Frontispiece to the First Edition of the King James Bible
"King Freddie's Bible"
from The War of Authorities: God versus King in Seventeenth Century England
Marguerite Clemenceau
Frederick Brandon took the throne with a clear programme: ease the burden on religious non-conformists enough so that one half the country or the other was not trying to overthrow the state at any given time; win from the papacy some statement of his regime's legitimacy; and negotiate as soon as possible an advantageous peace treaty with Spain. With those items accomplished, the plan was, as far as Frederick Brandon was concerned, to hunt, feast, and beget offspring, at least some of which would be borne by his actual wife, until dead.
But matters that he had little taste for, and was ready to admit, little competency in, kept intruding. First and foremost of these was that of religion, not merely the matter of what observances the state should tolerate, under what circumstances, and imposing what penalties where necessary, but that of the actual rituals and beliefs of the church of which he was the more-than-nominal head. As far as Frederick knew, James VI of Scotland avidly enjoyed theological debate. And so at least when it came to the matter of charting the course of the Church of England, Frederick would have apparently been happy to just leave James to it.
In truth, Frederick had always imagined when things got to this point he would have Philip Sidney as a kind of co-ruler. In fact, in the long and secretive process of planning their rebellion Frederick had toyed at the idea of restoring and giving to Sidney the title Henry VIII had bestowed on Thomas Cromwell, that of vicegerent of spirituals. And though obviously Frederick could not employ the dowager countess of Pembroke in any official capacity when it came to the Church of England, nonetheless, as Frederick's first teacher and spiritual guide, Mary Sidney exerted great influence on the king in the way of religious policy, and everyone knew it.
In fact, this was one reason for the sudden preoccupation with all the sexual rumors about the countess and the king flying around the court in the early months of the reign. It was believed that if Mary Sidney could be shamed into withdrawing from court, or the king's hand forced to exile her back to Wilton House, the Sidneys' strongly puritanical agenda could be effectively frustrated. Ultimately, of course, the same end was accomplished when King Frederick and his new Duke of Northumberland fell out over peace with Spain, and the Sidneys' power to reshape the spiritual life of the country to fit their fancy abruptly ended.
So Frederick, less with an air of triumph than frustration, would be left to feel his own way in these matters. It is worth asking at this juncture, just what this king believed. Unlike many rulers of the time, Frederick had remained silent for the most part in his public statements about any controversial aspects of religion and religious doctrine, leading some critics like Henry Howard to go as far as to call Frederick an atheist. Frederick's private letters, both to Mary Sidney and others, disproves any such notion Instead, as ever, Frederick had profited in his long ascent to the throne from strategic ambiguity, positioning himself one way when among his core evangelical followers, like the Sidneys and Herberts, and another way entirely when addressing his Catholic Derby kin. And he could not do so half so effectively if one set of his positions or the other were set forth in print.
But in so far as we can be said to know what Frederick believed in 1603, it was in a church with less pomp and ritual, closer to the lives of ordinary people, and more focused on individuals' relationships with Christ. In particular, he made enough flippant remarks to his close familiars about "supposed body and blood", there is no doubt he was of the Calvinist opinion when it came to the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
But with respect to say, church government, Frederick in private made just as plain that he believed in his bones that church government was best left out of the hands of ordinary believers. The reason he thought so was not because of any passage of scripture, and it was not to effectuate some biblically-informed ideal of Christianity. It was because he believed all religious belief, whether true or false, scripturally founded or impure, ran the risk of radicalism and rebellion and required a strong centralized authority, in the bishops and ultimately, in himself, to keep enthusiasm and zeal from tipping over into chaos.
While Calvinist in certain doctrines he may have been, he did not share Puritans' certainty that a humble, simple and democratic church would guard against error and corruption. Instead, he saw only too readily the threat of excess in this direction. Perhaps more importantly for Frederick however, he saw how the bishops were a vital tool in his running of the country, one he did not want to just hand away at the first opportunity.
Of course, it was not merely a matter of what Frederick wanted. The new king had come to power on a cresting wave of evangelical frustration with Elizabeth's Anglo-Catholicism. Many felt Henry VIII and Edward VI's reforms of the English Church were still only half-measures. And so, quite apart from what he had either intended or expected, the Frederician armies of 1603 had been filled out with Puritans who had needed only to be told they were fighting to keep Mary Queen of Scots' son from the throne of England. Leading a force composed of such men, no matter how careful one was about the actual promises he made, created inevitable expectations.
