Reformation and Rome

On 4 February 1592, the Vice-Chancellor and two of the heads wrote to the Chancellor, Lord Burghley. Their letter was a cocktail of anxiety and prejudice mixed in equal parts. In the 1590s, with the memory of the Armada still fresh, the whole nation half-expected a Spanish invasion and was convinced that a great army of Jesuits and priests was at work in the country, making ready. A proclamation, prepared towards the end of 1591, had painted an alarming picture of a popish fifth column entering the country ‘by secret Creekes and landing places’. By the River Cam they were worried, particularly as they had been told that ‘of these many doe attempt to resort into the Universities and houses of Lawe’. Consequently, a commission had been given to the Vice-Chancellor, and others, to seek out enemies of the state. In Cambridge they welcomed this opportunity, but they thought the government half-hearted. They were eager to proceed against ‘papisticall enymies’, but wanted to cast the net wider.

The three men so eager to parade their hatred of the exasperatingly provocative churchgoing papists were Robert Some, Vice-Chancellor and Master of Peterhouse, William Whitaker, Master of St John's, and Roger Goad, Provost of King's. Their enthusiasm for this task was entirely characteristic. All three men were impassioned opponents of the Roman Catholic Church. Plundering scripture for appropriate insults to hurl at Rome in 1588, Robert Some had compared contemporary popes to the Assyrians of the Old Testament who had besieged the holy city and denounced the religious reforms of the king. Whitaker meanwhile, in a series of books published in the 1580s, had set out to demonstrate that the pope was Antichrist and that the survival of popery in England was Satan's work. Goad, like Whitaker, was signatory of an earlier letter to the vigorously reformed Thomas Cartwright, urging him to take up his pen against Rome and ‘Satan's champions’.

The assumption that these three men shared, that the pope was Antichrist, was a common one. What marked them out as distinctive, though, was their determination to put prejudice into practice.