[In the following essay, Jensen discusses how the religious censorship practiced by the Elizabethan government was challenged in a sermon by Bishop John Jewell and a manuscript by Edmund Campion.]

Writing to a friend in 1586, the English Catholic exile Sir Francis Englefield described the attempt to reconvert England to the old faith: “In stede therfore of the sword, which we cannot obtayne, we must fight with paper and pennes, which can not be taken from us.”¹ Although the Counter-Reformation in England is usually characterized by those few dramatic episodes of violence—the Rising of the Northern Earls, the Spanish Armada, the Babington and other conspiracies to assassinate Elizabeth—which were successfully used by the government to galvanize public opposition to Catholicism, in fact the Catholic assault on England was primarily, as Englefield's letter suggests, linguistic rather than violent. Certainly the most radical fringe of the movement, the seminary priests, fought “with word & not with sword.”² According to traditional understandings of Elizabethan attitudes toward Catholicism, we could assume that most of the Queen's subjects responded to the invasion of Catholic writings rolling secretively from mobile, hastily erected presses or smuggled from continental sources as Spenser clearly means his audience to react to the “bookes and papers” comprising the vomit of the hideous monster Error in Book I of The Faerie Queene: with instinctive loathing and disgust. We could also assume widespread popular support for the series of acts and proclamations controlling seditious speech, writing, books, and libels.

But if we analyze some of the public events that comprised this Catholic invasion along with the language of contemporary pamphlets, ballads, and polemic involved in promoting and resisting the English Counter-Reformation, a sense of deep cultural contradiction emerges. For alongside increasingly draconian attempts to control both theological and political Catholic writings was a cultural ideology that championed the idea of freedom of religious thought—including the principle that open disputation and debate was the best way to arrive at religious truth. The contradiction between practice and ideology, between censorship on the one hand and the principle of freedom of conscience on the other, is one way to understand the Elizabethan government's need to claim that it prosecuted Catholics for treason, not religion. For in the face of the powerful cultural idea that denying subjects freedom of conscience in religious matters was wrong—an idea born largely out of the Marian prosecutions of the 1550s—the government had to provide an alternative explanation for the executions of seminary priests, secular priests, and lay recusants that took place throughout the 1580s and '90s.³

As the outlaw publications surrounding the execution of Edmund Campion in 1582 particularly suggest, the paradoxes of a culture in which censorship is accompanied by rhetoric championing freedom of thought helped open up a conceptual space in Elizabethan culture within which could develop the principle of free speech. Such a broad claim for the political efficacy of ideas originating in Catholic practice can only be made in the wake of recent studies that have underlined “[t]he relative impunity with which Catholics went about their business, the allegedly chaotic, corrupt and uneven administration of the recusancy statutes, and indeed the ideological and political disagreements and incoherences which lay behind both the drafting and the enforcing of those laws.”⁴ In the light of recent scholarship, Catholicism can no longer be dismissed as “the great unifying Other for the English state and nation.”⁵ Rather, it must be seen as one source of the political language which comprised the “strands of thoughts, congeries of concerns, catchwords and symbols in and through which contemporaries could view, describe and shape their political experience.”⁶ Trained by the official rhetoric of the government, Elizabethans in the last two decades of the reign may have distrusted Catholicism, hated the pope, and despised the Jesuit seminary priests, but some of the ideas produced by the peculiar situation of recusants in England were nevertheless congenial to the broader political culture.

In words and actions, Elizabethan Catholics made the argument that they asked only the “liberty” to engage in open debate and disputation on matters of religion.⁷ Especially during the events surrounding the arrival of Campion and Parsons in England in the early 1580s, Catholic writers attacked censorship, in almost Miltonic language, as an obstacle to the discovery of God's will in the world. Of course these arguments were self-interested, but they also packed a cultural punch, largely because they fed into the claims of other constituencies (some equally self-interested) urging the right of freedom of expression. As Frederich Siebert argued in 1952, Catholic pleas for freedom of “the press” circulated in Elizabethan England alongside very similar claims being made by Peter Wentworth in Parliament, by printers interested in the economic fruits of less tightly controlled printing, and by the Godly. Together the rhetoric of these groups creates, by the end of the Elizabethan reign, a cultural climate within which could flourish a widespread belief in the value of free expression.⁸

JEWELL'S CHALLENGE

At the start of the Elizabethan age, the strategies used to convince the English nation to accept the Anglican compromise suggest a commitment to the principle that truth in theological matters should be arrived at through open disputation. Such a commitment is hardly surprising, for disputation was associated not only with the rich scholastic tradition of the late medieval church, but also with Martin Luther's religious revolution. As G. R. Evans argues in a recent study of sixteenth-century theological debates, “Luther's career as a reformer began with a series of more or less formal disputations”; in addition, the rhetorical forms provided by scholastic debate provided a conceptual structure within which he began his inquiry into problems of contemporary church authority. Luther's Disputation Against Scholastic Theology (1517) “was written as a set of theses for the degree examination of Franz Gunther, at which Luther presided as Dean of the Faculty of Theology”; the more radical Ninety-Five Theses are also constructed rhetorically as a set of propositions to be disputed in formal debate.⁹ In the published version of the Theses, Luther challenges hostile readers to debate, a challenge partially fulfilled in Heidelberg in 1518 and Leipzig in 1519.¹⁰ The central concepts of Protestantism were in this sense born out of the processes of formal debate, and the founder of the movement encouraged the open airing of theological disagreement in public forums: “[W]e are accused of heresy and of being authors of new doctrine,” wrote Luther, “So we must defend ourselves in public disputation.”¹¹

