly fissiparous pre-​Civil War Indeed Peter Lake has labelled ‘antinomianism . . . itself a form of anti-​puritanism’:  Peter Lake, ‘Anti-​Puritanism: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-​Reformation England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), p. 94.

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metropolitan puritan community. What seems clear is that many of these radicalisms, including those of Banister and Glover, were born of contradictions inherent in the Protestant repurposing of the Decalogue that are still discernible in the writings of the first generation of reformers, and which by the second had become much more urgent and impossible to ignore.

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The third use of the law is to shew unto the Christians what works God requireth of them. For he would not that we should feign works of our own brains to serve him withal . . . but requireth us to do the works commanded by him. John Hooper, A Declaration of the Ten holy Commaundements of Almighty God (1548)

One of the most pressing questions for the first and subsequent generations of Protestants was:  how is God best served? The late-​medieval Church had spent centuries devising ever more complicated answers to this problem which was, after all, of fundamental importance to the life of the Christian. By c.1500 the answers were coming thick and fast. God was served, perhaps primarily, through the sacrifice of the mass and the performance of the other six sacraments. He was also served through the rich decoration of church buildings, the creation, veneration and adornment of images of him and his saints (particularly his virgin mother), the singing by trained choirs of elaborate hymns of praise and thanksgiving, through contact with relics, through pilgrimages, through the works of satisfaction associated with confession, through the purchase of indulgences, through the swearing of monastic vows, through prayer, and more besides.1 Most of these practices were rejected by Protestants on the basis that they were works of supererogation –​deeds and actions born of man’s own vain imagination, and not in any way commanded by God. However, stripping the spiritually bankrupt works of human invention out of the religious life of the nation left a significant vacuum. Insofar as religion was not only a body of abstract beliefs, but also a concrete set of practices, how were

The best and most evocative scholarly portrait of pre-​Reformation religious life is undoubtedly still Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

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good Protestants supposed to behave? What did it mean to be a faithful Christian, in a post-​reformation world? This question has most recently and most fully been answered by Alec Ryrie, who has explored in detail the minutiae of Being Protestant in Reformation Britain; from examining Protestant affections and emotions, through prayer and the importance of scripture, to the family and community dimensions of Protestantism.2 However, the Elizabethan homily, or ‘sermon of Good Works annexed unto faith’, started from a much simpler premise, drawn of course from scripture. The excerpt below is substantial but worth quoting at length: Now to go forward to the third part, that is, what manner of works they be which spring out of true faith and lead faithful men unto everlasting life. This cannot be known so well as by our Saviour Christ himself, who was asked of a certain great man the same question; “what works shall I do,” said a Prince, “to come to everlasting life?” To whom Jesus answered, “If thou wilt come to everlasting life, keep the commandments”. But the Prince, not satisfied herewith, asked farther, Which commandments? The Scribes and Pharisees had made so many of their own laws and traditions, to bring men to heaven, besides God’s commandments, that this man was in doubt whether he should come to heaven by those laws and traditions, or by the Law of God; and therefore he asked Christ, which commandments he meant. Whereunto Christ made him a plain answer, rehearsing the commandments of God, saying, “Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother, and, Love thy neighbour as thyself ”. By which words Christ declared that the laws of God be the very way that doth lead to everlasting life, and not the traditions and laws of men. So that this is to be taken for a most true lesson taught by Christ’s own mouth, that the works of the moral commandments of God be the very true works of faith, which lead to the blessed life to come.3

In other words, it was the Decalogue which defined comprehensively and in brief the praxis of the true Christian. Reformers rejected works of supererogation –​works of human invention, things which God had not asked mankind to do –​in favour of a handy scriptural list of ten things which God had demonstrated time and again that he was really rather keen on.4

Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Church of England, Sermons, or Homilies, appointed to be read in churches, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, of famous memory. . . (Dublin: Printed for Anne Watson and B. Dugdale, 1821), p. 41. 4 For more on the divine provenance of the commandments and its significance for reformers see Chapter 1. 2 3

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This still left reformers with a problem, however. Hooper was very clear that while the first and second uses of the law appertained ‘as well unto the infideles, as to the fideles; to such as be not regenerated, as to those that be regenerated’, the third office applied ‘unto the Christians’ alone.5 The homily of good works explained why: ‘without faith, all that is done of us is but dead before God, although the work seem never so gay and glorious before man’.6 As discussed above, all expositors of the commandments insisted that true obedience to God’s law was spiritual and internal.7 It was impossible for any man to fulfil God’s law, but while the imperfect efforts of the reprobate condemned them –​the necessary and righteous embodiment of God’s judgement –​the imperfect efforts of the elect were deemed acceptable by God in his loving mercy. The problem of the reformers was that, by and large, it was accounted impossible to distinguish between the elect and the reprobate, the saved and the damned, on earth.8 Their solution was simple:  to apply the same high standards to everybody, in the knowledge that anybody could, potentially, be counted as one of the elect. Such a policy was noble and optimistic, but it lay the groundwork for a significant amount of grief, uncertainty, frustrated expectations and pastoral disappointment. The chapters in this section move the discussion of the Decalogue on from abstract theology to practical application and lived experience. How did the commandments condition the lives of the faithful (and not so faithful) in post-​reformation England? How did they inform piety, worship, and religious culture and belief for those who considered themselves to be amongst the elect, as well as for those who spent less time agonising over their predestined state? We begin with the self-​identifying ‘godly’, before considering the rest of the population of post-​reformation England.

Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 282. Church of England, Sermons, or Homilies, p. 38. 7 See Chapter 3. 8 As Leif Dixon has observed regarding the thought of William Perkins, ‘while predestination may, in the end, be fundamentally exclusivist and divisive, in this world it actually brings everyone together’. Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c.1590–​1640 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 78. 5

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It is my purpose and my resolution (and not mine but the Lords) through Gods assistance, now to begine againe this Newers day 1637 to strive to renew my life in new obedience to his hole will and commandment. Nehemiah Wallington, ‘A Record of Gods Marcys’ (c.1637)

Introduction: The Problem with Puritans Puritanism is one of the most fascinating aspects of the English reformation, but also one of the most complex, both historically and historiographically.1 Thanks largely to the paradigm-​breaking researches of Patrick Collinson, we no longer see puritans as political and religious outsiders, or the destabilising innovators responsible for the outbreak of civil war in the 1640s.2 Instead, we have come to understand that puritanism was an essential part and product of the theological landscape of English Protestantism, albeit through their zeal for further reform and extravagant piety puritans occasionally appeared more like alien invaders than the landscape’s native inhabitants. ‘Puritan’ began life as a pejorative label attached to individuals by hostile outsiders, rather than as a term of self-​identification: in Collinson’s words, it was ‘a term of art and stigmatisation, which became a weapon of some verbal finesse but no philosophical precision’.3 Over the last few decades, the historiographical tendency has been to add balance For a concise overview see Peter Lake, ‘The historiography of Puritanism’, in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 346–​72. 2 Collinson’s oeuvre is too large to itemise here, but see, for example: Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967); Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England:  Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1991); Patrick Collinson (ed.), Godly People:  Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983). 3 The various historiographical positions on Puritanism are excellently summarised in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, ‘The Puritan Ethos, 1560–​ 1700’, in Christopher Durston and 1

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by watering down this hostile appellation with some of the more positive labels used by the individuals in question such as ‘the godly’.4 However, whilst the stigmatisation surrounding the word ‘puritan’ has helpfully been reduced, clever manipulation of terms of reference alone cannot bring historians the definitional clarity they crave. Whatever we call them, there was clearly something which marked puritans out as a distinctive group, both to contemporaries and to historians writing in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. Our growing appreciation of the subtlety and complexity of puritan belief and identity has meant that we have had to jettison previous readings, which saw ‘puritanism’ as straightforwardly synonymous with ‘parliamentarianism’, ‘Presbyterianism’, ‘Calvinism’, or ‘separatism’. The work of Peter Lake and Nicholas Tyacke (amongst others) has helped us to see that while all puritans were Calvinists, not all Calvinists were puritans –​indeed, as part of the international brotherhood of Reformed Churches, Calvinism was (more or less) the normative doctrinal position of the Church of England by the end of the sixteenth century.5 As for ‘parliamentarians’, ‘Presbyterians’, and ‘separatists’, puritans certainly predominated amongst their memberships, but these were much more limited groups which flourished at particular historical moments and in response to very specific circumstances; their concerns can and should not be projected back on to the entire community of the godly. Contemporaries were clearly aware of the differences between cultural puritanism and its complicated occasional association with other more militant causes. The godly layer Henry Parker, in the 1640s, identified four different ‘types’ of puritan:  religious, defined by their anti-​Catholicism; ecclesiastical, concerned with purging the Church of popish remnants; and political, largely based around opposition to the royal policies of Charles I.6 However, to these three, Parker argued, ‘must be joined also an Ethicall puritan’. The ‘most ordinary badge’ of this ethical puritan –​the largest and most important branch of all –​was ‘their Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism 1560–​1700 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996), pp. 1–​31. Patrick Collinson, English Puritanism (London: Historical Association, 1983), p. 10. 4 Durston and Eales, ‘The Puritan Ethos’, p. 3. 5 See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–​1640 (Oxford, 1990) and Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–​1635’, Past and Present, 114 (1987), pp.  32–​ 76, etc. It is worth pointing out that there are critics of this view. See, for example, Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992). Tyacke rebuts the views of White and George Bernard in Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Anglican Attitudes: some Recent Writings on English Religious History, from the Reformation to the Civil War’, The Journal of British Studies, 35.2 (1996), pp. 139–​67. 6 These are briefly discussed in Durston and Eales, ‘The Puritan Ethos’, p. 14.

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more religious and conscionable conversation, than that which is seene in other mens’; their zeal, their charity and reputation, and their goodness and godly behaviour.7 One of the most useful attempts to schematise this defining aspect of puritan identity has been R.  T. Kendall’s distinction between ‘credal’ and ‘experimental’ Calvinism.8 For credal Calvinists, the doctrine of predestination was to be accepted along with Calvin’s caution in the Institutes that: It is not right that man should with impunity pry into things which the Lord has been pleased to conceal within himself, and scan that sublime eternal wisdom which it is his pleasure that we should not apprehend but adore, that therein also his perfections may appear.9

Puritans, however, felt the need to resort to practical experimentation in order to discern their soteriological status more clearly. In doing so, and in attempting to penetrate ‘into the recesses of the divine wisdom’, they were entering what Calvin called ‘an inextricable labyrinth’.10 Alec Ryrie has recently challenged the current well-​worn consensus by claiming that ‘the division between puritan and conformist Protestants, which has been so important in English historiography, almost fades from view when examined through the lens of devotion and lived experience’.11 As with most provocative statements, there is plenty of truth in such a claim, but there are also quite significant problems. Insofar as Calvinist predestinarianism was ‘the water in which the English Church swam’, this is a valid point to make: but the whole tenor of puritan historiography from Collinson onwards has been to demonstrate that puritanism was divergent from the mainstream of the English Church not always in nature, but often by degree. The most convincing recent definition of puritanism comes from

Henry Parker, A discourse concerning Puritans. A vindication of those, who uniustly suffer by the mistake, abuse, and misapplication of that name (1641), pp. 50, 53–​4. 8 R. T.  Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1979). Leif Dixon has recently questioned the usefulness of Kendall’s definitions, suggesting that ‘credal’ Calvinism may in fact be something of a red herring, and offering the idea of ‘theocentric’ versus ‘anthropocentric’ approaches to the doctrine of assurance as an alternative. See Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c.1590–​1640 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 247–​50. 9 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Volume II, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids Michigan, 1957), p. 565. On the development of Calvin’s ideas after his death, see Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2003). 10 Dixon has gone so far as to claim that ‘the English predestinarians of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries walled themselves within the labyrinth, and set about plotting increasingly complex escape routes which only led them further in’. Dixon, Practical Predestinarians, p. 56. 11 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 6. 7

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the pen of Peter Lake, following the sad death of Patrick Collinson the new doyen of puritan studies, who describes the phenomenon as: A distinctive style of piety and divinity, made up not so much of distinctive puritan component parts, the mere presence of which in a person’s thought or practice rendered them definitively a puritan, as a synthesis of strands most or many of which taken individually could be found in non-​puritan as well as puritan contexts, but which taken together form a distinctively puritan synthesis or style.12

As Ryrie suggests, taken individually and viewed from a certain angle, many (although not all) aspects of ‘puritan’ piety credibly collapse into the religious mainstream. However, it is the distinctive synthesis of a number of different elements which slowly but surely starts to identify an individual as unmistakably puritan. We may certainly identify, as part of this synthesis, what Leif Dixon has described as a distinctive style of piety developed by moderate puritan ministers: which appealed directly to the inner world of the individual: a predestinarian pastoral theology which sought to chart the workings of grace on the subjective plane of experience, rather than through any formal mechanisms provided by the church and state.13

This chapter will argue that it was the Ten Commandments which formed, if not by themselves, then certainly a significant element of the foundation upon which this subjective pastoral orthopraxy was constructed. In spite of our considerable progress in analysing puritan culture and identity we still lack, I would like to suggest, a clear explanatory framework for understanding precisely what puritans did, and why they did it. This chapter will argue that the significance of the Decalogue in puritan religious culture has largely been overlooked, and that the dialectic between law and gospel, and the stipulations of the Ten Commandments themselves, are keys to unlocking the religious beliefs and practices of the godly. This is not the first time the Decalogue has been used to try to ‘explain’ puritanism. In 1976, J. Sears McGee published The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620–​1670, in Peter Lake, ‘Defining Puritanism –​Again?’, in Franke Bremer (ed.), Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-​Century Anglo-​American Faith (Boston, 1993), p. 6. As Ethan Shagan has noted, with reference to Lake and Collinson, ‘Puritan identity was a composite of theological beliefs, ecclesiology, “styles of piety”, and even social habits, and never constituted bare subscription to a single doctrine’. Ethan Shagan, ‘Introduction’, in idem (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’ (Manchester: MUP, 2005), p. 14. 13 Dixon, Practical Predestinarians, p. 6. 12

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which he suggested that the key difference between ‘Anglicans’ and puritans stemmed from their respective prioritisation of different portions of divine law. According to his hypothesis, puritans emphasised much more the commandments of the first table concerning love of God, whilst ‘Anglicans’ emphasised those of the second relating to love of one’s neighbour. Puritans, he suggested, also insisted upon an interpretation of the requirements of the first table (including an extraordinarily wide definition of idolatry) which ‘Anglicans’ rejected in favour of their own.14 In addition, McGee highlighted the contrast between the generally negative Pauline anthropology of the puritans and a more ‘optimistic’ Anglican attitude, which led to a positive view of the potential of human nature and its ability to deduce the divine will through the employment of natural reason. His work still contains some interesting observations, but the historiographical definitions of ‘Anglican’ and ‘puritan’ which McGee employed have been comprehensively superseded over the past forty years, rendering his judgements regarding the two tables obsolete.15 The difference between conformists and puritans, if it may be put so baldly, was not in the prioritisation of some parts of God’s law over others. Rather, as I intend to demonstrate, it lay in puritans’ adoption of a specific legal hermeneutic, based upon a cyclical employment of the second and third offices of the law as a basis for seeking growth in the doctrines of sanctification and assurance.16

Puritans, Pharisees, and the Charge of ‘Legalism’ The relationship between puritans and the Decalogue has been alluded to only briefly in several of the more important and influential modern edited volumes on Puritanism. Back in 1996, Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, in their introduction to The Culture of English Puritanism, noted simply that:

J. Sears McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620–​1670 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 70–​1. 15 For example, he suggested that while Puritans made salvation sound hard, Anglicans made it sound easy: Puritans were closer to the Calvinists of Dort, and Anglicans to the Arminians, a claim which is now rather difficult to accept. McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England, p. 59. 16 The title of a prayer by John Brinsley is particularly telling in this respect: ‘X. A prayer, that wee and all the Churches in token of our thankfullnesse to our blessed God, for our deliverance from Babilon, & for making us his people and Children, and his Covenant with us, may set our selves to honour him more then ever wee have done, especially in a more conscionable and chearefull walking in all his holy Lawes and Commandements, that hee may alwaies keepe us from that bloody tyranny’. John Brinsley, The fourth part of the true watch containing prayers and teares for the churches (1624), p. 289. 14

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Some puritans took a particular interest in the law-​giving books of the Old Testament and attempted to construct their personal and communal morality upon a strict and literal interpretation of the Ten Commandments and the other injunctions of the Mosaic Law.17

Fast-​ forward a decade or so, and the otherwise excellent Cambridge Companion to Puritanism mentions the commandments only three times in passing.18 By contrast, I would like to suggest that the Decalogue was central to the religious faith, practice and identity of English puritans. Let us begin, however, with contemporary perceptions of the close association between puritans and the Decalogue. In 1542, Sir Thomas Elyot published his Bibliotheca Eliotae or Eliotis librarie; part Latin dictionary, part encyclopaedia, part commonplace book. Most entries were only a line or two long: Decalogus, Elyot noted briefly, was ‘the boke of holy scripture, conteynynge the ten commaundementes’. The term ‘Pharisaei’, received a fuller treatment. The Pharisees, Elyot explained, ‘were amonge the Jewes certayne menne, whyche professed a fourme of lyvynge more strayghte and devoute thane other of that people, and therefore they were callyd by that name, for as moche as Phares in the hebrewe tunge signyfyeth dyvyded’.19 They had strict rules for fasting on the Sabbath, lived lives of chastity and slept only on stones or boards, or even thorns, in order to mortify the flesh and ‘kepe theym from styrrynge of flesshely appetyte’. Perhaps the most distinctive practice of the Pharisees as described by Elyot, however, was that ‘they ware on theyr forehead scrowes of parchemynte, wherein were written the tenne commaundementes gyven by God unto Moyses, whyche they callyd Philaterias’. Seventy or so years later, Edward Grimstone, the House of Commons serjeant at arms, published The estates, empires & principalities of the world, a translation of an original work by the French nobleman Pierre D’Avity. It described the Pharisees as leading ‘an austere life in shew, interpreting the law of Moyses according to their owne will’. Like Elyot, Grimstone/​D’Avity noted the presence of the Phylacteries, ‘papers upon their foreheads and left armes, wherein the ten commaundements of the law were written’. The Pharisees ‘also ware greater imbroderies upon their gownes, and they sowed thorns in them, to the end their pricking might

True as far as it goes, but hardly an extensive analysis. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, ‘The Puritan Ethos, 1560–​1700, in idem (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism 1560–​1700 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996), pp. 16–​17. 18 Coffey and Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, p. 133, 229, 232. 19 Thomas Elyot, Bibliotheca Eliotae Eliotis librarie (1542), sigs. Lvv; Ccr-​v. 17

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put them in mind of the commaundements of the law’. In addition, the text explained, they ‘did attribute all things to God, and predestination’.20 In his the way of lyfe a Christian, and catholique institution of 1578, translated by Nicholas Denham, the Danish Lutheran theologian Niels Hemmingsen described in detail the struggle between Christ and the Pharisees.21 For Hemmingsen, this was essentially the conflict between the gospel and the law, and between faith and works. Christ admonished the ‘great and manifold sinnes’ of the Pharisees, namely ‘Arrogancie, Hypocrisie, Covetousness, & erroneous Doctine, wherby they led awry both them selves & others’. The Pharisees were ‘arrogant, and proude people’, but even worse, they were ‘Hypocrites, which repute themselves to be righteous before God, and man, albeit they bee inwardly filled with all filthynesse and malice’.22 The self-​regard of the Pharisees, Hemmingsen/​ Denham explained, was akin to covetousness, ‘for that it suffereth it selfe to be reprehended of no body, but indevoureth to cover it selfe, with the cloke of wisdom, sedulitie, and sparefulness’. This arrogant self-​love was nothing less than a form of idolatry, ‘for, the covetous man reposeth more hope, in these momentary goods of the world, than in the living God’23. The charge against Judaism in general, and Phariseeism in particular, was therefore one of legalism. The nation of Israel had put their faith in a ceremonial law which, although in many important respects it prefigured Christ, was nonetheless an inadequate means for fallen mankind to attain salvation. Man’s ability to achieve salvation through the covenant of works –​ through obeying the law –​had been irrevocably forfeited as a result of Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden. The inherent sinfulness of man rendered him incapable of earning salvation: the belief that salvation could be achieved through pious activity, defined either as works of supererogation or even as the activities commanded by God himself, had to be jettisoned. The law could offer only damnation. Salvation could come solely through man’s recognition of his incapacity to perform good works, and a realisation that the narrow path to righteousness lay in Christ and the promises of the Gospel. In that sense, orthodox Calvinism was Pierre d’Avity, The estates, empires, & principallities of the world, trans. Edward Grimstone (1615), p. 1047. 21 The dates of his activity suggest that he may have been the same Nicholas Denham (MA) who was Rector of Kirk Bramwith from 1579, and perpetual vicar of Ecclesfield until his death in 1628. CCEd Personal ID 116447 [http://​theclergydatabase.org.uk/​, accessed 22 July 2015]. 22 Niels Hemmingsen, The vvay of lyfe A Christian, and catholique institution comprehending principal poincts of Christian religion, which are necessary to bee knowne of all men, to the atteyning of saluation, trans. N. Denham (1578), pp. 5–​6. 23 Hemmingsen, The vvay of lyfe A Christian, p. 7. 20

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the very opposite of Pharisaical legalism. The narrative of evangelical conversion required sinners to banish any lingering faith in man’s ability to fulfil the law, in favour of a humble submission to the Gospel’s promises of mercy. Puritan-​minded authors themselves were not slow to condemn the hollow legalism of the historical Pharisees. Andrew Willet, for the sake of argument a moderate conforming puritan, commented along those lines in his Hexapla, a commentary on Romans; because, of course, the future Apostle Paul had himself been a Pharisee before his sudden conversion on the road to Damascus. For Willet, Paul the Pharisee had lived in a state of blissful but fatal ignorance before his conversion: sin had appeared to be dead to him, but that had been a dangerous and false impression. Before his conversion, Paul had only: seemed to be alive . . . when as yet being a Pharisie, he had not full understanding of the lawe: then sinne also seemed to be dead: because as yet he did not feele the burthen of sinne, nor his conscience did not pricke him, while he contented himselfe with the outward observation of the law.24

The still (just about) conforming but much more ostentatiously godly London minister Stephen Denison, about whom Peter Lake has told us so much, explained in his compendious catechisme of 1621 that ‘it is not in any sort in our power to fulfill . . . [the commandments] legally to their perfection’.25 Another conforming godly minister, Thomas Taylor, explained that ‘this fulfilling of righteousnesse the Law looking for at our hands in our owne persons’ was ‘now impossible because of the flesh’.26 This was not simply a puritan position, of course, but an orthodox Calvinist one. God’s laws required total obedience, both inward and outward. Even if it were possible to comply with the Ten Commandments in all outward manifestations, the poisonous concupiscence which infected mankind’s innermost thoughts, feelings and urges meant that total spiritual and inward obedience was impossible. Through his imputed righteousness the deeds of the godly might be rendered acceptable to God under the covenant of grace, but the legal obedience required by the covenant of works was unattainable. Andrew Willet, Hexapla, that is, A six-​fold commentarie vpon the most diuine Epistle of the holy apostle S. Paul to the Romanes (1611), p. 323. 25 Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge (Stanford:  Stanford UP, 2001), passim; Stephen Denison, A compendious catechisme (1621), p. 44. 26 Thomas Taylor, The Kings bath Affording many sweet and comfortable obseruations from the baptisme of Christ (1620), pp. 66–​7. 24

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Some authors went further than condemning historical Judaism, and employed the image of the Pharisee for potent polemical effect. Pharasaical legalism was not just the mark of the Jews of old, but it was also alleged to be one of the chief heresies of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church. The conforming godly minister Thomas Beard, in his 1616 publication a retractive from the Romish religion, explained that ‘the Jewish Rabbines taught that those shall be more severely punished, who should violate the precepts of their Scribes, then they that should transgresse the law of Moses’. ‘And do not our Romish Rabbines affirme the same in effect’, he continued, ‘when they impose a greater punishment upon the breach of one of their traditional decrees, then if a man breake the precepts of Gods law’?27 The Roman Church, Beard went on to claim, was much more concerned by the breaking of rules of human origin –​such as eating meat in Lent or compromising a clerical vow of chastity –​than by the flouting of God’s ordinances, such as committing adultery or breaking the Sabbath. The Jews’ holy men had persuaded the simple people that ‘they are the onely Elect people of God, who easily can keepe not the Decalogue or tenne Commandements alone, but the whole law of Moses’. Similarly, the Catholic priesthood had no qualms in affirming ‘that a man may in this state of mortality, perfectly fulfill the whole law: yea, even doe more then the law requireth, and so supererogate’.28 The logical consequence of the papist doctrine led Beard incredulously to ask, ‘what needs have these of the death of Christ to purge away their sinnes, when they can thus by the ayde of Gods grace (as they say) keepe all the Commandements, and so pay the uttermost debt of their obedience’? The strident evangelical polemicist and playwright John Bale explained how divine writ had been corrupted by the combined efforts of the ‘sodomytes, Pharysies, and papistes’, again linking together Catholics and Jews in their abuse of holy ordinance.29 Thomas Becon, in defining ‘the true practise of the Law’, instructed the faithful that ‘neither must thou seke any other woorkes or rites, to worshippe GOD, as the Pope and his complices dooe, whiche are wholly given to the rightuousnesse of the Phariseis’.30 Thomas Beard, A retractiue from the Romish religion contayning thirteene forcible motiues, disswading from the communion with the Church of Rome (1616), p. 85. 28 Cf. Thomas Adams, The happiness of the church (1619), p. 135: ‘Who will wonder to see a Romish Pharise sooth and flatter himselfe on earth, when hee is not ashamed to doe it in judgement before the Lord Jesus Christ?’. 29 John Bale, A nevve comedy or enterlude, concernyng thre lawes of nature, Moises, and Christe, corrupted by the sodomytes, Pharysies, and papistes (1562). 30 Thomas Becon, A new postil conteinyng most godly and learned sermons vpon all the Sonday Gospelles, that be redde in the church thorowout the yeare (1566), f. 48v. Cf. The Scottish religious controversialist 27

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Godly authors (as much as anybody else) decried the historical legalism of the Jews as presented in the Old Testament and criticised in the New. They were keen to apply the labels of Judaism and Pharaseeism as a way of condemning the Roman Church, and particularly what they perceived as the papist tendency to prioritise outward ritual action over inner spiritual disposition. It is therefore not without some sense of irony that we must also observe that puritans were themselves occasionally accused of legalism, Phariseeism, and adopting a Judaical approach to the Christian religion.31 Perhaps the most famous puritan literary stereotype of them all, Ben Jonson’s ‘Banbury man’ Zeal-​of-​the-​Land Busy, was in Bartholomew Fayre asked to find a justification as to why the pregnant daughter of his godly widow paramour should be allowed to go to the fayre to satisfy her cravings for roast pork. ‘Good brother, Zeal-​of-​the-​land’, begged the widow Purecraft, ‘think to make it as lawful as you can’.32 Busy, the godly former baker and gluttonous hypocrite, accordingly massaged his scruples into a predictable but entertaining volte face, proclaiming with a final flourish, ‘I will eat exceedingly, and prophesy; there may be a good use made of it, too, now I think on’t: by the public eating of swine’s flesh, to profess our hate and loathing of Judaism, whereof the brethren stand taxed’.33 In choosing words such as ‘lawful’, and suggesting that the brethren stood taxed of Judaism, Jonson clearly expected the association of Puritanism and Jewish legalism/​Pharaseeism to resonate with the audience for the play when it was first performed in London in October 1614.34 Religious radicals could also see Puritanism as a new Pharaseeism in no uncertain terms. The radical antinomian and probable sometime Familist Robart Banister, who we met in Chapter  4, railed vehemently in his letters to the queen against Alexander Leighton, in his 1624 Speculum belli sacri, who employed the image of ‘the Pharisaicall Papist, being zealous of his Idoll-​daies’, as a way of criticising English and Dutch Protestants for their retention of some traditional Catholic festivals. Alexander Leighton, Speculum belli sacri: Or The looking-​glasse of the holy war (1624), p. 279. 31 Peter Lake has ‘resisted the claim that anti-​ Puritan satire, polemic and caricature invented Puritanism’, and I would agree; he also suggests that Puritanism studied through the lens of anti-​ Puritanism says much more about about the people doing the labelling than the persons being labelled; in this context I would contend that it says something interesting about both. Peter Lake, ‘Anti-​Puritanism: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-​Reformation England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 84–​8. 32 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fayre, Act I, Scene VI, lines 59–​60. My emphasis. 33 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fayre, Act I, Scene VI, lines 91–​5. 34 For more on Puritanism and Jonson’s play, see Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-​Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp.  579–​ 620; Patrick Collinson, ‘The theatre constructs Puritanism’, in David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (eds), The theatrical city: culture, theatre and politics in London, 1576–​1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 157–​69.

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‘our English Jues, the presies puritanes, that spye moses motes in every eye’, and whose attempts at further reformation were in danger of resulting in ‘a Juish church, from a christian’.35 In particular, and as discussed in the previous chapter, it was often the perceived legalism of puritan practical divinity which pushed individuals into more radical forms of antinomian nonconformity. The legalism of the puritans was also mocked by the author and anti-​Martinist polemicist Thomas Nash in his 1589 tract An almond for a parrat: Wherefore God even good man Davy of Canterbury, and better lucke betide thee and thy limbes, then when thou dauncedst a whole sunday at a wedding, and afterwardes repenting thy selfe of thy prophane agilitie, thou entredst into a more serious meditation against what table thou hadst sinned, or what part was the principall in this antike iniquitie.36

This reference to ‘meditation against what table thou hadst sinned’ was a clear reference to the two tables of the Decalogue; a not-​so-​subtle swipe at puritans’ preoccupation with living their lives in strict accordance with the Ten Commandments like the Pharisees of old. Nash cannot but have had the puritans in mind in his 1593 pamphlet Christes teares over Ierusalem when he wrote that ‘the Jewes vaine-​glory and presumptious confidence in their Temple, was one of the chiefe sinnes that pluckt their desolation. In that Chapter where our saviour gave judgement over Jerusalem, how bitterly did he inveigh against the hypocrisie and vaine glory of the Scribes and Pharisees’. ‘Never was so much professing, & so little practising’, he exclaimed; ‘so many good words, and so few good deeds’.37 Judaism and Pharaseeism as synecdoches of the formal observance of the precepts of the moral law were therefore important rhetorical and conceptual weapons during the long English reformation and post-​ reformation periods. The accusation of legalism –​of a diligent but hollow attendance to the divine will, prioritising outward action over inner sincerity –​summed up neatly one of the key differences between ‘true’ and ‘false’ religion. Thomas Beard took as axiomatic the proposition that ‘the religion which imitateth the Jewes in those things wherin they are enemies to Christ, cannot bee the truth’.38 To be accused of legalism was Two Letters to the Queen from Robert Banister. Lansdowne Vol/​99.4, f.8. Thomas Nash, An almond for a parrat (1589), f. 19r. 37 Thomas Nashe, Christs teares ouer Ierusalem Wherunto is annexed, a comparatiue admonition to London (1593), ff. 55r-​v. 38 Thomas Beard, A retractiue from the Romish religion contayning thirteene forcible motiues, disswading from the communion with the Church of Rome (1616), p. 57. 35 36

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therefore to be accused of hypocrisy, of superficiality, of going through the motions cynically and falsely.39 The label ‘Pharisee’ was powerful polemical currency. Its power often stemmed from the fact that, however misapplied, its use often had enough of the ring of truth about it to make the accusation plausible. ‘Pharisee’ effectively communicated Protestant anxieties about Catholicism in several fundamental respects. Firstly, it revealed reformers’ serious misgivings about the heavily ritualised nature of the Catholic religion (and the human origins of much of that ritual). Secondly, it illustrated concerns about a soteriology which prioritised the performance of good works as an essential ingredient in the earthly pursuit and posthumous attainment of salvation. And thirdly, it spoke to an inherent Protestant mistrust over the relationship between outward action and interior motivation. The Protestant belief in the absolute corruption of mankind as a result of original sin, a strong Pauline sense of the flesh/​ spirit dichotomy, and worry about the inevitable propensity of men and women to commit idolatry, made the temptation to contrast Catholicism with Judaism too strong to resist. As Beard explained, the Jewish Pharisees had fasted twice a week, and ‘so doe our Romish ones, save that they alter the order, but not the number of the dayes’. The Jewish Pharisees were also accustomed to mortifying themselves, banging their heads against walls, pricking themselves with thorns, lying on stones and drenching themselves with cold water, ‘for the reserving of their chastity’. In like manner, ‘so doe our Romish Pharises, they make a shew of whipping and scourging their owne carkasses, of going barefoote & woolward, of drenching themselves in colde water . . . to tame the rebellion of their unruly flesh’.40 If it was the ritualism of late-​medieval and early modern Catholicism which helped to make the charge of ‘Pharisee’ a halfway plausible one to level at its practitioners, then for puritans the incriminating quality was legalism. It is not my contention that we should accept at face value contemporary accusations that puritans were early modern Pharisees. In one key respect the insult was wide of the mark –​there was nothing formal, hollow, superficial or hypocritical about genuine puritan religious practice. Time and again, in text after text, catechism after catechism, exposition after commentary, puritan authors went to exceptional pains to stress that

Hypocrisy was a common characteristic of the stereotypical Puritan, and a charge frequently levelled against the godly. See For more on Puritanism and Jonson’s play, see Lake with Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, pp. 579–​620; Collinson, ‘The theatre constructs Puritanism’, pp. 157–​69. 40 Thomas Beard, A retractiue from the Romish religion contayning thirteene forcible motiues, disswading from the communion with the Church of Rome (1616), pp. 85–​6. 39

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God’s law was in essence a spiritual law, and that the observance it required was therefore primarily spiritual in nature. Formal, outward acquiescence was nothing without heartfelt inner commitment.41 As the godly vicar of Bury St Edmunds, George Estey, explained of the Ten Commandments, ‘This lawe requireth full obedience of the whole man: the whole man, I call soule & body, with every part & power thereof ’.42 Richard Greenham, whom Kenneth Parker has labelled ‘the father of English Reformed casuistry’, echoed him in the third of four special ‘uses’ he outlined for the commandments: ‘because God is a spirit, therefore his commaundements are spirituall, and require spirituall obedience’.43 In that respect, then, the accusation of legalism was indeed far wide of the mark. But in one key respect, the charge of Pharseeism as levelled at the puritans of Elizabethan and early Stuart England came extremely close to truth, and that was by highlighting a close and important relationship between them and the Decalogue. As Ezekiel Culverwell put it in A treatise of faith (1623), ‘the gift of the sanctifying spirit’ was ‘the first and chiefest fruit of faith, and roote of other graces necessary to salvation’ and ‘most sure evidence, that we bee the children of God, and heires of salvation by Christ’. The principal effect of the spirit, which was ‘most generall, and containes the rest’, was ‘the keeping of Gods commandments, which in sundry places is made a sure mark of saving grace’. ‘Hereby we know that we know him’, Culverwell explained: if wee keepe his commandements: the meaning whereof, is, that the conscionable endeavour to frame our lives, according to Gods will revealed in his word, is a most certen mark, that we be true beleevers, and so the true children of God & heires of glory.44

The Pharisees were partly defined by their use of the Phylacteries, worn on their heads or sleeves, and containing the text of the Ten Commandments. Post-​ reformation English puritans wore no such ritual objects, but For example, William Perkins wrote, ‘He that repents of one sinne truly, doth repent of all: & he that lives but in one known sinne without repentance, though he pretend neuer so much reformation of life, indeed repents of no sinne’. William Perkins, An exposition of the Symbole or Creed of the Apostles (1595), p. 445. 42 George Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements (1602), sig. K3r. 43 Greenham, Workes, p. 73; Kenneth Parker, ‘Richard Greenham’s “spiritual physicke”: the comfort of afflicted consciences in Elizabethan pastoral care’, in Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer (eds), Penitence in the Age of Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 72. On special uses of the commandments, see Chapter 3. 44 Ezekiel Culverwell, A treatise of faith wherein is declared how a man may liue by faith and finde releefe in all his necessities (1623), pp. 223–​5. 41

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metaphorically the Decalogue sat at the heart of their identity, and did much to shape not only their theological beliefs, but also their religious practice. The Decalogue was central to the puritan way of life, and in that sense puritans perhaps were the spiritual heirs of the Pharisees. However, outward observance of the Ten Commandments could only ever be half the story, and was considered by puritans themselves to be most closely associated with the ritualism and works-​righteousness of their antichristian popish rivals. Where the Pharisees wrote the Ten Commandments on slips of parchment, worn on their outer clothes, puritans attempted to write the Decalogue within themselves and to strive towards an absolute spiritual compliance with the law. In fact, God himself had written his law in mankind at creation, subsequently reminded them of what they had forgotten in the stony tablets of the Ten Commandments; and then, through the living breathing body of Christ, he had made the word flesh. All this was clear to the godly Lincolnshire minister Thomas Granger, when he wrote in his 1616 work The tree of good or evill: Let us therefore which have received the promises . . . freely without constraint, ingenuously and willingly as adopted sons reade, heare, talke, and meditate in the Law continually, and insteed of Jewish fringes, ribands, and Phylacteries, fitter for children then men of perfect age, let us carry the Law ingraven in the fleshy tables of our hearts.45

Sin, Sacraments, and the ‘Puritan Penitential Cycle’ What, then, was the true nature of puritans’ relationship with the Decalogue? Firstly, the ‘practical’ and ‘experimental’ aspects of puritan pious practice were often shaped around the behavioural impulses provided by the Ten Commandments. And secondly, as well as the guide and yardstick by which good deeds were identified and measured, the Decalogue was also the primary tool employed for the ongoing process of self-​examination, and the consequent identification and cataloguing of sinful behaviours. Because of their scripturally-​attested capacity for revealing the enormity of human sin, the commandments were the ideal choice for humbling the proud and reinvigorating them with feelings of repentance and a renewed desire for amendment of life –​a cycle which ideally resulted in the strengthening of faith, a process linked to the doctrine of assurance. As Alec Ryrie has recently observed, puritans were assiduous Granger, Tree, sig. A6v.