Many of these soldiers during the early stages of the War of the English Succession believed Frederick would grant only them and not the Catholics leniency as to their relationship to the Church of England, would abolish episcopal church government outright, and would institute a wholesale revision of doctrine in the English Church. The Elstree Letter had been only the first crushing disappointment they had suffered. It was followed, rather quickly, by a de facto bargain with the papacy itself, the elevation of the papist who had negotiated it to the dukedom of York, the extension of qualified religious toleration to the papists, and what was seen in Puritan circles as a dishonorable peace with Spain.
All this could still be so, but if King Frederick would effectuate the long-sought revolution in the English Church, the Puritans could still be satisfied.
But Frederick was above all else a pragmatist. The new king would not destabilize his reign virtually from the moment it began in order to write his own preferences into the fabric of doctrine and ritual of the Church of England. Probably even from before the Sidneys' departure, Frederick's plan had been to introduce fresh reforms into the Church of England only gradually, and only as the gradual attrition of the Anglo-Catholic leadership appointed by Elizabeth allowed Frederick to name his own men.
The most notorious of these had involved the Millenary Petition. Originally drafted by Puritan ministers to be delivered to James on his way from Scotland, it was revised and offered to Frederick in the heady days after he had taken London, with Elizabeth's dresses still hanging in their cabinets. Reading it, Frederick knew that a great number of the men who had fought and died for his cause had been enthusiasts for the reforms the petition advocated.
This sprawling document proposed everything from the end of the ceremony of confirmation, to a ban on baptisms by lay persons, to no more holding of multiple benefices by clergy. In the Church of England the Millenary Petition envisioned, there would be no more priests, and Sunday church services would be transformed. Had the petition been presented to James it would have had the air of a fanciful wish list, but in the hands of Frederick it was the earnest demands of loyal followers for the repayment of their commitment.
Much in the petition made Frederick uneasy, but he could not afford to repudiate it outright. The fact he didn't outraged the leadership of the Church of England, and contributed to Archbishop of Canterbury Whitgift's refusal to participate in the coronation, in which he was joined by Bishop of London Richard Bancroft, necessitating a delay in the ceremony until Archbishop of York Matthew Hutton could crown and anoint Frederick.
From the coronation fiasco on, Frederick knew he would have to wait to appoint new leadership in the Church to move forward with any of the substantial changes the supporters of reform wanted. Whitgift's mental acuity was already fading, with Bancroft and his chaplain filling an alarming number of his official responsibilities. But Frederick's surprise accession to the throne had made the fiery, stubborn Anglo-Catholic Whitgift less, not more, willing to leave. At the same time, Whitgift's adversarial relationship with the new king made any thought of replacing him on account of mere age or disability seem an act of tyrannical repression.
Mercifully, the stalemate ended in February 1604 with Whitgift's death. In choosing his successor, Frederick was less attracted to the brilliance of the candidates' erudition or their theological preferences. Instead, what mattered to him in his prospective archbishop was their personal relationship and the trust that went along with it. Thus he translated to the see of Canterbury Gervase Babington, bishop of Worcester, who had been chaplain to the Earl of Pembroke twenty years earlier, while the young earl of Lincoln had been skulking about Wilton House.
Once Babington was secure in Lambeth Palace, Frederick was able to seize the initiative. As a minimal gesture to the Calvinists, Frederick wanted to implement two of what he felt were the least noxious, and most reasonable, requests of the Millenary Petition: for priests of the Church of England to be the residents of their benefices, and for multiple benefices to no longer to be permitted. The days of the priesthood as a sinecure for younger sons of the aristocracy who could live where they liked and collect an income while showing scant regard for the spiritual wellbeing of their parishioners would be at an end.
For this very reason, the backlash was immediate and intense, not merely from the Church of England as expected, but from the highborn families which those younger sons came. Frederick's proposed
Order Concerning Benefices could not have been more controversial with such people if it proposed the banning of Christianity outright. But it was this controversy that gave Frederick the opening he wanted to hold a National Council of the English Church, at Cambridge, in autumn 1604. Frederick had hoped at the time that by when the council met Philip Sidney, Duke of Northumberland, would be back from the Netherlands and ready to provide his assistance. Of course, instead Frederick would have to get by without the help of either Sidney.