So a government intent on restoring Protestantism to England in 1558 was to a certain extent intellectually beholden to a tradition of theological debate and disputation that was as much Lutheran as scholastic. And indeed, one of the ways in which Elizabeth and her councilors attempted to garner public and parliamentary support for the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity was to stage an allegedly open debate at Westminster between divines from either end of the religious spectrum. The contest was over almost before it began, for “during arguments on the first proposition … the parties began quarreling about the rules and the Catholics refused to proceed.”¹² To be sure, by the 1560s discussions between the two sides had become all but impossible since Protestants and Catholics could no longer agree about what constituted allowable authorities and evidence.¹³ But the arrest of the recalcitrant bishops immediately following the dissolution of the debates suggests that the government's true motives were not to encourage but to stifle disagreement. The Westminster debates represent the Elizabethan government's interest in creating the useful fiction that it was willing to submit ecclesiastical policies to free and open disputation.

This double-edged approach to debate comes into sharper focus in the wake of Bishop John Jewell's “Challenge” sermon, first delivered in November 1562.¹⁴ The sermon ends with this appeal: “If any one of all our adversaries be able clearly and plainly to prove, by such authority of the scriptures, the old doctors, and councils … I am content to yield unto him, and to subscribe. But I am well assured that they shall never be able truly to allege one sentence.”¹⁵ Jewell's challenge set off a written debate that continued until the 1570s. Epistolary responses from Dr. Henry Cole soon provoked Jewell's Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, the book that “gave the Church of England a doctrinal form that it had lacked”;¹⁶ in this way the articulation of Anglican doctrine could be said to have been partially determined in the context of polemical debate. But although Jewell's Challenge seemed to embrace the concept of public disputation, the fight was, not surprisingly, rigged from the start. For one thing, speaking out in favor of Catholicism was punishable by law; even though the controversy began in the early Elizabethan “period of tolerant confusion” on religious matters, the imprisonment of the bishops had shown it was dangerous even in the early 1560s to support the old faith too enthusiastically.¹⁷ Secondly, almost all the books on the Catholic side of the controversy had to be printed on the Continent and smuggled into the country, a system which not only limited the distribution of Catholic responses to the well-circulated Anglican side of the dialogue, but could result in delays of up to four years between the writing of a Catholic tract and its appearance in print.¹⁸ The distribution difficulties encountered throughout the 1560s by Catholic writers were legally solidified by the first of the Elizabethan proclamations controlling seditious writing, issued in March 1569, in which subjects were called upon to “forbear” the “use or dealing with any such seditious books impugning the orders and rites established by law for Christian religion and divine service within this realm, or otherwise stirring and nourishing matter tending to sedition.”¹⁹ The proclamation followed upon (and referred to) the trial in Star Chamber of a group of men convicted of “receiving, buying, reading, keeping, commending, and sending abroad seditious books, set forth beyond the seas in the name of Harding, Dorman, Staphilus, Stapleton, Sanders, Smith, Rastell, and others, enemies to God's truth and the quiet government of the Queen.”²⁰ With the exception of Smith and Staphilus, all the writers listed in this conviction were involved in the controversy set off by Bishop Jewell in 1562. So although Jewell's Challenge seemed to embrace the concept of free and open disputation, it was clearly the impression of religious freedom, and not the reality, that the Elizabethan government was after. The government continued to engineer a series of false debates in the years leading up to the Jesuit influx of the early 1580s, including the written disputation inaugurated by the Bishop of Silves by the 1563 tract, Epistola ad Elizabetham Angliae Reginam de Religione and the “disputations” used in an attempt to bring the Abbot of Westminster to accept the Anglican settlement.²¹

On the one hand, then, it was important for the Elizabethan government and its chief apologists to display a willingness to subject Anglican doctrine to disputation. On the other hand, truly open debates, whether in person or in print, were not to be risked in the vulnerable early years of the Elizabethan settlement. Following the Northern Rising and the 1570 papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth and releasing English Catholic subjects from allegiance, the increased governmental emphasis on censorship can be tracked in a series of proclamations and statutes which steadily increased the penalties for airing unorthodox religious opinions.²² But even while Catholic written and spoken expression was being curtailed by acts and proclamations, the government continued to insist it allowed freedom of conscience in religious matters. The lengthiest official statement of the Elizabethan position was Burghley's Execution of Justice in England, published in response to the literature of martyrdom produced after Campion's execution. Burghley distinguished between the executed priests who had been convicted of treason, and the “many subjects known in the realm that differ in some opinions of religion from the Church of England … yet in that they do also profess loyalty and obedience to her Majesty … none of these sort are for their contrary opinions in religion prosecuted … nor yet willingly searched in their consciences for their contrary opinions that savor not of treason.”²³ Even in the relatively drastic proclamation “Establishing Commissions against Seminary Priests and Jesuits” (1591), which obligated all Englishmen and women to report any knowledge of seminary priests “upon pain that the offenders therein shall be punished as abettors and maintainers of traitors,” the government still claimed that attacks on Catholics were made “not for any points of religion.”²⁴ It was not impossible for Elizabethans, Catholic as well as Protestant, to see the absurdity couched between the avowed principles of freedom of conscience and debate, and the practice of Elizabethan policy toward Catholics. For despite Burghley's accurate claim that few Elizabethans were executed for religion, it was difficult to claim that Catholic belief was tolerated when any expression of that belief, in speech, writing, or practice, was punishable by increasingly severe laws.²⁵ It was this illogic at the heart of the governmental rhetoric surrounding the censorship of religious expression that was most effectively exploited by the seminary priests as they claimed the right to make their case for the old religion in public disputations.

