In 1569 the London printer William Seres, renowned mainly for producing books of prayers and devotions, published a slim octavo volume entitled A newe Booke called the Shippe of safegarde.¹ This work, ascribed on the title-page to one “G. B.,” has the appearance of a poetic miscellany; in addition to a prose dedication, the volume includes an introductory address to the reader in fourteeners, two narrative versifications of miraculous incidents from a Latin redaction of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, and the long title-poem. In 219 ottava rima stanzas, plus a 36-line interpolation from the Chaucerian Roman de la Rose, The Ship of safegarde, as poem is headed in the text, is a moral and religious allegory in which man's life is likened to the passage of a ship through dangerous seas.² As the bark of man's life steers between islands, shoals, and whirlpools of sin towards its hoped-for destination, the Haven of Bliss, its pilot, the soul, must trust to the divine compass and card to negotiate a course through the dangers. The mariner must avoid the Rock of Pride, the Rock of Avarice, the Quicksands of Detraction, the Sandbanks of Gluttony, the Island of Fleshly Pleasure, the Rock of Heresy, the Island of Idolatry, and the Rock of Hypocrisy. Beset by such hazards, few ships achieve the blessed goal. Only the pilot who has safeguarded his ship with the bulwarks of piety and moral vigilance can reach the heavenly port. Once his ship is thus provisioned, helpful beacons such as Prayer, Peace, Love, Mercy, Patience, and Faith direct him towards the Haven of Bliss.

Traditional and generic as its theme might be, the poem is a representative mid-Tudor work, where the species of allegory is that of the sermon, in which the typically commonplace imagery is rarely allowed to distract from the deeply serious moral purpose of the author. Sometimes, however, the author indulges in a more sophisticated brand of allegory, in which the imagery is sustained and developed and made peculiarly appropriate to its context. In this vein The Ship of safegarde shows characteristics of later allegories like The Faerie Queene.³ Typical also of the 1560s are both the poem's strong Protestant bias and its author's adaptation of stock imagery to promote a reformed agenda. Another distinctively Protestant feature of the poem is its use of polemic and satire to point up the follies and excesses of contemporary society. The poem thus suggests the influence of Erasmus's Lucianic satire as mediated through the mid-century English religious controversialists, notably John Bale. In addition, however, the poem reflects a wider intellectual commerce, as its author shows himself to be comfortable with both the milieu of neoclassical humanism and the doctrines of the early church fathers. There are also passages in the poem reminiscent of the conventions of the humanist emblem book. In detailing the Sandbanks of Gluttony and the Island of Fleshly Pleasure in particular, the imagery is highly visual, with the poet presenting a series of striking emblematic tableaux. This static rhetorical visualization, followed by close ecphrastic moralizing, resembles the emblema nuda species of emblem, where the picturae are replaced by verbal descriptions. In evidence too throughout the poem is that Horatian precept so popular with humanists in the sixteenth century, the pedagogic impulse to marry moral instruction and pleasant entertainment. For so long overlooked, The Shippe of Safegarde, for a range of reasons, is in need of modern reappraisal. It is hoped that the present edition will help facilitate a renewed interest in the work, thereby allowing the Shippe at last to assume its proper position on our rather short shelf of English literature from the 1560s. …

THE AUTHOR

Googe was an important pioneer of native English poetry in the mid-Tudor period.⁴ Born on St. Barnabas's Day, 11 June 1540, he was the son of Robert Goche, a Lincolnshire retainer to several prominent figures within the Henrician and Edwardian reformist party, including Sir William Cecil—a distant relation of Goche—and Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector. Googe's mother died a month after his birth, and Googe, as was customary in such circumstances, was farmed out to the household of his maternal grandmother, Lady Hales of Dane John Manor, Canterbury. His treatment by Lady Hales was evidently kind; in later years Googe was to look back on her as “the very Phoenix and Parageon of al the Gentlewomen that I ever knewe.”⁵ Canterbury was the administrative center of the Church of England, and Dane John was renowned as a focal point for reformed thinkers within the city, attracting at various times such luminaries of the new faith as John Bale, Alexander Nowell, and Matthew Parker. Influential as the presence of such figures must have been on the development of Googe's religious and political outlook in his formative years, it was more probably an event typical of the vicissitudes of the mid-Tudor period that shaped his thinking along strongly Protestant lines. In 1554 Googe's stepgrandfather James Hales was arrested on religious grounds by the Marian authorities. While in prison, Hales, already mentally unstable, attempted suicide by cutting his wrists. He failed, but on his release a short time later, he threw himself into the River Stour near Canterbury and drowned.⁶ This family tragedy, coupled with the testimony of the returning religious exiles at the end of Mary's reign, must have done much to convince Googe that the religious controversies of the day were manifestations of a forthright spiritual conflict between good and evil. Googe's moral sternness and unremittingly bleak view of human nature may also have been informed by the physical location of Dane John within the city of Canterbury. Known locally as The Dungeon, Googe's childhood home overlooked the city's place of public execution, where Googe could have seen the rotting corpses of Protestant martyrs amongst the usual traffic of thieves and petty felons.

