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Constantine in Scriptural Mode: ’s “Magisterial” Revisions to Acts and Monuments’ Second Edition (1570)

by

Wesley Miles Goudy

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Wycliffe College and Graduate Centre for Theological Studies of the Toronto School of Theology. In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Theology awarded by Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto.

© Copyright by Wesley Miles Goudy 2018 Constantine in Scriptural Mode: John Foxe’s “Godly” Magisterial Revisions to Acts and Monuments Second Edition (1570)

Wesley Miles Goudy

Doctor of Theology

Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This project explores a new vision of the Protestant magistrate as represented in the alterations which John Foxe made to his Ecclesiastical History, in Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570), a highly influential and controversial work which has been credited with shaping the course of English from the to the .

The work has also been read in abridged form under the title Foxe’s Book of . Foxe made incremental revisions to the work, which began as a 1554 and ended in a fourth 1583 revision to this English-language ecclesiastical history, still known by the title Acts and Monuments. Yet relatively little scholarship has been devoted to explicating the nature and motivation for Foxe’s revisions, beyond his effort to provide literary and historical support for the in the face of Roman opposition.

The most significant revisions appear between the first and second editions of Acts and

ii Monuments (1563, 1570), resulting in a textual expansion of some 500 pages. These revisions were drafted in a period of growing political tension, culminating in the Vestiarian

Controversy (1566), between the sanctioning of The Thirty-Nine Articles in convocation

(1563) and their final ratification in parliament (1571). This thesis paper identifies and explicates a shift in Foxe’s 1570 historiography in parallel with these tense circumstances and the revisions which were made to Article 37 “Of Civil Magistrates” in The Thirty-Nine

Articles. Many of Foxe’s 1570 alterations seem germane to a new definition of the “godly

Prince” in Elizabethan Article 37, itself an alteration from Article 36 of the Edwardian Forty-

Two Articles (1552) by the addition of at least three key doctrinal tenets. In solidarity with

Protestant concerns over the Queen’s ecclesiastical policy, Foxe’s second edition (1570) appears to amplify this reformist Article 37 definition of the “godly Prince” 1) by exhibiting a “godly” magistrate beholden to Scripture from ancient times, 2) by explicating the historic roles of both the lay and clerical “regimentes,” and 3) by featuring a longstanding parliamentary prerogative to “restrain by the civil sword” both prince and prelate. This thesis therefore offers a comparative analysis of the first and second editions of Acts and

Monuments in an effort to measure and explicate the parallel support which Foxe provided in his 1570 revisions for an emergent Elizabethan political theology of “godly” rule.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation to those who contributed, both academically and personally, to this work. First, I would express my gratitude to Dr. Mark

Noll and intertestamental scholar Julius Scott, whose advisory roles at Wheaton College encouraged further graduate study. Second, I would like to express my appreciation to the faculty and staff of the Toronto School of Theology, under whose auspices I was introduced to the study of early modern history, and particularly to Dr. J. Skira and Dr. D. Neelands, whose tutelage in the subject areas of early Christian hermeneutics and Anglican theology laid a foundation for this study. I am also deeply grateful to my thesis supervisors, Dr. Alan

Hayes and Dr. Ephraim Radner, for their patient erudition in facilitating this discovery of

Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and for highlighting, at one pivotal moment in this process, what they called “an essential interpretative key to reading A&M 1570 and to understanding

Foxe’s purpose and agenda in writing.” Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge the measure of support which I have received from my family, against much arduous and time- consuming labour; and in company with other colleagues in tertiary education, I am grateful for the assistance which I have received from the staff of the University of Toronto and the

University of Illinois libraries (and more intermittently from the staff of Buswell Library at

Wheaton College) in accessing necessary resources, and in locating certain rare books. May all of the above persons be encouraged in their preoccupations, and blessed in what Foxe has called “Christes fayth,” even as I have been by the study of this great (and massive) historical work and by the completion of an important chapter in my academic journey.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations ...... vii

I. Introduction to Foxe’s 1570 Revisions and Article XXXVII ...... 1 Modern Scholarship and Methodological Considerations ...... 11 Foxe’s Modern Legacy ...... 11 Methodological Considerations ...... 18 Historical Context ...... 21 John Foxe and the Second Edition ...... 21 The “Godly Prince”...... 27 The “Two Regiments,” the Crown, and Clerical Vestments ...... 37 A Godly “Prince-in-Parliament” Jurisdiction ...... 48

II. The “Godly Prince” ...... 58 Foxe’s Five Epochs and Temporal Millennium ...... 59 A Magisterial Defence under the Pax Romana ...... 66 Emperor Constantine of Christian Antiquity ...... 72 Constantine’s Scriptural Faith ...... 72 A Godly Defence of Christian Liberty ...... 77 His Defence of Godly Discipline ...... 80 John Wycliffe: Godly rule by Scriptural Authority ...... 83

III. Godly Rule in Two “Regiments” ...... 92 “Two Godly Regiments” in the First Millennium ...... 94 “Two “Swords” in the First Millennium ...... 99 A False Church of “Foreign Jurisdiction” ...... 106 “Foreign Jurisdiction” by Papal Excommunication ...... 116

v “Foreign Jurisdiction” by Papal Crusade ...... 120 “Foreign Jurisdiction” by Papal Persecution ...... 124

IV. A Godly “Prince-in-Parliament” Restraint ...... 134 A “Godly” Primitive Parliament ...... 136 “Straungers” to God’s Law ...... 139 A Second Millennium “Prince-in-Parliament” Restraint ...... 145 Godly Rule Foiled: King John and “Foreign Jurisdiction” ...... 148 Godly Rule Revisited: Magna Carta versus “Foreign Jurisdiction” ...... 153 A “Losing and Tying up Again” in the “Reforming Era” ...... 160

V. Conclusion ...... 171

VI. Bibliography ...... 185

vi

LIST OF ABREVIATIONS

Acts and Monuments 1563 - Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church wherein ar comprehended and described the great persecutions and horrible troubles that have been wrought and practised by the Romish prelates, speciallye in this Realme of England and Scotland, from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande, unto the tyme nowe present (1563)

Acts and Monuments 1570 - The Ecclesiastical History, Contaynyng the Actes and Monuments of thyngs passed in euery kynges tyme in this Realme, especially in the principally to be noted, with a full discourse of such persecutions, horrible troubles, the sufferyng of Martrys, and other thinges incident, touchyng aswel the sayd Church of England, as also Scotland, and all other foreine nations, from the primitiue tyme till the reign of K. Henry VIII (1570)

Art. 37 - Article 37 (“Of Civil Magistrates”) of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (Church of England, 1563, 1571).

B.L. - British Library,

E.E.B.O. - Early English Books Online

HE - Eusebius’s Historia Ecclesiastica

STC - Short Title Catalogue

vii CHAPTER ONE:

INTRODUCTION TO FOXE’S 1570 REVISIONS AND ARTICLE 37

This thesis investigates the copious alterations which were made to John Foxe’s second edition of Acts and Monuments (1570), published seven years after his first ecclesiastical history (1563) by a similar title, pertaining to the Elizabethan concept of godly rule.1 The first and second editions of Acts and Monuments were written in support of the new English Protestant establishment which, in the wake of Mary Tudor’s reign (1554-1558), and a generation after the

Henrician reformation (1534), had once again severed ties with . However, the civil magistrate’s role in the church remained highly controversial among both English Catholics and reformist Protestants, so that the first decade of the new queen’s reign was marked by rising political tensions. Yet an effort by some Elizabethan reformers (contemporaries with whom Foxe was personally acquainted) to articulate the role of the civil magistrate, as represented in Article

37 (entitled “Of Civil Magistrates”) of the Thirty-Nine Articles which was sanctioned in convocation (1563) and ratified in parliament (1571), would lead to an explicitly Protestant political theology of “godly” rule.

1 Foxe’s 1563 title is Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church wherein ar comprehended and described the great persecutions and horrible troubles that have been wrought and practised by the Romish prelates, speciallye in this Realme of England and Scotland, from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande, unto the tyme nowe present . . . (1563). Foxe’s 1570 title is The Ecclesiastical History, Contaynyng the Actes and Monuments of thyngs passed in euery kynges tyme in this Realme, especially in the Church of England principally to be noted, with a full discourse of such persecutions, horrible troubles, the sufferyng of Martrys, and other thinges incident, touchyng aswel the sayd Church of England, as also Scotland, and all other foreine nations, from the primitiue tyme till the reign of K. Henry VIII.

1 2

Born in 1517 in Boston, Lincolnshire, Foxe received a bachelor’s degree from Brasenose

College, (1537), and a master’s degree from Magdalen College, Oxford (1543). Upon converting to at Oxford, he resigned his fellowship (1545), married, and moved to

London, where he tutored the children of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (including Thomas

Howard, who became the fourth Duke of Norfolk). In the reign of Edward VI (1548-1553), Foxe was numbered among the first company of deacons to be ordained according to the Protestant rite (1550), and he soon became acquainted with a number of influential London Protestants.

Following the accession of Mary Tudor (1553-1558), Foxe was driven into continental exile along with his new Protestant compatriots, where he served as a proofreader for a Basel publisher with John Bale (whose published work entitled Image of Two Churches offered a similarly binary vision of true and false churches), compiled a Protestant martyrology at the behest of (by whom he also gained access to source material from England), and participated in a dispute at Frankfurt (mainly between Richard Cox and ) over utilization of the Edwardian Prayer Book (whose rites included the use of clerical vestments).

Returning to London after the accession of (1559), Foxe was again commissioned by

Bishop Grindal to write a Protestant ecclesiastical history, which he published in 1563. Having been given access to episcopal registers, state records, and anecdotal accounts of the Marian martyrs, Foxe patterned his 1563 work after the published histories of John Bale, Matthias

Flacius and other Protestant writers. Yet, upon receiving criticism from recusant Catholics who were categorically opposed to the idea of a Protestant state, and aware that English Protestants were themselves divided over the role of the civil magistrate, Foxe wrote a second ecclesiastical history, published in 1570, to which he added over 500 pages of source material. This 2350-page 3 work made significant historiographical provision for an emergent Elizabethan political theology of godly rule, as it had been newly defined in Article 37 (“Of Civil Magistrates”); and soon after finishing the new edition, Foxe’s historical labours were rewarded by the Elizabethan , as

Acts and Monuments 1570 was disseminated by order of convocation (1571) throughout the cathedral churches and deaneries of England.

Foxe’s political theology of “godly” rule, like Article 37’s description of the “godly

Prince” (1563), is made evident in some revisions which he made to this second edition of Acts and Monuments (1570). For the first edition had been written, in league with John Jewel of Salisbury’s answer to the in Apologia Ecclesia Anglicae (1562), to address the Roman Catholic challenge “Where was your church before Luther?” using accounts of papal persecution after the eleventh-century , when Rome began to battle vigorously for the appointment of ecclesiastical leaders (As source material for the medieval persecutions in Acts and Monuments 1563, Foxe incorporated large portions of his 1559 martyrology, Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum, a work of about 700 pages). Yet, confronted with

Roman Catholic criticism of this 1563 history, and reformist Protestant dismay over the queen’s ecclesiastical policy, Foxe’s second edition of Acts and Monuments (1570) would redirect the attention of his Elizabethan readership from the Roman persecutions to a “godly” magisterial defence of the true visible church, as it had existed previously in old England and continental

Europe.

This corresponding shift toward godly rule is immediately discernible in the preamble to Foxe’s dedication to Acts and Monuments 1570, where the epithets of “defendour of the faith” (a

Henrician title) and of “supreme gouernour” who is “next vnder the Lord,” epithets which were 4 used in his 1563 dedicatory address to Queen Elizabeth, are respectively replaced with those of

“defendour of Christes Fayth and ” and of “principall gouernour” who is under “Christ the supreme head” (a more reformed emphasis). The same historiographical shift can also be ascertained in the preamble to his new preface “To the true and faythfull Congregation of

Christes Vniuersall Church,” located on the very first page of his revised ecclesiastical history, where Foxe offers a “protestation or petition of the author” for an “aboundance of peace and tranquilitie,”2 a proposed state of affairs which subsequent alterations to his 1570 narrative reveal to have been accomplished in Christian antiquity under a “godly” Emperor Constantine.

Through voluminous additions to his former 1563 narrative, Foxe thereafter extends the length of

Acts and Monuments from approximately 1827 to 2354 pages in 1570, and including an increase from 60 to 150 woodcuts,3 in a frenetic expansion that would leave relatively few alterations for his subsequent 1576 and 1583 editions.4 Introducing a secondary stratum of “witness-bearers” able to “open the plaine truth of times lying long hid in obscure darknes of antiquitie,” beginning

2 John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, or TAMO (Sheffield: HRI Online Publications, 2011): 1570, pref. 1, 7, April 20, 2017, http//www.johnfoxe.org.

3 Both editions begin with the well-known woodcut image of two churches, one persecuted and one persecuting, overruled by the judgment seat of Christ, but many more woodcuts are added to the second edition. After a dozen new pictorial depictions of papal usurpation of the magistrate’s sword are added to the final unpaginated folios of the first 1570 volume, for example, the second volume begins with a new woodcut image of King Henry VIII, shown as a prominent symbol of the Protestant magistrate.

4 Many fewer changes were made to the 1576 and 1583 editions. But a new 1583 preface entitled “Four considerations geuen out to Christian Protestantes profesours of the Gospell with a briefe exhortation inducing to reformation of life,” for example, laments that the English church, despite its recent “tranquilitie” and “peaceable libertie” under this “virtuous” queen, had remained beleaguered by “worldly” neglect of hearing, reading, and following God’s Word, along with a clamouring after “worldly wealth and promotion” and an “exessiue outrage in pompous apparrell.” Acts and Monuments 1583, 20. 5 with Roman antiquity and Emperor Constantine, Foxe’s second edition thereby sets out to present a historical case for godly magisterial rule.5

Like Article 37’s “godly Prince,” Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570) would elucidate the “godly” magistrate’s role in the ecclesia by appealing to both Scripture and Christian history.

At the forefront of this second edition, Foxe’s 1570 dedication makes mention of recusant

Catholics who had criticized his former work (1563) and who had sought to exploit English ignorance of Scripture and history in order to influence the new political establishment.6 His

1570 dedication does not name any Elizabethan contemporaries (as I will later in this chapter in order to align Foxe with like-minded reformers, like Archbishop Grindal). Yet it does refer backward to “manifolde examples” of the Lord’s work in “preseruing his Church, in ouerthrowyng tyrants,... in relieuyng the godly, in bridelyng the wicked, in losing and tying vp againe of Sathan the disturber of common weales, in punishyng transgressions as well agaynst the first table as the second.” In consideration of these “godly” accomplishments of the past,

Foxe’s 1570 dedication asserts that his newly revised history would assist the queen’s subjects to

“knowe God in his woorkes, and to worke the thyng that is godly: especially to seke vnto the sonne of God for their saluation, and in his fayth onely to finde that they seeke for ...”7 This coherence between the original “fayth of Christ” (or scriptural faith) and godly rule is thereafter made visible throughout the new 1570 narrative, beginning with the political activities of early

5 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 2. stated that John Jewel’s Apologiae and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments could be found next to the Bible in every church within Elizabethan England. John Strype, Annals of the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1824): III, i, 738, December 15, 2017, http// www.hathitrust.org.

6 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 7-9.

7 Ibid., pref. 10 6

Christian magistrates like Emperor Constantine and King Lucius, as I will detail later in this chapter and beyond.8

In the wake of the Vestiarian Controversy (1566), when Archbishop Parker and the Ecclesiastical

Commission had used the Ornaments Rubric (as enshrined in the 1559 Religious Settlement) to deprive thirty-seven gospel ministers of their pulpits for refusing clerical vestments, many of

Foxe’s “godly” compatriots became concerned that the queen’s ecclesiastical policy would halt further advancements of the English reformation. Bishop Grindal, Bishop Jewel, and Bishop

Sandys, for example, all former Marian exiles who had contributed to the writing and ratification of The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563), had already expressed concern at the slow pace of Protestant reform; and now other Elizabethans wondered if the Vestiarian Controversy would not unleash centrifugal forces, either Catholic or Puritan or both, capable of derailing the fledgling

Elizabethan regime. Yet Foxe and the reform-minded Protestant leadership believed that they had recovered in the “godly” magistrate a historical linchpin by which to hold the Elizabethan establishment together—uniting all reformist Protestants, Anglicans and English Catholics under one temporal sword—while motivating civil and ecclesiastical elites toward greater ecclesiastical reform. As ancient prototypes of this “godly” magisterial authority, Emperor Constantine is described by Foxe in Acts and Monuments 1570 as a “meek” and “godly” ruler who collaborated with his bishops for the implementation of a new ecclesiastical policy that included iconoclastic reforms (i.e., under scriptural authority), and furthermore, second-century King Lucius of the

Britons is portrayed as a royal convert to who implemented the advice of Bishop

Eleutherius in establishing a godly “prince-in-parliament” constitutional model.

8 Acts and Monuments 1570, 62, 132, 168. King Lucius, Emperor Constantine and King Ethelbert here accept the “fayth of Christ” or “fayth of hym whych was crucified.” 7

As mentioned, with both Catholic recusants on the right and radical Protestants on the left questioning the legitimacy of the new English establishment, the Elizabethan bishops had themselves recently formulated a more efficacious definition of the magistrate’s role in ecclesiastical affairs. Gathering in convocation in 1563, they had sanctioned a revised doctrinal decree on the “godly Prince,” beholden to scriptural authority, as contained in Article 37 (“Of

Civil Magistrates”) of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563). This revised article also included a new dual description of the magistrate’s and minister’s role in the church—a “two regiments” model, both spiritual and temporal—which had been gaining strength in the broader Protestant reformed community (see Calvin’s Institutes IV.20 below, on page 46 of this chapter), and it included a new affirmation of the magistrate’s prerogative for implementing an ecclesiastical discipline.

In undertaking a comprehensive review of the alterations made to Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570), therefore, the following thesis paper highlights an indirect yet tangible convergence between Foxe’s 1570 historiography of godly rule and this emergent Elizabethan political theology, as expressed and codified by the bishops in Article 37 (“Of Civil

Magistrates”). Previously, the first and second clauses of Edwardian Article 36 (of the 1552

Forty-Two Articles) had merely read: “1. The King of England is Supreme head in earth, next under Christe, of the Church of England and Ireland. 2. The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England. . . .” In Elizabethan Article 37, however (as sanctioned by convocation in 1563 and ratified by parliament in 1571), the first clause was expanded to read:

1. The Queen’s Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and other her Dominions, unto whom the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign Jurisdiction. . . . We give not our Princes the ministering either of God’s 8

Word, or of the Sacraments. . . but that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers. 2. The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England. . . ” (italics mine).9

This revision to Elizabethan Article 37 (“Of Civil Magistrates”) presents three key attributes of the Protestant magistrate which appear relevant to Foxe’s 1570 historiography. First, and of primary importance to his new 1570 ecclesiastical history, is the revised Article’s affirmation that the magistrate’s prerogative is based on what “we see to have been given always to all godly

Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself” (while abandoning the 1552 Edwardian reference to the monarch as the “Supreme head” of the church “nexte under Christe”). This key revision to

Elizabethan Article 37, as I discuss in chapter two below on “The Godly Prince,” corresponds with the magistrate’s “godly” role in the church (accessed through scriptural authority) which

Foxe assigns to “godly” Constantine and his magisterial successors in Acts and Monuments

1570. Second, although the new Elizabethan Article follows its Edwardian predecessor (Article

36 in the 1552 Forty-Two Articles) by rejecting papal jurisdiction, it also offers the extra affirmation (the first of two in the new Elizabethan Article) that the English government, both civil and ecclesiastical, “is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign Jurisdiction” (italics mine), and it describes the temporal function of the civil magistrate (based on the prerogative given to the ancient “godly Prince”) as distinct from the spiritual function of the ecclesiastical minister in Word and Sacrament (I detail the Protestant struggle for ministerial independence from the Crown later in this chapter, beginning on page 39). Below, in my chapter three

9 Gerald Lewis Bray, ed., “The Forty-Two Articles, 1553; The Thirty-Eight Articles, 1563, The Thirty-Nine Articles, 1571,” 284-311, Documents of the English Reformation: 1526-1701 (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1994), 307-08. The Elizabethan Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1563, 1571) were a reaffirmation of the Edwardian Forty- Two Articles (1552), after the latter fell into abeyance under Mary Tudor. A third Elizabethan clause also reads: “The laws of the realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences” (where the 1553 phrase “civil laws” was modified in 1563 to become “laws of the realm”). 9 discussion of “godly rule in two regiments,” I will therefore address how, in league with this open endorsement of a duality of spheres in Article 37, and its supplemental ban on “any foreign

Jurisdiction,” Foxe’s 1570 history now portrays the magisterial regiment as suffering a millennium of decline, once its “godly” constitutional authority had begun to be usurped and coopted by Rome’s “two swords” jurisdiction, both temporal and spiritual (as implemented via papal excommunications, and persecutions). Third, with a new tenet of Article 37 (“Of

Civil Magistrates”) asserting that godly magistrates must “restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil doers,” chapter four below also illustrates Foxe’s new 1570 case for the

“godly” magisterial prerogative to “restrain” the “stubborn and evil-doers,” as well as Rome’s

“foreign Jurisdiction” in the church, through “prince-in-parliament” authority. My discussion of the expanded 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments is therefore trisected into three chapters

(below), in general alignment with the new tenets of Article 37, in order to measure and explicate

Foxe’s historiographical support for the emergent Elizabethan political theology of godly rule.

Foxe and his reform-minded contemporaries had good reason to seek a “godly” political solution to the challenges being posed by the Crown. Adopted as a reform measure by the English bishops in their 1563 convocation (without immediate sanction from the queen), The Thirty-Nine

Articles would be ratified by the 1571 parliament in the aftermath of the Northern Rebellion and

Ridolfi Plot of 1569-71.10 Yet royal assent would be granted only on a fourth reading, and the conservatism of the queen had become increasingly evident in the 1560s as a result of an ornamental cross which remained in her royal chapel (1559), a contrived failure of the Six

10 The Northern Rebellion and Ridolfi Plot (1569-71) sought the release of Mary Queen of the Scots from prison, her marriage to the crypto-Catholic Duke of Norfolk (Foxe’s former patron), and the deposition of Queen Elizabeth in favour of Mary (also a Tudor). Norfolk was executed in 1572, and Mary Queen of the Scots remained incarcerated until her execution in 1587. 10

Articles in convocation (1563), royal stoppage of the Alphabet bills (1566-67) in parliament, which avoided early ratification of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and enforcement of the vestment rule by her Ecclesiastical Commission (led by Archbishop Parker) during the Vestiarian Controversy

(1566).11 As the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis (1570) would, in effect, solidify government support for the Crown by absolving Catholic subjects of their obedience to the usurping

“supreme head,” it became increasing clear that future reform of the Church of England lacked one essential ingredient: royal endorsement.

Passage of The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, 1571) was a unique act of “prince-in-parliament” reform during Elizabeth I’s early reign. Immediately thereafter, during the 1571 parliament, for example, the queen reversed course by halting the corollary ecclesiastical discipline being discussed for ratification, the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (1571). This was an

Edwardian discipline which had been edited by John Foxe and had been presented to parliament by Thomas Norton for the establishment of the third and final mark of reformed Protestantism in

England (Martin Bucer, a prominent Cambridge professor and exile from the Rhineland, had identified the three marks of a true church to be the Word of God preached, the Holy Sacraments administered, and a godly discipline implemented). The queen’s intolerance of such “godly” reform would again be made evident in her sequester of the reformist archbishop Edmund

Grindal (1576) and in his subsequent failure to gain sanction for the Reformatio in the convocation of 1581. Yet, despite these setbacks, Foxe’s revised edition of Acts & Monuments

(1570), as disseminated among the churches of the commonwealth by order of convocation

11 The Six Articles (1563) sought to establish optional use of priestly vestments and congregant kneeling at altars, and the Alphabet bills sought to improve the learning and livings of the . Cf. Claire Cross, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (New , Barnes and Noble, 1969), 58; 86-87. 11

(1571), would continue to reflect a broader Protestant consensus for godly rule by featuring the magistrate’s historic role in the ecclesia in agreement with the revised tenets of Elizabethan

Article 37.12

Modern Scholarship and Methodological Considerations

Foxe’s Modern Legacy

This thesis builds upon the work of who have rehabilitated John Foxe’s legacy over the past half century. Motivated by the Catholic sympathies of the , S. R.

Maitland, a mid-nineteenth-century librarian at , sought to discredit Foxe’s historical scholarship as a work of Protestant partisanship. A century later, however, J. F.

Mozley’s John Foxe and his Book (1940) worked to rehabilitate Foxe’s credibility in the belief that, while he was “temperamentally incapable of writing what is now called scientific history,” he had at least written as one who was “careful not to misstate the facts.” In the 1960s, William

Haller’s Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (1963) and William Lamont’s Godly Rule

(1969) identified Foxe as a harbinger of British millenarianism and the English Civil War (e.g.,

Fifth Monarchists).13 Their assertions were debunked by V. Norskov Olsen in John Foxe and the

12 Despite the high cost of publishing Foxe’s two-volume work, the order of the 1571 Convocation read, “Every Archbishop and bishop shall haue in hys house The holy Bible in the largest volume, as it was lately printed in London, and also that full and perfect history, which is intituled Monumentes of Martyres,” and that these “same bookes” should be displayed in the cathedral. Jesse Lander, “Foxe’s Books of Martyrs: Printing and Popularizing the Acts and Monuments,” in Religion and Culture in England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69. However, Elizabeth Evenden and Tom Freeman also cite a letter from the Privy Council to the primates of Canterbury, York, and London, instructing them to direct their parish churches to obtain a copy of Acts and Monuments. Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman, “Profit, Print and Propaganda: The Elizabethan Privy Council and the 1570 edition of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’” English Historical Review 119, no. 484 (November 2004), 1289-90, citing Borthwick Institute, Institution Act Book II, Part III, fol. 85v.

13 J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and his Book (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1940), 155-56; William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Trinity Press, 1963); William Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics & Religion, 1604-1660 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1969). 12

Elizabethan Church (1973) and Katherine Firth in The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation

Britain, 1530-1645 (1979), both of whom considered a cadre of next-generation reformers

(which included John Napier, Thomas Brightman, and Mead) as the true progenitors of the millenarian Puritan movement.14 Foxe’s reputation as a church historian improved thereafter.

In the 1980s, Warren Wooden’s informative book John Foxe (1982) made only passing mention of William Lamont’s controversial claim that Acts and Monuments had “made the pursuit of the

Millennium respectable and orthodox;” and in the 1990s, Palle J. Olsen would dismiss Lamont, quite deftly, for having misappropriated the term “godly rule” to such an extent that the apocalyptically-minded John Foxe and the liturgically-minded could be together regarded as interlocutors with the Puritan millenarians.15 A. G. Dickens’s The English

Reformation (1964) had already begun to treat Acts and Monuments as a reliable resource within the English intellectual mainstream, as would Warren Wooden by observing that Foxe’s “respect for documentation and habit of including primary sources in his text marks a significant advance in the development of English historiography.” (Wooden also notes that, while the English church in Acts and Monuments 1570 is seen to have a distinct lineage from the apostolic era via

Greek-speaking missionaries and King Lucius, this fell far short of Foxe having equated the

English nation with God’s kingdom.)16

14 V. Norskov Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 99-100; Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 252. Richard Bauckham points to Olsen and Firth’s work in debunking the “elect nation” thesis. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English Reformation (Appleford: Sutton Courtney, 1978), 12-13.

15 Palle J. Olsen, “Was John Foxe a Millenarian?,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60, no. 4 (October 1994): 619-20; Warren Wooden, John Foxe (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), 28, citing Lamont, Godly Rule, 5.

16 A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London: B. T. Batsford,1964); Wooden, Foxe, 22, 35-37. 13

Historians of the past two decades, moreover, have drawn attention to Foxe’s role in establishing a Protestant-Constantinian political model. Thomas Freeman’s doctoral thesis observed Foxe’s extensive citation of Eusebius’s historical works and adoption of a Constantinian political model in the second edition (1570),17 and Pucci reflected on his 1570 edition's utilization of the

Eusebian Constantine rather than the Roman Catholic Constantine, since the latter was purportedly baptized by Sylvester I in exchange for papal jurisdiction of the Western empire. In fact, Pucci believed Foxe used his 1570 ecclesiastical history as a political weapon in the service of his anti-Catholic patrons, much as Lorenzo Valla did in his De falso credita at the time of King Alfonso’s conflict with the pope. Yet, while other magisterial reformers saw

Constantine as an agent of divine providence, having turned back centuries of Roman persecution to establish a true church and state that guaranteed Christian “liberty,” Pucci thinks that Foxe took the extra step of portraying the first Christian emperor as a proto-Protestant iconoclast who “utterly abjured idolatry after his vision” and as a “meeke” British-born prince who deferred ecclesiastical leadership to his early bishops in a “cooperative separation” between church and state.18

Foxe’s historiography has long been celebrated by Whig historians, who likewise saw English

Protestantism growing out of the native soil of late medieval Lollardy and the Tyndale Bible. It was a scholarly tradition which extended from John Foxe in the sixteenth-century to John Strype in the eighteenth-century to A. G. Dickens in the twentieth, and which celebrated Protestantism as a catalyst for human rationality, scientific progress, and religious liberty. It was this national

17 Thomas S. Freeman, “‘Great Searching Out of Bookes and Auctors’: John Foxe as an Ecclesiastical Historian” (PhD diss, Rutgers,1995).

18 Michael S. Pucci, “Reforming Roman Emperors: John Foxe’s Characterization of Constantine in the Acts and Monuments,” in John Foxe: An Historical Perspective, ed. Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 37-39, 41, 50. 14 heritage which S. R. Maitland sought to undermine in the era of the Oxford Movement, and which post-1960s Catholic revisionists, like Christopher Haigh, have since attempted to redraw as an artifice of Tudor absolutism that lacked popular support, at least at the dawn of the English

Reformation. Yet the Whig historiographical tradition continues to find expression in recent days, as John King has answered revisionists by pointing to the successful utilization of the printing presses by early Protestant propagandists and by exhibiting Foxe’s 1563 dedicatory panegyric of the queen as a prime example of this early Protestant zeal.19

Foxe’s modern legacy has also been enhanced by Elizabethan historical scholarship. J. E.

Neale’s Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559-1581 (1953) argued at mid-century that a “Puritan choir” in Parliament had coerced Queen Elizabeth into making concessions in the Religious

Settlement of 1559; but Norman L. Jones’ Faith by Statute (1982) and G. R. Elton’s The

Parliament of England, 1559-1581 (1986) of a generation later countered that the settlement had to be a function of the royal will, directed mostly against the Catholic , because

English Protestants otherwise lacked unanimity (e.g., in the “troubles at Frankfort”).20 Although uncertain as to who within the Privy Council was chiefly responsible, semi-revisionist Patrick

Collinson likewise credited the Crown with the Religious Settlement (1559), yet he took

19 David Loades, Revolution in Religion:The English Reformation, 1530-1570 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), 1-3; John King, Voices of the English Reformation: A Sourcebook (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pref. 4 (for the printing press) and 345-49 (for the reproduction of Foxe’s 1563 preface to Acts and Monuments). Loades cites Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563, 1570) and John Bale’s Image of Both Churches (1545) as examples from the sixteenth-century, T. Fuller’s Church History of Britain (1655) from the seventeenth, and J. Strype’s Ecclesiastical Memorials (1720) from the eighteenth. In recent decades, A. G. Dickens's attention to a pre-Reformation anticlericalism earns Foxe the designation of “heir to the Anglican tradition” (The English Reformation, 2).

20 J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1551-1589 (London: Cape, 1953); Norman L. Jones Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion (London: Royal Historical Society, 1982); G. R. Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559-1581 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), 43. 15 exception to Jones’s view that the queen was “as Protestant as Jewel, Grindal, or Cox.”21

Instead, in view of the silver cross in her royal chapel, her disfavour for married clergy (e.g.,

Archbishop Parker’s wife), and her “unusually negative prejudice against the preaching ministry,” Collinson labelled Elizabeth “an odd sort of Protestant.”22 Believing that the

Ornaments Rubric was “almost certainly” attributable to the queen, Claire Cross similarly emphasizes that Elizabeth had maintained an exclusively royal jurisdiction over ecclesiastical affairs in order “to stop further national reform of the church in parliament” (e.g., the Reformatio

Legum Ecclesiasticarum) and she recognizes that the Vestiarian Controversy “let loose the pent- up resentment of the radicals at the tardy process of reformation in England.”23 Yet, based on the queen’s “Book of Devotions,” Susan Doran affirms that the queen “stood firmly on the

Protestant side of the confessional divide” while maintaining a royal prerogative in “matters indifferent.”24

Aware of Foxe’s interlocution with the reformist party, especially in his opposition to the queen’s

Ecclesiastical Commission over the vestment rule, Susan Walsham, Carole Levin, and Thomas

Freeman all recognize in the church historian a certain proclivity to offer “godly” scriptural counsel related to Elizabeth I’s reign. In fact, Walsham describes Acts and Monuments 1570 as a

“Trojan Horse” of prescriptions on how this Protestant “Deborah” might govern like a second

Constantine, and she recognizes an air of covenantal conditionality which pervaded the speeches

21 Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 39-41, 109, citing Jones, Faith by Statute, 9.

22 Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 114; quoted in Susan Doran, "Elizabeth I’s Religion: The Evidence of Her Letters," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51, no. 4 (October, 2000), 699-700.

23 Cross, 73, 18, 48.

24 Doran, 716. 16 and sermons of the Elizabethan era. She also quotes Anne McLaren’s statement that the

“prophetic rhetoric” surrounding Deborah was “always double-edged,” both legitimizing the

English Protestant monarch and imposing certain “scriptural constructs” upon her.25 Levin likewise observes that Foxe’s second history (1570) presented some Erasmian-style exhortations to the “queen and the people about their mutual duties and obligations,” through both “praising and warning;” and he notes an example in Foxe’s commendation of the young captive princess for taking “little delight in . . . gay apparel, rich attire, and precious jewels,” even though

Elizabeth had long since dressed in royal splendor among her highly fashionable courtiers.26 In contrast with the quite untrammeled praise of Queen Elizabeth in his 1563 dedicatory preface,

Freeman observes the more suggestive rhetoric that was subsequently employed in his 1570 dedication, which praised, for example, the “provident zeal, full of solicitude, you have, minding

(speedily I trust) to furnish all quarters and countries of this your realm with the voice of Christ’s gospel and faithful preaching of his word.” Rather than continuing to “whitewash her conformity,” Freeman believes that changing circumstances in the 1560s (i.e., the Vestiarian

Controversy) had led the author of Acts and Monuments 1570 to become “implicitly critical” of the queen’s quasi-Catholic conformity and her failure to “purge” the church of “superstitious

25 Alexandra Walsham, “‘A Very Deborah?’ The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch,” in The Myth of Elizabeth, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman, 143-68 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 147, 149. Walsham also notes Bishop R. Curteys of Chichester’s 1575 Lent sermon in the royal chapel, for example, applauding Elizabeth's brother Edward as a Joshua who led his people into the Promised Land and the Queen herself as a “gracious Deborah” (147-48).

26 Carole Levin, “John Foxe and the Responsibilities of Queenship,” Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 113, 128. Levin observes that Alymer’s A Harborowe for faithfull and trewe subiects (1559) and Jewel’s A defense of the Apologie of the Church of England (1567) had likewise refuted Knox’s position on female rule with positive examples of female virtue (117). 17 abuses.”27 Freeman even states that the “garments, vestures, gestures and colours” mentioned in

Foxe’s third 1570 preface were “probably directed as much at the English Church as the Roman

Catholic,” noting that his second edition (1570) had altered Hooper’s refusal of vestments from the “old bishops” to that of “popish bishops” (with “popishe attire” added in the marginalia), and that it had included a new record of John Roger’s refusal of clerical vestments. In contrast with the “praise of Elizabeth’s clemency, learning and virtue which had introduced her imprisonment in the first edition,” Freeman contends, Foxe’s second edition purposefully juxtaposed the young captive princess’s ambivalent response to Mary’s Catholicism with the steadfast conviction of members of her own household, namely Horneby and Sandes, who preferred to suffer imprisonment and exile rather than accept the Roman mass.28

In V. Norskov Olsen’s John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (1973), Foxe is numbered among magisterial reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer rather than with the new generation of radical reformers, like Napier, Brightman, and Mead, who were willing to abandon Constantine’s visible church.29 Because of his steadfast loyalty to the Protestant establishment, John Foxe became estranged from the more radical Puritan-Presbyterian faction of his day, a fact which is evidenced in his letter to Bishop Roger, written after the 1581 expulsion of his son

Samuel from Magdalen College, in which he referred to the group as “fractious ”:

27 Evenden and Freeman, “Print, Profit and Propaganda,” 1294, referring to Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 10; Thomas S. Freeman, “‘As True a Subiect being Prysoner’: John Foxe’s Notes on the Imprisonment of Princess Elizabeth, 1554-55,” English Historical Review 117 (2002), 110-11.

28 Freeman, “Norton, Foxe and the Parliament of 1571,” Parliamentary History 16, pt. 2 (1997) 131; 135-36; Freeman, “Providence and Prescription: The Account of Elizabeth in Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’” in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 39-40, referring to Acts and Monuments 1570, 1715; Walsham, “Deborah,” 146-47. John King likewise observes that Princess Elizabeth took Mass throughout Mary I’s reign. King, “Fiction and Fact in Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs,'” in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. D. M. Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 27, 31.

29 V. Norskov Olsen, 71, 36. 18

If I were a man to rage with them against bishops and archbishops, they would have never sharpened their arrows against me. They hate me because I prefer to follow moderation and public tranquility. In this matter you bishops are concerned as well as I. My private wrongs I can bear; it is the church’s danger that moves me. This kind of men, if they gather strength, will throw all into confusion. They are worse than the old monks, and would reduce all to Judaean servitude.30

The year of this defence of his son at Magdalen was also the year that Foxe stood in opposition to the Protestant condemnation of the Jesuit Campion as a traitor. Olsen thus believes that Foxe exhibited a “middle way” Protestantism, linked to tolerant Erasmian humanism and anticlericalism (like Erasmus, Foxe had worked for Oporinus at Basel), so that he may be described as a “mirror of Elizabethan Anglican Puritanism” in support of an English monarchy, episcopate, and parliament.31

Methodological Considerations

With a systematic comparison and analysis of the 1563 and 1570 editions, this thesis will investigate the textual revisions made to Acts and Monuments’ second edition, during the 1560s decade of political tension, that both augment and correspond with the emergent political theology of godly rule expressed in Elizabethan Article 37 (“Of Civil Magistrates”). Foxe’s

1570 textual revisions represent an increase of over five hundred pages (from approximately

1,827 to 2,354 pages), an aggregate expansion which I have surveyed using The Unabridged

Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011)—a scholarly project directed by Mark Greengrass and David Loades in association with the Humanities

Research Institute of the University of Sheffield—in the aim of facilitating this comparative

30 Mozley, 111-12.

31 V. Norskov Olsen, 5, 16. 19 explication of the 1563 and 1570 texts.32 Although Foxe did not invent (except in a few isolated cases) the anecdotes, narratives, sermons, letters, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, examinations, religious disputations, parliamentary acts, and royal proclamations that were added to the second edition, he nonetheless exercised the privilege of editorial selectivity, while amending, abridging, and editing sources to facilitate his own historiographical purposes. Observing from Foxe’s own

1570 editorial notes how “a circle, an asterisk, a triangle, and a pointing finger” were used to indicate locations within the first edition where London printer John Day would add new materials to the second edition, Tom Freeman notes “the remarkable degree of personal editorial control Foxe exercised over these revisions and, by inference, over the entire text of Acts and

Monuments.”33 Foxe’s expanded second edition (1570) thus exhibits a plethora of new

“witnesses” and “monuments,” especially in the first millennium of ecclesiastical history, using large blocks of new source material that were absent from the first edition (1563). In addition, along with overlapping and parallel text interpolated into the five-hundred-year history since the eleventh-century Investiture Controversy, the second edition makes prolific use of new marginal notes, narrative interpretations, and other editorial “glosses” (patristic citations, critical analyses, etc.) to enhance its new historiographical aims (e.g., related to “godly rule”). Joseph Puterburgh speaks of such marginalia and textual commentary as an “intersection of text and history” that functions to “dramatize the dialectical relationship” between the reader and the author, and Ryan

Neztley asserts that phrases like “gentle reader” served to place Foxe, as editor, within the role of a “well-meaning collaborator, not a dissenting polemic voice,” in order to graciously “co-opt” his

32 The TAMO online edition features an 1,827-page 1563 edition and a 2,354-page 1570 edition. But in Foxe’s original pagination, showcased in brackets, the 1563 history ends with a blank page immediately following page number 1741, and the 1570 edition ends with the final page number 2315.

33 Freeman, “As True a Subiect,” 105. 20 early modern readership.”34 Like ancient Eusebius’s admission that his Ecclesiastical History was a compilation of earlier sources, sixteenth-century Foxe acknowledges his dependence upon ancient and medieval sources as a “compiler” rather than an “author,”35 while striving to reveal to his Elizabethan contemporaries that the “godly” magistrate possessed the keys to ecclesiastical reform.

In view of Foxe’s multifaceted approach, this paper combines a textual comparison and comprehensive analysis of his 1563 and 1570 texts with modern scholarship to measure the degree to which Foxe’s 1570 historiography comports with contemporaneous Protestant challenges to the queen’s ecclesiastical policy and the emergent political theology of godly rule.

As mentioned, I have utilized the revised definition of godly rule in Article 37 (“Of Civil

Magistrates”) to explicate Foxe’s 1570 historiography within the next three chapters bearing the titles of “The Godly Prince” (under scriptural authority from Christian antiquity), “Godly Rule in

Two ‘Regiments’” (a spiritual and temporal duality independent of Rome’s “foreign

Jurisdiction”), and “A Godly ‘Prince-in-parliament’ Restraint” (a godly legislative prerogative to oppose any “evil-doers” or advocates of “foreign Jurisdiction”). Within each chapter, I have also arranged my topical analysis of Foxe’s new source material in general accord with his five-step chronology (i.e., the “suffering,” “flourishing,” “declining,” “loosing of Sathan,” and

“reforming” times, as described at the beginning of chapter 2 below) to retain a measure of

34 Joseph Puterbaugh, “‘Truth Hath the Victory’: Dialogue and Disputation in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments,” Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue, ed. Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-Francois Vallee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 151; Ryan Neztley, “The End of Reading: The Practice and Possibility of Reading Foxe’s Actes and Monuments,” English Literary History 73 (2006), 206; 209.

35 Acts and Monuments 1570, 26; The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius Pamphilus, Transl. Christian Frederick Cruse (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1998), 14 (HE I.1). 21 structural clarity in identifying and delineating his 1570 historiographical objectives related to godly rule.