CAMPION'S BRAG

Edmund Campion's arrival in England in the fall of 1580 posed a serious challenge to the delicate balance the Elizabethan government had constructed between its claims to tolerate freedom of thought on religious matters and the increasingly strict control of Catholic expression. For the primary source of Campion's intellectual reputation lay in his rhetorical talents, talents widely and publicly recognized from his youth. Even as a grammar school pupil Campion had been identified as a gifted speaker when he was chosen to welcome Queen Mary to London “a representative of London Scholarship”; thirteen years later, during Elizabeth's state visit to Oxford in 1566, he was selected to greet the monarch and participate in a showcase public debate.²⁶ Campion so impressed the Queen on this visit that she recommended him as a protégé to her companion, the Earl of Leicester, then chancellor of the university.²⁷ Given Campion's well-known eloquence, coupled with the government's increased repression of Catholic written and spoken expression, as news of his return to England as a Jesuit missionary spread through the country in 1580, the threat he represented to the English government was as much rhetorical as ideological.²⁸

And Campion immediately began to fulfill these fears when one of his first acts upon arrival in England was to pen a challenge to disputation analogous to Jewell's challenge of 1560. Upon encouragement by one of his London hosts, both Campion and Parsons agreed to write down, against the possibility of their future arrest, “a brief declaration of the true causes of [their] coming.”²⁹ Campion's manuscript incidentally responds to official Elizabethan policy by making the claim that the purpose of his mission to England is spiritual, not political, but primarily the “Letter to the Lords of the Council,” popularly known as Campion's “Challenge” or “Brag,” is a plea for the Elizabethan government to allow an open theological debate. Campion requests that he be allowed to dispute before the Council itself, “before the Doctors and Masters and chosen men of both Universities,” and “before the lawyers, spiritual and temporal”—that is, in the political, scholarly, and legal argumentative arenas.³⁰ He wants only, he claims, to have the “questions of religion opened faithfully.”³¹ There is plenty in the tone of the letter to offend the Elizabethan authorities, but its primary source of irritation is the way in which it challenges the government's policy of censorship.

Soon copies of Campion's Challenge were circulating through Catholic channels in England: in a November letter William Allen comments that the declarations of both Campion and Parsons “pass from hand to hand everywhere among people in England and are a source of strength to many.”³² Both William Charke and Meredith Hanmer produced books confuting Campion, Hanmer's book further publicizing the Brag by reprinting it in its entirety.³³ The difficulties into which Campion's Challenge put the government were clearly articulated in Robert Parsons's early contribution to the dispute, A brief discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church, published under the pseudonym John Howlet. Here, Parsons makes an impassioned plea that an “indifferent triall” of Catholicism and Protestantism, “by publique disputation or otherwise,” be permitted in the name of “Gods cause, and the love of his truth.”³⁴ Parsons explicitly connects the recent petition of Campion (and, he claims, “sundry” others) to Jewell's challenge, which he claims was never allowed to be answered openly. Catholics have repeatedly submitted “most humble petitions that, seeing those men, which first challenged at Poule's Crosse, all the learned of our side that might be found, either to writing, or disputing: afterward procured your Majesties prohibition by proclamation, that no books should be written or read of that part in England: their petition was (I say) that at the least, there might some public disputation be admitted, whereby men's doubts might be resolved.” Not only does Parsons imply that a theological disputation would be in the service of discovering “God's truth,” but he articulates the impression being created by the refusal of the Elizabethan authorities to let the Catholic side be heard: “If our adversaries refuse this offer, they shall show too much distrust in their own cause.”

An unpublished ballad appended to a manuscript copy of the Life of Ignatius Loyola can further illustrate the ways in which Catholics used the example of Campion to support the concept of freedom of speech. The major polemical argument of this poem is that Catholics have not been allowed to try their cause in open debate.³⁵ Among the deluded souls who “know not gold from Drosse” the poet asks us to “specially … note” Hanmer and

          the fondlings Fulke and Charke
Whose peevish pride against the truth
          was published late in print.

These men only state their positions so boldly, the poet claims, because they know they need not fear a Catholic response: “They play upon advantages which makes them be so stoute, / They know what is against them sayde shall not be published out.” The poem also responds to calls for the Jesuits to come out of hiding such as Hanmer's exhortation to Campion to “yield yourself, become a good subject, and pray unto God that your Eyues may be opened.”³⁶ The poet of “You Catholics that Protestants” analyzes Hanmer's challenge and pronounces it deceitful, for if Campion agrees to debate without “safety,” “Ere disputation should be had first Tyburne should him beare.” Campion is better off, the poet suggests, going to work “discreetely,” for the conditions of censorship and threat under which he must write are insupportable:

They cuff his wing and bid him flyth
          they bid him fight but how,
His weapon must be taken away
          such odds they do allow,
They blame the hiding of his head
          their penal lawes do urge him …

The reason Campion has been disarmed of his weapon, the pen, is that Hanmer and Charke and the other Protestant controversialists know that if allowed to dispute Campion would win:

They would and do persuade the world
          such conference were vain
Foreseeing what should happ thereby
          the ruin of their raigne.

