Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans

English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth

Brian C. Lockey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317147091
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: Literature

Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans considers how the marginalized perspective of 16th-century English Catholic exiles and 17th-century English royalist exiles helped to generate a form of cosmopolitanism that was rooted in contemporary religious and national identities but also transcended those identities. Author Brian C. Lockey argues that English discourses of nationhood were in conversation with two opposing 'cosmopolitan' perspectives, one that sought to cultivate and sustain the emerging English nationalism and imperialism and another that challenged English nationhood from the perspective of those Englishmen who viewed the kingdom as one province within the larger transnational Christian commonwealth. Lockey illustrates how the latter cosmopolitan perspective, produced within two communities of exiled English subjects, separated in time by half a century, influenced fiction writers such as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anthony Munday, Sir John Harington, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. Ultimately, he shows that early modern cosmopolitans critiqued the emerging discourse of English nationhood from a traditional religious and political perspective, even as their writings eventually gave rise to later secular Enlightenment forms of cosmopolitanism.

PART I

Chapter 1
Papal Supremacy and the Citizen of the World

As I show in the first two chapters of this book, the global perspective of the English Jesuits, particularly their desire to view England as part of Christendom or an encompassing Christian commonwealth, was shared to a certain extent by conformist English writers such as Sir John Harington and even one of their avowed enemies, Anthony Munday, who served the crown as a “pursuivant” of renegade Jesuit priests and Catholic recusants.¹ Moreover, this shared perspective, which I characterize as “cosmopolitan,” was actually opposed to an insular belief, shared by both the old Marian Catholic establishment and some English Protestants, in the purity of Welsh or British or English identity.² My larger purpose here is to use the religious context to show that perspectives on English national identity and myths of national origin often cut across confessional boundaries in ways that complicate the common view of the distinction between English Catholics and Protestants.

Before moving on to a discussion of such writers of fiction, however, I would like to explore what I call the cosmopolitan mode within the Catholic self-presentation of Jeronimo Osório de Fonseca, Edmund Campion, and Robert Persons, as well as within the institutional development of the Society of Jesus. Campion himself had a complex relationship with earlier arguments about the primacy of papal authority and the pope’s right to depose sovereigns. On the one hand, as Thomas McCoog has argued, the English Jesuit mission to England before 1581 sought to minister to the religious needs of English Catholics rather than engage in more direct political involvement.³ According to Cardinal William Allen, Campion was in support of this approach.⁴ But despite Allen’s testimony and the indications in Campion’s writings showing that Campion saw his primary aim as promoting religious tolerance for English Catholics while outwardly maintaining a politically loyal stance towards to the crown, Campion included some subtle but clear signals that he sympathized with a more confrontational notion of how papal authority should relate to temporal magistrates.⁵ These signals open a window onto the global character of the Jesuit Order as well as the writings of its most influential English member, Robert Persons.

Lastly, this chapter explores the emergence of two competing conceptions of national identity. On the one hand, with the passage of the “Statute in Restraint of Appeals of 1533,” Henry VIII had claimed authority over both the ecclesiastical and the temporal realms, and Elizabeth had reaffirmed this authority. Richard Helgerson’s persuasive account of Elizabethans writing the English nation describes this independent and self-determined conception of nationhood, one in which Queen Elizabeth successfully claimed sovereignty over both the temporal and the ecclesiastical realms.⁶ In contrast, the English Catholic conception of the nation was quite different: not only did there exist separate realms of the temporal and the ecclesiastical for writers like Nicholas Sander, but the authority of the sovereign was seen as subordinate to ecclesiastical authority. And most importantly, this second conception of nationhood, in which the sovereign faced the possibility of “correction” by the Roman curia, was directly opposed to Henry VIII’s declaration that the “Realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the World, governed by one supreme Head and King, having the Dignity and Royal Estate of the Imperial Crown of the same.”⁷

The Osório-Haddon Controversy

Catholics saw Queen Elizabeth’s assertion of supremacy over the spiritual realm as constituting a usurpation of the Roman curia’s traditional authority. But Elizabeth’s claim also constituted a challenge to the traditional relationship between the spiritual and temporal realms, whereby the former was viewed as the overseer of the latter. The crucial moment in the controversy was the papal bull issued by Pius V in 1570, Regnans in Excelsis, which excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, absolving her subjects of their vow of obedience to her and effectively authorizing her deposition.⁸ During the years surrounding this watershed event, a number of religious controversies transpired in print between English reformers, consisting of John Jewel, William Fulke, Alexander Nowell, Walter Haddon, Thomas Bilson, George Acworth, and Bartolomew Clerke, and the English Catholic exiles and their allies, consisting of Nicholas Sander, Richard Bristowe, Thomas Stapleton, William Allen, Robert Persons, and Archdeacon and later Bishop Jerónimo Osório de Fonseca of Portugal. Much of the initial controversy that occurred in the 1560s concerned the reformers’ views on purely religious issues such as transubstantiation, the devotion of saints and images, purgatory, and confession, but there were also significant debates that concerned the relationship between ecclesiastical government and civil government, especially related to questions of royal and papal supremacy.⁹ One of the most famous throughout Europe and England involved the Portuguese prelate Jerónimo Osório de Fonseca and Walter Haddon, the Master of the Court of Requests at the English court.¹⁰