Instead, Frederick obsessed over the structure of the council, which would involve all English bishops, the deans of the great houses of worship, and the presidents of Oxford and Cambridge. He would not be, as it were, a participant. Instead, the assembled archbishops, bishops, and deans would on the first day vote on various ideas for reforms of the church, half of them arising from the Millenary Petition, the other half proposed by the attendees. Each of the twenty would then be debated. The king would not take part in the debate. Though he could ask questions, none could be put to him, nor could he be addressed directly without prior leave. He would then decide which of the twenty proposals would be enacted.
On October 7, the participants convened. The king welcomed them warmly, and opened the proceedings with a soothing speech reminding everyone there they had a common faith and common purpose. Immediately though, events took a fractious turn when Richard Bancroft, bishop of London, broke the rules and appealed to the king directly to enact no changes to the structure of the Church of England. Frederick answered, furiously, "Was this Church of England founded by the hands of men, or not? Then can men change it, or not?" From that point on, the theological conservatives were on the back foot, as Frederick took Bancroft's disruption as a challenge to his personal authority.
Again and again, the Puritan forces, led by John Rainolds, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, won concessions from a king now ready to show his displeasure had consequences. Excommunication could no longer be for minor matters, but only "grave felonies and severe abuses of worship". Bishops would still have the power to impose the sentence, but it would be appealed to a committee appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The king's proposals in the
Order Concerning Benefices to dispense with nonresident clergy and multiple benefices was enacted, with only a figleaf of compromise, by which those currently enjoying these livings could continue to do so, on good behavior, until their death.
The Anglo-Catholics who had governed the Church under Elizabeth fielded their own competing proposals among the twenty that the king heard. Even the one they thought would do the best with a king who had repeatedly stated his interest in doctrinal uniformity in Church of England teachings, which required each priest in the Church of England to swear an oath to support the Thirty-nine Articles adopted in 1579, failed. Instead the mere oath to the supremacy of the king in religious matters, almost a cruel jest in current circumstances, was maintained.
It was not that Frederick opposed the notion of an oath to a shared body of doctrine outright, he just believed he would rather wait for that body to become more settled. In short, he did not want the notions propounded twenty-five years earlier by Elizabeth's Anglo-Catholic bishops to be used to exclude his allies. Rather, it would be much better to wait a bit until the doctrine reflected their beliefs, and then put the Anglo-Catholics on the hot seat.
But after a while, even the Puritans who had begun the Council so strongly began to outrun their momentum. Frederick would not assent to sterner rules governing the sabbath, or new ones forbidding lay baptism, which was frequently performed by women, usually midwives. (The king later admitted he could not bear to think any family might think a decision by him to be the reason their stillborn baby had been denied salvation.) He also would not end the forms of ritual respect the English Church required of its parishioners for the cross and the name of Christ.
Of course, the most momentous moment at the Cantabrigian Council was a blunder. Frederick, feeling confident, ventured into a back-and-forth with Rainold about the use of the Bible in English Churches, and how they should all be from the same translation. Rainold, having lured the king out from his nest of rules designed to avoid personal embarrassment, asked if the king had a translation he would prefer to be universal in English churches. "The standard," Frederick huffed, not knowing what he was talking about. And thus, because there was no standard or authorized version of the Bible in all English Churches, and all existing translations had their critics, a new one would have to be created.
By year's end the king had named 56 scholars to the project to freshly translate the Bible into English, the Old Testament being translated from the Hebrew and the New Testament from the Greek. Richard Bancroft, whom the old-guard Anglo-Catholics had hoped would lead the project, was overlooked entirely and had no role. In his place, Richard Vaughan, Bishop of Chester, and from 1606 Archbishop of York, led the effort. Some of the theologians appointed to translate the Bible were so radical that, even after the Religion Act of 1604, many had been living in the Netherlands and participating in English religious matters by means of letters and print for fear of the recusancy laws.
After initially refusing Frederick's offer, which was something of an olive branch to an old friend, the Duke of Northumberlad in early 1606 agreed to serve as a kind of rhetorician-in-chief for the project, suggesting final edits for aesthetic reasons, which the primary translating committees of professional theologians could accept or reject. Sidney's contributions to the project was less substantial than what it might otherwise have been, however, as he was already entering into his final illness, and died in 1611.
The Common Bible of the English Nation ( or CBEN, or the Common Book, as it later came to be called) would finally be committed to the royal printer, Robert Barker, in 1613.
