C H R I S T I A N I D E N T I T Y, P I E T Y, A N D P O L I T I C S I N E A R LY MODERN ENGLAND
R O B E RT E . S T I L L M A N
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue 1 Introduction: Peace-Wars on the Continent and in Britain 00
THE IDENTITY
OF
PA RT 1 . CHRISTIANS
WITHOUT
NAMES
CHAPTER ONE
John Harington and the Confessional Beyond 00 CHAPTER TWO
Neuters and the Politics of Language in Early Modern Polemic, or How to Trouble the Confessional Divide 000
CROSSING
PA RT 2 . CONFESSIONAL ROADS TO CHRISTENDOM: PIETY AND POLITICS CHAPTER THREE
Imagining Christendom in Britain: Political Romance in 1589 and Disenchantment 000 CHAPTER FOUR
Enacting the Politics of Christendom: After the Scottish Mission (1590), James VI and I 000
viii Contents
PA RT 3 . P O E T RY T U R N I N G F R O M T H E C O N F E S S I O N S : S I D N E Y, C O N S T A B L E , A N D L A N Y E R CHAPTER FIVE
Poetic Energy and Poetic Economy in the Post-Reformation 000 CHAPTER SIX
Examining Constable’s Sonnets, or The Pleasures of Pious Miscegenation 000 CHAPTER SEVEN
Reading the Critical Conversation about Aemilia Lanyer: Performing Presence in the Confessional Beyond 000 Conclusion 000
Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000
Introduction Peace-Wars on the Continent and in Britain
C ONTINENTAL N ETWORKS
OF
A- CONFESSIONAL C HRISTIANS
Recovering the intellectual foundations of those Christians reaching across confessional boundaries begins properly by attending to recent scholarly treatments of Europe’s multiple confessions; it proceeds to the ongoing transformation of “toleration” studies among religious historians; and it then supplies an overview of its subjects’ intellectual foundations in light of their search for the peace of Christendom. In the geographical movement among the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, and France, there is remarkable diversity among Christians pursuing what scholars variously term “union” or “reunion,” “moderation” or “concord,” “conciliation” or ‘irenicism,” both in their beliefs and in their new politics developed to complement those beliefs. They were all a-confessionals. It takes a large tent to accommodate this full range of Christians and, while making the necessary distinctions between and among them, to give sufficient rigor to analysis. What startles attention from the first is how many early modern Christians refused, resisted, or opposed the confessions for the sake of repairing the torn body of Christendom. Multiconfessionalism was a reality in the early modern era, however much individual churches and states attempted to deny it, or
21
22
Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England
to contain and control its potential for violence, or to set aside its opportunities for reimagining Christian communities of a different kind.1 A confessional hegemony could obtain near exclusivity in certain corners of Europe—in Catholic Spain and Portugal, later in Lutheran Sweden and Denmark—but rarely elsewhere. Early in the century, Switzerland achieved a long-lasting peace between its Catholic and Protestant cantons in the Second Peace of Kappel (1531) by permitting the individual cantons to maintain the religion of their choice. Some states like Poland achieved fame for the attempt to legislate harmony across the divided confessions—among Calvinists, Lutherans, and the Bohemian Brethren in the Polish-Lithuanian Consensus of Sandomir (1570), the product of John Laski’s call for Protestant unity to forestall Catholic tyranny; or three years later in the far more comprehensive Warsaw Confederation, in which freedom of worship was granted to nearly all of the kingdom’s churches. Stephen Bathory, the famously inclusive and zealously Catholic king of Poland, sustained the agreement during his reign (1576–86). Even antitrinitarians and Anabaptists, refugees from confessional oppression elsewhere, were able to live more or less peacefully in Poland and Lithuania—until, that is, the monarchy allied with Jesuits in the early seventeenth century to eradicate the Confederation’s power.2 Central Europe set no great example for sovereigns in the West, who inclined to interpret compromise and conciliation as signs of weakness—unless or until, that is, the weight of religious war became unbearable for princes like William of Orange, Maximilian II, and Henry of Navarre. The German irenicist David Pareus maintained his admiration for Poland’s Consensus as late as 1614, as did those twin British conciliators John Dury and Samuel Hartlib as they exchanged letters about the “pacification” of England’s church in 1628.3 The early modern era was replete with synods, councils, and proposals for new synods and new councils to restore Christendom to wholeness, which rarely met and rarely achieved much success. The chronicle of such failures has led historians to study Europe’s multiple confessions mainly from the perspective of those early modern institutional networks whose job was to contain, to control, and—God willing—to extirpate diversity altogether. Under the absolutist regime of the con-
