The Cradle King (34 page)

Rainoldes had got as far as saying that the Book of Articles of Religion, now some forty years old, needed clarification, when the Bishop of London suddenly cut him off, and falling to his knees, burst into a tirade against the Puritans. They aimed not to reform, he claimed, but to overthrow the Church; they wanted to impose their doctrine of predestination, which was a Presbyterian doctrine; and they only opposed the rite of confirmation because they could not confirm. James by no means applauded this interruption, remarking instead that he might excuse the bishop’s passion, but he ‘misliked his sudden interruption’. Bancroft should have allowed Rainoldes to have finished, since there could be ‘no order, nor can be any effectual issue of disputation, if each party might not be suffered, without chopping, to speak at large what he would’.
²²
Although his early intervention had backfired, Bancroft was more successful when he turned to an issue close to James’s heart, that of personal attacks in sermons. Pulpits should not become the platform for lampoons and satires, he declared, ‘wherein every humorous, or discontented fellow might traduce his superiors’. This naturally appealed to the King who agreed it was ‘a lewd custom’; he threatened ‘that if he should but hear of such a one in a pulpit, he would make him an example’, and admonished the Puritan ministers, ‘that every man should solicit and draw his friends to make peace and if any thing were amiss in the Church officers, not to make the pulpit the place of personal reproof, but to let his Majesty hear of it’.
²³

James’s contribution to this session was much less constructive. During a discussion of whether only bishops were qualified to perform baptism, Bancroft referred to St Jerome who asserted that view, though he was ‘otherwise no friend to bishops’. James did not let the reference pass, and taxed St Jerome for his assertion that a bishop was not ordained by God; his views on the question could be summed up ‘with this short aphorism, No Bishop, no King’. As Rainoldes went further with his case, James reverted, as he often did when he was bored, to levity. Rainoldes raised Article 37, ‘The Bishop of Rome hath no authority in this land’, claiming that it should be augmented to read ‘nor ought to have’. At this James ‘heartily laughed’ and the lords followed suit. ‘What speak you of the Pope’s authority here?’ he asked.
‘Habemus iure, quod habemus,
and therefore, in as much as it is said,
he hath not,
it is plain enough, that
he ought not to have.’
According to Barlow, this was one of several motions that seemed ‘very idle and frivolous’ to the King and the lords, and so they drifted into ‘some bye-talk’, as someone remembered a quip ascribed to one Mr Butler of Cambridge about a Puritan: ‘a Puritan is a Protestant frayed out of his wits’. Rainoldes was not to be put off. When he proposed that a negative assertion (‘the intention of the Minister is not of the essence of the Sacrament’) James protested that if he put into the book every negative proposition the book would ‘swell into a volume as big as the Bible, and also confound the reader’. He recalled how John Craig in Scotland did a similar thing, casting all his beliefs in negative terms: ‘who with his
I renounce and abhor,
his detestations and abrenunciations he did so amaze the simplest people, that they, not able to conceive all those things, utterly gave over all, falling back on popery, or remaining still in their former ignorance. Yea,’ continued James, ‘if I should have been bound to his form, the confession of my faith must have been in my table book, not in my head.’
²⁴
When Rainoldes had finished, James turned to the Puritan ministers. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘if these be the greatest matters you be grieved with, I need not have been troubled with such importunities and complaints, as have been made unto me. Some more private course might have been taken for your satisfaction.’ And he turned to the lords, shaking his head and smiling.
²⁵

Despite James’s attitude to the Puritan ministers, there were some areas of agreement. To the demand that learned ministers be planted in every parish, James expressed his approval in principle. He had complained to Whitgift the previous October that ‘in many parts of the realm the parishes are so ill-served with persons not able to instruct in matters of their faith as is very scandalous to those of your degree and given much advantage to the adversary to seduce them.’ At that point, he had ordered that bishops should undertake an audit of their dioceses as a matter of urgency;
²⁶
now, however, he was not about to be seen to give in to a Puritan demand, and claimed that a sudden change would be dangerous. In any case, the universities could not afford to put a sufficient minister in every parish, and ‘he had more learned men in this realm, than he had sufficient maintenance for’ – so maintenance had to come first. In the meantime, young ministers who were ignorant and beyond hope should be removed; older ministers should be allowed to die in post. But ‘Jerusalem could not be built up in a day’.
²⁷