Googe's formal education was at Christ's College, Cambridge, an institution famous for its progressive theology in the sixteenth century, and alma mater of many English reformers. From Christ's, Googe proceeded to the Inns of Court in London and was a full participant in the burgeoning cultural life of that community. His first publication came at this time, when he was nineteen years old. The work, a poem of recommendation, prefaced Thomas Gressop's A Briefe Treatise, Conteynynge a playne and fruitfull declaration of the Popes vsurped Primacye; it appeared on 10 March 1560.⁷ Of much greater importance was his next publication, which followed a fortnight later: his translation of the first three books of Marcellus Palingenius's Zodiacus vitae, a work first published in Venice in 1532.⁸ Palingenius (alias Pietro Angelo Manzolli) was a poet under the patronage of Duke Ercole II D'Este of Ferrara. His Zodiacus vitae (or The Zodiake of Life in Googe's version) is a long moralizing satire on man's condition, encyclopedic in scope and occasionally brilliant in its imagery. The book had its controversial side, however; Palingenius was fully aware of the long-running enmity between the Estensi and the Papacy and included for Ercole's delight some passages satirizing both the Pope and the religious orders. Accordingly, in 1558 the Zodiacus was placed on the very first Index librorum prohibitorum and its late author exhumed and burned. This morbid posthumous fate did much to foster the view among reformed thinkers that Palingenius was a kind of crypto-Protestant, and his book enjoyed considerable success in reformed countries, often being reprinted at times of perceived Protestant peril, as in England in 1588 and the Netherlands in 1622. As a repository of memorable apophthegms and improving sententiae, the Zodiacus was valued for its educational potential, and in England it appeared on the statues of several grammar schools.⁹ Googe completed his task of translation in 1565 and furnished his work with an index and scholarly marginalia in 1576.¹⁰ His endeavors in Englishing Palingenius earned Googe the high esteem of leading Protestant intellectuals, including Edward Dering, William Chadderton, and Abraham Fleming.¹¹

Translating the Zodiake also gave Googe an opportunity to cultivate poet-patron relations with his now preeminent kinsman, Sir William Cecil. By the early 1560s Cecil was Elizabeth's chief minister. Of reformed bent, Cecil recognized the value of fostering the literary talents of his zealous young kinsman. This relationship was the most important connection in Googe's career. Through Cecil, Googe, whose father had died in 1558, was able to buy off his wardship at a favorable price;¹² through Cecil, Googe found regular employment at the households of Theobalds, Cecil House, and at Court;¹³ through Cecil, Googe was able to sidestep obstacles placed in his way by Mary Darrell's parents when they suddenly entertained the overtures of a wealthier suitor;¹⁴ through Cecil, Googe entered Parliament as M.P. for Aldeburgh in Yorkshire in 1571;¹⁵ and through Cecil, Googe was employed on two spells of government duty in Ireland, one of which was an important military posting.¹⁶ Googe repaid these favors with the fruits of his pen, presenting Cecil with successive editions of the Zodiake and relying on his patron's “learned protection and graue authority.”¹⁷ In 1579 he also dedicated to Cecil a translation of some Spanish moral proverbs of the Marquis of Santillana, and in 1577, aware of Cecil's affliction with gout, Googe tactfully dedicated to Richard Masters, Cecil's physician, a slim medical poem detailing cures and salves for the disease.¹⁸

Probably Googe's most important literary venture—although it was not regarded as such in his lifetime—was the publication in March 1563, when he was twenty-two years old, of Eglogs Epytaphes, and Sonettes.¹⁹ This small collection of original verse was unprecedented; no previous English author had published a volume of poems bearing his own name in his own lifetime. Although the collection shows its debt to Tottel's Miscellany of 1557, which was still very much in vogue, it has its own distinct points of interest. It boasts eight eclogues, which were among the earliest examples of original English pastoral. Sixteen years before the publication of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, Googe was already handling moral, political, and religious questions under the cover of shepherds' songs. Of the volume's other pieces, the epitaphs, or elegies, are earnest and full of strong feeling, and the “sonettes,” a miscellany of occasional verse, have been widely admired and anthologized over the past one hundred years.

In 1570, probably in response to Elizabeth's excommunication by Pope Pius V, Googe translated the Regnum Papisticum of Thomas Naogeorgus, or Kirchmeyer, a venomous satire on Roman folly and superstition.²⁰ Googe dedicated his Popish Kingdome, or reign of antichrist, to Elizabeth, hoping that she would find the work a “present meete for a Queene.” In 1577 Googe translated a treatise on agriculture from the Latin of Conrad Heresbach, Rei rusticae libri quatuor (Cologne, 1570).²¹Fovre Bookes of Husbandry enjoyed many reprintings, and was still respected in 1634 when Gervase Markham produced a revision of Googe's text.²² Although Fovre Bookes reflects its German origins, Googe was careful to augment his translation with additional information relevant to the English farmer. One detail is worth mentioning: in the prefatory materials Googe laments the inability of the English at sustaining serious viniculture. Given that southern England enjoys the same meteorological conditions as the wine regions of Germany, Googe feels that Englishmen should be capable of producing palatable wine. It is a testimony to Googe's agricultural acuity and intuition that his home parish of Lamberhurst now contains England's most productive vineyard.

The year 1587 saw Googe's last published work, another translation, this time from a Latin work (Frankfurt, 1583) by Andreas Berthold.²³ In this odd little book Googe preaches the virtues of a supposed wonder drug, Terra Sigillata. The prose dedication, addressed again to Masters, and another physician, Dr. Baylie, was signed from Alvingham in Lincolnshire. Googe had moved in the mid-1580s from Kent to his family seat, and passed his time in obscure retirement until his death in February 1594.

By the time of his death, Googe had earned wide respect as the translator of Palingenius and Heresbach, but was largely forgotten as an original poet. By the mid 1590s, readers had before them examples of the work of Spenser, Sidney, and Marlowe. Googe's original work from the 1560s belonged to a different era and must have seemed hopelessly outmoded in comparison to the flurry of sonnet sequences and elegant lyrics which were tripping from the presses. Googe's favored meter, the fourteener, a native approximation to the classical alexandrine, had once been regarded as a powerful tool of didactic expression. Now it had become a byword for rustic uncouthness: Shakespeare's Rude Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream hope to have the prologue to their amateur dramatics “written in eight and six.”²⁴ There can be no doubt that the historical proximity of Googe and other sober-minded writers of the mid-Tudor period to the glittering latter decades of the sixteenth century has done little to enhance their reputation. It should be remembered, however, that this earlier generation of writers did much to prepare the way for the later successes of the English literary Renaissance. They created a climate where literary production came to be respected and praised. For the greater glory of the English tongue they conscientiously naturalized a range of classical and continental models and provided the unlearned with serviceable vernacular versions of seminal texts. Thus they familiarized a native audience with literary forms and educated them in styles and conventions that later writers could build upon. Laboring against the censure of a received wisdom that branded English verse as barbarous, Googe and his contemporaries improvised a vernacular poetry from an eclectic range of models. The Shippe of safegarde typifies this cultural acquisitiveness. It is at once deeply traditional and yet forward-looking, morally urgent yet iconoclastic, conventional yet idiosyncratic. In all, the Shippe exemplifies much of the English literary achievement of the mid-Tudor years. In both its strengths and its limitations it provides evidence of a burgeoning faith in the native cultural voice while further revealing many of the confusions and contradictions that cut across that politically and religiously uncertain society.