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in the cultivation of their affections as a way of seeking assurance of salvation. Even longing for godly feelings could be evidence of grace, and the ‘almost narcissistic’ concern of Protestants for their spiritual wellbeing was part of a continuous quest for this and other signs of divine favour.46 On a series of cyclical and interrelated bases –​daily, weekly, annually, or at significant moments throughout the lifecycle –​puritans engaged in a painful process of searching their souls for the spots of sin. This was, in effect, a periodic re-​appropriation of the theological, linguistic and emotional languages and processes associated with conversion, leading to the creation of what I would like to term an ongoing ‘puritan penitential cycle’.47 There appear to have been some important parallels (as well as important distinctions to be observed) between the medieval sacrament of penance and this post-​reformation penitential cycle, although within the remit of this book it is only possible to sketch them in the broadest of outlines.48 Still, as Ronald Rittgers has observed, in the late medieval Church ‘priests helped to produce a penitential mentality that ultimately looked beyond sacerdotal ministrations to satisfy its logic’, and it is possible to see the reformation in general, and puritanism in particular, as the logical conclusion of this trend.49 In fact, English practical divinity in this respect was much closer to Catholic confessional practice, in its insistence on cataloguing and examining sins of conscience, than the policing of outwardly scandalous behaviours performed by French Reformed consistories as explored by Raymond Mentzer.50 Puritan religious practice entailed the absorption of the emotional and religious energy of sacramental penance Ryrie, Being Protestant, pp. 25–​48. Thomas Tentler has noted that ‘penitential theory and practice are central to the definition of the Reformation’, and ‘that the penitential systems of the Reformation simultaneously and paradoxically represent a continuation and a revolutionary break with medieval mentalities’; in particular he names ‘discipline and consolation’ as ‘useful categories for describing the functions of Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed penitential systems’. Thomas Tentler, ‘Postscript’, in Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer (eds), Penitence in the Age of Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 240–​3. 48 See, for example, the instructions for penitents laid out in the medieval Horae Eboracenses which stipulated that, before confession to a priest, the penitent sinner ought to ‘before all thynges in thy bedde chamber, or other secret place moche and often tymes thinke by thy selfe, where, how, whan, with whome, how many tymes, and how enormyly thou has synned, whether in spekynge, consent, wyl, or dede’: Horae Eboracenses: the Prymer or Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary according to the use of the illustrious church of York, ed. Christopher Wordsworth (Surtees Society vol. 132. Durham: Andrews & Co, 1920), pp. 147–​9. 49 Ronald Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys (Cambridge Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 38. 50 Indeed, Mentzer notes that Luther and Calvin felt that the minute examination of conscience associated with Catholic confession placed an excessive burden upon the individual, leaving them in a state of torment. Raymond Mentzer, ‘Notions of sin and penitence within the French 46

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into the ongoing process of sanctification and the quest for assurance; indeed, this dynamic reappropriation of penitentialism provided one of the chief motive forces behind puritan practical divinity.51 On what theological basis did this ‘puritan penitential cycle’ operate? We must begin by returning to the role of the Ten Commandments explored in Chapters 3 and 4, and reminding ourselves of their function in helping to define the Reformed understanding of sin and salvation. The commandments were, par excellence, the embodiment and expression of God’s law –​essentially, his will –​which together with the promises of the gospel formed the basic framework within which the Christian condition was understood. At every step along the narrow road to salvation the Ten Commandments acted as the yardstick and guarantor of the nature and authenticity of the religious, emotional and psychological experience of the sinner. It was the law, then, which helped the truly repentant sinner turn to Christ, although of course salvation was effected not by the law itself, but through the gifts of faith and grace. Proof of truly elect status was to be found in the possession of a spirit of love towards the formerly condemnatory precepts of the law. True faith was also to be known through its fruits, and the third office of the law demanded that the faithful strive to perform the works required by the Ten Commandments, following the blueprint for godly living given by God himself, with Christ as exemplar.52 The Decalogue therefore helped to define Protestant doctrine and experience in a series of confessionally specific ways, and anybody who took religion seriously in sixteenth-​century England, including (by definition) the godly, took the Ten Commandments pretty seriously as well. But more than that, Puritanism as a religious tendency placed an increased emphasis on the Decalogue in two very important and specific ways. Firstly, it laid considerable prominence on a particularly convoluted and exhaustive understanding of the third office of the law: on the Ten Commandments as a guide to godly living, with a view to the reformation of behaviour, the Reformed community’, in Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer (eds), Penitence in the Age of Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 91. 51 Katherine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer have noted that even as Protestants rejected sacramental confession on theological grounds, they strove to regulate individual beliefs and behaviour through penitential discipline, while offering assurance of God’s forgiveness. See their ‘Introduction’ in idem (eds), Penitence in the Age of Reformations, p. 3. 52 Likewise, Theodore Bozeman has described how, for the elect, ‘sin, repentance, and reconciliation’ were ‘the structuring realities of Christian personal existence defined by the covenant of grace’, and that ‘the experience of those realities was to be conditioned, if only in part, by an explicit moral calculus in which “the turning of sin is necessarily required of them that do look for the forgiveness of sin.”’ Theodore Dwight Bozeman, ‘Federal Theology and the “National Covenant”: An Elizabethan Presbyterian Case Study’, Church History, 61.4 (1992), p. 403.

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purging of sin, the performance of good works and the gradual progress of the individual towards sanctification. And secondly, it placed an equally important weight on a continuing engagement with the Pauline notion of the second office of the law as a mirror for the examination and identification of sin and as a schoolmaster unto Christ, in dialogue with the third office. In other words, conversion for puritans did not entail a transition from experiencing the Decalogue in its second office to living life in accordance with its third. The ongoing, lifelong processes of the strengthening of faith, of sanctification, and of the search for assurance, depended upon a continuous and evolving personal relationship with both the second and third offices of the Decalogue. Simply put, it was a distinctive feature of puritan piety that its proponents effectively put themselves through the emotional processes associated with religious conversion recurrently on a semi-​regular basis as a means of testing and strengthening their faith and advancing in godliness towards sanctification and assurance, and it was the Ten Commandments that provided both the general rationale and often the specific means for doing so.53 In doctrinal terms, there was nothing to separate puritans from the theological mainstream; their ‘radicalism’ was part of, not external or additional to, the normative theological position of the Elizabethan Church. Rather, it was through their much more rigid and obsessive praxis that puritans distinguished themselves from their less ‘godly’ counterparts. Richard Niccols, the Inner Temple lawyer, described the good works appointed for the regenerate man as: Prayer, both publike and private: the use of the Sacraments, Baptisme, and the Lords Supper: hearing the Word of God preached, with reading and conference: relieving the Poore: willing obedience to Lawes both Ecclesiastical and Civill in our severall vocations: strong striving against, and subduing of our own lusts and affections . . .

In this, he noted, ‘we are admirably holpen, if with fervent Prayer wee every one particularly joyne an earnest examination of our owne thoughts, words, and deedes, by the tenne Commandements of God’.54 Likewise, the ‘silver-​tongued’ preacher Henry Smith wrote in A preparative to mariage that all potential communicants should examine their life ‘by the tenne Peter Lake has explained that ‘what distinguished . . . the godly from the ungodly, was not so much their objective condition or external behaviour as their subjective apprehension of the meaning of their condition and actions’, and described how their pursuit of ‘ever more effectual graces’ was fuelled, in part, ‘by a series of antinomies or oppositions between fear and joy, repentance and assurance, the law and the gospel’, etc. Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), pp. 22–​4. 54 Richard Niccols, A day-​starre for darke-​wandring soules shewing the light (1613), pp. 52–​3. 53

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Commaundements of the Lawe’ before receiving the sacrament, and the Scottish diplomat Henry Balnaves recommended contemplation of the Decalogue ‘dayly at thy rising, and downlying at night’.55 One of the most detailed discussions of the role of the commandments in preparing the believer for participation in the Sacraments came from the pen of the godly Sussex minister William Attersoll. ‘Such as will in an holy manner prepare themselves to celebrate the Lords Supper to the glory of God and comfort of their owne soules’, he explained ‘must diligently acquaint themselves with these 4 pointes, with knowledge, faith, repentance, and reconciliation’.56 Preparation for the sacrament, in other words, was characterised by Attersoll as a microcosm of the processes leading to conversion and justification, but with reconciliation before communication as the end point, as opposed to a more general promise of salvation and lifelong sanctification. Knowledge, the first quality required, had two aspects: knowledge of God, and knowledge of ourselves. This knowledge included a number of elements, but the Decalogue featured prominently amongst them: First, that there is onely one God . . . . Secondly, that God made man and all other creatures . . . . Thirdly, man did fall through the entisement of the Devill, and his own wilful disobedience in breaking the commandements of God: Fourthly there are ten commaundements divided into two tables . . . . Fiftly, we cannot keepe these commandements, nor any one of them, but we breake them daily, in motion, in thought, in worde, and in deede: the breache where of deserveth the cursse of God, that is, all miseries in this life, death in the ende of this life, and Hell fire after this life: Sixtly, there is no meanes or remedy in ourselves or in any creature, but onely in Jesus Christ . . . . He hath pacified gods wrath, fulfild the righteousnes of that law, sanctified our nature, adopted us to be the children of god, and maketh our duties (though weake) acceptable to his father.57

The process which Attersoll described, the unbottoming of the soul ‘that we may learn how wretched and miserable we are by nature, and what remedy god hath ordained for our deliverance’, was therefore just as important for preparation to receive the sacrament as for laying the groundwork for the initial process of justification. Hence, the importance of the sacraments as a reapplication of divine grace lay partly in the emotional repetition Henry Smith, A preparatiue to mariage (1591), sigs. F6r-​v; Henry Balnaves, The confession of faith contending how the troubled man should seeke refuge at his God, thereto led by faith (1584), pp. 232–​3. 56 William Attersoll, The badges of Christianity. Or, A treatise of the sacraments fully declared out of the word of God (1606), p. 351. 57 Attersoll, The badges of Christianity, pp. 352–​3. 55

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of the processes which had led to the initial conversion or justification of the individual concerned.58 It encouraged believers to re-​confront their sinfulness, thereby further strengthening their repentance, their faith in and dependence on the promises of the gospel, and encouraging in them the performance of charitable works (i.e. the works of the law).59 David Como has described the resulting ‘perpetual cycle of means and duties’ in more negative terms, as creating ‘an addiction to their [puritans’] own form of divinity, thus ensuring their own social and cultural hegemony’.60 The result he suggests, in terms reminiscent of those contemporaries who accused puritans of a Pharasaical approach to religion, ‘was a rampant legalism and formalism, a religion that hid behind a mask of Christian piety even as it sold its adherents into a state of perpetual slavery’.61 An important question remains:  how far was this developing trend a characteristic of later puritan practice, as opposed to a feature of English Protestant writing from the very beginning? The answer is not straightforward. The seeds of the puritan penitential cycle can be observed in some of the earliest writing of the English reformation, but the practice is not one which receives explicit identification or encouragement until much later.62 To begin with those early seeds, we must look at The Institution of a Christian Man, published in 1537. This heavily evangelical formulary contained the first official use in England of the Reformed numbering of the Ten Commandments (with all of its theological implications), and along It was therefore not the case, as John Bossy once observed, that reformers ‘were in the mean time attempting to supply the place of penance by the practice of exterior discipline’. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1500–​1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 128. 59 Cf. John Brinsley, who wrote, ‘we must trie our repentance by the lawe of God, whereof the ten Commaundements are the summe’, and named ‘the fittest time’ as ‘in our preparation to the Saboth’, and ‘more carefully before our receiuing the sacrament or before a fast’. Brinsley, Watch, pp. 1–​3. 60 The application of the concept of hegemony to Calvinist dominance of the Jacobethan Church of England may stem from Como’s mentor. See Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–​1635’, Past and Present, 114 (1987), p. 34. 61 David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-​Civil-​War England (Stanford Calif.: Stanford UP, 2004), p. 137. 62 John Bossy noted that within the devotio moderna and pre-​reformation humanism, there was a tendency to psychologise and desocialise the sacrament of penance, by suggesting that sin was essentially something that occurred in the mind. He did so with reference to the development of confession within the Catholic Church, but it may be observed that the same forces were at work (albeit in a very different form and context) within the Protestant Reformation. John Bossy, ‘The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 25 (1975), p. 27. On a different but related note, Karl Gunther has recently (and convincingly) argued that Elizabethan Puritanism owed much more to early English evangelicalism than has previously been acknowledged: Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–​1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 58

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with the Cromwellian injunctions of 1536 and 1538, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the promulgation of the Great Bible in 1539, marked the high-​water mark of evangelical advance during the reign of Henry VIII.63 The exposition of the Decalogue contained within the ‘Bishops’ Book’ was fairly unremarkable and not theologically or confessionally contentious. True, the Second Commandment was described as condemning those ‘that be more ready with their substance to deck dead images gorgeously and gloriously, than with the same to help poor Christian people, the quick and lively images of God’, but overall the explication of the precepts of the law was not incompatible with a humanist-​tinged yet solidly Catholic faith.64 The most important discussion of the Decalogue in the ‘Bishops’ Book’ was arguably not in the section on the Ten Commandments at all, just as the most important comments on justification by faith were not contained within the article on justification. It is The Institution of a Christian Man’s discussion of the sacrament of penance which best illustrates the Protestant repurposing of the Decalogue to fit the new soteriological framework of justification by faith alone, and which anticipates the later use of the commandments in the ‘puritan penitential cycle’ described above. The ‘Bishops’ Book’ described the sacrament of penance as a process consisting of three separate parts: contrition, confession, and amendment of former life. The latter was explained to entail ‘obedient reconciliation unto the laws and will of God; that is to say, exterior acts and works of charity’.65 Contrition was broken down into two distinct elements. The first part was an acknowledgement of the filthiness and abomination of man’s own sin ‘unto which knowledge he is brought by hearing and considering of the will of God, declared in his laws’. The second part was: a certain faith, trust, and confidence of the mercy and goodness of God, whereby the penitent must conceive certain hope and faith that God will forgive him his sins, and repute him justified, and of the number of his elect children, not for the worthiness of any merit or work done by the penitent, but for the only merits of the blood and passion of our Saviour Jesus Christ.66 E.g. Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 231. ‘The Institution of a Christian Man, in Formularies of Faith put forth by Authority during the reign of Henry VIII, ed. Charles Lloyd (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1825), p.  137. For a detailed discussion of humanist Henrician Catholicism, see Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), especially Chapters 1–​3. 65 ‘The Institution of a Christian Man’, pp. 96–​7. 66 ‘The Institution of a Christian Man’, p.  97. Cf. Hugh Latimer’s Sermon on Romans 13:8–​9, preached on the first Sunday in Advent 1552, which contains very similar language: ‘The right penance consisteth in three points: the first is contrition; that is, I must acknowledge myself that I have 63 64

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Confession, or contact with a priest, was merely presented as sitting alongside the promises of the Gospel as a way of strengthening and eventually attaining certainty of faith. Christ’s death, the commentary noted, was sufficient to remit all sins and eternal pain due for the same, and yet penitents had also to bring forth the fruits of penance, and make restitution or satisfaction in will and deed to their neighbours. It was then their duty to ‘express their obedient will in the executing and fulfilling of God’s commandment outwardly’. Performing good works in this way would cause ‘thy light [to] glister out as bright as the sun in the morning, and thy health shall sooner arise unto thee . . . then shalt thou be like a garden, that most plentifully bringeth forth all kind of fruits, and like the well-​spring, that never shall want water’.67 This was an exuberant way to describe a doctrine and a sacrament about which reformers were ambivalent to say the least, and it is notable that the ordained clergy are barely visible in the Bishops’ Book’s discussion of penance: confession to a priest is deemed to be necessary ‘if it may be had’.68 Six years later, The Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for Any Christian Man, the ‘King’s Book’, would make it clear that priestly absolution lay at the heart of the sacrament of penance.69 But in the ‘Bishops’ Book’ the issue is rather cloudier. Absolution from the priest was to be treated as ‘the very words and voice of God himself, if he should speak unto us out of heaven, according to the saying of Christ’, casting the priest in the role not so much of active intermediary as passive messenger. And in the Bishops’ Book, auricular confession was deemed valuable because of the comfort and consolation it could provide for consciences, rather than for its sacramental nature per se, which received greater emphasis in the ‘King’s Book’.70 What the description of penance in the ‘Bishops’ Book’ does recall is the Protestant language of justification by grace through faith, and because of the location of that language within a discussion of confession, it also anticipates the later use of that theological and emotional language for transgressed God’s most holy laws and commandments . . . for the law of God, when preached, bringeth us to the knowledge of our sins: for it is like as a glass which sheweth us the spots in our faces, that is, the sins in our hearts’. Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, ed. George Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845), p. 10. 67 ‘The Institution of a Christian Man’, p. 100. 68 ‘The Institution of a Christian Man’, p. 97. 69 ‘The sacrament of penance is properly the absolution pronounced by the priest upon such as be penitent for their sins, and so do knowledge and shew themselves to be’. ‘A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man; set forth by the King’s Majesty of England, &c’., in Formularies of Faith put forth by Authority during the reign of Henry VIII, ed. Charles Lloyd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1825), p. 257. 70 ‘A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man’, pp. 259–​60.

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strengthening faith through the humbling of the spirit before receiving communion, and at other key times. Confession to a priest, of course, was the bedrock of the sacramental penitential cycle of late-​medieval Catholicism. Confession to oneself, and by extension to God, was in turn the foundation of the puritan penitential cycle described above. However, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that the evangelical penitential cycle performed a similar psychological and emotional function as its medieval antecedent –​dealing with the guilt arising from sinful behaviour, and strengthening faith by renewing the promise of salvation –​even if its theological function was entirely divergent.71 The abrogation of the sacrament of penance did not remove repentance from the life of the godly Christian; if anything, it actually increased its importance. By freeing it from a sacramental framework, the reformation facilitated a continuous and ongoing relationship between the godly and the emotional and religious pull of repentance.72 The direct equivalence between these two theologically and practically very different processes should not be overstressed. It is also not entirely clear whether the evangelical faction amongst the episcopal co-​authors of the ‘Bishops’ Book’ were attempting to reform the sacrament of penance itself, or merely trying to smuggle the language of justification by faith into the formulary under the guise of a comparatively inconspicuous Trojan Horse. Either way, the continuities with the recommendations of later puritan practical divinity are striking. It is important to note, however, that there were also significant differences in emphasis between the writings of the early reformers and later puritan divines. Catherine Davies has observed, for example, that whilst many Edwardian reformers saw themselves as Old Testament prophets, their rhetoric ‘concentrated firmly’ on this life, and in particular on anti-​ popery.73 For the first generation of evangelicals, the function of the law in stimulating conversion through its second office was largely a one-​time event. The ‘ministry of death’ then gave way to the law’s function as a guide for godly living. In other words conversion, once accomplished, was no longer in doubt: the task then was to strive to live a godly life. Of course The role of the post-​Reformation pastor in this respect ‘did not reflect earlier notions of sacramental absolution, with its emphasis on the ordained confessor as an instrument of God’s grace. Instead, the pastor functioned as a spiritual guide, accompanying those bewildered by sin or anxiety on their journey through troubled times’. Parker, ‘Richard Greenham’s “Spiritual Physicke”’, p. 76. 72 On the first page of his enormously successful spiritual manual The True Watch, John Brinsley explained that ‘the meanes whereby we may obtaine a certaine assurance, that we are the children of God . . . is by a careful examination of our selves, whether we feele these two graces, Repentance and Faith’, with repentance to be tried by the Ten Commandments. Brinsley, Watch, pp. 1–​2. 73 Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 3–​18. 71

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this was a difficult prospect. God had put forth his word, ‘the tenne commandements, that we might compare all our works with them, and not do contrary to his glory, and the profyte of our neighbour’.74 But evil and temptation were constant threats: as Thomas Becon described it, ‘where so ever GOD buildeth a Churche, there the Devill will builde a Chapell juste by’. The Ten Commandments were therefore one of the tools given to men, ‘that ye diligently take hede . . . [and] by no meanes, suffer your selves to be plucked awaie, from this my doctrine, neither by the subtile suggestions, of most subtile Satan’.75 God had made mankind a promise; ‘yf thou wylt heare my woorde, and kepe it. Thou shalt subdue the devyll, so that he wyll not be so bolde as to come nere unto thee’.76 There was, Becon explained, always a new profit by repeating the Ten Commandments, together with a special commodity ‘that the dyvell therby is driven frome thee that he may not hurt thee’.77 Becon’s words here express a refreshing confidence in the ability of the justified man to ward off the snares of Satan, investing the words of the Ten Commandments with an almost Talismanic power in repelling the temptations of Antichrist. To be clear, later puritans did not differ qualitatively from their predecessors in their theological interpretation of the second and third offices of the law. They simply differed in their ongoing emphasis and application of the commandments as a reflection of shifting pastoral circumstances. Neither did the first generation all speak with a united voice: for example, Tyndale and Hooper tended to emphasise the second office of the law, whilst Latimer spent more time dwelling on the third.78 But broadly speaking, the priorities for the first generation of evangelicals were to stamp out any notion of works righteousness amongst the laity, to establish beyond doubt the key soteriological doctrine of justification by faith alone, to Thomas Becon, A new postil conteinyng most godly and learned sermons vpon all the Sonday Gospelles, that be redde in the church thorowout the yeare (1566), ff. 16v–​17r. 75 Becon, A new postil, ff. 62r-​v. 76 Becon, A new postil, ff. 152r-​v. 77 Becon, A new postil, f. 152v. 78 See, for example: William Tyndale, ‘A Pathway into the Holy Scripture’, ‘The Wicked Mammon’, and ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’, in idem., Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1848), pp. 8, 48, 52, 155 (for Tyndale, the numbers of works and references could be multiplied endlessly); Hooper, ‘Declaration’, pp. 89-​89, 282, 409–​12. Hugh Latimer is an interesting contrast to Tyndale and Hooper: his sermons focus much more on amendment of life in line with the precepts of the law, although the difference could be partly related to the different purpose and intentions of a printed treatise versus a printed sermon. See, for example, his ‘Sermons on the Card’ of 1529, in idem, Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, ed. George Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845), pp. 7–​13. 74

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demonstrate that good works were the consequence (not the cause) of salvation, and to redefine the meaning of ‘good works’, in order to exclude works of supererogation and emphasise in their place the works of the law. The progression from the second to the third offices of the law performed this task admirably. ‘He that will behold himself well in that mirror and glass’, Hooper had written in relation to the second, ‘shall find such a deformity and disgraced physiognomy, that he will abhor his own proportion so horribly disfigured’.79 Subsequently, in line with the third, ‘let us speak God’s truth, and live according to his commandment’, Latimer enjoined: ‘he shall deliver us from the hands of our adversaries, and make us safe in his heavenly kingdom. Let us, I say, do God’s bidding and commandment’.80 This neat linear narrative of sinfulness, leading to conversion, and thence to a godly way of life, was admirably suited to the circumstances of late-​Henrician and Edwardian England, where evangelicals (even once in government) were an embattled religious minority. However, for the conscientious puritans of later Elizabethan and Jacobean England, born into an outwardly but imperfectly Protestant nation, the neatness of this linear progression from misguided Catholic sinfulness through conversion to godly Protestantism, and thence to a life of confident sanctification, no longer made sense. Old certainties gave way to fear and doubt, due in part to the ambiguity and uncertainty of predestinarian teaching.81 The men and women of late sixteenth-​and early seventeenth-​century England were forced to adapt a binary theology of good and evil to their experience of living in a much more subtle, nuanced and complex world. Put simply, conversion from false to true religion was relatively easy to identify, but the shift from being a reprobate sinner to an elect sinner was not necessarily as obvious or clear cut. General low-​level sinfulness, in all likelihood present in both the reprobate and the elect, could not be vanquished as comprehensively or decisively as the model of conversion from false to true religion implied. Practical divinity and the puritan penitential cycle, with its continuing stress on the second and third offices of the law operating in conjunction with one another, therefore Hooper, ‘Decalaration’, p. 88. ‘A sermon preached by M.  Hugh Latimer, at Stamford, November 9, Anno 1550’, in Latimer, Sermons and Remains, p. 307. 81 It should not, though, be taken for granted that predestination was a ‘pessimistic’ or troubling doctrine; indeed, it could be liberating and optimistic. As Leif Dixon has noted, the doctrine of predestination itself could not dictate the way people responded to it. Dixon, Practical Predestinarians, p. 31. For a discussion of the potentially troubling effects of predestinarian belief upon Puritans, see John Stachniewski, The persecutory imagination: English Puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 79 80

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evolved in response to the pastoral necessity of providing reassurance to a group of conscientious individuals who might remain wracked with a strong sense of their own sinfulness and self-​worthlessness long after their initial ‘conversion’.82 Puritan writers thus began to finesse the conversionary model of the law in two significant ways. Firstly, they began to stress the continuing function of the law in identifying sin, initiating repentance and strengthening faith even in the elect. Secondly, they also began to provide much more detailed explications of the commandments, both to facilitate this, and also to paint a more detailed and idealised portrait of puritan pious practice for the godly to emulate. Principles like those outlined by Richard Greenham concerning the ‘better understanding’ of the commandments, as examined in Chapter 3, transformed the Decalogue from a series of specific prescriptions and prohibitions to a series of heads or capitals for a much wider series of behaviours specified not only by scripture, but also by authors such as Greenham himself.83 By instigating such broad rules, he and others like him were able to extrapolate from each commandment in turn a series of practical religious concerns which in sum paint a meticulous and exhaustive picture of precise religious practice which we might c­ onfidently and without too much historiographical hand-​wringing label as ‘puritan’. Of course, this is precisely the sort of practical divinity for which Greenham became famous amongst his contemporaries, and for which he has been examined by historians including Eric Carlson and Kenneth Parker.84 But it is striking the extent to which the Ten Commandments, as treated by a range of expositors, were cunningly tailored and so became admirably suited to shaping and supporting a distinctively puritan style of piety, both in their detail and by their general approach, in holding the second and third offices of the law in a kind of creative tension with one another. On one level it is fairly obvious that an individual writer was likely to tailor their exposition of the commandments in order to reflect their own As Ezekiel Culverwell described it, even after justification, the righteousness of the godly was ‘as a stained or defiled defiled cloath, such as Gods pure eyes cannot endure’; only the ‘satisfaction made by Christ for the pardon of their defects’ enabled their obedience ‘to be well liking in his sight’. Culverwell, A treatise of faith, p. 225. 83 Greenham, Workes, p. 73. 84 E.g. Kenneth Parker, ‘Richard Greenham’s “spiritual physicke”: the comfort of afflicted consciences in Elizabethan pastoral care’, in Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer (eds), Penitence in the Age of Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 71–​83; Kenneth L. Parker and Eric J. Carlson, ‘Practical divinity’:  the works and life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 1998); Leif Dixon, ‘Richard Greenham and the Calvinist Construction of God’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 61.4 (2010), pp. 729–​45. 82

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broader theological and pastoral priorities. But to use the commandments in this way was not the default position: it was a deliberate choice. And by choosing to employ the Decalogue to frame not only broad issues of morality but also to inculcate quite specific issues of religious belief, practice and identity, authors such as Greenham were creating a discourse whose boundaries and priorities went well beyond the original text of the Ten Commandments as outlined in Exodus 20:1–​17, even if they were also in no small part shaped by it. Arthur Dent, in A pastime for parents explained that the function of the law in the unregenerate was to cause sin ‘to surg and swell’ within them. In this sense it was the office of the law to damn the unregenerate by identifying and enumerating their sins. But for the regenerate the law had four branches: as a rule to direct their lives; to teach them not to trust in themselves; to humble them in the sight of God; and to be their schoolmaster unto Christ. The children of God, through the application of divine grace, were freed from the curse of the law, but were still under its obedience and institution.85 It was for this reason that Dent and others so abhorred the country divinity of men such as Asunetus, the imaginary interlocutor from The plaine mans path-​way to heauen, which we will examine in more detail later on.86

The Fourth Commandment Remember the Sabbath Day, to Keep it Holy. Six Days Shalt thou Labour, and Doe All thy Work: But the Seventh Day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it Thou Shalt Not Do Any Work, thou, Nor Thy son, Nor thy Daughter, thy Manservant, Nor thy Maidservant, Nor thy Cattle, Nor thy Stranger That is within thy Gates: For in Six Days the LORD Made Heaven and Earth, the Sea, and all That in Them is, and Rested the Seventh Day: Wherefore the LORD Blessed the Sabbath Day, and Hallowed it. Exodus 20:8–​11

The commandment which best embodied both the ‘puritan penitential cycle’ described above, and many of the priorities of puritan piety more generally, was probably the fourth:  to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. One of the biblical images occasionally used to illustrate the importance of Sabbath keeping was the incident of the man discovered gathering sticks on the Sabbath as related in the Old Testament book of

Arthur Dent, A pastime for parents: or A recreation to passe away the time; contayning the most principall grounds of Christian religion (1606), STC2: 6622, pp. sigs D2v–​D3v. 86 See Chapter 5. 85

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Numbers, Chapter 15. The early part of Numbers 15 consisted largely of God explaining to Moses the nature of the sacrifices that the Israelites had to make to him when they came into the land of Israel. After 21 verses of this sort of thing, he explained to Moses the penalties for failure to obey his instructions. The penalties for erring ‘by ignorance without the knowledge of the congregation’87 were relatively mild: burnt offerings of bullocks and goats together with drink and priestly atonement were the principal ingredients. God went on to explain that ‘ye shall have one law for him that sinneth through ignorance’, but another law entirely for any that sinned in full knowledge of his actions.88 The soul that sins ‘presumptuously’ shall be ‘cut off from among his people’; ‘he hath despised the word of the Lord, and hath broken his commandment’.89 The chapter went on to describe how, in the wilderness, the Israelites found a man gathering sticks upon the Sabbath day. He was brought before Moses, Aaron and the rest of the congregation, who were uncertain how to punish the man. Then, ‘the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with the stones without the camp. And the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died’.90 Following the episode, God bid the Israelites to weave blue fringes into the borders of their garments, ‘that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them; and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring’.91 The unfortunate stick-​gatherer was a common trope in visual sources in post-​reformation England, and also in textual treatments of the Fourth Commandment.92 Indeed, the most comprehensive and frequently-​reprinted gloss on the commandments, John Dod’s A plaine and familiar exposition, contained a lengthy treatment of the Fourth Commandment, and of the incident from Numbers 15.93 The Fourth Commandment is the longest in the Decalogue in terms of the number of words it occupies in the Authorised (King James) Version (97 in total), beating the Second Commandment (91 words) into second place. Numbers 15:24. Numbers 15:29 89 Numbers 15:30–​31 90 Numbers 15: 35–​6 91 Numbers 15: 38–​39 92 On visual representations of Numbers 15, see Chapter 6. 93 Dod, Plaine, p. 153. The stick-​gatherer from Numbers was also believed to be the possible identity of the man in the moon. John Lyly, The Woman in the Moon, ed. Leah Scragg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 12. On the man in the moon more generally, see David Cressy, ‘Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon’, The American Historical Review, 111.4 (2006), pp. 961–​82. 87 88

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For Dod, the story about gathering sticks on the Sabbath was a cautionary tale which illuminated not the whole of the Fourth Commandment, but one small particle of it; the clause ‘in it thou shalt doo no manner of work’. Kenneth Parker has noted that suppression of trading and Sunday labours were two of the most common areas of concern when it came to Sabbath enforcement as viewed through visitation articles and injunctions.94 The picture is reinforced through churchwardens’ presentments and Church Court records from godly towns: the act books of the ecclesiastical court of Stratford-​upon-​Avon record a number of instances of individuals being punished for opening their shop windows on the Sabbath day.95 As Dod noted, attempting to labour for profit on the Sabbath was not only forbidden, it was also destined to be fruitless. The proof for this was Exodus 16, where God forbade the Israelites from going out to gather Manna on the Sabbath. ‘And this is to be noted by the way, that they went out, & found nothing:  and so this is perpetuall, that whoseoever goes out, to get any outward gaine, on the Lords day, he gaines nothing . . . Gods curse eates up more than his gaines’.96 Even Mary Magdalen and Mary the mother of James had rested on the Sabbath rather than going out to buy the ointments that they needed to anoint and embalm the body of the crucified Christ.97 According to Dod, the pedagogic value of the story of the man gathering sticks lay precisely in the ostensible triviality of his actions. As he explained, ‘he did the smallest worke, yet that little worke was so great a sinne, that God appoints him to be stoned to death for it. So that, no worke is so small, that, if it be a wordly matter, and not a matter of religion, or mercy, must be done on the sabbath’.98 God’s punishment of the seemingly inconsequential crime of gathering sticks may have seemed harsh, but it was doubtlessly just:  for the man had acted contemptuously and given an ill example of liberty to others. By doing so, he had imperilled not only his own soul but those of his brethen, particularly those of the more Kenneth L. Parker, The English Sabbath: A study of doctrine and discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 60. 95 31 Named individuals were presented for opening their shops on the Sabbath in Stratford-​upon-​ Avon between1590 and 1592: Shakespeare and the Bawdy Court of Stratford, ed. E. R. C. Brinkworth (Chichester:  Phillimore, 1972), pp.  51–​6, 121–​4, etc.; cf. The churchwardens’ presentments in the Oxfordshire peculiars of Dorchester, Thame, and Banbury, ed. Sidney A. Peyton (Oxford: Oxfordshire Record Society, 1928), p. 27 and passim. 96 Dod, Plaine, p. 152. 97 ‘Because Christs body was dead, and their embalming it, did yeeld no ease nor refreshing, and so was no worke of necessitie, nor a worshippe of God, they durst not doe it’. Dod, Plaine, p. 153. 98 Dod, Plaine, p. 153. 94

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impressionable members of the congregation. Again, the Church Courts in early modern England were keen to police what they saw as unnecessary labour upon the Sabbath; sometimes, indeed, a little too keen.99 In 1577, the act books of the ecclesiastical courts of London diocese noted that Thomas Gybbes of Westham had, ‘upon the Sondaie before Christmas last in service tyme . . . hewed downe a litle tree and made a bridge thereof ’. Gybbes’ defence was that his actions had been ‘of great necessitie . . . for that he had a bridge stollen awaye the night before; & when the parishners came to church, diverse of them openly complayned, that they could not saffely come over the bridge, for want thereof ’.100 ‘Necessity’ was, of course, a subjective term. As Christopher Haigh recorded, a group of shopkeepers from Chichester defended having sold victuals on Sunday evenings ‘to such poor people as are not able to buy their victual upon Saturday at night until they have received their wages, but he doth it not to the intent to profane the Sabbath day but repaireth orderly afterward to the high church both to service and sermon’.101 Was selling meat to the hungry poor an act of mercy, or was it encouraging the Israelites to gather Manna on the Sabbath? Was building a bridge to enable a group of parishioners to travel safely to church on Sunday a laudable religious deed, or a prohibited earthly labour? In spite of the blunt message communicated by the example of the man stoned to death for gathering sticks, it is not really surprising that parishioners, courts, and even ministers were occasionally confused as to whether or not the Sabbath was being observed properly; for advice on the subject differed significantly. As with the rest of the commandments, the apparently plain-​spoken clarity of the fourth belied the extent to which both its moral and theological messages were subject to manipulation and therefore in a state of some flux. Kenneth Parker, in his study of The English Sabbath, rightly asserts that Sabbatarianism was categorically not an invention of sixteenth-​ century puritanism, and that post-​ reformation divines drew heavily upon the doctrines and traditions established and developed by medieval scholastic theologians, particularly Thomas Aquinas’ distinction It is worth noting that the link between puritanism and moral reformation via the machinery of the ecclesiastical courts has been questioned: cf. Margaret Spufford, ‘Puritanism and Social Control?’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 41–​57. 100 A series of precedents and proceedings in criminal causes, extending from the year 1465 to 164; extracted from the act-​books of ecclesiastical courts in the diocese of London, ed. William Hale (London: Francis & John Rivington, 1847), p. 165. 101 Christopher Haigh, The plain man’s pathways to heaven: kinds of Christianity in post-​Reformation England, 1570–​1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 94. 99

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between the Sabbath’s moral and ceremonial constituent parts.102 No less a figure than Erasmus, writing in the Moriae Encomium of 1511, ridiculed the enquiries of scholastic theologians into quiddities such as whether ‘lesse sinne is it (saie they) to slea a thousande men, than ones on a sondaie to clowte a poore mans shoe’.103 And yet the new ascendency of the Decalogue, coupled with the profound repurposing of its theological significance as a result of the fundamental Protestant redefinition of sin and salvation, meant that the post-​reformation Sabbath was also a qualitatively different beast from what had gone before. Profound continuities with the medieval tradition and a broad consensus over the essential defining characteristics of the post-​reformation Sabbath should not be allowed to obscure profound differences; not only with the older tradition, but between Protestant divines themselves. In the remainder of this section, I would like to highlight some of the diversity of Sabbath beliefs in published works on the Ten Commandments, in order to gloss and revise our current understanding of the meaning of the English Sabbath. Firstly, looking at the Decalogue as a whole, it is clear that authors could vary significantly on the relative importance that they attached to the Fourth Commandment. Most expositions of the commandments put particular emphasis on the first and fifth, as head and sum of the first and second tables of the law respectively.104 As such, any breaches of the commandments of the first table thus represented a failure in the total and general subjection required by the first, irrespective of any other specific precepts which they contravened. Many authors were also keen to establish an overarching narrative to the Decalogue, in part to describe and in part to justify the sequence of the commandments. Edward Dering glossed the fourth in fairly narrow and literal terms in his briefe and necessary instruction of 1572: to keepe holye the sabboth day, is to come together, and with feare and reverence to heare the word of God preached unto us:  to receave his Sacramentes with fayth and with repentaunce: to pray together with one heart and voyce: to shewe in outwarde doyng our inwarde sabboth, that we rest from sinne and wickednes: that the spirit of God dwelleth in us, and worketh in this lyfe the beginnyng of our everlasting rest.105 Parker, p. 20. Cf. Stephen Denison’s explanation that the Fourth Commandment was moral rather than ceremonial ‘because it was given unto Adam in paradise by Gods owne example’. Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 32. 103 Desiderius Erasmus, The praise of folie. Moriae encomium a booke made in latine by that great clerke Erasmus Roterodame. Englisshed by sir Thomas Chaloner knight (1549), sig. M1r. 104 E.g. Whately, Pithie, p. 3; Hooper, Declaracion, p. 316. 105 Dering, briefe, image 16. 102

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This description located the Sabbath specifically in the core activities of Sunday worship:  hearing the word preached, receiving the sacraments, public prayer, and an outward and inward rest from worldly and sinful labours respectively.106 More usual, however, was a schema which saw a direct and overarching relationship between and progression across all four commandments of the first table. For the East Anglian puritan clergyman and anti-​Arminian George Estey, the First Commandment was about having God, and the remaining three precepts of the first table directed his pure worship: firstly its manner, secondly its end, and thirdly the time and place.107 Author, clergyman and scholar Thomas Wilson took a somewhat different approach in his exposition of the two first verses of the sixt chapter to the Hebrewes, published in 1600. Wilson described the first table in both positive and negative terms. The first commandment described the worship of God alone, shutting out false gods; the second gave direction for worship according to his commandment, shutting out false worship of the true God; the third outlined the manner of worship with holy reverence, shutting out prophaneness in his worship; and the fourth prescribed worship according to the time commanded by God.108 For the bishop of Worcester Gervase Babington, writing in his very fruitfull exposition of the Commaundements, the First Commandment was about the inward worship of God, and the other three precepts of the first table concerned the externals of worship.109 The First Commandment having established that God was the one God to be worshipped, the second set down the way and manner in which he was to be served; the third charged the faithful with the reverent use of his name; and the fourth described practical circumstances of the time and place of worship. For John Hooper, the purpose of the first commandment was to instruct the mind and soul of man that God was the only God: the third and fourth laid out instructions of how to honour and worship God; and the second was about how not to worship him.110 Judged by its most common station within these overarching schemas of the first table then, the Fourth Commandment comes out as a fairly distant runner up in terms of importance. The recognition of God, and his For Stephen Denison, the duties of the Sabbath also included the singing of Psalms. Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 32. 107 George Estey, A  most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements (1602), sig. K7v. 108 Thomas Wilson, An exposition of the tvvo first verses of the sixt chapter to the Hebrewes in forme of a dialogue (1600), p. 11. 109 Babington, Fruitfull, p. 84. 110 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 316. 106

