Books Condemned to be Burnt

I pass now to a book of great political and historical interest: The Conference about the Succession to the Crown of England (1594), attributed to Doleman, but really the handiwork of Parsons, the Jesuit, Cardinal Allen, and others. In the first part, a civil lawyer shows at length that lineal descent and propinquity of blood are not of themselves sufficient title to the Crown; whilst in the second part a temporal lawyer discusses the titles of particular claimants to the succession of Queen Elizabeth. Among these, that of the Earl of Essex, to whom the book was dedicated, is discussed; the object of the book being to baffle the title of King James to the succession, and to fix it either on Essex or the Infanta of Spain. No wonder it gave great offence to the Queen, for it advocated also the lawfulness of deposing her; and it throws some light on those intrigues with the Jesuits which at one time formed so marked an incident in the eventful career of that unfortunate earl. Great efforts were made to suppress it, and there is a tradition that the printer was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

The book itself has played no small part in our history, for not only was Milton's Defensio mainly taken from it, but it formed the chief part of Bradshaw's long speech at the condemnation of Charles I. In 1681, when Parliament was debating the subject of the exclusion of the Duke of York from the succession, it was thought well to reprint it; but only two years later it was among the books which had the honour of being condemned to the flames by the University of Oxford, in its famous and loyal book-fire of 1683 (see p. 194).

But if the history of the book was eventful, how much more so was that of its chief author, the famous Robert Parsons, first of Balliol College, and then of the Order of Jesus! Parsons was a very prince of intrigue. To say that he actually tried to persuade Philip II. to send a second Armada; that he tried to persuade the Earl of Derby to raise a rebellion, and then is suspected of having poisoned him for not consenting; that he instigated an English Jesuit to try to assassinate the Queen; and, among other plans, wished to get the Pope and the Kings of France and Spain to appoint a Catholic successor to Elizabeth, and to support their nominee by an armed confederacy, is to give but the meagre outline of his energetic career. The blacksmith's son certainly made no small use of his time and abilities. His life is the history in miniature of that of his order as a body; that same body whose enormous establishments in England at this day are in such bold defiance of the Catholic Emancipation Act, which makes even their residence in this kingdom illegal.

Doleman's Conference was answered in a little book by Peter Wentworth, entitled A Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for establishing her Successor to the Crown, in which the author advocated the claims of James I. The book was written in terms of great humility and respect, the author not being ignorant, as he quaintly says, "that the anger of a Prince is as the roaring of a Lyon, and even the messenger of Death." But this he was to learn by personal experience, for the Queen, incensed with him for venturing to advise her, not only had his book burnt, but sent him to the Tower, where, like so many others, he died. So at least says a printed slip in the Grenville copy of his book.

But Wentworth is better and more deservedly remembered for his speeches than for his book – his famous speeches in 1575, and again in 1587, in Parliament in defence of the Commons' Right of Free Speech, for both of which he was temporarily committed to the Tower. Rumours of what would please or displease the Queen, or messages from the Queen, like that prohibiting the House to interfere in matters of religion, in those days reduced the voice of the House to a nullity. Wentworth's chief question was, "Whether this Council be not a place for any member of the same here assembled, freely and without control of any person or danger of laws, by bill or speech to utter any of the griefs of this Commonwealth whatsoever, touching the service of God, the safety of the prince and this noble realm." Yet so servile was the House of that period, that on both occasions it disclaimed and condemned its advocate – on the first occasion actually not allowing him to finish his speech. Yet, fortunately, both his speeches live, well reported in the Parliamentary Debates.

To pass from politics to poetry; little as Archbishop Whitgift's proceedings in the High Commission endear his name to posterity, I am inclined to think he may be forgiven for cleansing Stationers' Hall by fire, in 1599, of certain works purporting to be poetical; such works, namely, as Marlowe's Elegies of Ovid, which appeared in company with Davies's Epigrammes, Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image, Hall's Satires, and Cutwode's Caltha Poetarum; or, The Bumble Bee. The latter is a fantastic poem of 187 stanzas about a bee and a marigold, and deserved the fire rather for its insipidity than for the reasons which justified the cleansing process applied to the others, the youthful productions of men who were destined to attain celebrity in very different directions of life.