THE IMAGERY OF THE SHIP OF SAFEGARDE: TRADITIONS AND ANALOGUES

The notion that life is like a voyage is, arguably, the paradigmatic metaphor for human existence.²⁵ The concept occurs in nearly all cultures in all ages, found in such varied expressions as Egyptian and Norse after-life beliefs, biblical episodes such as those of Noah and Jonah, Indian and Arabian tales of Sinbad, and Homer's Odyssey. As Hans Blumenberg has recently explained, “the repertory of this nautical metaphorics of existence is very rich. It includes coasts and islands, harbors and the high seas, reefs and storms, shallows and calms, sail and rudder, helmsmen and anchorages, compass and astronomical navigation, lighthouses and pilots.”²⁶ Whether human life is comfortable and secure, or troubled and vexed, the marine figure provides humanity with a spectrum of images to express its condition. And as Blumenberg noted, “the metaphorics of embarkation includes the suggestion that living means already being on the high seas, where there is no outcome other than being saved or going down, and no possibility of abstention.”²⁷

Given the ubiquity of the theme, one hesitates to claim with any confidence the ultimate source or inspiration for Googe's poem. There are, however, certain texts and traditions from which he clearly draws. The most obvious is Homer's Odyssey, not least because Googe cites episodes and incidents from the epic at various points of his poem. Googe could have read the Odyssey in a Latin translation, a number of which had been published during the first half of the sixteenth century, but the stories he refers to were commonly found in compendia and florilegia, and it may have been such a collection that furnished him with details from the poem. It is, of course, entirely unsurprising to find a Christian poet of this period reconfiguring pagan material to suit a Christian theme. Homer was among those ancient writers who were felt to be divinely enlightened and whose works contained covert Christian instruction. Medieval and Renaissance readers interpreted the Homeric epics as moral and religious allegories of human life, and episodes and incidents from them were subjected to close typological analysis.²⁸

Googe, though, did not have to resort to Christianized readings of the ancients to find the theme of his poem because biblical and Christian literature made extensive use of the ship and sea motifs. Men and women of Googe's era must have been very familiar with the comparison of man's life to a voyage, and of the ship as a place of refuge in a precarious world. In the Elizabethan Boke of Common Praier of 1559, the Divine Service for Baptism asks the Lord that the children “maye be receaued into the Arke of Christes Churche: and beeynge stedfaste in faythe, ioyefull through hope, and rooted in charitie, may so passe the waues of this troublesome worlde, that finally they maye come to the lande of euerlastyng lyfe, there to reygne with thee. …”²⁹ It could be that Googe found the key inspiration for his poem from the Anglican liturgy, but as a literary man he must also have been conscious of a range of other sources. He may have known, for example, the Legend of St. Brandan from Wynkyn de Worde's Golden Legend of 1527.³⁰ The story details the holy man's seven years of voyaging and his encounters with bejewelled islands and fabulous fish. The narrative structure is to a large extent dependent on the turning of the Church calendar, and the tale's moral impact is made through the emphasis placed on the saint's godly and estimable life. Googe likely also knew Chaucer's story of the morally pure Custance in the “Man of Law's Tale” from The Canterbury Tales,³¹ which features prolonged voyaging sequences and includes the motif of the charmed or magical boat so popular in Romance literature. The story's purpose, however, is much more elaborate than the typical Romance, and the tale of Custance and her voyages has considerable allegorical significance. The tale comes to speak of notions of life and death, rebirth and renewal, and separation and restoration, as well as providing images of the sacraments and the nature of the Christian life. Custance's obedience, faith, and perseverance can be read as exemplary patterns of pious behavior, and of direct application in righteous living. The ship in which she drifts connects with ancient ideas of the Ship of the Church, with Providence at the helm. The seas are the trials of life, and the destination the port of heaven. On this allegorical level, the story of Custance inhabits the same imaginative world as Googe's Ship and makes use of similar iconographic conventions. Googe is no hagiographer, however, and the Ship differs in important ways from both the stories of Custance and St. Brandan. These tales have a happy resolution, and the tensions created by the various situations and states experienced by the protagonists are relieved. In Googe's voyage the central protagonist is essentially Everyman, and the outcome of his journey remains uncertain: success depends on the mariner's following the navigational principles mediated by Googe from scriptural authority. The resolution of the issues raised in the poem lies outside the work, in the individual conscience of the reader.

In its allegoresis of moral choice and appeal to the reader's conscience, the Ship employs features of another religious literary form. The homiletic tradition, variously expressed in sermons, biblical commentaries, and works of devotion, had been a major channel of religious discourse from the earliest days of the Christian faith, and remained undiminished in its stature and popularity in the sixteenth century. The homilist viewed himself as a humble interlocutor between Christ's message and the common believer, and this role of advocate and teacher often required the use of mundane metaphors to illustrate profound spiritual mysteries. The homilist used images from everyday experience, and it is not surprising to find the image of the storm-tossed ship as one of the commonest metaphors used in homiletic writing. Examples among the works of the early church fathers are numerous and seem to have their roots in a range of biblical episodes such as Noah and the Deluge or Christ's calming of the storm. In his Sermons, St. Augustine figured the church as a ship sailing on the seas of temptation, beset by winds and dangers.³² Of greater interest to the reader of Googe, however, are the works of St. John Chrysostom, fourth-century Bishop of Constantinople. Like other homilists, he compares the virtuous man, for example, to “a skilful pilot, controlling the rudder of his mind with great vigilance, not allowing the craft to be submerged under the volume of the billows of wickedness, but getting the better of the storm and riding it out at sea as though safely berthed in port.”³³ Elsewhere he compares the Christian's desire of heaven to the avarice of the seafaring merchant.³⁴ From allusions in the prefatory matter to the 1565 edition of the Zodiake we know that Googe had read and admired Chrysostom's works by the time he wrote the Shippe.³⁵ Chrysostom was widely regarded as a venerable champion of simple, unadorned Christianity, and his works enjoyed great popularity among reformers. Of all the early church fathers, sixteenth-century Protestants found the doctrines of Chrysostom to be most in harmony with their own beliefs. Thus in 1543, John Cheke in seeking to encourage Henry VIII in the role of the reformist prince presented him with an edition of Chrysostom's works.³⁶