The controversy began in 1563, when Osório de Fonseca published in Paris the Epistola ad Elizabetham Angliae Reginam de Religione, an open letter to Elizabeth adopting a respectful and deferential view of the Queen’s still developing reign and offering advice to her on the relationship between the spiritual and temporal realms.¹¹ The controversy was joined by Haddon later that year, when he published a response in Paris called Gualthieri Haddoni pro Reformatione Anglicana Epistola Apologetica ad Hier. Osorium. Lusitanum.¹² Both works were subsequently translated into English: Osório’s Epistle was translated by Richard Shacklock, an English student of the civil law at the University of Louvain, and published in 1565 in Louvain, while Haddon’s response was translated by Abraham Hartwell and printed in 1565.¹³ Osório’s Epistola begins by introducing an international perspective to Queen Elizabeth’s authority over the church, a perspective that assumes an important place later in Haddon’s response to Osório. Osório declares that he offers his advice as a friend to Queen Elizabeth and to her realm, explaining that any good sovereign should not be concerned over whether his or her councilors are “a countrie man borne, or a straunger [ne ciuis, an externus is].”¹⁴ Rather that sovereign should be concerned with the intent with which the individual offers counsel. As a friend to the Queen, Osório explains that in many cases, counsel given by foreigners is to be preferred to counsel provided by the sovereign’s subjects, “for many treasons [insidiae] are wrought against Princes of theire howseholde seruauntes [a suis domesticis].”¹⁵ Most importantly, Osório has a characteristically Catholic conception of his own role as serving the welfare of the “Christian common weale [rempublicam Christianam],” and as a result, Osório explains that he thinks “no Christian Prince a forenner or a straunger [nullum Christianum principem externum & alienum puto].”¹⁶ For Osório, there exist two separate political entities, the Christian commonwealth and the temporal realm, with the first encompassing the second, so that from the perspective of an official within the Christian commonwealth, sovereigns and magistrates within the temporal realm should submit to counsel originating from within the former entity. Osório’s Epistola also contains a general attack on Protestantism, which he accuses of fomenting rebellion against religious authorities and eventually against temporal authorities as well. Whereas it is Christ’s purpose “to gather in to one place [in locum unum compellere] those which stray a broade, to ioyne those which be of diuerse myndes [animos inter se dissidentes], in an vniforme consent, mutuall beneuolence, and charytye,” Osório explains that Protestants are in league with the devil in sowing discord and division within the Christian commonwealth.¹⁷ To the extent that Elizabeth has separated England and her subjects from Rome, she has damaged this larger commonwealth and left it “vnhealed [rempublicam Christianam non sanauerunt].”¹⁸ Declaring that his own role is to “pray for the saffegard of all Christendome [pro totius Christianae reipublicae salute],” Osório laments the danger in which Elizabeth has placed England.¹⁹ He explains ultimately that in order to maintain the “auncient manners and good ordres [antiquos mores & officia rite]” of the realm, Elizabeth must “[re]-joyne your selfe to the consent of the Catholyke churche [ad consensum Ecclesiae totius aggregaueris].”²⁰ Throughout his short book, Osório repeatedly maintains “the vnitie of Catholyke churche [ab Eccesiae coniunctione],” which Elizabeth’s decisions have violated and endangered.²¹

Just as Osório’s arguments in the Epistola are a reflection of his official position as Archdeacon of Evora within the Roman Church hierarchy, Haddon’s response is influenced by his position within Elizabeth’s government. Haddon, as one of two Masters of Requests, held an important position within the juridical court that adjudicated matters relating to the Queen’s household and the hearing of poor men’s causes. As a court of equity, the Court of Requests had a substantial investment in the Queen’s power of prerogative, as opposed to the common law courts whose judges located the source of their jurisdictional authority in custom and tradition.²² In his response to Osório, Haddon begins by pointing to the national differences between the Portuguese prelate and Queen Elizabeth, reminding Osório that he is indeed foreign to the English realm and that he does not understand the customs of England and its laws and government, especially regarding the role of parliament in the passage of new law.²³ Haddon goes on to admit to Osório’s charge that the English sovereign has thrown off the yoke of the “imperial Bishop,” explaining that the English people and their ancestors have always felt a heavy burden under the authority of the church hierarchy and that, other than Christ, there was no other authority that they needed to acknowledge.²⁴ He goes on to question Osório’s conception of the unity of the Church under papal authority: “euen in the soundest age of the church there was one God, one fayth, and yet notwithstanding had Peter one prouince, Paul another, and Iames another, and diuers other had seuerall charge, whereas the seuering of the persons was no breach to the vnity in fayth.” Claiming the current “extraordinary popish regalty” to be a recent innovation within the church, Haddon argues that at its earliest most robust stages, the church held no such monarchical authority. As far as the Queen having separated herself from the Christian unity, she only seeks her rightful authority over her own subjects in England itself, an authority which the pope had unjustly usurped. And though Elizabeth does not acknowledge the pope as “king of Bishops,” she does acknowledge him as rightful Bishop of Rome.²⁵ Haddon thus implies that she merely asks for similar recognition of her own authority.

It is significant to note the two notions of nationhood that emerge in the first stage of this controversy. On the one hand, Osório conceives of the English realm as a rebellious province within the larger Christian entity, to which he refers as the “Christian commonwealth [respublica Christiana].” At the head of that Christian commonwealth, organized politically as a monarchy, is the Roman curia, and as one of this monarchy’s lesser magistrates, Osório claims the prerogative to counsel temporal magistrates, which is effectively what he offers within the Epistola. On the other hand is Haddon’s conception of a clearly demarcated Engli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Catholics, Royalists, Cosmopolitans: Writing England into the Christian Commonwealth
• Part I
• Part II
• Works Cited
• Index