Historical Context

John Foxe and the Second Edition

The political theology of godly rule, as represented in Acts and Monuments’ second edition, was forged from John Foxe’s experience of persecution and exile as an English Protestant. Having resigned his fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, because of his Protestant leanings in 1545,

Foxe experienced a period of financial desperation before becoming a tutor to the children of the recently executed Earl of Surrey at the Mountjoy house in London. At the time of Mary’s accession in July, 1553, many of his Protestant associates were suddenly driven into exile to

Basel, Frankfort, Strasbourg, and other Rhenish cities as enemies of the new Roman Catholic government.36 Many of these Marian exiles would later return to hold prominent ecclesiastical posts in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. In early 1554, Foxe himself fled under threat of arrest to

Strasbourg, where he compiled his Protestant martyrology Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum (1554). A year later, perhaps as a harbinger of the schism over royal authority as attested by the anonymous author of A Brief Discourse of the Troubles Begun at Frankfort

(1574), he also became embroiled in a dispute over Prayer Book reform at Frankfurt. It was

36 Devorah Greenberg notes that Foxe was of a plebian background but able to maintain a fellowship at Oxford for two years due to the goodwill of the headmaster of Brasenose College and some temporary financial support from several citizens. Devorah Greenberg, “Community of the Texts: Producing the First and Second Editions of Acts and Monuments,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 3 (Fall 2005), 698. His departure from the university may have been related to the requirement for clerical celibacy, since Oxford fellows were instructed to take priestly orders within one year of completing their master’s degrees. After resigning his fellowship, his son ’s memoirs record that Foxe had been sitting on the steps of St. Paul’s, with “his countenance thin, and eyes hollow, after the gastful manner of dying men,” when a stranger approached to offer him money and predict a rapid turn of fortune. Only a few days later, Simeon reports, he was invited by the duchess of Surrey to tutor the children of the Earl of Sussex. Simeon Foxe, “The Life of Mr John Foxe,” Landsdowne 388, sig. C1v; quoted in Wooden, 3-4. 22 during this controversy that Jean Calvin famously replied (on January, 20 1555) to John Knox and (both of whom were destined to become influential radical reformers after joining Calvin’s church at Geneva), saying, “I cannot tell what they mean which so greatly delight in the leavings of Popish dregs.”37

At Frankfurt, Foxe assisted Knox, Whittingham, and the other English reformers in drafting The

Forme of Prayers and Ministrations (1555), a compromise liturgy that avoided clerical vestments and other ornaments. Yet, once the charge of treason was levelled at John Knox by

King Edward VI’s former tutor, Richard Cox, Foxe took leave to Basel (not to Geneva with

Knox and the more radical reformers) to work with Edmund Grindal on an expanded 700-page martyrology entitled Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum (Basel, 1559). Foxe there joined with John

Bale as a proofreader, living with other Marian exiles in the former monastery of Klarakloster; and it was during this period that his “apocalyptic comedy” Christus Triumphans (1556) was published.38 At Klarakloster, Foxe may have also proofread Matthias Flacius’s Catalogus

37 James Heron, A Short History of Puritanism: A Handbook for Guilds and Bible Classes (: T & T Clarke, 1908), 72-75. Jean Calvin’s letter continues by saying, “They love the things whereunto they are accustomed. First of all, this is a thing both trifling and childish. Furthermore, this new Order far differeth from a Change.” But the letter leaves open the possibility of incremental reform by stating the discipline was not overtly “impious.” William Whittingham, A Brief Discourse of the Troubles Began at Frankfort, 1554-58 A.D. (London: Elliott Stock, 1908), 50-51. John Knox’s Book of Common Order also avoided clerical vestments, and the civil magistrates of Geneva and Basel both permitted reformed disciplines.

38 Commenarii rerum (Strasbourg, 1554) was dedicated to the leader of the German Protestant laity, Duke Christopher of Württemberg, and Rerum in Ecclesia (Basel, 1559) was dedicated to the Duke of Norfolk, whom he tutored at Mountjoy, in an effort to convert him to the Protestant cause. His Basel employer Oporinus also published S. Castellion’s De haereticis an sint persequendi (1559) that year, an early Protestant treatise on religious toleration in reply to the burning of Michael Severtus at Geneva. John Foxe became well acquainted with John Bale at Mountjoy and Klarakloster. Wooden, 6-9; John N. King, Foxe’s "Book of Martyrs" and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 76-77. 23

Testium Veritatis or Catalogue of Witnesses to the Truth (Basel, 1556), which, like Acts and

Monuments, represented the Waldensians, Hussites, and Lutherans as the true historic church.39

Foxe returned to England after Elizabeth I’s accession (1559), but rather than taking on a ministerial role, he continued proofreading and editing, this time for the London publisher John

Day on Aldersgate Street. He was also commissioned in support of the new Protestant establishment by Bishop Grindal to compile a first edition of Acts and Monuments (1563), an expansion of his former Latin-language into an English-language ecclesiastical history. This expansion featured a dichotomous title page image of true and false churches under the judgment seat of Christ, further accounts of papal persecution since the Investiture

Controversy, and descriptions of the civil magistrate’s role in ecclesiastical affairs, along with dedicatory praise for Queen Elizabeth.40 The Marian bishops in the House of Lords had refused the Oath of Supremacy (1559), and the papal bull Cum ex apostolatus officio (1559) had declared all English officials illegitimate who would cooperate with the new heretical establishment. Yet before the papal bull of excommunication Regnans in Excelsis (1570) had turned English

Catholic works into “traytorous bookes and writnges,” John Jewel’s Apologia ecclesiae anglicanae (1562) would challenge the recusants to prove their case against English

Protestantism from Scripture and Christian antiquity.41 This invited a response from Thomas

39 Matthias Flacius Illyricus had left his Tubingen teaching post for the free city of Magdeburg, from whence he wrote both Catalogus (Basel, 1556) and Ecclesiasticae Historiae or Magdeburg Centuries (Basel, 1561-74) which represented the Protestant Reformation as a revival of the true church of apostolic and Christian antiquity. V. Norskov Olsen, 20-21; and Euan Cameron,"Medieval Heretics as Protestant Martyrs,” in Martyrs and Martyrologies: Papers Read at the 1992 Summer Meeting and the 1993 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 198-99.

40 Although ordained by Bishop Grindal in 1560, John Foxe received no until 1563 and lived in a London house provided to him by his patron, the Duke of Norfolk. Wooden, 10-12.

41 See Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London: Scolar Press, 1977), 24. Also Carl S. Meyer, Elizabeth I and the Religious Settlement of 1559 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1960), 124. 24

Harding in A Confutation of a booke intitulated An Apology, which contained a few paragraphs addressed to Foxe denouncing the “huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs,” and from Thomas

Stapleton’s English of ’s Ecclesiastica Historia (1565), which referred to the

“misse informations of a [few] for displacing the auncient and right Christen faith” and marked sixth-century Roman missionary Augustine as the founder of English Catholicism.42 Another

Catholic response was offered in Nicholas Harpsfield’s Dialogi Sex (, 1566), written under the pseudonym of Alan from the , which began with criticism of

Flacius’s Magdeburg Centuries (1559-74) but also criticized Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563) in its final chapter. Here it counterposed that Foxe’s so-called “” John Wycliffe had died peacefully in his bed, and that his prominent Wycliffite benefactor, Lord Cobham (or John

Oldcastle, d. 1417), had been a condemned traitor.43

Acts and Monuments' first edition (1563) had sought to de-legitimize Rome’s former jurisdiction in England due to its persecutions of Wycliffites and English Protestants. So, although Foxe’s

1559 martyrology Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum had displayed Lord Cobham in a woodcut image bearing a cross on his shield as a valiant medieval knight, for example, his 1563 history showed

Cobham suffering the double punishment of hanging and burning as a naked martyr for heresy and treason (see Figure 1 below on page 26).44 Not unlike the Catholic critics of the 1560s,

42 Thomas Harding’s A Confutation of a Booke Intitulated an Apologie of the Church of England, 1565 (STC 12762), sig. 14r., quoted in V. Norskov Olsen, 8; Bede’s History of the Churche of Englande, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565) Sig 2, verso 3., and its appendix entitled A Fortress of the Faith, as cited in W. B. Patterson, “The Recusant View of the English Past,” 247-62, The Materials, Sources, and Methods of Ecclesiastical History. Papers Read at the Twelfth Summer Meeting and Thirteenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975), 256-57 (Stapleton’s works were published from exile in Louvain).

43 Wooden, 30-31.

44 Acts and Monuments 1563, 329; Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram, “The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments,” John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Scholarly Press, 1997), 81-83. 25 modern scholars have noted an unresolved tension between Foxe’s record of Protestant martyrdoms and his historiography in support of an established Protestant church. As Jane Facey states, Acts and Monuments exhibits the “problematic relations between the true church of gathered believers and the English nation . . . ,” and Peter Lake observes that “English

Protestantism . . . [was] an ideology not well suited . . . for a genuinely national church.”45 Yet a more cogent portrayal of the civil magistrate’s role was attempted in Acts and Monuments’ second edition, in which, while acknowledging recusant Catholic critics as “stingyng waspes and buszyng drones,” Foxe defended his 1563 historiography by saying, “I wrote no such book bearing the title of the ‘Book of Martyrs,” and by claiming to address “many other matters.” His second history also offered a direct response to Cope’s (Harpsfield’s) diminution of Cobham’s

(Oldcastle’s) legacy by defining a martyr as a faithful “witnesse bearer” and by offering evidence that Cobham was not regarded as a traitor by his parliamentary fellows.46 As stated in his first preface, Foxe makes it a key purpose of his 1570 edition to correct the “partiall dealing and corrupt handling” of history by medieval Catholic writers; but a more careful comparison and analysis of the first and second editions of Acts and Monuments also indicates that Foxe was resolved to defend and legitimize the scattered flock of true believers, long persecuted under

45 Jane Facey, “John Foxe and the Defense of the English Church,” and Peter Lake, “Presbyterianism, The Idea of a National Church and the Argument from Divine Right,” in Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England, ed. Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 162; 193.

46 Acts and Monuments 1570, 1, 715, 698, 783. The 1563 woodcut of Lord Cobham’s hanging and burning is also carried forwarded to the 1570 edition (783). 26 medieval Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction,” via a new historiographical emphasis on godly rule (in parallel with the “godly” magistrate of Article 37).47

Figure 1 – The Martyrdom of Lord Cobham in A&M (1563 & 1570)

47 Ibid., pref. 2. Patrick Collinson reflects on the tension in Foxe’s work between the suffering scattered flock and the gainfully established Erastian hierarchy, using as a point of reference the new 1570 prefatory figure of Elizabeth seated within the letter “C” of Christ (rather than in the “C” of Constantine, as in 1563). But Collinson believes that these inconsistencies and ambiguities were characteristic of this period of rapid transition to a national church and that Foxe’s sermons at St. Paul’s reflected a mainstream “single covenant” message to a mixed congregation by which the “exclusionary message” delivered to the “elect” was mixed with an “inclusionary message to all the rest” (Collinson, “John Foxe and National Consciousness,” John Foxe and his World, ed. Christopher Highley and John N. King [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002]: 26-28). 27

The Godly Prince

Acts and Monuments 1570 signals this shift of sentiment toward godly rule with the new dedicatory titles of “principall gouernour” under “Christ the supreme head” and “defendour of

Christes Fayth and Gospel” (in lieu of the former titles of “supreme gouernour” under “the

Lorde” and “defendour of the faith” which were used, respectively, in his 1563 dedication), and by offering redolent praise (in the final paragraphs of the same 1570 dedication) for the queen’s

“zeale full of solicitude . . . (speedily I trust) to furnish all quarters” of her realm with “the voice of Christes Gospell.”48 The Elizabethan compromise has been called “an ambiguous fusion of

Protestant theology and Catholic ritual,” but by the time of Foxe’s second ecclesiastical history

(1570), the partial reformation favoured by the Crown had become unacceptable to Protestant

“precisionists” (or purists) desirous of a new reformed discipline.49 Elizabethans generally regarded the queen’s accession to be an act of divine providence, but due to the Ornaments

Rubric enshrined within the 1559 Religious Settlement, many English Protestants had become preoccupied with what they regarded as the “rags of Rome” or “dregs of popery.” Loyal to

Christ as the “Head of the Church” (as suggested in the preamble to Foxe’s 1570 dedication), these reform-minded Protestants did not consider themselves bound to outward obedience to the

Crown in so far as the law of God was being violated. The Erastian party loyal to the queen, on the other hand, noted that the Act of Supremacy (1559) within the Religious Settlement had required allegiance “to the Supreme Governor of the realm” and outward compliance with the

48 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 7, 10; Cf. 1563, pref. 5.

49 King, Voices of the English Reformation, 5. 28

“rites, jurisdictions and pre-eminence pertaining to the imperial Crown.”50 These English royalists were supported by the cuius regio, euis religio (one king, one religion) model of the

Holy Roman Empire, as established at the Peace of Augsburg (1555), and by Anglican aspirations for Catholic-Protestant unity within a free general council. Yet when hopes for a

Catholic-Protestant compromise were extinguished by the reconvening of the council of Trent in

January of 1563, signaling that Rome would remain the arbiter of scriptural and ecclesiastical authority within the empire, a contingent of English bishops (with twelve of the nineteen bishops having suffered exile under Mary Tudor) sought an independent pathway to Protestant reform via the Thirty-Nine Articles (including the “godly” magistrate of Article 37).51

Foxe’s 1570 dedicatory use of the title “principall gouernour” under Christ the “supreme Head” therefore corresponds with a rising tide of “godly” reformed doctrine in the Elizabethan church, as manifest in the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, 1571). Article 37 likewise avoided the royal title of “Supreme Governor” in defining the “godly” magistrate, for example, even though the title of

“Supreme Governor” had recently been established in the Act of Supremacy (1559) and was itself a diminution of the royal title of “Supreme Head” in Edwardian Article 36. The revised

Elizabethan Articles also sanctioned clerical marriage in Article 32, reiterated scriptural authority in Articles 6 and 7, and expounded the interrelationship of faith and godliness in Articles 11 and

50 Quotations from the Act of Supremacy are derived from Thomas Kaufmann, “Elizabethan Settlement and the Religious Peace of Augsburg,” Sister : The Reformations in Germany and in England: Symposium on the Occasion of the 450th Anniversary of the Elizabethan Settlement, Sept 23rd-26th, 2009, ed. Dorothea Wendebourg (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 341.

51 Hirofumi Horie, “The Lutheran Influence on the Elizabethan Settlement, 1558-1563,” The Historical Journal 34, no. 3 (1991): 528-29, 533. With the reconvening of Trent under papal rather than scriptural authority, the English sought an alliance with the Lutheran princes, and the imprecatory Article 29 on the Lord’s Supper was omitted from the Thirty-Nine Articles until unity with the Lutherans became untenable. Believing that Protestants had been “utterly excluded” from participation at the council of Trent, Jewel cites the council as the “chief reason” for writing his Apologia (John Jewel, Apology of the Church of England [1563], trans. Thomas Cheyne [London, 1719], 13). 29

12.52 Foxe’s Sermon on Christ Crucified (1570) at St. Paul’s cathedral would similarly couple faith with godliness in a “golden chaine of our saluation” which had its “first beginning with

Christ,” declaring that from beginning “commeth faith; faith bringeth reconciliation, or iustification; with it commeth regeneration; after which ensueth new obedience, or mortification, with acception of good workes.” This rising tide of “godly” reform was also advanced by the

Geneva Bible (1560), which exhibited marginal notations that were replete with allusions to church discipline (signaling the need for “godly” reform based on scriptural authority), and which made prefatory use of Old Testament passages to exhort the new Protestant queen to

“build up the temple” in the hope that “God should bring to pass some wonderful work by your grace to the universal comfort of his Church.”53 The Crown had already signaled its opposition to further reform (e.g., clerical vestments), but this correlation of scriptural faith with godly discipline appears yet again in Foxe’s dedication to Acts and Monuments 1570, where he proposes that the queen’s subjects would “work the thing that is godly” by means of “hys fayth onely… and in no other meanes” (italics mine). As a further boon to godly reform, knowing that works like the Geneva Bible were being published beyond the reach of the queen’s censors (in

52 Everett Emerson says that The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) were “fully acceptable in doctrine to the evangelical, radical wing.” Emerson, English Puritanism from to John Milton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968), 10. For example, the revised Article 11 explicitly touts sola fide doctrine by saying, “We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works and deservings. . . ,” but a new Article 12 refers to “the fruits of faith” which “follow after justification” and which are “pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith, in so much that by them a lively faith may be.” Bray, Documents, 291-92. Elizabethan Article 6 of 1563 (“Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation”) states that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." Article 6 largely replicates the Edwardian 1552 version but adds a list of the canonical books. A protracted Article 7 (“Of the Old Testament”) summarizes the omitted Edwardian Article 19 on the relevance of the old moral law (Bray, 287-89).

53 John Foxe, “De Christo crucifixo or A Sermon of Christ Crucified, preached at Paule’s Crosse the Fryday before Easter, commonly called Good fryday,” in The English Sermons of John Foxe (Delmar, NY: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints,1978), 15; “The Preface to the Geneva Bible, 1560,” Bray, Documents, 355-60. The "Preface to the Queen" in the Geneva Bible recalls many “domestical enemies, as false Prophetes, craftie worldlings, faint heart soldiers, and oppressors of their brethren,” who now beset Zerubbabel (Bray, 356). 30 the Low Countries), Foxe’s 1570 edition even utilizes a record of Constantine’s patronage of

Holy Scripture to openly critique the inferior patronage of “Princes rayning in these our printing dayes.” This after comparing, earlier in his second edition, the fifteenth-century moveable press which disseminated the gospel of Christ into the vernacular language with the “gift of tongues” at Pentecost, where a new subtitle reads: “The benefite and inuention of Printyng.”54

While the Religious Settlement of 1559 had afforded a degree of sovereignty to the Crown in ecclesiastical matters (i.e., Act of Supremacy and Ornaments Rubric), Elizabethan Article 37 had pronounced a canonical limitation on the temporal sword based on that which had been “given always to all godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself.” It was a “godly” appeal to scriptural authority that was consistent with the aspirations of a number of English reformers who sought a new ecclesiastical discipline. For instance, Bishop Jewel of Salisbury’s letter to

Peter Martyr of November 16, 1559, stated: “The doctrine is everywhere most pure; but as to ceremonies and maskings, there is too much foolery. That little silver cross, of ill-omened origin, still maintains its place in the Queen’s chapel. Wretched me! this thing will soon be drawn into a precedent. . . .” Bishop had acknowledged the same royal indiscretion in a letter to Peter Martyr on April 1, 1560, while promising that “popish vestments” would soon fade away.55 However, failure of the Six Articles (1563) in convocation by a vote of 58 to 59 would expose the Crown’s determination to retain extra-scriptural rites and ceremonies such as clerical

54 Acts and Monuments 1570, 10, 858, 156. The Geneva Bible was printed on the continent until 1570. The English printing industry experienced a slow rise under the watchful eye of the Crown, which had been granted the power to censure “heretical” books in Article 51 of the 1559 Religious Settlement, so that English booksellers were content to import their books from the continent. Cf. Julian Roberts, “Biographical Aspects of John Foxe,” John Foxe and the English Reformation, 38-40.

55 The Zurich Letters, comprising the correspondence of several English bishops and others, with some of the Helvetian Reformers, during the early part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Hastings Robinson, ed. and trans. (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1842-47), I:54, 74, December 18, 2017, http://www.hathitrust.org. 31 vestments, baptismal signings, kneeling in communion, musical instruments, and days and festivals; and in demanding ministerial compliance with the vestments rule, Archbishop Parker’s

Advertisements (1566) would exhibit a willingness to deprive any clergy who refused submission to Crown and Canterbury.56

The struggle between the Crown and the “godly” Protestant faction would continue, in the wake of the Vestiarian Controversy, with Archbishop Parker’s observation that Bishop Grindal was not

“resolute and severe enough for the government of London.” (The former Marian exile was thus removed from the London see to the archdiocese of York, from the epicentre of Puritanism to that of English Catholicism in 1570.) And having been appointed to the of Canterbury at the death of Archbishop Parker in 1575, the reform-minded Grindal was soon sequestered to

Lambeth palace for refusing the queen’s order to halt the “prophesyings,” which were local training grounds for Protestant preachers.57 For consistent with the rising tide of godly reform

(having himself taken a prominent role in revising the 1553 Articles of Religion), the new archbishop’s “letter to the queen” had recommended that Elizabeth restrain herself in

“ecclesiastical matters which touch religion, or the doctrine and discipline of the church . . . according to the example of all godly Christian emperors and princes of all ages.”58 In this

56 Cf. Heron, 88-90, 98-99. Archbishop Parker’s demand on January 25, 1566, for ministerial compliance with the vestments rule, prayer book ceremonies, and Thirty-Nine Articles was publicized under the title Advertisements partly for due order in the public administration of common prayers and usinge the holy Sacramentes, and partly for the apparrell of all persons ecclesiasticall, by vertue of the Queenes maiesties letters commanding the same (1566), STC 10056.

57 , “Grindal, Edmund,” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3, ed. Leslie Stephen (New York: MacMillan & Co., 1885), 263.

58 “Letter to the Queen,” Dec. 20, 1576, The Remains of Edmund Grindal, D.D., ed. William Nicholson (Cambridge: University Press, 1843), 387. Archbishop Grindal’s “letter to the queen” instructs Elizabeth on her role as Supreme Governor by calling this “the antichristian voice of the pope, sic volo, sic jubeo; stet pro ratione voluntas” (“So I will have it; so I command, let my will stand for a reason”), without deference to the judgment seat of Christ. Remains, p 389; see also Cross, 173 (doc. 25). 32

“godly” reiteration of Article 37 (“Of Civil Magistrates”), Archbishop Grindal had sought to belie the notion that England’s royal sovereign could simply ignore scriptural and constitutional precedent.

Like Grindal’s “letter to the queen,” Foxe’s second ecclesiastical history (1570), having characterized Emperor Constantine as an archetypical “godly Prince” worthy of emulation by contemporary princes, reflected this Protestant yearning to return to an ancient and scriptural standard of “godly” rule. In the midst of this growing controversy with the Crown over “godly” reform, the preamble to Foxe’s first 1570 preface “to the true and faithful congregation” immediately called for “peace and tranquilitie” in the English nation in preparation for “the spedy commyng of Christ the spouse, to make an ende of all mortall miserie.” In the tradition of his mentor John Bale, whose preface to ’s A faithful admonition of a certain true blamed English magistrates under Mary Tudor for an ungodly lack of repentance and true obedience, Book I of Acts and Monuments 1570 then shows Constantine, on his march toward

Milvian Bridge, being converted to a “knowledge and fayth” of Christ for the salvation “of al the world” that indeed results in a thousand years of “peace and tranquilitie” in Christendom (see also chapter two below). This “godly beginning of good Constantine” is also seen facilitated by an assembly of “wise men” at Milan, who enact the landmark constitutional settlement, known as the Edict of Toleration (312), which is portrayed by Foxe as a providential “fulfilment” of the

Biblical prophecy of the millennium.59 As a strong historical corollary to Article 37’s “godly

Prince,” Emperor Constantine is thus seen by Foxe and his 1570 Elizabethan readers to have inaugurated a temporal millennium to complement the spiritual millennium begun by Christ.

59 Acts and Monuments 1570, 132-33, 26-27, 32. 33

Constantine’s temporal millennium was presented to Foxe’s 1570 readers within a broader spectrum of competing Christian eschatologies. Focused on the spiritual sphere more than the temporal sphere, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis had begun church history with the Fall of man, and sixteenth-century Protestants had inculcated the catholic doctrine of “inaugurated eschatology,” or the idea that the millennium began with the death and resurrection of Christ.60

Although affirming a historical appearance of Antichrist and Last Judgment after 6,000 years,

Augustine’s City of God had likewise avoided associating salvation history with the history of empires. By introducing Constantine’s temporal millennium, however, Foxe’s new 1570 historiography seems to ally more with the “last days” Christian emperor of the Sibylline Oracles

(a medieval Catholic reiteration of the Greek prophetess Sibyl) or with Joachim’s eschatological

“Third Age of the Spirit” (e.g., Foxe’s mentor, John Bale, had also used some Joachimite sources in his Image of Two Churches).61 Even so, Foxe’s 1570 narrative also retains a measure of

Augustinian-Lutheran orthodoxy by overlaying Constantine’s temporal millennium (324-1324) with a regressive five-stage chronology of “suffering,” “flourishing,” “declining,” “loosing of

Sathan,” and “reforming” times, where each epoch endures approximately 300-400 years and the

“simple puritye” of ancient Christianity is incrementally corrupted by a papal tyranny of “both the swordes.” This five-stage chronology appears to be borrowed by Foxe from a fourteenth-

60 John M. Headley, Luther’s View of Church History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 63-64. Martin Luther reiterates the classical idea of degeneration from a “golden age” of antiquity, believing that the ancients (i.e., , ) had little revelation but much faith, while medieval Christians (i.e., Roman Catholics) had much revelation but little faith (Headley, 124).

61 Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 20-22 (for Sibylline and Joachimite optimism); and Bauckham, 26 (for Bale and Joachim). Augustine’s 6000 year “world week” consisted of the following periodization: 1) to Noah, 2) Noah to Abraham, 3) Abraham to David, 4) David to the Babylonian exile, 5) Exile to Christ, 6) Christ to Second Coming, 7) Millennial Sabbath. Although the Biblical New Jerusalem was figurative, Augustine thought that it was existential in the church through the binding of Satan by Christ (V. Norskov Olsen, 29). Joachim’s third age of the Spirit begins in the year 1260 by counting 1260 years (i.e., Rev. 12) from the birth of Christ to the fall of Christendom (V. Norskov Olsen, 29). 34 century sermon, delivered by Nicholas Oresme at Avignon, exhorting the medieval papacy to

“last days” reform.62 In his earlier theatrical work entitled Christus Triumphans, Foxe had similarly rolled all of biblical and ecclesiastical history into a single cosmic battle between the followers of Christ and Antichrist, beginning with the Fall of Man, in which Ecclesia (the

Church) hid at the arrival of Psedomnus (Antichrist) to Babylon (Rome), but then reemerged for a “last days” preaching of the gospel.63 The same apocalyptic scenario is reflected in the fifth and final “reforming” epoch (1324-) of Acts and Monuments 1570, which begins with John

Wycliffe’s fourteenth-century preaching on godly rule and includes Foxe’s own prefatory call for renewed “peace and tranquilitie” and a defence of “Christ’s fayth and Gospel” under Elizabeth

I.64

Subsequent to Foxe’s 1570 history, however, the next generation of English Protestants would take this “godly” magisterial defence of Christ’s gospel in a new direction. The Act of

Uniformity (1559) had required ministers to provide monthly exhortations to “the works of faith, as. . . commanded in Scripture,” for the lack of learned preachers was regarded as a major obstacle of the Protestant reformation at a time when episcopal visitations were revealing that parish churches sometimes lacked even a quarterly sermon.65 In a similarly “reforming” spirit,

Foxe’s 1570 introduction lists the patronage of gospel preaching among the primary duties of a

62 Acts and Monuments 1570, 26, 32, 533-34.

63 Facey, “Defense of the English Church,” 163-64. Dedicated to the English merchants who supported the Marian exilic community, Christus Triumphans (Basel, 1555) begins church history with the fall of man (like Luther’s Commentary on Genesis) as Eve laments the death of her children and Mary sorrows over the rage expressed toward her son. V. Norskov Olsen, 59, citing Christus Triumphans, 8-15.

64 Acts and Monuments 1570, 1, 7—quoting from the preambles of the first two prefaces to Acts and Monuments (1570).

65 “The Act of Uniformity,” Bray, Documents, 329-334. 35 godly magistrate, and his 1570 dedication praises the queen, however suggestively, for the

“prouident care, and zeale full of solicitude you haue, mindying (speedely I trust) to furnish all quarters and countreyes of this your Realme with the voyce of Christes Gospell.”66 With the assistance of “godly” leaders like Archbishop Grindal, English ministers would be trained in the art of “prophesying” (with the tacit support of other English bishops) to deliver weekly sermons of “edification” throughout the ; and these “prophesyings” would soon normalize preaching in the Elizabethan churches, such that a weekly sermon could be mandated in the canons of 1604. Yet, while the English church was learning to regard itself as a “people of God,” or even a “new Israel,” a new generation of “godly” ministers would emerge to exploit omission of the ban on chiliasm in the Thirty-Nine Articles (where Edwardian Article 41 had once condemned an establishment of God’s kingdom on earth) by proclaiming a more radical and millenarian vision of godly rule.67

John Foxe had portrayed the first Christian emperor as a “godly” and “meke” collaborator with the Christian bishops, but next-generation English Puritans would reject this Constantinian model as an obstruction to godly reform.68 Believing that the Lutheran reformation was incomplete and that the Reformed churches of Holland and Scotland had become more apostolic than the English church, for example, English reformed minister Thomas Brightman’s

Apocalypsis Apocalypseos (1615) would abandon Protestant expectations of an imminent

66 Ibid., 35, 10.

67 Patrick Collinson, “The Elizabethan Church and the New Religion,” in The Struggle for Power: English History, 1550-1760, 2nd ed., edited by John M. Beattie, et al. (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 1990), 170-72. Edwardian Article 41, omitted from the Elizabethan Articles, states: “They that go about to renew the fable of heretics called Millenarii be repugnant to Holy Scripture, and cast themselves headlong into a Jewish dotage” (Bray, “The Forty- Two Articles of Religion,” Documents, 310).

68 Acts and Monuments 1570, 152. 36 parousia, or return of Christ, and would adopt a new millennial timeline that began with the fourteenth-century preaching of John Wycliffe. Brightman’s compatriot Joseph Mede would depart even further from a Foxean and early Protestant historiography by viewing “Satan’s binding” and the Biblical millennium as a completely future event.69 This Puritan departure from a “post-millennial” to a “pre-millennial” eschatology encouraged other sectarians like the Fifth

Monarchists, who sought to rid the English nation of all vestiges of Antichrist—pope, king, and prelate—in a “godly” march toward the New Jerusalem. Like other Puritans of this generation,

Joseph Mede’s student, John Milton, believed that Emperor Constantine had corrupted the church with temporal wealth and power and that the “tyrannical” acts of King Charles I were worthy of the ultimate penalty of regicide (i.e., Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1640).

This new Puritan political theology aimed at ecclesiastical reforms that would prepare the way for Christ’s earthly kingdom, both in England and the American continent, so that early New

England ministers like John Cotton and Thomas Goodwin expected a thousand-year reign of the to follow the final defeat of the Antichrist.70

In league with the first generation Protestant bishops who authorized Article 37 (“Of Civil

Magistrates”), Foxe’s post-millennial historiography of godly rule was categorically different from the pre-millennial eschatology of Civil War-era English Puritanism (1639-60). In his last

69 Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Vision from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 100-106.

70 Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 233-37 (for Milton); Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Vision from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 193, 193n (for Brightman, Mede, and Milton). The Magisterial Reformers worked toward a last days revival of gospel preaching under Constantinian authority, similar to Augustine’s City of God. But second-generation reformer Thomas Brightman (d. 1607) strengthened nonconformist rejection of England’s bishops by placing the beginning of the Biblical millennium at the preaching of John Wycliffe. The end of history would be accomplished by the conversion of Jewry, the destruction of the Turkish empire and Roman church, and the completion of Protestant reforms. Mead’s Key to the Revelation (1627, 1643) was authorized for republication by the Long Parliament (See also V. Norskov Olsen, 37-38, 84). 37 unfinished work entitled Eicasmi seu meditationes in sacram Apocalypsin (1587), John Foxe reiterated his belief in a 294-year span following Constantine’s temporal millennium (also called the “loosing of Sathan”) and even speculated that the parousia (c. 1300 + 294 years = c. 1594) could be “abrieviated for the elects sake” to the year 1586.71 Unlike seventeenth-century

Puritans, Foxe therefore placed the “godly” Protestant magistrate’s function in ecclesiastical reform, in opposition to “any foreign Jurisdiction,” in close proximity to the Second Advent.

The “Two Regiments,” the Crown, and Clerical Vestments

As previously noted, Article 37 had established a dualistic model for Elizabethan Protestantism in its declaration that ministers would exercise their spiritual role (in Word and Sacrament) while magistrates would exercise the temporal role which “we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself.” As this thesis indicates, Foxe’s historical interest in a “two regiments” model of godly rule is revealed in the wake of the 1560s reformist

Protestant struggle against the queen’s ecclesiastical policy. A full separation between the spiritual and temporal regiments had been prevented by the Ornaments Rubric (1559), a compromise measure on altars, images, and vestments which had been handed down from the

House of Lords to a reluctant House of Commons in the Act of Uniformity (1559). The 1559 Act had decreed that “such ornaments of the Church and of the ministers thereof shall be retained and be in use as was in the Church of England by authority of Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward the Sixth, until other order shall be therein taken by the Queen’s

71 Ryan Netzley, “Apocalyptic Calculations: Number, Meaning, and Reading in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, ed. Thomas P. Anderson & Ryan Netzley (Newark: University of Delaware, 2010), 256, citing Eicasmi seu meditationes in sacram Apocalypsin (London: George Bishop, 1587), STC 11237. Foxe’s reference to the “elect” derives from the Olivet discourse in Matthew 24:22. 38

Majesty.”72 In the process of jettisoning the “usurped and foreign power” of Rome, then, the

“Supreme Governor” had been apportioned, by parliament, a measure of jurisdiction pertaining to the external rites and ceremonies of the English ecclesia, as embodied in the 1559 Book of

Common Prayer.

Prior to the Vestiarian Controversy (1566), English Protestant leaders had been able to avoid strife and division by maintaining that religious externals were adiaphora, or “matters indifferent.” Yet, because the clerical garments used in the Lord’s Supper were widely regarded as visible images of Rome, enforcement of the Prayer Book vestment rule by the queen’s

Ecclesiastical Commission would result in a cacophonous quarrel of conformist versus nonconformist in which Foxe himself participated. Dissatisfaction had already been expressed within the reformist camp at the time of the Elizabethan Settlement (1559), when parliamentary leader Sir indicated to Peter Martyr (a Magisterial Reformer of Edwardian vintage) that certain “Sanballats and Tobiases” were obstructing the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and when Bishop John Jewel (a Marian exile) observed that “the bishops are a great hindrance to us.”

Yet with royal enforcement of the vestment rule, as publicized in Archbishop Parker’s

Advertisements (1566), Bishop Grindal of London (himself a Marian exile and staunch defender of the independent Dutch and French “straunger churches”) would explain to Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich that the English reformed party, being “unable to prevail, either with the queen or the parliament,” had opted to continue preaching the “pure doctrine of the gospel” rather than

“desert our churches for the sake of a few ceremonies.”73 A 1566 letter from Heinrich Bullinger

72 Bray, “The Act of Uniformity,” Documents, 334. The Ornaments Rubric required, for example, Eucharistic vestments of alb, stole, and cope.

73 “John Jewel to Peter Martyr,” March 20, 1559, “Sir Anthony Cook to Peter Martyr,” February 12, 1559, and “Bishop Grindal to Henry Bullinger,” August 27, 1566, The Zurich Letters, II:13-14, I:10, I:169. 39 and Rodolph Gualter was also published at this time, exhorting English reformers Lawrence

Humphrey and to comply with the ecclesiastical order on vestments rather than abandon their churches to the “wolves.” (This took place after Bullinger’s influential

Hundred Sermons on the Apocalypse [1561], a historical interpretation of the similar to John Bale’s Image of Two Churches [1545], had been published by English printer

John Day.) Clerical vestments were strictly forbidden in the Swiss canton, but defiance of magisterial authority was also prohibited, so the Zurich leadership sought to encourage the

English reformers on a middling pathway of adiaphora compliance with the Crown and archbishop.74

The Protestant struggle for ministerial independence (in Word and Sacrament) from the Crown had been simmering for over a decade. When Emperor Charles V had demanded that Lutherans use Catholic rites and ornaments under the Augsburg Interim (1548-55), Melanchthon had invoked the adiaphora principle on religious externals (including vestments); and when the

Black Rubric was added to the second Edwardian Prayer Book (1552) to facilitate kneeling in communion, Archbishop Cranmer had dismissed purist objections as “unlawful,” “ungodly,” and

“seditious and perilous to be heard of any subjects, as a thing breaking their bridle of obedience and loosing from the bonds of all princes.”75 Yet this purist yearning for ministerial independence regarding vestments and other externals would resurface in the 1555 “troubles at

Frankfurt” (as mentioned above). With talk of another interim in the early years of Elizabeth’s

74 See also “Laurence Humphrey and Thomas Sampson to Henry Bullinger,” July, 1566, The Zurich Letters, I: 159-163. The Zurich ministers had been opposed to the clerical vestments since the Augsburg Interim (1548-55), having advised the English to embrace “purity” and “simplicity,” but they had also applauded the civil magistrates of Heidelberg for altering their church doctrine from Lutheran to Reformed. Leonard Trinterud, ed., Elizabethan Puritanism (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971), 79.

75 Emerson, 6. 40 reign, Bishop John Jewel would write Peter Martyr to say, “I know that all changes of importance in the state are offensive and disagreeable, and that many things are often tolerated by sovereigns by reason of the times. . . . But now that the full light of the gospel has shone forth, the very vestiges of error must, as far as possible, be removed together with the rubbish, and, as the saying is, with the very dust. And I wish we could effect this in respect to that linen surplice.”76

Having refused an episcopate on the terms afforded by the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity (1559),

Biblical translator Miles Coverdale would be among the thirty-seven antivestarian ministers (of over one hundred London ministers) summoned to Lambeth Palace on March 26, 1566, for deprivation. Preacher-historian John Foxe was also numbered among those summoned. In addition, Foxe had been one of twenty-eight “godly preachers which have utterly forsaken

Antichrist and his Romish rags” in an appeal to Lord Dudley against the vestment rule,77 and he had been among twenty (including Humphrey and Sampson) who petitioned Archbishop Parker for an indulgence regarding this matter.78 In Acts and Monuments 1570, a staunch antivestiarian sentiment can also be decoded from Foxe’s new preface “to the followers of the procedings” in which he exhorts Catholic readers to seek salvation in the liberty of an “inward

76 “Bishop Jewel to Peter Martyr,” February 7, 1562, The Zurich Letters, I:100. Jewel elsewhere writes, “They are strangely bewitched, I say, that will bind their English priesthood and sacraments to garments: but much more enchanted, that can find no garments to please them, but such as have been openly polluted with Popery, superstition, and Idolatry.” “A godly and zealous letter written by Mai. A.G. 1570,” A parte of a register, contayning sundrie memorable matters, written by divers godly and learned in our time, which stand for and desire the reformation of our Church, in Discipline and Ceremonies, accordinge to the pure worde of God, and the Lawe of our Lande (Middleburg, 1593), 13, as reproduced in The English Experience: Its Record in Early Printed Books Published in Facsimile (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1973).

77 Freeman, “Providence and Prescription,” 37-38, citing Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys Library, MS ‘Papers of State’, ii, 701.

78 Freeman, “Reformation of the Church in this Parliament: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571,” Parliamentary History 16, pt. 2 (1997), 135. 41 workyng faith” rather than in the externals of “Byshops, garments, vestures, gestures, [and] colours.”79

Committed to a “two regiments” model under scriptural authority, as defined in Article 37, the anti-vestiarian reformers of the 1560s were threatening to divide the Church of England into warring factions over what many considered to be merely mundane matters of ecclesiastical discipline. Among the more radical reformers, Robert Crowley, who had published Vision of

Piers Plowman under King Edward’s reign, is credited with writing the “first Puritan manifesto” at the time of this crisis. Entitled A briefe discourse against the outward apparrell and

Ministring garmentes of the popishe church (1566), the tract asserted that externals must “edify” the church and that no prince can command what “God hath not commanded.”80 An anonymous tract by “I. B.” (possibly John Bartlett), entitled The Fortress of the Fathers (1566), also contended for ceremonial purity by citing Erasmus, Bucer, Martyr and others against these

Erastian “persecutors,” asserting that “the supreme magistrate is bound to obey the word of God, preached by Christ's messengers, and is also subject to the discipline of the Church” and that “the lordship of the bishops now exercised over both the rest of the clergy and over the lay people hath no ground in the word of God.”81

79 Acts and Monuments 1570, 15.

80 Robert Crowley, A brief discourse against the outward apparrell and Ministring garmentes of the popish church (1566), sig. Bii-Biii. STC 6079

81 The Fortress of the Fathers in Trinterud, 82, 86. Believing Christ to be the heavenly Head of the church, Martin Bucer is quoted in the Fortress admonishing clerics who “confirm those in their error which as yet know not that these things are free and at liberty.” Trinterud, 94, citing Bucer’s Enarrationes perpetuae in sacra squatuor eunagelia 1530, fol. 146b-147d. See also Leo Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England, 1509-1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 85. 42

On the other side of the ecclesiastical divide stood Archbishop Parker, former chaplain to Anne

Boleyn and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge under Henry VIII, and a more reluctant Bishop of

London, Edmund Grindal, former chaplain to Edward VI.82 Archbishop Parker had reduced the vestment requirement to a mere surplice for the parish churches, but dozens of pulpits would nonetheless lie vacant within Grindal’s diocese on Easter Sunday morning, 1566, as “godly” preachers and pamphleteers resolved to proclaim “Christ alone” the head of the Church.

Crowley’s manifesto was answered by Parker in a tract entitled A briefe examination for the tyme, of a certaine declaration . . . refusing to weare the apparrell prescribed by the lawes and orders of the Realme (1566), which appealed to the works of Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr,

Thomas Cranmer, and other Edwardians on behalf of the Erastian position.83

Among recusant Catholics, Thomas Stapleton made early use of the term “Puritan” in his 1565

Fortress of the Faith, which referred to the Vestiarian Controversy, and in his 1567 Counter Blast to M. Hornes Vayne Blast, which argued that English Protestants had disregarded centuries of popes, councils, and law in order to establish an illegitimate religion under magisterial authority. Recusant John Martial also made reference to vestments and “Puritans” in his 1564 A

Treatise of the Cross, in response to the Protestant furor over the cross in the royal chapel.84

Since English Catholics of the 1560s were the first to make use of the pejorative term “Puritan,”

82 Meyer, 78, 86.

83 Emerson, 14; John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 26-27. Parker challenges Crowley’s citations of Bucer, Martyr, Ridley and Jewel and attaches other supporting documents in opposition to John Hooper’s 1550 refusal of the vestments. Trinterud, 77, citing Parker, A brief examination for the tyme..., 1566, STC 10387.

84 Cross, 38; Trinterud, pref. 7, citing John Martial, A Treatise of the Cross, 1564, STC 17496. 43

V. Norskov Olsen finds it ironic that the Erastian (or royalist) party would adopt the same term in their struggle against the reformist party during the Admonitions Controversy.85

Bishop Grindal’s 1566 letter to Henry Bullinger notes that the queen had been highly offended by reformist Protestant claims to ministerial jurisdiction in matters of external discipline, and that the threat of nonconformist conventicles had become quite serious as some “learned clergy seemed to be on the point of forsaking their ministry.”86 By 1570, Bishop Richard Cox would inform Gualter of English preachers who had

so maddened the wretched multitude and driven some of them to that pitch of frenzy that they now obstinately refuse to enter our churches, either to baptize their children or to partake of the Lord’s supper, or to hear sermons . . . They establish a private religion, and assemble in private houses, and there perform their sacred rites, as the Donatists of old and the Anabaptists now.87

Foxe’s concluding prayer to his Sermon on Christ Crucified (1570) bears witness to this English schism over royal jurisdiction and ministerial independence (i.e., the “two regiments”) by his statement that “Turkes be not more enemyes to Christians, then Christians to Christians, Papistes to Protestantes: yea Protestantes with Protestantes do not agree, but fal out for trifles. So that the poore little flocke of thy Church [is] distressed on euery side . . . ;” yet the same prayer requests that the queen would be governed by “God” and “honorable counsel.”88

85 V. Norskov Olsen, 8. Olsen notes the use of the term “Puritan” in T. Stapleton’s Fortress of the Faith, first planted amonge us englishmen, 1565 (STC 23233), citing sig. 32r-46v, which attacks John Jewel’s reforms and refers to the Vestiarian Controversy, and in T. Harding’s A detection of sundrie foule errours... by M. Jewell, 1568 (STC 12763), citing fol. 332r.

