The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England

In Tudor and Stuart England

Darren Oldridge

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780752457390
• eBook ISBN: 9780752476421
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa rinascimentale

The Devil was a commanding figure in Tudor and Stuart England. He played a leading role in the religious and political conflicts of the age, and inspired great works of poetry and drama. During the turmoil of the English Civil War, fears of a secret conspiracy of Devil-worshippers fuelled a witch-hunt that claimed at least a hundred lives. This book traces the idea of the Devel from the English Reformation to the scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century. It shows that he was not only a central figure in the imaginative life of the age, but also a deeply ambiguous and complex one: the avowed enemy of God and his unwilling accomplice, and a creature that provoked fascination, comedy and dread.

1

INTRODUCTION

THE DYING ROOM

In the late Middle Ages the monastic hospital of St Wulfstan in Worcester kept a room for the dying. Attended by carers and spiritual advisors, the men and women who were taken to this room were encouraged to make peace with their world and preparations for the one to follow. As they contemplated their final surroundings, they viewed painted images designed to help them with this task: a depiction of the Trinity on the ceiling, and on the walls frescos of Christian martyrs, offering models of patient resolve in the face of pain. Perhaps the most potent image was a scene of judgment (see plate section). This painting, which remains on the wall, portrays the archangel Michael holding a set of scales, with a human soul suspended in one of its pans. Standing at his side and facing the viewer, St Mary drapes a set of rosary beads on the balance to tip the judgment in favour of mercy. Clinging to the other pan, a demon seeks to drag the balance towards damnation. As they reflected on this spectacle, its original viewers may have gained some reassurance concerning their own impending fate. Mary stands shoulder to shoulder with the angel and is clearly his equal. The demon, in contrast, is a verminous ‘imp’: it has to stretch itself upright to keep hold of the pan, and already its exertions seem futile.¹

The quiet drama of the dying room conveys themes that are fundamental to our understanding of the Devil in Tudor and Stuart England. Most simply, it provides a reminder that individuals engaged personally with demonic powers: Satan and his minions were not abstract ideas cut off from the world of lived experience. Nor, for the great majority of people, were they metaphors for other things, such as human wickedness or worldly injustice. While the Devil was intimately involved in the myriad sufferings of earthly life, he remained a living presence with a real character: a personality with whom men and women were obliged to contend. The image of judgment in the hospital also illustrates the highly integrated nature of pre-modern religion: the Devil belonged to a much larger scheme of belief, which comprehended the origins and destiny of humankind, the purposes of God, and – as the dying viewers of the painting were reminded – the weighing of individual souls. Satan occupied a central role in the scheme of salvation and damnation in sixteenth-century England, but his part made sense only in the context of this greater story.

Anyone viewing the paintings in St Wulfstan’s hospital today will notice another quality that documents the religious conflicts of the Tudor age. The faces of the figures that populate the walls have been removed, leaving only spectral impressions of their personalities. St Michael and the Virgin are featureless ghosts. The defacing of the images was an act of censorship initiated by Protestant reformers determined to erase the Catholic past. The Reformation abolished the power of saints and denounced religious art in strict compliance with the commandment not to make ‘graven images’; more deeply, it repudiated the whole system of belief that once sustained the men and women in the dying room. The Devil retained his central position in the new vision that replaced it. Indeed, he acquired a new status – in many ways more dreadful and intimate than the image on the hospital wall – in the religious life of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The idea of Satan that emerged influenced many aspects of culture and politics, with effects that were sometimes profound and often contradictory. This book charts the rise of the Protestant Devil, and attempts to recover the experiences of those individuals who, stripped of the protection of the saints, were obliged to take up a lonely struggle against the personification of evil.

THE CHANGING DEVIL

‘A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary’, wrote Joseph Conrad in 1911, as ‘men alone are quite capable of every wickedness’. Few would deny the second part of Conrad’s assertion, not least because of the industrialized violence that characterized the decades that followed his statement; but the concept of a personal Devil remains remarkably strong. For many millions of twenty-first-century westerners, the idea that a personal force lies behind the suffering and cruelty in the world seems a viable possibility; many others accept it as a matter of fact. To those who believe in the Devil, his presence is a constant and unchanging reality, and the historical approach of this book may seem challenging. After all, historians examine the construction and development of ideas over time, with the implicit assumption that these ideas are mutable and respond to the political and social circumstances in which they appear. Indeed, this book will argue that a distinctive – and distinctively modern – understanding of Satan emerged in the Tudor age. Such a historical approach is necessary, however, as it offers both believers and skeptics the best way to understand the Devil. This is because direct knowledge of Satan is unobtainable: even the most devout Christian (or talented necromancer) cannot possess it. As Jeffrey Burton Russell has argued, it is only through studying the idea of the Devil in human culture that we can understand him at all. ‘The Devil is what the history of his concept is. Nothing else about him can be known.’²

