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Impolitic pictures: providence, history, and the iconography of Protestant nationhood in early Stuart England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Alexandra Walsham
Alexandra Walsham*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

This paper explores the religious politics of remembering and visually depicting the recent past in early modern England. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the commemoration of a series of critical moments in the reigns of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth, and her Stuart successor, King James I, became a powerful bulwark of both Church and State. The story of the nation’s providential rescues from Catholic treachery and oppression, pre-eminently the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, evolved into an enduring myth which fused Protestantism with patriotism – a myth which, moreover, engendered its own highly emotive iconography. By the 1630s, however, the celebration of these same anniversaries grew increasingly contentious: as the theological complexion of the episcopal hierarchy gradually shifted, such events became the victims of a species of ecclesiastical amnesia. Caroline clerics began to take deliberate steps to discourage retrospection, to control the memory of historical milestones which were now regarded as a source of embarrassment. Here I want to suggest tentatively that this trend can be traced into the realm of pictorial representation. In the process, we may learn something more about the relationship between the Calvinist strand of the Reformation and the graphic arts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 33: The Church Retrospective , 1997 , pp. 307 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1997

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References

1 Ward, Samuel, Deo Trin-uni Britanniae Bis Ultori (Amsterdam, 1621)Google Scholar. See Stephens, F. G. and George, M. D., Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Division 1. Political and Personal Satires (1320-1832), 11 vols (London, 1870-1954)Google Scholar [hereafter BM Satires], no. 41, and Hind, A. M., Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1952-64), 2, pp. 393–4 Google Scholar.

2 See Aston, Margaret, England’s Iconoclasts, I: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988), pp. 452–7 Google Scholar.

3 The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 12, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1939), 2, p. 349. See also the letters of Joseph Mede, Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, to Sir Martin Stutevile: BL, MS Harley 389, fols 13r-v, 15v, 22v.

4 Thomas Scott, Boanerges (Edinburgh [London], 1624), p. 25. See also idem, The Second Part of Vox Populi (Goricom [London], 1624), p. 17. For the censure of other preachers in 1622, see Cogswell, Thomas, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 27–34 Google Scholar and Godfrey Davies, ‘English political sermons, 1603–1640’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 3 (1939), pp. 9–13.

5 London, Public Record Office, State Papers [hereafter PRO, SP] 15/42/76.

6 Samuel Ward, The Life of Faith, 2nd edn (London, 1621), p. 117.

7 PRO, SP 15/42/77. Ward was simultaneously prosecuted for nonconformity by Bishop Harsnet of Norwich. See Patrick Collinson, ‘Lectures by combination: structures and characteristics of church life in 17th-century England’, in his Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 488–9.

8 Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989)Google Scholar and idem, ‘The Fifth of November remembered’, in Roy Porter, ed., Myths of the English (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 68–90. For the Acts of 1606, see The Statutes of the Realm, ed. T. E. Tomlins et al. (London, 1819), 3 Jac. I. ci.

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10 London, Guildhall Library, MS 959/1 (Vestry minutes and churchwardens’ accounts, St Martin Orgar, 1471–1615), fol. 391 v. For an entirely typical example of a set of anniversary sermons, see Dyke, Daniel, Certaine Comfortable Sermons upon the 124. Psalme: tending to stirre up to Thankefulnesse for our Deliverance from the Late Gunpowder-Treason (London, 1616)Google Scholar.

11 See Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, ch. 5 and passim, and Hutton, Ronald, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 182–5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For example, Herring, Francis, Popish Pietie, or the First Part of the Historie of that Horrible and Barbarous Conspiracie, commonly called the Powder-Treason, trans. A. P. (London, 1610)Google Scholar; Garey, Samuel, Great Brittans Little Calendar: or, Triple Diarie. In Remembrance of Three Daies (London, 1618)Google Scholar; T. S., A Song or Psalme of Thanksgiving, in Remembrance of our Great Deliverance from the Gun-powder Treason (London, 1625); Rhodes, John, The Country Mans Comfort (London, 1637)Google Scholar (an enlarged edition of a book of ‘religious recreations’ first printed in 1588, no copy of which now survives). For puppet plays, see Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fayre: a Comedie, acted in the Yeare, 1614, repr. in Three Comedies, ed. Michael Jamieson (Harmondsworth, 1966), V.i.11-14.

13 Hering, Theodore, The Triumph of the Church over Fire and Water (London, 1625), p. 26 Google Scholar; Garey, Great Brittans Little Calendar, p. 184.