86 Grindal to Bullinger, The Zurich Letters, I: 169.

87 “Richard Cox to Rodolph Gualter,” February 12, 1571, Ibid., I, 234-38. Although somewhat arbitrary, it might be said that the Erastian party governed based on what was “not contrary to Scripture,” while the Puritan party governed based on what was “overtly commanded in Scripture.”

88 Foxe, “Sermon of Christ Crucified," unpaginated. 44

One of the queen’s most trusted ministers, Lord Burghley (or William Cecil), was regarded to have a sympathetic ear for Protestant reform within the Privy Council. In his Execution of

Justice in England (1583), he asserted that the English state would only persecute political treason, not religious faith, and he cited the Northern Rebellion (1569) of a decade earlier (just prior to the 1570 papal bull of excommunication) to justify the Protestant state’s intolerance of subversive clerics. Yet, believing that the Crown had been utilizing a Machiavellian model,

Cardinal William Allen critiqued Lord Burghley’s claims in True, Sincere and Modest Defense of

English Catholics (1584), offering the trial of Jesuit minister Edmund Campion as evidence that

Catholics had been condemned as traitors for refusing the monarch’s status as “head of the

Church.”89

Burghley’s argument appears to be supported in Foxe’s historical narrative of Lord Henry Grey’s execution, who, while being condemned for taking up arms against the Catholic monarch Mary

Tudor on behalf of his Protestant daughter Lady Jane, offers this public proclamation:

Masters, I have offended the Queen and her laws, and am thereby justly condemned to die . . . . And I pray god that this my death may be an ensample to all men, beseeching you also to bear me witness that I die in the faith of Christ, trusting to be saved by his blood only, and by no other trumpeting. . . .90

Here the temporal punishment is seen enacted in spite of Grey’s spiritual motivations. Yet Foxe would not fully embrace Burghley’s royalist position, for in the years after Acts and Monuments

1570 was published, he demonstrated a cognizance of the threat posed by the Crown to

89 Cross, 42-43, citing R. M. Kingdom, ed. Cecil, Execution of Justice; Allen, Modest Defence (Ithaca, NY), 1965.

90 Acts and Monuments 1570, 1675. David Loades notes that the final testimony of and her father, the Duke of Suffolk, reflect the Miserere Mei of Psalm 51 through a Protestant theological prism of repentance under God’s direct judgment. Loades, “John Foxe and the Traitors: The Politics of the Marian Persecution,” Martyrs and Martyrologies: Papers Read at the 1992 Summer Meeting and the 1993 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 240-42. 45 ministerial independence (in Word and Sacrament). Acting in solidarity with the religiously oppressed, for example, he joined the Dutch Reformed congregation’s defence of two condemned Anabaptists (1574) and opposed the trial and condemnation of the Jesuit minister

Campion (1581). Because of his defiant behaviour on behalf of the minister’s role, A. G.

Dickens was prompted to characterize Foxe as a Protestant who “bade the church to rely upon its spiritual weapons”—a statement which, in its essence, is an acknowledgment of the “two regiments” model.91

Foxe’s first 1570 preface highlights the “two regiments” model by offering a dualistic metaphor of an “Arke of his true spirituall, and visible Church.” The metaphor is part of a brief historical summation in which Marsilius of Padua, John Wycliffe and other “learned” persons are enumerated amid a throng of “faithful witnesses” (spiritual regiment) while “whole armies” (temporal regiment) are seen to amass in opposition to Rome’s “usurped authority” in the “last days.”92 Foxe’s 1570 history mentions Marsilius’s Defensor Pacis several times, dating its authorship to the first year of his “reforming era,” 1324, and observing that, because of this great literary work, the “popes vnlawful iurisdiction in thinges temporall is largelye disputed, and the vsurped authoritie of that see set forth to the vttermost.”93 Defensor Pacis was a humanistic treatise which recommended a lay jurisdiction rather than a clerical jurisdiction in ecclesiastical

91 Wooden, 14; Dickens, 323. Before being arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London, Campion’s letter “to the Right Honourable Lords of Her Majesties Privy Council,” known as “Campion’s Brag,” stirred up a flood of Protestant opposition by defending the aims of his Jesuit ministry. Campion’s accusers then made use of King Edward III’s Laws of Provisors and Praemunire.

92 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 3-5. Like the title page, the 1570 prefatory margin also identifies the conflict with Rome’s “usurped authority” as an “image of both Churches” (3n).

93 Ibid., 157, 487, 506. In his concluding paragraph of Defensor Pacis, Marsilius states his hope that the “civil community” (or the state) will be “preserved in peaceful or tranquil existence,” and he celebrates finishing his work “on Baptist’s Day, 1324” (June 24, 1324). Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of Peace, 2 vols, trans. Alan Gewirth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), II: 432. 46 temporalities. In 1535, it was published in English, immediately after the 1534 Henrician Act of

Supremacy, the legislative act of prince and parliament which ushered in the English

Reformation. Marsilius’s objectives were partially realized in Edwardian Article 36’s ban on

Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (1552), but they were more fully articulated in Article 37’s “two regiments” declaration that ministers would maintain their spiritual function (in Word and

Sacrament) while “godly” magistrates would exercise their temporal prerogative (in ecclesiastical discipline) in accord with scriptural authority.

Around the same time, in the intervening years between Edwardian Article 36 (1552) and

Elizabethan Article 37, first generation Protestant reformer Jean Calvin (the great exponent of divine election) would address the magistrate’s role in the church in his famous Institutes of the

Christian Religion (1559). Translated into English by Thomas Norton in 1562, Calvin’s

Institutes became accessible to the Marian exiles, which included 12 of the 19 Elizabethan bishops who drafted The Thirty-Nine Articles, John Foxe and other English reformers seeking a new consensus on godly rule. Like the duality of roles articulated in Elizabethan Article 37,

Calvin’s final chapter promoted the spiritual and temporal spheres with his observation that, just as the apostle Paul encouraged the faithful to put aside the “yoke of bondage” in spiritual matters, the apostle also exhorted them to rest content in their temporal stations.94 Here Calvin described godly magistrates as divinely ordained “ministers,” or “vicegerentes of God,” without whom anarchy would reign, as when “there was no king in Israell, and that therfore euery man did what pleased himself.”95 Even unjust magistrates should be obeyed, thought Calvin, except

94 Jean Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, translated by Thomas Norton (London: Richard Harrison, 1562), IV.20.1, fol. 491, citing Galatians 5:1 and I Corinthians 7:21. STC 4415.

95 Calvin, IV.20.6, fol. 493; IV.20.9, fol. 494, quoting Judges 21:25. 47 when they exceeded the limits of their civil authority by decreeing that which was contrary to

God’s law.96

Foxe’s first 1570 preface shows a false jurisdiction being implemented under Richard II, when the English king allowed Wycliffite ministers to be persecuted by his bishops for “goyng about from towne to towne in Freese gownes preachyng vnto the people” (italics mine).97 Jean Calvin had himself sought to defend the spiritual regiment by warning Bishop Grindal of London to

“have nothing to do with whatever smells of the temporal arm since the authority required for spiritual functions is properly conferred by God alone,”98 and Archbishop Grindal would subsequently defend against the royal order to halt the ministerial “prophesyings” in his famous

“letter to the queen.” As a primary author of The Thirty-Nine Articles, Grindal then offered a near reiteration of Article 37’s dual roles, both spiritual and temporal, by imploring the queen to limit her royal sovereignty in “ecclesiastical matters which touch religion, or the doctrine and discipline of the church… according to the example of all godly Christian emperors and princes of all ages” (Italics mine).99 Modern historian Patrick Collinson spoke admiringly of the archbishop’s letter as a recapitulation of ’s fourth-century defiance of Emperor

Theodosius and as a “remarkable affirmation of the limits to royal authority in the spiritual sphere.” Yet, because Grindal’s letter implied that “palaces belong to the emperor, churches to

96 Ibid., IV.20.31-32, fol. 502.

97 Ibid., 5.

98 Calvin to Grindal, 15 May, 1560, Opera, xviii. cols. 87-8, translation in G. C. Gorham, Gleanings of a Few Scattered Ears, 1854, 415-17; quoted in Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519-1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), 89.

99 “Letter to the Queen,” Remains, 387. Edmund Grindal had been a Marian exile until 1558, the until 1570, and the before being recommended by William Cecil to the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1575. 48 the bishop,” Collinson also believed that the archbishop had invoked an “anachronism” with regard to the “constitutional fact” of Tudor supremacy.100 For indeed, with historian Foxe deprived of his London pulpit due to his position on clerical vestments (1566) and Archbishop

Grindal sequestered to his Lambeth Palace because of his support for the “prophesyings” (1576), it would appear that Article 37’s “two regiments” model of godly rule, although sanctioned by both convocation and parliament (1563, 1571), was in danger of being eclipsed by the 1559

Religious Settlement (i.e., royal sovereignty).

A Godly “Prince-in-Parliament” Jurisdiction

Although a mixed government of royalty, nobility, and commons was understood to derive from the ancient Greco-Roman estates of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, for Foxe and many

English Protestants, the “prince-in-parliament” political model was subject to scriptural authority. Patrick Collinson observes, for example, that in Obedience of a Christian Man (1529), a Protestant treatise thought to have inspired the Henrician reformation of 1534, William

Tyndale’s political theology “had instructed the mind and conscience of Henry VIII, not privily but in print, for all the world to see.”101 Encountering royal resistance to Protestant reform under

Elizabeth I, Protestant magistrates thereafter noted that the Religious Settlement of 1559 had been forged via a “godly” collaboration between prince and parliament. In translating Calvin’s

Institutes in 1562, for instance, Thomas Norton (Cranmer’s son-in-law) spoke of parliaments

100 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Johnathan Cope, 1967), 195 (for “spiritual sphere”); Collinson, Grindal, 243 (for “anachronism”).

101 Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 21. W. D. J. Cargill Thompson recites the oft-repeated notion that Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) anticipated the first reformation parliament (1529) and Act of Supremacy (1534). Thompson, “The Two Regiments,” 26. Carl Meyer also notes that Tyndale’s moralistic and covenantal perspective earned him the appellation of “first Puritan” (Meyer, 132). 49 existing to correct “the outrageous licentiousness of kings” (as derived from Institutes, IV.20.31); and when confined to prison for opposing the Privy Council, the same parliamentarian wrote an episodic history entitled “Of the V Periodes of 500 yeares,” which described an invasion of

Britain every 500 years from the era of ancient Israel and classical Greece as a result of moral failures among its magisterial elites. One thing which may have weighed heavily on Norton’s mind was the royal order which halted his “religious campaign” for parliamentary ratification of the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (1571), a setback for Protestant reform that occurred soon after Norton had assisted Foxe in the compilation of Acts and Monuments (1570).102 As editor of this aforementioned work (1571), Foxe wrote a preface in which he expressed concern that the English “shippe” could be torn asunder without an ecclesiastical discipline, observing that Augustine’s City of God had denied the possibility of a happy state whose “walls are standing but its morals are being destroyed.”103 A parliamentary role was also acknowledged by

Foxe in this 1571 preface, for, along with lauding Edward VI’s Protestant theologians, bishops, and canon and common lawyers for having compiled the Reformatio, the preface reviewed constitutional developments from Solon of ancient Athens to the Twelve Tablets of republican

Rome to the laws of pre-Norman England. Upon taking singular exception to the Edwardian stricture forbidding ceremonies outside the Prayer Book (De divinis officiis, section 16), moreover, Foxe’s 1571 preface concluded that Scripture ought to be recognized as “the perfect guide to all divine worship” and recommended that the Reformatio be revised and authorized by

102 Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 44-45, citing Bowler, “English Protestant and Resistance Writings,1553-1603,” 305-07 (PhD thesis, London, 1981). His son, Robert Norton, testifies to Thomas Norton’s contribution to John Foxe’s 1570 history. Thomas Freeman, “The Reformation of the Church in this Parliament,” 136.

103 John Foxe, “Preface to the Learned Candid Reader,” in Tudor Church Reform: the Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, edited by Gerald Bray, Church of England Record Society 8 (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2000), 151, citing De civitate Dei, I.33. 50

“our most serene Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by the public authority of this present parliament.”104

This godly “prince-in-parliament” jurisdiction in the church is also evident in the new prefaces to

Acts and Monuments 1570. For in his first 1570 preface, Foxe describes England’s civil and ecclesiastical elites travelling in “one shippe together,” both church and commonwealth, rightly guided by “the nedle touched with the stone of Gods word;" and his 1570 margin reads,

“publicke execution of lawes, not forbidden in scripture,” where his third new preface suggests that ’s prophecy of the lion, the lamb, and the “peacable Mount of Syon” (chs. 11 and 65) had been fulfilled in the church “militant” and “peaceable gouernement” of Protestant

England.105 Foxe’s new 1570 dedication also suggests that the “principal gouernour” ought to facilitate the efforts of her peers, and other lesser magistrates, who would be inclined to “worke the thyng that is godly” based on previous examples “in preseruing his Church, in ouerthrowyng tyrants, in confoundyng pride, in alteryng states and kingdomes, in conseruyng Religion agaynst errours and dissentions, in relieuyng the godly, in bridelyng the wicked, in losing and tying vp againe of Sathan the disturber of commonweales, in punishyng transgressions as well agaynst the first table as the second.”106 Prior to the outset of his main historical narrative in Acts and

Monuments 1570, then, historian-reformer Foxe is already signaling to Elizabethan readers the viability of godly rule through “prince-in-parliament” authority.

104 Foxe, “Preface to the Learned Candid Reader,” 165. In his introductory comments, Gerald Bray states that although the Reformatio was not authorized under Queen Elizabeth, it was “highly esteemed by later canon lawyers and enjoyed an unofficial authority in ecclesiastical courts,” so that it remains “crucial for an understanding of Reformation church discipline” (Bray, Tudor Church Reform, i).

105 Acts and Monuments 1570, 6, 13, 13n.

106 Ibid., pref. 7, 10. 51

Once Norton’s 1571 “religious campaign” for an ecclesiastical discipline had been struck down, however, a more radical reformist party began to emerge in league with the continental

Protestant tradition of Calvin’s Institutes (1559), the Gallic Confession (1559), the Confessio

Scoticana (1560), and the (1561).107 In the anonymously published

Admonitions Controversy (1572) of the following year, for instance, parliamentarian John Field and minister Thomas Wilcox demanded more radical reforms that would have rejected everything from religious icons to clerical vestments to England’s episcopate. In contrasting

Christian antiquity with the present, the Admonition to Parliament (1572) would even link the

1559 Elizabethan Settlement and the Ornaments Rubric to Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction”:

In those days known by voice, learning and doctrine: now they must be discerned from other by popish and unchristian apparel as cap, gown, tippet, etc. . . . Then ministers were not tyed to any forme of prayers invented by man. . . . Now they are bound of necessitie to a prescript order of service and booke of common prayer patched (if not all together, yet the greatest peece) out of the Popes portui. . . .108

The Admonition to Parliament represented a heightened threat to the Elizabethan establishment, both civil and ecclesiastical, prince and prelate; and these fears were expressed in a 1573 letter to

Lord Burghley from Matthew Hutton, Dean of York, which said, “At the beginning it was a cap, a surplice, and a tippet: now it is grown to bishops, archbishops and cathedral churches, to the overthrow of the established order, and to the Queen’s authority in causes ecclesiastical.”109

John Field was temporarily imprisoned in 1573; and Cambridge fellow Thomas Cartwright, who

107 Leo Solt subdivides English Puritans into three camps: moderate Puritans like John Foxe and Thomas Norton (1560s and 1570s), Presbyterian Puritans like John Field and Thomas Cartwright (1570s), and separatist Puritans like Robert Browne and Henry Barrow (). Solt, 82-83.

108 “An Admonition to Parliament,” Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt, ed. W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas (New York: Burt Franklin, 1972), 11-12. The Admonition to Parliament (1572) presented the three “outward marks” of the true church to be the “pure” preaching of the Word, a “sincere” administration of the Sacraments, and a “severe” ecclesiastical discipline. Cross, 157-58.

109 Solt, 90, citing S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950), 227. 52 had publicly endorsed the Admonition, spent the same year in exile at Heidelberg (where A Brief

Discourse of the Troubles Begun at Frankfort [1574], published anonymously, recounted the

1555 division of Erastians and Puritans at Frankfurt). Yet, in the course of the ensuing debate between Presbyterian-Puritan Thomas Cartwright, a leading advocate for more radical reforms, and Erastian-Anglican , a future archbishop loyal to the queen’s Privy Council, both parties appealed to Acts and Monuments in an effort to substantiate their historical claims.

In so doing, the two rival camps endorsed Foxe’s 1570 work as a broad-based ecclesiastical history that was inclusive of monarch, minister and magistrate, a “prince-in-parliament” model of godly rule.

Historian Foxe was a moderate Puritan-Anglican reformer, neither a full Erastian nor a radical

Puritan-Presbyterian seeking to overturn the established order. His place on the Elizabethan political spectrum would have been near that of the contemporary Anglican-Puritan Conformist named Edward Dering (d. 1576), who, when summoned for questioning before the Star Chamber in 1573, had offered qualified support for the English episcopate and had asserted that “in the church there is no lawgiver but Christ Jesus.” Dering also said that the “prince ruleth in the commonwealth herself and in the church of God seeth that [it] be ruled of the Lord.”110 In this, the Anglican-Puritan minister shared Foxe’s political vision of a “principal governor” under

“Christ the Supreme Head,” even if he (unlike Foxe) was willing to use clerical vestments, when necessary, and to affirm to Lord Burghley (William Cecil) that “I have never broken the peace of

110 Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 20-21. In Dering’s 1570 sermon before the Queen, Donald Stump counts 125 scriptural citations directed at instructing Elizabeth on her godly responsibilities as chief magistrate. Stump, “Abandoning the Old Testament: Shifting Paradigms for Elizabeth, 1578-82,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 30, no.1 (Summer, 2004): 94. 53 the church, neither for cap nor surplice, for archbishop nor bishop. . .”111 Foxe had indeed

“broken the peace” in the Vestiarian Controversy (1566), yet the broad-based appeal of Acts and

Monuments 1570 (and his 1571 prefatory appeal to parliament on behalf of the Reformatio) exhibited a renewed hope for English “peace and tranquilitie” via godly “prince-in-parliament” reform.

Archbishop Parker’s Advertisements (1566), which required compliance with the vestment rule along with other rites and ceremonies contained in the 1559 Prayer Book, would become a dead letter under Archbishop Grindal (1575-83), under whose tenure Protestant ministers were permitted to exercise an elevated degree of independence. However the clock would be turned back again under Archbishop Whitgift (1583-1604), whose 1583 Twelve Articles (also known as

Articles touching preachers and other orders for the Church), once introduced, became a litmus test for ministerial acceptance of the (1559), the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the queen’s “sovereign” authority.112 The struggle between the “godly” and royalist factions then grew fierce, as Protestant radicalism was expressed in more virulent form in Robert

Browne’s True and short declaration (1584) and in the anonymous Marprelate tracts (1588-89).

In fact, the Marprelate tracts signaled a “root and branch” departure from the Elizabethan establishment by declaring that the English episcopate was a seat of “Antichrist” and that its

111 Dering to Cecil, 18 November 1570, B.L. Landsdowne Mss. vol. 12, no. 86. fol. 191r-v; quoted in Lake, Moderate Puritans, 19. Like Foxe, Dering makes a distinction between early bishops like Ambrose and Augustine, and those of the sixteenth century who were behaving as earthly lords. See Dering to Burghley, November 1573, B.L. Landsdowne Mss. vol. 17, no. 90, fol. 200; quoted in Lake, Moderate Puritans, 22. Although censured by the Crown, and under suspicion in the wake of the Admonition (1572), Dering was able to keep a lectureship at St. Paul’s in London. Yet, as an Augustinian-Puritan who was more interested in souls than externals, Dering could testify that he had not participated in the Vestiarian controversy. Trinterud, 131-32, 134.

112 Milward, 77. 54 parish system was an extension of Babylon.113 Parliamentarian Throckmorton, one possible author of the Marprelate tracts, alluded to an impending constitutional crisis in his 1586 declaration, “Under the warrant of Godes lawe, what may not this House doe? . . . I mean the three estates of the land. To deny the owner of this House ye knowe is treason.”114 Article 20 of the Thirty-Nine Articles had declared all rites and ceremonies under episcopal jurisdiction, but with Crown and Canterbury having been reconciled under the tenure of Archbishop Whitgift,

“prince-in-parliament” authority was unable to advance the cause of Protestant reform.

English parliamentarians adhered to a godly constitutional model that would bind the conscience of its magistrates to God’s law. Even Elizabeth’s Catholic rival, Mary Queen of the Scots, did not regard her royal cousin as an absolute monarch.115 In another expression of this “prince-in- parliament” constitutional model, (whose Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity famously answered radical Puritan claims) asserted that the English monarch held no prerogative to act in civil or ecclesiastical matters without the expressed cooperation of the respective estates.116 During Princess Elizabeth’s procession through the streets of London on the day before her coronation, furthermore, Richard Mulcaster (a 1559 member of Parliament and

113 Christianson, 62-69; Milward, 37, 86-87.

114 Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 61, citing Throckmorton’s 1586 speech in Pierpont Morgan Library, MA 276 (Phillipps MS13891), 9. Cf. Cross, 86 and Solt, 89-91.

115 Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 15-16. Since Mary considered Queen Elizabeth to be “in her minority,” Collinson believes, she held an opinion common among European capitals regarding a mixed government (Elizabethan Essays, 16). In De Republica, former secretary to Edward VI and Elizabeth Thomas Smith had described the mixed commonwealth as “a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord and covenantes.” Elizabethan Essays 17, citing Smith's De Republica Anglorum, 57.

116 See Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, VIII. i. 2, as reproduced in The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, edited by W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977-1998), Vol. III, 438. The Puritan faction began to turn from Crown and bishops to parliament after the Queen resisted the reformed “Six Articles” in the 1563 Convocation, articles which would have made kneeling in communion, baptismal signings, saint days, and festivals, etc. optional. 55 famous Elizabethan educator) observed that the future queen had been halted before a child actor representing the Hebrew heroine Deborah (seen leading God’s people to victory in Judges 4 and

5), who stood beneath a palm tree, dressed in parliamentary robes, and surrounded by male advisors from the three estates of nobility, clergy, and commons. As the overhead banner proclaimed: “Deborah with her Estates, Consulting for the Good Government of

Israel” (consistent with Foxe’s dedicatory address to the queen as a “principall gouernour” under

Christ’s authority), Mulcaster here surmised that “it behooveth both men and women so ruling to use the advice of good counsel.”117 In reply to John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558) against the Catholic monarch Mary Tudor, Bishop ’s An Harborowe for faithfull and trewe subiectes (1559) contemporaneously argued that, even if the spiritual sword was thought inappropriate to the female gender (as stated by Knox), this limitation would not apply to

England’s “prince-in-parliament” constitutional model. Instead, Aylmer argued that the new queen would be constrained by England’s “mixed” constitution and parliamentary law, since “it is not she that ruleth, but the lawes” and “she maketh no statutes or lawes, but the honerable court of Parliament,” since the monarch “can ordein nothing without them.”118

Living in the literary circle at Basel during this time, Aylmer had assisted Foxe with his 1559 martyrology Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum, and it is not inconceivable that Aylmer’s Harborowe

(1559) would have been influenced by the martyrologist, or vice versa. Like Aylmer, Foxe wrote

117 Richard Mulcaster, “The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage through the City of London,” 1559 (STC 7590); quoted in King, Voices of the English Reformation, 339-40. Here Elizabeth accepts a copy of the English bible, kisses and embraces it, and calls out “Time hath brought me hither,” as Mulcaster compares her future reign with the forty-year peace of Deborah.

118 John Aylmer, An harborowe of faithful and trewe subiects agaynst the late blowne blaste, concerninge the gouernment of wemen,... with a brief exhortation to obedience (London: John Daye, 1559): H3, December, 2017, http://eebo.chadwyck.com. STC 1005. 56 disapprovingly of Knox’s First Blast (1558);119 and Andrew Pettegree observes that, at the time of Elizabeth’s accession, both Aylmer and Foxe spoke of the queen as a new Deborah.120 Foxe also promoted the “prince-in-parliament” constitutional model in an address to the English nobility, saying: “And I think it was very wisely done by the ancient philosophers and astute law- giver who divided the state . . . into three parts: the rulers, the nobles and the commoners, and joined the public assembly and the senatorial nobility with the monarchy.”121 Yet “prince-in- parliament” authority also meant that “godly” reforms, while bolstered by parliamentary ratification of Article 37’s “godly” magistrate, could be held in check by the “supreme

Governour” (i.e., the 1559 Religious Settlement). This inconvenient truth was aptly articulated in a letter penned by Bishop Pilkington, saying, “We are under authority, and cannot make any innovation without the sanction of the Crown.”122

Foxe’s 1570 alignment of godly rule with “prince-in-parliament” authority was, at least in part, validated by subsequent ecclesiastical history. During the Exclusion Crisis and Popish Plot of

1678-81, for example, Whig opponents of absolute monarchy would celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s reign on her Accession Day by placing placards upon her statue that read, “Magna Charta et

119 Dale Hoak, “A Tudor Deborah? The Coronation of Elizabeth I, Parliament and the Problem of Female Rule,” John Foxe and his World, ed Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 74-76. Dale Hoak believes that Aylmer expected “true religion” to be restored in the next sitting of parliament (77-78). See Strype, Annals, Vol. I, pt. ii, 487-88, App. xvii for reference to Foxe’s disapproving letter to Knox.

120 Andrew Pettegree, Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996), 138. Megan Hickerson thinks Acts and Monuments celebrated the right (and responsibility) of both sexes to resist injustice and speak truthfully against political power. Megan L. Hickerson, “Gospelling Sisters 'Goinge Up and Downe’: John Foxe and Disorderly Women,” Sixteenth Century Journal 35, no. 4 (2004), 1050. Hickerson also connects godly resistance with female emancipation in Foxe's work, since Nicholas Harpsfield’s1566 critique called it "a seditious book advanced by the evangelical sect against the controlling of women" and tending toward chaos "because against God's law, women are made to command" (Hickerson, 1039, citing Alan Cope [Nicholas Harpsfield], Dialogi Sex contra Summi Pontificatus, Monasticae Vitae, Sancgtorum, Sacrarum Imaginum Oppugnatores, et Pseudomartyres [Antwerp: Christophori Plantini, 1566], 747).

121 Foxe’s Ad inclytos ac praepotentes Angliae proceres . . .(1557), 59; quoted in Olsen, 187

122 “Bishop Pilkington to Rodolph Gualter,” July 20, 1573, The Zurich Letters, I:287-288. 57

Religio Protestantium.” After the parliamentary overthrow of King James II in favour of

William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, moreover, John Locke’s Letter on

Toleration (1689) would affirm that religious liberty was an inviolable right, and his Two

Treatises on Civil Government (1689) would hold that the nation could overthrow any “tyrant” who failed to recognize it.123

Given the coherence of Foxe’s political theology of godly rule with the Protestant desire for ecclesiastical reform, as evidenced in contemporary events such as the Vestiarian Controversy

(1566) and ratification of The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, 1571), which included Elizabethan

Article 37, the next three chapters will measure the length and breadth of Foxe’s historiographical support for the “godly” magistrate under the chapter titles “The Godly Prince,”

“Godly Rule in Two ‘Regiments,’” and “A Godly ‘Prince-in-Parliament’ Restraint.”

123 Walsham, 162. Although the bell-ringing on Accession Day likely began earlier in some parish churches, Willam Camden dates the general celebration of November 17th to the year of Pope Pius IV’s bull of excommunication (1570). Roman Catholic writers would then accuse English Protestants of monarchical idolatry, while some Puritans bristled at the suggestion of a civic “holy day” (Walsham, “Deborah,” 155-56). CHAPTER TWO:

THE GODLY PRINCE

As observed in introductory chapter one, Foxe’s 1570 revisions to Acts and Monuments can be seen to offer parallel historiographical support for an emergent Elizabethan political theology of godly rule which recognized, as articulated in Elizabethan Article 37, a magisterial prerogative which had been “given always to all godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself.” In his brief eleven-page survey of the first millennium from the “florishing age” of the apostles to the

Investiture Controversy, Foxe’s 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments had hardly mentioned the ancient Christian emperor, Constantine. Yet in the shadow of Article 37’s “godly Prince” (1563),

Books I through III of the 1570 edition offered 175 new pages of historical narrative pertaining to Constantine and Christian antiquity. This new first millennium emphasis is presaged by a prefatory citation of ’s rule that antiquity is better than novelty, for example, and by an introductory assertion that the English Protestant ecclesia was a “renewing of the olde auncient church of Christ.”124 It is also indicated by initial paragraphs in Foxe’s new introduction and

Book I which preview a new five-step periodization of ecclesiastical history centered on godly rule. Within this new periodization, the first “suffering” era of apostolic persecution is thenceforth transformed into the second epoch of “flourishing” under Emperor Constantine,

124 Acts and Monuments 1563, 24; 1570, 2, 28. Regarding Foxe’s bold assertion regarding the English reformation, Gretchen Minton observes that Eusebius, Jewel, and Foxe all sought validation in Christian antiquity. Minton, “‘The Same Cause and Like Quarell’: Eusebius, John Foxe, and the Evolution of Ecclesiastical History,” Church History 71, no. 4 (December 2002): 715-742.

58 59 which is followed by a millennium of slow magisterial “decline” (epochs three and four) at the rise of papal sovereignty, and which leads to a final “reforming era” that features a reemergence of godly rule.125 In the final five hundred years after the Investiture Controversy, Foxe’s 1570 edition also supplements the former 1563 narrative with frequent interpolations and intermittent blocks of new source material which accentuate this “godly” magisterial model. Chapter two below will therefore discuss how, in general agreement with Article 37’s appeal to the “godly

Princes” of Christian antiquity, historian Foxe’s 1570 revisions have resulted in 1) an altered five-step chronology of godly rule, 2-3) a new record of the magistrate’s “godly” role under the

Pax Romana and Emperor Constantine, and 4) a revised perspective on John Wycliffe’s political theology in the final “reforming era.”

Foxe’s Five Epochs and Temporal Millennium

Reminiscent of the dichotomous title page image of the true and false churches in Acts and

Monuments (see Figure 2 on page 91), Foxe’s five-step chronology reveals that the fortunes of the “godly” magistrate largely evolved and devolved in inverse relationship with Rome. Each

300- to 400-year period thus marks an important high or low point in the history of the “godly

Prince.” Hence the post-apostolic “suffering time” (era #1) is seen transformed into a

“flourishing time” (#2) by the conversion of Emperor Constantine, the “declining time” (#3) prompted by Boniface III’s acceptance of the universal title “pope” (606 AD) then leads to the eleventh-century Investiture Controversy which is dubbed the “loosing of Sathan” (#4), and a

“last days” reversal from papal to godly rule is thereafter called the “reforming era” (#5).126 In

125 Acts and Monuments 1570, 26, 62.

126 Ibid., 26, 62. 60 league with John Jewel’s appeal to the early church over the heads of medieval popes and prelates in his Challenge Sermon (1560) and Apologia (1562), Foxe’s first 1570 preface “to the true and faithful congregation” alludes to a medieval “descent of the right Church” at a marginal reference to the “Image of both Churches.” The Elizabethan reader is here informed that, even during this initial era of decline, the British ecclesia remained “vncorrupt, and the word of Christ truly preached,” so long as Rome had “nothing as yet to do in setting lawes touching matters in the Church of England: but that onely appertained to the kinges and gouernors of the land.” Yet everything was “turned vpside downe, all order broken, dissipline dissolued, true doctrine defaced” during the eleventh-century Investiture Controversy, when religious “liberty was turned into law, argument into authoritie.” as temporal jurisdiction was ceded from kings and magistrates to the popes and prelates of Rome.

At the beginning of the second millennium, Foxe thus shows the “true visible Church” of scriptural and magisterial authority beginning to hide away in the face of a false jurisdiction at

Rome (i.e., Art. 37’s “foreign Jurisdiction).127 Yet his new 1570 preface also reminds the “now reformed” Church of England that, although papal sovereignty was ascendant in the medieval era, Christ’s “faythfull witnesses” still preached “no other doctrine, then nowe they heare theyr owne Preachers in Pulpits Preache, agaynst the Bishoppe of Rome and the corrupte heresies of his Churche,” and that parliaments and “whole armyes and multitudes” stood firm “within the

Arke of his true spirituall, and visible Churche.” From the beginning to the end of his second

127 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 3-4, 3n. 61 ecclesiastical history, then, from his “suffering time” to his “reforming time,” Foxe preserves a visible role for the “godly” magistrate, as implied by Elizabethan Article 37.128

Prior to the pronouncement on godly rule contained in Article 37, and the political tensions of the

1560s, Foxe’s first history (1563) had presented a diminutive summarization of the first millennium church with little concern for Constantine and his magisterial successors. Acts and

Monuments’ 1563 timeline was derived from Daniel’s four monarchies such that his “golden” age descended into a “brasen” age, with early ecclesiastical disputes being settled “by the word, and not by the sword” to the effect that “cruelty and tyranny was than in Neros court, not in

Peters seat.”129 The “flourishing” era was then associated with the ante-Nicene martyrs, not with

Emperor Constantine, indicating that church historian Foxe had not yet come to associate godly rule with a Christian “golden age” or a “pure” apostolic church (i.e., devoid of images, masses, celibacy, and vestments).130 Yet, as if prompted by the political doctrine espoused in Article 37,

Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570) utilized a new hermeneutic that transformed

Constantine into an agent of divine providence: applying a figurative tool called a “Sabbat of years” (or “month of years”) to Daniel’s “forty-two” months—with each month representing seven years of Christian antiquity (42 x 7 = 294 years)—to arrive at a 294-year “suffering time” (i.e., Foxe’s first epoch) which extended from the death of Christ (AD 30) to Constantine’s victory over Licinius (AD 324). In addition to this fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, Foxe’s

128 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 5-6.

129 Acts and Monuments 1563, 22-27, 19.

130 Ibid., 24, 18-19. In the early pages of Foxe’s 1563 history, Emperor Constantine is mentioned in conjunction with the early councils, and the 1563 text affirms that “no vniuersall bishop” had been recognized at the 325 council of Nicaea (24). The 1563 edition even mentions Emperor Phocas and Bishop Boniface III (25), but without the new five-epoch chronology, as demarcated by Constantine’s edict and Boniface III’s universal title. 62 second edition also calls Joseph “a plaine figure of Christ,” echoing ’s understanding of

Joseph in his commentary on Exodus, to mark 300-400 years of Hebrew bondage in Egypt as an

Old Testament archetype for the first three centuries of Christian suffering prior to Constantine.

And with the church now liberated in fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, Emperor Constantine not only figures prominently on Foxe’s 1570 five-step timeline as a godly magistrate who established a visible Christian church at the forefront of a 300-year “flourishing time,” he is even seen to inaugurate a millennium (324 AD + 1000 years) of “peace and tranquilitie” for God’s people throughout Christendom.131

As an early Christian progenitor of this figurative method of interpretation, Biblical scholar

Origen is also newly featured in Book I of Foxe’s second ecclesiastical history (1570). The third-century scholar is cited from Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History as one who pursued an

“inward and mystical speculacion” by “Gods heauenly prouidence” and classical study, although

Eusebius’ protracted discussion of his Alexandrian scholarship and pursuit of classical philosophy, manual labour, and ascetic discipline is here circumvented to underscore a

Protestant-like devotion “onely to that knowledge and seeking of the diuine scriptures, and suche other learning conducible to the same” (i.e., sola scriptura).132 Foxe admits some “blemishes of doctrine” in Origen, since his allegorical method had been disavowed by many Protestants; but he also counters that the church father (by whom this figurative method came to the Latin

West) had recommended Origen as an “excellent interpreter” and that Bishop Athanasius had

131 Acts and Monuments 1570, 152, 514. Origen compares Joseph’s betrayal and his rise to power with the death and resurrection of Christ in Exodus Homily I.2-5. Origen, Origen: Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. R. E. Heine (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1982), 228-238.

132 Acts and Monuments 1570, 92, citing Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History (HE) VI. 2-3. A longer discussion of Origen is found in HE VI. 2-29. Eusebius also refers to Origen pursing “deeper senses of the text” under the tutelage of his father (VI.2). 63 used his commentaries in defence of Nicene orthodoxy. Origen lived a half century prior to the establishment of Constantine’s visible church, but Foxe portrays him as a faithful witness to godly rule by observing his success in bringing “Christianitie into the emperial seate” through the conversion of Emperor Philip the Arabian (244-49) and by recording his martyrdom under the Roman persecutor Decius.133 The figurative “rule” of Biblical interpretation is also attributed to Origen (and Jerome) in Foxe’s marginalia next to a key sermon by Nicholas Oresme, heralding that “by Hierusalem… is ment the church,” as Oresme transforms 16’s allegory of Jerusalem’s unfaithfulness into a five-fold periodization of ecclesiastical history.

Since these five stages of martyrdom, prosperity, corruption, correction, and reformation134 appear to be replicated in the “suffering,” “flourishing,” “declining,” “loosing of Sathan,” and

“reforming” eras of Acts and Monuments 1570, Origen’s (and Oresme’s) figurative hermeneutic

(of Scripture) may be regarded as highly germane to Foxe’s historiography of godly rule.

Oresme’s sermon at the Avignon palace also sets the Foxean stage for a “reforming era” arrival of the papal Antichrist, once Constantine’s temporal millennium (324-1324) of “peace and tranquilitie” is seen to have expired. For with the affirmation that “by Hierusalem… is ment the church,” Oresme’s sermon uses Old Testament prophecy to affirm that the “churche shall fall” in a latter-day tribulation. The “futurist” eschatology of Roman Catholicism would anticipate an imperial Antichrist in the last seven years of history, but Foxe’s 1570 preface “to all the professed frendes and followers of the Popes procedynges” juxtaposes the “outward religion” of

133 Acts and Monuments 1570, 100, 99, citing Socrates, VI.13 on Jerome, and citing Pomponius Laetus, Sabellicus and Bergomensis on the conversion of Philip the Arabian by Origen and Roman bishop Fabian (See also HE VI. 34 & 36). Eusebius’s HE VI. 39 is also cited by Foxe on the death of Origen under Decius, and Suidas & Nicephorus IV.32 is cited on Origen’s suffering under captivity (100).

134 Ibid., 533n, 534n, 536. For Oresme’s full oration, see 532-37. 64

Rome with the “sonne of perdition” (II Thess. 2:3-4) where the pope is seen

“aduaunsing him selfe” in the temple of God, a medieval Roman “defection” from the ancient norm of the “fayth of Iesus preached” (i.e., the Christian gospel) which then reappears in Foxe’s

1570 introduction.135 The new 1570 preface also identifies the Roman persecution of Protestants with the two beasts of Revelation 13, but it declares the “church militant” and “peaceable gouernement” of Elizabethan England as a contemporaneous fulfilment of Isaiah’s Old

Testament vision of a lion and lamb living together in peace on Mt. Zion (i.e., Isa. 11, 65).136

The medieval Antichrist is also contrasted with godly rule in Foxe’s main 1570 narrative, where

Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (d. 1250) is seen to declare Pope Gregory IX a “forerunner” of the Antichrist while attempting to “restrain” his false claim to temporal power.137

Expectations of a papal Antichrist can also be found in Acts and Monuments' first edition, but

Foxe’s second edition contextualizes this event within his five-step historiography of godly rule.

For example, the 1563 text features Abbot Joachim’s (d. 1202) prediction, in front of the crusading King Richard II’s court, of a coming antichrist at Rome; and Archbishop Becket’s

“rebellion” under King Henry II (1154-89) is conjoined with the 1563 narrator’s statement that

“the tyme was not yet come, that Antichrist should so fully be reuealed. Neither was hys wickedness then so fully ripe in those days, as it hath ben now in our tyme” (italics mine).138

135 Acts and Monuments 1570, 534, pref. 15, 50. Jesuit Francisco Ribera’s In Sacrum Beati Ioannis Apostoli (1590) argued for a future leader who would rebuild the temple, be embraced by Jews, and overthrow the Roman in an era of Christian apostasy (D. Andrew Penny, “John Foxe, the Acts and Monuments, and the Development of Prophetic Interpretation,” John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades, (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), 265, citing Harold H. Rowden, The Origens of the Brethren, 1825-1850 (London, 1967), 14-15.

136 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 13, 15.

137 Ibid., 406, 405n.

138 Ibid., 326, 280; 1563, 107, 64. The 1563 edition here uniquely retains Richard II’s counterargument, based on medieval Catholic orthodoxy, that the Antichrist would be a political leader from the tribe of Dan, not a religious leader as suggested by Joachim (1563, 107). 65

However, the 1570 narrative, in addition to the above, begins the countdown to the papal

Antichrist with Constantine’s triumph at Milvian Bridge, where early church historian Eusebius’s vision of horse and rider falling into the “sea” (the Roman tyrant Maxentius drowning in the

Tiber) in a recapitulation of ’ triumph is reiterated and embellished by a Foxean depiction of Constantine’s “heavenly victory” and the “glorious hande of the Lord Christ fighting with his people.” A 1570 marginal note also reads, “The fygure of the old Testament verified in the new,” as Biblical prophecy and ecclesiastical history here converge in what Foxe calls a “godly beginning of good Constantinius,” as the first Christian emperor’s victory over the Roman persecutor Maxentius is conjoined with the Edict of Toleration to result in a thousand years of

“peace” and “tranquilitie,” “libertie & lyfe” for the church.139 Neither is this Foxean fulfilment of the Biblical millennium easily overlooked by the 1570 reader, for the margin here cites

Revelation 20 stating that Satan would be “bound vp,” and Books I and II of the 1570 edition each conclude with a reiteration of Emperor Constantine having “restraynd” or “bound vp” the

“ragyng and furious violence” of Satan for a thousand years.140 Book V even declares that a prevailing ignorance of scripture and history had prevented many Christians from distinguishing the spiritual millennium of Christ’s gospel, which bound Satan in heaven, from the temporal millennium which had existed from Constantine’s time, when the outward activities of the serpent were “restrayned” by the first “godly” magistrate.141

139 Acts and Monuments 1570, 133, 133n. Cf. HE IX.9; Vita I. 38-40. His reign leading up to the “florishing” time of Constantine, Maxentius is described by Foxe to be “like to an other Nero or Domitianus” for the murder, adultery, magic, and human sacrifice which had taken place at his royal court (132). The Vita Constantini likewise refers to the “unspeakable oppression” of this Roman “tyrant” (Vita I.36). Eusebius Pamphilus, Life of Constantine, intro. and trans. by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 83.