The more violent clashes arose from the demands of the Puritan John Knewstubs. Knewstubs took exception to the use of the sign of the Cross in baptism: this would offend the ‘weak brethren’, those clergymen who would not accept change, he claimed. ‘How long they would be weak?’ demanded James, incredulously. Was not forty-five years ‘sufficient for them to grow strong?’ Indeed, it seemed to him that ‘some of them were strong enough, if not headstrong; and howsoever they in this case pretended weakness; yet some, in whose behalf, they now spake, thought themselves able to teach him, and all the bishops of the land’.
²⁸
With his third question Knewstubs truly upset the King: these ‘weak brethren’ wondered how far James’s Church ordinances should bind them ‘without impeaching their Christian Liberty?’ The King, reported Barlow, ‘was much moved’. He said he would not argue the point, but added that ‘it smelled very rankly of anabaptism’. It reminded him of ‘the usage of a beardless boy’, John Black, at the last conference he had had with the Scottish ministers in December 1602. Black had told him ‘that he would hold conformity with his Majesty’s ordinances, for matters of doctrine, but for matters of ceremony, they were to be left in Christian Liberty, unto every man, as he received more and more light, from the illumination of God’s spirit’. More and more light until they go mad with their own light, said James, ‘but I will none of that, I will have one doctrine and one discipline, one religion in substance, and in ceremony: and therefore I charge you, never speak more to that point’.
²⁹

There were moments of humour. When Rainoldes objected to the phrase ‘With my body I thee worship’ from the Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service, James poked fun at the unmarried academic. ‘Many a man speaks of Robin Hood, who never shot in his bow,’ he said to Rainoldes, smiling; ‘if you had a good wife yourself, you would think all the honour and worship you could do her, were well bestowed.’ On the matter of ‘churching’, the service of purification of women after childbirth, James quipped ‘that women were loath enough of themselves, to come to Church, and therefore, he would have this, or any other occasion, to draw them thither’. When Rainoldes approved the bishops’ wearing of the ‘corned cap’, James turned to the bishops and said: ‘You may now safely wear your caps, but I shall tell you, if you should walk in one street in Scotland, with such a cap on your head, if I were not with you, you should be stoned to death with your cap.’ When Rainoldes urged that the Church should abandon the sign of the Cross ‘because in the time of popery it had been superstitiously abused’, James pointed out that by the same argument they should renounce ‘the Trinity, and all that is holy, because it was abused in Popery. They used to wear hose and shoes in popery,’ he pointed out to Rainoldes, ‘therefore, you shall now go barefoot.’
³⁰

There was a more serious point to be made about popish abuses. In Scotland, the Presbyterians had tried for years to persuade James that the Roman Church’s past use (and therefore abuse) of a particular ritual
de facto
rendered the ritual superstitious. But James now declared that nothing had turned him against the Kirk ministers more than their kneejerk reaction of disallowing anything ‘which at all had been used in popery’. To James, a greater danger was needless innovation, of which even the Church of England was guilty. ‘For my part, I know not how to answer the objection of the papists, when they charge us with novelties,’ he continued, ‘but truly to tell them, that their abuses are new, but the things which they abused we retain in their primitive use, and forsake, only, the novel corruption.’
³¹