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true worship, both internal and external, was dealt with by the first three commandments: the fourth merely existed to specify the practical details of when and where such worship ought to take place. But to leave matters there would mean neglecting the extraordinary lengths to which authors took their expositions of the individual commandments themselves. The reality was, of course, that the Fourth Commandment was about much more than simply the place and time of worship: it was about exploring in minute detail every single prohibition and obligation incumbent upon the believer in the broad arenas of public worship and private devotion.111 John Dod actually placed the Fourth Commandment above all of the others. The first reason for this was because, rarely amongst the commandments, its message was spelled out in both positive and negative terms; the second hinged upon its unique use of the word remember, which signified that as a precept it was ‘principally recommended’ of God, giving it the status of a ‘speciall charge’.112 Unusually amongst authors, Dod also suggested that the keeping of the Sabbath was a surefire way of obtaining temporal blessings ‘on soule and body’. This was ‘the most direct and sure meanes, to get all comfortable prosperity’, a reward which most authors linked to the more explicit promises of blessings outlined in the Second and Fifth Commandments.113 It was surely with a heavy dose of irony that William Whately described his own exposition of the Ten Commandments as ‘pithie’, for his explication of the Fourth Commandment contained no fewer than 81 separate divisions and subdivisions of duties prescribed and sins prohibited.114 The affirmative part of the commandment included duties of preparation (during the week and on the sixth day) and celebration (common to all and specific to governors).115 Celebrations common to all were divided between issues of manner and of matter, the former consisting of both rest and sanctification. The category of ‘rest’ concerned questions of who was to rest, when, and from what. Rest from the business of your calling involved considering the appropriate level of rest in thought, word and deed, as well as limitations of and exceptions to rest.116 Duties of sanctification could be public and private, respecting both corporate ‘Private’ here is not taken to mean solitary, but rather ‘non-​institutionalised’. For some of the various forms and contexts within which prayer could take place in the household, see Ryrie, Being Protestant, Chapter 14. 112 Dod, Plaine, 139. 113 Dod, Plaine, 176. 114 Whately, Pithie, pp. 87–​97. 115 Whately, Pithie, pp. 88–​9. 116 Whately, Pithie, p. 90. 111

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and domestic worship, and involving questions either of preparation or of use.117 Exhausting even in summary, Whately’s itemisation went on for pages, and at the finest level of granularity detailed specific actions to be enjoined and avoided, such as preventing private sanctification by spending time ‘idlely, in slugging & slothfulnesse, as sitting at doore, or in the chimney corner, and doing just nothing’.118 To give him his due, this was relatively ‘pithie’ for Whately; his exposition of the First Commandment occupied a full four times as many headings as the fourth. It is therefore not surprising, given the amount of microscopic detail that expositors strove to illuminate, that there were, if not exactly disagreements, then at least divergent opinions over the nature and scope of the Sabbath. Usually, discussions of hierarchy and responsibility were situated under the Fifth Commandment, to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’, but for George Downame the exposition of the Fourth Commandment provided a good opportunity ‘to consider the duty of the ministers, who are to be the chiefe actors in the publike sanctification of the Sabbath’.119 Duties required of ministers by the Fourth Commandment were deemed to include reading and preaching the word; administering the sacraments; and calling to God on the people’s behalf. Possible clerical breaches of this commandment included ‘careless non-​residency’ and idleness.120 The duties required of lay people by the commandment included not only coming duly and staying to the end of the service; behaving religiously and uprightly; and performing works of sanctification; but also collecting alms for the poor. Lay breaches included absence from the service through neglect, obstinacy, heresy and schism, as well as irreligious and hypocritical behaviour in the worship of God.121 Authors tended to expand the scope of the Sabbath along three trajectories in particular, to a variety of different degrees. The first of these trajectories was based around the notion of preparation. Along with William Whately, the Lincolnshire clergyman Thomas Granger noted that both body and mind needed to be prepared in advance of the commencement of the Sabbath itself: the body through moderate labour and diet, the mind and heart by purging them of lust and evil affections.122 The length of the Sabbath was therefore a topic of some, if not uncertainty, then at least deliberately flexible thinking. Whately was Whately, Pithie, p. 91. Whately, Pithie, p. 95. 119 Downame, Abstract, sig. E8v. 120 Downame, Abstract, sig. F1r. 121 Downame, Abstract, sigs. E8v–​F2r. 122 Granger, Tree, pp. 13–​14. 117 118

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adamant that the duration of the Sabbath was ‘for the full space of 24 hours, beginning the day and ending it according to the usual account of other days’.123 He drew a contrast between this Christian tradition, requiring a complete seventh day, and the ‘Jewes ordinarie compulsion’ ‘for to begin at Even’. Even so, his schema for obedience included the injunction ‘on the sixt day towards the end of it, by a seasonable breaking off our labours, and betaking our selves to make all things ready for the Sabbath, and so to rest our bodies’.124 He could therefore quite justifiably be accused of wanting both to have his cake and eat it. For Richard Rogers, it was the first three commandments that dictated the manner of divine service for the first six days of the week, with the fourth dictating the manner of service on the seventh. The Sabbath was therefore a matter for Sundays, but as a whole the commandments were designed by God to ‘set down a perpetual direction for his people throughout their pilgrimage’.125 In his briefe and necessary catechisme, Richard Greenham stressed that the Sabbath required the believer ‘to sanctifie the holy Saboth of the Lord from morning to night’.126 Whether the Sabbath was something that lasted from dawn to dusk, for a full space of twenty-​four hours, or whether preparation for the Sabbath began the evening before, several days before, or indeed during the full preceding week, was therefore a topic about which there was a surprising diversity of opinion, and no overall consensus. Secondly, for Granger and others, the programme of authorised Sabbath day activities also drew heavily on the traditional tropes of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Presented very differently from the formal and systematic way in which they featured in late medieval or early modern Catholic devotional guides and manuals, various of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, such as visiting prisoners or the sick, were subsumed as part of a broader range of duties enjoined by the Fourth Commandment.127 It is worth noting, however, that while many authors placed the works of mercy under the aegis of the Fourth Commandment, Dod (amongst others) situated them (and their neglect) as an issue better dealt with by the sixth.128 Active disagreement is too strong a term, but beyond the essentials of public and private prayer there was certainly a lack Whately, Pithie, p. 90. Cf. Dod, Plaine, p. 140. Whately, Pithie, p. 89. Cf. Brinsley, Watch, p. 33. 125 Richard Rogers, Seuen treatises containing . . . the practise of Christianitie (1603), p. 311. 126 Greenham, pithie, sig. A8v. 127 E.g. Robert Horne, Points of instruction for the ignorant (1617), sig. Biiiir. Cf. Robert Bellarmine, An ample declaration of the Christian doctrine, trans. Richard Hadock (1604), pp. 243–​6. 128 See Chapter 3. 123 124

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of consensus over precisely what pattern of activities of which the Sabbath ought to consist. The Sabbath could be extended chronologically, and the range of actions required to be performed could be expanded, but thirdly, the Fourth Commandment could also be enlarged through multiplication. For John Gibson, the Sabbath was specifically about ceasing ‘from al bodilie labour and weekely travayle’, and coming ‘to Church to hear the worde of God and receive the Sacraments, and pray’.129 In his anti-​Catholic polemic More worke for a Mass-​priest, Alexander Cooke criticised Catholics for substituting the word ‘Sabbath’ for ‘holy days’, thereby cheapening the notion of the divinely instituted Sabbath.130 But other Protestant authors came perilously close to replicating Rome’s error by suggesting that the spiritual application of the Sabbath was not limited to one day in seven, but was rather a perpetual obligation. Richard Rogers was careful to point out that ‘the sabboth it selfe, though appointed by God to holie exercises more then other; yet is neither in it selfe holier then other, nor we to thinke, that we may be lesse holie on other daies’.131 The working week may have lacked the helps to devotion provided on the Sabbath, and been riven with many hindrances; yet, Rogers suggested, ‘wee should endevour to walke in the sanctification of our hearts, and innocencie of life on the other daies, as well as on that’. Others went even further, by suggesting the existence of separate and parallel Sabbaths. Osmund Lakes’ A probe theologicall spoke of an internal Sabbath, which consisted ‘as the Scripture speaketh, in mortifying or doing off the Old man, and quickening or putting on the New man: the rest being in the first, while we refraine from sinne, and sanctification in the second’.132 The work of the internal Sabbath was ‘the studie of regeneration, and of the meanes thereto’.133 The righteousness of the internal Sabbath, of course, was proper only to the elect: the reprobate could observe the external Sabbath, but naturally the same spiritual benefits would not accrue. The Protestant convert Thomas Bell described no fewer than three (in fact four) Sabbaths. The ‘legal ceremonial, and externall sabboth’ alone applied both to the elect and the reprobate, and

John Gibson, An easie entrance into the principall points of Christian religion (1579), sig. Aiir. Cf. Robert Allen, Concordances of the Holy proverbs of King Salomon and of his like sentences in Ecclesiastes (1612), ig. Bbb4v. 130 Alexander Cooke, More vvorke for a Masse-​priest (1621), p. 50. 131 Richard Rogers, Seuen treatises containing . . . the practise of Christianitie (1603), p. 213. 132 Lakes, Probe, p. 118. 133 Lakes, Probe, p. 119. 129

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consisted of ‘a certaine set time appointed in the church, for the ministerie of the worde and administration of the sacraments’.134 In fact, there were technically two legal Sabbaths:  the immediate –​the historical Sabbath, abrogated by the coming of Christ, but still followed by the Catholic Church –​and the mediate, appointed by God in the New Testament, ‘to wit, the Sunday, which is our christian sabbath’.135 The second (or third) Sabbath was spiritual, and comprised ‘ceasing from sinne’. It was therefore ‘peculiar to the godly and regenerate’, and permitted no fellowship to carnal or dissolute persons.136 This spiritual Sabbath was ‘not tied to any certain time or daies, but ought to be kept every day without anie intermission’.137 The third (or fourth) and most perfect form of Sabbath, however, was the celestial Sabbath. This was the state ‘in which wee shall rest both in body and soule, from the labours and vexations of this present mortalie’. There were imperfections in the present life, both of body and soul, which the spiritual sabbath was unable to take away. However, in the celestial Sabbath, ‘there shall be no place, to anie labours, errours, tentations, or miseries whatsoever. For the vision beatificiall will wipe away all teares from our face’.138 John Dod offered a more cautionary judgement: that ‘these men that among us urge so much, that every day must be a Sabbath: marke them, whether they rest from sin any day at all, and observe if there be anie families, so bad as theirs’.139 To conclude, Godly authors were largely in agreement about the nature, significance and duties of the Sabbath, as enjoined by the Fourth Commandment. They defended vociferously its status as a valid commandment, recognised that it was possessed of a spiritual and an external aspect, and extolled the necessity of hearing the word preached, receiving the sacraments and praying with the congregation, as well as reading scripture, singing psalms and praying at home. Almost as vigorously they attacked Sabbath breakers, amongst whom they numbered those who profaned the Sabbath with sports and games, as well as those whose attitude to the duties outlined above was carnal or lukewarm. However, there was also a surprising diversity of views about the Sabbath, relating in part to its Thomas Bell, The suruey of popery vvherein the reader may cleerely behold, not onely the originall and daily incrementes of papistrie, with an euident confutation of the same (1596), p. 110. 135 Bell, The suruey of popery, p. 112. For more on the difference between the historical and spiritual aspects of the Fourth Commandment, see Chapter 1. 136 Bell, The suruey of popery, p. 108. 137 See also below, note 131. 138 Bell, The suruey of popery, p. 109. 139 Dod, Plaine, p. 132. 134

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status within the broader religious obligations outlined by the Decalogue as a whole. How long was the Sabbath? Did it go on from dawn to dusk, for twenty-​four hours, or for longer? How many Sabbaths were there? Did it specifically enjoin the corporal and spiritual works of mercy? Did it offer temporal blessings, as well as spiritual benefits, for the regenerate? And did the Sabbath lay out guidelines for worship on one day in seven, or perpetually throughout the life of the Christian?

Puritans and the Decalogue So far, this chapter has focussed on idealised descriptions of and prescriptions for pious practice found in the pages of pastoral and theological treatises. Authors, of course, are people too, and by focussing on printed literature we are still able to canvas a wide variety of individual opinion. But how far were ‘ordinary puritans’ (if the term is not an oxymoron) influenced by what they read in the pages of Dod, Perkins, Rogers, Greenham, and the like? How far did puritan religious practice actually sieze upon the Ten Commandments, and how commonly did individuals employ some form of the ‘puritan penitential cycle’ hypothesised above? As discussed previously, the puritan readers of such works were encouraged repeatedly to search their behaviour for signs of election; for the good deeds that would inevitably proceed from a sanctified nature. These good deeds were essentially the works prescribed by the Decalogue. The godly also regularly examined their behaviour for signs of sin, in order to repent their evil actions and amend the course of their lives, and it was the Decalogue which provided the only divinely-​sanctioned mechanism for this identification and condemnation of vice. In his Two treatises of 1593, William Perkins, perhaps the epitome of mainstream conforming Puritanism, wrote that: Touching actuall sinnes, they shalbe found by examination to be innumerable as the haires of a mans head, & as the sands by the sea shore: if any will but search themselves a little by the ten commandements of the Decalogue, for all their sinful thoughts, words, and deeds against God and man.140

Subsequently, in his guide unto godliness, the vicar of Ryton and younger brother of Edmund, Francis Bunny, described the law ‘to us as to a Perkins, Tvvo treatises, p. 17. W. B. Patterson has gone so far as to suggest, in the title of a recent article, a portrait of ‘William Perkins as Apologist for the Church of England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 57.2 (2006), pp. 252–​269. However, this view of Perkins has been subjected to fundamental criticisms in Dixon, Practical Predestinarians, pp. 77–​80.

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workman his rule and square, according to which we ought to frame all our actions’.141 There is no better place to begin testing the practical application of these ideas than with the infamous early seventeenth-​century godly woodturner and diarist Nehemiah Wallington. In one of his notebooks, entitled ‘A Record of Gods Marcys’, Wallington explained the necessity to: not only acknowledg our sinnes in general, but in partickeler as David did his adultrie and murder, so must we say: I have sinned and done this evill in thy sight (Psalms 51:4) O Lord I have broke thy Sabbath I have told lies, I have bin drunken I have stoole I have mocked and scoffed at thy sarvants I have bine Idel: I have bin disobedient to thee and to my parents and my master and other govornors which thou hast set over mee and I have wasted and spoiled thy good creturs and I have bine unthankfull to thee for thy many marcies . . .142

Here, Wallington does not mention the commandments explicitly by name, but reading through his list of sins we can easily recognise Sabbath-​ breaking (Commandment Four), the telling of lies as a form of false witness (Nine), the wasting of God’s creatures as theft (Eight), mockery as violent speech (Six), disobedience in the face of authority figures (Five), ingratitude as blasphemy (Three), and perhaps also by implication not having God (One) –​six or seven out of ten seems like more than mere coincidence. Later in the same notebook, Wallington reflected that ‘I have lived in sinne all my childhood heitherto. Likwise I Knew that these my sinnes were against the expres commandment of God in Exodus 20’.143 In discussing the measures he resorted to in order to banish the sin of lust, he claimed that ‘I have offen wished myselfe blind’ as he thought upon Christ’s gloss upon the Seventh Commandment in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultrie with her alredy in his heart’.144 Wallington did not only use the commandments to reflect upon sin, but also to draw up a blueprint for godly living and sanctification. In drafting a series of articles for the reformation of his life, Wallington wrote that ‘I grive to heare Francis Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse: or, A plaine and familiar explanation of the ten commandements (1617), p. 231. 142 The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–​1654: a selection, ed. David Booy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 30. For more information and background on Wallington, see Booy’s introduction to The Notebooks, and also Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s world: a Puritan artisan in seventeenth-​century London (London: Methuen, 1985). 143 The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, p. 41. 144 The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, p. 42. 141

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and see Gods commandments broken’, and that he sought reformation of ‘all things that are disagreeable to the holy law of God’. These included avoiding bitter speech and wishing hurt, not putting trust in riches more than God, not concealing the faults of his wares, taking ‘not the lest pin nor anything else from anyone’, and carrying himself ‘as a head and governor of a family’. These were clear references to the First, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Commandments, as expounded by the godly authors of the day in numerous catechisms and spiritual and devotional manuals.145 Wallington also spoke about renewing his life in obedience to God’s ‘holy will and commandment’, and his reference to the number of his sins as ‘more in number than the sand on the seashore or the haires of mine head’ strongly recalls Perkins’ description of self-​examination by the Decalogue, quoted above.146 Wallington also reflected explicitly on the evangelical function of the law as a means of revealing sin, writing ‘oh how often have I broken the cleere and righteous laws of God wherein as in a Glasse I might see those foule and filthy spotes of my soule and never laid them to heart’.147 While Wallington’s exceptionalism has been widely noted, he does provide us with evidence that individuals took to heart the prescriptions for godly living which resounded through the pages of contemporary puritan practical divinity. Wallington recalled that he was ‘held under the bondage of the law for some yeers, and so simple and ignorant was I even like a best [i.e.beast] that I thought I could keepe the law of God and therefore I did draw out Artickles and tied myself with many penalties which I was never able to parform’.148 The same year (1620), Wallington bought John Dod’s Plaine and familiar exposition of the Ten commandments, Osmund Lakes’ A probe theologicall, and Edward Elton’s Exposition of the Ten Commandments of God, ‘all to be as helps for me to walke in the ways of God’.149 The paradox inherent within the Decalogue –​that the unregenerate were unable to keep the commandments, and damned by that failure, while the actions The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, pp. 47–​8. The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, p. 49. Booy suggests that the wording is biblical in origin. Usage of the phrase ‘the sand which is upon the sea shore’ to suggest a great number of things (occasionally paired with ‘the stars of the heaven’) can be found in Genesis 22:17, Joshua 11:4, 1 Samuel 13:5, 1 Kings 4:29, Hebrews 11:12, etc. Psalm 40:12 speaks of iniquities and Psalm 69:4 of enemies ‘more than the hairs of mine head’, but the pairing of sands and hairs does not occur in the bible. Therefore, either both Perkins and Wallington employed the unusual pairing independently, or, as seems more likely, Wallington read it in Perkins and was struck by the imagery. 147 The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, p. 212. 148 Interestingly, here Wallington casts himself in the rather Pauline role of a Pharisee in the early stages of his spiritual journey. 149 After 1629, Charles I’s Royal Proclamation prohibiting discussion of predestination can only have increased the significance of such texts, although Wallington’s own pastor Henry Roborough 145

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of the regenerate (though still imperfect) were acceptable to God, and that therefore the godly ought to strive to live in accordance with the commandments, clearly tormented Wallington, as his repeated lapses into sin caused him to despair and to continuously question his election. When he compiled thirty-​one articles for his family to observe they included not taking God’s name in vain, rising early on the Sabbath, not quarrelling, not concealing faults in wares for sale, and not lying –​again, a moral code heavily dependent upon the Ten Commandments.150 Around 1622–​3, Wallington recalled how ‘he was still bent to know more what the law of God was’, and so he set himself the task of exploring every branch of every commandment, ‘gathering places of holy scripter of the old and new Testament the chapter and verse that speaks against all kind of sinne and quote them in a book by themselves to be in a readiness that I may the better know the will of God and so to lead my life thereafter’.151 Sadly this notebook does not survive, but it is clear that, for Wallington, reading the treatments of the Decalogue by godly authors was not enough; he wanted to compile his own concordance of sin under the framework of the commandments, using examples drawn from the bible.152 John Hooper, the Edwardian bishop of Gloucester, and through his initiation of the first vestiarian controversy one of the spiritual fathers of Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism, had explained in his declaration of the Ten holy Commandments of Almighty God that within the two tables of the commandments was ‘contained the whole effect and sum of all the scripture. And whatsoever is said or written by the prophets, Christ, or the apostles, it is none other thing but the interpretation and exposition of these ten words or ten commandments’.153 The sense that the Decalogue was a comprehensive summary of God’s law made it a powerful tool in the context of puritan practical divinity. We must not presume that Wallington’s view of the commandments was wholly negative, however. In considering his worthiness to take communion, he remarked upon the fact that ‘I have respect to all was investigated by the authorities for his illegal preaching on predestination. David R. Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, The Historical Journal, 46.2 (2003), p. 264, 288. 150 The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, p. 272. 151 The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, p. 273. 152 Most authors included marginal references to relevant portions of scripture in their work but some, such as Thomas Granger, went further: every single sin forbidden and virtue commanded in his exposition of the Decalogue came with at least one scriptural citation. Granger, Tree, passim. 153 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 271. Cf. Jean Calvin’s ‘Harmony of the Pentateuch’; idem, Commentaries on the four last books of Moses: arranged in the form of a harmony, trans. Charles William Bingham (4 vols. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1855).

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commandements. There is no part of an holy life but I desire to practis it . . . preferring Gods glory above all things yea life itself ’.154 Wallington was a gloriously atypical individual in so many respects; however, he still embodied a number of more widely representative puritan traits, traces of which can be found in a broader sample of puritan life writing.155 If puritans, as Collinson memorably reminded us, were simply the hotter sort of Protestant, then it makes sense to consider Wallington merely as one of the hottest; different in degree but not nature from his godly brethren. Reflecting upon his youth, Robert Blair the minister of St Andrews recalled how, after instruction in the catechism, he would never again play games on the Sabbath. Even when the schoolmaster dismissed him with the ‘express direction, “Go not to the town, but to the fields and play” I obeyed him in going to the fields, but refused to play with my companions, as against the commandment of God’.156 In his own duties as a teacher, Blair explained that he had learned ‘it was my duty, not only to teach my scholars according to the laws and customs of the college, but also, according to the law of God’.157 Like Wallington, Blair also reflected upon Paul’s epistle to the Romans, 7:9, ‘For I was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died’. The only way to come to Christ was through realising that salvation without him was impossible; the only way to come to that realisation was by coming face to face with the enormity of sin; and the only way of knowing sin and its consequences was through the dire imprecations of the law. When Satan tempted the young Elizabeth Isham to think blasphemous thoughts against God, and to curse her father, this she ‘utterly hated for I not onely knew that by the Law of God is deserved death, but also that my fathers deserts was farr from any ill on my part’.158 Like Wallington, Isham had also The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–​1654, p. 296. On the genre of Puritan life-​writing, see Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy:  Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality’, Historical Journal, 39:1 (1996), 33–​56, and Robert Warren Daniel, ‘“Have a little book in thy Conscience, and write therein”: Writing the Puritan Conscience, 1600–​1650’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 245–​58. 156 Robert Blair, The Life of Mr Robert Blair, Minister of St Andrews, containing his Autobiography from 1593–​1636, ed. Thomas M’Crie (Edinburgh, 1848), p. 5. 157 Blair, The Life of Mr Robert Blair, p. 5. 158 Elizabeth Isham, ‘Book of Remembrance’ (Princeton University Library, Robert Taylor Collection, MS RTC01 no. 62), Online Edition: http://​web.warwick.ac.uk/​english/​perdita/​Isham/​ [accessed 17.2.2016], f.  24v. Effie Botonaki has suggested that ‘by following the dictates of the [devotional] manuals, the passive and meek woman, which the dominant seventeenth-​century ideology was striving to mould, was transformed into an authoritative confessor as well as a shrewd account keeper and negotiator’. Effie Botonaki, ‘Seventeenth-​Century Englishwomen’s Spiritual 154 155

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read John Dod’s book on the commandments –​it was something of a sensation, going through almost twenty editions in the first thirty years after its inititial publication –​but she took from it a more positive message, one of comfort, ‘being much taken with the large extention of Gods mercie and goodness to them that love him’.159 In her Book of Remembrance, Isham criticised the unthinking repetition of the commandments as a prayer (a common puritan bugbear, and a practice Elizabeth’s mother had forbade), and in communicating her desire to be reformed she promised to God, ‘I would run in the way of thy commandements desiring to serve thee better than ever’.160 Isham also used the language of the Decalogue, and of its godly expositors, when reflecting upon her sinful behaviours. ‘Yea Lord I here humbly beseech thee to pardon wherein I have broken any of thy commandment against thee or my neighbour’, she wrote, expressing sorrow for sins in thought, word and deed, and of commission and action: terms familiar in works such as Dod’s.161 In his Seven treatises, the Essex clergyman and classical puritan Richard Rogers recommended to readers that ‘everie day wee should be humbled for our sins as through due examination of our lives by the law of God we shall see them’, surely the most extreme vision of the ‘puritan penitential cycle’, and impossible for all but the most dedicated (or obsessive) gospeller.162 Rogers, however, clearly believed in practising what he preached, because several times in his diary he recounted how examining his sins and corruptions had helped to restore him from ‘unsetlednes’ or ‘hardnes of hart’. ‘It is the worcke and occupation of a christian’, he wrote, ‘to learne to understand the laws of god and to walk in his ways, and thus that should be the chiefest thing which should be looked after and from thinge to thinge practized’.163 The puritan lawyer John Manningham recalled a sermon preached at Whitehall in 1603 by the godly conformist and future Diaries: Self-​Examination, Covenanting, and Account Keeping’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 30.1 (1999), p. 3. On Isham, see also Isaac Stephens, ‘Confessional identity in Early Stuart England: the “Prayer Book Puritanism” of Elizabeth Isham’, The Journal of British Studies, 50.1 (2011), pp. 24–​47. 159 Isham, Book of Remembrance, f. 24r. 160 Isham, Book of Remembrance, ff. 4r, 25r. 161 Isham, Book of Remembrance, f. 37v. 162 Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward, ed. M. M. Knappen (Chicago, 1933), p. 7. Cf. William Perkins’ advice to ‘Once a day keepe a court in thy conscience, call thy thoughts, thy wordes, and thy deedes to their triall: let the ten commaundements passe uppon them, and thy sinnes and corruptions which thou findest to be chaffe, blow them away by repentance, so shalt thou remain pure and cleane wheate, fit for the house and Church of GOD in this world, and for his kingdome in heaven’. William Perkins, A faithfull and plaine exposition vpon the 2. chapter of Zephaniah (1609), STC2: 19708, pp. 142–​3. 163 Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward, ed. M. M. Knappen (Chicago, 1933), p. 62, 70, 78.

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bishop of Winchester, James Montagu, in which the preacher explained that the commandments were given in the second person because they were more for practice than speculation, and that God would rather have good Christians than good scholars. It was through the law, Manningham noted, that the faithful were ‘brought to Christ by knowing our sin’.164 Elsewhere in his diary Manningham observed that all the commandments were to be kept with like respect and, following a sermon by the theologian and fellow of Exeter College Thomas Holland, he recorded that ‘the whole lawe’ was ‘but one word, Love, of God and our neighbour’.165 Samuel Rogers, grandson of Richard, prayed to God for his help ‘to delight greatly in thy commandments’, while Isaac Archer, minister of Mildenhall in Suffolk, recalled how it was his father’s letters that had ‘grounded mee in practicall divinity; when by dutyes I strived to worke out salvation, and by strict observing God’s law and the Sabbath day I thought to please God, he beat mee from a resting in any thing I did, and sent mee higher than all such performances’.166 As a conforming minister, Archer had a tense and troubled relationship with his Nonconformist father, and his diary is peppered with regretful references to his breach of the Fifth Commandment, usually in the wake of some disrespectful and acrimonious exchange of letters.167 The Ten Commandments were not the only way for the godly to anatomise their misdemeanours, but they were seen as one of (if not the) best. Archer recalled hearing a ‘Mr Shelton’ preaching about repentance in 1661. One method of self-​examination described by Shelton was to reflect upon each stage of life, ‘and viewing the sinns of each, as of childhood, youth, etc’. Another was by ‘considering the severall callings, and conditions of life I had bin, and how I had behaved my selfe in them, and what sins I  had bin guilty of in each of them’. However, the best method of self-​examination was ‘to compare my life spent with the rule by which I ought to walke, and by which I must be judged, and so run over all the commandments, and see how I had broken them all’.168 Archer’s wealthy John Manningham, The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602–​3, ed. Robert Parker Sorlie (1976), pp. 227–​30. 165 Manningham, The Diary of John Manningham, p. 197. 166 Samuel Rogers, The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634–​1638, ed. Tom Webster and Kenneth Shipps (Church of England record society 11. Woodbridge, 2004), p. 98; Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–​ 1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe, ed. Matthew Storey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p. 54. It is interesting to see that Archer’s father literally beat out of him the temptation to adopt a Pharasaical approach to pious living. 167 E.g. Two East Anglian Diaries, p. 72, 82, 113. 168 Two East Anglian Diaries, p. 78. 164

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parishioner William Coe, in his own diary, examined himself for sinful behaviours in advance of receiving the sacrament on Christmas day, 1694, and itemised his sins against the law under the headings of the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately for historians, the folios relating the sins against the Seventh commandment, and most of the Sixth and Eighth, the most socially scandalous material, were at some point torn out and presumably destroyed. Still, we read that Coe had ‘wished the death of those who in their life time have been forward and troublesome to me’ in breach of the Sixth Commandment, and had also ‘used arts to deceive the buyer’ in transgression of the eighth.169 Archibald Johnston of Wariston, addressing his soul, recalled ‘God having moved the to reckon over the catalog of al thy sinnes committed since thy marriage, and paralleling thy lyfe of this bygone 7 moneths with the ten comandements and finding thyself guilty a thousandfold of them al’.170 Years later, Wariston revealed that this process, which he undertook periodically, was influenced according to ‘Dods works’; he referred to confessing ‘unto God al thy sinnes according to Dods examination . . . according to his order enumerating the sinnes of every comandement’, and ‘at every comandement thou boued thy knees and particularly humbled thyself, but chiefly thy heart melted at thos tuo querof thou was most guilty’ (again, frustratingly, he does not reveal to the modern reader which sins those were).171 On another occasion, Wariston confessed his sins, ‘first by the order of the comandements, nixt by the order of my life tyme’, so as to achieve a more thorough examination.172 Wariston was something of an evangelist for this double confession, and recorded on one occasion recommending to a woman named Anna ‘before the communion to goe through the progres of hir lyfe and Dods catologe of sinnes against the ten comandements’.173 Although the sample is limited to diarists, it is clear that a wide variety of puritans –​male and female, clerical and lay –​regularly employed the Ten Commandments to examine the extent of their sinful behaviours, in a series of iterations of what I have termed the ‘puritan penitential cycle’. Such examinations might fall daily, weekly before the Sabbath, more infrequently before the Sacrament, annually at the start of the New Year, or at other significant moments in the individual’s life. In addition, these men and women also sought to frame their actions according to the rule of Two East Anglian Diaries, pp. 208–​11. Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, 1632–​39, ed. George Morison Paul (1911), p. 19. 171 Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, p. 94. 172 Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, pp. 104–​105. 173 Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, p. 250. 169 170

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God’s law in pursuit of assurance and further sanctification. The godly clergyman, ejected minister and puritan biographer Samuel Clark commented repeatedly in his sundry lives of eminent persons in this later age upon those individuals whose employment of the Decalogue for personal and social reformation had been exemplary. Clarke noted with satisfaction that, after he himself had spent six months preaching the doctrine of the Sabbath in Alcester, a ‘lusty young woman’ who danced on Sunday in an adjoining parish was struck down ‘with a sudden and grievous Disease, whereof she died within three days’.174 The godly Kent minister Thomas Wilson was lauded for behaving as ‘a son of Thunder in preaching the Law, to awaken secure, sensles Sinners’, while the Suffolk preacher Richard Blackerby was described as conducting himself ‘always such, as if at that moment he saw God, and had Gods Law, his own Covenant with God, and the day of account just then before his eye, so that whenever the Lord should come and call him, he would have been found so doing’.175 Blackerby’s most enduring testament was his purity of life: in Clarkes words, it was ‘fitting that the World should know and remember, that there was a man that lived fifty years after conversion, doing good, and walking with God in the Eyes of the most strict Observers, without perceived voluntary actual commission of any known transgression . . . in the conscientious observance of all his Precepts’.176 Clarke described the Cornish puritan Thomas Tregoss’ ‘daily progress in the Mortification of Sin’ as being ‘very remarkable’, commenting on his frequent ‘strict examination’, and his lack of toleration ‘to any known Sin, or omission of any Duty’.177 The ejected minister Joseph Allein was labelled as a man who ‘did not go but run the ways of Gods Commandments’. In the duties of the first table, he was styled as ‘very exemplary, and near to rigour’, yet he was also ‘as exact in the duties of the second Table: A man of morals; never spotted with any unjust or uncharitable act’.178 Clarke’s account of the life of the Presbyterian, ejected minister and interregnum head of Corpus Christi College Oxford, Edmund Staunton, recalls how he ‘bought Mr Brinsley’s Watch the second part, where the sins against the Ten Commandments are set down in order’. Staunton ‘fell upon the work of self-​examination’, and after a period of self-​deceit, eventually judged himself ‘guilty, yea, very guilty of most of the

Samuel Clarke, The lives of sundry eminent persons in this later age (1683), preface, p. 9. Clarke, The lives of sundry eminent persons, pp. 20, 60. 176 Clarke, The lives of sundry eminent persons, pp. 65–​66. 177 Clarke, The lives of sundry eminent persons, pp. 120–​122. 178 Clarke, The lives of sundry eminent persons, pp. 142–​143. 174 175

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Sins there enumerated and set down’.179 John Row confessed that ‘when he was Carnal, he could have wished many of the Commandments razed out of the Bible, but now he found his heart in some measure made suitable to the law’.180 The number of such instances could be multiplied significantly, especially if broadened out from specific references to the Commandments to more general discussions of self-​examination, which we might surmise also involved the Decalogue. Still, the weight of evidence is clear. The Decalogue, and the periodic process of penitential self-​examination its expositors encouraged, were essential elements of the culture of English Puritanism, and helped to mark the godly out from their conforming Calvinist co-​religionists. Indeed, it may not be going too far to suggest that the Ten Commandments facilitated experimental Calvinism itself, and anthropocentric approaches to the doctrine of assurance, including what I have termed here ‘the puritan penitential cycle’.

Dwelling Amongst the ‘Wicked’ It is also important to note that the role of the Decalogue in structuring the moral and spiritual life of the puritan did not end with personal introspection, but spilled out into –​in fact, required –​an imperative for broader social reformation.181 Henry Bull explained that the children of God should desire to perform God’s will ‘in such perfection and willingnesse, as it is in heaven’, but at the same time they should ‘lament the contrarie, in whom so ever it be so that often their eies gush out with rivers of teares, because men keepe not thy lawes’.182 In the words of Bernard Capp, ‘the puritan ethos of godly discipline and moral reformation, reinforced by humanist values of civility, sobriety, and good order, was pitted against a rival ethos of “good fellowship” and festive traditions’.183 The priorities of Clarke, The lives of sundry eminent persons, pp. 160–​161. Clarke, The lives of sundry eminent persons, p. 117. N.B. Row was a layman. The numbering of the volume restarts several times: first after Clarke’s own biography; then when he moves from talking about divines to godly lay people. 181 For previous historical studies of this impulse, see, Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England:  The Ritual Year 1400–​1700 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996); Martin Ingram, ‘Religion, Communities and Moral Discipline in Late Sixteenth-​and Early Seventeenth-​Century England: Case Studies’, in Kaspar Von Greyerz (ed.), Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 177–​193; Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling, 1525–​1700 (London: Academic Press, 1979); David Underdown, Fire From Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London: Pimlico, 2003). 182 Henry Bull, Christian praiers and holie meditations as wel for priuate as publique exercise (1596), pp. 102–​3. 183 Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars:  Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–​1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 3. 179

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and motivation for that ethos stemmed, in large part, from the sanctions and requirements of the Ten Commandments. The periods of the Civil War and Interregnum technically fall outside the chronological boundaries of this study, but they are worth considering briefly, because they represent the apogee of puritan attempts to bring about the moral reformation of broader society.184 The early ordinances of the parliamentarian authorities are peppered with reforming legislation, such as the 1642 Ordinance concerning stage plays and the 1643 Ordinance for burning the Book of Sports, which could both be viewed as attempts to prevent the profanation of the Sabbath in line with the Fourth Commandment.185 The ‘Ordinance for the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry’, passed on 26 August 1643, cannot but have had the Second Commandment in mind when it spoke of how the removal of idolatrous images and objects was ‘well pleasing’ to God and ‘conduceable to the blessed reformation in his Worship’.186 This was reinforced by a further act, passed in May 1644, ‘to remove all offences and things illegal in the worship of God’.187 In April 1645, the sanctity of the most significant Sabbath of the year was further guaranteed by the delightfully specific ‘Ordinance to abolish a custom of scrambling for cakes on Easter Day in Twickenham Parish Church’.188 Various ordinances were passed during 1646–​9 for keeping scandalous persons from the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and for regulating Holy Days, abolishing episcopacy, and ensuring the proper maintenance of ministers.189 The year 1650, however, proved to be something of a reforming zenith, with acts aimed at reinforcing the moral and religious character of the nation in line with the Decalogue coming thick and fast. First, in April came ‘An Act for the better Observation of the Lord’s Day’ (Fourth Commandment), followed in May by an act For an overview of the history of this period, see Michael J. Braddick, God’s fury, England’s fire: a new history of the English Civil Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2008). 185 Ordinances passed on 2 September and 5 May respectively. For full details, see Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–​1660, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (London: HMSO, 1911), also available at www.british-​history.ac.uk/​no-​series/​acts-​ordinances-​interregnum [accessed 23.07.2015]. The ordinance suppressing stage plays within the city of London was passed in October 1647. 186 ‘August 1643: An Ordinance for the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry’. 187 ‘May 1644: An Ordinance for the further demolishing of Monuments of Idolatry and Superstition’. It is not clear whether the reference to illegality refers to God’s laws, or the previous statute of August 1643. 188 ‘Table of acts:  1645’ www.british-​history.ac.uk/​no-​series/​acts-​ordinances-​interregnum/​xxx-​xliii [accessed 21 July 2015]. 189 Regarding the Lord’s Supper: 14 March 1645/​6, 5 June 1646; regarding Holy Days, 8, 11 and 28 June 1647; regarding episcopacy, 9 October 1646; regarding the maintenance of preaching ministers, 8 June 1649. 184

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‘for the suppressing of the abominable and crying sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication, wherewith this Land is much defiled, and Almighty God highly displeased’ (Seventh Commandment).190 In June, Parliament passed an act ‘for the better preventing and suppressing of the detestable Sins of Prophane Swearing and Cursing’, i.e. blasphemy (Third Commandment), and in August they followed it up with ‘An Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honour of God, and destructive to humane Society’ (First Commandment).191 This act acknowledged the existence of a deliberate programme of: Ordinances and Laws for the good and furtherance of Reformation, in Doctrine and Maners, and in order to the suppressing of Prophaneness, Wickedness, Superstition and Formality, that God may be truly glorified, and all might in well-​doing be encouraged.