140 Acts and Monuments 1570, 133n, 157, 192. Eusebius linked Constantine to Moses but not to the New Testament prophecy of the millennium (Vita I.12, 38; HE IX.9).

141 Acts and Monuments 1570, 514. 66

Roman Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy had both dated the millennium to the advent of Christ, a mainstream doctrinal position that is evidenced in Augustine’s City of God and retained in the first edition of Acts and Monuments. But although Edwardian Article 41 had repudiated millenarianism, the reform-minded bishops who drafted the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, 1571) had opened the door to a new political ideology by eliminating the article, while introducing the

“godly Prince” of Article 37.142 And at the defeat of the Roman persecutor Licinius (AD 324) in

Foxe’s second edition, Constantine is thereafter portrayed as a “godlye,” “meeke & most

Christian Emperor” who would “destroy the idoles,” turn “mourning into ioy,” and release

Christian captives unto “life and liberty (and woulde God also not so muche riches)” throughout the empire, thus uniting Roman Christendom both east and west, as Foxe’s 1570 margin reads,

“Apo. 20. From the time of Licinius, to Wickleffe 1000 yeres. Sathan bound up for a 1000 yeres.” Like the “meeke” lawgiver Moses who led the Hebrew nation out of Egyptian bondage,

Constantine hereby becomes an archetypical “godly” prince who, being led by divine providence to deliver God’s people from persecution to a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, inaugurates a thousand years of “peace and tranquilitie” for the visible Roman church up to the “reforming era” (1324-present) of John Wycliffe.143

A Magisterial Defence under the Pax Romana

Even during the Roman persecutions prior to Constantine, Acts and Monuments 1570 presents the magistrates who served under the Pax Romana (guaranteeing liberty of travel and communication) as instruments of divine providence for the propagation of Christ’s gospel. For

142 See the 1552 and 1563 Articles of Religion in Charles Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion (London, 1904), 294-99, 314-19.

143 Acts and Monuments 1570, 152, 152n. 67 although a worldly and idolatrous resistance to the gospel kerygma is seen entrenched in both church and state during Foxe’s “suffering time” (i.e., his first epoch)—with the “vaine Senate” of

Rome enacting “the lawe of man, then of God” in rejection of the “meeke Kyng of glory” and the religious leaders of Jerusalem choosing Caesar not “Christ to be theyr king”—this is presented to 1570 readers as a dereliction of civil and ecclesiastical duty leading to lawlessness and internecine warfare, as a marginal note reads, “Examples of the iuste plage of God vpon the

Romaine Emperours persecuting and resisting Christ, tyll the time of Constantine.”144 This ungodly church and state was not able to resist Christ’s gospel, however, even in Roman antiquity: for the main 1570 narrative shows the “rage and fury of the people” being quelled into

“alcyone days” of “quiet and rest” (like the “alcyon days” of Elizabeth I’s reign mentioned in the

1570 dedication) as the “learned” Bishop Quadratus and two Athenian elders offered a “defence of the Christian religion” before Hadrian’s imperial court (117-38).145 Bishop even advises Hadrian’s son-in-law Emperor Antoninus Pius (138-61) to maintain the ancient jurisprudence of his “godly fathers,” announcing that “since our doctryne flourished in the

Empyre, no mysfortune or losse happened from Augustus tyme,” where Foxe’s marginalia declares, “Christian religion began with the Empyre of Rome: Christian religion maketh common weales to flourish.”146 At a marginal note which reads, “Quietness geuen to the church,” the second edition (1570) also shows the ruling elites of Rome being drawn in great numbers to “the wholesome doctrine of the Gospel” under the peaceful reigns of Marcus

144 Acts and Monuments 1570, 62-63, 63n. Cited from Eusebius HE II.2 and Tertullian’s Apology 5.

145 Ibid., 79-80, pref. 9. Cited from HE IV. 3, 8-9, & Viris Illustribus, 20 (Aristides). The names of the other two Athenians elders are given as Aristides (philosopher) and Serenus Granius (nobleman) (79).

146 Ibid., 88, 88n, citing HE IV.26. In Eusebius’s HE, Melito only speaks of a “just ruler.” 68

Aurelius (161-80) and his son Commodus (161-92).147 Yet once the tyrannical Barracks Emperor

Maximinus (d. 238) seizes the imperial throne without approval from the Roman senate, a

“heathen multitude” is seen unleashed as “persecutours of hys worde” and the empire is seen ravaged by a divine scourge of “plage and pestilence.” Joining ranks with Eusebius and the classical Roman writers who regarded the Barracks emperors (236-84) as “levelers” and

“tyrants,” then, Foxe’s second edition aligns the “alcyone days” of the Pax Romana with a

“godly” constitutional defence of Christ’s gospel.148

Supplemental to this early Roman defence of the Word, Foxe’s 1570 history also associates the

Pax Romana with a certain courtly diffidence toward Roman idolatry. As vexation over the

Ornaments Rubric (1559) reached new heights in Elizabethan England, with nonconformist preachers being deprived of their pulpits (and some going to jail), Puritan conformist Edward

Dering delivered a 1570 sermon before the queen’s court that came within a whisper of identifying the cross and candles of her royal chapel with popery. In Acts and Monuments of the same year, Foxe likewise shows the apostle Andrew defending the “fayth of Christ” against the

“wicked counsel” of a magisterial court who engaged in acts of Roman idolatry, saying, “O crosse… ioyfully and desirously I come to thee, being the scholer of him which did hang on thee," while his 1570 margin offers an iconoclastic interpretation of the apostle’s testimony by declaring that “the crosse here is not taken for the materiall crosse of woode: but for the manner

147 Acts and Monuments 1570, 89n, 89, citing HE V.5 for “quietness” under Roman nobility. Antonius Pius and the Roman senate are also shown to receive a godly warning from Justin’s Apologies (which claims that Socrates, Plato and the Greek philosophers had borrowed their wisdom from the divine Logos of Scripture) that “it becometh princes to folowe vprightnes and pietye in their iudgementes, not tiranye and violence” (87). See also Apologies I.v. 4; I. xlvi.2; II.xiii.5-6 for Justin’s effort to persuade Roman authorities of this higher wisdom (c. 153-155).

148 Acts and Monuments 1570, 97, 107. Cites HE VII.1, 21-22 (based on the Dionysian account) for the decimating plagues in the decade after the persecutions of Decius (249-51) & Gallus (251-53). Cf. H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000), 118-119. 69 of deth vpon the cros which death was to him welcome.”149 Emperor Alexander Severus

(222-35) is also extolled in the 1570 edition as a Roman magistrate worthy to “be noted and followed” where he is seen to have maintained “wyse and learned” counselors at his court (rather than Roman idolators) and to have offered “freindlye and fauourable” audience to Christians, including the Biblical scholar Origen at his Antiochene palace.150 Consistent with John Bale’s preface to Luther’s A faithful admonition of a certeyne true pastor (1554), which blamed the nobility for the terrible plight of English Protestants under Mary Tudor, Foxe’s 1570 narrative thus associates the Pax Romana (i.e., “alcyon days”) with a magisterial court that favoured godly

(scriptural) counsel.151

Moreover, like Elizabethan Article 37’s directive for “godly Princes” to “restrain by the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doer” (and Foxe’s 1571 prefatory appeal in the Reformatio), Acts and Monuments 1570 also depicts the ancient Roman magistrate—whether persecuting or protecting the godly—as an instrument of divine providence for ecclesiastical discipline. In the first-century persecution under Domitian (81-96), for example, the nephews of Jude (brother to

Jesus) are seen released without harm after the emperor observed their roughly worked hands and heard their faithful witness of an otherworldly kingdom. In the second-century persecution under Trajan (98-117), the “suffering time” is also seen mitigated by magistrate Pliny’s defence

149 Acts and Monuments 1570, 65-66, 66n. Andrew’s testimony is cited from ’s De duplici martyrio ad fortunatum: a work now believed to have been composed by Erasmus of Rotterdam.

150 Ibid., 96n, 96-97, citing Jerome. Severus is here seen to prefer to accommodate a Christian congregation’s appeal for the use of his public building over that of some “sloobering Cookes and Skullyans” (96).

151 Gerald Bowler, “Marian Protestants and the Idea of Violent Resistance to Tyranny,” Protestantism and the National Church, ed. Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 127. 70 of the accused Christians as “godly and honest.”152 In the third-century persecution of Emperor

Decius, however, Bishop Cyprian is recorded as saying that the Roman church was “scourged, and worthely” for having failed to exercise a pure “discipline” devoid of pride, possessions, dissensions, and hypocrisy. This statement by Cyprian reinforces Foxe’s preliminary description of a third-century apostate church which had abandoned inward election for the ungodly pursuit of mere “outward profession.”153 Reminiscent of his 1570 title page image of a true and false church and his prefatory dismay over the “famous buildings” of sixteenth-century Rome, Foxe furthermore couples new construction, generous , and “great libertye and prosperitie of lyfe” in the third-century Roman church, prior to the Diocletian persecutions, with pride, “idlenes,” and “hipocrisye” among her ministers—along with a decline in “good order” and the “cal for his mercy”—to suggest that the Old Testament prophecies had been fulfilled in which the Lord threatened to forsake the “footestoole of his feete,” “prophane his sanctuary,” and

“turn away the helpe of his sword from her.”154 Just as compared the medieval papacy to the imperium of Nero, Domitian, and Diocletian in Vitae Romanorum Pontificum

(1555), Foxe here appears to conflate the imperial rite of proskynesis—where Emperor

Diocletian is described as “puft vp in pryde,” “demanding to be “worshipped as God,” and

“adourning his shooes with gold and precious stones” to have people “kysse his feet”—with the pride of these early Roman bishops.155 Like the disciplinary role of the “godly” magistrate in

152 Acts and Monuments 1970, 77, 71, citing HE III.20 for Domitian. In Eusebius’s version of Pliny’s letter, Christians are said to do nothing “contrary to the laws” of Rome (HE III. 33).

153 Acts and Monuments 1570, 110, 62, citing Cyprian’s Fourth book, epistle 4.

154 Ibid., 121-22, citing HE VIII.1 (third-century church) for passages from Psalms & (i.e., Lamentations) (122). Foxe also critiques second- and third-century Ignatius, , , Tertullian, Origen, and others for falling into doctrinal heresies of legal perfectionism, free will, chiliasm, etc. (113-14).

155 Ibid., 122. Cf. Pucci, 35, citing Robert Barnes Vitae Romanorum Pontificum (1555), sigs 6b-7. 71

Article 37, therefore, the third-century persecutions seem to be intended as a reminder to Foxe’s

1570 readership that the temporal sword had long acted as a divine instrument to “restrain” worldliness, pride, and idolatry in the church.

The Pax Romana even converges with godly rule in Acts and Monuments 1570 through a two- step process orchestrated by an iconoclastic Roman imperator and his British-born son. At

Foxe’s first citation of Eusebius’ Vita Constantini, Constantius Chlorus (305-06), ruler of Britain and Gaul, is seen feigning a royal order for pagan sacrifice—at a 1570 marginal note which reads: “Constantius proueth who were the Christians in hys court and who were not.” He here rewards conscientious objectors as “assured frendes” who were “worthy to be about a prince” while dismissing any servile idolaters of his royal court as “traitors vnto God.” In the question posed to the courtly sycophants—“How could they keep the faith with the Emperor if they were found to have no conscience about the Supreme?”—Constantius even echoes the earlier testimony of the soldier-martyr St. Maurice at his death.156 For when St. Maurice (d. 287) and the Theban legion are asked by Emperor Maximian (286-305) to make sacrifice and “beare armour againste the Christians” of Gaul, they refuse, saying,

But in this we may in no wyse obey thee, O Emperour… We haue fought in the quarell of faith, whiche in no wyse we can keepe to you, if we do not shewe the same to our God. We first sware vpon the Sacramentes of our God, then afterward to the kyng: and do you think the second wil preuaile vs, if we breake the first?”157

Constantius ruled as Western Caesar from 293 to 305, but Foxe distinguishes him from contemporary Roman persecutors Maxentius, Severus, and Licinius, by citing medieval sources

156 Acts and Monuments 1570, 128, 128n, citing Vita I.16 & Sozomen I.6.

157 Ibid., 126, citing Ado and Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale 13.2. 72 which place the Diocletian persecutions “before the commyng of Constantius to his gouernment.”158 Instead, Constantius is depicted as a “godly” and “meke” emperor whose

“affection towardes the worde of God” resulted in “peace & tranquilitie” within the western empire, and whose rule foreshadowed Emperor Constantine’s universal reign of “peace and tranquilitie.” This is consistent with Foxe’s bold-faced “protestation or petition” for “peace and tranquilitie,” as heralded in the preamble to his first 1570 preface, to end “all mortall miserie” under Elizabeth I’s reign (in preparation for the Second Advent). In the person of Emperor

Constantius of Britain and Gaul, then, the 1570 Elizabethan reader discovers a “godly” magistrate of Roman antiquity whose iconoclastic reforms were worthy of contemporary emulation.159

Emperor Constantine of Christian Antiquity

Constantine’s Scriptural Faith

In the son of Emperor Constantius Chlorus and Princess Helena of the Britons, Constantine

(whose conquest by the cross made him the first Christian emperor of both the Latin West and the Greek East), Foxe’s 1570 history presents a prime example of godly rule in parallel with the prerogative “given always to all godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself” in Article 37.

For just as the preliminary paragraphs of Foxe’s 1570 narrative immediately depart from the

158 Acts and Monuments 1570, 137, citing Bede, Maurtinus, Nosegaye, and others on the Diocletian persecutions. The Roman principate came to an end when Diocletian (284-305) was elected by his military comrades at Nicomedia. He appointed comrade-in-arms Maximian (285-305) as emperor of the West, and an imperial tetrarchy was formed when Caesars Galerius (Syria and Egypt) and Constantius (Britain and Gaul) were subsequently adopted as sons of Diocletian and Maximian by marriage to their respective daughters Valeria and Theodora. At the dissolution of the tetrarchy, Constantinius reigned briefly as Western emperor from 305 to 306.

159 Ibid., 127-28, pref. 1. Foxe cites Roman historian Eutropius for his characterization of Constantius as a “meke” ruler and Eusebius’s HE VIII.13 for Constantius’s relationship to the “worde of God.” 73

1563 edition’s preoccupation with the medieval persecutions in order to underscore the “first conversion of christen Realmes, to the fayth of Christ” (italics mine),160 here the “fayth of Christ” is seen to culminate in a fulfilment of the Biblical millennium (as mentioned above) by which

Emperor Constantine conjoins the scriptural faith of Jerusalem with the temporal sword of Rome to inaugurate a thousand years of “peace and tranquilitie” for a true visible church under godly rule.

In a statement attributed to him by Augustine, Constantine is seen to acknowledge the role of divine providence in godly rule by declaring that the “Empire was geuen by the determinat purpose of God” and that “he to whom it was geuen, shoulde so employ his diligence, as he might be thought worthy of the same at the handes of the geuer.”161 His symbol of victory, the chi-rho or labarum which his troops carried into battle, was inscribed upon contemporary Roman medallions and the 315 Arch of Constantine, but Foxe utilizes the Byzantine record provided in

Eusebius’ Vita Constantini, including his death-bed baptism by the bishop of Nicomedia, to indicate that the first Christian emperor had avoided allegiance to the and to debunk its claims that the emperor was baptized by Pope Sylvester I in exchange for temporal power in the Western empire.162 Allusions to Byzantine Caesaropapism (i.e., royal supremacy) are also avoided in favour of godly rule. For Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History had recorded that

Constantine was moved by “compassion” and “divine assistance” to “restore the Romans to that

160 Acts and Monuments 1570, 62. Foxe here pledges “not so much to intermeddle with outwarde affayres of princes (except sometime for example of lyfe)” and “to prosecute such thinges, which to the Ecclesiasticall state of the Church are appertaining.”

161 Ibid., 152, citing Aelius Lampridius’s Augustan History and Augustine’s Against Cresconius, Bk III. epist 49-50 (for Constantine’s statement), Eutropius (for Helena) and Vita IV (for his baptism).

162 The Vita shows Constantine baptized on Easter Sunday (337) at Nicomedia with his bishops and military officers nearby (Vita IV.59-63). Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla’s De falso credita (c.1440) argued that the papal account, the , was a forgery. 74 ancient liberty… derived from their ancestors,” and the Roman senators were shown honoring their “saviour and benefactor” with a great statue bearing the “signe of the crosse” along with the inscription: “By this salutory sign, the true ornament of bravery, I have saved your city, liberated from the yoke of the tyrant. Moreover, I have restored both the Senate and the Roman people to their ancient dignity and splendour.” Yet Foxe omits the senatorial praises and the second half of this inscription (along with mention of the grandiose described in Eusebius’s Vita

Constantini) such that—similar to his 1570 dedicatory address to a “principall gouernour” under

“Christ the Supreme Head”—the first Christian emperor is portrayed in Acts and Monuments

1570 as less of a powerful “supreme head” of the Roman state and more as a “godly” defender of the early apostolic church.163

Like his iconoclastic reinterpretation of the testimony of the Apostle Andrew and his similar depiction of the reign of Emperor Constantius Chlorus, Foxe here reappraises the “salutory sign” under which Constantine fought as a figurative symbol of sola scriptura faith rather than as an ornament of iconophilic veneration. Because Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History recorded no vision, dream, nor labarum prior to the battle with Maxentius at Milvian Bridge, Foxe utilizes

Eusebius’s Vita Constantini for his account of a superstitious emperor being converted on the march to Rome from “great doubt and perplexitie” to “great confidence” by the appearance of the “similitude of a Crosse” (italics mine) over the setting sun (with in hoc vince written in the stars).164 It was a testimonial which was received by Eusebius from Constantine “a long time

163 Acts and Monuments 1570, 133; Cf. pref. 7, citing HE IX.9, Vita I.39-40.

164 Ibid., 132; Cf. Vita I.28-29. In hoc vince means “By this sign conquer.” The vision occurs somewhere else in the Vita (Gaul), and the “stars” are added by Foxe as well. The plausibility of the Vita testimony is enhanced by Foxe’s statement that Constantine did “often times report” the event (132), but Eusebius’s Historia Ecclesiastica refers only to Constantine receiving “divine assistance” (IX.9). 75 after,” with confirming oaths, likely while the bishop was in attendance at the council of Nicaea or at the thirtieth anniversary celebration of the emperor’s reign (although modern historian H. A.

Drake questions the veracity of the emperor’s testimony after many years of exposure to the

Christian community).165 Foxe’s 1570 history offers a more “godly” and iconoclastic account of this “first conversion of christen Realmes, to the fayth of Christ” (italics mine), however, by replacing the Vita’s record of the “experts in his words,” who encouraged the emperor to “apply himself to the divinely inspired writings,” with his own exhortation that Constantine should

“seeke and aspire to the knowledge and faith of hym whych was crucified vpon the crosse, for the salvation of hym, and of al the world” (italics mine). Here Foxe adds a marginal warning that

“the material crosse [was] not to be woorshypped, but to be a meanes to bring Constantin to the fayth of hym which was crucified.” Combined with his subsequent observation that the emperor

“utterly abjured” idolatry after his victory at Milan, then, historian Foxe presents the first

Christian emperor to his 1570 Elizabethan readers as a “godly” magisterial convert from

“superstitious worship” to the “knowledge and fayth” of Christ, or scriptural faith.166

As articulated in his 1570 introduction, Foxe hopes that Protestant ministers would “admonish magistrates erring in their office,” and his 1570 dedication likewise exhorts the queen’s subjects

“to work the thing that is godly” on the basis of “hys faith onely… and in no other means.”167

Drawing on evidence in Elizabeth’s letters, Susan Doran argues that the queen had been favourable toward scriptural authority but that she was quite unsympathetic toward Protestant

165 Drake, 204. In addition to Nicaea (325) and Constantine’s thirtieth anniversary (336), Eusebius may have also met Constantine during the controversy related to the council of Tyre (335).

166 Acts and Monuments 1570, 62, 132, 132n, 152. Cf. Vita I.32.

167 Ibid., 35, pref. 10. 76 expressions of “iconophobia and emphasis on edification through preaching.” By ostensibly converting Emperor Constantine to the “knowledge and faith of Christ” (or scriptural faith) and relating his celestial vision of 312 to a royal disavowal of images, however, Foxe’s narrative both reinforces the title page image of the heavenly Christ as head of the church (to the detriment of the “Supreme gouernour” of royal supremacy in the Ornaments Rubric) and aligns the first

Christian emperor more closely with “godly” Protestant reform. As if to prompt Foxe’s dedicatory exhortation that the queen’s subjects should “work the thing that is godly” by Christ’s faith alone, Article 11 (“Of Justification”) had recently been revised in a sola fide direction in the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, 1571) to include the words: “We are accounted righteous before

God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our works or deservings…,” and Article 12 (“Of Good Works”) had been added to speak of the “fruits of faith” that “follow after justification” and “do spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith” (italics mine). Although Article 6, on “the Sufficiency of Scripture,” was not materially altered in the Elizabethan Articles, it too pronounced that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the faith, or be thought requisite as necessary to salvation” (italics mine).168

If Constantine’s apparent conversion to scriptural faith was understood by Foxe’s contemporaries as an early example of godly rule, including a purge of icons and other Roman traditions, as

Foxe’s new 1570 narrative seems to suggest, it would have drawn some attention to the

Ornaments Rubric, by which the queen had kept a silver cross in her royal chapel and by which

168 Bray, Documents, 291, 287. 77 her Ecclesiastical Commission had deprived thirty-seven gospel preachers of their pulpits in the

Vestiarian Controversy. As editor of the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (1571), Foxe would soon join forces with parliamentarians Thomas Norton and William Strickland, even as the latter magistrate expressed the hope to purge “superstitious things” from the Prayer Book so that all would be “brought to the purity of the Primitive Church.”169 As Constantine marched in victory through Rome bearing the newly constructed labarum of golde and precious stones before him “as one armed from heauen,” in ostentatious celebration of the church militant, then,

Foxe’s 1570 edition appears to exhibit the emperor’s “knowledge and faith of Christ,” or scriptural faith, as a key historical “monument” of godly rule.170

A Godly Defence of Christian Liberty

Beyond the first Christian emperor’s embrace of scriptural faith, moreover, Acts and Monuments

1570 portrays the ancient “godly Prince” as an ardent defender of gospel liberty. Foxe’s 1570 introduction had articulated a magisterial duty “to order and dispose in all things not contrary to

God,” and his Constantine narrative quickly moves from the victory at Milvian Bridge to the

“godly beginning of good Constantinus” at Milan, where the emperor and his “councell” of

“wyse men” act in “good aduisement” for a “common & publicke peace” to guarantee “libertie to vse and chuse what kinde of worshipping he list.” The passage, with its description of a collaborative legislative effort in accord with divine providence, thus suggests a political precedent for how England’s “principall gouernour” might cooperate with her magisterial peers for an enhancement of Protestant liberty. For in describing the first constitution for religious

169 H. C. Porter, ed. Puritanism in Tudor England, London, MacMillan, 1970, 142. Foxe’s early work, De censura sie excommunicatione ecclesiastica rectoque eius usa (1551), had also advocated a Protestant code of discipline.

170 Acts and Monuments 1570, 132. Cf. Vita I.31. 78 toleration in the Western world, the passage reveals to 1570 readers how this ancient “godly

Prince” came to fulfill the millennial promise of “peace and tranquilitie,” with Foxe’s reproduction of the Edict of Toleration (313) marking the event as a crowning achievement of

Constantine’s reign, as it is immediately followed by textual and marginal commentary on a

“marueilous working of God his mighty power” and “Gods work in defending hys Christians.”171

The Edict of Toleration might also be understood, however, as a political (or temporal) equivalent to the religious (or spiritual) decision rendered by Bishop Irenaeus and his third- century synod at Lyon in defence of gospel liberty. For when some adherents to the Greek Easter rite in Asia Minor are threatened with excommunication by Bishop Victor of Rome (189-99),

Bishop Irenaeus and the Lyon council, believing that the first-century apostles had not “bounde the churche to anye ceremonies and rites,” are seen to dismiss Bishop Victor’s preoccupation with “dayes, tymes, places, meates, drinkes, vestures” as a departure from the early Christian concept of adiaphora (a Greek word meaning “things indifferent”), their “concord of fayth,” and their “doctrine of Christian liberty.” In Acts and Monuments 1570, both Irenaeus (with his fellow ministers) and Constantine (with his fellow magistrates) are thus seen to render godly decisions against Roman tyranny and in favour of Christian liberty. These decisions offer scriptural and constitutional precedents which also comport with Foxe’s new definition (in his third 1570 preface) of true religion as an “inward working faith” by the Spirit rather than an outward expression of “byshops, garments, vestures, gestures,” etc., where the marginalia reads,

“Saluation of man standeth only in fayth of Christ.” From the very beginning of his second

171 Acts and Monuments 1570, 51, 133-34, 134n. Cf. Vita I.41; HE X.5. In Foxe’s earlier work Christus Triumphans, Ecclesia openly pronounces, “From the day when Constantine of Britain became ruler of the State we have enjoyed peace for a long time.” Christus Triumphans, 62; quoted in V. Norskov Olsen, 184. 79 edition, then, Foxe appears determined to reveal how the scriptural faith of both magistrates and ministers was mutually expressed through a “godly” defence of gospel (adiaphora) liberty.172

This “godly” cohesion of scriptural faith and constitutional liberty is also evidenced in the 1570 edition’s reproduction of Emperor Constantine’s diplomatic letters. In an effort to procure “quiet

& rest” for the persecuted Christians of Persia, after the royal courtier Usthazares and

Archbishop Simeon of Seleucia are seen martyred in Persia for their refusal to “betray God” through the worship of “visible creatures,”173 Constantine is seen introducing King Shapur II to the faith of “hym which was crucified” while drawing a causal connection between the defeat of the Roman persecutor Valerian (by Persian King Shapur I in 260 AD) and his own victory over the Roman persecutor Maximinus under the Christian labarum. This reproduced letter also includes some uniquely Foxean paraphrase, by which the first Christian emperor is seen to describe himself as subduing the Roman emperor “onely by hys fayth in Christ” and by which he then exhorts the Persian king to similarly “procure to your selfe grace through your fayth” through legal toleration for Christians.174 Another diplomatic letter to his eastern subjects also relates the natural laws of “reason” and “virtue” to the “knowledge of God” (i.e., scriptural faith), and contrasts the “meekenes” of his father Constantius with the “ungodly” imperators and

“sauage beastes” of Diocletian’s court who had used Apollo’s “lying oracles” to slander and

172 Acts and Monuments 1570, 94-95, preface 15, 15n.

173 Ibid., 148-49, citing Sozomen II.8-10. Foxe does not mention the Vita's account of Constantine’s planned invasion of Persia (See Vita IV:56-57).

174 Acts and Monuments 1570, 150. Cf. Vita IV.9-13. In the Vita, Constantine merely refers to the “sign my army carries" (IV.9) and to the “enormous satisfaction” which may be garnered “both to yourself and to us” by royal toleration of the Christians (IV.13). 80 persecute Christians.175 In prayerful soliloquy, Emperor Constantine even testifies that he was

“perswaded by thy onely oracles” to bear “thy ensigne” on behalf of those “whom the spirite of

God moueth” to exercise the “discipline of thy eternall word” (i.e., scriptural faith). As he instructs his eastern subjects to maintain “peace and tranquilite,” a concluding marginal caption here reads, “Constantinus neyther for feare dissemleth his fayth, neyther through policy defaceth gods glory” (italics mine). By means of Constantine’s letters, therefore, Foxe illustrates to his

1570 Elizabethan readers that “godly” rule, based on scriptural faith, was coterminous with a constitutional defence of Christian liberty.176

His Defence of Godly Discipline

Unlike England’s “supreme governor” who wielded singular authority on a cuius regio, eius religio imperial model, ancient Constantine is portrayed in Acts and Monuments 1570, reminiscent of the “principall gouernour” in its 1570 dedication, as one who “set forth a spectacle to all princes to followe” by his “meke and godly” collegiality. Like Moses

“delyuering the people, & agreeing them together,” “godly” Constantine here requests that

Bishop Miltiades of Rome convene a synod over the Donatist controversy (313) and offers public conveyance for the clergy to the council of Arles (314). Even more reminiscent of a

“principal governor,” Foxe’s second edition records that when the “Byshops required any councell to be had, he satisfied their peticions,” and it distinctively avoids the Vita’s phraseology

175 Acts and Monuments 1570, 153, 153n. The oracles of Apollo were used to blame Roman Christians for a decline in imperial prosperity.

176 Ibid., 153-54, 154n. Cf. Vita II.48-60 (incorrectly cited to HE X.5). Here the Vita Constantini refers to “thy guidance” (not “thy onely oracles”) and to the “doctrine” (not the “discipline”) of the Word (Vita II.55, 59). 81 that the emperor behaved “like a universal bishop appointed by God.”177 Instead, Constantine is portrayed by Foxe as a chief magistrate who ratified episcopal decrees and who, in an allusion to the post-Nicene factionalism led by Alexander and , pleaded with disaffected bishops to

“returne againe to the communion of the reuerend counsel” rather than foment further “discord and discention.”178 Contrasting the Vita Constantini with Acts and Monuments 1570, historian

Michael Pucci observes that the Eusebian Constantine was featured as a bishop-emperor in the

Byzantine mold, while Protestant Foxe portrayed him more as a lay catechist.179 Like the

Eusebian history, Acts and Monuments 1570 alludes to the Roman emperor’s status as pontifex maximus, but this occurs prior to Constantine taking on his “godly” magisterial role.180 In collaboration with his bishops, Foxe’s “meek” and “godly” emperor instead assumes a more diminutive status, reminiscent of the title of “principal governor” by which Foxe addresses

Queen Elizabeth in his 1570 dedication, as a “godly” magistrate who acts from within, rather than from above, the visible Christian church.

Like his 1570 introductory affirmation that civil magistrates must maintain “the law of God,”

Foxe’s 1570 history also shows Emperor Constantine as proactive in implementing a godly discipline. Where a marginal highlight reads, “The comtempt of Gods religion, the chiefest decay of commonweales,” for example, Acts and Monuments 1570 records that the first Christian emperor established a godly precedent for church and state by exempting Christian ministers

177 Acts and Monuments 1570, 155n, 154n, 154-55, citing Exodus 2, where Foxe has Moses “agreing the brethren together” (154). Cf. Vita I.44. In the Vita, Constantine also tells the bishops, “You are bishops of those within the Church, but I am perhaps bishop appointed by God over those outside” (Vita IV.24).

178 Acts and Monuments 1570, 155, citing Vita book II and Sozomen I.8-9.

179 Pucci, 47.

180 Acts and Monuments 1570, 40. Cf. Eusebius, HE, VIII.17. 82 from civic duty—reinforcing the respective roles of magistrate and minister in Article 37—and it also notes that he recognized Sunday as a public holiday, liberated Christian slaves, provided for poor widows and orphans, restrained gladiatorial combat, and promoted “onely Christians” to public office.181 The impious festival of Androgyni is also seen brought to a godly end, with

Bishop Marcus of Arethusa being commissioned to erect a church over the idolatrous temple of

Venus at Heliopolis (Syria), even as the Vita’s description of new ostentatious basilicas is avoided to underscore the emperor’s repair of damaged churches and his restoration of lost property. As a symbol of the magistrate’s temporal prerogative within the church militant, the cross on his soldiers’ weaponry is also said to make them “sooner to forget their old superstitious idolatrie,” and Emperor Constantine is shown to banish all “images and monumentes of idolatry” from his private chapel at Nicomedia. A prayer “tabernacle” is said to accompany him on his military campaigns, and a soldiers’ prayer acknowledging God to be their “only king” is ascribed to him.182 At the end of Book I, imperial provision for sacred study and the transcription of fifty bibles by Bishop is also used by narrator Foxe to contrast the “Christian zeale of thys Emperour” with the “inferiour Princes raygning in these our printing dayes.”183

Being twice recommended to Elizabethan readers as a “spectacle for all christian Princes to beholde & imitate, and worthy of perpetual memory in al congregations of Christian saynctes” (italics mine)—consistent with Article 37’s ancient “godly Prince”—Emperor

181 Acts and Monuments 1570, 154n, 154, 155-56. Sozomen also says that Christians received “almost all the principal posts” of the empire (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, Ed. Kevin Knight [New Advent, 2009]: I.8).

182 Acts and Monuments 1570, 155-56, 151. Cf. Vita IV. 20-21, 57; Sozomen I.8 (soldier’s prayer, weapons, prayer tent, and temples); Sozomen V.10 (for Heliopolis). The Vita describes temple fixtures and idols being confiscated and melted down for gold, silver, and bronze, and cult objects being moved to the imperial palace, hippodrome, and public square in (III.54); it also describes the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in almost millennial terms as a “new Jerusalem,” shining with gold and precious jewels (Vita III.33-40).

183 Acts and Monuments 1570, 156. Cf. Vita IV.34-36. 83

Constantine is hereby thrust forward in the Acts and Monuments 1570 as a seminal figure whose reverence for Scripture facilitated a “godly” shift toward civil and ecclesiastical reform.184

John Wycliffe: Godly Rule by Scriptural Authority

English theologian John Wycliffe’s belief that “no law, act or document is valid unless authorised by the Bible,” as represented in Foxe’s 1570 “reforming era” (the last of his five epochs beginning in 1324), also supports this political theology of godly rule.185 Papal jurisdiction was not expunged from English common law before the English Reformation (1534), but Wycliffe (d.

1384) and his followers, the Lollards (or Wycliffites), had so popularized scriptural authority that

Elizabethan Protestant John Aylmer’s An Harborowe for Faithful and Trewe Subiectes (1559) would refer to “Wyclif, who begat Hus, who begat Luther, who begat truth” next to his marginal pronouncement of “Christes second birth in England” (since paraphrased: “God is English”),186 and modern historian A. G. Dickens would subsequently refer to Wycliffe’s popular movement

(also known as Lollardy) as the “spring-board of critical dissent” from which leapt the English

Reformation.187 ’s doctrine of apostolic poverty had placed ecclesiastical temporalities under magisterial jurisdiction, and Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis had regarded the medieval pontiffs as purely spiritual advisors, but John Wycliffe went a step further by placing Scripture directly into the hands of an “elect” magistrate (e.g., Acts and Monuments

184 Acts and Monuments 1570, 157; also 155n.

185 Richard Rex, The Lollards (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 35, citing Tractate de Mandatis divinis (1375), 21-22.

186 Aylmer, An Harborowe, R1.

187 Dickens, English Reformation, 36. 84 shows Wycliffe writing Pope Urban VI to say that the “gospel of Christ is the whole body of

Gods law”).188

Wycliffe’s political influence reached its apex at the time of King Edward III’s death (1377) under the patronage of the king’s third son, John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. It is typified by several of Wycliffe’s works on the magisterial use of scriptural authority: De Civili Dominio

(1376), which argued from Scripture that princes held the temporal authority to discipline clergy through apostolic poverty; On the Truth of Sacred Scripture (1378), which suggested that laity could interpret Scripture on behalf of the English nation (with De Dominio Divino [1373] advocating a figurative interpretation of the Old Testament); and De officio Regis (1379), which insisted that a corrupt medieval church was subject to temporal discipline. Wycliffe’s works were influenced by medieval scholarship like that of ’s (d. 1253) and Thomas

Bradwardine’s (d. 1349) espousal of Augustine’s use of Scripture and doctrine of predestining grace, and like William of Ockham’s (d. 1349) and Richard Fitzralph’s (d. 1360) defence of apostolic poverty. However, Foxe describes Wycliffe as singularly devoted to the “auncient doctors,” so as to derive his political theology of godly rule exclusively from Christian antiquity.189

Although a key figure in the first edition of Acts and Monuments, Foxe’s second edition enhances Wycliffe’s proto-Protestant contribution to godly rule based on scriptural authority.

Both editions show the “mornyng starre” of the Reformation promoting “fayth,” “free

188 Acts and Monuments 1570, 566; 1563, 150-51. Cf. Michael Wilks, Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000), 147-48. The Magdeburg Bekenntnis (1550) had allowed Lutheran princes to defend justice when the emperor failed to do so, as both were ordained of God, but reformer Knox’s Appellation (1558) extended this right to nobility who would defend the “law of God” (Loades, “John Foxe and the Traitors,” 236).

189 Acts and Monuments 1570, 547; 1563, 140. 85 iustification,” and “the liberty of a Christian man,” and both show King Edward III and his parliament attempting to retrieve their “auncient libertie” related to ecclesiastical benefices (i.e., against Roman jurisdiction).190 Pope Gregory XI’s 1378 bull, reproduced in both editions, also cites the condemnation of Marsilius of Padua (i.e., on magisterial authority) in an effort to gain the apprehension of Wycliffe, who taught, quite similarly, that the “disciples of Christ” have no

“ciuill authority,” that papal excommunication can bind only an “aduersary of Gods law,” and that magistrates should “take away the temporalties from the spiritualty, synnyng habitualiter.”191

Articles of condemnation at the Council of Constance (1415), quoted in both Foxean editions, also allege that Wycliffe taught that “Siluester the pope, and Constantine the Emperour were deceaued in geuing and taking possessions into the churche,” that “a Deacon or priest may preache the worde of God” without episcopal sanction, that “it is not necessarie to saluation to beleue the church of Rome to be supreme head ouer all churches,” and that the pope’s decretals

“seduce from the fayth of Christ.”192 Yet, while both Foxean editions relate to the Edwardian ban on Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction,” the 1570 edition also contributes to the concept of godly rule by offering a new list of Wycliffe’s teachings which allege (in the final two of seven new articles) that Scripture is “sufficient of it selfe to rule the life of euery Christen man here, without any other rule” and that ecclesiastical canons can “adde no more perfection to the Gospell, then

190 Acts and Monuments 1570, 544; 1563, 137. The light of Wycliffe’s doctrine is here contrasted with the “ignorance and darkenes” of Roman “superstition,” by which “people were taught to worshyp no other thyng but that whiche they did see, and did see almost nothyng whiche they did not worship.” Wycliffe’s ministry is also associated with King Edward III and his parliament’s effort to regain control over ecclesiastical benefices (i.e., provisors) according to their “auncient libertie” (citing Caxton).

191 Ibid. 1570, 551, 552-554; 1563, 141, 143-46. These teachings are taken from the first, tenth, twelfth, and sixteenth articles, respectively, as quoted in the 1570 edition from a list of the condemning articles, prior to the 1377 Lambeth trial (552). In both editions, Pope Gregory XI asks the king to cooperate with the English bishops to end this “detestable and abominable madness,” which threatened to upset the “state of the whole church” (1570, 551; 1563, 141).

192 Ibid. 1570, 571; 1563, 160. 86 doth the white colour to the wall.” Another new list of Wycliffite articles also declares that the humble servant of the “churche militante” is nearest to a “vicar of Christ,” that a “true dominion secular” requires a “vertous lyfe,” and that “what so euer the pope or his Cardinals can deduce clearely out of the holy Scripture: that onely is to be beleued” (i.e., three of eighteen new articles). Thus Foxe’s second edition supplements the former 1563 narrative of Wycliffe in such a way as to advance an Elizabethan political theology of godly rule and scriptural authority.193

A new 1570 account of the summons of Wycliffe to St. Paul’s Cathedral in response to De Civili

Domino (1576) also advances Foxe’s historiographical case for a godly magistrate-led discipline by allusion to clerics who “sinne, habitualiter” and to the eleventh-century deprivation of by William Rufus. The case of Archbishop Anselm appears in an altered (1570) reply by Wycliffe to the sixth condemning article during the 1378 protestation at Lambeth, where he defends the magistrate’s jurisdiction with a corollary statement that “Christian princes” cannot act by “naked authoritie” when “limited” by law.194 In a subsequent answer to the eighteenth article on lay prosecution of clergy, where Wycliffe merely asserts that “the church is aboue the bishop” in the 1563 narrative, a 1570 edition extrapolation shows him explicitly referring to a

“residue of the body of the church, which possibly may stand most of lay men” (italics mine), ready to discipline clergy who threatened to turn the “fayth of the Scripture” into a “damnable case.”195

193 Acts and Monuments 1570, 550, 572.

194 Ibid. 1570, 547, 553; 1563, 144.

195 Ibid, 1570, 554. Cf. 1563, 146. My citations notwithstanding, the 1570 record of Wycliffe’s written protestations to the eighteen Lambeth articles generally follow the earlier 1563 record. 87

This “godly” magistrate-led discipline also emerges out of Foxe’s revised 1570 narrative where

John Wycliffe’s political allies seek to “restrain” a false Roman jurisdiction. For King Edward

III (d. 1377) is eulogized in the second edition—having a “mekenes” and “gentleness” like that of “godly” Constantine—as the greatest “bridler of the popes vsurped power” prior to King

Henry VIII, and John of Gaunt’s “displeasure agaynst the popish clergie” is associated with his determined patronage of Wycliffe as a like-minded “enemie agaynst the popes profession.”196

Duke John even threatens the Bishop of London with punishment (consistent with

Article 37’s description of the godly magistrate’s power to “restrain”) during the interrogation of

Oxford scholar Wycliffe at St. Paul’s Cathedral over De Civili Domino (noted above), after which Wycliffe is allowed to preach about London, “barefoot and in long frise gowns,” on the apostolic pattern. These “simple russet gownes” are also highlighted in Foxe’s first 1570 preface

“to the true and faithfull congregation” as one of the primary causes of episcopal disfavour toward Wycliffe and his faithful followers. Similar to Foxe’s refusal of the “rags of Rome,” therefore, Duke John’s resistance of the persecuting prelate and defence of Wycliffe’s preaching offers a medieval precedent, consistent with Elizabethan Article 37, by which “godly” magistrates might choose to “restrain” the outward vestiges of “foreign Jurisdiction,” including clerical vestments.197

The second edition even shows this “godly” magisterial “restraint” being applied to the clergy, based on scriptural authority, in the reign of King Richard II (1377-1400). Duke John of Gaunt’s political influence had waned at the arrival of the Black Death, as labor shortages and a series of

196 Acts and Monuments 1570, 550-51, 546

197 Ibid., 547-48, 550, pref. 5. 88 poll taxes unleashed a wave of popular fury that culminated in the Peasant Revolt (1381), in which rebel leaders Wat Tyler and John Ball sought legal and economic equity and Archbishop

Sudbury and Royal Treasurer de Hales were beheaded by an angry mob. With the rise of King

Richard II, Archbishop Courtenay (Sudbury’s successor) would oversee the condemnation of

Wycliffe’s teaching at Blackfriars (1382), and a petition against lay preaching would be grafted onto a royal statute without assent from the parliamentary commons (Modern historian Anne

Hudson believes the condemned traitor John Ball had been influenced by Wycliffe’s teaching on apostolic poverty).198 Foxe’s histories avoid any connection with Wycliffe by dismissing the rebellion as a mere instance of “cruell dissention . . . betwene the common people and the nobilitie” and by quickly turning the focus toward Wycliffe’s banishment from Oxford and his fatal stroke at Luttenworth (1384). Blame thus falls on the Roman church, as Foxe’s histories record an earthquake at the Blackfriars synod (1382) and the death of Wycliffe on St. Sylvester’s

Day (1384), the feast day of the very pontiff whom Roman Catholics celebrated for having received temporal jurisdiction from Emperor Constantine.199

Yet, as fellow Wycliffites Dr. Philip Repingdon and Chancellor Nicholas Hertford flee Oxford in both Foxean accounts (1563 & 1570), with Repingdon (d. 1424) lapsing into a “terrible persecutor” on the episcopal bench, the second edition offers an alternate account favourable to

198 Anne Hudson, “Hermofodrita or Ambidexter: Wycliffite Views on Clerks in Secular Office,” Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (Stroud, Eng.: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 41. John Wycliffe’s De Potestate Pape (1379) attacked the post-Constantinian “Caesarian clergy” for abandoning the doctrine of apostolic poverty (see Curtis Bostick, The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 30 [Leiden: Brill, 1998], 63-65). Yet like Foxe, medieval chronicler Thomas Walsingham makes no connection between the Peasant Revolt and the “poor preachers” of Lollardy (Rex, 52-53).