Introduction 23
fessions, Christianity threatened to turn from a communal experience to a doctrine—even to a dogmatic instrument of repression.4 It makes sense to record the history of those institutional networks, as historians have done voluminously, and to highlight the violence of confessional Europe in conjunction with that quest to eliminate opposition. With a paradoxical logic that belies expectation, repression produced violence that now supplies some of our most compelling evidence about the lived reality of early modern faith. This is a truth about post-Reformation Europe in evidence brilliantly from Brad Gregory’s study of the martyrs—willing both to die and to kill when salvation was at stake (a terrible pun)—to Denis Crouzet’s apocalyptic warriors shedding blood for God in France’s civil wars.5 Just count the acts of religious brutality inflicted upon Europe amid the Wars of the Schmalkalden League, the raids of the Sea Beggars, the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre, and the Battle of the White Mountain at the onset of the Thirty Years’ War, and the argument about the era’s pervasive religious violence illustrates itself. Inside the histories of the post-Reformation, what does not make sense are the twin assumptions that the religion of the confessions either exhausts or sufficiently explains the piety of early modern Christians generally (efforts to repress the heterogeneity of Christian beliefs were themselves horrific failures) or that the era’s violence provides our only or best evidence about faith’s lived reality for early moderns. The religious wars had their complement, as I plan to argue, in the early modern era’s peace-wars—that great variety of activities undertaken by intellectuals, poets, politicians, men of business, and women of consequence to pursue conciliation among the divided believers. Christians who resisted, opposed, or sought to transcend confessional identity have traditionally been absorbed into the study of toleration and the transhistorical teleology of enlightenment. W. K. Jordan and Joseph Lecler made early, sizable contributions to that study, with Jordan narrating a story of Protestant-inspired enlightenment in England and Lecler expansively revisiting that narrative to accentuate the contributions of Catholic and Reformed thinkers alike to the ideal of religious freedom—the kind of freedom ultimately valued by Pierre Bayle, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Voltaire.6 That narrative no
24
Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England
longer interests many contemporary historians for reasons widely acknowledged. In early modern Europe, “toleration” was conceived most often as a vehicle for containing and controlling heterodox religious communities who could not otherwise be coerced into conversion. It often accompanied the exercise of what Alexandra Walsham has learnedly described—by way of brutal paradox—as “charitable hatred,” a historically and sometimes theologically sanctioned logic for saving souls and burning heretics, whether in London, Antwerp, Heidelberg, Madrid, Paris, or Geneva.7 In the realm of public policy, “toleration” was the operative logic behind the Holy Roman Empire’s Peace of Augsburg (1555), with the division of its individual states into a patchwork pattern of cuius regio, cuius religio dominions, whose rulers determined their inhabitants’ confessional identity (Roman Catholic or Lutheran)—with no legal standing for the Calvinist Reformed, or (of course) for Anabaptists or Socinians and the like. France’s Edict of Nantes (1598) ended the civil wars with ninety-two public and fifty-six secret articles of agreement, the sum total of which seems now less a proviso for religious freedom than a quantification of political anxieties to contain religious violence by segregating Huguenots from Catholics. Even William Cecil, Lord Burghley, could preach toleration—when “toleration” meant tricking the pope into permitting recusant Catholics to attend official church services.8 The transformation of the scholarly literature about toleration from Jordan to Walsham has gone hand in hand, then, with the prevailing institutional focus on religion and its gravitational pull toward the coercive powers of the confessions and the states. Recovering a history of early modern England’s a-confessional Christians invites a different perspective. Current “toleration” scholarship excludes the subjects of this study, since these subjects were united in conceiving and pursuing conciliation, not as an evil to be tolerated, but as what Howard Louthan and Randall Zachman call a positive good to be obtained. In the aftermath of Christendom’s shattering, all of this book’s subjects pursued “ecclesial” concord and unity, however differently they conceived that unity, the means to obtain it, or the character of the ecclesiam that they might best foster.9 What