Marlowe, like Shakespeare, from an actor became a writer of plays; but though Ben Jonson extolled his "mighty muse," I doubt whether his Edward II., Dr. Faustus, or Jew of Malta, are now widely popular. Anthony Wood has left a very disagreeable picture of Marlowe's character, which one would fain hope is overdrawn; but the dramatist's early death in a low quarrel prevented him from ever redeeming his early offences, as a kinder fortune permitted to his companions in the Stationers' bonfire.

Marston came to be more distinguished for his Satires than for his plays, his Scourge of Villainie being his chief title to fame. Of his Pigmalion all that can be said is, that it is not quite so bad as Marlowe's Elegies. Warton justly says, with pompous euphemism: "His stream of poetry, if sometimes bright and unpolluted, almost always betrays a muddy bottom." But this muddy bottom is discernible, not in Marston alone, but also in Hall's Virgidemiarum, or Satires, of which Warton did all he could to revive the popularity. Hall was Marston's rival at Cambridge, but Hall claims to be the first English satirist. He took Juvenal for his model, but the Latin of Juvenal seems to me far less obscure than the English of Hall. I quote two lines to show what this Cambridge student thought of the great Elizabethan period in which he lived. Referring to some remote golden age, he says: —

"Then men were men; but now the greater partBeasts are in life, and women are in heart."

But strange are the evolutions of men. The author of the burnt satires rose from dignity to dignity in the Church. He became successively Bishop of Exeter and Bishop of Norwich, and to this day his devotional works are read by thousands who have never heard of his satires. He was sent as a deputy to the famous Synod of Dort, and was faithful to his Church and king through the Civil War. For this in his old age he suffered sequestration and imprisonment, and he lived to see his cathedral turned into a barrack, and his palace into an ale-house, dying shortly before the Restoration, in 1656, at the age of 82. Bayle thought him worthy of a place in his Dictionary, but he is still worthier of a place in our memories as one of those great English bishops who, like Burnet, Butler, or Tillotson, never put their Church before their humanity, but showed (what needed showing) that the Christianity of the clergy was not of necessity synonymous with the absolute negation of charity.

Davies, too, Marlowe's early friend, rose to fame both as a poet and a statesman. But he began badly. He was disbarred from the Middle Temple for breaking a club over the head of another law student in the very dining-hall. After that he became member for Corfe Castle, and then successively Solicitor-General and Attorney-General for Ireland. He was knighted in 1607. One of the best books on that unhappy country is his Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under obedience of the Crown of England until the beginning of Her Majesty's happy reign (1611), dedicated to James I. His chief poems are his Nosce Teipsum and The Orchestra. In 1614 he was elected for Newcastle-under-Lyme, and he died in 1626, aged only 57. Yet in that time he had travelled a long way from the days of his early literary companionship with Christopher Marlowe.

The Church at the end of the sixteenth century assuredly aimed high. At the time the above books were burnt, it was decreed that no satires or epigrams should be printed in the future; and that no plays should be printed without the inspection and permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London! But even this is nothing compared with that later attempt to subject the Press to the Church which called forth Milton's Areopagitica; there indeed soon came to be very little to choose between the Inquisition of the High Commission and the more noxious Inquisition of Rome.

Near to the burnt works of the previous writers must be placed those of that prolific writer of the same period, Samuel Rowlands. The severity of his satire, and the obviousness of the allusions, caused two of his works to be burnt, first publicly, and then in the hall kitchen of the Stationers' Company, in October 1600. These were: The Letting Humour's Blood in the Headvein, and, A Merry Meeting; or, 'tis Merry when Knaves meet; both of which subsequently reappeared under the titles respectively of Humour's Ordinarie, where a man may be verie merrie and exceeding well used for his sixpence, and the Knave of Clubs. Either work would now cost much more than sixpence, and probably fail to make the reader very merry, or even merry at all. One of the epigrams, however, of the first work may be quoted as of more than ephemeral truth and interest: —

"Who seeks to please all men each way,And not himself offend,He may begin his work to-day,But God knows when he'll end."