A century earlier, John Hooper had described the Ten Commandments as ‘so perfect and absolute a form of a politic wealth’, and during the interregnum it seems that the Decalogue truly did act as a blueprint for puritan reformers and legislators intent on transforming sinful England into a godly new Jerusalem.192 It is also clear that these national measures were enforced at a local level, as evidenced through the example of the Parliamentarian major, Justice of the Peace and mayor of Coventry Robert Beake, whose diary survives for the period of his mayorship, 1655–​6. Beake seems to have been particularly concerned with cracking down on the alehouses proliferating within the city, but Sabbath-​breaking, oath-​swearing, brawling and contention, and dishonesty and theft were also high on his list of priorities. On 9 December 1655, for example, he recorded that ‘The Lady Archer sent her man from Warwick to buy linkes [torches] to bury her sonn who died last night of the pox and could not be kept longer ‘April 1650:  An Act for the better Observation of the Lords-​Day, Days of Thanksgiving and Humiliation’; ‘May 1650:  An Act for suppressing the detestable sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication’. 191 ‘June 1650: An Act for the better preventing of prophane Swearing and Cursing’; ‘August 1650: An Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to humane Society’. 192 Hooper, ‘Declaration’, p. 316. For more on the first (civil) office of the law, see Section I, and in particular Chapter 2. Patrick Collinson has noted that whilst the English people became a people of the Bible in the later sixteenth century, in particular it was the historical and prophetical books of the Old Testament which most powerfully mirrored the experience of the new Protestant nation. See Patrick Collinson, ‘Biblical rhetoric: the English nation and national sentiment in the prophetic mode’, in Claire McEachern and Deborah Shuger (eds) Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 15–​45. 190

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than this night’. The day in question was a Sunday, and Beake was in two minds as to ‘whether her man might not be punished for breach of the Sabbath’:  he chose to consult with ‘Mr. Piddock, Mr. Bassnet and Dr. Grew’, who ‘resolved I might let him pass’.193 Two men arrested for travelling a week later were not so lucky; their fate was to be ‘putt into the stockes and a warrant to distresse’. On 10 April 1656, ‘being the Lord’s day’, Beake ‘went to the parke and observed who idly walked there’ in breach of Sabbath day observance; it appears that nobody reported Beake for his own perambulations.194 A series of Coventry residents were also arrested for swearing oaths. On 2 May 1656, ‘Goody Egerton convicted Goody Clifton for swearing an oath by God’; on 24 January John Edwards, a clothworker, had been found committing the same offense ‘by ould Perkins and Curtis’, and on 11 January John Buston was convicted by Ben Thompson for swearing two oaths.195 Beake refused to accept a sack of oats from a captain involved in a legal case, ‘least it should be a bribe’, and also arrested the wife of Mr Richard Rose for ‘the venting of counterfeit coin’.196 He adopted a more conciliatory approach to instances of brawling and contention, however. When Goody Naylor complained against Goody Wilding for calling her a witch, he ‘advised them to be friends or to bring better proofe of the words’; and when ‘Mrs Neale and Goody Tayler came before me on abrawling’ he also advised them to reconcile themselves with one another.197 Both Keith Thomas and Bernard Capp have noted that the 1650 puritan adultery act, which made adultery a capital offence, was the culmination of ‘almost a century’ of ‘sustained pressure’.198 Thomas demonstrated that few transgressors ever faced the full force of this piece of interregnum legislation and were actually sentenced for death for their sexual transgressions, ‘Diary of Robert Beake Mayor of Coventry, 1655–​1656’, ed. Levi Fox, in Dugdale Society Miscellany I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 117–​19. 194 ‘Diary of Robert Beake Mayor of Coventry, 1655–​1656’, p. 134. 195 ‘Diary of Robert Beake Mayor of Coventry, 1655–​1656’, p. 123, 125, 134. 196 ‘Diary of Robert Beake Mayor of Coventry, 1655–​1656’, p. 122, 124. 197 ‘Diary of Robert Beake Mayor of Coventry, 1655–​1656’, p. 134. This was an exercise by Beake of the moral tradition of which John Bossy would have approved:  John Bossy, Peace in the Post-​ Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 198 Capp, England’s Culture Wars, p. 6; Keith Thomas, ‘The Puritans and Adultery –​The Act of 1650 Reconsidered’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 257–​82. See also Ronald B. Bond, ‘“Dark Deeds Darkly Answered”: Thomas Becon’s Homily against Whoredom and Adultery. Its Contexts, and Its Affiliations with Three Shakespearean Plays’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 16.2 (1985), p. 197 and Wifrid R. Prest, ‘The Art of Law and the Law of God:  Sir Henry Finch (1558–​1625), in Pennington and Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries, p. 99. 193

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but in his words this was ‘an attempt, unique in English history, to put the full machinery of the state behind the enforcement of sexual morality’.199 Perhaps most notable in the earliest stages of this debate, as discussed at greater length in Chapter 2, was George Joye’s response to John Foxe’s Consultatio de non plectendis morte adulteris (1548), in which the future martyrologist argued against the making of adultery into a capital crime.200 Joye’s response argued that God’s will was as ‘immutable, constant and ferme’ as his ‘just judgementes and commaundementes’ were ‘constante, perpetuall and invariable’.201 ‘This lawe of punishement [of adultery] wyth death’, Joye argued, ‘is the lawe of nature, whereof the ten preceptes are grounded, and can not be abrogated’.202 During the reign of Edward VI, influential reformers continued to push for the death penalty for adulterers, including the ecumenically-​minded German reformer Martin Bucer, who travelled to England at Cranmer’s invitation in 1549 to take up the Regius Chair of Divinity at Cambridge. Bucer wrote at length in his De Regno Christi that adulterers ought to be punished with death, and Heinrich Bullinger expressed the same view in the tenth sermon of the second of his Decades, deeming the crime to be one ‘worthy of death and endless infamy’.203 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer himself did not push quite so far as to have the death penalty instituted for adulterers; however, the 1551 Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, his proposed replacement for the traditional framework of canon law, did stipulate harsh penalties for the crime of adultery.204 The discussion of adultery in the Reformatio began with the proposition that the crime ‘must be severely punished’, and went on to explain that: so awful is the wickedness of adultery that it is specifically attacked by one of the ten commandments, and under the ancient divine laws promulgated by Moses, it was also punished by the culprit’s being stoned to death by the people and buried under the stones, and furthermore, it was also punishable by death according to the civil law. It therefore follows that a crime so hateful to God and visited by our godly forefathers with a punishment Thomas, ‘The Puritans and Adultery’, p. 257. John Foxe, De non plectenis adulteris consultation Ioannis Foxi (1548). 201 George Joye, A contrarye (to a certayne manis) consultacion: that adulterers ought to be punyshed wyth deathe (London, 1549), sig. Aiiv. 202 Joye, A contrarye (to a certayne manis) consultacion, sig. Avr. 203 H. J. Selderhuis, Marriage and Divorce in the Thought of Martin Bucer, trans. John Vriend and Lyle D. Bierma (Kirksville MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999), p. 314; Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger:  the first and second decades, trans. H.I, ed. Thomas Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), p. 412. 204 Thomas, ‘The Puritans and Adultery’, p. 264. 199

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The punishment for adultery according to the Reformatio was not death, but it was much harsher than the penances and fines prescribed by the old ecclesiastical courts. All those convicted of adultery were to be sentenced to perpetual banishment or life imprisonment. In addition, ministers were to have all of their goods and property confiscated and distributed to their wives and children or to the poor of the parish; laymen were to restore their wives’ dowries and give them half of their own goods; and wives were to be to be deprived of their dowries ‘and of all benefits which might accrue to them from the property of their husbands, either under any law of our realm, or by custom, contract, or covenant’.206 The Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum was but one of many casualties brought about by the premature death of Edward VI and the accession to the throne of England of his Catholic half-​sister Mary. However, Cranmer’s vision of a reformed canon law resurfaced almost twenty years later in Elizabethan England, this time the result of an unlikely partnership between the martyrologist John Foxe, the author and parliamentarian Thomas Norton, and (perhaps) Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, William Cecil.207 The attempt by Norton to put the Reformatio before the 1571 ­parliament came at a critical time in the development of Elizabethan ­puritanism, coming at the close of more than half a decade of wrangling over the issue of conformity in the wearing of prescribed clerical vestments, and pre-​empting by a year John Field and Thomas Wilcox’s Admonition to Parliament and View of popish abuses yet remaining in the English Church, published together in 1572. The Reformatio was no Presbyterian manifesto, enshrining as it would have done in statute an expansive view of episcopal authority. However, it was an attempt to shear the last remnants of pre-​ reformation popery from the Church of England, and to finally establish a reformed discipline, one of the three marks of a True Church (alongside preaching of the word of God and proper administration of the sacraments). Moving beyond adultery, work by Margaret Aston on iconoclasm and Kenneth Parker on Sabbatarianism has confirmed beyond doubt that

Tudor Church Reform: The Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, ed. Gerald Bray (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), p. 265. 206 Tudor Church Reform, p. 267. 207 For a discussion of the Elizabethan revival of the Reformatio and Cecil’s possible involvement, see Thomas S. Freeman, ‘“The Reformation of the Church in this Parliament”: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571’, Parliamentary History, 16.2 (1997), pp. 131–​47. 205

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concerns about idolatry and the proper recognition and observance of the Sabbath ranked amongst two of the most significant issues of concern amongst godly Protestants throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.208 Likewise, the Reformatio contained strident denunciations of breaches of these and other precepts. Chapter 4 of the proposed framework, ‘Of Blasphemy’, explained that ‘of all the sins which exist, none is more horrible and there is none at which our Lord God is more greatly angered, or which is burdened with greater reproach, or into which the sharp weapon of revenge more quickly plunges, than the crime of blapshemy’.209 It also condemned and outlined punishments for ‘idolatry and other like crimes’, perjury, ‘swearing rashly’, calumny, malice, forgery, defamation, and a range of other offences.210 As Freeman has explained, in the fissile politics of the early 1570s and lacking a broad base of support on either the conformist or puritan side the Elizabethan attempt to resurrect Cranmer’s Edwardian reform of canon law quickly sank without a trace, especially once Elizabeth herself became aware of the proposals.211 Whilst the most radically-​minded godly activists were pushed towards Presbyterianism by the refusal of the queen and the institutional Church of England to embrace further reform, the majority of puritans focussed inwards, on the reformation of their own selves, families, households and communities. Indeed, it may even have been the case that the increasing cultural internalisation of the Ten Commandments by the godly was an indirect response to their failure to institute reformed discipline on an institutional level.212 The circumstances of parliamentary rule during the interregnum were, of course, unique; the debate between Joye and Foxe was just that:  a debate; and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum was only ever a failed blueprint for reform, both during the reign of Edward VI and that of Elizabeth I. However, one final example suggests that a godly reformation based around the Ten Commandments could also be enacted on a much more modest scale. In a wonderfully perceptive essay on ‘Magistracy and Ministry’ in The Religion of Protestants, Patrick Collinson described a legal Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts. Volume I: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Kenneth Parker, The English Sabbath: A study of doctrine and discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also the sections on the Second and Fourth Commandments in Chapter 1 and 5, respectively. 209 Tudor Church Reform, p. 225. 210 Tudor Church Reform, p. 233, 549, 551, 557, 559, 591, 653. 211 Freeman, ‘“The Reformation of the Church in this Parliament”’, pp. 143–​4. 212 I would like to thank Peter Marshall for this insightful observation. 208

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code drawn up in 1578 by local justices of the peace and displayed in the two parish churches of Bury St Edmunds. Collinson noted that the code dealt with ‘papistry, absence from church, disturbance of prayers and sermons, railing at magistrates and preachers, blasphemy, witchcraft, gaming, usury, and sexual offences’.213 The high or low point, depending on your perspective, was identified by Collinson as the punishment for fornication: to be tied to a post on Sunday day and night, and then whipped on Monday thirty times until the blood flowed. The document is held as part of the Lansdowne collection of manuscripts in the British Library, and the original makes for interesting reading.214 There are eighteen regulations in all, which (in summary) punished the following crimes: 1. Possession of ‘anie monument of idolatrie or superstition’. 2. Being ‘knowne or voiced commonlie to be a papiste’ or heretic. 3. Saying or hearing mass, or attending conventicles ‘to the strenthenning of him self in poperie or anie other Anthchristiane or corrupt Religion’. 4. Refusing to take part in church services, sermons, or Holy Communion. 5. Being ‘a blasphemer or common swearer’. 6. Being ‘a witche, an Inchaunter, or Sowthe sayer’. 7. Being ‘publicquclie voyced to be a witche, inchaunter or Sowthe sayer’. 8. Disturbing the congregation ‘with noyse’ during services. 9. Being ‘absent . . . from the Church on the Sabaote daie’ or arriving late/​leaving early. 10. Visiting the alehouse or being ‘otherwise evill occupied or ydle’ during service time. 11. Selling goods from a shop ‘in the tyme of common prayer or of the sermon’.215 12. Exercising any pastime forbidden by law, ‘and speciallie on the Sabaoth’.216 13. Being ‘a rayler depreaver or contemner of the magistrate or preachers’. Patrick Collinson, ‘Magistracy and Ministry’, in Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–​1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 158–​9. 214 British Library Lansdowne MS 27/​70 –​Bury St Edmund’s Penal Code, 1578. 215 Cf. the ordinances made for Sabbath day observation at Portsmouth in 1551 and at Manchester in 1616: The Urban Experience: A Sourcebook: English, Scottish and Welsh Towns, 1450–​1700, ed. R. C. Richardson and T. B. James (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 135, 142. 216 Cf. regulations made for worship in Northampton in 1571: The Urban Experience: A Sourcebook, pp. 137–​8. 213

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Being ‘a scoulder, a brawler or contentious person’. Being a ‘fornicator’ or ‘adultrer’. Being a ‘comon drunkard or rybald’. Keeping ‘an howse of dysinge or cardinge or anie unlawfull gaminge’. Being a ‘userer’, oppressor of the brethren, or a slanderer.

Looking down this list, it is striking not only how many of these regulations recall the Ten Commandments, but also that they do so in what is essentially the correct order. Regulations 1–​4 deal with different aspects of the Second Commandment against idolatry, with a strong anti-​ Catholic constituent. Regulations 5–​7 dovetail quite neatly with the Third Commandment against blasphemy, which typically included imprecations against witchcraft and sorcery. Regulations 8–​12 all pick up on proper observance of the Sabbath (Fourth Commandment), while regulation 13 enjoins respect for the authority of the magistrates and clergy, in line with the Fifth. Regulation 14 maps on to the Sixth Commandment, highlighting violent words and actions, and regulations 15–​17 can be seen as prohibiting different branches of carnal excess, in line with the Seventh Commandment. Regulation 18 encompasses both the Eighth and Ninth Commandments, through references to usury (theft) and slander (false witness). The first and last commandments are admittedly absent –​not because to have God and to avoid concupiscence were not important, but in all likelihood because as practical laws they would have been impossible to police. Otherwise, it seems quite plausible that these justices sat down, perhaps with one or more local ministers, and literally worked their way through the Decalogue in order to enforce an appropriately godly reformation upon the willing (and not so willing) inhabitants of Bury.217 And of course it is not only the crimes themselves which are telling but also, as Collinson implied, the harshness of the punishments to be meted out to flaunters and condemners of God’s moral law.218

For context on the Reformation in Bury, see John Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics: The Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–​1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), especially Chapter 4. 218 For further case studies of civic reformation, see Craig, Reformation, politics and polemics; Patrick Collinson and John Craig, The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–​1640 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave MacMillan, 1998); Barbara Coulton, ‘The Establishment of Protestantism in a Provincial Town: A Study of Shrewsbury in the Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27.2 (1996), pp. 307–​335; Richard Cust, ‘Anti-​Puritanism and urban Politics: Charles I and Great Yarmouth’, The Historical Journal, 35.1 (1992), pp.  1–​26. On the question of Puritanism and social control, see Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and piety in and English village and the critique in Spufford, ‘Puritanism and Social Control?’. 217

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The Ninth Commandment Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against thy Neighbour. Exodus 20:16

The Ninth Commandment encapsulated most directly the tension inherent within the third office of the law, between the desire to live a Christian life by seeking the society of other godly individuals and the obligation to prosecute obedience to divine precepts more widely throughout society.219 As John Brinsley explained, the significance of the Ninth Commandment was in ‘inioyning us to seeke all means to maintaine our own good name and our neighbours’.220 Again, however, the injunction embodied something of a paradox. To maintain your own good name might, understandably, be thought to involve avoiding the company of the wicked. However, the commandment also required not only that godliness in neighbours be praised, but also that wickedness be reproved, implying that contact with the less desirable elements of society was still a necessity. The model in this respect was perhaps the godly yet fiery Hebraist Hugh Broughton, who reputedly reproved a rowdy neighbour while staying at an inn, bursting into the offender’s room and demanding of him, ‘who art thou . . . wretch, who darest thus to blaspheme, and profane the glorious Name of the great God?’221 In other words, the godly were able to reconcile their desire only to associate with other members of the godly and the obligation inherent in the commandments to ‘love thy neighbour’, by interpreting the meaning of ‘love’ in terms of chastisement, edification and improvement. For Brinsley, then, the Ninth Commandment required three categorically discrete practices. The first was that individuals strive to maintain their own good name; first and foremost, ‘by living religiously, [and] walking in al the commandements of God without reproofe’.222 Secondly, God was also glorified through the preservation of ‘our Christian neighbours good name’. Brinsley’s terminology is ambiguous, but in speaking of ‘defending their credit’, and ‘covering their faults so much as we may without sin’, it is possible that his definition of ‘Christian neighbour’ was  approaching As Derek Wilson has noted, ‘it was a duty of every Christian preacher, and indeed of every Christian, not only to wrestle against his own sins, but to point out the sins of others –​to the unredeemed, so that he could repent and be saved, and to the Christian brother, so that he might progress along the path of holiness’. Derek Wilson, The People and the Book (Tiptree: Anchor Press, 1976), p. 155. 220 Brinsley, Watch, p. 69. 221 Clarke, The lives of sundry eminent persons, p. 7. Italics present in original. 222 Brinsley, Watch, p. 70. 219

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synonymity with ‘godly neighbour’.223 Thirdly and finally, individuals were required to abhor a series of contrary vices, such as envy, suspicion, boasting, betrayal, and so forth.224 Peter Barker took a different approach, explaining how through the Third and Ninth Commandments the law ‘hath made for [the tongue both] . . . a bitte and a bridle, by setting downe a double restraint’ to preserve the majesty of God and the dignity of neighbours.225 The commandment therefore guarded against all forms of malice and dishonesty, by speech and silence, publically and privately.226 The public ‘giver in of false evidence’ was named explicitly by the commandment, ‘because he cuts the throate of all goode proceedings, and is the beginner and first cause of turning justice topsie turvie’; however, false reports in private speech condemned anyone ‘if his tongue like the clacket of a Mill will still be wagging, if he doth what he can to grind to powder the good name of his neighbours’.227 Edmund Bunny also regarded the Ninth Commandment as predominantly a way of regulating the tongue, although he paired it with the Eighth Commandment: together, both dealt with dishonesty –​one in terms of deeds, the other in terms of words.228 Bunny clarified that the definition of ‘neighbour’ employed by the commandment was the broadest –​it was important not to bear false witness against any man, even a heretic, heathen or Jew. Listening to gossip was also a grave breach of the commandment, as was self-​deception: the Roman Church therefore broke this precept by calling itself (whilst not actually being) ‘catholic’.229 Osmund Lakes explained that ‘the end of this Law, is the wel-​governing of the tongue . . . the bridling of that little, but yet unrulie, peece of flesh, which lieth and wavereth within the teeth’.230 He went on to expound two aspects of the commandment pertaining to man’s ‘estate, either Civill or Christian’. In civil fellowship with man ‘it is meet that he hold truth toward him’, either for praise or ‘for the rebuking or punishing of his faults’.231 In Christian fellowship, ‘as he is in communion of brotherhood Brinsley, Watch, pp. 71–​2. Brinsley, Watch, pp. 73–​6. 225 Barker, Painefull, p. 292. 226 It was possible to breach the commandment silently by failing to defend the accused who were known to be innocent, or by malicious gesture. Barker, Painefull, p. 302. 227 Barker, Painefull, pp. 292, 298–​9. 228 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p.  212. On contemporary views of ‘sins of the tongue’, see also David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-​Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 2010), pp. 2–​16. 229 Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p. 218–​21. 230 Lakes, Probe, p. 315. 231 Lakes, Probe, p. 316. 223 224

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with him in Christ’, it was man’s duty to glorify God through his example and to stop the wicked speaking ill of him.232 George Estey placed the Ninth Commandment before the eighth in terms of importance, because good name was to be preferred above worldly goods, but explained that the Eighth Commandment came first in the Decalogue because some goods were necessary for life.233 Thomas Granger described the occasion of the Ninth Commandment as ‘our seditious nature’, and explained that censure was forbidden unless required by the ministry of the Gospel, the judgement of a magistrate, or the admonition of a friend.234 In breaching this commandment, furthermore, man became like the devil in working secretly, using soft words of deceit, making malicious accusations, and in sparing none while quietly labouring for his own advantage.235 It must be said that, generally speaking, commentators on the Ten Commandments often began to run out of steam towards the end of the list, although they usually managed to end with a final flourish in expositions of the tenth. The ninth, therefore, commonly received concise treatment in comparison with its brothers.236 John Carpenter, whose catechetical contemplations for children were brief throughout, simply explained that ‘thou art therein forbidden al lying, perjuries, back bitings, contumelies, brawlings, contentions, and flatteries’ and, conversely, ‘that thou report well of thy neighbour, and that thou testifie, and speake the truth of him in all things’.237 Some authors, however, brought more nuance to the proper understanding of this somewhat neglected commandment. William Perkins clarified that it was not only dishonest speech which lay in breach of the precept, but any attempt to mislead, for example through ‘a relation of the bare words only, and not of the sense and meaning’.238 In a legal context, it not only bound witnesses from committing perjury but also judges from pronouncing ‘unjust sentence’. Even jesting and wit were condemned, for while ‘Aristotle the Philosopher maketh [it] a vertue’, it was ‘by Paul the Apostle accounted a vice’.239 The tongue was ‘like Lakes, Probe, p. 317. George Estey, A most sweete and comfortable exposition, vpon the tenne commaundements (1602), sig. S1v. Cf. Babington, Fruitful, p. 438. 234 Granger, Tree, pp. 62–​3. Cf. Perkins, Chaine, p. 96. 235 Granger, Tree, p. 64. 236 For Example, George Chapelin spent eight pages discussing Seventh Commandment, eight on the Eighth Commandment, and just five on the ninth. George Chapelin, A familiar and Christian instruction (1582). 237 John Carpenter, Contemplations for the institution of children in the Christian religion (1601), sig. E2v. 238 Perkins, Chaine, p. 96. 239 Perkins, Chaine, p. 97. 232

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a sharpe rasor’, and quips might be entertaining to some but could be deeply wounding to others. Still, ‘salt and tart speeches’ in scripture such as Elijah’s mocking of the priests of Baal were acceptable because they were not merely spoken to please others, but were ‘sharply denounced against Gods enemies to his glorie’.240 Gervase Babington noted that it was also lawful to dissemble in warfare.241 The affirmative part of the commandment as described by Perkins and a handful of other authors was particularly interesting in two respects. Firstly, and this was common to all expositors of the Decalogue, it required a generally positive, friendly, supportive and optimistic frame of mind when it came to community relations. Christians were encouraged to rejoice in the credit and good estimation of their neighbours, and to willingly acknowledge their goodness. They were also compelled ‘to interpret a doutfull evill, to the better part’. For example, in the book of Genesis, Jacob was reprimanded for having been so quick to see Joseph’s torn and bloodied coat as evidence of his death, and Mary’s husband Joseph was criticised for having jumped to erroneous (if understandable) conclusions about his wife’s sudden unexplained pregnancy following the Annunciation.242 This was the early modern Calvinist equivalent of the modern motivational meme regarding the power of positive thinking.243 As hinted previously, however, there was a darker, more self-​destructive aspect to the exposition of the Ninth Commandment, which may in part have helped to encourage the popular stereotype of puritans as hypocrites, presenting a godly public face in order to conceal private sinfulness. As Perkins explained, the Ninth Commandment enjoined the faithful ‘to keepe secret the offence of our neighbour, expect it must of necessitie be revealed’.244 This was not about becoming ‘partakers of other mens sins’ –​rather, its concern was to conceal neighbourly imperfections so as not to provoke the individuals concerned to greater offence, while in the meantime admonishing them privately to make amends.245 The logic of this was not only practical but scriptural; however, it is easy to see how the godly’s efforts to conceal one another’s Cf. 1 Kings 18:27; ‘And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked’. 241 Babington, Fruitful, p. 467. 242 Genesis 37:31–​3; Matthew 1:19. 243 As Stephen Denison summarised it: think the best of others and judge them charitably. Denison, A compendious catechisme, p. 43. 244 Perkins, Chaine, p. 97. 245 William Dyke also wrote that the Ninth Commandment fobade ‘to speake of secret faults’, but rather required men ‘to conceale faults’. Dyke, Knowledge, p. 51. 240

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faults from public view might have helped to provoke popular perceptions and accusations of hypocrisy and carnal living.

Conclusions In the eyes of most commentators, the third office of the law was marked out from the first and second by the fact that it applied solely to the regenerate. The unregenerate, condemned to everlasting damnation by the second office, had no need of a guide to godly living; their fate was not to grow in sanctity as they drew closer to death, but to finish their lives even more steeped in sin than they had been when they were born. It is therefore not surprising that the self-​confessed godly had a special affinity with the ‘rule and square, according to which we ought to frame all our actions’.246 What is more surprising is the fact that this special affinity between puritans and the Decalogue has been remarked upon so infrequently by reformation historians. This chapter has sought to demonstrate that understanding the relationship between the godly and the Ten Commandments significantly advances our understanding of Puritanism itself, and also gives us an insight into the development of the hostile contemporary caricature of the stereotypical puritan. The care with which puritans sought to observe God’s law, in order both to demonstrate to others and prove to themselves their elect and increasingly sanctified state, opened them up to the charge of ‘legalism’, both from mainstream Protestants, and perhaps especially from the increasingly radical and extremist antinomian fringe.247 In reality, puritan observation of the Decalogue was far from mere legalism, in that the godly were deeply concerned not only with outward but also with wholehearted inward compliance with God’s law. Indeed, they themselves frequently characterised Catholics as Pharisees for what they perceived as an over-​emphasis on the external ritual elements of religion, elements they saw as devoid of a lively and sincere inner spiritual dimension. Still, the charge of Phariseeism as levelled against puritans had in it a grain of credibility as the godly strove to ‘carry the Law ingraven in the fleshy tables of our hearts’.248 It was not the third office of the law alone –​the drive to live as perfectly as possible in accordance with the precepts of God’s will –​which Bunny, A guide vnto godlinesse, p. 231. As discussed in the previous chapter and anatomised by David Como for the early seventeenth century. David Como, Blown by the Spirit (Stanford Calif.: Stanford UP, 2004). 248 Granger, Tree, sig. A6v. 246 247

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characterised puritan pious practice. Just as distinctive was their continuing employment of the law’s second office –​as a mirror for the identification of sin and for engendering repentance –​on a recurring basis and especially at key moments. Advice may have differed as to how frequently to conduct such spiritual self-​examination –​daily, weekly, before the sacrament, annually, or less often –​but this deliberate re-​creation of the emotional experience of evangelical conversion amounted to a new ‘puritan penitential cycle’: a kind of post-​reformation reimagining of the late-​medieval sacrament of penance. Confession in this instance was not to a priest, but to oneself, and to God. Nevertheless, the puritan penitential cycle may, for the most conscious-​stricken, have come to fill the spiritual and emotional void left by the abandonment of sacramental penance and absolution in the earliest stages of the reformation. Of all the commandments of the law, it was probably with the fourth that puritans had the closest relationship, detailing as it did the obligations of Christians in the formal observance of religious worship. The godly zealously enforced proper observation of the Sabbath, and were quick to condemn and punish in turn those whose activities profaned the Lord’s Day, following the example from scripture of the ruthless execution of the Israelite stick-​gatherer in Numbers 15. All of the godly saw proper observation of the Sabbath as an essential obligation, whose duties included participation in public worship and a range of appropriate domestic devotional activities; alone, with the family, or with wider gatherings of fellow Christian brethren. Still, there remained some variation of opinion on the precise nature of the activities enjoined; in how the length of the Sabbath was defined; and even in terms of how many ‘Sabbaths’ God had actually instituted. Examining prescriptive literature can only get us so close to a sense of how far such exhortations were followed in practice; however, a detailed exploration of a range of surviving puritan life-​writing suggests that godly readers took godly authors at their word, and employed their works as guides to help them live their lives in accordance with God’s will, as well as employing their techniques periodically for self-​examination for sin, most often by the Decalogue as well as by other means. In this way, the puritan penitential cycle presents itself not as a hypothetical possibility but as a demonstrable reality in the lives of a range of godly people, male and female, clerical and lay. The Decalogue also seems to have informed puritan attempts not only at personal reformation of life, but also helped to give shape to the broader social (and political) agenda of a godly reformation of manners. In godly communities, as well as during the unique circumstances

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of Parliamentarian rule during the interregnum, the Decalogue might provide not only the content for a detailed programme of reform, but also the imperative for godly individuals to take an active role in improving the moral fibre of the commonweal. The nature of this imperative is neatly demonstrated by expositions of the Ninth Commandment, which required that neighbours be subjected to the reforming efforts of the elect, whether they wanted to be or not. However, the Ninth Commandment also helps us to understand some of the tensions that existed between the desire to reform society, and the equally powerful impulse to withdraw from the company of the wicked and associate solely with other members of the godly fraternity. Injunctions drawn from the commandment to conceal sins from public view may also have helped to contribute to the popular image of puritans as godly hypocrites, preaching perfection whilst privately practising perfidy.

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The ‘Ungodly’

I answere againe, that it is not sufficient to say all these without booke, unlesse ye can understand the meaning of the words, and bee able to make a right use of the Commandements . . . by applying them inwardly to your hearts and consciences, and outwardly to your lives & conversations. This is the very point in which ye faile.

William Perkins, The foundation of Christian religion gathered into sixe principles (1591)

Introduction As described in the introduction to this section, the third office of the law as a blueprint for godly living and sanctification applied solely to the regenerate. However, mainstream Calvinist orthodoxy held that in this world at least it was impossible to be certain which individuals were predestined for election and which for reprobation. In any event, the first office of the law still demanded an outward compliance to the Decalogue from both the saved and the damned; at the very least, a convincing external obedience to the precepts of the divine will. With that in mind, the Ten Commandments formed a central plank in the fundamental religious education of the laity of reformation England.1 Perhaps the most obvious example of this pedagogical programme, and the one which has received the most scholarly attention hitherto, is the practice of catechesis. The Decalogue formed one of the four principal elements of most post-​ reformation English catechisms, alongside the Lord’s Prayer, the articles The importance of the commandments in religious education was not limited to England, or even to Protestant nations, but rather was universal throughout the Christian world. The Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta described seeing, ‘in Peru, a confession of sinnes brought by an Indian, written . . . with pictures and characters, painting every one of the tenne Commandementes, after a certaine manner, where there were certaine markes like ciphers, which were the sinnes hee had committed against the Commaundements.’ José de Acosta, The naturall and morall historie of the East and West Indies, E.G. (trans.) (1604), p. 448.

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of the Creed, and a discussion of the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. Although this chapter (and this book as a whole) draws heavily upon catechetical discussions of the commandments alongside a range of other material, it is not my intention here to replicate the work of historians such as Ian Green by discussing catechesis at length.2 Rather, I would like to flesh out some of the other ways through which the commandments encroached into the religious lives of the laity; in the liturgy itself, but also in more popular forms, such as music and visual culture.3 That cautious invocation of the notion of the ‘popular’ invites a brief discussion of the challenges and opportunities of trying to access, recreate and understand popular religion and popular belief in post-​­reformation England. It is these individuals who constitute the ‘ungodly’ of the chapter title –​not religious deviants or extremists but rather the broadly conformist majority, lacking in the zeal of their godly co-​religionists.4 Understanding the impact of religious change upon the faith and identity of these people has, in recent decades, become a ‘holy grail’ of reformation studies; although the final object will perhaps remain forever unattainable, we learn much about both ourselves and our quarry as we strive to inch ever closer to it. The fact remains that it is difficult enough to provide an objective account of religious belief as it exists today in ourselves and others –​its complexity, its nuance, its relationship with social, cultural and political practices and ideologies –​to make peering into the heads of men and women who lived and died some five centuries ago in a completely different intellectual, cultural and religious milieu an even more daunting proposition. We are rather like palaeontologists trying to recover and reconstruct the skeleton of an enormous dinosaur, without knowing the size or appearance of the beast we are trying to recreate. We may spend See, for example Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC, Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–​1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Ian Green, ‘“For Children in Yeeres and Children in Understanding”: The Emergence of the English Catechism under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37.3 (1986), pp. 397–​425; Ian Green, ‘The Dissemination of the Decalogue in English and Lay Responses to its Promotion in Early Modern English Protestantism’, in Dominik Markl (ed.), The Decalogue and its Cultural Influence (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), pp. 171–​89. 3 For a discussion of the role of the Ten Commandments in the Protestant household, see Jonathan Willis, ‘The Decalogue, Patriarchy, and Domestic Religious Education in Reformation England’, in John Doran and Charlotte Methuen (eds), The Church and the Household (Studies in Church History vol. 50. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), pp. 199–​209. 4 The objects of study here are the individuals described in positive terms by Judith Maltby as ‘Prayer-​ Book Protestants’, and more negatively by Christopher Haigh as ‘parish Anglicans’. See Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.  16; Christopher Haigh, ‘The Church of England, Catholics and the People’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (1984), pp. 195–​220. 2

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years delicately chipping away at the accumulated substrata of the past before we finally and triumphantly uncover a tiny fragment of something; but that, in hindsight, is the easy part. It is far more challenging to work out where that fragment fits in respect of the larger whole, and what its original significance may have been. Extended metaphors aside, this chapter will present evidence of several important fragments –​cultural artefacts through which the commandments seem to have played a prominent part in the religious experience of the English laity –​with the aim of furthering our understanding of the development of popular Protestantism during the period of the reformation. However, we may never know precisely what people thought or how they felt when they recited the Decalogue as part of a congregation, sang or heard a musical arrangement of the Ten Commandments, saw God’s own words written up on the walls of their parish church, or even gazed upon them illustrated in striking visual form.