Introduction 25
Gregory Hanlon has claimed about France during the civil wars might well be claimed for the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, and even Europe as a whole: that the late sixteenth century has a peace history as well as a war history that merits scholarly attention.10 That peace history is manifested in the myriad plans for achieving conciliation to forestall or to end the religious wars and is a history infused by underground resources from those wells of peace and amity that a Catholic scholar like John Bossy identifies with the “archaic” church or that might more simply be named primitive Christianity. Among the conciliators, Christians always have Christ in common, and the imperative of neighborly love, in which enemies especially are the objects of charity.11 Christians equipped themselves for the peace-wars with a variety of weapons, and it is good to begin with an overview of their range and number to deflect simplifications about some single intellectual strategy distinguishing their arguments. Sometimes they pursued conciliation as the work of conscience, grounded in a divinely conceived natural law or by extension as an imperative of international law; sometimes as the necessary communion of the Christian churches upon the historical model of the primitive church, its councils and its fathers; sometimes as the necessary consequence of epistemic modesty, and a complementary refusal to dogmatize, or, conversely, as the rational conclusion to a philosophical gathering of knowledge— progressively methodical and encyclopedic in character—to dispel error and to illuminate truth; sometimes, among elite humanists especially, as rhetorical accommodation turned religious praxis on the model of God’s accommodation of his Word to mankind; sometimes (more simply) as the lived response to the gospel’s plain call for Christocentric charity; and more rarely (but discernibly), as pious regard for religious differences to summon Christians together irenically, each tribe in its own tent. They targeted more limited or more expansive communities of Christians with recourse to one or more of these positive reckonings of conciliation because of their common identity as Christians whose pious identities were forged inside the dark crucible of confessionalism.
26
Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England
F ROM E RASMUS ’ S B ARBATIUS
TO
C ASTELLIO ’ S D ESOLATION
Nicholas of Cusa speculated that God took pleasure in multiple forms of worship (pagan and Christian), and Thomas More’s Utopians were as free as Turks to second the belief, but Cusa and More wrote before Luther and before Christendom’s shattering by advance upon advance of Reformation.12 One member of Richard Hooker’s circle, William Covell, could report with fascination that Themistius the Philosopher believed “the variety of the sects was a thing much pleasing to God”— and Covell hastened to clarify that his own preference was for uniformity.13 After the Reformation, a few voices (important to hear) were raised in favor of permitting and sometimes even endorsing freedom of worship among Christians of different churches or (more rarely) people of different religions or no religion at all. Emphasis turned more readily to concord and comprehension. Some of those schemes were authentically cosmopolitan in their comprehensiveness. In the comparatively rarified atmosphere of sixteenth-century Basel, a radical Catholic like Guillaume Postel could plan, in the advance of world harmony, a spiritual reconciliation between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire. At the close of the century, the French historian and political philosopher Jean Bodin could stage a colloquy among a Lutheran, a Calvinist, a Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, and two believers refusing confession to any religion (a deist and a skeptic) as advocacy for global tolerance, but he could not publish such a work. Global harmony was more safely envisioned as a unity.14 Abraham Ortelius mapped a world whose uninhabited spaces called out for population by means of an enlightened Christian charity, and Christopher Plantin published those maps because of their convictions derived from that still-mysterious Family of Love. These too were exceptional figures.15 With an eye to positive valuations of conciliation and their intellectual foundations, where does a history of a-confessional Christians properly begin? It begins with Desiderius Erasmus, the sixteenth century’s most famous and most influential advocate for Christian irenicism, and author of early modern Europe’s original account of the Christian who affirms his spiritual identity in opposition to membership within a visible church. In a dialogue entitled Inquisitio de fide,