Rainoldes proposed that the clergy should meet every three weeks, first in the rural deaneries, with matters raised, then moving to the archdeacon’s visitation, and ultimately to the episcopal synod, ‘where the Bishop with his
presbyteri,
should determine all such points, as before could not be decided’. At this request, James was evidently ‘somewhat stirred’, but answered with admirable calm. They aimed at a Scottish Presbytery, he stated, which agreed with a monarchy as much as God did with the Devil. ‘Then Jack and Tom, and Will, and Dick, shall meet, and at their pleasures censure me, and my Council, and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand up, and say, “It must be thus”; then Dick shall reply, and say, “Nay, marry, but we will have it thus”. And therefore, here I must once reiterate my former speech, “le roi s’avisera”. Stay, I pray you, for one seven years, before you demand that of me, and if then, you find me pursy [corpulent, short-winded] and fat, and my windpipes stuffed, I will perhaps hearken to you: for let that government be once up, I am sure, I shall be kept in breath; then shall we all of us, have work enough, both our hands full. But Dr Rainoldes, till you find that I grow lazy, let that alone.’
³²

Although James had twice let Rainoldes swipe at his Supremacy without comment, now he could not let the matter go. ‘Dr Rainoldes,’ he said, ‘you have often spoken for my Supremacy, and it is well: but know you any here, or any else where, who like of the present government ecclesiatical, that find fault, or dislike my Supremacy?’ Rainoldes replied that he did not. ‘Why then,’ said the King, ‘I will tell you a tale.’ After the Roman Catholic Mary Tudor came to the throne in England, it seemed that Scotland might follow suit. John Knox had written to the Queen Regent, Marie de Guise, as head of the Church, and telling her to suppress the dangerous ‘popish prelates’. But once the Regent had suppressed the popish bishops, Knox and his regime came in and soon ‘began to make small account of her Supremacy, nor would longer rest upon her authority, but took the cause into their own hand, and according to that more light, wherewith they were illuminated, made a further reformation of religion’. James spoke passionately of how Mary Queen of Scots had suffered under them. ‘How they used that poor Lady my mother, is not unknown, and with grief I may remember it: who, because, she had not been otherwise instructed, did desire, only, a private chapel, wherein to serve God, after her manner, with some few selected persons; but her Supremacy was not sufficient to obtain it at their hands.’ And James, the cradle king, had felt the pain. ‘How they dealt with me, in my minority, you all know; it was not done secretly, and, though I would [would like to], I cannot conceal it. I will apply it thus.’ Putting his hand on his hat, he spoke to the ‘lords and bishops’. If they were out of power, he claimed, and the Puritans in place, ‘I know what would become of my Supremacy. No Bishop, no King, as before I said.’ He had ‘observed since my coming into England, that some preachers before me, can be content to pray for James, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, defender of the Faith, but as for Supreme Governor in all causes, and over all persons (as well Ecclesiastical as Civil) they pass that over with silence; and what cut they have been of, I after learned.’ James rose from his chair, and made his way to his Inner Chamber. ‘If this be all that they have to say,’ he said as he left the room, ‘I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse.’
³³

A third and final day’s conference was held on Wednesday 18 January, to give the bishops an opportunity to answer some of the points raised. As the session came to a close, Knewstubs fell on to his knees, and begged the King that ‘some honest ministers’ in Suffolk be exempted from the newly enforced requirement to wear the surplice, or use the Cross in baptism, since it ‘would make much against their credits in the country’. Whitgift started to answer him, but James broke in. ‘Nay,’ said the King, ‘let me alone with him. Sir,’ he said, turning to Knewstubs, ‘you show yourself an uncharitable man. We have here taken pains, and in the end have concluded of an unity and uniformity, and, you forsooth, must prefer the credits of a few private men, before the general peace of the Church; this is just the Scottish argument, for when anything was there concluded, which disliked some humours, the only reason, why they would not obey, was, it stood not with their credits, to yield, having so long been of the contrary opinion; I will none of that,’ he concluded, ‘and therefore, either let them conform themselves, and that shortly, or they shall hear of it.’ James’s message was clear. Rainoldes, Chaderton, Knewstubs and Sparke ‘jointly promised, to be quiet and obedient, now they knew it to be the King’s mind, to have it so’. Barlow was moved. ‘His Majesty’s gracious conclusion was so piercing, as that it fetched tears from some, on both sides’.
³⁴