14 See Hering, Triumph, ‘To the Reader’; Dyke, Certaine Comfortable Sermons, p. 9; Taylor, Thomas, An Everlasting Record of the Utter Ruine of Romish Amaleck, in Two Sermons (London, 1624), esp. p. 24 Google Scholar; Herring, Popish Pietie, sig. A3r.

15 London, National Maritime Museum, A2251, reproduced in M. J. Rodríguez-Salgado et al., Armada 1588–1988 (London, 1988), fig. 16.12.

16 The phrase is Roy Porter’s in ‘Seeing the past’, P&P, 118 (Feb. 1988), p. 196.

17 Richard Smith, The Powder Treason ([London, c. 1615]) (BM, Satires, no. 67); The Papists Powder Treason (London, [?1679] first publ. e. 1612]) [San Marino, California, Huntington Library, RB 28300 IV: 21]. See Hind, Engraving in England, 2, pp. 342, 394–5.

18 See Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 141–2, 159 Google Scholar. For a more detailed discussion of the ‘monument’ tradition, see my ‘Aspects of Providentialism in Early Modern England’ (Cambridge University Ph.D. thesis, 1994), pp. 210–24.

19 Porter, ‘Seeing the past’, p. 191.

20 Watt, Cheap Print, pt 2, esp. pp. 134–9.

21 Karl Josef Hõltgen, ‘The reformation of images and some Jacobean writers on art’, in Ulrich Broich et al., eds, Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on his Sixtieth Birthday (Tubingen, 1984), p. 123. Also Patrick Collinson, From lconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation, The Stenton Lecture 1985 (Reading, 1986), pp. 22–6, restated in The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1988), pp. 115–21. On the centrality of the campaign against idolatry, see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, passim, and Michalski, Sergiusz, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London and New York, 1993), esp. ch. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Quotation from Vicars, John, The Sinfulness and Unlawfulness, of Having or Making the Picture of Christs Humanity (London, 1641)Google Scholar, sig. Blr. See also John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1936), I, xi, 12; William Perkins, A Warning against the Idolatry of the Last Times in his Workes, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1608–9), 1, p. 670.

23 See, for example, ‘A showe of the Protestants petigrew’, discussed and reproduced in Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 154–5.

24 BL, MS Lansdowne 84, fol. 238r.

25 Middleton, Thomas, A Came at Chess, ed. Harper, J. W. (London, 1966), III. i. 102–3 Google Scholar.

26 See Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution, and Adams, Simon, ‘Foreign policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624’, in Sharpe, Kevin, ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (London and New York, 1978), pp. 139–71 Google Scholar.

27 Carleton, George, A Thankfull Remembrance of Gods Mercy. In an Historicall Collection of the Great and Mercifull Deliverances of the Church and State of England (London, 1624)Google Scholar. BM, Satires, no. 98; Hind, Engraving in England, 2, pp. 297–9.

28 Lever, Christopher, The Historie of the Defendors of the Catholique Faith (London, 1627)Google Scholar. BM, Satires, no. 9: Hind, Engraving in England, 3, p. 214.

29 Carleton, A Thankfull Remembrance, 3rd edn (London, 1627), see esp. pp. 144, 248. The print is entitled A Thankfull Remembrance of Gods Mercie. By G. C. (London, 1625) [Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Sutherland Collection, Lar, vol. iii] J. See also Hind, Engraving in England, 2, pp. 298–9.

30 Sparke, Michael, To the Glory of God in Thankefull Remembrance of our Three Great Deliverances unto Etern[al] Memory (London, 1627)Google Scholar [London, Society of Antiquaries, Lemon Collection, no. 266]; idem, Thankfull Remembrances of Gods Wonderfull Deliverances of this Land. With other Speciall Prayers, bound with The Crums of Comfort (London, 1628). See also Hind, Engraving in England, 3, p. 101. On Sparke, see Plomer, Henry R., A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London, 1907), p. 169 Google Scholar.

31 Cushion cover, after 1621 (Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery, LL5292), discussed in Xanthe Brooke, The Lady Lever Art Gallery Catalogue of Embroideries (Stroud, 1992), pp. 18–20, who refers to another piece of needlework based on this design described in the will of one James Carcase dated 1637 as a ‘long pillow of tenteworke wherein is the Story of 88 and the Powther plott of the fiefte of November’ (PRO, PROB 11/182/f5).

32 Harrison, Edward R., The History and Records of Ightham Church (Oxford, 1932), pp. 16–18 Google Scholar, and relevant plates.