The idea of the Devil has been strikingly variegated. Indeed, few figures in history have possessed so many diverse and overlapping identities. The various names for the Devil illustrate this tendency. The Old Testament character of Satan – originally an angel loyal to God who was permitted to test the faith of His servants – was transformed into God’s enemy in Jewish apocalyptic literature in the centuries before Christianity. The Greek word for ‘adversary’ – the original Hebrew meaning of Satan – was rendered in Greek as ‘slanderer’ or ‘accuser’, and subsequently Latinized as diabolus, giving rise to the English ‘devil’. The fallen angel whose starry descent from Heaven inspired the name Lucifer, or ‘giver of light’, derived from apocryphal books of the Old Testament familiar to early Christian writers. This figure was conflated with Satan in the New Testament: in Luke’s gospel, for instance, Jesus ‘beheld Satan as lightning fall from Heaven’. By the sixteenth century, the names Lucifer, Satan and the Devil were used interchangeably. More broadly, these names could also be used to describe a host of lesser demons, whose identities frequently merged with that of their infernal master.³

The many names of the Devil were matched by his multiple and sometimes contradictory attributes. Satan was both the enemy of goodness and the punisher of sinners – and in this latter role he appeared to enforce the will of God. Only the Devil’s wickedness was relatively constant, though even this was sometimes challenged in ‘merry tales’ that portrayed him as a comic or likeable figure. As the ancient opponent of goodness, the Devil was defined more often by what he was not than by what he was, and his representation was correspondingly pliant: in the phrase of the art historian Luther Link, he was a ‘mask without a face’. Link observes that no stable iconography of the Devil emerged in medieval culture: he could be represented as a dragon-like monster, a rebel angel, a corrupted version of Pan, a man, or an ‘evil microbe’. Rather than a fixed identity, the Devil was a loose assembly of images united by their negative relationship to God; he was more an abstraction than a real character. Such diversity was probably useful. The sheer range of the images and qualities attributed to Satan made him an exceptionally adaptable figure: in his various guises, he could be pressed into the service of storytellers, artists, politicians and theologians of very different stripe.⁴

Tudor and Stuart representations of the Devil illustrate these variations. Satan was often depicted in grossly physical terms, not least in printed ballads describing the fate of evildoers. In this spirit, some of the earliest English versions of the legend of Johann Faust, a magician who traded his soul with the Devil, ended in a riot of carnage: the Devil ripped Faust’s ‘arms and legs in pieces’ and smashed his head ‘against the wall’. At the other extreme, some Protestant writers such as the Kentish gentleman Reginald Scot portrayed the Devil as a wholly immaterial presence: a ‘secret force or power’ that impelled individuals to wickedness. In the vision of many preachers and devotional writers, Satan was a mighty spirit whose power extended over all but those redeemed by Christ, and who continued to torment even these fortunate individuals. A parallel tradition in cheap literature depicted him as a crafty but fallible trickster, frequently gulled by resourceful peasants or beaten by fierce housewives.⁵

This array of images suggests that no single understanding of the Devil achieved complete dominance in Tudor and Stuart England. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern a consistent picture of the ancient enemy that emerged in the work of English theologians during the Reformation, and which can be described as the ‘Protestant Devil’. To create this distinctive image, Protestant thinkers drew selectively from the well of ideas about Satan that existed in the late Middle Ages, emphasizing some and neglecting others. Most notably, they stressed the spiritual nature of Satan. The Protestant Devil was preeminently a creature of the mind: an interior presence encouraging falsehood and sin. This internalised idea of the Devil – a dark counterpoint to the personal experience of God – diminished the importance of Satan’s physical manifestations. As Nathan Johnstone has observed, English Protestants elevated the Devil’s role as a tempter to the ‘single most important aspect of his agency’, and in this process they relegated his more fleshly attributes to secondary and largely theoretical phenomena. ‘Whilst they did not deny the Devil’s power to manifest physically’, Johnstone writes, ‘it is striking that they virtually ignored the possibility in their theological and devotional works’.⁶

