Witnessing to the faith: Absolutism and the conscience in John Donne’s England

By Shanyn Altman

This study utilises John Donne’s works concerning the Jacobean Settlement as a contextualised case study to examine a seriously pressing issue in contemporary society: the issue of Catholic loyalism post-1603 and the disputes that thistopic sparked over the matter of conformity.Altman examines Donne’s polemic in line with the vast expanse of literature relating to the pamphlet war and situates Donne’s arguments within a strong contemporary tradition of conformist thought. Within this context, the study argues that Donne articulated a theory of royal absolutism that would have struck home with many contemporaries who, whether Catholic or not, were faced with a regime determined to bring them into conformity. It further contends that the religio-political standpoint represented by Donne was not only fairly obvious to the English state but was also widely accepted by it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526154859

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Witnessing to the faith

POLITICS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN

General Editors

Alastair Bellany, Alexandra Gajda, Peter Lake,

Anthony Milton, Jason Peacey, Abigail Swingen

This important series publishes volumes that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in early modern Britain and beyond. It seeks to counteract the fragmentation of current historiography by encouraging a variety of methodological and critical approaches to this period of dramatic conflict and change that fundamentally shaped the modern world. The series welcomes volumes covering all aspects of sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century history, including the history of Britain’s growing imperial ambitions and global reach.

To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/politics-culture-and-society-in-early-modern-britain

Witnessing to the faith

Absolutism and the conscience in John Donne’s England

Shanyn Altman

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Shanyn Altman 2023

The right of Shanyn Altman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5484 2 hardback

First published 2023

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Note on sources

Introduction: Situating John Donne within post-Reformation studies

1Absolutism and the moderation of religion

2Resistance theory, tyrannicide and the trope of the ‘Evil Jesuit’

3Volunteerism and self-sovereignty in discourses on martyrdom

Conclusion: John Donne studies and the Revisionist paradigm

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making, and I am very grateful to all those who kept me motivated along the way. First and foremost, I would like to thank Jonathan Buckner for all of his generosity, help and support during the course of the project; indeed, he is one of the finest scholars I know, and I am greatly indebted to him for many years’ worth of ideas, discussion and proofreading. I also owe a very special thanks to Professor Michael Questier, who has been an outstanding mentor over the years and who has been extremely generous in sharing his vast knowledge of early Stuart history.

Much of the research for this book was undertaken at the University of Sussex and thanks are due to those in the Centre of Early Modern and Medieval Studies who have provided me with a treasure trove of ideas and intellectual stimulation. For reading numerous drafts of the book and giving me an enormous amount of encouragement, I am particularly grateful to Professor Andrew Hadfield. For guiding my thoughts and being an excellent role model, I am thankful to Dr Mary Ann Lund. I also owe much to Dr Angela Andreanni, Ilana Bergsagel, Professor Matthew Dimmock, Professor Dennis Flynn, Professor Margaret Healy, Simon Healy, Professor Tom Healy, Professor Victor Houliston, Dr James Hudson, Dr Amy Lidster, Dr Daniel Starza Smith, Dr Katrina Marchant-Stone, Dr Nicole Mennell, Dr Will Tosh and Professor Rebecca Totaro who have supported me in various ways over the years and who have always kept me in high spirits. The anonymous readers at MUP have also been incredibly insightful and their detailed feedback has been invaluable in developing the book.

For their unwavering faith in my ability, I extend my heartfelt thanks to Amit Babbar, Anton Eriera, Steph Gaynor and Aviva Menachof. For always being there to remind me that ‘there’s more to life than Shakespeare’, I am deeply obliged to Sarah Boyle and Ayisha Easey.

Above all, I would like to express my gratitude to my family, and especially to my parents who have supported me in more ways than words will allow.

Some material in this book appears elsewhere in different forms, and I am grateful to the various presses for permission to reprint it. Some material from Chapter 1 appears in ‘An Anxious Entangling and Perplexing of Consciences: John Donne and Catholic Recusant Mendacity’, European Journal of English Studies, 19, no. 2 (2015), 176–88. My thinking on Ignatius His Conclave and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions is based on two of my essays: ‘John Donne: Devotions’ and ‘John Donne: Ignatius His Conclave’, both in The Literary Encyclopedia. volume 1.2.1.03. English Writing and Culture: Renaissance (Elizabethan and Jacobean Periods, 1485–1625), ed. J. A. Roe. First published 21 July 2014 www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4592 [accessed 4 Mar. 2023]. Some of the material on martyrdom appears in ‘Martyrdom in Early Modern England’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, available at https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1186 [accessed 26 Oct. 2021].