199 Acts and Monuments 1570, 554, 568; 1563, 147, 150. When the proceedings at Blackfriars were interrupted by an earthquake, Foxe observes that both Archbishop Courtney and John Wycliffe claimed it as evidence of divine favour (556/147). 89

Foxe’s political theology of godly rule by scriptural authority. Although accused by Archbishop

Courtenay of usurping the episcopal “keyes,”200 the excommunicate preacher Hereford is here defended by King Richard II—where a 1570 marginal note reads, “What the K. might haue answered them, prosopoia”—as the archbishop is seen “restrained” by England’s chief magistrate using the theatrical device called a prosopon. The fictitious King Richard II even remembers the former rebellions of Anselm, Becket, and Langton at Canterbury and cites the legal principle of “equity” while summoning the bishops to his magisterial bench for a proper adjudication of the Hereford case based on the “touchstone of Gods holy word.” Like Foxe’s prefatory hope that Reformation England would sail as “one shippe,” both civil and ecclesiastical, guided by the “needle well touched with the stone of Gods word” (rather than being torn asunder by wind and wave), this imaginary defence of a Wycliffite preacher by

Richard II reinforces the “restraining” role of the “godly” magistrate under scriptural authority, as denoted in Article 37, within the historic English church.201

In the revisions which Foxe made in Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570), therefore, the

Elizabethan reader is presented with evidence of godly rule throughout ecclesiastical history, from the pre-millennial “suffering time” to the post-millennial “refoming era.” Foxe’s 1570 narrative begins with the Roman magistrates of the Pax Romana who administered justice in their treatment of gospel ministers, and moving from the providential conversion of Emperor

Constantine to scriptural faith (i.e., “Christes fayth) it inaugurates a millennium of “peace and tranquilitie” for the visible church based on “godly” Constantine’s defence of gospel liberty, his

200 Acts and Monuments 1570, 564-65; Cf. 1563, 153-54. Like the sermons of Robert Grosseteste, Hereford’s sermons of early 1382 advocated civil seizure of ecclesiastical property and criticized the Oxford monks for abandoning their core ideals (Bostick, 180).

201 Acts and Monuments 1570, 566n, 566; Cf. 1570, pref. 6. 90

“meek” collaboration with Christian bishops, and his zealous implementation of “godly” laws.

At the expiration of this temporal millennium (324-1324), John Wycliffe (d. 1382) also heralds a

“reforming era” in which clergy who “sinne habitualiter” under papal authority (i.e., “foreign

Jurisdiction) can again be “restrained” (i.e., disciplined) by a “godly” magistrate under scriptural authority. Having discussed the relevance of godly rule to Foxe’s 1570 historiography, Chapter three will next discuss Foxe’s increased attention to the “two regiments” model of godly rule—in agreement with the dual roles of magistrate and minister under scriptural authority as described in Elizabethan Article 37—which, after being established in Christian antiquity, are shown to be eclipsed (and coopted) by medieval Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction,” as implemented via excommunication, crusade, and persecution.

91

Figure 2 – The dichotomous title page to Acts and Monuments (1563 & 1570) CHAPTER THREE:

GODLY RULE IN “TWO REGIMENTS”

As noted in my introductory chapter, Foxe’s second edition (1570) sets the historical stage for a

“two regiments” ecclesia under godly rule, in league with Elizabethan Article 37’s dual description of magistrate and minister, by introducing the English church in his 1570 prefaces as an “Arke of his true sprituall, and visible Church” and as a “church militant” of both spiritual and temporal estates.202 The Augsburg Confession (1530) had envisaged a Protestant church of Word and Sacrament made tangible through the eye of faith—like Augustine’s City of God, which defined the city of God as spiritual and Christendom as temporal—and Edwardian Article 36

(1552) had substituted royal sovereignty (i.e., plentitudo potestatis) for papal sovereignty— declaring the English king to be the “Supreme head in earth, nexte under Christe of the Churche of England”—but without further definition of the Protestant magistrate’s role. Yet, in league with the reform-minded bishops who drafted Elizabethan Article 37, Foxe now advances the cause of godly rule (and Protestant reform) by providing historic illustrations of the magistrate’s role within a visible Christian church.

Commissioned by privy councillor William Cecil (Lord Burghley) in support of the new

Elizabethan establishment, John Jewel’s Apologia ecclesiae anglicanae (1562) had accused medieval Rome of acting “like Anabaptists and Libertines” in open disregard for the Christian

202 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 6, 13.

92 93 magistrate, and had declared English Protestantism as a Noah’s ark for all who would flee this

“corrupt Society of Wicked and Hypocritical Persons.” A new ecclesiastical model was now being erected, and Foxe’s 1563 dedication joined the English Protestant chorus by celebrating

Elizabeth I’s accession as a recapitulation of ancient Constantine’s reign, bringing to an end a second wave of Roman persecutions.203 Yet subsequent to Article 37, which effectively made the spiritual sword of the clergy coordinate with the temporal sword “given always to godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself,” Foxe’s second history exhibited a fivefold increase in his use of the term “regiment” (over his first edition) in connection with godly rule;204 and like Article

37’s pronouncement that England was “not nor ought to be subject to any foreign jurisdiction,”

Foxe’s second edition also placed both “regiments” in direct conflict with Rome. For his 1570 introduction explicitly defines Rome’s “two swords” jurisdiction as an illegitimate claim to

“bothe the keyes of the Spiritualty, and the scepter of the Layty,” and his first 1570 preface describes the true ecclesia of God, both spiritual and temporal, as unrecognizable and intolerable to the “worldly eyes” of Rome. Foxe’s 1570 title page and first preface thus feature an “image of both Churches” which is no longer indicative of a simple dichotomy of visible and invisible churches but of a gradual (and historical) subversion of Constantine’s visible church by a false

“two swords” jurisdiction at Rome.205

203 Jewel, Apology, 77, 74; Acts and Monuments 1563, pref. 1-4. Like Foxe’s histories, Jewel records Frederick Barbarossa’s neck being tread upon, Emperor Henry VI being crowned by the papal foot, and Emperor Henry VII and King John of England being poisoned at the pleasure of the pope.

204 To measure this fivefold increase, I searched references to “publicke regiment,” “both the regimentes,” spiritual “regiment,” etc., in the 1570 edition of The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online edition (e.g., on pages 26, 29, 33, etc.) in comparison with such references in the 1563 edition (e.g., on pages 37, 45, etc.). This revealed that, while the length of the 1570 history grew by one third, from a 1,827-page work to a 2,354-page work, there was a highly disproportionate, fivefold increase in Foxe’s use of the term “regiment” between the 1563 and 1570 editions.

205 Acts and Monuments 1570, 26-27, pref. 3. 94

This chapter, therefore, discusses Foxe’s 1570 vision of how godly rule was initially established in “two regiments” during Constantine’s millennium (324-1324), and how papal “ambition destroyed Religion” and “sincere fayth” began “to quayl” at the arrival of a false “two swords” jurisdiction at Rome.206 This eclipse (or cooptation) of the lay regiment by Rome is especially apparent after the eleventh-century Investiture Controversy, a period which Foxe calls the

“loosing of Sathan” (the name of his fourth epoch), at which time this “foreign

Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) is shown to mount a heretical and treacherous assault on Constantine’s visible church through papal excommunication, crusade, and persecution.

“Two Godly Regiments” in the First Millennium

In parallel with Article 37’s “godly Prince,” Foxe’s new introduction to Acts & Monuments

(1570) shows that the “two regiments,” both spiritual and temporal, were visibly active in the ecclesia from ancient times. Based on a single covenant perspective, Old Testament kings are said to have held temporal jurisdiction over the priesthood, inter-testamental Maccabean princes to have purified the temple out of “zeal to the lawe of the LORD,” and the New Testament apostles to have taught subjection to earthly powers.207 This “old” ecclesiastical model is then reconstructed for the Christian era at Foxe’s marginalia on the “office of ciuile rulers & magistrates” and “office of the ecclesiasticall minister,” where the magisterial office is deemed responsible to provide “good and godly” laws, “especially to see the law of God mainteined, to promote Christs glory and Gospell,” send and maintain “good preachers,” elect “faythfull”

206 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 4.

207 Ibid., 33. Magisterial Reformer Foxe cites both the apostle Paul’s admonition “Let every soul be subject unto higher powers . . ." (Rom. 13:1) and the apostle Peter’s admonition “Submit yourselves . . . whether it be to the king, . . . or unto governors . . . (I Pet. 2:13-14). 95 bishops, enforce the “disciplyne of the church” by “outward punishment,” and invoke synods for

“rytes and ordinaunces” that result in “edification” not “destruction,” while the ministerial office is seen responsible to administer Word and Sacrament, to “binde & loose,” to “teach the people the true difference betwixt the lawe and the Gospell,” and to “admonish also the Magistrates erring or transgressing in their office.”208 This ancient duality of spheres, which distinguishes the

“godly” magistrate (who is accountable to scriptural authority in the implementation of his temporal sword) from the gospel minister (who is limited to the spiritual sword of Word and

Sacrament), is also manifest under Foxe’s 1570 introductory subtitle “summe of S. Paules doctrine deliuered to the Gentiles,” where the civil magistrate is said “to bridle the disobedient” and “to order and dispose in all thynges not contrary to God,” while the gospel minister is said to bear the sword that is “onely spirituall, and not carnall.” And where Foxe’s 1570 introduction presents the Protestant doctrine of universal priesthood in juxtaposition with the four

Constantinian “degrees” of archbishop, bishop, minister, and deacon, the Elizabethan reader is again reminded that “both regimentes, ecclesiasticall and temporall” have been subject, from

Christian antiquity, to scriptural authority.209

This “godly” bifurcation of roles, which Foxe describes as two “regimentes,” both spiritual and temporal, begins to be integrated into his 1570 narrative from the first of his five epochs, namely, the “suffering time” of Christian persecution prior to the “first conuersion of christen Realmes, to the fayth of Christ.” For Book I of Acts and Monuments 1570 features third-century Bishop- martyr Cyril’s decision to admonish a magistrate by banishing Roman ruler Numerian (son of

208 Acts and Monuments 1570, 35n, 35.

209 Ibid., 51, 45. 96

Barracks emperor Carus) from the church as one “polluted with sacrifices of Idoles” (before the bishop is killed),210 and it features second-century Bishop-martyr Polycarp’s (d. 155) refusal to swear before the idols or defend himself before the pagan mob while pronouncing the Roman magistrate to be “ordayned of God.”211 At the “suffering time” conversion of Emperor Philip the

Arabian (244-49), who is said to have temporarily ushered “Christianitie into the emperial seate” prior to his “martyrdom” by Emperor Decius,212 a “godly” magistrate holds the highest office of the pagan Roman state. And at Bishop Victor of Rome’s (c. 190-91) threat to excommunicate the

Asian churches, as mentioned in chapter two above, Bishop Irenaeus and his Lyon council are seen to apply their spiritual swords against a “foreign Jurisdiction” at Rome (Art. 37).213 In the ebb and flow of three centuries of Roman persecution, then, Acts and Monuments’ second edition

(1570) suggests that the early church had already begun to teach and practice godly rule in “both regimentes,” both spiritual and temporal.

In the “flourishing time” after Constantine’s conversion (Foxe’s second epoch), moreover, Acts and Monuments 1570 records a “two regiments” collaboration of magistrate and minister (under scriptural authority) among the seventh-century Anglo-Saxons. As the first of the Saxon kings to receive the “fayth of Christ,” for example, King Ethelbert of (590-616) is seen to govern in a manner consistent with Constantine’s Edict of Toleration by promising his Frankish and

Christian wife Bertha “fredome of her fayth and religion,” by granting missionary-monk

210 Acts and Monuments 1570, 62, 121.

211 Ibid., 72, citing Eusebius’s HE IV.15. The margin here reads: “Policarpus obedient to hier powers.”

212 Ibid., 99, citing Sabellicus and Bergomensis, lib. 8. Foxe here states that Decius hated Emperor Philip (and his son) for having “committed their treasures vnto Faianus then bishop of Rome.”

213 Ibid., 94-95. 97

Augustine “free leave to preach” from the queen’s Dorobernia chapel (Canterbury), and by enacting royal “dooms” on the premise “that the fayth & seruice of Christ ought to be voluntarie,

& not coacte.” Yet, like Foxe’s 1570 introductory statement that ministers would “admonish also the Magistrates erring or transgressing in their office,” Bishop Gregory I of Rome (d. 604) is also seen to request that Ethelbert apply his “godly profession of Christes faith” against the “temples and workes of idolatrye,” to “conuert the multitude” and to “gouern the people in al holynes and godlye conuersation after the godly example of Emperor Constantinus” (italics mine).214 By acting in “godly” collaboration with Gregory’s spiritual sword, then, King Ethelbert is seen to revive Constantine’s visible church in both “regiments” among the Anglo-Saxon tribes who had invaded Britannia.

The northern Anglo-Saxon kingdom of is also seen to adopt this “two regiments” model of godly rule at the marriage of Saxon bretwalda Edwin (616-33) to Ethelbert’s daughter

Ethelburg. Although the Northumbrian prince, at first, believes the “faith of Christ” to be incompatible with the “good aduise of his counsail” and “olde lawe” of his Saxon kingdom— where the 1570 margin decries: “Old custome in matters of religion not to bee followed but onelye truth”—the king is soon seen to experience “afflictions” like those of Joseph, Paul,

Luther, and Constantine (who are said by the 1570 narrator to come to “know themselues” through godly testings) and like those of Princess Elizabeth (by whose incarceration, “it pleased

God to restore this his Gospel now preached amongest us”). Edwin's sufferings continue until the miraculous vision that precipitated his reign (similar to Constantine’s vision) is providentially revealed to Bishop , who henceforth admonishes the king to “receiue the fayth

214 Acts and Monuments 1570, 168-69, 172, cited from Henry of Huntington (reproducing Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, I.32). 98 of Christ, and to bee obedient to hym” (italics mine) in order that the “old lawe” of superstitious idolatry would be overturned throughout the land. As godly rule is subsequently established in

“two regiments” through official acts of iconoclasm, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria is said to enjoy “great peace & truth among the people,” a recapitulation of the “peace and tranquilitie” which had attended Constantine’s “godly” reign at the dawn of the temporal millennium (and to which the prologue to Foxe’s 1570 preface appeals, on behalf of the

Elizabethan church, on the first page of Acts and Monuments’ second edition).215

This godly “two regiments” ecclesiastical model is also seen perpetuated in the third of Foxe’s five epochs, the “declining time,” through the sacred learning of Bede of Jarrow

(c. 673-735) and that of his second generation Alcuin of York (c. 735-804), and in the following century by the “godly” reign of Anglo-Saxon King Alfred the Great (871-99). After making abundant use of his Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in Acts and Monuments’ second edition

(1570), Foxe here celebrates the eighth-century Biblical scholar Bede as a “learned” man of

“holynes and integritie;”216 and soon after, at the marginal declation, “The bishops and princes of

England against images,” Foxe also reveals that Bede’s disciple, Alcuin of York, had advocated iconoclastic doctrine in his learned epistle “grounded out of the autoritie of holy Scripture” at the time of the Carolingian court ruling against the iconophilic (787) (the

794 Libri Carolini, written at the behest of , was similarly critical of the ecumenical council).217 More evidence of a godly “two regiments” ecclesiastical model is presented where

215 Acts and Monuments 1570, 174n, 174-75, pref. 1.

216 Ibid., 183.

217 Ibid., 188n, 188. Robert S. Hoyt & Stanley Chodorow. Europe in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1976), 158-59. Alcuin became master of Charlemagne’s palace school at Aachen. 99

Acts and Monuments 1570 introduces King Alfred as a magistrate worthy of imitation by

“Princes in these our days” for his devotion to sacred learning, his “godly vertues,” and his

“prudent lawes” which resulted in renewed “peace and tranquilitie.”218 For under Alfred the

Great, godly rule appears in “both regimentes,” beginning with his wilderness exile (via “the prouidence of God”), as the king educates a “poore Swineheard” for a future appointment to the see of Winchester (i.e., the ministerial regiment) and defeats Danish King Guthrum and twenty lesser princes for the conversion of their princedoms under godly rule (i.e., the magisterial regiment). And having divided his royal treasury between temporal and spiritual spheres

(although Foxe critiques the king’s provision for monasteries), Alfred’s zealous provision for sacred learning subsequently results in “learned men” such as John Scotus Eriugena being admitted to his royal court, an Oxford college being founded to educate English nobility, and sacred books being translated from “latine into englishe.” The king is even seen to carry the

Psalms of David in his pocket for personal recourse to reading and prayer, and the common proverb “such as is the prince, such be the subiectes” is recited at mention of his deathbed translation of the Latin Psalter into the . Under “godly” Alfred the Great, then,

Foxe’s 1570 edition marks a revival of Constantine’s “two regiments” church, both magistrate and minister, within Anglo-Saxon England.219

The “Two Swords” in the First Millennium

Bishop Gregory I, author of Pastoral Care, whose tenure as bishop of Rome immediately preceded that of Foxe’s first “pope,” Boniface III, also personifies a true spiritual regiment

218 Acts and Monuments 1570, 200.

219 Ibid., 201-04. John Scotus Eriugena is seen banished from the court of Charles the Bald (840-77) as a “hereticke” for theological positions derived from Greek (rather than Latin) sources (204). 100 within this 1570 historiography of godly rule. For Acts and Monuments’ second edition not only mentions Bishop Gregory I’s rejection of the claim of universal title made by his contemporary,

Patriarch John of Constantinople, to indicate that the ancient Roman church was of a different character from the medieval Roman church, it also describes Gregory I dispatching missionary- evangelist Augustine for England (who is later seen baptizing in rivers on the apostolic model), bearing a commissary letter from Bishop Gregory of Rome to Bishop Arelatensis of the Franks that distinguished the temporal status of their “soueraigne Lorde,” Emperor Maurice, from

Gregory’s own spiritual status as seruus seeruorum Dei (“servant of the servants of God”).220 In a reply to nine “interrogations” by missionary-bishop Augustine, moreover, the godly Roman bishop advises that the local rites and ceremonies of the old English church be preserved, so that

“anye thing that seemeth better to the seruice and pleasying to God” would be administered from what was “good, godly, and religious” among the Anglo-Saxon churches. His advice correlates with contemporary Protestant efforts for Prayer Book reform and the new phraseology of

Elizabethan Article 34 (“Of the Traditions of the Church”) which states that “every particular or national church hath authority to ordain, change and abolish ceremonies, or rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying” (italics mine).221

Gregory I also instructs missionary-monk Augustine—who had recently established his archdiocese at St. Austin’s (of Canterbury) in collaboration with King Ethelbert—to restore the southern metropolitan to its original location at St. Paul’s in order to effect a “common counsell”

220 Acts and Monuments 1570, 174, 173, 168-169. Augustine is said to have baptized 10,000 converts on Christmas day (173).

221 Ibid., 170; Bray, Documents, 305. 101 of London and York (a passage also found in the 1563 edition).222 As a godly representative of

Constantine’s visible church, Bishop Gregory I is thus characterized by Foxe as a defender of

“both regimentes” and of ecclesiastical reform prior to the establishment of Canterbury.

Coincident with the first “conuersion of christen Realmes, to the fayth of Christ,” however, the second paragraph of Foxe’s historical narrative (immediately following his 1570 prefaces and introduction) also highlights a “creping in of superstition” and “false practice of the prelates” in a first millennium devolution toward Rome’s “two swords” jurisdiction. This countervailing shift from godly rule to “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) is initially manifest in the “declining time” (i.e., third epoch) tenure of Pope Boniface III (606 AD), whom Foxe’s second edition calls a proud “forerunner of Antichrist” for having accepted the universal title inherited by all successor “popes.”223 Archbishop Augustine signals a similar influx of Roman doctrine and discipline to Canterbury by erecting a “banner of the crucifixe” (due to the “grossenes of that tyme”) for his first sermon to the Saxon royal court, and by the “Romish manner” and

“pharisaical solemnitie” in which he “kept his chair” at a diocesan synod. (To further illustrate the minister’s role, Foxe also admonishes the Briton bishops for neglecting their “spiritual duty” to preach Christ’s gospel to the Anglo-Saxons.)224 Juxtaposed with an “anno 666” invasion of

Christendom by Islam, moreover, this Anglo-Saxon “decline” is marked by a seventh-century influx of “Italians and foreigners” to Canterbury (violating Bishop Gregory I’s directive that the

222 Acts and Monuments 1570, 171-72; 1563, 32-33. In this second letter to Augustine, contained in both editions, Gregory once again refers to himself as seruus seruorum Dei and to Emperor Maurice as “sovereign lord.”

223 Ibid. 1570, 62, 174. Foxe’s introduction identifies Pope Boniface III and Emperor Phocas with the advent of the papacy (1570, 40), and here Foxe’s main narrative begins to refer to the bishops of Rome as “Pope” Adrian I (772-795), “Pope Boniface V” (619-625), “Pope Honorius I” (625-38), etc. (174, 190, and 191 etc.).

224 Ibid., 169, 172-73. Bede shows the monk-missionaries offering prayers and litanies—without preaching—when “a silver cross for their banner” was brought before King Ethelbert (Historia Ecclesiastica, I.25) (169). 102 southern metropolitan see be returned to London).225 Here Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury

(669-90) arrives in a train of Latin monks, bearing masses and litanies, to “play the rex,”

“placing and displacing the Bishops at hys pleasure,” and enforcing a Latin discipline upon the

Anglo-Saxons (the Roman Easter rite and its diocesan structure, for example).226

Constantine’s “two regiments” ecclesiastical model is further eclipsed by the “two swords” of

Rome in the northern archdiocese of York. Here the godly ruler of Northumbria (634-42), King

Oswald (634-42), King Edwin’s successor, is initially seen to offer a meek and effectual prayer for the “saluation of his people” in the face of a superior militia led by pagan kings Penda &

Cadwallon, and he even appoints Celtic bishop Aidan as an evangelist for his people, with himself as English translator. Yet Bishop Aidan soon characterizes the Northumbrian people as

“not worthy” of such a “meke” (Constantinian) ruler, and King Oswy of Northumbria (642-70) thereafter presides over the Whitby synod (664) in which Celtic and Saxon ministers adopt the

Petrine model by implementing the Latin Easter rite to the exclusion of the Greek.227 The 1570 margin is here marked by Foxean expressions of horror and vexation at the sudden shift toward

Rome: offering statements such as “vniuersalitie alleged,” “Peter & John did not agree in the celebrating of Easter,” and “in the councell of Nice no such matter appeareth.” These marginal statements comply with Article 37’s ban on “foreign Jurisdiction” and with Foxe’s 1570 introductory assertion that “we denye that Peter the Apostle was euer bishop elected, installed, or intituled to the city of Rome;” and the 1570 narrative then implicates both regiments in a final

225 Acts and Monuments 1570, 179, 192.

226 Ibid., 180.

227 Ibid., 176, 177. Aidan’s statement about an “unworthy” people is made in the reign of King Oswine, another “meke” successor to Edwin and Oswald (177). 103 lament, loosely paraphrased from Bede’s original record, decrying that by “this simple and rude reason of the kyng, the multitude of eftsones consented.”228 In this manner, Foxe charts the

Anglo-Saxon church’s rapid “declining time” departure from godly rule in “both regimentes,” with both magistrate and minister moving from scriptural authority toward Rome’s “foreign

Jurisdiction.”

Thomas Norton described the Saxons as “men of a contrarie and false religion,” and Benedict

Robinson observes that English Protestants often associated the Anglo-Saxon invasions with a proto-Catholic infiltration of idolatry and superstition.229 Yet Foxe’s 1570 narrative portrays ecclesiastical wealth as another significant factor in this first millennium “decline” toward a “two swords” Roman jurisdiction. Although Constantine is seen to bar clerics from civil office and avoid large gratuities to the church, the “popish actes and doyngs” of eighth-century Archbishop

Boniface of Mainz (d 754)—especially after the “declining time” deposition of Merovingian

King Childeric III—are here seen to result in a Frankish-Roman alliance that converts the pontiffs into “princes of Rome & of .”230 The concurrent migration of landed wealth to

Rome, including the dukedoms of Ravenna and Lombardy, is likewise associated by Foxe with the seminal document of “two swords” papal sovereignty known as The Donation of

Constantine, which he rejects as medieval forgery (citing the work of Isidorus, Marsilius, Valla,

Enea Sylvio, Luther, etc.) due to the dissimilar “phrase and style” of Constantine’s letters (i.e.,

228 Acts and Monuments 1570, 178-79, 44. Cf. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, III.25.

229 Anthony Martin, “The End of History: Thomas Norton’s ‘V Periods’ and the Pattern of English Protestant Historiography," and Benedict Scott Robinson, “John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons” in John Foxe and his World, ed, Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 47-48; 55-56.

230 Acts and Monuments 1570, 185n, 186-87. Following the patronage of King Pippin III, Foxe notes that the title Rex Christianissimus expresses the gratitude of Pope Hadrian I toward Emperor Charlemagne’s patronage (187). 104 lacking Greek proficiency), the imperial baptism at Nicomedia (not Rome), and the election of his sons as “Augusti” (discordant with papal jurisdiction), as recorded in the Vita Constantini.231

This ungodly “decline” of Constantine’s church due to ecclesiastical wealth and power is shown to quickly accelerate among the Anglo-Saxons under the ninth-century reign of King Ethelwulf

(c. 839-56). As a former , Ethelwulf here bestows great wealth upon the

English church in accord with what Foxe describes as a “pernicious doctrine” for the “remission of theyr sins” that is “contrary to the information of Gods worde, and no small derogation to the crosse of Christ.” This critique is highly suggestive of Elizabethan Article 14’s condemnation of the medieval Roman doctrine of “supererogation” (which allowed for an accumulation of divine merit beyond mere obedience to Scripture);232 but Foxe also attributes the “meritorious dedes” of

Anglo-Saxon kings (in establishing monasteries and retiring to cloisters) to an insufficient

“knowledge and doctrine in Christes Gospell, especially in the article of our free iustification by the faith of Iesu Christ.” This latter charge is an open allusion to the new sola fide pronouncement in Elizabethan Article 11 (“Of Justification”) that “we are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings . . .” (italics mine).233 If the “free grace of the Gospell” was extended to all by faith,

Foxe believes, then a “good and a perfect” man could remain at his magisterial post in defence of

231 Acts and Monuments 1570, 186, 156-57. Foxe lists thirteen objections to the Donation’s authenticity. But for the three points mentioned, see Vita II.24-42; II.46; II.48-60 for “phrase and style"; III.13 on the emperor’s use of Greek; IV.61-63 for Constantine’s baptism; and IV.63, 68 for the election of his sons to the imperium.

232 Ibid., 193-94. Article 14 ("On Supererogatory Works") states: “Voluntary works besides, over and above God’s commandments, which they call works of supererogation, cannot be taught without arrogance and impiety. . ..” Bray, Documents, 292.

233 Acts and Monuments 1570, 190-91; Bray, Documents, 291. 105 the commonwealth rather than be constrained to offer his possessions to the church.234 The historic “decline” of Constantine’s godly regiment and rise of “two swords” ecclesiastical wealth and power in Anglo-Saxon England is thus attributed in Foxe’s second edition to an ungodly abandonment by civil magistrates of the “knowledge and fayth of Christ,” or scriptural faith.

Acts and Monuments 1570 levels particular blame for this “decline” of the magisterial regiment, however, on the unscriptural and unconstitutional practices of Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction.”

Some ninth-century examples include Pope Leo IV (847-55) decreeing that golden ornamented crosses be used in procession, Pope Nicolas I (858-67) pronouncing against clerical marriage, and Pope Hadrian III (884-85) excluding emperors from papal elections. 235 Yet the 1570 edition describes a pivotal eclipse of Constantine’s regiment in England when Archbishop of

Canterbury (959-988) exacts “penaunce” for an act of infidelity by King Edgar (959-75) through the investiture of celibate monks and then parades the king’s “bastard” son, St. Edward (975-78), before parliament with a Roman “crosse in his hand” to delay the accession of the king’s “right heyre and lawfull sonne,” Aethelred (r. 978-1016).236 Foxe raises questions about the archbishop’s legitimacy by citing the Chalcedonian decree (451) that “monkes should not intermeddle with the matters of the church;”237 and like John Bale’s identification of Dunstan with the loosing of Satan in Actes of Englysh votaryes, he also entertains speculation that the archbishop may have used “sorcery” to mislead parliament toward his new ecclesiastical policy

234 Acts and Monuments 1570, 160, 168.

235 Ibid., 62, 195, 198.

236 Ibid., 218-19, 220-21. Foxe cites John of Paris’s reference to St. Edward as “non legitimum filium, that is, no lawful sonne” (220). Where the 1570 margin declares: “K.Eward called Martir proued to be a bastard” (220n), he suggests that “later writers” may have made Editha the only child of the king’s promiscuity in order to protect the honor of St. Edward and St. Dunstan (220-221).

237 Ibid., 215. There is also a second reference to Chalcedon, canon IV, on page 217. 106 on clerical celibacy.238 Book III ends with King Edgar making a futile attempt at English church reform based on the “law of God”—declaring before Dunstan’s assembled bishops that “I haue

Constantine’s sword, and ye haue Peters sword in your handes…”—as Foxe’s 1570 marginalia make reference to “ignorance and superstition” and “the doctrine of iustification vnknown.” As a godly lesson to Elizabethan readers, then, Foxe’s new 1570 account of first millennium

England reveals that Constantine’s “two regiments” model of godly rule was gradually overthrown by a “two swords” ecclesiastical jurisdiction as a result of widespread indolence, within both the lay and clerical regiments, toward scriptural authority.239

A False Church of “Foreign Jurisdiction”

Elizabethan Article 37’s double rejection of Rome, having added a second decree that the

“government of all estates of this realm,” both civil and ecclesiastical, “is not, nor ought to be subject to any foreign Jurisdiction,” is especially germane to Foxe’s godly ecclesiastical model in

“two regiments.” For just as, in his 1570 introduction, fourth-century calls those “a little deceued” who looked to “the rocke onely of the person, and not the rocke of confession,” and sixth-century asserts that the church’s original doctrine and discipline was founded on scripture and councils instead of papal decrees and decretals,240 so

Foxe’s 1570 introduction declares that medieval Rome had falsely “attributed to itself much more, then either the limites of Gods word do geue, or standeth with the example of the old

238 Acts and Monuments 1570, 222. Bauckham, 73, citing T. B. Blatt, The Plays of John Bale (Copenhagen, 1968), 39. Foxe here cites Iornalensis’s account of a Winchester council of barons and bishops in which a crucifix or rood was manipulated to speak on behalf of Dunstan’s political agenda, but he admits that Howden, Fabian, and other chroniclers did not mention this account, and that William of Malmesbury referred only to “hearsay” (222).

239 Acts and Monuments 1570, 236n.

240 Ibid., 43-44, 31. Citing Gregory’s Francorum hist. lib X, ca. 8 & Hil’s De trin. Lib VI. 107

Romaine church.”241 Nor is Constantine’s council of Nicaea (325) thought by Foxe to have granted Rome “vniuersal fulnes & plentitude of power in both the regimentes, spiritual & temporall” (italics mine). Instead, he observes that plenitudo potestatis (“fullness of power”) was blocked by the synod of Carthage and that subsequent appeals were impeded by the parliamentary laws of both England and France for a millennium (i.e., premunire and pragmatica sanctio respectively). Even if Nicaea (325) had granted this sovereignty to Rome (upstaging the four metropolitans of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem), Foxe believes that it would have been accomplished iure non diuino, sed humano (“not by divine law, but by human”).242 By this conjecture, Foxe echoes Elizabethan Article 21’s declaration that general councils “have erred” and that their decrees “as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of Holy Scripture.”243 His 1570 use of scripture and history in defence of a “two regiments” ecclesiastical model therefore represents an ipso facto rejection of any “foreign Jurisdiction” emanating from Rome.

In his new 1570 dedication, moreover, Foxe notes that “certain evill disposed persons, of intemperant tongues” had been critical of his first edition (1563), and he promises to amend a certain “fault” which had left this former history vulnerable to Roman polemical writers who sought to influence “publicke authoritie.” His preface cites the eleventh-century chronicler

Aventino in connection with this “fault,” who then reappears after 175 pages of new material, as

241 Acts and Monuments 1570, 32. Earlier, Foxe’s 1570 introduction had said that primitive episcopal ordinations required three parties – “by the free voices of the people and of the Clergye, with the consent of the Emperour ioyned with all, and not a few conspired Cardinals, closed vp in a corner, as they be now” (p 29).

242 Ibid., 29-31, 34-36. The English law of premunire is seen defending against papal appeals, investiture, tithes in medieval era (35).

243 Bray, Documents, 297. 108

Foxe’s second edition (1570) reunites with his first edition (1563) at the “loosing of Sathan” (i.e., at the fourth 1570 epoch).244 Here narrator Foxe prays (in both editions) that England’s magistrates would not be enchanted by the deceitful “art or trade” of this eleventh-century

“sorcerer,” Pope Sylvester II (999-1003), whom he describes as having been raised up by diabolical power at the turn of the millennium.245 Thenceforth, he refers to the reformist pope

Gregory VII (1073-85) as a “sorcerer,” whom he also dubs the “fyrst and principall cause” of internecine warfare for having divided Christendom into “two churches” during the Investiture

Controversy246 (with Gregory having excommunicated Emperor Henry IV, dismissed the Diet of

Worms, and bestowed a rival crown upon the head of Duke Rudolph of Swabia with the words

Petra dedit petro, Petrus diadema Rodolpho, or “The Rock gave it to Peter, Peter gave the crown to Rudoph”).247 And where Gregory VII is said to advocate a “false libertie, against true authoritie” via papal investiture, the aforementioned Aventino reappears within the narrative to argue that, while the primitive bishops “neuer intermedled, nor intangled themselues” with the temporal sword—having been content with apostolic poverty and gospel preaching “to quicken, and not to destroy”—this Roman tyrant wielded “both the ecclesiastical and temporal swoord” (assisted by Duchess Matilda and Norman dukes) to “occupye both the regimentes.”248

244 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 7. Foxe’s first 1570 preface also refers to these critics as “stinging waspes & buzing drones” (p 2).

245 Ibid, 233, 233n; 1563, 28, 28n.

246 Ibid. 1570, 240-41; 1563, 36-37.

247 Ibid. 1570, 244, 247-48; 1563, 40-43. Prior to Pope Gregory VII’s accession, both editions also record that Cluniac monk Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII) enabled the college of cardinals to elect Popes Nicholas II (1058-61) and Alexander II (1061-73) without imperial approval and encouraged the council of Mantua to decree against lay investiture and priestly marriage (1570, 234-35; 1563, 29-30).

248 Ibid. 1570, 241; 1563, 36-37. 109

Acts and Monuments 1570 thus uses historical evidence of “two swords” Roman illegitimacy, along with instances of papal heresy and treason foisted upon the spiritual and temporal regiments (respectively), to strengthen its “two regiments” model of godly rule. For in addition to Emperor Henry IV’s barefoot plea to Pope Gregory VII for absolution at Canossa, as featured in both histories along with a woodcut image, the 1570 narrative uniquely shows the cardinals refusing the “trechery” of Pope Gregory VII’s excommunication of the emperor and witnessing a spontaneous fragmentation of the papal throne at its proclamation (i.e., “by the appointement of

God, [it] was rent and shyuered in peeces”). A second 1570 reference to Henry IV’s plea at

Canossa is also accompanied by a new 1570 celebration of the emperor’s “godly pacience” in the marginalia, while the pope is seen to do “as much as in him lay to make ii churches;”249 and where the new 1570 narrative describes a failed papal prophecy of Henry IV’s death and papal assassination attempts upon the emperor, another 1570 marginal note reads, “The pope by hys owne mouth condemned for an hereticke.” Here Deuteronomy 18:20-22 is also recited to underscore that false prophecy was a capital crime among the ancient Hebrews.250 By associating Pope Gregory VII with heresy and treason in this manner, Foxe strengthened the hand of any “godly” magistrate wishing to “restrain” this “foreign Jurisdiction,” both spiritual and temporal, in accord with Elizabethan Article 37.

Moreover, where Pope Pascal II (1099-1118) follows the treachery of his papal predecessors

Gregory VII, Victor III and Urban II by excommunicating Emperor Henry IV (1056-1105), the

249 Acts and Monuments 1570, 244-45, 245n. The new 1570 account recites eleventh-century Cardinal Benno’s “epistles” to his fellow cardinals and other “testimonies” related to papal investiture (243-46).

250 Ibid., 244-45, 244n. Deuteronomy 18’s reproduced text is seen to indict the false prophet with the words “let hym be slayne” (244). 110 second edition (1570) adds a dialogue revealing how magistrates would sometimes be treacherously misled by this “foreign Jurisdiction.” Here the “godly and faythfull” Bishop

Waltram argues for a Constantinian “peace” and unity under “our sovereign Lord the

Emperour”—as the 1570 margin reads, “concorde and iust obedience necessarye in a common wealth”—but Earl Ludwig cites Scripture to ask why they should not hate the enemies of God, like David, or destroy the peace of the devil, like Christ, who “came not to send peace but the sword.” And although the godly bishop quotes the apostle Paul’s admonition that “euery soul submit himself to higher powers,” the earl responds in kind with Augustine’s interpretation of the same passage, stating that “if the powers do commaund any thing against God, then haue them in contempt.”251 Decalogue imperatives against idolatry, murder, adultery, and covetousness are elsewhere used in Foxe’s histories (both the 1563 and 1570 editions) to warrant a magisterial defence of the “autority of the Gospel,”252 and like Article 37, Foxe’s 1570 introduction mentions a magisterial responsibility to “bridle the disobedient” and “order and dispose in all thynges not contrary to God.”253 Yet, with the full consequences of the Northern Rebellion and Ridolfi Plot

(1569-71) yet to be determined, and papal excommunication threatening the Protestant queen

(i.e., Regnans in excelsis 1570)—Foxe’s own patron, the Duke of Norfolk, was executed in 1572 for his complicity in the Catholic revolt—the Waltram-Ludwig debate seems uniquely tailored to civil magistrates who might be allured by this “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37). Within this

Elizabethan context, narrator Foxe prejudges Emperor Henry IV’s vices as insufficient “to excite his subiectes to rebell agaynst publike authoritie of God apoynted,” and he offsets Earl Ludwig’s

251 Acts and Monuments 1570, 259n, 260n.

252 Ibid. 1570, 299; 1563, 94.

253 Ibid. 1570, 51. 111 polemic against the emperor with marginal statements such as “a zeale, but farre from knowledge,” “ye true, if he had compelled you to forsake the name of Christ, which he neuer dyd,” and “Oh how craftely doth Sathan here shape him self to an angel of light.”254 Having himself lived in the London residence of the quasi-Catholic Duke of Norfolk until 1569 (at

Aldgate), Foxe now presents the magisterial ally of Rome’s “two swords” jurisdiction as an unwitting victim of a heretical and treacherous regime.255

Acts and Monuments’ second edition makes it known to 1570 Elizabethan readers, furthermore, that in the wake of the eleventh-century Investiture Controversy, this “foreign Jurisdiction” had found frequent lodging at Canterbury. For the second millennium begins in both Foxean editions with Archbishop Lanfranc (1070-89), a former abbot of Bec monastery in Normandy, asserting his preeminence over the archbishop of York on the pretext that “as the bishop of Canterbury is subiect to Rome because he had his fayth from thence: so Yorke ought to be in subiection to

Canterbury, which sent the first preachers thither.” But although, in the 1563 edition, the narrator expresses a reluctance to “medle” in matters of episcopal order, citing the sufficiency of the gospel vis-à-vis “thinges indifferent,”256 in 1570, the narrator abandons this neutrality with a marginal rebuttal of Lanfranc’s claim as “vtterly false.” He also substitutes his former equivocations with a partisan description of the Canterbury archbishop as one who had “plucked

254 Acts and Monuments 1570, 259-60. Article Eighteen of The Thirty-Nine Articles ("On the Name of Christ") states, “For Holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved” (Bray, Documents, 295).

255 In 1569, Foxe warned the duke, whose wife had died in 1567, against any romantic involvement with the Queen, and he moved out of the duke's London house the same year; yet Foxe nonetheless attended the duke to the scaffold in 1572 (Wooden, 13).

256 Acts and Monuments 1570, 239; 1563, 35-36, 36n. The importance of Canterbury is mitigated in 1563 by the narrator’s plea, “What matter is it where mennes crosses be caryed, so the crosse of Christ be magnified? or what mattereth it greatle, who be the Metopolite of England, London, Douer, or Canterbury, so the glory of Christ may shine and florishe in England?” (1563, 35). 112 downe” the old English church and “builded vp the new” by the enforcement of papal canons

(i.e., clerical celibacy); and with many episcopal sees being transferred from “townships to greater cities” (e.g., Chichester, Bath, Lincoln, Salisbury, etc.), the 1570 narrator shows two

Roman cardinals as having been present for the election of a new stratum of Norman bishops.257

By this departure from the 1563 narrative, then, the second millennium arrival of Archbishop

Lanfranc from Bec monastery could be recognized by Elizabethan readers as clear evidence that the Canterbury see had become, at times, a Trojan Horse for Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction.”

Coordinate with Foxe’s revised 1570 account of John Wycliffe, who is seen to describe

Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury (1193-1109) as a cleric who would “sinne, habitualiter” (as discussed in my previous chapter), the second edition likewise provides Elizabethan readers with a full account of this archbishop’s heretical and treasonous allegiance to the “foreign

Jurisdiction” at Rome. The intransigence of William Rufus toward Archbishop Anselm’s appeal for a pall from Pope Urban II (where the English king supported anti-pope Clement III) may be described by modern and Catholic historians as evidence of a “cruel and capricious” monarch.258

Yet, overlooking Anselm’s satisfaction theory of atonement and his famous dictum that “faith seeks understanding,” Foxe’s 1570 edition portrays the Canterbury archbishop as an ally of

Rome’s “two swords” jurisdiction: both as a Roman heretic who was not “sufficientlye acquainted with the iustification of a christen man” (i.e., wishing “rather to be without sinne in hell, than in heaven with synne”) and as a Roman traitor who justified his foreign loyalty by

257 Acts and Monuments 1570, 239n, 240, 238.

258 Hoyt & Chodorow, 338. Like Emperor Henry IV, William Rufus supported anti-pope Clement III against Pope Urban II. 113 invoking the Petrine doctrine.259 In his defence before the king, Anselm is thus seen making use of the famous gospel passage, “Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my church” (Mt.