By the Middle Ages, the influence of generations of homiletic writers had made the ship motif a commonplace for life's perils and trials. As G. R. Owst has shown, in the pulpit the basic image was subjected to almost endless elaborations and refinements.³⁷ It could take on the form of the universal church or the individual mortal. Sometimes the ship's mast figured as the cross of Christ, and the wind that filled the sails the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. In other versions, sins in the forms of sea-monsters could assail the ship or the vessel could be pitched by the storms of Pride. Attuned to these subtle variations on the theme, the Renaissance reader of homilies continued to be drawn by the imaginative appeal of the ship image. Numerous books of meditations from the period take as a starting point the similitude of life as a voyage.³⁸ Usually, however, the nautical image does not extend far beyond the title; the image serves as a springboard for more general religious reflections. An instance of this is Stephen Bateman's A christall glasse of christian reformation (1569), which announces its homily on Hope with an allegorical woodcut that dramatizes the Christian life as a passage through stormy seas. The text of the homily proper, however, makes no further allusion to marine imagery.³⁹ Metaphors in homiletic literature are not drawn out to the lengths achieved in the Ship, where Googe tries to couch his moral lessons in literary artifice. It is his intention, as he states in the dedication, to delight as well as to instruct, and to this end his precepts and sober guidance are enlivened by the imaginative development of the ship figure.

The Ship, then, does not seem particularly indebted to any one literary precedent, but rather draws on several venerable traditions. The fusion of literary genres within Googe's book has led John N. King to see the Ship, together with Stephen Bateman's The Travayled Pylgrime, as exemplifying “Elizabethan syncretism,” where authors brought together an “encyclopedic combination of romance, quest narrative, didactic allegory, and Protestant polemics.”⁴⁰ But whereas establishing connections with earlier works is problematic, no such difficulty exists when seeking resemblances between the Ship and later works. A little over a month after Googe dedicated the Shippe to the Darrell sisters, Edmund Spenser made his first appearance in print as the precocious translator of verses in Jan Van der Noot's A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings.⁴¹ Among Spenser's contributions to A Theatre is a series of epigrammatic translations from Petrarch, mediated to Spenser through Clément Marot's De Visions de Pétrarque. The second epigram describes the fate of a magnificent and richly laden ship which founders on a submerged rock when a “sodaine storme did … turmoyle the aire, / And tombled up the sea. …” For Petrarch, and Spenser, the vision of a stricken ship suggests the fragility of human ambitions and the dangers of presumption. Spenser was to enlarge upon the theme of a moralized voyage years later when he described Guyon's passage to the Bower of Bliss in Book II of The Faerie Queene. The description of the Bower itself shares striking parallels with Googe's Island of Fleshly Pleasure. The Rocks of Avarice, littered with the wealth of shipwrecked souls, recall Spenser's “Rich strond” in Book III, and the ship's progress past a series of allegorical temptations has points of contact with the parade of the Seven Cardinal Sins in Book I. There is little evidence to suggest that Spenser was directly indebted to Googe's poem, or indeed that he was even familiar with the piece, although the two poets may have met in Ireland in the early 1580s.⁴² Spenser certainly did not require the example of Googe's allegory to spur on his own fecund imagination, but it is nonetheless instructive to compare the diverse angles of approach between the two poets when handling similar themes. Another major work from a later period also derives from the same broad tradition as Googe's Ship. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678 & 1684) is arguably the definitive expression of the spiritual journey theme in English literary culture.⁴³ Although the Ship again falls short of the complexity and profundity of Bunyan's classic rendering of the Puritan experience, the two works have much in common. Both hinge upon the journey metaphor; both portray life as a succession of challenges and dangers; and both are driven by the conviction that continence and discipline are requisite for a successful negotiation of life's trials. Both even share a taste for embodying abstract notions with concrete forms: Googe with his Rock of Pride or Channel of Lowliness, Bunyan with his Slough of Despond and the Delectable Mountains. Important distinctions remain between The Ship of safegarde and works of the calibre of The Pilgrim's Progress and The Faerie Queene. The Ship links each poetic description—in itself usually a success—with a protracted exposition and interpretation. Spenser and Bunyan present their material in the enigmatic and resonant splendor of allegory proper, rarely intruding to offer commentaries on their conceits. The Faerie Queene, despite its vastness, maintains an internal coherence and unity, and its allegory is sustained, consistent, and suggestive. The Pilgrim's Progress, a simpler allegorical narrative, nonetheless remains similarly clear, focused, and monolithic in form and intent. In these areas the Ship is deficient. The allegorical structure repeatedly breaks down with digressions, anecdotes, and multifarious allusions. Even Googe himself sometimes seems unsure of his exact allegorical intentions: the ship itself can be read variously as representing the individual soul, or body, or mortal man collectively.

These confusions are symptomatic of the poem's mixed origins and intentions. Cross-bred with the various strains of homily, legend, allegory, and spiritual biography, the Ship on the whole emulates none of these forms at their best, and can appear to lack refinement and grace. In common with other mongrel breeds, however, the poem abounds in spirit and vigor. And this is its real significance; for a literary culture so long lying moribund and uninspired, the “Ship” and works of its kind offered evidence that in the early years of Elizabeth's reign a new pride and confidence in English letters was abroad, and with it a new mood of experimentation among native poets.

THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF GOOGE'S DEDICATION

Googe chose to dedicate The Shippe of Safegarde to his sisters-in-law on St. Valentine's Day. A tradition of the sixteenth century dictated that on the 14th of February men and women of all ages drew random names from a hat to determine their Valentine for the day. The practice, and its potential for disaster, is humorously described in Googe's poem “Of the Unfortunate Choice of his Valentine.”⁴⁴ Both married and unmarried alike entered into this game; if a married partner were chosen, he or she could be absolved of amorous obligations by presenting a gift to the choosing party. The formal occasion of the Shippe's dedication to the Darrell sisters may have stemmed from this seasonal tradition, but in his epistle Googe says he had long intended to present the girls with a book. Considering their “vertuous and well disposed minds” in their “yong and tender yeares”—judging by their grandfather's will they must have been at least twelve years old at the time—Googe resolved to show his good will towards them by “finding out such matter, as neither I might accompt my time vainly spent in wryting, nor you yours evill employed in reading.” He had settled on a project seeking to delineate “the perfite estate of a true christian,” and had given it the working title of “the counterfeyt Christian,” but his nearly completed manuscript met with “yll favourd misfortune.” Dismayed by the loss of his labors, Googe hastily began the Shippe “with a scarse quiet mind.” He explains that the conceit was inspired by his reflecting on the “daungers of this worlde, whereby the soule enclosed in the barke of sinfull fleshe wyth great hasard passeth,” though he confesses that the end product of his work is “a Ship but rudely furnished, and God knowes symply rygged.” Because the girls “delight in stories,” he has appended two tales from the lives of saints of the early church. He would have added more, but found his time pressured and the tales “tedious.” All this, of course, is the standard gracious rhetoric of dedications, where the writer plays down his literary ability, the charge of presumption is countered by the insistence of a moral purpose, and the product of long careful hours is dismissed as a trifle. Aside from his kinship by marriage to the Darrells, it was natural for Googe to dedicate his book to two such adolescents: it was a practice of ancient pedigree to present improving works for the edification and delight of minors. What makes Googe's choice of dedication particularly interesting in the case of the Shippe is that he was directing his work at the daughters of a recusant household.⁴⁵

Fraunces and Phillyp's grandfather had not only been the lord of the manor of Scotney, but also is said to have served as priest in the parish church of St. Mary's, Lamberhurst, from 1547.⁴⁶ He did not live to see the accession of Elizabeth, but just two months prior to her coronation he bequeathed to his son Thomas his beloved instruments and paraphernalia of devotion, including mass books, psalters, a chalice, vestments, candlesticks, cruets, and a sacring bell. Other references in his will show him to have been a considerable benefactor to the churches in that part of the Kentish Weald. He arranged for Lamberhurst's benefice to be repaired, and he made provision for the proper dressing of the altars in the parish churches of Wadhurst, Ticehurst, and Goudhurst. With the Elizabethan ecclesiastical settlement of 1559, Thomas Darrell the younger maintained the family's adherence to the old faith. Although nothing is explicitly stated in the documents relating to Googe's courtship wrangles with the family, it seems most likely that Darrell's low estimate of the poet was influenced by the latter's connections with such figures as Cecil and Parker. For a range of reasons, Darrell must have balked at the notion of establishing kinship with such a well-connected and energetic advocate of reformed thought.

In time, Thomas Darrell's recusancy extended beyond a mere refusal to adopt Anglican forms of worship. Soon after the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in England from Cardinal Allen's seminary at Douai (about 1573), Darrell offered Scotney as a safe house for incoming priests.⁴⁷ As such it was ideally situated. Scotney is an inconspicuous and relatively small manorial house, nestling in a large hollow, where even as late as the eighteenth century the air was felt to be unhealthy.⁴⁸ In Googe's time the surrounding terrain was heavily wooded, and in places marshy.⁴⁹ Despite its seclusion, however, it lay near the London-to-Rye road, thus affording easy access to either the capital or the English Channel. In short, Scotney was an excellent staging-post for incoming Jesuit missionaries. Darrell's commitment to the cause was so great that in 1580, while refurbishing the south wing of the castle, he fitted a network of concealed hiding-places—which can still be seen—alongside the grand oak staircase added also at this time. His clandestine activities at Scotney passed undetected until 1598 when the castle was twice searched after a Protestant serving-man tipped off the authorities.⁵⁰ The object of the searches was the renowned Jesuit Richard Blount, who had been installed at Scotney since 1591. Holed up for ten days while the searches took place around him, the priest made a dramatic escape over the frozen moat and the surrounding rough terrain, but the authorities arrested Thomas Darrell on suspicion of harboring Jesuit missionaries. He was taken to London and imprisoned in Newgate; his name disappears from the records at this point, and it is thought that Thomas Darrell died in custody.⁵¹

These events lay some time in the future when Googe dedicated the Shippe to Thomas Darrell's daughters in 1569. There can be no doubt that when he did so he was well aware of the family's religious leanings. Quite aside from his intimate and established knowledge of the family and their affairs, his mere domicile in the Lamberhurst area would have afforded him every opportunity to ascertain something of the Darrells' heterodoxy on religious matters, their secret being so open that one anonymous clerk recorded in the parish register of the burial of Mary's aunt as being “early in the morning without knowledge of the Minister and without Divine service.”⁵² It is worth noting that despite intermittent harassment the Darrell family kept true to Catholicism until the line expired in the late eighteenth century.⁵³ For Googe the gulf between his opinions and those of his wife's family must have seemed unbridgeable. As an ardent reformer, Googe would have found Darrell's recusancy and the Roman influence presumably exerted over his household deeply repugnant; due to the bonds of blood and civility, however, he was compelled to leave his extended family unmolested. His apparent response to this quandary was characteristic. Convinced of the efficacy of the written word to challenge and persuade the unreformed, Googe penned The Shippe of Safegarde as a shot in the polemical battle over the intellectual and emotional territory of his sisters-in-law. The Shippe is not, however, an overtly controversial text. Indeed by the standards of the day, it is restrained: in seeking to communicate reformed notions to his Catholic in-laws, Googe's approach was insinuative rather than incendiary.