Note on sources

Unless otherwise indicated, all references to patristic sources are taken from The Early Church Fathers series, ed. Alexander Roberts and Philip Schaff (published online at www.ccel.org/fathers.html), and all references to Shakespeare are to the Arden editions, in Arden 3 when possible, and otherwise in Arden 2. The British Library is abbreviated as BL and the Short Title Catalogue as STC. Unless indicated otherwise, all italics in quotations are the author’s own. Typographic ligatures have been removed from all references to Robbins’s edition of Donne’s poetry.

The following sources are used frequently throughout this book and are either cited within the text or referred to by short title. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Donne are to the following editions:

Biathanatos, ed. Michael Rudick and M. Pabst Battin (New York: Garland, 1982)

Deaths duell, or, A consolation to the soule, against the dying life, and liuing death of the body (London, 1632; STC 7031)

Ignatius His Conclave, ed. T. S. Healy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969)

John Donne: Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975)

Pseudo-martyr: Wherein out of certaine propositions and gradations, this conclusion is euicted. That those which are of the Romane religion in this kingdome, may and ought to take the Oath of allegiance (London, 1610; STC 7048) = PM

The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins (London: Longman, 2010)

Introduction: Situating John Donne within post-Reformation studies

The field of Donne scholarship is one of considerable size. New studies addressing Donne’s life and works appear in print regularly. Many of these studies are learned and considered, and demonstrate both analytical rigour as well as a profound interest in, and respect for, their subject matter and source material. Yet, and almost alone within Donne studies, it is seemingly customary to begin any substantial discussion of John Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr (1610) with a joke, an excuse or an apology. Indeed, it is almost mandatory in studies of Donne’s lengthy defence of the oath of allegiance (1606) to cite from, or contribute a defamatory comment to, the repertoire of insults that constitute the text’s reputation. Among the witnesses for the prosecution, Sir Geoffrey Keynes states that Pseudo-Martyr makes for ‘dull reading’;¹ Evelyn Mary Simpson claims that it is ‘an almost unreadable book written by a man of genius’;² and Augustus Jessopp believes that none but a ‘monomaniac’ would read the argument through.³ Among the witnesses for the defence, Victor Houliston has put forward a punning ‘Apology for Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr’;⁴ and Anthony Raspa, the text’s only editor, has admitted that, ‘for the modern reader, who has been brought up by twentieth-century literary tradition to expect captivating wit and haunting sensibility of Donne, … Pseudo-Martyr seems to move crab-like’.⁵

That there is an academic embarrassment surrounding the text is true, yet the dates of these comments indicate the direction of the discussion: from dismissals to apologies, Pseudo-Martyr has come to be more widely regarded as a work deserving of scholarly attention. Indeed, based on John R. Roberts’s annotated bibliographies of Donne scholarship, there has been a slow but steady rise in criticism on the text over the years, with discussions that include or focus on Pseudo-Martyr having grown from 0.1% (1912–67), to 1.6% (1979–95), to 2.9% (1996–2008).⁶ Such figures may not seem high, but they are significant in that they reflect a growing effort to establish Pseudo-Martyr’s relevance. As such, some articles that have emerged in recent years have broken custom: instead of apologising for Pseudo-Martyr, they state unabashedly that Donne’s polemical works are ‘extremely revealing of his thinking on a wide variety of fundamental issues’ and that, most probably, ‘Donne himself considered such works as Pseudo-Martyr his most lasting monuments’.⁷ ‘The very desire to belittle Pseudo-Martyr’, Jesse M. Lander contends, ‘betrays an unwillingness to grapple with Donne and his culture’.⁸ With a small but growing number of Donne scholars coming to terms with the idea that his ‘middle years are the crucial ones’,⁹ the preordination prose works, as Susannah Brietz Monta has termed them, and by extension the subjects of absolutism, religious moderation and martyrdom, are now acknowledged as fundamental to understanding Donne and the world he was living in.¹⁰