16:18), and defending the Petrine doctrine with the statement that “if I should forsweare S. Peter,

I should denye Christ.” As open affront to Article 37’s ban on “foreign Jurisdiction,” his testimony is accompanied in Foxe’s 1570 margin by a scornful dismissal of these “hye reasons of

Anselm,” and it is followed in Foxe’s main 1570 narrative by acts of Roman sacerdotalism, as

Pope Urban II’s pall is “layde vppon the aulter, whilest Anselm (spreading ouer hys shoulders hys popish vestments) proceeded vnto hys popish masse” (italics mine).260 Exiled to the continent, the archbishop is later seen sitting at the feet of Pope Urban II at the 1098 council of

Bari—the council that exacerbated the Great Schism (1054) between the Roman Catholic and

Orthodox churches over the filioque clause, unleavened bread, etc.—as Foxe enumerates the papal doctrines of clerical celibacy, transubstantiation, penitence, and so on, which were deemed heretical by both the Greek and English churches. Reminiscent of Archbishop Parker’s

Advertisements and the resultant Vestiarian Controversy (1566), Foxe’s second edition account of

Anselm seems to direct readers’ attention to Canterbury as an English platform for the “creeping in of superstitions” and “false practices of the prelates” from Rome.261

The “traitorous rebellion” of Archbishop Becket (1159-81) further enhances Foxe’s case for an influx of “foreign Jurisdiction” at Canterbury.262 For although both of Foxe’s histories (1563 and

259 Acts and Monuments 1570, 254. Citing Matthew Paris. In addition to Article 11 on “Justification,” Foxe may here be referring to Article 15 on “Christ alone without Sin” which says: “But all we the rest, although baptized and born again in Christ, yet offend in many things, and if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (Bray, Documents, 293).

260 Acts and Monuments 1570, 254-55, 255n.

261 Ibid., 256-58, 62.

262 Ibid., 278; 1563, 63. 114

1570) show the archbishop resisting the Constitutions of Clarendon (i.e., “double jeopardy”) based on his papal “salvo ordine suo” (“saving his order”) oath, and although both editions describe Becket’s execution inside Canterbury cathedral with his Roman cross “borne before him,”263 Foxe’s second edition (1570) adds the opening marginal assertion, “Becket no martyr,” and traces the archbishop’s maternal lineage to a region “bordering nere to Normandie”264—an allusion to the Bec monastery from which the reformist (Roman) archbishops Dunstan, Lafranc, and Anselm were summoned to Canterbury. As further evidence of this “two swords” (i.e.,

“foreign”) jurisdiction at Canterbury, Foxe’s second edition (1570) also shows the archbishop refusing the king’s request that he discipline the clergy and “Empress” Matilda (the Queen mother) requesting that Becket exercise proper “humility and moderation” toward her royal son rather than “rebell and stir his people against him.”265

Both of Foxe’s histories feature Archbishop Becket’s letter from exile threatening King Henry II with censure (like Bishop Ambrose with Emperor Theodosius) unless the king act as a “child of the church and not the ruler of the church,” but the 1570 narrator offers a novel response in defence of the “two regiments” model of godly rule. Against Becket’s claim that Emperor

Constantine had refused to administer temporal punishment on the bishops and that two Hebrew kings, Saul and Uzziah, had experienced divine punishment for usurping the clerical sword,266

263 Acts and Monuments 1570, 281-82, 302; 1563, 65-66, 98. Foxe’s 1563 and 1570 margins both attribute Becket’s death to the papal oath, where the main text states that “since the tyme the othe began to be layd and thrust vpon the byshops, all generall councels began to lose their libertie” (1570, 309; 1563, 106).

264 Ibid. 1570, 278n, 279. Next to the 1570 highlight “Becket no martyr” (278), the parallel text speaks of two churches, spiritual and temporal: one of “faith, religion, true doctrin, sincere discipline, obedience to gods commaundements,” etc., and another of worldly “possessions, liberties, exemptions, priuileges, dignities, patrimonies & superiorities” (1570, 278; 1563, 62).

265 Ibid., 280, 298-99.

266 Ibid., 289-91; 1563, 81-82. 115 the 1570 narrator counterposes that Constantine had summoned the bishops of Tyre “to haue theyr cause iudged and decided” and that King Saul and King Uzziah were not punished for usurping the clerical sword but rather for breaking God’s law (i.e., ungodly rule). In further support of the “two regiments” model of godly rule, the 1570 interlocutor also compares magisterial defenders of England’s “common laws” with ancient Hebrew princes who preserved the Mosaic law, and he offers a statement that lay adherence to the “doctrine and divine knowledge” of the clergy was required only in so far as “they go trulye before them without error, or els not.”267

These 1570 depictions of Anselm and Becket of Canterbury as sycophants of Rome indicate a

“godly” Foxean impetus, in parallel with Elizabethan Article 37, to represent “any foreign

Jurisdiction” at Canterbury as a direct threat to England’s “two regiments” ecclesia. For, even as

Pope Urban II’s ban on lay investiture “with crosse or with ryng, or with pastorall hoke” led to a compromise (1107) between Anselm of Canterbury and King Henry I for royal participation in episcopal investiture, devoid of divine symbols (i.e., a template for the 1122 Concordat of

Worms), narrator Foxe is brazenly intolerant of the new deal. He lists sacerdotal practices like clerical celibacy, papal absolution, and priestly vestments as canonical riders, and remarks that the archbishop should have been preoccupied with “preaching Christ at home to his flock” instead of “gadding to Rome” and drafting “tyrannicall” canons.268 Believing lay investiture to have been the normative practice in Constantine’s visible church, with “gods word allowyng wel

267 Acts and Monuments 1570, 291. Foxe also contends that the apostle Peter had commanded submission to civil authority (I Pet 2:13), that Christ had provided this apostle with tribute for Caesar (Mt 22:21), that Syrian King Alexander had appointed high priest Jonathan of Judah (I Macc 9-10), and that King had deposed the high priest Abiathar (I Ki 2:26-27).

268 Ibid., 265, 266. 116 the same,”269 Foxe refuses to accept the 1107 compromise as a “thing indifferent;” and he characterizes Anselm of Canterbury as a prelate who exhibited “zeale without knowledge” (i.e.,

Prov 19:2).270 Becket’s subsequent resignation before Pope Alexander III (recorded in both editions) is likewise recognized as an offense against the English Crown, as a new 1570 marginal query reads: “And why might ye not (M. Becket) resign it as wel to hys handes of whom ye took it”?271 Modern historians may extol Henry II for having applied his grandfather Henry I’s

“common law” to an extended network of royal courts, but with the latter king having failed to defend England’s laws (i.e., the Constitutions of Clarendon) against this “foreign

Jurisdiction” (Art. 37), Foxe’s second edition (1570) retracts a first edition (1563) reference to

Henry II as “a mirror to all Princes.”272 In league with Article 37’s ban on “foreign Jurisdiction,”

Foxe’s 1570 edition thus places England’s historic “two regiments” ecclesia, under godly rule, in direct opposition to the “two swords” jurisdiction emanating from Rome and Canterbury.

“Foreign Jurisdiction” by Papal Excommunication

In addition to this latter day expansion of Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” to Canterbury, Acts and

Monuments’ second edition (1570) also features an assault on the “two regiments” ecclesia, under godly rule, via papal excommunications, crusades, and persecutions. In his first prefatory address “to the true and faithfull congregation,” for example, Foxe cites Frederick Barborassa and his imperial household as particularly tragic victims of this papal “trachery.”273 Elected by

269 Acts and Monuments 1570, 262.

270 Ibid., 279; 1563, 63.

271 Ibid. 1570, 288, 288n; 1563, 74-75.

272 Ibid. 1570, 308; Cf. 1563, 104.

273 Ibid. 1570, pref. 2. 117 twelfth-century German princes to bring an end to the divisions caused by papal investiture,

Barbarossa (1152-90) is known to modern historians for having revived Justinian’s Code, established feudal vassalage, laid claim to the highest office in the empire (i.e., vice-regent of the divine), and forbidden appeals to Rome.274 Foxe’s margins highlight the emperor’s effort to repatriate oaths and appeals as “godly procedings,” and a diplomatic letter from Barbarossa to

Rome is shown to attribute the early church’s historic liberation to Emperor Constantine.275

Another letter from Barbarossa, accompanied by a marginal note about this “valiaunt Emperour” being “an example for all prynces to follow,” also informs his imperial subjects that his election by the German “princes” was sanctioned by “God alone: who in the passion of his sonne, subdued the world to be gouerned with two swordes necessary.”276 Yet, even this scriptural and constitutional defence of Constantine’s “two regiments” model fails to prevail over medieval

Rome’s “two swords” authority, for Foxe’s histories include (also in woodcut image) a final scene at St. Mark’s church in Venice, a scene not corroborated in currently available sources, in which Barbarossa is forced to accept absolution (like Henry IV at Canossa) while Pope

Alexander III steps upon his neck to recite the verse, “You shall tread upon snakes and adders.”277

Barbarossa’s grandson, Emperor Frederick II (1215-50) is also seen to suffer under papal hegemony in a short 1563 edition summarization of his reign, yet in Foxe’s 1570 history, twenty

274 Brian Tierney, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300-1475, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 295-99.

275 Acts and Monuments 1570, 275n, 276; 1563, 51n, 53.

276 Ibid. 1570, 277, 277n; 1563, 55-56, 56n. The “two swordes” of the Lord’s passion are mentioned in Luke 22:38.

277 Ibid. 1570, 278; 1563, 56, citing Ps 22, Mk 16. The scene at St. Mark’s church in Venice, as depicted by Foxe, may have been the aftermath of the emperor’s excommunication and 1176 military defeat at Legnano. 118 supplemental pages underscore the younger emperor’s valiant struggle against this “foreign

Jurisdiction” (Art. 37).278 In this new 1570 text, for example, Frederick II is uniquely seen to assert that lay investiture had derived from Constantine’s regiment, and the 1570 narrator records that Honorius, Mauritius, and Justinian had acted as imperial electors for pontiffs along with “the consent of the people and ecclesiasticall persons.” Anselm of Canterbury’s 1107 compromise is also described as a watershed event, in the wake of which the mid-twelfth-century canon lawyer

Gratian would “wraste thys authoritie out of the Emperours hands,” so that Gratian is called a

“pontificall parasite” for having “forged” the Decretum (especially canons 29-30) to falsely suggest that the city of Rome had merely retained its historic right of election.279 Challenged to defend his regiment from this “foreign Jusridiction” (Art. 37), a letter from Frederick II is seen to critique Pope Gregory IX’s use of “one sword, as with the other” as illegitimate, and to reproach the Roman curia (as Peter’s “little ship” is said to be “tossed vpon the sea” and gospel preachers

“commanded to silence”) by declaring that “the byrdes haue theyr captain and the seely Bee theyr kyng, but you wyll come vnder not gouernment.”280 Another diplomatic letter, added to the

1570 edition, informs the cardinals that the imperial seat had been under threat of “deprivation” ever since “we went about to reforme the ecclesiasticall state… Restrain your power and extirpate your great tyrannie, and reduce the same to the state and condition of the primatiue church” (italics mine).281 Moreover, at a final excommunicating decree from Pope Innocent IV and the council of Lyon (1245)—which the 1570 narrator characterizes as a vehement affront to

278 Acts and Monuments 1563, 135-36; Cf. 1570, 394-417. These twenty new pages in the 1570 edition are entitled the “Tragicall history of Frederick II.”

279 Ibid. 1570, 395-97.

280 Ibid., 411, 412.

281 Ibid., 417. 119

“Gods law,” “Christian doctrine,” “law of nature, and reason,” “rule of equitie,” and

“constitutions”—Frederick II’s letter to King Louis IX (and other lesser princes) dismisses

Rome’s plentitudo potestatis jurisdiction, saying,

For, although we acknowlege that the lord hath geuen ful power in spiritual things vnto his church: that whatsoeuer the same byndeth in earth is bonnde in heauen, and whatsoeuer the same looseth, is also loosed: yet we read neyther by gods law nor by any law of man that we ought of duetie to be subiecte vnto hym or that an empire ought at hys pleasure to be transformed and transposed: or that he may geue any such sentence or iudge them to punish princes temporally, and depriue them of theyr kingdoms (italics mine).282

Reminiscent of Article 37’s ban on “any foreign Jurisdiction” and its defence of godly rule, then, the 1570 narrative shows Emperor Frederick II appealing to scriptural and constitutional precedent in an effort to preserve the historic “two regiments” ecclesiastical model, as established in Constantine’s time, from a “two swords” Roman tyranny.

Modern historiographical portraits of Frederick II include his semi-Muslim upbringing and his maintenance of a harem, and a similar “fault of concupiscence” is admitted in Acts and

Monuments 1570 for his siring children out of wedlock. Yet Foxe also legitimizes Emperor

Frederick II by reciting the testimony of Pandolphus and other Italian writers, stating that he died among “Gods elect” with a mind “al together set and bent vpon the heauenly ioy and felicitye.”283 The Holy Roman Emperor would thus be recognized by Elizabethan readers as fulfiling the godly standard of Article 17 on “Election,” which states, “Wherefore they which be indued with so excellent a benefit of God be called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit, working in due season: they through grace obey the calling; they be justified freely… and at

282 Acts and Monuments 1570, 413, 414.

283 Ibid., 416. Cf. Tierney, 426. 120 length by God’s mercy, they attain everlasting felicity…" (italics mine).284 Although victimized by Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” via papal excommunication, Frederick II is nonetheless celebrated in Foxe’s 1570 edition as an “elect” magistrate who, cognizant of the scriptural and constitutional norms of Christendom, sought to defend and reform the “Arke of a true spirituall, and visible Church,” in accord with the historic “two regiments” model of godly rule.285

“Foreign Jurisdiction” by Papal Crusade

This second millennium assault on Constantine’s “two regiments” ecclesia by Rome’s “foreign

Jurisdiction” is also evidenced in Foxe’s second edition portrayal of the papal crusades, beginning with the “warres and tumultes of the princes of this world, against the people of God,” as mentioned in the preliminary paragraphs of his 1570 narrative. The deposition of Emperor

Otto IV, suspension of Archbishop Langton at Canterbury, and excommunication of the

Albigensian defender Count Robert VI have led modern historians to identify this Fourth Lateran council (1215) with civil dissension and crusade.286 Foxe’s parallel histories (1563 and 1570) likewise show the 1215 council striving to “subdue all princes” and Pope Innocent III

(1196-1216) commissioning an army of “Crossbearers, or crouched friars,” having the sign of the cross emblazoned upon their weaponry for battle against the Albigensian “hereticks,” while the sectarians of southern France are seen condemned as “worse then Turkes and Infidels” for resisting Roman authority.287

284 Bray, Documents, 294.

285 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 5. Foxe dubs the German and Italian writers “Parasites” who would “sclaunder thys good Emperour” (417).

286 Ibid., 62; Hoyt & Chodorow, Europe in the Middle Ages, 358.

287 Acts and Monuments 1570, 339, 350; 1563, 117-18, 128. 121

In the first preface to Foxe’s second edition (1570), however, such “heretickes and schismatickes” are seen defended by “whole armies and multitudes,” as the magisterial regiment allies with the religiously oppressed against the papal foe. In his third 1570 preface, Foxe also decries the violence of the papal sieges at Toulouse and Avignon in the Albigensian Crusade

(1209-29);288 and with mention of the “first conversion of christen Realmes, to the fayth of

Christ” in the opening paragraphs of his 1570 historical narrative, Foxe refers to “Christes mightie hand” having defended the church “agaynst his enemyes, according to the veritie of hys own worde.” Later, Albigensian protector Earl Raymond VI of Toulouse (d. 1222) is seen acting to enforce the “catholicke” articles of faith and witnessing the “hand of God fightyng for hys people” to deliver his city from papal siege (1218),289 and papal crusader King Louis VIII

(1223-26) and 22,000 French troops are seen to perish in the siege of Avignon (a fate not corroborated by contemporary sources). As the city walls are finally breached by papal forces, a

1570 marginal highlight also reads, “The citie of Auinion taken by treason and periury of the

Popes legate,” in order to underscore the treacherous nature of Rome’s “foreign

Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) during the crusades.290

At such a departure from the “two regiments” model of godly rule, Acts and Monuments’ second edition 1570, moreover, portrays these “foreign” crusades as a detriment to Roman “catholicity.”

Reminiscent of the title page image of two churches (see Figure 2 on page 91), Foxe's histories both characterize eleventh-century Pope Gregory VII as a “spirituall Ieroboam” whose

288 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 5, 13.

289 Ibid., 62, 360.

290 Ibid., 362-63, 362n, citing M. Paris, vita Henry III. 122 malevolent commitment to papal investiture had sorely divided Christendom,291 but the second edition uniquely reveals the Fourth Crusade (1202-04) to have exacerbated these divisions by the establishment of a Latin Patriarchate at Constantinople (1204-61). Here a reproduced letter to

Pope Gregory IX from Germanus (1223-40), elected to lead the Byzantine church by emperor-in-exile John III, not only compares the East-West schism to the post-Solomonic division of Israel, but it admonishes the pope to return to a Constantinian “two regiments” model by citing the apostle Peter’s “meke and humble” directive that shepherds should “feede the flocke” rather than behave as temporal lords—with Rome having instituted “exactions,”

“oppressions,” “Interdictions” and even “Martyrdomes” among the Greeks.292 In another reproduced letter to the Latin cardinals, the Greek patriarch points to the “mighty nations” of the

East (i.e., Russia, Syria, and Ethiopia) which had maintained a “unity of faith” without making their “Kynges and Princes your vassals,” as a marginal note alludes to King John’s 1213 fealty to

Rome. This second patriarchal letter also appeals to the apostle Peter’s tearful repentance at the crowing of the cock and his admonishment by the apostle Paul at Antioch, recommending that

Rome return to the “common counsell” with Constantinople that had prevailed since Christian antiquity (i.e., under Constantine’s regiment).293 Here the patriarch’s godly appeal to the New

Testament passage “one Lord, one Fayth, one baptism” (Eph 2)—like Foxe’s prefatory mention of Rome’s persecution of adherents to the “same Christ,” the “same Baptisme,” and the same interpretation of Scripture—sets the stage for Foxe’s poignant observation that the old Roman

291 Acts and Monuments 1570, 253; 1563, 46.

292 Ibid. 1570, 376, citing I Peter 5.

293 Ibid., 377-78, 377n. citing Matt. 26 and Gal. 2. 123

“catholicity” had been rent asunder by the Fourth crusade (as reflected in the Greek boycott of the 1215 Lateran Council which had sought to “subdue all princes”).294

The divisive nature of these “foreign” crusades is made even more discernible at Foxe’s 1570 prefatory assertion that the pope’s “warres neuer prospered against the Turke.” Both the first and second editions of Acts and Monuments mention the famous oration for crusade of Pope Urban II

(1088-99) at the council of Clermont (1095), but the second edition (1570) invokes the specter of

“foreign Jurisdiction” by combining monk Peter the Hermit’s leadership in taking “the signe of the crosse for their cognizance” with the apocalyptic image of blood filling Jerusalem’s streets to

“the thicknes of a foote.”295 The “two regiments” model is also applied to Christian Palestine in the First Crusade at the election of Duke Robert Curtose to the Jerusalem throne, as the duke is chastised in the 1570 margin for neglecting the “Lordes busines” in order to contend for the

English throne296 (just as King Henry II’s refusal to accept the Jerusalem throne during the second crusade is associated in Foxe’s parallel 1563-1570 text with an English outbreak of the plague).297 In the third crusade or “Kings Crusade” (1189-92), following Saladin’s victory at

Jerusalem (1187), the 1570 edition also shows King Richard I liberating all the residents of Acre who would “be Baptised and receaue the fayth of Christ,” yet discovering that many had only

“pretended to be Baptized” in order to “revolt” back to the Sultan. Here the 1570 edition again

294 Acts and Monuments 1570, 377-378, 339; Cf. 1570, pref. 13. The Fourth Lateran (1215) was also the council which defined the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.

295 Ibid., 2, 253; 1563, 46, citing Henry of Huntington, lib. 7.

296 Ibid. 1570, 261n, citing Henry Huntington, Mathew Paris, etc. (262). The historicity of Robert Curtose’s election to the Jerusalem throne is disputed.

297 Ibid., 308; 1563, 104. 124 summons “godly” Constantine’s “two regiments” model, both spiritual and temporal, using the adjacent marginal caption: “Religion would be taught, not coacted.”298

In an attempt to illustrate the legitimacy of Constantine’s temporal regiment, the 1570 edition celebrates papal adversary Emperor Frederick II for his “prosperous” campaign to Jerusalem in the Sixth Crusade, while admonishing papal ally King (St.) Louis IX of France for his “vayne vowe” against the Turk in the Seventh Crusade (1248-54).299 The 1570 margin here reads, “The beginning of the Turkes victories ouer Christendome,” as Louis IX is seen captured and ransomed while his nobility and soldiers struggle “to kepe their faith,” “murmure against God,” and defect for Muslim wives. The 1570 margin also reiterates, “The Popes warres neuer went well against the Infidel,” as the 1570 narrator surmises that an “idolatrie” of the Mass,

“superstition” toward images, and sale of indulgences had eclipsed the “power of their faith in

Christ, which is onely the victorie that overcometh the world.”300 In this manner, Acts and

Monuments 1570 is able to portray the “foreign” crusades led by the “two swords” papacy

(rather than led by a godly magistrate) as a heretical and treacherous “diminishing” of

Constantine’s “two regiments” ecclesia.301

“Foreign Jurisdiction” by Papal Persecution

298 Acts and Monuments 1570, 328, 328n.

299 Ibid., 402n, 388.

300 Ibid., 389n, 389-390, 390n, citing Mathew of Paris.

301 Ibid., 393. As Pope Innocent IV resisted the efforts of the “noble emperour” to convene a general council at Lyon, a nearby marginal note also reads, “The pestilent rancor of Pope Innocent 4, against Friderike 2. is the cause of all this mischiefe, that to this day we suffer by the Turkes” (389n). 125

And finally, this second millennium assault on the “two regiments” church is also evidenced in

Foxe’s second edition, beginning with his first 1570 preface, by a medieval Roman (or “foreign”) persecution of the “true Church of Christ.”302 Foxe’s 1563 and 1570 histories both record that a proto-Protestant doctrine was “taught and persecuted almost 400. yeres ago” by the twelfth- century Waldensians, a sect initiated by the “godly” translator of Scripture Peter Waldo and which Foxe credits with “restoryng & maintainyng the true doctrine of christes Gospell,” opposing the “iurisdiction of both the swords” and rejecting Roman sacerdotalism (including clerical vestments, sacred images, clerical celibacy, and other vestiges of “popery”). At this parallel passage, a marginal caption reads, “The temple of the Lord that is, the proper habitation wherin God most properly dwelleth and worketh. That is the very place maketh not the ministration of holy things either more or les holy.”303 In his new 1570 preface “to the true and faithful congregation,” however, Foxe makes preliminary mention of the “persecuted Church of

Christ” at the marginal caption, “Image of both Churches,” and of a violent Roman antipathy for the “true Church of Christ,” both visible and invisible.304 The new 1570 preface twice mentions the Waldensians among this “great number” of witnesses, and it includes the Wycliffite sect that is said to have been persecuted by the medieval church as “euill persons,” both as “fauourers and followers of Gods holy Word,” and as defenders of the “antiquitie, and verity of Christes true

Catholic Church” (scripture and Constantine), as they preached “from towne to towne in Freese gownes” on the apostolic pattern.305

302 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 3.

303 Ibid., 310-12, 312n; 1563, 58-61, 60n.

304 Ibid. 1570, pref. 3, 3n.

305 Ibid., pref. 4-5. 126

Because of an alliance between the English Crown and the Roman bishops in the fifteenth- century, the Wycliffites were forced to adopt the anonymity of conventicle worship (with their ideas being relegated to arcane books, letters, and pamphlets). Foxe’s second edition, accordingly, reproduces a Wycliffite work entitled, The Praier and complaynte of the plowman,306 in which, citing Ezekiel 37 and making a clear allusion to Rome’s “foreign

Jurisdiction” (Art. 37), the plowman (likely Minister William Langland) chastises contemporary

“shepheardes” who “smiteth with his sworde of cursing, and afterward with his bodylich sworde”—as a marginal note reads: “No temporall sword geuen to Peter.” The plowman here offers an alternate vision of the “true church” which emanates from the Old Testament accounts of Adam’s sin, Abraham’s promise, and the Mosaic law, and which culminates in the figurative battles of the Psalmist, the prophet Jeremiah’s new covenant, and in the New Testament epistles of Paul.307 Based on this scriptural and historical appeal, Foxe’s 1570 readers are encouraged to view the Wycliffites as a true “visible church” which had been falsely persecuted under the

“foreign Jurisdiction” of Rome.

Furthermore, Foxe’s 1570 history describes the “yong kyng,” Richard II (1377-99)—although

“no great disfauorer of the doctrine and way of Wickleffe”—as having been led astray (i.e., from the Constantinian ecclesiastical model) by the “pretensed zeale” of the , intent on persecuting the “godly.”308 In the 1390s examinations of Lincoln minister William

306 Acts and Monuments 1570, 515-23, citing William Tyndale for the Praier and Complaint of the Plowman unto Christ (Antwerp & London, c. 1531-3). Tyndale’s version followed after the original work, Vision of Piers Plowman, had spawned many imitations. The original work is thought to have been written by Minister William Langland, a fourteenth-century social gospeller seeking a purge of clerical corruption. A. G. Dickens speaks of a broader ploughman tradition as the Protestant press sought to capitalize on popular anticlericalism. Dickens, 381-82.

307 Acts and Monuments 1570, 515-19. Here Foxe makes marginal reference to “No temporall sword” and the “true church of Christ” (519n, 517n).

308 Ibid., 550, 562. 127

Swinderby and Oxford layman William Brute, for example, Bishop John of Hereford is seen to disparage the “Iudaicall” hermeneutic of the Wycliffites as having prompted “schismes” between the laity and the clergy. It is a “two swords” allegation against the “two regiments” model which is soon validated by Minister Swinderby’s testimony that “true preaching” was a duty mandated by God, and that laity could withhold tithes from any clergy who habitually commit the “sinne” of omitting such sermons from Sunday worship.309 Appealing to scriptural authority, Swinderby even testifies to a “two anointinges” in God’s law—“one of kyngs, an other of priestes”—while referring to a “sonne of perdition” who had taken up residence in the “temple of God” in these last days (alluding to II Thess. 2).310 This Wycliffite repudiation of the “two swords” papal jurisdiction, while under persecution, is also reiterated in the trial of the layman Brute, who cites the same passage (II Thess. 2), in conjunction with Daniel 7’s “abomination of desolation,” to dismiss papal power as a “double sort of legalle anointyng” of “bothe the priestly, and kinglye power.” Brute even applies Daniel’s 1290 “days” to a timeline of imperial authority from the reign of (d. 45 BC) to the downfall of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (d. 1250), after which the empire is seen to have fallen prey to papal authority, so that Foxe’s 1570 readership is able to identify a post-1324 “reforming era” displacement of Constantine’s “two regiments” ecclesia with an intolerant end-of-the-millennium “foreign Jurisdiction” at Rome.311

Foxe’s 1570 edition also reproduces a letter, discovered among William Brute’s papers in the

Hereford register and dated to the year 1385, allegedly written by Satan to the “proud prelates of

309 Acts and Monuments 1570, 575, 577. See 574-586 for Swinderby’s entire defence.

310 Ibid., 584. Here the 1570 margin reaffirms “two sortes of annointings in scripture” (584n). The charge of “Antichrist” is made several times by Swinderby in connection with the pope’s temporal jurisdiction (579, 580, 583-84).

311 Ibid., 592-93, 595-96, 617. See 587-618 for Brute’s entire trial. 128 the popes clergy.” The letter praises the medieval bishops for having defied Christ’s gospel declaration that “My kingdom is not of this world” in several ways. The applauded methods include subverting the “tranquilitye and peace” of Christendom for worldly gain, overlooking the

“poore good man” for ecclesiastical office in favour of flatterers, hypocrites and liars, and reinterpreting Scripture in an effort to persecute the faithful.312 Persecution of the true church by such “foreign” bishops becomes particularly palpable at the enactment of a medieval law known as De Heretico Comburendo (1401), which sanctioned the burning of numerous English witnesses at Smithfield (both Wycliffite and Protestant) between the reigns of Henry IV and

Mary Tudor (1400-1558). Both of Foxe’s histories include a woodcut depiction of the first

English martyr being burned at Smithfield, London minister William Sawtrey, after he was condemned by the bishops of convocation and denied an appeal to England’s parliament.313

However, in Foxe’s 1570 account, the burning of Sawtrey (for refusing sacerdotal practices like transubstantiation and the veneration of the cross) is conjoined with King Henry IV’s readiness

“to gratifie the clergy” with an “vnmerciful burning of Christes saintes.” Mention of the royal decree is here accompanied in Foxe’s 1570 margin by the damning epithet, “preposterous zele without knowledge” (reminiscent of Anselm and Becket of Canterbury), as the 1570 narrator exhorts contemporary princes to look to their own “knowledge and vnderstanding” of Scripture rather than allow themselves to be “blinded” by the doctrine and practice of “false prelates.”

Having begun the second edition (1570) narrative with mention of a “creeping in of

312 Acts and Monuments 1570, 621. Satan’s letter offers a particularly jubilant rejection of the doctrine of apostolic poverty.

313 Ibid., 635; 1563, 193. Mary Tudor needed the support of parliament to pass new laws, but religious heresy had become a capital crime under De Heretico Comburendo (1401). Even the skeptical William Haller accepts that Sawtrey was handed over for capital punishment under De Heretico Comburendo. Haller, 166. 129 superstitions” and “false practices of the prelates” from Rome to Canterbury 314 (to which I have alluded on page 112 in connection with Archbishop Parker and the 1566 Vestiarian Controversy),

Foxe now openly exhorts the magisterial regiment, under godly rule, to resist “any foreign

Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) in the guise of episcopal authority.

Foxe also believes that Lord Cobham, a fifteenth-century English magistrate who is seen condemned in both editions for defending Wycliffite preachers by “force of armes,” exemplified a godly “two regiments” ecclesiastical resistance to this “foreign Jurisdiction.”315 New source material is thus added to his previous 1563 account of Lord Cobham (John Oldcastle), after being critiqued in Alan Cope’s (Nicholas Harpsfield’s) Six Dialogues (1566), a polemical work which was published from prison at the time that Foxe was embroiled in the Vestiarian

Controversy. In its final chapter, the recusant Catholic author (who had exercised malevolent authority during the Marian persecutions and had refused the Elizabethan oath of supremacy) had berated Acts and Monuments 1563 as a book of lies and fables written to justify political insurrection, and had besmirched Lord Cobham’s reputation by describing him as a traitor rather than a martyr. Yet Foxe’s second edition responds to Cope’s accusations in Six Dialogues by awarding this exemplary magistrate with the title of “witnesse bearer,” a highly favourable designation within Constantine’s “two regiments” church, as the corresponding marginalia

314 Acts and Monuments 1570, 639-40, 639n, 62.

315 Ibid., 685; 1563, 313. 130 triumphantly reads: “The Lord Cobham worthy the name of martyr” and “The name of a martyr what it signifieth.”316

In his appeal to the king, Lord Cobham is seen (in both editions) to define the church militant as a “congregation” of bishops, barons, and commons in faithful adherence to God’s Word, but the

1570 margin also suggests an element of “foreign Jurisdiction” in the added words, “Gods lawe to be preferred before mans lawe.”317 At Archbishop Arundel’s retort during Cobham’s 1415 trial, stating that gospel preachers cannot be permitted to stir “dissention among the poore commons,” the 1570 margin further ponders “howe those are counted traytours and seditious, that teach or cause Gods truth to be taught”?318 and the 1570 narrator associates Cope’s

“slaunder” of Cobham with Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” in the question: “What Pope almost hath there been these last fiue hundredth yeares, which hath not been a traytour to his Emperour and prince, and to hys countrey?” In the 1570 edition, Cope’s allegations are thus cast among a

Roman “legion of lyes,” “doltish dreames,” and “fayned miracles” detrimental to “the sincere

Religion, doctrine and crosse of Christ;”319 while Lord Cobham is lifted from a “dunghil” of heretics and traitors—a possible reference to recusant Catholic Thomas Harding’s characterization of Acts and Monuments 1563 as a “stynkyng dunghill”—to be honoured as a

316 Acts and Monuments 1570, 697-98, 698n. After Cope’s (Harpsfield’s) Dialogi Sex contra Summi Pontificatus (1566) had attacked both Facius’s Magdeburg Centuries (1560) and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), Foxe’s second edition (1570) compares Cope’s work to ancient Erostratus seeking fame among the Greeks by setting fire to the temple of Diana (697).

317 Ibid., 686, 686n; 1563, 315. citing St. Alban’s chronicle. Oldcastle also cries out during the examination, “Lo, good people, lo. For the breakyng of Gods law and his great commaundements, they neuer yet cursed me. But for their owne lawes and traditions, most cruelly do they handle both me and other men” (689/319).

318 Ibid. 1570, 690, 690n; 1563, 321.

319 Ibid. 1570, 710. 131

“godly” defender of the “two regiments” ecclesia who “dyed for the word of God” in defiance of

Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (see Figure 1 on page 26).320

Similar to Henry IV’s readiness to “gratify” the persecuting English bishops with De heretico

Comburendo (1401), moreover, King Sigismund (1410-37) of the Germans is also seen to capitulate to this “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) by punishing the “great affection of Iohn Hus to

Iohn Wickleffe” at the general council of Constance (1412-17).321 After minster Hus’s 1415 trial, both editions show Emperor Sigismund delivering a final “oration” before the council for the extirpation of Hus and his heretical teachings, both root and branch by fire, while the bishop of

Londy is seen to encourage this “most holy and godly labour” against a schismatic “body of sin” who taught the “laytie to haue the dominion.”322 The 1570 edition also highlights the malign enmity between the “true church” and this “foreign Jurisdiction” by repeatedly highlighting

Sigismund’s failure to enforce the imperial promise of safe conduct323 and by reproducing new prison letters from Jan Hus to his Bohemian friends which claim, for example, that the emperor

“condemned him before myne enemies did,” and which state that the council debated “with noo grounded Scripture nor with any reason.”324 Falling to his knees and “lifting hys eyes vp vnto heauen” at the place of his execution in both editions (like Lord Cobham at his condemnation),

Hus’s actions reinforce the title page image of Christ seated in heavenly glory (see Figure 2 on

320 Acts and Monuments 1570, 713. See also Harding’s A Confutation, sig. 14r. STC 12762.

321 Acts and Monuments 1570, 573; 1563, 160. Sacrosancta (1415) had created a constitutional monarchy at Constance in which the assembled bishops held temporary dominion, but Foxe thinks that the Roman Catholic conciliarists of the council had acted “contrary to their owne doctrine” vis-a-vis the pope (1570, 728/1563, 236).

322 Ibid. 1570, 745-46, 757-78; 1563, 265-66, 288-89.

323 Ibid. 1570, 732n, 734n, 738n, 739n, 741n. Numerous references to safe conduct are here made in the 1570 margin.

324 Ibid., 762, 765, citing Cochleus (762). A letter from Bishop Nicholas of Nazareth in this situation, reproduced in both Foxean histories, recommends Hus as a “faithfull and a catholike man” (732-33, 245). 132 page 91) and Christ’s role as “Head of the Church” (as mentioned in the preamble to Foxe’s 1570 dedication).325 And where Foxe’s 1570 margin states that Hus suffered a “double inconuenience”—like Lord Cobham, who is seen “hanged, and burned hanging” on false charges of heresy and treason—it underscores the notion that an inverted justice had ensued as the “two regiments” of godly rule were displaced by Rome’s “two swords” jurisdiction.326

Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570) also utilizes these “foreign” persecutions by Rome, furthermore, to establish a godly “two regiments” model that is somewhat distinct from the

Wycliffite ecclesiastical model. For where Bishop John accuses Swinderby of preaching “that no man liuyng against the law of God is a priest, how euer he were ordeyned priest of any bishop,” his teaching is dismissed in Foxe’s 1570 margin as “one of Wicklifs blemishes” because of its incongruity with Elizabethan Protestant practice;327 and when Brute dismisses mandatory tithing and military combat, his ideas are corrected with marginal notes in respective support of “the positiue law of man” and a “necessary defence” by the magistrate’s temporal sword (i.e., under godly rule).328 The Oxford laymen’s recognition of how the spiritual “priesthoode of Christ, differeth from the legall priesthood of Aaron” (without altars, temples, consecrated breads, etc.) receives a 1570 marginal confirmation that “Sacerdos or priest” was not a New Testament term, thus distinguishing Wycliffite and Protestant ministers together from Roman sacerdotal

325 Acts and Monuments 1570, 760 (693); 1563, 292 (324). Cf. 1570 pref. 7, 132.

326 Ibid. 1570, 754n, 783.

327 Ibid., 576, 576n.

328 Ibid. 1570, 599-601, 599n, 601n. Where the Hussite magistrate Procopius pronounces the same doctrine, stating that the Hebrew law of tithing had been abrogated “in the first yeare of our Lord Iesus Christ, like as the precept of Circumcision” (797), he too is corrected with a 1570 marginal statement that “He meaneth, of clayming tithes by mere necessitie of the old lawe: and not by the positiue lawe of princes” (797). 133 practice.329 Yet where Brute attempts to make Christ’s mercy a guiding principle of the magistrate’s court, he is again met with Foxean disavowals in accord with the “two regiments” model, as the 1570 margin states that this gospel principle should be applied “onely to the pope and his prelates of the church, and not to ciuill magistrates,” and asserts that “Christian Princes” have recourse to any laws which may be “good and expedient for their commonweales.”330

Although the Crown’s ecclesiastical policy and the Ornaments Rubric was often disavowed by reformed-minded Protestants in the wake of the Vestiarian Controversy, Foxe’s second history did not reflect the need for a radical Protestant departure from the Elizabethan status quo (i.e., a full separation of church and state). Instead, in parallel with Article 37’s definition of the magisterial and ministerial roles, Foxe’s 1570 narrative utilizes the scriptural and Constantinian political model of godly rule to ally the “peacable gouernment” of Elizabethan England

(temporal regiment) with the “true church” of English Protestantism (spiritual regiment). In league with his reform-minded contemporaries, Foxe believed that this “two regiments” model would provide a godly constitutional precedent to offset the “foreign Jurisdiction” which, at times, had coopted Crown and Canterbury, and had sought excommunications, crusades, and persecutions against the “true church” of God. It thus remained the magistrate’s role to restrain anyone, even to the highest citadels of civil and ecclesiastical power, who would threaten the

“peace and tranquilitie” of England’s ecclesia under godly rule. And it is this “godly” and historic function of the magistrate, as is seen to be implemented under “prince-in-parliament” authority in Foxe’s second edition, which is the subject of my next chapter.

329 Acts and Monuments 1570, 613, 613n.

330 Ibid., 604-05, 605n, 604n. CHAPTER FOUR: A GODLY “PRINCE-IN-PARLIAMENT” RESTRAINT

As mentioned in my introductory chapter, Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570) portrays the “godly” magistrate carrying out a temporal disciplinary function within Constantine’s visible church, in parallel with Elizabethan Article 37 directive to “restrain by the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers” in all “estates and degrees,” including capital punishment. Foxe’s 1570 dedication thus speaks of a godly “bridelyng” of the wicked, “tying vp again of Sathan the disturber of common weales,” and “punishing transgressions as well agaynst the first table as the second” (a reference to the “two stone tablets” of the law, as received by Moses on Mt. Sinai).331

At the marginal note which reads: “Publicke execution of lawes, not forbidden in scripture,” furthermore, Foxe’s third 1570 preface “to all the professed frendes and folowers of the Popes procedynges” refers to this godly magisterial “restraint” being simultaneously aided by the labour of the Christian minister, so that “mens affections” may also be “altered, reformed, and chaunged to an other disposition” by Christ’s gospel.” This church, visible in “both regimentes” through Protestant England’s “peaceable gounernment” of “good lawes,”332 is thought by Foxe to be animated at its core by an “inward workyng of fayth,” in contradistinction to Rome’s

331 Acts and Monuments 1570, 10. The Ten Commandments which instructed the Hebrew nation in its covenantal relationship with God (1-4) and with each other (5-10), as described in Exodus 20:2-17, are also received by Moses in “two tablets” (Ex 31:18).

332 Ibid., 13n, 13. Here the gospel is also said to change the human heart “from stoutness to softnes: from violence to sufferaunce: from fiercenes to frobearyng: from pride to humilitie… and mekenes,” a transformation reminiscent of Constantine’s conversion (13).

134 135

“corporall religion” which was alternately expressed in “Byshops, garmentes, vestures, [and] gestures.333 England’s “two regiments” ecclesiastical model allowed Roman Catholics to depart the isle with “no dread” of death based on their spiritual profession of faith alone. Yet in spite of this exercise of religious liberty, Foxe’s 1570 preface also notes loyalty to a foreign bishop (i.e.,

Rome) had recently led some English Catholics to attempt an overthrow of the Elizabethan establishment, both civil and ecclesiastical (i.e., Northern Rebellion & Ridolfi Plot of

1569-71).334

The Peace of Augsburg (1555) had envisioned a cuius regio, eius religio model without elaborating on the magistrate’s role, but building upon Article 37’s expanded definition of the magistrate’s prerogative, Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570) presents a new vision of godly rule in connection with parliamentary authority. Beginning with the second-century parliament of King Lucius and continuing through Magna Carta and other medieval constitutions, Foxe’s second history thus offers a new narrative in which the “publicke regiment” is able to utilize a “godly” parliamentary prerogative so as “to order and dispose in all thynges not contrary to God.”335 In league with the previous two chapters on the “godly Prince” and the

“two regiments” model, therefore, this present chapter will demonstrate the degree to which

Article 37’s third new tenet, the “godly” imperative to “restrain by the civil sword” all “evil-

333 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 15, 15n. A conversion to the “fayth of Christ” (i.e., scriptural faith) is noted in both text and margin.

334 Ibid., pref. 13-14. For example, ten moderate Marian Catholic laity had retained their posts in the queen’s Privy Council, and , the former archbishop of York and under Mary Tudor, who had written the order for ’s execution, was living out his retirement in England. See Meyer, 19.

335 Acts and Monuments 1570, 51. This doctrine on the authority of the civil magistrate is listed among 19 doctrines taken from Paul’s letter to the Romans under the heading “the summe of S. Paules doctrine” (50-51). 136 doers” and “any foreign Jurisdiction,” is supported and enhanced by Foxe’s 1570 historiography of godly rule through “prince-in-parliament” authority.