Liturgy and Music Our starting point for considering the rapid ascendency of the Decalogue to a central role within public worship is the early English reformation. As John Bossy and others have noted, from the late-​fourteenth century onwards the commandments came to assume a much more prominent role throughout Christendom, in confessors’ manuals and elsewhere.5 However, it was the reformation movement which began in Germany and spread swiftly throughout Europe which really seized upon the commandments as a text of prime, even preeminent, importance. In 1526, Cardinal Wolsey’s proceedings against the German heretic Hans Reusell noted that amongst his possessions were a treatise on the Lord’s Prayer, the Articles of the Faith and the Ten Commandments composed by Luther in German, alongside a copy of De Libertate Christianitatis, and German translations of the Pentateuch and New Testament.6 From the earliest days of the evangelical movement in England, in other words, texts and treatises on the Ten Commandments captured the attention of the authorities, especially when found alongside other works deemed heretical. Two See, for example, John Bossy:  ‘Moral arithmetic:  Seven Sins into Ten Commandments’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 214–​34; Robert James Bast, Honor your fathers: catechisms and the emergence of a patriarchal ideology in Germany, c. 1400–​1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Lesley Smith, The Ten Commandments: interpreting the Bible in the medieval world (Leiden: Brill 2014). 6 ‘Wolsey’s Proceedings Against Heretics’ (8 February 1526), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII Volume 4, n. 1962. 5

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years later on 7 March 1528 another evangelical, the clerk of the London church of St Antony, was found by the authorities to be in possession of a book on the Ten Commandments, as well as the Gospel of Matthew in English.7 The Witham tailor Christopher Ravyn, previously convicted of heresy and forced to abjure his beliefs before Bishop Fitzjames, was also reported to have ‘once or twice a year, for the last four years’ gone to the houses of evangelical sympathisers and taught them ‘the commandments’. Clearly, in the early reformation period, to possess and transmit vernacular expositions of the Decalogue were behaviours strongly linked with evangelical heretics and their networks. This link was if anything confirmed, when on 1 April 1534 William Marshall wrote to tell Thomas Cromwell that Erasmus had just completed a new work on the Creed and the Ten Commandments, dedicated to Anne Boleyn’s father, Thomas, earl of Wiltshire. Marshall noted that he would have the text from the printers ‘as soon as God sends me money’, and would send two bound copies to Cromwell. ‘I hope you like the translation’, he added, ‘it cost me labour and money’.8 The following year, the prior of Haversfordwest William Barlow, in whose appointment Anne Boleyn herself had had a hand, wrote to Cromwell complaining about the abuse he had received at the hands of ‘Antichrist and his confederate adherents’ in attempting ‘sincerely to preach the Gospel of Christ’. Antichrist was personified in this particular instance by the aged and ailing Bishop of St David’s Richard Rawlins, whose agents confiscated from Barlow ‘an English Testament, the exposition of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth chapters of Matthew, the Ten Commandments, and the Epistle of St John, with clamorous exclamations against heretics –​as if to have the Testament in English were horrible heresy’.9 Barlow had his revenge, however, for in 1536 he was created Bishop, first of St Asaph, and then as Rawlins’ successor at St David’s.10 Given the Decalogue’s significance in these early evangelical networks, in stashes of illicit vernacular printed texts, and in correspondence with individuals at the highest levels of secular and ecclesiastical government, it is unsurprising that the Ten Commandments burst prominently on to the ‘Heretics’ (7 March 1528), Letters and Papers Henry VIII Volume 4, n. 4029. ‘William Marshall to Cromwell’ (1 April 1534), Letters and Papers Henry VIII Volume 7, n. 422. 9 ‘Wm. Barlow, Prior of Haversfordwest, to Cromwell’, Letters and Papers Henry VIII Volume 9, n. 1091. 10 Glanmor Williams, ‘Barlow, William (d. 1568)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2012 [www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​1442, accessed 4 Aug  2015]; J.  P. D.  Cooper, ‘Rawlins, Richard (c.1460–​1536)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​23186, accessed 4 Aug 2015]. 7 8

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public stage in 1536 with Anne Boleyn now queen, Thomas Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury and Thomas Cromwell vicegerent in spirituals. The Ten Articles of that year described how ‘the most Holy Word and commandments of God should most sincerely be believed, and most reverently be observed and kept of all our subjects’, and that ‘after we be justified we must also have good works of charity and obedience towards God, in the observing and fulfilling outwardly of his laws and commandments’.11 The Injunctions of 1536 also spoke of the duty of the clergy to ‘exhort as well to the keeping of God’s commandments and fulfilling of his works of charity’, in preference to the performance of works of supererogation. Article five went beyond these rather generalist exhortations to require fathers, mothers, masters and ‘governors of youth’ to teach their children and servants ‘their Paternoster, the Articles of our Faith, and the Ten Commandments in their mother tongue’, and this domestic religious education was to be reinforced by the minister in the context of public worship.12 Curates were required ‘in their sermons deliberately and plainly [to] recite oft the said Paternoster, the Articles of our Faith and the Ten Commandments, one clause or Article’ per day; they were also required to ‘deliver the same in writing, or show where printed books containing the same are to be sold’. Article four of the second Henrician Injunctions of 1538 modified these requirements slightly. Every Sunday and holy day ministers were required to recite to their parishioners ‘one particle or sentence of the Paternoster or Creed’, and to expound upon the same, ‘and that done’ to ‘declare unto them the Ten Commandments, one by one, every Sunday and holy day’ till they be likewise perfect in the same. For every complete cycle of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, congregations therefore had the precepts of the Decalogue read out to them many times over, suggesting that the commandments had a special pre-​eminence even amongst this exalted company.13 This situation held sway until the Edwardian Injunctions of 1547, of which article four stated that on every holy day on which no sermon was preached, the minister was required ‘immediately after the Gospel openly and plainly’ to recite ‘in the pulpit, the Paternoster, the Credo and the Ten Commandments in English’.14 It was on this same trio of texts that parishioners were to be examined during their Lenten confessions. Memorably, Bishop Hooper’s 1551 visitation of the clergy of Gloucester See the relevant portions of the Ten Articles and Henrician injunctions of 1536, in Documents of the English Reformation, ed. Gerald Bray (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1994), pp. 163, 170–​2. 12 See Willis, ‘The Decalogue, Patriarchy, and Domestic Religious Education ‘, pp. 199–​209. 13 1538 Injunctions, Documents of the English Reformation, pp. 179–​83. 14 1547 Injunctions, Documents of the English Reformation, pp. 247–​57. 11

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diocese discovered that around half of the 311 priests examined were unable to repeat the Ten Commandments, and that ten per cent were unable to state where in scripture they could be found.15 However, the Forty-​Two Articles of 1552 confirmed that the Decalogue was to be taught without ‘arrogance and iniquity’, and the Elizabethan Injunctions of 1559 cemented the place of the commandments, alongside the Paternoster and Creed, in public worship, formal catechesis, and domestic religious instruction.16 The most striking incursion made by the Decalogue into the public worship of the Church of England, however, was surely its inclusion in the liturgy for Holy Communion itself. The liturgy for the service ‘commonly called the Masse’ in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer began with a collect, epistle and gospel readings, and a sung Creed.17 Three years later, the more radical prayer book of 1552 made significant changes. After reciting the Lord’s Prayer and a collect, the priest was commanded to ‘rehearse distinctly all the x. Commaundementes: and the people knelyng, shal after everye Commaundement aske Gods mercy for theyr transgression of the same’.18 The act of kneeling conveyed ‘the idea of obeisance to God’, and recalled prayer, penitence, and also the posture adopted for the receipt of communion.19 It was also the bodily position encouraged during the general confession, in which the priest asked forgiveness on behalf of the congregation for ‘our manyfolde synnes and wickednes’.20 Ronald Rittgers, writing about the ‘reformation of the keys’ in early modern Germany, has observed that general confession was a way of confessing and absolving entire congregations without risking the potential abuses associated by reformers with the sacrament of penance.21 The recitation of the Ten Commandments held out the hope of salvation, but no promise of absolution, nor any imprecation of damnation. Rather, in response to the first nine commandments, the congregation were required to say, ‘Lord have mercy upon us, and encline our heartes to kepe thys lawe’; and after the Copy of Visitation Book, in Later Writings of Bishop Hooper together with his Letters and other Pieces, ed. Charles Nevinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1852), p. 151. 16 42 Articles and 1559 Injunctions, Documents of the English Reformation, pp. 284–​315, 335–​49. 17 E.g. The booke of the common prayer and administracion of the sacramentes and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche (1549), STC2: 16267, p. xii. 18 E.g. The boke of common prayer and administracion of the sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (1552), STC2: 16279, sigs. M6r-​v. 19 Lori Anne Ferrell, ‘Kneeling and the body politic’, in Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (eds), Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-​Reformation England, 1540–​1688 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 73. 20 The boke of common prayer (1552), sig. N4v. 21 Ronald Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys (Cambridge Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 85. 15

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Tenth Commandment, ‘Lorde have mercye upon us, and write all these thy lawes in our heartes we beseche thee’.22 The theological implications of this interactive recitation of the Decalogue by priest and people at the start of every communion service will be explored later in the chapter. For now, it is enough to observe that the Decalogue all but signalled the start of the weekly act of corporate worship, and also marked the first point at which the people were invited to play an active, speaking role in the service. This practice remained unchanged in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, meaning that the walls of English churches resounded with the words of the commandments during common prayer services throughout the reigns of Elizabeth and James.23 That the recitation of the commandments formed an important part of the new Edwardian liturgy is underscored by the fact that two polyphonic ‘Responses to the Ten Commandments’ are amongst the music preserved in the Wanley Part Books, probably the single best surviving source of mid-​Tudor polyphony.24 Both pieces match exactly the text of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, and therefore seem to be relatively late additions to what is primarily a collection of music based on textual sources dating from 1549 or earlier.25 Both were scored for four voices, and possess a simple homophonic texture typical of the transitional musical style of the time, which bowed to humanist and reformist pressures to emphasise the clarity and audibility of the sung text. Both settings therefore followed, broadly speaking, the recommendation provided by Thomas Cranmer to Henry VIII in a famous letter regarding the English Litany, wherein he explained that ‘the song that shall be made thereunto would not be full of notes, but, as near as may be, for every syllable a note; so that it may be sung distinctly and devoutly’.26 The latter of the two settings, by the composer John Heath, is written in a measured but up-​beat style, achieving a major tonality which sticks rigidly to the ‘one syllable per note The boke of common prayer (1552), sigs. M6v–​M7r. E.g. The booke of common praier, and administration of the Sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (1559), STC2: 16292, sigs. M1v–​M2r. 24 Peter Le Huray calls the Wanley Part Books ‘easily the most valuable of the extant Edwardian sources’: Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1967), p. 172. Thomas Tallis also produced a setting of the responses to the commandments as part of his Short (or Dorian) Service, although no copy earlier than the 1620s survives. John Harley, Thomas Tallis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 82. 25 James Wrightson (ed.), The Wanley Manuscripts (3 vols. Madison: A-​R Editions, 1995), volume 1, p. xlix; Le Huray Music and the Reformation, pp. 173–​5. 26 Thomas Cranmer, ‘Letter to King Henry VIII, 7 October, 1544’, in Rev. John Edmund Cox (ed. for the Parker Society), Miscellaneous writings and letters of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), p. 412. 22 23

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Figure 6.1.(a and b)  Responses to the Ten Commandments in the Wanley Part Books. Note: The transcriptions are my own, but the source is Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 224, 227

rule’ through a rhythmic structure consisting purely of semi-​breves and breves. The first arrangement is a livelier affair, with a number of leading notes, suspensions, and runs of crotchets; although the overall effect is still broadly homophonic, the tonality is much more modal in character. It also contains elements of word painting, such as the two middle voices’ run of ascending crotchets to illustrate the phrase ‘incline our hearts’. Figure 6.1 shows the first line of each setting. The upper, anonymous setting is more musically complex, whereas the lower setting by Heath is much slower and more musically sparse. These two settings represent different attempts to navigate and interpret changing post-​reformation sensibilities regarding polyphonic music.27 In brief, both humanist and reformed impulses placed increasing emphasis on the clarity and audibility of the text, with the music playing second fiddle to the words. Still, these arrangements tell us several other things. The marking out of the responses to the commandments in this way placed them in the same musical category as some of the most important parts For more on debates regarding the reform of religious music during the English Reformation, see Jonathan Willis, Church Music and Protestantism in Post-​Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), especially Chapter 2.

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of the communion service: the Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and canticles such as the Magnificat and Venite. At the same time, however, choral arrangements of the responses took their performance out of the hands (and mouths) of the congregation, and into the remit of a professional or semi-​professional choir. The petition to ‘have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law’ would no doubt have been understood as being sung on behalf of all those present, and the sense of immediacy lost through non-​participation may have been partly compensated for by the robust and majestic harmonies. Still, the experience would have been a very different one from a spoken congregational response, even if the precise nature of that difference is hard to quantity. The musicological consensus is that the Wanley Part Books represent the musical life not of one of the great cathedrals of the realm, but of a modestly wealthy London parish church, with a choir ‘of perhaps eight adults’.28 It is therefore not difficult to imagine that musical responses to the commandments may have been experimented with in cathedrals and parish churches with similar modest choirs up and down the land. In addition to a pair of responses to the liturgical recitation of the Ten Commandments, several other anthems within the Wanley material seem to suggest a fresh Edwardian emphasis on the importance of divine law. Perhaps the most famous today is the luminous Tallis anthem ‘If ye love me’, which uses parts of John 14:15–​17 to short, simple and breathtaking effect. ‘If ye love me’, the biblical text and the words of the anthem read, ‘keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth’.29 The message, ‘if ye love me, keep my commandments’ was a simple and effective summation of the duty incumbent upon the Christian possessed of a true and lively faith to strive to live in accordance with the precepts of the divine will, although clearly a great deal of theological subtlety was lost through such a concise abridgement. John Sheppard’s anthem in the same collection, ‘I give you a new commandment’, also drew upon the gospel of John, this time John 13:34–​35. This text effectively summarised the second table of the Decalogue:  ‘A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another’.30 Another anthem, whose composer is a matter of dispute (it may have been Johnson, Mundy, or Tallis), took as its subject a similar text from John 15:12–​13: ‘This is my Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. xiii. John 14: 15–​17. Cf. Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 2, p. 127. 30 Cf. Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 37. 28 29

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commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you’.31 Again, the importance of love of both God and man, together with the necessity of compliance with the divine will, is the overriding message. ‘Let all the congregation’, a metrical prayer for King Edward VI possibly by Thomas Caustun, is an intriguing composition in a number of respects; not least for the fact that it sets an original text not based on scripture, liturgy, or in fact any known source.32 The anthem contains a bald statement of justification by faith: ‘Now let us through thy precious death be of thy holy elect, for who that believeth not on thee shall be from thee reject’.33 The resounding climax to the work, however, was a forceful statement of the significance (and perhaps by implication equivalence) of divine and royal authority: ‘Grant us that we may keep always thy holy statutes ten, preserve our King, Edward the sixt, all people say, Amen’.34 Dubious poetry aside, once again the anthem underscores in musical form the importance of living life in accordance with the precepts of the Decalogue. Liturgically speaking, then, the reign of Edward VI seems to have been something of a ‘legal moment’ in the musical development of the English reformation:  that is to say it put a great and hitherto unprecedented emphasis on the importance of conducting oneself in full obedience to the prescriptions and prohibitions outlined in the Ten Commandments. The impact of a Communion service which began with a recitation of the Decalogue; which required the congregation to reply between each precept, or featured a choir doing so musically on their behalf; which included a sung anthem enjoining compliance with God’s ‘holy statutes ten’; and featured a sermon extolling the virtues of participating in the law such as that preached by Hugh Latimer at Stamford in 1550, or perhaps the third part of the homily on salvation, or where no sermon was preached repeated the Lord’s Prayer, Creed and Ten Commandments in English; would have been striking.35 And that is quite aside from the additional requirements of catechesis, and the injunctions’ stipulation that parishioners be examined on the same texts during Lent, as mentioned above. Musical settings of Cf. Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 1, pp. xxix, 143. Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. xxxiv. 33 Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 86. 34 Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 90. 35 Latimer explained, ‘God should possess our whole hearts, and we should most studiously walk, every man in his vocation, according to the word of God, according to his commandments; obeying our king, and succouring the poor and needy, as he hath commanded us’. ‘A sermon preached by M. Hugh Latimer, at Stamford, November 9, Anno 1550’, in Sermons by Hugh Latimer, sometime bishop of Worcester, ed. George Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), p. 305. ‘The third part of the sermon of the salvation’ called upon parishioners ‘to render ourselves unto God wholly, with all our will, hearts, might, and power to serve him in all good deeds, obeying his 31

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the responses to the commandments do not appear to have survived during the reign of Elizabeth, although the call and response repetition of the Decalogue at the start of the Lord’s Supper did remain. Musical anthems still contained incidental references to God’s commandments as expressed in the gospels and psalms, but perhaps not with such conspicuous density as in the Wanley part books. Counter-​intuitively, the seeds of the most lasting musical legacy of the Ten Commandments were sown not during the reign of the godly Edward VI, but by Protestant exiles during the rule of his Catholic half-​sister Mary I. In 1556, the congregation of English exiles in Geneva –​the more radical Marian refugees, who had rejected the use of a liturgy based on the Edwardian Book of Common Prayer amidst the so-​called ‘troubles at Frankfurt’ –​published their own reformed Church order, The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments.36 The publication contained a confession of faith, guidelines for the electing of ministers and the meeting of the consistory, prayers and confessions of sins, instructions for the ministration of the sacraments, rules for marriage, visitation of the sick and burial, a complete metrical psalter, and Calvin’s catechism. The confession of a sinner referenced Exodus 20 and God’s showing of mercy ‘to theym that love thee, and do thy commaundementes’, and the subsequent confession ‘for all states and tymes’ explained that mankind ‘contynually trangresse thy holy precepts, and commaundementes’.37 The liturgy for the Lord’s Supper as laid out in the forme of prayers abandoned the practice of the 1552 Edwardian Book of Common Prayer of the minister reciting the Decalogue, interspersed with congregational responses, but it included one important innovation. At the end of the 150 Psalms of David, squeezed in before Calvin’s Catechism, was a metrical versification of the Ten Commandments composed by William Whittingham. Titled ‘The Commandements of God. Audi Israel. Exod. xx’, the hymn consisted of eight stanzas in long metre –​one verse for the introduction, one for commandments during our lives, to seek in all things his glory and honour, not our sensual pleasures and vain glory’. Church of England, Sermons, or Homilies, appointed to be read in churches, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, of famous memory (Dublin: Printed for Anne Watson and B. Dugdale, 1821), p. 26. 36 The most recent (re-​)assessment of the ‘troubles’ is Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–​1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Chapter 5. See also Timothy Duguid, ‘The “Troubles” at Frankfurt:  a new chronology’, Reformation & Renaissance Review, 14.3 (2012), pp. 243–​68. 37 The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, &c. vsed in the Englishe Congregation at Geneua and approued, by the famous and godly learned man, Iohn Caluyn (Geneva, 1556), STC2:  16561, p. 52, 55.

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Figure 6.2.  William Whittingham, Audi Israel (first verse). Note: The transcription is my own, but the source is The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, p. 158

each of the six Commandments One to Five and Ten, and one verse for Commandments Six to Nine combined. The introduction was essentially an original verse, and bore no relation to Exodus 20:1–​2. Figure 6.2 shows the first stanza of Whittingham’s versification, set to music. The remaining verses were a more or less faithful metrical rendering of Exodus 20:2–​17. The threats in the Second and Third Commandments were given prominent billing: ‘for I thy god by revenginge, with grievous plagues this sinne will smit’, and ‘in his wrath he wolde thee spill’.38 The Fifth Commandment was also careful to spell out the blessing in return for obedience, ‘that thou longe dayes and good maiest lyve’. While the longer commandments had to be compressed to fit into a single verse, some quite significantly, the rhythmical scheme allowed the shorter commandments a small additional interpretive gloss. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ became ‘Beware of murther and cruell hate’, expanding the purview of the commandment from homicide to anger in line with Christ’s directive in the Sermon on the Mount. Likewise, the warning against adultery became ‘All filthie fornication feare’, again reflecting the wider range of sins comprehended by divines under the Seventh Commandment. Whittingham’s was not in fact the first English versification of the Decalogue –​Miles Coverdale’s ill-​fated Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes, published in 1535 and publicly burned soon after, contained a ten-​stanza arrangement, consisting of an introduction and nine verses following the traditional Catholic numbering: the prohibition against idolatry was missing entirely, and the two forms of coveting were treated together. Goostly psalmes also contained a second, five-​stanza arrangement of the commandments, consisting of an introduction and two verses on each of the two The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, p. 159.

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tables of the law.39 Still, Whittingham’s was the first to observe properly the reformed numbering of the Decalogue –​indeed, each commandment was numbered on the published text itself.40 Timothy Duguid has suggested convincingly that Whittingham’s composition was undertaken in Frankfurt in order to fulfil the liturgical requirements of the Anglo-​Scottish exiles there, whose liturgy was initially based on Vallerand Poullain’s Liturgia sacra, which had stipulated that the Ten Commandments should be sung before the Lord’s Supper’.41 The Genevan forme of prayers contained no such instruction, and the inclusion of Whittingham’s text with the psalter rather than the liturgy for Holy Communion suggests that it lost this role. Still, however it was used, it remained the only non-​psalmic metrical hymn within the forme of prayers. Whittingham’s versification of the Ten Commandments achieved lasting significance when it made the leap from the Genevan forme of prayers to John Day’s 1560 Psalmes of David in Englishe Metre, one of the forerunners to the 1562 Whole booke of psalmes. As well as sixty-​five psalm versifications, the work contained six other canticles and hymns: the Benedictus, Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, Ten Commandments, Lord’s Prayer, and Creed.42 Entitled ‘The x. Commaundements of almightie God. Exodus xx.’, and attributed to ‘VV. whit.’, STC2: 2427 preserved exactly the text and tune of the Genevan original. More interesting were the following four stanzas, also in long metre and entitled simply ‘An addition’. These additional verses added an important reformed theological gloss to the Decalogue. The first stanza called for the spirit of grace to restore mankind’s hearts, in order to help him to keep the precepts of law. The second explained that this was because man had no strength in himself to keep the law, and that therefore the might of Christ was necessary to that end.43 The ‘addition’ remained in Day’s next edition, produced the following year, of Psalmes. Of David in Englishe metre, an enlarged collection of eighty-​three Miles Coverdale, Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes drawen out of the holy Scripture (1535), ff. vv–​viiv. Coverdale’s shorter versification, for example, interpreted the Seventh Commandment as ‘And thy wedlock shalt thou fulfyll’, rather different from Whittingham’s ‘All filthie fornication feare.’ See The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, p. 159; Coverdale, Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes, f. viiv. 41 Timothy Duguid, Metrical psalmody in print and practice: English singing psalms and Scottish psalm buiks, c. 1547–​1640 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 21. 42 Psalmes of Dauid in Englishe metre, by Thomas Sterneholde and others: conferred with the Ebrue, & in certeine places corrected, as the sense of the prophete required: and the note adioyned withal (1560), STC2:  2427, pp.  181–​192. See also the useful appendices in Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–​1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 275–​6, 280. 43 Psalmes of Dauid in Englishe metre (STC2: 2427), p. 188. 39

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Figure 6.3.  Thomas Norton, Harke Israell (first verse). Note: The transcription is my own, but the source is Psalmes. Of David in Englishe metre (STC2: 2429), sig. Eiiiv

psalm versifications and eighteen other canticles and hymns.44 However, in Psalmes. Of David, Whittingham’s versification at the end of the psalter was joined by another new addition at the beginning, this time by Thomas Norton.45 Entitled ‘The x. Commaundements. Harke Israel. Exod. xx.’, Norton’s versification comprised eight eight-​line stanzas in ballad metre. Figure 6.3 shows the first verse of Norton’s arrangement. Norton’s paraphrase was significantly different from Whittingham’s. Each verse was longer and more rhythmically complex; however, it was also easier to sing. Whittingham’s tune ran over a full octave and contained a large leap of a sixth between the end of the third and beginning of the fourth lines, while Norton’s tune was pitched much more comfortably in the vocal range, spread over a range of only a fifth, and containing mostly stepwise movements, except for small jumps of a third in the first line and Psalmes. Of David in Englishe metre, by Thomas Sterneholde and others:  conferred with the Ebrue, & in certein places corrected (as the sense of the prophet required) and the note ioyned withal (1561), STC2: 2429. 45 There is no attribution in the psalter, but Timothy Duguid’s suggestion that Norton was the author of this and of a number of other new versifications in this and subsequent editions seems convincing. Duguid, Metrical psalmody in print and practice, p. 65, 95. 44

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a fourth in the second and third. Norton’s version was also textually superior, insofar as it followed rather more closely the full text of Exodus 20:1–​17. There was no ‘introductory’ verse as such: it began straight away with the First Commandment, after the instruction ‘Hark Israell, & what I say, give hede to understand’. The Second and Fourth Commandments, the longest in the Decalogue, were each given more than one long stanza of explication by Norton, where Whittingham had compressed them down into a single short verse each. Norton’s paraphrase of the Second Commandment over two full verses therefore contained important details, such as the punishment for idolatry being ‘unto the third and fourth degree’ and mercy being shown to ‘such as me love and my preceptes obey’, which Whittingham’s omitted. The Third Commandment, in Norton’s arrangement, received half of the fourth stanza (four lines), while the Fourth Commandment received the rest of that verse, and the whole of the fifth and sixth. It was therefore able to convey details such as the obligation not to let ‘thy son, daughter, servaunt, nor handmaid’ toil on the Sabbath, again not present in Whittingham’s paraphrase. The seventh verse dealt with commandments Five to Nine. The Fifth Commandment, spread over four lines, included the promise that, by honouring your parents, ‘prolonged thy days may be’; but the other commandments were essentially limited to their biblical text (or close thereto). There was no sense therefore, as there had been in Whittingham’s versification, that hate was as bad as murder or that all ‘filthie fornication’ was encompassed under the prohibition against adultery.46 Norton’s paraphrase of the Decalogue was thus more textually faithful to the original words of Exodus 20:1–​17, but lacked the theological edge of Whittingham’s, which hinted at the much wider range of duties and proscriptions hidden under each commandment. Whittingham also numbered each commandment, while Norton did not. This pairing of Norton before the psalms and Whittingham after them continued in Day’s first complete metrical psalter, the 1562 Whole booke of psalmes; the only change was that the ‘addition’ to Whittingham’s versification was re-​ named ‘A prayer’.47 ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’, as the whole booke of psalmes rapidly became known, was an early modern publishing sensation. Ian Green has estimated 790 editions between 1565 and 1720, surpassing numerically editions of bibles and Books of Common Prayer; over a million copies in 450 different Psalmes. Of David in Englishe metre (STC2: 2429), sigs. Eivr-​v. The whole booke of Psalmes collected into Englysh metre by T. Starnhold, I. Hopkins, & others, conferred with the Ebrue, with apt notes to synge the[m]‌with al (1562), STC2: 2430, p. 367.

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editions were sold between 1560 and 1640.48 Each one featured Norton’s and Whittingham’s paraphrases of the Ten Commandments, and although it is impossible to say for certain exactly when and how, they must have been sung from time to time in the context of both public worship and private devotion.49 Metrical arrangements of the Decalogue appeared in a range of additional publications. Richard Allison’s 1599 polyphonic The Psalmes of David in meter arranged the text and tune of Norton’s ‘Hark Israel’ for cittern and four-​part harmony, but his was not the first.50 Day himself had produced polyphonic versions of ‘the whole psalmes in foure partes whiche may be song to al musicall instrumentes’ in 1563, which included harmonisations of both Whittingham’s ‘Attend my people’ and Norton’s ‘Hark Israel’.51 Posthumous harmonisations of both ‘Attend my people’ and ‘Hark Israel’ by the Chapel Royal musician William Daman were also printed in 1591 by Thomas East, although they had both been published before without the composer’s permission by Day in 1579.52 There were a handful of others, but Whittingham and Norton between them therefore all but captured the market for metrical versifications of the Decalogue. In sum, the Ten Commandments were not solely the preserve of dusty treatises or learned sermons, to be pored over and meditated upon by self-​ conscious puritans, their findings dutifully recorded in spiritual diaries. The significance of the Decalogue in early modern society was plain to see and hear for anybody who attended a service in their local parish church, or who engaged with the ubiquitous musical cultures of balladry and metrical psalmody.53 In addition, religious articles and injunctions required the Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 183; Duguid, Metrical psalmody in print and practice, p. 186. 49 On the domestic singing of the psalms, see Beth Quitslund, ‘Singing the Psalms for Fun and Profit’, in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 237–​58. 50 Richard Alison, The Psalmes of Dauid in meter the plaine song beeing the common tunne to be sung and plaide vpon the lute, orpharyon, citterne or base violl, seuerally or altogether (1599), sigs. C7v–​C8r. 51 Tenor of the whole psalmes in foure partes whiche may be song to al musicall instrumentes, set forth for the encrease of vertue: and abolishyng of other vayne and triflyng ballades (1563), sigs. Diir-​v, Rir–​Riir. 52 William Daman, The former booke of the musicke of M. William Damon, late one of her maiesties musitions conteining all the tunes of Dauids Psalmes, as they are ordinarily soung in the Church: most excellently by him composed into 4. Parts (1591), STC2: 6220, pp. 7, 42. Thomas Sternhold, The psalmes of Dauid in English meter (1579), STC2: 6219, sigs. Ciiv, Livr. 53 For references to the Decalogue in contemporary balladry, see John Rhodes, The countrie mans comfort. Or Religious recreations fitte for all well disposed persons (1637), sig. A4v–​A5r; T.  T., Some f]yne gloues deuised for Newyeres gyftes to teche yonge peop[le to] knowe good from euyll wherby they maye learne the. x. commaundementes at theyr fyngers endes (c.1560) (see also Willis, ‘The Decalogue, Patriarchy, and Domestic Religious Education’, pp. 202–​3); Thomas Knell, An ABC to the christen congregacion or a pathe way to the heauenly habitacion (1550); Anonymous, A table of good nurture: wherin is contained a schoole-​masters admonition to his schollers to learne good manners (1625). 48

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frequent recitation of the commandments. The brief reign of Edward VI may have represented a particularly acute ‘legal moment’ in the stress placed on obedience to God’s law, as reflected in official regulations and musical compositions as well as sermons and homilies from the period. However, the most lasting and popular oral expressions of the commandments were the metrical arrangements composed in exile and in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, and reproduced ad infinitum as part of the sensationally successful Whole booke of Psalmes.

Commandment Boards I: Text, Form, and Position As well as securing the continued role of the commandments in the familiar spheres of worship, catechesis and domestic education, and witnessing their incorporation into the popular religious music of the day, the Elizabethan regime also established a new precedent.54 In a letter about the inclusion of new lessons in the calendar before the Book of Common Prayer, dated 22 January 1561 and addressed to Matthew Parker, Edmund Grindal, William Bill and Walter Haddon, Elizabeth bemoaned the ‘great disorders in the decaies of churches’ and ‘the unseemly keepinge in order of chauncells’ across the land, and called upon her servants to make ‘some good and speedy meanes of reformation’ thereof.55 This included an order: That the tables of the commandments may be comlye set, or hung up in the east end of the chauncell, to be not only read for edification, but also to give some comlye ornament and demonstration, that the same is a place of religion and prayer; and diligently to provide, that whatsoever ye shall devise, either in this or any other like pointe, to the reformation of this disorder, that the order and reformation be of one sorte and fashion, and that the thinges prescribed may accord in one forme, as nighe as they may; specially, that in all collegiate and cathedral churches, where cost may be more probablie allowed, one manner be used; and in all parish churches also, either the same, or at the least, the like, and one manner throughout our realm.

Robert Whiting notes that some churches painted texts of the Ten Commandments during the Edwardian period, but there was no order or injunction requiring this to be done, and while many churches in London seem to have done so, the likelihood is that only a minority of churches nationwide followed suit. Robert Whiting, The Reformation of the English parish church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 131. 55 Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, ed. Edward Cardwell (2  vols. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1844), vol. 1, p. 296. The letter is 1560 Old Style, 1561 New Style. 54

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These changes were to be introduced rapidly in both provinces, and were to be ‘quietly done, without shew of any innovation’.56 There followed nine months later in the royal orders of 10 October 1561 a command that ‘there shall be fixed upon the wall over the said Communion board the Tables of God’s precepts imprinted for the said purpose’, and that ‘in cathedral churches the Tables of the said preceptes be more largely and costly paynted out, to the better shew of the same’.57 There are several elements of Elizabeth’s instructions which it is worth picking out and examining. Firstly, it was the Decalogue alone, and not the catechetical trinity of commandments, Paternoster and Creed, which was singled out by the authorities for visual display in this unique manner within the church, reflecting the privileged place of the Decalogue in previous sets of royal injunctions. Secondly, the display of the commandments was partly about ‘comlye ornament’ and setting the correct ambience of a place of religion and prayer –​an early concession to the beauty of holiness. But thirdly, they were also designed to be edifying: to be read by those parishioners who possessed the necessary literacy to do so, and to assume an active, didactic function, beyond their role as mere ‘decoration’. Fourthly, churches should strive for uniformity of style. One way of achieving this may have been, as suggested by the royal order, through the use of texts specially ‘imprinted for the said purpose’, although no such texts (or indeed records of such printings) survive.58 But fifthly, richer institutions, and specifically collegiate and cathedral churches, were expected to put in the effort and resources to effect a richer and more impressive visual display. Episcopal and archiepiscopal injunctions over the following decade and a half flesh out our knowledge of how Elizabeth’s initial requirements were realised in practice. Bishop Guest’s 1565 articles for Rochester diocese Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, p. 297. Elizabeth I, Orders taken the x. day of October in the thirde yere of the raigne of our Soueraigne Ladye, Elizabeth Quene of Englande, Fraunce and Irelande, defender of the faith (1561), sigs. Aiv–​Air. The stipulation passed into the Anglican Canons of 1604, as no. 82. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts Volume I: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 362. Canon LXXXII, required ‘that the ten Commandements be set upon the East ende of every Church and Chappell where the people may see and reade the same, and other chosen Sentences written upon the walls of the said Churches and Chappels in places convenient’. Church of England, Constitutions and canons ecclesiasticall treated vpon by the Bishop of London, president of the conuocation for the prouince of Canterbury, and the rest of the bishops and clergie of the said prouince (1604), sig. O1v. 58 Records of their purchase, however, do survive. For example, 2s 4d paid in 1561–​3 by the churchwardens of Mere in Wiltshire ‘for a Table Prynted with the tenne comanndments And for a kalender and a boke of the homelyes’. ‘The churchwardens’ accounts of Mere’, ed. Thomas Baker, The Wiltshire Archaeological and natural History Magazine, 35 (1907–​8), p.  34. I  would like to thank Susan Orlik for bringing this to my attention. 56

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listed ‘the Table of the Ten Commandments’ along with the other essential items of church furniture required by the ecclesiastical authorities, as did Grindal’s for the Province of York in 1571.59 Bishop Bentham’s 1565 injunctions for Coventry and Lichfield specified that the table of the commandments should be set up ‘in the place where the Sacrament did hang’ along with ‘other godly sentences which be lately set forth’; a literal and physical substitution of the body of Christ for the Word of God.60 Matthew Parker’s 1566 Advertisements, primarily an attempt to thwart the resurgence of the Edwardian controversy over clerical vestments, required in its fifteenth item that the commandments be set up on the east wall over the communion table.61 In his 1569 articles for Worcester diocese, Edwin Sandys listed the ‘Table of the Ten Commandments’ with other essential items of church furniture, and he did the same in his 1571 articles for London.62 Matthew Parker’s short-​lived metropolitical visitation of Horne’s diocese of Worcester in 1575 described ‘the Table of the Ten Commandments’ as being situated ‘before the Communion board’.63 Perhaps the most detailed description was given in Bishop Cox’s injunctions for Ely diocese, dated 1571. The commandments were given their own article, number 28, which read: ‘Item, whether the east wall of the choir be hanged with a fair cloth and the paper of the Ten Commandments fastened in the midst thereof.’64 Far from the uniformity desired by Elizabeth, therefore, the injunctions issuing forth from her bench of bishops spoke of commandments in the forms of boards, papers, and painted texts, fixed to walls and cloths, positioned in various locations, either alone, or alongside a variety of other sentences of scripture. I use the generic term ‘commandment boards’ to discuss all of these objects, whether or not they were actually mounted or painted directly onto wooden boards. It is clear from official ecclesiastical instructions that commandment boards were one of the most prominent and ubiquitous

The other items required by item 8 were the calendar, the English Bible, the homilies, the paraphrases of Erasmus, a pulpit, communion table, and a chest for collecting alms for the poor. Visitation Articles and Injunctions Volume III, 1559–​1575, ed. W.  H. Frere and W.  P. M.  Kennedy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910), p. 157, 254, 283. 60 Visitation Articles and Injunctions Volume III, p. 165. Margaret Aston has suggested that ‘the tables of the law were deliberately placed on the exact site of the most offensive of all the displaced objects of idolatry: where holy altar and worshipped host had been’. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts Volume I, p. 367. 61 Visitation Articles and Injunctions Volume III, p. 175. 62 Visitation Articles and Injunctions Volume III, p. 226, 304. 63 Visitation Articles and Injunctions Volume III, pp. 381–​2. 64 Visitation Articles and Injunctions Volume III, p. 301. 59

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manifestations of the Decalogue in post-​reformation England. Scholars of the English reformation are becoming increasingly, unavoidably aware that the much-​touted death of religious imagery in Protestant England has been greatly exaggerated. Thanks to the work of scholars such as Tara Hamling, we are increasingly rejecting the stark metanarrative of a shift ‘from iconoclasm to iconophobia’, originally posited by Patrick Collinson more than thirty years ago, in favour of a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which even godly Protestants modified, adapted, relocated, and ultimately continued to live alongside a broad range of religiously themed visual media.65 Most of the key elements of this reassessment of the Protestant aesthetic will be familiar in outline: adoration was out, but edification was in. Pictures of individuals (such as saints) were therefore no longer considered to be appropriate, but narrative images were, for the most part, perfectly acceptable. The Second Commandment did much to condition educated opinion on what images were allowable, and where and how they were to be used.66 The categorical imperative was to avoid any chance of image worship, or idolatry. Generally speaking, therefore, producers and consumers of Protestant art turned with enthusiasm to the huge cast of Old Testament heroes and villains; while God the Father could no longer be represented, and most remained queasy about depicting Christ himself, the patriarchs, prophets, parables and persecutors of the Old Testament were fair (and safer) game. The other truism of our new understanding of Protestant visual culture is that it largely happened in places other than the church. Overmantles, firebacks, plasterwork ceilings, tapestries, samplers, plates and dishes, jugs and bowls: these were the canvases on which the new godly artisans of post-​ reformation England wrought their creative visions. One aspect of visual culture was still able to traverse the increasingly rigid boundary between domestic and ecclesiastical space with ease; but these were unthreatening See, for example, Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ household: religious art in post-​Reformation Britain (London: Yale University Press, 2010); Tara Hamling and Richard L. Williams (eds), Art re-​ formed: re-​assessing the impact of the Reformation on the visual arts (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007); Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (eds), Everyday objects: medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For Collinson’s original thesis, see Patrick Collinson, ‘From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: the Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation’, The Stenton Lecture 1985 (University of Reading: 1986), and also Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, (Basingstoke, 1991), Chapter  4. Collinson admitted overstating his original case, particularly with respect to pictorial art. See Peter Marshall, ‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), p. 569, n. 19. 66 See Chapter 1. 65

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images, smuggled into churches between the pages of official and semi-​ official publications, such as the Bishops’ Bible and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.67 Beyond bookish illustrations, and the occasional surviving panel of medieval stained glass, the post-​reformation church is still largely thought of as an image-​free zone. There might be decorative carved angels peeping down from the ceiling; the tombs or memorial inscriptions of local notables; a richly carved pulpit; a communion table and plate; and, of course, a selection of bound books ‘of the greatest volume’. Still, other than the baleful eyes of the heraldic beasts glaring down from royal and noble coats of arms, there was no actual art left in the post-​reformation parish church. Or was there?68 One of the most recent studies of the physical reformation of the English parish church has little to say on the subject of commandment boards. Robert Whiting’s book notes in the introduction that, by the seventeenth century, ‘whitewash has usually obliterated the wall paintings of Jesus and his saints’, and that many had been replaced ‘by painted royal arms . . . or by texts from the English bible, particularly the ten commandments’.69 However, while Whiting does not spend much time discussing post-​reformation painted texts, he does identify a handful of useful references to records in churchwardens’ accounts of commandment boards being erected, mostly in the early 1560s, and identifies a dozen surviving examples from the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods across the country. There is no analysis of the boards themselves. In general, however, Whiting notes that ‘where a text has been painted over a medieval saint or a doom . . . the replacement of the Catholic picture by the Protestant word is dramatically evident’.70 Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke’s Altars Restored

On the images in the Bishops’ Bible see Margaret Aston, ‘The Bishops’ Bible Illustrations’, in Studies in Church History, 28 (The Church and the Arts) (1992), pp. 267–​86. 68 Diarmaid MacCulloch, for example, has written that ‘Systematically the pictures and images which had been so central to the old worship were replaced by words:  painted texts on the walls, and boards bearing the Creed, Commandments, and Lord’s Prayer, placed at the east end of the church over the site of the high altar which had been the symbol of the hated mass. Otherwise, the only picture officially introduced in churches was the royal arms of the monarch.’ Diamaid MacCulloch, Building a Godly Realm (The Historical Association: London, 1992), p. 9. For another important case study of post-​Reformation church decoration, see Claire Tilbury, ‘The Heraldry of the Twelve Tribes of Israel: An English Reformation Subject for Church Decoration’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 63.2 (2012), pp. 274–​305. 69 Whiting, The Reformation of the English parish church, p. xvii. Whiting is not alone in his neglect of commandment boards. 70 Whiting, The Reformation of the English parish church, pp.  132–​3. Classifying wall paintings and decorative boards as ‘text’, as opposed to ‘image’, is problematic. Words themselves could constitute an important visual display, and commandment boards are the pre-​eminent example of this. 67

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contains scattered references to commandment boards on the east walls of churches, usually as a way of triangulating the location of the Communion Table when not in use, and a few more to the largely post-​1660 trend of depicting the Decalogue flanked by the figures of Moses and Aaron.71 In this respect, historians of mainland Europe are far ahead of British scholars:  the historian of the post-​reformation Netherlands, Mia Mochizuki, has written extensively on both ecclesiastical and domestic religious text paintings, including those featuring the Ten Commandments.72 For this book, I  began with the intention of locating and examining every extant commandment board dating from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, during the hundred years or so from Elizabeth’s initial order of 1561 to c.1660. The starting point for identifying surviving boards were the forty-​six volumes of Nikolaus Pevsner’s architectural guide The Buildings of England.73 Evidence from Pevsner was cross-​checked with a range of antiquarian and more modern publications, including British Listed Buildings, the inventories of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, Cox’s English Church Furniture, Bond’s Screens and Galleries, Cautley’s Royal Arms and Commandments in our Churches, and Whiting’s Reformation of the English Parish Church.74 Commandment boards are also discussed briefly in Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household, p. 54. Whiting’s book contains a number of errors regarding commandment boards, including the confusion of Bengeworth in Worcestershire with Badgeworth in Gloucestershire, and the repetition of several erroneous claims from Bond’s Screens and Galleries regarding boards which, even if they were present in 1908, are sadly no longer extant. 71 Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars restored: the changing face of English religious worship, 1547–​c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); see index entries for ‘church fabric and furnishings: table of ten commandments’, p. 381. The first Decalogue board to feature Moses and Aaron may have been the example dated by Fincham and Tyacke to c.1601, which adorned the chapel of Whitgift’s hospital in Croydon, consecrated in July 1599. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, pp.  89–​90 and plate 3 located between pages 224–​5. This chapter only considers parish church survivals, and so does not include Whitgift’s hospital. 72 Mia Mochizuki, The Netherlandish image after iconoclasm, 1566–​ 1672:  material religion in the Dutch golden age (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2008), p.  259; Mia Mochizuki, ‘At Home with the Ten Commandments:  Domestic Text Paintings in Seventeenth-​Century Amsterdam’, in A  Golahny (ed.), In His Milieu. Essays on the Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 287–​300. 73 I would like to thank Susan Orlik, whose PhD I co-​supervise with Dr Tara Hamling, for her invaluable assistance in conducting the initial trawl through Pevsner’s guides. Susan’s research on the changing fabric of the post-​reformation English parish church is likely to further revolutionise our understanding of its material and visual cultures. Nikolaus Pevsner et al, Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England (54 volumes. London: Penguin; London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971–​2015). 74 www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/​; http://​archive.historicengland.org.uk/​; J.  Charles Cox and Alfred Harvey, English church furniture (London:  Methuen, 1907); Bond, Screens and galleries; H. Munro Cautley, Royal arms and commandments in our churches (Ipswich: Norman Adlard, 1934); Whiting, The Reformation of the English parish church.