But as to the Council of Cambridge, it finished its proceedings with two final measures, not included among the original proposals. First, Frederick authorized a program of church visitations, to be adminstered by his Archbishop of Canterbury, to determine the quality of religious instruction and the regularity of religious observance in the country and to point out individual churches and even dioceses which were not fulfilling their duties. (Without a doubt, this was intended by Frederick as a means of embarrassing church leadership critical of him, both punishing those who had previously made themselves unhelpful, like Bancroft, and threatening any who might become a problem for Frederick in the future.)
Second, taking a cue from the decennial councils that had begun meeting in Wittenberg since the sixteenth century to govern the Lutheran Church, Frederick announced that in 1614 all the holders of the offices of those who had convened in Cambridge in 1604 would meet in Oxford, to evaluate the effects of the reforms just enacted, consider fresh measures, and assess the state of English Christianity more generally.
Thus satisfied, Frederick ended the Council on October 13 with a short address. In it, he reviewed all the measures that had been adopted, reviewed those which had not yet been adopted but which might prove necessary in the future, such as a more doctrinally rigorous oath for English priests, and considered those ideas which he had rejected. Surprisingly to those who did not know his personal views, he included in the final category a presbyterian church government. However Frederick chose his phrasing deliberately: he would not replace the English episcopacy with something else "so long as it proved itself no barrier, to true religion or proper government." Going further, he continued, "in England the Church has no princes, but servants." In short, his support for episcopacy was not absolute but conditional, and the obvious condition demanded of the attendees were their compliance with his reforms and support for his reign more generally.
For his part, Frederick left the Cantabrigian Council certain that he had won a victory as crucial and sweeping as
Cum magna misericordia or the winning of the
pas for England. He had achieved concrete reforms in the English Church that would make it better able to fulfill its purpose, without giving into the zeal of the Puritans that he feared might descend into absolutism. Nor would it maintain an idea of the English Church as a mirror of the Roman, but just with an English Bible and a king at its head rather than a pope. As far as Frederick was concerned, he had steered a middle course between the extremes, and avoided measures which might impose too much change too fast, or alienated a large segment of English society.
For the conservatives who had run the English Church under Elizabeth, of Bancroft or Thomas Bilson's ilk, the Cantabrigian Council was a reckoning that, if unwelcome, at least let them know the rules in dealing with Frederick going forward, and promised that the king was not completely unsympathetic to their cause. In a very real sense, it was their low point in Frederick's reign, where it seemed like they might even occupy the position of dissidents similar to what the Puritans had under Elizabeth.
More surprising was the response of the Puritans. Frederick had won for them at Cambridge huge concessions: the residency requirement, the end of multiple benefices, the restrictions on excommunication, and most importantly, a new translation of the Bible with strong Calvinists performing and overseeing much of the work. But among the Puritans there was profound disappointment: the English Church was still run by bishops; the pomp of the old ceremonies and vestments remained; the sabbath, in their view, was still disrespected; and the 39 Articles imposed by Elizabeth's bishops in 1579 were still untouched.
Their deep disappointment with the outcome of 1603 was even now, furthered along by the king's policy of a qualified tolerance for the Roman Catholics and the abandonment of the Dutch for a peace with Spain, turning into a much stronger and more lasting disapproval of Frederick. What the new king did not yet understand was that their quest to build a church conforming to an idealized primitive Christianity in all its particulars would not admit the sort of delicate political compromise Frederick had brought about at Cambridge. The Common Bible of the English Nation would not win them, either. Nor would any of the other concessions Frederick would throw their way over the rest of his quarter-century reign.
Before long, the gamesmanship would begin in earnest. When in the first year of his reign King Henry of Scotland was asked by the French ambassador if he he might ever harbor hopes of succeeding (in both senses of the word) where his father failed, the young king answered that he hoped if the English succession ever came to a test of arms again, that he might have the support of all Englishmen "of the party of Godly church government" (meaning presbyterianism), in short, the same quarters of English society Frederick had leveraged to usurp Henry's father.
More alarming still, in many corners of Puritan England a religious presbyterianism was now becoming coextensive with a political republicanism, as the thinking of George Buchanan gained greater and greater traction with the public. This would make for a grave crisis in the House of Brandon once its charismatic and impetuous founder had left the stage.
Hence the name Frankreich. A detail impossible to realize on a world map of that size is that Poland actually does keep Danzig/Gdansk, and with it, a Baltic port. No such thing as West Prussia. Someone on the previous thread imagined that the borders of the present-day alt-Germany is basically the German boundaries of 1919-1938, plus Alsace/Elsass. And right now to my mind that's still more or less accurate.