Not only does Pseudo-Martyr constitute Donne’s most comprehensive defence of the state and discussion on sovereignty and salvation, but it also lies at the centre of his biography as the work that earned him an honorary doctorate that led to his ordination in 1615 and consequently to his career as Dean of St Paul’s. An important English text supported by James VI and I in the pamphlet war that was spreading rapidly across Europe concerning the divine right of kings, it emerged alongside two other significant prose works produced by Donne in the crucial years following the Gunpowder Plot: Biathanatos (c.1608–10?), the first known Christian defence of suicide in English;¹¹ and Ignatius His Conclave (1611), a satirical attack on the Society of Jesus that was commissioned by the king and which was printed in both English and Latin. Although these polemical works have received greater recognition in recent years, the ways in which they are engaged with critically still remains quite limited. This is due, in part, to the fact that they are usually studied in isolation from Donne’s other works, being perceived as historical texts that have no place in literary studies – or, on the contrary, are discarded by historians as works produced by a literary figure that have no place in historical studies.¹² Indeed, although Donne’s position in the literary canon is unquestionable, his importance for early modern religious studies, especially for post-Reformation Catholicism, has been underappreciated – and perhaps even overlooked until circa thirty years ago when his sermons started receiving attention. Despite being marginalised in both Donne studies and post-Reformation studies, the preordination prose works reveal vital information about Donne and the politics and religion of Jacobean England, and are particularly important within the context of martyrdom, divine right monarchy and the rise of royal absolutism.

Although this book takes John Donne and his works concerning the Jacobean Settlement as its subject, its predominant aim is to utilise these works as a contextualised case study to examine a seriously pressing issue in contemporary society: the issue of Catholic loyalism post-1603 and the way in which this issue prompted disputes over conformity that fractured the community of which Donne was in some sense a member. Within this context, this book argues, Donne articulated a theory of royal absolutism that was inextricably bound to his soteriology, and which would have struck home with many contemporaries who, whether Catholic or not, were faced with a regime determined to bring them into conformity.¹³ It further contends that Donne’s argument represented views held by many contemporaries who did not find any issue with conformity, and whose religio-political standpoint was not only fairly obvious to the English state but also widely accepted by it.¹⁴ In this respect, Donne’s argument in Pseudo-Martyr places him within a strong contemporary tradition of conformist thought. By exploring the intricacies of Donne’s arguments in relation to the vast expanse of literature sparked by the pamphlet war, we are able to map out a textured image of what it meant to be an English subject who was trying to make sense of complex religio-political issues during the reign of James I.

Models of martyrdom in early modern England

During the Reformation of the English Church in the 1530s, Henry VIII took the title of supreme head of the Church in England. The English Church became in a sense a State Church. Expressions of support for papal authority in politics were interpreted as a challenge to royal power. Here the government of the Church of England supplied a series of political languages available for appropriation by several different interest groups. Peter Lake has written extensively on the quasi-democratic aspects of presbyterianism in the Elizabethan Church, something about which Elizabeth Tudor was generally less than impressed.¹⁵ Faced with hostility from not just the queen but also leading councillors, one stock response was that the real source of sedition was popery. A variety of political circumstances meant that the regime chose in the 1580s to take draft legislation before parliament which did indeed penalise aspects of contemporary Roman Catholicism as treasonous, that is, much more rigorously than the supremacy statute of 1559 and the new acts of 1571.¹⁶ Given the breadth of differently phrased orthodoxies in the Elizabethan Church, as well as the old faith’s continuing appeal among many, English subjects were confronted with competing notions of what it meant to be a good Christian and, consequently, conflicting views about who qualified as a Christian martyr – particularly once the regime started to use the law in a more draconian way against those who were prosecuted for offences against the new statutes. Here, martyrologies and other discourses on martyrdom were powerful tools available to those who wanted to demonstrate a continuity between early modern Christian institutions and the early Church. John Foxe had, after all, done precisely this.

Early modern studies often access martyrological material through discourse theory to demonstrate that Catholics and Protestants competed for ‘rhetorical mastery’ over a particular model of martyrdom that could be appropriated by those on both sides of the religious divide to portray their martyrs as the true martyrs.¹⁷ Indeed, it is now common enough to note that the conventions used within such discourses on martyrdom were by and large very similar, and that the early modern martyr could function ‘as a rhetorical device, a fecund lexicon through which the writers and image-makers from opposing doctrinal positions [could] define their positions’.¹⁸ These conventions consisted predominantly of three elements. First, in Monta’s terms, is the ‘institutional incarnation’ and ‘visible manifestation of one’s faith’;¹⁹ this is the idea of the martyr as a model adherent of their respective religious institution who is willing to witness publicly to their faith. Second, and a corollary of the first, is the idea of a true martyr as one who resists a persecutory and heretical state in the face of enforced conformity; it is often supposed, in fact, both in early modern sources, and in modern criticism of these sources, that martyrdom could not exist without persecution.²⁰ Finally, these martyrologies suggest the idea of a martyr as one who witnesses to their faith through physical suffering or death. Indeed, the histories and images in these works became iconic of Catholic and Protestant suffering-as-heroism, depicting the victims’ composed, passive and apparently painless experience against the rage of their persecutors. Thus, despite their disagreement over the ‘faith of the Church’ to which the martyr witnessed, both Catholic and Protestant martyrologists would have agreed on John Foxe’s conception of the martyr as one who glorifies God by their death, is steadfast in their Christian faith and is prepared to take action to subdue or vanquish the enemy.²¹ The conflict between these competing martyrologies reflected and also had the potential to induce and reinforce the hostile divisions between Catholics and Protestants in early modern England.