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This produced an initial sample which, through additional research, was whittled down to just under thirty genuine survivals. My aim to be comprehensive in the identification and analysis of these objects has not quite been fulfilled, for every time I think I have them all, somebody draws my attention to another possible candidate for survival: in this sense, national research at one remove can never equal detailed local knowledge. The other reason why comprehensive coverage may be an overly optimistic goal is that dating surviving boards is a difficult and imprecise art.75 Still, even if the total number of survivals is closer to thirty to thirty-​five, a sample of around twenty-​seven may be considered representative, and indeed starts to suggest a series of interesting and important trends in the representation, positioning, interpretation and use of such objects. The extant boards which comprise the sample are located across sixteen English counties. The geographical distribution of the boards is itself interesting:  half a dozen in Norfolk, four in Shropshire, three in Buckinghamshire, and only one or two elsewhere. There is a reasonable spread across the country, although fewer in the north than in the south, east and west. Most of the churches are in fairly small, isolated, rural parishes, with the notable exception of St Laurence, Ludlow.76 There are no surviving boards from London churches. Table 6.1 lists the 27 churches in the sample (in fact, there are 26 churches and one public house, for reasons that will be explained below): their dedication, location, and the county in which they are located. Every church in the kingdom was required to display the text of the commandments during the reign of Elizabeth, and the fact that references to the requirement drop out of visitation articles and injunctions after c.1570 seems to suggest that most had acquired a board of some kind during the first decade of her reign. Assuming a total survival of around thirty boards from c.9,000 early modern parishes gives a survival rate of 0.33, or around one third of one per cent. The commandment board is therefore an almost extinct genre of early modern material culture. Why do so few from the period survive? The early paper texts described by the Royal Order and Bishop Cox of Ely were presumably insubstantial things which rapidly succumbed to fire, damp, decay, or the desire to invest in something For example the board at Cartmel Priory in Cumbria. Information in the church itself suggests that the board is early seventeenth century, but the 2010 edition of Pevsner’s Cumbria dates it to 1681. I have chosen not to include Cartmel, on the basis both of Pevsner and stylistic grounds. 76 Alan Smith has noted that, because of its use by the Lord President of the Marches, St Laurence’s was more akin to a cathedral musical establishment than the average rural parish church. Alan Smith, ‘Elizabethan Church Music at Ludlow’. Music & Letters, 49. 2 (1968), pp. 108–​21. 75

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Table 6.1. Location and dedication of surviving commandment boards, c.1560–​c.1660 Dedication

Location

County

St Mary the Virgin St Nicholas All Saints St John the Evangelist St John St Saviour All Saints Holy Trinity All Hallows St Lawrence the Martyr Black Lion (Inn) St Benedict All Saints St Helen St Mary the Virgin St Catherine All Saints St Margaret St Peter St Lawrence St Michael and All Angels Holy Trinity St James St Michael St Mary St Richard St John the Baptist

Hedgerley Little Horwood Little Kimble Little Gidding Waberthwaite Dartmouth Wimbish Badgeworth Whitchurch Abbots Langley Hereford Haltham Cockthorpe Gateley Great Snoring Ludham Shipdam Tivetshall St Margaret Cound Ludlow Lydbury North Wistanstow Cameley Minehead Preston Burton Little Somerford

Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire Cambridgeshire Cumbria Devon Essex Gloucestershire Hampshire Hertfordshire Herefordshire Lincolnshire Norfolk Norfolk Norfolk Norfolk Norfolk Norfolk Shropshire Shropshire Shropshire Shropshire Somerset Somerset Suffolk Sussex Wiltshire

a little grander and more permanent. Texts on walls faded, decayed, or were painted over; and wooden boards disintegrated or were damaged, discarded or recycled. Old-​fashioned black-​letter depictions of the Decalogue grew dirty and irrelevant over the decades and centuries, and were replaced by some of the more garish eighteenth and nineteenth century examples which still abound in churches across the country. Others were either deliberately defaced or, in the words of H. Munro Cautley in describing the board at St Peter’s Yaxley, near Peterborough, ‘restored away’.77

Cautley, Royal arms and commandments in our churches, p. 109.

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I have broken the commandment boards in the sample down into six loose groupings. The first three I will examine in the remainder of this section, focussing on text, form and position; the remainder I will scrutinise in the next section, emphasising royal arms, decoration, and illustration. Before I address each group in turn, a word or two of explanation is necessary regarding this typography. Most (if not all) of the boards in the sample would fit quite easily into more than one group: by dividing them this way, I am merely trying to highlight the most significant characteristic of each board on a case-​by-​case basis. Others might therefore disagree with my categorisation, or indeed with my categories altogether. At the risk of stating the obvious, the great advantage to the historian of churches that have the text of the commandments painted directly onto their walls is that we can be reasonably certain that the paint is still located in the same place as it was when it was originally applied. The same is true for a small number of the largest boards, designed to fit structurally within the architecture of the church, but smaller artefacts were often moved around –​and even in and out of –​the church in the intervening centuries. Royal and episcopal injunctions required the text of the commandments to be displayed above the communion table, which when out of use would have been at the east end of the church, in the place where ‘the sacrament did hang’ above the altar before the reformation. However, the commandments at Burton in Sussex were painted in two broad, rounded, red-​framed tablets on the tympanum above the chancel arch. This may well have been above the location of the communion table when it was in use, and so was partially in tune with official instructions. However, it seems likely that in Burton and elsewhere the chancel arch was a natural place to erect such an important visual display irrespective of the position of the communion table. Every church in late-​medieval England would have had an elaborate rood above the screen between the nave and chancel, and many also featured a doom painting in the curved space above or around it. The reformation purged interiors of both rood and doom, leaving in many parish churches a conspicuously empty space which had previously been filled with rich and evocative decoration. It may therefore be that the positioning of commandment texts in this space represented not only a radical break from, but also a broad continuity with, what had gone before.78 The location also had the virtue of being fully visible to Roods were occasionally targets of iconoclastic activity in the early English Reformation, for example at Rickmansworth in 1522 and at Boxley Abbey in Kent and St Margaret Pattens in the city of London in 1538. It may be that a sense of the sanctity of this space persisted across the Reformation,

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anybody seated in the nave, as well as a natural focal point for wandering pairs of eyes during services. In addition, the church at Burton contains a handsome Caroline royal arms painted directly on to the walls, as well as a number of intricate wall texts, including a passage from Titus calling upon the congregation to deny ‘ungodlines and wordly lusts’ and ‘live soberly righteously and godly in this present world’.79 Although the conclusion is drawn on the basis of only four churches in the sample, it does seem the case that churches with the commandments painted directly on their walls often had a more general affinity with wall paintings, both medieval and early modern. St James’s church at Cameley in Somerset has a painted Decalogue in the plasterwork above the chancel arch similar to Burton’s, although additional decoration makes it a rather more intricate affair (Figure 6.4). Rather than simple rounded panels, those at Camely are noticeably tablet-​shaped, recalling the original stone tablets inscribed by God in Exodus, picked out by a thick orange border and entwined with red decorative elements, topped by a faded sunburst signifying God and also featuring some rather charming rouged angels. The modern church is festooned with fragments of medieval and early modern painting, from crabs and fishes to colourful figurative and floral decorations around openings and archways. At Little Kimble in Buckinghamshire, a few patches of plaster to the left of the door on the south aisle are all that remains of what was probably a fairly impressive painted commandment board, the top of which was at the same height as the top of the windows, about a foot above the recessed archway containing the door. This would certainly have been nowhere near the communion table, but it would have meant that the Ten Commandments were the last thing the parishioners saw as they filed out of the church on Sundays.80 The almost illegible fragments of or more pragmatically the space within and above the chancel arch remained one of the most visible in the parish church, and a natural focal point for the congregation. Margaret Aston, ‘Iconoclasm at Rickmansworth, 1522: Troubles of Churchwardens’, in idem (ed.), Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion 1350–​1600 (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), p. 231; Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 290; Peter Marshall, ‘The rood of Boxley, the blood of Hailes and the defence of the Henrician church’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46.4 (1995), pp. 689–​96. 79 Titus 2:11–​12. 80 At Cockthorpe in Norfolk, the commandments were painted in black letter script in an ornate black frame at the west end of the north aisle, opposite the door at the west end of the south wall of the nave, meaning that they would have been amongst the first things parishioners would have seen upon entering the church.

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Figure 6.4.  Ten Commandments wall painting, St James’ church Camely, Somerset.

the commandments are the only clue to the early modern appearance of the church. However, elsewhere are a series of imposing medieval survivals, including a depiction of the seven deadly sins, a crusading knight, and a pair of angels laying the body of Christ down in the sepulchre. It seems likely that enthusiastic modern restoration of the medieval treasures beneath led to the almost wholesale destruction of the early modern texts which were painted on top. Clearly the two iconographies would never have co-​existed in the same space. There are though perhaps some tentative conclusions that we can draw. The first is that congregations and communities who were accustomed to decorating their church walls with colourful religious symbolism could in some ways carry on as usual, replacing the forbidden and heavily pictorial medieval Catholic repertoire

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with an impeccably Protestant visual textual display. The second, however, is that for the first generation of parishioners at least –​for the ones who painted over their medieval treasures and commissioned the new texts that replaced them –​the visual transformation of the church interior must have represented a profound disjuncture with the past, and a poignant emblem of the attempts of the Elizabethan government to re-​inscribe Protestantism upon the churches (as well as the Church) of England. Moving on from wall-​texts to boards, the single largest category (nine boards, one third of the total) comprises simple textual depictions of the commandments. As with the plasterwork at Little Kimble, however, some wooden commandment boards only survive in a partial and fragmentary fashion. At the church of St Peter in Cound, the early modern commandment boards have been used in combination with other wood panelling to partition off the space at the base of the tower to form a makeshift vestry. This screen hints at the sort of fate that many early commandment boards may have met over the centuries since they were erected. Those not damaged by fire or water represented on one level a source of good timber; and in Cound that timber was put to good use to cordon off the west tower from the rest of the church.81 At their most fundamental level, boards such as those at Little Somerford in Wiltshire, and at Badgeworth in Gloucestershire, could be seen as representing a basic compliance with the official requirement to display the text of the Ten Commandments. The Badgeworth board is a handsome thing, approaching two metres square, currently located above a side altar at the east end of the north aisle (Figure 6.5). The text has been formed by inlaying light wood into a darker background, and the board itself is split into two vertical panels by a thin dividing line. The board reproduces the full text of Exodus 20:1–​17, and just manages to maintain the division between the two tables of the law by including the text of Commandments One to Three and the start of Commandment Four on the left hand side, with the remainder of the lengthy Fourth Commandment and precepts Five to Ten on the right hand side. Along the bottom one continuous line reads ‘God save the Queen 1591’, and gives the names of James Elbrige and William Bur, probably the churchwardens at the time the board was commissioned. The board at Little Somerford in Wiltshire, painted on the fiftteenth-​century boarded tympanum, was at some stage covered up by the church’s Elizabethan royal arms, and not uncovered until 1983. See www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/​en-​316399-​church-​of-​st-​john-​the-​baptist-​little-​som# .Vcy13fRK8nI [accessed 13.08.2015].

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Figure 6.5.  Commandment board, Holy Trinity church Badgeworth, Gloucestershire.

In its essential characteristics such an object could be presented as an example of a fairly unimaginative and minimalist level of compliance with the injunction to display the Decalogue, but both the size of the board and the level of craftsmanship make it stand out as something rather special; a significant financial investment, and a marked step up from a flimsy paper table. When new, this board with its clear script all in capitals would have been legible from some distance, at least for those with the ability to read it. The seventeenth century board from Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire is simpler still (Figure 6.6). Here, the text of the commandments was not even divided into two tables, but fills a large rectangular space, black on a white background, in one continuous block. The whole is introduced with the words ‘Theese are the Tenne Commandements of God. The same which God spake in the xx. Chapter of Exodus, saying . . .’. There are decorative elements here, most notably the rubrication of the first letter of the board, of each commandment, of the numerals which mark out each commandment, and of

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Figure 6.6.  Commandment board, church of St Lawrence the Martyr, Abbots Langley, Herefordshire.

the names of God and the book of Exodus itself. At the bottom is a short rhyming couplet dedicated to the monarch: O Glorious king long maye his ioyes yncrease He hath thy warrs subdued by his peace

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Figure 6.7.  Commandment board, church of All Saints Wimbish, Essex.

The theme of monarchy is one to which we will return. Another relatively simple board can be seen hanging above the south door at All Saints Church Wimbish, near Saffron Walden in Essex. Here the text fills a board which is about a meter square, and rather than being divided into the two tables runs on in one continuous block. But even here there are interesting features: the ornate first letter, the rubrication of the persons of the trinity and the first letter of each commandment, and the addition of numbers to further mark out each precept (Figure 6.7). Following the Decalogue itself there are two other short texts. The first is the petition that follows the recitation of the commandments detailed in the communion service in the Book of Common Prayer, ‘Lorde have mercy upon us, and write all these thy Lawes in our harts, we besech the’. This direct link between the visual/​material and oral/​liturgical uses of the commandments raises the question of whether and how these boards might have been used in the context of divine service. Were they simply decorative, or were they pointed at, referred to, read out, or meditated upon? The text on the board is clear, but the board’s comparatively small size means

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that it is not possible to say for certain where it would have originally been situated, or how it might have been ‘used’. The Wimbish board also includes a short passage from Matthew 7.12 summarising the second table of the law.82 The board is dated 1580 and features two pairs of initials; as with the Badgeworth board, it is likely that these were the churchwardens who commissioned it. The visual linking of the Old Testament text of the commandments with Christ’s validation and summary of the same in the New Testament is also significant, as is the choice of Matthew 7.12 (relating solely to love of neighbour) over Matthew 22:37–​39.83 Within the context of worship in this sleepy rural parish, it was perhaps more important to stress the pre-​eminence of maintaining good neighbourly and community relations over and above specifically religious obligations. It could also have been that the religious aspect of the commandments was already catered for by the imaginative linking of the painted Decalogue board with the petition in the Book of Common Prayer communion service. Or there could simply not have been enough space to write in the longer passage on the already rather crowded board. In any respect, on this board the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Church of England liturgy were interconnected in a mutually reinforcing visual and textual display; a macaronic synthesis of ecclesiastical authority, community ethics, and divine justice. This leads us on to a discussion of those commandment boards which contained significant textual elements over and above the Decalogue itself. Such a one is the small but rare brass plaque at the church of St Nicholas, Little Horwood, dating from from 1641 (Figure  6.8).84 There are some unobtrusive pictorial decorative elements here, such as the small angels in the top corners, but the visual impact is really created through the imaginative use and arrangement of a variety of different texts, as well as by the material of the board’s construction. Labelled as ‘the 20th of Exodus’, this board is particularly unusual for the heavily abbreviated form of the commandments. Abbreviation was a practice for which Protestants usually criticised Catholics, in part because abbreviating the ‘Jesus Crist said, what so ever ye wolde that men shulde do to you, even so do unto them. This is ye lawe and the prophete.’ 83 ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind . . . [and] Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself ’. 84 The commandment board at St John the Evangelist, Little Gidding, is also made of brass. For more on the physical setting of worship at Nicholas Ferrar’s church, see Trevor Cooper, ‘“Wise as serpents”: The Form and Setting of Public Worship at Little Gidding in the 1630s’, in Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie (eds), Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 197–​220. 82

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Figure 6.8.  Brass commandment board, St Nicholas’ church Little Horwood, Buckinghamshire.

first Commandment according to the Catholic numbering system effectively erased the divine prohibition against idolatry.85 Most boards, such as that at Badgeworth above, went to significant lengths to ensure the full and accurate depiction of the whole text of Exodus 20:1–​17. Moving down from the Decalogue, a short verse in rhyming couplets reads: Both old and young these Lawes befitt Which God himself in Sinai Writt These Morall are right just and true Which all men ought to keep and view. Who so these keep and by the merit See Chapter 1.

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This heavy metrical paraphrase of Matthew 5, the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, is framed by delicate scroll-​like brackets, and followed below by verses eighteen and nineteen from the same chapter written out in full; a rather pointed reminder not only to the congregation, but also perhaps to the minister, of the importance of living and teaching the Commandments. The juxtaposition of these texts from the Old and New Testaments, from Exodus and Matthew, functioned visually as a hermeneutic device, establishing beyond doubt the continuing validity of the moral law for Christians. It is also noteworthy that the overall focus of the board is very much on the third office of the law: that is, the practical application of the Decalogue as a guide to godly living for the regenerate. The reference to the merit of Christ, of course, is impeccably reformed, but the pastoral tenor of the boards is very much an optimistic one, which suggests that the keeping of the commandments is something which is attainable for all, and will bring the faithful significant benefits in this life and the next. At Lydbury North in Shropshire, the choice of texts placed alongside the commandments was a more predictable one. In a long panel running the entire width of the nave directly above the screen, the two tables of the commandments occupy the central two sections while the text of the Creed sits on the left hand side with that of the Lord’s Prayer on the right. The whole is encased in a vibrant and crisp polychromatic decorative border, and at the end the name of ‘Charles Bright, Churchwarden’ is recorded next to the date, 1615 (Figure 6.9). This placing together of the three texts of the Creed, Lord’s Prayer and Decalogue reinforced the importance of catechetical teaching, and the three texts were also frequently described as embodying the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.86 Finally, the commandment board situated in the church of St Mary at Preston in Suffolk represents an extreme example of the tendency to contextualise the Decalogue against the broader canon of scripture.87 This board, dating from the late Elizabethan period, is in the form of a folding triptych, and has as its companion an Elizabethan royal arms of the same size, shape and design. E.g. John Boys, An exposition of the dominical epistles and gospels used in our English liturgie throughout the whole yeare (1610), p. 120. 87 The board is discussed briefly in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts Volume I, p.  363–​6, and Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household, pp. 43–​4. 86

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Figure 6.9.  Board containing the Creed, commandments and Lord’s Prayer, church of St Michael and All Angels Lydbury North, Shropshire.

A brilliant sunburst at the top wreathed in boiling clouds represents God, and the Ten Commandments occupy the black central panel of the structure, with lettering picked out in gold and arranged within two intricate golden tablets (Figure 6.10). The length of the Second Commandment has meant that the fourth has been pushed wholesale onto the second tablet, which is consequently rather crowded as a result, although it is notable that the Tenth Commandment against coveting has been given ample space at the bottom, in keeping with the generally heightened religious tenor of the whole.88 On the left-​ hand panel are a number of scriptural quotations regarding the keeping of the Sabbath, from Isaiah 56 and 58 and Leviticus 19. The right hand panel contains several exhortations about the importance of keeping the commandments, from Leviticus, Revelation, and Deuteronomy. When closed, the reverse of the two red side panels contain further texts, featuring black script on a white background; there are various admonitions from the Old and New Testaments, on the left side to do good and charitable works, and On the Tenth Commandment, see Chapter 3.

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Figure 6.10.  Commandment board, St Mary’s church Preston, Suffolk (interior panels).

on the right side to care for the poor. There is even a quotation from the apocryphal book of Tobit: ‘Give almes according to thy substance: if thou have but a little, be not afraid to give a little almes. For thou laiest up a good store for thy selfe against the day of necessitie’.89 It is unclear from the object itself when the doors would have been opened, and when they would have been left closed, although perhaps they would have been left closed most of the time and opened for services. The plain black and white decoration of the outer panels and the rich red, black and gold colouring of the inner suggests that sanctity was conveyed by the additional ornamentation, and as a whole the board locates the commandments at the physical and conceptual heart of broader concepts of charity and good community relations.90 As with Little Horwood, the overwhelming emphasis is on the potential agency of the believer to act in a manner which would benefit the bodies of his neighbours and, implicitly, his own immortal soul into the bargain. The sister panel at Preston featuring the Elizabethan royal arms is a striking affair, and again, the reverse of the two Tobit 4: 8–​9. Margaret Aston has noted that golden images in particular received a major share of the invective when images came under reformist attack, in part because of specific Old Testament proscriptions of gold and silver idols. It seems, however, that gold colouring applied to scriptural lettering was a less controversial affair. See Margaret Aston, ‘Gold and Images’, in idem (ed.), Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion 1350–​1600 (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), p. 224.

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outermost panels contain more scriptural excerpts in black text on a white background. The focus this time is on the dangers of idolatry.91

Commandment Boards II: Royal Arms, Decoration, and Illustration Moving on to the next category, the association between commandment boards and displays of the royal arms comes through from the sample as a strong and vital one. This association could be made in a number of ways: spatially, in the relative positioning of these artefacts within the church interior; or stylistically, as in the case of the Preston triptychs. At St Helen’s church in Gateley, Norfolk, the commandment board no longer exists, but there is a clue to its relative positioning in the church on the fine Caroline arms which hang on the south wall, adjacent to the door at the rear of the nave. The text at the top of the image reads custos utriusque tabulae, roughly speaking ‘he who guards the tables of the law’.92 It is therefore likely that the commandments and royal arms were arranged near to one another –​perhaps one above the other, or facing one another from opposite sides of the church –​and that this spatial and textual relationship was used to indicate a conceptual one: that the authority of the monarch both rested upon and consisted in protecting the divinely instituted precepts of the Decalogue. What is subtly hinted at in Gateley is broadcast at deafening volume at St Margaret’s Church in Tivetshall St Margaret, Norfolk (Figure 6.11). In a flaming sunburst at the apex of the tympanum sits God, DEUS, flanked by a pair of IHS monograms. Below God are the royal arms of Elizabeth I; the heraldic beasts are standing upon a green and pleasant hillock strewn with white and red flowers, atop an ornate structure. They are flanked by elaborate flagpoles, with an image of a chalice on the left and a Tudor rose on the right. In the pointed lintel the text in red reads ‘O God Save ourr Quene Elizabeth’, and the tier below contains St Paul’s admonition from Romans 13.1, ‘Let every soule submyt hym selfe unto the auctoritie of the hyer powers for there is no power but of God the powers that be are ordeyned of God’, as well as the date, 1587. In the centre is a shield containing a white bird, crowned, holding a sceptre, and surrounded by three Tudor roses, which Tara Hamling Rendered here as:  ‘All carved or molten images which ar an abomynation to the Lord, Be not deceived, no Idolaters shalt inhearit the kingdom of God’. 92 For a fuller discussion of the phrase, see Chapter 2. 91

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Figure 6.11.  Commandment board, St Margaret’s church Tivetshall St Margaret, Norfolk.

has suggested is a heraldic reference to Elizabeth’s Boleyn heritage.93 The foundation of this impressive temple-​like structure is the text of Exodus 20, running along its width in one continuous block with rubricated characters for the number and first letter of each commandment. At either side of this structure, two small captions read ‘Rychard Russel, Jaffrey Neve and Howard Freman’; ‘In there tyme they caused this for to be done’. The rural Norfolk parishioners who gazed up at this astonishing spectacle every Sunday of every week of every month of every year of their lives could not but have been struck by the vivid imagery: the Ten Commandments, the laws of God, and the obedience owed to divinely appointed authority were the very foundations of the social and political order. The earthly commonwealth was presided over and appointed by God, and its very existence rested upon the recognition and observation of the precepts of the Decalogue. Tara Hamling, ‘Visual Culture’, in Andrew Hadfield, Matthew Dimmock and Abigail Shinn (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 83–​4.

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Tivetshall’s board is rare, but not unique, at least not in Norfolk, where another early seventeenth-​century example is to be found at Shipdham.94 Currently the expansive commandment board sits on the wall of the north aisle, and the matching royal arms, painted in the 1630s and then repainted in 1661, hang at the west end of the church above the organ. At Shipdham, the royal arms are surrounded by two rich swagged curtains, and capped by boiling clouds, raging seas, and the Tetragrammaton in a sunburst similar to that at Tivetshall St Margaret. The dimensions of the two elements are such that they suggest that the arms once occupied the apex of the chancel arch, and that the commandment board probably sat beneath them. Here again earthly monarchy was shown to rest upon a foundation of divine law; both protector of and shored up by the precepts of God, with the divine essence itself presiding at the summit of the system. Less easy to group together thematically, some churches took elaborate decorative approaches to the commandments, combining the words of the Decalogue with elements of significant figurative decoration.95 The board in St Laurence’s Ludlow, Shropshire, displays the text of the commandments not on stone tablets but upon a painted scroll (Figure 6.12). As at Little Horwood, this board sacrificed large portions of the text, heavily abbreviating the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Commandments, whilst giving over a significant amount of room to a number of decorative elements, including Tudor roses, a flowering vine, crowned monograms of the holy name of Jesus, and a red flower blooming from a dead branch.96 The churchwardens’ accounts for St Laurence, Ludlow, record in March 1561 ‘item, the 26. Day, at the visitacion, paid for the table of commaundementes and the new kalender . . . xviijd’, followed in April ‘the iiij day, to Thomas Season, for settinge the table of the commaundementes in a frame’, for which labour (and other work mending the bellows of the great organs) he was paid the not inconsiderable sum of iijs.97 The timing here is An early nineteenth-​century version can also be seen at the church of All Saints in Morston, Norfolk. 95 Keith Thomas has noted that all wall texts had ‘a decorative intention’, and that ‘in the sixteenth century writing was regarded as a pictorial art’. Keith Thomas, ‘Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-​Reformation England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 35–​6. 96 The latter is possibly in reference to Numbers 17:8. The board is also unusual (indeed unique in the sample) for its use of the word ‘desyre’ in place of ‘covet’ in the Tenth Commandment. 97 Churchwardens’ Accounts of the town of Ludlow, in Shropshire, from 1540 to the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Thomas Wright (Westminster: J.B. Nichols and Sons, 1869), p. 103. Robert Tittler has gathered several references to painters of tables of the Ten Commandments in his biographical database of ‘Early Modern British Painters, 1500–​1640’ [http://​spectrum.library.concordia.ca/​980096, accessed 14.11.2016]. My thanks to Professor Tittler for bringing his database to my attention. 94

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Figure 6.12.  Commandment board, St Laurence’s Ludlow, Shropshire.

significant. Not only would this make the Ludlow board the ‘youngest’ in the sample by far, but its erection predates the Royal Order of October 1561, although it postdates Elizabeth’s initial letter to Matthew Parker et al on 22 January. Perhaps John Scory, the first Elizabethan bishop of Hereford, was a particularly enthusiastic supporter of the commandments, or perhaps the early adoption was due to St Laurence’s ‘tenuous connection with royal authority’ as de facto ‘Chapel Royal’ of the Lord President of the Council of the Marches.98 The fact that the Decalogue was purchased for relatively little money at the visitation, along with the calendar, raises the prospect that this was a paper table of the commandments, and that perhaps the painted version came later. The unusually complete run of Elizabethan churchwardens’ accounts, however, do not mention the commissioning or painting of a new board, and the script and decoration certainly suggest an early provenance. The combination of abbreviated text and rich figurative decoration has a transitional feel to it: to borrow the words of Tessa Watt, the ethos is ‘distinctively “post-​reformation”, if not thoroughly “Protestant”’.99 The board at Great Snoring in Norfolk was possessed of a much more straightforward yet equally arresting iconography. The commandments were arranged in two tables, and in the centre above them was the scutum fidei device, explaining the relationship between the persons of Alan Smith, ‘Elizabethan Church Music at Ludlow’. Music & Letters, 49. 2 (1968), p. 115. Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–​1640 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. i, 126, 327, 374.

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Figure 6.13.  Commandment board, church of St Mary the Virgin Great Snoring, Norfolk.

the trinity. Bordering the text of the commandments on the left and right the four evangelists were depicted with their identifying holy creatures, and accompanied by the names of the four last things: Matthew and the angel above death; Luke and the ox above hell; Mark and the lion above judgement; and John and the eagle above heaven (Figure 6.13).100 Below the text of the first table is a quotation from John, ‘the law was given by Moses, but grace and trueth came by Jesus Christ’.101 To illustrate this further, in a panel to the left stands what appears to be the figure of Christ himself, his head surrounded by a halo, trampling a demon underfoot, and on the right what is possibly a figure of Moses. They each appear to be supporting the end of a wooden beam in their hands, but precisely what is not clear, and it is likely that these figures were added to the commandments from elsewhere, although all of the illustrations appear stylistically to be of around the same date. The whole is rounded off by the injunction, from Romans 13, to ‘love thy neighbour as thy selfe’. The potentially composite nature of this board makes it difficult to draw watertight conclusions, but the text of the commandments here is framed within an intensely visual setting, drawing heavily upon elements of traditional religious iconography which have been reworked in a new and imaginative way.102 This association of the four evangelists with the four last things seems to be unusual, and not one I have come across elsewhere. 101 John 1:17. 102 A depiction of Christ would be extremely unusual, given the almost universal hostility towards images of the persons of the Trinity. The black letter script of the commandment board suggests 100

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Figure 6.14.  Commandment board, All Hallows’ church Whitchurch, Hampshire.

Finally in this section, I would like to leave behind the vast majority of representations of the Ten Commandments in parish churches to focus on two (and a half ) extraordinary survivals. To my knowledge these have not hitherto been discussed by historians; as such they represent an important discovery in terms of our conception of the visual, artistic, material and religious cultures of the post-​reformation English parish church.103 These two churches contained illustrated tables of the Ten Commandments. Figure 6.14 shows the commandment board at Whitchurch, in Hampshire. an early provenance, but the images may well date from the same period as the rare James II royal arms (1688), or even later. British Listed Buildings suggests that the board is eighteenth century, although this seems unlikely, at least for the black letter script of the commandments themselves. 103 They should be considered alongside other examples of scripture painting, such as the Twelve Patriarchs at Burton Latimer in Northamptonshire, the Sacrifice of Isaac at Launcells in Cornwall, and the statues of David and Solomon in Walsoken in Norfolk. Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household, p. 55.

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At the top of the board in the centre is a representation of God as a blazing sun, below which an open bible declares Christ’s summary of the obligations of the law from Matthew 22:37–​39.104 The small gold decorative panel below is blank, but slightly damaged, and may at one time have contained text. To the left and right of the open bible are a pair of crowned golden hearts, containing the date (1602) when the board was created. Below these sit the two tables of the law, black rectangles with rounded tops, framed in gold, and containing the full text of Exodus 20:1–​17. The first table, listing the obligations of humanity to God (Commandments One to Four), is on the left, and the second, detailing the duties of humanity to their neighbour, is on the right hand side. Situated around these central elements on three sides, to the left, right, and below, are fourteen separate panels, each containing an image. The twelve panels on the left and right each have positioned on their outside edges a corresponding textual caption; the two images in the centre at the bottom are not labelled. The ten smaller images contain narrative depictions of instances, taken from the Old Testament, of the breaking of the Ten Commandments. The two larger images at the top left and right and in the centre at the bottom contain other narrative scenes from the book of Exodus. There is nothing theologically inappropriate or transgressive about such depictions. They are clearly narrative and instructional, and by presenting negative images of behaviours to be avoided rather than positive examples of practices to be imitated the ten images relating to the commandments avoid any possibility of idolatry. However, these scripture paintings clearly do not fit our preconceptions regarding the place of images within the post-​ reformation parish church, and our understanding of the role of the visual in Protestant religious worship may therefore need to be further revised as a result. In one sense what we have here is quite close to a post-​reformation doom, illustrating the providential punishments meted out to faithless sinners on earth rather than after death, although the small size of the boards makes it unlikely that it would have been mounted in the chancel arch as the distance between object and viewer would have rendered both text and image all but invisible. The small size and detailed text and imagery mean that worshippers would have needed to be fairly close to the board in order to be able to see and contemplate its contents. Perhaps the most logical and potent spatial positioning may therefore have been as a kind Matthew 22:37–​39: ‘Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself ’ (KJV).

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Figure 6.15.  Commandment board, church of St Mary the Virgin Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire.

of reredos which kneeling communicants could have studied while waiting to receive the bread and wine; considering whether they were indeed in charity with their neighbour and therefore spiritually pure enough to receive communion, whilst meditating on God’s law and the fate of those who flaunted it. The board at Whitchurch is tantalising, but it is only one board. However, just under fifty miles to the north-​ east, in Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire, is a second example identical to that in Whitchurch in almost every respect (Figure  6.15). The elements of the Hedgerley board are the same as those at Whitchurch, although the whole is rectangular in shape rather than square, and the colour palette is much lighter. The text throughout is black on cream, rather than gold on black, and therefore much more legible. The paintings are less detailed and more crudely executed, yet are larger and clearer as a result. The small panel below the open bible contains a short scriptural quotation taken from Proverbs 13:13; ‘whoso dispiseth ye word shall be destroyed but he that feareth the commandements shall be rewarded’. The most significant difference is the date: 1664. As the boards are, to all intents and purposes, carbon copies of one another there seem to be three possible explanations. The first (and most likely, given the cruder yet cleaner appearance of the later example) is that the Hedgerley commandment

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board was copied from the one at Whitchurch some sixty years after the original was made. The second explanation is that the date on one or the other is incorrect, and that both were created around the same time; however, neither board contains anything that would ‘date’ and need to be repainted (such as a royal coat of arms), although it is possible that the Hedgerley board was restored some fifty years after its creation and the date adjusted to reflect this restoration. The third possibility is that both boards were created entirely independently from one another and at different times from a third as yet unidentified common source. Without additional information coming to light, or detailed scientific testing, the precise details of the relationship between the Whitchurch and Hedgerly boards must remain open for the time being. In the meantime, the images on the boards demand further attention. Ten of the fourteen relate directly to the Ten Commandments. Each of these illustrates the breach of one of God’s commandments with reference to a story drawn from the Old Testament. The First Commandment, to know God, is shown by the drowning of Pharaoh and his host in the red sea.105 The Second, against graven images, features the 3,000 Israelites who were put to death for dancing around the golden calf.106 The Third Commandment shows a man from Leviticus stoned for blasphemy, while the Fourth is illustrated by the account in Numbers of the man stoned for gathering sticks on the Sabbath day.107 The Fifth Commandment features a picture of Absalom, killed by Joab for disobeying his father, whilst the Sixth shows Joab killing Amasa.108 The Seventh Commandment is illustrated with the story of the priest Phineas, who used a spear to execute Zimri and Cozby, the Israelite man and Midianite woman whose illicit interracial congress had precipitated a plague from God.109 The Eighth Commandment shows the stoning of Achan, who was condemned to death for attempting to pilfer some of the spoils of the fallen city of Jericho, while the Ninth shows the defenestration and subsequent canine dismemberment of Jezebel, for bearing false witness against ‘good Naboth’.110 Finally, the Tenth Commandment is Exodus 5:2. The caption on the Whitchurch board reads ‘Pharoah drowned in the sea with all his hoast for not knowing god’. 106 Exodus 32:27; ‘3000 of the isrelits slaine in a day for worshiping the goulden calfe in the wildernesse’. 107 Leviticus 24:14; ‘one stoned for taking the lords name in vaine’. Numbers 15:30; ‘one stoned for gathering of stickes on the sabbath day’. 108 2 Samuel 18:9; ‘Absalom hangth by the head & thrust through by Joab for disobeying his father’. 2 Samuel 20:9; ‘Joab killeth amasa’. 109 Numbers 25:8; ‘phinias killein simri & colby in ye act of adultery’. 110 Joshua 7:25; ‘Achan stoned for stealing ye goulden wedg & babalonish garment’. 1 Kings 21:19; ‘Jezabell eaten with dogs for bearing false witness against good naboth’. 105

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illustrated by the providential death by arrow of Ahab, Jezebel’s husband, who had coveted and acquired by nefarious means Naboth’s vineyard.111 The other four images relate to the giving of the law to Moses. The picture at the top left shows Moses coming to Sinai, while that at the top right shows him receiving the stone tablets from a white robed hand emerging from a haze of light in the upper left corner.112 The remaining two images are difficult to identify, although logically they are also likely to be part of the Exodus narrative, falling between Chapters 3 (the first image) and 31 (the fourth). The narrative panels relating to the commandments taken as a whole not only order the viewer to obey God’s law: they also provide a compelling reason why they should do so. The stories have been carefully selected not to illustrate the keeping of the commandments, nor even their breach, but rather the swift, vicious and terminal punishments meted out to those who have flouted the divine will. The episodes selected include no fewer than three stonings; the slaughter of more than 3,000 Israelites for idolatry; the drowning of a king and his army for not knowing God; four brutal murders with spears, arrows and swords; and the double whammy for poor Jezebel of falling from a tall tower and then being eaten by dogs. The message of the visual element of the composition is not so much ‘thou shalt’, nor even ‘thou shalt not’, but rather ‘if thou break these commandments, then God will visit terrible and merciless retribution upon you’. One wonders whether the ministers at Whitchurch and Hedgerley took particular pleasure at seeing the picture of the priest Phineas running a long spear through the bodies of an adulterous couple caught together in flagrante delicto. This pair of boards is fascinating, but insofar as they are ostensibly very closely related they could be written off as an exceptional one-​off, and therefore judged to be of limited significance. What helps to suggest that they are more than that is a series of wall-​paintings which reside in an upstairs room of the Black Lion Inn in Hereford, still a public house today. These wall-​paintings, badly damaged but dating probably from the late-​ sixteenth or early-​seventeenth century, also depict the breaking of the Ten Commandments, using (as far as it is possible to ascertain) the same narrative scheme as at Whitchurch and Hedgerley, although there are important differences in the depictions themselves. This suggests that we are not 1 Kings 22:35; ‘Ahab for coveting naboths vineyard was shot with an arrow from heaven’. Exodus 3:2; ‘Moses commanded by god to pull of his soos for the plac twas holy’. Exodus 31:13; ‘Moses take ins the commandements in mount sinai’.