After Campion's capture in the summer of 1581 and before his trial, his Challenge was nominally taken up when the Elizabethan government, implicitly acknowledging the potency of Jesuit calls to open debate, arranged a series of four disputations between Campion on the one side, and leading Anglican ecclesiastical authorities and controversial writers on the other. But, if these debates were meant to prove the government's open-mindedness, the strategy apparently backfired. During the first debate, Campion drew the audience's attention to his mistreatment when he asked whether it were “an answer to his challenge to rack him first, then to deprive him of all books, and to set him to dispute.”³⁷ The inequities of the situation were also readable in the physical set-up of the room: the racked and weakened Campion, unable to lift his arms, stood without the support of a table holding only a bible, while across from him sat two adversaries comfortably seated behind a table covered with books.³⁸ The Tower debates were clearly engineered to make sure the right side won, but there is evidence that the crown was less than pleased with the outcome. Bishop Aylmer objected to Lord Burghleigh that “so many [spectators] were admitted” to the first debate; for this reason he “sent to stay it.”³⁹ The second, third, and fourth debates were moved to smaller rooms that precluded large audiences. The debates were ended altogether after one of the disputants reported in a letter to the Privy Council that “the course hitherto taken, either by lack of aid or of moderation or convenient respect of admitting men to be hearers, hath been both fruitless and hurtful, and subject to great harm by reports.”⁴⁰ Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the maltreatment of Campion perversely contributed to his victory. According to the biographer of Philip Earl of Arundel, the earl converted to Catholicism as a result of his attendance: “by what he saw and heard then, he easily perceived on which side the truth and true religion was.”⁴¹ A man named Cawood got himself into trouble with Bishop Aylmer by “talk[ing] very liberally, extolling Campion's learning, and attributing the victory to him”; another man, Oliver Pluckett, “affirmed that Campion was both discrete and learned, and did say very well, and would have convinced them if he might have been heard with indifference.”⁴²

That the government would only hazard a debate with Campion when he was racked, unprepared, and bookless became an important theme in Catholic challenges to governmental censorship. But it was also possible for non-Catholics to perceive the weakness implicit in the government's refusal to debate the Jesuit fairly. Before the September debates public opinion had evidently turned against Campion with rumors—some substantiated—that the priest had betrayed fellow Catholics on the rack. But Campion's reputation was restored in the wake of reports of the four Tower debates.⁴³ A ballad preserved in the State Papers acknowledges from a Protestant point of view the danger posed by the treatment of Campion:

If instead of good argument,
We deal by the rack,
The Papists may think
That learning we lack.

This ballad encourages the government to engage Catholic calls to dispute head on:

Come forth, my fine darling,
And make him a dolt;
You have him full fast,
And that in strong holt.

Although confident that Campion could be successfully disputed, this ballad does not differ substantially from Catholic claims that Campion's views were assessed, not by a free and fair trial, but by the rack.⁴⁴

BALLAD DEBATES

In the wake of Campion's execution in February 1582, the disputation that was in his English career repressed from the scholarly sphere reappears in the language of popular ballads. To a 1582 account of the execution of Campion published by the Catholic printer Richard Verstagen were appended four pro-Catholic ballads;⁴⁵ when Anthony Munday responded to this pamphlet with A Breefe Aunswer made unto two seditious Pamphlets (1582), he reprinted the poems but added four new compositions of his own, each one refuting the arguments of the original poems in the same meter and style. These eight poems rehearse, in the idiom of the popular ballad, the debate disallowed in scholarly or political venues. In the process of being expressed in this medium the quarrel between Catholicism and Anglicanism is simplified, but for this reason the ballad form of the debate reveals the images and rhetoric through which popular culture processed the issues of language, censorship, freedom of thought, and freedom of debate raised by the Catholic martyrs.⁴⁶

The first pro-Campion ballad and Munday's poetic rejoinder are the two poems in the collection that most clearly thematize the centrality of linguistic expression and its restriction to the Campion story.⁴⁷ The Catholic version of the poem “Why do I use my paper, inke, and penne?” begins by counterpoising the poet's feeling of linguistic inadequacy with a description of Campion's language skills. Immediately the theme of censorship is introduced when the poet considers censoring himself because his subject “exceedes the compasse of my skill” (9); it returns as a central theme in the subsequent account of the Tower debates. There, as the poem repeats contemporary descriptions of the contest, Campion is described as having been effectively censored by being brought in “[f]rom rack in Tower,” “bookless, alone, to answer all that came” (44). Campion's execution is next interpreted as the government's most drastic form of censorship, but this censorship is transcended as Campion's death inspires the creation of several alternative mediums that will evade such governmental suppression. First, the execution is described as itself an act of writing that will be interpreted differently than was originally intended: “You did not know how rare and great a good / it was to write his precious gifts in blood” (113). Campion's martyrdom engenders a new language even more powerful than the earthly one:

his pen must cease, his sugared tongue be still;
but you forgot how loud his death it cries,
how far beyond the sound of tongue and quill.