The internalised view of Satan associated him with all forms of falsehood and temptation. As a consequence, he expressed himself most powerfully in his mastery of individuals, and his influence in the world appeared to rise or recede with the tide of false belief and irreligion. In 1652 Thomas Morton, the former Bishop of Durham, observed that Satan’s title of ‘prince of this world’ (John 12:31) described his lordship ‘of the generation of the wicked in this world’. As such, the extent of his kingdom was measured by the number of enemies of the gospel, whom the Devil possessed ‘in the heart’. Such an outlook did not necessarily magnify Satan’s power; but it meant that his influence seemed pronounced whenever sin and falsehood abounded. The early reformers struck a blow against the Devil by rescuing the gospel from Roman ‘superstition’; but later generations discovered that his empire of deceit was resilient. Conflict over the true form of Christianity tended to amplify Satan’s influence by focusing attention on his deluded adherents. At the same time, the reform of the church itself stripped away many of the rites and holy objects that had once shielded the faithful from his spite, as well as the saints that interceded on their behalf. Men and women had to face the Devil’s temptations alone, often in the belief that they held sway over the greater part of humankind.⁷

English reformers, then, crafted from the traditions of medieval Christianity a concept of Satan that was both intimate and powerful. This concept was presented to a wide audience in sermons, devotional literature, chapbooks and ballads, including cheap broadsheets such as Stand up to Your Beliefe (1640), which presented the ‘combat between Satan tempting and a Christian triumphing’ as a lively dialogue between a humble believer and the enemy. The appeal of this message depended on the disposition of individual listeners and readers, and was not confined to any one section of the population. Devout Protestants were a minority in Tudor and Stuart society, however. In part, this reflected the fact that religious devotion in any culture tends to be a minority pursuit. Reformed Christianity was also more demanding than late medieval Catholicism, as the latter was based as much on the performance of ritual as the understanding of theological precepts. With its intense emphasis on scripture, Protestantism certainly required a fairly high degree of literacy in a predominantly oral culture. This helps to explain the relatively rapid spread of the new faith in urban areas, and especially London, where both education and print were most widely available. These factors ensured that committed Protestants remained a self-conscious minority in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they were well represented among the political elite. The rest of the population, characterized by the Essex preacher George Gifford as ‘the common sort of Christians’, retained many conservative religious assumptions and correspondingly ‘unreformed’ ideas about the Devil.⁸

This book examines the rise of the Protestant Devil in Tudor and Stuart England. Chapter two argues that the godly minority diminished the more physical and often comic representations of Satan that belonged to the common inheritance of the Middle Ages, and abandoned the belief that men and women could overcome the ancient enemy by their own efforts. The reformed image of Satan imposed considerable psychological demands on those who took it seriously, and these are considered in chapter three. The rest of the book is concerned largely with the effect of these ideas on English society as a whole. It suggests that Protestant theologians largely failed to convince ordinary people of their case, and much broader attitudes towards the Devil continued to flourish. Their efforts were not, however, entirely in vain. Some Protestant assumptions did achieve widespread acceptance, resulting in a partially reformed view of the Devil in popular culture. These developments were shaped by a coalition of theological, social and psychological factors, the effects of which are surveyed below.

SATAN, PROVIDENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

If God did not exist, according to Voltaire’s maxim, it would be necessary to invent him. The same is probably true of the Devil, since his existence helps to resolve an enduring and profound difficulty in Christian theology: the so-called ‘problem of evil’. If God is perfectly loving, why does He allow the innocent to suffer? If He has infinite power, why does He do nothing to prevent it? These questions are raised by any instance of underserved pain. Theologians distinguish between ‘natural evils’ – such as famine and disease – and man-made atrocities like the gulags and extermination camps of the twentieth century, but both lead to the same basic dilemma: why does a good and all powerful God allow such things to happen?