Little appears to be known of Rowlands, but, like Bishop Hall, he could turn his pen to various purposes with great facility; for the prayers which he is thought to have composed, and which are published with the rest of his works in the admirable edition of 1870, are of as high an order of merit as the religious works of his more famous contemporary.

The only wonder is that the Archbishop did not enforce the burning of much more of the literature of the Elizabethan period, whilst he was engaged on such a crusade. He may well, however, have shrunk appalled from the magnitude of the task, and have thought it better to touch the margin than do nothing at all. And, after all, in those days a poet was lucky if they only burnt his poems, and not himself as well. In 1619 John Williams, barrister, was actually hanged, drawn, and quartered, for two poems which were not even printed, but which exist in manuscript at Cambridge to this day. These were Balaam's Ass and the Speculum Regale. Williams was indiscreet enough to predict the King's death in 1621, and to send the poems secretly to his Majesty in a box. The odd thing is that he thought himself justly punished for his foolish freak, so very peculiar were men's notions of justice in those far-off barbarous days.

CHAPTER II.

Book-Fires under James I

DESPITE Mr. D'Israeli's able defence of him, the fashion has survived of speaking disdainfully of James I. and all his works. The military men of his day, hating him for that wise love of peace which saved us at least from one war on the Continent, complained of a king who preferred to wage war with the pen than with the pike, and vented his anger on paper instead of with powder. But for all that, the patron and friend of Ben Jonson, and the constant promoter of arts and letters, was one of the best literary workmen of his time; nor will any one who dips into his works fail to put them aside without a considerably higher estimate than he had before of the ability of the most learned king that ever occupied the British throne – a monarch unapproached by any of his successors, save William III., in any sort of intellectual power.

Yet here our admiration for James I. must perforce stop. For of many of his ideas the only excuse is that they were those of his age; and this is an excuse that is fatal to a claim to the highest order of merit. All men to some extent are the sport and victims of their intellectual surroundings; but it is the mark of superiority to rise above them, and this James I. often failed to do. He cannot, for instance, in this respect compare with a man whose works he persecuted, namely, Reginald Scot, who in 1584 published his immortal Discoverie of Witchcraft, a book which, alike for its motive as its matter, occupies one of the highest places in the history of the literature of Europe.

Yet Scot was only a Kentish country gentleman, who gave himself up solely, says Wood, to solid reading and the perusal of obscure but neglected authors, diversifying his studies with agriculture, and so producing the first extant treatise on hops. Nevertheless, he is among the heroes of the world, greater for me at least than any one of our most famous generals, for it was at the risk of his life that he wrote, as he says himself, "in behalf of the poor, the aged, and the simple"; and if he has no monument in our English Pantheon, he has a better and more abiding one in the hearts of all the well-wishers of humanity. For his reading led him to the assault of one of the best established, most sacred, yet most stupid, of the superstitions of mankind; and to have exposed both the folly of the belief, and the cruelty of the legal punishments, of witchcraft, more justly entitles his memory to honour than the capture of many stormed cities or the butchery of thousands of his fellow-beings on a battlefield.

How trite is the argument that this or that belief must be true because so many generations have believed it, so many countries, so many famous men, – as if error, like stolen property, gained a title from prescription of time! Scot pierced this pretension with a single sentence: "Truth must not be measured by time, for every old opinion is not sound." "My great adversaries," he says, "are young ignorance and old custom. For what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it is so superstitiously pursued of some as though no error could be acquainted with custom." May we not say, indeed, that beliefs are rendered suspect by the very extent of their currency and acceptance?

