In England no less than in the embattled Dutch Republic, the yearning was for purity. One year after the demolition of the cross in St Mary’s, when a new minister arrived to lead the church, he lauded his monarch as God’s faithful servant, ‘who hath worthily triumphed over spiritual tyranny’.37 But in his own congregation, and across the length and breadth of the kingdom, there were plenty who disagreed. England was not the Dutch Republic, where the exertions of Calvinists in the cause of independence had helped to secure for their church – the ‘Reformed Church’, as they proudly termed it – a pre-eminent and public status. Elizabeth’s Protestantism was of a distinctively wilful kind. Her taste for the trappings of popery – bishops, choirs, crucifixes – appalled the godly. The more that she dismissed their calls for further reform, the more they fretted whether the Church of England over which she presided as its first Supreme Governor could be reckoned truly Protestant at all. The name first given them by a Catholic exile in 1565 – ‘Puritans’* – seemed less an insult than a fair description. Knowing as they did that only a small number were destined to be saved, they saw in the obduracy of the queen and her ministers all the confirmation they needed of their own status as an inner core of the elect. It was not just their right to shoulder the responsibility for reform, but their duty. What were all the titles of bishops if not mere vanities ‘drawn out of the Pope’s shop’?38 What the affectations of monarchy if not tyranny? True authority lay instead with the fellowship of the godly, led by its elected pastors and presbyters. Their charge it was to continue the great labour of cleansing the world of delusion, and of scraping away from the ark of Christianity all the accumulated barnacles and seaweed of human invention. Before the urgency of such a mission, all the raging of the traditional guardians of church and state, of archbishops and kings, were as nothing. The task was nothing less than to right the disorder of the cosmos. To join God with man.
Yet for all the revolutionary character of the Puritans’ programme – its dismissal of custom, its contempt for superstition – it was not nearly as radical a break with the past as either their supporters or their enemies liked to insist. Godly examples of idol-toppling were hardly confined to the Bible. In 1554, while Mary was still on the throne, the papal legate sent to welcome England back into the fold had addressed members of parliament, and reminded them of how it was from the papacy that they had first received the gift of Christ, which had redeemed their country from the worship of stock and stone. Meanwhile, in the Low Countries, Catholic leaders desperate to steel their flock urged veneration of Saint Boniface, who had brought the light of the gospel to their forebears, and constructed churches out of Thunor’s oak. This was a line of attack with the power to make Protestants feel uneasy. Various defences were employed against it. Some insisted that the first Christian mission to England had in fact arrived, not in the papacy of Gregory the Great but long before, back in the age of the apostles, and therefore owed nothing to the Antichrist of Rome; others that the saints celebrated by Bede had never existed, but instead been fabricated to fill the gap left by the banished gods. The thesis did not catch on. To many Protestants, the record of the Anglo-Saxon Church was a model and an inspiration. Clearly, its corruption, and that of Christendom as a whole, had been the fault of Gregory VII. Puritans, then, even as they rejected the old and familiar, could not entirely deny a lurking paradox: that their rejection of tradition was itself a Christian tradition.
Back in the earliest days of English Christianity, when the first king of Northumbria to hear the gospel had consented to be baptised, and was heading down to the river with his followers, a crow had appeared, croaking in a manner that every pagan knew to be a warning. But the missionary who had been preaching to them, a Roman sent by Gregory the Great, had ordered the bird shot dead. ‘If that heedless bird could not avoid death,’ he had declared, ‘then still less was it able to reveal the future to men who have been reborn and rebaptised into the image of God.’39 No Puritan would have thought to disagree. Mockery of the tall stories told by papists, of the folly of their claims that the footprints of the Devil were to be found imprinted on rocks, or that the bones of saints might in any way be reckoned holy, or that Christ, during the eucharist, became physically present among the congregation, did not imply any doubt that the divine was manifest in every aspect of the universe. Calvin had believed this quite as devoutly as Abelard. If reason had no role to play in fathoming the mysteries of faith, then in its proper sphere, where the stars moved on their inexorable course, and the birds sang their songs of love to their creator, and ‘grass and flowers laugh out to him’,40 it existed to reveal to mortals the traces and purposes of God.
A century on from Luther, Protestants could cast themselves as the heirs of a revolution that had transformed Christendom utterly. No longer merely a staging post in a lengthy process of reformatio, it was commemorated instead as an episode as unique as it had been convulsive: as the Reformation. It had been, in the opinion of its admirers, a liberation of humanity from ignorance as well as error. Once, when the world had been lost to darkness, there had been no limit to the stories of marvels and wonders that Christians had greedily swallowed; but then, ‘when the mist began to clear up, they grew to be esteemed but as old wives’ fables, impostures of the clergy, illusions of spirits, and badges of Antichrist’.41 If God was to be found in the interior experience of individual believers, then so also could he be apprehended in the immensity and complexity of the cosmos.
The truest miracles needed no popery to be rendered miraculous.
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* It is testimony to the enduring obsession of Christians with purity, and the way in which this has repeatedly been cast as an insult, that ‘Cathar’ can be translated as ‘Puritan’.
XIV
COSMOS
1620: L
EIDEN
A sense of themselves as a people redeemed from the chariots and horses of Pharaoh had never left the Dutch. Forty-six years on from the relief of Leiden, memories of the terrible siege were still proudly tended in the city. Of how troops sent by Charles V’s son, Philip II, the king of Spain, had almost succeeded in starving the inhabitants into submission. Of how, in desperation, the Dutch rebels had breached the dykes, to permit a relief force to sail up to the city walls. Of how a great storm had forced the besiegers to turn tail before rising floodwaters. Every year on 3 September, the anniversary of this miraculous event, a public day of atonement and thanksgiving was held. While many chose to fast, others preferred to eat meals in commemoration of how Leiden, ‘through God’s almighty rule, had been miraculously saved and set free’.1 Herring and bread, the food distributed to its starving people by the relief force back in 1574, were popular choices; but so too was stewed rodent. Leiden, by 1620, had become a city ‘flowing with abundance of all sorts of wealth and riches’;2 but this might as readily be a source of anxiety to its citizens as a reassurance. Every good thing, they knew, was a temptation. Just as it was the duty of a man to labour in his calling, so was it his responsibility to remember that all rewards came from the Almighty. Deeply read in the Bible as they were, the Dutch needed no reminding of what had befallen the children of Israel when they broke their covenant with God. The same divine anger that had sent the Spanish scattering before floods and winds might equally be a rod for their own backs. Once again, should they succumb to sin and profligacy, the people of Leiden might be reduced to gnawing on rat.