(110-12)

Alive, Campion was only able to speak “to them that present were,” but now, in defiance of print censorship, “fame reports his learning far and near / and now his death confirms his doctrine true” (117-18); “All Europe wonders at so rare a man; / England is filled with rumor of his ende …” (121-22). A second newly articulate medium is London itself, as “the streets, the stones, the steps you hailed them by / proclaim the cause for which these martyrs die” (125-26). As the poet interprets the speech of the dumb streets of the city, the language of Campion infuses itself into the streets and buildings of England's capital:

The Tower saith, the truth he did defend;
the barre beares witness of his guiltles minde;
Tiborne doth tell he made a pacient ende;
on every gate his martirdome we find.
in vaine you wroght yet would obscure his name,
for heaven and earth will still record the same.

(128-32)

Even “heaven and earth” are now graced with the speech denied Campion: “his virtues now are written in the skies, / and often read with holy inward eyes” (115-20). The final medium which speaks in the poem is Campion's martyred body. The sight of Campion's ‘partid quarters’ teach observers

to play the constant Christian's parts;
his head doth speak, & heavenly precepts give,
how we that look, should frame ourselves to live.

(160-62)

Now the example of Campion's life has become a more eloquent testimony to the Catholic faith than any words even Campion himself could have uttered. The argument that should, the opening of the poem suggested, have been heard openly in the Tower debates and in Campion's preaching, is now expressed by the example of Campion's life:

His youth enstructs us how to spend our daies;
his flying bids us how to banish sinne;
his straight profession shews the narrow waies
which they must walk that looke to enter in;
his home returne by danger and distresse,
emboldens us our conscience to professe.

(163-68)

Ultimately, imagery of “speaking” in “Why do I use my paper, inke, and penne?” coalesces to suggest that censorship of Campion, and indeed of Catholicism generally, is self-defeating. In a world where Catholics are not allowed to speak publicly, publish in safety or debate openly, the message of Catholicism has been displaced into other mediums: rumors and news, the sacred sites of martyrdom, the hagiographic life stories of martyred priests, and most powerfully in the visual signs of the martyred body. By rereading Campion's execution from a Catholic point of view, the poem confirms that the execution of Catholic traitors “opened spaces for Catholic agency and speech at the very centre of the persecutory state which was supposedly crushing Catholic treachery into silence and oblivion.”⁴⁸

The companion poem Munday writes as an accompaniment to “Why do I use my paper, inke and penne?” directly refutes the original poem, but the attempt to reimpose the official interpretation of Campion's execution inadvertently reveals the difficulties the government faced in defending both its treatment of the missionary priests and its policy of censorship. To begin with, in order to refute the claims of the first poem Munday must blatantly rewrite well-documented facts. Gone are any references to the use of the rack before the Tower debates: the prisoner is called to dispute only “After long delay,” a phrase which suggests Campion was told beforehand of the debates, and Campion is said to have been given “Bookes as many as he could demaund” (43-44). In Munday's account, the Anglican disputants “quickly did confute” Campion's “chiefest cause”:

His proofe layd downe, reprooved out of hand.
So that the simplest present there could say,
That Campions cause did beare the shame away.

(46-48)

Though either side could (and did) claim victory in the contest, when Munday must change the facts of the case in order to insist on the government's triumph, he reveals the weaknesses of his claim.

More subtly, Munday's main rhetorical tactic in this response poem also suggests the vulnerability of his position. For here Munday simply—and crudely—reverses the images of the original poem in an attempt to recharacterize Campion as villain rather than hero. For example, the first poet's opening statement of linguistic inadequacy in the face of Campion's glory becomes Munday's reticence to repeat the horror of Campion's treason (25-30). Munday also denies claims made by the first poet for the final expressiveness of Campion's death and martyrdom by repeating the original words with just enough changes to reverse the meaning: “The streets, the stones, the steps they hauled him by,” instead of proclaiming “the cause for which these martyrs die” now “Pronounst these Traitours woorthy for to die”:

The Tower sayeth he Treason did defend;
          The Barre beares witnesse of his guilty minde;
Tiborne dooth tell he made a Traitours ende;
          On every gate example we may finde.
          In vaine they work to laude him with such fame,
          For heaven & earth beares witnes of his shame.

(169-74)

Munday reads the death of Campion as the Elizabethan government meant it to be read, but in several ways the relationship between these two poems elucidates the central conceptual problem facing the Elizabethan authorities in their quest to restrict the expression of Catholic belief. Just as Hanmer reprinted Campion's challenge in the course of refuting it, just as Burghley restated the Catholic claim that Jesuits were being executed for religion not treason as he attempted to contradict it, so Munday's attempt to reinterpret Campion's death cites the Catholic position—and in the process inevitably indicates the centrality of disagreement and debate to social, political, and religious meaning. Repeating the words of the opponents both underscores the censorship to which they have been subjected, and also gives the lie to the claim (made, for example, by Hanmer) that debate on theological issues was closed. By attempting to impose an official reading on Campion's death, Munday also inevitably demonstrates that his is only one of a number of different readings. In this way these dueling ballads rehearse linguistically what Peter Lake and Michael Questier have argued about the executions of the seminary priests: that the failure of the government to control the meaning of these spectacles was not the result of “administrative weakness” but was inevitable given the “essentially theatrical way of dispatching the felon and embodying the power of the state.”⁴⁹ Not only does Munday's poem inevitably broadcast the Catholic case in the act of refuting it, but the language that makes the government's case is, like the bodies of Jesuits at the site of execution, always vulnerable to a range of interpretations.