Nonetheless, a Protestant ethos pervades the work. The emphasis throughout is on the centrality of scriptural authority. Googe's deployment of biblical exempla both familiarized the girls with biblical episodes and demonstrated to them the usefulness of scriptural exegesis in the sphere of personal morality. Repeated use of the Bible also absolved Googe from censure, as his arguments were conspicuously grounded on scripture. On some issues, though, Googe more obviously raised his head above the Protestant parapet. In the section dealing with Heresy, for example, Googe turns on the opponents of the vernacular Bible, dismissing them as “envious beasts” driven by “malice” (st. 152). This attack on the enemies of the English Bible coincided almost exactly with the publication and distribution of the new Bishop's Bible, that peculiarly Anglican translation commissioned and regulated by Matthew Parker.⁵⁴ Elizabeth and Cecil had reviewed the finished work on 22 September 1568, and it was put to press shortly thereafter. Published with a frontispiece portrait of Elizabeth herself, and also carrying full-page xylographs of Cecil and Dudley, the Bishop's Bible was a potent symbol of Protestant political and ideological dominance in 1560s England.⁵⁵ Among the prefatory materials, Parker reprinted the prologue Thomas Cranmer had originally added to the Great Bible of Henry VIII's reign. There Cranmer sought, in imagery later to be used by Googe, to encourage a public unused to the notion of free access to the scriptures: “They that be free and farre from trouble and entermedling of worldly thynges liue in safegarde and tranquilitie, and in the calme, or within a sure hauen. Thou art in the middest of the sea of worldly wyckednesse, and therefore thou needest the more of ghostly succour and comfort.”⁵⁶ In the Ship Googe clearly endorses the aims and aspirations of the ongoing translation movement. In stanza 153 he ridicules the efforts of an unnamed individual who recently

          needlesse paines did take
In culling out the faults he could espie,
Of everie tittell straight accompt doth make
In noting where he thinkes [the translators] run awrie.

The subject of this attack is uncertain, but Googe is obviously alluding to a known enemy of Bible translation who had identified perceived heresies and errors in the translators' work. One figure that fits the description is Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and a conservative churchman under Henry, Edward, and Mary. In 1542 he had pronounced the Great Bible “contaminate, sometime … with the malice of the translator … sometime by ignorance and sometime by negligence.”⁵⁷ The list of words he felt defied appropriate translation into the common tongue included many basic religious terms such as Christus, Dominus, sacramentum, gratia, charitas, and mysterium.⁵⁸ To reformed eyes, the exclusion of such vocabulary precluded the usefulness of a translation to the unlearned, and could merit Googe's estimation of his target's labors as the fruits of a “fonde and foolish braine.”

Other passages in the poem reveal its Protestant stance. In the treatment of Idolatry, Googe envisions an alluring island adorned with pyramids and altars and dotted with scented fires (sts. 161-69). He describes some of the many statues and graven images to be found there, and among them lists those of Saturn, Venus, Mars, Diana, Bacchus, Ceres, and other deities from the classical pantheon. He then proceeds to describe three other statues, the first two recognizable by their attributes as St. George and St. Christopher. The third image, that of an androgynous trifrons, would seem to be a representation of the demonic Hecate. Googe thus equates the veneration of such talismanic Christian saints as St. George and St. Christopher with the worship of the pagan gods, including that of witchcraft.

This uncompromising but oblique presentation of reformed opinions is carried on in the patristic translations Googe appended to his title poem. The stories are taken from the standard Renaissance edition of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, a Latin version originally compiled in the fifth century by Rufinus Tyrannius. Rufinus had freely but silently altered his material, grafting additional tales and incidents onto Eusebius's text, and Googe's second tale is one of these spurious additions.⁵⁹ The first passage tells of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna.⁶⁰ This story of the immolation of an early church martyr suggests that Googe was attuned to the interest such accounts carried with a public inspired by John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days. More commonly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, this work, first published in 1563, was a formidable memorial to the Protestant martyrs who had suffered persecution under Mary Tudor. Googe's translation is on the whole faithful to his original, but it is the details where he differs from Eusebius and Rufinus that are of real interest. Googe's account is more succinct and direct than the original: gone are the latter's digressions and elaborations. In part this simplification of the text could result from Googe's effort to keep the interest of the young readers to whom the work is addressed. But Googe does not merely edit Eusebius. He adds phrases and emphases to the existing text, and in places inserts blocks of his own verse. Accordingly the account of Polycarp's martyrdom takes on new color. The opening fourteen lines are entirely Googe's, serving as an introduction to the action of Eusebius's account by recalling the widespread persecution of the early church. The persecutors are described as descending on the “Christian flocke” with “wolvish tongue and tooth.” Googe is here connecting with a standard metaphor of the Reformation struggle in which the sheep represent the reformers, innocent creatures of God's flock, and the wolf represents Rome, the ravenous agent of the devil. Googe thus looks back not only to terrible and momentous events of the second century a.d., but also to those of recent memory. It is no accident that the story of Polycarp tells of a Greek bishop suffering at the hands of Roman authorities; reformers across Europe saw themselves as the heirs of the simple faith espoused by the primitive Greek Church.⁶¹ Like these early followers of Christ, they also found themselves to be a minority community undergoing persecution. In some particulars, however, the Polycarp story was not wholly suitable as an ideal Protestant biography. Googe felt it necessary to deflect attention away from Polycarp himself for fear of encouraging idolatry, and to focus instead on the worthiness of his beliefs. Thus the role of the portentous dream in the account is underplayed, and the marvels attendant on Polycarp's death are summarily handled. In Eusebius, the reader is provided with a mystical appreciation of the dead martyr's broken body, the bones being weighed “more precious than stones of great price, more splendid than gold.”⁶² Googe omits the passage entirely and replaces it with a more spiritual evaluation of Polycarp's death: “The people all amased, depart, the corse neglected lies, / The soule rejoycing at this day, unto the heaven flies” (ll. 206-7). The bishop's body is “neglected,” having served its mortal purpose; Googe thus precludes its use as an object of veneration.