A “Godly” Primitive Parliament

Acts and Monuments 1570 presents second-century King Lucius of the Britons as a native-born

“godly Prince” and as an early Christian progenitor of “prince-in-parliament” authority. At the beginning of Foxe’s historical timeline, prior to the fourth-century conversion of Emperor

Constantine to “the knowledge and fayth of Christ” (i.e., scriptural faith), this British prince is directly associated by Foxe with the “first conuersion of christen Realmes, to the fayth of Christ” in Book I, and in Book II with a fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy that distant islands “shal waite for hys law” (i.e., godly rule).336 The origins of British Christianity are acknowledged in Book II to be a matter of “great controuersie in these our popish dayes,” and in addition to King Lucius,

Foxe contends for the existence of a primitive British church by citing Gildas’ record on the arrival of Joseph of Arimethea, Bede’s observance of an ancient Greek Easter rite, and other allusions to the northern provinces of Rome by Tertullian, Origen, and Nicephorus.337

At the establishment of a visible British church under King Lucius in consultation with Bishop

Eleutherius of Rome, 1570 narrator Foxe even offers the categorical statement that “if the

Christian fayth and religion was fyrst deriued from Rome to this our nacion by Eleutherius, then let them but graunt to vs the same faith and religion, which then was taught at Rome” (italics mine). For second-century Bishop Eleutherius is here described as a primitive Roman prelate

336 Acts and Monuments 1570, 62, 160. Foxe quotes from Isaiah 60:9-10. In the Geneva Bible, this passage reads: “Surely the ysles shal waite for me, and the shippes of Tarshish, as at the beginning… And the sonnes of strangers shall buylde vp thy walles, and their Kings shal minister vnto thee…” (The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 edition, Peabody, MA: Henrickson Publishers, 2007).

337 Ibid., 158, citing Gildas, Bede, Tertulian’s Contra Judeos, Origen’s Homily 4, Nicephorus’s Book II, cap 40, etc. 137 who sent Damian and Fagan without “cross or procession” to convert the Britons from

“superstition” to a “sincere fayth” via “simple preachyng,” devoid of Latin masses, sacred images, priestly celibacy, universal popes, and other sacerdotal forms. Like the ancient faith of

Emperor Constantine, as discussed in chapter 2 above, Foxe’s 1570 edition shows second- century King Lucius of the Britons to have established a true visible church in “good order” (including ancient archdioceses at London, York, and Wales), based on the primitive

“fayth of Christ.”338

Along with a true visible ecclesia in Britain, ancient King Lucius is also seen in Acts and

Monuments 1570 to establish godly rule through a “prince-in-parliament” authority that is independent of “any foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37). For Bishop Eleutherius is here seen to advise the king against adopting Roman law, which “we may euer reproue,” and to instead “take ye a law” from both testaments of Scripture. Moreover, the bishop instructs the king to gather

“the councell of your Realm” together “as the henne gathereth her chickinges vnder her winges,” so that the “fayth & law of Christ” might be defended against “malicious men” who would seek to “do them wronge” (cf., Article 37’s “stubborn and evil-doers”).339 As mentioned in my chapter 2 (above), sixth-century Roman bishop Gregory the Great would advise Anglo-Saxon

King Ethelbert to look to the example of “godly” Emperor Constantine (and his “wyse men” at

Milan) in order to procure “peace and tranquilitie” for his kingdom; but four centuries earlier,

Bishop Eleutherius is here seen to recommend that “gods vicare” gather his British peers

338 Acts and Monuments 1570, 159-160. Mention of “good order” reflects the social hierarchy under “Almighty God” prescribed in the first paragraph of the Homily on Obedience.

339 Ibid., 159-60. 138 together directly under scriptural authority. The ancient bishop even declares as illegitimate any

“vicar” who would not “rule well” based on this godly constitutional model:

A king hath his name of ruling, and not of hauing a Realme. You shal be a king while ye rule well, but if you do otherwyse, the name of a king shal not remayne wyth you, and you shall lose it, which God forbid. The almightie God graunt you so to rule the Realme of Britaine, that you may reigne with hym for euer, whose vicar ye be in the Realme. 340

Like Foxe’s reference to a “principal governor” under Christ the “head of the church” in the preamble to his 1570 dedication, the ancient bishop Eleutherius here promotes a scripture-based collaboration of prince and peers that could be described as godly “prince-in-parliament” authority. This “godly” constitutional model is also implied in Foxe’s 1571 preface to the

Reformatio, where he presumes that the “wise men” of England’s parliament would collectively initiate and ratify a new scripture-based Prayer Book discipline.341 A similar Elizabethan model is elsewhere evidenced in Richard Hooker’s famous Ecclesiastical Laws (Book VIII), where cooperation is urged between the estates since “there is not any man of the church of England but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth” (both the civil and ecclesiastical estates).342 In parallel with Article 37’s directive for “godly” magistrates to “restrain by the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers,” and advocates of “any foreign Jurisdiction,” therefore,

Foxe’s 1570 readers are here presented with an ancient precedent for godly rule by “prince-in- parliament” authority which, like the “Israelite paradigm” which placed English Protestant

340 Acts and Monuments 1570, 160; Cf. 133.

341 Ibid., pref. 7, 159-60.

342 Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, VIII, i. 2 [Works, III, 438]. Hooker’s first four books were published in 1594, his fifth in 1597, and the rest were published posthumously. Book VIII was first published in 1648, and posthumous additions may have been made to his work. 139 magistrates in succession with ancient Hebrew princes, is able to reprove officials to the highest citadels of civil and ecclesiastical power.343

“Straungers” to God’s Law

The fundamental element of Bishop Eleutherius’s godly “prince-in-parliament” model is his instruction to “take ye a law” from both testaments of Scripture rather than from Roman law. In offering this godly counsel, the ancient bishop not only reinforces Elizabethan Article 37’s directive for “godly” magistrates to “restrain” the “evil-doers” and “any foreign Jurisdiction,” he also corroborates Article 7’s corollary injunction (in the Thirty-Nine Articles) that “no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.”344

The civil and ceremonial law of the Torah had been abrogated by Christ’s gospel among

Protestant theologians, but similar to Article 37’s “godly Prince,” England’s commonwealth lawyers continued to revere the Ten Commandments, Old Testament narratives and other moral imperatives as “God’s law.” The marginal note on King Asa’s treatment of the idolatrous Queen

Mother in II Chronicles 15:16, for example, was transposed from the Geneva Bible (1560) to the

Bishop's Bible (1567), saying: “Herein he shewed that he lacked zeal: for she ought to have died both by the covenant and by the law of God, but he gave place to foolish pity.” It was this

“godly” interpretation of an Old Testament passage that would hold sway in the wake of the

Northern Rebellion and Ridolfi Plot (1569-71), as Mary Queen of the Scots was being confined in prison on charges of treason for her complicity, when the English bishops presented an appeal

343 Collinson, “Biblical Rhetoric,” 20 (for “Israelite paradigm”), citing Michael McGiffert, “God’s Controversy with Jacobean England," American Historical Review, 88 (1983), 1151-76.

344 Bray, Documents, 291, 295-96. 140 before parliament for her execution.345 This public clamor for the death of a highly visible

Catholic claimant to the throne also seems presaged by Foxe’s third 1570 preface, where he criticizes the insurrection of Catholic “rebels” and yet implies that Elizabeth’s “peaceable gouernement” may have imposed somewhat innocuous restraints.346 His 1570 narrative then goes on to cogently illustrate the efficacy of “godly” magisterial restraint, in accord with Article

37’s directive to “restrain by the civil sword,” by recounting numerous violations of the Old

Testament prohibition against “letting in straunge nations” in ancient and medieval Britain, where the Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Norman invasions are presented as examples of a first millennium failure to maintain Eleutherius’s godly “prince-in-parliament” model.347

In the fifth-century Saxon invasions, for instance, the marriage of Prince Vortigern to Princess

Rowena, a Saxon “foreigner,” is seen to result in a massacre of Briton nobility at Stonehenge.

The crisis is resolved by godly “prince-in-parliament” authority, however, as Briton King

Ambrosius convenes an assembly of both estates in which Bishop Eldadus of Gloucester recommends that the captive foreign prince, King Hengist (father of Rowena), be executed according to the Old Testament example of King Agag (II 15).348 And although the so- called “traitor” Vortigern is dubbed a “Roman” in this 1570 account, a similar claim made of the godly prince Ambrosius (by the Italian chronicler Polydorus) is mitigated by the narrator’s retort that, according to “all our olde written stories,” Ambrosius was raised on the northern isle by a

345 Walsham, 149; Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 46, citing T.E. Hartley, Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, i, 1558-1581, 274-90.

346 Acts and Monuments 1570, 13-14. In league with her husband King Francis II, Mary Queen of the Scots was known to the Catholic world as the titular Queen of France, Scotland, and England.

347 Ibid., 165n., citing Bede, Gildas, Malmesbury, Huntington, Polydore, and others for early English history.

348 Ibid., 160-61, 165. Here Foxe echoes the opinions of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum on the disadvantages of Roman rule. 141

Briton mother.349 Foxe’s new 1570 attention to the Saxon invasions is not rooted in xenophobia, but in his Protestant conviction that these first millennium invasions were precipitated by political elites who failed to revere “God’s law;” for as “the idolatrous Saxons preuayled in number and strength against the Christian Britaines” (italics mine), Foxe also observes that the

British barons and bishops had acted with cruelty, hatred, and deceit toward any “meeke” and honest magistrate who would “wel rule a commonwealth.”350 By featuring an abandonment of godly “prince-in-parliament” authority in conjunction with this subversion of the ancient Britons by “straunge nations,” Foxe not only offers historical evidence in support of ancient

Eleutherius’s constitutional defence of the church against “malicious men,” he also strengthens

Article 37’s canonical imperative that “godly” magistrates should “restrain” the “stubborn and evil-doers” and “any foreign Jurisdiction.”

Acts and Monuments 1570 again addresses this godly “prince-in-parliament” restraint of

“evildoers” during the tenth-century Danish invasions. For the new 1570 narrative here suggests that Archbishop Dunstan (959-88) had used “sorcery” (i.e., the feigned miracle of a “speaking rood”) to mislead the English parliament toward Cluniac reform (that is, in favour of clerical celibacy) just prior to the advent of Pope Gregory VII’s reforms, and that the Danes were thereby incited to invade by “the discord that then was in the realme, and especially the hatred of the subiects agaynst the kyng.”351 Yet, at the conversion of Danish King Cnut (1016-35), the godly

“prince-in-parliament” model reemerges “little and litle,” a reference to Moses’s expectation of how the Israelites would displace the Canaanites from the land (Exodus 23:30), as the new

349 Acts and Monuments 1570, 165, 166.

350 Ibid., 168, 166-67.

351 Ibid., 222, 224. 142 convert to godly rule is also seen to comply with ancient Eleutherius’s expectation that “gods vicar” would collaborate with his noble peers based on scriptural authority. For the newly devout king is seen to collaborate with an Oxford parliament, adopt King Edgar’s “good and reasonable” laws, and enact godly laws on Sunday observance, adultery, and apostolic poverty

(related to clerical possessions).352 On one occasion, by helplessly sitting on his throne amid the rising tide of the River Thames, Cnut even appears to rebuke the ignorance of any courtly flatterers (consistent with God’s moral law in Psalms 12:3) who would honour him as an equal to the “kyng of all kynges” who held “all thynges subiect to the power and authoritie of hys worde.” King Cnut also offers a historical precedent for Article 37’s directive related to capital punishment by executing Duke Erike, the assassin of Edmund Ironside (son of King Aethelred and Cnut’s royal rival), as an accompanying marginal note declares that this “traytour” was

“worthily rewarded.”353 Modern historians acknowledge King Cnut’s conversion to Christianity and his adoption of English law, but Jane Facey believes that Foxe portrayed King Cnut as a ruler from “within rather than above the Church.”354 By offering a new 1570 narrative in which

Cnut collaborates with his English peers—in contrast with Protestant England’s “supreme governor,” who was then resisting parliament, harbouring Roman ornaments, and denigrating

Archbishop Parker’s wife on the pattern set by Dunstan—Foxe’s 1570 readers are presented with

352 Acts and Monuments 1570, 227, 226, 228-29, citing Howden, Fabian, and others.

353 Ibid., 228, 227.

354 Catherine Davies and Jane Facey, “A Reformation Dilemma: John Foxe and the Problem of Discipline,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39, no. 1 (January 1988): 61. 143 an opportunity to observe a “godly Prince” (Art. 37) who, like the “principal governor” of Foxe’s

1570 dedication, “ruled well” by utilizing ancient Britain’s “prince-in-parliament” model.355

Yet, soon after this short renaissance in godly rule under King Cnut, Acts and Monuments 1570 presents the eleventh-century Norman invasion as another negation of the godly “prince-in- parliament” model. For here, like the “malicious men” cited in Bishop Eleutherius’s letter to

King Lucius, the 1570 margin unambiguously reads, “The cause expended, why God suffred this land to be conquered by the Normandes,” as England’s elites fail to restrain the “treason of wicked Godwin” and his noble faction in the assassination of King Aethelred’s son and heir,

Prince Alfred.356 Earl Godwin’s son Harold, furthermore, is featured as a preeminent baron who performed great acts of cruelty at the vanguard of the English army before ascending to the throne by “the consent of the Lords” following the reign of King Edward (Prince Albert’s younger brother).357 It is even suggested that the marriage of King Edward to Harold’s noble sister, Edith, was left unconsummated because of the unseemly character of the Godwin family, as Foxe accepts “hate of her kynne” over “loue of chastitie” as an explanation for the king’s behaviour.358 Both of Foxe’s histories (1563 and 1570) show the royal cousin, Duke William, arriving from Normandy under the “banner” of Pope Alexander II (at a cosmic sign) to fulfill

355 Clerical marriage gained indirect statutory sanction at ratification of the Elizabethan Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, 1571). A majority of bishops and priests had remained unmarried throughout Edward's reign, and the Elizabethan Settlement did not directly reinstate the Edwardian law, for as William Haugaard describes it, the queen thought that "priest's wives did not often adorn the ministry." Eric Josef Carlson, “Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation” (1-31), Journal of British Studies, XXXI, no. 1 (January, 1992): 6, 13, citing William Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1968), 200-01.

356 Acts and Monuments 1570, 227n, 228.

357 Ibid., 230, 231.

358 Ibid., 229. 144

King Edward’s prophetic dream of a hundred-year subjection to foreign rule.359 Yet in his 1570 account, Foxe uniquely underscores an ungodly departure from the “prince-in-parliament” model by extending the king’s prophesy to include the pronouncement that the “peeres and bishops of the realme were seruantes not of God, but of the deuyl.”360

After swearing to defend Edward’s laws at his coronation (1067), moreover, Norman Duke

William’s (1066-87) betrayal of his oath follows a similar pattern in relation to this godly

“prince-in-parliament” authority.361 For here, William’s predecessor,

(1042-66), is exhibited in the 1570 edition bearing a “gentle and soft spirite” toward “other mens counsailes”—like meek “principal governor” Constantine—in order to compile a “commone” law from Briton, Saxon and Danish sources. Reminiscent of Bishop Eleutherius’s godly “prince- in-parliament” model, Edward’s law here cites “the constitutions of his aunciters & predecessors” and the “counsel of the nobles of his realme,” and it holds the “vicare of the hyest kyng” responsible to “defende” the English church against “wicked doers.” His law also endorses Eleutherius’s ancient prescription for the impeachment of princes by stating that they should “feare God: to loue & to obserue hys cummaundements: & cause them to be obserued through his whole kingdom,” or risk losing their kingdoms. But rather than “pluck away wicked doers” with the “good aduisement” of his nobility in compliance with England’s “godly” constitution,362 Duke William is seen to scorn parliamentary “assent” and undermine “the whole

359 Acts and Monuments 1570, 232, 237; 1563, 30-31. In addition to a prophetic verse on the cosmic appearance of a stella monstrante comaeta in the parallel text (237/30), the 1570 edition refers to a seven-day “blasing star” (237).

360 Ibid. 1570, 230.

361 Ibid., 231, 237.

362 Ibid., 229-30, 231. 145 state of gouernaunce of this common weale” by displacing English elites with a new stratum of

Norman “straungers,” and by enacting “new laws at his owne pleasure, profitable to him selfe” and by building fortifications with “great seueritie & cruelness.”363 In parallel with Article 37’s directive that “godly Princes” and magistrates should “restrain” the “evil-doers” and any “foreign

Jurisdiction,” then, Foxe’s 1570 narrative links the successive invasions of Britain by Anglo-

Saxons, Danes, and Normans with a failure to implement and preserve Bishop Eleutherius’s ancient political model of godly rule by “prince-in-parliament” authority.

A Second Millennium “Prince-in-Parliament” Restraint

Although Acts and Monuments’ second edition records that the post-Norman kings were challenged as “masters ouer their owne subiects” by their archbishops of Canterbury (i.e.,

Lanfranc, Anselm and Becket from the region of Normandy), as described in chapter three above, Foxe’s 1570 narrative also reveals a “godly” contemporaneous impetus among princes to

“restrain” this “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) in accord with the ancient “prince-in-parliament” constitutional model. For example, Norman Duke William (d. 1087) is seen “compelled, thorow the clamor of the people,” into accepting some of King Edward’s “good” and “common” laws, and his “learned” son King Henry I (1100-35) also restores a significant number of these old

English laws. Modern historians remember King Henry I for having employed lower nobility as itinerant justices to administer an English common law amidst the Norman feudal system of local authority, but after ignoring the king in his first (1563) history, Foxe’s second edition (1570) here dubs Henry I as a “fyrst king of England” and portrays him as a champion of the “prince-in-

363 Acts and Monuments 1570, 237-38. Foxe appears reluctant to dignify Duke William with the title of “king,” even though he did not pay homage to the pope. 146 parliament” model in defiance of “any foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37). By the “mediation of the

Lordes,” for instance, Henry is seen to succeed to the English throne against the aspirations of his older brother Robert Curthose of Normandy, and by electing two English bishops in collaboration with his parliament—thus ignoring Pope Urban II’s ban on lay investiture—he is shown to “litte fauour the vsurped power of Rome.” Like “godly” Constantius and Constantine in Christian antiquity, the twelfth-century king is also seen to dismiss “wanton persons” from his royal court, implement good governance “more by counsaile then by sworde,” and “reform” the civil and ecclesiastical estates.364 By Henry I’s resuscitation of godly rule and a “prince-in- parliament” restraint of “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37), then, Acts and Monuments’ second edition preserves the constitutional legacy of first millennium princes from Lucius to Edward the

Confessor.

A “prince-in-parliament” restraint of Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” is further advanced in Foxe’s

1570 narrative where the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, is said to

“brydle the pope & restraine hym of his will.” In response to Pope Gregory IX’s accusations of an imperial “beast rising out of the sea,” a 1570 reproduction of Frederick’s diplomatic letter here states that this papal “envier of our estate” had offered “absolution & remission of theyr sinnes” to rebel soldiers who would wage war against him; and where a marginal note reads,

“The emperour hangeth all the crossed soldiers,” the emperor is seen to conscript a royal militia of Saracen soldiers to combat the papal crusade.365 Another imperial letter also seeks baronial support for the appointment of a true “shepheard,” while describing Pope Gregory IX as a

364 Acts and Monuments 1570, 231, 261-62, 261n. Among Henry I’s laws, Foxe records stipulations on the “wearyng of garments,” and “that monkes and priests should beare no rule ouer lay persons.”

365 Ibid., 1570, 405n, 405-06, 408n. 147

“wolfe, persecutour, and tyraunt” who threatened the commonwealth, and like the parliament at

Aegra which joined with the emperor in “common consent,” his German bishops are likewise seen to condemn this papal “tyrany” against “faythfull subiectes” and “old and auncient customes.”366 As one who sought to reform the medieval church “to all sinceritie and puritie both of lyfe and doctrine,” Frederick II is thus presented to the 1570 reader as a “worthy” emperor who, like King Henry I and England’s parliament, had collaborated with both estates of his realm in order to “restrain by the civil sword” Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37).367

This “prince-in-parliament” restraint of Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37), however, is particularly salient in Foxe’s 1570 record of the contest between King Philip IV (1285-1314) and

Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) over royal taxation of the church. After convening a first assembly of the three French estates (i.e., barons, bishops, and commons) in 1302 to “publicize” his royal tax on church revenues in disregard of Clericos laios (the 1296 bull by Pope Boniface

VIII), King Philip IV’s action was answered by another famous papal bull, Unam Sanctum

(1302), in which Boniface VIII claimed that plenitudo potestatis papal sovereignty was a necessary tenet of salvation and therewith imposed ipso facto excommunication on all offenders.368 In Acts and Monuments 1570, Pope Boniface VIII is even introduced at the 1300

Roman Jubilee as an “eight Nero” (i.e., eighth horn of Daniel), dressed in imperial garb and wielding the “power of both swords,” like a “last days” antichrist.369 Philip IV’s minister

366 Acts and Monuments 1570, 407-08. Calling him a “most puisant prince in marshall affayres” as King of Jerusalem and Sicily, Foxe later notes this emperor’s success in diplomacy with the sultan and on the battlefield with the pope (416).

367 Ibid., 417.

368 Tierney, 429-30.

369 Acts and Monuments 1570, 449-50, 450n. Although Foxe shows him fatally imprisoned by Boniface VIII, it is often conjectured that his predecessor, the hermit , had left voluntarily for a monastery (Hoyt, 504). 148

William Nogaret is herewith seen to bring public charges of simony, heresy and false prophesy against the pope—with Boniface VIII being compared to the prophet Balaam and Philip IV to the holy angel who bore a “naked sword”370—so that the “faythful subiectes” of the French parliament were emboldened to administer the “power geuen vs from the Lorde” for a temporal

“defence of the churches libertie and the fayth.” Even the French (Gallican) bishops are seen to demur of such a false papal jurisdiction, “not hard of from the begynnyng of the world,” by which “straunge and vnknowne persons” had gained episcopal benefices (e.g., Article 37’s

“foreign Jurisdiction”).371 At the fatal 1303 beating of Pope Boniface VIII by French forces at

Anagni (not recounted in detail by Foxe), the 1570 narrative again reinforces Article 37’s decree on capital punishment in a marginal note which reads, “Here may all kings by the French king learne how to handle the pope. Boniface chuseth rather to dye then to geue ouer hys popedome.”372 Taken together, therefore, the 1570 Elizabethan reader is confronted with several royal champions of godly rule—King Henry I of England (d. 1135), Holy Roman Emperor

Frederick II (d. 1250) and King Philip IV of France (d. 1314)—who, by utilizing their ancient

“prince-in-parliament” prerogative, are able to “restrain” Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) in the final days of Constantine’s millennium (324-1324).

Godly Rule Foiled: King John and Foreign Jurisdiction

As Constantine’s temporal millennium (324-1324) draws to a close, however, Foxe also revises his former (1563) narrative of King John’s fealty (1213) to underscore a “last days” departure

370 Acts and Monuments 1570, 450, 451-52.

371 Ibid., 455, 456-57.

372 Ibid., 458. In Foxe’s account, Pope Boniface dies of deprivation, sorrow, and fear. 149 from godly Eleutherius’s “prince-in-parliament” constitutional model. King John had already been weakened before his noble peers by the loss of Normandy (1204), but Pope Innocent III had made the situation especially dire by investing Archbishop Langton (1207) and excommunicating the king himself (1209). Although poorly regarded by medieval chroniclers,

King John would later be exonerated in William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) and John Bale’s Kynge Johan (c. 1538) as a royal irritant of Rome, and Miles Coverdale’s dedication to King Henry VIII in the Great Bible (1539-41) would likewise note the

“untollerable wrong done by that Antychrist of Rome unto your Graces most noble predecessoure Kyng John.”373 In a parallel narrative shared by both 1563 and 1570 editions,

Foxe likewise presents King John as a harbinger of Protestant rule by asserting that he “neuer heard anye masse,” by castigating the “wicked papists” around him for treason,374 and by featuring a woodcut image of the king’s death via the poisoned chalice of a heretical monk.375

Consistent with the Saxon, Danish, and Norman invasions of Britain in the first millennium, however, Foxe’s second edition (1570) also attributes King John’s 1213 fealty to an ungodly failure of his parliamentary peers to “restrain” Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37). For the parallel 1563-1570 text shows the stage being set for the king’s downfall by papal threats of excommunication and crusade, with his nobles being asked to “crosse them selues” and “to warre agaynst thee, as vpon Gods enemie, and winne thy land,” while King Philip II of France

373 Tom Freeman, “John Bale’s Book of Martryrs?: The Account of King John in Acts and Monuments,” Reformation 3 (1998): 176-77.

374 Acts and Monuments 1570, 344, 340; 1563, 123, 118.

375 Ibid., 343; 1563, 122. 150

(1180-1223) is offered “remission of all his sinnes” in return for his participation.376 Yet new interpolations are made to the 1570 edition, including the marginal comment, “The pope author of rebellion and disobedience of subiectes towards their prince;” and where the parallel text refers to the “subtile treasons” of English prelates who had “blinded the nobilitie and the commons,” new paragraphs are inserted to indicate that the “Lordes and Barons were rebelliouslye incited” (via papal interdictions, absolutions and excommunications) to deprive

King John of the “homage, seruice, duties, debtes, and all other allegiaunce that godly subiectes owe and are bound to yelde & gyue their liege Lord and prince” (italics mine). In this new 1570 narrative, King John is seen removing his crown at Canterbury, kneeling before the papal legate

(Pandolph), and reciting the words, “Here I resigne vp the crowne of the realme of Englande to the Popes handes Innocent the thyrde, and put me holy in his mercy and his ordinaunce,” as members of his own royal court swear to hold him accountable to his papal oath.377 Tom

Freeman believes that the revised Foxean narrative reflects a new Elizabethan fear of Catholic rebellion and foreign invasion in the aftermath of the 1569-70 coup attempt and 1570 papal bull.378 Irrespective of the underlying cause, however, this new 1570 account clearly demonstrates to the reader how an ungodly breakdown of the “prince-in-parliament” model could result in a royal alliance with Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction.”

In contravention of Article 37’s ban on “foreign Jurisdiction,” furthermore, this thirteenth- century departure from England’s “prince-in-parliament” constitutional model is seen to bear

376 Acts and Monuments 1570, 337-338; 1563, 114-116

377 Ibid. 1570, 337n, 338.

378 Freeman, “John Bale’s Book of Martyrs,” 205, citing the “allegiance that godly subiects owe” and “pope author of rebellion” in Acts and Monuments 1570, 338, 337n. 151 unseemly fruit in papal taxation and investiture. After King John’s fealty, both Foxean editions

(1563 and 1570) highlight the “Babylonicall captiuitie and slauerye of England vnder the pope,” as English magistrates petition the council of Lyon (1245) against papal exactions made “without the consent both of the king, and agaynst the customes of the Realme” and to the detriment of poor relief, church maintenance, and gospel preaching (as mandated by English law).379 Unique to Acts and Monuments 1570, however, Foxe offers an ancillary account in which the “Lords and

Nobles, with the whole comminaltie of the Realme” (the beginnings of a bicameral parliament) appeal to the Lyon council in request of “good shepherds” who would “instruct the flock” rather than Roman “straungers” who would “flye out of the Realme” with ecclesiastical rents. Here the

English peers are seen brushed away by Pope Innocent IV in favour of a fresh recitation of King

John’s oath by the English bishops. One English cardinal compares the nation’s plight to that of

Balaam’s donkey, “beaten and bounst with spurres and staues,” but along with a new reference to the “wise Grecians” who had resisted Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37), 1570 narrator

Foxe characterizes medieval England as a “tame Asse” which had relinquished its Christian

“libertie” through “lacke of learnyng, and godly knowledge.”380 As in the days of Archbishop

Dunstan, then, Foxe encourages his 1570 Elizabethan readership to connect this thirteenth- century breakdown of “prince-in-parliament” authority and triumph of Rome’s “foreign

Jurisdiction” with widespread English ignorance of Scripture.

Yet, despite this thirteenth-century English failure to “restrain” Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction,” the 1570 edition records a “godly and learned” response from Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln (d

379 Acts and Monuments 1570, 357n, 356-57; 1563, 133n, 133.

380 Ibid. 1570, 384-85, 386, citing M. Paris, fols. 188, 193, 207. 152

1253), the famous master of Franciscan scholars and chancellor of Oxford who would be highly favoured by John Wycliffe. For after being introduced as an “open reprouer of the Pope and the kyng,” “preacher to the people,” and a “diligent searcher of the Scriptures,”381 Bishop

Grosseteste is seen to decry the appointment of a young papal relative, whom he calls a

“straunger” to his Lincoln diocese, as a “wicked” abuse of the pastoral office. Angry threats then emanate from the papal court, asking, “is not the kyng of England our vassal?” but the Lincoln bishop is seen to be saved from papal excommunication by his wide renown as a “holy,” learned and “catholike” man.382 And as the new papal exactions (noted above) are seen to exceed those of the royal treasury by a margin of 70,000 marks to 30,000 marks per annum, the 1570 narrative records that the dying schoolmaster also rebuked his Franciscan friars as “heretikes” for failing to apply their ancient apostolic creed to this false Roman jurisdiction. Even further, his deathbed aphorisms lament that “holy and wel learned men” were being turned by the papal treasury from the spiritual plow—toward indulgences, “vsury,” “extortion,” and simony (as highlighted in the

1570 margin)—and the bishop offers a dying “prophesy” that neither “shal the church be deliuered from the seruitude of Egipt but by violence and force, and with the bloudy sword.”

Thus Acts and Monuments 1570 portrays Bishop Grosseteste as a harbinger of magisterial reform

—similar to that which was instituted by the Elizabethan church in Article 37’s directive to

“restrain by the civil sword” Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction”—at a time when godly rule by

381 Acts and Monuments 1570, 426, citing M. Paris. Wycliffe’s De Civili Dominio (I.43) recites Grosseteste’s Letter 128 and Innocent IV’s decision to grant a Lincoln canonry to his nephew.

382 Ibid., 427-28, citing M. Paris & M. Florilegus. John Jewel’s Apology also noted that Valla, Petrarch, and Marsilius had attacked the “tyranny and Persian Pride of the Bishop of Rome” without having “departed from the Catholic faith” (Jewel, Apology, 87). 153

“prince-in-parliament” authority would be reestablished in accord with Eleutherius’s constitutional model.383

Godly Rule Revisited: Magna Carta versus “Foreign Jurisdiction”

Although a “godly” magisterial restraint of “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) had faltered at the time of King John’s 1213 fealty to Rome, Acts and Monuments 1570 also presents Magna Carta

(1215) as a contemporaneous revitalization of “prince-in-parliament” constitutional authority.

Magna Carta would not effectively impede ecclesiastical taxation until after Clericis laicos

(1296), but this great medieval constitution did require thirteenth-century kings to summon parliament for “extraordinary” revenue beyond the “ordinary” feudal estates and customs (for example, military campaigns).384 Ralph V. Turner spoke of a feudal “principle of commune consilium,” as reflected in the lord-vassal relationship by which a monarch was traditionally

“surrounded by his leading vassals, making decisions and settling disputes with their counsel”385

(i.e., Edward the Confessor’s collaborative laws). The same principle is evident in Foxe’s histories where King Philip II (Augustus) is seen to disavow King John’s 1213 vassalage to

Rome as a royal act which, devoid of the “lawefull consente of his Barons,” threatened to “bring al christian Kynges, and their kingdoms to nought.” Magna Carta was drafted to reverse this constitutional error, but Pope Innocent IV is nonetheless seen in Foxe’s record to condemn the

383 Acts and Monuments 1570, 428-30. “The godly talke of Rob. Grosted in time of hys sickenes” highlights the margin at the beginning of this segment (428n).

384 “Common law” parliamentary authority blossomed after the 1297 decision that the “community of the realm” must approve all “inordinate” tax revenue. C. Warren Hollister, The Making of England, 55 B.C. to 1399. Fourth Ed. Lexington, Mass: DC Heath and Co. 1983), 262.

385 Ralph V. Turner, “England in 1215: An Authoritarian Angevin Dynasty Facing Multiple Threats” in Loengard, Janet S, Ed. Magna Carta and the England of King John, 10-26. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010: 25. Ralph V. Turner even relates Magna Carta to Edward’s godly decree to “fear God” and keep his commandments, as mentioned above under my subtitle “Straungers to God’s law.” Turner, 25, citing Leges Edwardi Confessioris. 154 baronial cosignatories to Magna Carta “wyth great indignation and countenaunce most terrible.”386 Foxe’s 1563-1570 histories direct the blame for the “scourge” of papal taxation on those who refused “to take part with king John their naturall prince against the forreyne power of the Pope.” Yet, while Book I of the first (1563) edition ends without political resolution at the

First Baronial War (1215-17), leaping forward a hundred years in Book II to John Wycliffe’s ministry, Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570) adds two hundred pages of new material to reveal a Magna Carta-based renaissance of godly rule by “prince-in-parliament” authority.387

Foxe’s second edition (1570) presents Lord William Marshall, the chief signatory to Magna

Carta, as a great proponent of this godly “prince-in-parliament” authority. For, divergent from the 1563 edition, the 1570 narrative includes an account of the election of nine-year-old King

Henry III (1216-72), at Gloucester, in which Lord Marshall declares before the assembly that

“we haue persecuted the father of this yong prince for his euil demeyner, and worthily: yet… neither shall the child (as the scripture teacheth vs) beare the iniquitie of hys father” (italics mine). The 1570 margin here lauds Marshall as a “worthy and faythfull counsaylour” but chides other derelict parliamentarians with the words, “Truly sayd, that you persecuted hym, for persecutors ye were of a true man and you [sic] own naturall kyng. But wel might England cry out of your blinde guides & setters on.” And when the Earl of Gloucester challenges this new parliamentary initiative based on preexisting oaths to Prince Louis of France, Lord Marshall is also seen to answer, in the 1570 narrative, in accord with ancient Eleutherius’s prescription to

“rule well” through godly collaboration with his peers, or forfeit the throne. For Marshall

386 Acts and Monuments 1570, 340; 1563, 118-19.

387 Ibid. 1570, 358; 1563, 135. 155 observes that the French Dauphin, whom they had recently “called” to be their prince, had exhibited the political “pride” of attempting to “subuert” parliament.388 Both Foxean editions record the plot to displace the English lords with French barons,389 but the 1570 narrative makes extra mention of a “mercifull prouidence” and “workyng of Gods hand” in foiling it, as a new marginal note also reads: “An admonition to English men not to admitte forein rulers into the realme.”390 Against another “foreign” threat (Art. 37), then, Acts and Monuments 1570 reveals a post-Magna Carta return, led by William Marshall, to godly rule by “prince-in-parliament” authority.

Magna Carta was often revisited by thirteenth-century parliamentarians as a “fundamental law,” and in the wake of the English Reformation, seventeenth-century English Whigs would adorn statues of Elizabeth I’s on her Accession Day with placards that read, “Magna Carta et Religio

Protestantium.”391 In Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570), Foxe likewise places Magna

Carta on a contiguous constitutional timeline, beginning with the early “prince-in-parliament” model recommended by Bishop Eleutherius and continuing throughout English ecclesiastical history into the Elizabethan era. His 1570 narrative, for instance, states that King Henry II

“confirmed and ratified” Magna Carta “liberties” at the “greate parliament” of London (1218) and that, in the Oxford parliament of 1225, he reconfirmed the “old liberties and customes of this realme, for euer to be kept and obserued” (although they were “broken” and “confirmed agayne”

388 Acts and Monuments 1570, 345, 345n.

389 Ibid., 341; 1563, 120

390 Ibid. 1570, 346, 346n.

391 Walsham, “Deborah,” Myth, p 162. 156 during his reign).392 The “meek” and “godly” example of Constantine with his “wyse” men at

Milan may even be seen as reflected in the decision of Henry III and his “wyse and discrite” parliamentarians, after the Second Baronial War (1264-67), to adopt the Statutes of Marlborough

(1267) for a “reformation & bettering of the state of the realme and execution of common iustice.”393 This collaborative “prince-in-parliament” model is likewise reflected in the “gentle and wyse nature” of King Edward I in signing the Confirmation of the Charters (1297), when both the lords and the “whole commons” are seen rising up to petition that 1) no “tollage” or

“subsidie” be levied by the king without the “common assent of the archbishops, Bishops,

Abbots, and other prelates; Earles, borons, knightes, burgheses, and commons of the realme”; that 2) no goods can be seized “from any man” without his “consent”; and that 3) English barons would “enioye their lawes, liberties, and all customes,” as in former days.394

Yet conversely, in Foxe’s second history, this post-Magna Carta return to the ancient “prince-in- parliament” model is also conjoined with a “troubled” relationship with Rome and Canterbury, as

Archbishops Peckham (1279-92) and Winchelsey (1293-1313) are seen to rebel against this resurgent magisterial authority. For unlike ancient Bishop Eleutherius who advised King Lucius to gather the “people and folke of the Realme” together in “concord and peace” under scriptural authority and independent of Roman law, the “moderate and good nature” of King Edward I

392 Acts and Monuments 1570, 346n & 346, 360, 380. “Sinister” forces are said to prevail in the suspension of Magna Carta at a 1227 parliament to implement whimsical taxation “not accordyng to their abilitie, but accordyng as it pleased the iustice and other to leuie them” (363).

393 Ibid., 442.

394 Ibid., 459-60. Cf. The 1297 statute De Tallagio non Concedendo (written in Latin and French) aims at full observation of Magna Carta via the “common assent” of the bishops, barons, knights, burgesses, and other freemen in the statement (in French): “de la graunt chartre des fraunchises et la chartre de les foreste les queles feurent faites par comun asent de tout le roiaume en le temps le roi hanry notre pere, soient tenues en toutz leur pointz, saunz nul blemisement....” William E. Stubbs and H. W. C. Davies, ed. Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History: From the Earliest Times of the Reign of Edward the First. Oxford, 1913. 157 toward the English barons in signing the 1297 charter is seen to contrast with Roman incitement of the English bishops.395 As the 1570 narrator here observes that “there is no word in the scripture that excludeth spiritual men more then temporal men from obedience and subiection of

Princes,” therefore, Foxe’s Elizabethan readership is made to recognize that the post-Magna

Carta retrenchment of godly “prince-in-parliament” authority was not particularly amenable to advocates of Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37).396

Further along this historical continuum from King Lucius to Magna Carta to the Protestant

Reformation, it also becomes evident that Foxe’s 1570 political theology of godly rule by

“prince-in-parliament” authority includes a prerogative to “restrain” delinquent monarchs who refuse to uphold God’s law. Modern historian John Sadler states, “Since Magna Carta and the important constitutional reforms taking place during Henry III's reign, the king's conduct was held to be subject to the law… [T]he king's rule might be ordained by God but this did not excuse or exonerate tyranny.”397 The godly prohibition against “letting in straunge nations” resurfaces in Foxe’s 1570 edition, for instance, at King Henry III’s marriage to Eleanor of

Aquitane, who precipitates an influx of French “straungers” into his royal court, which, in turn, leads to such “vnreasonable collections of money” for foreign wars, that the English king is confronted by his “natural subiectes” (led by his brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort) bearing a

Magna Carta-like “humble sort of petition” for “common” governance. The resultant Provisions of Oxford (1258) are widely understood to have been a parliamentary milestone that remained

395 Acts and Monuments 1570, 159, 460.

396 Ibid, 458.

397 John Sadler, The Second Baron's War: Simon de Montfort and the Battles of Lewes and Evesham (South Yorkshire, England: Pen and Sword Books, 2008), 28. 158 unsurpassed prior to the English Reformation, having advocated popular representation in a

“third estate” or “commons” comprised of lesser knights and burgesses (i.e., a bicameral parliament); but the new constitution is also known to have precipitated the Second Baronial War of 1264-1267. In Foxe’s 1570 account, King Henry III, feeling that the Provisions had rendered him an “vnerlyng” to his “counsaile of lords,” quickly recognizes a mode of escape from this constitutional constraint via papal absolution (i.e., Art. 37’s “foreign Jurisdiction”).398 Yet the

“greatest part of his nobles and commons” are said to stand with De Montfort in a “iust quarrel” to defend “theyr laws”—much as Foxe’s first 1570 preface describes “whole armies and multitudes” defending the “Ark of the true spiritual and visible church.” For, although labelled a

“traytor” by the royal court, De Montfort is here seen to entrust his soul to God and his body to the battlefield amid the “darknes” and “tempest” of Evensham (1265) in a zealous effort to

“restrain by the civil sword” an English king who entertained “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) at the expense of “prince-in-parliament” authority.399

This godly “prince-in-parliament” restraint of kings soon culminates in Acts and Monuments

1570 with an end-of-the-millennium (324-1324) impeachment of King Edward II (1307-1327).

Remembered by historians as a royal tyrant who refused to be limited by the Parliamentary

Ordinances of 1311,400 Foxe’s second edition begins with the “godly lessons” which Edward II received at the deathbed of his father, Edward I, requesting that his royal son cooperate with his

398 Acts and Monuments 1570, 433n, 433, 434. Consistent with the “prince-in-parliament” model, Foxe’s blames both an “offending” king and his “impatient” subjects for the failure of “mutual concord” in the De Montfort affair (433).

399 Ibid., 436, 440. Cf. pref. 5.

400 G.L. Harriss, "The Formation of Parliament, 1272-1377," 29-60, Davies, R.G., and J.H. Denton, eds. The English Parliament in the Middle Ages. Manchester University Press, 1981: 31. 159

English peers and resist Piers Gaveston’s “sinister counsaile.” The young king’s “disobedient” nature and “evill disposition” invokes a constitutional crisis, however, when, four years hence, parliament is seen to reiterate his father’s wishes by demanding that he “debate by common counsaile of the Lordes both temporall and spirituall,” in compliance with Magna Carta, and that he banish “all alienes and peruerse counselours” from his royal court. As a result of this constitutional impasse, royal councillor Piers Gaveston is soon apprehended without the king’s consent, and beheaded by the “assent” of the “commons” and “whole Nobilitie.” Two papal legates seeking to intervene in the crisis are also rebuffed by England’s elites with the statement that “they had bysops both godly and learned, by whose counsaile they would be ledde onely: & not by any straungers” (i.e., “foreign Jurisdiction”).401 Indicative of the “loosing of Sathan” at the end of the millennium (324-1324), furthermore, the “sower of all discord,” Satan, is seen to rally certain “forren counsail” into the king’s court, leading ultimately to the summary execution of Gaveston’s executioner, Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322), and twenty-two more English peers.402 Yet, with the queen’s return from France (after five years), bearing England’s royal heir, a bill of deposition would be read in the “court of high parliament”—an assembly of commons,

“lordes spirituall and temporal” in three estates—to judge Edward II “a man not meete to be their king,” and to advise that his “rightfyll heyre,” Edward III (1327-77), “take wise, sage and true counsellers vnto him.”403

As a result of a series of constitutional crises in the century following Magna Carta, English parliaments would include knights and burgesses of the commons and English magistrates would

401 Acts and Monuments 1570, 480, 482, citing Roger of Avesbury’s vita Edouardi II.

402 Ibid., 483, 484. Foxe shows French counselors fueling resentments over the execution of Gaveston.

403 Ibid., 485-86. 160 swear allegiance to the crown rather than any royal personage.404 Yet in the impeachment of the sitting monarch, Edward II, Acts and Monuments 1570 seems to recall ancient Bishop

Eleutherius’s warning to any royal “vicar” who would fail to “rule well” via godly collaboration with their peers, in parallel with the “godly” magistrate of Article 37 who is commissioned to

“restrain by the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doer.” In this way, Foxe’s second edition appears to support an Elizabethan political theology of godly rule by “prince-in-parliament” authority which includes oversight of both pope and prince.