PROTESTANTS, PURITANS, PRINTERS, AND THE FREE SPEECH PRINCIPLE

The 1587 Holinshed engineers a significant juxtaposition between the prosecution of Elizabethan Catholics, the trial of Campion, and another contemporary political event, one which occasioned an equal amount of governmental concern about printed opposition to official policy:

At the same sessions were brought from the Fleet, the Gatehouse, Newgate, and the Counters, sundrie prisoners, indicted for refusing to come to church; all which being convicted by their owne confession, had judgement according to the statute, to paie twentie pounds for every moneth of such wilfull absence from the church. The first of November, monsieur Francis duke of Anjou, the French kings brother, and other nobles of France (having lately arrived in Kent) came to London, and were honorably received, and retained at the court with banqueting, and diverse pleasant shows and pasttimes, of whom more hereafter in place convenient.

On mondaie being the twentieth of November, Edmund Campion, Rafe Sherwin, Lucas Kerbie … were brought unto the high barre at Westminster. …⁵⁰

Although chronology might have determined the proximity of Monsieur and Campion in this passage, because the main description of the French visit is deferred there seems no pressing narrative need to sandwich it here between two different legal actions taken by the government against Catholics. The effect of this seemingly gratuitous juxtaposition is powerfully ironic, because it underscores that foreign policy imperatives were leading the Queen close to marriage with a Catholic duke even as Catholics on the domestic front were being defined as enemies of the English state. Since these marriage negotiations sparked a series of unwelcome written attacks from Protestants, in the early 1580s the mechanism of censorship was being used simultaneously against adversaries from opposite ends of the religious spectrum.

To what extent were the ironies of this fact widely observable by contemporary Elizabethans? In light of similar restrictions on freedom of debate experienced by both English Catholics and opponents of the Anjou marriage, did these groups, in many ways adversarial, perceive any affinity on the issue of censorship? It is true that those pressing for freedom of expression in the Elizabethan reign—Puritans, printers, Parliamentarians, and Papists—did not generally extract “intellectual principles of freedom” from their own singular claims for free expression: “their attacks were directed not against the theory underlying the restrictions but against the application of these restrictions to themselves.”⁵¹ But the absence of such statements of principle is hardly surprising given the treatment accorded those few who did express them: Peter Wentworth, for example, who claimed that only through free inquiry could “falsehood and all subtilties that should shadow and darken [Truth] be found out,” was imprisoned in the Tower for these opinions even though they were spoken in the relatively privileged venue of the House of Commons.⁵²

Some of the evidence for the claim that Catholic attacks on the curtailment of debate resonated widely in Elizabethan society have already been suggested: the Protestant ballad which urged open disputation with the Jesuits from a Protestant point of view; the anecdotal evidence of men who were appalled by the government's treatment of Campion in the Tower debates; the attempts of the government throughout the reign to create the illusion of free debate and claim the existence of freedom of conscience, despite evidence to the contrary. The possibility of solidarity between Catholics and Protestants on the issue of censorship in the 1580s is also richly suggested in the clues we have of the relationship between Sir Philip Sidney and Campion, two men who can represent the two constituencies most touched by governmental restrictions on debate in the early 1580s. Sidney almost certainly knew Campion in the 1560s and early 1570s, since Campion had been under the protection of his uncle Leicester in England and his father Sir Robert in Ireland; he also probably encountered the older man at Oxford, both at the state visit of Elizabeth in 1566 and when Sidney was an undergraduate and Campion one of the university's intellectual luminaries. At any rate, Sidney certainly visited Campion in Prague in 1577 during his European tour.⁵³ As Katherine Duncan-Jones has observed, Sidney biographers have gone to great lengths to dismiss Campion's description of Sidney as a “wavering soul,” “most eager” to hear the conversation of a Catholic. But if we loosen our grip on both the traditional image of Sidney “as a Protestant hero, whose whole life supposedly declared his commitment to the Reformed faith” and on the belief that Catholics and Protestants shared few common assumptions about politics and religion, it becomes possible to see in Sir Philip's receptivity to Campion an adherence to the principle of informed debate and disputation. As Duncan-Jones argues, Sidney's attitude toward free debate is congenial with Campion's; reared in the same academic culture, the two had had instilled in them a similar belief in “[c]hallenge and disputation, conducted on lines partly academic, partly chivalric.”⁵⁴ Certainly Sidney acted in accordance with this belief when, in the early 1580s, he wrote an unpublished but widely circulated letter to the Queen objecting to the match with Anjou. Since the letter resulted in his temporary loss of favor at court and banishment to Wilton, Sidney felt firsthand the frustrations occasioned by censorship. In writing and delivering the letter, Sidney seemed to register his own belief in the importance of disputation; the visit to Campion suggests Sidney extended this belief in the value of open debate to include the views of Jesuits.

The censorship of opposition to the Anjou marriage represented restrictions on the speech of mainstream Protestants; the more radical religious reformers constituted another group whose experiences with censorship led them to denounce the Elizabethan government. In the 1570s, the controls on Catholic books inaugurated by the March 1569 Proclamation was expanded to target Puritan opposition as the government took aim against the authors of the Admonition to Parliament.⁵⁵ From this point on, Puritan printers operated as the Catholics did, using secret and often transported presses, surreptitiously distributing hastily assembled publications. In the early 1590s, by a political irony that was lost neither on the Elizabethan authorities or religious nonconformists, the participants in the Martin Marprelate affair were prosecuted under laws first enacted to hinder the publication of Catholic writings. By this time the Godly were apparently capable of expressing solidarity with recusants on the issue of freedom of thought and expression. When Morris Udall was examined in Star Chamber by Solicitor Egerton he admitted political kinship with Catholics who also claimed freedom of conscience:

EGERTON:
Mr. Udall, I am sorry that you will not answer, nor take an oath, which by law you ought to do: I can assure you, your answers are like the seminary priests answers; for they say, there is no law to compel them to take an oath to accuse themselves.
UDALL:
Sir, if it be a liberty by law, there is no reason why they should not challenge it; for (though they be very bad ones) they are subjects, and until they be condemned by law, may require all the benefits of subjects; neither is that any reason, that their answering so, should make the claim of less value for me, seeing that herein we are subjects alike.(56)

Remarkably Udall, passionate reformer and ideological archenemy to the papists, is capable here of detaching religious issues from the legal and political ones that were at stake in the government's attempts to control Catholicism. Neither the theological errors of the priests, nor the fact that they are “very bad subjects,” could for Udall taint the legal principle that they were entitled to withhold certain information about the content of their consciences from the government.

Finally, a principled belief in freedom of speech was also expressed, albeit implicitly, throughout Holinshed's Chronicles. As Annabel Patterson has recently argued, the editors of the book “continually thematized the problem of censorship as the obverse of their belief in freedom of the press, the right to know, and liberty at least of conscience.”⁵⁷ In the uncensored 1587 edition of the Chronicles, Anthony Munday's Discoverie of Edmund Campion, and his Confederates, Holinshed's major source for the account of the Jesuits' trial, is edited and repositioned in such a way that the issue of censorship becomes the trial's dominant theme. In the absence of hard evidence against the defendants, Campion and the other Jesuits were charged primarily with having owned, read, and maliciously interpreted Nicholas Sander's De Visibili Monarchia, Bristow's Motives, and a Jesuit handbook on prevarication.⁵⁸ By cutting from the Discovery the case put forth by Munday that these books were part of the papist plot to overthrow the Elizabethan government, the Chronicles' editors foreground the epistemological and moral difficulties raised by censorship. For how can the Jesuits fairly be condemned for their alleged familiarity with certain disallowed books? Some defendants deny ever having seen the books; all deny that “they were commanded to be used amongest them both at Rome and at Rheimes.”⁵⁹ When Campion himself argues that the books were “not so ill as they tooke it for, nor deserved anie such iudgement of prejudice,” he suggests unstable processes of interpretation were the basis of the government's case.⁶⁰ Campion's trial in Holinshed, then, endorses in its own way the claim of the clearly Catholic ballad, “You Catholics that Protestants” by suggesting that the underlying purpose behind the execution of Campion was to control the expression and circulation of unorthodox religious ideas. Judiciously edited, and put into the context of a book “peppered with telling instances of freedom and speech denied and punished,” the allusions to censorship incidental in the original account of Campion's trial become readable as implicit support for Catholic pleas for open disputation and debate.⁶¹

One of the unwitting side-effects of rapid changes in religion legislated in the middle of the Tudor century seems to have been the creation of a climate within which a belief in tolerance, freedom of conscience, and even freedom of the press in theological matters was able to flourish. One important source for this belief was the experience of Catholics attempting to have their voices heard in the wake of the Elizabethan settlement, especially after the relatively open early days of the reign had given way to increasingly strict censorship. The inconclusive conclusion arrived at by John Donne's Satire III about the search for “true religion” in the post-Reformation world suggests how and why the principle of free speech was so congenial to this historical and intellectual moment. “Doubt wisely,” the poem suggests, “in strange way / To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; / To sleep, or run wrong, is” (77-78). In the wake of the splintering of the church, “doubting wisely” and “inquiring right” become the way to climb the “Cragged and steep” hill on which Truth sits; these processes were fed by the open disputation and debate which was as much a part of the Protestant and humanist tradition of inquiry as it was of Catholic scholasticism. The illogic of the Elizabethan government's attempt to square this increasingly important cultural ideology with a contradictory policy of escalating repression helped the political concept of free speech to thrive. For this reason, recusant culture should be seen as one important source for the rhetoric of free expression which ultimately served a number of the religious, social, economic, and political agendas of early modern England.

Notes

1. Letter from Sir Francis Englefield, March 9, 1586, PRO SP 53/15/552, quoted from D. C. Peck, “Government Suppression of Elizabethan Catholic Books: The Case of Burleigh's Commonwealth,” The Library Quarterly 47 (1977): 164.

2. From a ballad first published appended to A True Reporte of the Death and martyrdom of M. Campion, Jesuite and Priest by an anonymous “Catholike preist” (1582), reprinted by Hyder Rollins, ed., Old English Ballads, 1553-1620, Chiefly from Manuscripts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 178.

3. On the roots of this idea in the Marian reign see Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 153 (1996): 69-70; on the gradual development through the reign of the claim that Catholics were prosecuted for treason, not religion, see Gillian Brennan, “Papists and Patriotism in Elizabethan England,” Recusant History 19 (1988): 1-15.

4. Lake and Questier, 66.

5. Ibid., 66.

6. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, “Introduction” to their edited volume of essays, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 12.

7. See Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., “Playing the Champion: The Role of Disputation in the Jesuit Mission,” in McCoog, ed., The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1996), 119-40; my narrative of the role of disputation in Jesuit and Elizabethan culture is indebted to McCoog.

8. Frederich Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), 89; see also David Loades, “Censorship in the Sixteenth Century,” in Politics, Censorship and the English Reformation (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1991) and Annabel Patterson's recent argument that the arrangement of Holinshed's Chronicles expresses a belief in “freedom of the press,” in Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 234-63.

9. Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 103.

10. Ibid., 105-7.

11. Ibid., 103-11. See also McCoog, 119-20.

12. Norman L. Jones, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 23.

13. Ibid., 24; see Evans, passim, on the nature of authority and evidence in Reformation debates.

14. On Jewell's sermon and its aftermath, see Jones, 69-71 and A. C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559-1582 (London: Sands, 1950), 60-118. Southern, who dubs the ensuing debate “The Great Controversy,” provides a bibliography of 64 titles he includes as part of the disputation.

15. John Ayre, ed., The Works of John Jewell, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845-50), 1:1-25, quoted in McCoog, 119.

16. Jones, 69.

17. Ibid., 69; McCoog, 121-22.

18. See Southern's bibliography of the controversy, 61-64.

19. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 2:312-13.

20. Huntington Library MS Ellesmere 2768, 23, quoted in Hughes and Larkin, 2:313n.

21. Southern, 125-26.

22. On these proclamations see Hughes and Larkin, 2:341-43, 347-48, 376-79, 506-8, and 3:13-17. See also Peck's discussion, 166-67.

23. Robert M. Kingdon, ed., The Execution of Justice in England. … (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 9-10.

24. Hughes and Larkin, 3:88, 92.

25. On responses to the so-called Bloody Questions see Patrick McGrath, “The Bloody Questions Reconsidered,” Recusant History 20 (1991): 307, and Leslie Ward, “The Treason Act of 1563: A Study of the Enforcement of Anti-Catholic Legislation,” Parliamentary History 8:2 (1989): 298; on the rate of imprisonment of English Catholics for the offenses of harboring seminary priests, refusing to go to church, speaking against religion, and being caught with Catholic written material, see Patrick McGrath and Joy Rowe, “The Imprisonment of Catholics for Religion under Elizabeth I,” Recusant History 20 (1991): 419-20.

26. Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion: A Biography (London: J. Hodges, 1896), 3, 14.

27. Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Sir Philip Sidney's Debt to Campion,” in McCoog, ed., The Reckoned Expense, 88.

28. On this concern see Simpson, 169-76.

29. Ibid., 225.

30. This version of Campion's Letter to the Lords of the Council is taken from Southern, 154.

31. Ibid., 155.

32. Patrick Ryan, S.J., ed., “Some Correspondence of Cardinal Allen, 1579-85,” Miscellanea VII, Catholic Record Society 9 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1911), 31.

33. See Meredith Hanmer, The Great Bragge and Challenge of M. Champion a Jesuite … confuted & aunswered (London, 1581), 21^v.

34. Douay 1580. These passages are part of an introductory Epistle “To the Most Highe & Mightie Princesse Elizabeth,” unpaginated.

35. Bod. MS Rawl. D. 10, f. 134^v-5^v. The poem is written in the context of the controversy set off by the publication of Campion's “Challenge” in 1580, probably after the publication of the Charke and Hanmer's responses in early 1581, but before Campion's capture and execution.

36. Hanmer, 27.

37. Simpson, 366.

38. Ibid., 363-64.

39. Letter from Bishop Aylmer to Lord Burghley, 29 September 1581, BL Lansdowne MS 33, art. 24, quoted in Simpson, 377.

40. Ibid., 377, quoting from Lansdowne MS 33, art. 61.

41. Quoted in Simpson, 369.

42. Strype, Aylmer, c. iii; quoted in Simpson, 379. Lansdowne MS 33, art. 63, 28 December 1581, quoted in Simpson, 379.

43. Simpson, 378.

44. Quoted in ibid., 378.

45. A True Report of the Death and Martyrdom of M. Campion Jesuit and Priest, & M. Shwerwin, & M. Bryan priestes, at Tiborne the first of December (1582); on controversy over the authorship of this pamphlet, see Southern, 376-79.

46. That these poems circulated relatively widely in manuscript is suggested by the survival of the longest of them, “Why doe I use paper, pen and inke,” in at least five extant commonplace books of the sixteenth century. See Margaret Crum, ed., First Line Index of Manuscript Poetry in the Bodleian Library (New York: MLA, 1969), 2:1132.

47. The pro-Campion version of this ballad is entitled “Upon the death of M. Edmund Campion, one of the Societie of the holy name of Jesus”; Munday's poem is “Verses in the Libell, made in prayse of the death of Maister Campion.” Citations to the poems are given in line numbers, and are to the printed versions in Rollins, 66-172.

48. Lake and Questier, 66.

49. Ibid., 65.

50. Chronicles of England, Scotland and Wales, ed. Raphael Holinshed et al. (London, 1587), 3:1332.

51. Siebert, 89.

52. Ibid., 89.

53. Duncan-Jones, 87.

54. Ibid., 96.

55. Patterson, 254-55.

56. Thomas Bayley Howell, Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials (London: R. Bagshaw, 1809-26), 3, col. 1275.

57. Patterson, 234.

58. These works provide the content of so-called Bloody Questions. Another anti-Jesuit pamphlet which reprints questions based on the books of Sanders and Bristow, A Particular declaration … of the undutifull and traiterous affection borne against her Majesty by Edmund Campion … (1582), further highlights the centrality of reading and interpreting to the Jesuit prosecutions.

59. Holinshed, 3:1323.

60. Ibid., 3:1323.

61. Patterson, 238-39.