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just dealing with a shared source for two commandment boards, but a shared visual language for understanding the meaning of the Decalogue in post-​reformation England. The man stoned for gathering sticks on the Sabbath survives in Hereford, as does the death of Absalom, Joab locked in a deadly embrace with Amasa, and Phineas’ enacting of God’s judgement upon Zimri and Cozby. Most of the other panels are damaged or missing, but two of the partially surviving images also seem to fit the established narratives:  an ornate architectural facade looks as though it might have borne recent witness to a plummeting Jezebel, and a supine figure in the next panel is probably the dying Ahab, clutching at the arrow which is protruding from his chest. Figure 6.16 shows the illustration of the Seventh Commandment against adultery; first at Whitchurch, then Hedgerley, and finally Hereford. Commandments One to Three and Eight are lost, but given that six of the ten are matches for the schemes depicted at Whitchurch and Hedgerley, we can be reasonably confident that whole scheme was probably identical. The existence of the same illustrative scheme for depicting the Ten Commandments inside a secular space –​whether the room would have been devoted to domestic, business or mixed use is unclear –​as well as in two ecclesiastical spaces, suggests that the dichotomy between the religious art of the church and the household was not always as rigidly defined as we have come to expect.113 This schema of divine law and ruthless punishment, illustrated though a series of carefully chosen Old Testament narratives, was equally acceptable in the context of public worship and domestic decoration; a fitting adornment to a place of public prayer, as well as a private and/​or commercial space. What these three examples also demonstrate is the existence of a shared visual language for expressing God’s moral law, and in particular the consequences for those who chose to transgress it.114 Recent research on ‘domestic’ buildings in the early modern period suggests that we need to modify our notion of what constituted ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces, as domestic spaces frequently functioned as both. See Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household, in particular discussions of the Hall (pp. 122–​31) and the Great Chamber (pp. 148–​64). 114 Visual depictions of the Decalogue begain in the middle ages and were a reasonably common genre in German and Dutch prints in the early modern period. See Ilja M. Veldman, ‘The Old Testament as a Moral Code:  Old Testament Stories as Exempla of the Ten Commandments’, Simiolus:  Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vo. 23, No. 4 (1995), pp.  215–​39. The Whitchurch and Hedgerley boards appear to have been based on printed images, although they draw on several different sources. The influence of printed images on painting and other decorative arts is discussed in Anthony Wells-​Cole, Art and decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: the influence of continental prints, 1558–​1625 (London: Yale University Press, 1997). A planned article, co-​written with Tara Hamling, will contain a more detailed analysis of the visual sources which informed the Whitchurch and Hedgerley commandment boards. 113

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Figure 6.16.(a, b and c)  Depictions of the breaking of the Seventh Commandment in Whitchurch, Hedgerley and Hereford (Phineas impales Zimri and Cozby, Numbers 25).

This is not just a remarkable one-​off and an obvious carbon-​copy –​the existence of a third manifestation of the scheme, identical in outline but with signigificant differences of detail and composition, starts to look like something more significant. It also suggests that, where the commandments were illustrated, it was their providential and cautionary aspect –​the threat of divine punishment as the reward for disobedience –​which was considered the most important. Promising death for flaunting the commandments suggests not that nobody is capable of keeping them, but that

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Figure 6.16.  (continued)

everybody should strive not to break them; quite different from the theological tenor of most printed works of religious instruction and devotion. In sum, by studying the physical survivals of early modern commandment boards, a category of object hitherto neglected by the majority of historians and art historians alike, several initial conclusions suggest themselves. The extant boards indicate that after the reformation, popular attitudes to and experience of religion might be shaped by people’s relationships with changing church interiors and fabric no less than they had been in the late-​medieval church. Following the reformation, furthermore, commandment boards were one of the most prominent and actively didactic elements within those interiors. The same is also true of commandment boards as was the case for so much else in parochial worship (for example, music); the only true consistency of approach lay in the sheer imaginative variety of responses to an initial instruction, in this case to display the biblical text of Exodus 20 within the church.115 For example, official instructions stipulated that boards should sit at the east end of the church, in the same place as ‘the sacrament did hang’ before the reformation. This was a spatial substitution of the body of Christ for the word of God, a powerful statement about the changing priorities of the post-​reformation On variations in parochial musical practice see Willis, Church music and Protestantism, Chapter 3.

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church from sacramental to word-​based piety and worship, as well as of the centrality of the Ten Commandments to post-​reformation theology and religious practice. However, actual practice varied considerably from this prescribed norm. Some smaller boards may indeed have been placed above the communion table at the east end of the church as a kind of reredos, meaning that they were not often visible, but that they may have been particularly significant in the sightlines of individual parishioners when they knelt before the communion table to receive the bread and wine. The most common location for commandment boards, however, was within or above the chancel arch; above the screen or on the tympanum, likely to have been the site of the medieval rood cross and/​or a doom painting. Again, these were powerful substitutions. In the case of the doom, the word and will of God, the pathway to salvation, had supplanted the day of judgement, placing more emphasis on obedience in the here and now than the prospect of punishment in the life hereafter. In the case of the rood, somewhat counter-​intuitively, instructions about the good works that made up charity and godly living had taken the place of a prompt to meditate upon Christ’s suffering and sacrifice. Either way, the presence of the commandments above the chancel arch, alone or in combination with the royal arms, provided a powerful focus for congregational worship, as well as underscoring through close proximity to the pulpit the divine and secular authority of the minister. Painted Decalogues also suggest that the commandments could occupy other more liminal spaces, where they might be seen by those entering or leaving the church. The message here was surely either to take God’s law with you as you left the building, or to bear it in the forefront of your mind as you entered. Alongside this individualistic and creative engagement with the process of obeying the injunction to exhibit the commandments, a number of other themes emerge. In some boards, the text alone was the priority, while for others the spatial distribution of the text into the two tables of the law was particularly important. The Ten Commandments were widely seen as the distillation of God’s law as seen through both the Old and New Testaments, and so their juxtaposition with other quotations from both testaments, and even the liturgy, was also relatively commonplace. Visual elements were optional, and could range from the merely decorative through the mildly suggestive to the downright didactic. And the relationship between God’s law and the law of the kingdom, between divine authority and the authority of the monarch, was given figurative and visual expression in the decorative and spatial relationship between royal arms and tables of the Ten Commandments. The function of Decalogue

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boards in post-​reformation England therefore extended beyond teaching individual and communal morality, and establishing theological doctrine, to spelling out the social and political hierarchy in terms which nobody could misunderstand.

The Eighth Commandment Thou Shalt Not Steal. Exodus 20:15

Post-​reformation expositions of the Ten Commandments were, in the main, prescriptive:  they aimed to instil a particular morality upon their readership, and ultimately upon wider society. This morality was informed by a blend of scriptural precedent, theological ‘truth’, confessional bias, and contemporary mores. In a sense, then, discussions of morality by early modern authors attempting to clarify the meaning of the Ten Commandments were also reflective of commonly held ethical principles and values. Part of the strength of the commandments was that they embodied not only religious but also social and cultural norms and standards of behavioural practice. Nowhere was this clearer than in the second table of the Decalogue, and nowhere more prominent than in expositions of the Eighth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal’.116 Brodie Waddell has recently demonstrated that, contrary to the views of some of the great economic historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultural values had a considerable influence on economic agency.117 ‘Cultural presumptions and moral values inflected every single economic interaction in early modern England’, and a significant proportion of those moral values stemmed from religious and theological sources, including the Ten Commandments.118 The godly Suffolk minister Robert Allen explained that the Eighth Commandment had an important role to play in God’s masterplan for humanity. While the Sixth ‘provided for the safegard of mans person and life’, and the Seventh ‘for the propogation of the life of mankind’, the The Seventh Commandment was a close runner up in this respect, and in the first table, the Second Commandment. 117 E.g. R.H. Tawney, Religion and the rise of capitalism: a historical study (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938). Tawney’s thesis, that the Reformation contributed towards the erosion of Christian teachings on economic morality, has been widely criticised: see, for example, Laura Stevenson O’Connell, ‘Anti-​Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Literature’, The Journal of British Studies, 15.2 (1976), pp. 1–​20. 118 Brodie Waddell, God, duty and community: in English economic life 1660–​1720 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), p. 13. See also Brodie Waddell, ‘Economic Immorality and Social Reformation in English Popular preaching, 1585–​1625’, Cultural and Social History, 5.2 (2008), pp. 165–​82. 116

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Eighth Commandment was that wherein ‘the Lord should take order concerning the outward commodities of this life, for the comfortable maintenance thereof ’.119 Sins relating to the Eighth Commandment thus moved very quickly from the abstract ‘God comprehendeth and forbiddeth all injustice whatsoever may be committed of any person’, to the much more detailed regulation of fair economic behaviour.120 Allen, for example, outlawed twelve different categories of ‘getting out of men’s hands that which we have no right to’, with detailed lists of specific sins under each. In relation to buying, he forbade pretending that something was worth less than its true value, and paying with false coin. Concerning selling, sins included overpricing, selling average or substandard goods as though they were of the best quality, using false weights and measures, selling lands or titles with false or forged evidence, or passing sickly animals off as healthy.121 Regarding letting, landlords were warned against raising rents, taking away common land, or laying nearby properties desolate in order to live more privately. Those renting land or houses were warned against exhibiting greed in outbidding one another, and borrowers were barred from not paying back their debts, not paying enough, or paying too slowly. Lenders were banned from refusing to lend ‘without some pawn’, though their neighbour be in need and they ‘sustain no loss or hindrance thereby’. Those paying wages were warned not to keep back monies due or defer payment overlong, whilst those working were admonished against being negligent or presuming above their level of skill. Individuals exchanging goods were counselled to be sure that items were of equal value, and those in partnership were cautioned against failing in labour or oversight, or trying to take more than stipulated by their covenant. Finally, readers were warned against trying to gain material advantage through gambling and dice-​play, and ‘by crafty bribing and perverting of right from the holy seat of justice’.122 This exhaustive list of a single category of sins relating to the commandment against theft, from the pen of a single author, reflects more than a series of biblical priorities; more even than a specific theological worldview. Some forms of gambling, such as with dice or lots, were discussed specifically in the bible, but the enclosure of common lands and the forging of gentle or noble status were specifically early modern concerns. Those Allen, Treasurie, p. 205. Allen, Treasurie, p. 206. 121 Allen, Treasurie, p. 207. 122 Allen, Treasurie, pp. 208–​12. 119 120

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authors who sought to justify their interpretation of the commandments not logically or with Ramist diagrams but through reference to scripture, therefore occasionally struggled in relation to the Eighth Commandment. No less a figure than William Perkins, who bolstered his interpretation of God’s precepts wherever possible with precedents from the Old and New Testaments, strained his exegesis to the limits at times when discussing ‘Thou shalt not steal’. In condemning the practice whereby ‘the buyer concealeth the goodness of the thing, or the seller the faults of it, and blindfoldeth the trueth with counterfeit speeches’, Perkins had nothing to fall back on other than Proverbs 29:14: ‘It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer: but when he is gone apart, he boasteth’. However, to attempt to give his judgement some New Testament heft, he went on to wheel out the ever-​useful Matthew 7:12: ‘Whatseover ye would that men should doe to you, even so doe to them:  for this is the Lawe and Prophets’.123 Perkins went on to discuss sins whereby people were oppressed in buying and selling, and of seven specific forms of transgression only managed to provide scriptural sanction for three, the last of which, usury, prompted an extended discussion.124 He explained without reference to biblical exemplars that ‘in bargaining, it is not lawfull to purse one pennie, without the giving of a penniworth’, and that to charge more on a particular day was merely ‘to sell time, and to take more of our neighbour, than right’.125 Perkins also condemned engrossing and bankruptcy without referring to scripture. Further on in his commentary, he attacked gaming for money as ‘worse farre than usurie’, because ‘thou maist not enrich thy selfe by impoverishing thy brother’, again without scriptural precedent.126 Early modern expositions of the Eighth Commandment were therefore informed not only by biblical condemnations of economic wrongdoing, but by a contemporary sense of ‘moral economy’.127 Gervase Babington explained that honest labour was an essential part of the human condition: the whole of mankind had been bound after Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden to toil in the sweat of their brow. The Perkins, Chaine, p. 89. For more on shifting attitudes to usury during the Reformation, see Charles H. George, ‘English Calvinist Opinion on Usury, 1600–​1640’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 18.4 (1975), pp. 455–​74; Eric Kerridge, Usury, Interest and the Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); and Mark Valeri, ‘Religious Discipline and the Market: Puritans and the Issue of Usury’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 54.4 (1997), pp. 747–​68. 125 Perkins, Chaine, p. 90. 126 Perkins, Chaine, p. 91. 127 The famous term is E. P. Thompson’s; see his ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), pp. 76–​136. 123 124

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Eighth Commandment therefore directed men and women to live honestly in their calling: to live idly by the labours of others, or to engage in ‘bad labour’, was a breach of divine law.128 Bad forms of labour were defined as massing, juggling, charming, playing interludes, fiddling and piping up and down the country, carrying bears and apes, telling fortunes, ‘and such like trades, mentioned in the statute of this lande, touching vagabundes’.129 Again, this was, if not a truly popular interpretation of ‘thou shalt not steal’, at least one which was in tune with the dominant social and political discourse of honest labour which eschewed the pastimes of wastrels and scoundrels. The godly Lincolnshire clergyman Thomas Granger itemised no fewer than fifty sins forbidden by the Eighth Commandment. Granger was another author who tended wherever possible to provide multiple biblical references in support of his exposition of the commandments; however, in several instances he failed to do so in his explication of the eighth. For instance, sin X, ‘All cunning and secret practises to enhaunce the price of things’, stood alone without reference or citation, as did sin XII, ‘concealement of lands and abilities, that the poore may be overburthened in all manner of charges, which our selves might easily beare’. Granger explicitly condemned the sin of ‘Mixt Settlements, viz: to joyne a necessary and a voluntary settlement together, that the meaner sort may be compelled to pay for the profite and list of some few’ as ‘a wicked theft lately come in use’.130 These were problems that were endemic in early modern England but had no biblical analogue; however, as God’s law was widely acknowledged to encompass all possible human actions, by definition it had to condemn such egregious practices. In total, Granger listed a dozen sins condemned by the commandment with no warrant of scripture, including ‘wearying of our neighbours with many suites and delaies’, a growing problem in the increasingly litigious society of early modern England, and also ‘the Profession of Roguery’.131 Like Babington, Granger gave a long list of roguish sorts, including ‘counterfeit Schollers . . . Collectors . . . Minstrels, Tinkers, petty-​wandring Chapmen, Egyptians’ and ‘sturdy and stout loyterers’, defined not in relation to scripture, but rather the current law of the land: ‘Act 4. Stat. Anno Eliz. 39’.132 What the Eighth Commandment ultimately commanded, John Dod explained, was ‘contentedness with our owne estate, with that portion Babington, Fruitful, pp. 380–​5. Babington, Fruitful, p. 385. 130 Granger, Tree, p. 53. 131 Granger, Tree, p. 56, 58. 132 Granger, Tree, p. 56. 128

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whatsoever God hath allotted unto us’.133 Contentment was the opposite of greed, and all theft was born of mankind’s desire to possess the goods of others. Or almost all, for Dod explained that the commandment also required man not to abuse his own property, either ‘by wastefulnesse’ and ‘unjust spending’, or by the opposite sins, ‘niggardlinesse’ and ‘unjust sparing’.134 The former manifested itself in excess in diet, apparel, sport, building, and so on. Men who spent their wealth upon their ‘taste; this, to please mine eye; this, to delight mine eares’, and only gave ‘now & then a penny to the poore’ were giving ‘bread to the dogges and crummes to the children’.135 In other words, they were wasting God’s gifts for their own pleasure, rather than using them in his service and for the common good. Niggardliness was just as great a sin:  it was ‘a most miserable and base thing for one to restraine himselfe of his lawfull liberty in meat, drinke, apparel, and honest recreation, where God hath not abridged him’.136 Dod explained that God’s intention relating to the Eighth Commandment was a doctrine of ‘lawful liberty’; a message of moderation, a Goldilocks morality. For God to bestow both riches and abundance and also ‘right and joyfull use of the same’ was a sign of his love: it was a sign of divine hatred to be appointed ‘slaves and drudges . . . to lay up wealth in great store: but . . . want a liberall and a good use’.137 Dod condemned families who ‘in the middest of all outward meanes of comfort . . . live all without comfort’, and who ‘be such miserable bondslaves to lucre and covetousnesse, as that they be as much at the command of gaine, both for the body and their sleepe, and every thing, as the Saintes of God be into Christ Jesus’.138 Osmund Lakes did not explore theft against the self in his treatment of the Eighth Commandment, but he examined several different species of theft under a number of key offices, including ministers, princes, magistrates, and private persons. Ministers were deemed guilty of theft when they withheld or corrupted understanding of true religion, ‘as doen the Papists, locking up the Booke, and corrupting where they open’.139 Princes were guilty of theft when they started ‘unjust warres’ or aspired to be ‘Monarch of the world’, as well as by ‘wastfull exhausting the common treasure to his crowne belonging’, while magistrates were guilty ‘what way soever by neglect or Dod, Plaine, p. 316. Dod, Plaine, p. 299. 135 Dod, Plaine, pp. 300–​1. 136 Dod, Plaine, p. 304. 137 Dod, Plaine, p. 305. 138 Dod, Plaine, p. 306. 139 Lakes, Probe, p. 290. 133 134

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corruption, they faile to doe justice in deciding causes of right betweene parties at strife’.140 Expositions of the Eighth Commandment therefore painted an expansive view of personal and public morality, based partly on scripture, but also reflecting the public concerns of the day. Commentators often had surprisingly little to say regarding what we might consider the more obvious forms of theft –​mugging, burglary, robbery –​but the commandment was frequently brought to bear in order to illuminate a totalising view of ethical and unethical economic behaviour, including renting and letting, selling and buying, and the proper acquisition and distribution of goods and money. At the centre of this morality lay the notions of honesty and good stewardship. Men were obliged to be open and honest in their dealings with one another, and to properly care for and use the goods which God had seen fit to provide. The Eighth Commandment also commanded honest work in the labour of a calling, and forbade not only dishonesty, but also idleness, and labour in a dishonest calling. This was not a message of theological complexity, but of the rights and responsibilities of hard work and a blueprint for a genuinely moral economy.

Popular Belief and Practice The omnipresence of the commandments in post-​reformation religious life raises some important questions. How did people react to the Decalogue? In what ways did it influence or inform their sense of what it meant to be Protestant? What role did it play in their lives, their faith, and their religious practice? These are obviously areas of interest, but there are no easy answers, for unlike their godly brethren, the great mass of ‘ordinary’ early modern English men and women did not explicitly reflect upon their religious beliefs and actions and then write down their findings for posterity. This lack of evidence, however, does not mean that these men and women did not believe and act upon religious principles. In the introduction to a recent edited volume of essays, I argued that the religious decisions made by ordinary men and women should not be characterised as products of ignorance, hostility or indifference, but ought to be accounted as a form of lay theology.141 To endorse, modify or reject official theological teachings was not always, often, or perhaps ever simply a matter of a lack of understanding: it was in many respects a conscious theological choice in its own Lakes, Probe, p. 291. Jonathan Willis, ‘Introduction: Sin and Salvation in Reformation England’, in idem (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 3–​4.

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right. In that same volume of essays, Maria Devlin proposed that we ought to spend at least as much time thinking about ‘rhetorical theology’ –​the messages inherent in the generic forms through which religious teachings were communicated –​as we do about the abstract truths of systematic theology.142 In the remainder of this section, I  intend to draw some conclusions about the relationship between the Decalogue and popular religion, based on two categories of evidence: manifestations of the commandments themselves, as discussed in the preceding sections of the chapter; and the (often disparaging) assessments of popular belief occasionally made by godly authors and other commentators. Beginning with manifestations of the Decalogue in the liturgy, in music, and in visual and material form, there are two inferences which can be deduced at the outset. The first is that the relatively simple theological messages inherent within these popular forms were largely consistent with one another, across example and genre. The second is that the tenor of this message differed significantly from the prevailing drift of learned theological treatises, pedagogical manuals and pastoral and devotional guides. Or, more accurately, popular forms tended to emphasise only one aspect of the broader range of meanings explored in printed theological works. This aspect was the third office of the law, and more specifically the obligation incumbent upon God’s people to strive to live their lives in accordance with his holy precepts. In many ways, the tendency to emphasise this use of the Decalogue marks a degree of continuity in popular religion with the late-​medieval emphasis on ‘good works’.143 This was no ministration of death in the manner of the second Protestant office of the law: rather, it was a way of repenting for sins past and endeavouring to work towards amending behaviour as a step on the pathway toward attaining eternal life. While puritan use of the law involved an ongoing engagement with the emotional and theological language of conversion, popular engagement with the Decalogue was much more straightforward.144 In liturgy, in music, and in visual form, the commandments promised salvation to all in return for faithful obedience. Maria Devlin, ‘“If it were made for man, ‘twas made for me”: Generic Damnation and Rhetorical Salvation in Reformation Preaching and Plays’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 174. 143 See Chapter 1 for more detail. Bossy observes that ‘the advent of the catcheism was to confirm, on all sides of the confessional mêlée, a transition to the Ten Commandments as the moral system of the west which the teaching Church seems to have made largely in the fifteenth century. Its results may fairly be described as revolutionary’. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–​1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 38. 144 On puritanism, see Chapter 5. 142

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In some ways, therefore, reformers were victims both of the success of the Decalogue in infiltrating public religion so thoroughly, and of their decision to allow the most prominent embodiments of the Ten Commandments to stand without much in the way of interpretive theological gloss. Taken out of context and shorn of the careful couching of pedagogical and pastoral manuals, the commandments functioned in popular religion rather as they had done for the ancient Jewish society in which they were originally conceived:  as a simple list of ten instructions to govern religious faith and community relations, and a promise or covenant of salvation in return for obedience between God and his people. This popular post-​reformation covenant of works was not quite the same as the original, for of course the Ten Commandments were not the whole sum of popular religion in Protestant England: men and women were also taught the importance of faith in Christ and the doctrine of justification by faith alone, amongst other fundamentals. But when the 1538 Henrician injunctions required ministers to ‘declare’ unto parishioners the Ten Commandments, until they learned them by rote, they were imparting a series of simple religious obligations, not the nuanced network of theology and morality those same precepts became in the sermons or writings of evangelicals such as Cranmer or Becon.145 If half of the Edwardian clergy of Gloucester diocese were unable to recite all Ten Commandments to Bishop Hooper’s vistors, it is even less likely that they could or would have expounded the Protestant theological vision of the dialectic between law and gospel with any greater efficiency or authority.146 The weekly ministerial recitation of and congregational response to the commandments as part of the (ante-​)communion service helped the words of the Decalogue to trickle into the hearts and souls of the English, but in asking God to ‘encline our heartes to kepe thys lawe’, and to ‘write all these thy laws in our heartes’, unregenerate and regenerate alike were offered the promise of fulfilling the commandments of the law as an attainable prospect.147 The settings of those same petitions in the Wanley part books, and perhaps in other Edwardian parish music manuscripts which no longer survive, would likewise have underscored to listeners the message that it was possible to keep God’s law with a mixture of divine help and human effort, and that such obedience would be rewarded.148 1538 Injunctions, Documents of the English Reformation, pp. 179–​83. Later Writings of Bishop Hooper, p. 151. 147 The boke of common prayer (1552), sigs. M6v–​M7r. 148 Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 224, 227. 145

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Edwardian polyphony highlighted not only the importance of the law, but also through its careful choice of biblical texts suggested that that law might be kept, and that its keeping might be one of the keys to salvation. ‘If ye love me keep my commandments’, Tallis’ anthem ran, ‘and I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever’.149 ‘Grant us’, begged Thomas Caustun’s ‘Let all the congregation’, ‘that we may keep always thy holy statutes ten’.150 The notion that the commandments existed to be kept, and that anybody and everybody should strive to do so, was a powerful one, restoring a renegade sense of agency into the otherwise passive soteriological mantra of ‘justification by faith alone’. The Decalogue itself contained a powerful promise of mercy ‘to theym that love thee, and do thy commaundementes’, as highlighted in the forme of prayers composed by the most thoroughgoing evangelical exiles in Geneva during the reign of Mary I.151 William Whittingham’s versification of the Decalogue, ‘Attende my people’, called upon singers to ‘see that my words in minde thou beare, and to my preceptes listen well’.152 This metrical versification read and sang very much as a warning –​don’t do that, or this might happen –​again placing stress on the possibility that the reader/​singer possessed the agency necessary to obey. Believers were told to ‘feare’ fornication and ‘beware’ murder and hate, language which suggested that these sins were avoidable for those who were aware and alert of the dangers that lay therein.153 The brief metrical form lent itself well to the perfunctory statements of Exodus 20:1–​17, but not to communicating the nuance of the reformed theological understanding of the commandments. ‘Yeld honour to thy parentes, that prolonged thy daies may be’, it promised; I am the Lord thy God, that ‘mercy do display To thousands of such as me love and my preceptes obey’.154 In other words, the brevity of liturgical, musical and metrical forms, together with an emphasis on the importance of the unvarnished biblical text, allowed precious little room for important theological gloss, and facilitated a simplistic understanding of the rewards that might be bestowed upon those who believed in God, went to church on Sundays, and avoided theft, murder and adultery. The same applies, in large part, to the visual display of the precepts of the law on parochial Decalogue boards. Most of these let the text of John 14:15–​17. Cf. Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 2, p. 127. Wrightson The Wanley Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 90. 151 The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, pp. 52, 55. 152 The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, p. 158. 153 The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, p. 159. 154 Psalmes. Of David in Englishe metre (STC2: 2429), sigs. Eivr-​v. 149 150

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Exodus speak for itself, but even simple boards usually made it clear that this was not just any old sentence of scripture, but the very voice of God given material expression, and they attempted figuratively to recreate the physical form and spiritual authority of the original stone tablets through the visual and textual positioning and framing of the Decalogue. ‘These are the tenne Commaundements of God, the same which God spake in the xx. Chapter of Exodus’, declared the otherwise rather plain and unassuming board at Abbots Langley. Others, like that at All Saints Wimbish, repeated the Prayer Book petition to ‘write all these thy Lawes in our hearts’. At Little Horwood, the commandment board explained that ‘these morall are right just and true which all men ought to keep and view’, and promised that ‘who so these keep and by the merit of Christ doth trust heaven to enherit’. At Preston, the command board proclaimed a plethora of biblical verses exhorting readers to adhere to the commandments and advertising the benefits thereof: ‘Yf yee walke in Gods ordinances, and keepe his commandimentes, God wylbe amonge you: he wylbe your God, and yee shalbe his people’; ‘Blessed art they that doe his commandimentes that they may have right to the tree of lyfe and may enter in through the gates into the cyttye or newe Jerusalem’.155 The linking in some boards of royal and divine authority suggested that God’s laws were there to be kept, just as the laws of the land were to be obeyed, and while the wicked might be chastised the good could expect a life (or an afterlife) of contentment. The graphic punishments meted out to transgressors of the law in the illustrated commandment boards at Whitchurch and Hedgerley suggested that while evil would be punished, such extremes of evil were rare, and punishment could be avoided through careful and diligent endeavour. ‘Whoso dispiseth ye word shall be destroyed’, proclaimed the Hedgerley board, ‘but he that feareth the commandements shall be rewarded’.156 It seems likely that many more parishioners rejoiced at seeing wicked Jezebel get her just desserts than identified with Jezebel and feared that God’s curse might fall on them as well. As such, whilst warning against the perils of damnation, the ‘rhetorical theology’ of these boards assumed the potential for salvation within the viewer, and tailored its message accordingly to one of hope, and the promise of everlasting life in return for obedience to God’s holy precepts. This ‘testimony’ from the liturgical, musical and visual representations of the commandments appears to be confirmed by the rather more hostile and pointed observations of godly authors. William Perkins, in The Leviticus 26:3,12,14,24; Revelation 22:14. Proverbs 13:13.

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Foundation of Christian Religion gathered into six principles criticised the ‘ignorant people’ and twenty-​nine of their ‘common opinions’ as follows: 2 That God is served by the rehearsing of the ten commaundements, the Lords praier, and the Creede . . . 12 That yee can keepe the Commandements, as well as God will give you leave . . . 15 That yee can serve God with all your hearts:  and that yee would be sorie else . . . 25 That a man prayeth when hee saith the ten Commaundements.157

The historian may prefer to see this as evidence of popular religious preference as opposed to ‘grosse ignorance’, but it is clear that puritan authors like Perkins were frustrated by the simplistic understanding of the commandments which they professed to observe amongst the common people. In the quotation that opened this chapter, Perkins railed that ‘it is not sufficient to say all these without booke, unlesse you can understand the meaning of the words . . . applying them inwardly to your hearts and consciences, and outwardly to your lives and conversations’. In like manner, Arthur Dent placed into the mouth of Asunetus, the unlearned interlocutor in his Plaine mans pathway to heaven, the ignorant protest: Tush, tush; what needs all this a doe? If a man say his Lords praier, his Ten Commandements, and his Beliefe, and keepe them, and say no body no harme, nor doe no body no harme, and doe as he would be done to, have a good faith to God-​ward, and be a man of Gods beliefe, no doubt he shall be saved, without all this running to Sermons, and pratling of the Scripture.158

Atheos and Zelotes, the interlocutors in George Gifford’s Countrie divinitie, discussed the commandments at length. The learned Zelotes began by laying a trap for his unwary discussant, consisting of a series of seemingly innocent questions: ‘you love God above all[?]‌’; ‘yee love your neighbour as your selfe?’; ‘you looke by this meanes to come to heaven?’; ‘ye know the commandements of God and fulfil them also do ye not?’.159 Atheos William Perkins, The foundation of Christian religion, gathered into sixe principles (1591), sigs A2r–​A3r. Arthur Dent, The plaine mans path-​way to heauen Wherein euery man may cleerely see, whether he shall be saued or damned (1607), p. 25. 159 George Gifford, A briefe discourse of certaine points of the religion which is among the commõ sort of Christians, which may bee termed the countrie diuinitie (1582), STC2: 11846, ff. 11v-​12r. On Gifford, see also Alan Macfarlane, ‘A Tudor Anthropologist: George Gifford’s Discourse and Dialogue’, in Sidney Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art:  Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London:  Routledge, 1977), pp.  140–​155; Dewey D.  Wallace Jr., ‘George Gifford, Puritan Propaganda and Popular Religion in Elizabethan England’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 9.1 (1978), pp. 27–​49. 157 158

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naively answered each in the affirmative, declaring that ‘I am no theefe, nor murtherer, nor traitour: I pay everye man his owne. I thinke this is Gods bidding’.160 Zelotes then proceeded to assault Atheos’ confident stance, suggesting that the illiterate man fell at the first hurdle, breaking the First Commandment by not seeking to know God through his word. Atheos clearly knew the commandments, but did not understand them to his opponent’s satisfaction. As Zelotes himself explained: I am verie loth for to question with yee any further in the commandementes, yee are so exceeding blinde in them. For I knowe that in our land, let all the people be numbred, and five parts of yee doe understand so much in the commaundements, Lords prayer, and articles of the fayth, that it were a greate shame for a godlie man to haue a childe of x. yeeres olde for to knowe no more.161

In a sense, the reformers had become victims of their own partial success, or at least of the runaway success of the Decalogue. It seems that most ­people went as far as to learn the law, but shorn of learned theological commentary the pastoral and religious message it conveyed was a very different one from that which men like Dent, Gifford and Perkins hoped to instil.162 It was not only the lower orders who came in for such criticism. The Edinburgh university rector and minister Robert Rollock had scant comfort for those of the opinion that ‘If I have the Lords Prayer, the Beleef, and the tenne Commandements, I need no more; I am a Lord, I am a Ladie, I am a Gentleman, what neede I to trouble my selfe with the Byble? I have another occupation’.163 Faith, he explained, was like a fire; and all fires eventually went out unless renewed with fresh supplies of fuel. Thomas Taylor criticised the propensity of men and women to treat the recitation Gifford, the countrie diuinitie, f. 12v. Gifford, the countrie diuinitie, ff. 42v–​43r. 162 While Christopher Haigh has described such statements as ‘impressively unanimous’ evidence in favour of ‘popular pelagianism’, John Craig has warned against taking these judgements at face value, and Nicholas Tyacke has also criticised Haigh for adopting the categories of Puritan commentators, and thereby judging popular Protestantism through their eyes. My intention here is not to use the testimony of Puritan commentators to find the Protestantism of the majority wanting, but relates specifically to discerning their understanding of the function(s) of the Decalogue by reading them against the grain. John Craig, Reformation, politics and polemics: the growth of Protestantism in East Anglian market towns, 1500–​1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 6–​20; Christopher Haigh, The plain man’s pathways to heaven:  kinds of Christianity in post-​Reformation England, 1570–​1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Review: The plain man’s pathways to heaven:  kinds of Christianity in post-​Reformation England, 1570–​1640 by Christopher Haigh’, The Historical Journal, 52 (2009), pp. 265–​6. 163 Robert Rollock, Lectures vpon the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians (1603), p. 332. 160 161

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of the commandments as a form of prayer; ‘a popish thanksgiving, when there is not a word of prayer in them’, while Thomas Granger attacked the common failure of individuals to see the commandments as heads of a much wider series of precepts, berating those ‘that bableth over the Commandements, and maintaineth swearing, and hateth every good and righteous man, and is to every good worke reprobate’.164 The treatment of the Decalogue as a form of private prayer was probably the most frequent object of this kind of animus.165 Samuel Gibson, in A sermon of ecclesiastical benediction preached at a visitation in Oundle, railed against men and women who ‘use for prayers’ ‘those that are no prayers’, ‘thinking them to be so: not onely children, but olde men thinke they pray, and pray well, when they say the Creed and ten Commandements’.166 Most men and women in early modern England knew the Ten Commandments, but the theological message they drew from them was not the same as that peddled by learned divines.167

Conclusions According to systematic theology, the Ten Commandments were supposed to have nothing to say to the reprobate after condemning them to hell for the corruption in their nature and the sinfulness of their deeds. Those who self-​identified as –​or sought to ascertain whether or not they were one of –​the godly, employed the Decalogue as a significant weapon in their quest for assurance. But what of the ‘ungodly’ –​not the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but the broad conforming majority whose piety fell short of the fiery zeal of Puritanism? This chapter has demonstrated that the Ten Commandments were ubiquitous in the religious lives of such people: through the liturgy; through religious music; and through the visual and material reshaping of the parish church, which made the words of God’s law, painted on wood and stone or hewn into brass, a central focal point in the new spatial and liturgical re-​ordering of corporate public worship. We might deem the godly’s interaction with the Decalogue, explored Thomas Taylor, Dauids learning, or The vvay to true happinesse in a commentarie vpon the 32. Psalme (1617), p. 300; Thomas Granger, A familiar exposition or commentarie on Ecclesiastes (1621), p. 115. 165 Cf. Elizabeth Isham’s criticism of the practice of saying the commandments as a prayer, something of which her mother also strongly disapproved: Isham, Book of Remembrance, f. 4r. 166 Samuel Gibson, A sermon of ecclesiastical benediction preached at Oundle at a visitation (1620), p. 24. 167 Haigh, after Collinson, refers to this as ‘rustic pelagianism’ –​a gut-​reaction certainty that salvation came from good works, prayers and charity, whatever the preachers might say. Christopher Haigh, ‘The Taming of Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, History, 85.280 (2000), p. 582. 164

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in the previous chapter, a theological success but a pastoral failure, insofar as it created a range of difficult pastoral issues for ministers to deal with. In contrast, the ‘ungodly’s’ relationship with the Ten Commandments could be described as a pastoral success but a theological failure, judged by the reformers’ own criteria. That is to say, by and large men and women appear to have learnt the text of the commandments, but they were rather sketchier on their meaning, at least as expounded by the majority of Protestant divines across the long sixteenth century. As historians, we need to pay closer attention to the rhetorical theology of the linguistic and material forms through which the Decalogue was most commonly communicated. This rhetorical theology was inclusive, not exclusive; it was aimed at everybody, not just the elect. It was very clear about the threats and promises relating to the fulfilment of the commandments, but had very little to say about the impossibility of keeping them, or the role of the law in sentencing the reprobate to eternal damnation. Rather, what popular manifestations of the Ten Commandments did most effectively was extend the third office of the law to everybody, without exception. This was a guide to godly living for all, not just the elect, which spelled out in detail the punishments which would be imprecated upon the wicked, but also promised prosperity, mercy and eternal life for those who tried to live their lives in accordance with its precepts. In other words, the rhetorical theology of popular manifestations of the Decalogue did not discourage but rather actively facilitated the very ‘country divinity’ so abhorred by godly divines like Perkins, Gifford and Dent. By the high standards of such individuals, the Decalogue can be seen as a mark both of the success and failure of the reformation. In the eyes of historians, less concerned with such value judgements, it should be clear that the Decalogue played an important role in shaping English Protestantism along genuinely popular lines.168

The question may be asked as to whether this rhetorical theology of popular representations of the commandments contributed to what Alexandra Walsham has called the ‘parochial roots of Laudianism.’ This issue will be addressed in the Conclusion. For details, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Parochial Roots of laudianism revisited: Catholics, Anti-​Calvinists and “Parish Anglicans” in Early Stuart England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 49.4 (1998), pp. 620–​51.

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But yet if that to Christ thou wouldst, in this darke shade of night, See here a little starre God sends, in love to give thee light; A mirrour of Gods perfect law, wherby thou sinne mayst see, And seeing shun, and flie to Christ, that he may cover thee. John Dod, A plaine and familiar exposition of the Ten commandements (1604)

This book has sought to tell two distinct but interrelated stories. The first story is of the reformation of the Decalogue, of how the Ten Commandments were changed by and during the course of the English reformation. The existing historiography of the early modern Decalogue, such as it is, tells only part of this story; it describes the Ten Commandments’ gradual rise to prominence, and pre-​eminence over the Seven Deadly Sins, from the early fourteenth century to the latter part of the sixteenth after a millennium of relative medieval neglect.1 In John Bossy’s words, ‘the reformation brought to a conclusion the process of replacing the seven deadly sins by the Ten Commandements as the system of Christian ethics’.2 This book has sought to build on and at the same time move beyond the work of Bossy and others by exploring not only the moral and educational significance of the Decalogue, but also the extent to which its theology was repurposed, reinterpreted and reinvented by English Protestantism over the course of the reformation. The Ten Commandments were no longer just a moral and ethical guide: the most important way in which the Decalogue was adapted during the reformation was through the articulation of not one but three separate roles, functions, or offices, each of which defined the relationship between humanity and the law of God differently. It is around E.g. Bossy, ‘Moral’, pp. 214–​234. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–​1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 116.

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these three offices that this book has been structured, and one of its principal contentions is that the significance of the early modern Decalogue simply cannot be grasped without reference to this vital hermeneutical principle. The first office of the law was civil and temporal. Post-​lapsarian mankind, corrupted by the stain of original sin, needed to be governed and regulated somehow, and the Ten Commandments provided a simple but effective framework for ordering the externals of religious worship, as well as for ensuring the basic ingredients of an orderly commonwealth: respect for authority, private property, personal safety, honesty, and legitimate propagation. In their civil guise, the Ten Commandments were promulgated and enforced by the secular magistracy, with kings and judges God’s deputies on earth. As such they applied to everybody, regenerate and unregenerate, from birth to death. External obedience to the commandments promised nothing in terms of salvation, but it did offer the possibility of temporal blessings, so that life might not just be long but also leavened with comfort and plenty. The reformation was initially predicated on a heartfelt opposition to and therefore weakening of clerical power and the transfer of authority from clerical to lay hands. But over the course of the reformation Protestant clerics found themselves increasingly in the position of needing, wanting, and demanding greater authority. It is therefore possible that their renewed emphasis on the law of God was partly in order to facilitate a substitutionary appropriation of divine power, to make up for the amelioration of specifically clerical power: ‘I am telling you to do this, but do it not because I am telling you, but because I am simply repeating what God commands . . .’3 The second office of the law was evangelical, and the Decalogue was changed from a moral and legal code requiring external compliance to a staging post of prime importance along the narrow theological path to justification. While the civil office of the law required only formal and external obedience (go to church, don’t kill anybody), the second, evangelical office required a perfect spiritual obedience. Immediately after Creation, Adam and Eve had possessed the requisite grace to perform such flawless actions; however, following the Fall, the cancer of original sin meant that perfect obedience was now impossible for mankind to attain. Like a drop of black dye in a glass of otherwise pure water, humanity was tainted for ever by original sin, and their incapacity to fulfil the law meant that they were destined eternally to break it. Breaches of the law were the very C.f. Ronald Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys (Cambridge Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 4.