The problem of evil dissolves if all earthly events – including famines and atrocities – are attributed directly to the will of God. This position was adopted in some books of the Old Testament, which present an unflinching vision of Jehovah as the fount of both goodness and suffering. The message is unusually clear in the authorized translation of Isaiah 45:7: ‘I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.’ This position entailed a humble acceptance of divine sovereignty in all its aspects. Less palatably, it also implied that God was not unambiguously good. The construction of a perfectly benign (and perhaps more psychologically satisfying) vision of God required an alternative explanation for the obvious evils in the world – and the Devil emerged in this role. Indeed, some Old Testament scholars have argued that the idea of an entirely benevolent God encouraged the transformation of Satan from His servant into His evil opponent in the centuries before Christianity. This process was completed in the New Testament, in which a wholly loving God confronts a wholly malevolent Devil. On this interpretation, it appears that belief in the Devil arises from the assertion of God’s goodness.⁹

Viewed more narrowly, the Devil helped to resolve the apparent inconsistency between a perfectly loving and all powerful God and the presence of evil in the world. A good God would wish to prevent the innocent from suffering, and an omnipotent God could do so; yet human experience shows that this is not the case. One solution to this logical problem was to place an effective limit on God’s power by arguing that he acted within constraints imposed by the disobedience of his own creatures. Such disobedience could not be avoided without the abolition of free will, which a loving creator would not impose. The first rebellion against the deity was led by the angel Lucifer, who devoted himself to the corruption of humankind once he was cast down from Heaven. Through his intervention in the Garden of Eden, the first man and woman were deceived into betraying their maker, and this act brought sin and death into the world. A similar argument could explain specific instances of innocent suffering caused by famine and disease: as a powerful spirit in rebellion against God, Satan could be held responsible for such ‘natural evils’.¹⁰

The relationship between the Devil and God remained ambiguous, however. A tension existed between divine sovereignty and demonic agency: if the Devil was a free creature who disobeyed the Lord, did his freedom extend to complete autonomy? Such an assertion came close to acknowledging a spiritual power independent of God, and undermining His government. This problem arose whenever Christians emphasized divine authority, and came sharply into focus during the Protestant Reformation. For the German reformer Martin Luther, God was the ultimate cause of everything in the world, including events that appeared to be evil. The Devil, accordingly, always acted according to God’s will. Equally, John Calvin cited biblical precedents to affirm that the Lord supervised the Devil’s actions, as when ‘he turned Pharaoh over to Satan to be confirmed in the obstinacy of his breast’. By taking this view, Protestant theologians risked the suggestion that God desired evil. Luther avoided this conclusion by making some careful distinctions. First, he proposed that occurrences that seemed wicked to us were, in truth, part of God’s loving plan for the world. With our flawed minds and limited sense of perspective, we were incapable of seeing the goodness that underpinned all the creator’s works. Second, Luther distinguished between the will of God, which was always good, and the will of Satan, which was utterly malign. While the Devil took a cruel pleasure in what he did, God allowed him to act for reasons that were loving and just. Thus ‘God incites the Devil to evil, but he does not do evil himself’.¹¹

In Protestant England these ideas were contained within the doctrine of ‘providence’. This was the belief that God’s hand guided every event towards His ultimate purpose. Providential thinking was applied to all manner of earthly affairs, and also reached into the world of spirits. ‘Devils do much mischief’, wrote the West Country minister Richard Bernard in 1627, ‘but even by these also doth God work His will, and these do nothing without the hand of His providence’. Francis Raworth observed in 1655 that ‘providence extends toward all rational and intellectual creatures, men and angels, good and bad’. Since God’s intentions were benign and just, even demons were unwilling agents of the higher good. Their acts were performed with malice, but the divine hand ensured that their outcome was benevolent. As Edward Leigh noted in 1646, ‘God well useth evil instruments besides and beyond their own intention’. In A Sermon of Gods Providence (1609), Arthur Dent adapted the words of St Paul to describe this strange marvel: ‘so mighty and wonderful is God, that he is able to make the light to shine out of darkness’. John Milton dramatized this idea in Paradise Lost, in which Satan was tormented by the knowledge that ‘all his malice served but to bring forth / Infinite goodness’.¹²

The doctrine of providence was illustrated in the more mundane context of an English murder case in 1603. Elizabeth Caldwell conspired with her lover and two accomplices to poison her husband with rats-bane; but their plot resulted in the accidental death of a serving girl instead. A contemporary account of the crime noted that Caldwell had been inspired by the Devil, but his aims were frustrated by the hig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Devil and the English Reformation
• 3. Living With the Enemy: Protestant Experiences of the Devil
• 4. The Devil in Popular Culture
• 5. Women and the Devil
• 6. Possession and Exorcism
• 7. Witchcraft
• 8. The Changing Face of Satan
• Appendix: Selected Sources
• Notes and References
• Select Bibliography