The second story, one of Rufinus's additions to Eusebius,⁶³ affords similar contemporary applications. It recounts the tale of Gregory, Bishop of Neocaesarea, who converts a votary of Apollo by a demonstration of the true God's power.⁶⁴ Here again, the story seems handpicked by Googe for the instruction of his sisters-in-law. It shows the redundancy of worshipping false gods and the superiority of the Christian God to all other deities. The spiritual wealth of Gregory stands in contradistinction to the material splendor of the priest's “gorgeous temple faire” (l. 2), illustrating Googe's preference for unadorned Protestant worship over the more elaborate rituals of the old faith. The narrative also devalues the role of the priest as an intermediary between divinity and man. Gregory's communication with God is direct and intimate, while the followers of Apollo are obliged to seek recourse to the priest for spiritual guidance. In the ongoing Reformation debate, reformers were anxious to diminish the clergy's standing in the church, pointing instead to the centrality of the Word. Here Googe, in presenting this tale to the Darrell sisters, offers an alternative view of religious service, expressed, one presumes, with the silent hope that they will come to reject the perceived constraints of the formalistic faith they have been born into. His use of Eusebius is highly selective, and ultimately sectarian, but is a further manifestation of the Shippe's overall purpose, an evangelical concern to introduce the reader to reformed ideas, and to persuade the moral waverer into dedicated pious living.

Notes

1. The book is dated 1569 on its title page and was entered in the Stationers' Register for 1568-69.

2. A thorough study of the journey motif within the Renaissance period is Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).

3. For a discussion of the distinctions between these terms see Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 3-20.

4. The principal biographical and critical accounts of Googe are the following: Edward Arber, “Notes on the Life and Writings of Barnabe Googe” and “Introduction” to Googe, Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonettes (1563), edited by Arber, English Reprints (London: Edward Arber, 1871), 5-18; Peirce, “Barnabe Googe: Poet and Translator” [Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1954]; William E. Sheidley, Barnabe Googe (Boston: Twayne, 1981); Mark Eccles, “Barnabe Googe in England, Spain, and Ireland” [English Literary Renaissance 15 (1985)]; Judith M. Kennedy, “The Life and Times of Barnabe Googe” in Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, edited by Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 3-16, 29-30; Judith M. Kennedy, “Googe, Barnabe,” The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Judith M. Kennedy, “Barnabe Googe,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 132: Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers, First Series (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), 141-48; and Simon McKeown, “Barnabe Googe: Poetry and Society in the 1560s” (Ph.D. diss., The Queen's University of Belfast, 1993).

5. Conrad Heresbach, Fovre Bookes of Husbandry, translated by Barnabe Googe (London: Richard Watkins, 1577), X8.

6. See Kennedy, “The Life,” 5, and William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982), 547.

7. Nilus [Cabasilas], A Briefe Treatise, Conteynynge a playne and fruitfull declaration of the Popes vsurped Primacye, translated by Thomas Gressop (London: Henry Sutton f. Ralph Newbery, 1560).

8. An excellent discussion of the work is Rosemond Tuve's introduction to Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus, The Zodiake of Life, translated by Barnabe Googe, edited by Rosemond Tuve (1947; Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976), v-xxvi. See also Foster Watson, The “Zodiacus Vitae” of Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus: An Old Schoolbook (London: Philip Wellby, 1908); Guiseppe Borgiani, Marcello Palingenio Stellato e il suo poema lo “Zodiacus Vitae” (Citto di Castello, 1912); Sheidley, Barnabe Googe, 28-47; J. M. Richardson, “Palingenius, Marcellus,” The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton, 526; and McKeown, “Barnabe Googe: Poetry and Society,” 129-82.

9. See Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 379.

10. Palingenius, Zodiake (London: Henry Denham f. Ralph Newbery, 1565); Zodiake (London: H. Middleton f. Ralph Newbery, 1576).

11. Prefatory matter, Zodiake (1565); Zodiake (1576), 242.

12. Eccles, “Barnabe Googe in England, Spain, and Ireland,” 356.

13. Eccles, “Barnabe Googe in England, Spain, and Ireland,” 362, 366, 370. See also Richard C. Barnett, Place, Profit and Power: A Study of the Servants of William Cecil, Elizabethan Statesman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 66-67.

14. The interesting correspondence concerning this affair is reprinted in Googe, Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonettes, edited by Arber, 8-13.

15. Eccles, “Barnabe Googe in England, Spain, and Ireland,” 363.

16. Details of Googe's duties and experiences in Ireland are vividly preserved in his dispatches to Cecil and other members of the Privy Council. These are printed in William Pinkerton, “Barnabe Googe,” Notes & Queries 3rd Ser. 3 (1863): 141-43, 181-84, 241-43, 301-2, and 361-62. They are discussed in M. D. O'Sullivan, “Barnabe Googe: Provost Marshall of Connaught 1582-85,” Journal of the Galway Archaeological Society 18 (1938): 1-39.

17. Epistle dedicatory, Zodiake (1565).

18. Inigo Lopes de Mendoza, Marques of Santillana, The Prouerbes …, translated by Barnabe Googe (London: Richard Watkins, 1579); Christopher Ballista, The Overthrow of the Gout, trans. Barnabe Googe (London: Abraham Veale, 1577). For detailed studies of the latter see Robert M. Schuler, “Three Renaissance Scientific Poems,” Studies in Philology 75,5 (1978): 65-107; and Ballista, The Overthrow of the Gout, translated by Barnabe Googe, edited by Simon McKeown (London: Indelible Inc., 1990).

19. London: Thomas Colwell f. Raffe Newbery, 1563.

20. Thomas Kirchmeyer, The Popish Kingdome, or reign of Antichrist, translated by Barnabe Googe (London: Henry Denham f. Richard Watkins, 1570). Googe's translation was reprinted in the nineteenth century, edited by Charles Hope (London: Chiswick Press, 1880), and in the facsimile reprint edited by Peter Davison (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972). Googe may have been introduced to Kirchmeyer's work by John Bale, who was on familiar terms with the German reformer in the 1540s.