Introduction 27
composed just as the Reformation was troubling the peace of Christendom, Erasmus summons into imagination the figure of Barbatius, whose orthodoxy is tested by questions about his adherence to the Apostles’ Creed.16 The dialogue reads almost like a catechism. Credo by credo Barbatius affirms the existence of “one God, one Gospel, one faith, one hope; the participation of the same Spirit”—virtually all of what most believers would consider the definitive propositions of Christianity.17 As the dialogue proceeds, what attracts attention is Barbatius’s refusal to profess his belief in “Holy Church.”18 Instead, he affirms his membership within “the body of Christ, that is to say, a certain congregation of all men throughout the whole world who agree in the faith of the Gospel,” and by way of capacious expansion “all godly men [omnes pios] from the beginning of the world even to the end of it.”19 The membership that Barbatius claims, values, and asserts is membership inside the invisible church of Christ—past, present, and future. “Saint Socrates” belongs to the same church, Erasmus famously asserts elsewhere—and not just playfully.20 Erasmus’s Barbatius is an imaginary representation of Martin Luther, who had suffered excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church only three years before the dialogue was written. The Inquisitio de fide (1524) stands as a remarkable redemption of Luther from his condemnation for heresy. It stands also, of course, as a pointed reminder to Luther about the indispensability of unity within the community of the faithful. The invisible church has an authenticity that Erasmus affirmed on the basis of long-standing Christian religious thought, even as that visible church of Rome maintained sufficient freedom and grace (by Erasmus’s judgment) to accommodate all of its members—Martin Luther included. Within another year, Erasmus and Luther would clash over the theologically fraught issue of the will’s freedom, and soon after, amid the civil violence occasioned by Reformation, Erasmus would condemn Luther’s followers as lawless offenders against the peace of Christ, but he never once referred to Luther as a heretic. It would be convenient to categorize Erasmus as the authoritative voice of the early modern church that aspired to legitimacy as a via media. It was Erasmus’s vision of an inclusive Roman Catholic
28
Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England
Church that inspired George Cassander’s conciliation project at the failed Colloquy of Poissy (1561), that animated Michel de l’Hôspital in his address to the Estates at Orleans (1560)—when a genuinely inclusive Gallic church was still imaginable—and that supplied (on the other side of the confessional divide) Richard Hooker with his model for building the English church as a via media as much to propel as to celebrate its always-mythic realization as such (1594). Hooker’s friend Edwin Sandys knew all about the pan-European schemes to create a Constantinian church for unifying the Christian faithful—and catalogued precise tools that might be employed to that end—but he despaired about seeing any of them utilized.21 Mario Turchetti labels such pursuits examples of “condescending concord” utterly distinct from the “legitimizing” concord that expressed mutual respect among the divided and distinguished churches.22 Such labeling, however, can itself become confusing when applied to Erasmus or to other proponents of an institutionally unified Christianity. In Erasmus’s case, the label fits badly because of his pervasive influence, not only on early modern Christians seeking to move beyond the confessions within the context of an already existing church pursuing a more “authentic” catholicity (however interpreted), but also on those Christians who identified themselves as bridge builders between churches (ecumenists) or between members of the invisible church of Christ (in the line of Socrates and the early Luther). Erasmus imparted to those Christians—sometimes as a conduit, sometimes as an instigator—a wide range of intellectual tools and arguments. Some of them are plainly visible in the Inquisitio de fide, including the notion of a credal Christianity or minimal set of beliefs required for salvation, and the complementary conviction that fundamental truths can be distinguished from adiaphora—matters of soteriological indifference.23 What inspired those convictions was Erasmus’s commitment to a supradoctrinal account of Christianity privileging St. Paul’s “fruits of the Spirit” above matters of disputative concern (Gal. 5:22–23). At its core, Erasmus’s philosophy of Christ made love (caritas) the alchemy of faith, the very means by which the Christian actualizes the dignity of his creation in the image of God.