But Scot had a greater adversary than even young ignorance or old custom; and that was King James, who, whilst King of Scotland, wrote his Demonologie against Scot's ideas (1597). James's mind was strictly Bible-bound, and for him the disbelief in witches savoured of Sadduceeism, or the denial of spirits. Yet Scot had taken care to guard himself, for he wrote: "I deny not that there are witches or images; but I detest the idolatrous opinions conceived of them." Nor can James have carefully read Scot, for tacked on to the Discoverie is a Discourse of Devils and Spirits, which to the simplest Sadducee would have been the veriest trash. Scot, for instance, says of the devil that "God created him purposely to destroy. I take his substance to be such as no man can by learning define, nor by wisdom search out"; a conclusion surely as wise as the theology is curious. Anyhow it is the very reverse of Sadduceean. It is said that one of the first proceedings of James's reign was to have all the copies of Scot's book burnt that could be seized, and undoubtedly one of the first of his Acts of Parliament was the statute that made all the devices of witchcraft punishable with death, as felony, without benefit of clergy.

But about the burning there is room for doubt. For there is no English contemporary testimony of the fact. Voet, a professor of theology in Holland, is its only known contemporary witness; but he may have assumed the suppression of the book to have been identical with its burning; a common assumption, but a no less common mistake. On the other hand, many books undoubtedly were burnt under James that are not mentioned by name; and the great rarity of the first edition of the book, and its absence from some of our principal libraries, support the possibility of its having been among them.1 Nevertheless, to quote Mr. D'Israeli: "On the King's arrival in England, having discovered the numerous impostures and illusions which he had often referred to as authorities, he grew suspicious of the whole system of Dæmonologie, and at length recanted it entirely. With the same conscientious zeal James had written the book, the King condemned it; and the sovereign separated himself from the author, in the cause of truth; but the clergy and the Parliament persisted in making the imaginary crime felony by the statute." So that if James really burnt the book, he must have burnt it to please others, not himself; and though he may have done so, the presumption is rather that he did not.

The wonder is that Scot himself escaped the real or supposed fate of his book. Pleasing indeed is it to know that he lived out his days undisturbed to the end (1599) with his family and among his hops and flowers in Kent; not, however, before he had lived to see his book make a perceptible impression on the magistracy and even on the clergy of his time, till a perceptible check was given to his ideas by the Demonologie. But at all events he had given superstition a reeling blow, from which it never wholly recovered, and to which it ultimately succumbed. More than this can few men hope to do, and to have done so much is ample cause for contentment.

Fundamental questions of all sorts were growing critical in the reign of James, who had not only the clearest ideas of their answer, but the firmest determination to have them, if possible, answered in his own way. The principal ones were: The relationship of the King to his subjects; of the Pope to kings; of the Established Church to Puritanism and Catholicism. And on the leading political and religious questions of his day James caused certain books to be burnt which advocated opinions contrary to his own – a mode of reasoning that reflects less credit on his philosophy than does his conduct in most other respects.

But the first book that was burnt for its sentiments on Prerogative was one of which the King was believed personally to approve. This was probably the gist of its offence, for it appeared about the time that the King made his very supercilious speech to the Commons in answer to their complaints about the High Commission and other grievances.

I allude to the famous Interpreter (1607) by Cowell, Doctor of Civil Law at Cambridge, which, written at the instigation of Archbishop Bancroft, was dedicated to him, and caused a storm little dreamt of by its author. Sir E. Coke disliked Cowell, whom he nicknamed Cow-heel, and naturally disliked him still more for writing slightingly of Littleton and the Common Law. He therefore caused Parliament to take the matter up, with the result that Cowell was imprisoned and came near to hanging;2 James only saving his life by suppressing his book by proclamation, for which the Commons returned him thanks with great exultation over their victory.