21. See n. 5, above.

22. Conrad Heresbach, The Whole Art of Husbandry, translated by Barnabe Googe, revised by Gervase Markham (London: T. C. f. Richard More, 1631).

23. Andreas Bertholdus, The Wonderful and strange effect and vertues of a new Terra Sigillata lately found out in Germanie, translated by Barnabe Googe (London: Robert Robinson f. Richard Watkins, 1587).

24. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, edited by Harold F. Brooks, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1979), 3.1.23.

25. In addition to Chew, Pilgrimage of Life, see W. H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea (New York: Random House, 1950); Robert Cockcroft, The Voyage of Life: Ship Imagery in Art, Literature and Life (Nottingham: University of Nottingham Art Gallery, 1982); and Philip Edwards, Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton, Liverpool English Texts & Studies 30 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1997).

26. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, translated by Steven Rendall (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 7.

27. Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, 19.

28. For a discussion of the moral gloss imposed by Renaissance readers on classical writers, see Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932), 68ff.

29. The Boke of common praier, and administration of the Sacramentes, and other rites and Ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (London: Richard Grafton, 1559), S1^v-S2^r.

30. The tale is reprinted in St. Brandan, a Medieval Legend of the Sea, edited by Thomas Wright (London: Percy Society, 1844).

31. An excellent study of the tale, and a thorough discussion of the nautical motif in Christian iconography, is V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), 297-358.

32. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 314.

33. St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, translated by Robert C. Hill, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 82: 87.

34. St. John Chrysostom, On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, translated by Paul W. Harkins, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 72: 185.

35. Prefatory matter, Zodiake (1565), *8^v, (‡)2^v-(‡)3.

36. Joannis Chrysostomi, Homilae duae, translated by John Cheke (London: R. Wolfe, 1543).

37. See G. R. Owst, Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd ed. (1933; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 67-76, 177-78.

38. See for example Edward Cradocke, The shippe of assured safetie (London: William Norton, 1572); A. P., The Compasse of a Christian. Directing them that be tossed in the waues of this worlde vnto Christ Iesus (London: J. Wolfe f. J. Harison the younger, 1582); John Hull, The Arte of christian saylinge (London: J. Harrison & S. Stafford f. J. Harison, 1602); Richard Middleton, Card and Compasse of life … (London: W. S. f. Walter Burre, 1613); James Pickford, The safegarde from ship-wracke or heaven's haven (Douai: Peter Telv, 1618); Thomas Odell, A brief and short treatise. Called The Christians Pilgrimage to His Fatherland (Amsterdam: John Fredericksz, 1635); Thomas Brewer, Lord have mercy upon us … (London: Henry Gosson, 1636); Jeremiah Burroughs, The sea mans direction in time of storme (London: T. Paine & M. Simmons, 1640); Thomas Elsliot, The true mariner and his pixis nautical (London: s.n., 1652).

39. Stephen Bateman, A christall glasse of christian reformation wherein the godly maye beholde the coloured abuses vsed in this our present tyme (London: John Day, 1569), N3.

40. See John N. King, Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 5.

41. Jan Van der Noot, A Theatre wherein be represented as wel the miseries & calamities that follow the voluptuous Worldlings, As also the greate ioyes and plesures which the faithfull do enioy (London: Henry Bynneman, 1569). See The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 465.

42. See Kennedy, “Googe, Barnabe,” The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton, 336-37,336.

43. A useful survey of Bunyan's sources is James Blanton Wharey, A Study of the Sources of Bunyan's Allegories (Baltimore: J. H. Furst, 1904; repr., New York: Gordian Press, 1968).

44. The custom is described in R. Chambers, The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities (London: W. & R. Chambers, 1863), 1: 255. For Googe's poem, see Eclogues, ed. Kennedy, 98.

45. The Darrells' recusancy is noted in Peirce, “Barnabe Googe: Poet and Translator,” 203-5, and Kennedy, “The Life,” 30.

46. See William Morland, The Church in Lamberhurst ([England]: n.p., 1978), 13. Morland does not explain the apparent conflict between grandfatherhood and celibacy.

47. See John Morris, The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers (London: n.p., 1872), 2: 187-215.

48. See Christopher Hussey, Scotney Castle (London: The National Trust, 1990), 21.

49. The woodland, now partially cleared, provided fuel for iron-smelting, the area's principal industry in the early modern period. See Hussey, Scotney Castle, 3.

50. See Morris, Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, 207-11.

51. Morris, Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, 231; Hussey, Scotney Castle, 12.

52. Morland, The Church in Lamberhurst, 13.

53. Hussey, Scotney Castle, 16.

54. See F. F. Bruce, The History of the Bible in English (London: Lutterworth, 1970), 92-95.

55. See Margaret Aston, The King's Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 43-47, 124, 133.

56. Prefatory matter, The holie bible, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Jugge, 1572).

57. Cited in James Arthur Muller, Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1926), 105.

58. Muller, Stephen Gardiner, 104-5.

59. See Sheidley, Barnabe Googe, 101. Rufinus's translation, edited by Theodore Mommsen, appears on facing pages with the Greek original in Eusebius, Kirchengeschichte, ed. Eduard Schwartz, 3 vols., cont. pag. (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903-9), hereinafter cited as Rufinus.

60. For the original account, see Eusebius, The History of the Church, translated by G. A. Williamson, edited by Andrew Louth (London: Penguin, 1989), 118-23, and Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, translated by Kirsopp Lake, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1926), 343-57. See also Rufinus, 339-53.

61. See Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, The Theology of the English Reformers (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965), 30ff.

62. Eusebius, trans. Williamson, 122; cf. Eusebius, translated by Lake, 357.

63. See Rufinus, 2: 953-56.

64. A full assessment of the historical St. Gregory is given in Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986), 517-42.