A crucial point that arises from studies on the topic that employ discourse theory is that, despite confessional differences, the competition for a specific model of martyrdom placed certain Catholics and certain Protestants in agreement over a complex theological question: what exactly is a Christian martyr? However, it is equally important to note that the martyrological material employing the above conventions does not necessarily stand as a cross-sectional representation of what all Catholics and what all Protestants believed in early modern England and Britain. Indeed, it should not be supposed that within the history of Christianity the topic of martyrdom has ever been monolithic, nor, as some have argued, that there was an evolution in the conception of martyrdom, from a range of late medieval models to a uniform model based on the above archetype created by early modern Catholic and Protestant martyrologists.²² As has become clear in studies that take a predominantly social historical approach to the topic of Christian martyrdom, there were, in fact, conflicts over the question of martyrdom that existed alongside a wide range of confessional disputes, and which caused sharp divisions between co-religionists in the post-Reformation era.²³ Indeed, if we broaden our pool of resources on the topic beyond martyrologies, it becomes apparent that these conflicting views were reproduced discursively in a wide range of literature and literary forms.

At the centre of the disputes on martyrdom was a long-standing theological debate over what it meant to follow the example of Christ. The question of whether Christ’s crucifixion should be imitated literally through the martyr’s death, or metaphorically through the sacraments, or even at all considering the fallen nature of humankind, had occupied the minds of Christians long before the Reformation.²⁴ It was, in essence a question of whether a Christian had the right to put themselves forward for martyrdom; whether they had a claim to self-sovereignty irrespective of demands imposed on them by secular authorities, for example in having the right to disobey the monarch in the name of their religion, or whether they should be passive and obedient subjects who accepted the sovereign power and authority of the monarch while keeping their conscience private. Behind the records that historians of early modern politics have identified – State papers, newsletters, pamphlet reports of legal proceedings and all the rest – there was a (sometimes public) discussion of whether going to the wire in instances of enforced conformity was justified, or the mark of an extremist. On this point, tensions had run high between Christians since the martyrs of the early Church had died to establish the truth of Christianity in a pagan world, and continued to cause hostility between conformists, partial conformists and separatists in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.²⁵

When Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) was executed for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England, his death established a new cause for martyrdom: that of defending the unity of the Church and the authority of the pope.²⁶ The former Lord Chancellor’s refusal to cooperate was controversial since even some of his own family were prepared to conform. Whereas martyrs of the early Church had died to establish the truth of Christianity in a pagan world, martyrs of the Reformation and post-Reformation sought to distinguish the true Christian Church from the false one, causing or pointing to divisions between competing denominations. This new cause was first set out and detailed by Reginald Pole in 1536. Pole ‘argued that Christ had established the Church on the foundation of Peter, and that the authority vested in Peter had continued in his successors’, which meant it ‘was therefore impossible to usurp that authority because the Church was the whole community of Christendom united in and through the papacy’.²⁷ According to Anne Dillon, this ‘radically new type of martyrdom’ was ‘born out of the Reformation’:

Thomas More and those executed by Henry died because they believed that to acknowledge the king’s claim to supreme authority over the English Church would have been to deny the truth of that unity or papal authority.²⁸

For Pole and More, reformers were no longer a part of the true Church, and any act of conformity that involved a limitation or renegotiation of papal authority was to be considered as a matter of heresy. Taking the oath of supremacy could therefore lead Catholics to eternal damnation. ‘In the saving of my body’, More told his daughter Margaret Roper, ‘should stand the loss of my soul’.²⁹ At the heart of the battle between the churches was a claim for custody over religious truth: the core of Christianity for which the early martyrs had sacrificed their lives. During the Reformation, this religious truth was once again under threat of being demolished or purloined by heretics; martyrs thus sacrificed themselves not to establish the foundation of Christianity, as the early martyrs had done, but to distinguish and defend the true Christian cause from the false one. Any claim to martyrdom under such conditions, as Dillon stipulates, would always be subjective and could only be made within the ‘essential polarity of its antithesis, the pseudomartyr’.³⁰