Introduction 29
In tandem with this deep Christocentric piety—a living inheritance from late medieval Christianity—came a more modern-seeming skepticism about the limits of human intellection; or, put more plainly, Erasmus left too an epistemology to challenge dogmatic pronouncements about adiaphora. His Christian humility infused the skepticism of classical Academic philosophy to insist on the merely probable limits of human understanding. Push hard on those limits, and heresy became as the century advanced increasingly difficult to identify as a rational category, since determining the scope of the orthodox turned itself progressively uncertain. Of course, for Erasmus the lifelong Catholic, heresy could always be identified by the consensus of church councils or the early church fathers (witnesses whose testimony endured through time). Hence Cassander’s Erasmian gesture at the Council of Poissy (1561) to rename the heretics “schismatics” and to make room for their unification within the church. Cassander’s gesture was Erasmian because of its intellectual origin in the rhetorical assumptions informing Erasmus’s conception of conciliation and that internationally diverse body of elite humanists whom he inspired. The humanists’ quest for meaning ad fontes—in the original texts at the source of knowledge—both authenticated and complemented their efforts to restore the Roman Church to its primitive purity. For Erasmus, the incarnated Christ was the Word made flesh, and the Word who accommodated divine truth to human understanding in accordance with the best principles of the classical rhetorical tradition. As such, Christ became a model for the accommodation of differences among parties disputing about issues of faith, who required leniency and a demonstrable charity. When nearly a decade after defending Luther from heresy Erasmus wrote his De sarcienda ecclesiae concordia (1533; Mending the peace of the church), he used a rhetorical term (sygkatabasis) taken from the Cappadocian fathers to legitimize his specific suggestions for ecclesial unity, most notably a call for a church council to mediate disagreements—a prescription tirelessly invoked throughout the era, especially by kings intent upon realizing (or appearing to realize) religious conciliation, from Maximilian II of the Holy Roman Empire to Henry IV of France to James I
30
Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England
of England.24 Erasmus’s rhetorical reading of Christian accommodation became a commonplace among early modern Christians pursuing various kinds of conciliation, including Philip Melanchthon in Germany, Francis Junius in the Netherlands, Jean Bodin in France, and even that determined moderator William Chillingworth, whose The Religion of Protestants (1638) imagined a truly catholic and accommodating Church of England—a decade before the Civil Wars began.25 While Erasmus proposed an expansive lexicon of conciliatory ideas and irenic practices, the confessional era of the late sixteenth century demanded new ones just as it transformed the old into new, sometimes radically different kinds. Sebastian Castellio illustrates the argument well, since his career highlights the shaping power of confessional conflict over Christians who refused the doctrinal extremes of both Geneva and Rome, and who developed in response their own a-confessional identities. The same signs could always signify differently depending on the purposes of the users and their historical context—the confessional geography of the individual nation-state or city, its political institutions, the accessibility of its public domain, its permeability to outside voices, its experience of persecution, war, brutality, and mass murder, in short the full panoply of circumstances that shaped religious discourse of all kinds. Move event by event on the European stage during the last and most productive decade of Castellio’s career, 1553 to 1563, and the era’s hardening of confessional boundaries coincided publication by publication with Castellio’s emergence as Europe’s first internationally famous (and infamous) Christian refusing confession.26 In 1553, Calvin’s church in Geneva executed a heterodox Spaniard named Michael Servetus for heresy; in 1555, at the death of Charles V, the devoutly Catholic Philip II of Spain inherited the Netherlands, where the Inquisition was already working to extirpate heretics, and quickly redoubled its efforts; in 1559, the Roman Catholic Church put Erasmus’s works on its index of prohibited books; and in 1561, the Colloquy of Poissy ended in failure when Theodore Beza—Calvin’s chief lieutenant—refused compromise on the key issue of the Eucharist and frustrated plans to unite the churches. France’s civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots began in 1561 and continued intermittently for almost three decades,