For Cowell had taken too strongly the high monarchical line, and the episode of his book is really the first engagement in that great war between Prerogative and People which raged through the seventeenth century. "I hold it uncontrollable," he wrote, "that the King of England is an absolute king." "Though it be a merciful policy, and also a politic policy (not alterable without great peril) to make laws by the consent of the whole realm.. yet simply to bind the prince to or by these laws were repugnant to the nature and custom of an absolute monarchy." "For those regalities which are of the higher nature there is not one that belonged to the most absolute prince in the world which doth not also belong to our King." But the book was condemned, not only for its sins against the Subject, but also for passages that were said to pinch on the authority of the King. Yet, considered merely as a Law Dictionary, it is still one of the best in our language.

In the King's proclamation against the Interpreter are some passages that curiously illustrate the mind of its author. He thus complains of the growing freedom of thought: "From the very highest mysteries of the Godhead and the most inscrutable counsels in the Trinitie to the very lowest pit of Hell and the confused action of the divells there, there is nothing now unsearched into by the curiositie of men's brains"; so that "it is no wonder that they do not spare to wade in all the deepest mysteries that belong to the persons or the state of Kinges and Princes, that are gods upon earth." King James's attitude to Free Thought reminds one of the legendary contention between Canute and the sea. No one has ever repeated the latter experiment, but how many thousands still disquiet themselves, as James did, about or against the progress of the human mind!

In the proclamation itself there is no actual mention of burning, all persons in possession of the book being required to deliver their copies to the Lord Mayor or County Sheriffs "for the further order of its utter suppression" (March 25th, 1610); neither is there any allusion to burning in the Parliamentary journals, nor in the letters relating to the subject in Winwood's Memorials. The contemporary evidence of the fact is, however, supplied by Sir H. Spelman, who says in his Glossarium (under the word "Tenure") that Cowell's book was publicly burnt. Otherwise, James's proclamations were not always attended to (by one, for instance, he prohibited hunting); and Roger Coke says that the books being out, "the proclamation could not call them in, but only served to make them more taken notice of."3

That books were often suppressed or called in without being publicly burnt is well shown by Heylin's remark about Mocket's book (presently referred to), that it was "thought fit not only to call it in, but to expiate the errors of it in a public flame."4 Among works thus suppressed without being burnt may be mentioned Bishop Thornborough's two books in favour of the union between England and Scotland (1604), Lord Coke's Speech and Charge at the Norwich Assizes (1607), and Sir W. Raleigh's first volume of the History of the World (1614). I suspect that Scott's Discoverie was likewise only suppressed, and that Voet erroneously thought that this involved and implied a public burning.

But it was not for long that James had saved Cowell's life, for the latter's death the following year, and soon after the resignation of his professorship, is said by Fuller to have been hastened by the trouble about his book. The King throughout behaved with great judgment, nor is it so true that he surrendered Cowell to his enemies, as that he saved him from imminent personal peril. Men like Cowell and Blackwood and Bancroft were probably more monarchical than the monarch himself; and, though James held high notions of his own powers, and could even hint at being a god upon earth, his subjects were far more ready to accept his divinity than he was to force it upon them. It was not quite for nothing that James had had for his tutor the republican George Buchanan, one of the first opponents of monarchical absolutism in his famous De Jure Regni apud Scotos; nor did he ever quite forget the noble words in which at his first Parliament he thus defined for ever the position of a constitutional king: "That I am a servant it is most true, that as I am head and governor of all the people in my dominion who are my natural vassals and subjects, considering them in numbers and distinct ranks: so, if we will take the whole people as one body and mass, then, as the head is ordained for the body and not the body for the head, so must a righteous king know himself to be ordained for his people and not his people for him… I will never be ashamed to confess it my principal honour to be the great servant of the Commonwealth."

And in this very matter of Cowell's book James not only denied any preference for the civil over the common law, but professed "that, although he knew how great and large a king's rights and prerogatives were, yet that he would never affect nor seek to extend his beyond the prescription and limits of the municipal laws and customs of this realm."5