During his lifetime, Thomas More described as pseudo-martyrs those reformers who had witnessed to what he believed was a false cause, and constructed a contrasting image of the Catholic martyr: a humble, intellectual individual, with an informed conscience and no lust for the glory of martyrdom.³¹ Although More was certain in his conviction that the king could not be accepted as Supreme Head of the Church of England, he spent a great deal of time during his imprisonment contemplating whether or not a Christian may volunteer for martyrdom under these or, indeed, any conditions. Fearing that such an act might, in fact, constitute suicide, he decided that he would not denounce the king’s authority verbally until he was confident that he would face execution: ‘I have not been a man of such holy living’, he confessed, ‘as I might be bold to offer myself to death, lest God for my presumption might suffer me to fall, and therefore I put not myself forward, but draw back.’³² More may not have been so bold as to assume his right to volunteer for martyrdom, but he became, posthumously, the exemplar of his own martyrial construction, a man synonymous with his own works on martyrdom, and a central figure in what Anthony Raspa terms the ‘battle of martyrologies between the Catholic Church and the English reformers’.³³ For Catholic nonconformists and other separatists, More had set the standard for refusing to acknowledge the monarch as Supreme Head of the English Church.³⁴ For their Protestant and Catholic conformist opponents, he was nothing more than a heretic and a pseudo-martyr.³⁵

The pseudo-martyr debate continued into the Elizabethan era. In the case of Margaret Clitherow in the 1580s, for instance, her own chaplain says in so many words that there were other Catholics who thought she was extreme in her opinions, and in her nonconformity, though she was not the only one in York who behaved as she did.³⁶ The issue did not go away with the change of regime and monarch in Jacobean England, not least because the new monarch seemed to have promised tolerance and then, as some but not all saw it, failed to deliver on his promise. For many of John Donne’s contemporaries, uncertainty about the king’s stance on Catholic toleration following the Gunpowder Plot triggered a revival of aspects of the Archpriest dispute in which contemporaries had negotiated the unstable post-Reformation settlement in England.³⁷ This controversy might seem somewhat arcane to a modern-day audience, but it was a crucial aspect of the politics of the succession. Coming as it did after the new regime started to use the Elizabethan penal law against Catholic clergy (even if not very many of them), this was a big issue. Indeed, the debates about martyrdom would inevitably be continued when specific individuals came to grief at the hands of the state. On the matter, both Protestant and Catholic camps were divided, sometimes bitterly, for example between Calvinists and Lutherans, or between ultramontanes and Gallicans.

These conflicting views are particularly prominent in public discussions on the Jacobean oath of allegiance in the period of 1606–16, which is when the principal prosecutions for treason associated with refusal of the oath took place (though that in itself was not a treasonable matter).³⁸ The Jacobean oath of allegiance can be understood as the ‘ideological equivalent of the oath of supremacy’.³⁹ Due to More’s essential role in establishing the new cause for martyrdom, it was important that, when defending this oath, James I made an effort ‘to shatter the More legend and disperse the aura of sanctity it emitted’ by presenting More’s denial of the supremacy as ‘a very fleshly cause of martyrdome’.⁴⁰ Since it was considered a grievous sin for the government to force a person to swear to an oath against their conscience, the best way for the State to ‘diffuse the issue was to claim that Catholics simply did not face crises of conscience at all but, rather, had a choice between obeying or breaking the law’.⁴¹ Thus, James I presented the oath in political terms as a matter of civil obedience to separate radicals from loyalists.⁴² In order to be perceived as advancing a fair line of argument, it was important that any given party in the debate constructed a formula of reasoning that ostensibly promoted the separation of the State and the Church in the face of an opponent who was doing the opposite.⁴³ Thus, while most Catholic recusants presented Elizabethan and Jacobean treason statutes as being based on religion, and as a departure from established legal norms, conformists tended to argue that it was not the State but rather those committing treason and then calling themselves martyrs who were conflating temporal and spiritual matters.

The Jacobean oath, a provision of first of the Popish Recusants Acts that were passed in response to the Gunpowder Plot, controversially insisted on the divine right status of monarchy over and above the claim made by some