A “Losing and Tying up Again” in the “Reforming Era”

Having established a historiographical case for godly rule by “prince-in-parliament” authority,

Foxe’s 1570 edition then extends his constitutional paradigm beyond Constantine’s millennium

(324-1324) into the post-1324 “reforming era.” For, although Foxe clearly associates the end of this temporal millennium with “Sathan’s loosing” (even in his unfinished work Eicasmi, published after his death in 1587), his description of the post-1324 “reforming era” simultaneously anticipates another “tying up” of evil-doers by the efforts of godly magistrates who would replicate “Gods workes” of the past in “ouerthrowyng tyrants, in confoundyng pride, in alteryng states and kingdomes,…in relieuyng the godly, in bridelyng the wicked, in losing and tying vp again of Sathan the disturber of common weales” (italics mine).405 For example, in a new 1570 account of King Louis IV of Bavaria (1314-47), whose election was thwarted by

Avignon’s insistence that prospective emperors must be “confirmed” by the pontiff and that the pope might even choose to “reigne as Emperour, till a new Emperour was chosen,” Foxe shows a

404 Ronald Butt, A History of Parliament: The Middle Ages (London: Constable, 1989), 231-33.

405 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 10. 161

“meeke” and “gentle” king—reminiscent of King Lucius with his parliamentary peers or

Emperor Constantine with the “wyse men” of Milan—gathering his German estates together at

Frankfort (i.e., Rhens, 1338) to confirm the “auncient lawes and customs of the empyre,” to reaffirm the jurisdiction of his imperial “electours,” and to recall his royal pledge to “defende the fayth and Churche of Christ.” Marsilius of Padua (d. 1342), William of Ockham (d. 1348) and other “learned” scholars, moreover, are seen to unite with the king at his Munich court in civil and ecclesiastical opposition to this “vsurped” jurisdiction of Rome.406 In Book V, these “learned servauntes”—named in Foxe’s first 1570 preface as “faithful witnesses” who “followed Gods worde” within “the Arke of his true spirituall, and visible Church” (i.e., the true visible church)

—are also seen “trauailyng” against the “ragying fury of Satan” for the “reformation of the churche” and the “decay and ruin of the sayd Antichrist.”407 Marsilius of Padua is even seen condemned as a heretic in the year 1324, at the very inception of Foxe’s “reforming era,” as one who touted the “sound and catholicke” doctrine of “free justification by grace” (scriptural faith), defined the ecclesia as a “vniuersitie of the faythfull” (both regiments), and defended the participation of “godly and learned” laity in ecclesiastical synods (godly magistrates).408

At the beginning of his “reforming era,” Foxe asserts repeatedly that Satan’s “loosing” would only occur for a “stinte of tyme,” a “litle space of tyme” and a “small tyme,” so that the 1570

Elizabethan reader is led to expect another “tying up” of Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art.

406 Acts and Monuments 1570, 461, 487-88. Foxe cites Hieronimus Marius (and Crantzio) for the narrative on King Louis IV (487); and the 1570 margin heralds Louis IV as both an “emperour and Martyr,” as the king is numbered among the “blessed martyrs of Christ” for having been poisoned at the behest of the pope (488).

407 Ibid., 515, pref. 4-5. Franciscan defenders of apostolic poverty, Minister General Michael of Cesena and Paris theologian William of Ockham fled in 1328 to King Louis IV’s imperial court at Munich, where Marsilius of Padua also sought refuge after writing his influential work on lay jurisdiction entitled Defensor Pacis (1326).

408 Ibid., 506. Marsilius de Padua’ doctrine of justification is not referenced. The reigning Avignon Pope John XXII (1316-34) also condemned the doctrine of apostolic poverty and excommunicated King Louis IV of the Germans. 162

37).409 Some of this “tying up again” does indeed occur by means of “prince-in-parliament” authority during the reigns of Edward III (1327-77) and Richard II (1377-99). For under King

Edward III, a Statute of Provisors (1351) is seen enacted with “the consent of Lordes and commons” to reassert magisterial control of ecclesiastical benefices—where a 1570 marginal note celebrates the “pops primacye here in England bridled”—and a new parliamentary law of premunire is observed to restrict foreign appeals. A subsequent act, furthermore, is shown to declare that King John had unlawfully violated his royal oath by acquiescing to papal jurisdiction

“without the common assent of parlament”410 (A “commons petition” introduced under Edward

III would allow lesser knights and gentry to initiate statutory law, and parliament would begin to initiate impeachment proceedings against certain members of the royal court who contravened their statutes).411

Under Richard II, both of Foxe’s histories show the Lollard Twelve Conclusions (1395) being nailed to St. Paul’s and to publicly charge the Church of England with

“doting in temporalities after her stepmother the of Rome” (i.e., “foreign

Jurisdiction”).412 By this time, it is known that a phalanx of gentry lawyers were present in parliament to benefit from any seizure of ecclesiastical temporalities, and historian K. B.

McFarlane finds evidence in the St. Albans and chronicles that the parliaments of

409 Acts and Monuments 1570, 514-15, citing Revelation 20 on Satan’s loosing.

410 Ibid., 538 & 538n, 541, 542, citing Archiuis Regiae maiestates, Anno. 40. Reg. Edwardi, tit. 8; Anno. 50., Reg. Edwardi, tit. 94-97, 111.

411 Tierney, 465; J. H. Denton, "The Clergy and Parliament in the Thirteenth and Fourteeth Centuries," R. G. Davies and J.H. Denton, eds. The English Parliament in the Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 1981), 107. The Hundred Years’ War (1348-1453) provided incentive for parliament-led reform, independent of Avignon.

412 Acts and Monuments 1570, 626-28, citing St. Alban’s chronicle; 1563, 189-192. By opposing clerical celibacy, transubstantiation, images, and more, Carl Meyer thinks that the Twelve Conclusions had “Puritan overtones” (Meyer, p 132). 163

Richard II and Henry IV had afforded some political immunity to the Lollards.413 In Acts and

Monuments 1570, Foxe underscores this parliamentary collaboration with gospel ministers by reproducing a bull from Pope Boniface IX (1389-1404) to King Richard II warning of

“vnlearned” Lollards who had publicized “heresies” before “your kingly parlament,” and by noting that the archbishop of Canterbury had incited royal action against parliamentary sympathizers (i.e., Richard Stury, Lewis Clifford, Thomas Latimer, and John Mountacute).414

The bishops are even forced into a defensive posture toward the “prince-in-parliament” model in

Foxe’s 1570 narrative, as they are seen to pronounce “to the king in open parliament” (1397) their unwillingness to permit further lay infringement of their papal oaths, and as Archbishop

Arundel of Canterbury is forced into exile by king and peers as a “traytour” (1398).415

This godly “prince-in-parliament” restraint is likewise seen “loosed and tied up again,” in Foxe’s

1570 account, as Richard II arrogates himself above his parliamentary peers by seizing the estates of his archrival Henry of Lancaster and by declaring Edward II’s impeachment an act of treason. Here the 1570 narrator comments disparagingly of the king’s illicit alliance with the bishops, having accepted papal letters in the early years of his reign which trended “agaynst the crowne and regall dignitie, as also against the statutes & liberties of the said this our Realme of

England,” and having preferred in his later years to “serue the humore of the Pope and bloudy

413 K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 142-44. McFarlane speaks of a royal and parliamentary faction that was sympathetic to Lollardy for a period of about 30 years, in the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, until the trial of Lord Cobham (142-44).

414 Acts and Monuments 1570, 622, 626-28.

415 Ibid., 633, 635. Foxe’s parallel text earlier stated that “since the tyme the othe began to be layd and thrust vpon the byshops, all generall councels began to lose their libertie” (309/106). 164 prelates, then to further the Lordes procedynges in preaching of his woorde.”416 At the 1399 impeachment of the king, new 1570 marginalia underscore Richard II’s proclivity to “forsake the maintenance of the Gospell,” his willingness to accept “lewd counsaile,” and his “vices and vertues mixt,” so that the 1570 reader is left to judge whether the king was “vniustly deprived” by the “myght” of Henry IV’s interlocutors (e.g., Article 37‘s decree to “restrain” the “evil- doers”) or was “iustly deposed” for having failed to “restrain” the bishops in the Hereford trials of Swindersby and Brute (e.g., Article 37’s ban on “foreign Jurisdiction”).417 Yet, having maintained the position that Edward II’s reign was a “tiranny odious to the people,” Foxe’s second edition heralds Richard II’s “strange and lamentable” impeachment without criticism of the actions taken by the “nobles” and “commons” of parliament, only of those taken by the

“wycked Counsailours” about the king.418 Reminiscent of Bishop Eleutherius’s ancient warning that princes must “rule well” in “godly” collaboration with their peers or risk losing their kingdoms (or like Article 37’s directive to extirpate “stubborn and evil-doers”), Richard II’s

“reforming era” impeachment offers yet another post-millennial example of a “tying up again” by parliamentary means.

Parliament’s impeachment of Richard II would have been regarded by Foxe’s Protestant contemporaries as a constitutional right of the lords, bishops and commons in three estates. Like

Article 37’s “godly” directive to “restrain” the “evil-doer,” both civil and ecclesiastical, the

Elizabethan Act of Supremacy (1559) had decreed that doctrines and practices at odds with

416 Acts and Monuments 1570, 683, 633-34. Richard II had visited the tomb of Edward II and campaigned for his , and the 1388 parliament had convicted much of Richard II’s court of treason (Bennet, p 13).

417 Ibid., 633n, 634n, 633.

418 Ibid., 486n, 633. At Richard II’s downfall, utterly devoid of parliamentary support, the 1570 margin reads: “What it is for a Prince to be beloued of hys subiects” (635). 165

Scripture and early church councils could be judged “to be heresy by the High Court of

Parliament of this realm with the assent of the clergy in their Convocation.”419 The modern

English historian Patrick Collinson also suggests that the 1560 Geneva Bible’s marginal comment on David’s private quarrel with King Saul would have been counterposed with another note on Jehu’s public execution of King Joram of Israel and King Ahaziah of Judah to allow

English magistrates to act as arbiters of God’s judgment against “wicked and idolatrous” monarchs.420 The fate of ungodly kings and popes, in the minds of Foxe’s “reforming era” contemporaries, was therefore justly decided by the “High Court of Parliament.”

As a further illustration of this godly parliamentary authority, Acts and Monuments 1570 also attributes De Heretico Comburendo (1401), the Lancastrian law which mandated the burnings of

Lollards and Protestants at Smithfield in the “reforming era” (until the end of Mary Tudor’s reign), to royal collusion with evil-doing bishops rather than to “prince-in-parliament” action.

Modern historians often portray King Henry IV’s reign (1399-1413) as ridden with civil strife and episcopal tyranny, and they observe that Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions (1407) had banned English Bibles, free preaching, Wycliffite books, and open criticism of the English church. Yet Foxe’s second edition directs the blame toward the Lancastrian king and his bishops by stating that Henry IV was “hardlye beloued of his subiectes” and “alwayes oppressed with blynde ignoraunce by the crafty means and subtile pretenses of the clergy.”421 Foxe also castigates the fifteenth-century Lancastrian bishops as responsible for “more bloodshed among vs then in any other land or nation in Christendome,” and he attributes the end of the Lancastrian

419 Loades, 88, citing the Act of Supremacy.

420 Collinson, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I,” in Elizabethan Essays, 45.

421 Acts and Monuments 1570, 642, 645. See Bostick, 115n. 166 dynasty, at the death of Henry VI (d. 1471) in the Tower of London, to a “iust appointment of the

Lord” for the “vniust desplacyng” of King Richard II (by Henry IV and his bishops) and the subsequent burning of “Lord Cobham and many other” at Smithfield.422

Rather than critique England’s magistrates for failing to “restrain” the royal “evil-doer,” Foxe’s second edition instead lauds parliament for having been “constant in stoppyng out the popes prouisions, and in bridlyng his authoritie.” For it uniquely observes that a 1382 parliamentary law for the arrest of the Wycliffite heretics had not permitted the burning of the accused (with the law being rescinded the following year), and that De heretico comburendo (1401) itself lacked any legitimacy due to the absence of the customary petition from the “good commons.” The marginalia adjacent to this newly added text, furthermore, states, “Statut. an. 2. Henr. 4. de comburendo, proued not sufficient, to burne any man” and “The persecutors in burnyng Gods people haue done agaynst the lawe”423 (Modern historian A. K. McHardy names Arundel’s chancellor Robert Hallum, who later presided at the council of Constance in which Jan Hus was burned, as a possible author of De Heretico Comburendo. He states that the uncustomary use of

Latin, rather than French, justifies “doubt” as to whether the statute was “drafted by those usually responsible for legislation”).424 Even in the case of the burning of Lord Cobham

(described in chapter three above), narrator Foxe argues that Alan Cope’s condemnation of the good magistrate had been erroneously reliant on a “pretenced” indictment of the bishops’

422 Acts and Monuments 1570, 851, 869. At the time of the English Reformation, these laws were repealed by “prince-in-parliament” authority through the Submission of the Clergy (1532) granting final jurisdiction on canon law to the laity.

423 Ibid., 626, 718-19; 719n. Foxe cites Polydore Virgil, Scala mundi, Edward Halle, Fabian, and other medieval writers as primary sources for his accounts of the Smithfield fires.

424 A.K. McHardy, "De Heretico Comburendo, 1401," Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 116, 118, 123. 167 chamber. Debunking the notion that Cobham was a traitor, Foxe cites a post-mortem 1417 parliamentary roll acknowledging Cobham as a “hereticke,” without mention of any “traytour,” as well as parliamentary acknowledgement of a “common law” restraint against “foreine” jurisdiction.425 De Heretico Comburendo is thus presented to Foxe’s 1570 readers as a false construct of the Lancastrian bishops, subservient to Rome (in violation of Article 37’s ban), which came into existence through clerical usurpation to “seme to haue the force of a law, [but] which was neuer assented vnto by the commons.” On the basis of this “reforming era” record, then, Foxe prays that parliament would continue to be directed by Christ’s authority for “the aduaunsing of his word, and comfort of his people,” suggesting the need for a continued “tying up” of “any foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37) through godly parliamentary reform.426

This “godly” parliamentary model is also exhibited within the “reforming era” Bohemian church, once John Wycliffe’s teaching had been made available to them through the pious agency of

King Richard II’s wife, Anne of Bohemia (also a sister to Emperor Sigismund). Foxe’s 1570 history here observes that the Bohemian church under King Wenceslaus had been less oppressed by the “tyranny of Pharoa” (e.g., Article 37’s “foreign Jurisdiction”) than the contemporary

English church;427 and it adds, for example, that excommunicate preacher Jan Hus (author of De

Ecclesia, a reproduction of Wycliffe’s teaching) was able to appeal in his defence to the “rites, liberties and common customes” of the Bohemian realm, and that old Bohemian clergy loyal to

425 Acts and Monuments 1570, 783. Unlike on the continent, McFarlane describes the burning of heretics as virtually unknown in England prior to Henry IV (K. B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity [London: English University Press, 195]: 150).

426 Acts and Monuments 1570, 719n, 719.

427 Ibid., 626, 680. The “vertuous” Queen Anne is seen reading the four in “vulgar” English at the royal court and facilitating the passage of Wycliffe’s books (626). 168 the pope were admonished for “sinnyng habitualiter” (e.g., Wycliffe’s advice for the lay discipline of errant clergy).428 Where Jan Hus was promised safe passage to the council of

Constance, and yet hanged and burned as a heretic and traitor outside of Bohemia’s jurisdiction,

Foxe’s second edition features a newly added public declaration by Emperor Sigismund that heresy had disqualified the preacher of Prague from a magisterial defence, and this in juxtaposition with a marginal assertion that the emperor had “washed his handes with Pylate, yet he could not so cleare him selfe.”429 Another new marginal imperative reads, “Marke thys and learne, you noble man,” where both Foxean editions feature a warning “letter of the 54 Nobles of

Morauia” which excoriates the general council for Hus’s condemnation and promises to “defend the law of our Lord Iesu Christ, and the deuoute, humble and constant preachers thereof” within

Bohemian lands.430 Although both pope and general council are seen to advocate that the

Bohemian “heretickes” be burned, and to request that the English bishops subsidize a crusade

“agaynst the Lolardes (so the Papistes did terme them) of Bohemia,” the 1570 narrator counters that the “power, wit, and autoritie of the whole world” could never “subuert and supplant the word, and way of the Lord.”431 Jan Zizka (a Hussite nobleman reared in the royal court) is here seen in both editions to establish a hilltop fortress at Tabor, from when he successfully defends the Bohemian church from the papal crusaders (with a new 1570 marginal comment highlighting

428 Acts and Monuments 1570, 723, 726. Citing Cochleus (726).

429 Ibid., 776-77.

430 Ibid., 777n; 1563, 241-42.

431 Ibid. 1570, 784, 781, 794. While defending the gospel preachers from excommunication, the baronial defence league contributed greatly to the success of the Hussite movement. The senate and citizens of Prague also seek royal protection under the auspices of Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania (787). 169 that “Zisca putteth the Emperour to flight” at the siege of Prague”).432 Yet Foxe’s second edition adds a “godly request of kinges and princes, to styrre them vp to the zeale of the Gospell,” from

General Procopius Magnus and the Hussite nobility, so that, having recourse to public debate, magistrates would not be directed to “ouercome the other by violence or false suttelty, but onely by the word of God” (i.e., godly rule).433

This Bohemian example of godly rule is enhanced by a description of the “new house” of parliament at Prague (the three-chambered assembly of bishops, barons, and gentry extant from the time of Ziska to the Thirty Years’ War). For the new parliament house is seen defending the four Hussite doctrines of free preaching, communion in two kinds, apostolic poverty, and temporal punishments for mortal sin (as recorded in both editions), when a delegation, led by

Procopius Magnus, is dispatched to the Basil council on the promise of “safe conduct” and a

“free libertie to speak” in favour of their “evangelical” doctrines.434 And with ten catholic delegates arriving from Basel to deliver an opposing argument before the “cleargy, nobilitie and common people” of the Prague parliament,435 some interpolated material, unique to the 1570 edition (which also recounts the fate of Hus and Jerome at Constance), underscores the

Bohemian parliament’s determination to defend their four “euangelicall” doctrines and its skepticism toward the “latter councels” of the Roman church by recounting a parliamentary

432 Acts and Monuments 1570, 785-87, 787n; 1563, 302-06 , citing the story of Jan Zizka from Enea Silvio. Both the 1563 and 1570 margins celebrate “The victorye of the protestantes” (788/307).

433 Ibid., 794-95.

434 Ibid., 799; 1563, 311.

435 Ibid. 1570, 843-44; 1563, 389-91. Here the second presenter to the Basel council, Nicholas, openly speaks of Wycliffe as an “euangelicall Doctor” (843/390). 170 statement that the “catholicke faith” had survived “three dayes sounde and incorrupt onely in the Mary.”436

Because the impetuosity at the Prague parliament resulted in acceptance of the four

“euangelicall” doctrines of Bohemian church by the general council at Basel and Emperor

Sigismund,437 the Basel Compacts (1436) illustrate for Foxe’s 1570 readers how a mixed assembly of estates could enact godly laws and conduct parliamentary reform within a post- millennium (1324-present) visible church. Since the proto-Protestant Hussites are said to have triumphed “so long as they could agree among themselues,” Foxe here illustrates how a similar

“protestante” plurality within the parliament of Elizabethan England could exercise a “godly” magisterial prerogative for “tying up” the “stubborn and evil-doers,” both civil and ecclesiastical, and could extirpate the vestiges of “any foreign Jurisdiction,” in accord with Article 37 and

Foxe’s reform-minded contemporaries.438

436 Acts and Monuments 1570, 844n, 844.

437 Ibid., 846-47; 1563, 394-95.

438 Ibid. 1570, 796. The Basel Compact (1433) divided the mainstream Utraquists from the radical Taborite faction, after which General Procopius was killed in battle. The “Hussite King” George Podebrady (1458-71) was supported by the moderate Utraquists, who considered themselves orthodox Christians in the wake of the Basel Compacts; and the 1570 marginalia notes that Podebrady defeated “the 4. greatest princes in Europe” (877n) (i.e., King Wenceslaus of the Romans, Emperor Sigismund, King Albertus of Hungary & Bohemia, and his son Ladislaus I). CONCLUSION

As indicated by the preceding chapters, this thesis discovers in the new material added to Acts and Monuments’ second edition (1570), and in view of the political tensions of the 1560s and an emergent Elizabethan political theology of godly rule, as defined in Article 37 (“Of Civil

Magistrates”), a 1570 Foxean historiographical model of godly rule in “both regimentes” that was enforceable through parliamentary authority. His 1570 prefaces describe an English ark torn by wind and wave, as Catholics and reform-minded Protestants struggled with the implications of a 1559 Religious Settlement that had replaced papal jurisdiction with royal jurisdiction (e.g., the Ornaments Rubric, royal patronage of clergy, and the queen’s Ecclesiastical Commission).

A generation of like-minded reformers had been seeking to advance the English Reformation, and having become more intimately acquainted with the queen’s ecclesiastical policy by 1570, historian Foxe was himself seeking to address the challenges which confronted the Elizabethan church.

Within the first Elizabethan decade, the Vestiarian Controversy (1566) had proven to be a significant turning point for the new Protestant ecclesia. For in the wake of this struggle with the

Crown over clerical vestments, England’s visible church would begin to fracture between an

Erastian party which emphasized royal sovereignty and the Puritan party which emphasized scriptural authority. There was still no clear division between the two groups, since both subscribed to scriptural and magisterial authority. Yet, on the left of the Protestant mainstream,

171 172

Puritan radicals were becoming impatient enough with the slow advance of Elizabethan reform to publicly advocate the abolition of the episcopate, and on the other end of the spectrum, a phalanx of Catholic recusants were seeking to capitalize on Protestant divisions in order to reestablish Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction.” Meanwhile, the Elizabethan establishment was also faced with existential threats from the Ridolphi Plot (1569), the Northern Rebellion (1569-71), and papal excommunication of the queen (Regnans in Excelsis, 1570), so that the future of

English Reformation appeared to be in jeopardy at the time that Acts and Monuments 1570 was published. As a church historian commissioned to defend the new Protestant establishment by

Bishop Grindal (one of the chief drafters of The Thirty-Nine Articles, 1563), however, Foxe would lay a 1570 historiographical foundation for English unity and godly reform, in parallel with Elizabethan Article 37, by granting pride of place to the “godly” magistrate within the visible church.

As a reform-minded Protestant who admired the contributions of Marsilius de Padua, John

Wycliffe and other “learned” scholars on the civil magistrate’s role in the visible church, in Acts and Monuments 1570 Foxe presents scriptural and constitutional justification for godly magisterial reform of the Elizabethan ecclesia. Integral to this reforming endeavor, the first

Christian emperor Constantine is here seen as a “godly” magistrate who embraced the

“knowledge and fayth of Christ” (i.e., scriptural faith) prior to his conquest of Rome (312), and who enacted the Edict of Toleration (313) in collaboration with the “wyse men” of his realm in defence of a true visible church. Because of the “godly lawes” enacted by Constantine and his political successors, Foxe postulates that “both regimentes, ecclesiasticall and temporall” enjoyed a thousand years of “peace and tranquilitie,” a Christian temporal millennium 173

(324-1324) in which godly magistrates (i.e., the lay regiment) wielded their temporal swords for the discipline of clergy who would “sinne, habitualiter,” and gospel ministers (i.e., the clerical regiment) wielded their spiritual swords in order to “admonish also the Magistrates erring or transgressing in their office.”439 This temporal millennium is seen brought to an end by “two swords” papal sovereignty (i.e., Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction”) in Foxe’s fourth epoch, which he calls the “loosing of Sathan;” yet in his fifth and final epoch, which Foxe calls the “reforming era,” Marsilius de Padua (d. 1342) and John Wycliffe (d. 1384) are seen to reinvigorate the “two regiments” model of godly rule to the extent that this “foreign Jurisdiction” is again vanquished in the Bohemian revolution and Protestant reformation. Foxe even offers evidence in Acts and

Monuments’ second edition (1570) that the malevolent law known as De heretico comburendo

(1401), which was utilized by the Lancastrian kings (1399-1461, 1470-71) and Mary Tudor

(1553-58) in a wave of violent persecution against English Wycliffites and Protestants, was illegitimately enacted without the parliamentary ratification that had been customary in Britain from the second-century conversion of King Lucius to Christianity.440

In the preceding pages, I have divided my analysis and explication of Foxe’s new historiography of godly rule into three subject areas, in general alignment with the new tenets of Elizabethan

Article 37, under the chapter titles: 1) “The Godly Prince,” 2) “Godly Rule in Two ‘Regiments,’” and 3) “A Godly ‘Prince-in-Parliament’ Restraint.” The first generation of Magisterial

439 Acts and Monuments 1570, 726, 35.

440 Modern historian McHardy remains unconvinced that De heretico comburendo (1401) was necessary to burn English “heretics,” since canon law for the burning of heretics had come into existence with the . Yet he acknowledges that the burning of heretics and witches was “virtually unknown” in England prior to De heretico comburendo, and that the 1395 papal bull against the Lollards was not enforced until Henry IV’s reign. When some Roman Inquisitors later arrived under King Edward II’s reign to try members of the , he notes that they were met with great English resistance (A. K. McHardy, “De Heretico,” Lollardy and the Gentry, 112-114). 174

Reformers had sought to establish a visible Protestant church in England by “prince-in- parliament” authority in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI; but with the persecutions under

Mary Tudor, more zealous reformers under Elizabeth I’s reign, like John Foxe and Thomas

Norton, had become impatient with a Crown policy to impede further Protestant reforms, including a “godly” ecclesiastical discipline (i.e., the 1559 Prayer Book). This study shows that

Acts and Monuments 1570 thereafter offered a revised historiography which, although supportive of the new Elizabethan establishment, trended toward “godly” magisterial reform. In chapter 2 of this study (above), Foxe’s reformist zeal is evidenced in Constantine’s encounter with the heavenly Christ, which results, not merely in the emperor’s military triumph on behalf of Roman

Christianity, but also in his “godly” conversion to “Christes fayth,” his “meek” collaboration with early Christian bishops, and passage of “godly lawes” in restraint of Roman idolatry and other evils (i.e., based on scriptural authority). The Edict of Toleration (313), which the emperor enacted in collaboration with his “wyse men,” is especially germane to Foxe’s 1570 historiography, for it is shown to inaugurate a millennium of “peace and tranquility” for the edification of a visible church, and in fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, exactly the kind of “godly” magisterial reform for which English Protestants had hoped during Elizabeth I’s reign.

Chapter 3 of this study also provides evidence that, based on materials added to his second edition (1570), Foxe offered a new historiography of godly rule in “both regimentes, ecclesiasticall and temporall” in opposition to Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction” (Art. 37). After

Constantine’s “godly” reign, civil magistrates tended to the election of bishops, invocation of synods, and punishment of evildoers within the visible church, while ecclesiastical ministers devoted themselves to “Christes fayth and Gospel” for the edification of souls. Yet this “two 175 regiments” model of godly rule is shown to be gradually eclipsed and coopted by the papal “two swords,” a “foreign Jurisdiction” that is seen to emerge in conjunction with increased ecclesiastical wealth, papal investiture, and a universal jurisdiction at Rome. As a result of this protracted struggle between popes and princes (i.e., church and state), Christendom is eventually seen “diminished” and divided into an “image of bothe Churches,” as depicted on Foxe’s title page (see Figure 2 on page 91), especially as a result of papal excommunications, crusades, and persecutions. Under this malevolent “foreign Jurisdiction,” furthermore, Lord Cobham, a famous magistrate and patron of Wycliffite ministers, and John Hus, a leading minister of

Bohemia, are seen hanged and burned on false charges of treason and heresy (see Figure 1 on page 26). Yet, despite the tragic “decline” from a “two regiments” Constantinian ecclesia to a

“two swords” Roman hegemony, Foxe’s 1570 narrative offers some emblematic illustrations of how a godly English church and state could once again collaborate to defend a true visible church, in accord with Article 37’s ban on “any foreign Jurisdiction” and its dualistic description of the magisterial and ministerial roles, in order to restore the “two regiments” ecclesia of early

Christendom.

As described in chapter 4, Foxe’s 1570 history also reveals a godly “prince-in-parliament” constitutional tradition in which civil magistrates exercise their temporal prerogative, as pronounced in Article 37, to “restrain by the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers” and “any foreign Jurisdiction.” King Lucius’s conversion to the “fayth of Christ” had made Britain one of the first nations of Christendom to establish godly rule (i.e., “godly” laws), but the moral failure of its magisterial elites is subsequently shown to create opportunities for foreign invasion by

Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman conquerors, and to facilitate King John’s 1213 submission to 176

Rome’s “foreign Jurisdiction.” Yet Magna Carta (1215) is also seen in Acts and Monuments

1570 to resuscitate the ancient “prince-in-parliament” constitutional model, so that the stage would be set for an end-of-days “loosing and tying up again” of evil-doers in England under godly “prince-in-parliament” authority.

A century ago, J. F. Mozley had rehabilitated John Foxe’s reputation, if not as a scientific historian—knowing him to be a Protestant “partisan” who selected, amended, and abridged his sources—then at least as a post-Renaissance scholar who could be relied upon to not intentionally “misstate the facts.” More recently, Michael Pucci has concluded that Foxe’s decisive influence had not received the historical recognition it deserves—especially with regard to his view of Constantine.441 In evaluating the new materials which were added to the second edition of Acts and Monuments (1570), this paper not only identifies a “godly” shift in Foxe’s

1570 historiography in concert with a wide-spread Protestant impetus for magisterial reform in defiance of the queen’s ecclesiastical policy, it also alleviates this historiographical shortcoming noted by Pucci concerning the relationship between Foxe’s Constantinian model and the

Elizabethan Reformation. Yet Foxe’s revised 1570 emphasis on a “two regiments” ecclesia under scriptural authority, as first seen implemented by “prince-in-parliament” authority in the second-century reign of King Lucius and by Constantine and his “wyse men,” also has some broader implications.

With respect to Foxe’s description of godly (Constantinian) rule by scriptural authority, for example, it should be noted that V. Norskov Olsen spoke of Protestant historian Foxe as a

441 Mozley, 156; Pucci, 29-30. To offer one example, where John Bale seems to misrepresent the facts in his record of the Missionary-monk Augustine having condoned King Ethelbert’s slaying of Briton monks, in Acts and Monuments 1570 Foxe offers a less partisan account (See Freeman, “John Bale,” 198-99). 177

“mirror of Elizabethan Anglican Puritanism” rather than as a radical Puritan who sought to overthrow the English establishment.442 As noted in this study, Foxe presents his “godly” magistrate within the political mainstream, implementing good laws to preserve “peace and tranquilitie” within the visible church, opposing the “lawlessness and internecine warfare” that derived from Roman idolatry, and maintaining temporal punishments for ministers who “sinne, habitualiter” in violation of God’s law. Yet, hoping to press beyond the magisterial reforms that were enacted by Elizabeth I’s quasi-Catholic father, Foxe’s 1570 dedication addresses the queen as a “defender of Christ’s fayth and Gospel,” rather than as a “defender of the faith;” and his main 1570 narrative shows ancient Emperor Constantius (of the Western empire) dismissing all

Roman idolators from his royal court as a result of his “meke” and “godly” reverence for scriptural authority.443 Like Foxe’s subsequent defence of Anabaptist and Roman Catholic ministers before the magistrates of the Elizabethan state, Constantius’s “godly” son, Constantine, is also seen to defend the “fayth of Christ” in the broadest possible terms by enacting a “common and publicke peace” which guaranteed every citizen the “libertie to use and chose what kinde of worshipping he list” (i.e., the Edict of Milan). Foxe’s “godly” magistrate thus upholds an ancient constitutional tradition of religious liberty on behalf of all adherents to scriptural faith (i.e., the

“fayth of Christ”), even among those who could be accused of threatening the temporal peace of

Elizabethan England.444

442 V. Norskov Olsen, 16.

443 Acts and Monuments 1570, pref. 7; Cf. 1563, pref. 1.

444 Acts and Monuments 1570, 134. In his first preface “To the true and faithful congregation,” Foxe uses the term “true spirituall Church of God” in contrast with the “great Synagoge of the world,” with the latter being inadvertently defended by those who thought that the “true Church” should be “visible to the whole world” rather than to only a select few (3). 178

This constitutional right to religious liberty was still under development in Foxe’s day. The

Peace of Augsburg (1555) had reestablished the cuius regio, euis religio doctrine for Lutherans and Catholics within the Holy Roman Empire, but the rival camps would soon march onto the battlefield in defence of their respective creeds in the Thirty-Year War (1618-1648). King

Charles IX (1560-74) had contemplated legal toleration for French Protestants, but his “une foi, une loi, un roi” doctrine would soon beget the French Wars of Religion (1562-98) and the St.

Bartholemew’s Day Massacre (1572).445 Luther and Calvin had defended the idea of religious liberty, but Calvin would support the civil execution of Michael Servetus for heresy, and both reformers (Luther and Calvin) would condemn Anabaptists for the civil disobedience of avoiding infant baptism (a law that derived from Christian antiquity). Luther preached justification by faith with little attention to the legal status of Protestant radicals, but he also sided with political elites quite unmercifully during the Peasants Revolt (1525). Magisterial Reformers like Luther,

Calvin, and Tyndale446 held a political theology that required obedience to divinely instituted authority, avoidance of open rebellion, and recognition of the spiritual and temporal spheres.447

In Acts and Monuments 1570, Foxe’s narrative of the Wycliffite martyrs also repudiates William

Brute’s application of Christ’s gospel to the civil courts based on the Protestant understanding that the spiritual sword of the minister belonged in the ecclesiastical, not the civil, domain (i.e.,

445 Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton University Press, 2003), 89-90.

446 Zagorin, 75, 78-79. For the political theology of Tyndale and Calvin, see Obedience of a Christian Man and the Institutes of the Christian Religion, respectively.

447 C. D. J. Cargill Thompson, “The Two Regiments: The Continental Setting of William Tyndale's Political Thought," in Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c. 1500–c. 1750, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 22. 179 spiritual “regiment”). Based on this “magisterial” stance, it would appear that Foxe’s 1570 “two regiments” model of godly rule had not ventured very far from the Protestant mainstream.448

However, by his 1576 refusal of the queen’s directive to halt the “prophesyings” in the second decade of Elizabeth I’s reign, Foxe’s friend and compatriot Archbishop Grindal did make an overt departure from the magisterial mainstream.” In fact, based on the incongruity of the archbishop’s action with the Religious Settlement of 1559, Patrick Collinson even describes the archbishop’s “two regiments” recalcitrance as an “anachronism.”449 For, as one of the chief architects of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563), Grindal’s refusal of the queen’s order had included a near verbatim recitation of Article 37 (“Of Civil Magistrates”) aimed at limiting royal jurisdiction in the English church. Elsewhere, Collinson recites Richard Baxter’s description of

Grindal as the sort of archbishop who might have prevented the English Civil War—if he had been able to gain the approval of the Crown.450 This claim is supported by the fact that, under

Archbishop Grindal (1575-83), for instance, parish ministers had exercised more religious liberty

(adiaphora) than under either his predecessor or successor (i.e., Parker and Whitgift, respectively). Yet, against her archbishop’s bold defence of ministerial independence in Word and Sacrament (Art. 37), the queen held that the Protestant “prophesyings” were fostering

“schismatic divisions” throughout the towns, parishes and families of the nation in “violation of our laws and to the breach of common order” and that her subjects would be better “occupied

448 Acts and Monuments 1570, 605.

449 Collinson, Grindal, 243.

450 Grindal, Remains, 289. 180 with honest labour for their living.”451 The disparity of opinion over the magistrate’s jurisdiction in the church could not have been more stark.

The Royal Settlement (1559) had indeed made it difficult for ministers to ignore the will of the

Crown, but like Grindal’s “letter to the queen,” Foxe’s second edition (1570) had depicted

Constantine and his magisterial successors in “godly” (and “meek”) collaboration with the clerical regiment. Pucci calls it a “cooperative separation” between magistrate and minister.452

On the one hand, Acts and Monuments 1570 supported the royalist model by featuring, for example, Emperor Frederick II’s pronouncement that clerical authority could not stand in violation of both “gods law” and the “law of man” (i.e., “godly” constitutional authority); on the other hand, Foxe’s second history (1570) underscored the need for ministerial independence by revealing that, during the Lancastrian dynasty, Wycliffite preachers had been driven (by king and bishop) “from towne to towne in Freese gownes preachyng vnto the people” on an apostolic pattern.453 Like Archbishop Grindal’s defiant letter to the queen, Foxe’s 1570 introduction spoke of a ministerial duty to “admonish the Magistrates erring or transgressing in their office;” and with reform-minded Protestants still reeling from the Vestiarian Controversy (1566), his 1570 prefatory criticism of “Byshops, garmentes, vestures, gestures, etc.,” as Tom Freeman suggests, would have likely seemed as relevant to the half-reformed churches of Elizabethan England as to the Roman Catholic churches of the continent.454 English Protestant unity had begun to fray in the wake of the 1566 Vestiarian Controversy, as R. Crowley’s “first Puritan manifesto”

451 “The Queen’s Letter Suppressing Prophesying, 1577,” The Struggle for Power, 17.

452 Pucci, 50.

453 Acts and Monuments 1570, 414, pref. 5 (also 550).

454 Ibid., 35 181 postulated that no prince (or archbishop) can command what “God hath not commanded,” and as the anonymous Fortress of the Fathers (1566) pronounced that “the supreme magistrate is bound to obey the word of God, preached by Christ's messengers, and is also subject to the discipline of the Church.”455 Foxe himself had refused the surplice—a violation of royal supremacy which

Puritan Conformist Dering was careful to avoid456—but the reformist historian would not be numbered among the radical ministers seeking to destabilize the Elizabethan establishment. As indicated by his 1570 dedication which addressed the monarch as a “principal gouernour” under

Christ the Head, and reminiscent of Article 37’s avoidance of the title “Supreme Head,” Foxe sought a pathway to “peace and tranquilitie” in the English church via a collaboration in “both regimentes,” ministerial and magisterial, under scriptural authority (i.e., godly rule).

The seventeenth-century Whig interpretation of English history also seems to run in parallel with

Elizabethan Article 37 and Foxe’s political theology of godly rule. As suggested by the late seventeenth-century phrase “Magna Carta et Religio Protestantium,” the idea of a Magna Carta- style solution for English Protestantism was not peculiar to Acts and Monuments 1570. For instance, the consilium principle could be observed in the eleventh-century reign of Edward the

Confessor, as this medieval English king made use of the “advise of the nobles of his kingdom” to draft new laws.457 In An Harborowe for Faithful and Trewe Subiectes (1559), an apology written in defence of Elizabeth’s own coronation, John Aylmer (a Marian exile who assisted Foxe at Basel with his 1559 martyrology) had argued that the nation ought to support Elizabeth I’s

455 Solt, 85.

456 Acts and Monuments 1570, 15; Lake, Moderate Puritans, 19.

457 Turner, 25. 182 accession because it would not be “she that ruleth, but the lawes.”458 It is also clear from Acts and Monuments 1570 that Foxe traced “prince-in-parliament” constitutional authority from King

Lucius’s reign in Christian antiquity through King Henry I’s bicameral parliament and other medieval intermediaries, like Magna Carta, to the English Reformation.459 In his 1571 preface to the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, the Edwardian discipline by which Thomas Norton had hoped to establish a fully Protestant English church, Foxe even made a direct appeal for reform to the “wise” councillors of parliament.460 It is apparent, therefore, that Foxe’s 1570 expectations for a “godly” parliamentary solution to the queen’s ecclesiastical policy, like those of his reform-minded contemporaries, would be eventually realized, however imperfectly and belatedly, in the Whig political tradition.

Another matter which is alluded to in this paper, but is well beyond its scope, is that of whether

Foxe’s 1570 historiography can be linked with the English Civil War. Haller and Olsen had argued for a domino effect in the wake of the Admonitions Controversy (1572), suggesting that

Foxe’s 1570 depiction of the “godly” magistrate was a harbinger of the radical Protestantism that culminated a half century later in the Puritan revolution. In the new material added to Foxe’s second edition (1570), for instance, ancient Bishop Eleutherius offers the constitutional remedy of impeachment in cases where monarchs fail to “rule well” in godly collaboration with their peers, a parliamentary prerogative that is seen exemplified in the “reforming era” reigns of King

Edward II and King Richard II. Yet, while King Charles II may have fallen short of this “godly” standard in the estimation of seventeenth-century Puritan revolutionaries (e.g., the Fifth

458 Aylmer, An Harborowe, H3

459 Acts and Monuments 1570, 699-700.

460 Ibid., 159-160. Foxe, “Preface to the Learned Candid Reader,” Reformatio, 165. 183

Monarchists), Haller’s and Olsen’s thesis ignores some important but inconvenient facts, namely that Erastian Whitgift and Puritan Cartwright had both utilized Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in defence of their respective positions during the Admonitions Controversy, and that Foxe was himself critical of the Cartwright-Presbyterian faction in the final decade of his life. In his letter to Lawrence Humphrey, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, written after he and his son had been targeted by the Presbyterians for refusing to join the assault on the bishops, Foxe would describe this emergent Protestant faction as “worse than the monks,” declaring that they “would reduce all to Judean servitude.”461 In Acts and Monuments 1570, Foxe also excoriates the parliamentary peers who had abandoned King John prior to his submission to Rome, and he extols William Marshall for rallying England’s parliament in support of his royal heir, King

Henry III. Although Foxe’s political theology of godly rule had broken with the Augustinian tradition by advancing the idea of a Constantinian millennium (after Edwardian Article 41’s ban on millenarianism had been removed from the Thirty-Nine Articles), his five-step chronology nonetheless points to an immanent parousia, nearly within his own lifetime, at the end of the

“reforming era” (1324 + 294 years). Foxe’s post-millennial eschatology, forged from reformed

Protestantism and “godly” Constantine’s reign, was therefore categorically different from that of premillennialist Puritans who looked forward to a thousand-year reign of Christ upon the earth.

This study represents an examination of Foxe’s 1570 revisions to Acts and Monuments, which were published in the first decade of Elizabeth I’s reign in reaction to the queen’s ecclesiastical policy and in the wake of Article 37‘s definition of godly rule (“Of Civil Magistrates”). It finds evidence that John Foxe, being cognizant of his political circumstances in league with reform-

461 Mozley, 112. 184 minded Protestants (including a number of Elizabethan bishops), had sought to foster “peace and tranquilitie” within the visible English church through a historiographical shift toward godly rule

(e.g., his 1570 view of Constantine and the parliamentary prerogative). Yet this study does not attempt to provide an exhaustive record of the source materials which Foxe added to his second edition, nor does it draw a complete set of inferences from them. It is therefore hoped that this research, analysis, and exposition may prompt further investigation of Acts and Monuments 1570 and the contribution which John Foxe made to an English political theology of godly rule. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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