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definition of sin, and the Bible was happy to confirm that the wages of sin were death and damnation.4 With this message of condemnation in their minds, under the pens of Protestant divines the commandments underwent a dramatic expansion. A new estimation of the precipitous depths of the law meant that, pace the reformed renumbering of the Decalogue, concupiscence itself –​the innermost stirrings of sin, before and without conscious consent of the will –​was judged to be a breach of the Tenth Commandment. Humanity was therefore, by virtue of the Fall, disqualified from any possibility of salvation through perfect fulfilment of the law under the covenant of works. A renewed emphasis on the enormous breadth of the law also meant that individual commandments, and the Decalogue as a whole, were reconstructed in order to designate as sinful anything of which reformers disapproved; from stage plays to elaborate dress, and from dancing to the Catholic mass. The purpose of the evangelical office of the law was therefore twofold. As it applied to the reprobate, its function was to condemn sinners to hell. As it applied to those predestined by God to election, however, its job was show humans their incurable sinfulness and rank incapacity to fulfil the law, in order to kindle within them repentance and drive them to faith in Christ. The Decalogue by itself had no power to save, but it was made into a prime instrument in leading the godly to Christ, and thence to God’s justifying grace. Finally, the third office of the law was practical and pastoral; in this guise the Ten Commandments formed a hands-​on guide to godly living. However, whereas Catholics of all kinds had sought (and continued to seek) to perform the deeds of the law as part of the repertoire of good works through which they hoped to earn their salvation, the third office of the Protestant Decalogue applied only to the regenerate, who performed the works of the law not in order to bring about their redemption, but as a consequence of it. The Decalogue came to be made manifest in post-​ reformation England with an unequalled ubiquity; in sermons and homilies, in the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, in simple hymns and in complex polyphonic musical arrangements, in catechisms and devotional guides, on walls and boards in churches, in textual and pictorial form. The commandments therefore became a tool by which the godly in particular tried and tested their peculiar brand of experimental Calvinism by identifying good works performed and sinful behaviours enacted. They did so as part of their quest for assurance of divine favour and sanctification, as part Romans 6:25.

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of a complex and ultimately unsolvable soteriological calculus. The ‘Ten Words’ given by God to his people on mount Sinai, and written with his own finger on tablets of stone as well as in the fleshy tables of human hearts, were thus transformed into an almost infinite skein of civil, social, moral, theological and religious ordinances. The commandments became an intricate web, the supporting spokes of which were formed of a stable blend of biblical prescriptions and prohibitions, but across which lay countless gossamer threads of moral and theological relativism. In this way, the Decalogue was re-​made by the divines of reformation England; how could it not be? A behavioural code which had been composed to sustain and regulate a Jewish society in the sixth century before Christ clearly did not have the best interests of sixteenth-​century England at heart, whatever rhetorical parallels between the two nations began to emerge during the reformation.5 In moral and religious terms the commandments were manipulated by English Protestants in order to condemn sins which either hadn’t been considered sins –​or which simply hadn’t existed –​at the time when the precepts were first enumerated. The Protestant reconstruction of the Decalogue was also, inevitably, polemical: it not only censured alehouses and greedy landlords but also monasticism, crucifixes, relics and pilgrimage. If the first table of the Ten Commandments in particular defined true worship, then by definition that true worship had to look like early modern reformed Protestantism; and if the first four commandments prohibited false worship, then a large part of what they prohibited had to bear a striking resemblance to the doctrine and ritual of the Catholic Church. The English reformation therefore created a series of Decalogues which were specifically tailored to fulfil a range of confessionally-​specific functions. Renumbered, repurposed, broadened, deepened, multiplied, modernised, polemicised, subjectivised, and to be used in different ways by different groups at different times and in different contexts, the stone tablets of Moses’ law were forced to demonstrate a remarkable elasticity between 1485 and 1625. The second story that this book has sought to tell is more complex, more nuanced, but fundamentally of greater significance: the story of how the English reformation itself constituted, to a greater or lesser degree, a reformation of the Decalogue. That is to say, the Ten Commandments were not only shaped by but also themselves helped to shape the course of religious change in England across the long sixteenth century in profound and C.f. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, ‘Federal Theology and the “National Covenant”: An Elizabethan Presbyterian Case Study’, Church History, 61.4 (1992), pp. 394–​407.

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lasting ways.6 They did this firstly through their ubiquity, which in turn they owed to their divine institution. The reformation was a movement predicated not upon religious novelty, but upon the notion of a return to religious fundamentals. The foremost error of the Catholic Church, so the polemic of their opponents ran, was in allowing human innovation and tradition to contaminate the worship of God. The Protestant reformation, inspired by the textual methodologies and intellectual priorities of Christian humanism, sought to renew Christianity by clearing out the Augean stable of human invention, thereby restoring it to a state of biblical purity. That meant organising God’s worship not according to human tradition or will-​ worship, but according to his word and what he himself had commanded mankind to do. The Bible was the fullest expression of the divine will, but the Ten Commandments were held to be a concise yet comprehensive summary. They were an expression of the same unified essence as the first commandment given to Adam and Eve; the law of Christ; the moral law; God’s eternal and immutable will. The Decalogue thus became a central organising principle of the new Protestant faith. Gone were the commandments of man and the commandments of the Church; all that remained were the commandments of God. The Ten Commandments stood alone, shorn of their medieval Catholic association with other lists of sins, virtues and good works. They were one of the holy trinity of Protestant pedagogical texts, and whilst the Creed taught the faithful what to believe, and the Lord’s Prayer taught hope and how to petition God and give thanks, it was the Ten Commandments which taught charity: what to do and how to behave in order to be a Christian. Because of its central role in Protestant theology, and in educational, liturgical, theological and pastoral texts and treatises, the Decalogue was therefore able to shape the English reformation in a number of subtle but profound ways. At the most basic level, the individual commandments directed both clerical and lay attention to certain issues –​faith, idolatry, blasphemy, the Sabbath, obedience to secular authority, anger and violence, sexual continence, material goods, honesty and credit, concupiscence –​ many of which chimed with pre-​existing social and religious concerns. It is a moot point as to whether the renumbering of the commandments

As Peter Marshall has noted, ‘formations of religious identity in the sixteenth century were fundamentally dialectical processes . . . religious identities are created, not independently of, but through, language’, in this case the text of the Ten Commandments. Peter Marshall, ‘Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the semantics of schism’, in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the “Protestant Nation” (Manchester: MUP, 2005), p. 42.

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reflected or encouraged evangelical hostility to idolatry; it probably did both, and the same could be said touching the concerns of the rest of the commandments. Furthermore, the Decalogue as a whole was able to exert its influence in other ways. For example, the first office of the law demanded temporal and external obedience to the commandments, and placed the responsibility for ensuring that obedience onto secular magistrates. In doing so, it bolstered the authority of temporal government, but it also defined the authority and legitimacy of governors in part by the extent to which they were effective at promulgating and policing God’s law. By accepting the Ten Commandments as a form of discourse which helped to legitimise and guarantee their power to rule, magistrates from Henry VIII onwards (and downwards) were voluntarily constraining themselves to act thereafter within the boundaries of that discourse. Magistrates could themselves attempt to further massage the commandments in particular directions, but they were forced to do so as only one participant in a broader conversation involving theologians and the people. In terms of authority and the Fifth Commandment, then, rulers could talk about hierarchy as a divinely ordained principle of nature, and the responsibility of their subjects to honour and submit to them as a child to its parents; but they also had to accept that the metaphor of parenthood placed upon their own shoulders a wide range of obligations and duties of care. In terms of the second office of the law, the identification of sinful behaviours through the framework of the Ten Commandments became an essential aspect of the language and experience of evangelical conversion, by becoming the vehicle for engendering a sense of hopelessness, of repentance, and of the necessity of turning to Christ for salvation. The same law which was loathed by the reprobate was loved by the children of God, and so an inward and spiritual affection toward and thirst to fulfil the Ten Commandments became one of the marks of the elect. The Decalogue may therefore be one of the keys to unlocking the mysteries of the puritan psyche. In their constant search for (re)assurance, puritans submitted themselves over and over again to the emotional processes recognised as accompanying evangelical religious conversion, by examining themselves for sin according to the Ten Commandments, and subsequently searching for evidence of the performance of the works of the law in their everyday lives. As such they constructed for themselves a form of ongoing ‘puritan penitential cycle’, which was in large part practically and psychologically conditioned by the Decalogue. The vices puritans endeavoured to banish in themselves, and the virtues through which they sought sanctification and assurance, were defined by the Ten Commandments. It is in that sense

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that puritans became (and indeed were occasionally ridiculed as) the spiritual ancestors of the biblical Jewish Pharisees. Lastly, the Ten Commandments had an equally profound impact upon the popular Protestantism that emerged from the English reformation. We should not take at face value puritan denunciations of ‘country divinity’, or the suggestions of revisionist historians that the ‘parish anglicans’ of late-​sixteenth and early seventeenth-​century England were in any sense the ‘spiritual leftovers’ of the process of religious reform.7 Work by Judith Maltby and others has demonstrated clearly that most English people had genuine affection for the rites of the Book of Common Prayer and the singing of metrical psalms, and a genuine distaste for –​if not hatred of –​the Church of Rome, even if they were often able to tolerate and live alongside their religiously conservative neighbours.8 What also seems clear, however, is that the counter-​intuitive theology of double predestination could be something of a hard sell, and a great many ordinary people seem to have retained a residual affection for the common sense notion that, in the final instance, God would reward good behaviour and punish wrongdoing. This may have been down to a lingering fondness for the agency of the popular orthopraxy of late medieval (or early modern) Catholicism, or even a grass-​roots anticipation of later Laudian concerns; but whatever the origins it was not discouraged –​indeed it was positively encouraged –​by the ‘rhetorical theology’ of popular manifestations of the Ten Commandments: in the liturgy, in music, and in visual and material form. Presented for public consumption and cut off from learned theological nuance, the commandments appeared to request obedience, promising rewards to those who managed it and punishments for those who did not. Partly this was a function of genre; pedagogical texts and contexts assumed that the audience could learn and profit from the message being imparted. But it was also a function of the Decalogue, which appeared to require obedience because it was possible, and said nothing about the Calvinist conviction that the impossibility of obedience to God’s law was a vital cog in a complex but invisible soteriological machine. Divines could put almost any spin on the Ten Commandments, but try as they might, For a discussion of this historiography, see Chapter 6. Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Beth Quitslund, ‘Singing the Psalms for Fun and Profit’, in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 237–​258; Bill Sheils, ‘“Getting on” and “Getting Along” in Parish and Town’, in Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk F. K. Van Nierop, and Judith Pollmann (eds), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands, c.1570–​1720 (Manchester: MUP, 2009), pp. 67–​83.

7

8

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they could not escape the biblical text of Exodus 20:1–​17 even if they had wanted to; and, of course, they did not. The period of religious change between c.1485 and c.1625 therefore witnessed a reformation of the Decalogue in two senses: the reformation changed the Decalogue radically, almost to the point where it was unrecognisable; and the Decalogue helped to shape the reformation, in ways that were more subtle but no less significant over the longer term. Not least, we may see within their divergent attitudes to the Ten Commandments a key explanatory point of difference between the godly minority and the ‘ungodly’ Protestants who made up the majority share of congregations up and down the land. We might also espy, in the Decalogue’s particular nexus of religious and secular forms of law and authority, an explanation for the ‘compliance conundrum’ of why the English reformation was able to occur with comparatively little popular resistance.9 As well as charting some aspects of change over time, this study has strongly suggested that many of the divisions and debates which came to prominence in the Church of England under Elizabeth and James had their origins in the theological writings of Henrician and Edwardian evangelicals.10 The significance of this is not in labelling Hooper or Tyndale as the spiritual progenitors of later Puritanism. Rather, it is to highlight that the concerns of the Elizabethan and Jacobean godly arose directly from the well and mainspring of early English Protestantism itself. The passage of time brought about changing social, political and religious circumstances which, with the additional impact of generational change, required later divines to find new ways to respond to their evolving pastoral context.11 But while they tinkered around the edges –​refining and expanding lists of virtues and vices, shifting their focus from anti-​Catholic polemic to practical divinity, developing new pastoral strategies aimed at giving wavering believers a sense of assurance –​they did so within the parameters established by the great theological paradigm shift accomplished by the first generation of evangelical reformers.

Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-​Century England (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 197. In outline, but not in detail, this author has some sympathy with G. W. Bernard’s suggestion that the developments of the later English Reformation owed much to its Henrician origins. See G. W. Bernard, ‘The Church of England c. 1529–​c. 1642’, History, 75.244 (1990), pp. 183–​206. This is also one of the central arguments of Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–​1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 11 On the impact of generational change, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation of the Generations: Yough, Age and Religious Change in England, c.1500–​1700’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 21 (2011), pp. 93–​121. 9 10

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Finally, what this book has tried to do by example is to contribute to the broader discussion of the future direction of English reformation studies in two ways. Firstly, following the revisionist emphasis on radical change, and the post-​revisionist stress on continuity, the historiographical pendulum has now swung back to the point where we can recognise that the reformation had the power both to make the familiar feel new, whilst simultaneously presenting the new in familiar terms. Reformers were able to reassure people with the fundamentals of Christianity, like the Ten Commandments, even as those fundamentals themselves were undergoing a seismic redefinition. The strength of the reformation lay in large part in its ability to repurpose familiar doctrines to new ends, and in rebranding innovation with the ideological weight and reassurance of antiquity, thereby undermining historians’ attempts to impose simplistic or antagonistic models of continuity and change. Secondly, what this book hopefully does is contribute to the growing consensus that the cultural history of theology has an important contribution to make to our understanding of the English reformation, and the messy tangle of religious beliefs, practices, and identities to which it gave rise. Too often the temptation is to treat the theological changes which took place during the reformation as neat and settled, or as abstract and self-​contained, focussing instead on the practice of religion as something more tangible, something more real. To borrow an analogy from post-​Marxist historiography, however, there is little to be gained by a reductionist reformation history which sees theology as epiphenomenal in its relationship to a hard base of praxis. There was nothing neat or self-​contained about the theology of the reformation; doctrine was continually refined in the face of real world experience. As Leif Dixon has recently advised us, we ought to think in terms of a connective relationship between systematic and pastoral theology, rather than always conceiving of them comparatively, as two separate entities. Calvin and others, Dixon reminds us, did not write their theology as an abstract intellectual exercise: it only had meaning as it applied to the lives of ordinary men and women.12 Theology itself –​in this case, the theology of the Ten Commandments –​has a social and cultural history, and throughout the reformation it was evolving, even as it sought to represent a fixed ‘truth’ to the population. Little surprise then that the resulting message was often confused and contradictory; that its pastoral consequences differed according to time and place; and that it was Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c.1590–​1640 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 24.

12

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received in distinctive ways by different segments of the population. This confusion does not mean that we should abandon any attempt to describe or make sense of religious change, but it does point to the inadequacy of simple binary models of continuity and change, and even quaternary models of reformation which were either fast, slow, from above or from below.13 Rather, it makes sense for us to view the English reformation in dialectical terms, as a form of conversation. That is, we should not view religious change as something decided upon by a zealous minority and then forced upon a reluctant majority (however conceived), but as a subject which was continually open to debate, subject to scrutiny, and susceptible to modification. Not all voices in this debate were equal; some were more powerful, some more numerous, some better organised, some more educated, some more passionate. But whenever kings decreed, subjects (dis)obeyed, ministers preached, authors published, tutors taught, or spiritual counsellors offered pastoral advice, they each contributed to a common dialectical process of reformation. The result was therefore the product of a corporate endeavour:  rarely intellectually coherent, and certainly not always consensual. The English people made their reformation, even as it sought to remake them, and the Ten Commandments were an essential part of that process.14

Christopher Haigh, ‘The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation’, in idem (ed.) The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 19–​21. 14 Christopher Haigh famously suggested that ‘the Reformation had not changed the English people; it was the English people who changed the Reformation’; I  would prefer to moderate his judgement and see the process in more reciprocal terms. Christopher Haigh, ‘The Taming of Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, History, 85.280 (2000), p. 588. 13

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383

Index

Absolon, 121 Achan, 121, 325 Adam, 20, 26, 69, 76, 139, 146, 165, 166, 193, 333, 346, 349 adiaphora, 23, 46 adultery, 4, 13, 32, 76, 87, 120, 121, 122–​29, 140, 152, 154, 168, 174, 228, 257, 267 death penalty for, 122, 123, 127, 268, 269 prosecution by temporal courts, 84 spiritual, 40, 41, 41n88, 45, 70 age, 104, 111, 130 Ahab, 121, 326, 327 Allen, Robert, 41, 46, 60, 66, 68, 77, 91, 100, 151, 156, 193, 331 Allen, William, 40 Allison, Richard, 296 Almond, Oliver, 200 Ambrose, Saint, 31 Anabaptism, 68 Andrewes, Lancelot, 85 angels, 39, 40, 192, 194, 301, 306, 312 Saint Michael, 41 anger, 141, 152, 157, 160, 161 Anglicanism, 7, 224 antinomianism, 24, 55, 134, 178, 198–​212, 278 Aquinas, Thomas, 7, 53 Archer, Isaac, 262 Aristotle, 276 Arminianism, 18 Ascham, Roger, 168n137 Assize courts, 4, 76, 86, 112–​21, 131 assurance, 191, 209, 235, 236, 347, 350, 352 astrology, 66, 67 astronomy, 67 Athanasius of Alexandria, Saint, 31 atheism, 3, 56, 195, 196, 197, 203, 267 Attersoll, William, 182, 188, 191, 237 Augustine, Saint, 2, 5, 29, 29n38, 29n40, 32, 35, 53, 70, 138, 149, 201 avant-​garde conformism, 85 avarice, 34

Babington, Gervase, 38, 42, 45, 62, 110, 123, 148, 160, 182, 194, 250, 277, 333 Bale, John, 26, 228 balladry, 296 Banister, Robart, 214, 229 baptism, 137 Barker, Peter, 40, 65, 100, 148, 275 Barlow, William, 284 Baxter, Richard, 147 Beake, Robert, 267 Beard, Thomas, 228, 230 Becon, Thomas, 64, 180, 192, 228, 242, 338 belief. See faith Bell, Thomas, 54, 149, 254 Bellarmine, Cardinal, 52, 138, 149 Bentham, Thomas, 299 Bentley, Thomas, 191 bestiality, 124, 153, 174 Bible, 5, 43, 68, 349 Apocrypha Tobit, 316 Bishops’ Bible, 301 exegetics, 66 Gospel, 4n9, 19, 185 Great, 239 New Testament 1 Corinthians, 126 1 John, 284 1 Peter, 98 1 Timothy, 98 2 Timothy, 109 Acts, 28, 48, 205n115 Corinithians, 140 Ephesians, 94 Galatians, 23, 183, 184, 209 James, 165 John, 28, 37, 321 Luke, 95 Matthew, 24, 53, 77, 94, 161, 181, 190, 284, 312, 323, 333

383

384

384

Index

Bible (cont.) Romans, 75, 98, 133, 191, 209, 213, 227, 260, 317, 321 Titus, 154, 306 Old Testament, 1, 75, 127, 139 1 Kings, 95 2 Samuel, 98 Daniel, 116 Deuteronomy, 5, 22, 28, 29, 77, 94, 128, 138, 142, 159, 315 Exodus, 1, 5, 28, 29, 57, 69, 94, 142, 157, 192, 245, 257 Genesis, 277 Isaiah, 125, 315 Jonah, 172 Leviticus, 22, 128, 315, 325 Numbers, 43, 166, 246, 325 Proverbs, 98, 324, 333 Psalms, 27, 28, 40, 75, 116 Revelation, 315 Samuel, 75 Song of Songs, 54 perversion of, 65 reading, 45 Sermon on the Mount, 32, 34, 126, 140, 152, 314 Bishops’ Book, the, 16, 78, 146, 238 Blair, Robert, 260 blasphemy, 56, 60, 61, 64, 64n190, 66, 121, 257, 267, 271, 273, 349 blessings, 12, 20, 71 Bodin, Jean, 92 Boleyn, Anne, 284, 285, 318 Bonner, Edmund, 32, 49, 52, 137 Book of Common Prayer, 20, 47, 87, 286, 297, 311, 312, 340, 351 Book of Sports, 266 Bradford, John, 45, 89, 162 Bradshaw, William, 163 Bredwell, Stephen, 206 Bridges, John, 25, 79 Brinsley, John, 39, 42, 93, 165, 197, 264, 274 Browne, Robert, 207 Bruch, Richard, 65, 126 Bucer, Martin, 269 Buckinghamshire, 303, 306, 324 Bullinger, Heinrich, 79, 269 Bunny, Edmund, 62, 179, 275 Bunny, Francis, 39, 41, 107, 123, 170, 184, 256 Bury St Edmunds, 272 Byfield, Nicholas, 90 Calvin, Jean, 7, 21, 27, 47, 55, 76, 138, 164, 202, 222, 353 Calvinism, 66, 70, 80, 222, 226, 281

Cambridge, University of, 269 King’s College, 103 Pembroke College, 22 Cartwright, Thomas, 47 catechesis, 3, 4, 6, 8, 13, 18, 50, 108, 231, 281, 297, 314 cathedrals, 298 Catholicism, 5, 7, 12, 15, 19, 22, 24, 29, 31, 38, 48–​56, 70, 147, 194, 200, 228, 231, 312, 348, 351 anti-​Catholicism, 42 Caustun, Thomas, 290, 339 Cecil, William, 270 Chapelin, George, 39, 126 charity, 6, 52, 324, 349 Chark, William, 34, 187 Charles I, king, 87 charms. See witchcraft chastity, 126, 228 Chertsey, Andrew, 136, 143 children, 58, 60, 97, 123 rights of, 105–​07 Chrysostom, Saint John, 31 Church Courts, the, 122 churchwardens, 308, 312, 314, 318 Chytraeus, David, 183 Civil War, 14, 84, 199, 214, 220, 266 Clark, Samuel, 264 clergy. See ministers Coe, William, 263 commandment boards, 4, 13, 297–​336, 337, 339, 347, 351 Commandments of the (Catholic) Church, 50 commonwealth, the, 89 concupiscence, 34, 141–​49, 157, 171, 174, 177, 187, 210, 211, 213, 214, 227, 273, 347, 349 conscience, 185 conversion, 12, 178, 212, 213, 227, 234, 236, 238, 241, 243, 279, 337, 350 corporal mercy, works of, 29, 50, 51, 137, 162, 253 cosmetics, 125 country divinity, 64, 71, 214, 245, 351 covenant, 58, 63, 71, 188n41, 193, 264, 338 of grace, 25, 187, 189, 212 of works, 24, 25, 50, 187, 189, 201, 212, 226, 227, 338, 347 Coverdale, Miles, 292 covetousness, 29, 34, 142, 226 Cox, Richard, 299, 303 Cranmer, Thomas, 38, 67, 78, 89, 95, 98, 102, 108, 147, 161, 269, 271, 285, 338 Creed, 3, 4, 282, 285, 286, 298, 314, 342, 349 Cromwell, Thomas, 284, 285 cultural history of theology, 10, 353 Culverwell, Ezekiel, 45, 189, 191, 232

385

Index curse, 23 curses, 12, 20, 71 Daman, William, 296 dancing, 5, 125, 126, 154, 169, 230, 347 Day, John, 293 Decalogue. See law, moral; Ten Commandments Dedham Conferences, 207 Denison, Stephen, 46, 48, 105, 108, 125, 193, 227 Dent, Arthur, 25, 170, 184, 188, 245, 341 Dering, Edward, 249 devil, the, 40, 124, 145, 147, 148, 165, 167, 203, 242, 260, 276 diaries, 4 dicing, 66 dioceses Coventry and Lichfield, 299 Ely, 299 Rochester, 298 Worcester, 299 dissoloution of the monasteries, 239 Dod, John, 38, 39, 41, 44, 48, 58, 60, 89, 101, 108, 110, 123, 144, 162, 166, 192, 196, 246, 251, 255, 258, 261, 263, 334 domestic devotion, 45, 251 Downame, George, 65, 100, 124, 150, 156, 252 drunkenness, 125 Dyke, Daniel, 166, 181 Dyke, William, 44, 102, 107, 111, 139, 140, 151 Easter, 266 Eden, garden of, 1, 20, 69, 76, 120, 168, 226, 333 Edward VI, king, 77, 79, 81, 269, 270 Egerton, Stephen, 207 elect, the, 16, 49, 50, 170, 175, 178, 179, 181, 189, 191, 198, 210, 211, 212, 219, 235, 243, 244, 245, 254, 278, 280, 281, 338, 343, 347, 350 Elizabeth I, queen, 50, 77, 81, 204, 214, 270, 271, 297, 302, 303, 317, 352 Elton, Edward, 47, 109, 147, 258 Elyot, Thomas, 225 Erasmus, Desiderius, 160, 249, 284 Essex, 311 Estey, George, 46, 122, 144, 155, 232, 250, 276 Eve, 20, 69, 76, 166, 193, 333, 346, 349 excommunication, 122 exile, 291 faith, 6, 25, 52, 139, 175, 186–​92, 196, 198, 202, 212, 219, 235, 236, 238, 239, 244, 342, 349 Fall of mankind, 35, 120, 138, 168, 193, 213, 346 false witness, 121, 257, 273, 275 Family of Love, 200, 204, 205, 229 fasting, 47 Fenner, Dudley, 141, 196

385

fornication, 124, 153, 154, 174, 272, See adultery Foxe, John, 74, 127, 269, 270, 301 Frankfurt, 293 Fulke, William, 22, 33, 203 gambling, 332 Gataker, Thomas, 154 Geneva, 291 Gerson, Jean, 7, 136 Gifford, George, 341 Glorious Revolution, 14, 84 Gloucestershire, 308 Glover, Edward, 206, 214 gluttony, 125, 126, 137 God, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 16, 20, 26, 37, 60, 65, 74, 76, 78, 92, 113, 144, 145, 161, 166, 178, 188, 192, 210, 217, 233, 242, 246, 315, 317, 323, 340 Christ, 12, 22, 23, 32, 34, 50, 71, 78, 141, 145, 152, 162, 173, 179, 186, 190, 193, 196, 198, 214, 226, 260, 323, 338, 347, 350 death of, 48 his sacrifice, 24, 191, 201, 211, 212 images of, 40, 321 the Last Supper, 47 his finger, 4, 21, 69, 144, 192, 326, 348 his glory, 67 his justice, 170, 175, 179, 194 his law, 235 his mercy, 175, 179, 194 Holy Spirit, 20, 126, 150, 185, 190, 195, 210, 211 the Trinity, 29, 123 will of, 28 Golden Calf, 1 good works, 16, 64, 187, 190, 191, 203, 213, 218, 231, 238, 243, 256, 315, 337 Gouge, William, 123 grace, 186, 234, 293, 346 Granger, Thomas, 47, 108, 153, 233, 252, 334 greed, 150 Greenham, Richard, 44, 58, 69, 100, 105, 124, 141, 154, 193, 232, 244, 253 Gregory of Nazianzus, 31 Grimstone, Edward, 225 Grindal, Edmund, 297, 299 Guest, Edmund, 298 Hall, Joseph, 86 Heath, John, 287 hell, 134, 172, 181 Hemmingsen, Niels, 203, 226 Henry VIII, king, 16, 17, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 129, 239, 350 Hereford, 326 Hertfordshire, 309

386

386

Index

Hildersam, Arthur, 87 homilies, 41, 218, 347 Hooper, John, 15, 37, 41, 43, 67, 95, 102, 123, 134, 141, 145, 157, 161, 169, 181, 192, 219, 242, 259, 267, 285, 338, 352 Horne, Robert, 37 Horne, Robert (bishop), 299 humanism, 287, 52, 349 Humphrey, Laurence, 77 iconoclasm, 8, 31, 70, 300 iconophobia, 300 idolatry, 8, 21, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 41, 44, 52, 59, 70, 142, 173, 194, 197, 226, 231, 266, 271, 273, 300, 349 representations of God, 39, 300 images as laymens’ books, 41 religious imagery, 299–​301, 319, 322–​29, 340 incest, 153 indulgences, 217 intercession, 41 Interregnum, 14, 84, 266 Isham, Elizabeth, 260 James I, king, 18, 86, 352 Jerome, Saint, 5, 31, 32, 70 Jezebel, 121, 325, 327, 340 Johnston, Archibald, 263 Jonson, Ben, 229 Joye, George, 128, 269 Judaism, 2, 5, 22, 24, 43, 54, 69, 179, 225, 226, 230 judges, 4, 13, 114–​20, 131 justice, 112–​21 justification, 6, 12, 16, 23, 29, 138, 145, 178, 186, 187, 191, 198, 206, 210, 213, 214, 238, 239, 338, 339, 346 Kellison, Matthew, 201 kingship, 81, 129, 330, 340, 346 as keeper of the tables of the law, 83–​89, 107, 130, 317 duties of, 107–​08 limits upon, 86, 99, 111, 350 Lakes, Osmund, 40, 43, 63, 110, 254, 258, 275, 335 landlords, 332 Last Judgement, 117, 131 Latimer, Hugh, 242, 290 Laudianism, 14, 88 law, 4n9, 6, 13, 17, 18, 19, 49, 69, 76, 120, 139, 181, 224 ceremonial, 2, 19, 22, 23, 68, 69

of Christ, 19, 25, 26, 349 judicial, 2, 19, 22, 23, 24, 69, 82, 127 moral, 2, 5, 11, 15, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 70, 74, 76, 187, 314, 327, 349 as a mirror, 5 of Moses, 19, 24, 25, 26, 27, 228 natural, 27 as schoolmaster, 183–​85 three offices of, 11, 50, 345 civil, 11, 15, 16, 73, 346 evangelical, 12, 16, 24, 134, 163, 170, 173, 208, 212, 236, 258, 279, 346 practical, 12, 219, 235, 278, 281, 314, 337, 344, 347 legalism, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 238, 278 lending, 332 litigation, 334 liturgy, 4, 286–​87, 311, 337, 339, 347, 351 Locke, John, 87 London, 303 Lord’s Prayer, 3, 4, 77, 281, 283, 285, 298, 314, 342, 349 lots, casting of, 48 Ludlow, 303, 319 lust, 34, 126, 137, 140 Luther, Martin, 5, 7, 24, 28, 55, 75, 94, 138, 142, 168n137, 186, 187, 201, 283 magic. See witchcraft magistracy, 16, 80, 82, 91, 98, 107, 131, 276, 346, 350 Manningham, John, 261 marriage, 124, 125, 126, 153 martyrdom, 196 Mary I, queen, 44, 49, 65, 270, 339 Mary, mother of Christ, 41, 217, 277 masters, 130 duties of, 109–​10 masturbation, 124, 153, 174 Merbecke, John, 140, 183 metrical psalmody, 4, 339, 351 Middle Ages, 2, 6, 7, 135, 217, 349 Milton, John, 87 ministers, 90, 91, 102–​03, 130, 159, 344, 346 duties of, 108–​09, 252 More, Thomas, 50, 52 Moses, 1, 4, 16, 20, 23, 26, 69, 75, 78, 81, 82, 85, 113, 116, 122, 129, 136, 139, 187, 193, 201, 205, 211, 246, 321, 326 murder, 4, 113, 121, 122, 123, 150, 152, 157, 168, 339 music, 31, 43, 46, 126, 162, 217, 255, 282, 297, 329, 337, 338, 339, 347, 351 Naboth, 121 Nash, Thomas, 230

387

Index Nicodemism, 44 Norfolk, 303, 317, 319, 320 Norton, Thomas, 270, 294 numerology, 29, 53–​55 oaths, 68 Origen, 5, 31, 32, 70 Original Sin, 59, 76, 145, 146, 168, 231, 346, See concupiscence Osiander, Andreas, 38 Ottoman Empire, 38, 52, 58n160, 172 Oxford, University of Balliol College, 115 Corpus Christi College, 264 Magdalen College, 77, 115 Merton College, 116 papacy, the, 56, 65, 74, 77, 86, 136 papists. See Catholicism parents, 4, 59, 61, 91, 130, 285, 339 fathers, 59 as types for authority, 90–​93 parish church, 87, 297, 300, 301, 303–​31, 339 chancel arch, 305, 306, 319, 323, 330 communion table, 306 doom, 305, 323, 330 nave, 306, 314 pulpit, 3 rood, 305, 330 Parker, Matthew, 297, 299 Parker, Robert, 168 Parliament, 77, 78 Parr, Catherine, 16, 83 pater noster. See Lord’s Prayer Paul, Saint, 2, 35, 70, 78, 133, 149, 154, 155, 164, 203, 209, 227, 276 pelagianism, 203, 208 penance, 122, 137, 177, 279 perjury, 276 Perkins, William, 23, 24, 32, 40, 42, 58, 60, 66, 93, 98, 124, 127, 154, 156, 157, 179, 184, 189, 256, 276, 333, 340 Persons, Robert, 24, 34, 116, 179, 202 Pharaoh, 325 Phariseeism, 2, 205, 214, 224–​33, 278, 351 phylacteries, 225, 232 Phineas, 121, 325, 326, 327 physicians, 110 pilgrimage, 31, 217 Pilgrimage of Grace, 77 Pole, Reginald, 50 polygamy, 124, 153 Ponet, John, 80 popular religion, 6, 12, 281–​344, 351, 352 pornography, 125, 126, 154

387

practical divinity, 214 prayer, 45, 46, 65, 68, 193, 217, 236, 255, 343 preaching, 45, 46, 108, 130, 159, 250 Paul’s Cross, 56, 86 sermons, 13, 54, 76, 112–​21, 131, 285, 347 predestination, 12, 18, 57, 175, 222, 223, 226, 347, 351 to election, 12, 58, 208 to reprobation, 12, 145 presbyterianism, 84, 88 providence, 61, 62 purgatory, 135 puritanism, 4, 6, 7, 12, 13, 85, 86, 88, 109, 127, 147, 156, 175, 199, 205, 214, 215, 220–​80, 337, 341, 347, 350, 352 godly society, 45, 48, 195, 265–​78 practical divinity, 4, 209, 234, 243 Rainolds, John, 33 Raleigh, Walter, 22, 81 rape, 124 Rawlins, Richard, 284 reading, 46, 47, 255 regenerate, the. See elect, the relics, 31, 52, 217 religious identity, 11 repentance, 6, 12, 47, 139, 179–​86, 198, 209, 212, 233, 238, 241, 244, 256, 262, 347, 350 reprobate, the, 16, 50, 140, 170, 175, 179, 181, 189, 191, 193, 210, 212, 219, 243, 245, 254, 278, 338, 343, 347, 350 Restoration, 14, 84 rhetorical theology, 337, 344, 351 Rogers, Richard, 189, 253, 254, 261 Rogers, Samuel, 262 Rogers, Thomas, 133 Rollock, Robert, 342 royal arms, 301, 306, 314, 316, 317–​19, 330 royal supremacy, the, 6, 16, 17, 74, 86, 129 Sabbath, 5, 68, 166, 174, 228, 245–​56, 257, 260, 273, 279, 315, 327, 349 profanation of, 56, 121, 247, 266, 267, 268 sacraments, 3, 45, 46, 51, 109, 130, 177, 236, 237, 250, 282 confession, 217 holy communion, 324, 338 the mass, 44, 51, 217, 347 penance, 234, 239 saints, cult of the, 31 salvation, 12, 16, 25, 49, 58, 62, 64, 133, 135, 138, 170, 175, 177–​98, 208, 226, 231, 337, 340, 350 sanctification, 6, 12, 213, 235, 236, 257, 347, 350 Sandys, Edwin, 299

388

388

Index

Satan. See devil, the Scripture. See Bible separatism, 24, 46, 134, 206 servants, 100, 110, 130 Seven Deadly Sins, 2, 3, 7, 29, 34, 50, 51, 126, 136, 138, 147, 149, 172, 345 Sheppard, John, 289 Shropshire, 303, 314 sin, 6, 12, 24, 28, 34, 41, 66, 123, 128, 133, 135–​76, 177, 181, 185, 191, 198, 208, 211, 233, 238, 243, 256, 257, 259, 278, 334, 347, 348, 349, 350 Sinai, 1, 4, 20, 22, 26, 51, 69, 79, 113, 179, 211, 212, 348 sloth, 126, 137 Smith, Henry, 236 sodomy, 124, 153, 174 Somerset, 306 spiritual mercy, works of, 29, 50, 51, 137, 253 stageplays. See theatre stained glass, 301 stewardship, 336 Suffolk, 314 supererogation, works of, 70, 173, 217, 218, 226, 243, 285 superstition, 38, 56, 194 Sussex, 305 swearing, 65, 122, 268, 271, See blasphemy

Seventh Commandment, 76, 122–​29, 140, 144, 151, 153, 154, 257 Sixth Commandment, 141, 157–​63, 253, 263 as tablets of stone, 4, 20, 21, 27, 69, 120, 192, 211, 233, 306, 340, 348 Tenth Commandment, 34, 35, 70, 141–​49 Third Commandment, 8, 19, 57, 61, 64–​69 the two tables, 26, 35–​36, 118, 249, 323, 330 visual and material representations, 9 theatre, 125, 126, 347 theft, 4, 121, 122, 123, 128, 150, 257, 267, 273, 332, 335, 336 tithes, 102, 130 total depravity, 34, 70, 138, 146 Tyndale, William, 58, 74, 75, 83, 102, 134, 135, 139, 147, 164, 171, 181, 186, 187, 190, 242, 352

Tallis, Thomas, 289, 305n78, 339 Taylor, Thomas, 227 ‘Ten Articles’, 285 Ten Commandments, 10, 15, 325, 345, 348 all broken, 5 blessings espoused by, 57–​59, 61–​64, 251, 346 curses espoused by, 59–​61, 63–​64 Eighth Commandment, 331–​36 Fifth Commandment, 51, 57, 61–​63, 74, 76, 89–​112, 130, 151, 152, 252, 350 First Commandment, 8, 37, 52, 68, 78, 151, 192–​98 first table, 8, 37 Fourth Commandment, 8, 68, 245–​56, 279 Ninth Commandment, 34, 274–​78, 280 numbering of, 5, 12, 19, 28–​35, 37, 38, 48, 70, 238, 313 Second Commandment, 8, 9, 19, 31, 33, 36–​48, 51, 57, 58–​60, 70, 173, 239, 246, 266, 300

Wallington, Nehemiah, 260 Wanley Part Books, 287, 289, 338 Weber, Max, 57 Whately, William, 40, 44, 93, 124, 148, 159, 195, 251 Whitaker, William, 207 Whittingham, William, 291, 339 Willet, Andrew, 227 Wilson, Thomas, 188, 250 Wiltshire, 308 witchcraft, 65, 66, 113, 124, 153, 197, 268, 272, 273, 334 Wolsey, Thomas, 283 worship, 8, 34, 37, 42, 46, 70, 219, 250, 251, 266, 285, 297, 343, 349 of creatures, 40, 70 species of, 33 in spirit and truth, 45–​46 will-​worship, 42–​43

unregenerate, the. See reprobate, the Ussher, James, 33 usury, 333 vagabondage, 334 virtue, 77 virtues cardinal, 3, 51, 137 theological, 3, 51, 137, 314 vows, 47, 65, 217

zeal, 194