Introduction 31
and in 1563 the Council of Trent concluded its twenty-fifth and final session by reasserting the heresy of the Reformed churches and by affirming what appeared to everyone beyond its walls (and some inside) as doctrinal intransigence. It was Michael Servetus’s execution for heresy that first mobilized Castellio’s attack against the exercise of violence to force consciences. A Savoyard with a humanist education and Reformed credentials earned from Calvin’s own academy at Lausanne, Castellio shocked Europe by challenging Geneva in particular, the full range of Christian churches generally, and the political elites as a whole for denying the individual’s spiritual freedom to believe as conscience dictated—or put more modestly, for sacrificing human life to mere doctrinal disagreements. De haereticiis (1554) is a work of great rhetorical savvy that sets out to subordinate the appearance of personal opinion to the collection of public witnesses, ancient and modern, pre-and postReformation, Catholic and Reformed, as principled and pragmatic testimony against executing heretics. The book summons early Luther against late Luther, Erasmus against his own church, and even Calvin against Calvin, and responding to the whole lot, it highlights the irenical testimony of the church fathers from Lactantius and Chrysostom to Jerome and Augustine as witnesses on its behalf. Untethered from a personal stake in any “outward” church, Castellio writes from the perspective of a Christian who refuses (what appeared to him) as the un-Christian act of assuming sectarian names. Among the contributors to the De haereticiis was Sebastian Franck, a German radical whose conviction that any visible church was a corruption of Christ’s invisible and wholly spiritual church was a major influence on Castellio—pragmatically modest as Castellio remained by having such beliefs expressed by the pseudonymous “Augustin Eleuthereus,” safely at a rhetorical remove from himself.27 Castellio had no wish to join Servetus at the stake. Erasmus counseled against executing heretics. As his arguments matured, Castellio sought to abolish “heresy” as a category of meaningful speech, and consequently as an authentic standard of rational, religious, or political discourse. By the time he wrote his Conseil à la France desolée (1562), “heresy” had become in his argumentative
32
Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England
repertoire an empty nominal entity, merely a name applied by one religious faction against another that differed about matters of doctrine: “Donques heretique c’est un qui est d’une mauvaise secte” (Thus a heretic is anyone from a bad sect).28 The onset of France’s civil wars compelled Castellio into new conceptualizations of conciliation and more explicit articulations of his distinctive Christian identity. Erasmus pursued unity within the Roman Church. Castellio advocated instead for peaceful coexistence between France’s two warring churches, Catholic and evangelical, partly on the political advice of the Catholic pragmatist Etienne Pasquier and partly as a consequence of his own anticonfessional principles.29 As Christ was persecuted by the irreligious Philistines and corrupt powers of his day, so true Christians are persecuted now, Castellio argues, in rhetoric positioning the “true” Christian (who is modest and forgiving and “debônaire”) outside the parameters of the persecuting churches.30 From the position of the neutral outsider, Castellio tears into the all-devouring horrors committed by both sides from the same misreading of heresy. A Christian—simple as the proposition seemed to him—assumes his identity from Christ, belongs to the church of the Heavenly Jerusalem (wholly spiritual), and pursues freely the guide of his individual conscience. The era of confesssionalism had produced in Castellio an altogether new kind of Christian, except that Castellio would have insisted that there was nothing whatsoever new about his Christianity. To call him “Reformed” is to violate his self-identification as a Christian who resists all other names. Like Erasmus but with a keener spiritualist bent, Castellio became a conduit for late medieval piety in his role as Christian educator and conciliator. He produced a translation of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi (1563), as a devotional pathway for the individual Christian’s desired union with Christ.31 Again, Erasmus employed epistemic modesty in the pursuit of conciliation. Castellio sought to extend and to deepen the intellectual foundations of such modesty in his De arte dubitandi (1563), an unfinished book whose theology is rooted in natural law assumptions about those moral precepts inscribed by God into the conscience of every human being and the preeminent virtue of individual reason to choose freely to follow such precepts. And like