33 Reyce, Robert, Suffolk in the XVIIth Century: The Breviary of Suffolk, ed. Hervey, Francis (London, 1902), pp. 201–4 Google Scholar; Whittemore, Philip, ‘A brass plate commemorating the defeat of the Gunpowder Plot’ and Blatchly, John, ‘The “Gunpowder Plot” plate; a postscript’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 13 (1985), pp. 549–57 Google Scholar and 14 (1986), pp. 68–9 respectively.

34 Stow, John, A Survey of London (London, 1633), pp. 859–60 Google Scholar, and note the ‘Queen Elizabeth Monuments’ described in the ‘Perambulation or Circuit-Walke foure miles about London’. I owe this reference to Dr Julia Merritt.

35 Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pt 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Michael Sparke was one publisher of anti-Catholic propaganda prosecuted in court: Prynne, William, Canterburies Doome (London, 1646), p. 185 Google Scholar.

36 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, ch. 6. See also Damián Nussbaum’s essay in this volume, pp. 329–42.

37 Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, p. 153. See also Taylor, Thomas, Christs Victorie over the Dragon (London, 1633), p. 491 Google Scholar.

38 See, for example, Taylor, Jeremy, A Sermon Preached in Saint Maries Church in Oxford. Upon the Anniversarie of the Gunpowder-Treason (Oxford, 1638)Google Scholar and BL, MS Harley 7019, fol. 78r, where complaint is made of one Mr Kempe, a fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, who ‘extenuated the fact of the powder traitors’ on 5 Nov. 1637.

39 Prayers and Thanksgiving to be used … for the Happy Deliverance … from the most Traiterous and Bloody Intended Massacre by Gun-powder, the fifi of November, 1605 (London, 1635), sig. B4v (I am grateful to Mr Peter Glazebrook for allowing me to consult the copy of this rare liturgy in the Old Library of Jesus College, Cambridge). See also William Laud, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, DD., 7 vols (Oxford, 1847–60), 4, p. 406; 6, p. 52.

40 See [William Prynne], A Quenche-Coale ([Amsterdam], 1637), pp. 12–18; idem, Canterburies Doome, pp. 246–7; and Henry Burton, For Cod, and the King. The Summe of Two Sermons Preached on the Fifth of November last in St Matthewes Friday-Streete. 1636 ([Amsterdam], 1636), pp. 130–8.

41 Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, esp. pp. 152–5.

42 Burton, For Cod, and the King; PRO, SP 16/335/69. On Ward, see PRO, SP 16/278/65, fol. 144r; Prynne, Canterburies Doome, p. 361; Laud, Works, 5, p. 334, and pp. 328, 340.

43 Ibid., 3, p. 220.

44 Vicars, John, November the 5. 1605. The Quintessence of Cruelty, or Master-peece of Treachery, the Popish Powder-Plot (London, 1641)Google Scholar, sig. Air; Prynne, Canterburies Doome, p. 184. In his Englands Halle-jah (London, 1631), sig. B3r, Vicars referred in the margin to ‘Mr Wardes Disslo, Dissipo’.

45 Prynne, Canterburies Doome, pp. 91–3. No churchwardens’ accounts survive for this period for either of these parishes and the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England has no record of the monument. St George’s was badly damaged in bombing raids during the Second World War.

46 Ibid. The same engraving can be found in Prynne’s The Breviate of the Life of William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1644).

47 See Lake, Peter, “The Laudian style: order, uniformity and the pursuit of the beauty of holiness in the 1630s’, in Fincham, Kenneth, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), esp. pp. 161–85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Henderson, George, ‘Bible illustration in the age of Laud’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1982), pp. 173–204 Google Scholar.

48 Clarke, Samuel, Englands Remembrancer (London, 1657)Google Scholar and A True and Full Narrative of those Two Never to be Forgotten Deliverances (London, 1671).

49 Late seventeenth-century impressions survive of The Papists Powder Treason (see n. 17) and A Thankfull Remembrance of Gods Merde (see n. 29), which was retitled Popish Plots and Treasons (BM, Satires, no. 13). For the playing cards, see Whiting, J. R. S., A Handful of History (Totowa, N.J., 1978), esp. pp. 42 Google Scholar, 45, 52, 55, quotation at p. 50.

50 See BM, Satires, nos 42–44, 1223, 2456. For Henry Fox, see no. 3439. For other echoes, see nos 837, 1030, 6007. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature to 1792 (Oxford, 1959), pp. 31, 51, 63–4, 105, 165 and Plate 29(a).

51 See, for example, The Book of Common Prayer, 80 edn (London, 1676), CUL copy (classmark Adams 7.67.14), facing the ‘Form of Prayer’ for 5 Nov.; The Holy Bible (London, 1669), CUL, British and Foreign Bible Society copy, plate facing Pss 10–14.