Introduction 33
Erasmus, Castellio was a biblical scholar and translator, championing freedom of the will. His translations of the New Testament found their way—not coincidentally—into the hands of Antonio del Corro, who used them in his similarly anticonfessional epistle to the ministers of Antwerp. From Erasmus to Cassander and Castellio, the network of intellectuals promoting conciliation as a positive good spread widely in late sixteenth-century Europe. One illustration can focus the point in the service of a larger argument. Antonio del Corro’s admiration for Castellio was shared by another refugee reformer in the household of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—the Italian historian and military engineer Jacopo Aconcio. Aconcio was a Christian chameleon, abandoning Italy and Catholicism for England and an indeterminate variety of faith. His Strategemata Satanae (1559) supplied early modern Europe’s most methodical anatomy of confessional divisions. Dedicated to Elizabeth I, Aconcio’s Stratagems of Satan argued that heresy really is the work of the devil.32 Against all expectation, however, the text proceeded to explain that it is the devil’s work because its proscriptions endlessly set Christian against Christian, a Satanic stratagem for rendering permanent the divisions among the churches.33 Aconcio was the theologian responsible for arming many of Europe’s a-confessional Christians against charges of heresy. His argument informs radical texts advocating religious freedom in the Netherlands, including Dirk Coornhert’s, and French Catholic-loyalist tracts promoting freedom of worship, including Pierre de Belloy’s. In Friesland in 1590, a then-famous theologian named Gellius Snecanus invoked Jacopo Aconcio against heresy to deter the “assembling or uniting of any particular Sect” to “sanctifie the institutions of men” and defy Christian “liberty.”34 Aconcio is also one likely source for Donne’s searching out of the “true” church in Satire III. My point is straightforward. Aconcio belonged to a network of like-minded intellectuals. Everywhere that one looks in the pursuit of conciliation, the specific circumstances of the nation-state serve to define without delimiting the nature of those pursuits: the influence of Erasmus, Castellio, and Cassander was international and arguably pervasive—even Aconcio traveled widely—and every national pursuit found its intellectual origin and broader significance in
34
Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England
Europe’s expanding bodies of Christians seeking conciliation.35 The individual is a node in a network—a web of smaller and larger communities, whose connections are mutually dependent and defining.
M AKING P EACE : T HE N ETHERLANDS , THE H OLY R OMAN E MPIRE , AND F RANCE The following overview of the Continent’s peace-wars from the Netherlands to the Holy Roman Empire to France has a trajectory intended to be purposeful. It begins in the first nation-state to identify political with religious liberty and to seek peace by means of such liberty; it moves to the empire whose uneasiness about confessional tensions and impatience to pacify them gave liberty solely to princes to determine religious choice; and it ends at a climactic moment of irenical celebration of France’s new sovereign, Henry IV—the Gallic Hercules whose greatest strength was his ecclesial peacemaking, or so the irenicists heralded him in 1589. The Netherlands In the last decades of the sixteenth century, the Netherlands became the site of what Roger Kuin has rightly called World War Zero.36 Europe’s major powers—Spain, France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire—transformed the Low Countries into a theater for religious warfare and imparted thereby a whole new scope and fury to confessional conflict. Roman Catholics (Erasmian and post-Tridentine), Reformed Christians of various kinds (so-called libertines, moderates, and Calvinists), gnesio-Lutherans, Philippists, Anabaptists, and Mennonites, Socinians, Schwenckfeldians, Frankians, and Castelionites, crowded the religious landscape.37 The War of Independence established a Dutch republic in the North (1579) while leaving the South in Spanish control, and that war’s prosecution fostered an alliance in the republic between national and religious liberty unprecedented in Europe. In turn, the alliance was furthered by one of Europe’s most di-